Contested Legacies of “German” Friendship:

Max Kommerell’s The Poet as Leader in

German Classicism

Elke Siegel

There is a notable tension in the George and Rilke seminar. . . .

All of this affects my dream life in rather adverse ways; every
time I was nasty in the seminar, I tremble that the old demon
castigates me for this in a dream, and the fear is not always
unfounded.
—Max Kommerell to Hedwig Kerber-Carossa, 19431

Robert E. Norton, in his magisterial Secret Germany: Stefan George and

His Circle, calls the literary scholar and Germanist Max Kommerell
(1902–1944) “arguably the most original philosophical literary critic who
wrote in German during the twentieth century—second only, perhaps, to
Walter Benjamin.”2 For Giorgio Agamben, Kommerell was “certainly
the greatest German critic of the twentieth century after Benjamin, and
perhaps the last great personality between the wars who still remains to
be discovered.”3 There has emerged something of a consensus that Kom-
merell—particularly the Kommerell who wrote, after 1933, major studies
on Jean Paul, Schiller, Lessing and Aristotle, Goethe, Hölderlin, Kleist,

1. Max Kommerell, Briefe und Aufzeichnungen 1919–1944, ed. Inge Jens (Olten/
Freiburg im Breisgau: Walter, 1967), p. 415. All translations are mine.
2.  Robert E. Norton, Secret Germany: Stefan George and His Circle (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell UP, 2002), p. 627.
3. Giorgio Agamben, “Kommerell, or On Gesture,” in Potentialities: Collected
Essays in Philosophy, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1999),
pp. 77–85; here, p. 77. See Anthony Curtis Adler, “The Intermedial Gesture: Agamben and
Kommerell,” Angelaki 12, no. 3 (2007): 57–64.

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doi:10.3817/0916176077
www.telospress.com
78    ELKE SIEGEL

Cervantes, Calderón, and the Genji monogatari—might be the most bril-

liant German-speaking literary critic of the twentieth century, next to or
after Walter Benjamin.4
Yet the recognition of Kommerell calls for some reluctance. The jux-
taposition of Kommerell and Benjamin—two figures at opposite ends of
the political spectrum and with absolutely incomparable positions under
National Socialism—gives as much weight to the acknowledgment of
Kommerell’s abilities as a reader as it points to ambiguities.5 Benjamin
respected Kommerell’s brilliant critical sensibilities, which were in some
respects akin to his own and yet allowed for a radically different political
position: Kommerell was, after all, part of a “Germany,” secret or not, that
was responsible for Benjamin’s ultimate demise.
Kommerell had harbored early sympathies for the Nazi movement
and remained silent even after he distanced himself from National Social-
ist politics and the gleichgeschaltete Germanistik around 1933–34.6 Thus,
in a letter from 1932, Kommerell nonchalantly pondered that a recent
visit of a Nazi mob to Frankfurt University might have been direct-
ed at the departments of sociology and philosophy, which he described
as “hotbeds of Marxist microbes [Mikroben],”7 and about Adorno he
reportedly said that “one should put men like him up against the wall.”8

4.  Recent critical work on Kommerell as a scholar and critic includes Paul Fleming,
“The Crisis of Art: Max Kommerell and Jean Paul’s Gestures,” MLN 115, no. 3 (2000):
519–43; Walter Busch and Gerhart Pickerodt, eds., Max Kommerell: Leben, Werk, Aktuali-
tät (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2003); Matthias Weichelt, Gewaltsame Horizontbildungen: Max
Kommerells lyriktheoretischer Ansatz und die Krisen der Moderne (Heidelberg: Winter,
2006).
5. Regarding Kommerell’s work and life, see Christian Weber, Max Kommerell:
Eine intellektuelle Biographie (Berlin/New York: De Gruyter, 2011); Arthur Henkel, “Max
Kommerell (1902–1944),” in Hans-Joachim Zimmermann, ed., Die Wirkung Stefan Geor-
ges auf die Wissenschaft: Ein Symposium (Heidelberg: Winter, 1985), pp. 51–59; Gert
Mattenklott, “Max Kommerell: Versuch eines Porträts,” Merkur 40, no. 7 (July 1986):
541–54; and Joachim W. Storck, ed., Max Kommerell, 1902–1944 (Marbach: Deutsche
Schillergesellschaft, 1985).
6.  The fact that Kommerell joined the NSDAP late, in 1939, was probably at that
point due to career considerations and not a sign of support for Nazi ideology (see Weber,
Max Kommerell, pp. 4f.).
7.  See Kommerell’s letter to Andreas Heusler from July 10, 1932 (Kommerell, Briefe
und Aufzeichnungen, p. 26f.).
8.  Letter from Adorno to Benjamin, November 6, 1934, in Theodor W. Adorno and
Walter Benjamin, Briefwechsel 1928–1940, ed. Henri Lonitz (Frankfurt am Main: Suhr­
kamp, 1994), p. 73.
 CONTESTED LEGACIES OF “GERMAN” FRIENDSHIP   79

Adorno related this horrendous statement in a letter to Benjamin in order

to emphasize how hurt he felt by his friend’s engagement of Kommerell’s
work through published reviews.9 Nevertheless Benjamin did deem it
necessary to react to Kommerell’s work, to acknowledge the traces of
“a German conservatism worth its salt,” and to navigate the similari-
ties and differences of their methods.10 And it might just be Benjamin’s
ambivalent yet open recognition of Kommerell’s work that put Komme-
rell on the map—and put him on the map as a questionable figure, and
as a figure worthy of questions, precisely for political reasons. Moral
judgments, as Rainer Nägele has convincingly argued, will not answer
these questions.11
Kommerell was a figure with “Protean adaptability and changeabil-
ity,” as René Wellek writes,12 wearing at different times the hats of scholar
of German literature, of world literature, of poet, and of translator. Having
received his doctorate in 1924 with a dissertation on Jean Paul and Rous-
seau, Kommerell set aside his academic work for six years, during which
time he traveled with Stefan George, whom he had met in 1921–22 and
from whom he had received, as was the custom in the circle, the nick-
names “Puck,” the smallest (“das Kleinste”), and Maxim. Kommerell
served as George’s secretary, amanuensis, and companion, and together
with his close friend Johann Anton formed the inner circle of the George
Circle. For reasons that are not wholly clear—though Friedrich Wolters’s
hagiographic history of the George Circle, published in 1930, played a

9.  In a letter to Francis Charles Golffing from January 4, 1968, Adorno writes that
he had considered Kommerell, who received his habilitation in Frankfurt around the same
time as himself, a “highly talented fascist,” and that he never quite understood the “admira-
tion of the enemy” (Feindesbewunderung) that he saw expressed in Benjamin’s reviews of
Kommerell’s Der Dichter als Führer in 1930 and of Jean Paul in 1934. See Paul Fleming,
“Forgetting – Faust: Adorno and Kommerell,” in David Cunningham and Nigel Mapp,
eds., Adorno and Literature (London: Continuum, 2006), pp. 133–44.
10.  Walter Benjamin, “Against a Masterpiece,” in Selected Writings, Vol. 2: 1927–
1934, trans. Rodney Livingstone et al., ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary
Smith (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1999), pp. 378–85; here, p. 378.
11.  Rainer Nägele, “Vexierbild einer kritischen Konstellation: Walter Benjamin und
Max Kommerell,” in Busch and Pickerodt, Max Kommerell: Leben, Werk, Aktualität,
pp. 349–67; here, pp. 365f.)
12.  René Wellek, “Max Kommerell as Critic of Literature,” in Beda Allemann and
Erwin Koppen, eds., Teilnahme und Spiegelung: Festschrift für Horst Rüdiger (Berlin: De
Gruyter, 1975), pp. 485–98; here, p. 488.
80    ELKE SIEGEL

