1913 Read Free Page B

Lasker-Schüler, with her gaudy garments, her jangling rings and bracelets, her wild, fairy-tale imagination: in those days she was the embodiment of a society dashing into the modern age, a dream figure, the object of desire of such diverse men as Kraus, Wassily Kandinsky, Oskar Kokoschka, Rudolf Steiner and Alfred Kerr. But you can’t live on deification. Else Lasker-Schüler is in a bad way now that her marriage to Herwarth Walden, the great gallery owner and publisher of
Sturm
magazine, is at an end, and he’s with the appalling Nell, his new wife, sitting around in cafés from which Else has been banned, precisely because it means she won’t be there. But it was in just such an artists’ café, in December, that she met Franz and Maria Marc, who would become her guardian angels.
    So Else Lasker-Schüler picks up her copy of
Die Fackel
, oblivious to the touching advertisement by Karl Kraus, and then she turns over the postcard that Franz Marc has sent her. She freezes in silent jubilation. On the tiny space her far-off friend has painted her a
Tower of Blue Horses
, powerful creatures towering up to the sky, outside of time and yet firmly within it. She senses that she’s been granted a unique gift: the first blue horses of the Blue Rider. Perhaps this special woman, who always senses everything, and more – senses that in the weeks that followed, the idea of his postcard will produce an even bigger ‘tower of blue horses’ in faraway Sindelsdorf, a painting as a programme, an artistic landmark. The larger painting will later be burned, and all that remains of it will be that postcard, which bears the fingerprints of both Marc and Lasker-Schüler, and which willalways tell the tale of the moment when the Blue Rider began its gallop.
    Touched, the poet notes how the great painter has included her emblems, the half-moon and the golden stars, into his little painting of horses. A dialogue begins; associations, words and postcards fly back and forth. She appoints him the imaginary ‘Prince of Cana’; she is ‘Prince Yussuf of Thebes’. On 3 January, Else writes back and thanks him for her blue miracle: ‘How beautiful this card is – I’ve always wished my own white horses could be joined by horses in my favourite colour. How can I thank you!!’
    When Marc then invites her by postcard to come to Sindelsdorf, completely exhausted by the divorce and by Berlin, she boards the train with the Marcs. She is far too thinly dressed, so Maria Marc wraps her in a blanket she has brought along. It’s entirely possible she’s sitting in the same train in which Thomas Mann is hurrying back to his family fortress after his bungled
Fiorenza
première. It’s a lovely idea: the north and south poles of German culture in 1913, together in a single train.
    When the enfeebled poet arrives in Sindelsdorf in the alpine uplands, she lives at first with Franz Marc and his wife, Maria, a strapping matron under whose wings Marc snuggled when the winds blew too chill. ‘Painter Marc and his lioness’, as Else called them.
    She manages only a few days in the childless couple’s guest room, before moving on to the Sindelsdorf inn, with its terrific view across the moor to the mountains. But even here she can’t find peace. The worried landlady advises her to take a Kneipp cure and lends her the requisite books. Nothing does any good. Else Lasker-Schüler hurries from Sindelsdorf to Munich and finds a room in a pension on Theresienstrasse.
    The Marcs come after her and find her in the breakfast room, with whole armies of tin soldiers that she’s probably bought for her son Paul, ‘fighting out violent battles’ on the blue and white table-cloth, ‘instead of the battles that life constantly threw her way’. She is in a fighting mood, furious, quivering, not entirely in her right mind. At the end of January, in the Galerie Thannhauser, at the opening ofthe big Franz Marc exhibition, she meets Kandinsky, then gets into a squabble