They never will be weak, dilute, or old,
For unborn fires quicken in their mould.
And only one of ours can complete
The needed change or do the iron feat
To which they summon us when chaos reigns,
Only to stone and curse us for our pains.
And when in wrath the Mighty Mother scorns
To lean and couple at the lower bourns,
Some world-night when her pulses scarcely stir,
Then only one who always strove with her,
Ignored her wishes and denied her will,
Can crush her hand and grip her hair until
Submissively she plies her work afresh:
Turns flesh to god, embodies god in flesh.6
The latter-day ‘Templars’ George gathered around him comprised for him a unique kind of nobility and aristocracy of the spirit, not unlike that extolled a few years earlier by Nietzsche, and a few years later by D. H. Lawrence. The status of this elite had nothing whatever to do with social class, caste or background, and nothing to do with race or heritage:
The nobility you long for
Does not hail from crown and scutcheon.
Through their glances men of every
Rank betray their venal fancies
And their raw and ribald prying.
Sons of rare distinction grow from
Anywhere among the people,
And you will discern your kindred
By their frank and fervent eyes.6
It was for this nobility, for the sources of their inspiration and for what they were expected to achieve, that the words ‘Secret Germany’ were first employed. In 1910, three years after the publication of The Seventh Ring, one of George’s disciples composed an essay on the importance of the circle as the seed from which German renewal would spring:
For what is beginning to stir today beneath the desolate superficial crust is still half a dream, the secret Germany, the only living thing in this time . . . (and) only here put into words.7
The essay, which had George’s own personal blessing, went on to state that the revitalisation of Europe’s culture and spirit could only emanate ‘from the secret Germany, for which each of our words is spoken, from which each of our verses draws its life and rhythm’.8 Another disciple wrote that ‘the members of the Secret Germany consider themselves as a “cloister” or an “Order”.9 In Weimar Culture P. Gay says that George, unlike Nietzsche, ‘did not choose to be alone; it was the heart of his method to build a secret empire for the sake of the new Reich to come . . . It was an elitist programme pushed to the very limits of elitism; the secret Germany was a club to which new members were elected, and for which they were trained, one by one. Many called, few were chosen . . .’10
Through the circle’s journal, through his own work and that of his disciples, George’s vision evolved and came into ever sharper focus. There were echoes of Nietzsche and, paradoxically and despite George’s distaste for ‘decadence’, Gabriele d’Annunzio, who was not only the arch ‘decadent’ of the age, but also perhaps its most flamboyantly (if self-appointedly) heroic figure. There were many echoes of H. P. Blavatsky and Theosophy. There were echoes of Wagner, even though George seems to have concurred with Musil’s description of Wagner’s music as ‘a luggage van bound for the Infinite’. There were also many echoes of classical thought and mythology, such as characterised the work of George’s most important Germanic precursor, Friedrich Hölderlin.
In many respects, George was unabashedly pagan, scathingly condemning Judaeo-Christian tradition and theology. Church teachings were for him ‘a cycle of venerable fairy tales’ and ‘the last glowing embers of a creed which had had its time’. His paganism, while emphasising form and formal perfection, was never materialistic. It remained highly spiritualised, almost platonic. The fauns in George, like those in Mallarmé, are not crude embodiments of lust and ‘unregenerate nature’. On the contrary, they are oracles; they are mythic incarnations of the sublime magic that sustains all life; and they are manifestations of a spirituality more intense and profound than that of any organised religion. In a poetic dialogue entitled ‘Man and Faun’, one of the horned, cloven-footed and goat-tailed creatures speaks thus to its human interlocutor:
Beasts are devoid of shame and men of thanks.
With all that you contrive you never learn
What most you need, but we in silence serve.
One thing: In slaying us you slay yourselves.
Where we have trailed our shag the milk will spurt,
Where we withhold our hooves no blade will grow.
If only mind of men had reigned, your kind
And all you do would long ago be done.
Your fields would be infertile, dry your brake . . .
