Secret Germany: Stauffenberg and the True Story of Operation Valkyrie

by Michael Baigent

  In 1913, Steiner and an entourage of primarily German disciples defected from Theosophy and Created their own rival system, Anthroposophy. Steiner described Anthroposophy as ‘spiritual science’. Ultimately, it was a re-vamped and updated variant of Theosophy, embedded in a specifically Christian context. It also stripped Theosophy of many of the tenets that lent themselves to racist interpretation. Not surprisingly, perhaps, Steiner became singled out for vilification and attack by the Ariosophists and, as it consolidated power, the National Socialist Party. Nazi propaganda regularly castigated Anthroposophy as an integral component in the alleged international Jewish—Masonic conspiracy.

  On the whole, Anthroposophy tended to exert a beneficent influence. Among its most enthusiastic adherents, sponsors and financial supporters were the family of Helmuth von Moltke, Chief of Germany’s Imperial General Staff on the outbreak of the First World War and nephew of the earlier Helmuth von Moltke, architect of victory in the Franco-Prussian War. Another adherent, at least for a time, was the great Russian novelist, poet and aesthetic theorist Andrey Bely. The currency that Steiner’s thought enjoyed in such social and cultural circles attests to its influence and its aura of legitimacy and respectability. That aura remains largely intact even today. It has been reinforced by the promotion of Goethe studies, by other literary scholarship, by publishing ventures which have restored to print a number of important but neglected works, and by the network of Steiner Schools in Germany and elsewhere across the world, including Britain.

  It is not altogether inappropriate, therefore, to see Steiner as a species of ‘white magic’ counter-current to the ‘black magic’ of the Ariosophists and National Socialism. Nor is it inappropriate to compare him in certain respects to Stefan George. But there were important differences between the two men. Steiner actively sought and recruited disciples. Like H. P. Blavatsky, he dreamed of establishing a new religious system, if not, indeed, a new religion. He created a large, widespread and diffuse organisation and, as a necessary corollary of this, was perfectly content to delegate authority. And although he himself was repeatedly attacked by the Nazis, he did not counter-attack. On the contrary, his particular form of mysticism—a latter-day variant of German pietist tradition—led him to a sage-like pacifism reminiscent of Gandhi’s.

  George was much more haughtily Olympian than Steiner, much more aloof, much more fastidiously selective, much more patrician, much more ‘elitist’. He did not actively seek disciples; would-be followers had first to petition him, and then pass through a stringent assessment before they were deemed worthy to sit at his feet. Unlike Steiner, George recoiled with distaste from all mass movements, which were, for him, synonymous with the mob. He had no interest in founding an organisation, for, among other things, that would have entailed delegating authority, the very suggestion of which would have been inconceivable to him. There was, and could only ever be, one Stefan George. While Steiner’s gentle and accommodating Weltanschauung led him to a tolerant pacifism, the much more aggressive George insisted on the necessity for action.

  Steiner died in 1927, when the prospects of National Socialism acquiring power in Germany still seemed remote. George died in 1933, when the Nazi accession to power had just become a fait accompli. We cannot know how these two men, in their differing fashions, might have reacted to subsequent developments. Both, however, through their respective disciples and protégés, were to oppose the Third Reich from beyond the grave. Yet it was George’s influence, operating through Claus von Stauffenberg, that came closest to striking a decisive blow which would have transformed the course of twentieth-century history.

  12

  Legislators of the World

  Stefan George was born at a village near Bingen, on the Rhine between Koblenz and Wiesbaden, in 1868. He was thus three years younger than William Butler Yeats, the English-language poet he most resembles, and older than his two great Austrian contemporaries, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Rainer Maria Rilke, by six and seven years respectively. There was one other child in his family, an elder sister. His parents owned a few vineyards, made their living in the wine trade and were devout Roman Catholics, which George himself would quickly cease to be.

