Stefan Anton George (; 12 July 18684 December 1933) was a German symbolist poet and a translator of Dante Alighieri, William Shakespeare, Hesiod, and Charles Baudelaire. He is also known for his role as leader of the highly influential literary circle called the and for founding the literary magazine ("Journal for the Arts").
Life and career Early life George was born in 1868 in (now part of Bingen) in the Grand Duchy of Hesse. His father, also named Stefan George, was an innkeeper and wine merchant, and his mother Eva (née Schmitt) was a homemaker. When Stefan was five years old, the family moved to Bingen am Rhein.
According to Erika and Michael Metzger, both sides of the George family had lived in the area for generations and had risen from peasants, to millers, and finally to merchants.
At the time, the Roman Catholic Church was very important to the daily life of Bingen am Rhein and to the George family. Life revolved around the feast days of the Liturgical Calendar. Furthermore, when Stefan's mother died, the oleander trees she had planted when she had married her husband were donated to the nuns of the nearby Rochusberg, which symbolized a returning of God's gifts back to Him.
After attending primary school in Bingen, Stefan was sent, at the age of thirteen, to one of the best secondary schools in the Grand Duchy of Hesse, the Ludwig-Georgs-Gymnasium in the Grand-Duke Louis IV's capital city of Darmstadt. There, from 1882 to 1888, Stefan, "received a vigorous humanistic education in which Greek, Latin, and French were stressed."
Stefan "excelled in French" and gained "a thorough knowledge of modern European literature, as well as of the Greek and Roman authors."
Although later described as a loner, Stefan assembled his first circle of friends in Darmstadt, where he had access to libraries and to the theater, which fascinated him. He also taught himself to read Norwegian in order to read the works of Henrik Ibsen in the original language.
Making of a poet At the age of nineteen, George and a few other students of the Gymnasium started a literary journal called ("Roses and Thistles"). Here George published his first poems under the pseudonym Edmund Delorme. Even though the Gymnasium emphasized the poetry of the German Romantics, George taught himself Italian, in order to both read and translate the Renaissance poets whom he most revered. His first poems consisted of literary translations and imitations of the Italian poetry of Petrarch and Torquato Tasso.
When his schooling was concluded in 1888, it was clear to George and to his family that it would not work for him to follow the usual course into university, business, or the German civil service. Instead he began to travel.
He later told a friend, "Germany was intolerable then; just think of Nietzsche! I would have thrown a bomb if they had kept me here; or I would have perished like Nietzsche. My father was glad to get rid of me, for he sensed the danger."
Hoping to improve his grasp of English, George lived in London between May and October 1888. Queen Victoria was on the throne and London was still the capital of the global British Empire. George later recalled that in England he saw, "an expansive sense of life, borne by great political tasks and goals, an ancient cultural unity which carefully preserved traditions, a firmly moded way of life for all classes of the populace, a decorous politeness among all the people, phenomena which were no longer found in the Germany of those years, or which were just beginning to emerge."
It is also believed to have been during his time in London that George first encountered the English poetry the "honored masters" Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and Ernest Dowson, whose works George would later translate into German and publish in his homeland.
While briefly returning to Germany and his parental home in Bingen, George expressed a desire to convene a "Congress" of like-minded poets and to publish a collection of their works.
This was an idea deeply rooted in both the Western Canon and in German literature, as Goethe, Schiller, and the other German Romantic poets had circles of adherents who gathered around them. Even before that, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock had referred to his closest friends as, ("the noble few") and had made detailed plans for ("The Republic of Scholars").
During his subsequent tours of Switzerland and northern Italy, George played the title role in a production of Moliere's performed at Montreux. George later recalled, "Can you imagine anything more contradictory than that I, the socialist, communard, atheist, should play in a comedy with a German baron in the house of a professor of theology surrounded by a whole bevy of society ladies?"
Suffering from severe loneliness, George arrived in Paris in May 1889. On his first day there, he met the French poet Albert Saint-Paul, through whom George was introduced into the city's literary bohemia. Despite the intensely anti-German revanchism reigning over French culture during the Belle Époque, George found himself "spontaneously accepted by his peers." Through Albert Saint-Paul, George was introduced to Paul Verlaine, Francis Vielé-Griffin, Albert Mockel, and Waclaw Rolicz-Lieder.
Saint-Paul also persuaded the poet Stéphane Mallarmé to invite George to attend the Tuesday Symbolist soirées held in, "that little room in the Rue de Rome". George had been described to Mallarmé as resembling "the young Goethe before Werther". When they met, Mallarmé received George warmly, particularly when the latter revealed that he had recently begun translating Charles Baudelaire's into German.
