My Title Indicates a concern to offer some kind of counterweight to the sociological, historical and biographical considerations with which this volume is largely concerned. At the start of her magisterial work on the George Circle, Carola Groppe noted: “Seit den achtziger Jahren ist das Interesse an George und vor allem an seinem Kreis wieder gestiegen … Georges Lyrik wird weniger wichtig, entscheidend werden sozial- und kulturhistorische Fragestellungen; das Interesse reicht zudem weit über die Fachgrenze der Germanistik hinaus.”

This tendency has notably increased since the publication of her book, as is reflected in publications concerning the scholarly works that arose from the George Circle, or investigating its attitude towards the Jews or towards das schöne Leben; of all the space devoted to considerations of George’s works from Der Siebente Ring (1907) onwards, and his influence during that period, less than half has been concerned with his poetry.

George’s poetry is certainly still referred to, but the quotation of brief excerpts is often designed to bolster one-sided argument; even when it receives more coverage, as in the published lectures by Manfred Frank, the discussion of the poems is clearly merely ancillary to the development of, in this case, an all-too-familiar set of arguments. Tendentious excerpting and strange interpretations take their place in Frank’s work alongside judgments that may cause mild surprise in some readers, such as the characterization of “Rudolf” Boehringer as a “wahrer Fanatiker des Irrationalen.”

Of particular interest, no doubt inevitably, has been the continuing thorny question of Stefan George’s relations to National Socialism: gone are the days when a judgment from Heinrich Böll: “Ich las Stefan George, den ich keinen Augenblick lang für einen Nazi hielt,” or a firm scholarly conclusion such as “Sowenig wie Nietzsche war George ein Vorläufer des Nationalsozialismus,” could stem the tide of contrary argument. Currently, it seems, historical hindsight, and especially perspectives unavoidably shaped by the Holocaust, can hamper access to the actual historical context of concepts and ideas; at the same time, it seems problematic to place a text back into its historical context and then judge it by the standards of a quite different historical era — namely, our own.