Rudolf Kassner (11 September 1873 — 1 April 1959) 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.

Biography more less

Travels more less

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 poets 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.

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Contemporaries and the Unknown Eminence more less

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 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.

Accomplishments more less

Kassner introduced the work of William Blake 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 essayists 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, parables, 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.

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Notes and citations

Primary literature

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.