Insider Outsiders

Author(s): A. J. Sherman
Source: New England Review (1990-), Vol. 24, No. 3 (Summer, 2003), pp. 162-172
Published by: Middlebury College Publications
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40244301
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 A.J. Sherman

Insider Outsiders

-Uerlin," wrote Joseph Roth in 1930, "is a young and unhappy city-in-waiting, a tidy
mess, an arbitrariness exactly to plan, a purpose-seeming aimlessness. Never was so
much order thrown at disorder, so much lavishness at parsimony, so much method at
madness." The ironic, detached, paradoxical tone is characteristic of Roth (1894-1939),
the perennial outsider and myth-maker, a novelist best known for The Radetzky March
(1932), who prided himself also on being a poet and painter of verbal portraits. Roth
was also a specialist in that unique European journalistic genre, the feuilleton. A short
essay designed to amuse, to pique curiosity, perhaps to inspire reflection, the feuilleton
aimed to describe, with wit and economy, neglected or singular aspects of daily reality,
and it was cherished by readers of the leading German-language newspapers, to which
established and often distinguished writers regularly contributed these polished but
seemingly effortless essays, "true things on half a page." Joseph Roth was a master
of the unstated but demanding conventions of the feuilleton, aiming to touch as
well as entertain his audience, and this recently published selection of representative
Berlin reportage, translated by Michael Hofmann, conveys to English readers at least
some of the elegance and charm of Roth's style. What I Saw reflects, in addition to
the preoccupations and discoveries of a sensitive observer, the febrile atmosphere of
Weimar Germany, that fragile republic born of humiliating defeat, in which there
was, as Peter Gay tells us, "clear vision and political impotence, fear, suspicion, and
moments of irrational hope; among the politicians of the middle, politics as usual,
but with everyone else, a sense of emergency."
Roth arrived in Berlin in 1920, a twenty-six-year-old journalist with a shrewd eye
who had already attracted a devoted readership from publication in several Austrian
and German newspapers, and a deserved reputation for touchiness, occasional
grandiosity, a fondness for drink and tall tales. He had behind him studies at Vienna

What I Saw: Reports from Berlin, 1920-1933, by Joseph Roth, tr. Michael Hofmann, New York:
Norton, 2003.
Berlin in Lights: The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler (1918-1937), Charles Kessler, éd., New York: Grove
Press, 2000.
The Red Count: The Life and Times of Harry Kessler, by Laird M. Easton, Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2002.

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University, wartime service where he saw some of the disastrous campaigns on the
Eastern front, years of hand-to-mouth existence in which he came to know intimately
the poorest elements in society. An Austrian Jew in permanent mourning for the lost
Habsburg empire, "the only fatherland I ever had," in whose easternmost province,
notoriously impoverished Galicia, he had been born and spent his early years, Roth
trailed behind him a mysterious personal history he often deliberately fabricated as he
went along. He was given casually to obfuscating even the place of his birth, Brody, a
provincial city too minor to rate a description in Baedeker, in which the Jewish majority
and their Ukrainian, Polish, and German neighbors coexisted peaceably enough.
Roth was acutely sensitive to the fact that Berliners, rather like inhabitants of all the
world's major cities, tended in any event to look down upon provincials: they were
just able to tolerate new arrivals from, say, Rumania or the Balkans, but the very word
"Galicia" was risible, evoking superior smiles and a galling condescension. Roth put
it about that he had been born in Schwaby, a Swabian German settlement not in fact
that far from Brody, but substantially free of Jews; that his absent father had been,
variously, an officer in the Imperial army, a Polish count, a painter. In Roth's inventive
self-narration, these fictional fathers had in common spendthrift ways, alcoholism, and
depression, all of which Roth thus claimed naturally to have inherited. The truth of
Roth's paternity is both simpler and sadder than his fanciful inventions: his father, a
chronic depressive and a failure as a breadwinner, suffered a breakdown and abandoned
his wife shortly before Roth's birth, and died after years in the care of a Galician
healer-rabbi, never having seen his son. In later life, Roth was prepared to reveal that
his mother, herself a sad recluse, was Jewish, of Russian-Polish origins, and that her
entire existence had been utterly devoted to him, her only child. Roth's perennial
longing for the absent father explains in part his nostalgic, deeply felt affection for the
Austro-Hungarian Emperor, Franz Josef, in whose benign, fabulously long reign Roth
was born. To be sure, Roth shared his warm devotion to the Habsburgs with most
Galician Jews, profoundly grateful that their rulers granted them emancipation and
protected them from the persecution to which their brethren just across the frontier
in Russia were arbitrarily subjected. Characteristically carrying his imperial loyalty
further than most Jews, Roth was later to consider possible conversion to Catholicism;
there is indeed some evidence that he was eventually baptized. Growing up in Brody,
later entering secondary school in Lemberg, Roth took advantage of liberal Habsburg
policies to attend government schools, where he devoutly espoused assimilationist
ideas, jettisoning the Yiddish he heard at home, and perfecting his German by wide
reading and diligent writing. From his earliest school years, he never doubted his
vocation as a writer, and with considerable courage chose to devote himself to German
language and literature at a time when more of the modernizing Galician Jews were
adopting a Polish rather than German cultural orientation.
Lemberg, then the provincial capital of Galicia, prided itself on being a "little
Vienna": its population, one-quarter Jewish, supported theaters, concert halls,
libraries, a university, all drawing inspiration and often personnel from the imperial
capital. It was in Lemberg that Roth first encountered Zionism, which he firmly
and consistently rejected: clinging to the cosmopolitan model of the multi-national

