STEFAN GEORGE
327
by reference to their
Miinnerbund.
The aesthete is devoted to
abstract Beauty, to art for its own sake. George is devoted to
manhood, to art for
his
own sake. Art for Art's sake was a religion,
but George's religion was different, a strange compound of
Cala–
mus
and
Also Sprach Zarathustra,
a religion of man and, specifi–
cally, of Maximin, man, artist, hero, and god.
Sometimes Wolters writes as if George were a social poet, an
anti-democratic political leader. Certainly the implications of
George's views were all undemocratic. George himself never wrote
on politics but Wolters was merely his master's mouthpiece in his
frequent sallies against the "modern idols" of technological prog–
ress, feminism, populism, permanent peace.
George's philosophy was not that of Hitler and Rosenberg,
for he has little to say of race; many of the Circle (Wolfskehl,
Morwitz, Gundolf, Kantorowicz) were Jews; so were many friends
of the movement like Georg Simmel.
·If
Rosenberg's key-term is
Race, George's is the Hero.
If
Hitler's most individual contribu–
tion in
Mein
Kampf
is his analysis of propaganda and
Massen–
politik,
George's attitude is total indifference to all such concerns.
It is true that he combines· a hatred of the masses
qua
mob with a
love of them
qua
Volk, but his love of the German Volk, while no
Christian charity, was never very exclusive or bloodthirsty.
Erzvater grub, erzmutter molk
Das schicksal niihrend fiir ein ganzes volk.
*
This is regional love of soil not political love of nation.
But sometimes George was closer to politics. The Messianic
Hope of Germany, the expectation of a national awakening out of
the spirit of youth, Holderlin's vision of a German Hellas, was the
dominant image of George's life after the death of Kronberger.
The Master's changes are reflected in the works of the disciple,
Friedrich Gundolf, who turned more and more to the study of
Julius Caesar. Younger members of the Circle wrote on Napoleon
and Frederick II of Hohenstaufen. In 1924 Gundolf began his
biggest historical work with the remark that the crying need of the
age was for a Caesar. Wolters made nationalist speeches at the
universities.
If
not a Nazi, was George the leader of a rival anti–
democratic movement?
"The patriarch delved, the matriarch did her milking, fostering destiny itself for a
whole people." (From
Urlandschaft.)
