Alfred Schuler, by Wikipedia

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Alfred Schuler, by Wikipedia

Postby admin » Tue Mar 06, 2018 2:35 am

Alfred Schuler
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 3/5/18

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Alfred Schuler (1902)

Alfred Schuler (* 22 November 1865 in Mainz; † 8 April 1923 in Munich) was a religious founder, a gnostic, a mystic and a visionary. Franz Wegener has called Schuler the last of the German Cathars. Schuler saw himself as a reborn Roman of the late imperial era. Also a neopagan, he was the spiritual focus of the "Munich Cosmic Circle", and made a broad impact without ever publishing a book during his lifetime. Stefan George and Ludwig Klages were, amongst others, significantly influenced by him.

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Der junge Alfred Schuler; copyright dla; Ornamentfoto oben: Pompeij, copyright 2002 fw


Schuler studied Archaeology (and Law) in Munich but came to see archaeologists as "desecrators of graves ripping out of the earth what has been sanctified by the rite of burial, and confining to the unwholesome air of museums the lustrous force rightly working its mighty influence under the cover of darkness". After his studies Schuler made his living as an 'independent scholar' in Munich. He held his own "rebirth into an unpleasant epoch" to be the responsibility of an evil demon. Schuler died during an operation meant to remove a malignant tumour.

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Alfred Schuler auf dem Totenbett; Foto: Hanns Holdt, copyright dla



"Blood Beacon" and "Cosmic Circle"

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"Münchener Kosmiker": Wolfskehl, Schuler, Klages, George, Verwey. Photograph by Karl Bauer

At the turn of the nineteenth century the Munich borough of Schwabing became the center of certain anti-bourgeois forces tending towards an interest in the 'occult', among which were found the secretive cult of the 'Blutleuchte' ("Blood beacon"). An occult circle (Munich Cosmic Circle) gravitating around Karl Wolfskehl, Alfred Schuler and Ludwig Klages developed a doctrine according to which the Occident was plagued by downfall and degeneration, caused by the rationalizing and demythologizing effects of Christianity, held to be responsible for the betrayal of life's primary forces. A way out of this desolate state could, according to the "Cosmic" view, only be found by a return to the pagan origins. No exact common ground did however exist, as to what this "homecoming" would entail.

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Alfred Schuler und Ludwig Klages; copyright dla


Alfred Schuler and Ludwig Klages came to know each other in 1893.[1] They were, above all others, the leading personalities of the "Blutleuchte" and, with a few other 'initiates' such as Ludwig Derleth and the poet Karl Wolfskehl, the founders of this "occult circle". The first contact with Stefan George was established through Wolfskehl.

As clearly signalled by the name - "Blutleuchte" - "Blood" and "Light" were to play an important role. With the historical "degeneration of the blood", held to be a sacred life elixir and a metaphysical substrate of souls, "truthful" life was seen as sinking into an ever more weakened state. And thus it was found to be necessary to lead this conception of the blood up to its former state of light and power, as it was thought to have been in heathen times thousands of years ago, and to some degree in antiquity. In the sign of the "Blood Beacon" and the swastika, its incarnate emblem, a healthy state of life were to be regained.

From a chosen few, among which they imagined themselves to be and in which the "untainted blood" was supposed to be still working its healthy influence, a reversal was thought to be possible. By the work of these chosen few, the "incarnation of the undying spark of a distant past" (L. Klages), the founding energies of the "cosmic solstice" were to be rekindled. The occult practices of the Blutleuchte was supposed to be a symbiosis of heathendom and "lordly leadership" in the service of a wayward humanity in need of a fundamental rebirth.

Influence

The influence of the "Cosmic Circle" on Stefan George and his entourage is apparent by his use of the swastika in some of his publications, such as the Blätter für die Kunst. The "cosmic" influence can also be traced in the article "The Seventh Circle" and in his later work. As there was, however, in 1904, a rupture between George and the Schuler circle, its overt influence was intermittent.

From about the turn of the century Schuler kept in touch with occultists such as Henri Papus, and later took part in spiritualist séances directed by Albert von Schrenck-Notzing. Schuler also held a large number of lectures on "ancient heathen mysteries"; and in the "salon" of Elsa Bruckmann a series of speeches (from 1915 to 1923) on the subject of "the eternal city". Rainer Maria Rilke is known to have been present during Schuler's speeches.

The research into Schuler's life has been predominantly concerned with the memetic influence he may have exerted upon certain progenitors of German National Socialism, spurred by his anti-Judaism, his distinct employment of the swastika and, above all, by Robert Boehringer's thesis that Adolf Hitler may have met Schuler in the "salon Bruckmann". Despite his anti-Semitism, Schuler was however neither a National Socialist nor a member of any political party and it may seem likely that he would have found the active, public agitation of a politician to be a sacrilege against his gnostic beliefs.

Most important, the central doctrine of nazism, that the Jew was evil and had to be exterminated, had its origin in the Gnostic position that there were two worlds, one good and one evil, one dark and one light, one materialistic and one spiritual.... The mystical teachings of Guido von List, Lanz von Liebenfels, and Rudolf von Sebottendorff were modern restatements of Gnosticism.

When the apocalyptic promise of Christ's resurrection was broken, the Gnostics sought to return men to God by another route, more Oriental than Hellenist. They devised a dualistic cosmology to set against the teachings of the early Christian Church, which, they claimed, were only common deceptions, unsuited for the wise. The truth was esoteric. Only the properly initiated could appreciate it. It belonged to a secret tradition which had come down through certain mystery schools. The truth was, God could never become man. There were two separate realms -- one spiritual, the other material. The spiritual realm, created by God, was all good; the material realm, created by the demiurge, all evil. Man needed to be saved, not from Original Sin, but from enslavement to matter. For this, he had to learn the mystical arts. Thus Gnosticism became a source for the occult tradition.

A famous medieval Gnostic sect, the Cathars, came to identify the Old Testament god, Jehovah, with the demiurge, the creator of the material world and therefore the equivalent of Satan. Within Gnosticism, then, existed the idea that the Jewish god was really the devil, responsible for all the evil in the world. He was opposed to the New Testament God. The Cathars tried to eliminate the Old Testament from Church theology and condemned Judaism as a work of Satan's, whose aim was to tempt men away from the spirit. Jehovah, they said, was the god of an earth "waste and void," with darkness "upon the face of the deep." Was he not cruel and capricious? They quoted Scripture to prove it. The New Testament God, on the other hand, was light. He declared that "there is neither male nor female," for everyone was united in Christ. These two gods, obviously, had nothing in common.

The synagogue was regarded as profane by Christians. The Cathars -- themselves considered heretical by the Church -- castigated Catholics for refusing to purge themselves of Jewish sources; Church members often blamed the [Cathar] Christian heresy on Jewish mysticism, which was considered an inspiration for Gnostic sorcery.

But Gnostic cosmology, though officially branded "false," pervaded the thinking of the Church. The Jews were widely thought to be magicians. It was believed that they could cause rain, and when there was a drought, they were encouraged to do so. Despite the displeasure of the Roman Popes, Christians, when they were in straitened circumstances, practiced Jewish customs, even frequenting synagogues.

This sheds light on an otherwise incomprehensible recurring theme within Nazi literature, as, for example, "The Earth-Centered Jew Lacks a Soul," by one of the chief architects of Nazi dogma, Alfred Rosenberg, who held that whereas other people believe in a Hereafter and in immortality, the Jew affirms the world and will not allow it to perish. The Gnostic secret is that the spirit is trapped in matter, and to free it, the world must be rejected. Thus, in his total lack of world-denial, the Jew is snuffing out the inner light, and preventing the millennium:

Where the idea of the immortal dwells, the longing for the journey or the withdrawal from temporality must always emerge again; hence, a denial of the world will always reappear. And this is the meaning of the non-Jewish peoples: they are the custodians of world-negation, of the idea of the Hereafter, even if they maintain it in the poorest way. Hence, one or another of them can quietly go under, but what really matters lives on in their descendants. If, however, the Jewish people were to perish, no nation would be left which would hold world-affirmation in high esteem -- the end of all time would be here.

... the Jew, the only consistent and consequently the only viable yea-sayer to the world, must be found wherever other men bear in themselves ... a compulsion to overcome the world.... On the other hand, if the Jew were continually to stifle us, we would never be able to fulfill our mission, which is the salvation of the world, but would, to be frank, succumb to insanity, for pure world-affirmation, the unrestrained will for a vain existence, leads to no other goal. It would literally lead to a void, to the destruction not only of the illusory earthly world but also of the truly existent, the spiritual. Considered in himself the Jew represents nothing else but this blind will for destruction, the insanity of mankind. It is known that Jewish people are especially prone to mental disease. "Dominated by delusions," said Schopenhauer about the Jew.

... To strip the world of its soul, that and nothing else is what Judaism wants. This, however, would be tantamount to the world's destruction.

This remarkable statement, seemingly the rantings of a lunatic, expresses the Gnostic theme that the spirit of man, essentially divine, is imprisoned in an evil world. The way out of this world is through rejection of it. But the Jew alone stands in the way. Behind all the talk about "the earth-centered Jew" who "lacks a soul"; about the demonic Jew who will despoil the Aryan maiden; about the cabalistic work of the devil in Jewish finance; about the sinister revolutionary Jewish plot to take over the world and cause the decline of civilization, there is the shadow of ancient Gnosticism.

-- Gods & Beasts: The Nazis & the Occult, by Dusty Sklar


He is also known to have criticized the "nationalist tumour", and the "Hitler group" as representing the "drunken torchlight of death, leading people into the slaughterhouse".[2]

In later years Schuler has become the subject of some interest as a poet in his own right and as a forerunner of certain experimental practices of modernist literature.

References

1. They also knew the "Bohemian Countess" of Schwabing, Fanny zu Reventlow, who was Klages' lover for a period.
2. Franz Wegener, Alfred Schuler, der letzte Deutsche katharer, p.58

Literature

• Alfred Schuler: Dichtungen. München 1930.
• Alfred Schuler: Fragmente und Vorträge aus dem Nachlass. Mit Einführung von Ludwig Klages. Leipzig 1940.
• Alfred Schuler: Gesammelte Werke. Herausgegeben, kommentiert und eingeleitet von Baal Müller. München, Telesma-Verlag, 2007. ISBN 978-3-9810057-4-5
Secondary literature[edit]
• Wolfgang Frommel, Marita Keilson Lauritz, Karl Heinz Schuler: Alfred Schuler. Drei Annäherungen; Amsterdam 1985.
• Baal Müller (ed.): Alfred Schuler. Der letzte Römer. Neue Beiträge zur Münchner Kosmik: Reventlow, Schuler, Wolfskehl u.a. Castrum Peregrini Presse, Bonn 2000. ISSN 0008-7556
• Michael Pauen: Einheit und Ausgrenzung. Antisemitischer Neopaganismus bei Ludwig Klages und Alfred Schuler. In: Renate Heuer, Ralph-Rainer Wuthenow, Konfrontation und Koexistenz. Zur Geschichte des deutschen Judentums. Frankfurt New York 1996 p. 242-269.
• Michael Pauen: Alfred Schuler: Heidentum und Heilsgeschichte. In: Castrum Peregrini 42 (1993) p. 21-54.
• Gerhard Plumpe: Alfred Schuler. Chaos und Neubeginn. Zur Funktion des Mythos in der Moderne. Berlin 1978
• Franz Wegener: Alfred Schuler, der letzte deutsche Katharer. Gnosis, Nationalsozialismus und mystische Blutleuchte (2003) ISBN 3-931300-11-0
• Baal Müller: Kosmik. Prozeßontologie und temporale Poetik bei Ludwig Klages und Alfred Schuler: Zur Philosophie und Dichtung der Schwabinger Kosmischen Runde. München: Telesma-Verlag 2007 ISBN 978-3-9810057-3-8
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Re: Alfred Schuler, by Wikipedia

Postby admin » Tue Mar 06, 2018 2:41 am

Munich Cosmic Circle
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 3/5/18

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.


One such rather influential interpretation [coming out of the modern gnostic foundation] could be found in the George circle. This so called 'cosmic circle' took shape in the Schwabing quarter of Munich at the end of the nineteenth century, around the figure and poetry of Stefan George. Among its core members were Karl Wolfskehl (1869-1948), Friedrich Gundolf (1880-1931), Hans Busse (1867-1914), Friedrich Huch (1873-1913), Franziska Reventlov (1871-1918), Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), Alfred Schulter and Ludwig Klages.

-- Modern Gnosis and Zionism: The Crisis of Culture, Life Philosophy and Jewish National Thought, by Yotam Hotam


The irrational then, was abroad in 20th-century Germany. But so far we have examined only the secondary figures. The most influential occultists were a different caliber altogether. They can be divided into four main groups: (1) the Theosophy and Rosicrucianism of Prague and Vienna; (2) the Cosmic Circle of Munich; (3) the various colonies set up by the Progressive Underground to prepare for the coming new age; and (4) the Anthroposophy of Rudolph Steiner.

