Abstract
A German nobleman from the Baltic, Count Hermann Keyserling (1880–1946), began a yearlong journey around the world in 1911. He was discontented with a prewar Europe that had become increasingly materialistic and soulless as a result of industrialization and urbanization. Hoping to discover new spiritual stimuli that could serve as antidotes against these social phenomena, as well as to further his own Bildung (self-education), he visited several parts of the world, such as Egypt, Ceylon, India, China, Japan, Hawaii, and North America. He wrote the majority of his account of his travels after his return to Europe and before the outbreak of World War I, although its publication was delayed until December 1918. When his book The Travel Diary of a Philosopher appeared, it became an instant bestseller, alongside Spengler’s Decline of the West. For a conservative nobleman who married the granddaughter of Bismarck, Maria Goedela von Bismarck-Schönhausen, in 1919, the new republic was not easy to accept. Yet unlike Spengler, Keyserling did not believe in the inevitable decline of the West, and he associated “as much with men from the middle of the political spectrum as with those of the Right.”1 He continued his search for a global Lebensphilosophie (life philosophy) through his School of Wisdom in Darmstadt, which he founded in 1920.
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Notes
Walter Struve, Elites against Democracy. Leadership Ideals in Bourgeois Political Thought in Germany, 1890–1933 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 277.
Fritz Stern, Politics of Cultural Despair (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974);
Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism. Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 35–36.
Ute Gahlings, Hermann Graf Keyserling. Ein Lebensbild (Darmstadt: Justus von Liebig Verlag, 1996), 31, 35.
For Keyserling’s view on the oppositions between the East and the West, see Hermann Graf Keyserling, Über die innere Beziehung zwischen den Kulturproblemen des Orients und des Okzidents. Eine Botschaft an die Völker des Ostens (Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1915).
See also Gerhard Schepers, “Exoticism in Early Twentieth-century German Literature,” in Japanese-German Relations, 1895–1945: War, Diplomacy and Public Opinion, ed. Spang and Wippich (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 109.
Corinne Treitel A Science for the Soul. Occultism and the Genesis of the German Modern (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 66.
Gahlings, Hermann Graf Keyserling. 242–245. See also Ute Gahlings, “‘An mir haben die Nazis beinahe ganze Arbeit geleistet.’ Über den Umgang der Nationalsozialisten mit Hermann Graf Keyserling,” in Deutsche Autoren des Ostens als Gegner and Opfer des Nationalsozialismu. Beiträge zur Widerstandsproblematk, ed. Frank-Lathar Kroll (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2000), 47–74.
David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (New York: Norton, 1999), 353.
See Ernst Troeltsch’s The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Know Press, 2006).
James William, The Varieties of Religious Experience (Rockville, MD: Manor, 2008), 75.
Andrew Gordon, A Modern History of Japan. From Tokukawa Times to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 109.
Marius B. Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard, 2000), 338.
D. Eleanor Westney, Imitation and Innovation. The Transfer of Western Organizational Patterns to Meiji Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 5.
Linsu Kim, Imitation to Innovation: The Dynamics of Korea’s Technological Learning (Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 1997), 90.
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© 2016 Joanne Miyang Cho
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Cho, J.M. (2016). Count Hermann Keyserling’s View of Japan. In: Cho, J.M., Roberts, L.M., Spang, C.W. (eds) Transnational Encounters between Germany and Japan. Palgrave Series in Asian German Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137573971_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137573971_4
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