The New Kingdom (George)

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Stefan George
portrait by Reinhold Lepsius

The new empire is the title of the last collection of poems by Stefan George , published in 1928 . The cycle comprises the poems written since 1908 and not included in the Stern des Bundes , many of which had already been published in the Blätter für die Kunst .

Compared to earlier works, his last volume is less coherent in terms of form and content and its architecture is looser. In addition to the role of time judge , George also takes on the role of a prophetic herald of new values. Compared to the star of the covenant , however, his proclamations have lost their unconditionality and are no longer directed only to his disciples. Plato , and above all Friedrich Hölderlin , became increasingly important for George and the circle.

The appreciation of irrational forces, the ambiguous reference to the historical situation and the terminology of the volume led to George being declared an ideological forerunner of the "movement" during the National Socialist era .

Content and meaning

We can again distinguish three groups: 14 chants, 39 sayings and 12 songs. The sayings are divided into three times 13 often multi-part poems, first to the living , then to the dead .

George does not communicate himself directly, but chooses disguised disguises such as role poems , epic-dramatic dialogues and balladic forms. Understanding many poems is made more difficult by this form of lyrical veiling than by the seer pose and the reference to private events and personal relationships within the George circle . The sayings refer to the followers and disciples who survived the First World War or who fell in it, which corresponded to the isolation of the circle from the outside world and its elitist self-image. In addition to the time-critical accounts, the poet proclaims new values ​​and represents an aristocratic heroic ethos. In contrast to many of his adepts, however, he had rejected the war and Germany's war aims and hoped for an early end.

In the first group, beginning with Goethe's last night in Italy , George speaks as a seer and a warner. In a poem published in 1921, for example, he addressed a young leader in World War I. The artistically strict form corresponds to a soul drama, which is presented in a relationship between a young officer and the teacher who offers him help. The master wants to prevent the young man from ending up in cynical bitterness of disappointment with the course of the world. If he accepts his fate, the master sees a halo like a crown in front of his fluttering hair in the evening. The five stanzas consist of five pentameters each , followed by an Adoneus as in the Sapphic Ode .

This first group is concluded by poems in dialogue form ( The Hanged Man , The Man and the Drud up to The Burning of the Temple ), similar to those found in the Seventh Ring . The last group, Das Lied, brings together simple stanzas and ballad-like poems, some of which are extremely simple and without verbosity.

Most of the sayings are addressed to the living, few to the dead. Many of the verses can be identified by monograms and are addressed to different friends. Above all, the first saying to the dead has become as famous as it is notorious with its mighty, gloomy end-time verses:


When this race was once cleansed of shame, thrown
from the neck, the bondage of the indulgent
Only feels the hunger for honor
in the pasture : Then the bloodstream twitches on the whale place full of endless
graves .. Then the roaring armies hunt on the clouds,
then roar through the fields
The most terrible horror the third of the storms: the return of the
dead!

background

Friedrich Hölderlin, pastel by Franz Karl Hiemer , 1792

At the beginning of November 1928, at the last major reading on the occasion of the appearance of the New Reich , in which the brothers Berthold and Claus von Stauffenberg also participated, Ernst Morwitz was allowed to begin as the oldest confidante and the three opening poems of Goethe's last night in Italy , Hyperion I - III and Speak to the children of the sea . The participants knew that the first “child of the sea” meant Woldemar von Uxkull and the “next dearest” was Morwitz himself, whose special position was underlined by his lecture. After Erich Boehringer had read the poems The Poet in Times of Trouble and A Young Leader in World War I , George himself read Falkenstein Castle and Secret Germany .

Two of these poems are particularly instructive for understanding the New Kingdom . The poet in times of turmoil , which was written between 1918 and 1921 and is dedicated to the memory of Count Bernhard Uxkull and can be regarded as the quintessence of the New Kingdom , as well as Secret Germany, which was probably written in 1922 and was influential in several ways .

