BERLINNER TAGEBLATT

3 May 1931

Arrived in Berlin: Aleister Crowley.

This fifty-five year old personality is at present staying amongst us, in order to prepare for the exhibition of his paintings which is to take place in Berlin this Fall. Aleister Crowley is a painter by passion. He became one because as an Alpine Climber he has seen air and light effects, which previously were hardly accessible to human eyes. Crowley has ascended all the peaks of Mexico. After that he undertook two attempts to subdue the Himalayas. The last of his Himalayan expeditions took place in 1905. Crowley got up to a height of 7000 metres. Then a mutiny forced him to return. He has set down the experiences of his mountain expeditions in a number of books, which together with the Confessions of his Life, Adventures and poetry (Crowley has lived for a time as a Yogi too) just begin to appear in England. Crowley has given the advice to the leader of the German Himalaya expedition which has just started to ascend by a certain glacier. If the expedition follows this advice it must—Crowley told his interviewer, reach the summit—or perish. “The Germans have in this undertaking every chance to succeed.”

In England Crowley, the gentleman Bohemian, is a much contested personality. One group consider him as a revolutionary philosopher, another as a foolish artist; that this mountaineer, chess player, poet-philosopher and painter is one of the most peculiar personalities is denied by nobody. To us he presents himself as something between Karl May* and Schopenhauer, perhaps he is much more, perhaps less.

*Karl May, a writer on travel books, died about 15 years ago. He pretended to have been all over the world, wrote the most fascinating books and travel stories, which were sold by the hundreds of thousand. Afterwards it was found that he had never been there. But his books keep on being popular.