ABSTRACT
Stephane George was not really concerned with politics and a larger public. Those who still call George a proto-fascist have part of a very real "point." The esthete Ernst Gloeckner, homosexual lover of Bertram and a fellow anti-Semite, was first a George worshipper, then a George hater, damning him in 1924 for being "surrounded by nothing but Jews." We have seen that the unchronological order of poems in George's last book was a statement. Placing the two key poems at the beginning ("Goethe's Last Night in Italy") and the end (translated and analyzed as "Final Song"). Professor Max Dessoir told author in the 1930s that the Goethe poem was George's truest self. This chapter concludes: George did leave Germany as an anti-Nazi protest. But in 1933 he left earlier and first bade an ostentatious goodbye to his Jewish disciples, His remarks about the Third Reich as quoted ("worse than the Bolsheviks," anti-Semitism as "the end of German culture").
