Diary of an
Aesthete
Count Harry
Kessler met everyone and saw everything.
By Alex
Ross
W. H. Auden
called Kessler, a friend and patron of dozens of artists, “one of the most
cosmopolitan men who ever lived.
In 1983, a
bank employee on the island of Mallorca opened a safe that had been sealed
under a fifty-year lease and found three bulky diaries, each bound in morocco
leather. They belonged to Count Harry Kessler, the impossibly sophisticated
German diplomat and connoisseur, who lived from 1868 to 1937 and passed hardly
an inelegant day in between. Portions of Kessler’s later journals had been
published in the nineteen-sixties; W. H. Auden, in a review of the
English-language edition, called their author “one of the most cosmopolitan men
who ever lived.” But many of the earlier diaries were thought to have been lost
in the inferno of Hitler’s Europe. Having sought refuge on Mallorca when the
Nazis took power, Kessler, an outspoken pacifist who in the twenties earned the
nickname the Red Count, resettled in France after the onset of the Spanish
Civil War. He neglected to tell anyone that he had left behind crucial diaries
covering the pre-1914 era, and they languished in storage, like the sled in
“Citizen Kane.” Since the Mallorca discovery and other finds, scholars at the
German Literature Archive, in Marbach am Neckar, have been transcribing
Kessler’s collected work—there are some twelve thousand names—and a nine-volume
German edition is nearly complete. Laird Easton, the author of a 2002 Kessler
biography, has assembled and translated a hefty selection in English, entitled
“Journey to the Abyss: The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler, 1880-1918” (Knopf).
The poet
Richard Dehmel once said to Kessler, “You will write the memoirs of our time.”
The Count attempted to fulfill that mission late in life, but his diaries are
remarkable enough. “Journey to the Abyss,” which fluidly if not flawlessly
translates Kessler’s prose, is a document of novelistic breadth and depth, showing
the spiritual development of a lavishly cultured man who grapples with the
violent energies of the twentieth century. It is also a staggering feat of
reportage. “The age embraces Byzantium and Chicago, Hagia Sophia and the
turbine hall,” Kessler wrote, in 1907. “You cannot understand it if you only
see the one side.” Kessler saw everything.
A highlight
reel: Kessler listens to the elderly Bismarck explain that the German people
are too “pigheaded” for social democracy. He calls on Verlaine, who sketches a
portrait of Rimbaud in Kessler’s copy of “Les Illuminations.” He drops by
Monet’s studio in Giverny and asks the Master if he ever considered painting
the Thames by night. (“Yes, but one is too tired when one has painted all day,”
Monet tells him. “And then it would be difficult without imitating Whistler.”)
He dines with Degas, who forgets Oscar Wilde’s name. (“It’s like that
Englishman who went to die in a hotel, rue de Beaux-Arts, what was his name
again?”) He has an audience with the aging Sarah Bernhardt, who floats toward
him in a white silk negligee. He loans money to Rilke, although not before
making sure of his investment: “I asked him if he believed he could write in
Duino.” He discusses airplane design with Wilbur Wright and aerial bombardment
with Count Zeppelin. He gives Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Richard Strauss the
idea for “Der Rosenkavalier.” He witnesses the première of “The Rite of
Spring,” and afterward goes on a wild cab ride with Diaghilev, Cocteau, Léon
Bakst, and Nijinsky, the last “in tails and a top hat, silently and happily
smiling to himself.” Travelling from England to France a week before the
outbreak of the First World War, he shares a boat with Rodin, who, on parting,
delivers the cinematic line “Until next Wednesday, chez la Comtesse.”
In the
event that some jaded reader thinks he has heard all this before, Kessler holds
a trump card, in the form of Nietzsche. In the eighteen-nineties, Kessler
befriended Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, the philosopher’s reactionary sister,
and visited her at home in Weimar, where she was taking care of her now
demented brother. In a journal passage from 1897, we find ourselves gazing into
Nietzsche’s face. “There is nothing mad about his look,” Kessler writes. “I
would prefer to describe the look as loyal and, at the same time, of not quite
understanding, of a fruitless intellectual searching, such as you often see in
a large, noble dog, a St. Bernard.” One night, Kessler was awakened by noises
from Nietzsche’s room—“long, raw sounds, as if groaning.” When Nietzsche died,
in 1900, Kessler helped Förster-Nietzsche prepare for the funeral. After the
memorial service, he removed a sheet covering Nietzsche in his coffin. “The
deeply sunken eyes had opened again,” Kessler notes, in a line that made me shiver.
