"Diary of an Aesthete"
by Alex Ross
The New Yorker, April 23, 2012.
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.”
Lest some jaded reader
think that 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. Nine
years later, Munch 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.
More: Kessler on music.