1913 (27 page)

Or as a red book. During this year C. G. Jung starts noting down his dreams and experiences in a red leather-bound notebook – and begins to analyse himself with it. At the beginning of the year he, the President of the International Psychoanalytic Union, committed an act of parricide against Sigmund Freud. He not only rejected the libido theory as the central belief system of modern psychology but above all, as he said in his letter, ‘tugged the prophet’s beard’. Parricide, however, destroys not only the father but also the perpetrator. While Freud sinks into depression and suppressed rage, Jung descends into a severe crisis, because he no longer has the father figure he looked up to adoringly for so long. He relinquishes his teaching position at the University of Zurich and – just like Freud – becomes nervous about the encounter looming ever closer. The two enemy camps are due to meet in September at the Congress of Psychoanalysts in Munich.

Jung’s sleep suffers, and he is tormented by nightmares. One of them is the catalyst for the ‘Red Book’. Bathed in sweat, he awakes after having a vision of Europe sinking beneath the waves of a massive flood. Murder and manslaughter and corpses and devastation everywhere. By day he lectures on schizophrenia, but by night, in his unsettled dreams, he fears that he himself is becoming schizophrenic. The nightmare with the apocalyptic vision, in particular, torments him for so long that he tries to overcome it by writing it down. His dreams have been fraught with confusion ever since he managed to establish a very unusual love triangle in his life: he successfully convinced both his wife, Emma, and his lover, Toni Wolf, to accept their ménage à trois. On Sunday evenings Toni even comes to dinner at the family villa in Küsnacht on Lake Zurich. There are no records,
however, as to exactly how those evenings played out after dinner. All we know is that both Emma and Toni were analysts, and that the relationship between the three would endure for many decades. And that Jung himself rummaged through the events of the days and nights in his dreams, recording them hurriedly and feverishly in his ‘Red Book’. ‘Debate with the Unconscious’ was the name he gave to this experiment on himself. And, just like the masses of water flooding Europe in his dreams of 1913, Jung’s inner being unleashed a storm tide: ‘All of my later activities consisted of formulating what emerged from my unconscious, drowning me at first, during those years. It was the primary substance for a lifetime’s work.’

Elias Canetti, at nearly eight years of age, moves with his mother from Galicia to Vienna and starts to learn German.

And 1913 is the year when D. H. Lawrence becomes
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
. His Lady Chatterley is thirty-four years old, and he ran away from England with her after a brief, barely five-week-long affair. Her real name is Frieda von Richthofen – now Weekley, but her husband, a professor from the University of Nottingham and Lawrence’s lecturer, is unable to tame either her Prussian nobility or her temperament. The 27-year-old Lawrence, however, the miner’s son who has just submitted his manuscript for
Sons and Lovers
to his publisher, is impressed that she is ‘the daughter of a baron, from the ancient and famed lineage of von Richthofen’. Frieda is green-eyed, intelligent, blonde and devoted to living life to the full. She believes that paradise on earth can only be realised through free love. Lawrence takes her at her word and flees England with her, heading for Europe. In the spring of 1913 they find shelter in a love nest belonging to Frieda’s sister Else, in Irschenhausen in Upper Bavaria. The small, cosy, wooden summer house had always been a retreat for Else, the
wife of the Munich professor Jaffé, and her lover Alfred Weber, brother of Max Weber, with whom Else studied for her doctorate. When Frieda arrives there from England, Else gives her a stylish dirndl as a moving-in present, intended to show off her feminine charms to their best advantage. The sisters were always of one mind on these matters, even while they were both lovers of Otto Gross, a Freud disciple, cocaine addict and legendary seducer. Admittedly Else was the only one to have a child with him, named Peter, just like the son born in matrimony that very same year to Otto Gross and his wife, a woman called Frieda, just like his other lover. It seems the paradise of free love was a confusing place at times.

Lawrence and Frieda Weekley,
née
von Richthofen, have to fight for their love even after they flee – they are united by, as Lawrence once wrote, ‘a bond of affection, knotted from pure hatred’. But this early summer in Irschenhausen is their happiest time together. Isolated from the rest of the world in the Isar Valley, with fir trees and mountains behind them and the great expanse in front of them, they recover from their flight and summon new energy. It’s not long before Lawrence is singing the praises of Frieda’s ‘genius for living’. He clearly enjoys her genius for love just as much, for when he later goes on to release his most famous book, the erotic tales of
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
, the aristocratic seductress bears a strong similarity to Frieda von Richthofen. Irschenhausen, however, is not mentioned by name; it’s not romantic enough for a novel of that kind.

But by June 1913 they are both growing restless. Lawrence wants to go back to England to enjoy the success following upon the publication of
Sons and Lovers
. And his lover wants to see her children again. She abandoned three offspring, aged thirteen, eleven and nine, to run off with the young author. And now it’s breaking her heart. At the end of June they set off for England, after which Lawrence barely manages to tear her away from her beloved children. They make plans to meet in Italy. She isn’t convinced, however, by his declaration of love, so he promises to walk all the way through Switzerland to Italy. And he does. She believes him, for the time being.

The Innsbruck publication
Der Brenner
carries out a survey on Karl Kraus. In June, Arnold Schönberg writes these fine words in response: ‘In the dedication with which I sent my
Theory of Harmony
to Karl Kraus, I said something along these lines: “I have, it seems, learned more from you than one really should if one wishes to remain independent.” That sums up, not the extent, but certainly the level of the appreciation that I have for him.’ A very rare record of silent admiration, high regard and eloquence from this overheated year.

In June the German Reich celebrates the twenty-fifth anniversary of the reign of Kaiser Wilhelm II. He is a strange emperor, fascinated above all else by ships and decorum. Early in his reign he personally saw to it that court ceremonies were extended and new dress codes introduced. As his jubilee approaches, he takes all the planning in hand – wanting to make decisions not just about the staging of the event but also about the selection of presents. It was even his idea that he should be referred to in the speeches as the ‘Emperor of Peace’ – despite the fact that, just two weeks later, the Reichstag passes a bill approving the expansion of the army. And even though the old seating arrangements were retained at the gala tables – for example, placing the Reich Chancellor behind the Imperial family and the Federal Prince, and other representatives even far behind insignificant court officials – power relationships within the Reich itself hadn’t been that clear for quite some time. If the hierarchy was not reflected in the table, Wilhelm needed to fight hard for his political position within the constitutional monarchy. He didn’t have a genuine instinct for power. Instead, he turned his attentions to his strong point: public appearances. He would behave in a down-to-earth way, as if he were one of the people, a friend of the military, of simple pleasures, and an enemy of modern French art. He loved ships, the North, the marines. For him the greatest thing about the colonies was that they
were accessible only by ship. Even when he went hunting for wood grouse in the Hessian mountains with his lover, Countess Görtz, he spent the evenings, before the hunter’s horn sounded, etching little warships into the wood of the hunting lodge.

There are over 200 cinemas in Berlin by 1913. Most of them show productions from the film studios founded in Babelsberg the previous year: for example, Asta Nielsen’s
The Sins of the Fathers
. It tells the story of a painter’s muse who, to her adored, paternal hero, is a model for allegories of beauty. Then he leaves her, and she becomes an alcoholic. The painter encounters her again later and is transfixed, but doesn’t recognise her. He invites her to his studio, intent on painting an allegory of alcoholism which he intends to be his masterpiece. And it is. But when the muse sees that she, her love and her beauty are to be sacrificed on the altar of art and career, she destroys the canvas in a sensational act of protest. Asta Nielsen’s outbreak of rage makes her face a much-admired icon.