STEFAN GEORGE
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candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize, presumably because he had
no taste for peace.)
Rossner made some points which help us to a summing·up
from our different standpoint. George, he says, was not the
founder of a new humanism, but the last relic of an old order. He
was a nineteenth.century decadent who by his strength of will gath·
ered round him the parasites of the West-Jews. Rossner is not
hard on George's homosexuality except insofar as it implies mis·
ogyny; the strongest argument he advances
a
propos
of the Wol–
ters-Gundolf
]ahrbuch fur
die Geistige Bewegung
(1910-1912) in
which there appeared an essay by Berthold Vallentin (a Jew, to
Rossner's joy) entitled: Napoleon und die geistige Bewegung.
Rossner seizes upon the phrase "geistige Bewegung"-"intellec–
tual history"-and demonstrates that for all their anti-democratic
realism the Georgekreis are interested in Napoleon and other
heroes only as an influence upon "intellectual history."
This is acute, true, and crucial. George is not, in my view,
any sort of a politician; his interest is centered in the intellect and
the individual. The only conclusion he draws from the 1918 disas–
ter is that a youth is now more beautiful and brave. He is as
unaware of Ludendorff and Ebert as he is of Liebknecht and Rosa
Luxembourg. Stefan George's New Empire is of the mind, and
any impression we may have to the contrary is due either to our
own obtuseness, to George's occasional inconsistency, to the rich–
ness in suggestion of his verse which is relevant on so many planes
of reality, or to the statements of some of the Circle since George's
restraining hand was removed: Ernst Bertram, one of the cleverest
of the Circle, is now a prosperous Nazi professor. One should not
forget though, that the new day did not dawn for Walfskehl, Mor–
witz, Kantorowicz and the Jewish section of the Circle. Kantoro–
wicz is in California-not the home of heroic Teutonism-and
Morwitz is at Duke University, a seat of learning with an interest–
ing but unheroic history.
In 1909 Wolters called George's proposed empire: das geis–
tige Reich. He was right, and George has himself clarified the
ISSUe:
Dies ist reich des geistes: abglanz
Meines reiches hof und hain.
Neugestaltet umgeboren
Wird hier jeder: ort der wiege
Heimat bleibt ein marchenklang.