Many people dined with Diaghilev; rather fewer consorted with both Cosima
Wagner and Josephine Baker; only one man closed Nietzsche’s eyes for the last
time.
Kessler was
born in Paris, the son of a wealthy Hamburg banker and an artistically inclined
Anglo-Irish salonnière. The diaries begin in 1880, when the boy is twelve. An
early entry, in English: “This morning the emperor comes on the promenade and
speaks to mamma.” Soon after, Kessler was sent to St. George’s School, in
Ascot; he later attended the Johanneum, an élite school in Hamburg. His school
days and early adulthood occasionally recall the darker fiction of the period,
such as Robert Musil’s “Young Törless.” A classmate is evidently driven to
suicide by an abusive schoolmaster; a friend shoots his female lover. Here is a
macabre entry from 1896:
Musical
evening at the countess Königsmarck’s. Nelly Hohenlohe sang and Bohlen played.
As I was on my way, a young fellow shot himself dead in the grounds of the
Reichstag right next to me. I called for a policeman, but he could no longer be
helped. But the music afforded me little pleasure afterward.
On
Kessler’s stage, even seemingly tangential figures have a way of moving into
the spotlight; the Bohlen mentioned here later married into the Krupp family
and, as Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, ran the Krupp armament works for
several infamous decades.
In 1891,
Kessler embarked on a six-month trip around the world. His reports can be
callow and detached—“The way in which Negroes are occasionally lynched is
cruel”—but just as often they display a notable lack of chauvinism. The
Japanese strike him as more civilized than the Europeans, and in India he
perceives “endless psychological differentiation,” in comparison with the
homogenizing tendencies of Western civilization. In all, Kessler develops a
coolly receptive, post-Romantic sensibility that will serve him well in the
salons of the avant-garde. Of the Hachiman shrine in Kamakura, Japan, he says,
“The temple does not stand in a beautiful landscape, but the temple and the
landscape are one. The temple is only the symbol, so to speak, through which
the feelings evoked by the landscape are expressed.”
After a
year of military service, Kessler settled in Berlin, studying law in desultory
fashion and immersing himself in art. His taste rapidly progressed through the
movements of the day: Impressionism, Symbolism, Art Nouveau, and early
modernism. A new generation of artists began benefitting from his generosity,
especially after he came into his inheritance, in 1895. Visiting the studio of
Edvard Munch, in Berlin, Kessler described the young Norwegian as “hungry in
both the physical and psychological sense,” and paid sixty marks for two
engravings. Munch was, in fact, nearly starving; nine years later, he demonstrated
his gratitude by making a full-length portrait of the Count, his lanky body posed
amid a yellow-orange haze.
Kessler’s
chief ambition was to join the foreign service, but cosmopolitanism was no
guarantee of advancement in Kaiser Wilhelm II’s realm, and Kessler failed to
win a coveted spot at the German Embassy in London. Instead, in 1902, he became
an arts professional, joining the Art Nouveau architect Henry van de Velde in a
mission to modernize the old culture capital of Weimar. Their project stirred
controversy at the court of the Grand Duke of Weimar; unchaste drawings by
Rodin caused particular trouble. A local functionary named Aimé von Palézieux
agitated against Kessler, accusing him of besmirching the Grand Duke’s name.
Although Kessler had no choice but to resign, he retaliated against Palézieux,
persuading the venom-quilled journalist Maximilian Harden to spread stories
about his enemy’s financial misdemeanors. Soon afterward, in 1907, Palézieux
dropped dead, allegedly of pneumonia; suicide was suspected. Kessler wrote to
Hofmannsthal, “What is ugly about life is that it so often only provides uneasy
half solutions that are so seldom pure and tragic ones.” The hint of
bloodthirstiness in these pages seems, like that suicide at the Reichstag, a
bad omen.
There were
many tensions behind the calm exterior of the globe-trotting connoisseur.
