In Bed With The Right - From behind the Paywall： Episode 51： The George Circle

00:00:00.000 hello i'm adrian dom and i'm moira donagan whether we like it or not we're in bed with

00:00:18.460 the right this is our special post christmas patreon episode we are recording on new year's

00:00:24.200 eve and as adrian noticed off mic i've still got my christmas decorations up behind me which i got

00:00:32.180 to admire in person in yes brooklyn uh shortly before christmas we had a very special crossover

00:00:38.560 event uh by which i mean that adrian came over to my house and we had dinner with adrian and

00:00:45.560 adrian's husband hung and their beautiful really funny daughter river who ate like all of the

00:00:50.360 olives um and uh also friends of the pod uh patrick blanchfield and abby clunshin of ordinary

00:00:57.940 unhappiness were also there so it was like really like a special like crossover episode like when

00:01:03.580 like the simpsons and south park exist in the same universe like that's what it was that's right

00:01:09.620 we're definitely south park in this scenario it's the spinoff meeting the returning to the

00:01:15.100 mothership or something like that exactly fraser goes back to boston yeah exactly exactly um and

00:01:20.080 more as already alluded to this we're recording on december 31st 2024 because we said we were

00:01:27.160 going to give you two patreon episodes and i'll be goddamned if i don't stick to two episodes

00:01:31.880 a month now this may not actually see the light of day on the 31st depending on your time zone

00:01:36.580 but like i try adrian is a man of his word not me i like barely rolled out of bed at noon today

00:01:42.920 to record this and that way i am a kantian i'm like it is my it is my duty what good is a contract

00:01:48.900 an implicit contract as embodied by a patreon the categorical imperative what if nobody did

00:01:54.160 do patreon episodes a month yeah i know i feel like there are some fellow podcasters i i have

00:01:59.700 asked i've wondered this about uh like come on man you're leaving me hanging i need it i need it

00:02:05.420 anyway we don't want to be that um but and today we're talking you know you always call these the

00:02:10.800 freak flag episodes i mean also known as like my day job we're going to talk about um something

00:02:17.600 kind of weird um and i'm guessing this might be something that you literally know nothing about

00:02:23.540 so i'm we're going to talk about the georgia circle does that ring any bells for you the what

00:02:28.360 yeah okay i think is the joke fantastic this is good this is good and i'm guessing this might be

00:02:33.360 true for a lot of our listeners too i i hope that light bulbs are going to start going off

00:02:37.540 um and if the episode does its job i think some contemporary resonances will be very very clear

00:02:44.520 Tom Cruise is going to make a cameo appearance.

00:02:49.140 So it's, yeah, it's going to be a big story.

00:02:51.140 And this, you know, may well be a two-parter.

00:02:53.940 We'll see.

00:02:55.240 So we're recording on the last day of 2024, going into 2025.

00:02:59.460 So we're going to start the story in 1933 for no reason whatsoever.

00:03:05.420 Why do you ask?

00:03:07.720 So the year is 1933.

00:03:09.520 and I wanted to read you a lecture that a professor, a German professor, gives in May

00:03:18.420 of 1933. His name is Ernst Bertram. Dates are 1884 till 1957. There's no reason anyone would

00:03:26.460 have to know about him, but he kicks off his new lecture course on the history of German literature

00:03:32.500 at the University of Cologne by giving a kind of an intro speech, which he calls German Awakening.

00:03:37.840 Now, for those of you who know your history and you know what Germany is like in May of 1933, you're like, oh, brother, that can't be good, right?

00:03:50.040 So just to set the scene, Hitler had been anointed chancellor on, I believe, January 30th of 1933, and the Nazis had very, very swiftly consolidated power by basically purging people from the civil service, by hauling folks off to jail.

00:04:15.480 A lot of the famous German authors of the time have already fled Germany, but there are those who've stuck it out, who've stayed behind.

00:04:23.960 Some of them kind of hoping to make nice with the new rulers and others.

00:04:30.580 Well, I'll just let Ernest Bertram speak for himself.

00:04:35.260 So his German awakening, he wants to get his students excited about, quote,

00:04:40.660 the enormous political-spiritual breakthrough battle in the midst of which we now stand.

00:04:45.480 Our Volk requires all its spiritual powers and consciousness, and especially these.

00:04:52.220 No spiritual movement in Germany will ever remain vital for long

00:04:55.480 that does not succeed in conquering the German university from the inside out. 0.71

00:05:00.180 If this battle fails, it would mean the end of the white world, chaos, or a planet of termites. 0.75

00:05:07.360 So if you're following along at home, 0.99

00:05:11.840 yeah if you did not see that coming uh yeah that's some that's some nazi shit um i mean like 0.98

00:05:19.600 it's all there right like yeah the stuff about vermin the you know this and of course this kind 0.99

00:05:25.600 of conquest of the university from the inside out you know this is you know this is a professor

00:05:31.740 kind of trying to make a case you know that the universities don't need to be brought to heal

00:05:35.840 but rather that there are enough far-right professors within the academy that they

00:05:42.360 couldn't sort of do the Nazis' job for them. This turned out to be true. The professoriate

00:05:47.440 in 1933 in German universities was not particularly lefty. There were left-wing

00:05:52.560 academics, obviously, but it was a fairly conservative voting bloc and many of them

00:05:58.580 made common cause with the Nazis. Not all of them, in quite as termite-heavy language as

00:06:03.820 Ernst Bertram. You know, this is a guy who, you know, really is kind of going all in on this

00:06:08.420 stuff. Meanwhile, at a large book burning down the road in Bonn, his fellow German literature

00:06:15.460 professor, Hans Naumann, quotes one of his lines of poetry, lines that are frankly, you know,

00:06:23.360 scarily apropos, given what we're up against in our own present moment. I kind of have to quote

00:06:28.960 them here so here are the two couplets from bertram's poem to youth reject what confuses you

00:06:35.360 banish what seduces you what did not grow with pure will throw into the flames what threatens

00:06:42.040 you it seems like it would leave a lot of intellectuals somewhat idle you know well

00:06:48.180 it's it's basically it's it's anti-intellectual intellect or intellectual anti-intellectualism

00:06:52.540 isn't it yeah it's saying gray zones confusions uh nuance are bad right like committed then to

00:07:00.480 the flames now bertram had written this before 1933 but no one is quoting this at a book burning

00:07:06.760 so uh just just to make the subtext text right the idea is they were literally purging libraries at

00:07:14.040 this moment and and here is uh and here he's quoting uh you know these lines from from bertram

00:07:19.720 And so I should say that both Nauman and Bertram sort of see themselves in the tradition of the person that we're mostly going to be talking about today. And you might think, well, this means that we're going to be talking about a Nazi. Well, it's kind of complicated.

00:07:33.580 This is a story, what I hope to tell you today is a story of cultural conservatism, reactionary, openly reactionary politics, right, in the vein that we've examined in our Nietzsche episode, for instance, in our Wagner episode.

00:07:47.680 And it's about the role of sexuality and gender in both of those things.

00:07:51.920 But at the same time, there are a bunch of people like Bertram in it who did go fash, it seems like.

00:07:57.780 And then there are a bunch of people who don't, right?

00:07:59.800 That's the other thing.

00:08:00.600 It's about a conservative revolution

00:08:02.120 of which several members,

00:08:05.420 many members,

00:08:06.220 decide not to go along with the Nazis.

00:08:08.280 So Bertram is sort of like

00:08:09.060 one of the people we're looking at

00:08:10.740 because he's someone who

00:08:12.540 very much does sort of

00:08:14.120 make this connection between

00:08:15.300 like my cultural conservative,

00:08:18.060 my cultural reactionary politics

00:08:19.640 are being served by this new regime.

00:08:24.400 But there are others

00:08:25.460 who felt very differently.

00:08:27.100 Here is a lecture that the historian Ernst Kantorowicz gave a couple of months later, November 14th, 1933, and where he talks about the topic that really we're going to be talking about today, which is this idea of a secret Germany, right?

00:08:45.580 He says, the rulers of the secret Germany are immune against weaponization, and you will not get a hold of them by dragging their image into the street, making them resemble the marketplace and then celebrate them as your own flesh and blood.

00:08:59.020 This is the intellectual reply to Bertram. He's saying, no, the Nazis do not realize a conservative vision for Germany. The conservative vision for Germany doesn't work if you drag it into the marketplace, if you drag it, if you make it real. 0.51

00:09:14.260 It was always supposed to be an idea. Now, you might be like, well, politically, that's kind of weird. And we'll get there. Right. But that's that's the idea here. He's saying we are not identical with the Nazis. Right. And I should say Kantorovich was Jewish. That was part of it. He would he would leave Germany before long and settle first at Berkeley, then at Princeton.

00:09:35.560 but he also you know it's fairly clear that he that he just was kind of grossed out by these

00:09:42.860 people begging basically like a pitch for like hey appoint me you know your you know your education

00:09:50.260 czar and your new in your new third reich right like he's that's gross like that's not that's not

00:09:55.020 what the conservative revolution was about either and then the third person i wanted to introduce

00:09:59.820 you to. This is someone you might know. Do you know who Klaus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg is?

00:10:05.440 God bless you. No. This is someone you might know. Sorry. No, I don't know this person. Sorry. I'm

00:10:09.740 woefully ignorant. That is perfectly fine. German history. So he is associated with the events of 0.97

00:10:15.160 July 20th, 1944. So this is the day when a group of generals plotted to overthrow Hitler and

00:10:24.380 And Stauffenberg had the job of placing the bomb under Hitler's desk at the Wolfschanze in, what's today, Poland.

00:10:33.740 This I have heard about, yes.

00:10:35.080 And he basically put the, I think he put the wrong detonator in or like something.

00:10:40.820 It didn't go exactly as planned.

00:10:42.360 Some kind of slapsticky failure of the assassin.

00:10:45.740 Yeah.

00:10:45.920 It did not go well.

00:10:47.260 The table was too oaky or something. 0.95

00:10:49.580 And so basically Hitler, unfortunately, lived for another, what is it, nine months, I guess.

00:10:56.720 And he basically reports that he placed the bomb. 0.91

00:11:00.200 The generals decided to kick off the coup and hope for the best.

00:11:03.900 It does not go well.

00:11:06.260 And Stauffenberg closes out the evening of July 20th, getting led out before an execution squad in the Bendler Block,

00:11:14.440 which was then, today again, the Ministry of Defense in Berlin.

00:11:19.580 And as he gets shot, he is reputed to have shouted out the phrase, long live secret Germany, right?

00:11:28.980 It's a little disputed because as in English, secret and sacred sound very similar and, you know, they were guns firing.

00:11:36.000 But there is a long tradition that suggests that he basically dedicated this attempt, very belated, one should say, very belated attempt to rid the world of Hitler to this idea of a secret Germany.

00:11:49.740 And so that's what I wanted to trace today.

00:11:52.740 It's an episode about this secret Germany, about a strain of conservative thought that ended up leading basically these three men into very different directions, right?

00:12:02.300 Where one identifies with fascism, one says, like, I don't even understand how this is anything like what I'm doing, that secret Germany is not fascist. And another who seems to take it as inspiration to try and assassinate, you know, the leader of the Third Reich.

00:12:22.940 But it's also a story about masculinity, about sexuality.

00:12:26.260 It's a story about descent and kinship, about these traditions.

00:12:30.800 The Secret Germany, as we'll see, is an idea of a transmission line that is non-biological,

00:12:37.900 right? 0.80

00:12:38.300 You kind of pick your own ancestors.

