The Bard Across Three Reichs:
Germany, Shakespeare, & Andreas Höfele’s No Hamlets,
Part II

Johann (Jan) Toorop, Stefan George, 1896; George took great pride in the fact that his profile favored that of Dante’s.

4,669 words

Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)

Stefan George’s Dead Poets Society

The chapters about Stefan George (1868-1933) and those of his inner circle are the most interesting and even-handed of the book. Unlike Nietzsche, George was not primarily a philosopher, but a poet. His verse, however, was deeply influenced by French symbolism, as well as Nietzsche’s muscular ideas that emphasized will, vigor, and a profound dislike of both bourgeois conservatism and egalitarian progressivism. Höfele claims that “the native idiom” of George’s poetry doesn’t translate well.^[1] His piece “Afternoon” — pastoral, but militarily dynamic — may yet allow the English reader a taste of his unique style:

Smoulder of sunrays guttering downward,
Down from the cloudless cupola of heaven,
Smoulder of sunrays in flashing assault.

The limpid southern air in noonday silence,
Tumult of throngs has died before the palace,
Died on flagstones glutted with radiance.
The soundless rampart and desolate terrace,
The walls in long battalions blindly loom
Like ovens afire with fuel of victims . . .

Smoulder of sunrays guttering downward,
Down from the cloudless cupola of heaven.

He is lonely. They fall on his shoulders and hair
Ceaselessly, and he feels them with boundless delight,
For he fled from the chamber’s fragrant coolness,
Seeking counter-blaze for destroying blazes,
Until faintness reprieves him. He yields and sinks
Down-sliding close to a column’s base.
Smoulder of sunrays guttering downward.^[2]

Readers may also perceive in this example an instance of George’s worship of male youth and the subtle, but definite homoeroticism that pervaded his work. It was the kind of homoeroticism that completely rejected the “homosexual” type that proclaimed in modern terms the rise of a new, effeminate identity defined solely on the basis of sexual attraction. Instead, George looked to the ancients and embraced their exaltation of masculine beauty and power. There were no limp wrists or breathy lisps tolerated here.

George himself exuded a kind of hypnotic charisma that drew young men (and a few young women) to his secretive inner circle. The rings of Saturn all but shivered in his wake. Höfele quotes several of his acolytes and their almost helpless thrall to this singular personality, but Ernst Glöckner’s account stands out for its nearly Gothic shades: George was tall, “eerily tall . . . and his eyes were those of a frightening dream.” When he spoke, “his voice was hard and full of metal.” George greeted him, then “invited himself in” to Glöckner’s Munich flat. Next, the poet admonished his host for not seeking him out sooner. His features “became that of a devil. I never knew that a man could look like that.” “And now,” Glöckner despaired, “my only wish is that I had never met this man.” His anguished expressions of devotion that evening (“Master, what shall I do?”) were “beyond my control, I acted as in a dream,” for “I had no will of my own . . . I was a toy in his hands. I loved and hated at once.”^[3]

It was George’s quiet, but intense magnetism that inspired sociologist Max Weber to famously theorize about the all-consuming force that personal charisma could have. George’s star catch was Friedrich Gundolf, a name given to him by George himself when the 18-year-old first met the poet (George was 30 at the time). It was a fast marriage of the minds, and they set out to translate all of Shakespeare’s sonnets into German^[4] — an “undertaking only for the darlings of the gods.”^[5] They were especially drawn to those (Sonnets 42 and particularly 104, I believe) that spoke of a male “friend” whom Shakespeare’s narrator praised, “Ere you were born was beauty’s summer dead.”^[6]

All of Höfele’s subjects treated Shakespeare’s narrators and characters as if Shakespeare himself were speaking through them, revealing the Bard’s own inmost thoughts and desires, his own passions and beliefs. While Höfele mentions this fact on occasion (the Nietzschean notion “that one cannot invent these things, only draw them from oneself”^[7]), he does not make of this all that he could: that it was a key element in the German love of Shakespeare and their enthusiastic adoption of him into their private canon, for he’d supposedly allowed them access to the private recesses of his own mind. They saw themselves in Shakespeare, and not in Hamlet alone. The sonnets’ rhapsody about this “friend” could only have meant that Shakespeare was like they were: enamored with youth and vitality, with that German idealization that crowned golden, summery beauty as the image of absolute Divine.

But like so many German thinkers who worshiped this kind of sunny grace, George’s aura was of a darker hue — one more like Hamlet’s — and intellectual, rather than physical. His short piece “In the Park,” “cast the nighted shades” of Hamlet:

The poet, whom the birds serenely face,
In wide and shadowed arches dreams alone
[and] Who . . .
Intensely knows . . .
The poet also hears the lure of sound,
And yet today he must not yield to spells,
Because his speech with spirits, holds him bound.
His hand must goad the pen — though it rebels.^[8]

A simple case of writer’s block? We can all sympathize. I detect the inner conflict present here that defined the plot of Hamlet, so heavy with soliloquies and pregnant with moments of introspection. The “poet” sits “alone” in his “shadowed” melancholy, unable to transform his visions into reality on the page. Like Hamlet, the hand is willing, but the heart “intensely knows,” has looked into the cosmic abyss and “rebels.”