Kessler was attracted to men, and made little attempt to conceal that
attraction behind alliances with women. He responded in erotic terms to boxing
matches in London’s East End; chatted up a teen-age Belgian sailor; and, by
1907, was in a relationship with a svelte young racing cyclist named Gaston
Colin, who achieved immortality when he was sculpted by Kessler’s good friend
Aristide Maillol (“Le Cycliste,” Musée d’Orsay). Adopting a freewheeling
attitude toward sexuality, Kessler foresaw that German mores would undergo a revolution
in the nineteen-twenties. Yet certain of his friends were less enlightened.
Harden, having disposed of Palézieux, set about destroying Philipp Eulenburg, a
member of the Kaiser’s circle, by exposing his homosexual relationships. When
Kessler defended the accused, Harden responded with lethal irony: “It’s really
too bad that you and I had to bring down such great fellows as Palézieux and
Phili Eulenburg. But there was no other way.” Kessler had no answer to that.
After
losing his position in Weimar—in time, van de Velde’s arts-and-crafts school
would evolve into the Bauhaus—Kessler entered his high European phase, spending
many weeks each year in Paris and London. The most successful of his endeavors
was a boutique publishing company, the Cranach Press, whose edition of
“Hamlet,” with stark woodcuts by Gordon Craig, is considered one of the most
beautiful books ever made. Less inspired was a campaign to build a monument and
athletic stadium in honor of Nietzsche: the concept was a rare lapse of taste on
Kessler’s part, more Wilhelmine bombast than Dionysian frenzy. When Nietzsche
howled in the middle of the night, he may have been experiencing premonitions
of it. Blessedly, the scheme went unrealized.
From 1908
until the outbreak of the war, so many illustrious personalities crowd the
pages of Kessler’s chronicle that at times you may think, Oh, God, not another
dinner with Rodin. Yet there is a context for each name dropped. Kessler has a
flair for sketching people with a flurry of adjectives: Gabriele d’Annunzio,
the Italian author-demagogue, is “alternately vain, clever, boastful, sensual,
raw, impolite, coquettish, womanly, irascible, cold, bold, free-spirited,
superstitious, perverse, but always after an interlude his love for every kind
of sensual beauty returns.” And Kessler has a journalistic eye for the
scene-setting detail, observing that Rilke’s house smelled of fruit, that Rodin
liked to listen to Gregorian chant on his gramophone at dusk, that Gordon Craig
had “very ugly hands, the hands of a sex murderer.” At Nietzsche’s funeral, he
watches a “large spider spinning her web over the grave from branch to branch
in a sunbeam.”
No mere
onlooker, Kessler regularly intervened in the careers of his favorite artists,
often to constructive effect. In the case of “Der Rosenkavalier,” he supplied
not only the outline of Hofmannsthal’s libretto—episodes of aristocratic
libertinage adapted from a French operetta—but many crucial details of the
scenario. Hofmannsthal’s lyric gift found a complement in Kessler’s command of
dramatic structure. Unfortunately, by the time of the première, in 1911,
Hofmannsthal proved unable to admit publicly the extent of the collaboration,
and the friendship suffered. Hofmannsthal’s subsequent librettos for Strauss,
refined to a fault, might have benefitted from Kessler’s advice.
Sometimes,
Kessler’s urge to induce collaborations among his diverse genius friends became
overzealous. He set up an awkward meeting between Hofmannsthal and the dancer
Ruth St. Denis, who was taken aback when the poet asked her, “Are you
reliable?” Later, in the twenties, Kessler had the very weird idea of a
Josephine Baker ballet with music by Strauss. (Kessler supplied the scenario
for Strauss’s 1914 ballet “Josephslegende.”) As improbable as such notions are,
they epitomize Kessler’s belief in the primacy of mercurial human
relationships. Monumental abstractions had too much weight in German culture,
he thought; like his hero Nietzsche, he wanted to unite severity and
sensuality, North and South. Most of all, he wished to be, in the famous phrase
from “Beyond Good and Evil,” a “good European.”
Barbara
Tuchman found the title of “The Proud Tower,” her history of the prewar years,
in Edgar Allan Poe: “From a proud tower in the town / Death looks gigantically
down.” Kessler’s diaries are haunted by the same spectre. “Reinhold believes
that to get out of the inner swamp a war today would not be so terrible,” he
writes in 1908, in Berlin. “I note that because I am surprised to hear this
view more and more frequently here.” He hears the same casual belligerence in
Paris and London. Still, unlike his friend Walther Rathenau, the unorthodox
German-Jewish industrialist, Kessler stopped short of denouncing the armaments
race, and sometimes sounded cavalier about the prospect of war. On July 26,
1914, in Paris, he comments, “The storm is coming,” as if it were a matter of
buying a sturdy umbrella.
