[CTRL] [13] Secret Germany - Stauffenberg and the Mystical Crusade Against Hitler

[Kris Millegan]

 -Caveat Lector-

an excerpt from:
Secret Germany - Stauffenberg and the Mystical Crusade Against Hitler
Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh,(C) 1994
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd. 27 Wrights Lane London W8 3TZ, England
--[13]--

12

Legislators of the World


Stefan George was born at a village near Bingen, on the Rhine between Koblenz
and Wiesbaden, in 1868. He was thus three years younger than William Butler
Yeats, the English-language poet he most resembles, and older than his two
great Austrian contemporaries, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Rainer Maria Rilke,
by six and seven years respectively. There was one other child in his family,
an elder sister. His parents owned a few vineyards, made their living in the
wine trade and were devout Roman Catholics, which George himself would
quickly cease to be.

Even as a schoolboy, George is said to have kept aloof from others and
displayed a haughty, autocratic personality. He only joined such groups,
clubs or student organisations as he could lead or preside over - and, when
this was not possible, he would create his own. He began writing poetry at
the age of eighteen and in 1887 began to edit his school's literary journal.
He left school a year later in order to travel. Like so many important German
poets and novelists, he felt magnetically drawn to southern Europe; but if
the lure for Goethe, Holderlin, Heine, Mann and others was Greece or Italy,
George - though certainly devoted to the world of classical antiquity - felt
a profound affinity for Spain.

In 1888, George visited England. In February of the following year, he
visited Italy and then, in March, he made the first of a number of
pilgrimages to Paris. Here he became acquainted with many symbolist literary
figures, including Verlaine and the dying Villiers de l'lsle-Adam. Eventually
he was introduced, and apprenticed himself, to the arch-mage of 'le
symbolisme', Stephane Mallarme, who was also revered as a prophet and near
demi-god by such English and Irish artists as George Moore, Arthur Symons,
Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, Oscar Wilde and W. B. Yeats. Like them, George
fell under Mallarme's spell, fervently embraced the symbolist aesthetic and
adopted aspects of the French master's inscrutable demeanour. In certain
respects - an insistence on rigour, discipline and an almost monastic
asceticism, for example - George even outdid Mallarme. In consequence, he
contemptuously repudiated the lurid morbidity and 'decadence' - exemplified
by the novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans - with which French symbolism was often
associated, and which Mallarme deigned to tolerate. This repudiation imparted
to both his work and his personality a hard, uncompromising and frosty edge,
which differentiated him from Hofmannsthal and Rilke, his Austrian
contemporaries and fellow symbolist exponents.

Yet, like Hofmannsthal and Rilke, George dedicated himself self-consciously,
and with a genuinely religious sense of vocation, to the life of the spirit -
which meant, of course, the life of Art, in its most exalted, orphic and
prophetic sense. George subscribed to the prevailing dictum of 'l'art pour
l'art', 'art for art's sake', but art, for George, as for the other great
figures of his generation, was not what it might be for most people today -
not just one of many possible and equally valid human endeavours. On the
contrary, art was nothing less than a repository for the sacred, a conduit
between spirit and the mundane world, a lens into the numinous. For George -
as for Rilke, Hofmannsthal, Yeats, Joyce, Mann, Proust and the other
monumental poets and novelists of the early twentieth century - art was a
mystical vocation, and the artist was a combination of priest, prophet,
magus, sorcerer, occult adept, metaphorical alchemist and, ultimately, martyr
to his calling. In consequence, the frontiers between art and religion, art
and magic, art and the esoteric, were deliberately blurred.

George concurred with Shelley's famous statement that 'poets are the
unacknowledged legislators of the world', and resented. the fact that they
were unacknowledged. He regarded the poet as 'the appointed keeper of the
nation's inner strength'- in other words, of its 'fork souls or true
collective identity. The poet, in effect, was not what he is generally
understood to be, but something closer to the sacred bards of ancient Wales
and Ireland, or the wrathful and chastising prophets of the Old Testament:

In placid times they say the poet is
A winged child who sings his tender dreams
And showers beauty on a busy world.
But when abuses swell into a storm,
And Destiny pounds at the door his verses
Ring like a pick on ore . . .
When all are blinded he, the only seer,
Unveils the coming doom in vain . . .[1]

And further:

But in a mournful age it is the poet
Who keeps the marrow sound, the germ alive.
He stirs the holy flame . . .

A younger generation rises towards him,
The youths who, steeled by years of galling pressure,
Again have honest standards for the probe
Of men and things . . .

He breaks the chains and sweeps aside the rubble,
He scourges home the lost to lasting law,
Where lord is lord again, the great is great
And where integrity returns. He fastens
The true device upon the nation's banner.
Through tempests and the dread fanfares of dawning
He leads his tried and faithful to the work
Of sober day and founds the Kingdom Come.[2]

In 1890, George travelled to Copenhagen and again to Paris. In that year, he
also produced his first volume of verse, Hymnen (Odes), a slender volume in
an edition of one hundred copies intended for private circulation only. A
year later, he produced a second volume, Pilgerfahrten (Pilgrimages) and
visited England again, Munich and Vienna, where he met and became friends
with Hofmannsthal. In 1892 he organised the clique of associates and
disciples which was to become known as the 'George Kreis', the 'George
Circle'. In that year, too, there appeared the first issue of Blatter fur die
Kunst, the esoteric-oriented literary and cultural journal which George was
to co-edit for the next twenty-seven years. The inaugural issue contained,
along with some of his own poems, one by Hofmannsthal. In its subsequent
issues, the journal, as much as the manifestos and volumes of poetry that
appeared concurrently, affords an accurate and ongoing reflection of George's
personal and artistic development.

In 1893, George became loosely associated with an Ariosophiststyle cultural
school called the 'Cosmics', and with two of their mentors, the racial
theoreticians Alfred Schuler and Ludwig Klages. Before long, his relations
with them became strained, and plummeted when George, disgusted, walked out
in the middle of an anti-Semitic diatribe by Schuler. Associates of both men
made sporadic attempts to heal the rift, but George was becoming increasingly
incensed by pseudo-scientific blither about 'pure blood' and by anti-Semitism
generally. By 1904, his breach with Schuler, Klages and their entourage had
become permanent. It is significant that this, rather than any aesthetic
disagreement, constituted the grounds for the rupture. But it was an
aesthetic disagreement that led, shortly thereafter, to a rupture between
George and Hofmannsthal. Or, to be more precise, it was Hofmannsthal's
refusal to accord George unquestioning deference and the status of supreme
aesthetic potentate.

