Jews queers germans, p.3
Jews Queers Germans, page 3
Reflecting back on the experience years later—Verlaine never does contribute to PAN and dies in 1896, within a year of Harry’s last visit—Kessler concludes that despite the poet’s “great sexual passion” for Rimbaud and his incessant pressure on the younger man to yield, Rimbaud had the stronger will—“exceptionally strong”—and managed to hold Verlaine at bay. “Unhinged” by his unconsummated passion, Verlaine, in Harry’s view, shot Rimbaud “in complete desperation.” Even then, Rimbaud refused sex, and the relationship—“very much against Verlaine’s will”—remained chaste.
The details will never be known, but many—at the time and since—draw a conclusion opposite to Kessler’s, thus raising the question of why he chooses to believe the theory of unrequited love. His verdict of chastity is likely the result of superimposing his own recent and exceedingly painful experience onto Verlaine’s. Just two years prior, during his prescribed year of military service (in his case with the aristocratic Third Guard Lancers), Harry roomed with another cadet, the handsome 19-year-old Bavarian nobleman Otto von Dungern—and fell intractably in love with him. They rode together, swam naked in the Karthane River, spent hours exchanging stories and experiences—and never touched, other than glancingly. When they parted, Harry wrote in his diary that he was “right lonely without Dungern.” And that is all he wrote.
Harry is fully aware that his sexual attraction is solely to other men, but just as his diary says almost nothing about the boisterous side of his evenings at the Piglet, so it’s scrubbed clean of all but the most oblique references to his homosexuality. Like every diarist, Harry knows (or hopes) that he’s writing for posterity as much as for himself—after all, he saves his voluminous journals. Yet his avoidance of certain topics isn’t solely due to conscious dissembling. Social discretion has been bred into Harry’s bones. Much like his contemporary Edward Carpenter in England, who does openly acknowledge—and publicly champion—his homosexuality, Kessler carries what one of Carpenter’s friends calls ineradicable “tattoo-marks of gentility” (the comment made in regard to Carpenter burning his dress clothes and leaving his house barely furnished in a futile effort to divest himself of all outer marks of class privilege—gestures which Harry would have found grotesque).
The closest Harry ever comes to a frank declaration of his sexual attraction to men is a diary entry he makes in 1888, when 20: “I have flirted more or less seriously with over half a dozen young girls within the last two years, but love I have never felt for any of them and I am sure I do not wish to break anybody’s heart. I know by experience”—that is, with Otto von Dungern, unnamed—“what it is to love passionately and hopelessly, and that fearful misery I would not bring on anybody for the world.”
When it comes to evaluating others, Harry often ignores what some see as homoerotic—even transparently carnal—behavior; the verdict of “chastity” that he passes on the Verlaine/Rimbaud relationship carries over onto his judgment of a variety of other relationships. He blankets with the discreet gloss of “social rituals” the common practice in the military of officers and cadets dancing together, tossing bouquets to one another, and forcing drunken younger men to strip naked. And in the next few years, as the so-called “Eulenburg Affair” begins to heat up, Kessler will deplore what he views as the confounding of conventional rites of male friendship with homosexuality, deploring the “sea of dirt and contempt” unleashed on Eulenburg and Count Kuno von Moltke—both of whom he’s gotten to know and like at Cornelia Richter’s salon.
That storm is still a few years down the road. Eulenburg, for now, remains sequestered at his Liebenberg estate and the journalistic muckraker Max Harden, temporarily appeased by the Prince’s retirement—yet still rabidly opposed to the regime—bides his time. As for Harry Kessler, he remains happily preoccupied with developments in the arts, involving himself in a host of projects beyond PAN that encompass painting and sculpture, dance, theater, and design. For roughly the next five years, Kessler puts his energy, contacts, and wealth centrally at the disposal of those individuals and organizations increasingly determined to “secede” from the acceptable forms of expression dictated by the academies and controlled by the central government.