00:12:40.860 You construct a lineage that you like.

00:12:44.140 So it's about the family that we're born into, but much more about the family we choose,

00:12:48.520 not just in the here and now, but sort of extending back in time.

00:12:52.180 And listeners who know their queer theory can imagine why I'm interested in that, because that is something that, right, this is what Armistead Maupin calls the logical family.

00:13:03.700 Part of queerness is the rejection of the family you were born into in favor of a community that is freely chosen.

00:13:13.900 and in that way we are kind of doing a super right-wing 1920s queer theory uh and i hope

00:13:22.580 people like it i think it's a it's a weird it's a it's a weird story but it's a it's an interesting

00:13:27.060 one i think you will only get this on in bed with her right that's right this is the kind of thing

00:13:31.400 you're just not they're just not giving this out anymore that's right it's only here for the good

00:13:35.160 stuff only here for the for the for the real and and you know like so obviously like super timely

00:13:42.000 possibly possibly not but at the same time we've had a lot of discussions about our our gay

00:13:48.340 conservatives episode so i think that like gay conservatism is something that we need to think

00:13:52.900 about the question of um and this question of traditionalism right we you and i have come up

00:13:59.440 against that again and again whether it's our trad wives or olympic games right this question of 0.94

00:14:04.880 um why do what what is it with you know why are conservative traditionalists so shitty at

00:14:11.520 tradition well these are people who are conservative and who really have thought about what it means

00:14:16.160 to have a tradition and they really think of tradition not as like oh it's just a bunch of 0.61

00:14:22.020 shit that came before us right it's what my dad did and so i'm going to do it too they're like no

00:14:26.780 no no a a tradition is something that you will and you activate right these are post-nichean 0.93

00:14:33.920 traditionalists right nietzsche obviously big anti-traditionalists uh and and these guys are

00:14:39.120 sort of trying to split the difference and say hey uh no no no no a tradition has to be kind of

00:14:44.740 like freely chosen it has to be reactivated it has to be this kind of mystical communion with

00:14:50.520 the past and it will exclude some people and it will include people that you don't think of as

00:14:56.060 as uh you know your direct forebears well this might all sound very abstract i hope we'll we'll

00:15:02.200 be able to to put some some meat on them bones all right let's dig into it let's dig into it

00:15:07.740 So we have to get to the person behind it all.

00:15:10.940 This is Stefan Georgiou, who gives the Georgiou circle his name and who, you know, spoiler alert, turns out like he is easily the weirdest cultural figure, I think, in the German tradition or any tradition that I've ever studied.

00:15:29.040 I feel like that's a pretty crowded field.

00:15:30.860 It is.

00:15:31.820 But like, well, OK, so like I understand I'm throwing down the gauntlet.

00:15:35.760 I'm setting a high bar for myself. 0.75

00:15:37.740 You tell me it's, but already we have a guy who tried to assassinate Hitler, quoting him.

00:15:42.840 So like, that's, you know, Mallarmé can't say that for himself.

00:15:46.360 That's all I'm saying.

00:15:47.860 So Stefan Giorga is born in 1868 near Bingen, which is in the Rhine Valley.

00:15:53.880 He's a highly gifted kid and sort of experiments with two things.

00:15:58.900 He loves foreign languages, does a lot of translations in high school and invents sort

00:16:03.980 of secret languages.

00:16:04.740 And questions of secrecy are going to be really, really key for most of his life, for much of his life.

00:16:13.380 And the question of what happens when secrets are transmitted.

00:16:19.380 He becomes first interested in symbolist poetry.

00:16:22.500 He becomes interested in, as I say, in literary translation.

00:16:26.540 Does a lot of translation from the French, for instance, also from the Italian.

00:16:29.600 he sort of identifies himself with this idea of

00:16:33.260 art for art's sake

00:16:35.240 he's interested in Malarmé, Verlaine, Baudelaire

00:16:37.640 so basically garden variety

00:16:39.700 emo kid

00:16:41.320 circa 1880s

00:16:44.000 they're all reading and writing

00:16:46.940 at the same time it's important to note

00:16:49.580 that the question of secrecy

00:16:51.580 from the very first

00:16:53.780 carries an extra charge

00:16:55.540 that is to say from the very beginning

00:16:57.800 with Gheorghe, it's pretty clear that

00:16:59.680 the secrecy 0.51

00:17:01.560 is about the fact that he's gay

00:17:03.060 this is a kid who's 0.90

00:17:05.780 keeping a secret

00:17:06.440 and, you know, in a time

00:17:09.620 when, like, sharing that with someone, especially

00:17:11.640 if you're interested in them

00:17:12.640 carries a huge risk. At the same time

00:17:15.680 it's very important that

00:17:16.880 like for a lot of these guys

00:17:19.320 sort of, I mean, this is sort of the generation of

00:17:21.760 Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust, etc.

00:17:23.820 who all sort of think about this

00:17:25.620 but all of them

00:17:27.800 tend to think of the process of being in the closet, coming out, all that stuff,

00:17:33.580 opening yourself up to other, usually men, but also in some cases, women. They think of this

00:17:39.660 as actually describing a broader structure, right? Like there's something about having secrets

00:17:45.780 that sort of gay men or queer men have deeper insight into than anyone else. 0.96

00:17:54.160 Right. I think we, in our contemporary discourses of the closet, we tend to understand the closet with some kind of, you know, with some reason as a forced dishonesty, right? But you can also sort of turn that around and see it as a way to cultivate a kind of intimacy with the self and a degree of self-knowledge that can actually transmit into a kind of wisdom. 0.83

00:18:14.660 Exactly. And, you know, the fact that some things are not meant for everyone, right? It is a way of, there's a kind of elitism. Thomas Mann is very big into this idea that there's a kind of elitism to having desires that you do not share with the vast majority of people and you don't care to tell them that. You're like, cool, yeah, no, that's super hot, man. Great. Wonderful.

00:18:37.300 So it's not the closet as a kind of fear. It's the closet as a kind of elite refusal, right? It's not like, I can't tell you this because you're going to beat the shit out of me. Or it's not only that. It's also, I'm not going to tell you this because you don't deserve to know it.

00:18:50.800 Exactly. Because it's, it's, it's more refined. It's more, it's, it's less animalistic. It's less obvious, right? Like there's, I mean, this is a little bit later, but if you think of E.M. Forster's novel Maurice, which is about a perfectly ordinary young man who is made less ordinary by the fact that he's gay, right? Like Forster, you know, 50 years later has the same basic idea.

00:19:15.180 This man would be utterly boring, but thank goodness he likes dudes, right?

00:19:21.760 There's one thing about him that gets to be unexpected.

00:19:26.020 Exactly. And he doesn't have to tell anyone, right?

00:19:29.000 This is a lot of this idea that this is sort of a privileged secret.

00:19:35.200 It's a very, very important idea around the turn of the century.

00:19:39.620 It's a wonderful classic study by the theorist Yves Kosovsky-Sedrug about this, called The Epistemology of the Closet, which is all about this.

00:19:47.640 And one place I think where listeners can still test this out is that, like, if you've ever had a friend who sort of, like, doesn't date and, like, won't say why, and then people are like, well, maybe they're gay, right?

00:19:59.420 And it's like, it's this idea, like, well, people might have hundreds of reasons for not doing that, right?

00:20:06.340 But until sort of like asexuality

00:20:08.540 sort of became more into focus,

00:20:10.620 people sort of were like,

00:20:11.920 well, they're doing anything.

00:20:12.800 If anything is weird, it must mean

00:20:14.320 or if anything's unusual about my friend, 1.00

00:20:16.460 it must mean they're gay, right? 0.90

00:20:18.280 And I think that Cedric would say 0.96

00:20:20.980 that that's a late leftover from that discourse,

00:20:24.980 from that idea that the secret to have

00:20:28.300 is in some way homosexuality.

00:20:30.900 The interesting thing is, 0.69

00:20:31.680 I think it is largely a male phenomenon.

00:20:33.920 I think that we find that gay women at the time, right, there was more of a spectrum of desire, right? 0.79

00:20:41.360 And so I think that, right, like what you could express was better. 1.00

00:20:45.160 Still happens now. 0.96

00:20:46.180 Yeah, like there's something about the subordinate position of womanhood that almost creates a field of greater permission, right? 0.99

00:20:55.260 If you're already at the bottom of the hierarchy, you don't need to be like anxiously maintaining your place at the top of it.

00:21:02.100 So gender nonconformity is often punished along different criteria, but often like much less severely, particularly historically. Right. So like, you know, classic example, Thomas Jefferson's laws banning homosexuality in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

00:21:23.020 He wrote them so that for men, it was, I believe, castration on first offense and hanging on second.

00:21:31.080 And for women, it was a facial mutilation, right?

00:21:33.920 A non-fatal facial mutilation. 0.97

00:21:36.500 They drilled a hole in the nose, right?

00:21:39.040 And these are barbaric, right? 0.72

00:21:41.420 But they reflected an asymmetry in the perceived severity of the transgression between men and women.

00:21:48.460 And that is something that which you still see a lot of like residual understanding. Right. And like even now, you know, like a lot of women experiment at college, you know what I mean? And then and then go on to be reintegrated into heterosexuality in a very fulsome way.

00:22:05.100 Ooh, hiss. No, it's fine. It's fine. You know, it's a degree of social permission that is, I think it's easy to like construe it as a kind of privilege, but I think it also stems from the notion that like women's desires and women's lives more broadly are just kind of less serious.

00:22:22.840 Yeah. At the same time, I should say that, like, we also don't want to project kind of the values of mid-century America back onto the 1880s in Europe, where men were able to be intimate with each other in ways that were not homosexual. But like, frankly, today, like, I feel like you're coming on to me, man. I don't know. Like, we're constantly in tents together, right?

00:22:47.820 Right. Like this is the thing that they tell you when you read. I mean, sorry to bring it back to America, which is where all my experience is. But this is the thing that they tell you over and over when you read Herman Herman Melville's letters to Nathaniel Hawthorne, which seem frankly like such beautiful love letters. And you're like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Yeah. No, no, no, no, no, no. Like they. You shouldn't necessarily read it that way because homosociality is the buzzword of the 19th century. Yeah.

00:23:15.980 Yeah. And I mean, so that's the thing, right? It could be, but it doesn't have to be. And that's going to be really, really interesting because this is going to be sort of the way Georgi's career evolves is that he keeps kind of falling in with these groups of like, usually young, usually hot, usually artistically inclined young men.