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 Empire, he insisted that the Jews were well off under the Habsburgs and had no need
to seek asylum in what was then a neglected province of the Ottoman Empire. He
argued moreover that the Jews historically were meant to wander, and were a people
above mere nationality. Roth maintained this view even after the crumbling of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire into bitterly nationalist succession states, several of which
pursued oppressive and- Jewish policies. As late as 1934, after he had already fled the
Nazis into exile, he wrote to a relative contemplating emigration to Palestine, "I am
not sufficiently Jewish to go to Palestine. I am a German writer." Roth came to Vienna
at nineteen, determined to succeed at the university, where he deepened his studies in
German philology and literature. The would-be author and his mother, who joined
him shortly after he entered the university, lived in the poorest section of Vienna,
where they eked out an existence on the small income Roth earned by tutoring the
children of wealthy patrons, supplemented by occasional gifts from a well-off uncle in
Brody. Fellow students recalled him as wearing his shiny suit with studied elegance,
speaking a painstakingly correct, accent-free High German, and avoiding the usual
student pastimes and locales. Roth's early experience of deprivation of all kinds, the
humiliation of being fatherless, the sheer bleakness of his mother's lonely life, deeply
influenced his writing: throughout his fiction and reporting he returned repeatedly
to the themes of loss, exile, the demise of the Emperor-father, the collapse of the old
order. Identifying himself always with the helpless and those in need, the anonymous
struggling little people he met in his extensive travels, Roth wrote "one must have
respect for pain, for human greatness, and for the dirt that everywhere accompanies
suffering." Suffering and homelessness were indeed the ground bass in all he wrote,
suffusing even his lighter pieces with inescapable sadness. Roth's unflinching attention
to human pain, his genuine concern for the underdog, often his anger, prevented
his nostalgia for the vanished Empire from descending into the kitsch that one often
encounters in present-day Austria, where the Habsburg era is too frequently celebrated
in a saccharine sentimentalized version that owes more to second-rate operetta than
to historical reality.
What then did Roth see in his Berlin? aA café terrace planted with colorful
ladies, waiting to be plucked." A war cripple finding an abandoned nail file and
absently filing his nails, a dog chasing a ball, advertising posters whose large-scale
typography makes a war ultimatum "just as inconsequential as a cigarette." A squalid
boardinghouse in which Jewish refugees from Ukraine, from Galicia, from Hungary,
huddle in wretchedness while waiting for visas, money, tickets to places further West,
a temporary asylum that smells of "dirty laundry, sauerkraut, and masses of people,"
where "sighs disappear down the cracks between the floorboards" and "the reddish
sheen of an oil lamp battles its way through a veritable wall of smoke and sweat."
Roth spends nights in low dives familiar to us through their fictionalized versions in
Isherwood or Brecht, places "whose corners are always thick with bad characters"
such as Kirsch the burglar, Tegeler Willy, and Apache Fritz; police spies of both sexes;
prostitutes named Little Bertha, Annie from Silesia, Erna who displays her new gold
filling by laughing "at the saddest things." In these places music can barely be heard:
"its thin sounds come swaddled in cigar smoke like cotton." He spends other nights