Despite the enormous growth of Germany over recent decades—the population nearly doubles between 1870 and 1900—Berlin, its capital and financial center, remains something of a backwater in regard to the arts. In those same decades, as the dynamic revolutions of Impressionism and post-Impressionism sweep France (and in its wake, most of the cultural capitals of northern Europe), Berlin, in the mid-1890s, still has a grand total of two art galleries. Even within Germany itself, the cities of Munich and Dresden are far in advance of Berlin in accepting the new art.
All of which is about to change—and Harry Kessler, along with his newfound friend, the art dealer Paul Cassirer, are in the vanguard of the transformation. When Cassirer decides in 1898 to open a new gallery on Viktoriastrasse, a fashionable street filled with large homes that abuts the famed Tiergarten park, Harry persuades him to hire Henry van de Velde to design the space. Van de Velde creates a spare, sleek interior, its light gray linen walls decorated with discreet oak paneling running along the top. The gallery’s mission, Cassirer announces, will be “the promotion of a number of great artists who are virtually unknown in Germany.”
True to his word, Cassirer, within three years, fills his gallery with the first full-scale exhibition of the works of Vincent van Gogh. By then, Harry Kessler, through his writings, organizational efforts, and patronage, is also emerging as a key figure in transforming Germany from a timid straggler in the current aesthetic revolution to a serious contender for front-rank status—though never able to overtake France, its historic enemy, as the paramount center for artistic innovation.
The pace of change within Germany resembles a tortoise more than a steamroller. From the start, the new art runs into fierce opposition. Its critics are a resourceful, powerful, and unrelenting lot, and at certain points the secessionists suffer a string of reverses that at times resemble a total rout. More is involved than aesthetics; inherent in the sustained debate over art are contending political assumptions that centrally involve the Kaiser and his court. It’s recognized on all sides that what is at stake is not only the kind of art Germany will endorse, but the kind of political rule it will sanction.
The fine arts in Germany have long been dependent on the Kaiser’s favor. It is he who dispenses state patronage, controls exhibition space, and decides whose work will be exhibited. Wilhelm II takes his role as art patron seriously; he has decided tastes and doesn’t hesitate to intervene directly to reward favorites and blacklist dissenters. Aesthetic “truth,” he declares, lies in the “eternal laws that the creator himself observes, and which can never be transgressed or broken without threatening the development of the universe.” The Kaiser refrains from revealing the precise content of those eternal laws (or when and how the creator transmitted them)—but he knows aesthetic truth when he sees it. After all, he rules by “divine right,” which mandates automatic respect and legitimacy for his pronouncements. Kessler puts it succinctly: “the state spends money for hot air, but not for art.”
Much of the German establishment, and the middle class as well, strongly agrees with the Kaiser’s tastes and actions. The powerful conservative and anti-Semitic elements that dominate German life equate innovation with degeneracy, and any challenge to tradition is seen as a cosmopolitan plot to destroy German folkways. The Kaiser’s favorite painter, Anton von Werner, specializes in depicting scenes from Germany’s “glorious” past and, like the Kaiser, believes that historical verisimilitude is the marker of artistic merit. Werner detests modern art, yet is not, like most of those who side with him, a kneejerk conservative: when presented with an anti-Semitic petition from students and faculty of the Verein Berliner Künstler—the association of artists that Werner heads—he not only rejects it but forbids any circulation of comparable material.
The city of Weimar, capital of the small Grand Duchy of Saxe-Weimar, boasts a glorious past. In the early 19th century it had been home both to Goethe and Schiller, the storied eminences of German letters. Yet in the middle of the century, Franz Liszt had abandoned Weimar in disgust over its retrograde values, and the town sank into mossbacked oblivion. The first intimation that it might emerge from its smug slumber and again become an important cultural center is the interest Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche shows in moving her brother Friedrich’s archives there. The philosopher is still alive at the end of the 19th century, but in a ruinous state of health, wholly dependent on his sister’s care. Nietzsche’s doctors diagnose his disorder variously, as mercury poisoning, debilitating strokes, brain cancer, psychotic dementia, and tertiary syphilis (now thought to have resulted from visiting a male brothel in Genoa).
