By the time Stefan George was thirty years old, his plans for the second major phase of his life had fully crystallized: he was to confront his age with a poetic work of singular beauty, dignity and greatness, and he was to be the spiritual leader of a carefully prepared group of disciples who would form the vanguard in a fundamental renascence of German culture. George's opposition to all aspects of modern life was radical and unremitting, no matter how stylized and ambivalently non-specific the terms and metaphors of his invectives may sound. His contempt for Wilhelmine society in particular was aroused most vehemently by the perception that the inexorable domination of capitalist materialism over every facet of the social and the private world had leveled, if not forever destroyed, all traditional bonds and values. Dignity and individuality, for example, as the right of a unique person to subjective autonomy — the educational ideal of Weimar Classicism and the social goal of bourgeois humanism — had succumbed to the necessity of disguising the self behind so many roles, personae, or assumed identities. It is obvious that the terms of George's social criticism do not express original thinking. Rather, they derive their animus from a keen familiarity with some of the most advanced positions in contemporary intellectual debates. But his philippics against the spirit of his age also were not meant to be singled out as a separate segment of an oeuvre that otherwise eschews partisanship and shuns the open market place of ideas. George never wavered in his conviction that his art would retain its aesthetic autonomy, even as its commercial availability, since 1899 in the public editions of the Georg Bondi Verlag, made it also a shrewdly marketed commodity. If anything, his books, for some ten years lavishly decorated with the Jugendstil designs of Melchior Lechter, signaled their status as an art of extraordinary beauty, as a poetic Gesamtkunstwerk. Its purpose was to announce a new vision of life, “das schöne leben,” and to proclaim, progressively, the exclusive terms under which this visionary perception could be transformed into human reality and ultimately become a force with societal relevance.