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in shelters for the homeless, meeting an old, lost former lieutenant colonel in the
Czarist army; whole families who pay formal little calls to one another's partitioned
cubicles; "women in brown rags, shameless and shy, curious and apathetic, quivering
and resigned." "All state officials," Roth lashes out, "should be required to spend
a month serving in a homeless shelter to learn love." After staying a night in the
Admiral's Palace steam baths, an establishment that before the war was frequented by
affluent revellers sweating out their hangovers, Roth experiences the reality of another
kind of homeless shelter, where those who can't pay for a hotel are housed overnight
for a pittance, emerging mostly sleepless but clean into Berlin streets where "a truck
rumbles past, it's raining, and it's bitter."
Not by any means are all of Roth's observations tragic: he is amusing at the expense
of the Berlin artists and literati who gather night after night at Schwannecke's, a
watering hole where "one can be sure to find at midnight all those who only hours
before had sworn that they would never go there again, yes, that they hadn't set
foot there for years" and the volume of chatter from the assembled writers, critics,
film producers, agents, hangers-on, is such that individual feuds and reconciliations,
literary discussions, even coherent ideas are drowned in the general rhubarb, an
ingenious English equivalent for the almost untranslatable Munkeln. He watches
marathon bicycle races, not failing to notice the drivers who wait, trying to keep
warm, occasionally sleeping, outside the stadium. He goes to see a Harold Lloyd film
amid the lavish splendors of the UFA Palace, with its over two thousand seats and
full orchestra, night clubs where "industrialized merriment" is on offer and couples
with "brilliantly maintained teeth" dance to the latest tunes. Following the restless
migration of night owls, Roth traces the downward path from smart Knrfurstcndamm
cafés to proletarian dives, from champagne to Patzenhofer beer, observing as he goes
that the schnapps is increasingly stronger, the music cheaper, "and the women older
and stouter." Visiting the house of Germany's murdered foreign minister, the wealthy
and cultivated Walter Rathenau, a Jew assassinated by right-wing youths in 1922, Roth
is moved by the way Rathenau lived, surrounded by "beautiful paintings and colors,
with useless, sublime, tiny, fragile, impressive, tenderness-eliciting, powerful, dreamy
things," and there he recognizes on a table, in "significant proximity," the Shulhan
Aruchy a classic compendium of Jewish law, and an old German hymnal. In this piece
Roth's usual light ironies are replaced by deep sadness, regret for what Rathenau might
have contributed, had he lived, to the struggling Weimar Republic.
The Rathenau piece, written to commemorate the two-year anniversary of the
assassination, leads to the most powerful article in the volume, "The Auto-da-Fé of
the Mind," which was published in French when Roth was in Paris, a refugee from
Germany, in the autumn 1933 issue of Cahiers Juifs. In strong and bitter language,
echoing Voltaire's cry that "witticisms do not accord with massacres," he castigates
"the European mind" for surrendering "out of weakness, out of sloth, out of apathy,
out of lack of imagination" to the book burning that is obliterating the work of
so many of his fellow Jewish writers. Recalling that the Jews were overwhelmingly
the group in German society that cultivated the arts and the life of the mind, Roth
asserts that the Third Reich is but a logical extension of the philistine Empire of the

