Journey to the Abyss: The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler, 1880-1918

by Harry Graf Kessler, Laird M. Easton (Editor)

These fascinating, never-before-published early diaries of Count Harry Kessler—patron, museum director, publisher, cultural critic, soldier, secret agent, and diplomat—present a sweeping panorama of the arts and politics of Belle Époque Europe, a glittering world poised to be changed irrevocably by the Great War. Kessler’s immersion in the new art and literature of Paris, London, and Berlin unfolds in the first part of the diaries. This refined world gives way to vivid descriptions of the horrific fighting on the Eastern and Western fronts of World War I, the intriguing private discussions among the German political and military elite about the progress of the war, as well as Kessler’s account of his role as a diplomat with a secret mission in Switzerland.
 
Profoundly modern and often prescient, Kessler was an erudite cultural impresario and catalyst who as a cofounder of the avant-garde journal Pan met and contributed articles about many of the leading artists and writers of the day. In 1903 he became director of the Grand Ducal Museum of Arts and Crafts in Weimar, determined to make it a center of aesthetic modernism together with his friend the architect Henry van de Velde, whose school of design would eventually become the Bauhaus. When a public scandal forced his resignation in 1906, Kessler turned to other projects, including collaborating with the Austrian writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the German composer Richard Strauss on the opera Der Rosenkavalier and the ballet The Legend of Joseph, which was performed in 1914 by the Ballets Russes in London and Paris. In 1913 he founded the Cranach-Presse in Weimar, one of the most important private presses of the twentieth century.
 
The diaries present brilliant, sharply etched, and often richly comical descriptions of his encounters, conversations, and creative collaborations with some of the most celebrated people of his time: Otto von Bismarck, Paul von Hindenburg, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Richard Strauss, Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Diaghilev, Vaslav Nijinsky, Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, Sarah Bernhardt, Friedrich Nietzsche, Rainer Marie Rilke, Paul Verlaine, Gordon Craig, George Bernard Shaw, Harley Granville-Barker, Max Klinger, Arnold Böcklin, Max Beckmann, Aristide Maillol, Auguste Rodin, Edgar Degas, Éduard Vuillard, Claude Monet, Edvard Munch, Ida Rubinstein, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Pierre Bonnard, and Walther Rathenau, among others.
 
Remarkably insightful, poignant, and cinematic in their scope, Kessler’s diaries are an invaluable record of one of the most volatile and seminal moments in modern Western history.


From the Hardcover edition.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Biography, Germany, German Literature, Memoir, Diary

960 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

Harry Clément Ulrich Kessler (23 May 1868 – 30 November 1937) was an Anglo-German count, diplomat, writer, and patron of modern art. His diaries "Berlin in Lights" published in 1971 revealed anecdotes and details of the artistic and theatrical life in Europe, mostly in Germany, from the collapse of Germany at the end of World War I until his death in Lyon in 1937.

Reviews

[Warwick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Harry Graf Kessler is a character who seems to have stepped straight from the pages of Proust. An aristocratic aesthete with a fine sensitivity for the arts, an affinity for the beau monde and – naturally – a carefully concealed attraction to his own sex, he was perhaps the last great cosmopolitan citizen of the Belle Époque, at home in every capital on the continent, always calm and unruffled, as comfortable talking to avant-garde artists and poets as to statesmen and soldiers. Educated in turn at a Parisian lycée, a boarding-school in Ascot, and then the Johanneum in Hamburg, Kessler grew up speaking fluent Europe. And he simply knew everyone and saw everything.

He was at the opening of the Eiffel Tower (‘the grandest buildings of Rome were dwarfs by comparison’) and looked round the newly-founded Stanford University. He was one of the first to see the freshly excavated ruins of Knossos on Crete. He nipped into the gardens at Giverny to chat with Monet, and had his portrait painted by Munch. Close friends with Rodin and Maillol, he commissioned the latter to make a sculpture of his lover. He sat drinking with Rilke in his Paris garret, and saw him off in a car to Duino to find inspiration. He was at the legendarily riotous opening night of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, and went drinking across Paris with Nijinsky and Diaghilev afterwards. He flirted with Gabriele D’Annunzio, was shocked by the open lesbianism of Colette, and had a night out in Montmartre with Aleister Crowley (‘a fat, disgustingly dressed, bohemian Englishman with a collar’).

