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COPYRIGHT 2004 Modern Humanities Research Association
Secret Germany: Stefan George and his Circle. By ROBERT E. NORTON. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2002. xvii+847 pp. $49.95. ISBN 0-8014-3354-1 (hbk).
'Biografische Daten uber George', Friedrich Gundolf once wrote, 'gibt es wenig.' Despite this putative lack of information, Robert E. Norton has written a massive book, which can rightly claim to be the longest biography of Stefan George; and, if not the first full biography to appear in any language, as the dust jacket claims, then the first biography by someone who is outside the George-Kreis. But why should it have taken nearly seventy years for such a biography to be written? The answer is tied up with the fate of George's poetry, and the history of its reception.
As the title suggests, the notion of a geheimes Deutschland, and hence the interface of the aesthetic and the political, governs Norton's account. Even George's earliest texts, such as the Symbolist-inspired works collected in Hymnen (1890), are said to show that 'art and poetry in particular' soon became for him 'the absolute means of exerting mastery over himself and the world' (p. 83).But Norton identifies in 1893 a major shift in George's presentation of himself as poet: away from the Parisian world of French Symbolism, to a programmatic commitment to the German language and, beyond that, to Germany as...
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