major role in this13—Kommerell gradually withdrew from the circle over

the course of about two years.14
The burning of bridges to his past with George could not have been
performed more decisively: George held that “No path leads from him to
academia [Wissenschaft],” and Kommerell started to write a habilitation.
To make his act of emancipation even clearer, he invited George to his
inaugural speech at Frankfurt University in November 1930—on Hugo
von Hofmannsthal, of all people, who had refused a more intimate relation-
ship with George. And as if this were not enough, Kommerell got engaged,
violating the homosocial pact ruling the George state. In a sketch of a letter
to George in 1931 announcing this engagement, he wrote: “May the Meis-
ter see in this not a concession to ordinariness but a beautiful thought of
life [Lebensgedanke].”15 To add yet another layer to Kommerell’s struggle
for autonomy, he wanted to have his poetry published by George’s house
press, Bondi, with George’s help and approval. To this, his friend Anton—
who during this phase of estrangement was dangerously caught between
his friend Kommerell and the Meister George, whom he would never
betray—answered in November 1930: “[T]he State is more than an audit-
ing agency for good poems. You should have noticed that the confrontation
with the Meister is a wholly different litmus test than the manufacturing
of verses! Sans cela—you become a littérateur [Litterat]—which I don’t
wish for you, my dearest and nearest.”16
Not only did Kommerell remain a poet and publish literary works,
but he taught as Privatdozent for many years—another aspect of his life
that Anton, who was fighting for Kommerell’s friendship from within the
circle, had projected as a ridiculous future in the same letter: “In a couple
of years something can (it doesn’t have to) happen in the State without
you—which will make you into a harmless scholar à part.”17 Kommerell
did become a regular professor at the University of Marburg in 1941. But
although he secured a position in Germanic Philology, he remained an
outsider in the field. On June 7, 1944, briefly before his death, he wrote

13.  Kommerell, Briefe und Aufzeichnungen, pp. 182–88.

14.  For a discussion of Kommerell’s withdrawal from George, see Weber, Max Kom-
merell, pp. 59ff.; Norton, Secret Germany, pp. 709ff.; Thomas Karlauf, Stefan George:
Die Entdeckung des Charisma (Munich: Blessing, 2007), pp. 588ff.; Raulff, Kreis ohne
Meister: Stefan Georges Nachleben (Munich: Beck, 2009), pp. 58ff.
15.  Kommerell, Briefe und Aufzeichnungen, p. 224.
16.  Ibid., p. 199.
17.  Ibid., pp. 198f.
 CONTESTED LEGACIES OF “GERMAN” FRIENDSHIP   81

to Rudolf Bultmann: “My colleagues in the field see in me their natural

mortal enemy, and rightfully so.”18 Thus we have a Germanist who is not
really a Germanist as soon as he is in academia, and a literary critic who
during his time away from academia, in close proximity to George, pro-
duced what looks like a literary history of German Classicism but which
is neither a text for academic qualification (e.g., a dissertation) nor liter-
ary history in the strict sense: The Poet as Leader in German Classicism
(Der Dichter als Führer in der deutschen Klassik, 1928). Nor is it the
book in which Kommerell, who is revered by some today, shines most: the
“nationalist stamping”19 is so loud in this book that it drowns out moments
of great insight and detailed reading.
Kommerell worked on The Poet as Leader in close proximity to
George, and the book was published by Bondi, clearly branded as product
of the “George Circle.”20 His was one of three books to celebrate the year
of George’s sixtieth birthday, the other two being Ernst Kantorowicz’s
Frederick the Second (Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite, 1927) and George’s
own last book of poetry, The New Reich (Das neue Reich, 1928). As one
of the so-called Geistbücher (“spirit books”) coming out of the circle,
Kommerell’s The Poet as Leader is not a work written for academic quali-
fication, although it does want to intervene in the discourse on and official
use of literature, particularly regarding so-called Classicism with Goethe
at the center.21 George’s claim that these “spirit books” are “politics” is

18.  Ibid., p. 450. See also his letter to Hans-Georg Gadamer from February 28, 1940
(ibid., p. 33). Kommerell did not found a school, and he wrote about texts in an essayistic
style that could not be imitated by students; he did have a few students, though, who later
made a name for themselves, like Arthur Henkel and Dorothea Hölscher-Lohmeyer. For
the reception of the George Circle in the discipline of Germanistik, see Mario Zanucchi,
“Wissenschaftliche Rezeption: Germanistik,” in Achim Aurnhammer et al., eds., Stefan
George und sein Kreis: Ein Handbuch, 3 vols. (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2012), 2:1073–
83. See also Klaus Weimar, “Sozialverhalten in literaturwissenschaftlichen Texten: Max
Kommerells ‘Der Dichter als Führer in der deutschen Klassik’ als Beispiel,” in Lutz Dan-
neberg and Jürg Niederhauser, eds., Darstellungsformen der Wissenschaften im Kontrast:
Aspekte der Methodik, Theorie und Empirie (Tübingen: Narr, 1998), pp. 493–508.
19.  Nägele, “Vexierbild einer kritischen Konstellation,” p. 367. Regarding Komme­
rell’s relation to the German nation, see, for example, his letter to Joachim Sanner of
May 30, 1932 (Kommerell, Briefe und Aufzeichnungen, p. 232).
20.  For a synthesis and contextualization of this monograph, see Norton, Secret Ger-
many, pp. 671ff.
21. For further explanation of the term “Geistbuch,” see Jürgen Egyptien, “Die
‘Kreise,’” in Aurnhammer et al., Stefan George und sein Kreis, 1:365–407; here, pp. 392f.
82    ELKE SIEGEL

well known,22 and Kommerell certainly must have at least subjected his
work to this claim until, at the time of his separation from George, he
decidedly wanted to reject this assertion by the Meister. In a letter to Anton
on December 7, 1930, Kommerell, trying to affirm his autonomy at this
point, writes: “I have nothing to do with that.”23
It is, of course, not that simple to opt out of the political status of one’s
work.24 Nobody has pointed more precisely to the stakes of Kommerell’s
grand legend of German Classicism, as it is put forward in The Poet as
Leader, than Benjamin in his famous review of Kommerell’s book, enti-
tled “Against a Masterpiece” (“Wider ein Meisterwerk,” 1930):

[W]ith a radicalism unattained by any of its predecessors in the George

circle, this book constructs an esoteric history of German literature. Only
the profanum vulgus will see this as literary history at all; in reality, it is
a salvation history of the Germans.25

The double entendre of “Masterpiece” is certainly intended: Kommerell’s

book is a masterly literary study, and it is on the other hand just another
piece for the Master, who supposedly incarnates the poet as seer and leader.
The history told by Kommerell is a history of encounters and rela-
tions, of friendships and enmities. Indeed, one is tempted to give the book
the second title “The Poet as Friend in German Classicism.” The so-called
“cult of friendship” between roughly 1750 and 1850 is well known in
German literary history, raising the question of the role of friendship in a
network of production, reception, and distribution. This friendship is made
up of texts, tears, and emotions, and is often considered the only form of
expression open to the emerging middle class in the absence of a devel-
oped public culture.26 Friendship, thus, in a German context, oscillates

22.  See Norton, Secret Germany, p. 650.

23.  Kommerell, Briefe und Aufzeichnungen, p. 197.
24.  And this does not start or even end with the use of the word “Führer” in the title
of the book. George himself did not really approve of the choice; see the excerpt of a letter
from George to Kommerell from January 1929 in Storck, Max Kommerell, 1902–1944,
p. 16.
25.  Benjamin, “Against a Masterpiece,” p. 379. See Norton, Secret Germany, pp. 673f.
26. For a discussion of friendship in German cultural history and literature, see:
Angelika Beck, “Der Bund ist ewig”: Zur Physiognomie einer Lebensform im 18. Jahrhun-
dert (Erlangen: Palm & Enke, 1982); Rachel Anne Freudenburg, “Fictions of Friendship
in Twentieth-Century German Literature: Mann’s Doktor Faustus, Grass’s Katz und Maus,
Bernhard’s Der Untergeher and Wittgensteins Neffe, and Wolf’s Nachdenken über Christa
 CONTESTED LEGACIES OF “GERMAN” FRIENDSHIP   83

between the apolitical and the hyperpolitical, between the poetic and the
prosaic, between society and community. In other words, it is a highly
charged construct whose ideological adaptability became fully evident
in political-intellectual battles of the 1920s and 1930s. Whatever story
one wanted to tell about “Germanness,” about German literary history,
about the German middle class and its values or lack thereof, the story
and construct of society versus community (F. Tönnies) was to a large
degree played out in the semantics of “friendship.” It is the fault lines of
this struggle for a politically mobilizing narrative that I want to outline in
the following, juxtaposing Kommerell’s work with Wolfdietrich Rasch’s
The Cult of Friendship and Friendship Writings in Eighteenth-Century
German Literature (Freundschaftskult und Freundschaftsdichtung im
deutschen Schrifttum des 18. Jahrhunderts, 1936) and Walter Benjamin’s
German Men and Women (Deutsche Menschen, 1936).