One could go on. If his diary were simply a record of these meetings and encounters, it would already be valuable. But it's also brilliantly written, able to switch at will between sharp gossip, deep reflection, and philosophical rumination. A lifelong traveller and resigned atheist, he is stirred to spirituality by the impact with new places and new people:

How certain I am that I belong to this earth, that my dust will merge into the branches and blossoms and will continue the silent, majestic journey through eternity. The stars will look down for untold millennia and I too will be a part of the cosmos, small but eternal like God. And I too have known happiness.
—Florence, 1 Aug 1898

In the evening the Strand, Piccadilly. The great elemental phenomena that have moved me deeply: the sea, the mob, only then mountains, streams, plains, stretches of the sky. The metropolis contains the same poison of longing as does the sea. The same mobile melancholy, dreamy, objectless melancholy.
—London, 20 Apr 1903

The tragedy of this diary is that it is precisely the world of European culture that Kessler exemplifies from which – as he realises with great clarity – the cataclysm of the First World War arises. He spends much of the 1910s working feverishly in London and Berlin to improve Anglo-German relations, but when hostilities do finally break out in 1914 Kessler is a committed patriot, serving first on the Western front and later as a diplomat and spy in neutral Switzerland. Much of his job is to promote the history of German art and culture to counteract the Allied image of the ‘brutal Hun’.

Seeing his assessment of the situation inside Germany, during his frequent trips back home, is fascinating as the war goes on:

All around the world war rages and in the centre is this nervous city in which so much presses and shoves, so many people and streets and lights and colours and interests: politics and music hall, business and yet also art, field grey, privy councillors, chansonettes, and right and left, and up and down, somewhere, very far away, the trenches, regiments storming over to attack, the dying, submarines, zeppelins, airplane squadrons, columns marching on muddy streets, Hindenburg and Ludendorff, victories; Riga, Constantinople, the Isonzo, Flanders, the Russian Revolution, America, the Anzacs and the poilus, the pacifists and the wild newspaper people. And all ending up in the half-darkened Friedrichstrasse, filled with people at night, unconquerable, never to be reached by Cossacks, Gurkhas, Chasseurs d’Afrique, Bersaglieris, and cowboys, still not yet dishonored, despite the prostitutes who pass by. … That’s the world war, all right.
—Berlin, 18 Nov 1917

Given Kessler's commitment to a German victory (even when it was clear to most others which way things were going), it's even more impressive to see how quickly he accepts reality in 1918, even hoping that the new League of Nations can come in and take over German schools ‘so that the minds of children are not poisoned’.

The post-war world was not one that Kessler was particularly impressed by. During the conflict he had gradually seen the rise of a new kind of leader – not the men of learning and culture that he had known, but a new kind of bureaucrat formed by office life who was now coming into power.

Who can work hard for ten hours a day as an official and remain a human being, with heart and feeling, taste, culture, and humanity? If you put pure Bismarcks and Goethes in the offices and factories, after ten years they would be the same as our current technicians and officials: machines. … Bureaucratization, which is a consequences of the number of hours you work in an office, is the key question—whether you want to have creative people who participate in life, and not dried-up old mummies as rulers. No leading official should have to work more than four hours a day; to do more should be punishable.
—3 Jul 1918

From your mouth to my boss's ear, Count. Kessler's diaries of the 1920s and '30s (one of the best witnesses we have to the Weimar Republic) have long been in print; this particular volume, which was miraculously discovered much more recently, ends in 1918 and even in this abbreviated form clocks in at well over a thousand pages.

It makes the case for Kessler as one of the most essential diarists of the twentieth century, and contains so much to fascinate on almost every page that it feels incredibly rich and rewarding. It certainly justifies the comment made by his friend, the poet Richard Dehmel, as far back as 1901. ‘I say that you will write the memoirs of our time,’ Dehmel told him, after reading an extract from his travel diary. ‘I envy our grandchildren who will be able to read that.’ Now we can.

[Simon · Rating 5 out of 5]

A slow, magnificent read. Kessler knew everyone worth knowing in the Europe between 1880 and 1918, and was diligent in keeping an account of his life as both a German and a member of the international culture that knew no boundaries. In the end he was dragged (somewhat willingly) into the disaster of World War I, despite his contempt for the Wilhelmine government.

