Rudolf Kassner

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Rudolf Kassner (born September 11, 1873 in Groß-Pawlowitz , Moravia , † April 1, 1959 in Sierre , Canton of Valais ) was an Austrian writer , essayist , translator and cultural philosopher.

Life

Kassner's family had immigrated to Moravia (then Austria-Hungary ) from Silesia . His father, Oskar Kassner, was a landowner and sugar manufacturer; his mother Bertha, nee Latzel, was a sister of Adolf Latzel . His maternal great-uncle was Josef Latzel . Kassner saw himself as a mixture of German ancestry on his mother's side and Slavic on his father's side, stating that he inherited the “blood” from the mother and the “spirit” from the father ( Das physiognomische Weltbild , 116ff.).

Rudolf was the seventh of ten children. At nine months he developed polio , which resulted in a lifelong handicap. He grew up in a strictly Catholic environment. He received his school education through a private tutor. He studied economics, history and philosophy in Vienna and Berlin , where he heard lectures from the folk historian Heinrich von Treitschke . In 1897 he received his doctorate with the dissertation The Eternal Jew in Poetry .

In spite of his physical disability, Kassner undertook extensive trips to Russia , North Africa and India . He lived for a short time in Paris , London and Munich . His first writings were favorably received by fin de siècle artists. The former Munich bohemian was among his circle of friends, including Frank Wedekind and Eduard Graf von Keyserling . Kassner's friends also included Ulrich Graf von Brockdorff-Rantzau , Paul Valéry and André Gide . From 1900 to 1906 he was a regular member of the Vienna circle around the cultural philosopher and anti-Semite Houston Stewart Chamberlain , from whom Kassner later distanced himself.

In 1902 he met Hugo von Hofmannsthal and in 1907 Rainer Maria Rilke . He had a lifelong friendship and extensive correspondence with both of them. Rilke dedicated the eighth Duinese elegy to him ; both considered Kassner at times to be the most clairvoyant cultural philosopher of our time. The close friendship with Rilke in particular was often discussed in research. Schmölders (in: Neumann / Ott 1999) suspects that she had subliminal homosexual traits, at least from Kassner's side .

After the outbreak of the First World War , Kassner moved to Vienna . The dissemination of his writings was officially forbidden in the German Reich by the National Socialists in 1933. Nevertheless, his books continued to be published by Insel Verlag , such as the Book of Memory (Leipzig 1938). Because he was married to a Jewish woman, after Austria's annexation to the National Socialist German Reich in 1938 he was given a “writing ban”. His wife had fled Austria with the help of Hans Carossa .

In 1945 Kassner moved to Switzerland. In 1946 he moved to Sierre (Siders) in Valais, where his friend Rilke had also spent the last years of his life. Since 1950 he was a member of the German Academy for Language and Poetry . He gave lectures at the University of Zurich in the post-war period. He lived in Sierre until his death in 1959.

In 1960, Rudolf-Kassner-Gasse in Vienna- Döbling (19th district) was named after him.

plant

Rudolf Kassner's work is extremely idiosyncratic and at the same time is extremely well-read. Kassner himself wanted to see it divided into three periods: 1900–1908 aestheticism ; 1908–1938 physiognomics and from 1938 autobiographical writings, religious-mystical essays and “meta-political” interpretations of world events. Kassner's work shows a clear aversion to strict system designs. He preferred more informal spellings such as essays , aphorisms , prose sketches , parables and allegories . Nevertheless, his thinking moves in certain coherent paths and always returns to the same motives.

Kassner appeared as a pronounced anti-rationalist . His writings adopt motifs and terms from medieval mysticism , hermetics and Indian philosophy. The most important faculty of the mind for him was not the ratio , but the imagination , which for him meant "living intuition". He believed that the analytical-rational dissection of the world could be dealt with with a “wholeness” of perception.

According to Schmölders (1999), his essays have a “hunting component”. His early enemy is the “dilettante”, who for him is every modern person who overestimates himself and his position in the world, who wants to be an artist without being able to recognize the “whole” of the world, who is a victim of relativism and the Is individualism . He counters modernity that it has no “measure”, that it can no longer assign people their place. The only way to get back to “measure” and “greatness” is “passion” and “suffering”. Another enemy is the "actor" who only plays with social roles and thus makes himself an accomplice of modernity.

