Born 150 years ago – Poet Stefan George

The now largely engulfed work of Stefan Georges once represented a departure so admired in modern times that a composer like Arnold Schönberg set to music poems in the early 20th century.

"Strictly we are lucky and brittle / What has a short kiss? / A jet of rain …"

This celebrity was also fueled by the myth, which surrounded around George and Gottfried Benn 1933 in a speech of death.

"Only a few had seen him physically, he had never spoken publicly, never spoke in a newspaper, he had no permanent home, … as a sign he There were always names before him, guarded him, were his circle "

A man who remembers his singularity

Although the sound of Georgesen's voice is preserved in no sound recording due to such dissimulation, a reading of Bruno Schoenfeld of 1928 is made for the author himself approached his aura:

"Who has ever gone through the flame / Remains the trabant of the flame! / As he wanders and turns too: / Where else does his brilliance reach him? he never goes too far from the target … "

It was the aura of a man who put himself at the beginning of his singularity. At the age of 16, he seemed strangely bizarre to his classmates:

"The gray, indefinable eyes, the eyes of no one enjoying, out the window – then he completely rejected us."

study, travel, write [19659006] Born July 12, 1868 in Büdesheim bei Bingen, son of a winemaker and later financially secured by a small appanage, George does not study at any destination in Berlin, journey through Europe, meeting in Paris, the writer Stephan Mallarmé and evolves in his symbolism his fundamental ideas:

"the value of the seal does not decide the meaning but the form."

The since 1890 in books such as "Hymns", "Pilgrimages", "Algabal", "The Year of the Soul", "The Carpet of Life" or "The Seventh Ring" have collected poems immediately because of more and more radical writing gestures:

"You came home / Where all embers are dead / light There was only earth / world color Serious … Herd's sending shot / It was late. "

A circle of male followers chosen

For Theodor W. Adorno, these lines saved" the feeling of a global age ". But George had long since begun to portray himself as a poet-seer, as an itinerant ruler born of a "holy war" new "secret Germany", addressed in the circle of his male disciples carefully chosen as "master" and courted accordingly. loved to be welcomed. The strangers, who could glimpse inside the circle, were horrified – like Ernst Bertram, who thought he had a werewolf in George – or amused, like Count Harry Kessler:

"George is talking with so many people." 39, emphasis and monumental manner "

" The birth of poetry by the spirit of male eroticism, "sarcastically ironically Thomas Karlauf, George's youngest and most minute biographer, with References to Georges homoerotic schmalterei for young boys Karlauf, however, spoke both of the most famous German intellectuals and scientists who belonged to George's circle, like Friedrich Gundolf, of a "last acute outburst". German spirit on the eve of the disaster "but full of controversy, vanity and delusion.After all, when in 1933 the National Socialists bowed to the author and wanted to capture him, George has escaped and es He went to Switzerland where he died and was buried in December 1933 in Minusio near Locarno.