28. Secret Germany

Poète maudit

Hitler stated in Mein Kampf that he first became an anti-Semite in Vienna. According to Goodrick-Clarke, “If the German occult subculture was well developed before the First World War, Vienna could also look back on a ripe tradition of occult interest.”[1] The cultural eclecticism of the city of Vienna created a unique cultural phenomenon, the Viennese coffee-house, a legacy of the Ottoman army following the failed siege of 1683. The coffee-houses provided an important source of activity for the city’s Jewish intelligentsia, and new industrialist class, made possible following their being granted full citizenship rights by Franz Joseph I in 1867, and full access to schools and universities. [2]  Figures such as writer Stefan Zweig (1881 – 1942), psychologist Alfred Adler and the young journalist and playwright Theodor Herzl were among those who joined the coffeehouses in Vienna. Zweig once described the scene as “a sort of democratic club, open to everyone for the price of a cheap cup of coffee, where every guest can sit for hours with this little offering, to talk, to write, play cards, receive post, and above all consume an unlimited number of newspapers and journals.”[3] Zweig had a warm relationship with Herzl, whom he met when Herzl was still literary editor of the Neue Freie Presse, then Vienna’s main newspaper. Herzl accepted for publication some of Zweig’s early essays.[4]

According to Goodrick-Clarke, Frederick Eckstein, founder of the Theosophical Society of Vienna, and a member with Freud of the Pernerstorfer Circle, “cultivated a wide circle of acquaintance amongst the leading thinkers, writers and musicians of Vienna.”[5] Eckstein was among a circle of many artists, musicians, and writers known as Jung Wien (“Young Vienna”), who met in Café Griensteidl and other nearby coffeehouses in the late nineteenth century, along with Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler, Arnold Schoenberg, Alexander Zemlinsky, Hermann Bahr, Rudolf Steiner, Hugo Wolf, and Stefan Zweig. Many of these personalities formed part of what was called belonged to the homoerotic cult known as the George-Kreis (“George-Circle”), founded by Stefan George (1868 – 1933), that included many Jewish artists and intellectuals and associated with Jung Wien, and went on to fundamentally influence the Nazi movement.

Young Vienna turned away from the prevailing Naturalism of the time and experimented with various facets of Modernism, including Symbolism and Impressionism. George’s poetry is representative of the artistic tradition of Symbolism a late nineteenth-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts. George, like the Symbolists, was inspired by the pursuit of l’art pour l’art (“art for art's sake”), which implied that “true” art is utterly independent of any and all social values and utilitarian function. The phrase appeared in appeared in the lectures and writings of Victor Cousin, Benjamin Constant, and Edgar Allan Poe’s essay “The Poetic Principle” (1850). But, although the phrase had been circulating among the Parisian intellectual circles since the beginning of the nineteenth century, it was Théophile Gautier (1811 – 1872), who first fully articulated its metaphysical meaning in the prefaces of his 1832 poetry volume Albertus, and 1835 novel, Mademoiselle de Maupin.[6] Gautier was widely esteemed by writers as disparate as Balzac, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Pound, Eliot, James, Proust and Wilde.

In literature, Symbolism had its beginnings with the publication Les Fleurs du mal (“The Flowers of Evil,” 1857) by Charles Baudelaire (1821 – 1867), which signaled the birth of modernism in literature.[7] Jean Moréas (1856 – 1910), partly to redeem the reputation of the new generation of young writers from the charge of “decadence” that the press had implied, published the Symbolist Manifesto (“Le Symbolisme”) in Le Figaro on September 18, 1886, which names Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé (1842 – 1898), and Paul Verlaine (1844 – 1896) as the three leading poets of the movement. Mallarmé was famed for his salons, at his house on the rue de Rome. The group became known as les Mardistes, because they met on Tuesdays (in French, mardi). For many years, those sessions, where Mallarmé held court as judge, jester, and king, were considered the heart of Paris intellectual life. Regular visitors included W.B. Yeats, Rainer Maria Rilke, Paul Valéry, Stefan George, Paul Verlaine, and many others.

The Symbolist authors were often regarded as poète maudit (“damned poets), whose lives were marked by drug abuse, alcohol, criminality, violence, and depravity. Baudelaire’s Les litanies de Satan (“Litanies to Satan”) have often been emblematic as a sign of his Satanism.[8] The work that is considered Baudelaire’s masterpiece was his collection Les Fleurs du Mal (“The Flowers of Evil”), which begins with a famous address “To the Reader”:

 

Stupidity, error, sin and stinginess

Garrison our minds and enslave our bodies.

On evil’s pillow, Hermes Trismegistus

Slowly rocks our enthralled minds,

And the rich metal of our wills

Is vaporized by this learned alchemist…

It is the Devil who pulls the strings that move us: We find charm in the most disgusting things; Each day we take another step down into hell, Deadened to horror, through stinking shadows… Reader, you recognize this delicate monster, Hypocrite reader, my likeness, my brother![9]

 

À rebours (“In Reverse”) published in 1884 by  J.K. Huysmans, a friend of Verlaine, contained many themes that became associated with the Symbolist aesthetic. The novel, in which very little happens, catalogues the psychology of Des Esseintes, an eccentric, reclusive antihero. Des Esseintes is not impressed by the classic French authors like Rabelais, Molière, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot, preferring the works of Bourdaloue, Bossuet, Nicole, and Pascal. Schopenhauer, he exclaims, “alone was in the right.” Golden Dawn member Oscar Wilde was influenced by the novel as he wrote Salome, and Huysman’s book appears in The Picture of Dorian Gray, whose titular character becomes corrupted after reading the book. In Wilde’s novel, Dorian expresses the desire to sell his soul, to ensure that his picture, rather than he, will age and fade. As sin and transgression begin to alter the famous portrait, Dorian  becomes obsessively drawn is Wagner’s Tannhäuser. Wilde describes the “rapt pleasure” Dorian takes in “seeing in the prelude to that great work of art a presentation of the tragedy of his own soul.” In the late 1880s, Wilde met Clement Harris, who played Wagner on the piano to Wilde and later introduced him to his lover, Wagner’s son Siegfried.[10]

Without exception, the French Symbolists were Wagner enthusiasts. Their progenitor Baudelaire was Wagner’s main mediator in France.[11] Having attended performances of Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, and Der fliegende Holländer at the Paris Opera, Baudelaire admired Wagner’s idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, which he adapted to his own Symbolist program.[12] Mallarmé was intensively involved with Wagner, as were the poets of the same era whom George met in Paris. The Paris premiere Wagner’s Tannhäuser, in March 1861, was a debacle, with demonstrations breaking out. Appalled by the response, Baudelaire wrote the epoch-making essay “Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris.” It was likely through Baudelaire that Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (1838 – 1889) was introduced to Wagner, whose enthusiasm for occult literature was only surpassed by his Wagner mania.[13] In 1860, Villiers met his idol Baudelaire, who encouraged him to read the works of Edgar Allan Poe. An important event in Villiers’ life was his meeting with Wagner in 1869. Villiers read from the manuscript of his play La Révolte after which Wagner declared that the Villiers was a “true poet.”[14] In 1890, Villiers published Axël, a Rosicrucian drama heavily influenced by Victor Hugo, Goethe’s Faust and Wagner. Axël, Villiers’ testamentary work, is “the bible of Symbolist theater.”[15]

One of Symbolism’s most colorful promoters in Paris was art and literary critic Joséphin Péladan, who founded the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Cross (OKR+C) with Papus, Saint-Yves d’Alveydre and Stanislas de Guaita.[16] The “regency” of Fabré-Palaprat’s Order of the Temple, which was based on the spurious Larmenius Charter, was given by some surviving members to Péladan.[17] However, a schism resulted in the OKR+C due to Péladan’s eccentric behavior, having issued a public condemnation against a female member of the Rothschild banking dynasty.[18] In 1890–1891, Péladan abandoned the OKR+C, and established his own Ordre de la Rose-Croix catholique du Temple et du Graal (“Kabbalistic Catholic Rose-Croix Order of the Temple and the Grail”) which included many of the prominent Symbolist artists of the period. The reason for the split was that Péladan “refused to associate himself with spiritism, Freemasonry or Buddhism.”[19] Stanislas de Guaita, on the other hand, said that Péladan didn’t want to turn the order into a salon for artists.[20]

According to Péladan himself, he became aware of his vocation as founder of the order in 1888, during a performance of Parsifal in Bayreuth, from which he derived its Templar and Grail references. Péladan’s conceived of the Templars and Grail Knights as the guardians of a divine secret knowledge that was passed on by the Rosicrucians.[21] Péladan, explains Jan Stottmeister, transferred the occult theme complex to art: art itself was to be the Grail, the Philosopher’s Stone, and the artist was to see himself as a new Templar or Rosicrucian who served the Art Dieu, the “God of Art,” among fellow brothers and masters of the order.[22]

