1913 (40 page)

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illustration credits 10.1
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Between 11 and 13 October the legendary meeting of reformist and youth movement groups takes place on the 753-metre-high Meissner in the Kaufunger Wald. Ever since then, the mountain has been known as the ‘High Meissner’. The German Woodstock of the last generation to be born in the nineteenth century is an attempt to unite the Wandervogel hiking associations and the Free German youth groups in the open air. It’s a protest against the pompous statement of hyper-German patriotism going on at the same time in Leipzig, with the inauguration of the Leipzig Monument to the Battle of the Nations. A huge camp of tents assembles at the base of the mountain, with two thousand youths taking part. They hike through the forests, sing, take part in debates and listen to a variety of speakers. One of these is Ludwig Klages, who tells the young people that the modern age poses a grave threat, endangering Germany’s forests and, by association, the very essence of the German life principle. Klages warns them about technology destroying nature and pleads for a return to a more natural way of life. Titled ‘Man and Earth’, his provocative speech is a warning against progress and environmental destruction. The logo for the gathering on the ‘High Meissner’ is created by the reformist Fidus, a painter of down-to-earth yet sublime watercolours, in his dramatic painting
Hohe Wacht
, printed in the commemorative publication: young, naked men, with blades at their belt, stare proudly upwards. These men are also the audience for the young student Walter Benjamin’s very first public appearance. Having just switched from Freiburg to Berlin University, he has come to the mountain with his friends. As one of the speakers at the gathering, he explains that there can only be a truly free German youth once anti-Semitism and chauvinism are no longer in the picture. Next, the progressive educator Gustav Wynekens, co-founder of the Wickersdorf Free School and Walter Benjamin’s teacher, appeals to the crowd of young people:

The conference’s closing statement, the ‘Meissner Formula’, sworn to by all the participants, is much less dramatic. It states that ‘the free German youth bases its life around inner truthfulness.’ Conference also rules that ‘all events of the free German youth will be alcohol- and nicotine-free.’ Alcohol- and nicotine-free: no wonder it never turned into a revolution! Herbert Eulenberg said something along similar lines in his rhyming foreword: ‘My greetings to the youth that is no longer drinking/Instead, hiking through Germany and thinking.’ But once everyone comes back down from the mountain, returning to the valleys of the Fatherland, disillusionment quickly sets in. For Walter Benjamin too, who draws the following conclusion under the pseudonym ‘Ardor’ in Fritz Pfemfert’s Berlin magazine
Die Aktion
: ‘Hikes, festive garb and folk dances are not the ultimate and – in the year 1913 – not yet intellectual. This youth has not yet found its enemy, the born enemy it must hate.’ Benjamin misses the uprising against the fathers of the previous, affluent generations. He misses parricide. It’s worth noting, though, that he writes these fine words – and hopefully Benjamin disciples will forgive him for this – from his parents’ house at 23 Delbrückstrasse in Berlin, having moved back home following his semester in Freiburg.

But let’s give him credit for coming back from Freiburg to Berlin. As Else Lasker-Schüler said in 1913: ‘The artist will always come back to Berlin: for the clock of art is here, and it moves neither back nor forwards.’

After days of rain, the sunshine is causing mushrooms to shoot up from the ground all over the place. Sigmund Freud, visibly relieved that he managed to handle the gathering of psychoanalysts with dignity and good grace (and with a nice defeat for Jung), goes mushrooming on Sunday with his family. They all have their little wicker baskets with them, covered with checked cloths, and their eyes are fixed on the mossy ground of the Vienna Woods. Sometimes they go to the Semmering mountain too, where everyone whispers about the love nest that Mahler’s widow, Alma, is building out there for herself and the chaotic painter Kokoschka. But Freud and his family are drawn to the woods, not the summer residences. The children slip into their dirndls and shorts, Freud into his lederhosen, his green jacket and the hat with the gamsbart, and then the hunt begins. Freud leads the mushroom hunters – and it is always he who, with his eagle eye, finds the best mushrooms in the most hidden of spots. He then takes a few steps forward, pulls off his hat, throws it over the mushroom and whistles shrilly through his silver pipe, bringing his fellow hunters storming out from the undergrowth. Then, once he has the whole family’s rapt attention, he finally lifts his hat and lets them admire the booty. Anna, his beloved daughter, is usually granted the honour of laying the mushroom in her basket.

Just when Futurism is once again being proclaimed as the movement of the hour in Berlin, with Tommaso Marinetti speaking at the ‘First German Autumn Salon’, Dr Alfred Döblin, the great doctor, great author and great friend of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Else Lasker-Schüler, publishes his ‘Letter to F. T. Marinetti’. It contains these delightful words: ‘You tend to your Futurism, I’ll tend to my Döblinism.’ Döblin is unwilling to accept the destruction of syntax promoted by Marinetti in his
Futurist Manifesto
as the basis of a new
literature and art form. Instead, Döblin asks this of writers: don’t destroy, but rather get closer to life.

But when writers get closer to life, a collision can easily occur. On 28 October 1913 the following announcement appears in the
Lübeck Nachrichten:

These are the words of Mann’s then 67-year-old Uncle Friedrich, who is known as ‘Christian’ in
Buddenbrooks
. Thomas Mann delivers an amused response in a letter to his brother: ‘Did he feel he was being passed up in favour of Christian B., and perhaps wanted to remind people of his existence? I pity him, truly. My Christian Buddenbrook would never have written a letter like that.’

After fifteen years of construction, the grandiose Monument to the Battle of the Nations is inaugurated in Leipzig on 18 October, in honour of the hundredth anniversary of the battle against Napoleon.
Kaiser Wilhelm II pays tribute to the fighting spirit of the German people. The 91-metre-high monument, at a cost of 6 million Reichsmarks, commemorating the defeat of the French at the hands of the Prussians and their Russian and Austrian allies, was funded entirely from donations and lottery funding. The dark stone is granite porphyry, quarried in Baucha near Leipzig: 26,500 pieces of granite and 120,000 cubic metres of concrete were used for its construction. The inauguration of Clemens Thieme’s monument is attended by the German Kaiser, the king of Saxony, as well as all the rulers of all the German states and representatives of Austria, Russia and Sweden. The inauguration becomes a national, martial celebration with a grand parade. Dignitaries from the three victor countries lay down wreaths at the foot of the monument. Afterwards, there is a celebratory dinner in the Gewandhaus for 450 guests. No toast is made to freedom, only to the indestructible brotherhood of arms between Prussia and Austro-Hungary.