1913 (22 page)

‘Life is too short and Proust too long’, Anatole France writes with wonderful precision in 1913 about the publication of the first volume of
In Search of Lost Time
. So Proust struck him as ‘too long’ even before the remaining six volumes had come out. No one, not even Proust himself, had any idea where Proust’s meticulous search for the depths of memory would lead. The book as an attempt to capture the past in language – against the flow of time.

In Vienna, Sigmund Freud is gripped by his own book: ‘I’m now writing
Totem
with the feeling that it is my greatest, best, perhaps my last good book.’ What he’s undertaken is quite massive. The last sentence is: ‘In the beginning was the deed.’ With these words he wants at last to confront the biblical ‘In the beginning was the word’ and establish his new theory of civilisation. The primal moment in the history of its evolution, Freud thinks in the spring of 1913, is Oedipus’ act of parricide. He writes to a friend in May: ‘The thing is due to be published before the Congress, in the August issue of
IMAGO
, and it should make a clean break with everything Aryan and religious.’ After his break with C. G. Jung and the Zürich group of psychoanalysts, Freud spends the whole year worrying about September, when
that ‘Congress’, the Congress of the Psychoanalytical Society, is due to take place, the one that will force the now hostile groups back around a table. And Freud knows that the anti-Christian theory in
Totem and Taboo
, on which he is feverishly working, will seal the break with Jung and his disciples.

In early May, Rudolf Steiner writes to his mother: ‘And the war keeps threatening to come.’ But he has no time to worry about it. He wants to set up an Anthroposophical Centre at last, known as the Johannesbau.

And after his plans to erect this building in Munich are dismissed by the building commission, he speaks to his devotees in Stuttgart on 18 May and tells them to avoid trying to do anything new in Munich, as something about the city was dying (if Oswald Spengler had heard this in his Munich study, where he was working on his
Decline of the West
, he would have shouted with joy).

So Steiner explains: ‘New cultures have never been able to settle in this dying place.’ For a long time he has sensed that Dornach, near Basel, is the place for anything new and flourishing. But it was still too early for that.

For a long time the Anthroposophical Centre in Berlin was at the rear of 17 Motzstrasse. Rudolf Steiner lived there with his wife, Anna, but he insisted that his loyal companion and lover Marie von Sivers move in too, which, of course, didn’t work well for long. The rear extension was all a bit basic. Hardly any furniture, a few tables, books, a bed. Always the sound of a secretary tapping away somewhere on a Remington typewriter. Under great pressure Rudolf Steiner writes lecture after lecture here, theses elaborated over the course of several hours about the state of souls and the world, Christianity, the spirit of the nineteenth century, and at the same time his ‘office’ is busy organising lecture tours across all of Europe. Steiner and Marie von Sivers spend almost two-thirds of the year on the road – when Steiner is in Berlin, people make a pilgrimage to Motzstrasse to request help
and enlightenment from the master. Consultations go on for days at a time, the atmosphere is unexpectedly informal, visitors wait in armchairs and are then ushered into a little room where Steiner generally sits among the suitcases from his last trip, still unpacked. And yet he wins them all over with his empathy and his approachability. All they want is understanding for their
Weltschmerz
, disguised as neurasthenia. We know that Hermann Hesse was one of those who came in search of enlightenment and who were granted an audience with Steiner, and so, in fact, was Franz Kafka. How their brief meeting went, history, alas, does not record.

Spring is here at last. The teacher Friedrich Braun and his wife, Franziska, are pushing their pram through the Hofgarten in Munich. In December they became the proud parents of little Eva. Eva Braun is six months old when 24-year-old Adolf Hitler arrives in Munich on Sunday 25 May.

On the Sunday morning when Hitler leaves Vienna, the city is frozen with shock: one of the most senior military officers and secret service personnel in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, Colonel Alfred Redl, has been convicted of espionage during the night and has shot himself in his hotel room at 1.45 in the morning. Strangely, the pistol had been placed in his room, room number 1 at the Hotel Klomser, where he always stayed, in return for his signature on the paper in which he confessed his guilt. And the dishonoured Colonel Redl asks the secret service staff to leave the room quietly, before pulling the trigger. When Kaiser Franz Joseph, on getting up at four o’clock in the morning, learns the extent of Redl’s military espionage, he sighs deeply: ‘So this is the brave new world? And these the creatures that it brings forth? In the old days, that wouldn’t have been imaginable.’ An announcement is placed in the newspapers which tries to
maintain appearances: ‘The General Chief of Staff of the Prague Army Corps, Colonel Alfred Redl, has taken his own life in an attack of mental confusion. The talented officer, who had a great career ahead of him, had been suffering from insomnia for some time.’ In that way they attempted to package the terrible news that one of the most influential generals in Austro-Hungary had betrayed all their military plans to the enemy as suicide caused by insomnia. But Vienna hadn’t reckoned with Egon Erwin Kisch, the young reporter with the newspaper
Bohemia
. That Sunday, Kisch is waiting in vain, at the away game between his own football team, Sturm, and Union Holeschowitz, for their most dangerous striker, the fitter Hans Wagner. Then, on Monday, when Wagner explains himself to the captain and hems and haws, Kisch learns that on Sunday morning he had been recruited by the military to break into a private apartment in the Army Corps headquarters. He had seen strange things there: ladies’ tulle dresses, perfumed draperies, pink silk sheets. Kisch deftly placed an article in a Berlin newspaper about the true background to the death of Colonel Redl, which he had researched with the help of one of his team-mates.

So by Thursday 29 May the War Ministry’s military review has to reveal the whole truth:

Colonel Redl – ironically awarded the ‘Order of the Iron Crown Third Class’ for his services to counter-espionage, the army’s brightest hope, who reported to the Kaiser in person and was in close contact with the General Staff of the German Reich, General von Moltke – this Colonel Redl was suddenly exposed as a character out of an operetta. The small, dapper, red-haired man had spent his entire
fortune on his lovers, giving them cars and flats and buying himself perfumes and hair dyes. Having found himself in financial difficulties, he had been selling off all Austria-Hungary’s deployment plans, military codes and projects for national expansion. Now it was meltdown. The name ‘Redl’ became synonymous with a system that had gone rotten, an outmoded, decadent monarchy, the mark of Cain. His brothers Oskar and Heinrich were mercifully granted permission to change their names forthwith to Oskar and Heinrich Rhoden. Along with the name, the case itself was to be eradicated from the memory of the city and the country, but it did no good – whenever Stefan Zweig thought of the Colonel Redl affair, he felt a ‘horror in his throat’. But the Redl affair turned Egon Erwin Kisch, the man who uncovered it, into a legendary reporter. In return he received one of the highest civilian decorations that Vienna had to offer: the best table in Café Central was always reserved for him.

One more footnote – a weird one. On 24 May, the night before Colonel Redl shoots himself, Arthur Schnitzler dreams he shoots himself as well: ‘A mad dog bites me, left hand, to the doctor, he takes it lightly, I go, in despair – want to shoot self. In the paper it will say: “like a greater man before him”, which I find irritating.’