In the first, the poet takes up the myth of the lone perpetrator , which he described in the poem of the same name in the Carpet of Life collection and which was also emphasized by Theodor W. Adorno : In the soothing dusk before the great deed, the perpetrator surrenders to him "Soothing peace", because the next day it will happen and the "persecutors" will be "behind" him as a shadow, the "crowd that stoned" will look for him. Only the lonely acting person recognizes - like Kassandra - "when the weather is brewing from evil": "When all blindness struck - he was the only seer". In this way the perpetrator recalls the prophet Jeremiah .

When the disaster takes its course and no one listens to him, he knows how to proclaim hope and preserve traditions as the basis for the return of a hero: “He leads through stormy and gruesome signals / The early red of his faithful team to work / The watch day and night plant the New Kingdom. "

The term " Geheime Deutschland " was first used by Karl Wolfskehl in 1910 in the yearbook for intellectual movement . It is to be understood as a secret and visionary construct that lies hidden beneath the surface of real Germany and is intended to represent a secret force that can only be grasped pictorially and only recognized and made visible by special people. This mystical transfiguration of Germany and the German spirit is based on Schiller's fragment German Greatness : "Every people has its day in history, but the day of the German is the harvest of all time." It can also be understood as a mythical political figure of German great intellectuals of all times as the idea of ​​a German cultural nation that forms an antipole to the current state. The New Kingdom resides in him as a kind of Platonic idea .

As Hans-Georg Gadamer pointed out, George saw himself as a poet and seer, but not as a kind of savior . In the second cant of Hyperion , George, Holderlin and Hyperion, according to his interpretation, have melted into a poetic reflection. George's intellectual development was - like that of Hölderlin - shaped by higher experience. Was it for Holderlin Susette Gontard , whom he immortalized as Diotima, so for George Maximilian Kronberger , whom he transfigured to the god Maximin after his untimely death . It is less the enchantment of the man's presence than the loss and grief over his untimely death that matter to George and his art.

In Holderlin, George saw Germany's great seer, praised him as the herald of the new God and emphasized that his works should not be attributed to the romantic movement. Before Friedrich Nietzsche he recognized the Dionysian underground of Greek culture and saw the secret religious Orphic tradition of the Homeric religion.

expenditure

  • Stefan George: Das neue Reich (= complete edition of the works. Final version , Volume IX). Georg Bondi, Berlin 1928 (first edition).
  • Stefan George: The new empire (= complete works in 18 volumes , volume IX). Edited by Ute Oelmann. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2001 (authoritative study edition with useful commentary).
  • Stefan George: Works. Edition in 2 volumes. Volume 1. 4th edition. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1984, ISBN 3-608-95161-X .

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Michael Titzmann: Stefan George. The New Kingdom. In: Kindlers New Literature Lexicon. Volume 6: Ga - Gr. Kindler, Munich 1989, ISBN 3-463-43006-1 , p. 230.
  2. ↑ Joachim Kaiser in: Marcel Reich-Ranicki (Hrsg.): 1000 German poems and their interpretations. Volume 5: From Arno Holz to Rainer Maria Rilke. Insel-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main et al. 1994, ISBN 3-458-16673-4 , p. 100.
  3. ↑ Stefan George: The new realm. Sayings to the dead. In: Works. Edition in 2 volumes. Volume 1. 1984, p. 455.
  4. ^ Thomas Karlauf : Stefan George. The discovery of the charism. Karl-Bessing-Verlag, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-89667-151-6 , p. 586ff., Here p. 587.
  5. ↑ Johannsen: Realm of the Spirit. 2008, p. 204.
  6. ↑ Stefan George: The carpet of life. The culprit. In: Works. Edition in 2 volumes. Volume 1. 1984, p. 198.
  7. ↑ Stefan George: The new realm. The poet in times of turmoil. In: Works. Edition in 2 volumes. Volume 1. 1984, p. 416.
  8. ↑ Stefan George: The new realm. The poet in times of turmoil. In: Works. Edition in 2 volumes, Volume 1. 1984, p. 418.
  9. ↑ Johannsen: Realm of the Spirit. 2008, p. 201.
  10. ^ Gadamer: Hölderlin and George. In: Stefan George Colloquium. 1971, p. 123.
  11. ^ Gadamer: Hölderlin and George. In: Stefan George Colloquium. 1971, p. 120.