1913 (39 page)

Kurt Tucholsky, the hotheaded postgraduate law student at Jena University, soon to be one of the sharpest-tongued critics on the
Berlin magazine
Die Schaubühne
, dreams up the plan of every hotheaded, sharp-tongued journalist. He wants to found his own newspaper, which will be called
Orion
. Tucholsky wants to reach for the stars. It will be a ‘yearbook in letters’. Meaning that it will present the great people of the day in their authentic testimonies. A strange idea: three times a month subscribers will receive ‘the facsimile of a letter from a great European’. Nothing comes of it. Soon Tucholsky will have to tell the ninety-four interested parties who want to subscribe: ‘Orion remains what it was: a constellation, far away and unattainable.’ Rainer Maria Rilke and Hermann Hesse, those great letter-writers, had declared their interest early on (Rilke sends a poem on 21 September), as had Thomas Mann. But it isn’t enough. However, one extraordinary document survives from the phase of the magazine’s foundation: a letter from Tucholsky, in which he tries to recruit prominent collaborators from his room at 12 Nachodstrasse. In it he provides a cross-section of 1913 and the individuals who strike him as ‘great Europeans’ from a German point of view. The letter is unique in its breadth and concision. From the world of literature he wants to ask ‘Dehmel, Hofmannsthal, Brod, Blei, Morgenstern, Werfel, Rilke, Hauptmann, Wassermann, Thomas Mann, Heinrich Mann, Hesse, Schnitzler, Altenberg, Robert Walser, Sternheim, Shaw, Wedekind, Kellermann, Friedell, Keyserling, Hamsun and Kafka’ for contributions. But as well as them, ‘Mynona, Owlglass, Holz, Schäfer, Willi Speyer, Wied, Hochdorf (Brussels), Irene Forbes-Mosse’ – names which were given equal status to the great names quoted first, and which nobody knows today. Equally impressive is his list of the great living philosophers that Kurt Tucholsky wants to ask for help: ‘Mauthner, Chesterton, Rathenau, Simmel, Wundt, Mach, Buber, Flammarion, Bergson’. And finally, from visual art: ‘Meier-Graefe, Lichtwark, Behrens.’ And for the illustrations and drawings Tucholsky thinks, among others, of ‘Klimt, Barlach, Kollwitz’. It would have been nice if something had come of it.

There is a second contemporary cross-section of 1913 – an artistic one. The ‘First German Autumn Salon’ in Berlin, for which Franz Marc from Sindelsdorf and his friend August Macke in Bonn had been doing the groundwork since the spring, opens on 19 September in Herwarth Walden’s legendary ‘Sturm’ Gallery. He has transformed the empty villa at 34a Tiergartenstrasse – actually scheduled for demolition – into a spectacular exhibition space.

The list of artists for this exhibition, based on the Paris ‘Salon d’Automne’, contains everyone who was avant-garde in 1913 – with the exception of the Berlin Brücke artists, who are off at their summer retreats on the Baltic, still licking their wounds after the painful collapse of the artists’ association in May, and who aren’t yet ready for the next burst of group dynamics. ‘If I don’t join in,’ Marc writes to Macke in Bonn, ‘it wouldn’t be the greatest disaster imaginable, I just feel sorry for Nolde and Heckel.’ Not a word from Kirchner. He is deeply alien to the two warm-hearted Blue Riders. In the end 366 paintings by 90 artists from twelve countries are shown – after the ‘Armory Show’ in New York, the second exhibition of the year to set new standards. For the ‘Autumn Salon’ Walden had hired a huge hall at 75 Potsdamer Strasse. Bernhard Koehler, the great patron, donates 4,000 Marks to the organisation, although in the end he has to add an extra sum for transport costs. The ‘First German Autumn Salon’ is a sensation. Robert and Sonia Delaunay come from Paris for the opening, so do Marc Chagall and almost the whole of the Blaue Reiter, and even the Italian Futurists travel specially to the Sturm Gallery. They all know that they are witnessing a historic event. Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, Russians, Austrians, Hungarians, Italians, Czechs – all united in their desire for new art. It is an aesthetic alliance across all boundaries, a demonstration of the solidarity of the avant-garde beyond all foreign political skirmishes.

Works by Archipenko, Delaunay, Léger, Severini, Carra, Boccioni, Jawlensky, Marc, Macke, Münter, Klee, Chagall, Kandinsky and Picabia are on show, and beside them, for the first time in the circle of the avant-garde, paintings by the young painters Lyonel Feininger and Max Ernst. Franz Marc shows his three epoch-making paintings from 1913, on which the paint is not quite dry: the
Tour of
the Blue Horses
, then
Wolves (Balkan War)
and finally that picture of intersecting creatures for which he could not find a title, until Paul Klee at last suggested
Animal Destinies
. Accompanying this is a series of lectures for which Guillaume Apollinaire, the man who gave the Cubists their name, and Tommaso Marinetti, the spokesman of the Italian Futurists, the two most glittering art theorists, come to the Sturm Gallery.