-- The Occult Establishment, by James Webb


The whole of Germany was swept up in this esoteric wave, and youth more than anyone. The peculiarly nineteenth-century phenomenon, spiritualism, and its more "scientific" variation, Theosophy, in Germany were welded together with a mystical concept of the Volk as a people whose collective "soul" was more than the sum of its parts. This Aryan "soul," Germans believed, united the individual German to his geographical place. Every tree and rock of German soil was holy, and spoke to the people, shaping them and causing their creativity. The intuitive wisdom of which the Aryans, rooted in their land, were capable was hidden from the Jews, those eternal wanderers, who had no organic place of their own and, therefore, tried to usurp the fatherland of others. On this account, the Jew was most comfortable in the city, alienated from nature and the Volk Spiritualism joined itself to the idea of the Volk, in that nature emitted a vital ether, a life force, with which only the Aryan was in touch. He alone could contact an extrasensory world which would yield up its secrets and give him special powers.

The new romanticism was, above all, irrational, and this seemed to guarantee its easy acceptance. It peddled itself as more substantial than the discoveries of science, because science itself did not claim to understand the dark mysteries of the force which drove nature, whereas Madame Blavatsky and others like her did. List, borrowing her Theosophy, also did. Her "ancient wisdom," transposed by him into Germanic wisdom which had been destroyed by Christianity, could be revived through intuition, and would explain the essence of things. German mystics developed an ideology, a hodgepodge of the occult, racism, and romanticism which, while ridiculous, went down surprisingly well with youth hunting for certainties. Many young people, Walter Z. Laqueur points out in Young Germany,

joined one of the many new religious and occult sects whose prophets grew like mushrooms in the volkisch camp between the First and Second World War. Of such were Mathilde Ludendorff's [the general's wife] Tannenberg Bund, Arthur Dinter's group, the Asgard Circle, or Gustav Muller's sect, which believed that the human soul was an amalgamation of three or four animal souls ("according to reliable reports from beyond"), and that the planet Mars was the place where man first appeared.


To children whose fathers had been killed in the war, the leaders of these groups became surrogates. To adolescents disturbed by a fragmented society, they offered solidity. To students who knew that nothing awaited them upon graduation from school, they offered immersion in the group. To alienated youth drifting into dreary, unfriendly cities, they offered companionship. To young people bewildered by the intricacies of sex, they offered the solution of rigorous puritanism. To children who could no longer believe in the God of their fathers, they offered a new, modern God. To those thirsting for absolute meanings, they provided absolute answers.

As one participant put it (in E. Y. Hartshorne's German Youth and the Nazi Dream of Victory):

Mysticism and everything mystical had dominion over us. It was in our ranks that the word Fuhrer originated, with its meaning of blind obedience and devotion. The word Bund arose with us, too, with its mysterious undertone of conspiracy. And I shall never forget how in those early days we pronounced the word Gemeinschaft ["community"] with a trembling throaty note of excitement, as though it hid a deep secret.


He goes on more objectively:

The tragedy of the appeal of this mysticism to the youth of the post-war period was that it offered them a dreamy haven of refuge from the pressing problems of the day.

A significant proportion of cultured idealistic youth was thus, for years on end, and at the most impressionable age, withdrawn from the tasks of their time, and estranged. Instead of learning to see things as they were, and freeing themselves from the dangerous tradition of German escape-idealism, they became victims of a deceptive mysticism which made them easy victims for the National Socialists. Furthermore, by yielding to the lure of this mysticism, toward which an attitude of rational criticism was sure to mean angry expulsion from the "group," these boys lost all capacity for criticism. At a time when the blind obedience of the soldier was regarded as unworthy of rational men, they adopted the habit of a far more sinister obedience: the servile subordination of the mind under the yoke of an ideology.


The divine essence, or elan vital, or life force, or vril, was believed to be electromagnetic -- "Theo-zoological," in Lanz's terminology. Since the sun was the repository of this energy, it became the fashion for German youth groups, as for occult groups generally, to adopt the emblem of the swastika, a symbol for the sun. The festival of the changing sun, an old pagan ritual, was given a new occult twist by the Sera Circle, in that the cosmic rays were thought to emit esoteric knowledge along with warmth. List's Armanen believed that the solar symbol held the key to an ancient "secret science" and that by communing with the ghostly spirits present in certain Germanic ruins, mysterious veils of the past would be lifted. The Cosmic Circle practiced pagan rituals intended to arouse the life force and awaken clairvoyant powers in people of Germanic blood. In their songs and dances, the groups tried to recreate that primordial kinship with nature which they supposed ancient man to have had. They abhorred science and reason as enemies of the life of the soul. Many of them became vegetarians and teetotalers, for they believed that the purification of the physical body would help the soul to see reality. They threw over orthodox medicine for spiritual and herbal healing, which were somehow felt to be closer to the primal source.

-- Gods & Beasts -- The Nazis & the Occult, by Dusty Sklar




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Karl Wolfskehl, Alfred Schuler, Ludwig Klages, Stefan George, Albert Verwey. Photograph by Karl Bauer

The Munich Cosmic Circle was a group of writers and intellectuals in Munich, Germany at the turn of the 20th century, based around the mystic Alfred Schuler.[1] Along with Schuler, it consisted of the philosopher Ludwig Klages (1872-1956), the poet Karl Wolfskehl (1869-1948) and the writer Ludwig Derleth (1870-1948).[2] Another member of the group was the "Bohemian Countess" of Schwabing, Fanny zu Reventlow (1871-1918). She wrote about her experiences with the group in her Roman à clef Herrn Dames Aufzeichnungen (1913).[3]

Alfred Schuler and Ludwig Klages came to know each other in 1893. With the others they based their early association upon an appreciation of Ibsen's dramas.[4] Another interest was the work of Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815-1887), a Swiss anthropologist and sociologist, and his research into matriarchal clans.[5] They developed a doctrine according to which the West was plagued by downfall and degeneration, caused by the rationalizing and demythologizing effects of Christianity. A way out of this desolate state could, according to the "Cosmic" view, only be found by a return to pagan origins. Schuler was described by Theodor Lessing as "an oddity, a curious mixture of charlatan and genius, a show-off and a visionary".[6] The activities and rituals of the group were often sensationalized in bohemian fin-de-siècle Schwabing.

Some members of the Circle were also active in the group around the poet Stefan George, whom Wolfskehl introduced to the group. Ludwig Klages wrote a book praising his poetry in 1902.[7] George was not a member of the Circle, though he was in close contact with them.[8]

The group fell apart through an acrimonious dispute in 1904 between Klages, who considered himself a neo-pagan and against any form of organized religion, and the Zionist Wolfskehl, which led to charges of anti-semitism against Klages. Stefan George had also begun to distance himself from Klages' philosophy at this time and defended Wolfskehl against Schuler and Klages.[9]

Notes

1. The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement, By Richard Noll, p. 166-172.; Germany at the fin de siècle: culture, politics, and ideas, By Suzanne L. Marchand, David F. Lindenfeld
2. Where D.H. Lawrence was wrong about woman by Holbrook, David. Bucknell University Press, Associated University Presses, 1992
3. Gunna Wendt: Franziska zur Reventlow. Die anmutige Rebellin. Berlin 2008 (German)
4. Julia Zernack: "Nordische Mythen in der deutschen Literatur. Eddaspuren bei George und Wolfskehl", in: Annette Simonis (Hg.): Intermedialität und Kulturaustausch: Beobachtungen im Spannungsfeld von Künsten und Medien, Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2009, S. 38. (German)
5. The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory, Cynthia Eller, esp. p. 33-34.
6. Lessing, Theodore, Einmal und Nie Wieder. Bertelsmann, Guetersloh. 1969 (German)
7. Secret Germany: Stefan George and his circle by Robert Edward Norton
8. Georg Dörr: Muttermythos und Herrschaftsmythos, S.188 (German)
9. Furness, Raymond. Zarathustra's children: a study of a lost generation of German writers, p. 95
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Re: Alfred Schuler, by Wikipedia

Postby admin » Tue Mar 06, 2018 2:56 am

Prophet of doom: Stefan George, one of Germany's most celebrated poets, was a cult figure. But, despite his close links to Hitler's would-be assassins, his legacy has been sullied by Nazi associations
by Justin Cartwright
The Guardian.com
Sat 14 Jan 2006 06.37 EST First published on Sat 14 Jan 2006 06.37 EST

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In 1958, a German professor of literature gave a lecture in Berlin on the poet Stefan George, 1868-1933. He concluded by saying, "I think that you will, like me, now see in a new light George's dictum that the inmost destiny of a people is revealed in its poetry. In other words, classic poetry can indeed determine the destiny of a people, of the Germans in particular."

[strike "classic," replace with "Rosicrucian"]


The Archangel Raphael says,

The Sun intones his ancient song
'Mid rival chant of brother spheres.
His prescribed course he speeds along
In thund'rous way throughout the years.


Echoes of that heavenly music reach us even here in the Physical World. They are our most precious possession, even though they are as elusive as a will-o'-the-wisp, and cannot be permanently created, as can other works of art -- a statue, a painting, or a book. In the Physical World tone dies and vanishes the moment after it is born. In the first heaven these echoes are, of course, much more beautiful and have more permanency, hence there the musician hears sweeter strains than ever he did during earth life.

The experiences of the poet are akin to those of the musician, for poetry is the soul's expression of its innermost feelings in words which are ordered according to the same laws of harmony and rhythm that govern the outpouring of the spirit in music. In addition, the poet finds a wonderful inspiration in the pictures and colors which are the chief characteristics of the Desire World. Thence he will draw the material for use in his next incarnation.

The spirit that creates poetry moves within those who show weighty matters represented in pictures, for what is a picture but a silent poem?

-- The Rosicrucian Emblems of Daniel Cramer: The True Society of Jesus and the Rosy Cross, by Daniel Cramer


-- The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception: An Elementary Treatise Upon Man's Past Evolution, Present Constitution and Future Development, by Max Heindel (1909)


This professor was Alexander Schenk, Graf von Stauffenberg, brother of Claus and Berthold von Stauffenberg, both executed after the plot against Hitler's life on July 20 1944. Claus, like all his brothers a close disciple of Stefan Georg, had placed the bomb next to Hitler at the Wolf's Lair, Hitler's eastern command centre, and was shot that same evening after his return to Berlin. But remarkably, when the Nazis came to power in 1933 they had regarded Von Stauffenberg's mentor George as one of the artistic and spiritual forbears of their movement. They tried to enlist the poet to their cause, to reveal to the German people its 'true destiny', and planned to set up a literary award in Stefan George's name that would rival the Goethe Prize. George died that same year, so it was never clear how close he would have been willing to cooperate with the Nazis. Many of his disciples joined the National Socialist Party. And while the Nazis later cooled in their enthusiasm for him when they discovered there were a number of Jews in his circle, the suspicion has lingered that George prepared the ground for Nazism, with his appeal to a sacred Germany cheated of its destiny.

So who was Stefan George? I have to admit I had never heard of him until recently, when I was researching the bomb plot for my new novel. But his name cropped up time and again, particularly in relation to the three Stauffenberg brothers, who were part of the inner circle or Kreis, which assembled around the personality and ideas of the poet. He was known as the Master, and believed in his own destiny as someone who could change the world. His disciples were utterly in his thrall, and obeyed his every wish. By the mid-1920s George was considered one of the most influential people in the world, cited in one international newspaper as the equal of Lloyd George and Woodrow Wilson. Although his inner circle was small, no educated German was unfamiliar with his poetry and even now he is regarded as one of the finest German poets, ranking alongside Hölderlin and Rilke. But while other contemporaries such as Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Gottfried Benn are remembered, George is hardly spoken of and his poetry is not read outside very limited academic circles.

He was born Etienne George in 1868 at Bingen on the Rhine, the son of a wine merchant. His family came from Alsace, and George was initially more interested in his French than his German antecedents. He believed that modern man was decadent and could only be saved by a cultural renewal, and from an early age saw himself as just the man for the job. At school he was regarded as odd. Indeed, according to his biographer Robert E. Norton (Secret Germany: Stefan George and His Circle), he does seem to have been very odd, detached, supercilious, always trying to get other boys under his spell and demanding exclusive affection from the few who succumbed. His appearance was strikingly camp. His earliest poetry reveals a homoerotic element, along with fantasies of domination. Right to the end he appears to have been misogynistic and his followers almost exclusively male. Nobody seems clear about his sexual orientation, but he was capable of vindictive and even frightening behaviour towards his intimates if they rejected him or even, as in the case of one of the Von Stauffenbergs, wanted to marry.

