Harry Graf Kessler was many things - a wealthy art patron and connoisseur, for years of his life a professional diplomat and salon politician, a titled society figure whose political stance nevertheless was staunchly democrat, a friend or at least a nodding acquaintance of almost anybody of note or consequence in Europe between the two world wars, a writer and biographer, a printer and publisher of "quality" editions through his firm the Cranach Press, and a zealous and effective crusader for such honourable causes as pacifism and the League of Nations. On top of all that, Kessler was multi-cultured, spoke English and French as well as he spoke his native German, was a considerable intellectual, a key figure in his epoch and, above all, a diarist of genius.
Kessler was half-Irish, the son of an Irishwoman, Alice Bosse-Lynch, and of an elderly Hamburg banker. During his lifetime, however, strong rumours circulated that he was really the son of Kaiser Wilhelm I, who was past 70 when Kessler was born in 1868. He himself bitterly resented this slur (as he saw it) on his parentage and his mother's memory, and went out of his way to deny the story; yet it is still widely believed in Germany. According to this version the septuagenarian Prussian King (he was not yet German Emperor), always a noted ladies' man, had an intense affair with the romantic Irish girl, got her pregnant and married her off conveniently to the banker, who was ennobled as a reward for his complaisance. It was from him that Kessler inherited not only his considerable wealth but also his title of count (Graf).
His democratic and slightly leftist sentiments earned him the nickname "the Red Count", and Kessler was widely regarded as a traitor to his class, few of whom accepted the German Republic which replaced the rule of the exiled Kaiser, Wilhelm II. The diaries start in November 1918, a few days before the end of the first World War and some months before Germany's political humiliation at Versailles - which most liberal Germans recognised at once as a diplomatic disaster and the seeds of future trouble for Europe. With Germany's armies defeated but still in the field, Kessler was sent to Warsaw to negotiate the peaceful return from the Eastern Front of German troops via Poland. The wily nationalist leader Pilsudski played a double game, obviously waiting to see how the European cat would jump, and Kessler barely got away alive from obviously fomented mob violence.
Violence followed him back to Berlin, where the so-called Spartacists staged their attempted Leftist takeover and were only defeated when the new republican government was forced to call in army units to defend itself. Kessler witnessed much of the fighting at first hand, noting carefully the ruin and pillage of the Kaiser's palace, and later watched the funerals of the Spartacist leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, who had been captured, cruelly beaten and shot by the military.
In the early stages of Germany's fragile new democracy, he gave good service to the Weimar government and was close to the great statesman/industrialist Walter Rathenau, before the latter was gunned down in the street by reactionaries who hated him for his Jewishness and his alleged role in the disastrous Versailles Treaty. As a tribute to his dead friend, Kessler wrote a biography which still ranks as a classic of its kind.
During the 1920s Kessler was often abroad, on diplomatic missions to England and on goodwill visits to Paris, where he resumed his prewar ties both with the French intelligentsia and with the great, influential salon hosts and hostesses. Celebrities crowd the pages - Diaghilev (for whom Kessler had supplied the scenario of a ballet); Einstein, with whom he discussed his famous theory; Picasso; Max Reinhardt, the theatre impresario; George Bernard Shaw; Josephine Baker; Gordon Craig; Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard ("a bundle of nerves"); George Grosz; Cocteau; Paul Valery; Richard Strauss; the poet Hofmannsthal; the dramatist and Nobel Prize winner Gerhardt Hauptmann; Eric Gill; Erich Maria Remarque; as well as a horde of aristocrats, diplomats and politicians.
He moved inside these various worlds by virtue of the double passport of his name, title and wealth and of his immense culture. Many famous theatrical and musical first nights are described, and Kessler was always a clairvoyant critic of the arts. Though he was homosexual and never married, his sexual life is not mentioned, apart from discreet references to a certain "Max", who was his constant companion. In his era, people's sex lives still belonged in the realm of their private identities and were not for public perusal.
The count's hectic activities were brought to a long, painful halt in 1926, when he nearly died from a sustained bout of pneumonia. He recovered and returned to his many-layered, cosmopolitan existence, but in 1929 came the successive deaths of his friends Diaghilev and Hofmannsthal, Austria's greatest writer, as well as the epochal death of Gustav Stresemann, the statesman who more than anyone had seemed to be leading Germany back to health and a respected place among the European nations. To a man with such a sensitive political barometer as Kessler's, this was a turning point, and he wrote prophetically in his diary entry for October 3rd, 1929: "What I fear, as a result of Stresemann's death, are very grave political consequences at home, with a move to the Right . . . and the facilitation of efforts to establish a dictatorship."
With the end of the hectic, high-spirited 1920s a chill seems to descend upon the diaries, though the record of socialising, intellectual interchange, higher gossip (Kessler had a fine sense of humour, occasionally sliding into malice) and travelling continues at the former quick tempo. The Slump came to Germany, throwing millions out of work and bringing both Communism and Nazism to the fore, while a succession of ephemeral or intriguing party politicians helped involuntarily to pave the way for Hitler.
Finding the political and intellectual climate harder and harder to tolerate, knowing that his sands were running out in his native country (his personal servants had betrayed him to the Nazis) and that the values he had stood for were lost or despised, in 1933 Kessler sadly left for France and never saw Germany again. His house in Weimar, with its internationally famous library and gardens and art collection, was impounded by the Nazis, an event which probably hastened the heart condition which was to kill him in 1937.
Purely on their value as a unique record of European politics, intellectual life and a glittering social milieu that is gone, the diaries must rank high - in fact, it is almost impossible to understand 20th-century Germany fully without them. But Kessler was also an elegant, terse stylist, a prose artist able to conjure up with televisual immediacy the acclamation of a new Pope (Pius XI) in Rome, Rathenau's flag-draped coffin displayed in the Berlin Reichstag, defeated but defiant German soldiers passing through the Brandenburger Tor on their way home from the Western Front, Josephine Baker dancing naked in a Berlin apartment before a select private audience of men in evening dress, the studio of the great French sculptor Maillol whose patron and close friend Kessler was, the nuance, elegance and wit of French salon talk at its best, the touching abdication speech of Edward VIII of Great Britain over the radio.
Kessler belonged among the great European patrician liberals, now an extinct species, and to a cosmopolitan phase of culture which somehow has never been quite replaced - the second World War was its chief executioner. Though resolutely pan-European and anti-nationalist, he remained to the end a firm German patriot. The diaries (the translator, incidentally, is American and no relative of the Count) must rank as a 20th-century literary classic, and as the testimony of a gifted, outstandingly intelligent and many-sided man of a fateful epoch.
Brian Fallon is an author and critic