The public reaction ranges from furious to outraged. The newspapers publish terrible insults that seriously wound August Macke after the organisation’s endless efforts. He rages at the ‘bastards’ and ‘swinish newspaper rogues’, who don’t understand the works on show in Berlin. The
Frankfurter Zeitung
, for example, writes: ‘It creates the impression that something is on show in a developmental phase. Never has pretention been more presumptuous, never less well-founded.’ And the
Hamburger Nachrichten
adds: ‘In fact it is rough fiddle-faddle, this great mass of absurdities, of ludicrous scribbles. You think you’re coming out of the art gallery of a lunatic asylum.’ On the other hand, Franz Marc writes to Kandinsky: ‘My guiding idea in the hanging was: to show the massive intelligent absorption and artistic activity that is going on. A person will only go with a pounding heart, full of good surprises. For me personally, the conclusion is also surprising: a significant predominance (also in terms of quality) of abstract forms.’ Then Marc, Macke and Herwarth Walden publish a flyer which they distribute on the Kurfürstendamm and in the Zoo. It includes these fine words: ‘Art exhibitions must be visited against the will of the art critics!’ But it’s no good. Hardly anyone comes. The exhibition ends up as a financial disaster. In the end Koehler, the patron, has to stump up almost 20,000 Marks rather than 4,000 to cover the costs of rent and transport.

Like Rilke and Freud, Arthur Schnitzler is in Munich during the first days of September. He is staying at the Hotel Continental and attending the rehearsals of his play
Liebelei
. As chance will have it, his former lover Marie, known as Mizi, has a leading role. This Marie
Glümer, ‘Mz’ in the diaries, is a former patient and one of those ‘sweet girls’ from Vienna that Schnitzler always loved, who had a grip on their guilty consciences, girls you could take out to dinner, or take on outings, no more than that, and who fitted nicely into the bourgeois lives of their lovers. But now, in Munich, where he is staying with his wife, things become a little unclear.

On 9 September he is invited to Leopoldstrasse, to someone who loves women as much as he does: ‘Lieslo takes us to see Heinrich Mann, who lives here with his lover, a Prague Jewess. He introduces her as his wife and insists she be addressed and treated accordingly. Duke and Miss Morena are also there. Coffee on the terrace. Tolerable conversation. I cannot find Frau Mann as bad as other people paint her. Everyone together to the lake.’ And the atmosphere? ‘There is none.’

In Düsseldorf the lawyer Carl Schmitt waits daily to be discovered. In the evening he goes to bed with his lover Cari and is, as he confides in his diary, ‘wonderfully clumsy’: ‘nice fingering at night’.

So it goes, day after day; there’s nothing to do in court and the publishers reject his book
The Value of the State
, which contains Schmitt’s big anti-individualist programme. But then on 20 September the time has come. The publisher Mohr wants to publish Schmitt’s book, and the author grows an extra three feet tall: ‘Wonderful autumn weather. I feel like a great man walking unrecognised through the streets with secret superiority.’

Sadly it is not to last. On 30 September he writes after a visit to a concert: ‘The music stirred up all my complexes. I wanted to kill myself. What’s the point? No one cares about me, I don’t care about anybody. If only my book was there.’ Then, according to his wonderfully naïve hope, everything will be fine. But even the lawyer Dr Carl Schmitt cannot enforce such a law.

On 25 September 1913 Charlie Chaplin signs his first film contract with Keystone Studios. He receives $150 a week during the shoot for his début film,
Making a Living
.

Walther Rathenau publishes his book
On the Mechanics of the Mind
, in which he – chairman of the board of AEG and one of the central figures in German business – warns sharply of the dangers of technology and mechanisation to purity and the ‘Empire of the Soul’. He dedicates the book to ‘the young race’.

This is the month when Thomas Mann’s past catches up with him. In Dresden-Hellerau the avant-garde gather to watch a mystery play. Young Germans go hiking on the Meissner, which has been known as the ‘High Meissner’ ever since. Emil Nolde leaves Berlin to join an expedition to the South Pacific. August Macke finds paradise in Switzerland, by the shores of sunny Lake Thun. This month’s big question: is it OK to feel repulsed by the sight of Franz Werfel? And how much avant-garde can Berlin handle? Completely out of the blue, Ludwig Meidner paints a battlefield, which he calls
Apocalyptic Landscape.
Kaiser Wilhelm II inaugurates the Monument to the Battle of the Nations. Freud picks up his hat – and throws it at some mushrooms
.