The book is so dense that reading it took weeks. The editorial work is outstanding, and that's part of the problem. The footnotes will take the reader into an endless number of digressions (most of them well worth it). And the cumulative effect is almost hypnotic, as the long-lost world of the fin-de-siècle rises like Atlantis from the pages.

Indispensable for those interested in the period.

[Laura Jordan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was so rich, so dense, that there really wasn't any point in trying to get through it quickly. So I parceled it out into manageable bits, reading 20 pages a day -- it took me six weeks. But there really was so much to be gained from doing it this way. I felt like I really got to know Kessler, the world that he inhabited, his social circles, and his way of thinking. After I finished up the last page today, I realized that I was a little sad to be leaving someone whose company I had come to enjoy (and whose writing left so much to savor). Fundamentally, though, Kessler's diaries should be required reading for anyone interested in belle epoque Europe or the experience of World War I. And Kessler seemed to know everyone, from Monet to Rilke to Hindenberg. He was even there at the premiere of The Rite of Spring in May 1913 when the audience rioted after seeing Nijinsky dance.

Anyway, just to offer some flavor, here's my favorite quote:

"All around the world war rages and in the center in this nervous city which so much presses and shoves, so many people and lights and colors and interests: politics and music hall, business and yet also art, field gray, privy councilors, chansonettes, and right and left, and up and down, somewhere, very far away, the trenches, regiments storming over to attack, the dying, submarines, zeppelins, airplane squadrons, columns marching on muddy streets, Hindenberg and Ludendorff, victories; Riga, Constantinople, the Isonzo, Flanders, the Russian Revolution, America, the Anzacs, and the poilus, the pacifists and the wild newspaper people. And all ending up in the half-darkened Friedrichstrasse, filled with people at night, unconquerable, never to be reached by Cossacks, Gurkhas, Chasseurs d'Afrique, Bersaglieris, and cowboys, still not dishonored, despite the prostitutes who pass by. If a revolution were to break out here, a powerful upheaval in this chaos, barricades on Friedrichstrasse, or the collapse of the distant parapets, what a spark, how the mighty, inextricably complicated organism would crack, how like the Last Judgment! And yet we have experienced, have caused precisely this to happen in Liege, Brussels, Warsaw, Bucharest, even almost in Paris. That's the world war, all right." (November 18, 1917)

[Debn]

This book is outstanding - not just a window on a lost world, but a window on one of the most engaging, frustrating, eloquent, enigmatic & admirable human beings to live through some of the most turbulent times in German history. In these diary entries (beautifully translated and annotated by Easton) Kessler's personal diary reveals how he transitions from a reflexively conservative aristocrat to a military nationalist to a socialist, and all the while is a cosmopolitan, a humanitarian, a modernist and art lover and an eloquent observer of his time. The thing I love most about Harry Kessler is that he is always trying to improve himself, always trying to learn and grow, and that he structured his life in such a way that he enabled others to be their best selves.

Lots of people have read the post-1918 volumes (translated into English with the title 'Berlin in Lights' I think), but in my mind these earlier entries are so much better. Not just because this time period is more my interest academically, but also because of how Kessler changes from a stuffy, slightly pompous youth to someone else entirely. I read this thing in three days - I think I missed dinner twice because I couldn't put the book down.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

The German count was described by W.H. Auden as "probably the most cosmopolitan man who ever lived." Kessler was fluent in English, German, French and Greek and travelled actively through Europe and the Americas while pursuing his art and diplomatic careers.

The book is fascinating as an insight into an artistocrat's world. Famous people pop up with stupid ideas (Degas: "Compulsory education is an infamy"); dinner conversations course among people like George Bernard Shaw and Rodin; and great collaborations like Kessler's with Hoffmanstahl to create Der Rosenkavalier are described. It is worth reading as a reminder of the fervent changes during the Belle Epoque era -- and to see who pops up on the pages.

The story of how these journals, which cover Kessler's years as a schoolboy (age 12) to the end of World War I, is interesting in itself. Kessler's later journals on the 1920s and 1930s had long been published but it was supposed that his earlier journals had been lost. However, when a safe deposit box was opened in Mallorca in 1983, the first 38 years were found. Originally published in German, Laird Easton has edited them and published excerpts in English. The footnotes an editing are excellent, covering obscure historic people as well as people like Wilbur Wright with excellent background notes.