00:23:38.740 and everyone's like kind of gay right but it's like it's never entirely clear they're like look

00:23:46.080 we're all a little bit fruity right now it's the 1890s it's the 1900s are these people actually 0.93

00:23:51.620 fucking was yeah is difficult to determine from the historical record and probably was a little

00:23:55.920 ambiguous to the people who knew them also i think it was ambiguous to the people doing it 0.99

00:24:00.740 yeah they are like if you look at a if you look at a biography of george the number of nude pictures

00:24:07.840 is huge and yet if you look at some of their um of their letters like they're like oh no this man

00:24:13.720 is stone cold straight he just was like i was i was uh modeling nude for another man like what's

00:24:18.640 what's the i don't know what's the big deal right but so like yeah they like it was i think it was

00:24:25.420 unclear to them like but also that ambiguity becomes itself that's a sometimes like a fixation

00:24:32.500 an erotic fixation in its own right you know it could be yeah yeah or it could be that that you

00:24:36.780 know that that basically they they had sort of in between gradations that you know in an age where

00:24:43.300 we say come out come out wherever you are it just doesn't exist anymore right we're right this is

00:24:48.540 also still the we're still dealing with it with people who would have inhabited a milieu in which 0.84

00:24:55.760 homosexuality would have been understood more as a behavior than an identity necessarily right is

00:24:59.960 that still uh like a workable framework for this late in in time or not really i mean they're

00:25:05.520 definitely living through a time when uh the first words for homosexuality are available so

00:25:13.420 the earnings the iranians whatever it is like george is a we're in the 1930s or 20s right now

00:25:19.920 no no no i mean like so i mean like the the first i think the first sort of like book about

00:25:26.080 homosexuality is sort of 1850s 60s so that it's before george is born and he read a lot of this

00:25:32.860 stuff he he would have known he would have been conversant with that literature but that that 0.51

00:25:36.440 is a conception of gay as something you are as opposed to something you do right like the invert

00:25:41.080 as a figure more than just as a behavior exactly and so uh kraft ebing who writes the you know

00:25:48.360 psychopathia sexualis um that would have been i think he might have been georg's exact contemporary

00:25:53.780 it's somewhere in there maybe a little older than him but no no no he was of a generation where

00:25:58.440 like you know these things undergo transitions hey that's a good i'm sorry it's a pun sorry

00:26:03.780 oh sorry that's good i know a lot of people who are undergoing transition sorry like if you ask

00:26:10.360 the person on the street right they might be like well no it's just a behavior but like especially

00:26:15.120 people who recognize themselves in these identities they were starting to think of this as an as

00:26:19.800 identities and i think his circle generally thought that sexuality was bound up with their identity

00:26:24.840 um whether or not they thought it exhausted their identity is another question right they may have

00:26:30.880 said like well this commits me to a whole bunch of other things that are way more important but also 0.65

00:26:34.800 i'm having sex with men right yeah okay that's part of it um and and definitely uh and definitely

00:26:41.140 all the critics of the circle and all the outsiders that kind of kept making fun of them 0.86

00:26:46.540 were like you're just all you're all just doing it right like but it was like meant to take the

00:26:51.040 piss right oh do you dress up in togas and are you wearing a uh you know laurel wreath and then

00:26:56.620 like you go to town on each other is that what happens right like they're like oh i get it like

00:27:01.120 the whole poetry thing is just kind of a pickup joint right um they were making doing it to make 0.98

00:27:06.520 fun of the artistic pretensions of this group aside from the nazi shit this doesn't sound 0.85

00:27:12.500 that different from poets i actually know okay yeah yeah it's about the work uh but you guys 0.98

00:27:18.480 are all going to the bar and you're all sleeping together and actually actually like if you're

00:27:25.460 talking about new york in 2025 probably some of them are flirting with right-wing politics yeah

00:27:31.040 like this doesn't strike me as a totally um incomparable scene dime square polycule yeah

00:27:39.080 exactly yeah it's the dime square polycule but at the same time so as in the case of wagner you

00:27:44.640 remember how in Wagner we talked about how he like has this like modernist aesthetic but at the same

00:27:49.700 time this kind of anti-modern impulse like George is sort of part of that you know the same kind of

00:27:54.640 ideology he embraces modernist poetry but on the other hand he kind of he hates the marketplace he

00:28:05.200 hates you know the way you have to sell yourself for you know doing poetry now nowadays man right

00:28:11.140 Like he's going to reject all that and has this like very funny duality.

00:28:14.740 So his earliest volumes of poetry are these bibliophilic editions in extremely low print numbers.

00:28:22.280 They're worth a lot today.

00:28:24.920 So, for instance, he starts putting out this journal, this journal of poetry,

00:28:31.180 Blätter für die Kunst, journal of art.

00:28:34.520 it's a poetry journal

00:28:36.180 mostly his friends

00:28:38.540 and then some stuff he translated

00:28:40.100 from sort of

00:28:42.700 avant-garde poets from across Europe

00:28:44.420 usually pretty good taste

00:28:46.620 he printed these

00:28:48.320 in

00:28:48.980 limited edition of 100 copies

00:28:52.380 and it said on the cover

00:28:53.840 this magazine published by the editor

00:28:56.320 has a closed readership

00:28:58.100 invited by the members

00:29:00.020 right so

00:29:01.360 he's like you can't just buy this

00:29:04.340 thing like you have to subscribe it's like that invite is like those invite only sub stacks you

00:29:10.860 know yeah yeah you have to be on the list serve somebody has to add you yeah exactly and like

00:29:17.120 raya i'm sorry and and the weird part is like i at least one biographer is like i'm like i talked

00:29:25.200 to him about this and he was like i'm pretty sure it didn't sell out right like so it's just he's

00:29:31.140 just doing that like as a bit right like people like oh shit now i want to have it right yeah

00:29:35.360 yeah you can't get it like yeah he didn't have that many friends like it's like you know poetry

00:29:39.240 journals are hard to sell right like still today right and so so he's like oh no no you can't have

00:29:44.840 this but he's got like a whole stack of them like in his bedroom um so which which is like marketing

00:29:50.300 genius right so like on the one hand he's like i would never market myself in this way but no this

00:29:54.600 is a limited edition so it's going to cost you extra right so he's like completely like he's 0.95

00:29:58.500 kick-starting this shit he's like that's his kickstart exclusive i'm sorry and just to give

00:30:03.400 you a sense of just like the level of esotericism here um by 1904 all of his publications started 0.99

00:30:09.640 using their own punctuation and their own font he designed his own font and his own punctuation

00:30:14.600 so like it's truly like it's it's extra uh this is a man who is nothing if not extra

00:30:22.200 so yeah on the one hand there's this pronounced esotericism right there

00:30:26.780 it's only for people in the know it's not for the broad public it's not commercial so the work

00:30:33.800 itself is is elevating to the status of queerness right the same kind of like queerness as elite

00:30:40.060 secrecy exactly and and the esotericism is of course to some extent a marketing trick yeah

00:30:45.780 just the way that the poetry at least in the eyes of his is his detractors is just a nice way of

00:30:53.120 getting dudes and and i should say that there are you know in the early goings of this undertaking

00:30:58.980 uh again and again he sort of gets into these very intense friendships with poets

00:31:06.240 the paradigmatic case in here is the the conservative poet hugo von hofmann style

00:31:11.640 who's like 16 at the time and yeah like one six yes yeah okay also trigger warning that's that's

00:31:20.020 not the first not the last time you're gonna hear that uh okay the numbers keep going getting lower

00:31:24.240 here um yeah okay yeah again we don't know what happened but like it's not it's not great anyway

00:31:31.460 um and eventually hofmanstahl goes to his parents and it's like i'm getting kind of

00:31:36.520 icked out by these letters that this oh wow quite a bit older than me and then they're like

00:31:40.800 please don't do this anymore please stop hitting on our kid yeah yeah and then he basically was

00:31:47.140 like oh we we didn't see eye to eye aesthetically it's like sure stefan like that's that's what

00:31:52.020 or he turned you down it's like i don't like this bedtime story grandpa yeah yeah well he was i mean

00:31:58.160 george was like in his 20s so it's like oh okay all right it's not like not totally i was thinking

00:32:02.240 of him as like 45 no no no okay i mean not that it's not it's still not good but he keeps doing

00:32:08.720 it as he ages but he starts so like it's the kind of thing where it's like i get older and they just

00:32:13.520 stay in the same age like in uh what you call it uh days and confused days and confused yes yeah

00:32:19.540 all right all right all right that's his that's his approach to yeah uh german poets okay yeah

00:32:25.960 yeah yeah he keeps collecting these these young people and like he kind of styles himself this

00:32:31.440 kind of philosopher king kind of who is using pedagogic arrows to teach these young people

00:32:40.000 and to sort of like transmit these secret doctrines

00:32:44.660 that he sort of comes up with.

00:32:47.360 And it's really hard to tell like how much of that 1.00

00:32:50.660 is just like, it was just a bunch of queer coded 0.85

00:32:54.760 young people hanging out.

00:32:56.620 And like, he was genuinely like, you know, promoting them.

00:33:01.420 And to what extent like there is like actual,

00:33:05.040 you know, child abuse or like,

00:33:07.720 or or or whatever happening here um you will not be shocked to hear that that we know for a fact

00:33:13.560 that like in the outer edges of this this kind of intergenerational project there was child abuse

00:33:19.520 this sort of blew up in the 21st century because this story does not end until the 21st century

00:33:24.320 wow okay and part of why i have to be careful with this is that like the descendants of the

00:33:30.160 circle still are around and they will they will come for me this is the this is the patreon only

00:33:35.260 content where if you want to sue us for defamation you're gonna have to spend five dollars

00:33:40.960 yeah try that poets good luck getting the chapbook out for that

00:33:48.220 but yeah so um before long stefan georgia settles down in the city of munich uh where

00:33:55.580 he sort of um which sort of became kind of a hotbed for often right-wing avant-garde

00:34:04.980 thinking a lot of sort of people who had read too much Nietzsche and like hugged a horse uh ended up

00:34:11.840 camping to me for Munich this is the this is a uh Munich reputation that has like gone transatlantic

00:34:20.460 like this is my understanding of Munich is that what's where you go if you're a crazier right

00:34:24.740 winger and German is that still true or no no um yes but much more boring now okay now you just 0.89

00:34:31.940 go there if you're you enjoy champagne and hate immigrants or whatever but like i'm gonna get mail

00:34:36.320 for this i love munich it's fine it's a great city um how do you actually say it in german

00:34:43.080 because i know that's munchen munchen yeah munchen i'm that sounds so cute it doesn't sound like the 0.51

00:34:49.700 place where the fascists live it sounds like a place where the elves live yeah fascist elves

00:34:53.980 gets it right but but at the time it really was this kind of hotbed of of kind of um of aesthetic

00:35:03.180 ferment and kind of a political ferment it is generally a more backwards looking city than

00:35:10.680 berlin right berlin is where you go berlin is the city that sort of has to start over all the time

00:35:16.440 it's like it's a young city it um it became really urban very very quickly in the span of

00:35:23.220 20 30 years it's kind of ugly it's kind of is that like industry war very industrial and then

00:35:30.460 they keep like having new economic development there and then they keep bombing it is that just

00:35:35.220 like the cycle of the 20th century in berlin yeah but even before i mean like it's just you know

00:35:40.420 it's a city it's a fairly small city at the beginning of the 19th century it is a city of

00:35:46.980 million by the end of it right like it's it's it's basically the dubai of the 19th century just

00:35:53.420 um everything that they build gets paved over five minutes later so basically you know it's a city

00:35:59.100 that celebrates newness brashness and a kind of coldness right there's this there's a very good

00:36:04.640 book about this about cold conduct about how berlin is basically about kind of celebrating

00:36:09.780 anti-sentimentality and anti-traditionalism if you think of berthold brecht if you think of the

00:36:14.480 Penny Opera. That's the Berlin aesthetic, I would say. You're done with sacred cows and you're just

00:36:20.980 going to slaughter them all. And if you don't like it, then you just don't get it and you're

00:36:23.960 an idiot, right? Ketamine and mimes and brutalist architecture. Yeah, that's my impression of 1.00

00:36:29.300 Berlin. I mean, it's mostly Coke, I think. But actually, Munich also likes Coke, as I'm sure

00:36:34.720 everyone likes Coke. Coke is very popular. Coke is very popular. It was also very popular back then.