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 Hohenzollerns, and asks rhetorically whether aa people that elects as its president an
icon that has never read a book," President Hindenburg, is "all that far away from
burning books itself." He reminds his readers that he and his fellow writers served
in the war, in which many died, and that "we have written for Germany, we have
died for Germany. We have spilled our blood for Germany in two ways: the blood
that runs in our veins, and the blood with which we write. We have sung Germany,
the real Germany! And that is why today we are being burned by Germany!" Roth
was spared the worst: he died in Paris in May 1939, well before the invasion in which
he, as a foreign-born Jew and a prominent enemy of the Nazis, would have been in
gravest danger.
As the record makes clear, this is an author who took his feuilletons very seriously,
explaining to one of his newspaper editors, "it's not possible to write feuilletons
with your left hand ... I don't write witty columns, I paint the portrait of the age.
Pm not a reporter . . . Fm a journalist; I'm not an editorial writer, I'm a poet." The
more pity, then, that English-speaking readers may encounter Roth for the first time
through this collection, which, as the translator himself explains, is drawn from a quite
limited selection of Roth's journalism that appeared in Germany in 1996, subtitled "A
Reader for Walkers," and designed to accompany a nostalgic walking tour through
a Berlin that has by now all but disappeared, flattened by wartime bombing or the
new construction boom. Michael Hofmann's translation, which has elsewhere been
criticized for taking undue liberties with Roth's immaculate prose, is certainly fluent
and often lively; but the lack of notes makes many of the references inaccessible to
readers who may not know either Weimar history or Berlin geography. It is to be
hoped that readers of What I Saw will nonetheless be inspired to explore Roth's other
works, many also recently translated by Michael Hofmann, and discover for themselves
a major writer, a realist who resolutely turned his back on modernity, but is no less a
mirror of his times than Kafka or Schnitzler.
Another observer of Weimar Berlin, one uniquely poised to analyze developments
in politics, society, and culture, was the extraordinary figure of Harry Count Kessler
(1868-1937), a selection of whose Berlin diaries has recently been published in
English, as has Laird Easton's valuable biography. Kessler, the ultimate cosmopolitan
in everything he ever was or undertook, was born in Paris to an Anglo-Irish mother,
herself of mixed and exotic origins, whose striking beauty and presence so bewitched
old Emperor Wilhelm I that he ordered her husband, a wealthy German entrepreneur,
to be ennobled by the obedient Prince of Reuss, one of the many small principalities
of Imperial Germany. Thus it was that young Harry was born a Count, but inherited
too the lifelong suspicion that he was the Emperor's natural son, a canard he was
never entirely to live down. Educated at first, very unhappily, in French schools
whose squalors were in painful contrast to the elegance of his parental home, then
in England, at St. George's, Ascot, where he was a contemporary of Winston
Churchill's, Kessler learned to respect the deliberate cultivation of that "nobility,
poise, and truthfulness" expected of English gentlemen. Even at a young age, Kessler
moved easily between countries and cultures. After two years in England, he was sent

