1913 (16 page)

Now let us switch to Arnold Schönberg, that great charismatic figure who composed along the fault-line between late Romanticism and twelve-tone music. He had moved to Berlin because he felt misunderstood in Vienna. In the telephone directory it said: ‘Arnold Schönberg, composer and composition teacher, consultations 1–2 p.m.’ He had an apartment in Villa Lepcke in Zehlendorf, and he wrote to a friend in Vienna: ‘You wouldn’t believe how famous I am here.’

Then at the end of March he goes to Vienna. And becomes just as famous there as he was in Berlin. But not quite in the way he had imagined. On the evening of 31 April, in the great hall of the Musikverein, he is supposed to be conducting his own chamber symphony, Mahler and pieces by his pupils Alban Berg and Anton von Webern (who both had portraits of themselves painted by Schönberg hanging on their walls at home). And it is Alban Berg’s music that creates the greatest stir. ‘Songs with Orchestra on Picture Postcard Texts by Peter Altenberg,
op
. 4’, he has called his piece in the best Pop Art style – performed by a huge orchestra and with great solemnity. It rouses the audience to a fury, there is hissing and laughter and rattling of keys, which everybody brought to Schönberg’s last performance in February but didn’t need. Then Anton von Webern leaps to his feet and shouts that the whole rabble should go home, to which the rabble replies that people who like such music belong in the Steinhof. The Steinhof is the mental asylum in which the poet Peter Altenberg currently resides. The diagnosis of the public: insane music to lyrics by a madman. (There is, it must be said, a photograph of Altenberg with his nurse Spatzek from the Steinhof in those days, Altenberg looking into the camera, cool and relaxed, creating the ery powerful impression that Spatzek, the nurse, is the one who is mad. Altenberg captions it: ‘The lunatic and the asylum attendant’, leaving it unclear which is which.)

Schönberg stops the orchestra and shouts into the audience that he will have any trouble-makers removed by force, whereupon pandemonium breaks out, the conductor is challenged to a duel and one man clambers over the rows of chairs from the back. When he has reached the front, Oscar Straus, composer of the operetta
The Waltz Dream
, boxes the ear of the president of the Academic Association of Literature and Music, Arnold Schönberg.

Next day in the
Neue Freie Presse
, the following report appears:

Four people were arrested by the police: a student of philosophy, a physician, an engineer and a lawyer. The evening went down in history as the ‘ear-boxing concert’.

But contemporaries, above all Dr Arthur Schnitzler, who attended the concert with his wife Olga, responded laconically:

Life goes on. Schnitzler starts a new paragraph, and then writes: ‘Supper with Vicki, Fritz Zuckerkandl and his mother in the Imperial.’

The next day Arnold Schönberg travels back to Berlin, firmly convinced now that 1913 is an unlucky year and the Viennese are
unfathomable philistines. As soon as he is back in Berlin, he receives the reporter from
Die Zeit
and explains to him in a wonderfully mean-spirited and self-righteous way:

Herr Schönberg closes his interview with the following words for his future behaviour: ‘I have undertaken henceforth to take part in such concerts only when it is expressly stated on the tickets that disturbance of the performance is not permitted. It is obvious, after all, that the organiser of a concert is not only the moral but also the material holder of a right that is granted protection in any state based on private property.’ This interview is an unsettling document. The advocates of the new music are claiming an inalienable right to an undisturbed avant-garde. But even in this most unusual of years, that was asking a bit much.

At the end of the nineteenth century Camille Claudel had overwhelmed the great Auguste Rodin and created sculptures of singular beauty. She had dictated a contract to Rodin, forbidding him to have any other models but her, and obliged him to win her commissions and pay for her to have an Italian trip – and in return he could visit her four times a month in her studio. He complied. But then in 1893 she left him anyway.

From that moment things went steeply downhill for her. In 1913, twenty years later, she can think of nothing but him. She has grown fat and bloated in the meantime: unwashed, matted hair, confused expression. There is nothing now to recall the young sculptress for
whom first Rodin and then Claude Debussy fell head over heels. She is living in a cluttered ground-floor flat at 19 Quai Bourbon, deludedly destroying with accurate blows of her hammer all the works she has created; she feels persecuted by her family and by Rodin and by the rest of the world. She is convinced that Rodin, whom she last saw sixteen years ago, is shamelessly plagiarising her works.

Since she is firmly convinced that everyone is trying to poison her, she eats nothing but potatoes and drinks boiled water, and the shutters are kept closed so no one can spy on her. Her brother Paul Claudel visits her and then notes concisely in his diary: ‘In Paris. Camille insane, wallpaper hanging in long strips from the walls, one broken armchair, terrible dirt. She herself is fat and dirty and talks uninterruptedly in a monotonous and metallic voice.’

On 5 March, Dr Michaux issues a medical certificate that authorises Paul Claudel to have his sister committed to a closed institution. On Monday 10 March two beefy nurses break down the heavily bolted door to Camille Claudel’s studio and drag the screaming woman outside. She is forty-eight. On the same day she is brought to the Ville-Évrard mental hospital, where the psychiatrist in charge, Dr Truelle, confirms the diagnosis of serious paranoia. Every day she talks about Rodin. Every day she is worried that he wants to poison her, and that the nurses are his accomplices. It will go on like this for another thirty years. As yet no doctoral thesis has been written on ‘The Psychiatric Assessment of Camille Claudel’.

In March 1913 Albert Schweitzer graduates as a doctor of medicine. His thesis, ‘The Psychiatric Assessment of Jesus’, was unsettling but satisfactory. The next day he sells all his goods and chattels. Then on 21 March 1913 he takes his wife, Helene, and travels to Africa. In French Equatorial Africa, he founds the jungle hospital of Lambaréné, on the Ogooué.

Ernst Jünger too dreams of Africa. Under his desk at school he is constantly reading travel tales of Africa. ‘I was increasingly filled with the deadly poison of boredom’ – so it is clear for him that he must seek out the mysteries of Africa, the ‘lost gardens’ somewhere in the Upper Nile Delta or the Congo. Africa represents the epitome of all that is savage and primitive. He had to go there. But how? Let’s wait and see.

It’s the end of March. Marcel Proust pulls his fur over his night-shirt and goes back into the street in the middle of the night. Then he stares for two whole hours at the Saint Anne portal of the cathedral of Notre-Dame. The next morning he writes to Madame Strauss: ‘For eight centuries on that portal a much more charming humanity has been assembled than the one with which we rub shoulders.’ This is what is known, logically enough, as being In Search of Lost Time.

On 20 April, Hitler celebrates his twenty-fourth birthday in a men’s boarding house on Meldemannstrasse in Vienna. Thomas Mann is thinking about
The Magic Mountain,
and his wife has gone to take the cure yet again. Lyonel Feininger discovers a tiny village church in Gelmeroda and turns it into the cathedral of Expressionism. Franz Kafka reports for voluntary service with a group of vegetable farmers and spends his afternoons pulling up weeds as therapy for his ‘burn-out’. Bernhard Kellermann writes the best-seller of the year:
The Tunnel,
a science fiction novel about an underground link between America and Europe. Frank Wedekind’s
Lulu
is banned. Oskar Kokoschka buys a canvas as big as the bed of his lover, Alma Mahler, and begins to paint a portrait of them both. When it becomes a masterpiece, Alma will want to marry him. But not before
.