The German Poet as Leader

In the preface to Kommerell’s monograph, it becomes clear that the expres-
sion “Poet as Leader” (Dichter als Führer) designates the methodology
and aim of the book. The six poets that Kommerell gathers are the para-
digmatic figures of Classicism, not only because of their literary works
but also because of the specific, inseparable relation between literature
and life that their names come to represent. These poets were, Kommerell
explains, “wirkende”—acting, affecting, effective—persons, and thus they
functioned as models, “Vorbilder,” of a community.27 Kommerell concedes

T.” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1995), pp. 69–87; Eckhardt Meyer-Krentler, “Freund-
schaft im 18. Jahrhundert: Zur Einführung in die Forschungsdiskussion,” in Wolfram
Mauser and Barbara Becker-Cantarino, eds., Frauenfreundschaft–Männerfreundschaft:
Literarische Diskurse im 18. Jahrhundert (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1991), pp. 1–22; Gerhard
Richter, ed., Literary Paternity, Literary Friendship: Essays in Honor of Stanley Corngold
(Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2002); Simon Richter, “The Ins and Outs
of Intimacy: Gender, Epistolary Culture, and the Public Sphere,” German Quarterly 69,
no. 2 (1996): 111–24. I want to especially draw attention to Albert Salomon’s dissertation,
submitted in 1921 at the University of Heidelberg, since his study represents an early,
differentiated, and exceptionally sober—maybe therefore overlooked—investigation into
“German friendship” contemporaneously with Kommerell: Albert Salomon, “Der Freund-
schaftskult des 18. Jahrhunderts in Deutschland: Versuch zur Soziologie einer Lebensform
[1921],” Zeitschrift für Soziologie 8, no. 3 (1979): 279–308.
27. Max Kommerell, Der Dichter als Führer in der deutschen Klassik: Klopstock,
Herder, Goethe, Schiller, Jean Paul, Hölderlin, 3rd ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Bondi, 1982):
p. 7. All translations from the text are mine.
84    ELKE SIEGEL

that, of course, the poets’ works will always be most important, but there
is the danger “of seeing in the writer [Dichter] the mere poet [den bloßen
Poëten].” Looking at the “mere poet,” however, one misses the “immense
German current of forces [Kräftestrom] of that time.” In other words, the
writer is a mere poet, a bare, naked poet, if his work is not understood as
intricately tied to the channeling, creation, or catalyzing of a community,
more precisely a German community in the absence of a German nation.
As Eberhard Lämmert has shown, the nineteenth-century German
bourgeoisie successfully installed the figure of the poet laureate (Dichter-
fürst) in order to integrate spirit and power or politics,28 creating a bourgeois
“cliché”29 of Weimar Classicism. When, one might ask, was the poet in
Germany ever a “mere poet” after that?30 In other words, what claim
does Kommerell really make here for the poet? The German bourgeoisie,
despised by George and his (national) conservative circle, certainly does
not have to be convinced that poets are more than poets, and Kommerell
certainly does not want to secure this inheritance for the poet, i.e., for
George.
Instead, the book is addressed to “today’s youth,” i.e., a small, highly
educated sliver of that youth,31 and, as Kommerell notes in passing, it
might also contribute something to literary history. To the young, because
of the installation of Classicism as national heritage in the nineteenth cen-
tury, literature from the Classic era appears “a bit dull and pale.”32 Wanting
to appeal to the important ideological contingent of the youth, Kommerell,
at the end of the preface, for a second time, invokes the “German current

28. Eberhard Lämmert, “Der Dichterfürst: Metamorphosen einer Metapher in

Deutschland,” in Ulrich Raulff, ed., Vom Künstlerstaat: Ästhetische und politische Utopien
(Munich: Hanser, 2006), pp. 144–85.
29.  Ernst Osterkamp, “Anna Amalias und Goethes Weimar,” in Raulff, Vom Künst-
lerstaat, pp. 42–59; here, p. 45.
30.  Regarding the moral role of the writer and the idea of the poet as seer and spiritual
leader of the nation, see Raulff, Kreis ohne Meister, pp. 256f.
31.  See the fierce debate between Erich Kleinschmidt and Dorothea Hölscher-
Lohmeyer in 1984 over the question what or whom Kommerell meant by “youth” (i.e.,
in the end, a controversy about the question of ideology), in: Erich Kleinschmidt, “Der
vereinnahmte Goethe: Irrwege im Umgang mit einem Klassiker 1932–1949,” Jahrbuch
der deutschen Schillergesellschaft 28 (1984): 461–82; Dorothea Hölscher-Lohmeyer, “Der
vereinnahmte Kommerell: Zu dem Aufsatz von Erich Kleinschmidt ‘Der vereinnahmte
Goethe,’” Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft 29 (1985): 536–38; and, in the same
publication, “Max Kommerell, der Lehrer,” pp. 558–71.
32.  Kommerell, Der Dichter als Führer, p. 7.
 CONTESTED LEGACIES OF “GERMAN” FRIENDSHIP   85

of forces” at work among and between the poets of Classicism, which he

will attempt to make visible. Kommerell certainly does succeed in bring-
ing the poets to life in his monograph. Thus Benjamin, in the previously
mentioned review, drily writes: “You become aware of just how at ease the
classical writers were on horseback.”33
What Kommerell uses as a hook is the role that poets have played not
in some sterile literary history, but in the creation of a German community.
And while Germans, proud inhabitants of the country of poets and think-
ers (Land der Dichter und Denker), might readily agree that poets are at
the heart of what “German” means, what would have to be proven is that
this is precisely not an apolitical or purely “cultural” matter, untainted,
as the middle class would prefer, by any questions of power or politics.
Friendship, forged by the poets, supposedly proves that the poets alone
single-handedly created the possibility for a German community, ex nihilo,
so to speak. For a narrative that operates typologically, Stefan George is,
of course, the one in whom what began back then is to be fulfilled now in
order to move into a “certain” German future.