  Even as a schoolboy, George is said to have kept aloof from others and displayed a haughty, autocratic personality. He only joined such groups, clubs or student organisations as he could lead or preside over—and, when this was not possible, he would create his own. He began writing poetry at the age of eighteen and in 1887 began to edit his school’s literary journal. He left school a year later in order to travel. Like so many important German poets and novelists, he felt magnetically drawn to southern Europe; but if the lure for Goethe, Hölderlin, Heine, Mann and others was Greece or Italy, George—though certainly devoted to the world of classical antiquity—felt a profound affinity for Spain.

  In 1888, George visited England. In February of the following year, he visited Italy and then, in March, he made the first of a number of pilgrimages to Paris. Here he became acquainted with many symbolist literary figures, including Verlaine and the dying Villiers de l’Isle-Adam. Eventually he was introduced, and apprenticed himself, to the arch-mage of ‘le symbolisme’, Stéphane Mallarmé, who was also revered as a prophet and near demi-god by such English and Irish artists as George Moore, Arthur Symons, Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, Oscar Wilde and W. B. Yeats. Like them, George fell under Mallarmé’s spell, fervently embraced the symbolist aesthetic and adopted aspects of the French master’s inscrutable demeanour. In certain respects—an insistence on rigour, discipline and an almost monastic asceticism, for example—George even outdid Mallarmé. In consequence, he contemptuously repudiated the lurid morbidity and ‘decadence’—exemplified by the novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans—with which French symbolism was often associated, and which Mallarmé deigned to tolerate. This repudiation imparted to both his work and his personality a hard, uncompromising and frosty edge, which differentiated him from Hofmannsthal and Rilke, his Austrian contemporaries and fellow symbolist exponents.

  Yet, like Hofmannsthal and Rilke, George dedicated himself self-consciously, and with a genuinely religious sense of vocation, to the life of the spirit—which meant, of course, the life of Art, in its most exalted, orphic and prophetic sense. George subscribed to the prevailing dictum of ‘l’art pour l’art’, ‘art for art’s sake’, but art, for George, as for the other great figures of his generation, was not what it might be for most people today—not just one of many possible and equally valid human endeavours. On the contrary, art was nothing less than a repository for the sacred, a conduit between spirit and the mundane world, a lens into the numinous. For George—as for Rilke, Hofmannsthal, Yeats, Joyce, Mann, Proust and the other monumental poets and novelists of the early twentieth century—art was a mystical vocation, and the artist was a combination of priest, prophet, magus, sorcerer, occult adept, metaphorical alchemist and, ultimately, martyr to his calling. In consequence, the frontiers between art and religion, art and magic, art and the esoteric, were deliberately blurred.

  George concurred with Shelley’s famous statement that ‘poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’, and resented the fact that they were unacknowledged. He regarded the poet as ‘the appointed keeper of the nation’s inner strength’—in other words, of its ‘folk soul’ or true collective identity. The poet, in effect, was not what he is generally understood to be, but something closer to the sacred bards of ancient Wales and Ireland, or the wrathful and chastising prophets of the Old Testament:

  In placid times they say the poet is

  A winged child who sings his tender dreams

  And showers beauty on a busy world.

  But when abuses swell into a storm,

  And Destiny pounds at the door his verses

  Ring like a pick on ore . . .

  When all are blinded he, the only seer,

  Unveils the coming doom in vain . . .1

  And further:

  But in a mournful ag
e it is the poet

  Who keeps the marrow sound, the germ alive.

  He stirs the holy flame ...

  A younger generation rises towards him,

  The youths who, steeled by years of galling

  pressure,

  Again have honest standards for the probe

  Of men and things . . .

  He breaks the chains and sweeps aside the rubble,

  He scourges home the lost to lasting law,

  Where lord is lord again, the great is great

  And where integrity returns. He fastens

  The true device upon the nation’s banner.