Only by magic life is kept awake.11
In his paganism, George did not share Heine’s fear of Wotan and Thor re-emerging to demolish the cathedrals of Christendom. ‘Each age’, he felt, ‘has only / One god, and only one proclaims his throne’.12 He warned that ‘when its gods have died a people dies’.13 And future renewal resided, again, with the nation’s young: ‘Now youth calls up the gods, both the eternal / And the returning when their day is rounded.’14 In consequence, George was quite prepared to welcome new manifestations of the forces and principles anthropomorphised as the gods of antiquity. Like Hölderlin, however, he was less interested in the old Teutonic pantheon than he was in that of the classical world. He sought in the soil of Germany, in a uniquely and specifically Germanic context, certain forces, certain principles, certain embodiments of energy, certain dynamics or processes at work that might be ascribed, metaphorically, to the agency of ‘deities’. George denoted these incarnations, or what might be called ‘concentrations of godhood’, as ‘avatars’, a term that figured prominently in Theosophical thought. But the ‘avatars’ of H. P. Blavatsky were intended to be taken literally—invisible ‘secret masters’ in the Himalayas who periodically, as in the case of Jesus, assumed human form and intervened in the world’s affairs. George’s ‘avatars’, like the somewhat similar figures scattered through the work of W. B. Yeats, were much more metaphorical and symbolic.
One of the most important ‘avatars’ in George’s work is a figure invoked under the name of ‘Maximin’, implying all the associations of the English words ‘maximum’ and ‘minimum’—everything and nothing, for example, or greatest and least, or macrocosm and microcosm. As he functions in George’s work, ‘Maximin’ is quite clearly a kind of artistic reincarnation of the dead youth Maximilian Kronberger. Resurrected and translated into literary immortality, ‘Maximin’ displays all the attributes of godhood—a godhood which constitutes George’s own unique personal inspiration and presides over his relationship to the young who are Germany’s future. Thus, in the fragment entitled ‘Maximin’:
To some you are a child,
To some a friend, to me
The god whom I divined
And tremble to adore.15
And in ‘Incarnation’:
Now that you are strong and high,
What you have prophesied was done:
You have changed our pact, and I
Am the child of my own son.16
In other words, the poet has been reborn through the agency of his own literary creation and the youth who inspired it. This becomes clearer from another poem, ‘Introit’:
Resigned I face the riddle that he is
My child, and I the child of my own child . . . 17
Who is your god? All that my dreams avowed,
Kin to my vision, beautiful and proud.
He is the force the lap of darkness vented,
The sum of every greatness we were granted,
The deepest source, the inmost blaze—he is
Where I have found the purest form of these.
He flooded every vein with richer teeming
Who first for one was rescue and redeeming.
He filled the gods of o
ld with fresher breath,
And all the words the world has done to death.
The god is veiled in highest consecration,
With rays around he manifests his station,
Embodied in a son whom stars begot
And a new centre conjured out of thought.18
To the modern mind, much of this may seem bizarre. One must remember, however, that it is essentially a personal mythology transmuted into a symbolic poetic ‘system’. As such, it is not significantly different, and certainly no more bizarre, than the elaborate system evolved by Yeats and outlined in that most daunting of all his works, A Vision. And indeed, there is one very specific antecedent for George’s concept of ‘avatars’ in English literature: the short narratives such as ‘Denys l’Auxerrois’ and ‘Apollo in Picardy’ by Walter Pater in the collection Imaginary Portraits.