At the Cradle of German Literature: Kommerell’s Klopstock

Over five chapters Kommerell’s monograph draws a line from Klopstock,
via Goethe, Schiller, and Jean Paul, to Hölderlin (with dispersed remarks
on Herder throughout), continuously relating literature, life, and commu-
nity. In the first chapter on Klopstock as the “Apprentice of the Greeks”
(Der Lehrling der Griechen), it becomes clear that the representation of
the “Poet as Leader”—i.e., as a hero in German history—is, in the absence
of a unified German nation, substantially tied to an invocation of friend-
ship, which becomes the name for that relationship in which the greatness
of the poet is enacted.34 Or rather: his greatness consists in calling forth a
community of friends. This narrative grows out of a particular mythologiz-
ing interpretation of German history mobilized by Kommerell:

That the pupil from Schulpforta suddenly was able to join the German
syllables to form such antique grand sounds, is one of the inexplicable
events as they occur only in our history: other people experience blos-
soming and disintegration in a uninterrupted progression following a

33.  Benjamin, “Against a Masterpiece,” p. 379.

34.  For an overview of the place of Klopstock in the “George canon,” see Erika Alma
Metzger, “Klopstock and the Stefan George Kreis” (master’s thesis, Cornell University,
1961), esp. pp. 72ff., for Kommerell’s chapters on Klopstock in Der Dichter als Führer.
86    ELKE SIEGEL

law [in gesetzlich undurchbrochener Abfolge] . . . we repeatedly received,

against all possibility and out of nothing, a creating [schaffender] will
and a new beginning.35

In comparison to the “normal history” of other peoples, the history of

the Germans or of Germanness (das Deutsche) forms an exception: the
particularity of German history is its lack of a linear history. There is no
tradition; there are only new beginnings. Such a “history,” then, can only
be narrated in the form of moments and deeds of great individuals, who,
without tradition and community, have to create these always anew, under
changing conditions. What remains stable is the phantasma of the kinship
between Greeks and the Germans.
The model for the poet as leader is, as Kommerell explicates in the
preface, the Greek poet. He was the “voice of the community,” rooted
in “history and the matter of the soul [Seelenstoff] of the people.”36 The
problem that German Classicism had to solve, though, was precisely the
essential untetheredness (Ungebundenheit) of the poet’s voice. This is
why genius in language and expression required, as a supplement, another
necessary gift, the “drive” to create or find a community of friends:

Equal to Klopstock’s poetic achievement is another: he instinctively

[triebmäßig] discovered the only sphere of activity that allowed for the
creation of a substitute for the lacking maturity of the people [völkische
Reife]: the circle of friends. This was . . . his state concentrated into the
poetic circle. Without this ground in life [Lebensgrund], as small as this
sliver was, the new song would have been idle play.
Antiquity and friendship stand at the cradle of German literature as
the eternal and the present, from whose encounter emerges the miracle.37

Friendship, the circle of friends, might offer merely the most narrow
ground in life, but it offers a “grounding,” where otherwise, as Komme-
rell claims, the poet would have no relation to anything beyond himself
and his words would carry no weight beyond “idle play.” Friendship thus
grounds literature in life, but it serves merely as a surrogate for what is
posited as the actually necessary “ground”: the community of a mature
“Volk”—not a culture, a society, or a nation, but a “Volk.”

35.  Kommerell, Der Dichter als Führer, p. 16.

36.  Ibid., p. 11.
37.  Ibid., p. 12.
 CONTESTED LEGACIES OF “GERMAN” FRIENDSHIP   87

According to Kommerell, Klopstock found this “surrogate” in the

group of writers called the “Bremer Beiträger,”38 a “clique of outdated
conduct,” that Klopstock transformed “into a friendship covenant [Freund-
schafsbund] . . . deeply excited by the new experience of language.”39 This,
for Kommerell, is the formula for the creation of a people:

Klopstock has experienced in the real covenant a higher one, has expe-
rienced the forces through which truly a Volk is created: the priesterly
profession of the poet, Hellas arising again in Germany and the love with
which the “few noble men” love each other.40

The younger Klopstock is a “leader,” Kommerell claims, because he under-

stood not only how “to write poetry but how to live poetically.”41 By
creating a new poetic language out of the encounter of German and Greek,
Klopstock provided the language and a model of life that set a precedent;
he offers, in Kommerell’s argument, proof for the claim that the poet is
able to give soul to a community, with friendship as the model community
of the poet.
For Kommerell, this community, which he regards as an unequal re-
lationship between a great poet and his poetically “mediocre” friends,
constitutes only a bare-bones version, which will have to be converted into
the heroic friendship of equals—i.e., that between Goethe and Schiller—
until Hölderlin emerges as the poet who is able to invoke a “fatherland”
from the position of solitude, without the mediation of a poetic communi-
ty.42 The story of the Germans as the history of poets forming communities,

38. Ibid., p. 15. “Bremer Beiträger” means literally “Bremen Contributors.” The

name stems from the journal that this group of writers published in the city of Bremen. For
an interpretation of these writers that gives them their due, see Christel Matthias Schröder,
Die “Bremer Beiträge”: Vorgeschichte und Geschichte einer deutschen Zeitschrift des
achtzehnten Jahrhunderts (Bremen: Schünemann, 1956).
39.  Kommerell, Der Dichter als Führer, p. 15.
40. Ibid., p. 23. The last line contains a quote from Klopstock’s poem “To My
Friends” (“Auf meine Freunde,” 1747): “That’s when I, friend, learnt, how the noble / How
the few noble loved each other” (“Da lernt ich, Freund, wie sich die Edlen / Wie sich die
wenigen Edlen liebten”).
41.  Ibid., p. 32. Kommerell distinguishes two versions of the “leader”: there are those
who are the “world will” (Weltwille), and there are those that the world will uses in order
to then drop them after they served their task (ibid., p. 30). In Kommerell’s argument, this
difference mirrors a distinction between the South (i.e., antiquity) and the North (see, e.g.,
ibid., p. 34). Klopstock falls in the latter category.
42.  Cf. ibid. p. 261.
88    ELKE SIEGEL

as told by Kommerell, thus is also the story of the refinement of friendship

and its sublation in Hölderlin’s fatherland.

Wolfdietrich Rasch’s Klopstock: Seed of a “Volk”

A brief, maybe all too brief, glance at the habilitation43 of the literary
historian Wolfdietrich Rasch44 proves helpful for situating Kommerell’s
argument and language in relation to the discourse of the academic dis-
cipline of Germanistik in the 1930s. Entitled The Cult of Friendship and
Friendship-Writings in Eighteenth Century German Literature (Freund-
schaftskult und Freundschaftsdichtung im deutschen Schrifttum des
18. Jahrhunderts, 1936) and to this day considered a standard work on
friendship in German literature,45 Rasch’s book, written eight years after
Kommerell’s The Poet as Leader, provides, in terms of the covered mate-
rial, the prehistory of Kommerell’s Classicism. There are parts of Rasch’s
work that can stand the test of time: for example, his argument about
enlightenment, secularization, and Pietism leading to the emergence of
the secular individual in need of a particular type of relationship. But in
this monograph, the somewhat abstract “Volk” of Kommerell’s national
conservatism has been transformed into the “völkisch” of racial ideology,
and the overall historical construction ultimately disqualifies this study as
a scholarly work.
Rasch does mention Kommerell’s monograph in a footnote,46 but one
certainly cannot blame Kommerell for the rampant racial ideology in
Rasch’s book.47 Rather, one has to mention one of Rasch’s teachers, Julius

43.  Post-doctoral work submitted for the highest academic degree, which is the pre-
requisite for a permanent academic position.
44.  For an overview of Rasch’s work and career, including the temporary suspension
from his post at the University of Würzburg after 1945, see Christian Begemann, “Zur
Erinnerung an Wolfdietrich Rasch (1903–1986),” Musil-Forum 13/14 (1987/88): 293–98.
For Begemann, it is Rasch’s 1938 study on Herder, even more than the book on friendship,
that exhibits all symptoms of NS ideology (ibid., pp. 295f.).
45.  Wolfdietrich Rasch, Freundschaftskult und Freundschaftsdichtung im deutschen
Schrifttum des 18. Jahrhunderts: Vom Ausgang des Barock bis zu Klopstock (Halle: Nie-
meyer, 1936). For a rereading of this study from today’s perspective, see Wolfgang Adam,
“Wieder Gelesen: Wolfdietrich Rasch: Freundschaftskult und Freundschaftsdichtung im
deutschen Schrifttum des 18. Jahrhunderts,” Goethezeitportal, October 25, 2004, http://
www.goethezeitportal.de/db/wiss/epoche/adam_rasch.pdf.
46. Rasch, Freundschaftskult, p. 257. All translations from this text are mine.
47.  In fact, one can clearly mark the difference between Kommerell’s and Rasch’s
interpretations and mobilizations of Klopstock by looking at one specific Klopstock poem:
 CONTESTED LEGACIES OF “GERMAN” FRIENDSHIP   89