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to the famed Johanneum in Hamburg, an establishment with a formidably rigorous
tradition in Classical studies, where Kessler was also first introduced to the secret rituals
and language, the mysticism and moonlit Romanticism of homoerotic Wilhelminian
culture. His biographer indeed speculates that Kessler's homosexuality, which he
struggled throughout his life to conceal and at the same time justify, conferred
upon Kessler his abiding status as a "secret outsider," and made him more receptive
to the avant-garde, to modernity altogether, than he might otherwise have been,
maturing amid the stifling conformism of Imperial Germany's social elite. Sensitive,
guarded behind an invariant charm that nonetheless repelled any attempts at intimacy,
Kessler was always fully conscious of his outsider status, even at the very pinnacle of
German and international society. His social situation was indeed analogous to that
of Kaiserjuden such as Albert Ballin or Max Warburg, who cherished close ties to
Wilhelm II, yet were always aware that as Jews they had to avoid the slightest misstep
that might jeopardize their position at Court. It is no coincidence that Kessler became
the author of the standard biography of Walther Rathenau, whom he knew well:
Kessler's instinctive understanding of Rathenau's ambivalence concerning both his
Jewishness and homosexuality gives the work a poignancy more touching because
understated. Even as a young man, Kessler was renowned for impeccable bearing and
a certain elegance, captured memorably in a well-known portrait by Edvard Munch.
Kessler was moreover effortlessly polyglot: a voracious reader in French, English,
German, Greek, and Latin, he was noted even in his day for perfect command of these
and other languages as well. He started keeping his celebrated diaries at age twelve,
and made his last entry only a day before he died in 1937. Aspiring to a diplomatic
career, Kessler attended the universities of Bonn and Leipzig, read political economy
and philosophy, joined the most aristocratic fraternities, though avoiding the ritualized
drinking and duelling that were uncongenial to him. After a trip to New York, where
he sparkled at Mrs. Astor's parties as "a good dancer, and a Count!" he went on
to Egypt and Italy before reporting to complete his military service in one of the
most prestigious Imperial regiments, the Third-Guard Lancers, all of whose officers
were aristocrats. It was there that Kessler had his first great love affair with a fellow
cadet, Otto von Dungern, a nineteen-year-old from a noble Bavarian family, slender,
handsome, blond, a brilliant equestrian who was in Kessler's words "bête comme un
héros de Corneille" [as dumb as one of Corneille's heroes]. Shortly after completing
military service, young von Dungern went on to marry, a pattern that Kessler
repeatedly had to endure with lovers for whom Kessler represented but a transitional
object before conventional matrimony. Kessler began to understand that he would
ultimately be alone; the frenetic social whirl that he both craved and complained of
was his way of compensating for the lack of intimacy in his life.
The tragi-comedy of Kessler's interlude in Weimar's sleepy little Court, presided
over by a philistine Grand Duke, is itself the stuff of legend: how Kessler made great
efforts as director of the Grand-Ducal Museum for Arts and Crafts to introduce
new art, only to be sabotaged by intriguing courtiers, the active hostility of Kaiser
Wilhelm II himself, and the ultimate scandal of a Rodin exhibition, dedicated to

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 the Grand Duke, in which a squatting female nude was perceived as presenting her
buttocks to royalty in the very definition of lèse-majesté. Kessler's aspirations to make
of the "New Weimar*5 a center for all that was exciting and innovative in European
art shattered on the mulish intransigence of his grand-ducal patron; but Kessler was
already launched on that combination of shrewd connoisseurship, active diplomacy,
and real sympathy for emerging art that was to bring to his attention all the leading
artists of his time, a galaxy of European talent for whom he functioned as Maecenas,
minister plenipotentiary, and often personal friend. Shuttling between Weimar, Paris,
London, and Berlin, where he maintained an apartment, Kessler knew and often visited
Durand-Ruel and other leading galleries, and eventually met such established artists
as Monet, Renoir, and Degas, as well as younger artists including Signac, Vuillard,
Bonnard, Rodin, and Maillol. Kessler knew well all the developing German, English,
and Scandinavian artists and writers: he was a cormorant collector of talent in all
media, including the theater. Unique among this glittering assemblage, Maillol indeed
became close to Kessler, not least through Kessler's relationship with Gaston Colin,
the young French cyclist who was one of Maillol's models, and who after some years
as Kessler's lover also married, yet remained devoted to his sometime patron.
Count Kessler's generosity to a large number of artists was sustained by a substantial
income, in the pre-war years, derived from his father's extensive international
businesses. Kessler did not, however, confine his patronage to the visual arts: he
was able also to fund the short-lived but impressive art and literary journal Pan; to
establish the Cranach Press, which ultimately produced, in 1926, a sumptuous edition
of Virgil's Eclogues, on handmade paper, illustrated by Maillol; and also to support
the earliest efforts of Max Reinhardt in the theater. It was Kessler who suggested
to Hugo von Hofmannsthal the central idea, and who wrote the scenario for what
ultimately became Der Rosenkavalier, and he later collaborated with Serge Diaghilev
and Hofmannsthal on a ballet based on the Biblical Joseph story. Kessler was full of
creative ideas, forever the useful intermediary or the catalyst for new developments
in the art world.

