THIS IS THE DIARY JUNCTION - DATA AND LINKS FOR OVER 500 HISTORICAL AND LITERARY DIARISTS
PLEASE TAKE A MOMENT ALSO TO LOOK AT KIP FENN, A MAJOR NOVEL ABOUT THE 21st CENTURY
- freely available on this site
Kessler, Harry ___ 1868-1937 ___ German
(born France) ___ soldier
BIOGRAPHICAL SUMMARY
Kessler was born in Paris. His
father was a banker who had been ennobled by Kaiser Wilhelm I and his mother
was considered an Irish beauty. He was educated in England and in Germany,
and trained for a career in the foreign service. However, he became more
interested in the arts, and was involved, during the mid-1890s, in developing
an elitist magazine called 'Pan'. He was particularly concerned with trying
to develop the arts in Weimar, and held various appointments, including
director of the ducal art museum and the art school. In 1904, he went to
London to seek advice on the design of books for Insel Verlag, the innovative
Leipzig publishing house, and was introduced to Eric Gill and Edward Johnston.
When war broke out, Kessler led troops into Belgium and on the eastern front,
but he became traumatised, apparently because his loyalties were so divided
between three of the nations at war. Thereafter, he was briefly an ambassador
in Poland, and became involved in peace negotiations. (Later, he turned
to pacifism, and this led to him being exiled from Nazi Germany.) In the
1920s, he continued travelling and supporting the arts and producing superb
editions of classical masterpieces published by his own Cranach Press. Although
his 20th century diaries were published in the 1960s (in German) and 1970s
(in English), earlier diaries, recently discovered, were used by Laird Easton
in writing a biography 'The Red Count', published in 2002. His diaries are
said to mention more than 40,000 people, some of them leading artists of
the day.
One
biography link
DIARY DATES, CONTENT DESCRIPTORS
1880-1937 ___ military political
social travel art culture society people
WEB TEXT LINKS
ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT LINKS
German Literature
Archive
SOME PUBLISHED TITLES
The Diaries of a Cosmopolitan,
Count Harry Kessler 1918-1939
In the Twenties; The Diaries of Harry Kessler
The Red Count: The Life and Times of Harry Kessler
May 2005
THIS IS THE DIARY JUNCTION - DATA AND LINKS FOR OVER 500 HISTORICAL AND LITERARY DIARISTS
Please
email if you have any corrections, additions or comments. |
IMPORTANT NOTES AND CAUTIONS:
1) The first line of basic information
may be incomplete in several ways: some historical figures have different
names (titles, pen-names); their birth and death dates may be unknown or
uncertain (g - guess, c - circa); similarly, their occupations may be unknown,
or they may have had other jobs; and, for early diarists, I've used 'British'
a bit too freely. 2) The biographical summary may not be accurate. It was
compiled quickly from various sources, mostly on the internet, and the facts
were not checked anywhere near as rigorously as they would have been if
they'd been intended for publication in a printed form. 3) The journal dates
and descriptors (which are in no particular order) must be treated with
caution: since I have not examined the diaries myself, the descriptors are
only guesses based on bibliographies, anthologies and internet biographies.
4) For the biography and etext links, I have ignored any sites with charges,
and I have avoided, wherever possible, those with pop-ups or too much advertising.
I have limited myself to providing three etext links where there is some
variety between them. 5) For the original manuscript links, I have limited
myself to providing a maximum of two (although, for a few diarists, their
original diaries are held in more than two places). 6) I have provided the
titles - chosen randomly - for up to three printed editions of the diaries. |