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satirical magazine
Simplicissimus
, one would find him mocking the fact that the policemenworry about falling asleep out of boredom after eight o’clock in the evening; the great magazine of the
fin de siècle
can’t even provoke its own city any more and seems, in the most pleasant of ways, to be fatigued, as if it were stretched out on a chaise longue with a cigarette in its left hand. The magazine’s counterparts in other cities are
Die Fackel
in Vienna, and
Der Sturm, Die Tat
and
Die Aktion
in Berlin, their breathless names alone revealing that the true battles of the modern era are being fought there.
    And of course, Munich’s quiet, gentle abdication as the capital of Art Nouveau and the
fin de siècle
can also be witnessed in the name of the guest house in Theresienstrasse where Else Lasker-Schüler is living in February 1913: the Pension Modern (not to be confused with La Maison Moderne, the legendary Parisian gallery of Art Nouveau set up by the German art propagandist and writer Julius Meier-Grafe, which closed in 1904). So if the guest houses proudly carry their modernity in their names, then it has clearly long since moved on – to the Café Grössenwahn in Berlin (whose name means ‘megalomania’) and to the Café Central at 14 Herrengasse in Vienna, to be precise. Names can be so revealing.
    And so the capital of the modern age
anno
1913 is Vienna. Its star players are Sigmund Freud, Arthur Schnitzler, Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, Adolf Loos, Karl Kraus, Otto Wagner, Hugo von Hoffmannsthal, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Georg Trakl, Arnold Schönberg and Oskar Kokoschka, to name but a few. Here the battles raged: about the unconscious, about dreams, the new music, the new way of seeing, the new architecture, the new logic, the new morality.

    ‘Fear of women – the minute they take their clothes off.’ There are two places in Europe in 1913 where this fear of Spengler’s is not an issue. One is Monte Verità in Ascona, near Lake Maggiore, where a wonderfully eccentric group of free-thinkers, free spirits and nudists are doing their exercises, a specific blend of eurhythmics, yoga and physiotherapy. The others are Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele’sstudios in Vienna. Their drawings, whose lines teetered so sensually between pornography and the so-called New Objectivity, delineated the curves of the ‘most erotic city in the world’, as Lou Andreas-Salomé declared Vienna to be back then. Although the women in Klimt’s paintings were always swathed in golden ornament, he encircled the bodies in his sketches with an inimitable line that swept across the page, softly undulating like curls falling loose over a shoulder. Egon Schiele went even further in his explorations of the human body – the forms he depicted were tormented, strained with nerves and martyred, distorted, more sexual than erotic. Where Klimt’s work reveals soft skin, Schiele shows nerves and sinews; where Klimt’s bodies flow, Schiele’s splay, entangle and contort. Klimt’s women lure, while Schiele’s shock.
    ‘I’m not interested in my own person’, said Klimt, ‘but rather in other people, especially women.’
    If these drawings, which made a voyeur of everyone exposed to them, were well known, they were soon subjected to censorship, thereby increasing the notoriety of their creators. When Schiele wanted to exhibit his work
Friendship
in Munich, he received an interesting rejection letter. The director of the gallery wrote to inform him that his work could not be shown under any circumstances because of its extreme nature, and that it would offend common decency. Full stop. New paragraph. He, however, would be very interested in purchasing the work. There, neatly encapsulated, is the chasm between public and private morality in 1913.

    Berlin is becoming too bright. The gas lanterns, neon signs and city lights are threatening to outshine the stars in the night sky. In 1913 the demolition vehicles roll in to tear down the New Berlin