Charming, cold-eyed cosmopolitan

At last a diary as penetrating on Berlin as the Goncourt brothers’ on Paris has been translated into English. The author, Count Harry Kessler, resembled a character from Sybille Bedford’s masterpiece, A Legacy. Born in Paris in 1868, he was educated in England, France and Germany. His father was a Hamburg banker; his mother was an Irish-Scottish beauty called Alice Blosse Lynch, admired by the Emperor Wilhelm I. At once German and European, Kessler rotated, as freely as some do today, between London, Paris and Berlin.

After a year in the army, and a voyage round the world, Kessler devoted himself to the arts. Exhibitions and parties, and  long descriptions of landscape, fill his diary. He did not find social life hollow. Needing patrons for his projects, he admired the skill with which, at parties, ‘enormous forces of material and intellectual capital play against each other’. He enjoyed dissecting his acquaintance. A patron of the arts in Paris, much admired by Marcel Proust, was  Comtesse Greffuhle. Kessler wrote that her ‘taste and understanding are subordinated to her will to dominate and to shine, no matter the cost’.

Friends described in his diary include, among many others, Bakst, Rodin, Maillol, Rilke, Max Reinhardt and George Grosz. Kessler went to parties with Cocteau and Diaghilev and collaborated with von Hofmannsthal and Richard Strauss on Der Rosenkavalier and The Legend of Joseph. His portrait by Munch, in a white hat, leaning on a cane, is an epitome of elegance.

Photographs, however, show the coldness in his eyes.

Kessler is an incomparable observer of Germany, when it seemed destined to be the lighthouse of the world. The nepotism and bureaucracy of the universities were, in his opinion, almost as burdensome as the state’s.