Volume 47, Number 7 · April 27, 2000
Dancing on a Wobbly Deck
By Ian Buruma
Why do the diaries[*] of Count Harry Kessler fill me with such nostalgia? Since I was born six years after the end of World War II, and fourteen years after Kessler's death in 1937, this would seem to be an odd emotion; how can one possibly feel nostalgic for something one hasn't experienced, or even seen? To long for a world one never knew is surely absurdly romantic. But then, romantics are always drawn to what is lost, or even to what never was but appears to be real in retrospect. One is drawn to a myth of the past, perhaps more than to the real thing. The Europe of Kessler's diaries, which undoubtedly existed, is a lost world encrusted with glittering layers of myth, spun by Isherwood, Grosz, Brecht, and Weill, among others. What infuses Kessler's descriptions of 1920s Berlin, Weimar, Paris, and London with such melancholy beauty is the author's own awareness that, even as he was writing, his world was doomed to almost total destruction. It was decadent in the most literal sense.
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