This poem forms the central piece of George’s last volume, Das neue Reich (The Kingdom Come, 1928), and combines the poet’s central themes: autobiographical recollection, a fierce critique of modern society, the invocation of poetic ancestors and heroes, allusions to World War I, and commonalities between Germany’s potential and ancient Greece.

The poem also brings together the forms to which George was most dedicated: hymns, dramatic voices, and epigrammatic lines addressed to friends (so-called Sprüche).

The initial invocation is addressed not to the Muses but to the abyss. Confronting the most extreme form of negation permits the poet to see how modern man is trapped in a greedy and shameless lifestyle, oblivious to any determining force in his life. This confrontation opens up a “new sphere” granted by the gods as an alternative to a world of systems and norms, of speed and distraction.

The poet, upon his return home from the Mediterranean coast, finds this sphere embodied in seven figures who represent experiences or encounters that transcend everyday routine. Six of the seven figures can be identified as friends or former friends of George. Each of the six friends was in a certain way an outsider, and so was the seventh (who appears first), the archaeologist Hans von Prott, who in 1903 committed suicide in Greece.

The hymn concludes with the warning that what society at present values most will vanish, and any hope for imminent renewal is shown to be vain.

Geheimes Deutschland reflects George’s (and modernity’s) discovery of German lyric poet Friedrich Hölderlin’s late hymns. Hölderlin’s influence on George is fundamental but deliberately obscured. George’s lines about the disappearance of gods and their possible return, however cautiously framed, were considered dangerously ambivalent in the 1920s.

Its trocheo-dactylic meter places the poem neatly within the classical tradition. The language is deliberately difficult (with its elision of prefixes, sometimes ambiguous grammatical structures, rare diction, and absolute metaphors), but its difficulty emphasizes the poem’s distance from everyday life and is designed to make the reader reflect on his or her own life.

The title has been taken to be synonymous with the circle of George’s friends, but there are crucial differences, such as the fact that George’s circle was never kept secret.

Bibliography
George, Stefan. The Works of Stefan George. Rendered into English by Olga Marx and Ernst Morwitz. 2d rev. and enlarged ed. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1974, 371–374.

Categories: German Literature, Literature, World Literature

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