00:36:39.940 yeah okay we're just speed running the 20th century but this time stupider and worse 0.97

00:36:45.740 yeah with less coke somehow yeah so and munich is right like it's a catholic city it's it's it's 0.96

00:36:52.840 was long dominated by the church it's in bavaria which is not unimportant we'll get to why that

00:36:58.720 might matter uh later on i'll be quizzing on your german geography but uh but keep that in mind

00:37:05.600 dear listeners so he he falls in in the district of schwabing which is part of munich um with a

00:37:12.720 first sort of circle of friends which overlaps with this other circle the who call themselves

00:37:18.080 the cosmics that he's also sort of part of so this is people like i mean this is not there's

00:37:22.800 no reason people have to know this but karl wolfsky ludwig klages fridrich gundolf i'll maybe

00:37:27.960 briefly tell you what the what the um what the cosmics are all about just to give you a sense

00:37:33.120 of just like because i feel like so far we've been describing this as kind of like these people

00:37:38.500 are these people are maybe a little light on the loafers but they're basically queer modernists 0.84

00:37:44.780 okay well get ready for a for me to open up a fire hose of just absolute bat shittery okay all 0.92

00:37:54.320 right i'm strapped so so his friend alfred schuller big influence on him um regarded himself

00:38:01.240 as a reincarnated Roman

00:38:02.620 who wanted to prepare the ground

00:38:05.340 for what he called bloodlights,

00:38:07.160 which are basically reincarnated

00:38:09.540 ancient Romans,

00:38:11.520 which would bring about

00:38:14.380 or portend somehow

00:38:16.720 an ancient and original unity

00:38:19.640 of feeling and reason

00:38:20.980 which had been lost in modernity,

00:38:22.680 which seemed to mean with Christianity. 0.96

00:38:24.260 Oh, okay.

00:38:26.600 Yeah.

00:38:26.800 Alfred Schuller's very pragmatic program.

00:38:29.540 i have here his collected works um which he would read from publicly and you know i teach a seminar

00:38:38.720 on georg-wilhelm-fridrich hegel i think i can make sense of a impenetrable text holy shit i can i'm

00:38:45.700 like what the fuck is this it is it's people were just sitting and nodding and i'm like i don't know 0.59

00:38:51.500 mantis it seems like this guy is having aneurysm get him to a hospital this is how i feel when i 1.00

00:38:56.860 try and read Lacan I'm like no you're all full of shit oh yeah you're lying nobody this doesn't 0.98

00:39:02.000 make sense to anybody but so I think I'm just going to describe a few more of these people 0.99

00:39:06.520 this is sort of you can sort of hear the like get a sense of the vibe the vibe yeah yeah so the next

00:39:12.320 guy I'm going to talk about is Ludwig Derlet who's basically this sort of low-rent Nietzsche clone

00:39:16.320 who wanted to kind of create a highly hierarchized purified Catholic Christianity

00:39:22.880 um he wanted to organize it through orders right so like think of like knights templar he was sort

00:39:28.360 of trying to create like a knights templar in munich with a bunch of poets um and they were

00:39:33.820 gonna have like sacraments and all that stuff so he's like trying to sort of create a more purified

00:39:38.360 catholic church i think there's a bunch of anti-mary shit in there too of course yeah because 0.91

00:39:43.580 the the feminization of christianity this is also happening in the u.s at the time yeah yeah so you 0.98

00:39:48.440 can imagine georgia being like all men you say and he did these like very impressive readings

00:39:55.100 uh where he'd sort of rave and rant for a live audience um and thomas mann went to see him uh

00:40:01.640 in the 1890s and wrote a early uh short story about it called at the prophets or visiting the 1.00

00:40:07.420 prophet which is entirely a send-up of this guy he's like get a load of this fucking asshole 0.95

00:40:11.560 this is hilarious man himself lived in in munich at the time but he sort of he's on the outside of 0.99

00:40:18.840 this looking in he's a gay man who's about to marry or who's just married a woman and who but

00:40:24.960 who whom he told i'm gay by the way right and and he's like but i want to be bourgeois i want to be 0.51

00:40:31.200 a father i want to be i want to commit to the to marriage and you know uh but i'm also a queer man

00:40:37.960 for a 19th century woman that's probably not the worst deal yeah no she was okay with it

00:40:42.580 basically um and and eventually like his kids are in on this too it's like it's very very strange

00:40:47.480 but he thought of this as like a turn towards the bourgeois okay and he thought that all the

00:40:52.920 posing and the affectation of these much more openly well comparatively openly gay men was 0.63

00:41:00.200 basically it was just posy and juvenile he's like you gotta you gotta settle that self-regard 0.70

00:41:05.300 it's a performance

00:41:07.960 for the

00:41:09.900 purposes of like social positioning

00:41:11.540 it's kind of insincere

00:41:13.620 yeah

00:41:14.280 so the third person I want to talk about

00:41:17.420 though I think this is someone we should maybe at some point

00:41:19.920 devote an entire episode to because he's just like 1.00

00:41:21.780 such a rebarbative shit 1.00

00:41:23.880 by far the creepiest of the bunch 1.00

00:41:25.880 Derlet and Schule are just

00:41:27.300 cranks basically 0.99

00:41:29.280 but now we're getting into the real shit 1.00

00:41:31.820 the real shit 0.99

00:41:32.400 Ludwig Klages is basically a Bachofen redux. 0.98

00:41:35.860 I don't know if you know, but he was a few, Jakob Bachofen.

00:41:38.640 He's the guy who wrote the mother rite, very, very influential in the 19th century.

00:41:42.540 So he's the guy who's like, there's an original matriarchate that basically got, or matriarchy that basically got supplanted.

00:41:49.880 And basically all of Greek myth is the story of how the Greeks destroyed the matriarch.

00:41:55.540 This is also a wild goose chase through anthropology.

00:42:01.420 sometimes like radical feminists went like adrian riches of women born has a huge section devoted to

00:42:06.000 this it's like a very popular idea for which there is candidly just like zero historical evidence

00:42:11.560 well and 19th century feminists were really big into the idea that like there is some um distant 1.00

00:42:17.440 past that justifies our worldview either by being an example of utopia or an example of like a primal 0.98

00:42:25.860 horror that needs to be suppressed and and prevented from its return yeah so basically

00:42:30.560 clages thought that basically so he was famous for the the science of character he thought you

00:42:36.320 could like he could you had an essential character there was were ways to to figure it out he thought

00:42:42.360 that one was through your handwriting so he became sort of the father of graphology basically but his

00:42:48.320 main thing was this opposition of soul and spirit right the soul is materialistic it's rationalist

00:42:54.460 it's scientific, it's quantifying, and ultimately uncreative, right? It discovers what the world

00:43:00.420 happens to be like and orders things accordingly. And the soul, by contrast, lives in the world,

00:43:07.380 is one with the body, is creative, but therefore also doesn't know progress, really, right?

00:43:13.140 Progress is, in fact, identical with the destruction of life, right? Life, both in the

00:43:21.240 sense um of the unity of body and soul right he thinks it's just progress is bad for us physically

00:43:27.980 for you and me physically and the literal destruction of humans in industry and mass war

00:43:33.120 right so he has this kind of anti-modernist bent where he says like where you see progress i see the

00:43:37.980 making disposable of human life very kind of proto-ecological i would say uh anti-progress

00:43:47.380 position um just to give you an idea of what he sounds like in 1913 he gives a very famous speech

00:43:53.480 to a youth gathering um this was very big in the second german empire where he says

00:43:58.560 quote under the pretext of utility economic development culture progress in reality aims

00:44:05.600 at the destruction of life so like it's kind of kind of impressive for like 1913 um you can see

00:44:13.540 why people who didn't agree with Cláges

00:44:15.660 on much else could find

00:44:17.480 something to like in that.

00:44:19.860 Cláges was neo-pagan,

00:44:22.100 which meant he was, like Nietzsche,

00:44:24.340 deeply hostile to Christianity

00:44:25.720 and to traditional morality.

00:44:27.600 He also had some kind of weird thing

00:44:29.760 with, I think, younger

00:44:31.520 girls in his case.

00:44:33.400 And unfortunately, it also meant that he was,

00:44:35.980 again, like Nietzsche, quite

00:44:37.400 anti-Semitic. 0.79

00:44:38.800 Just an all-around

00:44:40.940 sweetheart.

00:44:41.800 um and so these were all people so just stepping back like what's true of these three folks that

00:44:48.320 i've told you right like they're all conservative revolutionaries they're all reactionary mystics 0.99

00:44:52.980 in some way um and also and this is very very crucial absolute fucking weirdos just huge 0.99

00:44:59.800 fucking weirdos so it's a male-dominated group but this group is not largely gay as far as we 0.99

00:45:06.500 can tell um and it's not exclusively men huh okay there are women who hang out with them 1.00

00:45:12.580 mostly aristocratic women are drawn to this circle um and you know there's for instance

00:45:19.260 franziska von revendloh who i like who was friends with all these dudes and then spent like decades

00:45:25.860 writing very funny satires about them uh which are great um she dated clagas for a while and

00:45:32.040 dumped him after he demanded quote-unquote purity from her what does that mean yeah

00:45:37.640 it does not mean what you think it means i mean i think i think any i think you should dump any guy

00:45:45.340 who talks about women's purity in any context like dump that guy immediately but what does 0.99

00:45:51.360 this guy mean he wanted her to stop smoking isn't that awesome and she's like fuck you you're out 1.00

00:45:58.260 She's like, fuck you, me and my cigarettes. 1.00

00:46:00.600 We'll be together forever. 1.00

00:46:02.600 She, like, lights up. 1.00

00:46:03.680 She, like, blows smoke right in his face.

00:46:06.300 Yeah. 1.00

00:46:06.540 In his face. 1.00

00:46:07.060 And it's, like, hippie scum. 1.00

00:46:09.820 Okay, I like that about her. 1.00

00:46:11.500 I like that about her.

00:46:12.160 Yeah, it's pretty cool, yeah.

00:46:14.280 And also on him, like, good on him.

00:46:16.500 Like, I mean, he could have been, like, stop sleeping with other people.

00:46:18.580 And he's like, I think it's bad for your lungs. 1.00

00:46:21.020 And she's like, fuck off. 1.00

00:46:23.280 Like, I get both of them, yeah. 1.00

00:46:24.900 You're making me like these people.

00:46:27.340 Like, you have to stop.

00:46:28.260 we've got to get we've got to get back to how they're nazis because they all go nazi right

00:46:31.860 clagas definitely okay the other ones died before oh well that's that's their saving grace is just

00:46:37.180 like dropping dead in the early 1930s is that it yeah i mean that is that is definitely

00:46:42.920 that definitely helpful uh god why didn't i think of that anyway sorry

00:46:58.260 so in 1906 um george breaks with these people and founds basically his own group and his own

00:47:14.820 ersatz religion okay um it's it's a little hard to tell who broke with whom as with all this it's

00:47:20.540 basically like these are just very messy bees if you will um and both sides are like oh we broke

00:47:27.020 with the other right um the reason clages gives he's like well i i basically gave george an

00:47:34.440 ultimatum about karl wolfsky who's another member of the circle um because george had

00:47:40.960 lots of jewish people in his circle and clages is like that we can't have that 0.50

00:47:44.500 and according to him george wouldn't disown them um which in which case good for george 0.98

00:47:50.400 and and and clagas was committed to a deep sort of weininger style uh anti-semitism

00:47:56.480 just but it's kind of characteristic of his of his circle there's this weird duality on the one

00:48:02.780 hand it's the circle is a is a bunch of fellow travelers to nascent reactionary and fascist

00:48:09.280 movements and it had a bunch of jewish members right and that would persist until the end right 0.51

00:48:15.240 Like in 1933, you have a straight up Nazi kind of mouthing off about how like Georgiev

00:48:21.860 would have wanted the Nazis to win.