In the meantime, successive volumes of poetry had appeared in 1893, 1894,
1897 and 1899. And in 1902, in Munich, George had encountered a
twelve-year-old youth named Maximilian Kronberger, for whom he conceived a
highly idealised, and stylised, affection. Contrary to allegations made at
the time, and even today repeated, it seems clear that there was no
homosexual relationship between George and Maximilian. In fact, George saw
Maximilian on no more than a dozen occasions, and always in public or in the
boy's home and in the presence of his mother. But Maximilian came to be
imbued by the poet with a portentous symbolic significance came to represent
an epitome of classical Grecian beauty in human form and, as such, an
'avatar' of divine forces. This fused with a poignant solicitude and
tenderness, very likely paternal in character, and engendered a passionate
attachment - probably the most passionate attachment of George's life. When
Maximilian died in 1904, George was stricken. Maximilian's death - the
fragile mortality of what had seemed so sublime and so supernal - continued
to haunt him for years afterwards. He seems not wholly to have recovered from
the blow until 1924, when, it has been suggested, the young Claus von
Stauffenberg appeared as en 'avatar' of the same numinous principles formerly
incarnated by the boy who had died twenty years before.

By the first decade of the new century, George was beginning to publish for,
and reach, a wider audience. He maintained a restlessly peripatetic
lifestyle, moving constantly between Berlin, Munich, Bingen, Vienna,
Frankfurt and Heidelberg. In each of these cities he had a circle of friends
who served to insulate him, acting as a buffer between himself and the world
and enabling him to sustain his aloof stance. The members of each such circle
were carefully vetted and expected to prove worthy of George's lofty
expectations. His relation to them was always that of 'Master' to disciple.
They were obliged to swear an oath of allegiance to the circle and to George
personally. In his book on Stefan George, E. K. Bennett makes it clear that
it was 'not just a conception of poetry which the disciples were required to
share with the Master, but a conception of life'.[3] It was Hofmannsthal's
refusal to accept these terms that led to his alienation from George.

For three years following Maximilian Kronberger's death, George published
nothing. Then, in 1907, there appeared his seventh volume of poetry, entitled
Der Siebente Ring (The Seventh Ring), divided into seven sections. Among
other things, this volume reflected the influence of Theosophy and H. P.
Blavatsky, for whom seven was the supreme sacred number. But The Seventh Ring
also marked a dramatic change in George's orientation, something amounting to
a kind of conversion.

In the past, George had shared with Mallarme and the French symbolists not
only an aesthetic, but also a comprehensive Weltanschauung which encompassed
its own metaphysics and ethics. According to symbolist metaphysics, the
material or phenomenal world was ultimately but a reflection of some other,
higher reality - what Mallarme generally denoted by such words as 'l'azur'
and 'l'ideal'. Symbolist ethics dictated a complete dissociation of the
artist from society. The symbolists did not see themselves as teachers or
mentors: their role was simply to embody and refract the numinous in the
perfect work of art, which need be accessible only to fellow initiates. To
this extent, they felt themselves absolved from mundane morality and all
social or pedagogical responsibility.

Until the end of his life, George continued to employ symbolist literary
techniques, and remained loyal to the underlying aesthetic, but with The
Seventh Ring he repudiated the accompanying metaphysics and ethics. He now
undertook to seek and reflect the sacred, the numinous, not in some ethereal
'other' dimension, but in the actual and mundane world around him. The
characteristically intangible images of the symbolists - smoke, mist, clouds,
sky and wind- began to disappear from his poetry, and were replaced by motifs
that were harder, more solid, more tangible, often with a polished, glazed
and brightly enamelled patina. And Maximilian's death seemed to have left him
with a legacy of responsibility, of obligation to Germany's young. He
appointed himself custodian of Germany's spiritual and cultural future.
Abandoning the godlike indifference of the symbolist poet-mage, he assumed
the more Platonic or Pythagorean role of mentor and teacher. He remained, of
course, detached and aloof. He was hardly going to demean himself as a
conventional pedagogue. But with the elite, handpicked cadre of youths he
admitted to his circle, he felt himself playing a part analogous to that
played in Greek myth by Chiron, the centaur who functions as guide,
instructor and tutor to such heroes as Aesculapius, Jason, Achilles and
Hercules.

In the past, then, George had sought to impart to art, and especially to
poetry, a new purity and perfection. After 1907. he sought to impart a new
purity and perfection to reality itself- or, more specifically, to Germany's
future. 'L'ideal' of Mallarme was now no longer to be a remote transcendent
principle, but an agent active in the phenomenal world - as what one
commentator has called 'a germinating and transforming seed'. According to
one of his associates writing at the time, George felt himself entrusted with
'a holy mission which raised him alone above the mass of fellow poets . . .
[He] believed fanatically in the advent of a new spirit-filled age and in his
special mission to bring it about.'[4]

To this end, his circle had not only to be esoteric initiates. They had also
to be mystical warriors, soldiers of the spirit engaged on a spiritual
crusade. In this respect, they were heir to the knights in the poem entitled
'Templars', although George meant by the term something very different from
the Ariosophist New Templars of Lanz von Liebenfels.

Once in a Golden Age we merged with all,
For aeons now the crowd has shunned our call.
We are the Rose: the young and fervent heart,
The Cross: to suffer proudly is our art.

On unknown courses, silent and austere,
We turn the sombre spool, we turn the spear.
Through co-ward years our flaming weapon rings,
We scourge the people and we challenge kings.

We do not join the customs and the bout
Of those who look askance at us and doubt
And fear because their hatred never felled
What with our savage love we caught and held.

Whatever loot our swords and slings have gained
Pours negligently from our spendthrift hand,
And-though our rage devises harsh decrees,
Before a child we fall upon our knees.

We veil the flashing glance, the loosened lock
Which once betrayed the lord in beggar's smock,
Shyly from forward swarms who on our shade -
When we are gone - confer their accolade.

We nursed at alien breast and so our sons
Shall never be the children of our loins,
They never will be weak, dilute, or old,
For unborn fires quicken in their mould.

And only one of ours can complete
The needed change or do the iron feat
To which they summon us when chaos reigns,
Only to stone and curse us for our pains.

