1913 (20 page)
Authors: Florian Illies
A small summit meeting at 16 Ainmillerstrasse. Paul Klee visits Gabriele Münter and Wassily Kandinsky, who are united in their desire to drive art forward. At the height of their love affair, in 1906, Münter and Kandinsky travelled together through Italy and France, painting shimmering oil studies of the sea so similar that even today we still don’t know which of them painted which. Now, seven
years later, their lives are becoming more separate, as are their styles and – almost – their beds. Kandinsky is drifting away towards his blazingly colourful abstraction, while Gabriele Münter sticks to her weighty painting, with black lines bordering the colours like the lead in stained-glass windows. That’s also the style in which she paints Paul Klee when he comes to visit them. A jagged profile, starchy collar, precise moustache, against a backdrop of several Kandinsky and Münter paintings hanging on the walls. Klee is even wearing slippers in the portrait, showing just how at home he feels there. The snow is still thick on the ground that April in Munich, so Klee would probably have got his feet wet as he walked round to see his friends. Comfortably warm now, he tucks his feet into the slippers belonging to the mistress of the house. Perhaps it’s that small, friendly gesture that makes him finally give in today when Gabriele Münter asks, yet again, whether she can paint his portrait. His shoes will take another hour to dry anyway, he may have thought, stoically accepting his fate. And so he gazes out at us from the picture, a lasting legacy of this intimate moment from the private lives of the Blaue Reiter.
Austro-Hungary doesn’t have a chance against the attack from the French. On 14 April the Frenchman Max Decugis beats the Austrian count Ludwig Salm in three sets at the final of the Madrid tennis tournament: 6–4, 6–3, 6–2.
What’s the quickest way to get from America to Europe? In
Telefunken Zeitschrift
, no. 11 (April 1913), there’s a report on the ‘first radio-telegraphic success between Germany and America’. It says: ‘For the first time since the existence of radio telegraphy, radio-telegraphic messages have been successfully sent across the ocean on
the New York–Berlin line. The distance spanned was around 6,500 kilometres.’
In April, S. Fischer publishes the biggest best-seller of 1913:
The Tunnel
, by Bernhard Kellermann. Within four weeks 10,000 copies have been sold, and after just six months 100,000. (By way of comparison: Thomas Mann’s
Death in Venice
, published in February 1913, sold just 18,000 copies in 1913, and it took until the 1930s for 100,000 copies to have been printed.)
The Tunnel
tells the story of the construction of a tunnel from New York to Europe. Deep under the Atlantic, hordes of people burrow towards one another. It’s a crazy story: science fiction mixed with realism, social criticism with engineering romanticism, capitalist belief in progress with wearily apocalyptic fantasy. The tunnel collapses, leading to strikes, rage and misery below the earth, and stock market flotations, dreams of marriage and disillusionment above. Then, after twenty-four years, the workers from Europe and America reach out their hands to one another thousands of metres under the Atlantic. Success at last. Two years later the first train travels under the earth between the continents. It takes twenty-four hours, but no one wants to board it. By then development has raced on, and the tunnel, which was once the technological utopia, is now a sentimental piece of history – people are flying from America to Europe by plane, and in half the time.
And so Kellermann succeeds in creating a great novel – he understands the passion for progress that characterises the era he lives in, the faith in the technically feasible, and at the same time, with delicate irony and a sense for what is really possible, he has it all come to nothing. An immense utopian project that is actually realised – but then becomes nothing but a source of ridicule for the public, who end up ordering their tomato juice from the stewardess many thousand metres not under but
over
the Atlantic. According to Kellermann’s
wise message, we would be wise not to put our utopian dreams to the test.
Crazed with love, Oskar Kokoschka has relinquished common sense. With brute force he tries to put Alma, the personification of his own female utopia, to the test, which in his case is otherwise known as ‘marriage’. But Alma is more sensible than that. She doesn’t believe in marriage. Nonetheless, she doesn’t want Kokoschka to squander all the energy that seems to have arisen out of the intensity of his feelings. So she tells him: I’ll marry you if you create a real masterpiece. From this day on her beloved has no other goal but this. He buys a canvas which he cuts to the exact measurements of the bed they share, 180 by 200 centimetres, in order to create his masterpiece.
He heats up the glue, he mixes the colours. Alma is to stand and pose for him, no: lie down and pose. He wants the picture to depict her as he likes her best: naked and horizontal. Alma Mahler – or, the Position of the Woman in 1913. He intends to paint himself lying next to her, but isn’t yet sure exactly how to do it. He writes her a letter: ‘The picture is moving slowly, but with constant improvements, towards completion. The two of us with strong, calm expressions, our hands entwined, at the bottom a semicircle, a sea illuminated by Bengal lights, a water tower, mountains, lightning and the moon.’ It is intended to be Oskar Kokoschka’s
Meisterwerk
. And against all expectation, it really is. But will it be enough to make Alma marry him?
In 1913 Walter Gropius publishes his essay ‘The Development of Modern Industrial Architecture’ in the yearbook of the German Workers’ Association. It includes fourteen photographs of American warehouses and silos, which Gropius perceives to be the embodiment
of a new architectural language: form follows function. They were built by engineers according to purely functional principles: simple cube formations, no ornamentation, no fuss. Gropius claims that this architectural ethos is a return to ‘purity’. Or, to use his words: ‘In the motherland of industry, America, large industrial buildings have been created whose unknown majesty towers above even the very best of Germany’s industrial buildings. They wear an architectonic face of such certainty that the meaning of the building becomes comprehensible to the onlooker with persuasive force.’
A warm spring evening in Vienna: Arthur Schnitzler has such a violent argument with his wife that on 25 May he dreams of shooting himself. Nothing comes of it. But that same night in Vienna, Colonel Redl shoots himself after being convicted of espionage. On the very same night in Vienna, Adolf Hitler packs his bags and takes the first train to Munich. The artists’ group Die Brücke breaks up. In Paris, Stravinsky celebrates the première
of The Rite of Spring
and catches his first glimpse of his future lover Coco Chanel. Brecht is bored at school and has palpitations. So he starts writing poetry. Alma Mahler runs away from Oskar Kokoschka. Rilke argues with Rodin and can’t get round to writing
.
The time has come: Max Weber invents his memorable phrase ‘the disenchantment of the world’. In a little essay on fundamental concepts in sociology he writes about what is important for the capitalist structure of society – and that includes the increasingly mechanical, scientific and rational treatment of everything previously considered a miracle. ‘Disenchantment of the world’ means, in Weber’s own words, that humanity believes it can control everything by means of calculation. Still, Weber’s own body resists the calculations of diet pills. In the spring of 1913 the 49-year-old had travelled to Ascona without his wife, Marianne, to cure himself of his drug addiction and his alcoholism. In this way, disenchanted, he wants to create an ‘outer’ beauty. But not a chance. He fasts in Ascona and takes a diet of ‘vegetarian fodder’, as he writes to his wife. But it’s no good: ‘The upholstery and the swill won’t budge. It’s how the plan of creation meant it to be.’ So he stays fat, because that’s how it was calculated to be. So with him there’s clearly more plan than creation involved. Thus his own weight problem becomes the basis for one of the most important slogans of the twentieth century.