1913 Read Online Free PDF

come up with that phrase, is living at 12 Schöne Aussicht, Frankfurt am Main. The keyperson in his life, apart from his mother, is the chimpanzee Basso in Frankfurt Zoo. At the same time Frank Wedekind, author of
Spring Awakening
and
Lulu
, is friends with Missie, a chimpanzee from the Zoological Garden in Berlin.

    Marcel Proust sits in his study at 102 Boulevard Haussmann in Paris, building his own cage. Neither sunlight nor dust nor noise must bother him while he’s working. It’s a special form of work/life balance. He has hung his study with three layers of curtains and papered his walls with cork panels. In this soundproofed room Proust sits by electric light, sending excessively polite New Year letters, as he does every year, with the urgent request that they henceforth spare him presents. He was constantly receiving invitations, but anyone who sent them knew how exhausting it was for him, because he sent letters and notes in advance about whether he was coming or not, and how he probably wouldn’t etc. – a great procrastinator, actually matched in this respect only by Kafka.
    Here sits Marcel Proust, in this soundproofed room of the mind, trying his hand at his novel about memory and the search for lost time. The first part would be called ‘A Love of Swann’s’, and in fine ink he writes the final sentence down on paper: ‘The reality I once knew no longer exists. The memory of a particular image is the melancholy remembering of a particular moment; and houses, streets, avenues are fleeting, oh! the years.’

    Must memory be melancholy remembering? Gertrude Stein, the great Parisian salon hostess and friend of the avant-garde, is shivering a few streets away from Proust. She is engaged in a terrible fight with her brother Leo; their decades-long flat-share is threatening to come apart at the seams. Is everything ephemeral? She dreams of the spring. She draws warmth from a thought. She looks at the Picassosand Cézannes on her wall. But does one thought make a spring? She writes a short poem including the phrase ‘A rose is a rose is a rose’. Just like Proust, she is trying to capture something that wants to be forgotten. So this is the world of poetry, the world of the imagination, in January 1913.

    Max Beckmann finishes his painting
The Sinking of the Titanic
.

FEBRUARY
    Things are livening up now. In New York the Armory Show is modern art’s Big Bang, with Marcel Duchamp showing his
Nude Descending a Staircase.
After that, his star is firmly in the ascendant. Nudes are everywhere, especially in Vienna: a naked Alma Mahler (by Oskar Kokoschka) and lots of other Viennese socialites in works by Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele. Others bare their souls to Sigmund Freud for 100 Kronen an hour. Meanwhile, Adolf Hitler is painting quaint watercolours of St Stephen’s Cathedral in the common room of Vienna’s boarding-house for men. In Munich, Heinrich Mann is working on
Man of Straw
and celebrating his forty-second birthday at his brother’s house. The snow still lies thick on the ground. Thomas Mann buys a plot of land and builds himself a house. Rilke continues to suffer, and Kafka continues to hesitate. A small hat shop belonging to Coco Chanel expands. Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, races around Vienna in his golden-wheeled car, plays with his model railway and worries about assassination attempts in Serbia. Stalin meets Trotsky for the first time – and in the very same month, in Barcelona, a man is born who will later murder Trotsky on Stalin’s orders. Is 1913 perhaps an unlucky year after all?

    ( illustration credits 2.1 )

    When will his time finally come? All the waiting around is driving Franz Ferdinand mad. The 83-year-old Emperor Franz Joseph has been on the throne for an incredible sixty-five years and has no intention of giving it up for his nephew, who is now next in line following the deaths of Sissi, Franz Joseph’s beloved wife, and Rudolf, his beloved son.