The war
fever infected Kessler as it did many distinguished Europeans. By mid-August,
he was commanding a German-artillery munitions unit in Belgium, and the diary
attempts to explain away the atrocities that the Kaiser’s troops were
committing around him. Even so, Kessler does not hide the grimness of the
scene, which marks the beginning of the new art of total war: “The bare,
burned-out walls stand there, street after street, except where there are
household objects, family pictures, broken mirrors, upset tables and chairs,
half-burned carpets as witness to the conditions before yesterday. Pets, pigs,
cows, and dogs run without masters between the ruins. . . . Five or six men
were being led away by soldiers, hatless, stumbling, white as corpses. One held
aloft, cramped, his right hand to show that he had no weapon. They were
probably going to be shot.” For the reader, it is a shock to be deposited in
such hellish landscapes several pages after watching the antics of Diaghilev
and company; few books capture so acutely the world-historical whiplash of the
summer of 1914.
That
winter, Kessler joined the Austro-Hungarians’ Carpathian Campaign, a would-be
masterstroke that resulted in the deaths of two million men. At first, he feels
pure elation: “We are on one of the most adventuresome journeys in world
history.” The sight of high villages blanketed by snow puts him in mind of Chinese
drawings; a scene of soldiers bathing in a river gives him an earthier
pleasure. He is smitten with a handsome German major, and shares with him a
cozy cabin, perusing foreign-language newspapers and sampling preserves that
relatives have dispatched from enemy lands. Amid the luxury, he falls prey to
anti-Semitism, which festered in the German officer corps during the war. As
the scale of the slaughter sinks in, though, Kessler takes a more detached view
of the conflict, seeing it through a wide-angle, Tolstoyan lens:
Little
black figures—whether German or Russian you cannot tell—run forward, then
backward, then forward again. Shrapnel bursts over them, shells explode sending
up great swirling clouds of dust. The figures throw themselves down, disappearing
as if sucked up by the earth, stand up again, and run either backward or
forward. The general and the entire staff are clueless about the meaning of
their indecipherable movements. Are they Germans who are advancing and have
been repulsed, or Russians who attack? No one knows. You are confronted by a
spectacle whose meaning cannot be understood.
And then he
meets a man named Klewitz, a petty-dictator chief of staff who irritates him
into a new awareness. Klewitz, he writes, is “very persuaded of his own
importance, and yet a plebeian at the same time. . . . He does not impose
himself on people but rather clobbers them with his position.” Kessler calls
him a _Schwarzalbe—_a black elf, like Wagner’s Alberich. “God save us from
being ruled by such people after the war.” As Kessler catalogues various
manifestations of thuggishness and brutality on the front, he is studying
Fascism before it has a name.
Kessler
remained patriotically committed to the war, but his fervor was gone. By early
1918, when Krupp’s giant gun was shelling Paris and General Ludendorff’s
climactic offensive came within forty miles of the city, the diarist seems
almost fearful of victory. “The energy and imagination of Germany, its
superiority grows into something demonic,” he writes. His vision of Germany in
peacetime, conspicuously different from that of Ludendorff and the Fatherland
Party, imagines a constructive engagement with the East, a “mutually enriching
and autarchic German-Slavic-Byzantine world,” even the building of a great new
Jewish nation.
During the
final two years of the war, Kessler was posted in Switzerland, directing
cultural propaganda at the German Embassy and engaging in tentative
negotiations for a separate peace with France. By degrees, he reverted to his
prewar, art-fomenting self. When the High Command asked for anti-American
material, he commissioned three young avant-gardists—George Grosz, Wieland
Herzfelde, and John Heartfield—to make a cartoon entitled “Sammy in Europe,” in
which the Prussians evidently came off as badly as the Americans. (Alas, it
subsequently vanished.) Kessler also sponsored Swiss performances of Mahler’s
“Resurrection” Symphony, revelling in its “revolutionary, apocalyptic mood.”
