Rudolf Kassner
Encyclopedia
Rudolf Kassner was an Austrian writer, essayist, translator and cultural philosopher. Although stricken as an infant with poliomyelitis, Kassner traveled widely to northern Africa, the Sahara, India, Russia, Spain, and throughout Europe. His translations of William Blake
introduced this English romantic poet to German-speaking audiences. His literary career covered six decades, including a period of isolation during the Nazi years in Vienna. His writings on physiognomy
reflect his effort to understand the problems of modernity and Man's subsequent disconnectedness from time and place. His later autobiographical writings suggest a brilliant literary mind attempting to make sense of a chaotic post-nuclear world.
(at the time part of Austro-Hungary) from Silesia
. His father, Oskar Kassner, was a landowner and factory owner, descended from government officials and businessmen. His maternal ancestors were peasants.Kassner regarded himself as a German-Slavic mixture, having inherited German Blut (German: blood) from his mother and a Slavic Geist (German: spirit) from his father (Das physiognomische Weltbild, 116ff.).
The seventh of 10 children, Rudolf Kassner was born on 11 September 1873 in Gross-Pavlowitz in southern Moravia, near Znaim. Shortly after Kassner's birth, his father moved the family to the countryside near Nikolsburg
, where he leased imperial property, profitably cultivated beet
s, and ran a sugar factory.
Kassner contracted poliomyelitis
at nine months of age, which affected both his legs and required him to use crutches for the rest of his life. He grew up in a strict Catholic milieu and was schooled at home. He and his siblings were educated by governesses. When he was a young adult, a tutor prepared him for annual state examinations that allowed him to attend the gymnasium in neighboring provincial town of Nikolsberg.
where he set out to study German philology
, Latin
, and Philosophy
. He spent the last two semesters, in 1895 and '96, in Berlin, where he attended the lectures of the nationalist historian Heinrich von Treitschke
. Kassner, too, was an enthusiastic theater-goer. This formed the basis for later reflections on acting and the role of the actor, important for his physiognomic worldview. In 1896 he returned to Vienna and completed his studies with a doctoral dissertation on Der ewige Jude in der Dichtung (The Eternal Jew in Poetry), which he completed in 1897.
Despite his physical handicap, Kassner traveled extensively in Russia, North Africa, and India. He lived in Paris, London, and Munich for short periods of time. His first publications found favor among fin-de-siècle poets and artists. He was a member of the so-called Bohemian circle in Munich to which Frank Wedekind
and Eduard Graf von Keyserling
also belonged. Kassner was acquainted also with Ulrich Graf von Brockdorff-Rantzau
, Paul Valéry
, and André Gide
. From 1900 to 1906 he was a regular member of the Viennese group gathered around the cultural philosopher and anti-Semite Houston Stewart Chamberlain
. Kassner later distanced himself from Chamberlain.
In 1902 he met Hugo von Hofmannsthal
and in 1907, Rainer Maria Rilke
, and developed deep and lasting friendships with both men. Rilke dedicated the eighth Duineser Elegie
to Kassner. For a time both Hofmannsthal and Rilke considered Kassner to be the most far-sighted contemporary cultural philosopher. His close friendship with Rilke has received a great deal of scholarly attention. Schmölders speculates that at least on Kassner's part this friendship was latent homosexuality (in: Neumann/Ott 1999).
After the outbreak of World War I
, Kassner moved to Vienna. He married in 1914. During the war years Kassner passionately studied Mathematics and Physics; for this was the period when Einstein's great work was published and much of the work on the foundations of mathematics were taking place. He met Einstein once in Vienna. Kassner tried to understand in his own way, new ideas such as the concept of four dimensional space and the concept of Number etc. His book Zahl und Gesicht is the result of this deep engagement. During this period he was often in Berlin were he met Georg Simmel
, Gerhart Hauptmann
and Walter Rathenau.
In 1924 and in 1931 Kassner was again in Rome. From 1926 to 1931 he traveled every year to Paris and he spent every late summer in the castle Schönhausen
, where Princess Herbert Bismarck lived. During the interwar period also Kassner published many of his books, although they were prohibited in Germany after 1933. Nevertheless, his books continued to appear until he was forbidden to write (Schreibverbot) after the Nazi annexation
of Austria in 1938. During World War II
, Kassner remained in his home in Vienna. Out of his years-long work in isolation emerged a monumental work Das neunzehnte Jahrhundert: Ausdruck und Größe. His wife, who was Jewish, had escaped from Austria after the Anschluss with the help of Hans Carossa.
Through the intervention of some of his Swiss friends Kassner moved to Switzerland
in 1945. In 1946 he moved to Sierre (Siders) in Valais
where his friend Rilke had also spent the last years of his life. He lectured at the University of Zürich
and lived in Sierre
until his death after a long illness on 1 April 1959.
of the eighteenth century. The English writer Laurence Sterne
influenced Kassnerr and he appears as a character in Kassner's Die Chimäre. Kassner translated Sterne's Tristram Shandy and Cardinal Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua
into German, and wrote several essays on Sterne, Thomas de Quincey
and Thomas Hardy
.
In 1900 Kassner made his first trip to Paris. Here he met André Gide
, whose work Philoktet he translated into German. He also met Maurice Maeterlinck
. His involvement with French culture is reflected in his essays on Baudelaire, Auguste Rodin
, Abbe Galiani and Diderot and in his translations of the works of Gide and St. John Perse.
While in Paris, Kassner received a visit from T. S. Eliot
and during this trip, he formed his great friendship with Rilke, the poet. In many histories of German literature
, Kassner finds mention at best as a friend of Rilke and Hugo von Hofmannsthal
. Yet, the two poets have testified amply to Kassner's profound influence on them. Rilke dedicated his eighth Duino Elegy, the most important elegy, to Kassner. In a letter to Princess Marie von Thurn and Taxis, Rilke says of Kassner: "...is not this man, I say to myself, perhaps the most important of all those who are writing today?" On his deathbed Rilke recalled with great fondness his association with Kassner.
Kassner's association with Hofmannsthal began in 1902. He visited the poet in Rodaun. Both of them belonged to that generation of Austrians who believed they were witness to the steady decline of western culture and the inexorable erosion of its institutions. Hofmannsthal wrote about Kassner in 1904: " I believe that he is perhaps the most important literary man, the most important culture critic that we have ever had in Germany" Kassner also knew Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the notorious racial theorist and anti-Semite, to whom he had sent his first book. At Chamberlain's House in Vienna Kassner often met Count Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, Count Hermann von Keyserling and the Indologist Leopold von Schröder.
In 1905 Kassner traveled through Spain, and from to Tangier in Morocco
. His father passed away in Vienna in 1906 and Kassner spent that year in Vienna. In 1907 he traveled again to Italy, further to Tunisia
, Algeria
, Morocco and by motorcar through the Sahara
.
On 16 October 1908 Kassner's began his lengthy journey through India
. From London he proceeded by sea to Bombay. On board he became acquainted with the Maharaja of Kapurthala and one Mr. Inder Choudhary, a judge at the Calcutta high court. In the first week of November 1908 Kassner traveled from Bombay to Jaipur
; then to Thaneswar and arrived on 24 November 1908 in Kapurthala
to take part in the birthday celebrations of the Maharaja. From there he went towards Lahore
and Peshawar
, also a jaunt to the Khyber Pass
. He returned south through Delhi
and Agra
to Lucknow
. In a train accident on 3 December Kassner lost his baggage. Ten days after that he reached Benaras via Allahabad
. Next he proceeded to Calcutta, where, incidentally, he met Stefan Zweig
. In Calcutta he stayed with his friend, whom he met on the journey to India, Inder Choudhary. On 1 January 1909 he went to Darjeeling, from where he viewed the Kanchanjunga. He went by steamer to Burma and traveled up to Bhano on the Chinese border. From Calcutta Kassner went by sea to Colombo, from there he reached South India in mid-February; setting out most likely from Tuticorin to Madras via Madurai
and Thanjavur. He reached Madras on 24 February 1909. He also visited Hyderabad and Ellora and journeyed home from Bombay on 6 March 1909.
On the return journey he spent some time in Egypt; from there he proceeded to Rome and spent the rest of that year in Italy. We do not know much about Kassner's experiences in India or about the sources of his knowledge about India, apart from what he himself says in his writings. But it is evident that India deeply influenced Kassner. Kassner himself confessed later that he became a philosopher through the Indians. Besides his two major works on India, Indian themes constantly recur in Kassner's writings. Kassner's Indian journey and his experiences in India are of immense importance in understanding his life and works.
In 1911 he traveled to Russia
. He started from Vienna in May 1911 and traveled to St Petersburg; then to Moscow and from there along the Volga up to Saralow. He went southwards to Yalta
and then to Kieslovodsk, north of Caucasus
. In an automobile he crossed the Caucasus and went along the route that leads via the Caspian to Samarkhand in Turkestan. He returned after a brief stay in St. Petersburg and Moscow to Berlin towards the end of October 1911. Soon translations from the Russian followed: Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy.
1900-1908; physiognomy 1908-1938: and after 1938 autobiographical writings, religious and mystical essays, and "meta-political" interpretations of world events. Kassner rejected rigid philosophical systems and thus preferred looser literary forms such as essays, aphorisms, prose sketches, parables, and allegories. Nevertheless, his works revolve around certain coherent contexts and returns again and again to the same themes.
According to Schmölders (1999) Kassner's essays have a "predatory component." His early adversary was the "dilettante", that is, modern man who overestimates himself and his place in the world, who would be an artist without being able to the recognize the "whole" of the world, who is a victim of relativism and individualism. He accuses modernity of being without "standard" (Maß), no longer able to show man his place in the world. The only way to attain "standard" and "greatness" is through passion and suffering. Kassner further denounces the "actor" who only plays with social roles and turns himself into the accomplice of modernity.
a cultural crisis that left traces of alienation and uprootedness in human faces. In the intellectual landscape of the 1920s Kassner's world-view thus reflects the "conservative revolution."
According to Kassner's physiognomy, in the old, aristocratic corporate society every person had a face that resulted from his connection to his estate. Modern man has, however, lost the "standard" that anchored him in the community: the face of modern man is thus "gaping" like a wound because it is no longer anchored in the world. Kassner uses "face" in its dual meaning as vision and visage, seeing and countenance. Physiognomic interpretation is, however, not something that can be learned; Kassner believed that the "seer" alone is called to physiognomy. "Imagination" becomes for Kassner the most important human ability, for it alone makes it possible to see the world as a unity or "form" and "to see things together."