00:48:25.660 Georgiev himself is at that point dying and won't say one thing one way or the other.

00:48:30.180 And then you have Kantorovich saying like, no, obviously not.

00:48:32.960 Right.

00:48:33.200 So like there is this kind of interesting duality where on the one hand.

00:48:36.760 It's more ambiguity.

00:48:37.740 It's more weaponized ambiguity. 0.89

00:48:39.000 It's will they or won't they, but for Nazism. 0.59

00:48:40.700 them you know it's and i don't know whether george ever like had a sort of a principled 0.67

00:48:45.800 stance here or whether he just kind of liked having friends and like didn't want to lose any

00:48:51.040 of them but it is very clear that he like he he you know the nazis made overtures to him in 1933

00:48:56.620 and he went to switzerland i mean like i feel like that does speak a clear language he's like

00:49:00.700 nah i'm not not feeling this yeah this is not go this is not gonna be good for me in one way or

00:49:06.120 the other well or it's not good for my friends right i mean like he did think of the circle as

00:49:09.600 like his legacy and he didn't didn't want that um so he as i said he founds his own ersatz religion

00:49:15.940 he had met yeah what it seems like it seems like this was kind of a trend right oh yeah uh like

00:49:23.460 everybody was coming up like the modernists the modernists got weird and they came up with new

00:49:28.080 religion oh yeah oh but this is this is going a step beyond all right tell me about it again like

00:49:32.920 like this is going weirder places okay so i keep being like oh this is something that i kind of 0.97

00:49:39.000 recognize and you keep being like no no no no it's so much weirder it's so much weirder than

00:49:43.760 that um because i mean like we almost yada yada defounding his own religion you're like yeah cool

00:49:48.280 that's fine wait what but so in 1906 when he breaks with the cosmics he he founds his own

00:49:53.620 religion based on a young man he met in 1902 named maximilian kronberger he had sort of well

00:50:02.280 he says like oh i saw him walking down the street in munich and i started following him because i

00:50:07.660 was so taken with like this religious experience okay so you cruised him that's uh that's great

00:50:14.700 Kronberger at the time 14 I saw this guy walking down the street and I was so overcome with what

00:50:22.020 was definitely a profound spiritual experience yeah and this is also not some guy this is like

00:50:28.080 literally a teenage boy yeah and he basically loops him into his into his circle Kronberger

00:50:34.780 turns out to be kind of have a touch of the poet himself you there do you want to do some

00:50:40.180 like conservative uh like modernist poetry like imagine being approached on the street for that

00:50:47.220 purpose and also nude modeling yeah yeah i mean like i have to say given the weirdness of the

00:50:53.220 pitch he has a shocking success with this stuff he must have had a lot of charm it's like yeah

00:50:58.700 i'll pose nude for you yeah he must have he must have had something going for him it's not charm

00:51:02.980 i wish i had some pictures to show you there's a kind of severity and kind of like mysteriousness

00:51:09.720 to the guy it's like oh it must be serious and important that i posed yeah yeah maybe that's it

00:51:14.780 people will sort of do these profile pictures of him he only approved pictures from a very specific

00:51:19.440 angle to be taken of him because like you have to see his nose that's where clagas gets the whole

00:51:24.020 characterology from that is like no like this is the essential expression like normal photography

00:51:29.360 is is evacuating us of our essence but this is the true face and people would like have his like

00:51:36.820 would have masks of his face on their desk and like it it gets fucking weird that's that's weird

00:51:42.680 okay so he he drafts this kid into his new weird cult who then dies oh yeah he i think it's typhus

00:51:50.480 i forget what it is i should have looked this up but he dies in 1904 does he become the messiah

00:51:55.060 Yeah.

00:51:55.800 Like Antinous, like Hadrian and Antinous.

00:51:57.980 Exactly.

00:51:58.440 That's where he goes.

00:51:59.160 He's like, you know, what if this guy was just God, this like very pretty teenage boy

00:52:03.420 I met like a couple of weeks ago?

00:52:05.760 Now you're thinking like a cult leader in 1904.

00:52:09.820 Well done.

00:52:10.880 That's exactly what he does.

00:52:12.000 He's like, hey, like this is exactly a kind of Hadrian kind of motif.

00:52:17.240 This is exactly a kind of...

00:52:19.100 Do our listeners basically know, has anybody read the Marguerite Yorsen, our book Memoirs

00:52:23.180 of Hadrian is great.

00:52:24.500 on this uh but it's actually real history of the emperor hadrian uh famous i think for destroying

00:52:30.720 the second temple and that's right igniting the jewish diaspora so like you know that was him 0.93

00:52:36.860 what a dick uh also had a much younger boyfriend who he met as a dancer in turkey and this kid 0.94

00:52:46.820 like mysteriously died during a cruise up the Nile under like possibly suspicious circumstances 0.99

00:52:54.900 and because a cool Poirot was not there to be like my suspicions were first aroused when the

00:53:00.500 centurions uh the grief that resulted after Antonius's death like really consumed Hadrian

00:53:12.020 drove him a little crazy and hadrian started to create a cult around his dead teenage boyfriend

00:53:18.980 that was briefly a rival to christianity uh they still do um unearth sometimes in these

00:53:26.000 archaeological excavations in the mediterranean world these pictures these like statues of

00:53:30.420 antonus um who looks like a pretty boy he looks like he was a beautiful boy and uh you know r.i.p 0.97

00:53:36.700 i don't think he was god but but this is an established pattern that sometimes pervy gay

00:53:43.140 guys do is what i guess i'm trying to say yeah and he's also he's also uh drawing on the 0.87

00:53:50.140 algabal heliogabalus myth the like the very late roman emperor heliogabalus who kind of

00:53:57.420 also appears to have been a teenager and and about whom these like very queer rumors got spread sort

00:54:04.180 of i think as a damnatio memoriae after he was overthrown basically and and i should say that

00:54:09.440 georg is i think second volume of poetry was called algabal after after helio gabala so like

00:54:15.060 okay so that was the tradition he was he was kind of scouting for this like this yeah like like

00:54:19.860 on the one hand like clearly the you know kornberger's death did hit him hard but he

00:54:25.520 was also in a weird way primed he probably had had the idea to make like the beauty of boys

00:54:33.040 into a semi-divine project before and that is you know that's a that's a tune that a lot of

00:54:41.100 people have sung so he starts basically creating kind of we don't know to what extent because like

00:54:47.120 none of this is ever written down or if it's written down it's never shared with the outside

00:54:51.380 but some kind of cult grows up around this child who's now venerated as maximin that's how they

00:54:59.720 call him and he writes poetry about him uh there's a 1906 he publishes a collection of poems called

00:55:06.900 the star of the covenant right which is which has like all these poems about about maximin

00:55:12.520 the whole cycle but it's pretty clear that like there was a kind of cultic dimension a ritualistic

00:55:18.100 dimension that is not exhausted in the poetry or at least he wanted us to believe there was i have

00:55:23.100 no idea maybe they didn't but like and that's the interesting part right like so far everything's

00:55:28.920 been kind of la pur la and everything's like kind of performance art but like the moment you're you

00:55:34.340 have this kind of cultic dimension that you then don't put in the books right like there's something

00:55:40.040 else going on yeah this covenant he sort of starts insisting has a political dimension right so he's

00:55:45.480 trying to say we are setting up a state we are setting up a new community a new covenant right

00:55:51.700 Like the biblical echoes there are not lost in Germany either, right, in order to sort of create a better Germany in some way, right?

00:56:02.680 Like it gets a religious and a kind of a political dimension at the same time.

00:56:09.720 So was there any element of like race science in the worship of this boy?

00:56:13.020 Was he like a particular specimen or is it just that he was pretty?

00:56:18.480 Or is that stuff not like present in the archive?

00:56:21.700 I don't know. I mean, like, in the poetry, it's not evident. I mean, we're going to read some

00:56:30.540 Georgian poetry later together, but like, he's too good a poet to sort of go on about someone's

00:56:37.040 blue eyes. So it's a little hard to tell. I think that generally, the politics were about racial

00:56:47.240 purity but in a much more abstract way right um and this is really really important um to sort of

00:56:53.820 drill down on what kind of nationalism this is the moment when the the conversation about secret

00:56:58.940 germany sort of enters into the vernacular and the mythology of the georgia circle the idea of

00:57:05.460 secret germany had been around before but this is when georgia starts sort of thinking about okay

00:57:10.440 although the the cycle of poems about secret germany is is still a bit in in the future but

00:57:16.600 it's probably easiest to describe sort of where george and his groups his various groups diverged

00:57:23.220 from what we might call the kind of conservative or reactionary mainstream in the german-speaking

00:57:28.280 world because again and again they didn't quite behave the way you'd predict right like you have

00:57:32.880 a garden variety and like right like the way you're saying like there must be race signs in

00:57:36.740 there somewhere like not quite like they're weirder than that yeah this is these people keep

00:57:41.880 surprising me so like for one thing they were not really nationalists right or rather they were

00:57:47.600 fiercely committed to a germany but that germany was not identical with the actual existing country

00:57:54.520 okay right so now this is what we have to get into we have to quiz you a little bit on your

00:57:59.140 german history when did germany first become a country do you happen to know this i know

00:58:05.560 that involved somebody named Otto von Bismarck that's right whose great-grandchild just broke 0.96

00:58:13.560 up with Kate Moss you'll be uh sad to learn oh shit yeah um because he wanted to get sober and 0.92

00:58:19.380 she wasn't into that um this is my tab this is my tabloid uh habit you know coming to bear back on 0.94

00:58:26.840 in bed with the right and I believe that was like I want to say the first half of the 19th century

00:58:30.720 like fairly recently maybe even later yeah yeah 1870 1871 1870 is the franco-prussian war so i

00:58:37.480 thought it was older than it really was it's yeah no germany is 1870 to 1871 is but then before that

00:58:43.640 it was a kind of incomprehensible yeah hodgepodge series of douche a lot of douches a lot of like

00:58:50.060 very very small territorial um like governance well few fewer by the time they had been consolidated

00:58:59.020 under what like the austro-hungarian empire like no various various patentates right well i can i

00:59:04.720 can walk you through it it's actually an interesting story germany became a country

00:59:07.460 when georgia turned three oh wow okay so he's almost an exact contemporary of his nation so

00:59:12.840 he probably really feels a lot of investment in this project yeah no oh oh my god he keeps

00:59:19.020 surprising me this guy is like i should i should know i feel like like i'm at the magic show and

00:59:24.680 they keep on pulling out rabbits and like ribbons and i keep on i'm like just floored every time

00:59:30.580 yeah so yeah the situation was right like you mentioned ottoman bismarck germany basically was

00:59:36.700 united by by and under the prussian monarchy right it annexed the ryanish provinces after 1815 after

00:59:44.660 napoleon was defeated though bingen where miurga was born remained instead part of the state of

00:59:50.620 Hesse. And over the next 50 years, it started gobbling up more and more of...

01:00:00.300 Was this a military conquest or largely a peaceful enterprise?

