Berlin in Lights: The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler, 1918-1937

Count Harry Kessler (1868-1937), the son of a German banker and an Irish beauty, was a diplomat and publisher who moved easily among the worlds of art, politics, and society. He lived in Berlin but traveled throughout Europe, always with a keen eye for the political climate of the times. His diaries encompass an extraordinary variety of people: Einstein engages him in long discussions on his theories; Josephine Baker dances naked in Kessler's drawing room; Lloyd George presides over the farcical Genoa conference in 1922. Kessler had dinner with Max Reinhardt, George Grosz, Virginia Woolf, Jean Cocteau, and Andre Gide, lunch with Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill, and Erik Satie. His diaries encapsulate this tumultuous time frame, recording at first hand the agonizing collapse and death of Weimar Germany and the arrival of the Nazis.