Description:
"A richly contextualized portrait of a key Weimar figure, who deserves to be better known. Easton is a lively writer."--Martin Jay, University of California, Berkeley
"Provocative and original. "The Red Count "should be welcomed by a growing number of cultural historians interested in reassessing the politics of European modernism and in current debates about the trajectory of German political culture and cultural politics in the decades before the rise of fascism."--Kevin Repp, Yale University
"A major addition to understanding the cultural contributions Germany made to the modernist impulse, especially in the years before 1914. Kessler's numerous activities, as delineated by the author, attest to the cosmopolitanism of many within Germany's urban, liberal elite. "The Red Count" is extremely well-written. Easton's prose is fluid, colorful, and eminently readable. " --Marion Deshmukh, George Mason University
Review Quotes: "W.H. Auden called him probably the most cosmopolitan man who ever lived. Aesthete, patron, diplomat, diarist, peace campaigner, defender of the Weimar republic and exile from Nazism, this ultra-sophisticated German count belongs to a type that probably no longer exists: a moneyed and cultivated amateur whose brains and background brought him effortless access to politics, society and intellectual life in any capital where he set foot. In the first full biography in English, Laird Easton describes Kessler's life in detail and well."--The "Economist