David Auerbach on Hans Blumenberg: 'It is rare for [Hans Blumenberg] to “take sides” explicitly because he is often preoccupied with showing that the sides are not what we think they are.'
Pippin is interviewed about Hegel and art: 'With Hegel, the official answer to that question is that art is an intuitive, sensible mode of intelligibility of the Absolute.'
Richard Sennett on humanism: 'Here a contrast between Pico and Spinoza is all important. Spinoza emphasized unities transcending time—timeless unities in mental space—whereas Pico dwelt on the fact of shifting time, and shifting time in everyday experience.'
In a blog post about the perils of using 'and/or' in legal writing, there is this quote from a 1942 case: 'The expression “and/or” is unfortunate. I do not think I have met it before in a will, and I hope I shall never meet it again.' And from a 1976 case: '[T]he commonly accepted meaning is that "and/or" means either "and" or "or," or both.'
I like Raymond Chandler, but never have I so desired to rip a cigarette out of someone's mouth as when I heard this 1958 interview of Chandler by Ian Fleming:
Bob Duggan reviews a Neue Galerie show on fin-de-siècle Vienna: 'How Vienna in 1900 gave birth to modernity' -- '“In his life, Klimt clearly divided women into those he respected, even exalted, and those he slept with,” [Jill] Lloyd acknowledges, but also “Klimt’s images of women are acknowledged as complex representations with a symbolic force; as such, they embody allusions to the ‘women question’ that are far from straightforward".'
I did not make my entry into the Bohème until I had pushed back the thick baize curtain behind the glass door of the Café Stefanie, seated myself at one of the little marble-topped tables and ordered an absinthe. (Richard Seewald, 'In the Café Stefanie')
Café Stefanie (1905)
Researching Munich's café life in the early 20th century has proved to be an excellent 'way in' to the cultural and artistic milieu of a great and very influential creative centre. I don't know if it was on a par with café life in Vienna, but the gathering of creative and intellectual talents in the cafés of Schwabing at least comes close.
The Stefanie was one of the three central European cafes that were nicknamed Café Grössenwahn (Café Megalomania) -- the other two were the Café des Westens in Berlin and the Griensteidl in Vienna. The characterization of these three establishments' regular customers as megalomaniacal might have been an act of mockery by others, but it was also a bit of self-irony on the part of the customers themselves, who included many writers, activists, and artists.
It had two rooms, a large one with two billiard tables ... and a smaller one at whose windows the chess players sat. ... In the smaller room the chess-players sit crouching silently over their boards: Gustav Meyrink, who popularized magic and horror, is playing with Roda Roda [aka Sandór Rosenfeld], who substitutes for the officer's uniform he used to wear the obligatory red waistcoat and the monocle in his rubicund bulldog face. (Richard Seewald, 'In the Café Stefanie')
And the psychoanalysts: the unhappy Dr. Gross, son of the famous criminal psychologist, his waistcoat sprinkled with cocaine, who was put away by his father; Dr. Gösch, ... lecturing to an attentive following on his idea of circular marriage, Leonhard Frank whose Cause made him famous because he introduced psychoanalysis into literature. (Richard Seewald, 'In the Café Stefanie')
In a previous post I applied the term 'hippie central' to Schwabing (a neighborhood in Munich). I meant 'hippie' to refer generally to Bohemian tendencies, but I've discovered closer ties between the Bohemians of early 20th-century Germany and the American hippies of the 1960's. The man pictured above, Gusto Gräser, was a nomadic 'poet-prophet' who lived in many parts of Germany -- he's in Berlin in the above photo -- including Munich and it surroundings. He eventually settled in Munich.
Gräser in Munich (1945)
Gräser was one of many naturmenschen, men who rejected industrialization and the unnatural trends of urbanization and who adopted a 'back to nature' creed. Although Gräser lived in Munich and visited cities, for much of his life he lived in more pastoral places. He lived for a while at Monte Verità (pdf) near Ascona in Switzerland. Monte Verità, which Gräser co-founded, was similar in many ways to a hippie commune. Its founders were pacifists who wanted to establish a communal, vegetarian and clothing-optional settlement far from any cities. More information about this commune can be found at the next link along with several photos, but note that some of the depicted inhabitants of Monte Verità aren't clothed. Among the inhabitants were so many artists and authors from Schwabing that it was called 'Schwabing von Schwabing'. These inhabitants included Otto Gross, Leonhard Frank, Erich Muhsam, Franziska Countess zu Reventlow, Oskar Maria Graf, Marianne Werefkin, Alexej Jawlensky, Hugo Ball, Paul Klee, and Ernst Toller. One of the commune's most famous visitors was Herman Hesse.
