His mother had built up a considerable library of German, French and English literature
The literary figures that nourished the creative mind of a legendary fashion designer are presented by William Middleton in his book “Paradise Now: The Extraordinary Life of Karl Lagerfeld” published by Harper.
His mother had built up a considerable library of German, French and English literature, says Middleton. And Karl remembers: “Reading was her great passion. She shut herself in her room to read.” The first book in his parents’ library that caught Karl’s attention was ‘Das Nibelugenlied’, the story that was the inspiration for Wagner’s ‘The Ring of the Nibelungen’ opera cycle. “It was a thick book, with pictures that were very scary. It wasn’t a children’s book. But my mother said, “If you want to read it, learn to read.” And that’s how I learned,” recalls Lagerfeld.
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His mother encouraged him to read Goethe, focused the young man’s attention on the complete edition of his works, 40 volumes. “My mother was fascinated by Goethe and literally forced me to read all his works,” explains Karl. He unearthed some elements of Goethe, for example his poetry. However, throughout his life his favorite German novel was “Electic Affinities” by Goethe (s.s. published in our language by KANAKI Publications, translated by Demosthenes Kurtovic).
Karl studied the 19th century writer Eduard von Keyserling. “He writes about the passions of the Baltic aristocracy in the 1880s. Seductive,” he points out. “Keyserling is Impressionism. In three words, you see the place, the area, you smell the air. His descriptions, which even today fascinate me, evoke so many associations with so few words” (p.s. von Keyserling’s “Waves” is published in our language by LOGGIA Publications, translated by Anastasia Hatzigiannidis).
He was particularly taken by Count Harry Graf Kessler (1868-1937), as Middleton reports. “Because of my mother, I’ve been a big fan of Harry Kessler since my early youth,” he says. Middleton relates that Kessler was never absent from any major cultural event, whether it was the premiere of Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin or Brecht and Weil’s Pentateuch; one week he had a table at Albert Einstein’s; the next to Josephine Baker, who improvised a dance around a nude female sculpture by Aristide Maillol that Kessler owned. For the British poet WH Auden Kessler was “probably the most cosmopolitan who ever lived”. He settled in Berlin at the end of the 19th century and then in Weimar and was a literary magazine editor, a museum curator and a writer. In 1909 he conceived the idea and wrote the libretto for Richard Strauss’s opera The Knight with the Rose; today, he is best known for his diaries.
Middleton recounts that the printer and publisher Gerhard Steidl often chatted with him Karl Lagerfeld for Kessler. “His mother idolized Harry Graf Kessler. He was a leftist, many referred to him as the ‘Red Count’, he was a minister in the new German government before Hitler and he was interested in Jewish culture,” explained Steidl. Karl Lagerfeld was fascinated by Kessler, underlines William Middleton and continues “As he once said, ‘if I identify with anyone, it would be Harry Kessler'”.
Source :Skai
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