Product Description

Known as the Red Count' because of his fiercely republican views, Count Harry Kessler was intensely involved in the art, politics and society of Weimar Germany. A writer of sharp perception and boundless curiosity, Harry Kessler wrote down everything as it happened. The diaries encompass an extraordinary variety of people. Josephine Baker dances naked in his drawing-room, Einstein engages him in long discussions about his theories, George Grosz contacts him from underground during the political troubles. Asquith and Cocteau, Diaghilev and Gide, Lloyd George and Richard Strauss, Rodin and Bernard Shaw, Eric Gill and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Virginia Woolf and Paul Valery, are among the people he knew and observed. He took a keen interest in politics. Alongside his artistic adventures are accounts of street fighting, the Spartacus uprising, the murder of Rosa Luxemburg, government upheavals, international disputes, elections and assassinations.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #663713 in Books
• Published on: 2000-08-17
• Original language: German
• Binding: Paperback
• 560 pages

About the Author
Count Harry Kessler was born in 1868; his father was a banker who had been ennobled by Kaiser Wilhelm I and his mother was a famous Irish beauty. He saw action in the First World War and took part in negotiations that led to Lenin's sealed-train trip across Germany to St Petersburg. At the end of the war he was posted to Warsaw as German minister. He served on diplomatic missions to the Genoa Conference of 1922 and on secret negotiations with the British in 1923. After Hitler's rise to power in 1933 Harry Kessler lived in self-exile in Paris, where he died in 1937.

Customer Reviews

Closet case who knew everyone from V Woolf to Diaghilev
Not sure who I would recommend this to, but if you are interested in politics and the arts in Europe after the First World War then you will probably enjoy it. It's remarkable because Kessler seems to have been a mover and shaker in both politics and the arts, and he doesn't bragg about it.
It's a bit like reading Proust for real. He was gay and he nevers mentions it - sad.