He decided that poetry was to be the weapon of attack in his conquest of the world. For this odd boy from an undistinguished wine merchant's family, it was an extraordinary ambition. Initially, he gravitated towards the Symbolists - even writing poetry in French - and always felt alien in Germany, particularly its Prussian parts. Mallarmé, Verlaine and Baudelaire were his models and he translated some of their poems. He proclaimed his credo as Kunst für die Kunst - L'art pour l'art. Later, when he turned his attention to German literature - believing that Germany needed a peculiarly German cultural revolution - he was considered to be one of the most influential Modernists.

His poetry may have been innovative, but there was nothing modern about his beliefs: they were forming around the idea that there was a secret, sacred Germany which was both the true past and the true future and that his was mission to revitalise German poetry and the nation itself. But the Germany he had in mind was neither democratic nor industrial, rather a kind of Hellenistic and Teutonic new Reich, half-empire, half-state, led by an aesthetic elite, of which he would be the undisputed and charismatic leader.

Reading about George, I was able, I thought, to understand more clearly the Führerprinzip, the idea that a strong leader is a requisite for Germany. It had always seemed to me implausible; an attempt, after the event, to explain the inexplicable - Germany's shameful acquiescence in Hitler's rise to power. But as I read about George and his influence, I saw how deep was this longing for something nobler and how acute the sense of Germany's humiliation at all levels of society. George felt that somewhere in the unspecified recent past Germany had become utterly decadent; his solution was to revert to a near mythical idea of a nobler, purer Germany to be led by a charismatic figure. This Germany had been betrayed by the powerful in finance, in literature and in politics. It is the counterpart of the argument that Germany received a stab in the back during the first world war; intellectually and culturally the greatness of Germany had been traduced.

By 1894, George was establishing himself as the prophet of this new era, which would reject naturalism, through his journal Blätter fur die Kunst. His editorial style was implacably intolerant of any competition or contradiction. Max Weber, while acknowledging the merits of his poetry, was appalled by the priestly and messianic element in George's make-up.

An idealised homoeroticism was also a fundamental part of George's life. In 1891, as a young man, he fell in love with the 17-year-old Von Hofmannsthal, a precocious talent already noticed beyond his home town of Vienna. At 21, George travelled to Vienna and took to following Von Hofmannsthal home from his gymnasium, sending him flowers and trying to arrange assignations. When Von Hofmannsthal, who was of a nervous disposition, told his parents he was frightened of George, and possibly by his own realisation that he might be gay, George was asked to leave town by Von Hofmannsthal's father.

George wrote letters of unsettling intensity to the father and son, trying to justify himself. The possibility of a deep relationship with Von Hofmannsthal obsessed George for years, and he tried from a distance to get the young poet, dramatist and essayist to write for the Blätter. Eventually, spurned, he began to denigrate Von Hofmannsthal's writing, particularly his taste for journalism, although Von Hofmannsthal was more generous about George's abilities. The irony is that Von Hofmannsthal is more highly regarded than George now.

In 1902 George became obsessed with a boy of 13, Maximilian Kronberger, who died two years later of meningitis. In George's volume of verse, Der Siebente Ring, Maximilian was deified. There was a minor scandal, as much about the sacrilege as the homoerotic undertones, but typically he turned the attack on his critics.

It was at this time that George set about becoming wholly German. His circle repudiated his French influences: he was now in the company of Nietzsche and Wagner, wrote Carl August Klein, nominally the editor, in the Blätter. In reality he had been told that his French poetry was never going to be acceptable and he turned back to German in humiliation. French poetry, he proclaimed, was really just a transitional stage of German poetry. George continued his practice of using highly stylised language and archaic words and very complex syntax to capture the unique German-ness to which he aspired. His influence grew; his poetry seemed to touch a general sense of malaise, a belief that unnamed, shadowy people had sabotaged the greatness of Germany.

Just after the turn of the century he began moving away from his Symbolist beginnings to a belief that culture, like a sealed train, could carry the bacillus of artistic and social revolution. What Germany needed to regain its mythic greatness was a revival. It had to be thorough and blood would be spilled. In fact blood was probably an essential element. Gradually the dictum that art was entirely for its own sake was forgotten. His own obsessive personality, meanwhile, had gathered disciples, who began increasingly to resemble a cult. Readings of the Blätter's manifesto took place before each meeting and a form of archaic folkloric dress was favoured. Increasingly his poetry and the work published by his group could be seen as an attack on the institutions and the decadence of Germany in favour of an earlier, more noble Germany, and this, by implication, was a Germany of exclusively Teutonic blood and values. George's influence over what was to come was believed by some critics and historians including AJP Taylor and Karl-Heinz Boher to be undeniable, given his immense influence during his lifetime.

It was common in Germany in the early part of the 20th century for people who regarded themselves as open-minded and civilised to say without embarrassment that there were too many Jews in positions of influence. It wasn't on wholly barren ground that the Nazis sowed their poisonous seeds. Although George had many Jews in his circle, some of his comments on Jews are extraordinary. He once said that "one Jew is very useful, but as soon as there are more than two of them, the tone becomes different and they tend to their own business". And, "Jews are the best conductors. They are good at spreading and implementing values. To be sure, they do not experience life as deeply as we do. They are in general different people."

By the time the Nazis came to power in 1933, some in George's circle believed this was his moment to move out of the artistic undergrowth and encourage a government based on his principles. Although ill and unwilling to reveal himself, he wrote to Goering in equivocal terms and did not actively distance himself from the Nazis. The Nazis were proposing a Stefan George Prize, to rival the Goethe Prize, which would glorify the qualities they believed they shared with George. When, just before he died, he moved to his small house in Minusio in Switzerland, George's followers denied that he was absenting himself from Nazi Germany. But after the war his remaining supporters were quick to suggest that it had indeed been a tactical withdrawal.

George once said he was not overly concerned by the signs that the Nazis were moving against the Jews, even when some of his circle lost their academic jobs, but there is no evidence that he would have acquiesced in what was to come. Nonetheless, even in 1933 it was clear that the Nazis had sinister plans for the Jews. By the end of 1934 more than 2,000 leading intellectuals and artists had left Germany, most of them Jewish. It is this uneasy sense that George shared some Nazi beliefs that has, according to a leading German critic, Professor Karl-Heinz Boher, led to a modern reluctance to appreciate his undoubted qualitiesas a poet. Of course it is also true that in 1933 even some of the people who were to become implacable opponents of Hitler shared a certain sympathy for the idea of a secret Germany. One of these was Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg.

The Von Stauffenbergs were introduced to George's circle when they were very young. They were Catholics, said to be descended from a royal line, and extraordinarily good-looking. This chimed well with George's belief in a kind of feudal hierarchy and Claus was considered the very model of the aristocratic leader; indeed, he went on to prove himself as a young officer of outstanding ability, which was to see him made a colonel after being wounded in North Africa, where he lost an eye and a hand. But when he and his brothers met George, George was impressed as much by their looks as their lineage. They were exactly what he had in mind for his all-male, Hellenistic élite. Claus was later admired by Hitler for much the same reason, namely that - unlike either George or Hitler himself - he looked the part of the German hero. After George's death, the brothers devoted much of their spare time to George's legacy and his "state" and tended his grave in Switzerland.

What exactly was there in the poetry that was so appealing to so many? Trying to read it in translation, particularly when compared with the work of his contemporaries in Britain and Ireland - Yeats and Eliot, to name just two - I found it impossible to discern. Even taking into account the context, it seems peculiarly heavy handed. It is full of sophomoric longing and intensity and appeals to a mystic sensibility. Clearly I am missing something, but it seems important to accept that the appeal to people such as Claus von Stauffenberg and his other fanatical followers was profound. When Von Stauffenberg returned to Berlin in 1941, he was still keyed up by the successes of Hitler's campaigns. But only a year later, after he discovered the atrocities being committed in the east by the SS Einsatzgruppen against Jews and political commissars, he was horrified and declared Hitler a criminal. He was particularly upset that potential allies who hated Russia had been turned so quickly into enemies. Now on the general staff, Von Stauffenberg started to plot. He drew in colleagues, and read to waverers one of George's poems of 1907, "The Antichrist", which is particularly apocalyptic:

The Lord of the Flies is expanding his Reich;
All treasures, all blessings are swelling his might ...
Down, down with the handful who doubt him!

Cheer loudest, you dupes of the ambush of hell:
What's left of life-essence, you squander its spell
And only on doomsday feel paupered.

You'll hang out your tongues, but the trough has been drained;
You'll panic like cattle whose farm is ablaze ...
And dreadful the blast of the trumpet.


You could, of course, read this entirely differently, but for Von Stauffenberg the Nazis had been prophesied by George.The time for tea-parties and conversations was over, said Von Stauffenberg: he would kill Hitler himself when he was next summoned to a briefing with the Führer.

On July 20 1944, at the Wolf's Lair in east Prussia, Claus von Stauffenberg placed the bomb in a briefcase next to Hitler, left the meeting room and watched the explosion from a distance. He flew back to Berlin, convinced he had killed the dictator. When it turned out that Hitler, by a miracle, was almost unscathed, the conspirators began to lose heart. The generals quickly betrayed the colonels; there were no contingency plans for a failed coup. Later that same evening Von Stauffenberg was taken out and shot in the grim courtyard of Army headquarters, in the Bendlerstrasse, with three colleagues. In all, Hitler took his revenge on 4,800 people. In Von Stauffenberg's proposals for Germany after the coup, you can easily trace the influence of George: a new, hierarchical Germany, paying due regard to the contribution of the aristocracy and its ancient values, was to be instituted; the German people would come into their own, a people who represented "a fusion of the Hellenic and Christian origins in its Germanic being". His last words just before he was executed were "Long live our secret Germany," or - some witnesses say - "Long live our sacred Germany".
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Re: Alfred Schuler, by Wikipedia

Postby admin » Tue Mar 06, 2018 4:01 am

Princess Elsa, the Hitler Supporter of Byzantine Origin
by Konstantinos Menzel
Jan 20, 2014

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Image
Elsa Bruckmann together with her husband Hugo Bruckmann

History is like a mix of faint details, like an endless puzzle with infinite pieces that may never merge into a single image.

This is also the case in the largely unknown story of Elsa Bruckmann (1865-1946), who went down in history as a fervent personal admirer of Adolf Hitler. She supported him financially from his earliest days in politics and made it her mission to introduce the Führer to the leading Jewish industrialist lobby of the time.

Elsa was not always a Bruckmann. She was a woman of high historical legacy with an important name. Elsa was born as Princess Cantacuzène of Romania, daughter of Prince Theodor Cantacuzène of Romania.

Along with her father, she claimed descent from a family dating back to the Byzantine Empire, the royal Byzantine house of Kantakouzenos, anglicized as Cantacuzène. During the Byzantine era the family provided two emperors and became associated after the Fall of Constantinople, with enterprises in the Ottoman regions of Wallachia and Moldavia, modern-day Romania and Ukraine, as well as in Russia.

According to historical sources, Elsa Bruckmann along with businessmen, representatives of higher social classes, German elite ladies and individuals, were financing the Nazi leader before and after his failed coup in 1923, up until his last days as Führer.

As the wife of a German publisher, Hugo Bruckmann, who was also a devotee of Hitler, she became fascinated by the leadership profile of Hitler and enlisted her circle of friends to raise financial and political support for the rising leader.


Elsa had the strong belief that by supporting Hitler, she was contributing to the reconstruction and strengthening of Germany.

******************************

Elsa Bruckmann
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 3/5/18

Image
Elsa Bruckmann
Princess Cantacuzene of Romania
Born 23 February 1865
Died 7 June 1946 (aged 81)
Hugo Bruckmann
House Cantacuzene

Elsa Bruckmann (23 February 1865 – 7 June 1946), born Princess Cantacuzene of Romania, was since 1898 the wife of Hugo Bruckmann, Munich publisher of the writings of Houston Stewart Chamberlain.[1] She held the "Salon Bruckmann"[2] and made it a mission to introduce Adolf Hitler to leading industrialists.

References

1. Sherree O. Zalampas, Adolf Hitler: A Psychological Interpretation of His Views on Architecture
2. http://www.tagesspiegel.de/kultur/liter ... 60844.html
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Re: Alfred Schuler, by Wikipedia

Postby admin » Tue Mar 06, 2018 4:20 am

Rainer Maria Rilke
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 3/5/18

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One such rather influential interpretation [coming out of the modern gnostic foundation] could be found in the George circle. This so called 'cosmic circle' took shape in the Schwabing quarter of Munich at the end of the nineteenth century, around the figure and poetry of Stefan George. Among its core members were Karl Wolfskehl (1869-1948), Friedrich Gundolf (1880-1931), Hans Busse (1867-1914), Friedrich Huch (1873-1913), Franziska Reventlov (1871-1918), Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), Alfred Schulter and Ludwig Klages.