  Through tempests and the dread fanfares of

  dawning

  He leads his tried and faithful to the work

  Of sober day and founds the Kingdom Come.2

  In 1890, George travelled to Copenhagen and again to Paris. In that year, he also produced his first volume of verse, Hymnen (Odes), a slender volume in an edition of one hundred copies intended for private circulation only. A year later, he produced a second volume, Pilgerfahrten (Pilgrimages) and visited England again, Munich and Vienna, where he met and became friends with Hofmannsthal. In 1892 he organised the clique of associates and disciples which was to become known as the ‘George Kreis’, the ‘George Circle’. In that year, too, there appeared the first issue of Blätter für die Kunst, the esoteric-oriented literary and cultural journal which George was to co-edit for the next twenty-seven years. The inaugural issue contained, along with some of his own poems, one by Hofmannsthal. In its subsequent issues, the journal, as much as the manifestos and volumes of poetry that appeared concurrently, affords an accurate and ongoing reflection of George’s personal and artistic development.

  In 1893, George became loosely associated with an Ariosophist-style cultural school called the ‘Cosmics’, and with two of their mentors, the racial theoreticians Alfred Schüler and Ludwig Klages. Before long, his relations with them became strained, and plummeted when George, disgusted, walked out in the middle of an anti-Semitic diatribe by Schüler. Associates of both men made sporadic attempts to heal the rift, but George was becoming increasingly incensed by pseudo-scientific blither about ‘pure blood’ and by anti-Semitism generally. By 1904, his breach with Schüler, Klages and their entourage had become permanent. It is significant that this, rather than any aesthetic disagreement, constituted the grounds for the rupture. But it was an aesthetic disagreement that led, shortly thereafter, to a rupture between George and Hofmannsthal. Or, to be more precise, it was Hofmannsthal’s refusal to accord George unquestioning deference and the status of supreme aesthetic potentate.

  In the meantime, successive volumes of poetry had appeared in 1893, 1894, 1897 and 1899. And in 1902, in Munich, George had encountered a twelve-year-old youth named Maximilian Kronberger, for whom he conceived a highly idealised, and stylised, affection. Contrary to allegations made at the time, and even today repeated, it seems clear that there was no homosexual relationship between George and Maximilian. In fact, George saw Maximilian on no more than a dozen occasions, and always in public or in the boy’s home and in the presence of his mother. But Maximilian came to be imbued by the poet with a portentous symbolic significance—came to represent an epitome of classical Grecian beauty in human form and, as such, an ‘avatar’ of divine forces. This fused with a poignant solicitude and tenderness, very likely paternal in character, and engendered a passionate attachment—probably the most passionate attachment of George’s life. When Maximilian died in 1904, George was stricken. Maximilian’s death—the fragile mortality of what had seemed so sublime and so supernal—continued to haunt him for years afterwards. He seems not wholly to have recovered from the blow until 1924, when, it has been suggested, the young Claus von Stauffenberg appeared as an ‘avatar’ of the same numinous principles formerly incarnated by the boy who had died twenty years before.

  By the first decade of the new century, George was beginning to publish for, and reach, a wider audience. He maintained a restlessly peripatetic lifestyle, moving constantly between Berlin, Munich, Bingen, Vienna, Frankfurt and Heidelberg. In each of these cities he had a circle of friends who served to insulate him, acting as a buffer between himself and the world and enabling him to sustain his aloof stance. The members of each such circle were carefully vetted and expected to prove worthy of George’s lofty expectations. His relation to them was always that of ‘Master’ to disciple. They were obliged to swear an oath of allegiance to the circle and to George personally. In his book on Stefan George, E. K. Bennett makes it clear that it was ‘not just a conception of poetry which the disciples were required to share with the Master, but a conception of life’.3 It was Hofmannsthal’s refusal to accept these terms that led to his alienation from George.