The ‘avatars’ that interested George were universal in their attributes, but also uniquely and specifically manifest in a Germanic context. Throughout his work, there is a preoccupation with German history, with sacred sites and topographical features such as the Rhine, and with illustrious figures of a semi-legendary heroic past. Among the most important of these figures were the Hohenstauffen emperors of the high Middle Ages, and especially the greatest of them, Friedrich II, who brazenly defied the pope, established a multi-cultural and multi-racial court in Sicily, provided a bridge to the West for Arabic and Judaic arts and sciences, and professed himself an adept in alchemy, astrology and other arcane disciplines. In 1927, Ernst Kantorowicz, one of the Jewish members of George’s circle, published what was then regarded as the definitive biography of Friedrich. Three years previously, in May 1924, a number of members of the circle, including Berthold von Stauffenberg, made a special pilgrimage to Friedrich’s tomb in Palermo. Once again, the phrase ‘secret Germany’ was invoked. On the sarcophagus of the Hohenstauffen ruler, a wreath was laid bearing the inscription:
SEINEN KAISERN UND HELDEN
DAS GEHEIME DEUTSCHLAND
[‘To their emperors and heroes
From the Secret Germany’]19
It must be remembered that this designation, ‘Secret Germany’, was not only used to denote George’s circle. It was also, later, to be the name Claus von Stauffenberg adopted for his cadre of conspirators. And ‘Es lebe unser geheimes Deutschland!’—‘Long live our Secret Germany!’—were to be his last words, flung back defiantly at the firing squad that took his life.20
Given George’s characteristic themes—the glory and majesty of Germany’s resonant past, the propensities of a sacred soil to nurture avatars of godhood, the formation of a new aristocracy of the spirit which evoked echoes of the Nietzschean ‘superman’—it is not difficult to see why he should have endeared himself to the National Socialist hierarchy. Superficially, at least, his treatment of these themes seemed to harmonise perfectly with theirs, just as did many elements in Nietzsche and Wagner. And there were other motifs in George’s work which also proved of considerable interest to the Nazis.
The swastika today has only one primary association. It immediately connotes, above anything and everything else, the Third Reich. During the first three decades of the twentieth century, however, the swastika was a familiar quasi-esoteric device—as familiar as, say, the phoenix. Even Rudyard Kipling had many of his books printed with a swastika embossed on the jacket. It had long been an ancient sun symbol in ancient Hinduism and certain schools of Tibetan Buddhism. H. P. Blavatsky’s personal emblem consisted of an anticlockwise swastika within a circle, surmounted by the interlocked triangles—or six-pointed star—of the mystical ‘Seal of Solomon’. From 1892 until 1900, translations of Blavatsky’s works were printed in a German periodical that bore a swastika on its cover. And the swastika was adopted, too, by certain of the Ariosophist sects, such as the Order of the New Templars and the Thule Society. It symbolised their self-arrogated connection with Indian thought, and their putative claim to a racial link with the ancient Aryans who colonised the Indian sub-continent.
George, too, adopted the swastika and used it as a personal device on his publications, as did certain members of his circle. Its associations for George were as private and idiosyncratic as those of the phoenix were for D. H. Lawrence, and he used it in much the same way. To outsiders, not surprisingly, it seemed to imply a shared Weltanschauung, perhaps even an identification, with the Ariosophists, and subsequently with National Socialism.
Even more important than his use of the swastika, however, were the connotations and implications George attached to the term ‘Führer’. It has now been virtually established that the significance Hitler attached to the term derived directly from George.21 According to Mein Kampf, Hitler saw his first opera, Wagner’s Lohengrin, as a boy of twelve in Linz. At the end of the last act of this opera, the title of ‘Führer’, which means literally nothing more than ‘leader’, is conferred by Lohengrin on the Duke of Brabant. Undoubtedly, given Wagner’s appeal to Hitler, the term’s significance in Lohengrin cannot be overlooked, especially when one recalls Hitler’s infatuation with the Grail romances, the later depiction of him as would-be ‘Grail knight’ and the attempt to exalt the SS as a latter-day conflation of the Teutonic Knights with those of the Round Table. But it was George, not Wagner, who invested the title of ‘Führer’ with the specific qualities that Hitler, in his use of it, arrogated to himself.
George had immersed himself in the arcane cosmological systems of Joachim de Fiore, a twelfth-century Cistercian esotericist whose subsequent influence was to be considerable—on Dante, for example, on Renaissance magi like Giordano Bruno, on such of George’s own contemporaries as Joyce and Yeats, on such modern literary figures as Michel Tournier. If George’s preoccupation with the number seven owed something to Theosophy, it owed much more to Joachim, whose own preoccupation with the number seven involved, among other things, the opening of the Book of the Seven Seals described in Revelation. Joachim also endeavoured to divide human history into three messianic ages—cycles of time presided over by God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. The age of God the Father corresponded to the period of the Old Testament, the age of God the Son to the Christian era of the New. The age of the Holy Spirit, according to Joachim, would correspond to the dispensation of the future, which would supersede that of conventional Christendom and the established Church.
