Theater of Cruelty (28 page)

In 1892, Kessler embarked on a world tour, first taking in the United States, where he much preferred the women in New York society to the men, who were “businessmen, the older ones often vulgar, the younger for the most part boring, loud, and suffering from ulcers.” He liked Japan, where “the perfect and natural manners of even the most common man, make of the average Japanese a being who is infinitely more remote from barbarism than the crude, sensation-hungry European.” He didn’t much care for the British imperial trappings in India, but found the view of Benares from the Ganges “wordlessly beautiful and colorful and moving.” On to Egypt, and then back to Europe by way of Sicily, where he was so happy to see “familiar places and cities after all the fantastic and strange sights” of the Orient that he “even rejoiced at the sight of the old baroque church in Taormina, converted into a theater.”

Kessler would not become a pacifist, let alone a social democrat, until the Weimar period, when he became known as “the Red Count.” And even then, when democracy needed every defender it could get, he was too much of a social snob to feel much affinity with the common man’s elected representatives. Yet drawn as he was to
high society in various European capitals, he saw through its affectations with an acid eye. Here he passes an evening in Paris with the Baroness van Zuylen and her lesbian lover, Mme Riccoï:

He adds that the Baroness van Zuylen was née Rothschild, but “does not look very Jewish.” Whether this was something to be said in her favor is not quite clear.

One advantage of the homosexual life is that it often cuts across class barriers. Kessler’s lovers were not usually from his own social milieu. There was the “little sailor cadet Maurice Rossion” and “the little Colin,” a French bicycle racer. True, Kessler took a rather exclusively aesthetic view of these boys, as if they were specimens of the kind he liked watching in Whitechapel boxing rings: “A few magnificently slender and thoroughbred young fellows among them. Not completely full-blooded like the Greeks but beautiful, slender half-bloods.” But relations were not only physical; he liked to ply the little sailor and the little Colin with important literary works: Balzac, etc.

Kessler’s most intimate friendships were with gifted men who felt like outsiders. Despite his fashionable disdain for Jews in general, one of his closest friends was the statesman and industrialist Walther Rathenau, who was Jewish, although not entirely happy to be so. Kessler’s anti-Semitism is worth looking at a little more closely, for it
helps us understand his wider views of society and politics, and perhaps even why he would become one of the champions of a devastating war.

Disobliging remarks about Jews that speckle Kessler’s diaries are often made by others. Degas, for example, in 1907, on a Belgian Jew, who became a French citizen: “Such people do not belong to the same humanity as us.” Or Richard Wagner’s widow, Cosima, on “the Jewish question”: “She thinks the Jews are a danger because they are
different
from the Germans.… By cohabiting with us, therefore, matters of morality, of honesty, etc. have been
thrown into question
which
should not be subject to reflection
on the part of reason.” Kessler records these statements, the latter in 1901, without comment.

The views of Kessler’s great friend Rathenau are cited at some length. Rathenau believed that Jewish intellect, honed over two thousand years of Talmudic disputation, was “completely sterile in itself.” The Germans, however, were a different matter: “The more he [Rathenau] gets to know the Germans, the more his respect and admiration for them increases.” This was in 1906. Sixteen years later, after having saved the German war industry during World War I, the great German Jewish patriot was murdered by two ultranationalists in Berlin, following up on the popular beer hall song of the time: “Knallt ab den Walther Rathenau, die Gottverdammte Judensau!” (Bump off that Walther Rathenau, the Goddamned Jewish pig).

Some of Kessler’s own observations often concern physical appearance, as in his entry on a friend’s Jewish wife, named Isi: “Isi has something physically repellent for me, as if she belonged to another species.” This was in 1899. Two years later, on the same person: “A brown, demonic, at times almost beautiful appearance, but physically repulsive.” The repulsion may owe something to the fact of Isi being a woman. But these remarks are rather typical of a man whose social, political, as well as artistic judgments are above all aesthetic.

This made him vulnerable to ideas that would turn out to be very toxic indeed. In 1896, Kessler speculates about the nature of modern society. The feudal state, he argues, with its feudal codes of loyalty and honor, was replaced by the dynastic state, based on the interests of the ruling families, and this in turn was replaced by “the racial state within which the links are nationalism and language.” Although Kessler has little sympathy for the (anti-German) chauvinism of the French, particularly the reactionary Roman Catholic kind, which he dismisses as the “sickness of nationalism,” he can see a certain beauty in the racial state. One of the more disturbing diary entries, of June 20, 1904, reads:

Post-Holocaust, such notions are of course abhorrent, even though in some far-flung places such as Singapore they still enjoy some credence. However, 1904 is not 1935. There is no hint of violence in Kessler’s views. What he tries to do is to bridge the gap between his social and his artistic views with a utopian vision of beauty. The model for Kessler is not some Wagnerian fantasy of medieval Germany, or other forms of Teutonic Gothickry, which he considered vulgar. His ideal is ancient Greece. It is at once an erotic and a political ideal. He writes, in 1908: “Is it possible that our culture can find its way, without making a break with the past (Christianity), to a standpoint from which it can say yes, with a good conscience, to lust, to the naked, to all of life, as did the Greeks?”

