The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God

by Watson, Peter

  He took the gold from holy chalices·

  For blond hair the straw of ripening wheat·

  The pink from children who draw with brick·

  From the washerwoman at the stream the indigo.

  Nature here is placed in the service of art and, implicitly at least, the artist is being positioned on the same level as God. Throughout the collection it is the accomplishment of the poet that is foregrounded. Part of the aim here, as elsewhere with the Symbolists, is to subdue and even overthrow the outside world, the physical world we inhabit, which is considered “irretrievably debased, tawdry and malignant” and which is to be replaced by the creations of this privileged group of initiates.

  This privileged group also congregated around George via Blätter für die Kunst (Pages for Art), which was more than a journal but a standard-bearer to which George’s followers could rally and extend his message. This was all the more important because, early on and for some time afterward, his books of poems were printed in editions of very few copies (206 for The Year of the Soul), and distributed only to handpicked followers. This privileged view was not confined to George. Hugo von Hofmannsthal wrote to him, confiding: “I am completely agreed with everything you say; I also have no concern for the ‘paper,’ nor for publicity, rather I am concerned solely about coming into contact with a necessarily small circle of people searching as I am and to get to know related works of art that are otherwise inaccessible [italics added].” To underscore their task, the journal proclaimed that its central aim was to promote a “spiritual art”—eine geistige Kunst—“on the basis of the new sensibility and manner—an art for art.”13

  The most accessible of George’s verse is probably The Year of the Soul, which Norton describes as “a melancholy wash spread over the interior landscape of the poet’s mind.”

  You stepped up to the hearth

  Where all embers have died·

  The only light on the earth

  Was the moon’s cadaveric color.

  You dipped your pallid fingers

  Deep into the ashes

  Searching feeling groping—

  That there may be a glow again!

  See what the moon advises you

  With a gesture of consolation:

  Step away from the hearth·

  It has become late.

  Throughout the book everything is bathed in this “twilight glow,” not unlike the deliquescent, placeless, sensual women in some of Gustav Klimt’s paintings, who seem to float past the viewer, where the sheer beauty of the creation outweighs any other form of meaning. (This quality is the one most challenging to the translator.)

  George initially wanted to use poetry to create an alternative world, but with Blätter he also developed the idea of a circle, a small, privileged group of people to surround him. And in this idea, of a circle of initiates, was embedded the issue of hierarchy that took on increasing importance as a way to live, as a viable alternative to bourgeois society. George and his followers saw a circle of like minds as the best way for great ideas, beautiful ideas, to emerge and coalesce. Even within this circle, there was never any claim that all were equal. Indeed, it was stated that “small” ideas of the lesser members could help generate larger, more beautiful ideas in the leaders (George himself, of course, was at the top). For the lesser members, it was regarded as consolation enough to have played a part in the higher life of the leaders. As one of them put it, the lesser members gathered the flowers which a leader would later “weave into his wreath.” The circle always presupposed a center that gave stability, direction and purpose to the whole.14

  Such a view, such a setup, made sense only alongside another characteristic of George’s circle—a determined attack on the value of reason and rationality. One can see why. The critical faculty creates doubt, calls things into question, does not recognize sanctioned authority, and therefore tends to be isolating. Belief is best sustained in the absence of criticism. George’s group valued above all the “ecstatic celebration that erases all distinctions among individual beings.”15

  Various alternatives to reason were offered by members of the circle. Ludwig Klages, a philosopher who thought the modern world “degenerate” and who founded the German graphologists’ association, proposed that “enthusiasm” drives the artist. “Creative natures are characterized by the deep love of life. From it flows enthusiasm—that is the power of self-sacrifice, of dissolving into the object of veneration. Belief and adoration are in the soul of the creative one. Art is not created out of objective knowledge, but out of an enthusiastic embrace of illusions and dreams.”

