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.

As ideologue, George followed in the wake of Nietzsche—not that he would recognize any mentor later than Goethe and Hölderlin. Resolutely anti-Christian, anti-Enlightenment, anti-democratic and anti-feminist, he championed a heroic new order, a Germanized Hellas, in which a spiritual aristocracy would trample the old society underfoot. His message had a powerful appeal already in the Wilhelmine era, with its ambiguous relationship to modernity. After the trauma of Versailles, it converged with the virulent nationalism of the radical right. Yet even at the peak of his influence, George remained enough of a poet to escape any simple political reduction. Protestantism and Prussia were the constant bugbears of this unregenerate Rhinelander, as well as the despised Bürgertum. In 1914 he distanced himself from the patriotic euphoria that engulfed most of his followers, and all but relished the prospect of German defeat. He never endorsed any political party, even when the triumphant Nazis claimed him as their inspiration.

If George was in his time a towering presence in German poetry, he is not widely read today outside of the academic world, and no English translation of his work is currently available. In technique he stood at the cusp of modernism, parallel to the transformation in music, as extreme chromaticism faltered before the new twelve-tone coinage. His concern to communicate the subtleties of personal experience in delicate and ineffable terms appealed at this time to Schoenberg and Webern, both of whom made song cycles out of George’s early works. ‘The Year of the Soul’, published in 1897, retains a certain popularity from its fine fulfilment of a perennial poetic function: what Norton aptly describes as ‘a kind of melancholy wash’ is spread over the interior landscape, giving everything a ‘slightly faded, somewhat elegiac cast’—very much the world of Pelleas and Melisande. Later, however, as he felt ‘the wind of other planets’, George’s distinctive voice became closely entangled with images of destruction wrought by heroic leaders, and it is hard to read this work today without sensing the looming shadow of events he himself helped to promote.