The most original part of his work are probably the writings on physiognomics that he wrote from 1908 onwards. Kassner's physiognomy is not a systematic guide to reading character from facial features; Rather, it is essentially a conservative cultural philosophy. The modern concept Kassner as a crisis of culture, which in the face of human traces alienation leaves and uprooting. In the intellectual landscape of the 1920s , Kassner's worldview is therefore close to the Conservative Revolution .

According to Kassner's physiognomic view, people in the old, aristocratic class society had a "face" that was shaped by their attachment to their class. The modern man of the crowd, however, has lost the “measure” that held him in the community; the face of modern man is therefore "gaping" like a wound, because it no longer has any correspondence or anchoring in the world. The word “face” must be understood in its double meaning: as vision and visage , sight and the face. Physiognomic interpretation, however, is not something that can be learned; Kassner envisions a kind of elitist vocation. Only the “seer” is gifted in physiognomics. Kassner's most important human ability is the “imagination”, which makes it possible to look at the world as a unity or “shape” and to “see things together”.

In his work, Kassner takes a stand on the important intellectual movements of his time: he presents himself as an outspoken opponent of psychoanalysis , which for him is another symptom of the cultural crisis. She tries to uncover the most extreme desires in every person - parricide, incest - and so banalize the "great". Kassner disliked the talk of “ intimacy ” and “unmasking”. On the other hand, Albert Einstein's theory of relativity was the most important confirmation of his philosophical findings for him. In terms of number and face , Kassner even attempted a cultural-philosophical reinterpretation of Einstein's theory into his own understanding of “space world” and “time world”.

Although Kassner alludes to current events and analyzes current society again and again in his writings, this happens increasingly in his later work in a kind of private mythology that uses ambiguous, "puzzling", but often only vaguely defined terms and - despite being more unequivocal Criticism of time - often does not allow one to commit to a political stance.

Kassner presented himself politically early on as a European who tried to characterize the peoples of Europe without favoring his own. Often the Germans in particular (to whom he counted himself because of his ancestry) are most severely criticized. Despite his youthful enthusiasm for Treitschke and Chamberlain , he did not express himself openly anti-Semitic and married a woman of Jewish descent. Nevertheless, hidden devaluations and stereotypes of the image of the Jews can be detected in his writings (cf. Schmölders in Neumann / Ott 1999).

In his late work the tendency towards mystical-religious syncretism is fulfilled ; Kassner presents himself as a “magician” who cultivates a magically inaccessible language in which he speaks darkly about the “mysteries” and “secrets” of the world without wanting to uncover them; he plays with motifs from Buddhism and Indian religions, which he mixes with Christian ideas.

The early admiration for Friedrich Nietzsche was later Kassner unpleasant, already in dilettantism of 1910, he accuses him that he had helped "would be every artist" that now. Søren Kierkegaard is one of Kassner's great influences, and he repeatedly refers to his Christian anthropology . Other openly named role models are Blaise Pascal and Plato .

The closest to Kassner's contemporaries are Hofmannsthal and Rilke, Karl Wolfskehl and Max Picard , the latter also author of physiognomic writings. But there are also clear ideological parallels to Oswald Spengler .

His early work was recognized by Georg Lukács , Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin , who, however, also sharply criticized him. He was partly praised by contemporaries - Rudolf Borchardt called him in 1908 the “only real mystic of race”; Friedrich Gundolf attested him in 1911 "purity and height of disposition"; Dolf Sternberger , Fritz Usinger , and Hans Paeschke were among his admirers. In many cases, however, he also met with criticism and incomprehension, for example with Rudolf Alexander Schröder . Thomas Mann described his book number and face as "subtle and precious"; Friedrich Dürrenmatt reported that a personal encounter with Kassner completely "disenchanted" him for him.

Awards

Fonts (selection)

Single fonts

  • The eternal Jew in poetry. Dissertation 1897 - only received in a sketchy copy
  • The mysticism, the artists and the life 1900
  • Death and the Mask: Parables. Leipzig: Insel 1902
  • Motives: essays. Berlin: Fischer (1906)
  • Melancholia: a trilogy of the mind. Berlin: Fischer 1908
  • The amateurism. 1910
  • Of the elements of human greatness. Insel Verlag, Leipzig 1911 (1954: Insel-Bücherei 593/1)
  • The Indian thought. Leipzig: Insel 1913
  • The chimera. Leipzig: Insel 1914
  • Number and face: along with an introduction: the outline of a universal physiognomics. Leipzig: Insel 1919
  • Cardinal Newman. Apology of Catholicism. Munich: Drei Masken Verlag 1920
  • The basics of physiognomy. Leipzig: Insel 1922
  • The myths of the soul. Leipzig: Insel 1927
  • Narciss: or myth and imagination. Leipzig: island. 1928
  • The physiognomic worldview. Munich: Dolphin 1930
  • Book of memory. Leipzig: island. 1938. Erlenbach-Zurich: Rentsch 1954 (2nd edition)
  • Transfiguration. Erlenbach-Zurich: Rentsch 1946
  • The second trip. Erlenbach-Zurich: Rentsch 1946 - autobiographical
  • The nineteenth century. Expression and size. Erlenbach-Zurich: Rentsch 1947
  • The birth of christ. A trilogy of interpretation. Erlenbach-Zurich: Rentsch 1951
  • The Inner Realm: Attempting a Physiognomy of Ideas. Erlenbach-Zurich: Rentsch 1953
  • The face of the German in five centuries of German painting. Zurich; Freiburg: Atlantis 1954
  • Spiritual worlds. 1958

Kassner also translated works by Plato , Aristotle , André Gide , Gogol , Tolstoy , Dostoyevsky , Pushkin , John Henry Newman and Laurence Sterne .

Work edition

  • Complete works , 10 vols., Ed. by Ernst Zinn and Klaus E. Bohnenkamp, ​​Pfullingen: Neske 1969–1991

literature

  • Dietmar Kamper:  Kassner, Rudolf. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 11, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1977, ISBN 3-428-00192-3 , p. 320 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • A. Kensik: Conversation with Narcissus: Rudolf Kassner 1947–1958 . Zurich 1985
  • Gerhard Neumann, Ulrich Ott (ed.): Rudolf Kassner: Physiognomics as a form of knowledge . Rombach, Freiburg 1999, ISBN 3-7930-9208-9
  • Hans Paeschke: Rudolf Kassner. Neske, Pfullingen 1963
  • Claudia Schmölders : The Conservative Passion: about Rudolf Kassner, the physiognomist , in: Merkur , 49th year 1995, issue 12, pp. 1134–1140
  • Uwe Spörl: Godless mysticism in German literature at the turn of the century. Schöningh, Paderborn 1997, ISBN 3-506-78610-5
  • Herta F. Staub: Rudolf Kassner: an Austrian thinker. Österreichischer Bundesverlag , Vienna 1964
  • Theo Stammen: Rudolf Kassner: The Nineteenth Century - Expression and Greatness (1947) , in ders .: Literature and Politics . Ergon, Würzburg 2001, ISBN 3-935556-82-9
  • Stefan Zweig : Elements of human size , in: Reviews 1902–1939. Encounters with books . 1983 E-Text
  • Daniel Hoffmann: "No, no, then nothing should be." Rudolf Kassner's intellectual resistance to the 20th century, in: German authors of the East as opponents and victims of National Socialism. Contributions to the problem of resistance. Ed. Frank-Lothar Kroll. Duncker & Humblot , Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-428-10293-2 , pp. 151-177
  • Daniel Hoffmann: The frightened person. Rudolf Kassner's late work. In: Religious themes in the German-language literatures of the post-war period (1945-1955). Ed. Natalia Bakshi (Kemper-Bakshi), Dirk Kemper, Iris Bäcker. Munich 2013, ISBN 3-7705-5410-8 , pp. 91-104

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Kassner, Rudolf
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Writer, essayist, translator, cultural philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH September 11, 1873
PLACE OF BIRTH Groß-Pawlowitz , Moravia
DATE OF DEATH April 1, 1959
Place of death Sierre , Canton of Valais