  As Leonard Woolf said, there have been countless artistic “circles” of all colors held together more or less loosely by common assumptions, but there has been nothing quite like George’s “secret Germany,” as it would come to be called.16

  The Tapestry of Life did not have a religious-sounding title, like some of George’s other books, but it nonetheless had qualities of a sacred text. Its language recalls the Bible and takes the form of a gospel with an angel, the bearer of the doctrine of “the beautiful life,” George’s own idiosyncratic vision. The most important lesson the angel teaches the poet is “the value and importance of submitting to a superior being,” the angel giving the poet leave to adopt a similar position in regard to his own followers.

  A small flock going quietly along its way

  Proudly remote from the working bustle

  And on their flags the slogan stands:

  To Hellas forever our love.

  The Greek ideal would eventually congeal for George into a coherent doctrine, inside which he offered the shelter of meaning and certainty, and asked in return absolute loyalty.

  We march at the side of our severe lord

  Who carefully examines his fighters

  No weeping keeps us back from following our star

  No friend’s arm and no bride’s kiss.

  George’s followers were, in effect, his disciples. He had adopted the Christian model, but in the service of beauty, to which he alone had ultimate access. This may seem anachronistic to us, but it is at least fairly straightforward. However, there were to be complications.

  SHAKESPEARE, NOT YAHWEH

  Some of George’s disciples were young men, boys even. At first they were chosen under the pretext of a search for poetic talent, but that was gradually dropped. There were two who were to be especially notable. The first, in 1898, was Friedrich Gundelfinger. So handsome that women sent him flowers, he was a mesmerizing conversationalist and a brilliant mimic. Gundelfinger was obsessed with George and George with him. George called him “Gundolf.”17

  Even in this we see George’s views evolving, in that his personal agenda was gradually raised to the level of a dogma, which had two elements. The George doctrine was for art and against Protestantism, Prussia and the bourgeoisie. Everyone in his circle held to these views with an intensity that is probably beyond us today. Gundolf said it plainly: “I want to serve Shakespeare and not Yahweh or Baal.” The members regarded themselves as “a higher form of being” and regarded art not as a game but as sacred. Without exaggeration, it was for them a matter of life or death.18

  The second of the young men who was to have a profound influence on George was in fact a mere boy. In 1903, when George met Maximilian Kronberger, the former was thirty-five and the latter had just turned fifteen. And it was the premature death of Maximilian (Maximin, as he became to George) that sparked a crucial new phase in George’s own life, partly because Maximin died unexpectedly from meningitis the day after his sixteenth birthday. Until that point, the exceptionalness of the George circle had not gone much beyond their shared sense of aesthetic superiority. But Maximin’s death changed everything.

  It appears that, at this juncture, George had some kind of mystical experience. As his biographer says, “The nonrational, immaterial sphere had alway
s been associated with poetry for George. He [now] made a straight-faced claim for Maximin’s divinity and himself as a secular priest, in a private religion.” This takes some swallowing, but the poet and translator Friedrich Wolters, who was one of George’s most devoted followers, agreed that the master felt himself touched by a miracle—“that God had decided to appear in human form, as Maximin.”19 From now on, George saw himself not just as a poet but also as a kind of Jesus figure. What distinguished him from others in history who have adopted such a pose (and often received psychiatric treatment as a result) is that his acolytes treated him in the way that he wished to be treated.

  By 1910, there were some thirty people in George’s entourage, which represented, in their own eyes at least, a distinct alternative to the bourgeois (Christian) way of life. They had a well-defined purpose and unity; unlike the loose agglomeration of bourgeois society, the group offered a new way of living against society, of sharing a profound hatred for modernity. In his book The Seventh Ring (1907), George went so far as to outline a private eschatology, signifying the end of the old way of living together and announcing a new one in which the disciples surround a master. Discipleship, which some among the circle openly acknowledged, would seem a very foreign and even ridiculous idea; nonetheless, it liberated the disciple from “the arrogant isolation of the ego” and allowed him to lead his (hardly ever her) life in the act of adoration and praise, this being the purpose and salvation of the members.