He wrote this in Olympia, traveling around Greece with Maillol
and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the Viennese playwright. Maillol, always eager to please his patron, says all the right things about Greece. He shares with Kessler a fondness for buttocks, brought to mind by “ship boys” diving for gold coins in the Bay of Naples, but also, less obviously, by the columns of the Parthenon, which Maillol declares to be “like the buttocks of a woman.” Later, in Paris, he declares his enthusiasm for Nijinsky: “He’s absolutely Eros. Before you wondered where the Greeks got this? Now you see—it was young people like him.”

Hofmannsthal is less taken by the worship of everything Greek, which almost destroys his friendship with Kessler. Relations are strained even further when Hofmannsthal confesses to having gone through Kessler’s luggage at the hotel. “Somewhere,” writes Kessler, “there is clearly a difference between us regarding tact, perhaps a racial difference.” Perhaps he was referring to Hofmannsthal’s Jewish great-grandfather.

And yet, Kessler refuses to sink to the depths of Wagnerian anti-Semitism. It is, in fact, Rathenau who mentions, approvingly it seems, the poisonous racialism of Arthur de Gobineau, in an argument about—what else?—Greece. Kessler paraphrases his friend’s argument thus: the Greeks lost their essence and became vain in the fifth century “when the good, strong, blond blood had been pushed aside by the black blood of a lower race, which happened approximately from the Persian wars on.” Kessler objects to his Jewish friend “that the racial question was much too complicated and still much too unclear to derive such general, apodictic principles from it.”

Kessler was not the only one to project visions of ancient Greece onto his own place and time. Think of the many Greco-Roman colonnades adorning the British Empire. But his was an erotic vision that he pinned to his hopes of a sexual utopia in Germany, one where men could be free to dance naked in the northern sun. In 1907, returning
to Paris from Germany, he comments that all Germans seem to be talking about is pederasty and zeppelins. He hopes this will lead to

Perhaps not. But a month later, back in Berlin, he talks about the new generation in Germany:

The countermodel to Kessler’s ideal of Greece is Rome, whose “magnificent parvenu style” still impresses the world, “as much and even more so than the diamonds of a Jewish banker’s wife or the racing yacht of the most recent Chicago millionaire.” This is what offended Kessler’s sense of beauty: the prospect of “Americanization,” the “economically unified state” that threatened to replace the “racial state.” Americanization was cheap, grasping, shallow, vulgar, unnatural, impure. The symbol of the Americanized parvenu is the Jewish banker’s wife.

Kessler’s Germany, confounded with an erotic, aesthetic fantasy of Greece, was a place in his imagination. He knew it, too. Returning from Paris to Cologne in December 1908, he wrote how much he loved “the isolation of being abroad” but could not give up on Weimar
and Berlin: “They are the background of my life, a sort of mythical background, approximately like ‘heaven’ for Christians.” And this, he believed, was worth fighting for in the Great War against the Western powers.

Kessler’s descriptions of the war are extraordinary for their vividness and their typically Kesslerian romanticism. On the Russian campaign in 1915, he revels in the soldierly camaraderie, with cheerful young men wandering

He reads an essay on the “inner transformation of Germany” and muses: “The ‘new man’ as the result of the transformation of Germany during the war. This mystical goal inspires me as well.” Contrast that to the “Jews, who sit in every village as numerous as lice.”

Despite the champagne-like air, Kessler can still see the terror of war clearly. On the Russian front:

But he wants to believe in a German victory until the end, even speculating that in the face of American money, Germany has “the cunning of our Jews which I have deployed, plus our efficiency.”

Imminent defeat leaves Kessler in a state of despair. But at least this allows him to take a more realistic view of the world. He writes that “the war has done more to uproot the old morality than a thousand
Nietzsches.” He worries that “the entire European world has begun the ferment, all the anger from the trenches is rolling backward.” Viewing an exhibition in Zurich of paintings and woodcuts (Gaugain, Seurat, Kirchner), he can no longer see a way to bridge the gap between his aesthetic and his political ideals, which is expressed in one of the most revealing entries in his diary, on March 27, 1918:

The only way for a better world to emerge from the wreckage is “out of a new ideology that commands a general consent.” This new ideology would soon come in Germany, with devastating consequences, an ideology that owed much to ideas Kessler himself had championed, of race, youth, purity. The new age, leading up to the next world war, would be a grotesque version of Kessler’s dream of the vigorous, masculine, racial society. Kessler was utterly opposed to the Nazi ethos. But by then it was far too late.

Kessler’s diaries should be read not only for the pleasure of the author’s always stimulating and often amusing company but because they contain a chilling lesson. Here was one of the most cultivated, cosmopolitan men of his time, an intellectual committed to European civilization who nonetheless endorsed ideas that contained the seeds of its near destruction. What does this tell us about our own age, when new notions are floating around about defending Western civilization against a foreign faith, notions that could turn out to be just as toxic? Cultural sophistication, alas, is no prophylactic against the allure of terrible ideas.