Many years later, the members of Mallarmé's circle were to recall that they immediately identified Stefan George as, "a poet of unusual promise." Despite his confidence, George seemed extremely shy and rarely participated in the circle's discussions, preferring instead to listen and learn. Meanwhile, George also filled 365 pages with poems by French and other European authors, many of which he was later to translate into German.
According to the Metzgers, "For the Symbolists, the pursuit of 'art for art's sake' was a highly serious – nearly a sacred – function, since beauty, in and of itself, stood for a higher meaning beyond itself. In their ultimate higher striving, the French Symbolists are not far from the Platonic ideals of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, and this idealistic aspect was undoubtedly what appealed to George far more than the Estheticism, the Bohemianism, and the apparent Nihilism so often superficially associated with this group."
Paul Verlaine and Stéphane Mallarmé were the only living poets whom George considered his superiors and whose apprentice he ever wished to be. Particularly Mallarmé, whose circle of disciples called him ("The Master"), was to be a lifelong model for George's art, philosophy, and way of life.
The French Symbolists were every bit as enthusiastic for George, as is revealed by the evidence of their surviving letters and subsequent memoirs of his visit to Paris, which were published in a 1928 theme issue of the . George wrote in 1896, "Paris, the only place where I found and possess true friends."
At this time, George felt a very intense hostility to what he saw as the banality and philistinism of German culture during the German Empire. In his subsequent poem (), which celebrates his visit to Paris and "whose title recalls the original unity of Germany and France under Charlemagne", George denounced the militarism and expansionism of the Imperial Government, "the complacent materialism of the German middle class", and the hostility to German artists, poets, and intellectuals. George asked the German people, "Where is your bard, you proud and boastful race?" He then answered that there was no one, as the German people had driven Friedrich Nietzsche insane and forced Arnold Böcklin into exile. Even so, "Stefan George's experience in Paris during the early 1890's ... impelled him to return to Germany to give a new voice and form to German poetry."
After returning to Germany, George first began to study Romance languages and their literature at Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, where he remained for three semesters.
At the time, George had serious doubts about the ability of the German language to say what he wished to say in his poems. For this reason, he preferred instead to write French and Spanish poetry and even invented a language which he dubbed Lingua Romana, which combined words from Spanish and Latin with German syntax.
George also seriously considered emigrating to Mexico at the urging of a wealthy Mexican family he had met and befriended in Paris. When George saw the family off on a ship back to Mexico, he gave them a copy of the first collection of his poems in German, ("Odes"), which had just been privately printed in a limited edition of 100 copies.
Also while living in Berlin, George joined forces with fellow student Carl August Klein to found the annual literary magazine entitled . At the time, George felt that German poets had been reduced to two main literary movements, both of which he opposed. The first was for a poet to be "a provider of a pleasant diversion", or as Arno Holz called such poetry, "a lilac-sweet spring rhapsode". The other role was for a poet to become a Naturalistic social critic, or what George sarcastically termed, "an apostle of reality". Stefan George and Carl Klein therefore intended for to be a vehicle for what they termed "the new art", which was intended to both build upon and supersede both literary movements within German poetry, while also drawing upon the ideas of the French Symbolists.
While George was not the first German poet to draw inspiration from the French Symbolists, he has been termed, "the most gifted, eloquent, and productive exponent of the poetic aspects of the movement in his homeland". George also, "did not slavishly follow any masters", but set his own stamp upon those aspects of Symbolism that he found appropriate for his purpose of revitalizing German culture and German literature.
George was the main person of the literary and academic group known as the ("George Circle"), which included some of the major, young writers of the time such as Friedrich Gundolf and Ludwig Klages. In addition to sharing cultural interests, the group promoted mystical and political themes. George knew and befriended the "Bohemian Countess" of Schwabing, Fanny zu Reventlow, who sometimes satirised the group for its melodramatic actions and opinions. George and his writings were identified with the Conservative Revolutionary philosophy. He was homosexual, yet exhorted his young friends to have a celibate life like his own.
Ida Coblenz In 1892, George met Ida Coblenz, a wealthy and cultured German Jewish heiress who not only admired his poetry but also demonstrated deep insight into his work. Their meeting took place in Bingen am Rhein. Many of George’s poems in Preisgedichte (1895), Das Jahr der Seele (1897), and even Der siebente Ring (1907) were inspired by her. Years later, George told his friends that there had once been a woman who was "my world".
George saw Ida often, particularly in the fall of 1894 and the summer of 1896. Ida's brief and unhappy arranged marriage to Leopold Auerbach, a Jewish businessman from Berlin, did nothing to interrupt her relationship with George. When Ida, however, began a relationship with the married poet Richard Dehmel, whom she later married in 1901, George viewed Ida's decision as a betrayal of the worst order. Dehmel, due to his Marxism, Bohemianism, and "sensual glorification of life as it is", stood for everything that George detested in German poetry in Imperial Germany.