1913 (51 page)

From his lips to Kafka’s ears. Felice Bauer is no longer returning his letters. He writes to her by registered post, he writes to her by special delivery, he even sends his friend Ernst Weiss with a message to her office at Lindström AG, but she doesn’t answer. Then Kafka receives a telegram announcing the imminent arrival of a letter. But the letter never arrives. They speak briefly on the phone: Felice begs him not to come to Berlin for Christmas and promises she will write to him soon. But she doesn’t. When there is still no sign of a letter by midday on 29 November, Franz Kafka sits down in Prague and starts a new letter, his second proposal. He writes and broods, writes and broods. By New Year’s Eve he has reached page 22. By the time he finishes, the letter is thirty-five pages long. Kafka writes: ‘Felice, I love you with all that is humanly good in me, with everything that makes me worthy of being among the living.’ When the bells of Hradčany ring out at midnight, Kafka stands up briefly and goes over to the window. The family moved in November, so Kafka is no longer looking out over the river and the bridge and the parks, but is looking at the Altstadtring. It’s snowing softly and unrelentingly, muffling the cannon shots from the castle, and outside in the streets people are celebrating the arrival of a New Year. Kafka sits back down and continues to write: ‘Even the fact that there are things in me you find fault with and would like to change, I love that too, I just want you to know that.’

Käthe Kollwitz, weary of life with her husband and uncertain about which direction her art should take, acknowledges: ‘At any rate 1913 has passed quite innocuously, not dead and sleepy, quite a lot of inner life.’

Quite a lot of inner life: probably so. In the dark December night Robert Musil takes notes from which his novel
The Man without
Qualities
will later grow. Now he writes the lovely sentence: ‘Ulrich predicted the future and had no idea.’ Not bad. He takes another sip of red wine and lights a cigarette (or at least that is how one imagines it), then, writing as Ulrich, his protagonist, he turns his attention to the heroine, Diotima, the much-desired beauty, the Woman Full of Qualities; and all the time he had that particular sentence on his lips. So he writes: ‘And something was open: it was probably the future, but to some extent it was her lips too.’

There are a few happy people this Christmas Day in 1913. Karl Kraus and Sidonie Nádherný von Borutin are two of those for whom everything remains open. The shock waves of the argument with Franz Werfel have not yet reached their idyll. They are still enjoying each other, secretly, but with a great deal of love. Kraus is overwhelmed by the Borutins’ charming castle in Janowitz, still lit only by paraffin lamps, and by its dreamlike park, with the wonderful, 500-year-old poplar tree in the courtyard – the park that also cast its eternal spell on Rilke. Even now, in December, the great poplar still has a few ragged leaves up in its crown, which rustle when the wind blows over the hill. Kraus succumbs entirely to the magic of this place. Here, where his beloved Sidonie is mistress of the horses and the dogs and the pigs, this is his paradise. Here everything is what it is, good, and natural, and true. Sidonie and Janowitz, this liberation from Vienna and its intellectual corset, turn Karl Kraus into a different person. Sidonie’s brother wishes his sister to have a suitable marriage, but at night, when Karl creeps down the dark, cold corridors of the castle as soon as the brother has gone to sleep and climbs into Sidonie’s warm bed, they stop thinking about suitability. Karl Kraus arrived on 23 December; his friend Adolf Loos will follow him on 24 December. They want to celebrate Christmas together. Loos tries, probably so as not to disturb the young couple for long, to visit the castle of the successor to the throne in Konopiště, next door to the Borutins’ castle. He writes a letter and asks to be allowed in. But Franz Ferdinand does
not want to be disturbed. A shame, it would have been an interesting encounter: the two opposite poles of Austria-Hungary. Loos, the ice-cold adversary of ornament, and Franz Ferdinand, the hot-blooded commander in chief of the army.

Then a letter arrives for Sidi from Paris, sent by Rilke. ‘Is Karl Kraus with you?’ he asks, because Sidi has confided in him. And then he asks Sidi – who was so repelled by it – to pass on an essay about Franz Werfel to Karl Kraus, entitled ‘About the Young Poet’. He couldn’t have sent anything more unsuitable to Kraus, who learns soon afterwards that Werfel has been spreading rumours about his beloved, which makes him as angry as a raging bull.

But this time Rilke’s letter does not further disturb the loving idyll in Janowitz. Sidonie sets the letter aside – nothing urgent, she thinks – and goes for another walk in the park with Karl and her beloved dog Bobby. They dance among the snowflakes falling gently from the sky.

Kraus, who never stays away from his desk for more than two days at a time, extends his holiday to the New Year and writes elegant nature poems. Sidonie, the tall, proud beauty, later gives him a dreamy photograph of herself, writing on the back in blue ink: ‘Karl Kraus/in memory of days shared by Sidi Nádherný/Janowitz 1913–14.’ He immediately hangs it over his desk in Vienna, and never takes it down. And at some point, at some point in his life thereafter, he sends her a postcard from St Moritz: ‘Please remember Christmas 1913 tonight.’ It must have been lovely, that Christmas.

On 27 December the ministry in Vienna extends the sick leave of the neurasthenic librarian second-class Robert Musil by a further three months. He immediately travels to Germany to negotiate with Samuel Fischer, becoming editor of his magazine
Neue Rundschau
shortly afterwards. On his train journey from Vienna to Berlin he notes irritably: ‘Conspicuous in Germany; the great darkness.’

New Year’s Eve 1913. Oswald Spengler writes in his diary: ‘I remember how I felt as a boy when the Christmas tree was plundered and cleared away, and everything was as prosaic as it had been before. I cried all night in bed, and the long, long year to the following Christmas was so long and bleak.’ And again: ‘Life in this century oppresses me today. Everything redolent of comfort, of beauty, of colour, is being plundered.’

At the end of 1913 a surprising book is published. Its name is
The Year 1913 –
in it is the attempt to give an account of the present, which is ‘rich in cultural values’ but which at the same time sees an ‘increased blunting and superficiality in the masses’. The chief highlight is the last essay by Ernst Troeltsch about the religious phenomena of the present: ‘It is the old story that we all know, which for a while we called progress, and then decadence, and in which people now like to see the preparation of a new idealism. Social reformers, philosophers, theologians, businessmen, psychologists, historians signal it. But it is not there.’ The old story that was once called progress –how wisely people spoke in December 1913. But who understood those words in the hubbub of that year?

In Babylon the temple site of Etemenanki is discovered. It is the legendary Tower of Babel.