Petersen, who played an active part in the Gleichschaltung of Germanistik

as a discipline. To give just one example of the kind of value judgments
and tendentious connections of past and present that pervade the book: the
individualism of the beginning eighteenth century constitutes for Rasch a
crisis of the

völkisch existence that has been a long time coming, a crisis in which
recovery already announces itself, in which the restoration of the reality
of the Volk starts to ready itself—even if this becoming of the Volk has
proceeded infinitely slowly and arduously, threatened by relapses over
and over again, and even if only today we experience its completion.48

German literary history and analysis is here performed in the service of

telling the history of the German Volk, which Rasch sees coming into its
own in 1936. And it is friendship—a certain kind of friendship, which is
decisively not rational and which, in the book’s narrative, lies at the heart
of an emerging bourgeois public sphere that has no interest in forming
a political, civic society—that Rasch wants to extract as the seed in the
eighteenth century for twentieth-century ethnic Germanness and its politi-
cal organization. Thus Rasch quotes, for example, from Nazi pedagogue
and philosopher Alfred Baeumler’s Male Covenant and Science (Männer-
bund und Wissenschaft, 1934): “Friendship as a form of life only prospers
in relation to the covenant [Bund] and the state. There is no friendship
without fatherland, but also no fatherland without friendship.”49 In other
words, there should be no individual and no individual or private friend-
ship. The friendship invoked here is the glue of a male community called
“fatherland.”

“To My Friends” (1747). Klopstock revised this poem twenty years later, replacing all
names of Greek antiquity with Germanic names. For Kommerell, only the earlier version
counts as a true poetic achievement, which lies in the poem’s elevation of friends in the
movement through “actually” experienced friendship. The willful recourse to a supposed
Germanic heritage by the “bard” Klopstock (i.e., not the apprentice of the Greeks) in the
later version, Kommerell writes, is “cold affectation” (Kommerell, Der Dichter als Führer,
p. 18). Rasch also sees in “To My Friends” the most valid expression of a new experience
of friendship and the “deed of foundation of the covenant in its elevated form” (Rasch,
Freundschaftskult, p. 246). But the Germanicizing transformation, Rasch claims, “wants to
posit the circle of friend in their appropriate space” by showing the connection of “friend-
ship with the fatherland, with the völkisch community” (ibid., p. 250).
48.  Ibid., p. 105.
49.  Ibid., p. 109.
90    ELKE SIEGEL

Benjamin finished his review of Kommerell’s book with a famous last

line, quoted above, which is as intricately argued as it is provocatively
formulated:

This land can become Germany once again only when it is purified, and
it cannot be purified in the name of Germany—let alone the “secret Ger-
many” that ultimately is nothing but the arsenal of official Germany, in
which the magic hood of invisibility hangs next to the helmet of steel.50

Regarding Benjamin’s use of the word “purification,” Eckart Goebel has

recently argued that Benjamin outdoes the George Circle in this review
precisely by invoking the circle’s primordial vocabulary of sacrifice.51
Benjamin thus proposes that what has to be sacrificed is the “paltry” pres-
ent, a “today” that the circle refuses to acknowledge.52 Only through the
sacrifice of the today in the course of critique of the present, Benjamin
argues, will one achieve the ability to really question the past. It is not the
“pure” word or poetry that will “purify” the world, but rather critique and
theory, renounced by the circle that wants to deny its Romantic heritage.53
What exists under the name “Germany,” in other words, is not Germany,
and if it has to be purified to become Germany again, then it cannot be
“purified” in the name of Germany.
Rejecting the work of such critique, the George Circle’s “secret Ger-
many” risks making available a stash of (linguistic, rhetorical) weapons
to the official Germany from which it supposedly wants to distance itself.
Using Benjamin’s image, one could claim that Kommerell’s book—though
his work since 1933 had changed substantially—would become eminently
usable as an arsenal for post-1933 Germanistik, even if Rasch only grants
Kommerell one footnote. These two books on German literature and its
relation to community, especially friendship, seem to go together like
“magic cloak” and “steel helmet.”

50.  Benjamin, “Against a Masterpiece,” p. 384. For a reading of this passage, see
Irving Wohlfarth, “Walter Benjamin’s ‘Secret Germany,’” in David Kettler and Gerhard
Lauer, eds., Exile, Science, and Bildung: The Contested Legacies of German Emigre Intel-
lectuals (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 27–45; here, pp. 32ff.
51.  Eckart Goebel, “Critique and Sacrifice: Benjamin–Kommerell,” trans. Jerome
Bolton, German Quarterly 87, no. 2 (Spring 2014): 151–70; here, pp. 167ff.
52.  Benjamin, “Against a Masterpiece,” p. 383.
53.  Ibid., p. 379. See Wohlfarth, “Walter Benjamin’s ‘Secret Germany,’” p. 36.
 CONTESTED LEGACIES OF “GERMAN” FRIENDSHIP   91

Learning to be a Friend: Kommerell and/as Schiller

Schiller was not a major figure in the canon of the George Circle. But who-
ever writes about Goethe and German Classicism cannot but acknowledge
the relation between Goethe and Schiller. Some scholars today suggest
that calling this relation “friendship” means falling prey to the nineteenth-
century bourgeois mythologization of the Weimar “dioscuri,” and that
it would be more accurate to call what they formed a “cartel of cultural
imperialism” or an “artistic production collective.”54 The legend of this
friendship—later manifested as a tenet of German national heritage in
Ernst Rietschel’s double statue of Goethe and Schiller (1857)—was pre-
ceded by a celebration of Schiller, the “poet of freedom,” as a national
treasure, before Goethe, after the conservative turn following the failed
revolution of 1848,55 assumed the place of the poet laureate with Schiller
as his “friend.”
It is therefore somewhat surprising that Kommerell’s extensive de-
piction of Schiller as pioneer and helper of Goethe not only forms the
center of his Schiller interpretation but also literally forms the center of
the book.56 Given the sheer number of pages dedicated to Schiller, one
wonders whose leadership weighs more heavily, or just how difficult
and unlikely was Schiller’s path to Goethe. Schiller’s leadership, for
Kommerell, makes possible Goethe’s leadership, culminating in On the
Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters (Über die ästhetische
Erziehung des Menschen, in einer Reihe von Briefen, 1795) and the idea of
an “Aesthetic State.”57 He dedicates enormous interpretive and narrative
54.  See, for example, Michael Böhler, “Die Freundschaft von Schiller und Goethe als
literatursoziologisches Paradigma,” IASL 5 (1980): 33–67, available online at http://iasl.
uni-muenchen.de/register/boehler2.htm.
55.  See Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Building a National Literature: The Case of Ger-
many 1830–1870, trans. Renate Baron Franciscono (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1989), esp.
pp. 179ff.
56.  Müller-Seidel comments on the connection of conspiracy and friendship in
Kommerell’s interpretation of Schiller’s dramas and points to the precarious political
dimension of this interpretation. In his later essays and lectures on Schiller (“Schiller
als Gestalter des handelnden Menschen,” 1934; “Schiller als Psychologe,” 1934–35),
Müller-Seidel argues, Kommerell changed his take on Schiller in the course of distancing
himself from National Socialism. See Walter Müller-Seidel, “Schiller im Verständnis Max
Kommerells: Nachtrag zum Thema ‘Klassiker in finsteren Zeiten,’” in Peter-André Alt et
al., eds., Prägnanter Moment: Studien zur deutschen Literatur und Klassik Festschrift für
Hans-Jürgen Schings (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2002), pp. 275–308.
57.  Kommerell, Der Dichter als Führer, p. 240. See Ulrich Raulff, “Der Traum vom
ästhetischen Staat und die Diktatur der Dichter,” in Vom Künstlerstaat, pp. 7–17.
92    ELKE SIEGEL