-- Modern Gnosis and Zionism: The Crisis of Culture, Life Philosophy and Jewish National Thought, by Yotam Hotam


Image
Rainer Maria Rilke
Rilke in 1900, aged 24
Born René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
4 December 1875
Prague, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary
Died 29 December 1926 (aged 51)
Montreux, Vaud, Switzerland
Occupation Poet, novelist
Language German, French
Nationality Austrian
Period 1894–1925
Literary movement Modernism
Spouse Clara Westhoff
Children 1

René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke (4 December 1875 – 29 December 1926)—better known as Rainer Maria Rilke (German: [ˈʁaɪnɐ maˈʁiːa ˈʁɪlkə])—was a Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist, “widely recognized as one of the most lyrically intense German-language poets”[1] writing in both verse and highly lyrical prose.[2] Several critics have described Rilke's work as inherently “mystical”.[3][4] His writings include one novel, several collections of poetry and several volumes of correspondence in which he invokes haunting images that focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude and profound anxiety. These deeply existential themes tend to position him as a transitional figure between the traditional and the modernist writers.

Rilke travelled extensively throughout Europe (including Russia, Spain, Germany, France and Italy), and in his later years settled in Switzerland—settings that were key to the genesis and inspiration for many of his poems. While Rilke is most known for his contributions to German literature, over 400 poems were originally written in French and dedicated to the canton of Valais in Switzerland. Among English-language readers, his best-known works include the poetry collections Duino Elegies (Duineser Elegien) and Sonnets to Orpheus (Die Sonette an Orpheus), the semi-autobiographical novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge), and a collection of ten letters that was published after his death under the title Letters to a Young Poet (Briefe an einen jungen Dichter). In the later 20th century, his work found new audiences through use by New Age theologians and self-help authors[5][6][7] and frequent quotations by television programs, books and motion pictures.[8] In the United States, Rilke remains among the more popular, best-selling poets.[9]

Biography

Early life (1875–1896)


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Rilke, three years old, circa 1878–1879

He was born René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke in Prague, capital of Bohemia (then part of Austria-Hungary, now part of the Czech Republic). His childhood and youth in Prague were not especially happy. His father, Josef Rilke (1838–1906), became a railway official after an unsuccessful military career. His mother, Sophie (“Phia”) Entz (1851–1931), came from a well-to-do Prague family, the Entz-Kinzelbergers, who lived in a house on the Herrengasse (Panská) 8, where René also spent many of his early years. The relationship between Phia and her only son was coloured by her mourning for an earlier child, a daughter who had died only one week old. During Rilke's early years Phia acted as if she sought to recover the lost girl through the boy by dressing him in girl's clothing.[10] His parents' marriage failed in 1884. His parents pressured the poetically and artistically talented youth into entering a military academy in St. Pölten, Lower Austria, which he attended from 1886 until 1891, when he left owing to illness. He moved to Linz, where he attended trade school. Expelled from school in May 1892, the 16-year-old prematurely returned to Prague. From 1892 to 1895 he was tutored for the university entrance exam, which he passed in 1895. Until 1896 he studied literature, art history, and philosophy in Prague[11] and Munich.[12]

Munich and Saint Petersburg

In 1897 in Munich, Rainer Maria Rilke met and fell in love with the widely travelled, intellectual woman of letters Lou Andreas-Salomé. Rilke changed his first name from “René” to “Rainer” at Lou's urging because she thought that name to be more masculine, forceful, and Germanic.[13] His relationship with this married woman, with whom he undertook two extensive trips to Russia, lasted until 1900. But even after their separation, Lou continued to be Rilke's most important confidante until the end of his life. Having trained from 1912 to 1913 as a psychoanalyst with Sigmund Freud, she shared her knowledge of psychoanalysis with Rilke.

In 1898, Rilke undertook a journey lasting several weeks to Italy. In 1899, he travelled with Lou and her husband, Friedrich Andreas, to Moscow where he met the novelist Leo Tolstoy. Between May and August 1900, a second journey to Russia, accompanied only by Lou, again took him to Moscow and Saint Petersburg, where he met the family of Boris Pasternak and Spiridon Drozhzhin, a peasant poet. Author Anna A. Tavis cites the cultures of Bohemia and Russia as the key influences on Rilke's poetry and consciousness.[14]

In 1900, Rilke stayed at the artists' colony at Worpswede. (Later, his portrait would be painted by the proto-expressionist Paula Modersohn-Becker, whom he got to know at Worpswede.) It was here that he got to know the sculptor Clara Westhoff, whom he married the following year. Their daughter Ruth (1901–1972) was born in December 1901.

Paris (1902–1910)

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Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907), an early expressionist painter, became acquainted with Rilke in Worpswede and Paris, and painted his portrait in 1906.

In the summer of 1902, Rilke left home and travelled to Paris to write a monograph on the sculptor Auguste Rodin. Before long his wife left their daughter with her parents and joined Rilke there. The relationship between Rilke and Clara Westhoff continued for the rest of his life; a mutually-agreed-upon effort at divorce was bureaucratically hindered by Rilke's “official” status as a Catholic, though a non-practising one.

At first, Rilke had a difficult time in Paris, an experience that he called on in the first part of his only novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. At the same time, his encounter with modernism was very stimulating: Rilke became deeply involved with the sculpture of Rodin, then the work of Paul Cézanne. For a time, he acted as Rodin's secretary, also lecturing and writing a long essay on Rodin and his work. Rodin taught him the value of objective observation and, under this influence, Rilke dramatically transformed his poetic style from the subjective and sometimes incantatory language of his earlier work into something quite new in European literature. The result was the New Poems, famous for the “thing-poems” expressing Rilke's rejuvenated artistic vision. During these years, Paris increasingly became the writer's main residence.

The most important works of the Paris period were Neue Gedichte (New Poems) (1907), Der Neuen Gedichte Anderer Teil (Another Part of the New Poems) (1908), the two “Requiem” poems (1909), and the novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, started in 1904 and completed in January 1910.[15]

During the later part of this decade, Rilke spent extended periods in Ronda, the famous bullfighting centre in southern Spain. There he kept from December 1912 to February 1913 a permanent room at the Hotel Reina Victoria[16][17] (built in 1906), where his room remains to this day as he left it, a mini-museum of Rilkeana. The hotel was recently renovated and the poet's room is no longer even marked. The furniture and personal effects are now relegated to a glassed-in niche near the hotel spa, but out on the terrace Rilke is commemorated by a bronze statue.[citation needed]

Duino and the First World War (1911–1919)

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Duino Castle near Trieste, Italy, was where Rilke began writing the Duino Elegies in 1912—recounting that he heard the famous first line as a voice in the wind while walking along the cliffs and that he wrote it quickly in his notebook.

Between October 1911 and May 1912, Rilke stayed at the Castle Duino, near Trieste, home of Princess Marie of Thurn und Taxis. There, in 1912, he began the poem cycle called the Duino Elegies, which would remain unfinished for a decade because of a long-lasting creativity crisis. Rilke had developed an admiration for El Greco as early as 1908, so he visited Toledo during the winter of 1912/13 to see Greco's paintings. It has been suggested that Greco's manner of depicting angels has influenced the conception of the angel in the Duino Elegies.[18] The outbreak of World War I surprised Rilke during a stay in Germany. He was unable to return to Paris, where his property was confiscated and auctioned. He spent the greater part of the war in Munich. From 1914 to 1916 he had a turbulent affair with the painter Lou Albert-Lasard. Rilke was called up at the beginning of 1916 and had to undertake basic training in Vienna. Influential friends interceded on his behalf—he was transferred to the War Records Office and discharged from the military on 9 June 1916. He returned to Munich, interrupted by a stay on Hertha Koenig's Gut Bockel in Westphalia. The traumatic experience of military service, a reminder of the horrors of the military academy, almost completely silenced him as a poet.[19]

Switzerland and Muzot (1919–1926)

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Château de Muzot in Veyras, Switzerland, was where Rilke completed writing the Duino Elegies in “a savage creative storm” in February 1922.

On 11 June 1919, Rilke travelled from Munich to Switzerland. The outward motive was an invitation to lecture in Zurich, but the real reason was the wish to escape the post-war chaos and take up his work on the Duino Elegies once again. The search for a suitable and affordable place to live proved to be very difficult. Among other places, Rilke lived in Soglio, Locarno and Berg am Irchel. Only in mid-1921 was he able to find a permanent residence in the Château de Muzot in the commune of Veyras, close to Sierre in Valais. In an intense creative period, Rilke completed the Duino Elegies in several weeks in February 1922. Before and after, Rilke rapidly wrote both parts of the poem cycle Sonnets to Orpheus containing 55 entire sonnets. Together, these two have often been taken as constituting the high points of Rilke's work. In May 1922, Rilke's patron Werner Reinhart bought and renovated Muzot so that Rilke could live there rent-free.[20]

During this time, Reinhart introduced Rilke to his protégée, the Australian violinist Alma Moodie.[21] Rilke was so impressed with her playing that he wrote in a letter: “What a sound, what richness, what determination. That and the Sonnets to Orpheus, those were two strings of the same voice. And she plays mostly Bach! Muzot has received its musical christening...”[21][22][23]

From 1923 on, Rilke increasingly had to struggle with health problems that necessitated many long stays at a sanatorium in Territet, near Montreux, on Lake Geneva. His long stay in Paris between January and August 1925 was an attempt to escape his illness through a change in location and living conditions. Despite this, numerous important individual poems appeared in the years 1923–1926 (including Gong and Mausoleum), as well as the abundant lyrical work in French.

In 1924, Erika Mitterer began writing poems to Rilke, who wrote back with approximately fifty poems of his own and called her verse a Herzlandschaft (landscape of the heart).[24] This was the only time Rilke had a productive poetic collaboration throughout all his work.[25] Mitterer also visited Rilke.[26] In 1950, her “Correspondence in Verse” with Rilke was published, and received much praise.[27]

In January and February 1926, Rilke wrote three letters to the Mussolini-adversary Aurelia Gallarati Scotti in which he praised Benito Mussolini and described fascism as a healing agent.[28][29][30]

Death and burial

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Rilke's grave in Raron, Switzerland

Shortly before his death, Rilke's illness was diagnosed as leukaemia. He suffered ulcerous sores in his mouth, pain troubled his stomach and intestines, and he struggled with increasingly low spirits.[31] Open-eyed, he died in the arms of his doctor on December 29, 1926, in the Valmont Sanatorium in Switzerland. He was buried on January 2, 1927, in the Raron cemetery to the west of Visp.[31]

Rilke had chosen as his own epitaph this poem:

Rose, oh reiner Widerspruch, Lust,
Niemandes Schlaf zu sein unter soviel
Lidern.

Rose, oh pure contradiction, delight
of being no one's sleep under so many
eyelids.


For occult knowledge it is evident that the earth is not only what geologists describe. Geologists conceive the earth's components as being similar to the skeleton of man. Yet the spiritual also belongs to our earth whose aura has been permeated by Christ. During the day's twenty-four hours, this earth sleeps and is awake just as we are. We must familiarize ourselves with the fact that the state of wakefulness on earth occurs during the winter, and the state of sleep during the summer. The earth spirit is most awake in these twelve or thirteen days from Christmas to the Epiphany. In ancient ages when, as you know from the various presentations in my lecture series, human beings elevated themselves to a sort of dreamlike clairvoyance to reach a spiritual understanding of the world, in those ages the most favorable time for this process was summer. Thus, it is quite natural that whoever wants to elevate himself to spiritual heights by means of a more dreamlike clairvoyance will have an easier time of it during the summer, when the earth is asleep. Therefore, St. John's midsummer-day was in ancient ages the most propitious time to raise the soul to the spiritual level. The old way of spiritual interaction with the earth has been replaced by a more conscious elevation that can best be reached during the earth's wakefulness.

For this reason, legends inform us that unusually endowed people, who are particularly suited by their karmas, pass into an extraordinary state of consciousness that resembles sleep, but only on the surface. its inner quality is such that it can be inspired by those forces that elevate human beings to the domain we call the spirit world. A beautiful Norwegian legend (see Note 2) tells us that Olaf Åsteson, in church on Christmas Eve, falls into a sleeplike state and when he awakens on January 6 is able to relate the experiences he had in this condition. This Norwegian legend does in fact describe the experiences that one perceives first as the soul world — and then as something that feels like the spirit world, but with everything being expressed as images, as imaginative forms.

-- Christ in Relation to Lucifer and Ahriman, A Lecture by Rudolf Steiner


A myth developed surrounding his death and roses. It was said: “To honour a visitor, the Egyptian beauty Nimet Eloui, Rilke gathered some roses from his garden. While doing so, he pricked his hand on a thorn. This small wound failed to heal, grew rapidly worse, soon his entire arm was swollen, and his other arm became affected as well”, and so he died.[31]

Image

During the next stage of the process which we may call the GROWTH-DEVELOPMENT, we find in Emblems 21 (increase) and 22 (I am not wounded) the heart lying in a nest of dead thorns; but new growth is sprouting through the heart.

