George-Kreis

Formed in the late 19th century, when George published a new literary magazine called Blätter für die Kunst [de] ("Journal for the Arts"), the group featured many highly regarded writers and academics.

Among his followers were Karl Wolfskehl and, a little later, Alfred Schuler and Ludwig Klages, both members of the Munich Cosmic Circle, as well as the Polish author Waclaw Rolicz-Lieder and the Dutch poet Albert Verwey.

The teacher-student ratio formed a constituting characteristic of the group, with George and a small number of ingenious beings, such as Karl Wolfskehl and Ludwig Klages, empowered to create their own art by divine inspiration.

Geheimes Deutschland was also the title of a poem published in George's late work Das Neue Reich ("The New Empire") in 1928, in which he proclaimed a new form of an intellectual and spiritual aristocracy, to some extent obliged to Schiller's On the Aesthetic Education of Man.

")[2][3] On the other hand, the Circle's anti-civilizing attitudes have also been identified as preparing the ground for the rise of Nazism by Marxist scholars such as Bruno Frei or writers like Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, and Thomas Mann.