In the years just before and after Joachim’s death in 1202, rumours and legends began to circulate of a great messianic emperor who would transform and redeem European civilisation. These came increasingly to focus on the Hohenstauffen emperor Friedrich II, who did nothing to dispel them. On the contrary, he and his propagandists actively encouraged them, and milked them for all they were worth. Friedrich proclaimed his own birthplace to be a second Bethlehem and declared himself to have been ‘raised up by God in the spirit of Elijah’ (whose mystical return had been one of Joachim’s recurrent themes). ‘To his supporters,’ the historian M. Reeves has observed, ‘Frederick was the ultimate renovator mundi’, the ultimate renewer and redeemer of the world.22 He took pains to identify himself quite specifically with the ruler ordained to preside over Joachim de Fiore’s age of the Holy Spirit.
In describing this ruler, Joachim had used the Latin designation ‘dux’. He had cited Matthew 2:6, the earliest Latin versions of which read: ‘Et tu Bethlehem terra Iuda . . . ex te enim exiet dux . . .’ A modern Bible will usually translate this as: ‘And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah . . . for out of you will come a ruler ...’ But ‘ruler’ is not the only, nor even the most accurate, rendering of ‘dux’. Neither are such later derivations as the English ‘duke’, the French ‘due’, the Italian ‘duce’ (as adopted by Mussolini) or the German ‘Herzog’, which Luther used in his vernacular translation of the Bible. All of these denote a particular rank of nobility, which came into being only during the latter days of the Roman Empire. Prior to that, ‘dux’ meant, quite simply, ‘leader’. But its context in Matthew imbued it with sp
ecifically messianic connotations. A ‘dux’, in other words, was not just a conventional leader, but a messianic leader—a messiah, a saviour, a redeemer, ordained and consecrated for his rôle by the active principle of divine grace, God’s will made manifest. 23 Vestiges of this exalted significance persist even today. Thus, for example, a British duke or duchess is not a ‘Majesty’, nor a ‘Highness’, but a ‘Grace’.
Luther’s translation of the Bible may have used for ‘dux’ the word ‘Herzog’, the German equivalent of ‘duke’. Later German Bibles use for ‘dux’ a much more accurate word. They use ‘Führer’, meaning a specifically messianic leader. It was precisely in this sense that George used the word in, for example, The Seventh Ring. It was precisely in this sense, too, that members of George’s circle used the word, sometimes in reference to George himself. In 1928 one of his disciples, Max Kommerell, published Der Dichter als Führer in der deutschen Klassik (The Poet as Leader in the German Classical Period), a text extolling Hölderlin as ‘the seer of the secret Germany’ which would one day in the future awake. At the present time, Kommerell concluded, Stefan George ‘is the Führer’—in, again, a specifically messianic sense.24 It was precisely in this sense, with all its lofty and exalted religious connotations, that Hitler appropriated the designation for himself. The supposedly redemptive principles he advocated were, of course, rather different from poetry.
The Nazis were more than eager to acknowledge their debts to George and to do him homage. Certain of his poems were officially read out during celebrations of National Socialist Party Day in Nuremberg, as well as at Hitler Youth meetings. His last volume of poetry, Das Neue Reich (The New Reich) was hailed as heralding the National Socialist dispensation. George himself was acclaimed as a prophet who had anticipated the new era, in which the spheres of spirit and politics would merge. He was consistently lauded as an oracular custodian of German self-awareness and identity (which, under the new régime, would fully manifest itself through the German people). There were many invitations and appeals for him to join the National Socialist Party, which already included a few members of his own circle.
Secret Germany: Stauffenberg and the True Story of Operation Valkyrie Page 30