A Poet’s Reich: Politics and Culture in the George Circle (review)

Perhaps no other major poet in German modernism has stirred up more recent critical debates than Stefan George. The immensely detailed biographies of the master and his circle by Robert E. Norton (Ithaca, London, 2002), Thomas Karlauf (Munich, 2007) and Ulrich Raulff (Munich, 2009), rather than forging anything resembling a scholarly consensus, have dramatized the contradictions, conflicts, and ambivalence that arise from George’s and his disciples’ amalgamation of diverse positions: aestheticist poetics, homoerotic friendship, and misogynistic resentment; Greco-European cosmopolitanism and protoecological awareness; critiques of industrial capitalism, bourgeois materialism, and scientistic rationality; and intellectual authoritarianism, antisemitic sentiments, and ultranationalist politics. No other poet seems to reflect more startlingly the disturbing clashes between insight and blindness that mark German culture between the Wilhelminian Gründerzeit and the end of World War II.

The need to take a step back and assess the poet’s reputation for our times is reflected, among many others, by the publications of a George Companion (Rochester, NY, 2010) and a monumental Handbuch (forthcoming; Berlin, 2012). Supplementing these endeavors, the present volume thoroughly addresses the many questions arising from the George circle’s attempt to forge new alliances between cultural renewal and political action. The wide-ranging essays, all of them impeccably researched and well documented, reconsider standard topics such as the artistic and intellectual programs of the circle (Ute Oelmann), George’s homoerotic Erlösungsreligion (Adam Bisno), and the circle’s variegated Platonic politics (Melissa S. Lane). The volume also offers new insights into less well known figures and themes: the intellectual biography of Gertrud Kantorowicz, one of the few respected female members of the master’s male-dominated circle (Robert E. Lerner); Friedrich Gundolf’s work on George’s competitor Rilke (Rüdiger Görner); and the writings of Edgar Salin and other political economists around George (Bertram Schefold). The public perception of George during the Weimar Republic receives due attention (David Midgley), as does the topic of the poet’s imperial mythologies (Richard Faber).

In their introduction, the editors rightly argue that the “structures, ideas, and programs” of the circle were “neither static nor monolithic,” but “changed over time” and “were renegotiated and redefined by the different subgroups” among the poet’s followers (8). Such a call for methodological and historical differentiation seems especially justified when addressing the circle’s diverse attitudes toward National Socialism. To name but one example, Martin A. Ruehl convincingly argues that Frederick II and his Hohenstaufen empire, as depicted in Ernst Kantorowicz’s mythopoetic biography, “contain numerous facets that are incommensurable” with Nazi ideology, and that its author himself was an “outspoken critic of the Third Reich,” even though he cannot be counted among the members of the “aesthetic resistance” to the regime; nor should one downplay the “illiberal and antihumanist notions underlying his biography,” concepts that in many ways “converged” with Nazi thought (228).

But not all the contributions are so balanced. Even more radically than his magisterial biography, Robert E. Norton’s essay proposes “that Hitler in fact occupied, both in his own mind and in that of countless Germans at the time, a space—or, if you will, a realm—that had been created in part by Stefan George” (279). George and his “entourage” (271) helped lay the “intellectual groundwork of merging the aesthetic with the political in fashioning the idea of a new German order” in the wake of the “conservative revolution” of Hugo von Hofmannsthal and others, while the dictator “took the next step by attempting to transform some version of that idea into reality” (284). If Norton overstates his case by detecting a direct and inevitable trajectory from George’s vision to Hitler’s politics, Peter Hofmann, in an otherwise insightful essay on the George circle and National Socialism, seems rather reductive in his reading of George’s famous reply (through Ernst Morwitz) of May 10, 1933 to the...