Chapter 73War — Money — CollapseKRIEG — GELD — ZUSAMMENBRUCH
📖 This chapter with the German alongside →
Signor Franchetti had left. He had had no luck with his outstanding studies, no art dealer would warm to them.
The children were very sad about the Mabronk business and were sorry all the same not to have made the desert son's acquaintance. I was in Dresden with Inge a few times more — the third time immediately after the declaration of war. The journey took me twelve hours. With great trouble I quieted the child, who had entirely lost her head. England's declaration of war came during this Dresden time of mine. They were deeply agitating days.
And then at last, with great trouble, I got back to Lichtenrade-Tempio, again in twelve hours. My first concern now was to get back the 1600 marks which I had advanced to Herr J., Verlag Emil Gutmann, for our lectures. The bureau was shut, Herr J. at his private flat had himself denied to me. To my pressing letters he finally replied that the firm had dissolved itself, that I was of course free to go to law. But that this would be useless expense for me. He too had lost his fortune through the outbreak of the war.
So there I suddenly stood facing nothing. A few commissions were cancelled. The hope of a successful tour was swallowed in the war's abyss along with 1600 marks in cash. For the action brought afterwards had, once the firm was extinct, not the slightest result. A person must have luck! Isabel Hearn, the Englishwoman, had been the better woman of business.
I wanted to have money sent to me out of my capital. But the bank declared that it could lend nothing more on it, and that if I wanted to sell I should get, in the very best case, barely five hundred marks for a thousand.
So there I stood, the owner of a “little doll's castle” with a park, with peacocks and other luxury animals, suddenly without any means whatever! Everybody else was laying in stores for the coming months. I myself would soon not be able to buy bread for the coming days. In the midst of splendour and magnificence and three hundred unsold pictures1! — So I wrote first to my publishers — Reissner had accepted “Im Schatten der Mormonen”2 and Otto Janke “Yoshiwara.” The latter was even already printed and was just about to appear when hostilities with Japan broke out.3 They both declared that they could make me no payments on account in such times.
My novel “Der aussätzige König”4 had just been finished and was not even copied out.
What was to be done? So I was forced to turn to all manner of societies and to rich friends. Most of them failed me. Some, however, stood the test. After I had, crucifying my pride a thousand times over, written my fingers raw for three months at “begging letters,” as I contemptuously called them myself, I had scraped together with great difficulty two thousand marks. I sent off at once the pictures that were in part to be “delivered” for it, and now had before me, with the utmost thrift and the cutting of every expense not absolutely unavoidable, a period free of care in which I could wait and see how everything would develop.
But those three months are among the most frightful of my life. In them I drew up the account and saw how little I had achieved with all my struggling and striving. And what was a possession like the Tempio for, if one had not the means to keep it up in bad times as well? In my bitterness I entirely forgot the mass of thoroughly evil blows of fate that had brought me step by step into this position. Me, who know how to save and to manage and to go without as hardly anybody does. Who made her great journeys round the world, her whole gain in life, possible on half of what another would have needed for them.
And after everything I had got no further. Now I stood in pomp and splendour entirely without means. In freedom I could indeed create as an artist, with my inexhaustible ideas. But only in freedom! The thought of painting or writing something for sale positively paralysed me. And the giving of lessons I had long since recognised as impossible for me. Again and again I must insist on it: without all the misfortunes I had quite enough to get through, at a pinch, on the interest of my saved capital and without earning anything besides. But to set the Tempio going again after the vandal destruction I had to break into the capital. And the gift of making a golden and certain daily income out of my art was entirely denied me. More and more the conviction pressed itself on me that it is easier to be a true, inward artist than to get the works of art that come into being taken off one's hands. Especially when one is an outsider — as I became through Mors Imperator — and shall for ever remain5.
I had believed, you see, that I could force the thing from the other end, with the novel, with film pieces. Fortune too seemed at first well disposed towards me, in that Janke and Reissner had accepted my first two novels and thought very highly of them.