Kessler is an aristocrat, a snob, a racist, anti-Semitic, a closeted homosexual, and carries the prejudices of his time and class against other people. But you see his views change over time as he interacts with hundreds of people in the pages of the diary. He is shocked in 1888 when his father believes that all countries will become republics in the next century and that it will happen non-violently. Yet he becomes a principalled democrat by the time of the Weimar Republic after World War I.

[Charlotte · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most thrilling and overwhelming books I've ever read. I can't imagine a person of such breadth and intellect today. Harry Kessler, from a vastly wealthy German banking family, with an English mother, was instrumental in the promotion of modern art, then served ably on the German side in WWI (that weirdest and least justifiable of wars) despite deep connections with both family and friends, including his mother and sister, in "enemy" territory. He must have been an incredibly engaging person, because he literally knew everyone-- from artists (Degas, Malliol, Bonnard, Vuillard, Rodin...) to literary, musical and theatrical geniuses (Nietzsche, Rilke, George Bernard Shaw, Diaghilev, Nijinsky, Richard Strauss, Hugo von Hofmannsthal...) to political leaders of all persuasions from the Kaiser to the representatives of the Bolsheviks, with whom he negotiated a separate armistice from his diplomatic position in Switzerland. He was gravely disturbed by Germany's total and sudden defeat in 1918, his experiences in that war bringing him eventually to pacifism. He predicted both the rise of German fascism and the eventual formation of the European Union. He left Germany in 1933 when Hitler began to attack his beloved art and artists and his own life became endangered by Hitler's cohort. He never returned to Germany again, dying in 1937. There is a second volume of these diaries covering the rest of his life which I will read next year.

I've never understood the basis of WWI and while I know a little more now, having read this book, it still seems insane to me that so many died over such ridiculous aims. It plunged Europe into utter chaos for years and made WWII inevitable. I wonder what Kessler would have made of it if he'd lived. I'm sure in one way or another he would have been involved. A man of action in whatever sphere he was engaged with.

Anyway, there is nothing like a detailed and honest diary, covering an entire sentient life, to bring a person long dead back to life, as well as the eras in which they lived. This volume begins with a ten year old boy excited about meeting the Kaiser (the one before the one that lost WWI and abdicated to save his skin) and ends with grief over the foreseen future for Germany.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

what a different time...

[Frank B. Farrell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Laird Easton has performed an enormously valuable service in editing and translating the diaries of Count Harry Kessler, from 1880 to 1918, while also writing a biography of him called The Red Count. Kessler’s history is so diversely interesting that it is difficult to give credit to it when one first encounters him. The son of a German banker and an Anglo-Irish aristocrat, he is educated first in a Parisian primary school, then at an English boarding school, and then at a German gymnasium and university. He becomes a wealthy patron of modernist painting, poetry, dance, and theater; a Prussian military officer who fights on the eastern front in the Great War; a homoerotic aesthete; a would-be diplomat in Germany’s complex negotiations with other nations after the war; and, eventually, a great defender of the Weimar Republic and of a democratic Germany against the National Socialists, whom he despises. Kessler closes Nietzsche’s eyes immediately after his death and advises his sister about creating a Nietzsche memorial. He meets with Verlaine to discuss the work and personality of Rimbaud, and he offers financial support to Rilke when the latter goes off to Duino to write poetry. One sees him joining Nijinsky and Diaghilev in a celebratory taxi ride in Paris right after the first performance of The Rite of Spring. He assists Hofmannsthal in writing the story for Der Rosenkavalier, and has a long discussion with the German foreign minister Walter Rathenau before the latter attends a crucial conference in Italy in 1922. He gives us a crucial eyewitness account of the attempts to former a soviet republic in Berlin after the war and of its defeat. Kessler also lays out some of the early steps in the formation of the Bauhaus school, and he is an early collector of Cezanne and van Gogh. The list of his encounters with the great and the interesting could go on for several pages more, as these fascinating diaries attest to. The 1880-1918 diaries were left for safekeeping by Kessler in a bank in Mallorca in 1933, where he fled after Hitler took power in Germany. Three years later, with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War and the Nationalists’ sympathies for Nazi Germany, he found that he could not return to the island, so the diaries were lost until 1983, when the Mallorcan bank, after its normal 50-year waiting period, made them available to German archives. Kessler’s aesthetic preferences and assessments are of great interest, but even more so are his political transformations. His very great devotion to Nietzsche’s work leads him not to fascism but to a passionate commitment to the Weimar Republic. He is an excellent model today for a cosmopolitan Europe (though in his various negotiations he remained clearly a German patriot).