The first World War was not only suicide for Europe but a personal catastrophe
for Kessler. Initially an enthusiast for the war, as virtually all his contemporaries were,
Kessler rapidly became disillusioned as he saw his cosmopolitan world destroyed. His
beloved sister, married to a French marquis, was cut off from him throughout the
war, as was his ailing mother, who died shortly after the war ended, before he could
visit her. Countless friends in England and France were likewise inaccessible, though
Kessler managed to smuggle some support to Gaston Colin and his family. Kessler
himself saw active service on the Eastern front, experiencing in war-torn Galicia both
another great love, with a young staff officer, and some of the most bitter campaigning
of the war. Posted then to Verdun, he was witness to the worst horrors of the Western
front, and was finally invalided home, diagnosed with "shell shock." Barely recovered,
he was despatched as a secret intermediary to neutral Switzerland, in hopes of feeling
out the Allies about the possibility of a negotiated peace. In that mission he was
undermined by envious and incompetent German diplomats in Bern and Berlin; and
after Germany's total defeat, he accepted the thankless assignment of being the Weimar

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Republic's first ambassador to Poland. Pursued from one residence to another by
furious Polish mobs, again sabotaged, this time by the German military, Kessler was
forced to resign after an ambassadorship that lasted only twenty-six days.
All these and other disillusioning experiences transformed Kessler into a left-wing
liberal, a pacifist, and an active defender of the Republic. He launched himself into
political life, devoting more than a decade to ceaseless travel, writing and speaking
on behalf of pacifist and liberal organizations, trying to make the League of Nations
work, undertaking confidential diplomatic missions for the Foreign Ministry. In 1924
he campaigned unsuccessfully for the Democratic Party as a candidate for a Reichstag
seat. He was accused predictably of betraying his own class, called mockingly "the
Red Count," threatened by right-wing conspirators, snubbed by former comrades in
arms and even his university fraternity brothers. The fortune he inherited was severely
diminished by confiscations - the English and French authorities treated him as an
enemy alien - and much of what remained to him was destroyed by rampant inflation.
The great crash of 1929 and the subsequent banking crisis completed his financial ruin;
but Kessler, ever the aristocratic aesthete, was never good at economizing. Virtually
to the end, he made ends meet by selling off his collections piece by beloved piece,
re-financing his house in Weimar, begging his sister for subventions that ultimately
consumed most of her inheritance as well. Kessler's optimism, jaunty self-assurance,
hopes for Europe and the world, drained away in almost precise proportion to the
loss of his fortune. And yet, throughout all these experiences, he continued to write,
filling volume after red-leather volume in the diminutive elegant hand that recorded
with meticulous detail meetings, conversations, observations, and musings that in sum
constitute a vast and scrupulous accounting of what happened over the last century to
Germany and Europe. Alas, only a fraction of the diaries has ever been published in
any language, though there are plans to issue all of them eventually on CD-Rom; and
the re-publication of the Charles Kessler (no relation) translation of 1971 still contains
only a portion of the diaries from 1918 to 1937. But what a fascinating cornucopia
even this very limited selection is!
Kessler, inspecting the former Imperial Palace looted by sailors during the
revolutionary events of December 1918, writes with cold rage: "But these private
apartments, the furniture, the articles of everyday use ... are so insipid and tasteless,
so philistine, that it is difficult to feel much indignation against the pilferers. Only
astonishment that the wretched, timid, unimaginative creatures who liked this
trash, and frittered away their life in this precious palatial haven, amidst lackeys and
sycophants, could ever make any impact on history. Out of this atmosphere was born
the World War, or as much of the guilt for it as falls on the Emperor. ... It was a
shock to be confronted with the dead sailors, some in coffins, others on stretchers,
laid out in a ground-floor doorway ... A stale smell of corpses hung in the cold air."
Enrico Caruso, seen in Sorrento, "looks like Napoleon on St. Helena. Always gloomy
and preoccupied." Meeting Einstein at a banker's dinner party, Kessler asks him what
problems he is working on, and receives the reply: "he said that he was engaged in
thinking . . . The ironical trait in Einstein's expression, the Pierrot Lunaire quality,
the smiling and pain-ridden scepticism that plays about his eyes becomes ever more

