How Karl Lagerfeld Learned to Love Literature

OK …I know this is a little off topic but who can resist the colliding worlds of Karl Lagerfeld & Literature !

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Both of his parents were polyglot, with his father said to have spoken nine languages. He encouraged Karl, when he was young, to learn Russian. His parents often spoke French together. “When I was five, I asked for a French tutor,” Karl recalled. “I hated not being able to understand what they were saying, which is why they were speaking French.” His mother, trilingual, had assembled quite a library of German, French, and English literature. “Her great passion was reading,” he remembered. “She would shut herself in her room to read.”

The first tome in his parents’ library that attracted Karl’s attention was Das Nibelungenlied, an epic poem from the German Middle Ages The story was one of Richard Wagner’s inspirations for the four operas in his Ring Cycle (Der Ring des Nibelungen, 1853–1874). The Lagerfelds’ copy featured illustrations by a nineteenth-century German artist, Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld. “It was a thick book, with images that were pretty terrifying,” Karl recalled. “It was not a book for children. But my mother said, ‘If you want to read it, learn how to read.’ And that is how I learned.”

His mother went on to encourage young Karl to read Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the great eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary figure. “My mother was fascinated by Goethe and literally forced me to read his entire works,” Karl explained. She focused Karl on the complete edition of his works, forty volumes published by Johann Friedrich Cotta in 1832.

There were some elements of Goethe that Karl found tedious. His poetry, for example, was less than inspiring. But Goethe’s Elective Affinities was, throughout his life, Karl’s favorite German novel. Goethe had a vast range of interests, moving between the disciplines of literature, theater, philosophy, science, aesthetic criticism, politics, and religion. There was an expansiveness about Goethe’s intellectual life, an ambition that inspired Karl from an early age.

There were other significant literary discoveries. His mother introduced him to such figures as Gustav Stresemann, the German statesman, and Walther Rathenau, an industrialist and author who was assassinated in 1922 by the Organisation Consul, a forerunner of the Nazis. He also learned of Eduard von Keyserling, a nineteenth-century author of stylized novels. “He writes about the passions of the Baltic aristocracies in the 1880s,” Karl noted. “Ravishing!” He was struck by the spareness of the prose. “Keyserling is Impressionism. With three words, you see the place, the area, you smell the air. His descriptions, which still strike me today, are so evocative with such few words.”

But Karl was particularly taken by another historical German figure that he was encouraged to read: Count Harry Graf Kessler (1868–1937). “I have been a huge fan of Harry Kessler since my early youth because of my mother,” Karl later explained.  Kessler was intellectually rigorous, international, and urbane. Kessler never missed the opening of a major cultural event, whether it was the premiere of Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin or Brecht and Weill’s Threepenny Opera.

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How Karl Lagerfeld Learned to Love Literature