1913: The Year Before the Storm, by Florian Illiies
A Christmas present from a friend, the same friend who had recommended Dancer from the Dance, a year ago.
Quite accidentally, I’ve been reading a lot of history lately. This summer I read a history of the gay rights movement told through television sitcoms (Hi Honey, I’m Homo!); a history of the black civil rights movement told through the final days of several men and women who were murdered during the struggle (The Martyrs); and a history of the holocaust of World War II told through four masterworks of music written as memorials to the dead (Time’s Echo). 1913 is the history of a single year, the year when the arts in Europe turned decisively from Romanticism to Modernism, and when the politics of Europe turned toward war.
Like, Search, Michelle Huneven’s novel of a congregation’s year of search for a new minister, 1913 takes place in a single year and has that book’s same forward momentum and ease of reading. The chapters come month by month each introduced by a teasing summary of what’s to come. Within each chapter are dozens of disconnected stories and incidents separated by breaks, like diary entries. The same people appear throughout the year, so stories that begin in one month are often continued in later months. Kafka, for instance, writes awkward love letters to a woman named Felice, proposes marriage, travels from Prague to Berlin to meet her and so on. The book traces their strange, unconsummated affair throughout the year.
1913 was certainly a landmark year in the arts. The book begins with the Armory show in New York City that introduced European modernist art to the Americans and made a sensation, in particular, of Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase. The year ends with Marcel Duchamp constructing the first of his ready-made sculptures, the bicycle wheel mounted on a kitchen stool. 1913 is the year Proust publishes Swann’s Way, the year Virginia Woolf publishes To the Lighthouse, the year Thomas Mann publishes Death in Venice. 1913 is the year of the Rite of Spring, appearing in May a few weeks after Debussy’s ballet, Jeux. Schoenberg finally premiers his late-romantic song cycle Gurre-Lieder to enthusiastic acclaim in February, though by 1913 he had longed moved on, stylistically.
A long thread follows the rivalry between Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung culminating in the Fourth Congress of the International Psychoanalytic Association in September, after which the two men would never again meet. There’s another long thread of Oskar Kokoschka’s affair with Alma Mahler and the painting he produced from their tempestuous romance, The Bride of the Wind. Illies reminds us throughout the book that the Mona Lisa, stolen from the Louvre two years earlier is still missing, only so that at the end of his book, in the final weeks of 1913, he is able to include the story of its recovery when the thief attempts to re-patriate the painting to Italy through an art gallery in Florence. Running through the book more like a fuse than a thread, is the character of Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne (but only if his uncle, Franz Joseph would ever die) who would be assassinated in June of the following year igniting the First World War.
Illies mentions many authors and artists who are probably better known in Germany. I confess I’ve never heard of the poet Georg Trakl, or the painter August Macke, and only vaguely knew of the writer Ernst Junger. A science fiction novel by Bernhard Kellermann called, The Tunnel, about a tunnel built beneath the Atlantic Ocean connecting Europe to the US was apparently the best seller of 1913. Several persons are mentioned only for what they will do in later years: Stalin, Trotsky, and Hitler make appearances: Hitler painting watercolors in a boarding house. James Joyce is mentioned but his contributions to modernist literature are still many years in the future. Why other folks receive a mention is mysterious to me. Of what significance is it that 1913 is the year Charlie Chaplin, signs his first movie contract? Or that Louis Armstrong, age 11, receives the present of his first trumpet?
Although the stories are fun, the arbitrariness of Illies’ citations became, eventually, my frustration with the book. Although the premise seems to be a narrow window on a particularly remarkable year, in fact, Illies includes numerous people who weren’t doing anything particularly remarkable in 1913. Rilke is a major figure in the book but his most important work, the Duino Elegies were begun the previous year in 1912 and completed in 1922, the same year he completed his Sonnets to Orpheus. Schoenberg is a towering figure of 20th century music but 1913 was in no way his most significant year. To the Lighthouse and Death in Venice are not Woolf and Mann’s most important works. Any year would have just as many important artists alive available for name-dropping. If you’re going to include Louis Armstrong, age 11, then why not include all the other people who would make remarkable artistic contributions in later decades but who were only talented children in 1913?
The other reason to focus on 1913, of course, is that 1913 is the last year before 1914. It is, “the year before the storm” of the book’s subtitle. But the subtitle implies something the book doesn’t deliver. The experiences of these artists and writers don’t lead to the war. Nothing that makes the war inevitable occurs, and the year 1913 ends with the outbreak of war still six months in the future. I’m thinking of the very different experience of reading Isherwood’s Berlin Stories, in which the rising wave of anti-semitism, while background to the stories, adds tension to every one. The world is clearly in flux in 1913. The artists are wrestling with the rapid change of industrialism, globalism, the after-effects of the colonial era, political revolution, decline of religion, sexual freedom, and so on. But artists deal with such cultural turmoil and internal angst every year. That’s not being an artist in 1913, that’s just being an artist. And their artistic experiments while significant to art were irrelevant to the war. The riot in the Theatre de Champs Elysees following Stravinsky’s Rite on May 29, 1913, changed the world of art but cannot be accused of being predictive of the riot that engulfed the world a year later.