Re: Alfred Schuler, by Wikipedia
Posted: 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
NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT
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."
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:
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".
by Justin Cartwright
The Guardian.com
Sat 14 Jan 2006 06.37 EST First published on Sat 14 Jan 2006 06.37 EST
NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT
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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".