A NOTE FROM AMERICA
Eighty years ago Williams College co-operatively published Count Harry Kessler's provocative Germany and Europe, New Haven, 1923, published for the Institute of Politics by the Yale University Press. That book put in permanent form the political views Kessler had expounded in a series of six lectures in July-August 1923, before the famed Williams College Institute of Politics. In 2003 we co-published with the Triton Verlag in Laubach John Dieter Brinks' lovingly compiled, and in large part written book that serves also as a permanent record of a grand Cranach Press exhibition that has been seen at its European venues for less than two years, and in America for six months. Thus Williams College will have presented to America, separated by four score years, a whole picture of the two great passions of this remarkable Weimar intellectual's thoughtful, mature life.
It is also appropriate that a large part of the funds for our co-publication is a gift from Lois K. Levy, the daughter of Donald S. Klopfer, Williams Class of 1922, who, as co-founder of Random House, negotiated with Harry Kessler for the distribution rights of Cranach Press books in America. Shortly after the Hamlet appeared, changed attitudes in Germany and financial constraints caused the work of the Cranach Press to cease. We hope that by participating jointly in the exhibition and this book, Donald Klopfer's enthusiasm for presenting Kessler's achievement to America will finally have been fulfilled.
The tremendous success of the colloquium on Kessler in Williamstown in October 2004 proves that these hopes were not unfounded. For three days a panel of international experts discussed various aspects of Kessler's role in German life and letters. I do not doubt that an echo of this extraordinary man and his achievements will reach well beyond this corner of Massachusetts, to all interested people in the English-speaking world, through the Anglo-American version of John Dieter Brinks' excellent book.
25 February 2005
Robert L. Volz, Chapin Library, Williamstown