But then came the war and disturbed my circles. That was the standing circulus vitiosus around which all my brooding turned. And with it the grief that under the prevailing circumstances I could not keep up the Tempio as I had been accustomed to. In this way it gave me no more joy, was nothing to me but a burden, a “block on the leg.” How much freer and more independent, freer to move, I should be if all my savings and Konrad's were still lying at the bank instead of in the Tempio. Several thousand marks I should save every year in upkeep alone. On those alone I could have lived.
So do the longing, the goal and the embodiment of my dreams change for me, slowly and surely, more and more into a curse.
Notes
Sources, identifications, and points where the German carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the original.
- ↑three hundred unsold pictures — The size of the stock in her own hall in 1914, given as a number for the only time — and the reason the Tempio could not pay for itself. She had been painting for forty years, had held one-woman shows in Berlin, Vienna, Paris, London and Chicago, and had three hundred canvases on her hands in the building she had put her savings into. It is worth setting beside the police list of forty-eight pictures stolen from the Tempio in the theft of a few years before, and beside the picture lottery at the July festival: she was raffling work at garden parties because the ordinary trade would not move it. The number also bears on any attempt to reconstruct her output, since it says that the greater part of it was still in her possession when the war began, before the inflation, the sales and the dispersal that followed her death. (The gallery on this site)
- ↑Reissner had accepted “Im Schatten der Mormonen” — The Mormon novel of the last chapter but four had a publisher. Carl Reissner of Dresden, her house publisher for twenty years, had taken it — and then the war came. In chapter 68 she wrote it at Algiers in a few weeks of the spring, wie im Fieber, under two titles she had not settled between. Here it has been accepted by Reissner, who had published Via passionis, Tollkraut, the Telmann requiem and Von Jenseits des Grabes. Later in this chapter she says that Janke and Reissner had taken her first two novels and thought highly of them. So the book was written, placed and, on the evidence of the whole record this project holds, never printed. What stopped it was the same thing that stopped everything else in this chapter. Nothing under any of its three titles has been found in any catalogue searched here. (Reissner published her before)
- ↑The latter was even already printed and was just about to appear when hostilities with Japan broke out. — This is why Yoshiwara did not come out until 1920, two years after her death: it was set, printed and on the point of publication in 1914, and Japan declared war on Germany on 23 August. The two facts together close a question the earlier chapters opened. She wrote the novel at Biskra in the winter of 1913–14; Otto Janke had it printed within months; and then Japan entered the war on the Allied side, and a German novel named for the pleasure quarter of Tokyo, with a foreword by a professor from Tokyo, became unpublishable overnight. It waited six years and appeared in 1920, after the peace and after her death, in the edition with her own hand-drawn lettering. So the book that is now her best known was finished and printed before the war, and its whole publishing history is a casualty of one week in August 1914. (Yoshiwara)
- ↑“Der aussätzige König” — The Leprous King: a third novel, finished in the summer of 1914 and still in one manuscript copy. No trace of it has been found in this project. The title belongs to Baldwin IV of Jerusalem, who was king at thirteen, leprous from childhood and dead at twenty-four, and it is also the title of a poem in Rilke's Neue Gedichte of 1907 — which is worth noting and nothing more, since Rilke had written about her paintings in 1896 and the subject was common property. What matters here is the count. Between the winter of 1913 and the summer of 1914 she finished three novels: Yoshiwara at Biskra, the Mormon book at Algiers, and this one at the Tempio. One appeared six years later, one was accepted and seems never to have been printed, and this one was not yet even copied out when the money ran out. (Her works)
- ↑an outsider — as I became through Mors Imperator — and shall for ever remain — Thirty years after the picture was seized and she was charged over it, she names it as the thing that decided her life, in a chapter about not being able to sell. Mors Imperator, the great allegorical Death, was exhibited in 1888, withdrawn on the Kaiser's order and made the ground of a charge of lèse-majesté against her. She was twenty-eight years past it when the war ruined her and more than thirty when she wrote this, and the sentence sets out the account: the scandal made her famous and unsellable at once, and she treats the two as one fact. It is also the only place in the memoir where she says that the condition is permanent — und ewig bleiben werde — in the future tense, about a life that had five years left in it. (Mors Imperator)