Free 1913 by Florian Illies Page B

other couples. Anyway, in the evening Einstein goes to coffee houses or bars all by himself and drinks a beer – Max Brod, Franz Werfel and Kafka might be sitting at the next table, but they don’t know each other. And then, in March 1913 – just like Kafka – Albert Einstein writes long letters to Berlin. On a visit to the city he has fallen in love with his recently divorced cousin Elsa. He writes her terrible things about his marriage: he and Mileva no longer sleep in the same room, he avoids being alone with her under all circumstances, she is an ‘unfriendly, humourless creature’, and he treats her like an employee whom regrettably he is unable to fire. Then he putsthe letter in an envelope and off he goes to the post office – and so Einstein and Kafka’s epistolary laments travel, presumably in the same postbag from Prague to Berlin, to the far-off girls of their dreams, Felice and Elsa.

    In New York the Federal Reserve, the ‘Fed’, is founded. The most important shareholders are the banking houses Rothschild, Lazard, Warburg, Lehmann, Rockefellers Chase Manhattan and Goldman Sachs. The introduction of the Fed ensures that American governments are no longer able to print new money. In 1913, on the other hand, income tax is introduced.

    The industrialist Walther Rathenau far-sightedly recognises the economic challenge represented by the USA. And in 1913, the year of the arms race, he sketches the picture of a peaceful European union with close European ties: ‘One last possibility remains: the emergence of a Central European Tariff Union. The task of creating the freedom of economic movement for the countries in our European zone is difficult but not insoluble.’

    In the
Cambridge Review
, vol. 34, no. 853 (6 March 1913), p. 351, the first publication by the student Ludwig Wittgenstein appears: a critical review of Peter Coffey’s
The Science of Logic
, but in fact the first manifesto of Wittgenstein’s very own logic. He considers what Coffey says to be illogical. The Viennese industrialist’s son, about to turn twenty-four, is also spiky with his teacher at Trinity College, Cambridge, the legendary Bertrand Russell. During the holidays he travels with his lover, the maths student David Pinsent, to Norway, where they have bought a little cabin in Skjolden, and workson the foundations of his theory which, when published as the
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
will be among the most important texts of the century. (It is, incidentally, so complex that Russell, when he receives a letter asking him to copy-edit the book, asks to have his own questions sent back to him so that he can understand Wittgenstein’s answers.) Only Pinsent understands Wittgenstein completely. When Wittgenstein, two years his senior, was looking for a guinea pig for his psychological experiments into language and music, Pinsent had answered the advertisement. He soon became his guinea pig in matters of homosexuality and logic too. Wittgenstein will, logically enough, dedicate his
Tractatus
to Pinsent.

    Spring Awakening: on 8 March, in Vienna’s Café Imperial, Frank Wedekind, Adolf Loos, Franz Werfel and Karl Kraus meet for an early coffee.

    Kafka’s father is making him suffer like a dog, and he can’t bear it when someone coughs in the Prague flat next door or slams the door. He doesn’t write his ‘Letter to His Father’ quite yet. But in 1913 Egon Schiele, the 22-year-old Viennese painter, writes his ‘Letters to the Mother’. On 31 March, for example: ‘I will be the fruit which, once corrupted, will leave behind eternal living creatures, so how delighted must you be to have brought me into the world?’ His mother has a different view of things. She is furious that the grave of her husband, Schiele’s father, is becoming overgrown, and writes to him: ‘That wretched and neglected grave contains the bones of your father, who sweated blood for you. How much money are you squandering? You have time for everything