1913 (26 page)

Restless and sweating, the morphine-addicted poet Georg Trakl travels back and forth between Salzburg and Innsbruck in June 1913. He can’t wait to see Grete again, his beloved lover, sister, his own flesh and blood, but he misses her; he wants to meet with Adolf Loos, the esteemed anti-ornamentalist, but he misses him too. He rushes to Vienna, where he starts an unpaid internship at the war ministry, only to call in sick a few days later. He vaguely suspects, perhaps even knows for certain, that Grete, who in his mind is allowed to be only with him, is betraying him with his friend Buschbeck. He writes to him: ‘Perhaps you know whether my sister Gretl is in Salzburg.’ Trakl retreats into drugs, suffering and alcohol, and descends into a ‘hell of self-made pain’. He writes and destroys; his corrections on
the sheets are like stigmata, scratched into the paper as if it were raw flesh. He writes the poem ‘The Damned’, which includes the verse:

Ludwig von Ficker, his fatherly friend and patron, in whose houses and castles Trakl finds shelter that year, immediately prints the poem in the June edition of his magazine
Der Brenner
. But not even that makes Trakl feel proud. He plunges ever lower.

Edvard Munch paints his picture
Jealousy
.

Meanwhile Thomas Mann is sitting in his country home in Bad Tölz, and wants to start writing. He has an idea for a new story, to be set in Davos, in the sanatorium he got to know while visiting Katia. A self-contained universe. The book is to be a counterpart to
Death in Venice
, currently on sale, but this time, as he writes in a letter, the story will be ‘easy-going and humorous (even though death will be a favourite once more)’. The working title is
The Enchanted Mountain
.

He wants to get started. The children are playing catch outside in the meadow, watched over by the nanny. But he can’t start. He keeps glancing at the rug in his study, and each time he does so he’s overcome with rage at the rug trader, Schönnemann, who ripped him off. He asked another Munich dealer to take a look at it, and he valued the rug at a third of the price he paid. But Herr Schönnemann refuses to reimburse him, so Thomas Mann takes the matter to court. He looks out at the Alpine peaks, then lays his fountain pen aside. The enchanted mountain will have to wait. He writes to his lawyer, instructing him to pressurise the rug trader into paying up.

Harry Graf Kessler, dressed, as always, in a white three-piece suit, travels by train from glittering Paris to turbulent Berlin, falling for Westphalia’s charms en route. ‘Journey through Westphalia’, he notes in his diary on 3 June.

These were the words of Harry Graf Kessler – exactly a week after Die Brücke disbanded in Berlin, a group of artists who had spent eight years capturing the voluptuous, heavy, expansive and maternal qualities of the German landscape in German Expressionism. And a group to which Kessler paid no attention whatsoever.

Franco-German relations in 1913 in the publication
Simplicissimus
, featuring an advert for Henkell Trocken sparkling wine: ‘From the grape to the cask in Rheims. From the cask to the bottle in Biebrich, where the preparation of our brands Henkell Trocken and Henkell Privat is complete. We are the only German sparkling wine maker which is at the absolute peak of organisation, both in the Champagne region and in Germany.’ You turn the page. On the next, you see a caricature of a completely Frenchified German in magnificent clothes, spending the afternoon reading the illustrated journals. The caption reads: ‘These relentless incidents on the border are horrendous enough already. But our men will be flabbergasted once they see the French approaching with all their elaborate fashions.’

On 29 June the Reichstag passes a military bill (put forward by the government) at the third reading, approving the increase of peacetime troops by 117,267 men to 661,478.

On a not very pleasant day in 1913 Franz Marc suddenly reaches for his paintbrush and paints a picture that contrasts wildly with the rest of his oeuvre. The painting in question doesn’t depict the usual paradise, where animals are as mild as angels and human beings are redundant. No. This time it’s all about hell. Franz Marc, horrified by the newspaper reports from southern Europe and the increasingly bloody carnage there, paints a sinister, snarling picture. He calls it
The Wolves (Balkan War)
.

On 20 June 1913, at midday, the unemployed thirty-year old teacher Ernst Friedrich Schmidt, from Bad Sülze, walks into the Sankt-Marien School in Bremen draped with weapons. Brandishing at least six loaded revolvers, he forces his way into the classrooms on a shooting rampage. When one revolver runs out of bullets, he reaches for the next. Five girls between the ages of seven and eight die, while eighteen children and five adults are severely injured. Eventually a passer-by manages to overpower him. He later claims he was protesting about not having found a teaching position.

The year 1913 sees the publication not only of the first volume of Marcel Proust’s
In Search of Lost Time
but also of a work of revolutionary force for twentieth-century philosophy: Edmund Husserl’s
Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological
Philosophy
. Husserl’s great paradigm shift for philosophy was a turning away from the positivist realities of the surrounding world and a move towards the facts of consciousness. And 1913 was the year in which every aspect of the world within became a reality: as a picture, as a book, as a house, as an illusion.