Ur-hippies at Monte Verità
Some of the naturmenschen moved to the USA. For example, there was Hermann Sexauer, 'a philosophical anarchist, a radical pacifist, a theoretical nudist, and an anti-communist,' who was born in Teningen, Germany and who moved to the USA in 1906, eventually establishing a natural foods store in Santa Barbara. More influential was Bill Pester of Saxony. He left Germany (to avoid military service) and settled in California. Here are some photos of Pester, including one of him at his hut in Palm Canyon, California.
These pics look like they're straight out of the 60's, but they're from approx. 1917. (Pester moved to the USA in 1906.)
Pester met a young American named eden ahbez (who eschewed capital letters) and became ahbez's 'mentor'. Ahbez and the other young Americans who followed Pester called themselves 'nature boys' (a loose translation of naturmenschen). In 1948, ahbez wrote a song about Pester and called it 'Nature Boy'. Nat King Cole recorded it, which drew media attention to ahbez. He appears briefly in this clip followed by footage from another TV show in which Cole performs the song.
The nature boys received some attention also from Jack Kerouac's reference to them in On the Road. And they became well-known in California simply because of their distinctive appearance.
This story has been told before (esp. at the above links) but I wasn't aware of it until I looked up Monte Verità.
In Saxony, Dresden is a more popular tourist destination than Leipzig. I was short of time at this stage of my trip, so I could visit only one of these cities. I opted for Leipzig, and I'm glad that I did. Historically, Dresden was the more extravagant capital of Saxony, while Leipzig was more prominent as a trade centre, but a very cultured one. Among Leipzig's former residents are Leibniz, Bach, Goethe, Mahler, Schumann, Wagner, Luther, Lessing, Nietzsche, and Schiller.
The city drew so many geniuses partly because it has long been a university town and partly because it was home to many publishers. For me, the most interesting of these publishers was Rowohlt, which was run by Ernst Rowohlt and Kurt Wolff.
Rowohlt preferred to do much of his work in nearby bars and cafés. Over the lunch hours (one gets the impression that with Rowohlt lunch took hours), he and his associates did business at Wilhelms Weinstube [Wilhelm's Wine Parlour].
The student who introduced me to Hasenclever soon led us to the regular midday gathering in the back room of Wilhelm's Wine Parlour .... [T]he little circle was dominated by a colossal figure with enormously broad shoulders; beneath a tuft of ginger hair beamed the reddish face .... This was Ernst Rowohlt, bursting with vitality and joie de vivre .... [Kurt Pinthus, 'Leipzig and Early Expressionism', in The Era of Expressionism, p. 68]
According to my guide (Literarisches Leipzig), this wine parlour was located at Hainstrasse 23, where the ugly, low building is (lower right) in this photo:
[T]he midday gathering at Wilhelm's Wine Parlour ... became a breeding ground, then a centre, a place of pilgrimage for the young writers from the German-speaking world. Whenever any writer of the young or older generation came to Leipzig from Berlin, Prague, Munich, Vienna, West Germany he knew that he would meet Rowohlt and Werfel and Hasenclever and me and others like himself in that wine parlour. And he knew that he would then go on to the traditional coffee houses: the refined Café Felsche ... the stark Café Merkur ... or Café Bauer on whose old-fashioned red plush benches generations of men of letters had sat. [Pinthus, p. 71] (audio plays at last link)
Pinthus says that Werfel arrived in Leipzig at the end of October, 1911, and became an employee at the publishing firm.
With a powerful, though untrained, voice [Werfel] sang arias from his beloved Verdi ... and thunderously declaimed his hymnic poems. Every other day he would come and see me with a new magnificently declaimed poem. [Pinthus, p. 70]
Hasenclever, Werfel, and Pinthus in Leipzig (1912)
Pinthus recalls (p. 73) the day when he met Kafka (June 29, 1912): 'Brod turned up with a tall, thin, very pale, very shy person who hardly spoke at all: Franz Kafka.' In advance of this meeting, while Kafka toured the city, Brod had met with Rowohlt and the others and raved about his friend's work. Intrigued, Rowohlt suggested that Brod bring Kafka around for lunch.