  For three years following Maximilian Kronberger’s death, George published nothing. Then, in 1907, there appeared his seventh volume of poetry, entitled Der Siebente Ring (The Seventh Ring), divided into seven sections. Among other things, this volume reflected the influence of Theosophy and H. P. Blavatsky, for whom seven was the supreme sacred number. But The Seventh Ring also marked a dramatic change in George’s orientation, something amounting to a kind of conversion.

  In the past, George had shared with Mallarmé and the French symbolists not only an aesthetic, but also a comprehensive Weltanschauung which encompassed its own metaphysics and ethics. According to symbolist metaphysics, the material or phenomenal world was ultimately but a reflection of some other, higher reality—what Mallarmé generally denoted by such words as ‘l’azur’ and ‘l’idéal.’ Symbolist ethics dictated a complete dissociation of the artist from society. The symbolists did not see themselves as teachers or mentors: their rôle was simply to embody and refract the numinous in the perfect work of art, which need be accessible only to fellow initiates. To this extent, they felt themselves absolved from mundane morality and all social or pedagogical responsibility.

  Until the end of his life, George continued to employ symbolist literary techniques, and remained loyal to the underlying aesthetic, but with The Seventh Ring he repudiated the accompanying metaphysics and ethics. He now undertook to seek and reflect the sacred, the numinous, not in some ethereal ‘other’ dimension, but in the actual and mundane world around him. The characteristically intangible images of the symbolists—smoke, mist, clouds, sky and wind—began to disappear from his poetry, and were replaced by motifs that were harder, more solid, more tangible, often with a polished, glazed and brightly enamelled patina. And Maximilian’s death seemed to have left him with a legacy of responsibility, of obligation to Germany’s young. He appointed himself custodian of Germany’s spiritual and cultural future. Abandoning the godlike indifference of the symbolist poet-mage, he assumed the more Platonic or Pythagorean rôle of mentor and teacher. He remained, of course, detached and aloof. He was hardly going to demean himself as a conventional pedagogue. But with the elite, handpicked cadre of youths he admitted to his circle, he felt himself playing a part analogous to that played in Greek myth by Chiron, the centaur who functions as guide, instructor and tutor to such heroes as Aesculapius, Jason, Achilles and Hercules.

  In the past, then, George had sought to impart to art, and especially to poetry, a new purity and perfection. After 1907. he sought to impart a new purity and perfection to reality itself—or, more specifically, to Germany’s future. ‘L’idéal’ of Mallarmé was now no longer to be a remote transcendent principle, but an agent active in the phenomenal world—as what one commentator has called ‘a germinating and transforming seed’. According to one of his associates writing at the time, George felt himself entrusted with ‘a holy mission which raised him alone above the mass of fellow poets ... [He] believed fanatically in the advent of a new spirit-filled age and in his special mission to bring it about.’4;5

  To this end, his circle had not only to be esoteric initiates. They had also to be mystical warriors, soldiers of the spirit engaged on a spiritual crusade. In this resp
ect, they were heir to the knights in the poem entitled ‘Templars’, although George meant by the term something very different from the Ariosophist New Templars of Lanz von Liebenfels.

  Once in a Golden Age we merged with all,

  For aeons now the crowd has shunned our call.

  We are the Rose: the young and fervent heart,

  The Cross: to suffer proudly is our art.

  On unknown courses, silent and austere,

  We turn the sombre spool, we turn the spear.

  Through coward years our flaming weapon rings,

  We scourge the people and we challenge kings.

  We do not join the customs and the bout

  Of those who look askance at us and doubt

  And fear because their hatred never felled

  What with our savage love we caught and held.

  Whatever loot our swords and slings have gained

  Pours negligently from our spendthrift hand,

  And though our rage devises harsh decrees,

  Before a child we fall upon our knees.

  We veil the flashing glance, the loosened lock

  Which once betrayed the lord in beggar’s smock,

  Shyly from forward swarms who on our shade

  —When we are gone—confer their accolade.

  We nursed at alien breast and so our sons

  Shall never be the children of our loins,