The German Poet Stefan George and Pre-National Socialism in Germany

As a comprehensive account of the European and American reception of George’s works and those of the appr. 40 members of his circle is - after the translation of all his poems in 1949 The Works of Stefan George by Olga Marx and Ernst Morwitz - yet to be written, the following article is an attempt to introduce George and his followers to the English-speaking world. It focuses on some exemplary, representative persons from a cultural and political point of view. As the male-bonded circle was conceived and perceived by George and his disciples as an aesthetic state within the state and as a quasi-religious sect, born of the opposition to trends of current society around the turn of the 19th/20th century, its antiestablishmentarian view had a politically significant influence on pre-Nazi world, reaching its zenith during the Weimar Republic, but even longer up to the recent past of Germany [ ]. George’s reaction to Hitler’s ascension to power has given rise to various and contradictory interpretations, and the question if his poetry was politically guilty or if is pure and timeless, decadent favouring ‘l’art pour l’art, has not yet been conclusively interpreted. As the circle was not a monolithic group, its influence was highly ambivalent. In 1924 the call was made that there is a demand for a strong man, feeling tired and making do with sergeants instead of leaders (“Heute, da das Bedürfnis nach einem starken Mann laut wird…, da man der Mäkler und Schwätzer müd sich mit Feldwebeln begnügt statt der Führer”) - the 1st sentence in Friedrich Gundolf’s book on the Roman statesman and general Julius Caesar, the most heroic man, as Gundolf said: The book appeared in the year when Adolf Hitler was tried for his Beer Hall Putsch. What does the call for seriousness, dignity and awe (“für ernst, würde und ehrfurcht” [ ]) and the fight against shallowness (“oberflächen-tendenzen”) voiced by Friedrich Wolters and Friedrich Gundolf, the most widely read scholar of German philology at the time, in 1910 mean? For Gundolf as for others George was the mixture of strong will and sensitivity, of hard deed and tender dream (“unerbitterlicher Wille und regsame Zartheit”, “harte Tat und zarten Traum”), and the transformative power of poetry to purify the German soul and to create new beings (“menschenbildende Weltkraft”/man-creating worldpower), thus becoming like Goethe before a shaper of Germans (“Gestalter der Deutschen”). Some of George’s disciples hoped that the Third Reich was or would become the realization of George’s “Neues Reich,” joined the National-Socialist Party or sympathized with the Nazi movement, some only initially, whereas others opposed the regime, and went into exile (e. g. Karl Wolfskehl (b. 1869, Darmstadt, Germany – d. 1948, Auckland, New Zealand) or saw themselves as part of the innere Emigration (Rieckmann). The concept of a secret Germany (“geheimes Deutschland”) played a decisive role that the circle was controversial about.