1913 (25 page)
Authors: Florian Illies
Two journeys to the centre of the earth: Piero Ginor Conti, in Larderello in Tuscany, manages to use water from the earth’s core to produce electricity. Geothermia has been discovered. At the same time Marshall B. Garner writes his book in which he claims that mammoths still live inside the earth. They didn’t die out at all, he claims, they just withdrew to warmer climes.
In Vienna, Oskar Kokoschka goes on working on the canvas that is the same size as the bed of his lover Alma, the widow of Gustav Mahler. He is in great pain because Alma has just aborted their child. He cannot forgive her for destroying the fruit of their love. Again and again he paints accusatory pictures of Alma with that child, whose life he imagines through art. He was present at the abortion in a Vienna clinic and took the bloody cotton wool back to his studio, repeatedly mumbling to himself, ‘This will be my only child.’ (Tragically he was right.)
And yet he’s still sexually obsessed with Alma; he can only work when she has granted him her favours. So day in, day out, he stands in his studio in Alma’s bright red pyjamas, which he tore off her at the start of their affair and which he always wears when he paints. In
1913 he paints her almost a hundred times: Alma. It’s an adventurous passion, full of rage, raving, happiness – ‘so much hell, so much paradise’, as Alma calls it. He used to want Alma to beat him during the act of love, which she didn’t enjoy, but in his daily letters Oskar pleads with her ‘to strike me with your beautiful dear little hand’.
Between kisses he shouts out his murderous plans and his fury. It must have given him an almighty kick.
Kokoschka’s jealousy is so colossal that, when he leaves Alma’s flat at night, he sometimes waits in the street until four o’clock, until he’s sure no other man is climbing the stairs to his beloved. ‘I shall tolerate no other gods before me’, he writes, beautifully and idiotically at the same time. His jealousy also extended with particular intensity to Gustav Mahler, Alma’s late husband. So time and again they have to make love right under the composer’s death mask. And Kokoschka pleads with Alma, who with her infallible knack of spotting artistic genius and the
genius loci
has, of course, been in Paris this particular May: ‘Please, my sweet Almi, shield your sweet body from prying eyes and further strengthen my feeling that every strange hand and every alien gaze is a blasphemy against the sanctity of your beautiful body.’ Then, at the end of May, worship turns to magic. Oskar Kokoschka writes pleading letters to her at her hotel in Paris: ‘I must soon have you as my wife, or else my great gift will perish miserably. You must bring me back to life in the night like a magic potion.’ Alma starts to get worried. She decides to stay an extra week in Paris after all.
In Carl Sternheim’s play
The Snob
, on which he is working in the summer of 1913, he hides dozens of allusions to Walther Rathenau, the great chairman of AEG, romantic, author, politician, thinker. And also one of the most narcissistic figures of his time. At the première of
The Snob
, Sternheim’s wife, Thea, sits next to Rathenau, worrying that he might know he’s the one being depicted on stage. But narcissism can also act as a form of protection. Rathenau is unmoved.
At the end he says only that he would like to read the play through carefully once more.
The 27-year-old Ludwig Mies van der Rohe comes back to Berlin and sets himself up as an architect.
Max Beckmann writes in his diary: ‘Man is and remains a first-class swine.’
This is the month when it becomes clear that war is simply not an option. Georg Trakl is searching for his sister and deliverance from damnation, while Thomas Mann is just looking for some peace and quiet. Franz Kafka makes a marriage proposal of sorts, but it doesn’t come across well. He seems to confuse it with an oath of disclosure. D. H. Lawrence publishes his
Sons and Lovers,
then runs off to Upper Bavaria with mother-of-three Frieda von Richthofen, who becomes his inspiration for Lady Chatterley. Other than that, nerves are raw everywhere. In cinemas, Asta Nielsen destroys an unknown masterpiece in
Sins of the Fathers.
The German army is set to grow and grow. Henkell Trocken celebrates Franco-German friendship
.
There couldn’t possibly be another war, Norman Angell was sure of that. His 1911 book
The Great Illusion
became a worldwide best-seller. In 1913 he writes a well-received ‘Open Letter to German Students’, through which his theories reach an even greater audience. At the same time the fourth edition of his book is published. As ever more vexing noises push their way northwards from the Balkans that early summer, the intellectuals in Berlin, Munich and Vienna are able to calm their nerves by reading the British publicist’s book. In it Angell expounds his theory that the era of globalisation renders world wars impossible, because all countries are now economically interlinked to such a high degree. He also says that, alongside the economic networks, close international ties in communication and above all in the world of finance mean that any war would be preposterous. He argues that, even if the German military wanted to pit its strength against England, there is ‘no establishment of significance in Germany which would not suffer greatly’. This, he claims, will prevent war, because ‘the entire German financial world would exert its influence over the German government, thereby putting a stop to a situation which would be ruinous for German trade’. Angell’s theory convinced intellectuals all over the world. David Starr Jordan, the President of Stanford University, utters these great words after Angell’s lecture in 1913: ‘The Great War in Europe, that eternal threat, will never come. The bankers won’t come up with the money needed for such a war, and industry won’t support it, so the statesmen simply won’t be able to do it. There will be no Great War.’
At the very same time Wilhelm Bölsche’s epic three-volume work
Die Wunder der Natur
is published, with the lovely title
The Triumph
of Life
in the 1913 English-language edition. Bölsche, a divine writer, toned down Modernity, or more specifically the findings of modern science, for the bourgeois public, sprinkling on a fine dusting of sugar to make it more palatable. Instead of providing supporting evidence for Darwin, his intention was to depict the ‘Mysteries of the Universe’s Splendour’. This gave rise to some unusual biological and moral theories. The public responded enthusiastically in 1913 to Bölsche’s reasoning, for example, that all higher beings are, in essence, nice to one another. He claimed that conflict only arises in the animal kingdom when an opponent is deliberately provoked. So not only would countries no longer wage war in the future, but animals wouldn’t either. This, at least, was Wilhelm Bölsche’s comforting message. Small wonder that his book was prominently displayed on all respectable imperial bookshelves. Kurt Tucholsky described the basic configuration of the upper-class library as follows: ‘Heyse, Schiller, Bölsche, Thomas Mann, an old book of verse …’. In essence, Bölsche’s work was a book of verse as well – in that he inscribed peaceful verses into the album of Modernity, dreaming up a world in which the animals behave as peacefully and affectionately as they do in Franz Marc’s paintings.