Berlin in Lights Berlin in Lights THE DIARIES OF COUNT HARRY KESSLER ( 1918 - 1937 ) Translated and edited by Charles Kessler With an Introduction by Ian Buruma T G R O V E P R E S S N e w Y o r k German edition copyright © 1961 by Insel Verlag, Frankfurt am Main English translation copyright © 1971 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson Introduction copyright © 1999 by Ian Buruma All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003. First published in German as Harry Graf Kessler, Tagebücher 1918-1937 First published in Great Britain in 1971 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson Published simultaneously in Canada Printed in the United States o f America FIRST AMERICAN EDITION Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kessler, Harry, Graf, 1868-1937. [Tagebücher, 1918-1937. English] Berlin in lights : the diaries of Harry Kessler, 1918-1937 / translated from the German and edited by Charles Kessler, p. cm. Original English ed. Published: The diaries of a cosmopolitan, 1918- 1937. London : Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971. Includes index. ISBN 0-8021-1663-9 1. Kessler, Harry, Graf, 1868-1937. 2. Kessler, Harry, Graf, 1868- 1937—Diaries. 3. Diplomats—Germany—Diaries. 4. Germany—Politics and government— 1918-1933. I. Kessler, Charles. II. Title. DD231.K4 A3513 2000 943.085*092—dc21 [B] 99-087291 Grove Press 841 Broadway New York, NY 10003 00 01 02 03 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents In tro d u ctio n ix T ran slator’s N o te x iv 1918 I 1919 49 1920 115 1921 135 1922 149 1923 205 1924 231 1925 237 1926 271 1927 309 1928 341 1929 359 1930 377 1931 403 1932 4 0 9 1933 439 1935 4 6 5 1936 475 1937 481 M r t t A O / I A T Illustrations Phillip Scheidemann (Kurseil) 3 Contemporary Cartoon of Friedrich Ebert (Heine) 5 ‘The Angry Kaiser’ (Klee) 7 Death Mask of Jozef Pilsudski 17 Karl Liebknecht (Kursell) 37 ‘Memorial to Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg’ (Grosz) 59 George Grosz: self-portrait 64 Hugo Preuss (Kursell) 75 ‘The White General’ 1918 (Grosz) 87 Café scene (Grosz) 89 Friedrich Ebert (Kursell) 109 Cartoon by Grosz 126 Gustav Noske (Kursell) 129 Jean Cocteau : self-portrait 146 Albert Einstein (Strink) 156 ‘Esprit d’Entente’ (Cocteau) 160 David Lloyd George 162 Drawing by Grosz 188 Edward Gordon Craig: self-portrait 193 ‘Cathedral of Socialism’ 1919 (Lyonel Feininger) 201 Erik Satie (Cocteau) 208 Street-scene by Grosz 234 ‘Rosary Crucifix’ (Gill) 245 Roundel made for Kessler’s Cranach Press (1925) 260 Cartoon by Karl Arnold showing Gustav Stresemann as the guardian angel of the young Republic 264 Diaghilev (Cocteau) 269 Richard Strauss 275 Josephine Baker (Serge) 280 Drawing by Grosz. A comment on post-war decadence 288 Hugo von Hofmannsthal (Colin Spencer) 296 François Poulenc (Cocteau) 298 Isadora Duncan (Cocteau) 329 Illustrations viii Eric Gill: self-portrait 1927 ‘The Soul and the Bridegroom* 1927 (Eric Gill) Kurt Weill (Dolbin) Cartoon by Karl Arnold, 1928. A comment on the gulf between the rich and poor Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal Bertolt Brecht ‘Gvil War* 1928 (Grosz) Diaghilev and Nijinsky (Cocteau) Virginia Woolf. Woodcut by Vanessa Bell Gustav Stresemann Picasso: self-portrait Nazis marching (Grosz) Max Reinhardt (Gossmann) Cartoon by Olaf Gulbransson, 1931. A comment on the Depression and on Hitler’s attempts to come to power legally Aristide Briand. Detail from a cartoon by Karl Arnold ‘Let us build monuments’, 1932 (Karl Arnold) Cartoon by Karl Arnold, 1932. ‘If this goes on any longer the only army we will have left will be the Salvation Army.’ André Gide (Colin Spencer) Cartoon by Karl Arnold. Hitler promises to assist von Papen ‘German autumn’ (Heine) Cartoon by Grosz commenting on the persecution of the Jews Cartoon drawing of Keyserling by Arnold Mussolini and Hitler 331 331 336 343 346 353 354 356 362 369 382 400 401 407 411 414 421 433 445 451 455 488 The publishers are grateful to the following copyright-holders for their permission to reproduce the illustrations on the pages shown: Methuen & Co. Ltd, pages 188 and 234; Angelica Garnett and the Hogarth Press, page 362; Editions Stock, pages 146, 208, 298, 356; The Mansell Col lection, page 162; Bildarchiv der Österreich Nationalbibliothek, pages 3, 37,75» 109,129,156,369 and 488; The Estate of George Grosz, Prince- town, New Jersey, other illustrations by George Grosz ; Mrs Renée Hague, illustrations by Eric Gill. Introduction Why does