For Germany he thought the only viable form of government would be a Socialist Republic, but I doubt if he would have made this a must for all countries. Furthermore, I am unwilling to apply the term “renaissance” to a period which saw the rise of such asinine movements as Dada and Surrealism.Ĭount Kessler was known as the “Red Count,” but he was never a communist. What had changed were their audiences, who were now ready to appreciate them. Eliot.Īt this point I should like to take a slight exception to the description on the dust-jacket of the 1920s as an “era of cultural renaissance.” There were, to be sure, important figures like Brecht, Weill, and the Bauhaus Group who were creations of that decade, but most of the greatest writers, musicians, and painters had started their careers before 1914. The only notable exceptions, so far as I can make out, were Winston Churchill and T.

There is hardly anyone in political or artistic circles in either country whom he does not seem to have met. Partly educated in France and England, he was completely at home in both. Unlike Saint-Simon, who was only concerned with France, Kessler was one of the most cosmopolitan men who ever lived. Perceiving, quite rightly, that a league based on national sovereignty would be impotent to deal with any serious crisis, he proposed a league made up of international collectivities-labor unions, churches, professional groups, etc.-but nothing came of it. His most ambitious plan was to reorganize the League of Nations. Later he went on several diplomatic visits, to Warsaw, to London, to Genoa. Before the war, apparently, he had collaborated with Bernard Shaw in an effort to improve Anglo-German relations.

Like Saint-Simon, though deeply involved in politics he does not seem to have exerted a decisive influence on events.

Mysteriously, there are no entries between New Year’s Eve, 1933, and May 25, 1935. Count Kessler’s diaries begin when he was fifty, three days before the Armistice, and end in 1937, a year after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, when he was an exile living in Paris.

Before the deluge by otto friedrich