Postulants for admission to his circle were subjected to initiation rituals and rites which involved such arduous undertakings as writing worthy poems. Members of the circle were all given new cultic names that reflected their individual qualities—except, significantly, for Claus von Stauffenberg, who kept his own. George also invented his own private language, in which he composed a number of evocative poems and expected his disciples to be versed. Lines in this language, which owes much to Spanish and Portuguese, were often woven into his German poems as well:
CO BESOSO PASOJE PTOROS
CO ES ON HAMA PASOJE BOAÑ.31
It is now clear that much of the bizarre and exotic extravagance attributed to George was, at least to some extent, misplaced. In a lecture after the war, Alexander von Stauffenberg stated:
Previously there was talk of a kind of ‘ritual’—of gorgeous robes, incense and secret ceremonies. Whatever substance there may have been in these rumours at the time (and they were undoubtedly exaggerated), we never detected a trace of anything of the sort. Life went on very normally—meals, walks in the country, discussions in the evening—all completely simple ... Only for the major poetry readings was there a special atmosphere of solemnity, and that was quite understandable ...32
To the mother of the three Stauffenberg youths, the rumours were nevertheless disquieting. Given her devotion to poetry, Gräfin Karoline was, of course, already familiar with George’s work, but the prospect of her three sons being apprenticed to him was altogether a different matter. The countess undertook her own investigations. According to some accounts, she even employed a private detective. She herself drove to Heidelberg to meet the ‘Master’ and assure herself that he was unlikely to corrupt her children. George emerged from the countess’s enquiries unscathed.33 In her meeting with him, Karoline was not only appeased, but also impressed and converted. Her sons, she concluded, could not have a better mentor. Stauffenberg’s most recent German biographer, Peter Hoffmann, also acquits George:
The suspicion of homo-eroticism surfaced, but it was also misplaced, although it was understandable because the circle consisted only of men ... The study of Greek culture, particularly Plato, undoubtedly provided grounds for assuming sundry things. There are also poems from the circle of friends which seem to hint at homo-erotic relationships. But for the Stauffenberg brothers, it was all a matter of the mind; and Claus later defended to his officer friends the Greek Eros praised by Plato ... so energetically and clearly that they were convinced. One is wrong to assume that George ever did anything untoward along the hinted lines ...34
The evidence seems effectively to counter the allegations against George. The milieu, after all, was not the cabaret society of decadent Berlin, but the provincial world of conservative Württemberg.
Homosexuality was not only more of a stigma than it is now. It was also a criminal offence. And the Stauffenbergs were not just punctilious in their respect for the law, but also acutely sensitive about any potential stain on the family name and honour. Were there even the slightest grounds for crediting the rumours about George’s circle, it is inconceivable that Gräfin Karoline would have allowed her sons to become members.
Berthold and Alexander joined the circle in the summer of 1923, Claus at the end of 1924, when he was seventeen. Their reception into the exclusive group was a source of mutual enthusiasm. The Stauffenbergs had long been devotees of George’s work, and all of them knew many of the ‘Master’s’ poems by heart. Other disciples ‘seemed to see something regal in the Stauffenbergs’, regarding them as avatars of heroic figures of the past, the knights who had served the Hohenstauffen emperors. George himself, as well as other members of the circle, wrote poems specifically dedicated to Berthold. As for Claus, Ludwig Thormaehlen reported panegyrically:
The future seemed to be tangible in him. One can imagine the enthusiasm that George felt at the advent of this youth ... George was a passionate guardian of youthful potential ... Claus flourished in this milieu of humanitarian education and was nurtured in the poetic. The intellectual and creative came naturally to him. The poetic was necessary to him. His love and admiration for George were unquestionable, direct yet without any unhealthy deference ... His rare presences delighted the poet, brightened the poet’s spirits. In his direct and fresh fashion—a fashion appropriate to his age—he participated in every conversation with equal degrees of reserve and intelligent intervention. Like Berthold, he was, in his own way, a master of the free and lofty. He recognised nothing to be above him, nothing to be beneath him ... His exchanges with George were warm and straightforward. The oath of allegiance was made immediately and candidly, as though between loved and honoured members of an extended family.35
The oath of allegiance to George was of profound significance to all three of the Stauffenberg brothers, but seems to have exercised a particularly strong hold over Berthold. Lacking Claus’s fierce independence, he sought the ‘Master’s’ approval for a number of his decisions. When he was in Paris, during 1927-8, he made a point of obtaining George’s permission before embarking on a holiday to the south of France. In 1931, he became engaged to a woman of whom George disapproved. The following spring, George (then in exile in Switzerland) summoned Berthold for a weighty consultation. On what appears to have been the ‘Master’s’ decree, Berthold withdrew from the marriage—though he did finally marry the woman after George’s death.36 Years later, when George was long dead, Berthold continued to maintain that his allegiance to the ‘Master’ took priority even over his obligations to the State.