For Kassner the physiognomy
is basically a ‘phenomenology of Being’. It is based on Goethe's anti-Kant
ian statement "The highest is to understand that all facts are already theory. One need not search behind the phenomenon, for they themselves are the theory". Kassner's physiognomy is an attempt to portray the world in all its manifestations.
Of course, Kassner's teachings are not easy to understand. Kassner's physiognomy though is distinct from the traditional rational physiognomy from pseudo-Aristotle to Lavater. Rational science objects to physiognomy thus: How can one draw conclusions about the inner character of anybody from his external features? Can one? Yet, physiognomy tried to be ‘scientific’and came to be devalued. Even in the eighteenth century Lavater tried to reduce the differences among the human faces to certain common denominators and tried to build a system of symbols to interpret it. (Kant
considered it too pretentious a task for mere mortals). Nevertheless the idea was to build a system and to give a scientific explanation.
Kassner's physiognomy studies the rhythmic and changeable aspects of the face, which are not accessible to the rational physiognomy characteristic of its early period. Freudian psychoanalysis
considered every face a mask
and tried to unravel what lies behind it. This is a far cry from Kassner's physiognomy. Of course psychoanalysis has recognized that "man no longer appears as he is". But Kassner's physiognomy asserts, " Man is just as he appears to be because he does not appear as he really is." This is the basic axiom of Kassner's physiognomy. Kassner developed a style suited to the articulation of this physiognomy: the frequent use of zeugma
for example is characteristic of his writing; he brings together things that appear to be contradictory on the surface in order to show not immediately evident interconnections between them. The seemingly contradictory phenomena combine to give a total image of the whole. One distinct advantage of this method is its usefulness in avoiding of the tendency to reify.
Kassner's physiognomy is not about naïve inference of individual characteristics from physical features. It is a seeing-together of the soul
and cosmos. Kassner uses the word Gesicht (an untranslatable word which refers to what sees, namely face or countenance, and also what is seen, the vision.). This physiognomy is also a cosmogony
. For Kassner all that can have a form: animals and humans, ideas, philosophies and religions, concrete things and products of pure fantasies, things of the present and the remote past all these can be Gesicht. In this Gesicht. rather than behind it, is the relationship of the soul to the entire cosmos and it needs interpretation. For Kassner, the physiognomist is the mystic of the whole created world.
The paradox as a form of thinking is very important to understand Kassners diagnosis of modernity. The incongruence between the external appearance and the internal disposition of man, the surface and deep structure of humans, as it were, forms the basis of his understanding of the modern individual. Psychoanalysis and other theories of human nature, analyse the appearance to unmask the reality. Kassner avoids all reification and takes that which appears first to his sight, his vision, namely human action and behavior, as the basis for his searching physiognomic enquiry.
Phenomena considered purely externally call for a rational explanation for establishing causal nexus, whereas to understand authentic form requires imaginative interpretation. To be able to see the form, one need to fuse critical and creative faculties, in short ‘räsonnieren’ as Kassner terms it. Hence, the conscious use of paradoxes that characterizes much of Kassner's writing. This indeed produces a shock-effect, much like the stunning effect of the Socratic elenchos. His zeugmas confront the reader to provide him a surprisingly new perspective. Like a Zen
master with his counter-rational sayings, Kassner shakes the reader's rational, analytic thought processes in order to make him aware of the dynamic whole, the whole reality of the appearance.
Kassner uses many ideas such as form, gestalt, whole, order, idea etc., to emphasize the holistic aspects of his approach. The activity that forms the basis of this type of perception is seeing and interpreting (deuten). It calls for seeing–together, for a synoptic vision. This is why Kassner rejects the ‘thing-in-itself’ that never manifests itself in phenomena. Kassner holds that the image includes the thing along with its movement, its dunamis. The phenomena are not the external covering of content. Form and content yield a unity, held together by imagination, whereas critical reason separates them. Imagination is synthetic; reason is analytic.
Although Kassner alludes to current events in his writings and analyzes contemporary society, this is done in his later work increasingly in a kind of private mythology that makes use of ambiguous, enigmatic and often unclearly defined ideas that often cannot to attributed to a political stance.
Kassner's autobiographical works are difficult to understand; even his reminiscences contain passages, which are not easy to follow because of their idiosyncratic terminology. But many great modern texts are difficult (who will not vouch for enigmatic intricacies of Eliot and Pound
, Joyce
and Heidegger
to mention but a few). "Works of this kind with their closely woven thoughts, are not easily accessible", wrote Hofmannsthal. "It consists of a number of unconnected writings...the contents are new and important, the title is unobtrusive. In the writings there is no system or definite terminology nor does the author mention about the unity of the work" . Surely Kassner does not provide an easy approach to his works. One cannot build a system out of his works. As he himself says "I have no system and hence not the language of the system".
Kassner's world is a world without masters and disciples. It is not built upon his predecessors, he had no precursors, hence the difficulty of categorizing his work. From the viewpoint of a traditional Indian one can designate him a ‘Gnanayogi’. His life as second birth, as second sailing was the journey of a soul to realization, an unending journey of the quest for knowing. It is not as though his physical disability prompted an inward journey. With Kassner the elemental and strong power of the senses and the spiritual energy is unmistakable. Kassner's world is a paradox. In it there is suffering and that makes it very Christian; there is in him the drama of the soul, a deep, unresolved tension; every feeling call forth its denial, with every thought its contradiction. There is also unity in division. With every division there is also a crossing. It is lived paradox, not dialectics. It is tension, not antitheses. No dialectic, no millennium, no utopia, no synthesis, no telos, only the middle and one has to live with it. Hence the absence of any revolt in him. This is titiksha in the real sense of the term.
and the Word
becoming flesh are of central importance to Kassner's thoughts. Kassner said that the hold of the myth held sway as ‘grand form’, as order, rank and institution even in the ages of Christian dogma
. The complete dissolution takes place in the age of baroque. Then in the nineteenth century, the French Revolution
, Kant's Critiques and Goethe's Faust
inaugurate the real chronicle of the individual. Through a ‘Gleichgewichtstörung’, to use Kassner's phrase, the individual is loosened from tradition and becomes a slave to the collective. Kassner diagnoses the individual of his times as dilettante, achiever, speculator, actor, dialectician, materialist, mediocre, indiscrete humans lacking altogether the sense of measure. But the world of the individual is also the world of freedom. The isolated derailed individual seeking his counterpart finds him in the Gerechte (the just man, or the righteous man). The notion of the der Heilige (the Holy) is absent in the western world.
Kassner says the counterpart of the Indian Rishi in the West is the Just Man. Kassner sees the saviour of the modern times in the Just man, in the pilgrim
, in the Christian and the child like man. According to Kassner the contradiction between thought and action is Christian. This state of being at odds with oneself, induced no doubt by the elemental tension occasioned by the psyche's experience of contradictory, or even conflicting experiences, is what prompts Kassner to rehabilitate Plato
nic periagoge in a Christian context. In other words, the want of alignment with the temporal world leads to the profound onset of imagination –Einbildung, restored by Kassner to the transitive sense of Middle High German
– the boundless imagination, i.e. its "lack of measure" holds for today's humans according to Kassner the only promise of accomplishing the amalgam of truth and justice. Steigerung and Umkehr (antilepsis) are the twin features of this transcendence in immanence.
Evocative images characterize Kassner's writing. Instead of analytic concepts he deliberately employs paradoxes and zeugmas that meaningfully bring together the small and the big, the near and the distant to obtain deep insights. In this context one needs to investigate Kassner's key terms such as Middle, Measure, Magic Body, Personality, Imagination
, Vision, Seeing, Order, Umkehr, Saint
, Chimera etc. "His concepts are not really concepts", writes Usinger "... not defined, the ideas occur again and again." One of Kassner's characters says, "You know very well my weakness and understand that I cannot define and all my definitions are false." His works have no linear development and do not yield swiftly to rational analysis.
Politically, Kassner saw himself early on as a European who tried to characterize the peoples of Europe without favoring his own. His sharpest criticism is often reserved for the Germans. In spite of his youthful enthusiasm for Treitschke and Chamberlain he was never openly antisemitic; he married a woman of Jewish ancestry. Nevertheless, derogatory comments about Jews and Jewish stereotypes can be found in his writing (cf. Schmölders in Neumann/Ott 1999).
In his late work the tendency toward mystical and religious syncretism
comes to the fore: Kassner sees himself as the "magician" who employs a magical and inaccessible language to point to "mysteries" and "secrets" of the world: he plays with themes of Buddhism and Indian religions that he mixes with Christian ideas.
Kassner regretted his early admiration of Friedrich Nietzsche
. As early as 1910 in Dilettantismus he accuses Nietzsche of having contributed to "everyone wanting to be an artist." One of the greatest influences on Kassner was Søren Kierkegaard
to whose Christian anthropology he refers again and again. Other named role models are Blaise Pascal and Plato.
Intellectually, Kassner is closest to his contemporaries Hofmannsthal and Rilke, Karl Wolfskehl and Marx Picard (who also produced physiognomic works), but there are also clear philosophical parallels to Oswald Spengler.
Georg Lukács, Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin admired Kassner's early works - although Benjamin also sharply criticized Kassner. He was praised by his contemporaries: in 1908 Rudolf Borchardt called him the "only genuine mystic of quality;" in 1911 Friedrich Gundolf attested to his "purity and loftiness of sentiment;" Dolf Sternberger, Fritz Usinger, Hans Paeschke were among his admirers. But Kassner also encountered criticism and a lack of understanding, for example, by Rudolf Alexander Schröder. Thomas Mann characterized his book Zahl and Gesicht as "hair-splitting and precious;" the Swiss playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt
reported that for him a meeting Kassner had "broken Kassner's spell." "A new Nietzsche has appeared among us. He is called Rudolf Kassner and he speaks in antitheses, contradictions and paradoxes, deep and mystical, here and there in the tone of a prophet. Whether ‘the Modern’ places him above, below, or beside Nietzsche one does not know yet, but as far as I am concerned he is to me dearer than Nietzsche" hailed a reviewer of his first published work in 1900.
Congratulating Kassner on his eightieth birthday T. S. Eliot
wrote: "To contribute to the chorus of praise and thanks which should greet Rudolf Kassner on his eightieth birthday is a privilege which confers greater honour to the contributor than to the recipient. I am happy to have the opportunity on this occasion to salute and pay homage to so distinguished an author and so great a European who has every reason to look back with pride upon his life-work."
In the same volume W. H. Auden
writes on Kassner's book Zahl und Gedicht: "Among all the books which a writer reads over the years, the number which have so essentially conditioned his vision of life that he cannot imagine who he was before he read them is, naturally, very small.... Zahl und Gesicht was for me, and still is, such a book; in such a case discussion is not called for, only gratitude and homage."
Ludwig Curtius wrote to him: "You were to me always a ‘sage’ like the sages of the ancient times, whom I approached as a child, which I still do today." In Kassner's writings on system and order in the work Zahl und Gesicht the Swiss dramatist Dürrenmatt could read a premonition of later inhuman totalitarian regimes. Yet Kassner is relatively unknown; most histories of literature and philosophy do not even mention his name.
to Germany. He discovered the Christian poet in Baudelaire. In 1903 he made the German public aware of the works of André Gide through his translation. Even before existential
philosophy came into vogue, Kassner in his essay on Kierkegaard, which incidentally is the first German writing on Kierkegaard, had spoken about the existential predicament, the thrown-ness of man in the World. He translated from Greek, English, French and Russian. His understanding of the Indian society is full of rich insights quite different from that of a philosopher like Hegel, who had never set foot in India. Despite his physical handicap, Kassner traveled to India, met people there, saw for himself how people live there. Kassner's insights into India are an admirable example of his distinctive approach to cultural understanding and anthropology
. In his own nonacademic way he was one of the most learned men of the last century. He traveled far and wide, even to inaccessible regions, despite a life-long crippling disability. He was more widely traveled than most of his contemporaries. His knowledge of the classical world, of the oriental and occidental texts, of religion and philosophy, of history and culture, of literature and art is profound and comprehensive. He had a deep knowledge of the cultural history of modern man. He saw, as perhaps no one else saw, the internal contradictions and discontents of modernity.
Kassner was immensely productive; his literary activity extends over sixty years and he was writing till the age of eighty-five. He is considered one of the greatest essay
ists and "the only German essayist who processed humor." In his writings he judges severely his contemporaries and his criticisms are provocative. Given his vision and his relentless focus on man even his silences are telling. Kassner was no less an iconoclast
than Nietzsche, though temperamentally he is the exact opposite of the overwrought philosopher. Mason wonders: "How little there is in the post-renaissance mental activities and achievements that he does not abominate!" But he adds, "There is something curiously authoritative about these denunciations of his.... They raise important issues, which have hitherto been overlooked; one cannot afford to ignore them." But this criticism of his never ended up in nihilism
. He was above all an anti-nihilist. Kassner speaks of being a mystic
in order not to become a nihilist. Though Kassner says that he is a conservative due to the exasperation and consternation that modern world caused him, he is in no sense a reactionary, cynic, pessimist or defeatist and had no romantic yearning for the past, and no escapist delusions.
Yet he is unknown. Could it be that Kassner's works were ‘out of season’? In as early as 1929 Hofmannsthal wrote about Kassner's writings that "a not too distant future will wonder how our period that is craving for new forms and contents could neglect such fresh content in such novel forms." Forty years later in 1969 Michael Schmidt comments that "this ‘staunende Zeit’ cannot of course be ours." Still a generation later in 2005 in the latest article published on Kassner Prof. Subramanian writes that even today "fame has eluded Kassner."
Kassner is variously described as ‘Philosopher’, ‘Thinker’, ‘Cultural–Historian’, ‘Platonist’, and ‘Philosopher–Poet’. One may call him a ‘cultural philosopher’, for the primary object of his studies were cultures and their symbolic representations. His contributions to the understanding of Greek antiquity, ancient India and European Modernity form an essential part of his writings. It is indeed appropriate to call him a ‘seer’, in the multiple sense of the term, for ‘seeing’ and ‘vision’ are central to his physiognomy. Whenever he observes, he conveys unfailingly his sense of wonderment. It is this wonderment of the seer that sets in train his deep probing inquiry bordering on the mystic, which yet again to Kassner becomes manifest when poetry affiliates to philosophy. It is his vision, his Anschauung that gives his works an intensity and luminosity.
For as Kassner himself said "I should regard every line of my work suspect... if the knowledge and the feeling desert me that any enlightenment of man from them must work like a physical light; out of this desire arose the form, style and the language of the whole work". His works present a distinctive way of seeing, totally different from the current empirical methods of the social sciences.
The same themes recur in Kassner again and again, in their prismatic break-up as essays, parable
s, dialogues and reminiscences. He visits the same zone time and again with profit. It is not as though there is no progress, indeed the progress in thought can be said to have a spiral movement, as his dogged, unflinching gaze winds itself around the phenomena.
But as Eudo C. Mason suggests, Kassner's texts, given their importance and greatness are justifiably difficult. For when we seek the source of their difficulty we cannot say that his style is pedantic or jargon-filled. His sentences are always clear and sober without rhetorical flourish but laced with gentle humor and irony
. It is in a sense unfortunate that he labeled his worldview physiognomy, for it was a discredited discipline and Kassner has had to an explain over and again how his physiognomy differs from traditional physiognomy.
Kassner also translated works by Plato
, Aristotle
, André Gide
, Gogol, Leo Tolstoy
, Dostoievsky, Pushkin and Laurence Sterne
.
, pp. 32–33.
William Blake
William Blake was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age...
introduced this English romantic poet to German-speaking audiences. His literary career covered six decades, including a period of isolation during the Nazi years in Vienna. His writings on physiognomy
Physiognomy
Physiognomy is the assessment of a person's character or personality from their outer appearance, especially the face...
reflect his effort to understand the problems of modernity and Man's subsequent disconnectedness from time and place. His later autobiographical writings suggest a brilliant literary mind attempting to make sense of a chaotic post-nuclear world.
Biography
Before his birth, Rudolf Kassner's family emigrated to MoraviaMoravia
Moravia is a historical region in Central Europe in the east of the Czech Republic, and one of the former Czech lands, together with Bohemia and Silesia. It takes its name from the Morava River which rises in the northwest of the region...
(at the time part of Austro-Hungary) from Silesia
Silesia
Silesia is a historical region of Central Europe located mostly in Poland, with smaller parts also in the Czech Republic, and Germany.Silesia is rich in mineral and natural resources, and includes several important industrial areas. Silesia's largest city and historical capital is Wrocław...
. His father, Oskar Kassner, was a landowner and factory owner, descended from government officials and businessmen. His maternal ancestors were peasants.Kassner regarded himself as a German-Slavic mixture, having inherited German Blut (German: blood) from his mother and a Slavic Geist (German: spirit) from his father (Das physiognomische Weltbild, 116ff.).
The seventh of 10 children, Rudolf Kassner was born on 11 September 1873 in Gross-Pavlowitz in southern Moravia, near Znaim. Shortly after Kassner's birth, his father moved the family to the countryside near Nikolsburg
Mikulov
Mikulov is a town in the South Moravian Region of the Czech Republic with a population of 7,608 . It is located directly on the border with Lower Austria. Mikulov is located at the edge of a hilly area and the three Nové Mlýny reservoirs...
, where he leased imperial property, profitably cultivated beet
Beet
The beet is a plant in the Chenopodiaceae family which is now included in Amaranthaceae family. It is best known in its numerous cultivated varieties, the most well known of which is the purple root vegetable known as the beetroot or garden beet...
s, and ran a sugar factory.
Kassner contracted poliomyelitis
Poliomyelitis
Poliomyelitis, often called polio or infantile paralysis, is an acute viral infectious disease spread from person to person, primarily via the fecal-oral route...
at nine months of age, which affected both his legs and required him to use crutches for the rest of his life. He grew up in a strict Catholic milieu and was schooled at home. He and his siblings were educated by governesses. When he was a young adult, a tutor prepared him for annual state examinations that allowed him to attend the gymnasium in neighboring provincial town of Nikolsberg.
Student life
In 1892 Kassner enrolled at the University of ViennaUniversity of Vienna
The University of Vienna is a public university located in Vienna, Austria. It was founded by Duke Rudolph IV in 1365 and is the oldest university in the German-speaking world...
where he set out to study German philology
Philology
Philology is the study of language in written historical sources; it is a combination of literary studies, history and linguistics.Classical philology is the philology of Greek and Classical Latin...
, Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
, and Philosophy
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
. He spent the last two semesters, in 1895 and '96, in Berlin, where he attended the lectures of the nationalist historian Heinrich von Treitschke
Heinrich von Treitschke
Heinrich Gotthard von Treitschke was a nationalist German historian and political writer during the time of the German Empire.-Early life and teaching career:...
. Kassner, too, was an enthusiastic theater-goer. This formed the basis for later reflections on acting and the role of the actor, important for his physiognomic worldview. In 1896 he returned to Vienna and completed his studies with a doctoral dissertation on Der ewige Jude in der Dichtung (The Eternal Jew in Poetry), which he completed in 1897.
Despite his physical handicap, Kassner traveled extensively in Russia, North Africa, and India. He lived in Paris, London, and Munich for short periods of time. His first publications found favor among fin-de-siècle poets and artists. He was a member of the so-called Bohemian circle in Munich to which Frank Wedekind
Frank Wedekind
Benjamin Franklin Wedekind , usually known as Frank Wedekind, was a German playwright...
and Eduard Graf von Keyserling
Eduard von Keyserling
Eduard Graf von Keyserling was a Baltic German fiction writer and dramatist and an exponent of literary Impressionism.-Biography:...
also belonged. Kassner was acquainted also with Ulrich Graf von Brockdorff-Rantzau
Ulrich Graf von Brockdorff-Rantzau
Ulrich Graf von Brockdorff-Rantzau was a German diplomat, the first Foreign Minister of the Weimar Republic and German Ambassador to the USSR for most of the twenties.-Early career:...
, Paul Valéry
Paul Valéry
Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry was a French poet, essayist, and philosopher. His interests were sufficiently broad that he can be classified as a polymath...
, and André Gide
André Gide
André Paul Guillaume Gide was a French author and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1947. Gide's career ranged from its beginnings in the symbolist movement, to the advent of anticolonialism between the two World Wars.Known for his fiction as well as his autobiographical works, Gide...
. From 1900 to 1906 he was a regular member of the Viennese group gathered around the cultural philosopher and anti-Semite Houston Stewart Chamberlain
Houston Stewart Chamberlain
Houston Stewart Chamberlain was a British-born German author of books on political philosophy, natural science and the German composer Richard Wagner. He later became a German citizen. Chamberlain married Wagner's daughter, Eva, some years after Wagner's death...
. Kassner later distanced himself from Chamberlain.
In 1902 he met Hugo von Hofmannsthal
Hugo von Hofmannsthal
Hugo Laurenz August Hofmann von Hofmannsthal ; , was an Austrian novelist, librettist, poet, dramatist, narrator, and essayist.-Early life:...
and in 1907, Rainer Maria Rilke
Rainer Maria Rilke
René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke , better known as Rainer Maria Rilke, was a Bohemian–Austrian poet. He is considered one of the most significant poets in the German language...
, and developed deep and lasting friendships with both men. Rilke dedicated the eighth Duineser Elegie
Duino Elegies
The Duino Elegies are a set of ten elegies written in German by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke from 1912 to 1922. They are frequently referred to as Rilke's most acclaimed poetic work.-Presentation:...
to Kassner. For a time both Hofmannsthal and Rilke considered Kassner to be the most far-sighted contemporary cultural philosopher. His close friendship with Rilke has received a great deal of scholarly attention. Schmölders speculates that at least on Kassner's part this friendship was latent homosexuality (in: Neumann/Ott 1999).
After the outbreak of World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
, Kassner moved to Vienna. He married in 1914. During the war years Kassner passionately studied Mathematics and Physics; for this was the period when Einstein's great work was published and much of the work on the foundations of mathematics were taking place. He met Einstein once in Vienna. Kassner tried to understand in his own way, new ideas such as the concept of four dimensional space and the concept of Number etc. His book Zahl und Gesicht is the result of this deep engagement. During this period he was often in Berlin were he met Georg Simmel
Georg Simmel
Georg Simmel was a major German sociologist, philosopher, and critic.Simmel was one of the first generation of German sociologists: his neo-Kantian approach laid the foundations for sociological antipositivism, asking 'What is society?' in a direct allusion to Kant's question 'What is nature?',...
, Gerhart Hauptmann
Gerhart Hauptmann
Gerhart Hauptmann was a German dramatist and novelist who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1912.-Life and work:...
and Walter Rathenau.
In 1924 and in 1931 Kassner was again in Rome. From 1926 to 1931 he traveled every year to Paris and he spent every late summer in the castle Schönhausen
Schönhausen
Schönhausen is a municipality in the district of Stendal in Saxony-Anhalt in Germany, located 70 km north of the state capital of Magdeburg. It is the seat of the Verbandsgemeinde Elbe-Havel-Land.- History :...
, where Princess Herbert Bismarck lived. During the interwar period also Kassner published many of his books, although they were prohibited in Germany after 1933. Nevertheless, his books continued to appear until he was forbidden to write (Schreibverbot) after the Nazi annexation
Anschluss
The Anschluss , also known as the ', was the occupation and annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany in 1938....
of Austria in 1938. During World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, Kassner remained in his home in Vienna. Out of his years-long work in isolation emerged a monumental work Das neunzehnte Jahrhundert: Ausdruck und Größe. His wife, who was Jewish, had escaped from Austria after the Anschluss with the help of Hans Carossa.
Through the intervention of some of his Swiss friends Kassner moved to Switzerland
Switzerland
Switzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition....
in 1945. In 1946 he moved to Sierre (Siders) in Valais
Valais
The Valais is one of the 26 cantons of Switzerland in the southwestern part of the country, around the valley of the Rhône from its headwaters to Lake Geneva, separating the Pennine Alps from the Bernese Alps. The canton is one of the drier parts of Switzerland in its central Rhône valley...
where his friend Rilke had also spent the last years of his life. He lectured at the University of Zürich
University of Zurich
The University of Zurich , located in the city of Zurich, is the largest university in Switzerland, with over 25,000 students. It was founded in 1833 from the existing colleges of theology, law, medicine and a new faculty of philosophy....
and lived in Sierre
Sierre
Sierre is the capital of the district of Sierre in the canton of Valais in Switzerland. It has a population of 14,355.It is situated on the French–German language border of the canton of Wallis...
until his death after a long illness on 1 April 1959.
Travels
Between 1898 and 1912 Kassner traveled extensively. In the years 1897–98, 1908, 1910 and in 1912 he was in England. His first book Die Mystik, die Künstler und das Leben is about English poetsEnglish poetry
The history of English poetry stretches from the middle of the 7th century to the present day. Over this period, English poets have written some of the most enduring poems in Western culture, and the language and its poetry have spread around the globe. Consequently, the term English poetry is...
of the eighteenth century. The English writer Laurence Sterne
Laurence Sterne
Laurence Sterne was an Irish novelist and an Anglican clergyman. He is best known for his novels The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, and A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy; but he also published many sermons, wrote memoirs, and was involved in local politics...
influenced Kassnerr and he appears as a character in Kassner's Die Chimäre. Kassner translated Sterne's Tristram Shandy and Cardinal Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua
Apologia Pro Vita Sua
Apologia Pro Vita Sua is the classic defence by John Henry Newman of his religious opinions, published in 1864 in response to what he saw as an unwarranted attack on him, the Catholic priesthood, and Roman Catholic doctrine by Charles Kingsley. The work quickly became a bestseller and has...
into German, and wrote several essays on Sterne, Thomas de Quincey
Thomas de Quincey
Thomas Penson de Quincey was an English esssayist, best known for his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater .-Child and student:...
and Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy, OM was an English novelist and poet. While his works typically belong to the Naturalism movement, several poems display elements of the previous Romantic and Enlightenment periods of literature, such as his fascination with the supernatural.While he regarded himself primarily as a...
.
In 1900 Kassner made his first trip to Paris. Here he met André Gide
André Gide
André Paul Guillaume Gide was a French author and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1947. Gide's career ranged from its beginnings in the symbolist movement, to the advent of anticolonialism between the two World Wars.Known for his fiction as well as his autobiographical works, Gide...
, whose work Philoktet he translated into German. He also met Maurice Maeterlinck
Maurice Maeterlinck
Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck, also called Comte Maeterlinck from 1932, was a Belgian playwright, poet, and essayist who wrote in French. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911. The main themes in his work are death and the meaning of life...
. His involvement with French culture is reflected in his essays on Baudelaire, Auguste Rodin
Auguste Rodin
François-Auguste-René Rodin , known as Auguste Rodin , was a French sculptor. Although Rodin is generally considered the progenitor of modern sculpture, he did not set out to rebel against the past...
, Abbe Galiani and Diderot and in his translations of the works of Gide and St. John Perse.
While in Paris, Kassner received a visit from T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
and during this trip, he formed his great friendship with Rilke, the poet. In many histories of German literature
German literature
German literature comprises those literary texts written in the German language. This includes literature written in Germany, Austria, the German part of Switzerland, and to a lesser extent works of the German diaspora. German literature of the modern period is mostly in Standard German, but there...
, Kassner finds mention at best as a friend of Rilke and Hugo von Hofmannsthal
Hugo von Hofmannsthal
Hugo Laurenz August Hofmann von Hofmannsthal ; , was an Austrian novelist, librettist, poet, dramatist, narrator, and essayist.-Early life:...
. Yet, the two poets have testified amply to Kassner's profound influence on them. Rilke dedicated his eighth Duino Elegy, the most important elegy, to Kassner. In a letter to Princess Marie von Thurn and Taxis, Rilke says of Kassner: "...is not this man, I say to myself, perhaps the most important of all those who are writing today?" On his deathbed Rilke recalled with great fondness his association with Kassner.
Kassner's association with Hofmannsthal began in 1902. He visited the poet in Rodaun. Both of them belonged to that generation of Austrians who believed they were witness to the steady decline of western culture and the inexorable erosion of its institutions. Hofmannsthal wrote about Kassner in 1904: " I believe that he is perhaps the most important literary man, the most important culture critic that we have ever had in Germany" Kassner also knew Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the notorious racial theorist and anti-Semite, to whom he had sent his first book. At Chamberlain's House in Vienna Kassner often met Count Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, Count Hermann von Keyserling and the Indologist Leopold von Schröder.
In 1905 Kassner traveled through Spain, and from to Tangier in Morocco
Morocco
Morocco , officially the Kingdom of Morocco , is a country located in North Africa. It has a population of more than 32 million and an area of 710,850 km², and also primarily administers the disputed region of the Western Sahara...
. His father passed away in Vienna in 1906 and Kassner spent that year in Vienna. In 1907 he traveled again to Italy, further to Tunisia
Tunisia
Tunisia , officially the Tunisian RepublicThe long name of Tunisia in other languages used in the country is: , is the northernmost country in Africa. It is a Maghreb country and is bordered by Algeria to the west, Libya to the southeast, and the Mediterranean Sea to the north and east. Its area...
, Algeria
Algeria
Algeria , officially the People's Democratic Republic of Algeria , also formally referred to as the Democratic and Popular Republic of Algeria, is a country in the Maghreb region of Northwest Africa with Algiers as its capital.In terms of land area, it is the largest country in Africa and the Arab...
, Morocco and by motorcar through the Sahara
Sahara
The Sahara is the world's second largest desert, after Antarctica. At over , it covers most of Northern Africa, making it almost as large as Europe or the United States. The Sahara stretches from the Red Sea, including parts of the Mediterranean coasts, to the outskirts of the Atlantic Ocean...
.
On 16 October 1908 Kassner's began his lengthy journey through India
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
. From London he proceeded by sea to Bombay. On board he became acquainted with the Maharaja of Kapurthala and one Mr. Inder Choudhary, a judge at the Calcutta high court. In the first week of November 1908 Kassner traveled from Bombay to Jaipur
Jaipur
Jaipur , also popularly known as the Pink City, is the capital and largest city of the Indian state of Rajasthan. Founded on 18 November 1727 by Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh II, the ruler of Amber, the city today has a population of more than 3.1 million....
; then to Thaneswar and arrived on 24 November 1908 in Kapurthala
Kapurthala
Kapurthala is a city in Punjab state of India. It is the administrative headquarters of Kapurthala District. It was the capital of the Kapurthala State, a princely state in British India. The secular and aesthetic mix of the city with its prominent buildings based on French and Indo-Saracenic...
to take part in the birthday celebrations of the Maharaja. From there he went towards Lahore
Lahore
Lahore is the capital of the Pakistani province of Punjab and the second largest city in the country. With a rich and fabulous history dating back to over a thousand years ago, Lahore is no doubt Pakistan's cultural capital. One of the most densely populated cities in the world, Lahore remains a...
and Peshawar
Peshawar
Peshawar is the capital of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and the administrative center and central economic hub for the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan....
, also a jaunt to the Khyber Pass
Khyber Pass
The Khyber Pass, is a mountain pass linking Pakistan and Afghanistan.The Pass was an integral part of the ancient Silk Road. It is mentioned in the Bible as the "Pesh Habor," and it is one of the oldest known passes in the world....
. He returned south through Delhi
Delhi
Delhi , officially National Capital Territory of Delhi , is the largest metropolis by area and the second-largest by population in India, next to Mumbai. It is the eighth largest metropolis in the world by population with 16,753,265 inhabitants in the Territory at the 2011 Census...
and Agra
Agra
Agra a.k.a. Akbarabad is a city on the banks of the river Yamuna in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, India, west of state capital, Lucknow and south from national capital New Delhi. With a population of 1,686,976 , it is one of the most populous cities in Uttar Pradesh and the 19th most...
to Lucknow
Lucknow
Lucknow is the capital city of Uttar Pradesh in India. Lucknow is the administrative headquarters of Lucknow District and Lucknow Division....
. In a train accident on 3 December Kassner lost his baggage. Ten days after that he reached Benaras via Allahabad
Allahabad
Allahabad , or Settled by God in Persian, is a major city of India and is one of the main holy cities of Hinduism. It was renamed by the Mughals from the ancient name of Prayaga , and is by some accounts the second-oldest city in India. It is located in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh,...
. Next he proceeded to Calcutta, where, incidentally, he met Stefan Zweig
Stefan Zweig
Stefan Zweig was an Austrian novelist, playwright, journalist and biographer. At the height of his literary career, in the 1920s and 1930s, he was one of the most famous writers in the world.- Biography :...
. In Calcutta he stayed with his friend, whom he met on the journey to India, Inder Choudhary. On 1 January 1909 he went to Darjeeling, from where he viewed the Kanchanjunga. He went by steamer to Burma and traveled up to Bhano on the Chinese border. From Calcutta Kassner went by sea to Colombo, from there he reached South India in mid-February; setting out most likely from Tuticorin to Madras via Madurai
Madurai
Madurai is the third largest city in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu and one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. It served as the capital city of the Pandyan Kingdom. It is the administrative headquarters of Madurai District and is famous for its temples built by Pandyan and...
and Thanjavur. He reached Madras on 24 February 1909. He also visited Hyderabad and Ellora and journeyed home from Bombay on 6 March 1909.
On the return journey he spent some time in Egypt; from there he proceeded to Rome and spent the rest of that year in Italy. We do not know much about Kassner's experiences in India or about the sources of his knowledge about India, apart from what he himself says in his writings. But it is evident that India deeply influenced Kassner. Kassner himself confessed later that he became a philosopher through the Indians. Besides his two major works on India, Indian themes constantly recur in Kassner's writings. Kassner's Indian journey and his experiences in India are of immense importance in understanding his life and works.
In 1911 he traveled to Russia
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
. He started from Vienna in May 1911 and traveled to St Petersburg; then to Moscow and from there along the Volga up to Saralow. He went southwards to Yalta
Yalta
Yalta is a city in Crimea, southern Ukraine, on the north coast of the Black Sea.The city is located on the site of an ancient Greek colony, said to have been founded by Greek sailors who were looking for a safe shore on which to land. It is situated on a deep bay facing south towards the Black...
and then to Kieslovodsk, north of Caucasus
Caucasus
The Caucasus, also Caucas or Caucasia , is a geopolitical region at the border of Europe and Asia, and situated between the Black and the Caspian sea...
. In an automobile he crossed the Caucasus and went along the route that leads via the Caspian to Samarkhand in Turkestan. He returned after a brief stay in St. Petersburg and Moscow to Berlin towards the end of October 1911. Soon translations from the Russian followed: Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy.
Works
Kassner himself divided his work, into three periods: aestheticismAestheticism
Aestheticism was a 19th century European art movement that emphasized aesthetic values more than socio-political themes for literature, fine art, the decorative arts, and interior design...
1900-1908; physiognomy 1908-1938: and after 1938 autobiographical writings, religious and mystical essays, and "meta-political" interpretations of world events. Kassner rejected rigid philosophical systems and thus preferred looser literary forms such as essays, aphorisms, prose sketches, parables, and allegories. Nevertheless, his works revolve around certain coherent contexts and returns again and again to the same themes.
Aestheticism
Kassner can be characterized as an antirationalist. His writings deal with themes and concepts of medieval mysticism, hermetics, and Indian philosophy. For him the most important ability of the mind (Verstand) is not reason (ratio) but rather the imagination (Einbildungskraft)which he believed make "living perception" possible. He believed that he had overcome the analytical and rational dissection of the world by means of a "totality" of perception.According to Schmölders (1999) Kassner's essays have a "predatory component." His early adversary was the "dilettante", that is, modern man who overestimates himself and his place in the world, who would be an artist without being able to the recognize the "whole" of the world, who is a victim of relativism and individualism. He accuses modernity of being without "standard" (Maß), no longer able to show man his place in the world. The only way to attain "standard" and "greatness" is through passion and suffering. Kassner further denounces the "actor" who only plays with social roles and turns himself into the accomplice of modernity.
Physiognomy
Kassner's post-1908 writings on physiognomy are probably the most original part of his work. His physiognomy is not a system for reading character from facial features; rather it is at its core a conservative cultural philosophy. Kassner saw in modernityModernity
Modernity typically refers to a post-traditional, post-medieval historical period, one marked by the move from feudalism toward capitalism, industrialization, secularization, rationalization, the nation-state and its constituent institutions and forms of surveillance...
a cultural crisis that left traces of alienation and uprootedness in human faces. In the intellectual landscape of the 1920s Kassner's world-view thus reflects the "conservative revolution."
According to Kassner's physiognomy, in the old, aristocratic corporate society every person had a face that resulted from his connection to his estate. Modern man has, however, lost the "standard" that anchored him in the community: the face of modern man is thus "gaping" like a wound because it is no longer anchored in the world. Kassner uses "face" in its dual meaning as vision and visage, seeing and countenance. Physiognomic interpretation is, however, not something that can be learned; Kassner believed that the "seer" alone is called to physiognomy. "Imagination" becomes for Kassner the most important human ability, for it alone makes it possible to see the world as a unity or "form" and "to see things together."
For Kassner the physiognomy
Physiognomy
Physiognomy is the assessment of a person's character or personality from their outer appearance, especially the face...
is basically a ‘phenomenology of Being’. It is based on Goethe's anti-Kant
KANT
KANT is a computer algebra system for mathematicians interested in algebraic number theory, performing sophisticated computations in algebraic number fields, in global function fields, and in local fields. KASH is the associated command line interface...
ian statement "The highest is to understand that all facts are already theory. One need not search behind the phenomenon, for they themselves are the theory". Kassner's physiognomy is an attempt to portray the world in all its manifestations.
Of course, Kassner's teachings are not easy to understand. Kassner's physiognomy though is distinct from the traditional rational physiognomy from pseudo-Aristotle to Lavater. Rational science objects to physiognomy thus: How can one draw conclusions about the inner character of anybody from his external features? Can one? Yet, physiognomy tried to be ‘scientific’and came to be devalued. Even in the eighteenth century Lavater tried to reduce the differences among the human faces to certain common denominators and tried to build a system of symbols to interpret it. (Kant
KANT
KANT is a computer algebra system for mathematicians interested in algebraic number theory, performing sophisticated computations in algebraic number fields, in global function fields, and in local fields. KASH is the associated command line interface...
considered it too pretentious a task for mere mortals). Nevertheless the idea was to build a system and to give a scientific explanation.
Kassner's physiognomy studies the rhythmic and changeable aspects of the face, which are not accessible to the rational physiognomy characteristic of its early period. Freudian psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis is a psychological theory developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis has expanded, been criticized and developed in different directions, mostly by some of Freud's former students, such as Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav...
considered every face a mask
Mask
A mask is an article normally worn on the face, typically for protection, disguise, performance or entertainment. Masks have been used since antiquity for both ceremonial and practical purposes...
and tried to unravel what lies behind it. This is a far cry from Kassner's physiognomy. Of course psychoanalysis has recognized that "man no longer appears as he is". But Kassner's physiognomy asserts, " Man is just as he appears to be because he does not appear as he really is." This is the basic axiom of Kassner's physiognomy. Kassner developed a style suited to the articulation of this physiognomy: the frequent use of zeugma
Zeugma
Zeugma is a figure of speech in which two or more parts of a sentence are joined with a single common verb or noun. A zeugma employs both ellipsis, the omission of words which are easily understood, and parallelism, the balance of several words or phrases...
for example is characteristic of his writing; he brings together things that appear to be contradictory on the surface in order to show not immediately evident interconnections between them. The seemingly contradictory phenomena combine to give a total image of the whole. One distinct advantage of this method is its usefulness in avoiding of the tendency to reify.
Kassner's physiognomy is not about naïve inference of individual characteristics from physical features. It is a seeing-together of the soul
Soul
A soul in certain spiritual, philosophical, and psychological traditions is the incorporeal essence of a person or living thing or object. Many philosophical and spiritual systems teach that humans have souls, and others teach that all living things and even inanimate objects have souls. The...
and cosmos. Kassner uses the word Gesicht (an untranslatable word which refers to what sees, namely face or countenance, and also what is seen, the vision.). This physiognomy is also a cosmogony
Cosmogony
Cosmogony, or cosmogeny, is any scientific theory concerning the coming into existence or origin of the universe, or about how reality came to be. The word comes from the Greek κοσμογονία , from κόσμος "cosmos, the world", and the root of γίνομαι / γέγονα "to be born, come about"...
. For Kassner all that can have a form: animals and humans, ideas, philosophies and religions, concrete things and products of pure fantasies, things of the present and the remote past all these can be Gesicht. In this Gesicht. rather than behind it, is the relationship of the soul to the entire cosmos and it needs interpretation. For Kassner, the physiognomist is the mystic of the whole created world.
The paradox as a form of thinking is very important to understand Kassners diagnosis of modernity. The incongruence between the external appearance and the internal disposition of man, the surface and deep structure of humans, as it were, forms the basis of his understanding of the modern individual. Psychoanalysis and other theories of human nature, analyse the appearance to unmask the reality. Kassner avoids all reification and takes that which appears first to his sight, his vision, namely human action and behavior, as the basis for his searching physiognomic enquiry.
Phenomena considered purely externally call for a rational explanation for establishing causal nexus, whereas to understand authentic form requires imaginative interpretation. To be able to see the form, one need to fuse critical and creative faculties, in short ‘räsonnieren’ as Kassner terms it. Hence, the conscious use of paradoxes that characterizes much of Kassner's writing. This indeed produces a shock-effect, much like the stunning effect of the Socratic elenchos. His zeugmas confront the reader to provide him a surprisingly new perspective. Like a Zen
Zen
Zen is a school of Mahāyāna Buddhism founded by the Buddhist monk Bodhidharma. The word Zen is from the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese word Chán , which in turn is derived from the Sanskrit word dhyāna, which can be approximately translated as "meditation" or "meditative state."Zen...
master with his counter-rational sayings, Kassner shakes the reader's rational, analytic thought processes in order to make him aware of the dynamic whole, the whole reality of the appearance.
Kassner uses many ideas such as form, gestalt, whole, order, idea etc., to emphasize the holistic aspects of his approach. The activity that forms the basis of this type of perception is seeing and interpreting (deuten). It calls for seeing–together, for a synoptic vision. This is why Kassner rejects the ‘thing-in-itself’ that never manifests itself in phenomena. Kassner holds that the image includes the thing along with its movement, its dunamis. The phenomena are not the external covering of content. Form and content yield a unity, held together by imagination, whereas critical reason separates them. Imagination is synthetic; reason is analytic.
Autobiographical
Kassner addressed the important intellectual movements of his time. He is a pronounced opponent of psychoanalysis which for him is a further symptom of cultural crisis. It tries to discover in man the most extreme appetites - parricide, incest - and turns the great into the banal. On the other hand, Albert Einstein's theory of relativity was for him the most important confirmation of his philosophical thought. In Zahl und GesichtKassner even tried to make Einstein's theory compatible with his own understanding of "space world" and "time world."Although Kassner alludes to current events in his writings and analyzes contemporary society, this is done in his later work increasingly in a kind of private mythology that makes use of ambiguous, enigmatic and often unclearly defined ideas that often cannot to attributed to a political stance.
Kassner's autobiographical works are difficult to understand; even his reminiscences contain passages, which are not easy to follow because of their idiosyncratic terminology. But many great modern texts are difficult (who will not vouch for enigmatic intricacies of Eliot and Pound
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
, Joyce
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
and Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher known for his existential and phenomenological explorations of the "question of Being."...
to mention but a few). "Works of this kind with their closely woven thoughts, are not easily accessible", wrote Hofmannsthal. "It consists of a number of unconnected writings...the contents are new and important, the title is unobtrusive. In the writings there is no system or definite terminology nor does the author mention about the unity of the work" . Surely Kassner does not provide an easy approach to his works. One cannot build a system out of his works. As he himself says "I have no system and hence not the language of the system".
Kassner's world is a world without masters and disciples. It is not built upon his predecessors, he had no precursors, hence the difficulty of categorizing his work. From the viewpoint of a traditional Indian one can designate him a ‘Gnanayogi’. His life as second birth, as second sailing was the journey of a soul to realization, an unending journey of the quest for knowing. It is not as though his physical disability prompted an inward journey. With Kassner the elemental and strong power of the senses and the spiritual energy is unmistakable. Kassner's world is a paradox. In it there is suffering and that makes it very Christian; there is in him the drama of the soul, a deep, unresolved tension; every feeling call forth its denial, with every thought its contradiction. There is also unity in division. With every division there is also a crossing. It is lived paradox, not dialectics. It is tension, not antitheses. No dialectic, no millennium, no utopia, no synthesis, no telos, only the middle and one has to live with it. Hence the absence of any revolt in him. This is titiksha in the real sense of the term.
Kassner's view of history
In his keen inquiry into human history Kassner differentiates two worlds– ‘the world of the father’ and ‘the world of the son’. ‘The world of the father’ is the world of the ancient man. Kassner says that ancient man with his magic hieratic cultures had no sense of individuality. These myth-dominated cultures, like that of the Greeks, are also a space world (Raumwelt). It is a world without division. It is also the world of identity. In this finite world, the polis with its norms regulates the tension between the individual and the group and the word approximates the thing designated by it. The divergence between the word and the thing occurs in ‘the world of the son’, which is a time world (Zeitwelt), the world of individuality. The conflict between inside and outside, form and content, soul and body, dream and reality, begins in this ‘world of the son’. Here myth and mystery part company. The magico-mythical world, the unified but repetitive world gives way to the world of individual, divided but unique in history. But in Kassner we find no theories about the philosophy of history, no conflict of nature versus civilization as in Rousseau, no progress in history as in Hegel. In Kassner there is no dialectic but drama. The figure of ChristChrist
Christ is the English term for the Greek meaning "the anointed one". It is a translation of the Hebrew , usually transliterated into English as Messiah or Mashiach...
and the Word
Word
In language, a word is the smallest free form that may be uttered in isolation with semantic or pragmatic content . This contrasts with a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of meaning but will not necessarily stand on its own...
becoming flesh are of central importance to Kassner's thoughts. Kassner said that the hold of the myth held sway as ‘grand form’, as order, rank and institution even in the ages of Christian dogma
Dogma
Dogma is the established belief or doctrine held by a religion, or a particular group or organization. It is authoritative and not to be disputed, doubted, or diverged from, by the practitioners or believers...
. The complete dissolution takes place in the age of baroque. Then in the nineteenth century, the French Revolution
French Revolution
The French Revolution , sometimes distinguished as the 'Great French Revolution' , was a period of radical social and political upheaval in France and Europe. The absolute monarchy that had ruled France for centuries collapsed in three years...
, Kant's Critiques and Goethe's Faust
Faust
Faust is the protagonist of a classic German legend; a highly successful scholar, but also dissatisfied with his life, and so makes a deal with the devil, exchanging his soul for unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures. Faust's tale is the basis for many literary, artistic, cinematic, and musical...
inaugurate the real chronicle of the individual. Through a ‘Gleichgewichtstörung’, to use Kassner's phrase, the individual is loosened from tradition and becomes a slave to the collective. Kassner diagnoses the individual of his times as dilettante, achiever, speculator, actor, dialectician, materialist, mediocre, indiscrete humans lacking altogether the sense of measure. But the world of the individual is also the world of freedom. The isolated derailed individual seeking his counterpart finds him in the Gerechte (the just man, or the righteous man). The notion of the der Heilige (the Holy) is absent in the western world.
Kassner says the counterpart of the Indian Rishi in the West is the Just Man. Kassner sees the saviour of the modern times in the Just man, in the pilgrim
Pilgrim
A pilgrim is a traveler who is on a journey to a holy place. Typically, this is a physical journeying to some place of special significance to the adherent of a particular religious belief system...
, in the Christian and the child like man. According to Kassner the contradiction between thought and action is Christian. This state of being at odds with oneself, induced no doubt by the elemental tension occasioned by the psyche's experience of contradictory, or even conflicting experiences, is what prompts Kassner to rehabilitate Plato
Plato
Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...
nic periagoge in a Christian context. In other words, the want of alignment with the temporal world leads to the profound onset of imagination –Einbildung, restored by Kassner to the transitive sense of Middle High German
Middle High German
Middle High German , abbreviated MHG , is the term used for the period in the history of the German language between 1050 and 1350. It is preceded by Old High German and followed by Early New High German...
– the boundless imagination, i.e. its "lack of measure" holds for today's humans according to Kassner the only promise of accomplishing the amalgam of truth and justice. Steigerung and Umkehr (antilepsis) are the twin features of this transcendence in immanence.
Evocative images characterize Kassner's writing. Instead of analytic concepts he deliberately employs paradoxes and zeugmas that meaningfully bring together the small and the big, the near and the distant to obtain deep insights. In this context one needs to investigate Kassner's key terms such as Middle, Measure, Magic Body, Personality, Imagination
Imagination
Imagination, also called the faculty of imagining, is the ability of forming mental images, sensations and concepts, in a moment when they are not perceived through sight, hearing or other senses...
, Vision, Seeing, Order, Umkehr, Saint
Saint
A saint is a holy person. In various religions, saints are people who are believed to have exceptional holiness.In Christian usage, "saint" refers to any believer who is "in Christ", and in whom Christ dwells, whether in heaven or in earth...
, Chimera etc. "His concepts are not really concepts", writes Usinger "... not defined, the ideas occur again and again." One of Kassner's characters says, "You know very well my weakness and understand that I cannot define and all my definitions are false." His works have no linear development and do not yield swiftly to rational analysis.
Politically, Kassner saw himself early on as a European who tried to characterize the peoples of Europe without favoring his own. His sharpest criticism is often reserved for the Germans. In spite of his youthful enthusiasm for Treitschke and Chamberlain he was never openly antisemitic; he married a woman of Jewish ancestry. Nevertheless, derogatory comments about Jews and Jewish stereotypes can be found in his writing (cf. Schmölders in Neumann/Ott 1999).
In his late work the tendency toward mystical and religious syncretism
Syncretism
Syncretism is the combining of different beliefs, often while melding practices of various schools of thought. The term means "combining", but see below for the origin of the word...
comes to the fore: Kassner sees himself as the "magician" who employs a magical and inaccessible language to point to "mysteries" and "secrets" of the world: he plays with themes of Buddhism and Indian religions that he mixes with Christian ideas.