Péladan’s Salon de la Rose + Croix, which grew out the OKR+C, was a series of six avant-garde art, writing salons which he hosted in 1890s Paris.[23] Péladan wanted the Salon to create a forum for artists who rejected the officially approved academic art being exhibited by the Académie des Beaux-Arts, and the influential Impressionists. Central to Péladan’s doctrine was the promotion of the arts “especially of an esoteric flavour,” hoping to “overcome European materialism.”[24] Writers as diverse as Paul Valéry, André Gide, André Breton, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline read Péladan with interest, as did Le Corbusier.[25] Also attending the Salon was Mallarmé. Péladan opened the Salon, which was also attended by Mallarmé, proclaiming:

 

Artist, you are a priest: art is the great mystery, and when your efforts succeed in creating a masterpiece, a ray of the divine descends on it as on an altar… Artist, you are king: art is the true kingdom… Artist, you are a magician: art is the great miracle and proves our immortality.[26]

 

In “The Occult Roots of Modernism,” Alex Ross noted, referring to the above proclamation, “What Péladan took from Wagner, above all, was the idea that art could assume the functions of religion.”[27] When Péladan discovered Wagner, he went to Bayreuth wearing a white coat, a sky-blue tunic, a lace jabot and suede boots, with an umbrella held by a shoulder belt. Although Wagner’s widow Cosima refused to receive him, this did not prevent him from publishing the complete operas of Wagner in French with his annotations “as therapeutics to detoxify France from its materialism.”[28] According to “Gods have no homeland on earth, and Wagner is a god. To the rhythm of the Valkyries, we'd be even better at killing the Krauts.”[29]

Péladan singled out for praise Félicien Rops (1833 – 23 August 1898), whose  “Les Sataniques,” is a series of etchings depicting satanic demons raping and killing women. Rops provided frontispieces for a series of enormously successful novels known collectively as La Décadence Latine (“Latin Decadence”), by Péladan, which began appearing in 1884. In “The Victory of the Husband,” from 1889, Izel and Adar, who are married, and honeymoon at the Wagner festival in Bayreuth, cannot restrain themselves and begin making love. In “The Androgyne” from 1891, male classmates vie a feminine boy who escapes by engaging in of mutual exhibitionism with a mannish maiden. From the same year, “The Gynander,” Péladan’s preferred term for lesbians, another androgyne named Tammuz converts dozens of “gynanders” to heterosexuality after he magically generates replicas of himself. As an orchestra performs Wagner, the women fall to worshipping a giant phallus.[30]

 

Young Vienna 

At the end of 1878, the government dissolved the Leseverein der deutschen Studenten Wiens (“Reading Club of the German Students of Vienna”), the official organization of the pan-German Pernerstorfer circle, and this led to the members meeting regularly at the Ramharter, Vienna’s first vegetarian restaurant, which opened in 1879, in Vienna’s city center.[31] Many visitors of the Ramharter belonged to the pan-German Pernerstorfer circle.[32] Eckstein, who was also affiliated with the Pernerstorfer circle, grouped his fellow vegetarians into two camps: the “Socialists” and the “Pythagoreans.” In one of his major writings, Religion und Kunst (“Religion and Art”), published in 1880, Wagner had praised Pythagoras as a teacher of the meatless diet and thus ignited interest in vegetarianism among musicians and among his fans. For the premiere of the opera Parsifal in 1882, many members in this group travelled to Bayreuth. Eckstein, apparently, did so on foot.[33]

Among the “Pythagoreans” was the young Hermann Bahr (1863 – 1934), Herzl’s fraternity brother in Burschenschaft Albia, who then had socialist and pan-German leanings and later distinguished himself as the leading theoretician of the artistic avant-garde of fin de siècle Vienna. The composer Hugo Wolf (1860 – 1903), who later shared a flat with Eckstein would take part in the “summer colonies” (Sommerkolonien) of the Theosophically-oriented circle around Marie Lang (1858 – 1934), a women’s rights activist and social reformer, and her husband Edmund, who hosted an influential salon in Vienna.[34] They also summered with a colony of friends in Grinzing at the Schloss Belle Vue, known as the place where Freud experienced his dream, Irma’s injection, that he subsequently analyzed to arrive at his theory that dreams are wish fulfillments.[35] The Langs also created a Theosophical study group with Eckstein and Franz Hartmann. In 1888, they met Steiner and introduced him to Theosophical literature, as well as to Lang’s friend and ally, the painter and writer Rosa Mayreder (1858 – 1938).[36] The two women would both become influential in Steiner’s development and he and Mayreder would continue a correspondence for many years.[37] Steiner commented that Lang was the soul of the circle, and that it was her personality and interest in Theosophy that encouraged the participation of the rest of the group.[38]

The “socialist” wing of the vegetarians included Pernerstorfer’s friend Victor Adler. Adler was hosting meetings at his home at the time that Mahler first entered the Circle.[39] However, George von Schönerer’s increasingly anti-Semitic policies, culminating in the amendment of an Aryan paragraph, led to an estrangement with Adler from the Pernerstorfer Circle. Victor’s wife Emma was the sister of Heinrich Braun (1854 – 1927), childhood classmate of Freud’s during their high school years, influencing the young Freud for a time to contemplate a career in politics or law.[40] Emma was a socialist who, with other Jewish writers of the time, such as Hedwig Dohm, Bertha Pappenheim, and Hedwig Lachmann, “combined political activity with artistic creativity.”[41] Hedwig’s husband was Ernst Dohm (1819 – 1883), an actor and Jewish convert to Christianity, who was coeditor with Julius Rodenberg of the Salon für Literatur, Kunst und Gesellschaft from 1867 to 1874. From 1886, Adler published the Marxist journal Gleichheit (“Equality”), and travelled to Germany and Switzerland, where he met with Friedrich Engels, August Bebel and Karl Liebknecht. He was charged several times for his activities and spent nine months in prison. From 1882 to 1889, Adler resided at an address that later became famous as the Freud’s office, the present-day Sigmund Freud Museum. In 1889, Adler founded the Social Democratic Party of Austria. His son, Friedrich Adler (1879 – 1960) , a Social Democratic politician, perhaps best known for his assassination of Minister-President Karl von Stürgkh (1859 – 1916) in 1916. Friedrich had studied chemistry, physics and mathematics at the ETH Zurich, where he became a close friend of Albert Einstein.[42]

 

Café Griensteidl 

In Oedipus and the Sphinx (1905), the cycle of Greek tragedies adapted by the symbolist dramatist and playwright and member of the George-Kreis, Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874 – 1929), very closely follows a “Wagnerian tragedy” by Péladan.[43] Hugo’s great-grandfather, Austrian silk merchant Isaak Löw Hofmann (1759 – 1849), from whom his family inherited the noble title “Edler von Hofmannsthal,” was a Jewish tobacco farmer ennobled by Emperor Francis Joseph I of Austria. Hofmann took great interest in the Jewish community of Vienna, being president in 1806 and representative in 1812, which latter office he held until his death. His son, and Hugo’s grandfather, was Augustin Emil Hofmann von Hofmannsthal (1815 – 1881), head of his father’s subsidiary business-house in Milan. Hugo’s sister, Elise von Hofmannsthal, married Solly Herz, brother to Adelheid Herz, who married Carl Mayer von Rothschild, son of Mayer Amschel Rothschild and founder of the Neapolitan branch of dynasty. Among Carl Mayer’s children were Charlotte who married Baron Lionel de Rothschild, a friend of Benjamin Disraeli, and Mayer Carl von Rothschild who recommended Gerson Bleichröder to Otto von Bismarck as a banker.[44]

Peter Altenberg (1859 – 1919), one of the main proponents of Viennese Impressionism, was a contemporary of Karl Kraus, Gustav Mahler, Schnitzler, the symbolist painter Gustav Klimt, and Adolf Loos, with whom he had a very close relationship. Altenberg’s favorite coffeehouse was the Café Central, to which he even had his mail delivered. Some of the poetry Altenberg wrote on the backs of postcards and scraps of paper were set to music by composer Alban Berg, who studied with Arnold Schoenberg (1874 – 1951), the founder of modern atonal music. In 1901, Schoenberg married Mathilde Zemlinsky, the sister of the conductor and composer Alexander von Zemlinsky (1871 – 1942), with whom Schoenberg had been studying since about 1894.

