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Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism #30
The Red Count: The Life and Times of Harry Kessler (Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism)
The life of Count Harry Kessler (1868-1937), the famous Anglo-German art patron, writer, and activist, offers a vivid and engrossing perspective on the tumultuous transformation of art and politics that took place in modern Europe between 1890 and 1930. In the first half of his career Kessler was one of the most ardent and well-known champions of aesthetic modernism in Imperial Germany, becoming a friend and patron to pioneering artists and writers of his day, most notably French sculptor Aristide Maillol, Belgian architect Henry van de Velde, English theater designer Gordon Craig, and Austrian poet and playwright Hugo von Hofmannsthal and, in his capacity as director of the Museum of Arts and Crafts in Weimar and vice-president of the German Artists League, served as a spokesman and lightning rod for embattled modern art. In the aftermath of the First World War, in which he served as a soldier, propagandist, and secret agent, Kessler embarked on a public career as a committed internationalist and pacifist, a stance that led ultimately to his exile from Germany upon the Nazi seizure of power. Making use of the recently discovered portions of Kessler's extensive diaries, one of the most remarkable journals ever written, Laird Easton explains the reasons for this startling metamorphosis, showing for the first time the continuities between Kessler's prewar aestheticism and his postwar politics and highlighting his importance within the larger history of the rise of modern art and politics. This lively narrative, the first English-language biography of Harry Kessler, provides a rich and fascinating portrait of the man whom W. H. Auden called "a crown witness of our times."
534 pages, Paperback
First published May 6, 2002
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
August 27, 2018
Brilliant important thinker of the early 20th C. A must read for anyone interested in the early Weimar history from a key mover and shaker himself, Count Kessler. He analyzed, he collected art, he mentored, he critiqued, he traveled, he met practically every key personality from Europe during this period. Particularly liked reading Kessler's personal impressions of Walther Rathenau. There is a second volume of these precious diaries. So grateful they were compiled and translated.
March 5, 2021
I stopped this book about a hundred pages in. Long winded, overly philosophical and none of the Kessler’s life was staying with me. I’m not even sure who this book was written for.
July 10, 2024
Easton's biography looks at the life of the patron of the arts, Count Harry Kessler (1868-1937). I learned about Kessler while reading a biography about Karl Lagerfeld. One of the only books Lagerfeld carried with him throughout his life was Kessler's multi-volume autobiography, which intrigued me. Indeed, Kessler a well borne member of German aristocracy led a queer cosmopolitan life that inspired Lagerfeld's approach to his own life. While an exhaustive account of Kessler's life, the book needed more pictures detailing the many artworks discussed throughout the book to help the reader understand the importance to Kessler.
Kessler had foreseen his fate; he knew that he would not see then end of the Third Reich......in the words of Hugo von Homnannsthal 'an artist in living material'-should quickly fade. His influence and activity were, with the exception of the years from 1916 to 1924, largely exercised privately. 3
It is this intersection between the richness of a life and it comprehensive recording, mediated by a keen intelligence, that makes Kessler's diary one of the greatest personal documents of the twentieth century....4
The cry of Stephen Daedalus, 'History is a nightmare from which I'm trying to awake,' could have been the slogan of Kessler's generation in Germany... 7
Alexandre Kojeve has written that all important questions lead, sooner or later, to the answer 'Who am I?'..8
The Liebenberg Circle refers to a group of conservative aristocrats who sough to influence the young Kaiser Wilhelm II's foreign policy. Tow of their principal leaders, Count Philipp zu Eulenberg and Count Kuno von Moltke, were homosexual. 31
In Florence, while admiring the delicate, dreamy, feminine beauty in the works of Donatello, Kessler first articulated one of the central themes that would preoccupy him for many years, the revolution in human consciousness brought about by St. Francis of Assisi. Like a spring the Franciscan movement replenished the well of the Western imagination, bringing in its flood two new contributions to the art: the ideal of feminine beauty and a fresh enthusiasm for nature. 37
Nietzsche's argument that a life could be justified by its beauty, not by its usefulness, and his will to confirm the value of life, despite his own isolation, lack of faith, and sickness, served as an important moral reinforcement for Kessler in his own struggle to define a mission that would justify his life. 43
Pan was a product of the Berlin bohemia... 64
The motivation for much of the turn-of-the-century travel literature was not so much scholarly or even escapist, at least in the narrow sense of the word; rather, travel served as means of self-discovery. This explains the fragmentary, deeply subjective, and impressionistic character that Kessler insisted was an integral part of the genre. 79