And when in wrath the Mighty Mother scorns
To lean and couple at the lower bourns,
Some world-night when her pulses scarcely stir,
Then only one who always strove with her,

Ignored her wishes and denied her will,
Can crush her hand and grip her hair until
Submissively she plies her work afresh:
Turns flesh to god, embodies god in flesh.[5]

The latterday 'Templars' George gathered around him comprised for him a
unique kind of nobility and aristocracy of the spirit, not unlike that
extolled a few years earlier by Nietzsche, and a few years later by D. H.
Lawrence. The status of this elite had nothing whatever to do with social
class, caste or background, and nothing to do with race or heritage:

The nobility you long for
Does not hail from crown and scutcheon.
Through their glances men of every
Rank betray their venal fancies
And their raw and ribald prying.
Sons of rare distinction grow from
Anywhere among the people,
And you will discern your kindred
By their frank and fervent eyes.[6]

It was for this nobility, for the sources of their inspiration and for what
they were expected to achieve, that the words 'Secret Germany' were first
employed. In 1910 three years after the publication of The Seventh Ring, one
of George's disciples composed an essay on the importance of the circle as
the seed from which German renewal would spring:

For what is beginning to stir today beneath the desolate superficial crust is
still half a dream, the secret Germany, the only living thing in this time .
. . (and) only here put into words.[7]

The essay, which had George's own personal blessing, went on to state that
the revitalisation of Europe's culture and spirit could only emanate 'from
the secret Germany, for which each of our words is spoken, from which each of
our verses draws its life and rhythm'.[8] Another disciple wrote that 'the
members of the Secret Germany consider themselves as a "cloister" or an
"Order".[9] In Weimar Culture P. Gay says that George, unlike Nietzsche, 'did
not choose to be alone; it was the heart of his method to build a secret
empire for the sake of the new Reich to come . . . It was an elitist
programme pushed to the very limits of elitism; the secret Germany was a club
to which new members were elected, and for which they were trained, one by
one. Many called, few were chosen . . .'[10]

Through the circle's journal, through his own work and that of his disciples,
George's vision evolved and came into ever sharper focus. There were echoes
of Nietzsche and, paradoxically and despite George's distaste for
'decadence', Gabriele d'Annunzio, who was not only the arch 'decadent' of the
age, but also perhaps its most flamboyantly (if self-appointedly) heroic
figure. There were many echoes of H. P. Blavatsky and Theosophy. There were
echoes of Wagner, even though George seems to have concurred with Musil's
description of Wagner's music as 'a luggage van bound for the Infinite'.
There were also many echoes of classical thought and mythology, such as
characterised the work of George's most important Germanic precursor,
Friedrich Holderlin.

In many respects, George was unabashedly pagan, scathingly condemning
Judaeo-Christian tradition and theology. Church teachings were for him 'a
cycle of venerable fairy tales' and 'the last glowing embers of a creed which
had had its time'. His paganism, while emphasising form and formal
perfection, was never materialistic. It remained highly spiritualised, almost
platonic. The fauns in George, like those in Mallarme, are not crude
embodiments of lust and 'unregenerate nature'. On the contrary, they are
oracles; they are mythic incarnations of the sublime magic that sustains all
life; and they are manifestations of a spirituality more intense and profound
than that of any organised religion. In a poetic dialogue entitled 'Man and
Faun', one of the horned, cloven-footed and goat-tailed creatures speaks thus
to its human interlocutor:

Beasts are devoid of shame and men of thanks.
With all that you contrive you never learn
What most you need, but we in silence serve.
One thing: In slaying us you slay yourselves.
Where we have trailed our shag the milk will spurt,
Where we withhold our hooves no blade will grow.
If only mind of men had reigned, your kind
And all you do would long ago be done.
Your fields would be infertile, dry your brake . . .
Only by magic life is kept awake.[11]

In his paganism, George did not share Heine's fear of Wotan and Thor
re-emerging to demolish the cathedrals of Christendom. 'Each age', he felt,
'has only / One god, and only one proclaims his throne'. [12] He warned that
'when its gods have died a people dies'. [13] And future renewal resided,
again, with the nation's young: 'Now youth calls up the gods, both the
eternal / And the returning when their day is rounded.'[14] In consequence,
George was quite prepared to welcome new manifestations of the forces and
principles anthropomorphised as the gods of antiquity. Like Holderlin,
however, he was less interested in the old Teutonic pantheon than he was in
that of the classical world. He sought in the soil of Germany, in a uniquely
and specifically Germanic context, certain forces, certain principles,
certain embodiments of energy, certain dynamics or processes at work that
might be ascribed, metaphorically, to the agency of 'deities'. George denoted
these incarnations, or what might be called 'concentrations of godhood', as
'avatars', a term that figured prominently in Theosophical thought. But the
'avatars' of H. P. Blavatsky were intended to be taken literally - invisible
'secret masters' in the Himalayas who periodically, as in the case of Jesus,
assumed human form and intervened in the world's affairs. George's 'avatars',
like the somewhat similar figures scattered through the work of W. B. Yeats,
were much more metaphorical and symbolic.

One of the most important 'avatars' in George's work is a figure invoked
under the name of 'Maximin', implying all the associations of the English
words 'maximum' and 'minimum'- everything and nothing, for example, or
greatest and least, or macrocosm and microcosm. As he functions in George's
work, 'Maximin' is quite clearly a kind of artistic reincarnation of the dead
youth Maximilian Kronberger. Resurrected and translated into literary
immortality, 'Maximin' displays all the attributes of godhood - a godhood
which constitutes George's own unique personal inspiration and presides over
his relationship to the young who are Germany's future. Thus, in the fragment
entitled 'Maximin':

To some you are a child,
To some a friend, to me
The god whom I divined
And tremble to adore.[15]

And in 'Incarnation':

Now that you are strong and high,
What you have prophesied was done:
You have changed our pact, and I
Am the child of my own son. [16]


In other words, the poet has been reborn through the agency of his own
literary creation and the youth who inspired it. This becomes clearer from
another poem, 'Introit':

Resigned I face the riddle that he is
My child, and I the child of my own child . . .[17]


Who is your god? All that my dreams avowed,
Kin to my vision, beautiful and proud.
He is the force the lap of darkness vented,
The sum of every greatness we were granted,
The deepest source, the inmost blaze - he is
Where I have found the purest form of these.
He flooded every vein with richer teeming
Who first for one was rescue and redeeming.
He filled the gods of old with fresher breath,
And all the words the world has done to death.
The god is veiled in highest consecration,
With rays around he manifests his station,
Embodied in a son whom stars begot
And a new centre conjured out of thought. [18]

To the modern mind, much of this may seem bizarre. One must remember,
however, that it is essentially a personal mythology transmuted into a
symbolic poetic 'system'. As such, it is not significantly different, and
certainly no more bizarre, than the elaborate system evolved by Yeats and
outlined in that most daunting of all his works, A Vision. And indeed, there
is one very specific antecedent for George's concept of 'avatars' in English
literature: the short narratives such as 'Denys l'Auxerrois' and 'Apollo in
Picardy' by Walter Pater in the collection Imaginary Portraits.

