1913 (18 page)

Georg Grosz is in Berlin, sketching the incomprehensible. The explosion of poverty and wealth. The noise. The traffic. The building sites. The cold of the streets and heat of the brothels. Men of Straw. The obese men in hats, the fat women whose flesh is bursting from their clothes. Thrashing bodies, freezing bodies, gaping bodies. A jagged, thin black line captures everything. His sketches scrape, as if he’s carving tattoos into skin. ‘The periphery of the city, stretching around itself like an octopus, exerted a strong pull on us. We sketched the barely set new buildings, the bizarre cityscapes where rail tracks steamed over subways, waste dump sites bordered on garden allotments, where cauldrons of asphalt stood at the ready next to the newly mapped streets.’ Grosz draws and draws. And when he reaches the end of a sketchpad, he goes to a bar, drinks a glass of Pilsner and eats some pickled herring. He finishes up with a
Koks mit’m Pfiff
: potato schnapps with a little cube of sugar, dipped in rum, which
you can barely taste. Whenever he’s flat broke, he goes to Aschinger’s with Kirchner and the other hordes of bohemians. There you can get a huge bowl of pea soup for 30 Pfennigs – and as much bread and rolls as you want to go with it. When the bread basket is empty, the waiter brings a new one, and Grosz tucks some into his pockets for the hungry days to follow. Then he goes out onto the street, into the cafés, the brothels, the bars, and sketches the crown of creation: the pig, mankind.

Vienna lies in Sigmund Freud’s shadow. Thoughts of the superego are even spilling from 19 Berggasse and entering people’s dreams. On 9 April, Arthur Schnitzler records the following in his notebook: ‘Ridiculous dreams. Arrive home from some rehearsal or other, planning to get a shave at Epply’s, suddenly in my bathroom, Herr Askonas wants to shave my leg (probably ahead of lancing a carbuncle) – the Freud school of thought might interpret this as some kind of disguised suicide attempt.’

Alfred Flechtheim, the great art dealer and collector, starts to plan his suicide. At this moment he is still a minor corn merchant with a fatal addiction to art. But he has a grand plan: during his honeymoon in Paris with his wife, Betti Goldschmidt, he invested almost all her dowry in contemporary art. Picasso, Braque, Friesz. In his diary he wrote: ‘There’s something psychotic about art. It has grabbed hold of me.’ So he plans to become rich by speculating on corn prices and copper-mining in Spain, so that he can then make his living as an art dealer. But when it comes to the corn trade, he is no expert. Sadly this seems to run in the family. His father and uncle have brought the family business, the Flechtheim Mill, to the edge of ruin through some risky manoeuvres. All the digging for copper in Spain comes to nothing, and before long all Flechtheim’s money is spent. He owns
five Cézannes, one Van Gogh, two Gauguins, ten Picassos, pictures by Munch and Seurat – and is in debt to the tune of 30,000 Marks. He goes to visit his father-in-law, Goldschmidt – ‘dear beau-père’, as he addresses him that day – and asks whether he will accept his art collection as ‘security’. But the answer given by Goldschmidt, the biggest property owner in Dortmund, is ‘No’. Who can say whether Picasso and Cézanne and Gauguin will be worth anything in a hundred years’ time? Speechless, Flechtheim gets up and leaves. He cries on the shoulder of the young Nils de Dardel, a stunningly handsome but profoundly untalented Swedish artist. Flechtheim falls in love with him, and Betti threatens to leave him when she finds out. The threat of losing his dignity through divorce and the exposure of his homosexuality and debts prompts Flechtheim to decide, in the absence of anyone he can challenge to a duel, that suicide is the only way out: ‘I’m stuck in a quagmire.’ He writes to his wife: ‘I hope you find a man who is worthy of you.’ But he never sends it, instead taking out a very lucrative life insurance policy – to benefit his parents and wife – and planning the ‘fatal accident’ for 1914. He will dedicate the whole of 1913 to preparing for it. In his diary all his thoughts circle around his impending bankruptcy. ‘If I go bankrupt, then I’ll flee to Paris, take along as many pictures as I can manage and live there for another eight months.’ But then events take an unexpected turn: suddenly he is able to sell his Van Gogh to the museum in Düsseldorf for 40,000 Marks, his friends buy him out of his absurd mine dealings and the corn company is saved from bankruptcy. And so by autumn 1913 Alfred Flechtheim is, with the help of Paul Cassirer, able to open a gallery at 7 Alleestrasse in Düsseldorf. His wife forgives him, and he forgives himself. The carefully laid suicide plans are shelved. He is even able to pay the contributions for the life insurance.