the diary of Count Harry Kessler fill me with such nostalgia? Since I was bom six years after the end of World War Two, and fourteen years after Kessler’s death, this would seem to be an odd emotion; how can one possibly feel nostalgic for something one hasn’t experienced, or even seen? To long for a world one never knew is surely absurdly romantic. But then, romantics are always drawn to what is lost, or even to what never was but appears to be real in retrospect. One is drawn to a myth of the past, perhaps more than to the real thing. The Europe of Kessler’s diary, which undoubtedly existed, is a lost world encrusted with glittering layers of myth, spun by Isherwood, Grosz, Brecht and Weill, among others. What infuses Kessler’s descriptions of 1920s Berlin, Weimar, Paris and London with such melancholy beauty is the author’s own awareness that, even as he was writing, that world was doomed to almost total destruction. It was decadent in the most literal sense. Kessler’s Europe, stylish, libertine, sophisticated, sinister, revolutionary and always shadowed by extreme violence, was still a continent that felt it was in the centre of the world. Europe, and Germany especially, fizzed with ideas, some of them mad, even lethal. Paris and Berlin produced the greatest scientists and philosophers, the most interesting musicians, paint ers and novelists, the finest newspapers and the best architects - as well as the most poisonous political agitators. Metropolitan European culture, that of Berlin in particular, was filled with a feverish attraction to Americana: Brecht’s gangster-ridden fantasies of Chicago, Grosz’s hal lucinatory drawings of New York, the crazes for Hollywood, dancing and jazz. And yet, unlike today, American pop culture did not dominate. The centre had not yet shifted entirely across the Atlantic. Although these diaries were written during the Weimar Republic, Kessler was really a product of an older European society. A publisher of fine, limited edition books, a diplomat, an art collector, a cosmopolitan aristocrat born in France from a German father and an Irish mother, he belonged to an age when the sweet life of the European upper classes was at its peak. It was quite natural that his beautiful mother should have caught the eye of Kaiser William I while taking the waters at a German spa, and allegedly became his mistress. That was long before the Great War, of course. Hitler’s rise in 1933 was the coup de grâce for a world that had already been fatally wounded at the Somme, in Ypres, Gallipoli and Verdun. After that kind of slaughter, the Old World could never feel at ease again. Like Scott Fitzgerald, Kessler was an extraordinary observer of a giddy society that was weirdly out of kilter, sparkling, brilliant, yet constantly on the edge of a nervous breakdown. The Kessler diaries begin in 1918, when the author observes the revolution in Berlin, after Kaiser William II had fled to Holland. Sailors of the German navy have mutinied in Kiel. Karl Liebknecht commands the rebellious workers in Berlin. The Kaiser’s palace is raided. Kessler speaks, half-admiringly, of a slaves’ revolt against England and American capital. (Kessler was not known as the ‘Red Count’ for nothing.) What makes his descriptions of this doomed rebellion so fascinating, however, is his air of aristocratic désinvolture^ his ironic distance from the daily^ events. The same appears to apply to the city itself. People are killing each other in the streets, yet life goes on, the shops and department stores stay open, Christmas trees are lit, the hurdy-gurdies continue to play in the Friedrichstrasse with gunshots ringing in the background. It is often in his descriptions of the bleakest scenes that Kessler’s terse prose reaches the level of poetry: ‘In the Imperial Stables lay the dead, and the wounds freshly inflicted on the Palace and on Germany gaped into the Christmas night.’ Kessler’s Berlin is a bit like the Titanic; its people dancing on a wobbly deck, oblivious to the looming catastrophe. In fact, Kessler himself was not oblivious. Already in 1920, on the 10th of January, when the Peace Treaty was ratified in Paris, and the Great War is finally, officially over, Kessler writes: ‘A terrible era begins for Europe, like the gathering of clouds before a storm, and it will end in an explosion probably still more terrible than that of the World War. In Germany there are all the signs of a continuing growth of nationalism.’ Obviously, even Kessler couldn’t have known just how terrible the explosion would be, but his awareness of doom lends a macabre quality to the descriptions of his extremely elegant life under the axe of history. Dinners with Einstein, parties with Max Reinhardt, breakfasts with Max Liebermann; soon they would be in America or dead. Kessler was deeply involved in the affairs of his time, and yet his observations are those of a man who was always slightly off-centre. He was an insider who wrote with the sardonic eye of an outsider. Perhaps his homosexuality, never mentioned in his diary, accounts for this, or perhaps it was the ambivalence of an aristocrat living in a revolutionary age. Kessler’s style and manners were aristocratic, but his politics were not: he loathed the Hohenzollern monarchy and was a confirmed repub lican. Even though he had a high degree of disdain for the plebeian mediocrity of most Social Democratic politicians, Kessler remained a Social Democrat. His political heroes were Gustav Stresemann and Walther Rathenau, both of whom served as foreign ministers, and Strese mann as Chancellor too. Kessler wrote an admiring biography of the former. Neither Rathenau nor Stresemann were men of the Left, to be x Introduction Introduction x t sure, but they knew that failure of the Weimar Republic would mean dictatorship, either communist or fascist, both highly disagreeable. Too few Germans shared that opinion at the time. When Rathenau was murdered in 1922 by rightwing anti-semites (he was a reluctant Jew) and Stresemann died of a stroke seven years later, Kessler prophesied, quite correctly, that the end of the Republic was at hand. It is clear from the first page of Kessler’s diary that he was a man of enormous cultivation. Indeed, he was what Germans call a Schöngeist, a man of ‘fine spirit’, a fastidious aesthete. The producfs’b f his Cranach Press in Weimar - classical poetry, translated by the best contemporary writers, illustrated by superb woodcuts, printed on paper made of raw silk - exude that same air of a lost European culture as Kessler’s elegant language. But this refined aestheticism injects a peculiar tension into Kessler’s political and social observations. His instincts are invariably decent. The sight of Nazi thugs rushing into a Jewish-owned hotel bellowing ‘Germany awake!’ and ‘Death to Juda!’ makes him feel sick. By the same token, however, the leftwing, Spartacist rhetoric of ‘necessary violence’, indulged in by his friend, George Grosz, also fills him with dismay: ‘I contradicted him on the ground that any idea is debased by alliance with force.’ There is one diary entry in which the tension between Kessler’s aesthetics and his politics becomes particularly evident. On 17 January 1919, when the Spartacists are still not defeated by government troops in Berlin, Kessler compares the good breeding and handsome looks (to which he was always susceptible) of young Prussian officers with the uncouth demeanor of the proletarian rebels. Obviously, he says, one prefers the company of the officers and Junkers. Likewise, he observes, the rebel leaders, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, are indisputably finer human beings than the ‘little men’ who thrive in the coarse game of contemporary politics. And yet, ‘it is probably more important to raise the general level of a nation than to breed outstanding physical or ethical specimens’. A democrat, th'en. But that means dealing with those little men who rise to the top. And Kessler, at least in the privacy of his diary, doesn’t attempt to hide his contempt. Not to put too fine a point on it, Kessler was a snob. There are worse things to be. His bitchiness helps to sharpen some of his best sketches of people and places: the Polish archbishop’s palace smelling of chlorine and furnished ‘in the middle-class style’; or the Social Democrat, Matthias Erzberger, ‘with his baggy cheeks and sly, sensual lips’, who ‘always looks like someone who has fed well and is in the process of giving a tip’. Like many aristocrats, Kessler doesn’t mind workers so much, especially when they are young and strapping, but cannot stand the lower and middle ranks of the bourgeoisie. He worries about the disappearance of the cultivated upper-middle class from German political life. ‘This is the age Introduction of little men’, he writes. ‘They all look alike . . . In Germany only taproom politicians make their way.’ Soon, he fears, Social Democratic workers and rightwing rabble-rousers will have to fight it out alone. National Socialism, he says, ‘is a delirium of the German lower middle class. The poison of its disease may however bring down ruin on Germätfy and Europe for decades ahead.’ Reality was a bit more complicated. The Nazis had allies and supporters among all classes in Germany, workers as well as aristocrats. Indeed, Kessler is at his acerbic best when he reports on the low scheming of wealthy industrialists and conservative politicians, who looked down their noses at Hitler, but thought they could use the vulgar little corporal to their own advantage. At the same time it was precisely the upper-middle- class disdain for little men that helped to bring Hitler to power. For too many ‘fine spirited’ Germans cultivated their minds but left politics to those they considered beneath them. This was less a matter of Zeitgeist , as Kessler would have it, than of anti-political fastidiousness. High taste produced an extraordinary high culture in pre-war Germany, but Schöngeisterei , the aesthetic approach to life, was a poor pillar with which to hold up the tottering Republic. Kessler was an enemy of the Nazis from the beginning. But since the Nazis, in his view, were petty bourgeois, one couldn’t expect them to come up with anything that wasn’t contemptible. In a way, the old monarchy was even worse, in Kessler’s view, because of its hideous pretensions. The Nazis were barbarians, but the Kaiser and his entourage were aristocratic Philistines, and that was, in a way, even harder to forgive. Nothing irritated Kessler more than to be associated with the ancien régime just because William I had taken a shine to his mother. Some even thought Kessler had Hohenzollem blood himself. At a lunch in December 1931, Kessler explains his hatred for the old monarchy to a man who had believed exactly that. The main reason for his republicanism, Kessler said, was the Kaiser’s ‘perverse bad taste’. He had bad taste in people, and ‘bad taste in art, literature, politics and his style of living; bad taste revealed by every word he uttered’. In 1918, during the red rebellion in Berlin, Kessler enters the imperial palace, after it has been ransacked by the mob. As he sifts through what remains of the imperial trinkets and gewgaws and objects d’art, he reflects on the appalling taste they reveal and feels some sympathy for the looters. He is astonished that the ghastly, unimaginative Kaiser ‘who liked this trash’ could have left his mark on history. A world war was launched from this ‘rubbishy, trivial, unreal microcosm, furnished with nothing but false values’. Kessler is disgusted that ‘this world was not done away with long ago’. Indeed it ‘still continues to exist, in somewhat different forms, elsewhere’. This is clearly a cry from Kessler’s heart. And he is right, of course, xii Introduction to deplore the hideous style of William II. He may even be right that the Kaiser’s overblown yet tawdry fantasies were partly responsible for the Great War that brought even greater convulsions in its wake. And yet there is something about Kessler’s desire to ‘do away’ with worlds, because they are in poor taste, that misses the point. Taste is not always the best guide in politics, and Germans have indulged a bit too much in doing away with worlds in the last hundred years or so. So Kessler could easily have fallen into the trap that ensnared so many cultivated Germans. He could have settled for being a fine spirit, turned away from worldly matters, and cultivated his garden, as it were. The fact that he chose to be political and stick his neck out in support of the Republic made him a rare and remarkable figure. And yet, soon after he retired from public life, after being told that it would be bad for his health to return from France to Hitler’s Reich, he was forgotten. That is the common fate of political affairs, and those who dedicate themselves to them. With luck, art, or at least the best of it, lasts longer. Art was Kessler’s greatest love, and it is only fitting, then, that his memory should have been saved for posterity after all by a consummate work of art, his diary. xiii Ian Buruma London, June 1999 Translator’s Note The Diaries of Harry, Count Kessler were edited for the original German edition with the consent of the owner of Kessler’s papers, the Marquis de Brion. The English edition has been somewhat cut from the published German version, to exclude matter unlikely to be of interest to an international public and, in some places, to avoid repetitions of purely business or administrative