The 'avatars' that interested George were universal in their attributes, but
also uniquely and specifically manifest in a Germanic context. Throughout his
work, there is a preoccupation with German history, with sacred sites and
topographical features such as the Rhine, and with illustrious figures of a
semi-legendary heroic past. Among the most important of these figures were
the Hohenstauffen emperors of the high Middle Ages, and especially the
greatest of them, Friedrich II, who brazenly defied the pope, established a
multi-cultural and multi-racial court in Sicily, provided a bridge to the
West for Arabic and Judaic arts and sciences and professed himself an adept
in alchemy, astrology and other arcane disciplines. In 1927, Ernst
Kantorowicz, one of the Jewish members of George's circle, published what was
then regarded as the definitive biography of Friedrich. Three years
previously, in May 1924, a number of members of the circle, including
Berthold von Stauffenberg, made a special pilgrimage to Friedrich's tomb in
Palermo. Once again, the phrase 'secret Germany' was invoked. On the
sarcophagus of the Hohenstauffen ruler, a wreath was laid bearing the
inscription:

SEINEN KAISERN UND HELDEN
DAS GEHEIME DEUTSCHLAND

['To their emperors and heroes
>From the Secret Germany'][19]

It must be remembered that this designation, 'Secret Germany', was not only
used to denote George's circle. It was also, later, to be the name Claus von
Stauffenberg adopted for his cadre of conspirators. And 'Es lebe unser
geheimes Deutschland!' - 'Long live our Secret Germany!'- were to be his last
words, flung back defiantly at the firing squad that took his life.'[20]

Given George's characteristic themes - the glory and majesty of Germany's
resonant past, the propensities of a sacred soil to nurture avatars of
godhood, the formation of a new aristocracy of the spirit which evoked echoes
of the Nietzschean 'superman' - it is not difficult to see why he should have
endeared himself to the National Socialist hierarchy. Superficially, at
least, his treatment of these themes seemed to harmonise perfectly with
theirs, just as did many elements in Nietzsche and Wagner. And there were
other motifs in George's work which also proved of considerable interest to
the Nazis.

The swastika today has only one primary association. It immediately connotes,
above anything and everything else, the Third Reich. During the first three
decades of the twentieth century, however, the swastika was a familiar
quasi-esoteric device - as familiar as, say, the phoenix. Even Rudyard
Kipling had many of his books printed with a swastika embossed on the jacket.
It had long been an ancient sun symbol in ancient Hinduism and certain
schools of Tibetan Buddhism. H. P. Blavatsky's personal emblem consisted of
an anti-clockwise swastika within a circle, surmounted by the interlocked
triangles - or six-pointed star - of the mystical 'Seal of Solomon'. From
1892 until 1900 translations of Blavatsky's works were printed in a German
periodical that bore a swastika on its cover. And the swastika was adopted,
too, by certain of the Ariosophist sects, such as the Order of the New
Templars and the Thule Society. It symbolised their self-arrogated connection
with Indian thought, and their putative claim to a racial link with the
ancient Aryans who colonised the Indian sub-continent.

George, too, adopted the swastika and used it as a personal device on his
publications, as did certain members of his circle. Its associations for
George were as private and idiosyncratic as those of the phoenix were for D.
H. Lawrence, and he used it in much the same way. To outsiders, not
surprisingly, it seemed to imply a shared Weltanschauung, perhaps even an
identification, with the Ariosophists, and subsequently with National
Socialism.

Even more important than his use of the swastika, however, were the
connotations and implications George attached to the term 'Fuhrer'. It has
now been virtually established that the significance Hitler attached to the
term derived directly from George.[21] According to Mein Kampf, Hitler saw
his first opera, Wagner's Lohengrin, as a boy of twelve in Linz. At the end
of the last act of this opera, the title of 'Fuhrer', which means literally
nothing more than 'leader', is conferred by Lohengrin on the Duke of Brabant.
Undoubtedly, given Wagner's appeal to Hitler, the term's significance in
Lohengrin cannot be overlooked, especially when one recalls Hitler's
infatuation with the Grail romances, the later depiction of him as would-be
'Grail knight' and the attempt to exalt the SS as a latterday conflation of
the Teutonic Knights with those of the Round Table. But it was George, not
Wagner, who invested the title of 'Fuhrer' with the specific qualities that
Hitler, in his use of it, arrogated to himself.

George had immersed himself in the arcane cosmological systems of Joachim de
Fiore, a twelfth-century Cistercian esotericist whose subsequent influence
was to be considerable- on Dante, for example, on Renaissance magi like
Giordano Bruno, on such of George's own contemporaries as Joyce and Yeats, on
such modern
literary figures as Michel Tournier. If George's preoccupation with the
number seven owed something to Theosophy, it owed much more to Joachim, whose
own preoccupation with the number involved, among other things, the opening
of the Book of the Seven Seals described in Revelation. Joachim also
endeavoured to divide
human history into three messianic ages - cycles of time presided over by God
the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. The age of God the Father
corresponded to the period of the Old Testament, the age of God the Son to
the Christian era of the New. The age of the Holy Spirit, according to
Joachim, would correspond to the dispensation of the future, which would
supersede that of conventional Christendom and the established Church.

In the years just before and after Joachim's death in 1202, rumours and
legends began to circulate of a great messianic emperor who would transform
and redeem European civilisation. These came increasingly to focus on the
Hohenstauffen emperor Friedrich II, who did nothing to dispel them. On the
contrary, he and his propagandists actively encouraged them, and milked them
for all they were worth. Friedrich proclaimed his own birthplace to be-a
second Bethlehem and declared himself to have been 'raised up by God in the
spirit of Elijah' (whose mystical return had been one of Joachim's recurrent
themes). 'To his supporters,' the historian M. Reeves has observed,
'Frederick was the ultimate renovator mundi', the ultimate renewer and
redeemer of the world.[22] He took pains to identify himself quite
specifically with the ruler ordained to preside over Joachim de Fiore's age
of the Holy Spirit.

In describing this ruler, Joachim had used the Latin designation 'dux'. He
had cited Matthew 2:6, the earliest Latin versions of which read: 'Et tu
Bethlehem terra luda . . . ex te enim exiet dux. . .' A modem Bible will
usually translate this as: 'And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah . . .
for out of you will come a ruler . . .' But 'ruler' is not the only, nor even
the most accurate, rendering of 'dux'. Neither are such later derivations as
the English 'duke', the French 'duc', the Italian 'duce' (as adopted by
Mussolini) or the German 'Herzog', which Luther used in his vernacular
translation of the Bible. All of these denote a particular rank of nobility,
which came into being only during the latter days of the Roman Empire. Prior
to that, 'dux' meant, quite simply, 'leader'. But its context in Matthew
imbued it with specifically messianic connotations. A 'dux', in other words,
was not just a conventional leader, but a messianic leader - a messiah, a
savior, a redeemer, ordained and consecrated for his role by the active
principle of divine grace, God's will made manifest.[23] Vestiges of this
exalted significance persist even today. Thus, for example, a British duke or
duchess is not a 'Majesty', nor a 'Highness', but a 'Grace'.