John R. Covach proposed that, “an understanding of both Emanuel Swedenborg’s ideas, as they are represented in “philosophical” novels by Honoré de Balzac, and Rudolf Steiner’s interpretation of Goethe’s scientific writing leads to a fuller recovery Schoenberg’s meaning.”[45] According to literary critic Anna Balakian, Swedenborg’s doctrine of correspondences was picked up and transformed by Symbolists, beginning with Baudelaire. Schoenberg a chapter of Séraphita, which refers to Swedenborg, in the early stages of Die Jakobsleiter (Jacob’s Ladder”), and combining it with the story of “Jacob Wrestling” from Legends by August Strindberg (1849 –  1912), who was heavily influenced by Swedenborg’s philosophy.[46] Schoenberg acknowledged the influence of Swedenborg and Balzac in the famous “Composition with Twelve Tones” essay. Additionally, Karl Wörner has suggested that Schoenberg’s Die Jakobsleiter resembles Rudolf Steiner’s Mystery Dramas, which were performed in Vienna in the years before World War I.[47]  However, it is certainly possible that Schoenberg derived the essence of Steiner’s ideas from his life-long friend Oskar Adler (1875 – 1955), who was very familiar with occult doctrines.[48]

In 1897, Jewish anti-Semite Karl Kraus (1874 – 1936) broke from Young Vienna with a scathing satire, Die demolierte Literatur (“Demolished Literature”), and was named Vienna correspondent for the newspaper Breslauer Zeitung. One year later, as an uncompromising advocate of Jewish assimilation, he attacked Herzl with his polemic Eine Krone für Zion (“A Crown for Zion”). The title is a play on words, as Krone means both “crown” and the currency of Austria-Hungary from 1892 to 1918. One Krone was the minimum donation required to participate in the Zionist Congress in Basel, and Herzl was often mocked as the König von Zion (“King of Zion”) by Viennese anti-Zionists.

In 1899, Kraus renounced Judaism, and in the same year he founded his own magazine, Die Fackel (“The Torch”). In its first decade, contributors included such well-known writers and artists as Peter Altenberg, Richard Dehmel, Egon Friedell, Oskar Kokoschka, Else Lasker-Schüler, Adolf Loos, Heinrich Mann, Arnold Schoenberg, August Strindberg, Georg Trakl, Frank Wedekind, Franz Werfel, Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Golden Dawn member Oscar Wilde. Else Lasker-Schüler (1869 – 1945) was a German-Jewish poet and playwright famous for her bohemian lifestyle in Berlin and her poetry. She was in a romantic relationship with Gottfried Benn (1886 – 1956) was a German poet, essayist, and physician, who was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times. Frank Wedekind (1864 – 1918) belonged to the Wedekind family from Horst, which included suspected Illuminatus Georg Christian Gottlieb Wedekind.[49] Wedekind was best known for the “Lulu” cycle, a two-play series, including Erdgeist (“Earth Spirit,” 1895) and Die Büchse der Pandora (“Pandora’s Box,” 1904). Wedekind’s first major play, Frühlings Erwachen (“Spring Awakening,” 1891), caused a scandal because it contained scenes of homoeroticism, implied group male masturbation, actual male masturbation, sado-masochism between a teenage boy and girl, rape and suicide, as well as references to abortion.

In 1904, Kraus supported Wedekind to make possible the staging in Vienna of his controversial play Pandora’s Box. The open depiction of sexuality and violence in these plays, including lesbianism and an encounter with Jack the Ripper—a role that Wedekind played in the original production—pushed the boundaries of what was considered acceptable on the stage at the time. In Franziska (1910), the title character, a young girl, initiates a Faustian pact with the Devil, selling her soul for the knowledge of what it is like to live life as a man. A performance of Wedekind’s Spring’s Awakening was attended by Hitler and his friend Kubizek in Vienna.[50]

In 1900, Hofmannsthal met the composer Richard Strauss (1864 – 1949), for whom he later wrote libretti for several of his operas. Strauss has been described as a successor of Richard Wagner and Franz Liszt.[51] In 1889, Strauss left his post with the Bavarian State Opera after being appointed Kapellmeister to Wagner’s patron, Charles Alexander, Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, in Weimar. He served as the assistant conductor of the Bayreuth Festival during which time he befriended Cosima Wagner who became a close friend. Strauss’ first opera to achieve international fame was Salome, which featured an erotic “Dance of the Seven Veils,” shocked opera audiences from its first appearance. Gustav Mahler could not gain the consent of the Vienna censor to have it performed; therefore it was not given at the Vienna State Opera until 1918. The Austrian premiere was given at the Graz Opera in 1906, with Arnold Schoenberg, Giacomo Puccini, Alban Berg, and Gustav Mahler in the audience.

 

Salome

Salome used a libretto by Hedwig Lachmann that was a German translation of the French play Salomé by Oscar Wilde. Hedwig was Jewish and the daughter of a cantor, Isaak Lachmann. Hedwig married Gustav Landauer (1870 – 1919), one of the leading theorists on anarchism in Germany.[52] Landauer’s closest friends included Martin Buber, Margarete Sussman, Fritz Mauthner and  Auguste Hauschner.[53] Hauschner married painter and manufacturer Benno Hauschner, and they held a salon in their apartment in the Tiergarten district of Berlin that attracted her cousin Fritz Mauthner, Gustav Landauer, Max Liebermann, Max Brod and Maximilian Harden, the journalist who exposed the homosexual conduct between the Kaiser’s close friend Philipp, the homosexual friend of Herzl, Prince of Eulenburg, and General Kuno, Graf von Moltke.

As Fritz Mauthner (1849 – 1923) related in his memoirs, his maternal grandfather was a military officer in the sect of Jacob Frank.[54] Mauthner was enthusiastic about Bismarck, and moved to Berlin, where worked as a journalist and wrote literary and theatre criticism for the Berliner Tageblatt. During World War I, he wrote inflammatory and nationalistic newspaper articles, placing the importance of Germany’s military success above any philosophy.[55] In 1906, he published a book on Spinoza. Mauthner, whose work is concerned with the philosophy of language and atheism, is remembered mainly for his Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache (“Contributions to a Critique of Language”), published in three parts in 1901 and 1902. Though mainly forgotten, Mauthner’s influence can be found in the work of Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett and James Joyce.[56] The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who took several of his ideas from Mauthner, acknowledges him in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922).

Hedwig’s first love was Richard Dehmel (1863 – 1920), who suggested they live in a “threesome” with his wife Paula Oppenheimer, sister of the Zionist Franz Oppenheimer. Franz and Paula’s father, Dr. Julius Oppenheimer (1827 – 1909), served for many years as a preacher and teacher at the Jewish Reform temple of the Berlin.[57] Dehmel is considered one of the foremost German poets of the pre-World War I era. In 1896, he published the poem “Venus Consolatrix”  in the volume of poems Weib und Welt (“Woman and World”), in which he described a mystical sex act with a female figure in which Mary, the mother of Jesus, Venus and Mary Magdalene are merged. As a result, he was tried for obscenity and blasphemy Weib und Welt was ordered to be burned. His poem Verklärte Nacht (“Transfigured Night”) was set to music by Arnold Schoenberg, who was influenced by Wagner.[58] Dehmel was a contributor to Kraus’s Die Fackel.

In 1894, Dehmel had co-founded Pan magazine, dedicated to Gesamtkunstwerk and providing support to young artists. Pan was published from 1895 to 1900 in Berlin by Otto Julius Bierbaum (1865 – 1910) and Julius Meier-Graefe (1867 – 1935), a German art critic and novelist. As Meier-Graefe wrote, “Among us Germans, art was not a class distinction, an enervating form of dilettantism, or a luxury, but the one and only reality, the ultimate altar, the final bond holding humanity together… heroism.”[59] Following Dehmel’s example, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck (1876 – 1925), who wrote a book about Dehmel published in 1900, affirmed his belief in the mission of art. “We have art,” wrote Moeller, “an art that has made religion superfluous and given the citizens of the modern world an assurance that only belief in God could otherwise confer.”[60]

In 1910, Dehmel’s Pan magazine was revived by Berlin gallery owner and art dealer Paul Cassirer (1871 – 1926), who had worked for the weekly magazine Simplicissimus in Munich, which published the work of writers such as Thomas Mann and Rainer Maria Rilke. Contributors included Hermann Hesse, Gustav Meyrink, Fanny zu Reventlow, Jakob Wassermann, Frank Wedekind, Heinrich Kley, Alfred Kubin, Otto Nückel, Robert Walser, Heinrich Zille, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Heinrich Mann, Lessie Sachs, and Erich Kästner. Under Cassirer’s leadership, Pan printed stories and poems, in the emerging Symbolist and Naturalist movements, and also played an important role in the development of German Art Nouveau. Pan went on to publish contributors like Wedekind, Georg Heym, Ernst Barlach and Franz Marc. Cassirer was the first to exhibit Manet, Cezanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin in Germany, and he championed the work of the Impressionists’ German counterparts, like painter Max Liebermann. The group, along with Barlach, Kandinsky, and Max Beckmann eventually made up the core of the avant-garde formation, the Berlin Secession, an art movement established in 1898, who rejected traditional art styles then advanced by both academia and officials, and created the foundation of Modernism.[61]

