15 Facts About Max Kommerell

Max Kommerell was a German literary historian, writer, and poet.

Max Kommerell became interested in the thought of the George circle, and after transferring again to the University of Marburg in 1921 he was introduced personally to Gundolf and George himself through a friend who worked there as an assistant of Friedrich Wolters, another member of the circle.

Max Kommerell completed his doctorate in 1924 with a thesis on the Romantic novelist Jean Paul.

Under George's influence, Max Kommerell adopted a position of elitist disdain for democracy and support for irrationalism and German nationalism, becoming identified with the Conservative Revolutionary movement.

In 1928, Max Kommerell published a programmatic work, Der Dichter als Fuhrer in der deutschen Klassik, embodying the views he had received from George.

Max Kommerell completed his habilitation at the University of Frankfurt am Main in the same year and taught there throughout the 1930s; his first lecture at Frankfurt concerned Hugo von Hofmannsthal, a rival of George, whom Kommerell praised as a poet who was not a "leader".

Max Kommerell criticised George's "liturgical pathos", which he compared to "Philistinism dressed up as spirit".

In 1933, Max Kommerell published a monograph on Jean Paul, titled simply Jean Paul, which became one of the most influential studies of that writer.

Max Kommerell failed to secure a chair at Frankfurt, and returned to Marburg after he was offered a professorship there by the Reich Education Ministry in September 1941.

Max Kommerell joined the Nazi Party in 1941, likely after originally applying in 1939, and served as a member of the Sturmabteilung.

Nevertheless, in 1943 the Nazi government banned an anti-Soviet drama by Max Kommerell, Die Gefangenen, for its "depressive character", perceiving in the play a critique of the German system itself.

Max Kommerell went on to marry two women: Eva Otto from 1931 to 1936, and Erika Franck in 1938, with whom he had one daughter, Yvonne.

Max Kommerell died of cancer in Marburg on 25 July 1944.

Max Kommerell is remembered primarily through Benjamin's critique of his work and his engagement with Martin Heidegger, whose analysis of Friedrich Holderlin was once described by Kommerell to Hans-Georg Gadamer as a "productive train-wreck".

Max Kommerell was a formative influence on the historian and critic Arthur Henkel.