-- The Rosicrucian Emblems of Daniel Cramer: The True Society of Jesus and the Rosy Cross, by Daniel Cramer


Writings

The Book of Hours


Rilke published the three complete cycles of poems that constitute The Book of Hours (Das Stunden-Buch) in April 1905. These poems explore the Christian search for God and the nature of Prayer, using symbolism from Saint Francis and Rilke's observation of Orthodox Christianity during his travels in Russia in the early years of the twentieth century.

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

Rilke wrote his only novel, Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (translated as The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge) while living in Paris, completing the work in 1910. This semi-autobiographical novel adopts the style and technique that became associated with Expressionism, which entered European fiction and art in the early 20th century. Rilke was inspired by Sigbjørn Obstfelder's work A Priest's Diary and Jens Peter Jacobsen's second novel Niels Lyhne (1880), which traces the fate of an atheist in a merciless world. Rilke addresses existential themes, profoundly probing the quest for individuality, the significance of death, and reflection on the experience of time as death approaches. Rilke draws considerably on the writings of Nietzsche, whose work he came to know through Lou-Andreas Salomé. His work also incorporates impressionistic techniques that were influenced by Cézanne and Rodin (to whom Rilke was secretary in 1905–1906). He combines these techniques and motifs to conjure images of mankind's anxiety and alienation in the face of an increasingly scientific, industrial, reified world.

Duino Elegies

Rilke began writing the elegies in 1912 while a guest of Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis (1855–1934) at Duino Castle, near Trieste on the Adriatic Sea. During this ten-year period, the elegies languished incomplete for long stretches of time as Rilke suffered frequently from severe depression—some of which was caused by the events of World War I and his conscripted military service. Aside from brief episodes of writing in 1913 and 1915, Rilke did not return to the work until a few years after the war ended. With a sudden, renewed inspiration—writing in a frantic pace he described as “a savage creative storm”—he completed the collection in February 1922 while staying at Château de Muzot in Veyras, in Switzerland's Rhone Valley. After their publication and his death shortly thereafter, the Duino Elegies were quickly recognized by critics and scholars as Rilke's most important work.[32][33]

The Duino Elegies are intensely religious, mystical poems that weigh beauty and existential suffering.[34] The poems employ a rich symbolism of angels and salvation but not in keeping with typical Christian interpretations. Rilke begins the first elegy in an invocation of philosophical despair, asking: “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the hierarchies of angels?” (Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen?)[35] and later declares that “every angel is terrifying” (Jeder Engel ist schrecklich).[36] While labelling of these poems as "elegies" would typically imply melancholy and lamentation, many passages are marked by their positive energy and “unrestrained enthusiasm.”[32] Together, the Duino Elegies are described as a metamorphosis of Rilke's “ontological torment” and an “impassioned monologue about coming to terms with human existence” discussing themes of “the limitations and insufficiency of the human condition and fractured human consciousness ... man's loneliness, the perfection of the angels, life and death, love and lovers, and the task of the poet.”[37]

Sonnets to Orpheus

With news of the death of his daughter's friend, Wera Knoop (1900–1919), Rilke was inspired to create and set to work on Sonnets to Orpheus.[38] Within a few days, between February 2 and 5, 1922, he had completed the first section of 26 sonnets. For the next few days, he focused on the Duino Elegies, completing them on the evening of February 11. Immediately after, he returned to work on the Sonnets and completed the following section of 29 sonnets in less than two weeks. Throughout the Sonnets, Wera is frequently referenced, both directly by name and indirectly in allusions to a “dancer” and the mythical Eurydice.[39] Although Rilke claimed that the entire cycle was inspired by Wera, she appears as a character in only one of the poems. He insisted, however, that “Wera's own figure [...] nevertheless governs and moves the course of the whole.”[40]

The sonnets' contents are, as is typical of Rilke, highly metaphorical. The character of Orpheus (whom Rilke refers to as the “god with the lyre”[41]) appears several times in the cycle, as do other mythical characters such as Daphne. There are also biblical allusions, including a reference to Esau. Other themes involve animals, peoples of different cultures, and time and death.

Letters to a Young Poet

Image
Letters to a Young Poet, cover of the 1934 edition

In 1929, a minor writer, Franz Xaver Kappus (1883–1966), published a collection of ten letters that Rilke had written to him when he was a 19-year-old officer cadet studying at the Theresian Military Academy in Wiener Neustadt. The young Kappus wrote to Rilke, who had also attended the academy, between 1902 and 1908 when he was uncertain about his future career as a military officer or as a poet. Initially, he sought Rilke's advice as to the quality of his poetry, and whether he ought to pursue writing as a career. While he declined to comment on Kappus's writings, Rilke advised Kappus on how a poet should feel, love, and seek truth in trying to understand and experience the world around him and engage the world of art. These letters offer insight into the ideas and themes that appear in Rilke's poetry and his working process. Further, these letters were written during a key period of Rilke's early artistic development after his reputation as a poet began to be established with the publication of parts of Das Stunden-Buch (The Book of Hours) and Das Buch der Bilder (The Book of Images).[42]

Rilke's literary style

Figures from Greek mythology (e.g. Apollo, Hermes, Orpheus) recur as motifs in his poems and are depicted in original interpretations (e.g. in the poem Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes, Rilke's Eurydice, numbed and dazed by death, does not recognize her lover Orpheus, who descended to hell to recover her). Other recurring figures in Rilke's poems are angels, roses and a character of a poet and his creative work.

Rilke often worked with metaphors, metonymy and contradictions (e.g. in his epitaph, the rose is a symbol of sleep—rose petals are reminiscent of closed eyelids).

Rilke's little-known 1898 poem, “Visions of Christ” depicted Mary Magdalene as the mother to Jesus' child.[43][44]

Quoting Susan Haskins: “It was Rilke's explicit belief that Christ was not divine, was entirely human, and deified only on Calvary, expressed in an unpublished poem of 1893, and referred to in other poems of the same period, which allowed him to portray Christ's love for Mary Magdalen, though remarkable, as entirely human.”[45]

Legacy

Image
A portrait of Rilke painted two years after his death by Leonid Pasternak

In the United States, Rilke is one of the more popular, best-selling poets.[9] In popular culture, Rilke is frequently quoted or referenced in television programs, motion pictures, music and other works when these works discuss the subject of love or angels.[46] His work is often described as “mystical” and has been seized by the New Age community and self-help books.[5] Rilke has been reinterpreted “as a master who can lead us to a more fulfilled and less anxious life.”[6][47]

Rilke's work (specifically the Duino Elegies) has deeply influenced several poets and writers, including William H. Gass,[48]Galway Kinnell,[49] Sidney Keyes,[50][51] Stephen Spender,[33] Robert Bly,[33][52] W. S. Merwin,[53] John Ashbery,[54] novelist Thomas Pynchon[55] and philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein[56] and Hans-Georg Gadamer.[57][58] British poet W. H. Auden (1907–1973) has been described as "Rilke's most influential English disciple" and he frequently "paid homage to him" or used the imagery of angels in his work.[59]

Works

Complete works


• Rainer Maria Rilke, Sämtliche Werke in 12 Bänden (Complete Works in 12 Volumes), published by Rilke Archive in association with Ruth Sieber-Rilke, edited by Ernst Zinn. Frankfurt am Main (1976)
• Rainer Maria Rilke, Werke (Works). Annotated edition in four volumes with supplementary fifth volume, published by Manfred Engel, Ulrich Fülleborn, Dorothea Lauterbach, Horst Nalewski and August Stahl. Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig (1996 and 2003)

Volumes of poetry

• Leben und Lieder (Life and Songs) (1894)
• Larenopfer (Lares' Sacrifice) (1895)
• Traumgekrönt (Dream-Crowned) (1897)
• Advent (Advent) (1898)
• Das Stunden-Buch (The Book of Hours)
• Das Buch vom mönchischen Leben (The Book of Monastic Life) (1899)
• Das Buch von der Pilgerschaft (The Book of Pilgrimage) (1901)
• Geldbaum (1901)
• Das Buch von der Armut und vom Tode (The Book of Poverty and Death) (1903)
• Das Buch der Bilder (The Book of Images) (4 parts, 1902–1906)
• Neue Gedichte (New Poems) (1907)
• Duineser Elegien (Duino Elegies) (1922)
• Sonette an Orpheus (Sonnets to Orpheus) (1922)

Prose collections

• Geschichten vom Lieben Gott (Stories of God) (Collection of tales, 1900)
• Auguste Rodin (1903)
• Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke (The Lay of the Love and Death of Cornet Christoph Rilke) (Lyric story, 1906)
• Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge) (Novel, 1910)

Letters

Collected letters

• Gesammelte Briefe in sechs Bänden (Collected Letters in Six Volumes), published by Ruth Sieber-Rilke and Carl Sieber. Leipzig (1936–1939)
• Briefe (Letters), published by the Rilke Archive in Weimar. Two volumes, Wiesbaden (1950, reprinted 1987 in single volume).
• Briefe in Zwei Bänden (Letters in Two Volumes) (Horst Nalewski, Frankfurt and Leipzig, 1991)

Other volumes of letters

• Briefe an Auguste Rodin (Insel Verlag, 1928)
• Briefwechsel mit Marie von Thurn und Taxis, two volumes, edited by Ernst Zinn with a forward by Rudolf Kassner (Editions Max Niehans, 1954)
• Briefwechsel mit Thankmar von Münchhausen 1913 bis 1925 (Suhrkamp Insel Verlag, 2004)
• Briefwechsel mit Rolf von Ungern-Sternberg und weitere Dokumente zur Übertragung der Stances von Jean Moréas (Suhrkamp Insel Verlag, 2002)

