Rudolf Kassner
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Rudolf Kassner (1873–1959) was an Austrian writer, essayist, translator and cultural philosopher.
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[edit] Life
Kassner's family immigrated to Moravia (at the time part of Austro-Hungary) from Silesia in Germany. His father, Oskar Kassner, was a landowner and factory owner. Kassner regarded himself as a German-Slavic mixture, having inherited German "blood" from his mother and a Slavic "spirit" (Geist) from his father(Das physiognomische Weltbild, 116ff.).
Rudolf was the seventh of 10 children. At nine months he contracted polio which left him lame for the rest of his life. He grew up in a strict Catholic milieu and was schooled at home. He studied national economy, history, and philosophy in Vienna and Berlin where he attended the lectures of the nationalist historian Heinrich von Treitschke. He received his doctorate in 1897 with a dissertation on Der ewige Jude in der Dichtung ("The Eternal Jew in Literature").
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-siécle poets and artists. He was a member of the bohemian circle in Munich to which Frank Wedekind und Eduard Graf von Keyserling also belonged. Kassner was acquainted with Ulrich Graf von Brockdorff-Rantzau, Paul Valéry, and André Gide. From 1900 to 1906 he was a regular member of the Viennese group around the cultural philosopher and antisemite Houston Steward Chamberlian. Kassner later distanced himself from Chamberlain.
In 1902 he met Hugo von Hofmannsthal and in 1907, Rainer Maria Rilke with both of whom he developed deep and lasting friendships. 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 (in: Neumann/Ott 1999) speculates that at least on Kassner's part this friendship was latently homosexual in nature.
After the outbreak of World War I Kassner moved to Vienna. The Nazis officially prohibited his writings in 1933. Nevertheless, his books continued to appear until he was forbidden to write (Schreibverbot) after the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938. Kassner's wife who was Jewish was able to escape from Austria with the help of Hans Carossa.
Kassner emigrated to Switzerland in 1945. In 1946 he moved to Sierre (Siders) in Valais where his Rilke had also spent the last years of his life. He lectured at the University of Zurich and lived in Sierre until his death in 1959
[edit] Works
Kassner himself divided his work, which is extremely individual and shows his wide reading, into three periods: aestheticism 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. Neverthless, his works revolve around certain coherent contexts and returns again and again to the same themes.
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 accomplise of modernity.
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 modernity a cultural crisis that leaves traces of alienation and uprootedness in human faces. In the intellectual landscape of the 1920's 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 intepretation 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."
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 again and again alludes to currect 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.
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. Inspite 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;" Friedrich Dürrenmatt reported that for him a meeting Kassner had "broken Kassner's spell."
Kassner received the Gottfried Keller Prize in 1949; the Great Austrian State Prize for Literatur in 1953; and the Schiller Memorial Prize of the State of Baden-Württemberg in 1955.
[edit] Bibliography
- 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
- 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, Aristotle, André Gide, Gogol, Tolstoi, Dostojewski, Puschkin and Laurence Sterne.
[edit] Complete works
- Sämtliche Werke, 10 Volumes., edited by Ernst Zinn and Klaus E. Bohnenkamp, Pfullingen: Neske 1969 - 1991