Dehmel frequented the café Das schwarze Ferkel, as did Franz Evers (1871 – 1947), and pianist and composer Conrad Ansorge, August Strindberg and Moeller van den Bruck.[62] Evers was a member of Wilhelm Hübbe-Schleiden’s German Theosophical Society and afterwards worked as an editor of The Sphinx.[63] Evers shared a studio with another theosophist, the artist Fidus (1868 – 1948), who illustrated his Hohe Lieder and Prana of the Guido von List Society.[64] Fidus also contributed to the early homosexual magazine Der Eigene (“The Unique”), published by Adolf Brand (1874 – 1945), a campaigner for the acceptance of male bisexuality and homosexuality. Brand had joined the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, founded in Berlin in 1897 by Magnus Hirschfeld (1868 – 1935), and six other gentlemen, to campaign against the legal persecution homosexuality. A prominent Jewish sexologist and homosexual, Hirschfeld coined the term “transvestite.” Contributors to Der Eigene included Evers, Theodor Lessing (1872 – 1933)  and Thomas Mann (1875 – 1955). Katharina “Katia” Pringsheim, Mann’s wife, was the granddaughter of Hedwig and Ernst Dohm. By 1900, Fidus was one of the best known painters in Germany, and had come under the influence of writers such as van den Bruck, and the Wandervogel movements. In 1908, Fidus joined the Germanic Faith Community, a religious group led by the painter Ludwig Fahrenkrog (1867 – 1952), which adopted Germanic neopaganism.[65]

Despite his record of fighting conservatives, Dehmel was one of the signatories of An die Kulturwelt! (“To the Cultural World!”), a manifesto published in October 1914, signed by 93 scientists, artists and writers.  The manifesto was written by was the playwright Ludwig Fulda (1862 – 1939), the son of the merchant Carl Hermann Fulda (1836 – 1917) and his wife Clementine, née Oppenheimer, daughter of the merchant and first Jewish city councilor of the Frankfurt magistrate, Julius Philipp Oppenheimer (1812 – 1869). The manifesto called on the masses to support the German Empire after the outbreak of the World War I and denied the Allies’ accusations of German miliary excesses in in neutral Belgium as self-defence.[66] Dehmel proclaimed in 1914: “We Germans are more humane than the other nations; we do have better blood and breeding, more soul, more heart, and more imagination.”[67]

 

George-Kreis

Dehmel did eventually live a threesome with Paula and Ida Auerbach, who had formerly been engaged to his rival Stefan George, before divorcing Paula and marrying Ida in 1899. Stefan George is also known for his role as leader of the highly influential literary group of mostly homosexual—and often Jewish—intellectuals called the George-Kreis (“George Circle”), who had called for a spiritual aristocracy, what he called a “Secret Germany,” to rebuild the nation. George was very close to Ida Auerbach, who was born in Bingen into a prosperous well established Jewish family. After they met in 1892, George came close to dedicating a cycle of poems to her. When Ida married, however, in 1895, it was to Leopold Auerbach, a Jewish businessman and philanthropist from Berlin. The Auerbachs’ home became a focus for the Friedrichshagen Poets’ Circle.

George had attended every Wagner performance at the court theater during his time at grammar school in Darmstadt. In a letter to his mentor, the French poet Albert Saint-Paul, in 1891, George wrote of the “Grand Master Wagner.”[68] In 1892, in the second issue of Blätter, George’s childhood friend Carl August Klein named Wagner first among the German cultural heroes, ahead of Nietzsche and the Symbolist artists Arnold Böcklin (1827 – 1901) and Max Klinger (1857 – 1920), who were “joined by a poet,” meaning Stefan George.[69] From Büchern der Hirten- und Preisgedichte (“Books of the Pastoral and Praise Poems”), from 1894, to the Neuen Reich (“New Reich”) in 1928, George’s lyric poetry contains inspiration and in some cases literal borrowings from the libretti of Parsifal and Twilight of the Gods, the last in Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung.[70]

George found his youthful penchant for Wagner confirmed and enhanced through his participation in the world of the Parisian symbolists. After George travelled to Paris in 1889, Saint-Paul also persuaded Stéphane Mallarmé to invite George to attend the Tuesday Symbolist soirées. When they met, Mallarmé received George warmly, particularly when the latter revealed that he had recently begun translating Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal into German.[71] Mallarmé, whose circle of disciples called him Le Maître (“The Master”), was to be a lifelong model for George’s art, philosophy, and way of life.[72] According to Ernst Morwitz (1887 – 1971), a Jewish member of the George-Kreis, who passed on a personal communication, George attended a lecture by Péladan in Brussels at the beginning of the 1890s and also met Verlaine during this event.[73] Allusions to Templars and Rosicrucians can be found many times in George’s poetry, earliest in the poem Irrende Schar, which evokes the Grail Castle, and most explicitly in the poem Templer (“Templars”), which begins with “We Rose… We Cross.”[74]

Hofmannsthal, whose work was influenced by Péladan, met George in 1891 at the age of seventeen and had several poems published in the Blätter für die Kunst. Robert Boehringer, head of the Boehringer Ingelheim pharmaceutical giant, joined the circle in 1905. Jewish professor Friedrich Gundolf (1880 – 1931) had been a member of the George-Kreis since 1899, having introduced himself there through Shakespeare’s sonnets translated into German. Gundolf subsequently became George’s closest friend and lover.[75] Gundolf published first poems in George’s periodical, the Blätter für die Kunst. During 1910 and 1911, he edited the Jahrbuch für die geistige Bewegung (“Yearbook for the Spiritual Movement”), which preached the cultural political opinions of the George-Kreis. Gundolf also had several relationships with women, which George only tolerated as long as he did not plan to marry. Therefore, their break occurred when in the early 1920s when Gundolf decided to marry Elisabeth (“Elli”) Salomon, a political economy student.[76]

George was also associated with Max Dessoir, who founded the Society for Psychological Research with Schrenck-Notzing and Hübbe-Schleiden, the president of the German Theosophical Society and who was also contributor to The Sphinx. In March 1895, Dessoir, then a professor at the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin, wrote to Klein to ask if back issues of the Blätter were available. Dessoir was preparing his lectures on the history of aesthetics and the theory of art, and he wanted to address the most recent pertinent developments. Klein wrote back:

 

Since just at this moment an artistic and aristocratic drive is asserting itself against the naturalistic and plebeian one and is beginning to imitate the works of our collaborators, we would find ourselves much obliged to you if you wished to say a few conscientious honest words about our movement.[77]

 

George’s interest in occult literature is further corroborated by the fact that his library contained a copy of the Sphinx from 1893, which contains two translations of Verlaine poems from his poetic rival and intimate enemy Richard Dehmel.[78] Dessoir finally made George’s poetry known for the first time in academic circles and the general public in a lecture in November 1895. The honor in a temporarily close relationship between George and Dessoir, even leading to plans for a joint journal in 1896. Hofmannsthal was intended as co-editor of the journal, but no publisher could be found for it. During that time, Dessoir introduced the unknown poet in one of the largest family magazines in the German Empire. In Westermann’s Illustrierte Monatshefte, Dessoir published an essay titled Über das Kunstgefühl der Gegenwart (“On the Artistic Feeling of the Present”). According to Dessoir in 1896, the materialism of the recent generation no longer applied to the current one: “In the midst of restless progress… we yearn for the Sabbath silence of the heart. From time to time we cherish deep, self-indulgent sadness. Then we feel God… Buddhism, Theosophy and Catholicism give us the longed-for impulse.” These impulses, explained Dessoir, were met by a new artistic feeling expressed most clearly in the Blätter für die Kunst and the “Head of the Guild: Stefan George.” The significance, according to Dessoir, is that “white magic of art creates a community of the rarest kind.”[79]

In the years 1909 and 1910, explains Stottmeister, George will literally play the role of a master of the order.[80] George’s “evident homosexuality” is represented by works such as Algabal and the love poetry he devoted to a gifted adolescent whom he met in 1902 named Maximilian Kronberger, whom he called “Maximin.”[81] When Maximin died of meningitis two years later, he was “idealized [by George] to the point of proclaiming him a god, following his death… the cult of ‘Maximin’ became an integral part of the George circle’s practice…”[82] The Maximin-Erlebnis (“Maximin Experience”) is seen as George’s ultimate attempt to establish his authority as master, prophet and reformer.[83] Algabal, which is one of George’s best remembered collections of poetry, is a reference to the effeminate Roman emperor Elagabalus (c. 204 – 222). Elagabalus’ family held hereditary rights to the priesthood of the sun god Elagabal (Baal), of whom Elagabalus was the high priest at Emesa in Syria. The priest-kings of Emesa were closely lined with the history of Neoplatonism. Through intermarriage with the Julia-Claudio dynasty, the House of Herod and the House of Commagene, they were behind the formation of the Mysteries of Mithras. The god was later imported to Rome and assimilated with the sun god known Sol Invictus, which was closely related to the Mysteries of Mithras, and strongly influenced the development of the rites of Catholic Christianity.