energy to exploring Schiller’s way to his telos, Goethe. This story of Schil-
ler, as told by Kommerell, is one of an ongoing battle between sensual
force and idea, a battle of Schiller against Schiller, of Schiller wrestling
his being from Kant’s ideas. To this end, Schiller had to first learn to be a
friend. Schiller’s path to Goethe appears as a path toward the recognition
of what friendship means. Or rather, it is a way toward cognition, specifi-
cally the recognition of the leader Goethe, through friendship.
To tell such a detailed story might be strategic, considering that Schil-
ler not only leads Goethe to Goethe’s leadership but, in Kommerell’s story,
also stands in for “us,” as it were; and the book is, after all, about leading
the reader on the path to Classicism and its rightful heir, George. But more
seems to be at stake here. It is in these chapters that Kommerell actually
dedicates substantial thought to friendship as a form of relation that is
more than a substitute for a not-yet-existing community of noble German
men. This exploration of friendship is intimately tied to the question of
conspiracy and rebellion against the state. And the question becomes,
which state—since the George Circle from within was sometimes called
Staat.58
As Kommerell observes, the conspiracies in Schiller’s early dramas,
The Robbers (Die Räuber, 1782) and Fiesco’s Conspiracy at Genoa (Die
Verschwörung des Fiesco zu Genua, 1783), are carried out by a “horde”
of men, united merely through their capacity for resistance. In these cases,
the means—a mob—does not suit the end: freedom. Starting with his work
on Don Carlos (1783–87), Kommerell argues, Schiller will dream up the
friend as co-conspirator, sensing that the bond of friendship between con-
spirators would ennoble the conspiracy.59 The trinity “friendship, idea,
deed,” Kommerell writes, “is held together in the word conspiracy.”60 The
forces of conspiracy, he continues, become condensed in friendship.61

58.  For the various self-designations of the “George Circle,” see Armin Schäfer, Die
Intensität der Form: Stefan Georges Lyrik (Cologne: Böhlau, 2006), pp. 261ff. See also
Niels Werber, “Der George-Staat,” http://www.soziale-insekten.fb3.uni-siegen.de/PDF/
George09.pdf.
59.  For a recent interpretation of Schiller’s Don Carlos with a focus on the question
of friendship, see Luzia Thiel, Freundschafts-Konzeptionen im späten 18. Jahrhundert:
Schillers ‘Don Karlos’ und Hölderlins ‘Hyperion’ (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann,
2004), esp. pp. 15ff.
60.  Kommerell, Der Dichter als Führer, p. 201.
61.  Or, as Osterkamp writes: “The poet . . . is leader, because he is a conspirator.” See
Ernst Osterkamp, Poesie der leeren Mitte (Munich: Hanser, 2010), p. 34.
 CONTESTED LEGACIES OF “GERMAN” FRIENDSHIP   93

In his encounter with the writer and lawyer Christian Gottfried Körner,
Schiller for the first time experiences friendship, an experience that leads
to the writing of the Philosophical Letters (Philosophische Briefe, 1786).
Here, Schiller (or, for Kommerell, the Kant in Schiller) transforms the
experience of friendship into an idea, thereby destroying it. Friendship is
turned into a mode of self-perfection through the friend, using up or appro-
priating the friend in the process.62 Schiller’s tendency to convert anything
into ideas leads, in the Philosophical Letters, to the “devouring of all that
is human in the realm of ideas. . . . Friendship . . . led to a state [Zustand]
where friendship was no longer needed.”63 As Kommerell sees it, this is
Schiller’s ungratefulness and monstrosity in human relationships.64 Schil-
ler was always attracted to the similar, “never to the opposite,”65 making
the other merely into another, better self.
A similar inaptitude regarding friendship can be observed in Schil-
ler’s arduous, long-lasting work on the already mentioned Don Carlos.
What starts as the drama of two reunited friends, the prince Don Carlos
and Marquis de Posa, who in their youth made plans to create an enlight-
ened state out of their enthusiastic friendship, becomes, in the process of
writing, something else, threatening the unity of the play and confusing
readers and spectators who kept searching for this unity in the friendship
theme. The drama’s shift away from the focus on the friendship after the
first three acts results, as Schiller will later explain in his Letters about
Don Carlos (Briefe über Don Karlos, 1788), from a change in the focus of
his interest regarding the main protagonists:66 from the youth Carlos, who

62.  Kommerell, Der Dichter als Führer, p. 211. What Kommerell does welcome in
Schiller’s Philosophical Letters, harking back to Winckelmann, is his insight that in a strict
sense there can be no Christian friendship, since the devotion to the friend threatens, in a
Christian worldview, always to fall back into the economy of expecting a reward in another
world, whereas true friendship should be beyond such an economy (ibid., pp. 206f.).
63.  Ibid., p. 226.
64.  Thus, for example, in a letter to Wilhelm Reinwald, on April 14, 1783, during his
work on Don Carlos, Schiller ponders that “friendship and platonic love are only a confu-
sion of a another being with one’s own,” therefore mere effects of our poetic faculty. See
“Schiller an Wilhelm Reinwald, 14. April 1783,” Friedrich Schiller Archiv, http://www.
friedrich-schiller-archiv.de/briefe-schillers/an-wilhelm-reinwald/schiller-an-wilhelm-
reinwald-14-april-1783/.
65.  Kommerell, Der Dichter als Führer, p. 196.
66.  See the first letter of the series in Friedrich Schiller, “Letters on Don Carlos,” in
Plays: Intrigue and Love and Don Carlos, ed. Walter Hinderer (New York: Continuum,
2003), pp. 305–46; here, p. 308.
94    ELKE SIEGEL

has not become the enlightened heir to the throne that his friend Posa had
expected, to the manly Marquis, who seems willing to make friendship
subservient to the idea of freedom for all mankind.67 Kommerell writes:

A reader enthusiastic about the earlier Carlos idea . . . had to come to the

conclusion that Schiller, if he was able to deny its law in such a way, never
tested the inspiration through a friendship such as he describes . . . because
the friendship of conspirators is different from a conspirative state: in the
latter the deed hovers as demand above the individuals, in the former it
is the heartbeat and blood circulation of two people who want the deed
as their highest being . . .68

The reader who falls for the enthusiastic friendship between Carlos and
Posa that offers hope for a future enlightened rule will, according to Kom-
merell, be disappointed by the drama’s turn and conclude that the author
must never have experienced friendship: if the goal grows out of the idea
of friendship as the relationship between two who are equal, then the ideal
suffers when friendship suffers. The two relations—a vertical, top-down
model in the “state,” and a horizontal relationship between equals that is
usually considered the core of any definition of “friendship”—are at odds.
Kommerell now seems to want to be a reader who rescues Schiller from
the charge of not knowing friendship. For a reader who has the detailed
view of Schiller’s life and work—i.e., a reader like Kommerell himself—it
is clear that Schiller knew friendship like few others but was not (yet) able
to hold on to the experience of friendship and instead showed the “ingrati-
tude of the thinker” (Undankbarkeit des Denkers) who leaves behind, as
Posa seems to do, what once inspired his thought. Thus, Kommerell writes,
“the sublime lover appears in the end as loveless.”69 Why, one wonders,
is it important for Kommerell to emphasize that even if Schiller in Don
Carlos lets friendship deteriorate into a matter of statecraft, this does not