He went on to become one of the greatest gallery owners of the modern movement – even though, in 1913, he exhibited hideous paintings by his former lover, Nils de Dardel, next to works by Cézanne and Picasso. He later founded
Der Querschnitt
, perhaps the most liberal magazine Germany has ever known, and as timeless as the art Flechtheim loved so much.

At exactly half-past seven in the evening of 24 April, the American president, Woodrow Wilson, presses a button on his desk in the White House and sends a telegraphic signal to New York. This triggers the simultaneous illumination of 80,000 light bulbs in the newly finished Woolworth Building, the tallest in the world. Thousands of onlookers are waiting in the New York darkness for the moment of illumination. The tallest lighthouse in the world can be seen from far inland, and by great ships up to a hundred miles out at sea. America is beaming.

On 20 April, Adolf Hitler turns twenty-four. He sits in the men’s boarding house at 27 Meldemannstrasse in the working-class neighbourhood of Brigittenau, Vienna, painting in the common room. His room is too small to paint in. Five hundred people have tiny individual cabins there, each containing a bed, a clothes stand and a mirror, in front of which Hitler grooms his moustache each morning. Board costs 50 Hellers a night. Anyone who stays there long-term, like Hitler, gets new bedding every Sunday. During the day most of the residents hang around the city, looking for work or distraction, and in the evenings they come streaming back. Only a few stay there during the day, and Adolf Hitler is one of those. Day after day he perches by the bay window in the so-called study where the day’s newspapers are kept, sketching and painting watercolours of Vienna’s attractions. He sits there, puny, in his ancient, threadbare suit; everyone in the home knows the story of his humiliating rejection from the art academy. A heavy black strand of hair keeps falling into his face, so he flings it back into place with a frantic jerk of his head. In the mornings he sketches out the picture with his pencil; in the afternoons he adds the colour. Each evening he gives that day’s finished piece to another boarder, asking him to sell it in the city. Most of the paintings go to Kühler, a female art dealer in Hofzeile, in the 1st district of the city,
or to Schlieffer, the junk dealer at 86 Schönbrunnerstrasse. Most of his paintings are of the Karlskirche, or sometimes of the Naschmarkt. If a scene comes out well, he paints it a dozen times, getting 3 to 5 Kronen per painting. Hitler puts the money aside, not squandering it all on booze as his fellow residents do; he lives sparingly, almost austerely. Next to the writing room is a branch of an Austrian dairy, where Hitler buys bottles of good milk and Iglauer farmhouse bread. Whenever he wants to relax, he goes to the Schönbrunn Palace Park or plays chess. For the most part he spends the whole day quietly with his paints. But when the talk turns to politics, a spark rushes through him. He throws his paintbrush aside, his eyes flash and he holds blazing speeches about the immoral state of the world in general, and of Vienna in particular. It can’t go on, he screams, there are more Czechs living in Vienna than there are in Prague, more Jews than in Jerusalem and more Croats than in Zagreb. He flings back his strand of black hair. He sweats. Then, all of a sudden, he breaks off from his diatribe, sits back down and turns his attention to his watercolours.

In the April edition of the
National Geographic
humanity sees one of the wonders of the world for the first time. Machu Picchu, the Lost City of the Incas, was rediscovered by a collaborative expedition between Yale University and the National Geographic Society. The leader of the expedition, Hiram Bingham, took the very first photographs of the ruins of this magical city, suddenly discovered among the high vegetation at the highest heights of Peru.
National Geographic
dedicates the entire issue to its excavation: the magazine publishes 250 photographs, dazed, enthused and excited, as the introduction to the article states, by this ‘wonder’. Then it declares: ‘What an extraordinary people the builders of Machu Picchu must have been to have constructed, without steel implements, and using only stone hammers and wedges, the wonderful city of refuge on the mountain top.’ In the fifteenth century, when Florence was at the peak of its greatest era and Leonardo was painting the
Mona Lisa
, Machu Picchu
came into being, 2,360 metres high up in the Andes. Even today the rain drainage system in the terraced city works perfectly.