Luther's translation of the Bible may have used for 'dux' the word 'Herzog',
the German equivalent of 'duke'. Later German Bibles use for 'dux' a much
more accurate word. They use 'Fuhrer', meaning a specifically messianic
leader. It was precisely in this sense that George used the word in, for
example, The Seventh Ring. It was precisely in this sense, too, that members
of George's circle used the word, sometimes in reference to George himself In
1928 one of his disciples, Max Kommerell, published Der Dichter als Fuhrer in
der deutschen Klassik ( The Poet as Leader in the German Classical Period), a
text extolling Holderlin as 'the seer of the secret Germany' which would one
day in the future awake. At the present time, Kommerell concluded, Stefan
George 'is the Fuhrer'- in, again, a specifically messianic sense.[24] It was
precisely in this sense, with all its lofty and exalted religious
connotations, that Hitler appropriated the designation for himself. The
supposedly redemptive principles he advocated were, of course, rather
different from poetry.

The Nazis were more than eager to acknowledge their debts to George and to do
him homage. Certain of his poems were officially read out during celebrations
of National Socialist Party Day in Nuremberg, as well as at Hitler Youth
meetings. His last volume of poetry, Das Neue Reich ( The New Reich) was
hailed as heralding the
National Socialist dispensation. George himself was acclaimed as a prophet
who had anticipated the new era, in which the spheres of spirit and politics
would merge. He was consistently lauded as an oracular custodian of German
self-awareness and identity (which, under the new regime, would fully
manifest itself through the
German people). There were many invitations and appeals for him to join the
National Socialist Party, which already included a few members of his own
circle.

George was painfully aware of the ways in which Nietzsche had been
appropriated, misinterpreted and exploited. He was scathing in his
condemnation, while, at the same time, commiserating with the dead
philosopher, whom he acknowledged as a 'Fuhrer' and explicitly linked with
Jesus:

The rule of fervent silence shall continue
Until the brutes who soil him with their praise
And fatten further on the reek of rotting
Which helped to strangle him, at last are stifled.
But you shall live in glory through the ages
With crowned and bleeding brow like other leaders.[25]

That he himself would soon suffer a fate similar to Nietzsche's was becoming,
to George, only too bitterly apparent.

In actual fact, he loathed and despised the Nazis, who represented 'ghastly
caricatures of his elusive ideal'.[26] They gradually began to assume for him
a status even more loathsome than his antipathies and 'pet peeves' of longer
standing. Aloof, patrician, aristocratic and elitist as he was, George had
always recoiled from 'the mob' and everything associated with it, including,
of course, such mass movements as Communism - which, in seeking a lowest
common denominator, reduced all humanity to the level of 'the mob'. He had
always recoiled from 'das Leichte', the 'Facile' - the ersatz, the shoddy,
the spurious, the vulgar, the tacky, everything that resulted from spiritual
and creative laziness and the quest for a 'short cut'. He had always recoiled
from what he called 'Prussianism', by which he meant not just militarism, but
also conformity, uniformity, regimentation, stodginess, bureaucracy,
straight-laced complacency, philistinism, materialism and an arid lack of
imagination.

The Nazis, for George, combined all of these things in a new nadir of human
and spiritual degradation. National Socialism effectively fused mob mentality
with both the 'Facile' and 'Prussianism'. And the Party's adherents were
guilty, too, of an even more grievous transgression- of tramping into the
sacred domain of George's own rarefied thought, appropriating it as their own
and in the process, reducing it to a gauche and grotesque travesty. In
Nazism, George saw elements of his own exalted and supernal vision reflected
as in a trick mirror at a fun fair, warped and twisted perversely out of
shape. To that extent, his grievance with National Socialism was more
intensely personal than, say, Thomas Mann's, whose detached, Olympian yet
unequivocal hostility was proof against any attempt to co-opt it. The Nazis,
George felt, had plundered and sullied sacrosanct aspects of his most private
self- the very inspiration and sense of mission that sustained him. And thus,
though he was never threatened as Mann was, his only option was exile - exile
dictated not by self-preservation, but by an overwhelming disgust.

If George's attitude towards Nazism was misunderstood - both by the Nazis
themselves and by subsequent commentators - so, too, were certain of his
other attitudes. He has sometimes been accused, for example, of
anti-Semitism. Yet he spurned the so-called 'Cosmics' end the racial
theoreticians associated with them precisely because he recoiled from
anti-Semitism. His attitude towards anti-Semitism was one of lofty, almost
weary, contempt:

A racial policy is no new thing: it is no more than an evil legacy from the
nineteenth century. Only the spirit, not some breeding establishment, is
capable of producing a good new race of men.[27]

George's grievance was not with Jews or with Judaism, but, like Lawrence's,
with Judaeo-Christian thought and tradition, with values and attitudes rather
than with people. So far as people were concerned, George made no distinction
whatever between 'Jewish' and 'Aryan' Germane. There were a number of Jewish
members in his circle, one of whom later joined the German resistance in
Holland and died in a concentration camp. In the summer of 1933, shortly
after the Nazi accession to power, another Jewish member of George's circle,
a woman named Edith Landmann, wrote an essay entitled 'To the German Jews who
belong to the Secret Germany'. [28]
In this essay, Frau Landmann endeavoured to raise support for an ambitious
scheme - an exodus of German Jews and the creation of ideal communities,
based on George's thinking, abroad.

In his attitude towards Judaism as such, George characteristically sought
deeper, more subterranean dynamics than were apparent to the naked eye. He
took pains to discern latent connections between Germans and Jews. For
George, the hatred and prejudice involved in German anti-Semitism displayed
an intensity only possible in
instances of blood kinship and self-recognition - the relationship,
ultimately of Cain and Abel. If Jews were guilty of anything, it was of being
too akin to the Germans.

You, the extremes: the one from barren snow-drifts
And wave-swept cliffs, the other from the glowing
Wastes of a spectral god, are both at equal
Remove from radiant seas and fields where mortals
Live out their lives and shape themselves and gods.
Fair-haired or dark, the selfsame womb begot you.
Each hates and seeks and does not know his brother,
And always roams and never is fulfilled.[29]

Behind these ostensibly straightforward lines, there is what the jargon of
current literary criticism would label a complex 'sub-text'. The same
sub-text was also being explored and developed by Thomas Mann, who addressed
it in his massive tetralogy, Joseph and His Brothers. Like Mann, George was
aware of how extremes of climate encouraged altered states of consciousness
and thereby religious experiences. The primary agent in the relationship
between climate and consciousness was wind.

The Greek word 'pneuma' combines a number of associated meanings. It denotes
'spirit', and 'breath' or 'exhalation', and also 'wind'. As George was aware,
the association of these, as exemplified by the word 'pneuma', had been a
commonplace since biblical times, if not indeed before, and had figured
prominently throughout esoteric thought. Wind was taken to be, quite
literally, the breath of God, God's spirit, the closest approximation God
ever assumed to physical manifestation. For Joachim de Fiore, wind functioned
as symbolic herald for the coming age of the Holy Spirit; and the same theme
has more recently been developed by Michel Tournier.

In Ecclesiastes 12:7, the 'Ruach', the fiercely hot desert wind, is equated
with the spirit that returns to God after the body has died and returned to
dust. For the ancient Israelites, however, the 'Ruach' was the literal breath
of their god of wrath. Indeed, as Thomas Mann has argued, there are
etymological grounds for believing that the very word 'Ruach' evolved into
'Yahweh' and thence into 'Jehovah'. In much the same fashion, Wotan, whose
name evolves from 'Wode', an archaic Germanic word for 'rage', derived from
the shrill Valkyrie-like shrieking of the Arctic wind sweeping through the
ancient Germanic forests.

In their later development, both Wotan and Jehovah were essentially gods of
wrath, of power, of majesty, of pageant and spectacle, of battle and
conquest, of Cecil B. De Mille special effects and casts of thousands. Both
trafficked in the particular kind of fear, or 'sacred awe', engendered by
grandeur and sheer physical ferocity, yet in their origins both were gods of
wind and, as such, essentially formless. For George, form was of paramount
importance; and the sculpted, anthropomorphic divinities of the classical
world were thus immeasurably more congenial to him than the abstraction of
wind-born deities.

If allegations of pro-Nazi sympathies and anti-Semitism on George's part have
been misplaced, so, too, have allegations of his homosexuality. His
relationship with Maximilian Kronberger, despite assumptions to the contrary,
was never homo-erotic in character or in practice; and the love expressed in
the poems postdating Maximilian's death could hardly be described as amorous
idolatry. It is, rather, a paternal tenderness and solicitude fused with a
rarefied platonic soul kinship. There is no evidence that any other
relationships in George's life were homosexual. And although he displayed
little interest in women, during the 1890s he maintained a lengthy affair
with Ida Coblenz, who later married a member of his circle. Ultimately, it
would seem, George was not so much either homosexual or heterosexual as
simply 'sexless'. He appears to have sublimated his sexuality entirely into
an exalted idealisation of 'pure' beauty end 'pure' form.

George's asexuality is illuminated by Gustave von Aschenbach, the protagonist
of Thomas Mann's nouvelle Death in Venice. Contrary to the impression
conveyed by Visconti's film, Mann's nouvelle is most emphatically not a
psychological 'case study' of homosexuality, latent or of any other kind. The
real theme in Death in Venice is the toll exacted on the personality by a
life dedicated, with a single-minded and religious sense of vocation, to the
spirit and to art. Such monomaniacal dedication inevitably involves a cost to
other aspects of the personality, which, rigorously suppressed and denied all
expression, fester in a neglected recess of the psyche, turn rancid and
depraved.

In his monklike devotion to art, Aschenbach, Mann tells us, has lived his
life like a perpetually clenched fist. The nouvelle depicts how, fatigued by
the incessant pressure it has sustained, this fist, under the influence of
almost any catalyst, can inadvertently relax - and how- aspects of human
experience, repudiated for so long and consequently corrupted, can then
suddenly erupt with obsessive power and usurp the foreground of
consciousness. Aschenbach has devoted his life religiously to beauty of form.
When he is seduced, it is not by sexuality, nor by eroticism, but by a human
embodiment of what he has always worshipped - a pure, classically Grecian
beauty of form. The youth by whom he is besotted conforms precisely to
George's concept of an 'avatar', but this youth could just as easily have
been a girl, or an animal, or a tree, or a landscape. In human form, however,
beauty becomes more seemingly attainable- and in masculine human form, more
potent as a metaphor.

Homosexuality in Death in Venice is essentially a metaphor rather than a
psychological phenomenon explored for its own sake. The real issue is
Aschenbach's self-abandonment and the 'depravity' that follows. Homosexuality
was simply the most shocking metaphor that Mann, writing in 1911, could find
for self-abandonment and 'depravity', but Aschenbach could just as readily
have succumbed to heterosexual dissipation, to gambling, to alcoholism, to
drug addiction or to any of numerous possible manifestations of a hitherto
rigorously controlled psyche losing control of itself and being overwhelmed
by its own neglected aspects.

Aschenbach is often said to have been based, at least in part, on Gustav
Mahler, a suggestion reinforced, obviously, by his Christian name. Yet there
are reasons for suggesting that he was also based on Stefan George, whom Mann
described as 'this proud and priestly temperament'. Certainly Aschenbach's
life - lived like a clenched fist which makes him a 'culture hero', a beacon
and 'role model' for generations of youth - has much in common with George's.
It is clear that George recognised something of himself in Aschenbach and
took umbrage. He pronounced Death in Venice, as Mann ruefully and
sympathetically acknowledged, to be 'the highest drawn down into the realm of
decadence'.[30] For George, then, writing in 1911, adoration of classical
beauty in human form was commendably lofty and worthy, but homosexual
attraction, even if never actualised in practice, was decadent and
reprehensible. Like Aschenbach, George lived his life like a clenched fist.
In George's case, however, the fist remained firmly clenched.

When asked what constituted his greatest work, George, in words now famous,
replied: 'My friends.' His concept of friendship was rather different from
what most people would associate with the word. For George, it entailed
warmth, trust, intimacy and loyalty, but it also entailed aloofness,
remoteness and detachment - the relation, again, of a magus or guru to his
deferential disciples. He drew sustenance from their adulation and fidelity,
but kept himself deliberately distant and mantled in mystery. Discussion in
his circle revolved primarily around 'ideas' and 'issues'. If it ever became
personal at all, it became so in connection with his proteges' lives rather
than his own. George ultimately saw his 'friends' as sources of inspiration
for himself, and as malleable raw material to be shaped and groomed, as if
his relationship to them were itself a work of art.

Yet it is doubtful whether any of George's disciples would have seen that
relationship as in any sense one-sided or selfish. Nor can one deny the
element of altruism in his attitude. Although he himself was hardly a man of
action - he conveys an impression of physical inertia worthy of the Buddha,
if not, indeed, of full-fledged godhood - he insisted, emphatically and
repeatedly, on the necessity for action by his disciples. They were to be the
custodians of Germany's future, an exclusive and elite cadre meticulously
nurtured and honed for the task of leadership. The training and refinement of
this cadre was something George regarded as a mission, a sacred duty, a
discharging of his own personal responsibility to Germany - and, beyond
Germany, to humanity as a whole, to the life of the spirit, to the cosmos and
whatever gods or governing principles presided over it.

There are, of course, illustrious classical precedents for the role George,
perhaps arrogantly, assumed. In many respects his circle suggests an updated
version of the ancient Platonic academy, with George himself playing the part
of Socratic mentor, guide and sage. George himself would probably not have
welcomed this comparison. For one thing, Platonic thought was rather too
abstract for his taste; for another, the academy, as it appears in its
Platonic manifestation, was too divorced from mundane practical reality, from
the world of action.

For George, the real classical antecedents of his circle were the schools
associated (at least according to esoteric tradition) with Pythagoras.
Pythagorean teaching was, if anything, even more spiritual and mystical than
Platonic thought, but it was also more concrete, emphasising a network of
interlocking connections between the phenomenal world and the numinous. Most
important of all, the prevailing image of the Pythagorean schools was not one
of quietism and isolation from secular life. The schools were generally seen
as mystically and magically oriented precursors of, say, Harrow and Eton,
preparing and grooming hand-picked cadres of young men for active roles of
service in public life, in government, administration, the military and other
spheres of civic responsibility.

Whatever the fine points of difference between the Platonic and the
Pythagorean, the prototype for George's circle lay, so far as he was
concerned, in ancient Greece. Such a classical point of reference was
thoroughly in keeping with his classical sympathies in other respects, and
with his paganism and antipathy towards Judaeo-Christian tradition. Yet
despite his antipathy towards that tradition, George nevertheless grafted one
supremely crucial aspect of it on to his own essentially pagan
Weltanschanung. This was the necessity for self-sacrifice as a vehicle to
spiritual salvation and redemption. However inimical George felt
Judaeo-Christian tradition to be, his concept of sacrifice is recognisably,
and emphatically, Judaeo-Christian. And in order to articulate his concept,
he had no compunction about plundering Judaeo-Christian terminology, imagery
and symbolism.

Referring to Claus and himself, Berthold von Stauffenberg stated that 'We are
not really what are called Catholic believers in the proper sense. We did not
go to church very often, nor to confession: my brother and I feel that
Christianity is unlikely to produce anything creative.'[31] Yet the
Stauffenbergs had been born and raised as Catholics. However tepid their
faith, they also, all their lives, considered themselves to be Catholic. How
did they accommodate their Christianity, nominal though it may have been,
with George's unique hybrid of esotericism and paganism? One answer to this
question would seem to be George's concept of sacrifice. For the
Stauffenbergs, as well as for other members of George's circle, the concept
of sacrifice appears to have been a connecting link between conventional
established religion and the 'Master's' thought. Through the concept of
sacrifice, Christian believers could draw from paganism a new energy and
vitality for their faith. And through the concept of sacrifice, George's
paganism acquired an element of acceptability, respectability and legitimacy.
It could not be branded 'subversive', 'immoral" or 'anti-social', as, for
example, D. H. Lawrence's was.

By July 1944, it had become apparent that Claus von Stauffenberg could no
longer just direct and co-ordinate the conspiracy against the hierarchy of
the Third Reich. He would have to act personally, taking upon himself the
responsibility of assassinating Adolf Hitler - and this, needless to say,
would in all likelihood mean an act of self-sacrifice. Towards the beginning
of July, Stauffenberg conceived the idea of an oath of mutual intent to bind
the inner circle of the conspiracy together - quite possibly to ensure their
cohesion and continued dedication of purpose in the event of his death. He
discussed the matter with his brother, Berthold, and with Rudolf Farhner, and
asked them to draft a preliminary text. This was accordingly drawn up, and
Berthold's secretary typed it out. The original copy disappeared, having
probably been destroyed in the aftermath of 20 July, but Rudolf Fahrner kept
a photocopy, with hand-written amendments by Stauffenberg, which a woman
friend hid until after the war. Parts of it were published in 1952 the whole
of it in 1992. The document echoes much of Stefan George's teachings and many
of his poems. One particularly central passage reads:

We want a new order which makes all Germans responsible for the state and
guarantees them law and justice; but we despise the lie that all are equal
and we submit to rank ordained by nature. We want a people with roots in
their native land, close to the powers of nature, finding happiness and
contentment in the given environment, and overcoming, in freedom and pride,
the base instincts of envy and jealousy. We want leaders who, coming from
every section of the nation, are in harmony with the divine powers and set an
example to others by their noble spirit, discipline and sacrifice.[32]

It is as an illumination of these tenets - noble spirit, discipline and
sacrifice - that George's monumental poem 'Secret Germany' should here be
quoted in its entirety (and with the reminder that no translation of a poem,
and especially of a poem like this, can approximate to the effect of the
original):

Let me stand at your verge,
Chasm, and not be dismayed!

Where irrepressible greed has
Trampled down every inch of
Earth from equator to pole and
Shamelessly wielded relentless
Glare and mastery over
Every nook of the world,

Where in the smothering cells of
Hideous houses, madness
Just has found what will poison
All horizons tomorrow:
Even shepherds in yurtas,
Even nomads in wastes -

Where no more in a stony
Forest valley the she-wolf
- Rugged nurse! - suckles boy twins,
And neither untrodden islands,
Nor a garden of virgins
Dawn to foster the Great,

There in the sorest of trials
Powers below pondered gravely,
Gracious celestials gave their
Ultimate secret: They altered
Laws over matter and founded
Space- a new space in the old . . .

Once down by the southern
Sea I lay on a boulder,
Wrung as lately my kin
Spirit, when breaking through
Olives, the Spook of Noon
With goatee foot flicked me:

'Now that your eyes grew discerning,
Go and find in your sacred
Land primordial soil,
Slumbering lap of fill,
And regions as pathless and dark
As the densest of jungles.'

Pinions of sunny dream,
Carry me close to the depth!

They told me of one who from rock-ridden coast
An instant had seen the Olympian gods
In heavens which split with the light of the dawn,
Whereat his soul was flooded with dread.
He shunned the board where his friends were grouped
And plunged into riotous waters.