The Stauffenbergs had signed a secret pact, whose tenets were above those of personal relationships. They demanded the energy and commitment of the whole person. Ultimately, it was about an idea. George’s circle fostered, especially for the youths, the spirit (later) to be engendered by the conspiracy: Secret Germany.37
As members of George’s circle, the Stauffenberg brothers read and discussed literature, philosophy, aesthetic theory and a corpus of what today would be called ‘esoteric’ teachings. They also read and wrote poetry, which Berthold and Alexander continued to do into adulthood and maturity. Claus, as far as is known, abandoned his efforts after the age of eighteen or so, but there were many other activities in George’s circle to keep him stimulated. There were constant discussions, conversations and debates traversing the vast spectrum of George’s interests. There were the ‘divagations’ (to use the word of one of George’s own mentors, the French symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé) of the ‘Master’ himself, an unfailing source of inspiration to his disciples. There were communal meals and walks in Heidelberg and the surrounding countryside, especially to scenic or historically resonant sites along the Rhine, where the Stauffenbergs’ own sense of legend, tradition and the sacred nature of the river were echoed by the ‘Master’s’ orphic pronouncements. Intimidating though George could be, Claus was not cowed. He adapted eagerly and comfortably to the prevailing ambience, and made himself an integral member of the group:
He would intervene in a manner which showed his intelligence—frank and honest in opposition, good humoured in criticism, but equally vigorous in agreement or in support of any justified demands by others.38
George was not just a self-proclaimed magus advocating a pure aestheticism based on ‘l’art pour l’art’, not just a mystic advocating personal self-perfection and self-refinement. He was fervently committed to the necessity for action, and though he despised politics as such, he was profoundly concerned about the cultural future of the West as a whole and Germany in particular. When asked what he considered his most important work, he replied: ‘My friends.’39 He might equally have said, ‘My protégés.’ Ultimately, George saw himself as a kind of Chiron or Pythagcias, grooming a select cadre of ‘spiritual aristocrats’ for the weighty task of leadership. This, he felt, was his real legacy. And his insistence on service and responsibility to the community, on an enlightened few to function as beacons, would have meshed perfectly with the values and attitude
s the Stauffenbergs had acquired through their family. Indeed, George’s mentorship would have reinforced those values and attitudes, and imparted a new, more focused direction to them. His insistence on action, as well as on human interaction, contributed significantly to Claus von Stauffenberg’s renunciation of architecture in favour of the army.
In October 1924, shortly before deciding to embark on a military career, Claus wrote to George, citing the ‘Master’s’ own work (and emulating something of the ‘Master’s’ own unorthodox syntax):
and in this book I learned the sense of wakeful nights: of the rhythms of praying life and the sound of loud supplications. And the clearer Aliveness stands before me: the loftier Humanity reveals itself and the more piercingly the deed shows itself: so much darker does one’s own blood become: so much fainter grows the sound of one’s own words and so much rarer the sense of one’s own life: indeed, until the hour which, in the harshness of its impact and the greatness of its advent, gives the sign. Master, I have learned too much from this poem:
YOU ARE THE CORNERSTONE AND I ACCLAIM YOU.40
The line quoted is from a poem published in 1913, but it is the first line of a stanza which could have been addressed to the Stauffenbergs personally. It is not difficult to imagine how George’s words could sink like fishhooks into the mind of a seventeen-year-old high-born youth:
You are the cornerstone, and I acclaim you
For how you face yourselves, and me, and others,
Fulfil your tasks and urge to faithful hearts.
You are the vassals, bearers of the realm . . . what
works
Within it soon will work the whole, and what
You do not grasp today can never be.41
Two months before Claus’s letter to George, in August 1924, Alexander von Stauffenberg had composed a poem entitled ‘The Warrior’. In it he depicts his younger brother agonising over the question of whether to embark on a military career:
The yearnings of the soul you barely hide
Sorrow stirs your young brow: too far away to you
What moves your fresh youth
Now you walk at my side silent and serious
Before you were all turmoil and interrupted
By wild stirrings to us alone appeared your sorrow
I saw your breast pounding in silent tolerance
Because fate took away from you the sweet pleasures.
Still it is true that each pain only proves our worth
And a scout finds a willing guard
I never saw glow with such tenderness
And never by such glowing dreams considered.
The stern brow, the pensive spectator
Towered up cities in the midday country—
You stand still in the shade by the wall
Of the cathedral and questioningly raise your hand.
O self reply, silent companion
Your picture as before is turmoil and embers
and it burns
And pours in one with the crowned rider
That our faraway hopes call king.
It shares the fate of the creation of pain
The noble song, the unstill passion
After a deed so far away ... till you in your heart
The brother find even in decline.42
The ‘crowned rider’ in this poem—the figure standing ‘still in the shade by the wall of the cathedral’ with questioningly raised hand—is in fact a statue. It is known as ‘der Bamberger Reiter’ (‘the Knight of Bamberg’) and stands inside Bamberg’s thirteenth-century cathedral, on the lefthand pier of the choir—the eastern end of the edifice just beyond where the transepts join. The statue is believed to date from around 1240, and generally regarded as a masterpiece of medieval German sculpture. The identity of the figure has never been definitively established, though some hold it to be a representation of Saint Stephen, King of Hungary and brother-in-law of the German Emperor Heinrich II.