References

1. Biography: Rainer Maria Rilke 1875–1926 on the Poetry Foundation website. Retrieved 2 February 2013.
2. "Rainer Maria Rilke". Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation. 2017-07-16. Retrieved 2017-07-17.
3. See Müller, Hans Rudolf. Rainer Maria Rilke als Mystiker: Bekenntnis und Lebensdeutung in Rilkes Dichtungen (Berlin: Furche 1935). See also Stanley, Patricia H. "Rilke's Duino Elegies: An Alternative Approach to the Study of Mysticism" in Heep, Hartmut (editor). Unreading Rilke: Unorthodox Approaches to a Cultural Myth (New York: Peter Lang 2000).
4. Freedman, Ralph. Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1998), p. 515.
5. Komar, Kathleen L. "Rilke: Metaphysics in a New Age" in Bauschinger, Sigrid and Cocalis, Susan. Rilke-Rezeptionen: Rilke Reconsidered (Tübingen/Basel: Franke, 1995), pp. 155–69. Rilke reinterpreted "as a master who can lead us to a more fulfilled and less anxious life."
6. Komar, Kathleen L. "Rethinking Rilke's Duisiner Elegien at the End of the Millennium" in Metzger, Erika A. A Companion to the Works of Rainer Maria Rilke (Rochester, New York: Camden House, 2004), pp. 188–89.
7. See also: Mood, John. ‘'Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1975); and a book released by Rilke’s own publisher Insel Verlag, Hauschild, Vera (ed.), Rilke für Gestreßte (Frankfurt am Main: Insel-Verlag, 1998).
8. Komar, Kathleen L. "Rethinking Rilke's Duisiner Elegien at the End of the Millennium" in Metzger, Erika A., A Companion to the Works of Rainer Maria Rilke (Rochester, New York: Camden House, 2004), 189.
9. Komar, Kathleen L. "Rilke in America: A Poet Re-Created" in Heep, Hartmut (editor). Unreading Rilke: Unorthodox Approaches to a Cultural Myth (New York: Peter Lang, 2000), pp. 155–78.
10. "Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke" at http://www.washingtonpost.com
11. Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke by Ralph Freedman, Northwestern University Press, 1996, ISBN 0-8101-1543-3, p. 36.
12. "Rainer Maria Rilke | Austrian-German poet". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 2017-07-17.
13. Arana, R. Victoria (2008). The Facts on File Companion to World Poetry: 1900 to the Present. Infobase. p. 377. ISBN 978-0-8160-6457-1.
14. Anna A. Tavis. Rilke's Russia: A Cultural Encounter. Northwestern University Press, 1997. ISBN 0-8101-1466-6. p. 1.
15. Rilke, Rainer Maria (2000-07-12). "Rainer Maria Rilke". Rainer Maria Rilke. Retrieved 2017-07-17.
16. "Mit Rilke in Ronda" by Volker Mauersberger (de), Die Zeit, 11 February 1983 (in German)
17. "Hotel Catalonia Reina Victoria", andalucia.com
18. Fatima Naqvi-Peters. A Turning Point in Rilke's Evolution: The Experience of El Greco. The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, Vol. 72, Is. 4, pp. 344-362, 1997.
19. An Kurt Wolf, 28. März 1917. S. Stefan Schank: Rainer Maria Rilke.pp. 119–121.
20. Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke by Ralph Freedman, Northwestern University Press, 1996, ISBN 0-8101-1543-3, p. 505
21. R. M. Rilke: Music as Metaphor
22. "Photo and description". Picture-poems.com. Retrieved 2012-06-07.
23. "Rainer Maria Rilke: a brief biographical overview". Picture-poems.com. Retrieved 2012-06-07.
24. Katrin Maria Kohl; Ritchie Robertson (2006). A History of Austrian Literature 1918-2000. Camden House. pp. 130–. ISBN 978-1-57113-276-5.
25. Karen Leeder; Robert Vilain (21 January 2010). The Cambridge Companion to Rilke. Cambridge University Press. pp. 24–. ISBN 978-0-521-87943-9.
26. Rainer Maria Rilke; Robert Vilain; Susan Ranson (14 April 2011). Selected Poems: With Parallel German Text. OUP Oxford. pp. 343–. ISBN 978-0-19-956941-0.
27. Erika Mitterer (2004). The prince of darkness. Ariadne Press. p. 663. ISBN 978-1-57241-134-0.
28. "Rilke-Briefe: Nirgends ein Führer" (in German), Der Spiegel(21/1957). 22 May 1957. Retrieved 28 January 2014.
29. "Elegien gegen die Angstträume des Alltags" by Hellmuth Karasek (in German). Der Spiegel (47/1981). 11 November 1981; Karasek calls Rilke a friend of the Fascists.
30. Rainer Maria Rilke, Lettres Milanaises 1921–1926. Edited by Renée Lang. Paris: Librairie Plon, 1956[page needed]
31. Excerpt from "Reading Rilke – Reflections on the Problems of Translation" by William H. Gass (1999) ISBN 0-375-40312-4; featured in The New York Times 2000. Accessed 18 August 2010 (subscription required)
32. Hoeniger, F. David. "Symbolism and Pattern in Rilke's Duino Elegies" in German Life and Letters, Volume 3, Issue 4 (July 1950), pp. 271–83.
33. Perloff, Marjorie, "Reading Gass Reading Rilke" in Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Volume 25, Number 1/2 (2001).
34. Gass, William H. Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999).
35. Rilke, Rainer Maria. "First Elegy" from Duino Elegies, line 1.
36. Rilke, Rainer Maria. "First Elegy" from Duino Elegies, line 6; "Second Elegy", line 1.
37. Dash, Bibhudutt. "In the Matrix of the Divine: Approaches to Godhead in Rilke's Duino Elegies and Tennyson's In Memoriam" in Language in India Volume 11 (11 November 2011), pp. 355–71.
38. Freedman, Ralph. Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1998), p. 481.
39. Sword, Helen. Engendering Inspiration: Visionary Strategies in Rilke, Lawrence, and H.D. (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1995), pp. 68–70.
40. Letter to Gertrud Ouckama Knoop, dated 20 April 1923; quoted in Snow, Edward, trans. and ed., Sonnets to Orpheus by Rainer Maria Rilke, bilingual edition, New York: North Point Press, 2004.
41. Sonette an Orpheus, Erste Teil, XIX, v.8: "Gott mit der Leier"
42. Freedman, Ralph. "Das Stunden-Buch and Das Buch der Bilder: Harbingers of Rilke's Maturity" in Metzger, Erika A. and Metzger, Michael M. (editors). A Companion to the Works of Rainer Maria Rilke. (Rochester, New York: Camden House Publishing, 2001), 90–92.
43. Liza Knapp, "Tsvetaeva's Marine Mary Magdalene" (The Slavic and East European Journal, Volume 43, Number 4; Winter, 1999).
44. Susan Haskins, Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor (Riverhead Trade; 1995).
45. Susan Haskins, Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor, p. 361 (HarperCollins; 1993 ISBN 0-00-215535-4).
46. Komar, Kathleen L. "Rethinking Rilke's Duisiner Elegien at the End of the Millennium" in Metzger, Erika A. A Companion to the Works of Rainer Maria Rilke (Rochester, New York: Camden House, 2004), p. 189.
47. See also: Mood, John. Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1975); and a book released by Rilke’s own publisher Insel Verlag, Hauschild, Vera (editor). Rilke für Gestreßte(Frankfurt am Main: Insel-Verlag, 1998).
48. http://www.theparisreview.org/interview ... lliam-gass
49. Malecka, Katarzyna. Death in the Works of Galway Kinnell (Amherst, New York: Cambria Press, 2008), passim.
50. Guenther, John. Sidney Keyes: A Biographical Enquiry (London: London Magazine Editions, 1967), p. 153.
51. "Self-Elegy: Keith Douglas and Sidney Keyes" (Chapter 9) in Kendall, Tim. Modern English War Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
52. Metzger, Erika A. and Metzger, Michael M. "Introduction" in A Companion to the Works of Rainer Maria Rilke (Rochester, New York: Camden House, 2004), p. 8.
53. Perloff, Marjorie. “Apocalypse Then: Merwin and the Sorrows of Literary History” in Nelson, Cary and Folsom, Ed (eds). W. S. Merwin: Essays on the Poetry (University of Illinois, 1987), p. 144.
54. Perloff, Marjorie. "Transparent Selves': The Poetry of John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara," in Yearbook of English Studies: American Literature Special Number 8(1978):171–96, at p. 175.
55. Robey, Christopher J. The Rainbow Bridge: On Pynchon's Use of Wittgenstein and Rilke (Olean, New York: St. Bonaventure University, 1982).
56. Perloff, Marjorie. Wittgenstein's Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), passim. which points towards Wittgenstein's generous financial gifts to Rilke among several Austrian artists, although he prefer Rilke's earlier works and was distressed by his post-war writings.
57. Gadamer analyzed many of Rilke's themes and symbols. See: Gadamer, Hans-Georg. "Mythopoietische Umkehrung im Rilke's Duisener Elegien" in Gesammelten Werke, Band 9: Ästhetik und Poetik II Hermenutik im Vollzug (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1993), pp. 289–305.
58. Dworick, Stephanie. In the Company of Rilke: Why a 20th-Century Visionary Poet Speaks So Eloquently to 21st-Century Readers (New York: Penguin, 2011).
59. Cohn, Stephen (translator). "Introduction" in Rilke, Rainer Maria. Duino Elegies: A Bilingual Edition (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1989), pp. 17–18. Quote: "Auden, Rilke's most influential English disciple, frequently paid homage to him, as in these lines which tell of the Elegies and of their difficult and chancy genesis..."

Further reading

Biographies


• Corbett, Rachel, You Must Change Your Life: the Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin, New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2016.
• Freedman, Ralph, Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke, New York, 1996.
• Prater, Donald, A Ringing Glass: The Life of Rainer Maria Rilke, Oxford University Press, 1994.
• Tapper, Mirjam, Resa med Rilke, Mita bokförlag.
• Torgersen, Eric, Dear Friend: Rainer Maria Rilke and Paula Modersohn-Becker, Northwestern University Press, 1998.

Critical studies

• Engel, Manfred and Lauterbach, Dorothea (ed.), Rilke Handbuch: Leben—Werk—Wirkung, Stuttgart: Metzler, 2004.
• Erika, A and Metzger, Michael, A Companion to the Works of Rainer Maria Rilke, Rochester, 2001.
• Gass, William H. Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation, Alfred A. Knopf, 2000.
• Goldsmith, Ulrich, ed., Rainer Maria Rilke, a verse concordance to his complete lyrical poetry. Leeds: W. S. Maney, 1980.
• Hutchinson, Ben. Rilke's Poetics of Becoming, Oxford: Legenda, 2006.
• Leeder, Karen, and Robert Vilain (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Rilke. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-521-70508-0
• Mood, John, A New Reading of Rilke's “Elegies”: Affirming the Unity of “life-and-death” Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2009. ISBN 978-0-7734-3864-4.
• Numerous contributors, A Reconsideration of Rainer Maria Rilke, Agenda poetry magazine, vol. 42 nos. 3–4, 2007. ISBN 978-0-902400-83-2.
• Pechota Vuilleumier, Cornelia, Heim und Unheimlichkeit bei Rainer Maria Rilke und Lou Andreas-Salomé. Literarische Wechselwirkungen. Olms, Hildesheim, 2010. ISBN 978-3-487-14252-4
• Ryan, Judith. Rilke, Modernism, and Poetic Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
• Schwarz, Egon, Poetry and Politics in the Works of Rainer Maria Rilke. Frederick Ungar, 1981. ISBN 978-0-8044-2811-8.

External links

• Media related to Rainer Maria Rilke at Wikimedia Commons
• Rainer Rilke and his Poem Black Cat
• Works by Rainer Maria Rilke at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Rainer Maria Rilke at Internet Archive
• Works by Rainer Maria Rilke at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Publications by and about Rainer Maria Rilke in the catalogue Helveticat of the Swiss National Library
• "Literary estate of Rainer Maria Rilke". HelveticArchives. Swiss National Library.
• Rainer Maria Rilke, Profile at Poets.org
• International Rilke Society (in German)
• Panther - English Translation
• Rilke, Rainer Maria (1920). Erste Gedichte. Leipzig: Insel.
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Image
Paul de Lagarde
Paul Anton de Lagarde.png
Paul Anton de Lagarde
Born 2 November 1827
Berlin, Germany
Died 22 December 1891 (aged 64)
Göttingen, Germany
Other names Paul Bötticher
Occupation Orientalist

Paul Anton de Lagarde (2 November 1827 – 22 December 1891) was a German biblical scholar and orientalist, sometimes regarded as one of the greatest orientalists of the 19th century.[1][better source needed] As a conservative political theorist, Lagarde's strong support of anti-Semitism, vocal opposition to Christianity, racial darwinism and anti-Slavism are viewed as having been among the most influential in supporting the ideology of fascism and Nazism.[2][3][4]

His great learning and gifts were curiously mixed with dogmatism and distrust in the activities of others.[5] In politics, he belonged to the Prussian Conservative party. He died in Göttingen on 22 December 1891.

Early life and education

De Lagarde was born in Berlin as Paul Bötticher; in early adulthood he legally adopted the family name of his maternal line out of respect for his great-aunt who raised him. At Humboldt University of Berlin (1844–1846) and University of Halle-Wittenberg (1846–1847) he studied theology, philosophy and Oriental languages.

In 1852 his studies took him to London and Paris.

Career

In 1854 he became a teacher at a Berlin public school, but this did not interrupt his biblical studies. In 1866 he received three years leave of absence to collect fresh materials, and in 1869 succeeded German orientalist and theologian Heinrich Ewald as professor of oriental languages at the University of Göttingen. Like Ewald, Lagarde was an active worker in a variety of subjects and languages; but his chief aim, the elucidation of the Bible, was almost always kept in view. Lagarde was easily the most renowned Septuagint scholar of the nineteenth century, and he devoted himself ardently to Oriental studies.

Political interests

Parallel to his academic work, he attempted to establish a German national religion whose most striking manifestations were an aggressive anti-Semitism and expansionism.[6] He held few concrete religious beliefs at the ready for his postulated national religion as his first political treatise Über das Verhältnis des deutschen Staates zu Theologie, Kirche und Religion. Ein Versuch Nicht-Theologen zu orientieren (On the Relationship between the German State to Theology, Church and Religion: A Non-Theological Essay) demonstrates. In regard to the state, he called for its initial and most important task to be to create a climate in which a national religion could flourish. Meanwhile, he obliged those who had faith in God to a radical morality wherein they distinguish solely between "duty or sin" in their every action. In addition, first a formal language must be developed for the religiosity of these newborn men.[7] In the second part of his 1875 book, Über die gegenwärtige Lage des deutschen Reichs. Ein Bericht (On the Current Situation of the German Reich: A Report), he connected thereto and specified as follows:[8]

Germany is the totality of all German-feeling, German-thinking, German-willing Germans: In this sense, every one of us is a traitor if he does not consider himself personally acountable in every moment of his life for the existence, fortune and future of the fatherland, and each is a hero and liberator if he does.