  “The duty of disciples is not imitation,” Gundolf claimed. “Their pride is that the master is unique. They should not make his images—but rather be his work—not put on and display his petrified traits and gestures—but rather absorb into their being his blood and his breath, his light and his warmth.” “The Führer’s disciples,” Gundolf went on (in an unfortunate metaphor), “should be walking ovens that he has heated, matter he has animated etc. . . . Only a Führer or master can properly be said to be a ‘personality.’ . . . Whoever knows himself not to be a master should learn to be a servant or disciple—[which is] better than a hyperactive vanity.”20

  SECRET GERMANY: A SPIRITUAL STATE

  All this was so at variance with the common European tradition of Enlightenment and liberalism that the question has often been asked as to whether some sort of private pathology was involved here, either on George’s part or that of his followers (Ludwig Klages certainly showed signs of schizophrenia). But over time, George’s influence would grow, not diminish. By then he was the center of a quasi-religious cultural crusade, “a circle of disciples [that] was to find its fulfillment in forming a spiritual state, which could gradually penetrate the outlying regions in ever farther reaches.”21

  One of the reasons George was not dismissed as deranged undoubtedly stemmed from the uncanny effect he had on others. Alexander von Bernus (1880–1965) was a poet and editor of Die Freistatt, a magazine which published such authors as Frank Wedekind, Rainer Maria Rilke, Stefan Zweig, Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse. Many of his contributors became his friends, so he was not easily overawed. But when George stayed with him at Stift Neuburg, von Bernus’s country residence near Heidelberg, in the summer of 1909, even he admitted that “what was convincing and compelling about Stefan George was not so much his poetry . . . as the fascination of a great personality who had mastered his passions . . . a personality that was much more that of a Roman Caesar than that of a poet. . . . In the years before World War One an almost mythical nimbus surrounded him.”

  Gundolf carried this further. He believed “in spiritual impregnation, in the resurrection and rebirth of the pupil through the master, in the implanting of the spirit, like the priest of a primitive tribe.” All this gained further momentum when, in November 1909, George announced that he was founding a new journal, the Jahrbuch für die geistige Bewegung (Yearbook for the Spiritual Movement).22 According to Karl Wolfskehl, another of George’s entourage, “the group had an agreed view of life itself.” As opposed to the “overheated cult of individuality of our time,” which fed on the empty slogans of “reason,” “freedom” and “humanity,” George’s disciples “represented the only unity of people, works, and desires to have arisen organically” during the previous two decades. It was only among circle members, Wolfskehl wrote, that “personal envy and resentment, all striving among one another, all craving to steal or swindle each other’s status,” were absent. For him and the others, “the true driving force of the time” should be sought “not in that infertile wasteland known as the modern world but somewhere else: in the constellation gathered around George that Wolfskehl for the first time gave a name to—‘Secret Germany.’” George was felt by his disciples to be the leader of a spiritual war “that can no longer be avoided.”23

  Nor was this the end of such claims. Gundolf again: “Professing one’s faith in George is not professing faith in a person. Stefan George is the most important person in Germany today. . . . He wields his power by creating the linguistic body of the coming spirit and forming souls for the coming faith.” Gundolf even suggested that the Germans were, in effect, a modern form of chosen people, “fortunate to have had the miracle of potential rescue dropped in their midst.” Not everyone was chosen, of course. Salvation would be granted to very few, even among the Germans. The others would perish unredeemed. “With George, those Germans who are still able to experience a poet at all are beginning to have the premonition of a new day and the lifting of an ancient anguish.”24 For Wohlters, “We should esteem instead the ‘great man,’ follow him where he leads us, no matter what sacrifices he may demand.” For those lucky enough to be admitted to the circle, they should “look for the man who would provide meaning and a model for your will.” It went without saying that members of the circle should keep themselves free from all “contamination” of a physical or spiritual nature. “The healthy man turns his eye from suffering and keeps himself fit for battle with his enemy.”25