Brod and Kafka headed straight for Wilhelm's Tavern, where Rowohlt sat and waited with Pinthus and his friend and freelance editor Walter Hasenclever over several large mugs of wine spritzer. [Kafka: The Decisive Years, Rainer Stach, p. 74]
Stach says that the meeting didn't go well, for Rowohlt was impressed by other extroverts, like Werfel, and not so much by shy, nervous characters like Kafka. (Kurt Wolff, at that time Rowohlt's 'silent' partner, wasn't so disapproving of shyness.) Kafka, too, didn't seem pleased with the encounter. He wrote in his diary, 'Strange daily gathering at noon in the Wine Parlour. Large, wide wine goblets with slices of lemon.' [Quoted from Pinthus, p. 73] Still, Brod succeeded in persuading the publisher to add Kafka to his small stable of authors.
As Pinthus said, in the evenings Rowohlt and company typically headed for a café, though it sounds like Werfel often went his own way. (Singing and thunderously declaiming all the while?) 'He usually went to the Café Felsche or the theater in the evenings, then spent the night making the rounds of bars, cabarets, and brothels.' [A Life Torn By History: Franz Werfel 1890-1945, Peter Stephan Jungk, p. 32]
While Werfel was making his evening rounds, Rowohlt could usually be found in the Café Zum Arabischen Coffe Baum, which opened for business in 1694. Its past customers include Schumann, Wagner, Liszt, Lessing, Gottsched, Goethe, and Bach. (The apple strudel here is perfect.) Here's the decoration above its entrance.
Pinthus says that this decoration was installed by Augustus the Strong (and the profligate), and that it depicts 'a Turk sitting under a coffee bush holding a huge coffee pot while a cherub is passing him a cup of what the Leipzigers call the "hot stuff".' [Pinthus, p. 72] Of the café's past customers, its owners seem especially impressed by Schumann, to whom they've dedicated a room.
Once ensconced here for the evening,
Rowohlt reigned at a clean scrubbed wooden table where great quantities of Pilsner were drunk and many ham and egg sandwiches consumed. This was rounded off by a session in the spacious Central Theater Bar .... And there about midnight we would really let ourselves go [!?!], especially Ernst Rowohlt, full of enthusiasm, laughter and boisterous good spirits. [Pinthus, p. 72]
Rowohlt, Wolff and their employees were in their twenties at this time. Werfel, Pinthus, Hasenclever, and Willy Haas (a friend from Prague) shared an apartment. They enjoyed the lifestyle of rowdy grad students while launching one of the most important publishing companies of the 20th century.
This building at Kurfürstendamm 217 in Berlin must have been a pension or hotel in the first third of the 20th century, since both Robert Musil and Joseph Roth lived in it at different times in the '20s and '30s (source: Literarisches Berlin).
A plaque on the building indicates that Musil wrote a portion of Man Without Qualities while residing at this address from 1931 until 1933. Here's a passage from Musil's diaries (actually from an unsent letter included in them) about apartment hunting in Berlin at an earlier stage of his life:
In the first few days in Berlin I had one or two flashes of insight. When I was looking at rooms. Some small, some big, dark, elegant ones, and bright patriarchal ones. I was looking for something, but didn't know what; not a study, not a work-room, not a room for living, a room of the kind that might have been occupied before me by the person I would like to have become. It sounds so ridiculous, but it made me walk the streets for days. (Notebook 3, Oct. 4, 1903)
Roth lived at Kurfürstendamm 217 in 1925. He continued to live in the area into the early 1930's, including at the Hotel am Zoo, and worked on The Radetzky March in a nearby bar/café at Kurfürstendamm 15. One finds this plaque at the latter address:
Update (July 6, 2011): I found an older picture (1950s?) of Kurfürstendamm 217 (the Musil-Roth residence) in Wilfried Berghahn's book Robert Musil. The building used to be 'Pension Stern'. Here it is:
Kandinsky reminisced fondly about his days in Munich in a letter that he wrote to Hanna and Karl Wolfskehl on Nov. 6, 1926, in which Kandinsky recalls
the old times -- Ainmiller-Römerstrasse -- I still have in good memory. Those were in general good, exciting, hopeful times that promised more than has been realized till now. (Quoted from Peg Weiss's book, Kandinsky in Munich: the Formative Jugendstil Years, p. 82)
One surprise for me in reading about the creative milieu of Munich in the early 20th century is its long hidden connection to Canadian literature. One of the early Canadian novelists was Frederick Philip Grove. Apart from being a novelist, Grove turns out to have been an accomplished fabulist. He appeared in Manitoba in 1912, claiming to be from Russia. He became a teacher and eventually a principal, lived near the North Dakota border, and wrote stories about prairie life. It turns out that Frederick Grove, prairie storyteller, was really Felix Paul Berthold Friedrich Greve, a Prussian who had moved to Munich in 1901 and associated with members of Stefan George's circle (esp. Friedrich Gundolf). In Munich, Greve affected the mannerisms of Oscar Wilde, which apparently undermined Greve's attempt to ingratiate himself with Wolfskehl. Greve ran up a big debt, was sent to prison, faked his own suicide and moved to Kentucky and then Canada. [Correction (July 15): After Munich, Greve moved to Berlin and began a relationship with Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. She helped him to fake his suicide and followed him to America, but he parted company with her in Kentucky.] So, this seemingly somewhat boring old figure in Canadian, prairie literature turns out to have arrived here from the fin de siècle's hippie central in Schwabing, Munich.
