Stefan George (1868–1933) is one of the three pre-eminent German poets of his time. Together with Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Rainer Maria Rilke, he initiated the revival of German poetry at the turn of the century and put an end to the “Sing-Sang Mode” of post-Romantic German poetry (Glöckner 81) written by poets such as Friedrich Bodenstedt (1819–1892), Adolf von Schack (1815–1894), Paul Heyse (1830–1914), and Emanuel Geibel (1815–1884), poets who were popular at the time, though they are now mostly forgotten. At age twenty-two, Rilke referred to George as “Meister Stephan [sic] George” (Zeittafel 74). Hofmannsthal was a lifelong admirer of George's poetic achievements; in a 1903 note he called him “der große Dichter unserer Zeit” (Sämtliche Werke 31: 235). Neither the personal and artistic differences between Hofmannsthal and George, nor the rupture of their relations in 1906 diminished in any way Hofmannsthal's high regard for the “Größe seines Werkes [. . .] die Einzigkeit seines Schöpferischen u. Prophetischen in der Sprache” (Hofmannsthal/Pannwitz 22).

George played an equally important, albeit controversial and provocative role in German cultural and political history. Although George is often linked with the l'art pour l'art movement, and although his artistic consciousness and the poetry he wrote in the 1890s bear the imprint of European aestheticism, his post turn-of-the-century poetry and the writings that emerged from the poets and intellectuals he gathered around him in the George-Kreis constitute above all a scathing commentary on the political, social, and cultural situation in Wilhelmine Germany. In the decades immediately following the Second World War his memory was kept alive primarily by memoirs and reminiscences of those who had joined his circle and by the journal Castrum Peregrini (Encampment in Exile) founded in 1951 by German emigrants in the Netherlands. For reasons I will discuss below, the general public as well as much of the literary and scholarly establishment in Germany did not and could not approach George with the same impartiality as it did other writers who had achieved fame before the Second World War. Criticism centering on the aesthetic aspects of George's works rather than on his person or his works in relation to political events in Germany before and after 1933 was primarily the work of non-German scholars such as Claude David.