Attending a post-concert reception at the apartment of Paul Cassirer, he lets
his mind wander from the van Goghs and Cézannes hanging on the walls to images
of Trotsky and the Bolsheviks. The Red Count is coming to life.
“Until we
have created a romance of peace that would equal that of war, violence will not
disappear from people’s lives,” Kessler told friends at war’s end. His new
world view, set forward vigorously in speeches and articles, steered clear of
Communism but incorporated pacifism, internationalism, and, in line with the
philosophy of Rathenau, a kind of guild socialism. In early 1922, Rathenau was
appointed foreign minister, and Kessler became one of his confidants. When, a
few months later, Rathenau was assassinated by right-wing militants, Kessler’s
admiration only deepened, and in 1928 he published an alternately studious and
rhapsodic biography of the late minister—a melancholy memento of German
progressivism.
Amid myriad
public appearances and occasional diplomatic assignments, Kessler kept to his
accustomed cultural rounds. In the later diaries, now available under the title
“Berlin in Lights,” you find him taking tea with Virginia Woolf, persuading
Josephine Baker to dance in his library, and attending the première of “The
Threepenny Opera.” But the post-1918 entries lack the exuberance of those which
came before. The American Century was under way, and Kessler had little taste
for its blatant mixture of moralism and materialism; in his estimation,
democracy in the Anglo-American mode perpetuated the usual oligarchic forces
behind a pseudo-populist façade. He sensed that his artistic paradise had no
future. “Nowhere is there any great interest that needs art, I mean great art,
as the church in the Middle Ages or even the politics of splendor of the popes
and the Bourbons,” he once wrote. “Art has become a luxury.”
Throughout
the diaries, Kessler dwells on the irreconcilability of aesthetic and political
realities. Viewing an exhibition of Expressionist pictures by Ernst Ludwig
Kirchner in March, 1918, he writes, “A huge gap yawns between this order and
the political-military one. I stand on both sides of the abyss, into which one
gazes vertiginously.” His hope was somehow to bridge that gap. It may seem
ironic that so art-obsessed a soul became entangled in foreign policy, sitting
through conferences and delivering stylishly wonky lectures, but in the end his
public service was aimed at shaping a world in which the life of the mind could
flourish. As Easton says in his biography, for Kessler “the whole mighty
apparatus of the state is only there to permit the flowering of a nation’s
culture.”
A fanatical
aesthete to the end, Kessler never diverged from the young Nietzsche’s belief
that art justifies life. The Russian composer Nicolas Nabokov recalled that
Kessler viewed works of art as “living creatures belonging to the same species
as himself.” The creation animated him even more than the creator, and this is
what lifts his diaries far above the level of gossip. He writes wonderfully of
the importance of revisiting the deepest works at different stages of one’s
life, for they will change appearance, “like medieval cathedrals at different
times of the day.” Make haste when you are young, he advises, or “it is too
late, and you have missed the morning light of the masterpieces.” Such light
floods the journals of Kessler’s youth, when he believed that one painting or
poem could change the world.
In 1935,
toward the end of his Mallorcan idyll, Kessler completed the first of a
projected four volumes of memoirs. Titled “Peoples and Fatherlands,” after
Nietzsche, the book covers Kessler’s childhood and youth, with passages adapted
from the diaries. It was banned in Germany, but a copy fell into the hands of
Thomas Mann, then living near Zurich. In early 1937, Kessler paid him a visit.
There is something uncanny about the encounter between the two men, for they
had many qualities in common: mixed parentage (Mann’s mother was
half-Brazilian), gay desire, a postwar swing from eccentric nationalism to
eccentric socialism. The life of Count Harry Kessler might be read as a
semi-autobiographical novel that Mann never ventured to write. In conversation
with Kessler, Mann praised and quoted from the memoir. Kessler must have felt
encouraged to press on with his task.
It was not
to be: Kessler’s health was failing. When he died, at a French boarding house
run by his sister, in November, 1937, the obituaries were few. Perhaps Kessler
felt that he would leave no lasting trace of his astounding life; if so, he was
mistaken. Scattered in libraries and hiding places across Europe was, in
essence, the book that Richard Dehmel had prophesied decades before: the
supreme memoir of the grand European fin de siècle. ♦
Alex Ross
has been contributing to The New Yorker since 1993, and he became the
magazine’s music critic in 1996.
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