The greatest lesson of Greek antiquity for Kessler was that there was no hateful sensuality, that sensuality lay at the heart of a genuine culture. 'A beautiful body of a boy and the great love that Plato provided the world as its axis, are both cause and effect....Sensuality is the axis and the pole of all else; perhaps even in its raison d'être, thus its importance. 169
In his lecture "Science as a Vocation," Max Weber wrote that modern life is characterized by the 'disenchantment of the world,' the process of intellectualization and bureaucratization that had ineluctably limited the place of magic, charismatic religion, and religious awe. 190
'Only in dance do I know how to say the highest things,' wrote Nietzsche. If the nineteenth century witnessed the greatest age of opera, the beginning of the twentieth century saw the rise of dance. 196
The world that we must seek is a world in which the creative spirit is alive, in which life is an adventure full of joy and hope, based rather upon the impulse to construct than upon the desire to retain what we posses or to seize what is possessed by others. It must be a world in which affection has free play, in which love is purged of the instinct for domination, in which cruelty and envy have been dispelled by happiness and the unfettered development of all the instincts that build up life and fill it with mental delights. Such a world is possible; it waits only for men to wish to create it. Bertrand Russell, Roads to Freedom. 298
...but as Verlaine's Caspard Hauser says: Death did not want me....406
Kessler had foreseen his fate; he knew that he would not see then end of the Third Reich......in the words of Hugo von Homnannsthal 'an artist in living material'-should quickly fade. His influence and activity were, with the exception of the years from 1916 to 1924, largely exercised privately. 3
It is this intersection between the richness of a life and it comprehensive recording, mediated by a keen intelligence, that makes Kessler's diary one of the greatest personal documents of the twentieth century....4
The cry of Stephen Daedalus, 'History is a nightmare from which I'm trying to awake,' could have been the slogan of Kessler's generation in Germany... 7
Alexandre Kojeve has written that all important questions lead, sooner or later, to the answer 'Who am I?'..8
The Liebenberg Circle refers to a group of conservative aristocrats who sough to influence the young Kaiser Wilhelm II's foreign policy. Tow of their principal leaders, Count Philipp zu Eulenberg and Count Kuno von Moltke, were homosexual. 31
In Florence, while admiring the delicate, dreamy, feminine beauty in the works of Donatello, Kessler first articulated one of the central themes that would preoccupy him for many years, the revolution in human consciousness brought about by St. Francis of Assisi. Like a spring the Franciscan movement replenished the well of the Western imagination, bringing in its flood two new contributions to the art: the ideal of feminine beauty and a fresh enthusiasm for nature. 37
Nietzsche's argument that a life could be justified by its beauty, not by its usefulness, and his will to confirm the value of life, despite his own isolation, lack of faith, and sickness, served as an important moral reinforcement for Kessler in his own struggle to define a mission that would justify his life. 43
Pan was a product of the Berlin bohemia... 64
The motivation for much of the turn-of-the-century travel literature was not so much scholarly or even escapist, at least in the narrow sense of the word; rather, travel served as means of self-discovery. This explains the fragmentary, deeply subjective, and impressionistic character that Kessler insisted was an integral part of the genre. 79
The greatest lesson of Greek antiquity for Kessler was that there was no hateful sensuality, that sensuality lay at the heart of a genuine culture. 'A beautiful body of a boy and the great love that Plato provided the world as its axis, are both cause and effect....Sensuality is the axis and the pole of all else; perhaps even in its raison d'être, thus its importance. 169
In his lecture "Science as a Vocation," Max Weber wrote that modern life is characterized by the 'disenchantment of the world,' the process of intellectualization and bureaucratization that had ineluctably limited the place of magic, charismatic religion, and religious awe. 190
'Only in dance do I know how to say the highest things,' wrote Nietzsche. If the nineteenth century witnessed the greatest age of opera, the beginning of the twentieth century saw the rise of dance. 196
The world that we must seek is a world in which the creative spirit is alive, in which life is an adventure full of joy and hope, based rather upon the impulse to construct than upon the desire to retain what we posses or to seize what is possessed by others. It must be a world in which affection has free play, in which love is purged of the instinct for domination, in which cruelty and envy have been dispelled by happiness and the unfettered development of all the instincts that build up life and fill it with mental delights. Such a world is possible; it waits only for men to wish to create it. Bertrand Russell, Roads to Freedom. 298
...but as Verlaine's Caspard Hauser says: Death did not want me....406
February 24, 2023
Author was convicted of possessing child pornography and fired. He is not fit to be a professor of history, and you should not waste your time reading his book. Waste of time and space. He is lucky to get of with probation. If I ever see him in person, there will be more said.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews