Rudolf Kassner - Contemporaries and The Unknown Eminence

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 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.