Jews queers germans, p.2
Jews Queers Germans, page 2
After their first meeting, Philipp and Wilhelm quickly become good friends. By 1888, when the Crown Prince ascends to the throne at age 29 as Wilhelm II, he’s already describing Philipp, a dozen years his senior, as “my bosom friend, the only one I have.” Philipp introduces the youthful Kaiser to his own small group of intimates—the so-called “Liebenberg Circle,” a reference to his country estate in Brandenburg not far from Berlin. Philipp accompanies the youthful Kaiser on exclusive hunts at a succession of noble estates, and in the evenings he often entertains the other guests by singing his own ballads while accompanying himself on the piano.
By the 1890s Wilhelm has installed Philipp in the cabin adjoining his on the royal yacht, Hohenzollern, and Philipp has become a regular participant in the all-male, month-long summer cruises to Scandinavia. When Philipp’s ballads are published as a book—Rosenlieder, a popular success—Wilhelm prominently displays it, alongside a picture of Philipp, on his desk.
The two men are in many ways dissimilar. Philipp, warm, tactful, and somewhat shy, has nothing of Wilhelm’s grandiosity, nor his restless, volatile, hyperactive temperament (Philipp describes his friend at one point as “highly charged with electricity”). Nor does Philipp require, as does Wilhelm, constant praise and admiration; as Philipp privately puts it, the Kaiser “is grateful for it like a good, clever child.” What the two men do share is a strenuous belief in the monarch’s personal rule, based on divine right and free of dictation from a fledgling, politically fractious Reichstag. Wilhelm’s entourage commonly refers to him as the “All-High,” and Philipp eagerly escalates the fawning praise by sometimes referring to his friend as “Wilhelm Proteus”—the ancient prophet able to assume whatever shape he chooses.
By the 1890s it’s widely acknowledged that Philipp has become the most powerful member of the Kaiser’s civil entourage, uniquely positioned to influence his policies and appointments. It’s Philipp who first suggests in 1897 that Bernhard von Bülow be made head of the foreign office; knowing exactly which string to pluck, Philipp emphasizes von Bülow’s “true, deep personal love for Yr. Majesty.” Wilhelm not only accepts Philipp’s ardent recommendation but subsequently promotes von Bülow to Reich Chancellor, a post he will hold from 1900 to 1909. During his tenure von Bülow will outdo Eulenburg in sycophancy and in carrying out the Kaiser’s every autocratic wish; he will also return Philipp’s favor by cunningly maneuvering against him behind his back. Philipp himself at the turn of the century is named ambassador to the Kingdom of Württemberg, then to the more prestigious post at the Kingdom of Bavaria, and finally as the Reich’s representative in Vienna, capitol of Germany’s foremost ally, the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Like everyone around the Kaiser, Eulenburg often has to lavish ingratiating praise on His Majesty, yet he’s able to see clearly many of Wilhelm’s unappealing qualities. They’re legion—his adolescent humor; his harshness; his inability to listen; his pretension to knowledge and wisdom he doesn’t possess; his assumption of infallibility in all matters, including the artistic and the spiritual; his limited attention span—and even more limited compassion (it’s “as if,” Philipp writes a friend, “certain feelings which we take for granted in others are suddenly simply not there”). “He wants to instruct,” Philipp admits, “but does not take to being instructed himself.”
Wilhelm often visits pranks and practical jokes on his guests. His sadistic notion of “fun” is to turn inward the many rings on his right hand (his left arm is withered, having been severely damaged at birth) and then squeeze a visiting dignitary’s hand as hard he can, relishing the anguished reaction. He thinks it the height of hilarity to come up behind an old general and cut his suspenders, and to have another jump over a stick in imitation of a dog. Alternately, Wilhelm enjoys suddenly pinching someone or hitting him hard on the behind with a baton.
The sensitive, gentle Eulenburg is shocked during one Nordic cruise at what he calls “the quite disgusting spectacle” of the Kaiser assembling the older members of his entourage on deck for morning gymnastics—their groans and the Kaiser’s gleeful shouts producing an unsettling medley. Sometimes Wilhelm will baptize a newcomer to the yacht by pouring champagne on his head—or have him carried around on a block of ice. On a visit to Eulenburg’s Liebenberg estate Wilhelm has another guest parade about as a circus poodle, sporting long bangs made out of black wool and a tail appended at the back, performing “tricks” like howling at the moon in response to music cues or a pistol shot. Occasionally His Majesty orders a member of his entourage to cross-dress in a feathery hat and tutu, and dance—as Wilhelm roars with laughter. Eulenburg firmly refuses to participate in any of the Kaiser’s capers.
