On her garter belt Lou Andreas salomé wore the many scalps of the greatest minds she had begged: she had been in a confessional in St Peter's with Nietzsche, in bed with Rilke and in Russia with Tolstoy, Frank Wedekind names his lulu after her and Richard Strauss his Salomé. Now her latest victim, intellectually at least, Freud...
Above all, however, Lou Andreas Salomé, now fifty-two, the author of several books about eroticism and the mind, was receiving psychoanalytic training from the master himself. In March she would set up her own practice in Göttingen. So there she sits at the solemn Wednesday lecture
Beside her the master's learned colleagues, on her right the already legendary couch and everywhere the little sculptures that the antique-obsessed Freud collected to console himself ... (查看原文)
He is waiting, like Stalin, for his big break. His name is Adolf Hitler. The two men, whose friends at the time say they liked to walk in the park at schönbrunn, may have greeted one hats as they made there way through the boundless park. (查看原文)
So the artistic revolutionaries dashed ever onwards, impelled by their horror of being fully understand by the bourgeois public. Picasso might have been reassured had he known that Arthur schnitzler wrote in his diary on 8 February: Picasso: the early paintings outstanding; violent resistance to his current cubism. (查看原文)
Freud is developing his theory of parricide. So in Dec.1912 Jung had written to Freud:"I would like to make you aware that your technique of treating your pupils as patients is a mistake." By so doing Freud is creating "impudent rouges"and "slavish sons", he writes. And he continues:"Meanwhile you always remain comfortably on top as the father. Out of pure subservience, no one dares to tug the prophet's beard."
Seldom in his life has anything hit Freud as hard as this act of parricide. During those few months, when his beard must have sprouted new grey hairs, he drafts a first reply which he doesn't send, and which will only be found in his desk after his death. But on 3 January 1913 he summons all his strength and writes to Jung in Kusnacht: "Your assumptions that I am... (查看原文)
It's a fine irony that one of the most interpreted and most discussed break-ups of 1913 should begin with a vow of silence. From this moment on Jung will chafe at Freud's methods, and Freud, conversely, and Jung's. Before that he gives a precise definition of parricide among primitive people: they put on masks of the murdered father— then pray to their victim. You might almost call it the Dialectic of Enlightenment. (查看原文)
The provocation consisted of him wearing a wooden spoon in the buttonhole of his suit. By so doing, the futurists wanted to demonstrate against what the regarded as the ridiculous fashion of the degenerate aesthetes who still wore chrysanthemums in their buttonholes in memory of Oscar Wilde. (查看原文)
As in Vienna, Adolf Hitler, the painter who failed to get into the art academy, has no contact with the artistic avant-garde of the city. We don't know whether he saw the exhibitions of degenerate art by Picasso or Egon Schiele or Franz Marc, which caused such a furore in Munich in 1913. The artists of his generation who had made a career for themselves were alien to the art-school reflect throughout his life, and he eyed them with suspicion, envy and hatred.
When he comes home, he knocks on Frau Popp's door to ask her to fetch him some hot water from his pot, and he says,"Just sit down with us and have something to eat, you look starving." But Hitler's startled by that, he takes his teapot and flees to his room. Throughout 1913 he never gets a single visitor. He paints by day, and until... (查看原文)
As ever more vexing noises push their way northwards from the Balkans that early summer, the intellectuals in Berlin, Munich and Vienna are able to calm their nerves by reading the British publicist's book. In it Angell expounds his theory that the era of globalization renders world wars impossible, because all countries are now economically interlinked to such a high degree. He also says that, alongside the economic networks, close international ties in communication and above all in the world of finance mean that any war would be preposterous. He argues that, even if the German military wanted to pit its strength against England, there is "no establishment of significance in Germany which would not suffer greatly." This, he claims, will prevent war, because "the entire German financial w... (查看原文)
"The Worst Marriage Proposal In the World": on 8 June, in Prague, Franz Kafka has finally begun to ask for Felice's hand in marriage. But he breaks off mid-sentence, and it's not until 16 June that he is able to bring himself to finish the letter. It ends up being over twenty pages long. Kafka begins with a detained account of how he needs to look for a doctor— what exactly he wants him to certify, perhaps fertility or sanity, in unclear. Or maybe it's all just a laboured pretext to delay the inevitable marriage and its consummation:"Between you and me there stands, apart from everyone else, the doctor. It is doubtful what he will say, because medicinal diagnoses are not really the crucial factor in such decisions, and if they were, then it wouldn't be worth taking them into account. I was... (查看原文)
Trakl hones his words, battles with his language until knows he can release it into the world. A world in which he himself cannot survive. His poems — even those about the last days of mankind — do not herald disaster. In them history has long since taken what Friedrich Durrenmatt calls "the worst possible turn", precisely because it has now been thought and written down as poetry. (查看原文)
And since there was no one left on earth, it wanted to go to heaven, and the moon looked down on it so kindly and when at last it came to the moon it was a piece of rotten wood and then it came to the sun it was a withered sunflower. And when it came to the stars, they were little golden flies, stuck on the way the shrike sticks them on the blackthorn and when it wanted to go back to earth, the earth was an upturned pot and the child was all alone (查看原文)
