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pregnant, he leaves her too. And so it goes on. At some point he will return to his homeland, which will by then be called Yugoslavia, and assume control of it. Josip Broz will then call himself Tito.
    So, in the first months of the year 1913, Stalin, Hitler and Tito, two of the twentieth century’s greatest tyrants and one of its most evil dictators, were, for a brief moment, all in Vienna at the same time. One was studying the question of nationality in a guest room, the second was painting watercolours in a men’s boarding house, and the third was circling aimlessly around the Ringstrasse to test how well various automobiles handled the corners. Three extras, or non-speaking parts, one might think, in the great play that was ‘Vienna in 1913’.

    It was icy cold that February, but the sun was shining, which was and is rare for the Viennese winter, but it made the new Ringstrasse gleam all the more in its snow-white splendour. Vienna was bubbling over with vitality; it had become a world city, and this could be seen and felt all over the world – everywhere except in Vienna itself, where, through sheer joy in self-destruction, people hadn’t realised that they had unexpectedly moved to the apex of the movement which called itself Modernism. Because self-doubt and self-destruction had become a central component of the new way of thinking, and what Kafka called the ‘Nervous Era’ had dawned. And in Vienna nerves – virtually, metaphorically, artistically and psychologically – were laid bare like nowhere else.
    Berlin, Paris, Munich, Vienna. These were the four capitals of Modernism in 1913. Chicago was flexing its muscles, New York wasblossoming gradually but didn’t definitively take the baton from Paris until 1948. And yet 1913 saw the completion of the Woolworth Building, the first one in the world to rise above the Eiffel Tower, and of Grand Central Station, making it the biggest railway station in the world, and the Armory Show made sure that the sparks of the avant-garde ignited in America too. But Paris was still in a league of its own that year, and the French press saw neither the Woolworth Building nor the Armory Show as cause for excitement. Why should they be? After all, the French had Rodin, Matisse, Picasso, Stravinsky, Proust, Chagall ‘etc., etc.’ – all of whom were working on their next great masterpieces. And the city itself, at the peak of its affectation and decadence, embodied in the dance experiments of the Ballets Russes and Sergei Diaghilev, had a magnetic attraction for every cultivated European, in particular four über-cultivated individuals in white suits: Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Julius Meier-Graefe, Rainer Maria Rilke and Harry Graf Kessler. In the Paris of 1913 only Proust wanted to reminisce; everyone else wanted to keep moving forwards, but, unlike in Berlin at the time, preferably with a glass of champagne.
    Over in the German-speaking world, Berlin’s population was exploding, but culturally speaking its golden age was still to come. It forged ahead rather impetuously – but word that ‘Berlin’s nightlife was its speciality’ had already reached Paris and the artistic circle surrounding Marcel Duchamp. Munich, by contrast, was stylish and yet had taken a kind of well-earned rest – most evidently in the fact that self-glorification was becoming all the rage there (and no one in Berlin had any time for that). One other indicator is, of course, that the bohemians are becoming completely bourgeois: Thomas Mann is seeking – for the sake of his children – a house in the suburbs, in a peaceful location with a large garden. On 25 February 1913 he buys a plot of land at 1 Poschingstrasse and has a magnificent villa built there. His brother Heinrich has sought out Munich as an excellent location from which to write about Berlin, the city hurling itself into the future that is the setting for
Man of Straw
, the epic novel that he is completing. If one were to read Munich’s