1913 Read Free

foreseen. A toxic affront, in which the personal bloodlust must surely be apparent even to the most unsuspecting!’
    ‘He wrote that only because he didn’t get me, my dear Tommy,’ Katia says by way of consolation, and strokes his forehead maternally when she returns from her spa cure.

    Two national myths are founded: in New York, the first edition of
Vanity Fair
is published. In Essen, Karl and Theo Albrecht’s mother opens the prototype of the first Aldi supermarket.

    And how is Ernst Jünger? ‘Fair.’ At least, that’s what it says in the report the seventeen-year-old Jünger has been given in the reform school in Hameln for his essay on Goethe’s ‘Hermann and Dorothea’. He wrote: ‘The epic takes us back to the time of the French Revolution, whose blaze disturbs even the peaceful residents of the quiet Rhine valley from the contented half-sleep of their everyday lives.’ But that wasn’t enough for his teacher, who wrote in the margin, in red ink: ‘Expression too sober this time.’ We learn: this means thatErnst Jünger was already sober, when everyone else thought he was drunk.

    Every afternoon Ernst Ludwig Kirchner boards the newly built underground train to Potsdamer Platz. The other painters of Die Brücke – Erich Heckel, Otto Mueller, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff – had moved to Berlin with Kirchner from Dresden, that wonderfully forgotten Baroque city where the group was founded. They were a community in every respect, sharing paints and women, their paintings indistinguishable from one another – but Berlin, that pounding mental overload of a capital city, turns them into individuals and cuts away the bridges connecting them. In Dresden all the others were able to celebrate pure colour, nature and human nakedness. In Berlin they threaten to founder.
    In Berlin, in his early thirties, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner comes into his own. His art is urban, raw, his figures are overstretched and his drawing style as frantic and aggressive as the city itself; his paintings ‘bear the rust of the metropolis like varnish on the brow’. Even in the underground carriages his eyes greedily absorb people. He makes his first, quick studies in his lap: two, three strokes of the pencil, a man, a hat, an umbrella. Then he goes outside, pushes his way through the crowds, sketchpads and brushes in hand. He is drawn to Aschinger’s restaurant, where you can spend all day if you’ve bought a bowl of soup. So Kirchner sits there and looks and draws and looks. The winter day is already drawing to a close, the noise in the square is deafening, it’s the busiest square in Europe, and passing in front of him are the city’s main arteries, but also the lines of tradition and the modern age: come up out of the U-Bahn into the slushy streets of the day and you will see horse-drawn carts delivering barrels, side by side with the first high-class automobiles and the droschkes trying to dodge the piles of horse droppings. Several tram lines traverse the big square, the huge space rings with a mighty metallic scrape each time a tram leans into the curve. And in among them: people, people, people, allrunning as if their lives depended on it, above them billboards singing the praises of sausages, eau de cologne and beer. And beneath the arcades, the elegantly dressed ladies of the night, the only ones barely moving in the square, like spiders on the edge of a web. They wear black veils over their faces to escape the attention of the police, but the striking aspect is their huge hats, bizarre towering constructions with feathers, under the streetlights, whose green gaslight is lit when early winter evening falls.
    That pale green glow on the faces of the prostitutes in Potsdamer Platz, and the raging noise of the city behind them, are what Ernst Ludwig Kirchner wants to turn into art. Into paintings. But he doesn’t yet know how. So for the time being he goes on drawing – ‘I’m on familiar terms with my drawings,’ he says,