67.  Kommerell, Der Dichter als Führer, p. 211.

68.  Ibid., pp. 209f.
69.  Ibid., p. 210. The first kind of reader could, of course, counter that someone who
can use the experience of friendship as inspiration without keeping the connection between
experience and thought does not really know friendship, that friendship or a friend again
becomes a means to another end—that such a thinker has not understood what in Kom-
merell’s phrase “Undankbarkeit des Denkers” seems to make itself heard: that “danken”
(thanking) and “denken” (thinking) are actually intimately related. For the relationship
between thinking and thanking, especially regarding Nietzsche and Wagner, see Avital
Ronell, The Test Drive (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 2005), pp. 281f.
 CONTESTED LEGACIES OF “GERMAN” FRIENDSHIP   95

mean that Schiller did not understand conspirative friendship in its differ-
ence from a conspirative state?
Two readings seem to be possible here. In the first, the state is precisely
the present, modern (nation) state that George and his followers reject,
because of its supposedly “alienating” demands on the individual. Hope
lies in the conspiracy against this state by friends who are equal in the face
of their common goal, i.e., hope lies with the friends of and around George
who envision a different future state. But to call the relationships between
George’s disciples, much less the relations between the disciples and the
Master, “friendship” does not adequately describe the social structure in
the conspirative empire of the “secret Germany.” If one wanted to call this
“Männerbund” a society of friends, then maybe it applies in the sense of
the often euphemistic use of the term “friendship” for homosexual love.
But while The Poet as Leader does delineate the enmities and friendships
that are, for Kommerell, at the core of Classicism, and sometimes even
hints at the eros in such constellations, that is not the story Kommerell
wants to tell. Of course, it would have been one worth telling.70
There is, however, a second possible reading of the above passage: as
an argument against the state that is the “George state,” where George as
a “predatory monad” (räuberische Monade) ruled with a “nearly demonic
form of appetite for power [Machttrieb],” devouring any independent
other and transforming this other into himself.71 In a diary note from
1930 dedicated solely to the working through of his dissolving relation-
ship to George, Kommerell writes that the whole “living around each
other” (Umeinanderleben) in the circle was grounded in “such a com-
plete abandonment of the personal sense of self” that can only be deemed
bearable for a young man, but not for an adult.72 If this passage is read in

70.  Regarding the homosociality of the George Circle, see Marita Keilson-Lauritz,

“Stefan George’s Concept of Love and the Gay Emancipation Movement,” in Jens Rieck-
mann, ed., A Companion to the Works of Stefan George (Rochester, NY: Camden House,
2005), pp. 207–31; and Bernd Widdig, “Kameraden, Männerhelden und Dichterfürsten:
Männerbünde in der Moderne,” Der Deutschunterricht 47, no. 2 (1995): 64–74.
71. Max Kommerell, “Notizen zu George und Nietzsche,” in Essays, Notizen, Poe-
tische Fragmente, ed. Inge Jens (Olten/Freiburg im Breisgau: Walter, 1969), pp. 225–50;
here, p. 230.
72.  Kommerell, Briefe und Aufzeichnungen, p. 182. While Kommerell seemingly had
no issues with homosexuality and rejected all value judgments on sexual preferences (see
his letter to his school friend Joachim Boekh, July 13, 1919, in ibid., p. 73), he did after
his break with George note the “most extreme suspicion” that George recast an “individual
96    ELKE SIEGEL

reference to the George state (and Jörg Robert has suggested reading the
pedagogue Schiller as the pedagogue Kommerell’s “medium and imago”),
then the question emerges if Kommerell in the Schiller chapter stages a
revolt against the George state, even if this might appear “loveless,” but
already setting up the defense that sometimes the greatest lover appears
loveless.73
The structure of the community or state that George founded practi-
cally disallowed friendships that were not mediated through the figure of
the poet as the leader who stands above the others. If one reads the Schiller
chapters autobiographically, one could say that Kommerell gives a portrait
of himself as George’s helper and friend, needed by George, as Schiller is
needed by Goethe to fulfill his role. And with these chapters he shows the
gratitude that, as Kommerell argues, Schiller’s thought expressed after his
encounter with Goethe: an inescapable, beautiful human being in the here
and now who turned Schiller’s thinking to thanking, and from the Kantian
world of ghostly ideas to the immanence of the other. Schiller’s Aesthetic
State is, for Kommerell, the consequence of this encounter with Goethe
as a singular individual, and Schiller, with the idea of the Aesthetic State,
turns away from the conspiracy against the state, away from immediate
political change, toward the restoration of balance in the individual that
has to precede any thought of political change.74
Thinking about friendship in the course of reading Schiller, Komme-
rell seems to arrive at moments when his argument hovers undecidedly
between the insight into friendship as a relationship between singular
individuals, who precisely cannot and should not be instrumentalized for
any abstract law or state, and, on the other hand, the turning outward of
this relationship in a desire for a higher goal beyond the pair of friends,
implying the danger of turning the singularity of the friends and friend-
ship, based on the love of the other as end in itself, into a means. Schiller’s

spiritual erotic condition of existence as an objective pedagogical idea,” using his power
over his disciples for his erotic and sexual gratification (Kommerell, “Notizen zu George
und Nietzsche,” p. 233).
73.  Thus, Jörg Robert argues that Der Dichter als Führer not only contains a secret
history of the circle but also a psychogenesis of Kommerell’s desertion from it. See Jörg
Robert, “Schiller—Kommerell—George: Eine Konstellation der Moderne,” in Jeffrey
High, Nicholas Martin, and Norbert Oellers, eds., Who Is This Schiller Now? Essays on
his Reception and Significance (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2011), pp. 367–82, esp.
p. 378. See also Karlauf, Stefan George, p. 576.
74. See Kommerell, Der Dichter als Führer, p. 246.
 CONTESTED LEGACIES OF “GERMAN” FRIENDSHIP   97

solution to this dilemma, for Kommerell, seems to be the “aesthetic state

out of the spirit of friendship,” as it were.
About George, Kommerell wrote in 1934, four years after breaking
from him and one year after his death:

George was a king. That is the main thing. And that is why I have com-
mitted an outrage against him, no matter the necessity or right. My
friend, his life and his death, is in this story of mysteries [Mysterienge-
schichte] of noble blood a chillingly confused minute, and here, too, my
hands have become guilty. Such will also be the idea of my Calderon
adaptation.75

It is important remember the dedication of Kommerell’s The Poet as

Leader: “To the friend Johann Anton [Dem Freunde Johann Anton].” The
dedication to “the friend” of this “Masterpiece,” of a “Geistbuch,” which
is to expand and concretize the spiritual realm of the George Circle and
state, should give pause. Right at the beginning, the book seems to create
or to lay bare a division or fissure in this “state,” where there should be
no friendship that is not mediated through the Meister. Anton, whom
Kommerell chose as a friend and with whom be formed the “dioscuri,”76
did not survive Kommerell’s break-up with George. In George’s state—a
secret cult, if one takes seriously Kommerell’s employment of the Greek
mysterion, with the accompanying elements of initiations and different
levels of knowledge of the doctrines—there could not be a friendship with
the “toad” (Kröte), as Kommerell was called after he left the “Meister”
behind. Anton, caught between friend and state, between Kommerell and
George, a disciple to the end, committed suicide on Kommerell’s twenty-
ninth birthday, in February 1931.77
75.  Kommerell, Briefe und Aufzeichnungen, pp. 281f. For a discussion of Kommerell’s
use of Calderon’s figure of Phokas for his critique of George, see Weber, Max Kommerell,
pp. 173ff.; and Claudia Albert, “Eine Welt aus Zeichen—Kommerells Caldéron,” in Busch
and Pickerodt, Max Kommerell: Leben, Werk, Aktualität, pp. 234–48; here, pp. 236f.
76.  See Karlauf, Stefan George, p. 537; Raulff, Kreis ohne Meister, p. 61. For a short
biography of Johann Anton, see Franz K. von Stockert, “Johann Anton,” in Aurnhammer
et al., Stefan George und sein Kreis, 3:1264–66.
77.  See Weber, Max Kommerell, pp. 62f.; Norton, Secret Germany, pp. 711f.; and
Karlauf, Stefan George, pp. 589ff. For Kommerell’s attempt to publish a volume of poetry,
dedicated to the memory of his dead friend, with George’s publisher Bondi, see the sketches
for letters to George in 1931 (Kommerell, Briefe und Aufzeichnungen, pp. 219–23). For the
last letters between Kommerell and Anton, see Kommerell, Briefe und Aufzeichnungen,
pp. 175–207.
98    ELKE SIEGEL

