This year is an appropriate one to recall the work of the artist and playwright Oskar Kokoschka (1886–1980). It is one hundred years since his return, from Berlin and his activity with the avant-garde magazine Der Sturm, to Vienna. There he met Alma Mahler, recent widow of the composer. A tempestuous love affair ensued, which ended definitively when, on August 29, 1915, as a dragoon in the Austro-Hungarian army, Kokoschka was shot in the head by machine gun, then bayoneted in one lung and left to die, by Russian forces on the Eastern Front. Remarkably, he survived; but Alma Mahler,…