Stefan George (1868-1933)
A Nietzschean despiser of mass-men, mechanization and modernity,
Stefan George was a Rhineland-rooted admirer of French and Hellenic culture. As such, he was morally opposed to the growing Germanic anti- Semitism around him. In 1933, George rejected brusquely the Presidency of the Writers Academy offered him by the Nazis – and left Germany to die in Switzerland. Earlier, his extremely ill-considered use of words like “Führer”, intended mostly for his private group of disciples, was often misunderstood as public and political: cf. ‘The Anti-Christ’ below (from Der Siebente Ring, Berlin, 1907). This poem, warning against the holocaust of a false “Reich” and a false Führer, helped inspire the famous assassination attempt against Hitler by George’s disciple Claus von Stauffenberg.
George broadened the limits of German diction in two ways: by
creating a new poetry that was sometimes as musical as Italian and
sometimes as monosyllabic and rugged as English. He also achieved
greatness by his translations of Baudelaire, Dante, and Shakespeare.
Today his prophet-robes have faded into an art-nouveau period piece, and his cult of master and disciple would strike the Anglo-American sense of humour as preposterous, yet his is the marvellous achievement of almost single-handedly restoring authenticity, austerity, and the dignity of form to German poetry at a time when it fell between the two evils of a slack epigone-romanticism and an arid unimaginative naturalism. Not his cult but his lyricism will appeal to readers today.
I have included, as indicated in the Introduction to this feature, Peter Viereck’s translation of ‘Templars’, also from George’s Der Siebente Ring. Interested readers may like to dig out this translator’s earlier version, published in MPT, First Series, 21. I have been obliged, for reasons of space, to excerpt drastically from the ‘Translator’s comment on “Templars”’. This is regrettable since much of the joy of reading Viereck’s essays (as with his friend Joseph Brodsky) comes from following where a richly stocked mind leads. [DW]
Page(s) 244-245
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