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 noticeable." Of Mussolini and the Italians: "the price of having a funny man at the
head of their Government is proving a little high for his compatriots." At a bull fight
in Barcelona: "Loathsome memory, despite the colourful, savagely lively, grandiose
spectacle. The slaughter of the helpless old horses, whose bowels are torn out of their
bodies, is shocking and disgusting . . . The most colourful, glittering display is no
compensation for animals who don't stand a chance being killed to provide Sunday
afternoon sport for coarse-grained crowds. By the end I felt as though I had been
bludgeoned, mentally apathetic and physically fit to vomit." He describes Berthold
Brecht: "strikingly degenerate look, almost a criminal physiognomy, black hair and
eyes, dark-skinned, a peculiarly suspicious expression; very nearly a typical twister.
But in conversation he thaws ... he has a head on his shoulders and is not . . .
unattractive." Meeting Nijinsky again after the great dancer's descent into madness,
Kessler fails to recognize him until prompted by Diaghilev, then tries to encourage
Nijinsky "with gentle words. The look he gave me from his great eyes was mindless but
infinitely touching, like that of a sick animal." Wilhelm II, always an object of Kessler's
contempt, is characterized as "this nincompoop and swaggerer who plunged Germany
into misfortunes . . . Not a facet of him is capable of arousing pity or sympathy."
Lunching in 1928 in Vienna with Richard Strauss, he reports "Strauss aired his quaint
political views, about the need for a dictatorship, and so on, which nobody takes
seriously." These diaries are often compelling reading, even if many of the personalities
and events described require explication for contemporary readers: we feel rather
like eavesdroppers at a particularly grand party, and come to admire Kessler's sheer
stamina. How did he do it all? Easton's biography of Kessler tells us, and is also worth
reading: exemplary in its refusal to speculate or indulge in postmortem psychoanalysis,
it describes with sympathy a man whose actual accomplishments are disappointing
when compared with the "vast nimbus of potentiality" he radiated. Occasional minor
errors in this account, especially in the transcription of foreign names and phrases,
suggest lapses in attention that would have pained the impeccable Count Kessler.
It was inevitable that Kessler should arouse the hostility of the Nazis, of whom
he wrote: "it is difficult to say which feeling is stronger, loathing or pity, for these
brainless, malevolent creatures." In March 1933 he was told he was high on the
Nazis' blacklist, and was urged by high-placed friends to prolong his stay in France.
Restlessly fleeing from France to Spain, then back again to France, battling illness
and the unaccustomed necessity to write for a livelihood - he was working on French
and English versions of his memoirs - Kessler never saw Germany again. His own
valet revealed himself as a Nazi agent, his house in Weimar and his flat in Berlin were
ransacked by the Gestapo, then plundered by creditors and others, but his multi-
volume diary had already been hidden outside Germany. The last missing volumes were
recovered from a Majorca bank vault only as recently as the 1980s, and deposited in
the German National Literature Archive, Marbach, which safeguards the voluminous
Kessler papers. In his elegiac introduction to Berlin in Lights, Ian Buruma recalls that
Kessler's contributions to German public life were largely forgotten after his death
in 1937, but predicts that his diaries, a "consummate work of art," have assured that
Kessler's memory will endure.