Harry Kessler first meets Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche when he travels to her home in Naumburg in the fall of 1895 to negotiate for the publication in PAN of some of her brother’s speculative works on music. Förster-Nietzsche has a reputation for being exceedingly difficult—malicious, spiteful, obstinate—but she’s much taken with Kessler’s debonair manner and lucid intelligence, invites him to stay for dinner, and gives her assent to publication in PAN. When Kessler tells her that he’s an enormous admirer of her brother and a staunch supporter of his work, Elisabeth allows him a rare glimpse of the great man. Nietzsche sits immobile in a chair—and according to Elisabeth will do so for hours on end—in a kind of stupor. He recognizes only acquaintances from childhood, and even that connection is soon lost.
Kessler’s visits to Förster-Nietzsche not only continue but gradually increase; he becomes something of a confidant and advisor. Elisabeth shares with him details of her many quarrels, especially with Wagner’s widow, Cosima, and with Lou Andreas-Salomé, the gifted writer (and later psychoanalyst) who is the only woman—so Nietzsche once declared when proposing marriage—that he’d ever found attractive. Harry is an attentive listener and discreet counselor, though he often finds Elisabeth’s conversation “silly” and “self-pitying.” But it gradually dawns on him that if he succeeds in persuading her to move her brother’s archives to Weimar, the coup would instantly boost the city’s profile and open the way for its return to prominence—and could even, conceivably, turn it into a dynamic center for fostering avant-garde art.
By the time of Nietzsche’s death in the summer of 1900 Elisabeth, under Harry’s guidance, has made Weimar the permanent home for her brother’s archives. Kessler has even persuaded her to hire his friend Henry van de Velde to design a building to house the material. Through Elisabeth’s introductions over the next few years, and then through the grace and subtlety of his own personality, Kessler moves with consummate ease in Weimar society, which he mostly finds comically parochial. The exception is the young grand duchess Caroline, who is genuinely attuned to artistic innovation and becomes his particular champion. Among his other new acquaintances is the Polonius-like figure of the court chamberlain Aimé de Palézieux, who also serves as director of the Weimar Museum; for a time Palézieux expresses enthusiasm for the idea of returning Weimar to its former glory—yet only for a time.
Förster-Nietzsche, pleased with van de Velde’s architectural plans, successfully lobbies for his appointment as director of the Weimar art school. From there, in what seems like a natural progression, Kessler is himself in 1902 given a curatorial post in the Museum of Arts and Crafts and then, the following year, accepts the offer to become its official director. He buys a house in Weimar, and begins to travel frequently between London, Paris, and Berlin to attend exhibitions, personally meet with many of the most innovative artists and gallery owners of the day, and make plans for some of them to take up short-term residence in Weimar.
Kessler assumes his new post at the Museum with eyes wide open to the petty quarrelling and entrenched conservatism of the local populace. He’s aware early on that court chancellor de Palézieux, on the surface friendly and enthusiastic, is intriguing behind his back, filling the fairly empty head of the Grand Duke with accusations of Kessler’s “immoral” preferences in art. Kessler characteristically retains his poise, rarely allowing any extreme emotion to show. Initially he’s too involved in the work at hand, too excited at finally having an official platform from which to foster contemporary art, to heed the steadily mounting drumbeat of opposition. “We will build what we have in mind,” he writes van de Velde, “a clear, clean, healthy, invigorating apprenticeship. Let the others follow with sour expressions. It won’t change anything.”