  In November 1913, George published The Star of the Covenant (Der Stern des Bundes) in an edition of ten copies. It contains a hundred poems that need to be read several times if they are to be understood. It is the testament of “Secret Germany,” its aims being to show that the poet is, in effect, a priest, drawing the attention of his followers to the beauty that has replaced God; to identify the poverty and unworthiness of the present world, which must be eradicated before the new age can begin; and to show followers how to conduct their lives in this new age, in the shadow of the great man who leads them.26 George’s aims in this work are nothing less than breathtaking.

  Marianne Weber spoke for many when she said: “The deification of mortal people and the foundation of a religion based on George . . . seemed to us to be the self-deception of a people who are not entirely up to the modern world.”27 Nonetheless, when the First World War broke out there were many who came to share George’s views about leadership and followership. George Lukács thought that the poet was a prototype of Hitler. And many soldiers took The Star of the Covenant (by then widely available) with them to the front and used it “as a breviary.” This aspect will be examined in chapter 9.

  The central unity of George’s work is, then, the establishment of a new religion founded on the power of poetry, where it is the form that takes precedence over the content of any specific poem or body of poems: it is the form of poetry that intensifies sensation. This is to be viewed in the German tradition of Bildung, the process of self-cultivation and refinement in which Dichtung, the practice and experience of poetry, was seen as a highly valued critical corrective to the progressive domination of intellectual life by scientific research and dispassionate scholarship (Wissenschaft). Poetry, on this reading, is superior to the rational idioms of science “because it is imbued with the power of synthesis.” 28 (Remember that Freud had been applauded for his synthesis.)

  All this comes together, for George, in the centrality of the idea of praise. Praise, for him, is the foremost aspect of worship; praise establishes
a relationship between the great man and his followers, between in effect a deity and his worshippers. People need both axes, George is saying, in order to be fulfilled. They need a vertical axis, someone to look up to and learn from, and a horizontal axis, where members of the worshipping community live together according to shared ideals obtained by worship. The notion that “poetry is praise” was adopted by George for his later work. In 1928, Max Kommerell would publish The Poet as Leader in the Age of German Classicism.

  LIVING WITH DISAPPOINTMENT

  Paul Valéry, the French poet and man of letters, was born, he said, in one of the places where he would have wished to be born—Sète, in the South of France, “where my first impressions came from the sea and the activities of a seaport.” Sensitive and highly intelligent, Valéry grew up constantly anxious about making mistakes in his schoolwork and about competition (though there were only four pupils in his class). This may well have colored his attitudes in later life. Always self-disciplined (Nietzsche’s works formed his bedside reading early on), he began to write poetry in his teens, before he did his military service. In 1890, at age nineteen, he met the poet Pierre Louÿs at a festival to celebrate the sixth centenary of the University of Montpellier, Louÿs being a student delegate from Paris. A friendship blossomed, and the Parisian, who mixed in the circle centering on Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine and André Gide, offered to show them some of Valéry’s work. These early friendships no doubt helped propel Valéry’s talent.

  That talent included a lifelong interest in mathematics, and from that stemmed an interest in order, which in turn fueled an interest in music and architecture, major concerns of Mallarmé’s. For Valéry, music and architecture were the greatest art forms, for they were “pure intention.” It was this interest in order that shaped at least part of his philosophy: he thought our main concern should be the attempt to go beyond our organic/biological nature. For him, the processes of organic nature were no guide to the desirable issues of human evolution—as he pointed out, morbidity is as natural as healthiness.29 What separated humans from other animals was our ability to break free from our biological inheritance, and he insisted that “the various things that we are” may be best understood as discontinuous from one another, casting doubt on the idea of the moi pur because we have many successive selves, some of which exist simultaneously.