1913 (47 page)

After their wedding in May, Victoria Louise of Prussia and Prince Ernst August of Hanover move to Braunschweig. For the first time in almost fifty years there is once again a member of the Guelph family as ruling count of Braunschweig. The young couple are very happy and go on to have five children.

In the small garrison town of Zabern in Alsace-Lorraine, which has been part of the German Reich since 1871, something horrendous
happens on 28 November. In the evening a few dozen demonstrators turn up outside the German army barracks, protesting that the regiment commander Baron Günter von Forstner has declared that all Frenchmen are ‘Wackes’ – a term of abuse for the Alsatian French – and that ‘you can shit on the French flag’. These words had reached the local newspaper and provoked shock among the population. When the demonstrators hold up placards and ask for respect, the commander of the regiment has three infantry units advance with live ammunition and bayonets at the ready. Panic breaks out among the demonstrators, but the German soldiers lay into them and arrest more than thirty people, including some innocent passers-by. They are locked in a coal cellar without light and toilets. Then commander Baron Günter von Forstner says the following words: ‘I consider it a great fortune if blood flows now […] I am in charge, I owe it to the army to create respect.’

Five days later he is recognised with a troop of soldiers, and some workers at a shoe factory call him ‘the Wackes Lieutenant’, whereupon he loses his temper and brings his sabre down on the head of a disabled hostage, who cannot run away quickly enough, making him collapse in a pool of blood.

The very next day the Reichstag in Berlin discusses events in Zabern. The ‘Zabern Affair’ threatened peace between France and the German Reich more than any previous event. The German war minister, Erich von Falkenhayn, refuses to be diverted by this open flouting of the law by the German army. He claims that ‘noisy rioters’ and ‘provocative organs of the press’ are responsible for the intensification of the situation in Zabern. In response there are fights in the Landtag, and the opposition opposes any illegal actions by the military. The centre-party member Konstantin Fehrenbach: ‘The army is also subject to the law, and if we place the army outside the law and abandon the civilian population to the arbitrary rule of the army, then, gentlemen:
Finis Germaniae
! … It will be a disaster for the German Reich.’ But the real disaster is yet to come, because the German head of state, Wilhelm II, actually approves of the spirited response of the German military and cannot find anything really dramatic in the so-called
‘Zabern Affair’. But the reaction in the European press reached a furore when the sentence of Commander Forstner, which initially carried a prison term of only 43 days for grievous bodily harm, was reduced on appeal in the higher military court to acquittal. Forstner, the judges ruled, had acted in ‘putative self-defence’ and was consequently innocent. The left-liberal
Frankfurter Zeitung
acknowledges the frightening message of this acquittal: ‘The bourgeoisie has suffered a defeat. That is the actual, visible sign of the Zabern trial […] In the argument between military force and civilian force, the court martial has laid down the right of the unrestricted dominion of the former towards the bourgeoisie.’

In 1913 Prada is founded and opens its first shop, selling high-class leather goods in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele in Milan.

In mid-November, Kaiser Wilhelm takes the train to Halbe, to the ‘Kaiser Station’, then continues on into the forest of Dubrow, south of Berlin. The hunt begins at half-past one in the afternoon, in an area spanned with cloths and nets. By the time the horn is blown again at a quarter to three, a total of 560 animals have been killed. Kaiser Wilhelm II alone has killed ten stags and ten boar. At the hunt dinner in the evening he asks that a memorial be erected to his marksmanship forthwith.

November 1913 produces the most intimate, sympathetic and perhaps most honest correspondence between Thomas and Heinrich Mann. Thomas Mann is not in a good way right now. His wife, Katia, isn’t getting any better; her cough, which she has been trying to heal for months, even years, in sanatoriums, is there again, more hacking than
ever. And for the first time he is in debt, having over-reached himself with the construction of a house on Poschingerstrasse, now almost completed. He asks his publisher Samuel Fischer for an advance of 3,000 Marks for his next novel. And to his brother Heinrich he writes: ‘I have only ever been interested in decay, and that is precisely what prevents me from taking an interest in progress.’ And then:

And then, with unusual warm brotherly love: ‘It is of course crassly tactless of me to write to you like this, for what can you reply?’ But Heinrich Mann, who will conclude his great novel of the times,
Man of Straw
, in the next few months, clearly knows what to reply. We don’t know his reaction. But we do know Thomas’s: ‘For your intelligent, tender letter I thank you from the bottom of my heart.’ And again, a kind of sudden declaration of love to his sibling: ‘In my fondest hours I have long dreamt of writing another long and faithful book of life, a continuation of
Buddenbrooks
, the story of us five siblings. We are worth it. All of us.’ Never again will he grant his brother so deep an insight into his soul, so tortured by weariness and doubts.

Still no sign of the
Mona Lisa
.

Marcel Duchamp still doesn’t feel like making art, but he has an idea. ‘Can one,’ he wonders, ‘create works that are not art works?’ And then, in the autumn, in his new flat on Rue Saint-Hippolyte in Paris,
the front wheel of a bicycle suddenly appears, and he mounts it on an ordinary kitchen stool. Marcel Duchamp mentions it quite casually: ‘It was something I wanted to have in my room, the way one has a fireplace or a pencil sharpener, except that it was not in any way useful. It’s a pleasant device, pleasant because of the movements it made.’ Duchamp finds it so calming to spin the wheel with his hand. He likes its endless rotation on its own axis. While in Paris and Berlin and Moscow artists are still fighting about whether Cubism, Realism, Expressionism or Abstraction is the royal road, the young Duchamp just puts a bicycle wheel in his kitchen and thus creates the first ‘ready-made’. It’s the most casual quantum leap in art history.