Chapter 41Moving House — New PlansUMZUG — NEUE PLÄNE
📖 This chapter with the German alongside →
And then this many-coloured time too had rushed away. And I came back to Berlin. — The cypresses around my new Tempio had every one dried up in the heat. But in the house itself almost everything was finished. Now came the terrible removal with my thousands of museum pieces. My whole establishment was really one single museum. Johanna, sadly, had had to go into a sanatorium again. So she could now take none of the heavy work from me, and I had everything on my own shoulders. But it gave me joy. From London I had brought beautiful fabrics with me, and now fitted out the rococo boudoir in lilac, black and gold, the atelier in white, the dining room in green and yellow and the bathroom in orange with yellow tonings. It turned out very original. In the longish light-green hall, though, which led onto the columned veranda, all my pictures were to be united into a permanent exhibition. For weeks I had building-up to do there with the paperhanger, but the two hundred pictures came so close upon one another, and the side walls so near together, that one could scarcely stir in the room, let alone gain any overview. The former owner of the property, Herr Zappe1, therefore advised me to buy the adjoining parcel from him and to build a picture hall of my own. That, to be sure, would mean considerable further costs. But the hall as a picture gallery for two hundred pictures was simply impossible.
I wanted to think it over ripely, and went off first of all for eight days to the Harz, to come clear with myself on lonely walking tours. When I returned, my resolve was taken in favour of the hall to be newly built.
We made a design, Herr Zappe and I, which pleased us both greatly. Twenty metres of length this hall was to have, and high clerestory windows on both sides. The narrow end received a gable façade with two seated female figures. Antique casts were walled in on either side of the portal, which was green and looked like patinated bronze, and above, running all round as a frieze, casts of the beautiful dancing maenads were employed.
The roof was made flat and adorned all round with green vases of antique form. Flanking the entrance, though, two reclining sphinxes were to lie on narrow socles. Such a sphinx hall had been the dream of my life, from childhood on, since in Darmstadt I passed daily, satchel in hand, by the sphinxes of the Freemasons' lodge and dreamed of all their secrets. But for the present all these splendours were still a good way off.
Only in the next spring was the laying of the hall's foundations to begin, or indeed only in the autumn; I had still not firmly made up my mind, and its building seemed to me an all too great risk. Under fifteen thousand marks it would not, with the building ground, be put up for me. That wanted ripe consideration. — And yet, was it not the best investment of capital for Konrad's inheritance2, which my brother-in-law had made over to me together with the children's portion? Thus the money, fixed fast in the Tempio, would after my death remain to the children. The plan lured and lured. Herr Zappe made me yet another plan, to join the new piece of garden to the one already there — then it would be a park. The park of Tempio Hermione! Like an intoxication it seized me. And was this not the fulfilment of my life's dream? Could not everything — in such a paradise — be borne, even the loneliness?
Notes
Sources, identifications, and points where the German carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the original.
- ↑Herr Zappe — A name new to the record: the previous owner of Prinzessinnenstraße 14, still holding the land next door — and, in the next paragraphs, co-designer of the picture hall. The plan he plants here came true on a documented schedule: the adjoining plot was bought in 1909, and the purpose-built Gemäldehalle opened on 2 June 1911 with more than two hundred of her pictures, and its first summer brought a repeat Rose Festival and, on 3 September 1911, the Greek Moon Festival; Robert Koch and much of Berlin society signed the guest book, which survives in the Tempelhof Museum. The memoir now supplies what the local records could not: whose idea the hall was, and that its seller drew the designs with her.
- ↑Konrad's inheritance — Konrad Telmann's estate, made over to her by her brother-in-law — Admiral von Holtzendorff, the children's adoptive father, husband of Telmann's sister Margarethe née Zitelmann — together with the children's portion. The fifteen thousand marks of the hall are the dead husband's money. And the sentence that follows is a will made in passing: the money, "fixed fast in the Tempio," is to remain to the children after her death — to the Helga and Inge who put their heads together on Hiddensee the summer before and would not speak a word to her. Fifteen thousand marks was serious money, on the order of ten years of a skilled workman's wages. The chapter's closing question — whether in such a paradise everything, even the loneliness, could be borne — is the adoption wound and the sphinx dream in a single sentence, and the memoir leaves it unanswered.