46 Facts About Stefan George

Stefan Anton George was a German symbolist poet and a translator of Dante Alighieri, William Shakespeare, Hesiod, and Charles Baudelaire.

Stefan George is known for his role as leader of the highly influential literary circle called the George-Kreis and for founding the literary magazine Blatter fur die Kunst.

Stefan George was born in 1868 in Budesheim in the Grand Duchy of Hesse.

Stefan George's father, named Stefan George, was an inn keeper and wine merchant and his mother Eva was a homemaker.

When Stefan George was five years old, the family moved to Bingen am Rhein.

Furthermore, when Stefan George's mother died, the oleander trees she had planted when she had married her husband were donated to the nuns of the nearby Rochusberg, which symbolized a returning of God's gifts back to Him.

Stefan George taught himself to read Norwegian in order to read the works of Henrik Ibsen in the original language.

On his first day there, he met the French poet Albert Saint-Paul, through whom Stefan George was introduced into the city's literary bohemia.

Saint-Paul persuaded the poet Stephane Mallarme to invite Stefan George to attend the Tuesday Symbolist soirees held in, "that little room in the Rue de Rome".

Stefan George had been described to Mallarme as resembling, "the young Goethe before Werther".

Meanwhile, Stefan George filled 365 pages with poems by French and other European authors, many of which he was later to translate into German.

Paul Verlaine and Stephane Mallarme were the only living poets whom Stefan George considered his superiors and whose apprentice he ever wished to be.

The French Symbolists were every bit as enthusiastic for Stefan George, as is revealed by the evidence of their surviving letters and subsequent memoirs of his visit to Paris, which were published in a 1928 theme issue of the Revue d'Allemagne.

At the time, Stefan George had serious doubts about the ability of the German language to say what he wished to say in his poems.

Stefan George seriously considered emigrating to Mexico at the urging of a wealthy Mexican family he had met and befriended in Paris.

When Stefan George saw the family off on a ship back to Mexico, he gifted them with a copy of the first collection of his poems in German; Hymnen, which had just been privately printed in a limited edition of 100 copies.

At the time, Stefan George felt that German poets had been reduced to two main literary movements, both of which he opposed.

The other role was for a poet to become a Naturalistic social critic, or what Stefan George sarcastically termed, "an apostle of reality".

Stefan George, "did not slavishly follow any masters", but set his own stamp upon those aspects of Symbolism that he found appropriate for his purpose of revitalizing German culture and German literature.

Stefan George was the main person of the literary and academic group known as the Stefan George-Kreis, which included some of the major, young writers of the time such as Friedrich Gundolf and Ludwig Klages.

Stefan George knew and befriended the "Bohemian Countess" of Schwabing, Fanny zu Reventlow, who sometimes satirised the group for its melodramatic actions and opinions.

Stefan George was homosexual, yet exhorted his young friends to have a celibate life like his own.

In 1916, in a deliberate revolt against the jingoistic literary movement known as Hurrah-Patriotismus, which was overwhelmingly popular on the German home-front during the First World War, Stefan George wrote and published the pessimistic poem "Der Krieg".

Stefan George wished to create a new, noble German culture, and offered "form", regarded as a mental discipline and a guide to relationships with others, as an ideal while Germany was in a period of social, political, spiritual and artistic decadence.

Stefan George's poetry was discovered by the small but ascendant Nation zialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, a precursor to Nazism, which had its roots in Bavaria.

Stefan George declined both the money and the honorary position, "in the so-called academy", but said that he approved of its "national" orientation.

Stefan George explained that he had administered German literature for five decades without any need for an academy.

Many years later, Stefan George told his friends that there had been a woman who was "my world".

Stefan George met Ida Coblenz, a wealthy and cultured German Jewish heiress who both admired his poems and showed very deep insights into them, at Bingen am Rhein in 1892.

Stefan George saw Ida often, particularly in the fall of 1894 and the summer of 1896.

When Ida began a relationship with the married poet Richard Dehmel, whom she later married in 1901, Stefan George viewed Ida's decision as a betrayal of the worst order.

Dehmel, due to his Marxism, Bohemianism, and, "sensual glorification of life as it is", stood for everything that Stefan George detested in German poetry in Imperial Germany.

Stefan George had been planning to dedicate his 1897 poetry collection Das Jahr der Seele to Ida Coblenz.

On 25 July 1933 Stefan George travelled to Wasserburg on Lake Constance, where he remained for four weeks.

Stefan George was joined there at various times by Frank Mehnert, Berthold von Stauffenberg, Claus von Stauffenberg, and other younger members of the George-Kreis.

On 24 August 1933 Stefan George took a ferry across the Lake to Heiden, Switzerland.

That same month Stefan George declared that both his way of life and his friendships were sufficient proof of his tolerance and indifference to all religions.

Claus von Stauffenberg organized the wake in accordance with the customs of the Italian-speaking Canton of Ticino and the Stefan George-Kreis kept constant vigil at the Minusio cemetery chapel until the morning of 6 December 1933.

Twenty-five members of the Stefan George-Kreis, including Jewish members Ernst Morwitz and Karl Wolfskehl, attended the funeral.

Stefan George's poetry is characterized by an aristocratic ethos; his verse is formal in style, lyrical in tone, and often arcane in language, being influenced by Greek classical forms.

Algabal is one of Stefan George's best remembered collections of poetry, if one of his strangest; the title is a reference to the effete Roman emperor Elagabalus.

Stefan George was an important translator; he translated Dante, Shakespeare and Baudelaire into German.

Stefan George rejected all attempts to use it for mundane political purposes, including those of Nazism.

Stefan George's poetry emphasized self-sacrifice, heroism, and power, which won him the approval of the National Socialists.

Stefan George was fond of his Jewish disciples, but he expressed reservations about their ever becoming a majority in the group.

Stefan George's poetry was a major influence upon the 20th-century classical music composed by the Second Viennese School, particularly during their Expressionist period.