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Title: Berlin in Lights: The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler (1918-1937) by Charles Kessler, Ian Buruma ISBN: 0-8021-3839-X Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: 09 January, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (2 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Fascinating wide-angle snapshot of Europe between the wars
Comment: Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel, in Tom Lehrer's facetious 1964 tribute ballad _Alma,_ is credited with marrying most of the creative men in early 20th-century Europe. (Lehrer was ungenerous, not to Alma but to Europe, since some creative Europeans did live outside Vienna in those days.) In contrast, Harry Kessler's range of contacts, if less intimate, was mind-bogglingly wider. Easton, in his sweeping and eloquent new biography of Kessler (cited below), quotes an estimate that over 40000 names appear in Kessler's complete diary. That surpasses even Dumas's 37267 fictional characters, and Kessler's people were real. Kessler was a learned, aristocratic German diplomat and arts patron with international roots and upbringing, in touch with many leading figures of his day. This book is a portion of his diary, opening in 1918 just before the armistice, and lasting, like Kessler himself, until 1937. Something of a Pepys of inter-war Europe, therefore, though Kessler focuses on ideas, or people of ideas. Kessler observes concisely and often penetratingly the changes in Europe after the Great War, and many historical figures whom he meets either in Germany or during his travels and later exile. The book is thus peopled with politicians and artists from Rosa Luxemburg and Jozef Pilsudski to Diaghilev and Isadora to Erich Maria Remarque who, Kessler reports, knocked out _All Quiet on the Western Front_ in six weeks. Included also are some of that small club of celebrities that surface so reliably in New York book-review periodicals in recent decades (people like Virginia Woolf, the Sackville-Wests, and various Nabokovs; Scott and Zelda however are missing).
Which leads me to more on this edition, good and bad. It is a reprint of the 1971 English translation by Charles Kessler (no relation), reissued by its British publisher, with a new introduction by Ian Buruma (also published separately in the _New York Review of Books_). The 1971 translation includes high-quality notes, locating events and personalities in context. The cold-war-era time frame of the notes is evident. This recent reprint however reflects lost opportunities. The introduction describes the milieus (omitting Vienna among culturally important venues -- revenge for Tom Lehrer?) and speculates on Kessler's personality. But it has little of the basic factual background that would help a general reader to make sense of the rest of the book. We must look to the Library of Congress data on the copyright page, for example, to see Kessler's life dates and therefore that he was 50 years old when the book opens. What was Kessler's career before 1918; what was his military service, to which he often alludes in the diary. Most glaringly, Kessler refers internally to the diary as beginning many years before 1918; why does the introduction fail to address the missing parts? It's as if we entered a show at curtain time only to find that we joined the last half in progress, and without explanation.
Laird Easton, Kessler's recent biographer (_The Red Count,_ ISBN 0520230353, recommended if the diary interests you), informs me that pre-1918 Kessler diaries surfaced in Mallorca in 1983, after the 1971 edition but long before this reprint. Also found slightly earlier were entries from most of 1923 and 1924, including remarks on US life and culture, from two extensive trips to America. (Recalling not just Tocqueville but, from Kessler's own time, Voegelin's 1928 _Über die Form des amerikanischen Geistes_ -- Vienna again. The latter is now in English translation as ISBN 0807118265.) Easton's biography addresses the American interludes and mentions a CD-ROM edition of the entire diary, pending in Germany. The current diary reprint could have been stronger with the restoration of the long-rediscovered material, or with a more practical introduction, but what it has is still very good. Here is history from a primary source, in all its complexity and individuality. Filtered, it's true, through some editing, but nothing like the parochializing and dumbing-down that characterize US popular sources on modern history today. Which reminds me of Jacques Barzun's comments (ISBN 0819562378 p. 37) on the "Alexandrian" phase of civilizations, the flowering of indirect, reference-book information (also, by the way, of lawyers) preceding collapse.
Rating: 4
Summary: I LOVE BERLIN 1918-1929
Comment: Berlin in Lights is a fascinating piece of history. Here we get a first-hand look at the Nazi's gaining power in Germany mixed in with lunches with Erik Satie and Jean Cocteau. So from the high (great culture and artists) to the very low (the rise of Hitler). Count Kessler kept a great journal and had ...interesting friends.
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Title: The Red Count: The Life and Times of Harry Kessler (Weimar and Now, German Cultural Criticism, 30) by Laird McLeod Easton, Univ of California Pr ISBN: 0520230353 Publisher: University of California Press Pub. Date: 01 June, 2002 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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Title: The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity by Detlev J.K. Peukert, Richard Deveson ISBN: 0809015560 Publisher: Hill & Wang Pub. Date: 01 September, 1993 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: The Hot Girls of Weimar Berlin by Barbara Ulrich, Jerry Stahl ISBN: 0922915768 Publisher: Feral House Pub. Date: 01 December, 2002 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Before the Deluge : Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s, A by Otto Friedrich ISBN: 0060926791 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 22 November, 1995 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
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Title: Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider by Peter Gay ISBN: 0393322394 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: December, 2001 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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