The plan he comes up with is for van de Velde’s school to serve as a design center for local industries and for his own museum to transform itself into a center that, through exhibitions and lectures, will convert the public to the cause of aesthetic modernism. The culminating moment of several years of effort on Kessler’s part is the foundational gathering he organizes late in 1903 of scattered groups of secessionists from various parts of Germany to form a new body—the Deutsche Künstlerbund (the German Artists League)—designed to counteract the influence of Anton von Werner’s own union of German artists, the Allgemeine Deutsche Kunstgenossenschaft. Kessler’s aim, as he describes it in his diary, is “to eliminate the historical point of view insofar that history does not provide an aesthetic insight.” To that same end he succeeds in bypassing the Museum of Arts and Crafts and creating the “Grand Ducal Museum for Craftsmen”—after all, he writes, “painters are, or should be, principally craftsmen.”
In a pamphlet, Kessler spells out his vision for the new German Artists League: it must be tolerant of a great variety of styles, and not—unlike the von Werner coalition of artists—seek to “eliminate individualism.” “We must create,” he writes, a counter-force “which will enable talent to follow its artistic conscience in safety . . . For there can be no doubt, in art only the exceptional has value . . . Everything else is not only worth less; it is worth nothing.” Kessler explicitly draws the political parallel: the protection and fostering of individualism, he argues, should “be accepted as well in the political life of the nation.”
Though Kessler believes that the central purpose of the Artists League is to maximize the individual’s free expression, he doesn’t extend the democratic principle to organizing the affairs of the League itself. He argues against the proposition that the opinion of every member should have equal weight in deciding every issue that arises; that sort of mistaken egalitarianism, he insists, would invite chaos and paralyze the decision-making process. Kessler proposes instead that an executive committee of 30 members, elected for five-year terms, be empowered to make all decisions regarding such matters as membership applications and appointing juries. “You may call this framework elitist if you like,” Kessler boldly asserts, “but I call it representative—functioning—democracy.” His proposals easily carry the day and he, along with such friends and allies as Henry van de Velde, Max Liebermann, Max Klinger, and Eberhard von Bodenhausen, are chosen to serve on the executive committee.
During these same few years at the turn of the century, as Kessler invests enormous time and energy into creating an institutional structure to support contemporary art, he’s simultaneously augmenting his own private collection. Sometimes he buys through the galleries—two Cézanne pictures and a drawing from Vollard; Bonnard and Renoir from Durand-Ruel; Maurice Denis from Paul Cassirer, and then, also from Cassirer, he purchases in July 1904 for 1,689 marks—the equivalent then of $399, and today roughly $10,000—van Gogh’s masterful Portrait of Dr. Gachet; in 1990, before the recent art boom, it will re-sell for nearly a hundred million.
As Kessler meets and forms friendships with many of the leading artists themselves, he often visits their studios and buys directly from them—Signac’s Brume du Matin, two of Vuillard’s paintings, a bust by Rodin, several of Aristide Maillol’s sculptures, Odilon Redon’s lithographs, Max Liebermann’s drawings, Monet’s views of London, and so on—filling his Weimar home, amassing one of the critically important modernist collections of the time.
It’s a heady period for Kessler, yet his triumphs are shadowed by growing antagonism in Weimar to his “scandalous” attempt to corrupt the citizenry. As one local artist writes in the provincial newspaper, “in the new museum we encounter paintings and drawings that deeply offend our feelings. What is displayed is so revolting that we must warn our wives and daughters not to visit the museum.” The smear campaign against him reaches a climax in 1905 when Kessler mounts an exhibit of Rodin’s watercolors of female nudes, and the Grand Duke joins in denouncing it. Appalled at such crude philistinism, Kessler submits his resignation. The Grand Duke ignores it, informing Kessler instead that he has been dismissed.
When Prince Eulenburg retires to his estate in 1902, his intention, of necessity, is to keep a low profile. He does remain in touch, however, with close friends in Berlin and, to a diminished degree, with the Kaiser himself. Family life proves no substitute for the excitement of being at the center of the Emperor’s entourage and his chief confidant. “I enjoy the family little,” Eulenburg writes to Axel Varnbüler, one of his closest friends in the Liebenberg Circle. “I gladly go my way, like a peculiar sheep, who avoids the herd with a scowl. The dog ceaselessly and pitilessly drives him back to an acquired sense of duty. Heaven knows it’s not innate.”
