1913 Read Free Page A

‘I’m more formal with my paintings.’ So he grabs his intimate friends, stacks of sketches that he’s done from his table over the past few hours, and hurries home, to his studio. In Wilmersdorf, 14 Durlacher Strasse, second floor, Kirchner has made a burrow for himself: nearly every inch hung with oriental carpets, stuffed with figures and masks from Africa and Oceania and Japanese parasols, as well as his own sculptures, his own furniture, his own paintings. Photographs of Kirchner from those days show him either naked or wearing a black suit and tie, his high-collared shirt snow-white, his cigarette held as limply in his hand as if he were Oscar Wilde. Always by his side, Erna Schilling, his beloved, the successor to soft, scatty Dodo in Dresden, a ‘new’ woman with a free spirit beneath a page-boy haircut, the spitting image of Kafka’s Felice Bauer. She decorated the flat with embroideries based on her designs and Kirchner’s.
    Kirchner had met Erna and her sister Gerda Schilling a year before at a Berlin dance hall, where Heckel’s girlfriend, Sidi, was also on stage. He lured the two pretty, sad-eyed dancers to his studio that first evening, because he knew straight away: their architecturally constructed bodies would ‘train my sense of beauty in the creation of the physically beautiful women of our time’. Kirchner first stepped out with nineteen-year-old Gerda, later with 28-year-old Erna, and in between with both. Flirt, muse, model, sister, saint, whore, lover – it’s hard to tell exactly which, where Kirchner is concerned.From hundreds of drawings we know every detail of these two women: Gerda sensually provocative, Erna with small, high breasts and a wide bottom, calm, at melancholy peace. There is a glorious painting from these days: on the left, three naked women, soliciting; on the right, the artist in his studio, cigarette in his mouth, checking the women out like a connoisseur. That’s how he likes to see himself. ‘Judgement of Paris’, he writes in black paint on the back of the canvas, ‘1913, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’.
    But when Paris Kirchner comes home from Potsdamer Platz that evening, the lights are out, Paris comes home too late for his judgement, and Erna and Gerda have gone to sleep, buried in the enormous cushions in the sitting room that this
trio infernal
will turn into the most famous Berlin room in the world.

    Prussian Crown Princess Victoria Louise and Ernst August of Hanover kiss for the first time in January.

    The New Year edition of
Die Fackel
, Karl Kraus’s legendary one-man Viennese magazine, contains a cry for help: ‘Else Lasker-Schüler seeks 1,000 Mk towards the education of her son.’ It is signed by, among others, Selma Lagerlöf, Karl Kraus and Arnold Schönberg. After her divorce from Herwarth Walden, the poet could no longer pay the fees of the Odenwaldschule in which she had placed her son Paul. Kraus had wrestled with himself for six months about whether to publish the appeal. In the meantime Paul had been sent to a boarding school in Dresden, but at Christmas even Kraus, the cool executioner who could strictly separate emotion and rationality, was overwhelmed by generosity. He places the small ad in the last free space in
Die Fackel
. Before it, Kraus writes: ‘I see an apocalyptic Galopin preparing for the end of the world, the herald of ruin, overheating the limbo of temporality.’

    The tiny attic room at 13 Humboldtstrasse in Berlin-Grunewald is ice-cold. Else Lasker-Schüler has just wrapped herself up in lots of blankets when she hears the shrill doorbell dragging her from her daydreams. Lasker-Schüler – wild, black eyes, dark mane, lovesick, unfit for life – envelopes herself in her oriental dressing gown and opens the door to the postman, who holds out her mail: her severe and distant friend Kraus’s bright red
Die Fackel
from Vienna and then, just below, a little blue miracle – a postcard from Franz Marc, the Blaue Reiter artist.