When Alexandervon Stauffenberginvoked ‘der Bamberger Reiter’, he was again following in the ‘Master’s’ footsteps. Shortly before the First World War, Stefan George had also invoked the statue, in a short poem entitled ‘Bamberg’:
You, the most alien, sprang—when there was need—
A lawful scion from your people’s flank.
Does not this shrine portray you on your steed,
Proud and contending as a kingly Frank?
And carven—neither Ghibelline nor Guelph—
In the imperial chamber, you are shown:
A silent artist who surpassed himself
And waits bemused for God to do his own.43
It is perhaps not surprising that ‘der Bamberger Reiter’ came to hold a mystical significance for Claus von Stauffenberg. Not only was the statue an evocative embodiment of the chivalric values to which he subscribed. It also bore a positively uncanny physical resemblance to himself—as if he, in the flesh, did indeed represent God’s attempt to rival the work of the unknown medieval sculptor. In George’s circle, and later, in the army, friends would tease him by calling him ‘der Bamberger Reiter’. Even Sir John Wheeler-Bennett, the eminently unmystical British military historian, was struck by the resemblance between man and statue. In Nemesis of Power: A History of the German General Staff in Politics, Wheeler-Bennett published, side by side, photographs of the statue and Claus von Stauffenberg. If one did not know better, one would have no doubts whatever that Stauffenberg had been the sculptor’s model.
6
The New Reich
Whatever personal chord it may have touched in him, ‘der Bamberger Reiter’ did, in fact, portend something of Claus von Stauffenberg’s destiny. On 1 April 1926, at the age of nineteen, he entered the regiment in which his uncle had served: the 17th Bavarian Cavalry, also known as the Bamberg Cavalry and with its depot in that town.
Having been so drastically reduced in size by the Treaty of Versailles, the Reichswehr was all the more stringent in its training programmes. Candidates for officers’ commissions had first to serve in the ranks as ordinary soldiers, and the young aristocrat did not always find this congenial. ‘For our kind,’ he wrote in a letter to his father a few weeks after his induction, ‘it is not easy to play among the common people for long periods.’1 He also stated that he had never expected the early phases of his military service to be enjoyable; and there was never any question of his failing to ‘stick it out’. He was to be promoted to lance-corporal on 18 August 1927; to NCO on 15 October 1927; to sergeant on 1 August 1928; to staff-sergeant on 1 August 1929; to second lieutenant on 1 January 1930, and to full lieutenant on 1 May 1933.
Among other things, his association with the Bamberg Cavalry allowed Stauffenberg to indulge his love of horses.
He had a real passion and an inborn skill for riding and handling horses. When he was billeted on a farmer, he one day came across a young mare among the draught-horses, ‘an enchanting personality’, as he put it. He bought the mare, trained her to perform the passage and levade and won a prize with her in the difficult dressage test.2
In later years, he was to buy shares, along with his father-in-law, in a foal named Jagd, which he chose from a stud farm and trained personally. He was to become one of Germany’s most prominent horsemen, standing as a candidate for the country’s Olympic dressage team. And a decade later, as war drew nearer, he was to prepare for the Staff College in Berlin two markedly different papers that reflected the contradictory aspects of his character, one oriented presciently towards the future, the other rooted firmly in tradition and the past. The first of these papers was a striking and revolutionary advocacy of the deployment of paratroops in a combat rôle—something unheard of at the time, yet soon to be a cornerstone of the most advanced military thinking and implemented by the Wehrmacht in such theatres as Holland and Crete. The second paper, with an archaic chivalry verging on quaintness, passionately advocated and tried to rationalise the continued use of mounted cavalry in contemporary warfare.
In October 1927, as a candidate for a commission, Stauffenberg was posted to the infantry training school in Dresden, where he first met his later co-conspirator, Merz von Quirnheim, and began to learn Russian. In 1928, he received a new posting, to the cavalry school at Hannover, where only the most highly rated sergeants were sent. During the winter of 1927-8, he travelled frequently to Berlin, where he would meet Berthold and Alexander and attend poetry readings at Stefan George’s apartment.
At the cavalry school in Hannover, he first met one of his future divisional commanders, Major (later Lieutenant-General) Friedrich-Wilhelm, Freiherr von Loeper, who, on the basis of his glowing reports, nominated Stauffenberg course leader. In this capacity, he quickly earned the confidence of both colleagues and superiors.
He was an expert at settling differences, acting as a go-between and smoothing out quarrels; he looked for and found the good side to everybody and had an extraordinary knack of making the best of everything.3
Secret Germany: Stauffenberg and the True Story of Operation Valkyrie Page 13