1913 (50 page)

Emil Nolde has reached the destination of his dreams. On 3 December, two months after their departure, he sails past the Palau islands with Ada and the expedition group on the North German Lloyd steamboat
Prinz Waldemar
. On the small island of Jap, in the Western Caroline Islands, they make their first contact with the native inhabitants, who berth their boats next to theirs and come on board. Then they journey on, towards the equator, sailing past the island of German New Guinea, where August Engelhardt founded his empire.
The German reformist, incredibly gaunt by now, lives here in his book-filled hut on the beach, gathering the followers of his coconut religion around him. He believes the coconut to be a heavenly fruit (because it grows at such heights) and preaches that people can only be healthy if they nourish themselves exclusively on its milk and flesh. He loves the wonderful, heavenly sound it makes when opened, that moment when the coconut splits.

Even Nolde is eating many coconuts these days, but it isn’t enough for him; he needs the regular supplement of a freshly killed chicken. On 13 December the expedition group reaches Rabaul, the capital city of the Neu-Pommern nature reserve. There they are each appointed with a native ‘boy’. Tulie and Matam are the names of the two boys who will tend to Emil and Ada Nolde from now on. So they can all acclimatise, the group now spends four weeks on a small mountain above Rabaul, named Narmanula, where they are able to stay in a newly built but as yet unused colonial hospital. After weeks of waiting, Nolde is overcome by an intense urge to create. He takes his watercolour paper, pours a little stream water into a holder and paints from early in the morning until late at night: Matam and Tulie at first, then the natives’ huts too, the women, the children, the tranquillity, the palm trees. He also cuts a block of wood and makes a woodcut of the two boys. Their ears and eyes are delicately carved onto the dark heads, and you can even see Tulie’s curious nose and Matam’s protruding upper lip, with the lush South Pacific vegetation visible in the background.

Emil Nolde is not only fascinated but also disillusioned. Here in Palau he can no longer see the untouched South Pacific that Paul Gauguin once painted, the one the European poets conjured up in their poems. The native inhabitants of the colonies are sadly Europe-anised, ‘their defiance broken, their hair cut short’, he writes. They are all being brought to Rabaul to learn German or English, and after that they return to their native villages to work as interpreters for tourists. Nolde heads across by boat to the Gazelle peninsula, where he hopes to find a more native way of life – realising that he is
witnessing a culture at the moment of its demise, he reaches for his watercolours to preserve the evidence. He searches for paradise in the vibrant pink and red blooms of the bougainvillaea and hibiscus, and in the naked bodies of the natives too. But in their faces Nolde finds a frightening apathy. Instead of unspoilt joy for life, his pictures of the South Pacific speak of the seriousness of the modern era. He writes letters back to his distant homeland: ‘I’m painting and drawing and trying to capture something of primordial being. I may have succeeded here and there, but I am nonetheless of the opinion that my paintings of the primordial people and some of my watercolours are so genuine and crude that they could not under any circumstances be hung in perfumed salons.’

Dozens and dozens of watercolours are created in Neu-Pommern that December, melancholic studies of the agony of a culture broken by European pressure. Mothers and children huddle up to one another as if on a sinking ship. So this is the paradise he dreamed of for years on end, and which he spent sixty arduous days travelling to.

On 23 December, Nolde sends 215 drawings and watercolours with the Rabaul post steamer to his friend and patron Hans Fehr in Halle. On 24 December, Emil Nolde notes in his diary how much he misses a white Christmas, the crackle of wood in the fireplace and the decorated Christmas tree: ‘It was almost impossible for us to get into the Christmas spirit in this heat. Our thoughts wandered over the seas and across the world to the cosy corners of the German homeland, where the lights burned brightly. I put the little wooden figures that I carved during the sea journey with a pocket knife onto our Christmas table.’

On 25 December, issue 52 of
Die Schaubühne
published the poem ‘City Christmas’, by Kurt Tucholsky, alias Theobald Tiger. It portrays Christmas as a bourgeois drama in which people no longer have feelings, only roles.

Arthur Schnitzler is not proud. That December he notes in his journal that he has finally given up hope that anyone will ever really understand him: ‘Dr Roseau is sending around a pamphlet about me – well-meaning, and in essence, the same thing that is written about me everywhere. I have now given up on expecting the critics of today to understand me.’

On 1 December 1913 in Lübeck, Ernst Karl Frahm is born. He will later call himself Willy Brandt.

Oskar Kokoschka spends Christmas with Alma, her mother and her daughter in the newly built house in Breitenstein. The lighting isn’t working yet, so after dusk they all sit around the fireplace, the blazing fire and numerous candles bathing everything in a festive glow. Kokoschka gives Alma a fan which he painted for her; on it a man is pictured losing Alma to a large fish. Kokoschka is convinced that ‘there has been nothing of its kind since the Middle Ages, for no lovers have ever breathed into one another so passionately.’ (Later, once Alma has been breathing into Walter Gropius for a good while, Kokoschka has a life-size puppet modelled on Alma, discussing every wrinkle and every pad of fat around the hip region with the puppet-maker, and he goes on to live longer with the puppet than he lived with Alma herself. But that’s just an aside, after all, because we don’t really want to know what will happen next, not here in 1913.)

D. H. Lawrence, who is enjoying his greatest success ever in England with
Sons and Lovers
, according to which a man can only be either a son or a lover (which is a parricide of sorts), has already made the conflict between intellect and instinct into a big topic with this book. Back in the autumn, in an attempt to make his beloved Frieda von Richthofen believe him, he walked through the whole of Switzerland, and now the two of them are celebrating a warm Christmas in a dockside bar by the Mediterranean. That Christmas, Lawrence composes his very own confession of faith: ‘My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true.’