Berlin in Lights
Subtitle: The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler, 1918-1937
Contributors: Harry Kessler (Editor); Ian Buruma (Introduction); Charles Kessler (Translator)
Publisher: Grove Pr; Brand: Grove Pr
Published: April 2000
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 535
ISBN-13: 9780802116635
Subjects: Germany; Kessler, Harry,; Europe - Germany; Diaries And Journals; Literary Criticism; History: World; Graf,; European - German; European history (ie other than Britain & Ireland); German; Literary studies: general; 1868-1937; Diaries; Diplomats
First sentence: At eight in the morning a telephone call from Hatzfeldt.
Description: "Count Harry Kessler (1868-1937), the son of a German banker and an Irish beauty, was a diplomat and publisher who moved easily between the worlds of art, politics, and society. He lived in Berlin, but traveled throughout Europe, always with a keen eye to the political climate of the times. Kessler's work as a publisher of rare limited-edition art books brought him in contact with the great artists of his era.

His work as a diplomat and his canny timing ensured his presence at the world-changing political events of the day. He recorded in his diaries the world that he witnessed.".

"Kessler's diaries encompass an extraordinary variety of people: Einstein engaging him in long discussions on his theories, Josephine Baker dancing naked in a friend's drawing room, Lloyd George at the farcical Genoa conference in 1922, and "the endless SA goose-stepping parade" in Berlin at Hitler's appointment as chancellor in 1933.

There were dinners with Max Reinhardt, Georg Grosz, Virginia Woolf, Jean Cocteau, and Andre Gide, lunches with Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill, Erik Satie, and others encapsulated in this time frame. Fascinated by the cynical spirit of doomed Berlin, his diaries record at first hand the agonizing collapse and death of Weimar Germany and the arrival of the Nazis."--BOOK JACKET.