In the town where the trivia from everywhere
Are posted on pillars and patches of wall
For people to gape at and hasten on,
No one had eyes for the greater event:
Uncanny through tottering structures and streets
The dangerous prowl of the demon!

In winter he stood in the candle-lit hall,
His shimmering shoulder hidden in folds
The flame on his cheek in the leaves of a wreath,
The god concealed from the stare of fools,
In clear-scented warmth of the winds of spring,
Set foot on flowering courses.

The Listener who knew every person and thing,
Played ball with the stars in a rapturous reel,
The hunter unhunted, yet here he avowed
With stammering lips, his apostle-like form
Transfixed in the gleam of the opaline globe:
'This passes my grasp, I am silenced.'

Then forth from the region of order and peace,
Through sulphurous night a tempest unloosed
The clash and the clamour of savage wars,
The smoulder of worlds in the throes of the end.
And crumbling terrains and shadows unleashed
The silver hooves of the chargers.

I came upon him of the pale-golden hair
Who smilingly lavished serene repose
Wherever he went. He was hailed by us all
The darling of Fortune, but late he confessed
His vigour was drained to give strength to a friend,
His life a sequence of offerings.

I loved him who - my blood in his veins -
Had sung the song only less than the best,
Who idly shattered his lute when he failed
To gain a treasure he once divined,
Who merged with anonymous throngs and bowed
A forehead destined for laurels.

Throughout the country, on roads and in squares,
Wherever I was on the watch, I asked
Omniscient Rumour with hundreds of eyes:
'Have you ever heard of the like?' And he
- Though loth to be startled - replied: 'I heard
Of much - but this is unheard-of''

Let me mount to your height,
Summit, and not be destroyed!

Who shed, who of you brothers
Doubts, unshocked by the warning,
That what you most acclaim, what
Most you value today is
Rank as leaves in the fall-wind,
Doomed to perdition and death!

Only what consecrate earth
Cradles in sheltering sleep
Long in the innermost grooves,
Far from acquisitive hands,
Marvels this day cannot grasp
Are rife with the fate of tomorrow.[33]

This poem was among the last George wrote. It was composed, and read aloud at
a special meeting of his circle, in 1928. The book in which it appeared was
published in the same year. During the five years of life remaining to him,
George published nothing further. He had effectively said all he had to say;
end 'Secret Germany', as its very title suggests, stands as his definitive
valedictory pronouncement, a kind of testament. There have been suggestions,
too, that, for certain members of his circle, the poem was regarded as a sort
of coded programme for the future, a blueprint for how to carry on in the
'Master's" absence.

It is, of course, impossible to know whether Stauffenberg himself saw 'Secret
Germany' in this way. Did he perhaps feel that, in some oblique, symbolic or
even 'occult' fashion, it had been addressed to him personally? That he later
considered it immensely relevant to his circumstances is apparent from his
use of its title for his own network of conspirators. And from the
perspective of hindsight' the modem reader can discern the poem as being,
despite its opacity, eerily apposite.

It is clear that Stauffenberg felt George's spirit to be close to him during
the spring and summer of 1944, and especially during the final days
culminating with the explosion of 20 July. He would quote frequently from
'The Antichrist', and also from 'Verses for the Dead':

When men of the future are purged of dishonour,
Their shoulders released from the shackles of bondage[34]

He must surely, too, have had constantly in mind the stanzas of 'Templars',
such as:

And only one of ours can complete
The needed change or do the iron feat
To which they summon us when chaos reigns,
Only to stone and curse us for our pains.[35]

In the early hours of the morning of 21 July, Stauffenberg and the three men
shot with him were hastily buried. Later that day, the bodies were exhumed
and cremated, and their ashes were scattered over the fields. There
disappeared at the same time two pieces of personal jewellery which
Stauffenberg always wore. One was an ancient cross that had come down to him
through his wife's family. The other was a weighty gold ring which he wore on
the remaining finger of his left hand. Engraved on it in raised letters were
the words: 'FINIS INITIUM'. This ring represented for him his personal
covenant with Stefan George. The inscription, which translates as 'The End
and the Beginning', derives from the last line of a poem

George published in 1913, in the volume Der Stern des Bundes (The Star of the
Covenant):

I am the One, I am the Two,
I am the womb, I am the sire,
I am the shadow and the true,
I am the faggot and the fire.
I am the bow, I am the shaft,
I am the seer and his prediction,
I am the sheath, I am the heft,
I am abundance and affliction,
I am the victim and the slayer,
I am the symbol and the meaning,
I am the altar and the prayer,
I am the end and a beginning.[36]

pp.253-281

12 Legislators of the World


1 George, The Works of Stefan George, Marx and Morwitz, p.363
2 Ibid., p.365.
3 Bennett, Stefan George, p.12.
4 Goldsmith, Stefan George: A Study of his Early Work, p. 120
5 George, op.cit., pp.238-9.
6 Ibid., p.338.
7 Hoffmann, Claus Srhenk Graf von Stauffenberg und seine Bruder, p.65.
8 Ibid.
9 Landmann, Erinnerungen an Stefan George seine Freundschaft mit Julius und
Edith Landmann, p. 137.
10 Gay, Weimar Culture p.50..
11 George, op.cit., p.378.
12 Ibid., p.309.
13 Ibid., p.362.
14 Ibid., p.363.
15 Ibid., p.257.
16 Ibid., p.267.
17 Ibid., p.318.
18 Ibid., p.319.
19 Kantorowicz, Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite, Vorbemerkung.
20 An alternative translation of the words into English is: 'It lives, our
Secret Germany!'
21 Bowra, The Heritage of Symbolism, p. 140.
22 Reeves, Joachim of Fiore and the Prophetic Future, p.62.
23 Interview with Hans-Dietrich Fuhlendorf, Keil, 11 October 1992. For a
discussion of this point, see his Ruckkehr zum Paradies oder Erbauen dies
Neuen Jerusalem?, pp., 192-3
24 Hoffmann, op. cit., p.66.
25 George, op.cit., p.219.
26 Gay, op.cit., p.49.
27 Kramarz, Stauffenberg, p.28.
28 Landmann, op.cit., p.136.
29 George, op.cit., p.326.
30 Mann, Letters, p.96.
31 Zeller, The Flame of Freedom, p.448, n.14, quoting Spiegelbild einer
Verschworing, p.455.
32 Zeller, op.cit., p.395. For the complete oath see Hoffmann, op. cit.,
pp.396-7.
33 George, op.cit., pp.371-4.
34 Ibid., p.398.
35 Ibid., p.239
36. Ibid., p.322.

-----
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris

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