Kreis ohne Meister. Stefan Georges Nachleben (review)

On December 4, 1933, soon after midnight, the German poet Stefan George died in the small Swiss town of Minusio, near Locarno. Shortly after his interment, the consul of the new Nazi-governed German state laid a wreath at George's grave with a swastika-adorned ribbon. A few days later, some of George's disciples removed the swastika from the ribbon. The next morning, another group of disciples sewed it back on. When Ernst Kantorowicz, one of the many Jewish members of the George Circle, departed from Minusio after George's funeral, he reportedly saw two younger associates give the Hitler salute on the departure platform.

These episodes usually furnish the end-point or epilogue of the increasingly numerous histories of Stefan George and his group of followers that have appeared over the past twenty-odd years. In a typically bold move, Ulrich Raulff has made them the starting point of his impressive study on the George Circle. While most scholars agree that George's death brought about the rapid dissolution of what he liked to call his "state" (Staat), Raulff regards the break-up of the Circle as a much more protracted process—and one that throws important light on the inner workings of this vast "Mobile aus Menschen, Bildern und Ideen, das der Mann im Zentrum, der 'Meister' oder große Uhrmacher, beständig in Fahrt halten und justieren musste" (14). Drawing on a wealth of archival material, enhanced by almost a hundred photographs—most of them hitherto unknown to scholars—and packed with countless fascinating vignettes, Raulff's book provides a masterful survey of George's intellectual and cultural legacies, from the year of his death to the centenary of his birthday in 1968. It pays particular attention to the different ideological stances taken by George's disciples after 1933 (Chapter 2); the attempts by various members of the Circle to preserve George's ideals and—after 1945—to clear his reputation from the charge of "proto-fascism" (Chapters 3 and 5); and the influence of George's notion of "pedagogical eros" on the educational policies of the Federal Republic (Chapter 6).

According to Raulff, George's spirit lived on not just in various counter-cultural trends, but also in some of the foremost political figures of the new West Germany, notably the Weizsäckers, Carlo Schmid, and the Bildungsreformer Hellmut Becker. To have shown the continuing resonance and relevance of Georgean thought beyond 1945 is perhaps the greatest achievement of Kreis ohne Meister, which easily takes its place alongside the groundbreaking studies by Robert Norton (Secret Germany: Stefan George and his Circle, Ithaca 2002) and Thomas Karlauf (Stefan George. Die Entdeckung des Charisma, München 2007), as well as seminal earlier works by Stefan Breuer (Ästhetischer Fundamentalismus. Stefan George und der deutsche Antimodern ismus, Darmstadt 1996), Carola Groppe (Die Macht der Bildung. Das deutsche Bürgertum und der George-Kreis 1890-1933, Köln 1997), and Rainer Kolk (Literarische Gruppenbildung. Am Beispiel des George-Kreises 1890-1945, Tübingen 1998). It deservedly won the non-fiction prize of the Leipzig Book Fair in 2010.

Reviewers to date have almost without exception been full of praise and tended to ignore the book's various weaknesses which shall be briefly enumerated here. Factual errors aside (Kantorowicz, for instance, should not be associated, as Robert Lerner has pointed out, with the homosexual poets of the San Francisco Renaissance), Raulff offers a somewhat skewed account of the Circle's membership by discussing at considerable length figures such as Hubertus zu Löwenstein and Erich von Kahler who belonged at best to the fringes of the Circle and whose writings can hardly be considered representative. 1968 is a somewhat arbitrary terminus ad quem, especially in view of the extraordinary George renaissance in Germany since the 1990s. More could and more should have been said about Wolfgang Frommel and his ventures (first the publishing house Die Runde and then the journal Castrum Peregrini) to...