New Left Review 18, November-December 2002
DAVID FERNBACH
PROPHET-PARIAH
The verdict Walter Benjamin delivered on Stefan George, a few months after the Nazis seized power and shortly before the poet died, still stands as his most appropriate epitaph: ‘If ever God punished a prophet by fulfilling his prophecy, then that is the case with George.’ From his beginnings under the aegis of French symbolism—Hymnen was published in 1890, when he was twenty-two—the poet had graduated to prophet well before the Great War; and in its aftermath George’s call for a messianic leader who would redeem Germany was increasingly translated by the thousands of young men who hung on his words into support for Hitler. His publications had pioneered the swastika motif, albeit in a cursive form, and his last work in 1928 was titled Das neue Reich.
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