Stefan Anton George (German: [ˈʃtɛfan ˈʔantoːn ɡeˈ(ʔ)ɔʁɡə]; 12 July 1868 – 4 December 1933) was a German symbolist poet and a translator of Dante Alighieri, William Shakespeare, Hesiod, and Charles Baudelaire. He is also known for his role as leader of the highly influential literary circle called the George-Kreis and for founding the literary magazine Blätter für die Kunst ("Journal for the Arts").
George was born in 1868 in Büdesheim in Bingen (now part of Bingen) in the Grand Duchy of Hesse. His father, also named Stefan George, was an innkeeper and wine merchant, and his mother Eva (née Schmitt) was a homemaker. When Stefan was five years old, the family moved to Bingen am Rhein.
According to Erika and Michael Metzger, both sides of the George family had lived in the area for generations and had risen from peasants, to millers, and finally to merchants.
At the time, the Roman Catholic Church was very important to the daily life of Bingen am Rhein and to the George family. Life revolved around the feast days of the Liturgical Calendar. Furthermore, when Stefan's mother died, the oleander trees she had planted when she had married her husband were donated to the nuns of the nearby Rochusberg, which symbolized a returning of God's gifts back to Him.
After attending primary school in Bingen, Stefan was sent, at the age of thirteen, to one of the best secondary schools in the Grand Duchy of Hesse, the Ludwig-Georgs-Gymnasium in the Grand-Duke Louis IV's capital city of Darmstadt. There, from 1882 to 1888, Stefan, "received a vigorous humanistic education in which Greek, Latin, and French were stressed."
Stefan "excelled in French" and gained "a thorough knowledge of modern European literature, as well as of the Greek and Roman authors."
Although later described as a loner, Stefan assembled his first circle of friends in Darmstadt, where he had access to libraries and to the theater, which fascinated him. He also taught himself to read Norwegian in order to read the works of Henrik Ibsen in the original language.
At the age of nineteen, George and a few other students of the Gymnasium started a literary journal called Rosen und Disteln ("Roses and Thistles"). Here George published his first poems under the pseudonym Edmund Delorme. Even though the Gymnasium emphasized the poetry of the German Romantics, George taught himself Italian, in order to both read and translate the Renaissance poets whom he most revered. His first poems consisted of literary translations and imitations of the Italian poetry of Petrarch and Torquato Tasso.
When his schooling was concluded in 1888, it was clear to George and to his family that it would not work for him to follow the usual course into university, business, or the German civil service. Instead he began to travel.
He later told a friend, "Germany was intolerable then; just think of Nietzsche! I would have thrown a bomb if they had kept me here; or I would have perished like Nietzsche. My father was glad to get rid of me, for he sensed the danger."
Hoping to improve his grasp of English, George lived in London between May and October 1888. Queen Victoria was on the throne and London was still the capital of the global British Empire. George later recalled that in England he saw, "an expansive sense of life, borne by great political tasks and goals, an ancient cultural unity which carefully preserved traditions, a firmly moded way of life for all classes of the populace, a decorous politeness among all the people, phenomena which were no longer found in the Germany of those years, or which were just beginning to emerge."
It is also believed to have been during his time in London that George first encountered the English poetry the "honored masters" Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and Ernest Dowson, whose works George would later translate into German and publish in his homeland.
While briefly returning to Germany and his parental home in Bingen, George expressed a desire to convene a "Congress" of like-minded poets and to publish a collection of their works.
This was an idea deeply rooted in both the Western Canon and in German literature, as Goethe, Schiller, and the other German Romantic poets had circles of adherents who gathered around them. Even before that, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock had referred to his closest friends as, die wenigen Edlen ("the noble few") and had made detailed plans for Die Gelehrtenrepublik ("The Republic of Scholars").
During his subsequent tours of Switzerland and northern Italy, George played the title role in a production of Moliere's Le Misanthrope performed at Montreux. George later recalled, "Can you imagine anything more contradictory than that I, the socialist, communard, atheist, should play in a comedy with a German baron in the house of a professor of theology surrounded by a whole bevy of society ladies?"
Suffering from severe loneliness, George arrived in Paris in May 1889. On his first day there, he met the French poet Albert Saint-Paul, through whom George was introduced into the city's literary bohemia. Despite the intensely anti-German revanchism reigning over French culture during the Belle Époque, George found himself "spontaneously accepted by his peers." Through Albert Saint-Paul, George was introduced to Paul Verlaine, Francis Vielé-Griffin, Albert Mockel, and Waclaw Rolicz-Lieder.
Saint-Paul also persuaded the poet Stéphane Mallarmé to invite George to attend the Tuesday Symbolist soirées held in, "that little room in the Rue de Rome". George had been described to Mallarmé as resembling "the young Goethe before Werther". When they met, Mallarmé received George warmly, particularly when the latter revealed that he had recently begun translating Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal into German.
Many years later, the members of Mallarmé's circle were to recall that they immediately identified Stefan George as, "a poet of unusual promise." Despite his confidence, George seemed extremely shy and rarely participated in the circle's discussions, preferring instead to listen and learn. Meanwhile, George also filled 365 pages with poems by French and other European authors, many of which he was later to translate into German.