detail. Persons named in the Diaries can be identified by reference to the Index. The identity of name between the writer of these Diaries and the present translator is pure co incidence: there is no family connection. C.K. Come on, switch on the lights, give us a chance to see w hat it’s all about: Berlin in lights. — K u rt Weill, Berlin in Lights (1928) 1918 Wednesday , 6 November i çï 8 Berlin At eight in the morning a telephone call from Hatzfeldt. Last night the Cabinet did after all reach a decision about Pilsudski.1 Groener and Hoff mann concurred, though the Chancellor was not there and, the meeting over, everyone standing ready to leave. He is to be released, but is first to sign a statement drafted by General Hoffmann. I am to go to Magdeburg and induce him to agree to this text. With Hatzfeldt to the Chancellery, but the Chancellor not available. Spoke to Groener for only a moment and without mention of Pilsudski. Then Haeften took matters in hand officially. Mann, the Navy State Sec retary, was meanwhile conferring with Ebert,2 the Social Democrat, at a small table in the imposing Congress Hall. Haeften was in a hurry because Phillip Scheidemann (Kurseil) he had to see Hermann Müller into an aeroplane for Hamburg, with which communications are severed. Scheidemann,3 in conversation with another ‘statesman’, stalked majestically through the apartments. Oberndorff, whom I met on the stairs, called across to me that at five o’clock he leaves with Erzberger for French headquarters to hear the armistice conditions from 4 Foch. The débâcle, capitulation and revolution is complete and in these surroundings, sacred to the memory of Bismarck since the days of the Congress of Berlin, as gripping as the Imperial coronation4 at Versailles fifty years ago. At the War Ministry we were told that the naval mutineers have seized Hamburg, Lübeck, and Cuxhaven as well as Kiel. At Hamburg the soldiers have joined the sailors, forming a Red government. Reds are stream ing with every train from Hamburg to Berlin. An uprising is expected here tonight. This morning the Russian Embassy was raided like a disreputable pot-house and Joffe,5 with his staff, deported. That puts paid to the Bolshevik centre in Berlin. But perhaps we shall yet call these people back. Berlin in Lights Thursday , 7 November ig i8 Magdeburg This morning Schloessmann, the officer in charge of Pilsudski, came to me in great excitement because the Commanding Officer had sent him orders for the garrison to stand by. He thought - probably correctly - that this would simply upset the troops and render them the more likely to mutiny. He asked me to intervene. My mission, I replied, gives me not the slightest right to interfere with military measures. If, however, the Commanding Officer should want my private opinion, I would advise against taking any con spicuous precaution that is not absolutely necessary. Just then a call came through from Command Headquarters; the Commanding Officer wished to talk to me. I drove out there and heard that Hanover had fallen to the Reds. They have arrested the Commanding Officer and occupied the Headquarters. This afternoon a deputation of Red sailors is expected to reach Magdeburg, but Headquarters hopes to intercept them at the station. Though work continues, there is unrest at Krupp’s. The Commanding Officer, a cavalry general, fat, tired, back from the Front and not up to local conditions, sat slumped behind his desk. He had already rescinded his stand-by order at the suggestion of the chief of police. How, he inquired, do they handle these matters at Berlin ? So far as I know, I said, by using as far as possible the workers themselves, in the form of the trade union and Social Democrat organizations, to maintain order. Pushing the workers forward is his intention too, he commented wearily, at the same time hinting that he will not be surprised to find himself under arrest by the revolutionaries before the day is out. Obviously neither he nor any of his officers to whom I have spoken has real confidence in the troops. As he has nothing at his disposal, he remarked dejectedly, with what is he supposed to crush an uprising? I could not help thinking of Liège in August 1914 when we also had nothing at our disposal and insurrection, followed by gruesome suppression, did occur. We must hope that we don’t now face that in Germany! Events at Kiel, Lübeck, Altona, Hamburg and Hanover have as yet passed off fairly bloodlessly. That is the way all revolutions start. The