01:00:03.700 It was largely military. Well, some of it is through administrative reform, and then a lot

01:00:09.920 of it are the wars of unification. The war against the Danes, which allows the Prussians

01:00:17.280 to gobble up Schleswig and Holstein in the north. 0.66

01:00:19.620 Then a war against the Austro-Hungarians in 1866.

01:00:24.360 And finally, basically we are left with Prussia,

01:00:28.720 which is basically at that point,

01:00:29.820 two thirds of what's called the German Confederation, right? 0.89

01:00:32.880 So huge, just the absolute elephant in the room. 0.55

01:00:36.360 And then I forget how many exactly,

01:00:38.480 it's like something like 12 to 14 other states.

01:00:41.640 So Bavaria is one of these.

01:00:42.840 This is why the people of München

01:00:44.740 do not like the people in Berlin

01:00:46.300 because they feel they got annexed but it's and it's also a lot of um it's a lot of the

01:00:53.260 southwestern states so baden württemberg hesse where george was born that's where your family's

01:00:59.640 from right around like my family's from baden yeah and palatinate yeah so so these were and

01:01:04.940 these really only got integrated into what was then but then became the german empire okay they

01:01:10.460 were they were essentially independent until until 1870 71 and so there's this big like

01:01:18.220 moneyed military empire taking these people by force and that's probably not entirely harmonious

01:01:25.780 exactly and people felt themselves not they might feel themselves german but they didn't feel

01:01:33.160 themselves prussian and this the german identity before unification was it largely linguistic um

01:01:38.300 yeah it was a lot of linguistic well this is the other thing right like it's largely around language

01:01:43.100 because it has trouble being around about other things right you think about like is germany

01:01:48.200 protestant or catholic it's both yeah it's both right was germany part of the roman empire uh

01:01:54.220 yes and no yes and no exactly right is germany part of western europe or or more like east central

01:02:00.640 europe depends yeah yeah right so that's really really interesting okay yeah if you think about

01:02:05.800 like a guy like george who grows up on the rhine right where there are roman ruins everywhere

01:02:10.980 moves to munich and he probably he probably feels like he's got a lot in common with the french

01:02:15.440 he thinks he has roman ancestries right think of alfred schula and his blood lights right he's like

01:02:20.380 where i used to walk there are now there once were roman emperors whereas like these prussian 0.70

01:02:25.680 barbarians like would have been like soiling themselves in their bear skins right like but 0.98

01:02:30.160 also the the barbarians won so like like it's not it's not an ethos of domination it's an ethos of 0.94

01:02:36.180 refinement yeah yeah exactly right and it's one of resignation throughout the 19 19th century

01:02:43.320 german nationalists really thought like hey we're gonna bring about like when we say we want to 0.97

01:02:49.040 united germany what we mean is we're gonna get rid of all these assholes who run our current states 0.99

01:02:54.220 right we want to get rid of these dynastic heads of family this douchey of that's the size of a 0.99

01:02:59.080 postage stamp and extracts like extortionate taxation on the locals. We're going to get rid

01:03:05.060 of them. Okay. Yeah. I can. I understand that. The French, the English all did this. Why are we

01:03:09.900 not getting with this program? Right. And what they got, of course, was that one of those

01:03:14.880 potentates just took over everything. Yeah. And so there are a lot of there's a big place for

01:03:19.040 German nationalists. Well, not like that. Okay. Right. This sucks. Right. And Giorga's nationalism

01:03:23.860 falls into that, right?

01:03:25.000 It's a nationalism

01:03:25.720 that is weirdly international, right?

01:03:28.300 He's like, 0.99

01:03:29.140 I don't want this kind of like 0.99

01:03:31.020 blood and iron shit 0.99

01:03:32.940 from Otto von Bismarck. 1.00

01:03:34.060 I want a Catholic, 1.00

01:03:35.760 a Roman, 1.00

01:03:37.160 a refined,

01:03:38.660 you know,

01:03:39.380 a church-based

01:03:40.720 kind of German nationalism.

01:03:42.820 And all I will do

01:03:43.940 is retreat

01:03:44.580 from this official, 0.60

01:03:46.980 this mercantile Germany.

01:03:48.900 Also, of course,

01:03:49.440 like Prussia

01:03:49.720 was the industrial powerhouse.

01:03:50.940 It was richer, right?

01:03:52.100 It was also kind of a like

01:03:53.860 Look, we're a little bit more traditional. You think of Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, right? That entire book is about like, hey, why are Catholics so poor, right? Like why are Protestants so wealthy? Like he's trying to grapple with the reality of post-unification Germany where he's like, yeah, like there are real, right? Like there's a little bit of like real Germany kind of like red state, blue state kind of thing going on here where people are like.

01:04:17.520 Right. So there's the, like, the elites who industrialized, even though there's a, like, a large proletarian working class in those industrial centers, they don't have the nostalgic claim to an agrarian authenticity that characterizes a lot of, like, nationalist imaginations in the European 19th century. Is that basically where you're going?

01:04:37.280 the the contradictions of modernity it's a little bit of a wagner thing right the

01:04:40.760 contradictions of modernity would have been a lot clearer in berlin right than they were in bingen

01:04:46.080 where he grew up and so like this anti-modernism does also have a kind of anti-capitalist edge

01:04:52.040 oh my god this is so real i'm sorry this is just like reactionary anti-establishment

01:04:59.720 traditionalism yeah it is it's like is this just peter thiel like is peter thiel funding this guy

01:05:07.420 is what i want to know i mean there is some there's something like that right like i was

01:05:11.980 thinking of peter thiel here too that like this idea of just right i mean or or william f buckley

01:05:16.820 right yeah standing athwart the train of history yelling stop right like that is to some extent

01:05:23.020 like progress was bad yeah this is not the progress that we wanted um i will just i will

01:05:29.100 opt out i will nope out of all of this it's interesting that this arises this traditionalism 0.53

01:05:35.320 arises from a gay milieu like that is really fascinating to me yeah i mean it's it's not

01:05:41.220 just them but like of course the idea of a identity that contains multitudes right he's like

01:05:47.660 i'm a hyper nationalist also i'm a roman right like it's so funny right like if you think of

01:05:53.140 someone like there's like the dumbest kind of national german nationalism of the time someone 0.54

01:05:56.640 like heinrich von treitschke who is just like the germans are the descendants of the germanic tribes 0.88

01:06:02.220 that beat the romans and this is our you know this you know siegfried ideal is our national ideal

01:06:08.180 it's domination domination nationalism it's very trumpy yeah exactly and and then you it's like we 0.98

01:06:13.740 kick their ass and then we're going to go back to our pre-roman influences which are superior by 0.99

01:06:20.120 virtue of having kicked their ass yeah yeah yeah and and george is not that he is someone who 0.99

01:06:25.480 who's the identity he wants is one that contains kind of multiplicities thomas mann has a really 0.99

01:06:32.180 interesting book during his conservative phase in world war one he sort of switches sides during

01:06:37.240 the weimar republic where he gets invited to do a talk about the evils of weimar republic and like

01:06:41.880 actually, I'm for this. Sorry. I can refund your honorarium. I feel like everyone's looking real

01:06:49.460 bummed right now. A lot of us probably should have done that at some point when we were invited

01:06:53.960 to give a talk. It's like, actually, I think I've switched sides. And so basically, but he wrote

01:06:59.520 this book, The Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man in 1918, where he sort of says, Germany,

01:07:05.240 the german identity is to have carried to term all the contradictions of europe right he says

01:07:13.480 like all the things right like catholic catholic versus protestant modern versus traditional like

01:07:19.060 right the the brits know where they fall the french know where they fall the russians know

01:07:23.040 where they fall we're like uh can i hear option a again right like he's like the the idea of

01:07:28.620 german is to be kind of riven between these two things we like he thinks germans know

01:07:35.000 all the advantages of what it would be like to be a western european and all the lure of not being

01:07:40.400 that right like that's that's his idea like we we feel both is his idea george is sort of the same

01:07:46.540 way he sort of says the nationalism that secret germany uh implies is multiple and it is the

01:07:53.840 queerness and the multiplicity are maybe not the same but they're not distinct they're linked

01:07:59.080 yeah so basically right german nationalism had been forward-looking right intensely forward-looking

01:08:23.340 It had all been about the country, but creating a country that didn't exist, right?

01:08:29.360 And its creation implied a massive reshaping of what was then this kind of, as you say,

01:08:34.940 this hodgepodge of states.

01:08:36.680 And when unification actually happened in 1871, that left a lot of people very disappointed.

01:08:43.740 And so this is where part of that response, there were different people responding different

01:08:47.660 ways.

01:08:48.300 Nietzsche is someone who responds to that one way.

01:08:50.340 But there is this idea of the secret Germany that emerges.

01:08:55.900 It's like a real Germany that isn't represented by Wilhelm I, Friedrich Wilhelm, and Wilhelm II. 0.95

01:09:02.920 They're like the Hohenzollerns with their spiked helmets and their weird marching and all that shit. 0.94

01:09:09.540 That's not really Germany. 0.97

01:09:12.080 What we want now is secret Germany. 0.89

01:09:14.580 Right. And I can I can this is a very early version of this Paul de Lagarde in 1875, formulating basically an early version of this idea, quote, the Germany that we love and long to see has never existed and perhaps never will. 0.51

01:09:30.120 the ideal is something that is and is not at the same time people only thrive in the mysterious

01:09:36.180 warmth of a star that has never yet been glimpsed germany would have been founded if we were to take 0.58

01:09:42.260 a negative stance against the current vices of a time that was obviously influenced by un-germans

01:09:48.020 if we formed an open alliance to ward off and combat these vices which would not lack external

01:09:53.240 signs and symbols, nor the strictest discipline, right? So I don't want to sugarcoat this. This is

01:10:03.540 also like, you can see how this shades into anti-Semitism, anti-democratic politics, right?

01:10:08.240 One of the things that they reject from the West is parliamentary democracy, right? These are

01:10:14.060 dyed-in-the-wool reactionaries. At the same time, they're looking at the Kaiser and are like, nah,

01:10:18.040 not like that um so it's it's both right he's he's it's a germany that is a star that has never yet

01:10:27.340 been glimpsed right it it it has its political role only in not being real this is what kantorovich

01:10:33.960 was going on about in 1933 just be like guys we can't make this real the whole point of secret

01:10:38.560 germany is it's not real yeah right you can't do it like the moment it becomes realized it is part

01:10:44.360 of the same problem that it's meant to combat right and if you think about the the negative

01:10:49.420 stance this is very much what the georgia circle would sort of end up with and be like not like

01:10:54.620 that we are we reject the contemporary world we reject modernity we reject um just everyday

01:11:04.060 politics we reject you know the industrialized world in favor of this this other thing that that

01:11:11.560 will never come yeah return but only to my imagination yeah yeah right yeah return to this

01:11:16.940 thing that i hope will never show up if you look at i mean this is it was a little hard to render

01:11:20.600 this in english but if you look at lagarde's right um germany would have been founded right

01:11:25.840 he's like very careful to be like yeah that's an extreme what is that like subjunctive tag tense

01:11:31.900 yeah it's like it's past tense and also subjunctive in the past there was a possibility

01:11:37.980 Yeah. Right. And it will not happen. But yeah. Right. And so in this context, Georgian is set, sort of have an interesting position, right? They are serious nationalists, but a nationalism that was sort of like not interested in the actual German nation, right? They're obsessed with the racialized German essence, right? They are interested in dissent, impurity and all that stuff. But one that seemed to transcend any actually existing Germans, right? They thought the Kaiser was degenerated.

