Stefan George is the most elusive figure in the literary history of Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany, a period that begins with Friedrich Nietzsche’s excoriations of Judeo-Christian morality in the late 1880s and ends with the Nazi book burnings of 1933. From a distance, George’s life looks like a secret passageway connecting these two ominous termini. He appears as the Antichrist in the age of democracy, as the counterrevolutionary herald of the Third Reich.
The life of this poet is often divided into three periods. Around 1890, the young George stood under the banner of “art for art’s sake.” He was inspired by Mallarmé and the French symbolists, with whom he studied in Paris; he later translated Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil into German. He established a literary magazine that published his poems and those of his friends in small limited editions for an invitation-only readership.
After 1900, in the second phase of his career, George metamorphosed from Germany’s leading exponent of aestheticism into a critic of enlightened liberal-democratic culture: “a cold and disfigured humanity,” as he called it in a rare prose essay from 1907, “that boasts its manifold achievements while great deeds and great love are vanishing.” This “world of contradiction,” he wrote three years later, is “totally mechanical · totally shadowlike · totally derivative and incapable of generating its own life.” In 1913, George published Star of the Covenant, the holy scripture of George’s emergent brotherhood, in which a voice from heaven promises spiritual rebirth to his devoted flock after the obliteration of the modern world: “Ten thousand men must the holy madness smite / Ten thousand must the holy plague destroy / Tens of thousands the holy war.” The following year, German soldiers carried copies of it into the trenches.
During the Weimar Republic, in the twilight of his career, George’s poetic activity receded. He devoted himself to mentorship, cultivating a cadre of followers, often called the “George Circle,” whose boyishly handsome members—this was a selection criterion—were admired by Germany’s intellectual vanguard and appointed to prestigious academic posts at the best German universities. They were celebrated for their monographs on great men among the likes of Plato, Frederick II, and Napoleon, each thick volume bearing George’s trademark stamp of approval on its cover in the form of a curved swastika. It is hardly surprising that some of George’s followers trumpeted völkisch ideology throughout the 1920s, or that a few remained committed to the Nazi regime well after Hitler’s rise to power in 1933—the year of George’s death in the Swiss village of Locarno at the age of sixty-five.
“George was not a political theorist.”
That is the shape of George’s life in the imagination of someone who knows him from sketches of modern German history, where his name sometimes appears alongside those of illiberal political philosophers such as Oswald Spengler, Carl Schmitt, and Ernst Jünger. In the English-speaking world, where there has never been much interest in George’s poetry, this is where one is most likely to encounter his message. This is unfortunate for several reasons. In the first instance, George was not a political theorist; he was the most respected German poet of his time. His name belongs in literary anthologies alongside Rainer Maria Rilke and Thomas Mann, who were long considered lesser writers, but whose posthumous fame overshadows George’s work.
But even if one ignores George’s poetry and sees him as he was seen in the later years of his life, as the energetic prophet of The New Reich—the title of his final collection of poems—there is no clear path leading from his aristocratic ethos to the racist mass movement that triumphed as he lay on his deathbed. On the contrary, his work can be cited as a critique of Nazism, and many of his disciples read it this way. The George Circle was a sanctuary for Jewish intellectuals and homosexual poets in early twentieth-century Germany, and even after 1933, these disciples never forsook the wisdom of their “Master,” as they called George with deference and affection. Almost all of them carried his teaching into exile with unqualified devotion, nurturing future generations of literary critics and historians in Princeton, Berkeley, and Chapel Hill.
Despite this, for much of the past century, George has been regarded, at best, as a sensitive lyric poet at home in The Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse, and at worst, as a megalomaniacal cult leader and pedophile. But today it is precisely those features of George’s life long considered irredeemable—his ethical severity and his cultivation of virtue in young men through the educative power of love—that appear most inspiring and alive. At a time when learning is becoming indistinguishable from vocational training, when the mind confronts its technological obsolescence, and when the relations between teachers and students are surveilled by Title IX officers, George appears, with all his foibles, as an iconoclastic sage, man, and teacher.