Kassner regretted his early admiration of Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a 19th-century German philosopher, poet, composer and classical philologist...
. As early as 1910 in Dilettantismus he accuses Nietzsche of having contributed to "everyone wanting to be an artist." One of the greatest influences on Kassner was Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Aabye Kierkegaard was a Danish Christian philosopher, theologian and religious author. He was a critic of idealist intellectuals and philosophers of his time, such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling and Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel...
to whose Christian anthropology he refers again and again. Other named role models are Blaise Pascal and Plato.
Contemporaries and the Unknown Eminence
Kassner received the Schiller Memorial Prize of the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg in 1949. On the occasion of this award Theophil Spoerri spoke of Kassner as "Die unbekannte Größe", the unknown eminence. Anyone who tries to understand Kassner's work has to confront this paradox. Kassner is remarkably great and yet unknown. Here is a person, of whom it can be said without reservation that he is one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century; and some of the greatest writers, poets and philosophers of Europe have acknowledged their indebtedness to him.Intellectually, Kassner is closest to his contemporaries Hofmannsthal and Rilke, Karl Wolfskehl and Marx Picard (who also produced physiognomic works), but there are also clear philosophical parallels to Oswald Spengler.
Georg Lukács, Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin admired Kassner's early works - although Benjamin also sharply criticized Kassner. He was praised by his contemporaries: in 1908 Rudolf Borchardt called him the "only genuine mystic of quality;" in 1911 Friedrich Gundolf attested to his "purity and loftiness of sentiment;" Dolf Sternberger, Fritz Usinger, Hans Paeschke were among his admirers. But Kassner also encountered criticism and a lack of understanding, for example, by Rudolf Alexander Schröder. Thomas Mann characterized his book Zahl and Gesicht as "hair-splitting and precious;" the Swiss playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt
Friedrich Dürrenmatt
Friedrich Dürrenmatt was a Swiss author and dramatist. He was a proponent of epic theatre whose plays reflected the recent experiences of World War II. The politically active author's work included avant-garde dramas, philosophically deep crime novels, and often macabre satire...
reported that for him a meeting Kassner had "broken Kassner's spell." "A new Nietzsche has appeared among us. He is called Rudolf Kassner and he speaks in antitheses, contradictions and paradoxes, deep and mystical, here and there in the tone of a prophet. Whether ‘the Modern’ places him above, below, or beside Nietzsche one does not know yet, but as far as I am concerned he is to me dearer than Nietzsche" hailed a reviewer of his first published work in 1900.
Congratulating Kassner on his eightieth birthday T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
wrote: "To contribute to the chorus of praise and thanks which should greet Rudolf Kassner on his eightieth birthday is a privilege which confers greater honour to the contributor than to the recipient. I am happy to have the opportunity on this occasion to salute and pay homage to so distinguished an author and so great a European who has every reason to look back with pride upon his life-work."
In the same volume W. H. Auden
W. H. Auden
Wystan Hugh Auden , who published as W. H. Auden, was an Anglo-American poet,The first definition of "Anglo-American" in the OED is: "Of, belonging to, or involving both England and America." See also the definition "English in origin or birth, American by settlement or citizenship" in See also...
writes on Kassner's book Zahl und Gedicht: "Among all the books which a writer reads over the years, the number which have so essentially conditioned his vision of life that he cannot imagine who he was before he read them is, naturally, very small.... Zahl und Gesicht was for me, and still is, such a book; in such a case discussion is not called for, only gratitude and homage."
Ludwig Curtius wrote to him: "You were to me always a ‘sage’ like the sages of the ancient times, whom I approached as a child, which I still do today." In Kassner's writings on system and order in the work Zahl und Gesicht the Swiss dramatist Dürrenmatt could read a premonition of later inhuman totalitarian regimes. Yet Kassner is relatively unknown; most histories of literature and philosophy do not even mention his name.
Accomplishments
Kassner introduced the work of William BlakeWilliam Blake
William Blake was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age...
to Germany. He discovered the Christian poet in Baudelaire. In 1903 he made the German public aware of the works of André Gide through his translation. Even before existential
Existentialism
Existentialism is a term applied to a school of 19th- and 20th-century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, shared the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject—not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual...
philosophy came into vogue, Kassner in his essay on Kierkegaard, which incidentally is the first German writing on Kierkegaard, had spoken about the existential predicament, the thrown-ness of man in the World. He translated from Greek, English, French and Russian. His understanding of the Indian society is full of rich insights quite different from that of a philosopher like Hegel, who had never set foot in India. Despite his physical handicap, Kassner traveled to India, met people there, saw for himself how people live there. Kassner's insights into India are an admirable example of his distinctive approach to cultural understanding and anthropology
Anthropology
Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...
. In his own nonacademic way he was one of the most learned men of the last century. He traveled far and wide, even to inaccessible regions, despite a life-long crippling disability. He was more widely traveled than most of his contemporaries. His knowledge of the classical world, of the oriental and occidental texts, of religion and philosophy, of history and culture, of literature and art is profound and comprehensive. He had a deep knowledge of the cultural history of modern man. He saw, as perhaps no one else saw, the internal contradictions and discontents of modernity.
Kassner was immensely productive; his literary activity extends over sixty years and he was writing till the age of eighty-five. He is considered one of the greatest essay
Essay
An essay is a piece of writing which is often written from an author's personal point of view. Essays can consist of a number of elements, including: literary criticism, political manifestos, learned arguments, observations of daily life, recollections, and reflections of the author. The definition...
ists and "the only German essayist who processed humor." In his writings he judges severely his contemporaries and his criticisms are provocative. Given his vision and his relentless focus on man even his silences are telling. Kassner was no less an iconoclast
Iconoclasm
Iconoclasm is the deliberate destruction of religious icons and other symbols or monuments, usually with religious or political motives. It is a frequent component of major political or religious changes...
than Nietzsche, though temperamentally he is the exact opposite of the overwrought philosopher. Mason wonders: "How little there is in the post-renaissance mental activities and achievements that he does not abominate!" But he adds, "There is something curiously authoritative about these denunciations of his.... They raise important issues, which have hitherto been overlooked; one cannot afford to ignore them." But this criticism of his never ended up in nihilism
Nihilism
Nihilism is the philosophical doctrine suggesting the negation of one or more putatively meaningful aspects of life. Most commonly, nihilism is presented in the form of existential nihilism which argues that life is without objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value...
. He was above all an anti-nihilist. Kassner speaks of being a mystic
Mysticism
Mysticism is the knowledge of, and especially the personal experience of, states of consciousness, i.e. levels of being, beyond normal human perception, including experience and even communion with a supreme being.-Classical origins:...
in order not to become a nihilist. Though Kassner says that he is a conservative due to the exasperation and consternation that modern world caused him, he is in no sense a reactionary, cynic, pessimist or defeatist and had no romantic yearning for the past, and no escapist delusions.
Yet he is unknown. Could it be that Kassner's works were ‘out of season’? In as early as 1929 Hofmannsthal wrote about Kassner's writings that "a not too distant future will wonder how our period that is craving for new forms and contents could neglect such fresh content in such novel forms." Forty years later in 1969 Michael Schmidt comments that "this ‘staunende Zeit’ cannot of course be ours." Still a generation later in 2005 in the latest article published on Kassner Prof. Subramanian writes that even today "fame has eluded Kassner."
Kassner is variously described as ‘Philosopher’, ‘Thinker’, ‘Cultural–Historian’, ‘Platonist’, and ‘Philosopher–Poet’. One may call him a ‘cultural philosopher’, for the primary object of his studies were cultures and their symbolic representations. His contributions to the understanding of Greek antiquity, ancient India and European Modernity form an essential part of his writings. It is indeed appropriate to call him a ‘seer’, in the multiple sense of the term, for ‘seeing’ and ‘vision’ are central to his physiognomy. Whenever he observes, he conveys unfailingly his sense of wonderment. It is this wonderment of the seer that sets in train his deep probing inquiry bordering on the mystic, which yet again to Kassner becomes manifest when poetry affiliates to philosophy. It is his vision, his Anschauung that gives his works an intensity and luminosity.
For as Kassner himself said "I should regard every line of my work suspect... if the knowledge and the feeling desert me that any enlightenment of man from them must work like a physical light; out of this desire arose the form, style and the language of the whole work". His works present a distinctive way of seeing, totally different from the current empirical methods of the social sciences.
The same themes recur in Kassner again and again, in their prismatic break-up as essays, parable
Parable
A parable is a succinct story, in prose or verse, which illustrates one or more instructive principles, or lessons, or a normative principle. It differs from a fable in that fables use animals, plants, inanimate objects, and forces of nature as characters, while parables generally feature human...
s, dialogues and reminiscences. He visits the same zone time and again with profit. It is not as though there is no progress, indeed the progress in thought can be said to have a spiral movement, as his dogged, unflinching gaze winds itself around the phenomena.
But as Eudo C. Mason suggests, Kassner's texts, given their importance and greatness are justifiably difficult. For when we seek the source of their difficulty we cannot say that his style is pedantic or jargon-filled. His sentences are always clear and sober without rhetorical flourish but laced with gentle humor and irony
Irony
Irony is a rhetorical device, literary technique, or situation in which there is a sharp incongruity or discordance that goes beyond the simple and evident intention of words or actions...
. It is in a sense unfortunate that he labeled his worldview physiognomy, for it was a discredited discipline and Kassner has had to an explain over and again how his physiognomy differs from traditional physiognomy.
Awards
- Gottfried Keller prizeGottfried KellerGottfried Keller , a Swiss writer of German-language literature, was best known for his novel Green Henry .- Life and work :...
, 1949; - Grand Austrian State PrizeGrand Austrian State PrizeThe Grand Austrian State Prize is a decoration given annually by Austria to an artist for exceptional work. The recipient must be an Austrian citizen with a permanent residence in Austria....
1953 - Schiller Memorial PrizeSchiller Memorial PrizeThe Schiller Memorial Prize is a literature prize of the State ofBaden-Württemberg. It is presently endowed with 25,000 Euros and has been awarded since 1955 on Friedrich Schiller's birthday, 10 November. The prize acknowledges outstanding work in the field of German literature or intellectual...
of the State of Baden-Württemberg, 1955.
Published works
- Der ewige Jude in der Dichtung. Dissertation 1897
- Der Tod und die Maske: Gleichnisse. Leipzig: Insel 1902
- Motive: Essays. Berlin: Fischer (1906)
- Melancholia: eine Trilogie des Geistes. Berlin: Fischer 1908
- Der Dilettantismus. 1910
- Von den Elementen der menschlichen Groesse. Leipzig: Insel 1911
- Der indische Gedanke. Leipzig: Insel 1913
- Die Chimäre. Leipzig: Insel 1914
- Zahl und Gesicht: nebst einer Einleitung: Der Umriss einer Universalen Physiognomik. Leipzig: Insel 1919
- Kardinal Newman. Apologie des Katholizismus. München: Drei Masken Verlag 1920
- Die Grundlagen der Physiognomik. Leipzig: Insel 1922
- Die Mythen der Seele. Leipzig: Insel 1927
- Narciss: oder Mythos und Einbildungskraft. Leipzig: Insel. 1928
- Physiognomik. München: Delphin 1932
- Transfiguration. Erlenbach-Zürich: Rentsch 1946
- Die zweite Fahrt. Erlenbach-Zürich: Rentsch 1946 - autobiographisch
- Das neunzehnte Jahrhundert. Ausdruck und Grösse. Erlenbach-Zürich: Rentsch 1947
- Das inwendige Reich: Versuch einer Physiognomik der Ideen. Erlenbach-Zürich: Rentsch 1953
- Das Antlitz des Deutschen in fünf Jahrhunderten deutscher Malerei. Zürich; Freiburg: Atlantis 1954
- Buch der Erinnerung. Erlenbach-Zürich: Rentsch 1954
- Geistige Welten. 1958
Kassner also translated works by Plato
Plato
Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...
, Aristotle
Aristotle
Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology...
, André Gide
André Gide
André Paul Guillaume Gide was a French author and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1947. Gide's career ranged from its beginnings in the symbolist movement, to the advent of anticolonialism between the two World Wars.Known for his fiction as well as his autobiographical works, Gide...
, Gogol, Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist...
, Dostoievsky, Pushkin and Laurence Sterne
Laurence Sterne
Laurence Sterne was an Irish novelist and an Anglican clergyman. He is best known for his novels The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, and A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy; but he also published many sermons, wrote memoirs, and was involved in local politics...
.
Collected works
Rudolph Kassner, Sämtliche Werke, Bände I – X, Ernst Zinn und Klaus E. Bohnenkamp (Eds), Günther Neske, Pfüllingen, (1969–1991).Correspondence
Rudolph Kassner, Briefe an Tetzel, Ernst Zinn und Klaus E. Bohnenkamp (Eds), Günther Neske, Pfullingen, 1979. Bohnenkamp, Klaus E. (Ed.), Rainer Maria Rilke und Rudolph Kassner, Freunde im Gespräch: Briefe und Dokumente, Insel, Memmingen, 1997.Further reading
Acquistapace, Eva: Person und Weltdeutung: Zur Form des Essayistischen im Blick auf das literarische Selbstverständnis Rudolf Kassners, Peter Lang, Frankfurt a. M., 1971. Andreas, Willy: Das Neunzehnte Jahrhundert, Ausdruck und Größe von Rudolf Kassner, in: Historische Zeitschrift, 169, Leibnitz Verlag, Munich, 1949, pp. 127–131. Bachmann, Dieter: Rudolf Kassner (1873–1959), Essay und Essayismus, Kohlhammer, Stuttgart, 1969, pp. 44–65. Baumann, Gerhart: Rudolf Kassner, Goethe-Sehen und Gesicht, Entwürfe zur Poetik und Poesie, Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1976, Munich, pp. 147–163. Baumann, Gerhart: Rudolf Kassner, Gericht und Gegengericht- Aus den Schriften- Auswahl mit Nachwort, Insel Verlag, Frankfurt a. M./ Leipzig, 1992, pp. 342–367. Baumann, Gerhart: Rudolf Kassner- Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Kreuzwege des Geistes, Rede zum 90. Geburtstag Rudolf Kassners gehalten am 30 Oktober 1963 in Wien, W. Kohlhammer Verlag, Stuttgart, 1964. Bock, Werner: Rudolf Kassner und die moderne Physiognomik, in: Universitas, 10.Jg., Heft7, 1955, pp. 715–719. Bohnenkamp, Klaus E.: Ein wenig bekannter Aufsatz von Rudolf Kassner über die Prosa des jungen Hofmannsthal, Für Rudolf Hirsch, (Ed.) J. H. Freund, pp. 295–309. Bohnenkamp, Klaus E.: Kassner und Rilke im gegenseitigen Urteil, in: Rilke Symposium, 'Rainer Maria Rilke und Österreich', im Rahmen des Internationalen Brucknerfestes'83, (Ed.) Storck, Joachim W., Bruckner Haus, Linz, 1986. Bohnenkamp, Klaus E.: Rudolf Kassner und André Gide, in: Germanisch - Romanische Montatsschift, 29 / 1979, Carl Winter Universtätsverlag, 1979, pp. 94–102. Bong-Hi Cha: Das Erstlingswerk Rudolf Kassners, Ansätze zu seinem 'physiognomischen Weltbild', Doctoral Dissertation at Eberhard- Karls University, Tübingen, 1976. Borchart, Rudolf: Rudolf Kassner, 'Melancholia', eine Trilogie des Geistes, in: Prosa I, Stuttgart, Ernst Klett Verlag, 1957, pp. 485–487. Böschenstein, Bernard: Stefan George vu par Rudolf Kassner, Melanges a David, 1986, pp. 171–188. Brunnemann, A. Brandl: Kassner's " Die Mystik, die Künstler und das Leben", Book Review, in: Frankfurter Zeitung, 6 January 1901 & Deutsche Literaturzeitung, 21April 1900, Nr17, pp1133–34. Büchler, Franz: Schizoider Zeitgeist, Wasserscheide zweier Zeitalter, Essays, Lothar Steihne Verlag, Heidelberg, 1970, pp. 102–121. Burnke, Eduard (Ed.): Rudolf Kassner, Die Mystik, die Künstler und das Leben, Book Review in: Literarisches Centralblatt, 51Jg.,Leipzig, No.27, July 7, 1900, pp. 1135–37. ? C.J.: Künstlermystik, Review of Kassner's work Die Mystik, die Künstler und das Leben, in: Die Grenzboten, Zeitschrift für Politik, Literatur und Kunst, 59.Jg., Leipzig, 1900. Burckhart, Carl Jakob: Rudolf Kassner, Bildnisse, S. Fischer, Frankfurt a. M., 1958, pp. 268–273. Chapple, Gerald: 'Diese drei Jahre München', Rudolf Kassner writes to Rilke, in: Modern Austrian Literature, Volume15, Numbers3/4, 1982, pp. 221–237. Chapple, Gerald: Aus Rudolf Kassners Reisebriefen an Lili Schalk, in: Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 9 September 1973, zum 100. Geburtstag Rudolf Kassners. Chapple, Gerald: Rudolf Kassners Platonismus, in: Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 9 September 1973, zum 100. Geburtstag Rudolf Kassners. Eisenreich, Herbert: Kassner und keine Nachwelt 1959, in: Reaktionen, Essays zur Literatur, 1964, pp. 271–276. Enzink, Willem: Erinnerungen an Max Picard 1888-1965, in: Neue Deutsche Hefte 35.Jg. 1988. pp. 189–205. Enzink, Willem: Erinnerungen an Rudolf Kassner, in: Neue Deutsche Hefte, 31, 1984, pp. 288–297. Glasnapp, Helmuth von: Das Indienbild deutscher Denker, K. F. Koehler Verlag, Stuttgart, 1960. Hecht, Hans: Rudolf Kassner. Englische Dichter, in: Beiblatt zur AngliaAnglia (journal)
Anglia, subtitled Zeitschrift für Englische Philologie is an German journal on English Linguistics. It was started in 1878. There are about three issues a year.-History:...
, pp. 32–33.
- Heinecke, Hans: Rudolf Kassner, Dichtung und Dasein, Gesammelte Essays, Karl H. Hensel Verlag, Berlin, 1950.
- Howes, Geoffrey C. : Emerson's Image in Turn of the century Austria, The cases of Kassner, Friedell and Musil, in: Modern Austrian Literature, Volume 22, Nos. 3/4, 1989, pp. 227–240. Janitzer, Hermann: Rudolf Kassner. Englische Dichter: Book Review, in: Zeitschrift für Englischen Unterricht, 21.Bd. 1.Heft, Breslau, 1922, p. 132. Kamper, Dietmer: Rudolf Kassner: Kuturphilosoph und Schriftsteller, in: Neue Deutsche Bibliographie, pp. 320–21. Kassner, Rudolf: Erinnerung an Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Worte des Gedankens, Nachrufe aus dem Todesjahr 1929, Sign HOF 120/138, Lothar Stielem Verlag, Heidelberg, pp. 41–55. Kassner, Rudolf: Die Hände des Joghi, in: Merkur, 3/1949. Kassner, Rudolf: Vom Grunde, in: Merkur, VII Jg. 9. Heft, September 1953, pp. 801–02. Kemp, Friedhelm: Der Schauende schaut immer nur das Leben, in: Süddeutsche Zeitung, Wochenende 8/9 September 1973. Kensik, A. Cl.: Narziss, Aus den Gesprächen mit Rudolf Kassner, in: Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Sonntagausgabe, 12 Mai1963, Blatt 6. Kensik, A. Cl.: Gedenken an Rudolf Kassner: Rudolf Kassner im Gespräch, in: Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Sonntagausgabe, 4 April 1959, Blatt 10. Kensik, A. Cl.: Zwischen Frage und Antwort, Aus Gesprächen mit Rudolf Kassner, zum 85. Geburtstag Rudolf Kassners, in: Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 6 September 1958. Kensik, A. Cl. und D. Bodmer (Eds.): Verzeichnis der Werke Rudolph Kassners, in: Rudolph Kassner zum achtzigsten Geburtstag. Gedenkbuch. Im Eugen Rentsch Verlag, 1953, pp. 243–250.
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