01:12:05.340 like they they weren't so worried about jewish people they were worried about the kaiser

01:12:08.820 uh right like what an oaf right and like at the same time the interesting question becomes

01:12:17.780 um you know what's the relationship between the actual germany and the real germany right

01:12:23.300 like and this is sort of going to become the big the big um thing that that consumes them

01:12:30.880 all throughout the weimar republic because they're like oh not like this either we hate this too

01:12:35.440 but it was of course a republic that right-wing forces many of whom they were allied and friends

01:12:40.920 with were actively starting to destroy yeah and so that is where you get that's where you get

01:12:46.120 people like thomas mann being like okay this is where the fun stops yeah unlike the empire like

01:12:51.380 i actually would be pretty sad if this ended and i think what comes after is much worse

01:12:55.100 stop doing this right this is also like the complaint that a lot of people

01:13:00.220 on the left have right now it's like oh liberal democracy is terrible and also there's such small

01:13:06.760 portions right it's like this is not this is inadequate and you're really gonna miss it now

01:13:11.500 that it's leaving yeah yeah exactly and and in some way they sort of never made they made their

01:13:19.100 sort of baseline rejection kind of this this pose that they would take vis-a-vis everything and like

01:13:24.740 And, you know, Mann really is the sort of big antipode here.

01:13:28.420 He's like, what are you doing? 0.98

01:13:30.020 It's like Thomas Mann is what happens when you mature out of this, like, kind of dime-square-y bullshit and become a serious intellectual. 0.81

01:13:38.380 You wind up in the position of Thomas Mann, which is like, no, people's actual lives and dignity are on the line.

01:13:44.700 And we have to do what is necessary to preserve them.

01:13:49.320 Yeah, I mean, it's so funny.

01:13:50.100 on the one hand you're like oh that delusional fop like marries a woman because he thinks it's 0.94

01:13:55.480 like a maturation process because he thinks he can yeah but actually he's like he's he does a

01:14:00.780 good job of maturing right he's like at least this way yeah he's on to something with like 0.93

01:14:05.980 all your weird like gay posing is kind of juvenile right he's like you the the big moral test is how 0.91

01:14:13.960 how will you prevent this from happening and you can't right that's that is really bad oh my god 0.85

01:14:19.400 that's too close to home i know but now you know why i wanted to talk about this on december 31st

01:14:25.100 2024 so we have the nationalism right where they're nationalists and anti-nationalists at

01:14:29.860 once they're traditionalists and anti-traditionalists at once right they hated most actual

01:14:35.000 traditions right this is the post nietzsche generation so the story is not like they think

01:14:42.180 like nietzsche that there is something wrong with modernity but it's not that straightforward they're

01:14:46.840 not sort of typical returners right they thought that part of their provenance was to construct

01:14:56.520 their own secret germany back in time right so that is to say like dante was for them a german

01:15:03.320 ancestor shakespeare was a german ancestor right um and then like other people they hate it so they

01:15:08.700 do this weird like emperor frederick ii in the 10th 11th century is like a forebear for them

01:15:14.680 right algabal heligabalus uh hadrian right like they they start creating this kind of um this kind

01:15:21.660 of lineage that's both kind of like very traditional hyper-traditional but also very

01:15:27.200 selective right it's never just like straightforwardly everything that used to be

01:15:31.260 was good right everything that right uh what keeps us from doing stuff like this right like they're

01:15:37.240 like oh no also the past had a bunch of bad people yeah right a bunch of things were very very 0.64

01:15:40.900 terrible um we're selecting and of course they very often selected people who were queer which

01:15:46.920 is the other interesting thing or who didn't sort of fit into their into their into their own times 0.80

01:15:52.020 right they the georgia circle sort of is important for for instance rediscovering the poet

01:15:56.600 who you may know right who had basically gone crazy and then like written incomprehensible

01:16:05.080 poetry in a tower for 40 years and everyone was like well the good the early stuff's good and

01:16:09.600 too bad what happened with him and they're like no the later stuff is better right so they like

01:16:14.340 inaugurated the serious study of this guy's late poems like 40 years of them basically um wow they

01:16:21.140 they they've left a huge trace on the study of german literature because they they basically

01:16:26.180 re-evaluated everything they were like oh this person is much much better much more interesting

01:16:30.500 um you know uh they're a true ancestors the other ones are the reason why we're in this mess in the

01:16:36.140 first place right and so you know when i i still have here a book by georg's follower fridrich

01:16:41.180 gundolf about goethe and i don't i can't grab it right now because i'm mic'd in but um so it's

01:16:47.540 both a very very influential book about the poet if you look at the dust jacket i sometimes have

01:16:52.920 visitors to my office who stare at it and are like uh what because it has a swastika on the outside

01:16:58.700 of it and gundolf briefly the advisor to one dr joseph goebbels so like oh yeah wow okay yeah i'm 0.97

01:17:07.780 like you can't make this shit up it's it's not that big a country i guess they they do this thing

01:17:13.920 where they kind of assemble this canon of people they think are cool um and often enough those tend 0.99

01:17:19.040 to be kind of people who are somehow queer coded but there's more than that it's like it's also

01:17:24.800 they think that there's intellectual lineage here

01:17:26.880 that they're kind of

01:17:28.620 drawing towards.

01:17:31.560 And the other thing

01:17:32.540 that they said was like, well, really what we're

01:17:34.820 trying to transmit here is a sense

01:17:36.820 of aristocracy. These are the best.

01:17:39.400 These are the elect. These are

01:17:40.820 the few. We read Goethe

01:17:42.740 in ways that others couldn't read him.

01:17:44.660 We read Hölderlin in ways that

01:17:46.580 others can't read him. We understand Dante

01:17:48.840 in ways that even his Italian readers

01:17:50.880 can't understand him. We understand the 0.98

01:17:52.800 secret messages that they're sending us right and this idea of a transmission of aristocracy

01:17:57.700 is extremely important here there's an amazing passage that saladin schmidt a distant cousin

01:18:03.440 of george's and sort of member of the circle at one time wrote to ernst bertram whom we've already

01:18:08.560 met that i think is worth reading in full it's about thomas mann who we talked about it's about

01:18:13.680 stefan george and about the danish poet hermann bang um bertram and schmidt were at the time in

01:18:19.840 some kind of sexual relationship uh schmidt was very openly gay um bertram we don't really know

01:18:26.440 but probably he writes about these three men behind all their asceticism there hides an outraged

01:18:35.240 hunger oh they would love to seize hold of the things if things didn't keep retreating from

01:18:40.380 from them it's not that they learn to live without things the things taught them to live without

01:18:45.500 them they are aristocrats only because they are wanting all their posture their lack of illusion

01:18:51.680 is arrangement is pose their hatred for pose is the hatred of small difference like nietzsche's

01:18:58.380 hatred for wagner he's he's basically doing the maximin hofmann style thing he's saying

01:19:05.260 they are they're casting as nobility what is actually rejection yeah the people they like

01:19:14.520 don't like them back and i'm sorry for you man but that's not a poetics that's you know that

01:19:19.720 seems like that seems like something you should take up with your psychoanalyst or whatever

01:19:23.840 something that i do kind of admire about these people is how much they seem to have gotten under 0.63

01:19:29.180 the skin of their contemporaries and just annoyed the shit out of other german modernists well

01:19:34.860 they're just i mean what it is is also it's just all it's it's funny that it's all so serious and 0.93

01:19:39.500 also so catty like they they read each other like drag queens honestly they are yeah they're 0.95

01:19:45.880 vicious they're it's beautiful and yet this idea of an aristocracy of need this idea that like 1.00

01:19:54.320 queerness confers a kind of outsider status that is kind of aristocratic in its own way right you're

01:20:01.700 not part of the humdrum everyday existence right there's a story that thomas mann writes and that

01:20:11.320 he then withholds for 20 years because he based it on his in-laws which is about a set of twins

01:20:20.000 named siegmund and sieglinde and they go to see wagner's die valkyrie right the valkyrie where

01:20:27.020 two twins, Sigmund and Sieglinde, 0.96

01:20:29.500 have sex. As we covered

01:20:31.200 canonically on In Bed with the Right. Exactly.

01:20:33.140 And then they get

01:20:35.280 home. She's supposed to marry this boring

01:20:37.560 I forget what he's, banker or something

01:20:39.340 like that. And

01:20:40.740 then they go home and what else are you going to do 1.00

01:20:43.300 but have sex? They have sex with each other. 1.00

01:20:45.280 And as they lie there, 0.98

01:20:47.140 she says, and this is the final exchange of the

01:20:49.360 short story,

01:20:51.120 well, what are we going to do about this guy?

01:20:53.400 What are we going to tell this guy? And he replies,

01:20:55.380 well he'll have a less trivial existence from now oh yeah the idea that like sexuality takes

01:21:00.940 you out of triviality right it takes you out of like there's something there's a group being

01:21:07.040 grossed out by heterosexuality in the way these guys live their traditionalism right they're

01:21:11.700 saying like we don't want the kind of wrote kind of academic traditionalism of like this is what 0.96

01:21:18.360 our immediate predecessors taught us fuck our immediate predecessors we seek out our own

01:21:23.540 ancestors and they're going to be cool then we rock and roll gonna be wild it's gonna be back 0.99

01:21:27.620 in alia we're gonna commune with them and then we're gonna like have a 16 year old god like wait

01:21:32.120 what there's a a resistance to a kind of pedantic trivial humdrum existence that they equate both

01:21:41.800 with heterosexuality with capitalism and with modernity i think we should look at this um poem

01:21:49.480 that will give you a sense of like why this problem comes to head in 1933.

01:21:54.820 Just I don't want to leave that out.

01:21:57.480 So this is a poem called The Poet in Times of Confusion.

01:22:00.540 Maybe I'll just read a couple of passages for you,

01:22:03.500 which gives you a very good idea of like just how

01:22:05.820 Georg's negative stands to his own time works,

01:22:09.880 how his conservatism works,

01:22:11.120 but also how his critique of kind of everyday conservatism works, right?

01:22:16.600 So I'll read.

01:22:18.440 In placid times they say the poet is a winged child who sings his tender dreams and showers

01:22:23.680 beauty on a busy world. But when abuses swell into a storm and destiny pounds at the door,

01:22:29.640 his verses ring like a prick on oar and are misheard. When all are blinded, he, the only seer,

01:22:37.120 unveils the coming doom in vain. But though the cries of a Cassandra fill the house,

01:22:41.960 the frantic rabble sees one thing alone, the horse, the horse that rushes to its death.