The historian Ulrich Sieg classifies his position as follows: "He despised the Christianity that he considered bland and lukewarm and hoped for a folkish religion of the future."[9] Lagarde was conversant with Adolf Stoecker, the founder of the anti-Semitic Berlin Movement. He also showed interest in folkish-anti-Semitic societies such as the Deutscher Volksverein of Bernhard Förster and Max Liebermann von Sonnenberg, as well as the Deutschsoziale Partei of Theodor Fritsch. To the latter, he established contact in 1886 by sending his treatise Die nächsten Pflichten deutscher Politik (The Coming Tasks of German Politics), at the core of which he considered to be a German policy of settlement in Eastern Europe.[10] In German Writings, in which he compiled his previously published political essays, there can be found numerous anti-Semitic passages in which we learn, among other things, that he considered Jews to be the greatest barrier to German unification, whereas he simultaneously avowed the concept of a German colonization of southeastern Europe and proposed that the Jewish population settled there at the time be resettled to Palestine or Madagascar.[11] The only alternatives for Lagarde were the total assimilation or emigration of the Jews.[12]

In his 1887 essay "Jews and Indo-Germanics", he wrote: “One would have to have a heart of steel to not feel sympathy for the poor Germans and, by the same token, to not hate the Jews, to not hate and despise those who – out of humanity! – advocate for the Jews or are too cowardly to crush these vermin. Trichinella and bacilli would not be negotiated with, trichinella and bacilli would also not be nurtured, they would be destroyed as quickly and as thoroughly as possible."[13]

In addition to his influence on anti-Semitism, Lagarde is also of importance to the formation of German imperialist thought. In this regard, he concentrated on German border colonization within Europe rather than the acquisition of overseas colonies. This bears a close resemblance to the later concept of German Lebensraum most notably espoused by Friedrich Ratzel. In 1875, Lagarde maintained that the primary objective of German politics was the "gradual Germanization of Poland." Since he was concerned about how many Germans emigrated in their search for land, he advocated a border colonizing land acquisition for the peasantry, which he considered the "true foundation of the state." This land acquisition aimed to create a Mitteleuropa under German leadership "that reaches from the Ems to the mouth of the Danube, from the Neman to Trieste, from Metz to about the Bug."[14]

In his 1918 book, The New Europe, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk regards Lagarde as one of the leading philosophical and theological spokesmen of Pan-Germanism, and furthermore describes Heinrich von Treitschke as its historian, Wilhelm II as its politician and Friedrich Ratzel as its geopolitical geographer. In all of them he saw the representatives of the imperialistic "German Drang nach Osten" that threatened the Slavic countries.[15]

Legacy

Lagarde's anti-Semitism laid the foundations for aspects of National Socialist ideology, in particular that of Alfred Rosenberg. He argued that Germany should create a "national" form of Christianity purged of Semitic elements and insisted that Jews were "pests and parasites" who should be destroyed "as speedily and thoroughly as possible".[16][17] His library now belongs to the New York University.[5]

Works

He edited the Didascalia apostolorum syriace (1854) and other Syriac texts collected in the British Museum and in Paris. He edited the Aramaic translation (known as the Targum) of the Prophets according to the Codex Reuchlinianus preserved at Karlsruhe, Prophetae chaldaice (1872), the Hagiographa chaldaice (1874), an Arabic translation of the Gospels, Die vier Evangelien, arabisch aus der Wiener Handschrift herausgegeben (1864), a Syriac translation of the Old Testament Apocrypha, Libri V. T. apocryphi syriace (1865), a Coptic translation of the Pentateuch, Der Pentateuch koptisch (1867), and a part of the Lucianic text of the Septuagint, which he was able to reconstruct from manuscripts for nearly half the Old Testament.

Of the Armenians he published Zur Urgeschichte der Armenier (1854) and Armenische Studien (1877). He was also a student of Persian, publishing Isaias persice (1883) and Persische Studien (1884). In 1880, de Lagarde attempted to reconstruct a Syriac version of Epiphanius' treatise, On Weights and Measures, which he entitled, Veteris Testamenti ab Origene recensiti fragmenta apud Syros servata quinque. Praemittitur Epiphanii de mensuris et ponderibus liber nunc primum integer et ipse syriacus (Gootingae 1880). He followed up his Coptic studies with Aegyptiaca (1883), and published many minor contributions to the study of oriental languages in Gesammelte Abhandlungen (1866), Symmicta (1. 1877, ii. 1880), Semitica (i. 1878, ii. 1879), Orientalia (1879–1880) and Mittheilungen (1884). Mention should also be made of the valuable Onomastica sacra (1870; 2nd ed., 1887).

He edited:


• Pedro de Alcalá (1883). Petri Hispani de lingua arabica libri duo. A. Hoyer. p. 440. ISBN 3-535-00798-4. Retrieved 2011-07-06.
• Pedro de Alcalá (1883). Petri Hispani (reprint ed.). O. Zeller. p. 436. Retrieved 2011-07-06.
• Pedro de Alcalá (1883). Petri Hispani (reprint ed.). O. Zeller. p. 436. Retrieved 2011-07-06.
• Pedro de Alcalá (1883). De lingua arabica libri duo: Pauli de Legarde studio et sumptibus repetiti. prostant in aedibus D.A. Hoyer. Retrieved 2011-07-06.

In Deutsche Schriften (1878–81; 4th ed., Göttingen, 1903), he attempted to involve himself in politics.[1] It deals with the position of the German state relative to theology, the church and religion.[5] It became a nationalist text.[citation needed]

Notes

1. Gilman, D. C.; Peck, H. T.; Colby, F. M., eds. (1905). "Lagarde, Paul Anton de". New International Encyclopedia (1st ed.). New York: Dodd, Mead.
2. Fascism: Intellectual origins, Encyclopaedia Britannica
3. Paul de Lagarde on Liberalism, Education, and the Jews: German Writings (1886), German History in Documents and Images
4. Johnson, Paul (1983), “Modern Times”, Harper and Row: New York
5. Rines, George Edwin, ed. (1920). "Lagarde, Paul Anton". Encyclopedia Americana.
6. http://www.perlentaucher.de/buch/ulrich ... ophet.html
7. Deutsche Schriften; Göttingen, 19205, p. 81. Cf. Ulrich Sieg (2007), pp. 162–166.
8. Deutsche Schriften; Göttingen, 19205, p. 186.
9. Interview with Ulrich Sieg , accessed 4 Apr 2015.
10. Ulrich Sieg (2007), p. 253.
11. Magnus Brechtken, „Madagaskar für die Juden“. Antisemitische Idee und politische Praxis 1885 - 1945, Oldenbourg Wissenschaft, München 1998, S. 16f.
12. Vgl. Ulrich Sieg (2007), p. 62f.
13. Paul de Lagarde: "Juden und Indogermanen" 1887, nach A. Bein, Der moderne Antisemitismus, in Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, Jg. 6, 1958.
14. Cited by Ulrich Sieg (2007), p. 173f.
15. Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk: Das neue Europa. Der slawische Standpunkt; Berlin 1991, pp. 13–44.
16. Snyder, L. Encyclopedia of the Third Reich, Wordsworth, 1998, p.203
17. Stern, Fritz The Politics of Cultural Despair: a study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology, 1961 (see Chapter I, "Paul de Lagarde and a Germanic Religion").

References

• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Lagarde, Paul Anton de". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. This work in turn cites:
• Herzog-Hauck, Realencyklopädie
• Anna de Lagarde, Paul de Lagarde (1894)
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Re: Alfred Schuler, by Wikipedia

Postby admin » Tue Mar 06, 2018 5:37 am

Ludwig Klages
by Wikipedia
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Ludwig Klages
Born 10 December 1872
Hanover, Germany
Died 29 July 1956
Kilchberg, Zurich
Era 20th-century philosophy
Region Western Philosophy
School Lebensphilosophie (philosophy of life)[1]
Main interests: Psychology
Notable ideas: Theory of graphology

Ludwig Klages (10 December 1872 – 29 July 1956) was a German philosopher, psychologist and a theoretician in the field of handwriting analysis. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.[2]

Life

Klages was born in Hanover, Germany. In Munich he studied physics, philosophy and chemistry – however, after completing his doctorate in chemistry he resolved never to work as a chemist. He met the sculptor Hans Busse and with him and Georg Meyer he founded the Deutsche Graphologische Gesellschaft (German Graphology Association) in 1894.

In Munich Klages also encountered the writer Karl Wolfskehl and the mystic Alfred Schuler. He was a lover of Fanny zu Reventlow, the "Bohemian Countess" of Schwabing, and with Wolfskehl, Schuler and the writer Ludwig Derleth they formed a group known as the Munich Cosmic Circle, with which the poet Stefan George is sometimes associated. He wrote a book praising George's poetry in 1902. As a member of this group his philosophy contrasted the "degenerate" modern world with an ancient, and mystical, Germanic past, with a heroic role for the artist in forging a new future.[3][4] George distanced himself from Klages' mystical philosophy (which was shared by Schuler), but continued for a time to publish Klages' poems in his journal Blätter für die Kunst.[5] Wolfskehl acquainted Klages with the work of Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815–1887), a Swiss anthropologist and sociologist, and his research into matriarchal clans.[6]

In 1914 at the outbreak of war Klages moved to Switzerland and supported himself with his writing and income from lectures. He returned to Germany in the 1920s and in 1932 was awarded the Goethe medal for Art and Science. However by 1936 he was under attack from Nazi authorities for lack of support and on his 70th birthday in 1942 was denounced by many newspapers in Germany. After the war he was honoured by the new government, particularly on his 80th birthday in 1952.

Work

He created a complete theory of graphology and will be long associated with the concepts of form level, rhythm and bi-polar interpretation. Together with Friedrich Nietzsche and Henri Bergson he anticipated existential phenomenology. He also coined the term logocentrism in the 1920s.[7]

He was the author of 14 books and 60 articles (1910–1948). He was co-editor of the journals Berichte (1897–1898) and its successor Graphologische Monatshefte until 1908. His most important works are:

• Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele (1929)
• Die Grundlagen der Charakterkunde

As a philosopher, Klages took the Nietzschean premises of Lebensphilosophie "to their most extreme conclusions." He drew a distinction between life-affirming Seele (spirit) and life-destroying Geist (mind). Geist represented the forces of "modern, industrial, and intellectual rationalization", while Seele represented the possibility of overcoming "alienated intellectuality in favor of a new-found earthly rootedness."[8]

When Klages died, the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas urged that Klages' "realizations concerning anthropology and philosophy of language" should not be left "hidden behind the veil" of Klages' "anti-intellectualist metaphysics and apocalyptic philosophy of history". Habermas characterized these realizations as "not outdated" but ahead of the time.[9]

Klages is an important anti-semitic thinker.[10] He reportedly said, "To the Jew, everything human is a sham. One might even say that the Jewish face is nothing but a mask. The Jew is not a liar: he is the lie itself. From this vantage point, we can say that the Jew is not a man. … He lives the pseudo-life of a ghoul whose fortunes are linked to Yahweh-Moloch. He employs deception as the weapon with which he will exterminate mankind. The Jew is the very incarnation of the unearthly power of destruction."[11]

References

1. Lebovic, Nitzan (2013). The Philosophy of Life and Death: Ludwig Klages and the Rise of a Nazi Biopolitics. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. AIAA. p. 9. ISBN 1137342056.
2. "Nomination Database". http://www.nobelprize.org. Retrieved 2017-04-19.
3. Noll, Richard. The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement. Touchstone. pp. 166–172. ISBN 0684834235.
4. Marchand, Suzanne L.; Lindenfeld, David F. (2004). Germany at the fin de siècle: culture, politics, and ideas. Louisiana State University Press. ISBN 0807129798.
5. Furness, Raymond (1978). The twentieth century, 1890–1945. Barnes & Noble. p. 98. ISBN 006492310X.
6. Eller, Cynthia (2000). The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory: Why An Invented Past Will Not Give Women a Future. Beacon Press. ISBN 978-0-8070-6792-5.
7. Josephson-Storm, Jason (2017). The Myth of Disenchantment : Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. pp. 214, 221–222. ISBN 9780226403533. OCLC 958780609.
8. Aschheim, Steven E. (1992). The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890–1990. Uni. of California Press. pp. 80–81. ISBN 0520085558.
9. "Klages – Gewalten des Untergangs". Der Spiegel (in German) (37/1966). 5 September 1966. An article looking back ten years after his death.
10. Levy, Richard S. (2005). Antisemitism: A Historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution, Volume 1. ABC-CLIO. p. 257. ISBN 1851094393.
11. Ludwig Klages, Rhythmen und Runen (Rhythms and Runes) (1944), as cited in "Ludwig Klages on Judaism, Christianity and Paganism (Excerpts and Aphorisms)".