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 One is tempted to speculate on whether Kessler and Joseph Roth ever met. No
evidence available to me suggests that they did, though each indubitably knew of the
other, and Count Kessler must often have read Roth's writing. Kessler's enormous
acquaintance in many circles of Berlin society, his typical day of aa lunch, a reception,
a dinner and one or two balls," his vast network of "who was who in the Weimar
Republic or even who aspired to be who" makes it impossible to rule out at least
a nodding acquaintance with Roth, who was one of the best-known journalists in
Berlin. Moreover, both Kessler and Roth knew many, if not most, of the leading artists
and writers who collectively gave Weimar Berlin so much of its renowned brilliance,
its nervous energy. If it is hard to imagine Kessler, the ultimate fastidious aesthete,
exploring even for louche purposes the grittier locales frequented by Roth, their paths
may have crossed in some literary or artistic context, though Kessler, a crashing snob,
was capable of withering scorn for the middle class, and appreciated Jews only at the
very highest level of society. In his Galician war diary, for example, he described the
East European Jews as "louses," comparing them unfavorably with the attractive
blond Ruthenian peasants among whom they lived. Both early refugees from the
Nazis, Kessler and Roth could also have met in exile, where, as Kessler wrote, "the
whole of the Kurfurstendamm is descending on Paris." In the end, they were both
buried in France, Kessler in the family tomb at Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, after
a funeral attended by a sparse assemblage that included not one of the many artists
Kessler had so generously helped over many years.
Roth's funeral was an altogether different affair. He had died in a Paris hospital,
of liver failure and other complications of alcoholism. His surviving friends gathered
to sort out the many myths Roth had propagated about his life, and argued whether
his purported conversion to Catholicism was just another of his tall tales. One friend
insisted that Roth had wanted a Catholic funeral, another maintained that Roth had
been a "super- Jew" who only toyed with Catholicism as an aspect of his sympathy for
the Austrian monarchist movement. Among Roth's Jewish friends, several who were
themselves baptized joined the Catholic contingent in pressing for a full Catholic
burial, a view that in the end prevailed. In the absence of documentary proof of
Roth's baptism, he was buried outside Paris instead of in the Montmartre cemetery
where several friends had suggested he might have cared to repose next to Heinrich
Heine, that other famous convert. Roth was interred in the ambiguous Cimetière
Thiais, a nominally Catholic suburban cemetery that had plots also for Jews and
Muslims. It was agreed by his friends that no Mass would be said, and that after the
simple graveside service no speeches would be made. There was nonetheless a good
deal of apprehension as the funeral date approached. All were shocked and surprised
by the large and emotional crowd that gathered at the cemetery on a hot afternoon
two days later: it included refugee writers from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia,
and Spain, old friends, young people, representatives of the German Writers Union,
the League for True Austria, the Habsburg family, members of German and Austrian
student fraternities in full dress with swords. Monarchists and Communists, Catholics,
East European Jews, nameless poor people Roth had befriended in cafés, in police
stations, or in the waiting rooms of foreign consulates, jostled uncomfortably for

A. J.Sherman 171

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 position. Everyone, it appeared, had been fond of Roth, but found himself irritated
or embarrassed by the person standing next to him. As two Catholic priests began
the funeral service, there was loud murmuring from the East European Jews, most
from Galicia, demanding that a rabbi appear. When Count Franz Trautmansdorff
presented a representative of Roth's family with a wreath in the name of Otto von
Habsburg - and loudly proclaimed, ato the loyal fighter for the monarchy, in the
name of His Majesty Otto of Austria!" - Egon Erwin Kisch, a left-wing writer who
was leader of the Vienna Red Guard, stepped out from the delegation of Communists
and threw a red wreath into the grave, shouting, "in the name of your colleagues of
the Defense League of German Writers!" Then several Jews pushed to the grave and
began to pray in Hebrew, while tension between the monarchists and Communists
grew perceptibly. The uproar at the graveside, and the noise of a passing train, were
sufficient to disrupt any attempt to say Kaddish, the Jewish memorial prayer. For a
while, there seemed some danger of a riot; but then other wreaths were thrown into
the grave, it was eventually filled, and at last the crowd melted away. In the end, even
Roth might have been hard pressed to describe the multiple ironies of his send-off.
Both Roth and Kessler, supremely talented outsiders, were witnesses compelled
to endure the destruction of cherished values and institutions, of a whole fabric of
culture and associations that had shaped and nourished them; but they were not mere
bystanders in history. Their struggles for political and ordinary human decency, their
generosity and engagement, compel admiration. In a squalid time, they displayed
great courage, and the written record of their lives continues to move and enlighten
us. Their literary legacy seems secure.

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