Another Classicism, another “Secret Germany”:

Walter Benjamin’s German Men and Women
On April 1, 1931, Walter Benjamin, using a pseudonym, published a series
of texts, entitled “Letters” (Briefe), in the Frankfurter Zeitung. Over the
next year a total of twenty-seven letters accompanied by short commentar-
ies were published, letters that were originally written between 1783 and
1883 by more or less well-known authors. This project of a collection of
letters should be read as countering the George Circle’s—Kommerell’s—
take on, or taking hostage of, German cultural or literary tradition under
the name of “Klassik.”
Benjamin, however, does not explicitly introduce his collection with
reference to Classicism. What he invokes instead is a “humanist attitude”
(humanistische Haltung). In his introduction to the series, he writes that
the letters,

without claiming any historical or thematic relation, have one thing in

common. They make present again [vergegenwärtigen] an attitude, which
is to be called humanistic in the German sense. To evoke this attitude at
the present time seems all the more advisable, the more onesidedly those
who today question German humanism—often gravely and fully con-
scious of their responsibility—adhere to the works of art and literature.
These letters articulate, what force, what expressiveness inhered in the
formation of private life of that epoch of German humanism.78

Sketches for a lecture entitled “On the Trail of Old Letters,” conceived
around the same time in 1932, do refer the project explicitly to Classi-
cism, which, as Benjamin writes, has become “a mountain . . . covered
by a glacier.”79 The canon, he goes on to explain, has been closed long
ago and no longer leaves any room for discussion: “its rigid immobility
threatens to be matched by its present lack of influence.”80 Benjamin
shares with Kommerell the goal to counter the reification of German

78.  Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 4, pt. 2, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and
Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), pp. 954f. See Bea-
trice Hanssen, Walter Benjamin’s Other History: Of Stones, Animals, Human Beings, and
Angels (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1998), pp. 108ff. I have slightly altered Hans-
sen’s translation of this passage (ibid., p. 110).
79. Walter Benjamin, “On the Trail of Old Letters,” in Selected Writings, Vol. 2,
pp. 555–58; here, p. 556. See Wohlfarth, “Walter Benjamin’s ‘Secret Germany,’” pp. 38f.
80.  Benjamin, “On the Trail of Old Letters,” p. 556.
 CONTESTED LEGACIES OF “GERMAN” FRIENDSHIP   99

Classicism, but he rejects any monumental concept of Classicism and

instead invokes the lived ethical attitude, a “humanism” that he wants to
show in the modes of communication and address between the better but
also the lesser or even hitherto unknown figures of German letters. Ben-
jamin therefore aims at making Classicism accessible not by reference to
its published works, to which those threatening to destroy the legacy of
humanism refer, but by offering to readers “private” texts that bear the
traces of a discrete, tactful attitude toward the other—a different kind of
friendship altogether, perhaps alluded to by the motto of German Men
and Women, the book that would emerge from this series of letters five
years later: “Of Honor without Glory / Of Greatness without Glamor / Of
Dignity without Pay.”81
In the preface to The Poet as Leader, Kommerell wanted to lure
the best of the German youth back to Classicism, to the poet as leader,
and to George by giving a vibrant picture of a Classicism turned sterile.
Benjamin, in a counter-move, wants to draw attention to Classicism as
humanism by steering away from the misused canon of literary texts and
drawing attention to life, as does Kommerell—but without telling legends
of Germanness, as Kommerell does. If literature has become politicized
by ideological uses and readings, and if the lives of the poets as “lead-
ers” are recounted in ideological ways (certainly not only by Kommerell),
Benjamin instead went to the archives to dig out letters that might allow
readers to encounter the past on different terms, to read friendship, for
example, through the ways that friends write to each other: not building a
state or planning conspiracies, but weaving the subtle and civic texture of
sociability.
In 1936, Benjamin published his only book from exile, the strategically
titled German Men and Women, which contained nearly the same collec-
tion of letters along with more extensive commentaries. At the center of
the book’s new preface, we no longer find the term “humanism.” Instead,
Benjamin refocuses the project by tying it to the name Goethe and to the
bourgeoisie (Bürgertum). While the letters in the collection are organized
chronologically, there is one letter that Benjamin takes out of this order to
place it at the beginning, a letter in which Karl Friedrich Zelter, a friend of

81.  “Von Ehre ohne Ruhm / Von Größe ohne Glanz / Von Würde ohne Sold.” For
the changing contours and goals of Benjamin’s project due to changing historical condi-
tions, see James McFarland, Constellation: Friedrich Nietzsche and Walter Benjamin in
the Now-Time of History (New York: Fordham UP, 2013), pp. 180ff.
100    ELKE SIEGEL

Goethe’s for three decades, reacts to the news of Goethe’s death in 1832.
Referring to this letter, Benjamin writes in the book’s preface:

Dating from the middle of the century covered here, it provides a glimpse
into the time—Goethe’s youth—marking the inauguration of the era in
which the bourgeoisie seized its major positions. But the immediate
occasion of the letter—Goethe’s death—also marks the end of this era,
when the bourgeoisie still held its positions but no longer retained the
spirit in which it had conquered them. It was the age when the German
bourgeoisie had to place its weightiest and most sharply etched words
on the scales of history. And it had little to place there except those
words—which is why it met its unlovely end in the boom years of the
Gründerzeit.82

If, as Osterkamp shows, George vehemently rejected “the bourgeois lev-

eling of life and the relativization of values in modernity,”83 Benjamin
is trying to provoke the bourgeoisie into remembering its hopes and its
failure to act in the past, when everything was left to the word, to the poets
whose words were not weighty enough to alter the course of history with-
out the political engagement of the bourgeoisie. Those poets who tried to
throw in the weightiest words, though, form the real “secret Germany.”84
Benjamin, in an unpublished text entitled “German Letters” (“Deutsche
Briefe,” 1931), explicitly identifies those shunned poets—forced into
exile, like himself—and sets their “secret Germany” against the not so
“secret” Germany of the George Circle:

The intention of this series is, rather, to reveal the lineaments of a “secret
Germany” that people nowadays would much prefer to shroud in heavy
mist. For a secret Germany really exists. It is merely that its secretness
is not simply the expression of its inwardness and depth, but—albeit in
a different sense—the product of raucous and brutal forces that have

82.  Walter Benjamin, “German Men and Women: A Sequence of Letters,” in Selected
Writings, Vol. 3: 1935–1938, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Howard Eiland, et al., ed. Howard
Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2002),
pp. 167–235; here, p. 166.
83. Osterkamp, Poesie der leeren Mitte, p. 34.
84. Comparing Kommerell’s book and Benjamin’s review “Against a Masterpiece,”
Irving Wohlfarth writes: “At the risk of oversimplification, Benjamin’s and Kommerell’s
conceptions of a ‘secret rendez-vous’ between past and present may be contrasted as fol-
lows. The one stands under the sign of revolution, the other under that of myth, alias the
‘conservative revolution’” (Wohlfarth, “Walter Benjamin’s ‘Secret Germany,’” p. 35).
 CONTESTED LEGACIES OF “GERMAN” FRIENDSHIP   101

prevented it from playing an effective role in public life and have con-
demned it to a secret one. And these forces are the same ones that drove
Georg Forster from his native land, that led Hölderlin to try to earn his
living as a tutor in France, and that made Johann Seume play into the
hands of the recruiting officers from Hesse, who then sent him to fight in
America. Must we define these forces more precisely?85

85.  Walter Benjamin, “German Letters,” in Selected Writings, Vol. 2, pp. 466–68; here,
p. 468.