Further reading

• Gunnar Alksnis, Ludwig Klages and His Attack on Rationalism. Kansas State University, 1970. Also published under the title Chthonic Gnosis. Ludwig Klages and his Quest for the Pandaemonic All, Theion Publishing, 2015.
• Reinhard Falter, Ludwig Klages. Lebensphilosophie als Zivilisationskritik, Munich: Telesma, 2003, ISBN 978-3-8330-0678-4.
• Raymond Furness, Ludwig Klages, in: Zarathustra's Children: A Study of a Lost Generation of German Writers, Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2000, ISBN 1-57113-057-8, pp. 99–124.
• Michael Grossheim, Ludwig Klages und die Phaenomenologie, Weinheim: Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH, 1993.
• Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm, The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity and the Birth of the Human Sciences, University of Chicago Press, 2017.
• Nitzan Lebovic, The Terror and Beauty of Lebensphilosophie: Ludwig Klages, Walter Benjamin, and Alfred Bauemler, South Central Review 23:1 (Spring 2006), pp. 23–39.
• James Lewin, Geist und Seele: Ludwig Klages’ Philosophie, Berlin: Reuther & Reichard, 1931.
• Tobias Schneider, Ideological Trench Warfare. Ludwig Klages and National Socialism from 1933–1938. Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 2/2001.
• Tommaso Tuppini, Ludwig Klages. L'immagine e la questione della distanza, Milano: Franco Angeli, 2003.
• Chiara Gianni Ardic, La Fuga degli Dèi. Mito, matriarcato e immagine in Ludwig Klages, Milano: Jouvence, 2016.

External links

• The Science of Character
• The Biocentric Metaphysics of Ludwig Klages
• Cosmogonic Reflections by Ludwig Klages at the Internet Archive
• File of "On the Biocentric Metaphysics of Ludwig Klages" at the Internet Archive
• "Ludwig Klages on Judaism, Christianity and Paganism"
• "The Literary Criticism of Ludwig Klages and the Klages School" by Lydia Baer
• "Chthonic Gnosis. Ludwig Klages and his Quest for the Pandaemonic All" by Dr. Gunnar Alksnis
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Re: Alfred Schuler, by Wikipedia

Postby admin » Tue Mar 06, 2018 5:52 am

Karl Wolfskehl
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Accessed: 3/5/18

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Image

Image

Karl Wolfskehl (17 September 1869 – 30 June 1948) was a German Jewish author who wrote poetry, prose and drama in German. He also translated from French, English, Italian, Hebrew, Latin and Middle High German into German.

He was born in Darmstadt, Germany, the son of the banker and lawyer Otto Wolfskehl. He studied in Leipzig and Berlin. In 1898 he married Hanna de Haan, daughter of the Dutch Director of the Darmstadt Chamber Orchestra. They had two daughters: Judith (born 1899) and Renate (born 1901).

He was active in the Munich Cosmic Circle, a group of intellectuals in Munich led by Alfred Schuler. This group broke up in 1904 due to a rift between Wolfskehl, supported by Stefan George, and Ludwig Klages, supported by Schuler.

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He emigrated to Switzerland in (1933), then to Italy (1934) and ultimately, with his partner Margot Ruben (1908–1980), to New Zealand (1938). He died there in 1948.

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Karl Wolfskehl, UNDER NEW STARS: Poems of the New Zealand Exile. German and English.
Translations by Andrew Paul Wood, Margot Ruben, Dean and Renate Koch, edited by Friedrich Voit

Karl Wolfskehl (1869-1948) was probably the most prominent literary figure among the refugees from Nazi Germany who came to New Zealand in the 1930s. Aged 69 when he arrived in this country, Wolfskehl wrote his finest poetry here in the last decade of his life. Until now little work by this important poet has been available in English translation. Now Andrew Paul Wood of Christchurch has added many new translations to existing versions by Margot Ruben and Dean and Renate Koch to provide a substantial bi-lingual selection of the work of Wolfskehl’s New Zealand exile, including his masterpiece Job or The Four Mirrors. UNDER NEW STARS is edited by Dr Friedrich Voit (University of Auckland), an internationally acknowledged authority on Wolfskehl’s life and work.

In addition to the poems, presented on facing pages in both German and English, the book includes a substantial introduction by Friedrich Voit, a Note on Translation by Andrew Paul Wood, several tipped-in photographs (including two of Wolfskehl and one of his grave at Waikumete Cemetery), a facsimile of a handwritten poem, and a drawing by Leo Bensemann, alluded to in the poem To the Creator of “Fantastica”.

UNDER NEW STARS is typeset in 12pt Adobe Garamond Pro. Letterpress printed by Tara McLeod on a Littlejohn Cylinder proofing press from photopolymer plates made by Inline Graphics Ltd. The paper is 104gsm Sundance Felt natural white. Binding is by Design Bind Ltd. and includes silver blocking of Wolfskehl’s initials on the cover. Hard covers, 108 pages, 240 x 160mm, an edition of 90 copies. ISBN 978-0-864618-2-8.

Price $290. A pre-publication price of $240 is offered up to the end of October.

UNDER NEW STARS was launched at the Gus Fisher Gallery, 74 Shortland Street, Auckland, on Thursday 30 August, 2012 at 5.30pm. The speaker was Dr. Leonard Bell.

-- Karl Wolfskehl, by hollowaypress.auckland.ac.nz


Sources

• Elke-Vera Kotowski, Gert Mattenklott: "O dürft ich Stimme sein, das Volk zu rütteln!" Leben und Werk von Karl Wolfskehl Olms, Hildesheim 2007, ISBN 978-3-487-13303-4 (German)
• Briefwechsel aus Neuseeland 1938-1948 by Karl Wolfskehl, Cornelia Blasberg
• Karl Wolfskehl: Three Worlds / Drei Welten. Selected Poems. German and English. Translated and edited by Andrew Paul Wood and Friedrich Voit. Cold Hub Press, Lyttelton / Christchurch 2016, ISBN 978-0-47335867-9
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Re: Alfred Schuler, by Wikipedia

Postby admin » Tue Mar 06, 2018 6:23 am

Ludwig Derleth
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 3/5/18

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Ludwig Derleth (3 November 1870 – 13 January 1948) was a German writer.

He was born in Gerolzhofen in Bavaria. After studying philosophy and literature Derleth worked as a college level teacher of ancient languages. While living in Munich he became part of the Stefan George entourage and also the Munich Cosmic Circle of Alfred Schuler and Ludwig Klages, which broke up in 1904.

In later years he made his living as a free-lance writer in Rome, Basel, Perchtolfsdorf outside Vienna and, from 1935, in Ticino, where he died in 1948.

Work

He published his first poems in George's Blättern für die Kunst and in the Jugend magazine Pan. In 1904 he published his "Proclamations" for a reformed and reorganized Catholicism. Derleth spent 40 years completing his major work Der fränkische Koran. He may have served as a model for Thomas Mann's 1904 novel At the Prophet's.

Other works: Seraphinische Hochzeit (1939) and Der Tod des Thanatos (1945).

*********************************

Ludwig Derleth
by http://www.literatisch.de/ludwig-derleth.html
Accessed: 3/5/18

Ludwig Derleth (born November 3, 1870 in Gerolzhofen, † January 13, 1948 in San Pietro de Stabio, Switzerland) was a German writer.

Image

After completing his studies in philosophy and literature, Derleth initially worked as a high school teacher for ancient languages. During his years in Munich he came into contact with the George circle and also belonged to the Cosmic circle around Alfred Schuler and Ludwig Klages. Later he lived as a freelance writer in Rome, Basel, Perchtoldsdorf near Vienna and from 1935 in Ticino, where he died in 1948. The Ludwig-Derleth-Realschule in his hometown Gerolzhofen is named after him.

As a lyricist, he first published in the Journal of the Arts and in the magazine Pan. His passionate effort was aimed at a new hierarchical order of purified Catholic Christianity, which he proclaimed in his 1904 proclamations with revolutionary pathos. His major work The Frankish Koran (1932) is a large-scale world song from the "Pilgrimage of the human soul from God to God", a powerful book of life and faith, in which he worked for almost 40 years.

Further publications: Seraphine Wedding (1939) and The Death of Thanatos (1945).

He may have served as a model for Thomas Mann's 1904 novel At the Prophet's.

Source: Wikipedia
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Re: Alfred Schuler, by Wikipedia

Postby admin » Tue Mar 06, 2018 6:38 am

Fanny zu Reventlow
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 3/5/18

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Franziska Countess zu Reventlow, undated photo

Countess Fanny "Franziska" zu Reventlow (Fanny Liane Wilhelmine Sophie Auguste Adrienne) 18 May 1871 – 26 July 1918)[1] was a German writer, artist and translator, who became famous as the "Bohemian Countess" of Schwabing (an entertainment district in Munich) in the years leading up to World War I.[2]

Life

Fanny (or Franziska, as she was also called later) Reventlow was born in the family seat at Husum in the north of Germany, the fifth of six children of the Prussian aristocrat Ludwig, Count zu Reventlow (1825–1894) and his wife Emilie (1834–1905). The family were on friendly terms with the North German writer Theodor Storm. Her eldest brother Theodor died as a fifteen-year-old, her brother Ernst was an ultra-nationalist writer and eventually became a Nazi.

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The family Schloss at Husum

While young she was in constant conflict with her mother. She was thrown out of boarding school for misbehavior and lack of respect for the authorities. After being sent to stay with a family friend in 1893, she fled to Hamburg. Here she met Walter Lübke, who financed her art studies in Munich, and whom she married in 1894.[2]

The marriage broke up when she set off again in 1895 to Munich, to continue her studies. They were divorced in 1897. In September of that year her son Rolf was born; she never divulged the name of the father (although it is very likely to have been the Polish-born painter & engraver Adolf Eduard Herstein).]

In Munich she supported herself by translation work for the Albert Langen Publishing House and by writing short articles for magazines and newspapers such as Simplicissimus and the Frankfurter Zeitung. After taking some acting lessons in 1898 she had a short engagement at the Theater am Gärtnerplatz. Otherwise she took casual jobs as a secretary, assistant cook, insurance agent and so on to keep going. As usual in Bohemian circles she also received financial help from male friends and casual acquaintances.

She was a friend of Ludwig Klages and thus became part of the Munich Cosmic Circle based around the mystic Alfred Schuler, which also included Karl Wolfskehl. It broke up in acrimonious circumstances in 1904. She wrote about her experiences with the Circle in her Roman à clef Herrn Dames Aufzeichnungen (1913). She also got to know Theodor Lessing, Erich Mühsam, Oskar Panizza, Rainer Maria Rilke, Marianne von Werefkin, Alexej von Jawlensky, Frank Wedekind and many others of the "Munich Moderns". With her son she travelled to Samos (1900), Italy (1904, 1907) and Corfu (1906/1907).[3]

She left Munich for Ascona in Switzerland in 1910 (Monte Verità), where she wrote her "Schwabing" novels. In 1911 married Baron Alexander von Rechenberg-Linten, a marriage of convenience, which enabled him to inherit 20,000 Marks. However, he lost this in a bank collapse in 1914.

In 1916 she moved to Muralto on Lago Maggiore. She died in 1918 in a clinic in Locarno following a bicycle accident and was buried in the cemetery of the Santa Maria in Selva church in Locarno. Emil Ludwig spoke at her funeral.

Feminism

Reventlow is best known as one of the most unorthodox voices of the early women's movement in Europe. While many of her peers were pressing for improved social, political, and economic rights for women, Reventlow argued that ardent feminists, whom she labelled "viragoes," were actually harming women by attempting to erase or deny the natural differences between men and women. Reventlow maintained that sexual freedom, and the abolition of the institution of marriage, were the best means by which women could hope to achieve a more equal social standing with men.[2]

Works

• (with Otto Eugen Thossan) Klosterjungen. Humoresken (two stories), Wigand, Leipzig 1897
• Das Männerphantom der Frau (Essay), in: Zürcher Diskußionen 1898
• Was Frauen ziemt (Essay); under the title Viragines oder Hetären? in: Zürcher Diskußionen 1899
• Erziehung und Sittlichkeit (Essay), in: Otto Falckenberg, Das Buch von der Lex Heinze. Leipzig 1900
• Ellen Olestjerne, J. Marchlewski, Munich 1903
• Von Paul zu Pedro, Langen, Munich 1912
• Herrn Dames Aufzeichnungen oder Begenheiten aus einem merkwürdigen Stadtteil", Langen, Munich 1913
• Der Geldkomplex, Langen, Munich 1916
• Das Logierhaus zur Schwankenden Weltkugel und andere Novellen, Langen, Munich 1917
• Tagebücher (ed. Irene Weiser, Jürgen Gutsch), Stutz, Passau 2006

References

1. Church baptismal record, Husum
2. Katharina von Hammerstein (2006). "Franziska Gräfin zu Reventlow". Fembio.org. Retrieved 2009-02-02.
3. Stein, pp. 95–111

Sources

• Stein, Gerd (1982). Bohemien-Tramp-Sponti (in German). Fischer. ISBN 3-596-25035-8.
• Wendt, Gunna (2008). Franziska zu Reventlow. Die anmutige Rebellin. Biographie (in German). Aufbau-Verlag. ISBN 978-3-351-02660-8.
• Egbringhoff, Ulla (2000). Franziska zu Reventlow (in German). Reinbek (rm 614). ISBN 3-499-50614-9.

External links

• Biography
• Data on Fanny zu Reventlow und E-Texts of her diaries and books (in German)
• Works by Fanny zu Reventlow at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
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