In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

BULLFIGHTING
"Bullfight. Repulsive, deathly impression despite the varied wild, lively,
and grandiose images. The slaughter of the decrepit, helpless old horses
whose entrails are ripped from their bodies and sopped up with bloody
rags is infuriating and vile. The beautiful, young, fiery bull enters, and
after a half an hour is dragged out as a dead piece of meat. It evoked in
me only anger and pity ... I become more and more tired and exhausted.
Finally, it was as if I'd been struck with an ax: inwardly, I was
completely apathetic and filled to the brim with disgust. The whole night,
it was as if I were continually being awakened by an intense, deafening
noise." With such words of moral indignation, Harry Graf Kessler,
whose mode of life connects the political world of Weimar Germany
with high modern culture, reacts to a bullfight in Barcelona on Sunday,
April 18. But Kessler's emotions cannot be quite as unequivocal as the
words in his diary suggest. For only two weeks later, on May 2, he
attends another corrida. This time, Kessler tries hard to separate the
positive aspects of his impressions from the negative ones: "Yet again to
the bullfight in the afternoon. A young, very deft matador with a sharply
defined, almost Mongolian yellow-brown face: Agrabeno. Complete
mastery, a dancer before the bull. It was beautiful and worth seeing, but
the cowardly, cruel manner in which the horse was given to the bull as
a prize remains appalling and horrifying. All in all, a display of shocking
brutality, because the same people who turn this disgusting torture of
animals into a show are the most graceful and serene dancers of Sar-
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