 

Cosmic Circle

Members of the George-Kreis also belonged to the Cosmic Circle, a group of writers and intellectuals in the famous bohemian Schwabing district of Munich, at the turn of the twentieth century, founded by occultist Alfred Schuler (1865 – 1923), philosopher Ludwig Klages (1872 – 1956), and German-Jewish poet Karl Wolfskehl (1869 – 1948). Wolfskehl’s friends and associates included Rainer Maria Rilke, Thomas Mann, Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Paul Klee, Alfred Kubin, Walter Benjamin, Else Lasker-Schüler, Albert Schweitzer and Martin Buber.[84] In 1905, Mann married Katia Pringsheim, who came from a wealthy, secular Jewish industrialist family. Along with Theodor Herzl, Wolfskehl had established a local chapter of the Zionist movement in Munich in 1897.[85] Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 – 1926), considered one of the most significant poets in the German language, had had a long-term affair with Lou Andreas-Salomé, Paul Rée’s and Nietzsche’s temptress, and Freud’s pupil.

In 1894, Schuler met Ludwig Derleth (1870 – 1948), who associated with Papus and Péladan, and the very prolific writer Paul Sédir (1871 – 1926), and who became Superior Inconnu Initiateur and a member of the Supreme Council of the Martinist Order.[86] From about the turn of the century, Schuler, a disciple of Guido von List, kept in touch with occultists such as Papus, and later took part in spiritualist séances directed by Schrenck-Notzing.[87] Theodor Lessing, before he wrote his classic on Jewish self-hatred, published by the Zionist Jüdische Verlag, became friendly with Klages, but the friendship came to an end in 1899. In 1902, Schuler was one of the founding members of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee in Munich, alongside with Magnus Hirschfeld.[88]

In 1899, Schuler sent a reverential letter to Papus, the temporary Parisian “Delegate of Adyar” and founder of the Ordre Martiniste. His request for a personal audience was turned down by an intermediary named Sero, but an exchange of letters continued until 1905. At the same time, Schuler received occult study documents from Papus, which he regarded as “secret writings.”[89] The contents of the study documents, the so-called Grüne Hefte (“Green Notebooks”), in Schuler’s possession were a hodgepodge of occultism with a strong theosophical bent. They included excerpts from The Secret Doctrine by Blavatsky, an astrological table, letters on Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism, a spell probably written by Schuler, a Gnostic treatise, an Old Norse runic song, and excerpts from Papus’ Traité élementaire sur la Magie pratique (“Elementary treatise on practical magic”). Éliphas Levi, Franz Hartmann, and the occult historian Carl Kiesewetter (1854 – 1895), who was interested in Theosophy and alchemy, are mentioned by name.[90] The latter two belonged to the founding members of the German Theosophical Society and to the circle of authors of The Sphinx.[91]

Despite his anti-Semitism, Klages accused Schuler of “Jewish blood” during a brief lovers’ quarrel.[92] Nevertheless, Derleth, Wolfskehl, Schuler and Klages developed the mysterious doctrine of “blood” and “light,” the Blutleuchte (“Blood Lamp”), that viewed a return to pagan origins as the only way to reverse the decay and decline of the West caused by Christianity. After the steady decline of the blood, understood as a sacred elixir of life, it had to be brought back to its former purity of pagan times. They counted themselves among the few among whom the pure blood was still effective, and who could bring about desired transformation. Schuler was interested in ancient cult practices such as “blood brotherhood, blood vengeance, atonement through blood, and the use of blood in healing and protective magic.” Schuler and Klages contemplated literally “forging the desired connection with the past through a magical blood sacrifice.”[93]

Salvation through the Blutleuchte was to be regained under the sign of the Blutleuchte and the swastika that symbolized it.[94] Schuler proclaimed around 1900, that the world must “choose” between the “Aryan swastika” and that “castration symbol,” the “Jewish-Christian cross.” Wolfskehl as well had the swastika symbol on his teacups.[95] Before it became fully established as Schuler’s anti-Semitic symbol, the German-Jewish publisher Georg Bondi (1865 – 1935), George’s devoted friend and publicizer, sometimes printed the swastika on his books. Bondi was married to Eva Dohm, the daughter of Hedwig Dohm, and a friend of Martha Fontane (1860 – 1917), the daughter of Theodor Fontane (1819 – 1898), who was educated in Leipzig, where he became acquainted with the progressives of the Vormärz. Hedwig Dohm was the grandmother of Katia Mann, Thomas Mann’s wife.

The Swastika also appears prominently on designs of books from the George-Kreis designed by George’s collaborator, the Theosophist Melchior Lechter (1865 – 1937). In April 1903, a greeting card was sent to Lechter from Munich, signed by “Stefan,” Gundolf, Mr. and Mrs. Wolfskehl, Klages and Schuler, signed with the symbol of a swastika. The card referred to the “Devachanic Plane,” which according to Theosophical teachings is a plane of being above the “physical” and “astral” planes. The card stated:

 

DIE MUENCHENER ROSENKREUZER/SENDEN DEM BRUDER AUF DER DEVACHAN/EBENE IHRE GRÜSSE (“THE MUNICH ROSICRUCIANS/SEND THEIR GREETINGS TO THE BROTHER ON THE DEVACHAN/GREETINGS”).[96]

 

Problematic for Klages, however, was that Wolfskehl claimed to have discovered a Jewish Blutleuchte (“blood lamp”). Roderich Huch (1880 – 1944) describes this problem, which would contribute to their separation:

 

The cosmicists Schuler and Klages could do both, because they were not looking for the race, but the soul, i.e. the luminous soul substance, as they saw it alive in Wolfskehl and others in the early days, even though they were pure-bred Jews, and only condemned Wolfskehl when he thought he had discovered a Zionist Blutleuchte and thus, in their view, betrayed the cosmic soul.[97]

 

Klages insisted George exclude Wolfskehl from the George-Kreis, on the grounds that Wolfskehl was Jewish. Klages was in part upset about Wolfskehl’s relationship with Klages’ former lover, Fanny zu Reventlow. Whom he described as a “pagan saint.”[98] Reventlow proclaimed a doctrine of free love and matriarchy, having borne a child out of wedlock without disclosing the father’s identity on the principle that only the mother should have all rights in her children. Reventlow had relationships with Rilke, Edgar Jaffe, and Adam Hetschel, who regarded Reventlow as the most significant woman of the century and Klages as the most significant man. Hetschel even predicted that if Reventlow and Klages joined together, “the world of paganism would celebrate a revolutionary awakening,” and “there would be a renewal of paganism on the whole planet.”[99]

In 1904, Klages and Schuler broke with Wolfskehl and George, though Schuler still visited Wolfskehl later on and Wolfskehl’s admiration for Schuler did not diminish in the following years. Schuler felt surrounded by a Jewish conspiracy:

 

Ambiguous-unambiguous figures crossed the stage: a sinister rabbi—a gruesome Galician Jewess—a Jewish “mystic,” apparently a representative of a secret order. The dependence of the Blätter on a Jewish center became a certainty… Secret leadership became apparent, and the leader’s name was Wolfskehl.[100]

 

Similarly, Klages also resented George’s relationships with various young men, stating:

 

…his pedagogical Eros was particularly directed towards Jewish youths… and it hardly requires greater acumen to demonstrate that the God in whom he believed and whom he saw embodied in a fifteen-year-old named Kronfeld [Maximin] was none other than—Yahweh![101]

 

George’s Rosicrucian poem Templer appears in a volume of poetry titled Der Siebenten Ring (“The Seventh Ring”), which Lechter illustrated with the Ouroboros symbol of Gnosticism, of a snake biting its own tail, also employed in Blavatsky’s seal. Jan Stottmeister, the friendship developed between the Theosophist Lechter and George has no other example in George’s biography in terms of its warmth and mutual “master” veneration.[102] Lechter read Nietzsche became an enthusiastic follower of Wagner, and his early drawings were inspired by Arnold Böcklin  and Max Klinger and by French symbolists. In the years before 1900, George and Lechter often visited his musician friend Richard Wintzer (1866 – 1952), who played “especially Wagner and Beethoven” for them.[103] Lechter’s admiration of Wagner was intertwined with an equally deep admiration of Joséphin Péladan.[104] In December 1901, Lechter had acquired the two volumes of Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine, which had only just been translated into German.