Harry Kessler figures prominently in my book Euroconnections: Literature, Philosophy, Religion, and Sexuality, 1880-1940, which explores connections, coincidences, and chance meetings between European intellectuals in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

You can read the first chapter of Euroconnections for free at the link below:
https://frankbfarrell.substack.com/p/...

[Zack Whitley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow wow wow. Just amazing. I felt like I was living through these times with Kessler. His diary brings to life so much of the cosmopolitan world of a European aristocrat at the turn of the last century. It's just fascinating reading. And he interacts with so many of the big names of his time: Mailol, Hindenburg, Monet, Rodin, Nijinsky and so many more. I love his thoughts on Degas - old man, reactionary - and how the French view of impressionism had changed in just 20 years from abhorrence to warm embrace.

But mostly, I loved Kessler. He just seems like a wonderful person full of curiosity and vigor but with humanizing contradictions and prejudices that were probably typical for his time. And he was so clearly gay and yet never mentioned it, of course. Sometimes his revealing entries put a smile on my face: like, the best part of the war was when all the soldiers went skinny dipping and one of them let Kessler take his picture. Yes, I giggled to think how happy days like this would make his gay little heart. And of course I felt his sadness and his depressions when a crush moved on. Who knows if these crushes were requited. Did they every talk about it? Is that something they could talk about a hundred years ago? The diary is silent. Some things couldn't be written down even in a diary I suppose.

[OGK · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating evocation of an entire era, not so distant from us in time but which already feels like a completely different world. This long and detailed diary reads like a conversation with a much cooler friend who knows everyone you ever wanted to meet. Art, politics and war formed an incredible mix in Count Kessler's life and he described it in perfect literary style. If I have anything negative to say about this book it's some minor reservations regarding the translation and commentary. Unfortunately, I noticed a few errors especially regarding Russian culture and history which I'm reasonably familiar with. Those are only blips, though, and don't distract from the overall brilliance of the book.

[Lee Barry · Rating 5 out of 5]

No one could possibly read all this—or even want to. But you should read some of it as a comparison with today’s world. Kessler certainly had a wonderful charmed life.

I loved some of his insights about art:

“Sentimentality equals conventional, phony feelings. It is a sign that no genuine feelings are in hand. Art needs feelings, consists of intellect and feelings. If the second element is not available then conventional feelings have to serve as a surrogate. Sentimentality therefore should not be confused with strength of feeling, it is a symptom of the exact opposite.” (1903) (p. 286)

[Bruce · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chronicle of the Gilded Age and World War I from one of its central characters in Germany. As a gay man, he was to (only) some degree an outsider, but as a patron of the arts and world traveler who spoke multiple languages fluently he met a lot of historic people and was in the middle of a lot of the action, which is depicted fairly clearly here. Editorial touch is perfect, by a historian at California State University.

[Nasus]

Picked this up and read about 40% of it; trips to the US, esp NY in the gilded age, dealings with a dying Nietzsche and his sister; WWI; all interesting. But some parts too esoteric or of the time for me to be able to follow. Overall an interesting view of the 20 years covered in these diaries. This fellow sure was a Zelig - he met many artists, politicians and other important people of the day.

[Cleopatra]

I don't enjoy it as I expect. Well not everyone can be my idols.

[Marc Bosma · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ik heb de versie in Privé-domein gelezen. Heel intrigerend om een beeld te kunnen krijgen van deze tijd en van de vele verschillende domeinen waarin Kessler actief was. Invloedrijke man. Bv. rond Volkenbond, links democratische beweging in de Weimar republiek, bevordering kunst, behouden archief van Nietzsche etc.

[Alexandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

i read this slowly over the last few years, and kessler became a friend of sorts. i did not always agree with his arrogant judgements, but he had a beautiful mind. i hope the rest of his diaries are translated. reading such a personal account of WWI in the time of Trump helped shine a light on the uncertain times in the USA right now.