Serious people bore Wilhelm, yet he requires their unqualified assent to his authoritative pronouncements on a host of weighty matters. Along with dabbling in painting seascapes, he spends millions of marks furnishing multiple royal residences, and confidently compares his garish taste with the Medicis. Eulenburg encourages his interest in art, but not the superficiality of his pronouncements about it. Wilhelm’s artistic preferences are entirely conventional (as are Eulenburg’s for that matter, but unlike the Kaiser, he makes no effort to inflict his opinions on others).
Wilhelm despises anything that smacks of the avant-garde; when a group of Berlin artists withdraws (the so-called “Secession”) from the annual exhibition patronized by the Kaiser, and form their own show, Wilhelm vetoes awarding the gold medal to Käthe Kollwitz because her etchings depicting the plight of impoverished cottagers lack, Wilhelm announces, “patriotic” content and stray from “the feelings in mankind for beauty and harmony.” The Kaiser’s idea of a great painter is Anton von Werner, director of the Institute of Fine Arts in Berlin, whose most famous canvas is The Proclamation of the German Empire, depicting the coronation of Wilhelm I—a picture the discriminating modernist Count Harry Kessler dismisses as “a fashion illustration for military tailors.”
Kessler, approaching 30 at the time of the “Berlin Secession” in 1898, has been edging his way into prominence as an ardent advocate of “modernism,” a posture neither predictable nor “fitting” for someone of his social standing. Harry’s father Adolf comes from a banking family prominent in the world of international finance. His mother, Alice—whom Harry adores—is a renowned, high-spirited beauty whose salon in Paris (where the couple mostly resides, and where Harry and his sister Wilma were born) attracts the likes of Ibsen, de Maupassant, and Sarah Bernhardt. The old emperor, Wilhelm I, not only ennobled the Kesslers but skipped over the traditional stepping stone of “baron” to go straightaway to “count”—as much in tribute, it’s widely believed, to Alice’s extraordinary good looks as to Adolf’s exemplary good deeds.
As a young man, Harry’s life has followed the traditional pathways of a privileged patrician. He’s enrolled in the fashionable St. George’s school in Ascot, where he becomes fluent in both Greek and Latin—and where his classmates include Roger Fry, later a renowned art critic, as well as a handsome boy named Maat with whom Harry becomes romantically infatuated. Harry then returns to Germany to enter the university in Bonn, where his already-impeccable credentials are further burnished through election to the aristocratic Borussia fraternity—which boasts Wilhelm II among its alumni.
Harry is particularly drawn to a fellow member of the Borussia corps, Eberhard von Bodenhausen, whom he describes in the diary he started keeping at age 12 as an “almost ideal beauty, tall, blond, with a slender, nimble, perfectly proportioned body . . . a Greek statue, come to life through some inward fire.” A future industrialist and art patron, von Bodenhausen will become allies with Kessler in the struggle to advance Impressionist and post-Impressionist art against the “dead weight” of the academic establishment.
But first comes a stint at the University of Leipzig, where Harry becomes friendly with another fellow student, Gustav Richter, whose grandfather is the composer Giacomo Meyerbeer and whose mother, Cornelia Richter, holds a famed salon in her home on the Bellevuestrasse. Harry attends with some regularity, as do any number of prominent figures of the day, some of whom will loom large in his immediate future—the poet and playwright Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the industrialist and writer Walther Rathenau, and, now and then, the Kaiser’s close confidant Prince Eulenburg, occasionally accompanied by his own dear friend, Count Kuno von Moltke. Harry’s already impressive network of contacts expands exponentially.
His studies, simultaneously, are broadening his critical faculties. Lujo Brentano’s Leipzig lectures advocating trade unionism as a necessary tool for improving working-class conditions lead Harry to personally explore slum conditions; the deplorable plight of laborers and their families further sensitizes him to the need for reform—yet does not convert him to socialism; in 1888 he still defines himself in his diary as “a conservative at heart.” Yet he’s already abandoned a number of orthodoxies: he deplores the upper class treatment of women in Germany as “decorative dolls”—as well as the middle and working class vision of them as “exalted housekeepers and perfect cooks.”