Stottmeister has shown that, although George ridiculed Blavatsky as die dicke Madame (“the fat madam”), it was not because of his rejection of Theosophy, but of his claim of ultimate and undisputable authority, and his concern that his pupils might show allegiance to any other “Masters” (such as the Theosophical Mahatmas), or to any other child-idol such as Jiddu Krishnamurti, the Indian boy elected by the Theosophists as their future World Teacher. As shown by Stottmeister, the central figure in George’s rivalry with Theosophy was artist Melchior Lechter. After Lechter met George, he would create numerous designs for his publisher, Georg Bondi Verlag, which became known to a wider circle of readers through the publication of George’s Blättern für die Kunst from 1898 and the publication of George’s books illustrated by Lechter. Lechter was part of an atelier community that included Hans Evers, Moeller van den Bruck and Fidus.[105]

In October 1910, Melchior Lechter made a trip to India, together with Wolfskehl. Both had already become members of the Theosophical Society. They paid no less than five visits to Adyar, had a private meeting with Annie Besant, accompanied her and her followers on walks, listened to lectures, and met the young Krishnamurti. Back home, Lechter published an account of his trip to India as Tagebuch der indischen Reise (“Diary of the Indian Journey”) in 1912, and sent a copy to George as a Christmas gift. The gift was not well received, and George refused to answer and cut all ties of friendship with Lechter.

Urged on by Klages, Schuler gave three lectures in 1915 on Über die biologische Voraussetzungen des Imperium Romanum (“The Biological Preconditions of the Imperium Romanum”). Among the audience was Rilke who was deeply impressed by the hitherto unknown Schuler. This led to a personal contact between Schuler and Rilke. Rilke’s wife, the sculptor Clara Rilke, sculpted a bust of Schuler. To Princess Maria von Thum und Taxis he wrote that he had spent several hours with Schuler by whom he was marvelously stimulated (“wunderlich erregt”).[106]

Between 1911 and 1912, Rilke stayed at the Castle Duino, near Trieste, home of Princess Marie of Thurn und Taxis, who was married to Prince Alexander von Thurn and Taxis (1851 – 1939), from the Bohemian line of the House of Thurn and Taxis. She was one of five children of Egon Karl Franz zu Hohenlohe-Waldenburg-Schillingsfürst (1819 – 1865), a Knight of Malta and the brother of Chlodwig, Prince of Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, who had been appointed Prime Minister of Bavaria through Richard Wagner’s intercession at the secret request of Otto von Bismarck.[107] Also visiting the Castle Duino were the Counts of Chambord, Empress Sisi and Emperor Franz Josef I, Archduke Maximilian with Charlotte, Eleonora Duse, Johann Strauss, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Paul Valéry, Mark Twain, Franz Liszt, Victor Hugo, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and Archduchess Maria Josefa often stayed in the castle.

 

Great Men

George’s followers, explained Peter Viereck, were confident that the poem “Templer” written by George “would regenerate Germany and save European culture.”[108] Viereck cites Claude David’s French biography of Stefan George as observing:

 

The poem summons forth a sort of Free Masonry… living separate from the world, misunderstood, stoned… “Only he who always fought her” [the earth], can force her to endure human rule. The Templars are the seed of a new order...a spiritual elite, always recruited from the best...true to an inner law.... They combine action with meditation: while preserving spiritual values, they threaten the throne of the unworthy. The humanism here presented” [as opposed to the antirational obscurantism of Klages and Schuler] “restores the possibility of life and wisdom,… the self confidence of humanity.”[109]

 

Many of Stefan George’s Jüngeren (“Younger Ones”), who referred to him as “the Master,” revered him as the hidden spiritual leader and “emperor” of Geheimes Deutschland (“Secret Germany”).  As mentioned by Lawrence A. Tritle, “There can be little doubt of the preoccupation with or idealization of Great Men among members of the Georgekreis.”[110] George was also greatly influenced by the work of the Roman historian Plutarch, especially the Lives of Noble Greeks and Romans. The notion literary-intellectual elite originates not only with Nietzsche, but appears as well with Mallarmé and Golden Dawn member W.B. Yeats. The concepts set forth by Nietzsche, of elite groups, the Superman, the Underman, figure prominently in the works of George and his circle. George dedicated a poem to Nietzsche in Der siebente Ring. Fritz Koegel and Kurt Breysig, both member of the George-Kreis, had been friends of Nietzsche. These influences appear in three important biographies of Great Men by members of the George-Kreis: Gundolf’s Caesar, Kantorowicz’s Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite (“Emperor Frederick II”), and Vallentin’s Napoleon. At the conclusion of the biography of Caesar, Gundolf criticizes historians of the nineteenth century for their inability to adequately grasp the “spirit of genius” of both Caesar and Napoleon.[111]

In 1919, George befriended the Ernst Hartwig Kantorowicz (1895 – 1963), a German-Jewish historian, and guided him to write his biography of Emperor Frederick II. According to Kantorowicz, George adopted the conspiratorial idea of Secret Germany from Paul de Lagarde and Julius Langbehn (1851 – 1907), also an anti-Semite and an early figure in the Völkisch movement.[112] Lagarde was conversant with Adolf Stoecker, who was also involved in the Antisemitenpetition. Lagarde also showed interest in völkisch societies such as the Deutscher Volksverein of Bernhard Förster and Max Liebermann von Sonnenberg, as well as the Deutschsoziale Partei of Theodor Fritsch. For Lagarde, Jews and liberals were allies, which the true German nationalist had to oppose. All that was needed, as he wrote in 1878, was a Führer to lead them:

 

Only the… strong will of a single Man can help us...not parliament nor statutes nor the ambition of powerless individuals… a Führer who would so completely represent the people that in him they would be united and his command would be their will… a new Barbarossa, a great one… a leader of genius with artistic temperament… a Caesar-Artist… whose fire of spirit and strength of arm will fulfill our ancient victorious longings.[113]

 

From November 1889 to February 1890, when Nietzsche was being treated in a psychiatric clinic in Basel, Langbehn attempted to cure him, claiming that the methods of the medical doctors were ineffective in treating Nietzsche's condition.[114] In the following year, Langbehn anonymously published his highly successful Rembrandt als Erzieher (“Rembrandt as Educator”), a title in deliberate reference to Nietzsche’s work on Schopenhauer. To Langbehn—ignoring the artist’s friendship with Menasseh ben Israel—Rembrandt represented the epitome of German culture, which was menaced by “Americanism.” Germany’s true religion, according to Langbehn, was not Christianity but Aryanism. He described the German Nordic as “the Aryan par excellence,” and lauded Germany’s monarchy, which he believed to be enthroned by the grace of God. The Greater Germany of the future, he said, would govern Europe and achieve universal domination. In 1891, he published 40 Lieder (“40 Poems”), again anonymously, which were explicitly erotic, prompting the state prosecutor of Schleswig-Holstein to threaten to press charges, and causing Langbehn to withdraw the book.

The notion of a “secret emperor” of the Germans was found in Langbehn’s Rembrandt als Erzieher. The connection between the secret and the national was referred to in 1875 in Largade’s Schrift Über die gegenwärtige Lage des Deutschen Reichs (“On the current situation of the German Empire”): “If at least there were conspirators among us, a secretly open alliance that sank and created for the great tomorrow, and to which, even if the crowd would not understand it in these reversed days of Pentecost, all could join whose unspoken longing it offered the word.”[115] George later commented at a reading of Lagarde: “Now there are conspirators. And the best conspiracy is at the very beginning.”[116] The ideas of George and Kantorowicz were reflected in Lagarde who wrote:

 

The Germany we love and desire to see has never existed, and perhaps never will. The ideal is something that is and is not at the same time… People thrive only on the mysterious warmth of a never-seen star… Germany would be founded if we took a negative stance against the current vices of an obviously un-German-influenced time, if we formed an open alliance to defend against and combat these vices, which should be as little without outward signs and symbols as without the strictest discipline…[117]

 

The term Geheimes Deutschland was used for the first time in 1910 by Wolfskehl in an article for the first Jahrbuch für die geistige Bewegung, a magazine published between 1910 and 1912 by Friedrich Wolters and Friedrich Gundolf, both members of the George-Kreis. As with Neuen Reiches (“New Reich”), another central concept of the George-Kreis that he coined, Wolfskehl saw Secret Germany as both an aspiration and a reality. Wolfskehl, in an essay written in 1910 and representing Stefan George’s views, first used the expression Secret Germany to describe the contributors to the Blätter fur die Kunst and its “exclusive invited readership.”[118] In 1909, together with Wolfgang Kapp’s brother-in-law, Friedrich von der Leyen (1873 – 1966), Wolfskehl also included influential medieval authors such as Wolfram von Eschenbach in the prehistory of Secret Germany.[119] Identified with poets revered by George and his followers, for Wolfskehl the Secret Germany was both timeless and eschatological.[120] Wolfkehl expressed both fear and hope:

 

…that a movement from the depths—if such a thing is still possible in Europe—could issue only from Germany, from the secret Germany, for which every one of our words is spoken, from which every one of our verses draws life and rhythm, and in whose unceasing service lies felicity, torment and the sanctification of our lives.[121]

 

However, Wolfskehl and many other members of the George-Kreis also perceived Secret Germany within a broader European dimension. Homer, Plato, Pindar and Alexander the Great, then selected Roman emperors, as well as medieval emperors from the Carolingian, Ottonian and Hohenstaufen dynasties, but also Dante, for example, were counted among its spiritual “ancestors.” By means of the Secret Germany, Wolfskehl also spoke of the need to revive a number of old European virtues, “discipline and virtue, the epitome of Roman virtus, Hellenic kalokagathia and arete.”[122] In his poem Lebenslied. An die Deutschen (“Song of life. To the Germans”), Wolfskehl also addressed the Jewish significance for the development of German poetic and political culture, referring to his own ancestry, as he was descended from Jewish Kalonymus family. One of his ancestors, for example, the knight Rav Kalonymus, had given his own horse to the Holy Roman Emperor Otto II at the Battle of Stilo in 982 AD, after the emperor had lost his own, thus saving the emperor’s life and the succession of imperial rule and the empire.[123] The term Secret Germany was subsequently used many times in George-Kreis, who were convinced that the Secret Germany had been awakened by the Master’s new poetry. George himself adopted it in the 1920s as shown in the title for one of his poems, published in 1928 in his last volume of poetry, Das neue Reich.

 


[1] Goodrick-Clarke. Occult Roots of Nazism, pp. 27–28.

[2] Andy Walker. “1913: When Hitler, Trotsky, Tito, Freud and Stalin all lived in the same place.” BBC Magazine (April 18, 2013).

[3] Eileen M. Lavine. “The Stimulating Story of Jews and Coffee.” Moment (Sunday 2, 2016)

[4] Gabe Friedman. “Meet the Austrian-Jewish novelist who inspired Wes Anderson’s ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’.” Haaretz (January 17, 2015). Retrieved from http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-features/1.637453

[5] Goodrick-Clarke. Occult Roots of Nazism, p. 28.

[6] Aaron Schaffer. “Théophile Gautier and ‘L’art pour l’art’.” The Sewanee Review, 36: 4 (1928), pp. 405–417.

[7] Clement Greenberg. “Modernism and Postmodernism.” William Dobell Memorial Lecture, Sydney, Australia, Oct 31, 1979. Arts 54, No.6 (February 1980).

[8] Jeffrey Burton Russell. Mephistopheles: The Devil in the Modern World (Ithica: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 207.

[9] Cited in Russell. Mephistopheles, p. 207.

[10] Nikolai Andres. “Wilde Wagner: Tannhäuser and The Picture of Dorian Gray.” The Wildean, 48 (2016), p. 70.

[11] Stottmeister. Der George-Kreis und die Theosophie, p. 75.

[12] Nikolai Andres. “Wilde Wagner: Tannhäuser and The Picture of Dorian Gray.” The Wildean, 48 (2016), p. 68.

[13] G. Jean-Aubry. “Villiers de l’Isle Adam and Music.” Music & Letters, 19: 4 (1938), p. 393; Stottmeister. Der George-Kreis und die Theosophie,, p. 75.

[14] G. Jean-Aubry. “Villiers de l’Isle Adam and Music.” Music & Letters, 19: 4 (1938), p. 398.

[15] Dorothy Knowles. La Réaction idéaliste au théâtre depuis 1890 (Droz, 1934), p. 66.

[16] Marcel Roggemans. History of Martinism and the F.U.D.O.S.I (Lulu.com, 2009), p. 36.

[17] Massimo Introvigne. “Ordeal by Fire: The Tragedy of the Solar Temple.” In The Order of the Solar Temple: The Temple of Death (ed.) James R. Lewis (Ashgate, 2006), p. 22.

[18] Kerry Bolton. “Joséphin Péladan & the Occult War Against Liberal Decadence.”

[19] Tobias Churton. Gnostic Philosophy: From Ancient Persia to Modern Times (Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions, 2005). p. 322.

[20] André Billy (1971). Stanislas de Guaita (in French). p. 37.

[21] Stottmeister. Der George-Kreis und die Theosophie, p. 74.

[22] Ibid., p. 75.

[23] André Billy (1971). Stanislas de Guaita (in French). p. 37.

[24] John Michael Greer. The New Encyclopedia of the Occult (Llewellyn Worldwide, 2003). p. 365.

[25] Alex Ross. “The Occult Roots of Modernism.” The New Yorker (June 26, 2017).

[26] Stottmeister. Der George-Kreis und die Theosophie, p. 72.

[27] Alex Ross. “The Occult Roots of Modernism.” The New Yorker (June 19, 2017). Retrieved from https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/06/26/the-occult-roots-of-modernism

[28] “The Peladan brothers.” Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Cross. Retrieved from https://www.okrc.org/freres-peladan?lang=en

[29] Translated by DeepL. Cited in Esteban Buch. “‘Les Allemands et les Boches’ : la musique allemande à Paris pendant la Première Guerre mondiale.” Le Mouvement Social, 208: 3 (2004).

[30] Alex Ross. “The Occult Roots of Modernism.” The New Yorker (June 19, 2017). Retrieved from https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/06/26/the-occult-roots-of-modernism

[31] Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke. “The Modern Occult Revival in Vienna 1880–1910.” Theosophical History, 1: 5 (1986), p. 99; cited in Karl Baier. “Occult Vienna: From the Beginnings until the First World War.” In Hans Gerald Hoedl, Astrid Mattes & Lukas Pokorny, (eds.). Religion in Austria, Vol. 5, (Vienna: Praesens, 2020), p. 9.

[32] Karl Baier. “Occult Vienna: From the Beginnings until the First World War.” In Hans Gerald Hoedl, Astrid Mattes & Lukas Pokorny, (eds.), Religion in Austria, Vol. 5, (Vienna: Praesens, 2020), p. 9.

[33] Ibid., p. 10.

[34] Ibid., p. 9.

[35] Eric Kandel. The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present (New York City, New York: Random House Publishing Group, 2012), p. 68.

[36] Rudolf Steiner. The Education of the Child and Early Lectures on Education (Great Barrington, Massachusetts: Anthroposophic Press, 1996), p. ix.

[37] Johannes Hemleben. Rudolf Steiner: An Illustrated Biography (Forest Row, East Sussex: Rudolf Steiner Press, 2013), pp. 44, 46–47.

[38] Rudolf Steiner. Autobiography: Chapters in the Course of my Life, 1861–1907 (Great Barrington, Massachusetts: SteinerBooks, 2005), pp. 191–192.

[39] “Members of the Pernerstorfer circle.” Mahler Foundation. Retrieved from https://mahlerfoundation.org/mahler/the-man/pernerstorfer-circle-member/

[40] Joel Whitebook. Freud: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

[41] Friederike Ursula Eigler & Susanne Kord. The Feminist Encyclopedia of German Literature (Greenwood Publishing Group, 1997), p. 207.

[42] Peter Galison. “Assassin of Relativity (Lecture)". YouTube. Retrieved 8 April 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlONXXn9_QI

[43] Martin Mueller. “Hofmannsthal's Electra and Its Dramatic Models.” Modern Drama, 29: 1 (Spring 1986), p. 72.

[44] Fritz Stern. Gold and Iron: Bismarck, Bleichröder and the Building of the German Empire, p. 17.

[45] John R. Covach. “Schoenberg and The Occult: Some Reflections on the Musical Idea.” Theory and Practice 17 (1992), p. 104.

[46] Ibid., p. 106.

[47] Cited in John R. Covach. “Schoenberg and The Occult: Some Reflections on the Musical Idea.” Theory and Practice 17 (1992), p. 109.

[48] Covach. “Schoenberg and The Occult,” p. 109.

[49] Melanson. Perfectibilists.

[50] Hamann. Hitler’s Vienna, pp. 75.

[51] Bryan Gilliam & Charles Youmans. “Richard Strauss.” Grove Music Online (January 20, 2001). Retrieved from https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/display/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000040117

[52] Patrick Jordan. “A Life of Dialogue: Martin’s Buber’s Path to a Believing Humanism.” Commonweal (June 8, 2020). Retrieved from https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/life-dialogue

[53] Cedric Cohen-Skalli & Libera Pisano. “Farewell to Revolution! Gustav Landauer’s Death and the Funerary Shaping of His Legacy.” The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy, 28: 2 (2020), p. 198.

[54] Fritz Mauthner. Erinnerungen (München: Georg Müller, 1918), p. 111.