01:22:46.580 then prophets may foretell the anger of the tribal god the trot of assur's thousands which 0.71

01:22:52.760 dragged the chosen people into bondage the clever council has more sure report there rides the 0.82

01:22:58.520 warner shuts him in a cell and when the holy city is besieged burghers and warriors jostle in

01:23:04.220 confusion within the lords and priests have bloody quarrels for broomsticks while without

01:23:10.200 the stoutest bulwark is falling he is silent and he sighs you could read this as tragic you know

01:23:19.800 like i i was waiting for cassandra and then there she was right you could also read it as kind of a

01:23:24.620 drag you know like this is like oh you guys um you can't make your work a facious and maybe

01:23:33.200 i think this the what i'm reading is like this is from somebody who doesn't actually want their

01:23:38.280 work to be a facious right you don't actually maybe want it to have stakes there's something

01:23:43.180 about that like refusal of an attainable political project or the refusal of having your politics be

01:23:50.680 realized in the actual world it's a little bit of cowardice right it's an avoidance of responsibility

01:23:54.920 yeah it's the idea really is that if you were to drag the poet out of poetry if you were to really

01:24:02.940 listen to this cassandra they wouldn't be a cassandra anymore yeah right and therefore they 1.00

01:24:07.580 would have to let go of their privileged status exactly and be among the muck of those whose 0.97

01:24:13.480 actions have consequences yeah part of being a seer is not being heard right or part of being

01:24:20.600 the poet is to be a seer that isn't heard right uh all these are warnings that were not heeded

01:24:26.320 he is silent and he sighs of course the funny thing is like there is an emphasis on silence in

01:24:31.900 a frankly pretty long poem i'm only giving you certain certain bits of it um so there is kind of

01:24:37.660 a you're right to detect a certain kind of internal contradiction like this is someone who does seem

01:24:42.140 to want to have a an impact but he's he's worried about the kind of impact right there's a you can

01:24:48.440 see where someone like kantorovich is like well clearly stefan didn't want us to to be like yeah

01:24:53.600 it's kind of like hitler right like like whether or not he was this kind of conservative right like

01:24:58.620 he didn't want to be politicized in this straightforward way, right? There's a kind

01:25:03.060 of protopolitics or superpolitics at work here, right? It's above the squabbling, the bulwarks

01:25:09.820 falling, the generals, et cetera, et cetera, right? So I'll keep reading maybe. But in a mournful age,

01:25:16.040 it is the poet who keeps the marrow sound, the germ alive. He stirs the holy flame that leaps

01:25:21.500 across and shapes the flesh in which to burn, discovers the truth of tidings which our fathers

01:25:26.400 gave that those elected to the highest goal begin by passing through the waste that once the heart 0.88

01:25:31.780 of europe shall redeem the earth so you keep the marrow sound now we get to the creepy biologistical 0.96

01:25:40.680 shit right yeah the poet keeps some kind of biological inheritance alive now in his defense 0.93

01:25:47.900 right like on the one hand this sounds a lot like you're keeping some kind of genetic inheritance 0.96

01:25:52.420 yeah and especially with the evocation of the like transcendent nature of sexuality it's like oh this

01:25:58.060 is what's bringing you into contact with a a time greater than your own lifespan you know blah blah

01:26:03.720 blah blah blah the the coming into immortality as they say yeah and exactly the the the there is

01:26:09.380 there there are two things here right like on the one hand there is a kind of idea that you form the

01:26:13.620 next generation but there's also clearly invocation there's a sexual dimension to this

01:26:17.880 part of alfred schula's whole idea of the blood lights was very clearly that like 0.53

01:26:22.420 Part of how this is transmitted is by having sex with younger people, right?

01:26:25.960 This is here too, right? 0.82

01:26:27.720 So it's a weird kind of mixture of like creepy kind of racialized stuff, but also just kind 0.82

01:26:34.640 of an explanation of why you gather young people around you, which is like totally fine, 0.80

01:26:38.480 right?

01:26:38.640 Like the poet gathers people around himself.

01:26:41.440 Like he's writing this like in the immediate aftermath of World War I.

01:26:43.900 He's like, how do we salvage a youth that was made to do that, right?

01:26:48.280 the georgia circle hated world war one uh were pretty strongly pacifist you know at a time when

01:26:54.380 frankly social democrats and socialists were not pacifists right they were like this is bad this is

01:26:59.000 really bad right and when he's talking about europe's spirit like this might sound kind of

01:27:03.140 creepy to people but he's also thinking about like this is this was really bad you guys and

01:27:07.620 you know we have to find a way like to have young people not do that right like like we there are

01:27:15.160 ones we can save basically so while i've steel manned his point here let me now see where where

01:27:21.620 it all goes right um and when the final hope has almost perished in sternest grief his eyes already

01:27:29.880 see a coming light unstained by venal mobs by threadbare minds and follies steeped in poison

01:27:36.060 a younger generation rises towards him the youth who steeled by times of galling pressure

01:27:42.600 again have honest standards for the probe of men and things

01:27:47.040 who fair and grave and proud in alien worlds

01:27:50.580 accept themselves for what they are

01:27:52.520 avoid the rocks of brazen boasting

01:27:55.020 and the morass of would-be brotherhood

01:27:57.080 spat out the lifeless stale and base

01:28:00.160 and from their consecrated dreams and deeds and sorrows

01:28:03.620 begot the only one who can restore

01:28:06.880 he breaks the chains and sweeps aside the rubble

01:28:09.720 the scourges home the lost to lasting law where lord again is lord the great is great again

01:28:15.460 where poise again is poise he fastens the true device upon the nation's banner through tempests

01:28:21.660 and the dread fanfares of dawning he leads his tried and faithful to the work of sober day and

01:28:28.740 founds the kingdom come so a couple of things first right you can see why george who starts

01:28:37.600 out as this kind of decadent poet like it like sounds totally different here right this is this

01:28:43.440 is prophetic this is a prophet poet right like this is it's it's it's not meant to be there's

01:28:50.620 nothing reflective this is this is propulsive this is this is almost you can see why people

01:28:56.500 thought this was political speech right this was religious teaching this is zealotry right

01:29:00.900 deliberate poetic zealotry the other thing we do have to point out is the man who comes

01:29:06.160 to fasten the true device upon the nation's banner it's the kind of thing that like yeah

01:29:11.660 writing that and then like you know you can see why how people got there in 1933 right yeah yeah

01:29:16.800 so there is this kind of uh idea of a leadership and he will call this by the way he's no longer

01:29:23.040 calling it a circle he's no longer calling it a covenant it's a reich of course it is yeah

01:29:28.040 this is from a cycle of poem called the new the new reich right like so he's he wants to set up

01:29:36.860 an empire now he's its leader right and and he's about this one man who will who will you know

01:29:44.380 draw these tides of youths into his hand and write his will across the sky with the stars

01:29:48.940 um t.e lawrence right you wouldn't be totally crazy for thinking this uh was calling for exactly

01:29:55.920 what ended up happening yeah yeah yeah yeah um it's so depressing to see the way that like the

01:30:05.620 like the fascist kind of clouds gather you know yeah like i feel like i've gotten a picture of

01:30:10.400 what happened at least in munich where it just sort of like gets the air gets heavier yeah you

01:30:17.060 can tell it's gonna rain you know what i mean yeah yeah and you get the sense also how political

01:30:22.540 emotions sort of get mobilized when they're thwarted and frustrated right like i i think

01:30:29.820 about this again about the young people who have who again have honest standards for the probe

01:30:34.360 of men and things who fair and grave and proud and alien worlds accept themselves for what they

01:30:39.100 are right like on the one hand like this is again about queerness right he's saying accept yourselves

01:30:44.380 like it's fine to be the way we are right free to be you and me yeah right and then with the stuff

01:30:51.980 about the avoid the rocks of brazen boasting and the morass of would-be brotherhood like that's

01:30:57.700 the other thing that i think is so interesting that he's always ready to be pre-disappointed

01:31:01.040 right like oh not like that like brotherhood but not like that um you know uh we are awesome we

01:31:07.180 are aristocrats but not boastful or anything right like this this way of like pre-disappointment

01:31:12.380 um as a stance of a kind of reactionary politics i think we're going to see a lot of that in the

01:31:18.760 next year or two as things get darker in the united states i think we're going to get a lot

01:31:22.400 of people being like well no i didn't well i'm not part of that anymore right like peter teal 0.93

01:31:26.720 is going to run the other way in like t minus two months because like it's a fucking easy pose to

01:31:31.720 take right to sort of be like i i didn't i didn't want any part of that right and you're like well 0.80

01:31:36.140 what do you think i only wanted my enemies crushed i didn't like the people i was neutral

01:31:42.240 to warm about to also be crushed we were just speculating it was just an essay it

01:31:48.700 was the spirit of the perverse. It was just Curtis Yarvin's blog. Who could have known that

01:31:56.280 someone would do this, right? And this preformed disgust at seeing the very clear implicates of

01:32:02.880 your politics in action. That's another thing that this circle very much models what we're

01:32:09.800 going to see in the next year or two. And I think this is why I wanted to make sure to get this one

01:32:13.480 in under the wire. It's like you're calling shotgun on the rise of fascism in America.

01:32:17.640 You're like, I called it.

01:32:18.740 I called it.

01:32:19.280 I read the poetry on my podcast.

01:32:22.620 Also, the way the intelligentsia is going to relate to it.

01:32:27.060 There are poses of disaffection, of not me, of withdrawal that are being modeled here.

01:32:35.140 Then on the one hand, I understand.

01:32:36.680 And I think that like I'm not faulting Stefan Gheorgen necessarily, right?

01:32:39.860 Like he was a very old man by the time the rubber did end up hitting the road and he

01:32:45.580 did what he could, I would say.

01:32:46.960 But it's important to note that like the seductiveness of that pose is pretty enduring, right? Like the idea that you're like, well, I just won't occupy myself with that. That's also stupid, right? And it's like, no, the humdrum, the everyday, the trivial is where a lot of these battles are waged and decided.

01:33:06.220 And this kind of aristocratic withdrawal from it is its own kind of danger, is its own kind of problem, frankly, in modern society.

01:33:18.940 There's no backsies, guys.

01:33:21.920 You have to take accountability for the logical conclusions of your own ideas.

01:33:27.460 Exactly. 1.00

01:33:28.300 Don't be like these dweebs. 1.00

01:33:30.060 Be like Thomas Mann.

01:33:31.460 Yeah.

01:33:31.800 Well, in some ways.

01:33:32.900 but i mean like yeah overall a better a better ideal yeah we have to do an episode at some point

01:33:40.000 about thomas mann the other thing that he was very good at that i thought i think about a lot

01:33:43.940 was he was implacable after it was all over he kept the receipts right every time someone was

01:33:48.800 like well i didn't really support hitler he's like this you he's like that guy on twitter like

01:33:54.100 oh really right what about this essay like well it was a different time he's like i didn't say it

01:34:00.360 you said it i didn't say it how come right and i do think that like yeah if more of that spirit

01:34:05.740 had won out after uh in 2021 onwards we might be having a very different conversation and

01:34:12.180 stefan george might be more securely historical than he unfortunately is yeah whoever is last

01:34:18.300 left alive in america uh make sure you don't let anybody else get away with it that's right

01:34:24.200 thank you so much for taking me on this weird journey these are uh these are

01:34:29.120 hilarious cranks and i had so much fun getting to know them i'm glad i hope people like this

01:34:33.640 we we said the patreon was going to get experimental well this is experimental yeah i

01:34:37.480 think this is the kind of thing that is perfect for the patreon because it's only for the true

01:34:41.980 heads it's weirder and wackier it's international it's evocative this is this is in bed with the

01:34:48.060 right at its best at its best well thank you so much for being part of this journey moira thank

01:34:53.140 you all for being part of this journey this year it's been a great year for in bed with the right

01:34:57.660 and I can't wait

01:34:58.920 to see what

01:35:00.040 the next year brings

01:35:01.380 which means

01:35:01.880 we're basically recording

01:35:03.020 in like four days already

01:35:03.900 it's gonna be great

01:35:04.580 it's gonna be great

01:35:05.060 all right

01:35:05.360 awesome

01:35:05.620 bye see you next time

In Bed With The Right - July 08, 2025

From behind the Paywall： Episode 51： The George Circle

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