Life
THE E’ER INSCRUTABLE | The Weeping Meister: Stefan George and the Death of Maximilien Kronberger
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By GRIFFIN SMITH-NICHOLS
In a photo dated 1904, the German poet, translator par excellence of Shakespeare and Baudelaire and consummate “aesthetic fundamentalist” Stefan George poses with glowering magnetism in the midst of a spindly crop of German youths, as he was wont to do. This was an early incarnation of the later-dubbed “George-Kreis,” an inner circle of Philhellenists, Renaissance men and introspective esthetes which included the von Stauffenberg brothers, the future would-be assassins of Hitler and which fascinated and perplexed some of the highest names in German literature: Rilke, Thomas Mann and others all met (and occasionally sparred) with George and his acolytes. Like the central figure of a latter-day Pythagorean cult, obsessed with Hellenic and medieval pageantry, George dons a flowing, laurel-wreathed Dante costume; a fellow Kreis-member dressed as Homer stands beside him, and George himself has his arm wrapped tenderly about the shoulders of a pale-cheeked, milky-eyed youth in the garb of a Florentine squire, his hands gripped nervously at his hips. He was an unsuspecting München youth named Maximilian Kronberger, and he would die of meningitis a mere few months later. George was crushed; one passage from the Lieder included in Der Siebente Ring, published in 1907, reads:
“Nun muss ich gar
Um dein aug und haar
Alle tage
Im sehnen leben.”
George had first caught sight of Maximilian in 1902, and swiftly wormed a place for himself in the then 13-year-old boy’s family life.