A Poet’s Reich: Politics and Culture in the George Circle edited by Melissa S. Lane and Martin A. Ruehl (review)

The last decade has seen a marked resurgence of interest in the work of Stefan George, as well as in the network of writers and scholars he created around himself. It is probably owed at least to some extent to the fact that those who had an often ideologically motivated stranglehold on one way or the other of understanding the poet gradually relinquished control to a younger generation of scholars, who avoid either filing George away as a Vordenker of Nazism, or completely rejecting any notion that “a poet’s Reich” might have something to do with the decidedly unpoetic one set up by Hitler and his ilk.

Many of the protagonists of this resurgence are represented in this admirable volume, scholars like Robert Norton, Thomas Karlauf, and Ute Oelmann. Other central texts, like Ulrich Raulff's Kreis ohne Meister (2009), function as consistent interlocutors, to the point that they constitute “secret” contributors in their own right. What makes this volume and the thirteen essays gathered in it so eminently enjoyable is the fact that while this new crop of George scholars largely agree to ignore the pitched ideological battles that marked George’s postwar reception, they agree on little else. There is a spirited debate between the different contributors, and while none of them offer the simple answers to the question of the George circle’s politics that proved so seductive after 1945, they each accentuate their answers differently.

One reason for the care with which they approach “Politics and Culture in the George Circle” is that the contributors do not think that the circle or its politics remained stable and fixed. All of the contributors agree that the George circle underwent a series of marked shifts in its nearly thirty years, and that, all acolyte protestations to the contrary, these shifts were very much motivated by transformations in that other, less-secret Germany. In their introduction, Lane and Ruehl point to the circle’s rightward drift as a radicalization of its members’ oppositional stance as the hated Kaiserreich gave way to the even more hated Weimar Republic. In his solo contribution, Ruehl points out that this development puts the lie to attempts to whitewash for instance Ernst Kantorowicz’s work from the 1920s as somehow liberal and latently anti-fascist.

Another reason is to be found in the admirable breadth of the scholars considered and the scholars considering them—“politics” in this volume consists of a good deal more than just questions of state, nation, and organization. From Robert Lerner’s portrait of Gertrud Kantorowicz, Bertram Schefold’s article on economics in the George circle, to David Midgley’s investigations of George’s strange career as a highly reclusive public poet during the Weimar years, these articles consider the George circle from any number of angles, and together make clear that “politics” was very broadly understood among the poet’s acolytes—which makes for a refreshingly diverse set of political Georgians on offer.

One link the volume tackles head-on is that between homoeroticism and rightwing politics. If after 1945 that link was often made to delegitimate the George circle as a precursor to a “gay fascism,” the contributions dealing with homosexuality make clear that the time has now come to think through that link with some care. Melissa Lane’s contribution on the Platonic underpinnings of George’s politics accomplishes this for the circle’s “official” ideology, while Adam Bisno’s article takes an in-depth look at George’s relationship to his young crushes—from Hugo von Hofmannsthal, via Maximilian Kronberger, to Cajo Partsch.

Robert Norton’s contribution to the volume meanwhile takes on the central dichotomy that subtended George’s postwar reception: was he “just” after art, or were there “also” politics involved? Norton reminds us that it was this very distinction that the George circle...