In a similar way, the lectures of Anton Springer—the first professor of art history in Germany—in defense of contemporary art, confirm Harry’s aesthetic taste even as they move him to unconventional speculations about the nature of “beauty” that will resonate far into the future. “The beauty of a thing,” he writes in one diary entry, “lies much more in our imagination than in the thing itself . . . it corresponds to something inside of the person who cherishes it. The truth of an ideal is always, even if it were held by all of mankind at the same time, a subjective one.” In short, so-called “timeless, universal” truths—the “natural laws” shibboleth of an earlier age—are a chimera, a hunger for certainty which is unobtainable. “You cannot answer,” Kessler concludes in his diary, “the fundamental question of aesthetics, ‘What is an artwork?’ . . . You must put the question this way: What processes must a work evoke in the psyche of the observer in order for it to count as a work of art? Then you would discover that something can be a work of art for someone and not for others.”
Such views, when Harry takes up residence to Berlin late in 1893, are the currency of a new generation of artists in rebellion against the hyper-realism of the art academies, artists who—going back at least to the 1870s—concern themselves with the transient play of light, contemporary (rather than historical) imagery, and the quick-change instability of modern life. It is in France that the “Secessionists”—among them Monet, Sisley, Degas, and Pissarro—first make their influence known. And it is in Paris that an independently wealthy young Harry—having tried his hand as an apprentice law court official and quickly realized that it was “a mistaken vocation”—begins to haunt the galleries and studios.
From an early age, he’d always visited the Louvre when in Paris, initially with his mother, then on his own. When 19 he’d taken himself to the exhibition, the Artistes Indépendants, of those Impressionist painters denied access to the official art salons—but this initial exposure had repelled him: “orgies of hideousness and nerve-shaking combinations of colors I thought impossible outside a madhouse,” he wrote contemptuously in his diary.
Over the next five years, Harry began increasingly to question his previous allegiance to traditional culture. It’s “striking,” he confided to his diary in 1894, “that an age that has been more creative than any other in producing original and important forms for machines, railroads, warships, and weapons still has not exploited these forms artistically.” It had, but at the time Harry’s vision had been myopic. Once he dropped the lorgnette, his eyes quickly came into focus. By the time of the “Berlin Secession” in 1898, Harry had become an ardent champion, though never “vulgarly” passionate in his admiration—hot-blooded fervor is foreign to his well-mannered temperament.
He goes now far less to the Louvre than to the avant-garde galleries that have sprung to life on the rue Laffitte—the elegant Durand-Ruel establishment; the daring—he’s among the first to buy and display van Gogh and to give Cézanne his first show in 1895—Ambroise Vollard’s smaller, less luxurious space; and the Bernheim-Jeune gallery, which specializes in the so-called “Nabi” (the Hebrew word for “prophet”) artists, most prominently Bonnard and Vuillard. Paris will for some time remain the center for contemporary art, but one important gallery does open in Berlin—Paul Cassirer’s establishment on Viktoriastrasse, designed by Kessler’s recent acquaintance, the Belgian architect Henry van de Velde (whom he hires to design his own audaciously elegant apartment).
Harry also joins a group of young artists and writers who decide to inaugurate a new illustrated journal, PAN, with the intention of giving voice to insurgent movements in the arts. A noisy, contentious bunch, mostly still in their twenties, they meet haphazardly at a rundown tavern, Turkes Wine and Beer Cellar, at the corner of Unter den Linden and the Wilhelmstrasse. The Swedish exile August Strindberg, who lives in the neighborhood and first discovers the tavern, rechristens it the Black Piglet during one of his alcoholic stupors, a hallucinatory reference to the Armenian wine sack that sways over the entranceway.
The PAN contingent gathers in one of the tavern’s two rooms, just big enough for a solid wood table to hold pitchers of beer and wine, loaves of round black bread, sausage and cheese—and an upright piano, on which one of the group’s central figures, the Polish writer Stanisław Przybyszewski (“Staczu” to everyone), is given, especially when drunk, to pounding away on his own version of “Chopin.” Staczu is married to the beautiful, enigmatic Dagny (“Ducha”, Polish for “soul”) Juel; Ducha is promiscuous as a matter of principal, and several of the other young men, in particular the painter Edvard Munch (for whom she models), find her erotically irresistible.