[55] Joachim Kühn. Gescheiterte Sprachkritik: Fritz Mauthners Leben und Werk (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1975), p. 257–266.

[56] Silvia Dapía. Die Rezeption der Sprachkritik Fritz Mauthners im Werk von Jorge Luis Borges (Cologne, Weimar: Böhlau, 1993); Linda Ben-Zvi. “Samuel Beckett, Fritz Mauthner and the Limits of Language.” PMLA, 95: 2 (1980), pp. 183–200; Maria Kager. “James Joyce and Fritz Mauthner: Multilingual Liberators of Language.” The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, 93:1 (2018), pp. 39–47.

[57] Claudia Willms. Liberale Erziehung im Milieu (Bohlau Verlag, 2018), pp. 78–91.

[58] Gary D. Stark. Banned in Berlin: Literary Censorship in Imperial Germany, 1871–1918 (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2009), p. 204.

[59] Viereck. Metapolitics.

[60] Arthur Moeller van den Bruck. Die moderne Literatur (Berlin: Schuster und Loeffler, 1902), p. 440; cited in Alain de Benoist. “Arthur Moeller van den Bruck.”  Retrieved from https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/alaindebenoist/pdf/arthur_moeller_van_den_bruck.pdf

[61] Emily D. Bilski. Berlin Metropolis: Jews and the New Culture, 1890–1918 (New York: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 51–53.

[62] Alain de Benoist. “Arthur Moeller van den Bruck.”  Retrieved from https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/alaindebenoist/pdf/arthur_moeller_van_den_bruck.pdf

[63] Marina Schuster. Fidus. In Uwe Puschner, Walter Schmitz & Justus H. Ulbricht (eds.), Handbuch zur „Völkischen Bewegung“ 1871–1918 (Munich: Saur, 1996), p. 904.

[64] G. L. Mosse. “The Mystical Origins of National Socialism.” Journal of the History of Ideas, 22: 1 (1961), p. 87.

[65] Carrie B. Dohe. Jung’s Wandering Archetype: Race and religion in analytical psychology (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), p. 111.

[66] Gary D. Stark. Banned in Berlin: Literary Censorship in Imperial Germany, 1871–1918 (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2009), pp. 250–251.

[67] Stephen van Evera. “Hypotheses on Nationalism and War.” International Security, 18: 4 (1994), p. 27, n. 44.

[68] Stottmeister. Der George-Kreis und die Theosophie,, p. 74.

[69] Ibid.

[70] Ibid.

[71] Michael & Erika Metzger. Stefan George (Twayne’s World Authors Series, 1972), pp. 19–20.

[72] Ibid, pp. 21–22.

[73] Stottmeister. Der George-Kreis und die Theosophie, p. 73.

[74] Ibid., p. 76.

[75] Thomas Karlauf. Stefan George. Die Entdeckung des Charisma (Frankfurt am Main: Büchergilde Gutenberg, 2007), p. 284. Cited in “Friedrich Gundolf.” Via Monuentum. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20160720164825/https://www.via-monumentum.de/index.php?article_id=77

[76] Thomas Karlauf. Stefan George. Die Entdeckung des Charisma (Frankfurt am Main: Büchergilde Gutenberg, 2007), p. 524. Cited in “Friedrich Gundolf.” Via Monuentum. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20160720164825/https://www.via-monumentum.de/index.php?article_id=77

[77] Robert E. Norton. Secret Germany: Stefan George and his Circle (Cornell University Press, 2002), p. 173.

[78] Stottmeister. Der George-Kreis und die Theosophie, pp. 80–81.

[79] Ibid., p. 82–83.

[80] Ibid., p. 76.

[81] Norton. Secret Germany, p. 354

[82] David Fernbach. “Prophet-pariah.” New Left Review, 18 (November–December 2002).

[83] H. J. Monatshefte Meessen. “Reviewed Work: Stefan George: A Study of His Early Work by Ulrich K. Goldsmith.” Monatshefte, 54: 7 (1962), 368.

[84] “Das Affenherz ist so etwas Vielgestaltiges.” Albert Schweitzers Briefwechsel mit Karl Wolfskehl. In Sinn und Form, 64:4 (2012), p. 516–531.

[85] Richard Wollin. “Walter Benjamin Meets the Cosmics.” Retrieved from https://media.law.wisc.edu/m/ndkzz/wolin_revised_10-13_benjamin_meets_the_cosmics.doc

[86] “The Three Luminaries Collection Vol III.” The Three Luminaries. Retrieved from https://www.threeluminaries.com/2020/11/the-three-luminaries-collection-vol-iii/

[87] Pascal Themanlys. “Le Mouvement Cosmique.” Retrieved from http://www.abpw.net/cosmique/theon/mouvem.htm

[88] Franz Wegener. Alfred Schuler, der letzte deutsche Katharer. Gnosis, Nationalsozialismus und mystische Blutleuchte (Gladbeck 2003), p. 13.

[89] Stottmeister. Der George-Kreis und die Theosophie,, p. 87.

[90] Ibid. p. 88.

[91] Ibid.

[92] Viereck. Metapolitics.

[93] Hans Thomas Hakl. Eranos: An Alternative Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (New York: Routledge, 2014), p. 24.

[94] Franz Wegener. Alfred Schuler, der letzte deutsche Katharer: Gnosis, Nationalsozialismus und mystische Blutleuchte (KFVR, 2014).

[95] Viereck. Metapolitics.

[96] Stottmeister. Der George-Kreis und die Theosophie, p. 102.

[97] Cited in Franz Wegener. Alfred Schuler, der letzte deutsche Katharer. Gnosis, Nationalsozialismus und mystische Blutleuchte (Gladbeck 2003), p. 11.

[98] Cynthia Eller. “Matriarchy and the Volk.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 81:1 (March 2013), p. 193.

[99] Nicolau Sombart. “Max Weber and Otto Gross: On the Relationship between Science, Politics, and Eros in Wilhelmine Germany.” History of Political Thought, 8:1(1987), pp. 145–146. Cited in Cynthia Eller. “Matriarchy and the Volk.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 81:1 (March 2013), p. 193.

[100] Franz Wegener. Alfred Schuler, der letzte deutsche Katharer. Gnosis, Nationalsozialismus und mystische Blutleuchte (Gladbeck 2003), p. 11.

[101] Franz Wegener. Alfred Schuler, der letzte deutsche Katharer. Gnosis, Nationalsozialismus und mystische Blutleuchte (Gladbeck 2003), p. 12.

[102] Stottmeister. Der George-Kreis und die Theosophie, p. 95.

[103] Ibid., p. 100.

[104] Ibid., p. 101.

[105] Jost Hermand & and Gregory Mason. “Meister Fidus: Jugendstil-Hippie to Aryan Faddist.” Comparative Literature Studies 12: 3 (1975), p. 292.

[106] Mandel, Siegfried. “Rilke’s Readings and Impressions from Buber to Alfred Schuler.” Modern Austrian Literature 15: 3/4 (1982), p. 265.

[107] Salmi. Imagined Germany, p. 128.

[108] Viereck. Metapolitics.

[109] Claude David. Stefan George (IAC publisher, Lyon-Paris, 1952), p. 251; cited in Viereck. Metapolitics.

[110] Lawrence A. Tritle. “Plutarch in Germany: The Stefan George ‘Kreis’.” International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 1: 3 (Winter, 1995), p. 112.

[111] Ibid., pp. 109-121.

[112]  Ernst Kantorowicz. “Das Geheime Deutschland.” In Robert Benson & Johannes Fried, Ernst Kantorowicz. Erträge der Doppeltagung (Stuttgart, 1997), p. 78.

[113] Waite. Psychopathic God, p. 275; cited in Richard Landes. Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience (Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 357.

[114] Lee Sorensen (ed.). “Langbehn, Julius.” Dictionary of Art Historians. Retrieved from http://arthistorians.info/langbehnj

[115] Translated by DeepL.

[116] Edith Landmann. Gespräche mit Stefan George. (Düsseldorf/Munich: Helmut Küpper formerly Georg Bondi, 1963), p. 50. Translated by DeepL.

[117] Paul de Lagarde. Die Religion der Zukunft (1878). In Paul de Lagarde. Schriften für das deutsche Volk. Band 1 (München 1924), p. 279.

[118] Peter Hoffmann. Stauffenberg: A Family History, 1905-1944 (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2008), p. 33.

[119] Norman Franke. Jüdisch, römisch, deutsch zugleich...? (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 2006), p. 166

[120] Ibid., p. 167–183.

[121] Cited in Peter Hoffmann. Stauffenberg: A Family History, 1905-1944 (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2008), p. 33.

[122] Franke. Jüdisch, römisch, deutsch zugleich...?, p. 170.

[123] Ibid., pp. 369–411.

Zionism