I've just returned from a trip to Germany. I visited Munich, Augsburg, Berlin, and Leipzig. I'll post on the cultural history of some of these places (in the way that I did on cafés in Vienna), with the focus on Munich, where I spent the most time.
Munich has much in common with Vienna. Both cities are predominantly Roman Catholic centres in which German is the main language. Both cities served as the home base for several Holy Roman Emperors and have the magnificent, old buildings to prove it. Both cities hosted a brilliant artistic culture in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a culture that thrived in several cafés. And both cities included among their early 20th-Century inhabitants Lenin and Hitler.
Differences between Munich and Vienna are evident from the fact that Hitler disliked Vienna but loved Munich. He seems to have regarded Munich as his adopted home town (even though Vienna was the capital of his home country). Why did Vienna repel this monster while Munich attracted him? From what I can tell, Hitler hated Vienna's more cosmopolitan milieu. Also, Vienna showed more appreciation and support for its creative Bohemians (like Peter Altenberg) while Müncheners seem, for the most part, to have regarded their city's artistic, café culture with disdain and suspicion. This hostile stance reflects the incursion of rural and small-town Bavarian attitudes into the city, feeding a tendency in its inhabitants to be uncritical of tradition and to resent the apparently idle proto-hippies who challenged it. As Thomas Mann put it, Munich was 'the unliterary city par excellence. Banal women and healthy men – God knows what a lot of contempt I load into the word "healthy"!' (Quoted from p. 4 ofWhere Ghosts Walked: Munich’s Road to the Third Reich by David Clay Large)
Pro-tradition and against the shock of the new (esp. in the arts) -- it's no surprise that a man like Hitler would find such a setting more congenial than Vienna. However, it is an uncomfortable fact that Hitler himself affected the style of a café Bohemian. One of the things that drew him to Munich was its advanced status as a city for painters. After failing in Vienna, he found that he could support himself (for a brief time) as a postcard painter in Munich. He became an outsider Bohemian, a Bohemian in his lifestyle but a reactionary in art and politics, whose opinions in these areas were (even before WWI) more in line with the overall tone of Munich than that of Vienna.
One of the Munich cafés that Hitler favoured was the Carlton Tea Room. It was across the street from the more famous Café Luitpold. The Luitpold's building didn't survive WWII. After the war, the Luitpold re-opened in a new building on the same site as the old one. Across the street from the Luitpold I found an establishment called the Carlton Bar and Restaurant.
I don't know what (if any) connection it has to the Carlton Tea Room. It's in the courtyard of this building:
In his autobiography, The Turning Point, Klaus Mann describes his experience of observing Hitler in the Carlton Tea Room as follows:
It was at the beginning of 1932 that I spent half-an-hour or so watching him at a table just a few feet from mine. The Carlton Tea Room in Munich was one of his favorite places .... My main reason for going there was that the Café Luitpold, on the other side of the street, was crammed with SA men. ... I found him surprisingly ugly, much more vulgar than I had anticipated. ... He was flabby and foul and without any marks of greatness, a frustrated, hysterical petty bourgeois. It was a most unpleasant experience to have him so close to me, but at the same time it meant something like a relief. For I was positive that he had no chance to conquer Germany. 'He is not to be our dictator,' I felt with a sort of malignant satisfaction. 'You have no chance, silly little mustache. Don't fool yourself, Schicklgruber: you are a washout. Five years from now, nobody will remember your name ...' Was there no bloody aura around his head to remind me? No writing on the wall of the Carlton Tea Room?
A comprehensive summary of Munich's history at the centre of the Nazi movement can be found in this 51-page pdf on a German and Bavarian government site (cf. their site with an MP3 version).
