[1] According to Michael and Erika Metzger, both sides of the George family had lived in the area for generations and had risen from peasants, to millers, and finally to small town merchants.

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.

[6] 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.

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?

[9] 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".

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.

In their ultimate higher striving, the French Symbolists are not far from the Platonic ideals of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, and this idealistic aspect was undoubtedly what appealed to George far more than the Estheticism, the Bohemianism, and the apparent Nihilism so often superficially associated with this group.

[13] The French Symbolists were every bit as enthusiastic for George, as is revealed by the evidence of their surviving letters and subsequent memoirs of his visit to Paris, which were published in a 1928 theme issue of the Revue d'Allemagne.

[17] Also while living in Berlin, George joined forces with fellow student Carl August Klein to found the annual literary magazine entitled Blätter für die Kunst [de].

[18] While George was not the first German poet to draw inspiration from the French Symbolists, he has been termed, "the most gifted, eloquent, and productive exponent of the poetic aspects of the movement in his homeland".

[8] George was the main person of the literary and academic group known as the George-Kreis ('George Circle'), which included some of the major, young writers of the time such as Friedrich Gundolf and Ludwig Klages.

[19][20][page needed] Stefan George met Ida Coblenz, a wealthy and cultured German Jewish heiress who both admired his poems and showed very deep insights into them, at Bingen am Rhein in 1892.

He wished to create a new, noble German culture, and offered "form", regarded as a mental discipline and a guide to relationships with others, as an ideal while Germany was in a period of social, political, spiritual and artistic decadence.

"[26] In February 1933, the Nazis began dismissing all of their political opponents as well as Jews from the Prussian Academy of the Arts; this included Thomas Mann, René Schickele, Georg Kaiser, and Franz Werfel.

[26] On 5 May 1933 the Prussian Minister for Sciences, Arts, and Public Education, Bernhard Rust, informed George that the new government wished to appoint him to an honorary position within the academy.

Rust further explained that he intended to publicly describe George as the forefather of the Nazi Party's "national revolution", and also offered him a large sum of money to do with as he wished.

When Karl Josef Partsch, Albrecht von Blumenthal, Walter Anton, Ludwig Thormaehlen, and the three Stauffenberg brothers also arrived, they were allowed a brief glimpse of George in his darkened room; but the poet was not aware of their presence.

Although Berthold von Stauffenberg, Thormaehlen, Anton, Blumenthal, and others wished to return his body to Germany for burial, Boehringer, as the poet's heir, overruled them by quoting George's own words: "A man should be buried where he dies.

Claus von Stauffenberg organized the wake in accordance with the customs of the Italian-speaking Canton of Ticino and the George-Kreis kept constant vigil at the Minusio cemetery chapel until the morning of 6 December 1933.

Boehringer, however, disapproved of the deception and quietly informed Baron Ernst von Weizsäcker, the German Minister at Bern, that he could deliver a wreath to the grave on the day after the funeral.

George was also a highly important intermediary between German Romanticism and literary realism of the 19th century and the 20th-century Expressionist and Modernist poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, August Stramm, Reinhard Sorge, and Berthold Brecht.

Even though George was, like his fellow war poets Siegfried Sassoon, Hedd Wyn, and Wilfred Owen, a very harsh critic of his own era, he was also very much a man of his own time.

[34] George's poetry is characterized by an aristocratic ethos; his verse is formal in style, lyrical in tone, and often arcane in language, being influenced by Greek classical forms.

Stefan George's "evident homosexuality" is represented by works such as Algabal and the love poetry he devoted to a gifted adolescent of his acquaintance named Maximilian Kronberger, whom he called "Maximin", and whom he believed to be a manifestation of the divine.

But George had dedicated the work, which includes the lyric "Geheimes Deutschland" ('"Secret Germany"') written in 1922, to Berthold Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, who, with his brother Claus, took a leading role in the 20 July plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler and overthrow the Nazi Party.

[citation needed] In a view inspired by the German Romantic poets and the French Symbolist, George and his followers saw him as the monarch of a separate government of Germany, composed of his intellectual and artistic disciples, bonded by their faithfulness to "The Master" and to a common vision.

[39] Some of the members of the 20 July plot against Hitler were drawn from among his devotees, notably the Stauffenberg brothers who were introduced to George by the poet and classical scholar Albrecht von Blumenthal.

The book's account of Frederick II and his "dynamic personality and ability to shape the Empire according to a higher vision seemed to sum up the aspirations of the George Circle."

Radically innovative Austrian Jewish composer Arnold Schoenberg set George's poetry to music in the "Ich darf nicht dankend", Op.

Arnold Schoenberg's student Anton Webern also set George's poetry to music in his early choral work Entflieht auf leichten Kähnen, Op.