The slender, impeccably groomed Harry Kessler, his penetrating eyes alert with intelligence even as his courtly bearing hints at the need for emotional distance, is on the surface something of a fish out of water when compared to the unbridled bohemianism of Staczu’s circle. But various other young people move in and out of the PAN group, including several of Harry’s more disciplined classmates and friends: Eberhard von Bodenhausen (his Borussia fraternity brother), the poet Richard Dehmel, and Julius Meier-Graefe (whose forthcoming book, The Impressionists, will win a mixed review from Harry).
Besides, Harry can more than hold his own when Staczu and his acolytes—all of whom find Nietzsche a source of profound inspiration—heatedly debate the merits of Huysmans, Baudelaire, and Mallarmé, or Staczu’s mystical views on the value of hypnosis and alchemy, or his theory (pre-Jung) of a collective memory and the importance of the unconscious forces (what he calls “psychic naturalism”) underlying our surface behavior. Staczu’s mesmerizing voice and biting sarcasm are potent persuaders, yet Harry meets them not with a competing brand of uninhibited clamor, but with the more disarming style of graceful urbanity. (Once again, as with his sexual encounters, Harry deliberately omits from his diary any details of the turbulent combat that characterizes PAN’s meetings. He keeps his worlds distinct). Staczu and the others in PAN’s more profligate contingency recognize in Kessler not only a first-class intelligence, but also a genuine desire to foster the journal’s fortunes. They’re in agreement that Harry would be the best choice to visit the poet Paul Verlaine in Paris with an invitation to contribute to the new journal.
Kessler first calls on the poet on July 10, 1895. More than 20 years have passed since Verlaine fell obstinately in love with Arthur Rimbaud, abandoned his wife and infant son (after an abusive, alcoholic scene), later shot and wounded Rimbaud in a fit of jealousy, and went to prison for the crime, where he converted to Roman Catholicism. When Harry enters Verlaine’s decrepit building on the rue St. Victor, the place smells to him “of cats, coal, and the drying diapers of the proletariat.” Feeling his way through a dark antechamber to the designated door, Harry opens it to a melancholy scene: a sparsely furnished room, with a few straw chairs, a white wooden table, and a large double bed. In it lies Verlaine—to Harry, “the greatest lyrical poet of France”—amidst a disordered array of pillows, fully dressed and with slippers on his feet.
The poet explains that rheumatism and the heat have forced him to take to his bed. But he does rouse himself, brings Harry over to the flat’s sole window to show off the flowerpots and birdcages that surround it, and explains that the “little, old, fat” woman (as Harry describes her in his diary) making currant wine in a corner of the room “takes cares of me very well”; in Harry’s view she seems more “a governess than a mistress.” He tells Verlaine about PAN, describing it as “an important journal with money to offer” in return for some of his poems. The poet lethargically mumbles something indistinct in response, and then lapses into silence.
Thinking to rouse him, Harry deliberately makes reference to Rimbaud and notices at once “a nervous flame darting” in Verlaine’s eyes. When he speaks, it’s with quiet simplicity: “He had a great influence on me. He was the cause of a great deal of pleasure and pain for me. We left together in pursuit of adventure. A lot of absurd things, à la Wilde, were said about us. The publication of his poems is encountering difficulty because his sister, an old spinster, wants to censor everything that, in her opinion, portrays her brother in a satanic light. She wants to make of him an angel, which he wasn’t at all, but rather a man, or rather a child, of genius.” Verlaine stops abruptly and Harry’s highly developed sense of discretion prevents him from pressing the poet to continue. Seeing Verlaine’s face cloud over with a heavy veil of melancholy, Harry suggests that he return some other time, and diplomatically takes his leave.
He does visit Verlaine several more times, and each time finds the poet spruced up a bit more in clean white pants, a black coat, and a brown velvet hat (and even the “fat grisette,” as Harry refers to her, has on a pink blouse “in which she almost looks smart”). With each visit Harry finds Verlaine “more sympathetic”; he begins to understand “how this man can exert an irresistible charm.” Verlaine speaks no German, but there’s no need—Harry is fluent in English (and in French as well), which Verlaine does speak. Without prodding, the poet returns again and again in their conversations to Rimbaud, describing “his Herculean figure, his deep blue eyes with their somewhat fixed stare, the striking mobility of his face, his little turned-up nose, which had, like his character, something mocking and pert about it, and his great, fantastic genius standing in almost uncanny contrast to his childlike exterior and his youth.”