His disposition was not George’s only Hamletian similarity; he, too, dissented from the official court culture and state. Three years after his joint publication of Shakespeare Sonnette with Gundulf, the George Circle released its 1912 Yearbook for the Spiritual Movement that began with a “sweeping condemnation” of the current state-of-affairs: “Everyone from the Emperor [Kaiser Wilhelm II] to the lowest field worker [understands] that it cannot possibly go on like this . . . No one can still honestly believe in the foundations of the” modern world. The chichi present needed the infusion of sterner stuff, the molding of a “nobler breed of men.” If it did go on like this, the Germans, “as the French already have and the Americans will,” would turn “into a feminized people.” This would be a worse “social danger than the thousand particular ills described by the newspapers . . . Never again [could] a great man go forth from such desubstanced, uprooted . . . stock.” The spirits of future Caesars, Napoleons, and Goethes would be smothered in their cradles. Höfele calls this a “paroxysm of misogyny,” but all we need to do is look around to see what the effects of denigrating manliness have wrought.^[9] The Preface went on to extol the great Platonic eros that fired the souls of Shakespeare and Dante — the one for his “friend,” and the other for Beatrice — and made them great creators (not simply masters) of language.

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The members of George’s Circle began to refer to their organization as “the state,” an elitist vanguard that would expand outward to shape an entire people. Poetry and a “philosophy of life” had emerged within the “Secret Germany” that George had galvanized. And at the center of this Platonic state sat the poet/philosopher-king, himself, in all his great and terrible wisdom.

It was one thing to write poetry about war and glorious, manly suffering — the purifying act of a bloodletting. It was another to practice such a conviction. Soon after the Circle published George’s militaristic volume of poetry, entitled Star of the Covenant, the Great War broke out. Like almost everyone else, Gundolf and the Circle’s young members were carried away with enthusiasm. They even cheered the Kaiser’s parliamentary exclamation that he knew “no parties anymore, only Germans.”^[10] As Nietzsche before him, George was on a Swiss vacation when Germany declared war, and — despite entreaties made by his wildly anxious followers — did not shorten his visit. In fact, they noticed that the Master remained strangely aloof from the entire affair — almost as if his Secret Germany had been impinged upon by “real life,” and he resented it. It also caused him personal agony, for with each passing week, more and more of his young members were dying at the Front. This was not the hypothetical war that anyone, philosopher-king or apostle, had envisioned. In the second edition of Star of the Covenant, George wrote with quiet indignity that the volume “was courted by misunderstandings . . . it was said that the poet had dealt with actualities of the present, rather than with distance and dream.” Covenant was originally intended to be read only by “a circle of intimate friends,” and not meant as “a breviary for the people” at large.^[11]

George’s misgivings about the war were prescient, and the regime that replaced the second German Empire was less than “purified.” Once again, the Secret Germany was opposed to the official state. But it was the shock in the personal lives of George and Gundolf that most ruined the latter and embittered the former. According to Höfele, George allowed his favorites to have affairs with women, as long as they weren’t too serious. Gundolf, however, fell seriously in love with a young woman named Elisabeth Saloman. After she nursed him through a nearly fatal bout of pneumonia during the winter of 1918-19, “there was no question of his parting from her.”^[12] He disobeyed the Master and married Elisabeth at the age of 39. The final nail in the coffin of their relationship was Gundolf’s unapproved dedication to his new wife, located in the flyleaf of his latest book of scholarship. From then on, George refused to acknowledge him at all.

Gundolf never regretted his marriage, and also held faith that the Master would eventually forgive his “transgression.” He began comparing his situation to that of Shakespeare’s Brutus and Caesar. In 1919 he wrote a dialogue poem of an imagined confrontation between the two men after the Battle of Pharsalus. In it, a defeated Brutus declared to a victorious Caesar:

Hate you I don’t.
But grieve for us
That I can’t love you as I would:
For the sake of justice.

Because “justice” is a feminine noun in German, Höfele argues that this poem was actually “pleading for a woman.”

O could you see her
As truly as you see yourself and me!
Caesar, she lives And I for her . . .^[13]

Despite his “pleading,” reconciliation never came, and Gundolf died of cancer at the age of 51; “none of his friends was in any doubt that what had [really] killed him was banishment from the Master’s Circle.”^[14]

Selfish behavior that outdid even Hamlet’s aside, George and his work are worthy of recommendation. There isn’t any of the swishy “gayness” that so distort today’s raunchy “literary works” (I hesitate to dignify them with the phrase), and I enjoyed exploring his opus beyond Höfele. This German author was so much more than the poet who might have inadvertently helped to inspire National Socialism.

Carl Schmitt’s “Blackamoor”

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It was to George’s advantage that he kept no incriminating personal diaries of the sort that Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) left behind. The impression that these extensive entries made — at least in Höfele’s pointed use of them — was that of “a deeply conflicted personality, subject to [violent] mood swings . . . [and] a man plagued by anxiety and self-doubt, [lurching] between extremes of elation and despair,” of which his outward life would seem to have given little indication.^[15] All of Höfele’s chapters include heavy doses of psychologizing, but Schmitt gets the full Freudian treatment.

Carl Schmitt came from a lower middle-class Catholic background, and his political philosophy was a unique blend of radicalism and conservatism. He is best known for his theories on sovereignty, the figure of the Roman-inflected “Dictator,” and the “friend-enemy” dichotomy that he argued defines politics. His brilliant insight that all modern political concepts are secular derivatives of religious ones has become axiomatic. He is also notorious for having joined the NSDAP. In December of 1923, well into the Weimar era and shortly after Hitler’s failed Beer Hall Putsch, Schmitt noted in his diary that “‘Germany is Hamlet’ — Oh, alas, not for a long time anymore.”^[16] Schmitt was not referring to Hamlet’s notorious dithering; the Weimar parliamentary system that he abhorred did plenty of that. By 1923, inflation had increased the price of a newspaper to half a trillion Reichsmarks. Things had certainly reached a “state of emergency.” No, Schmitt lamented that Germany no longer had the nobility of a Hamlet. Germany was “no Hamlet,” and that was something to mourn.

All of this seems sober enough, but Höfele does not focus on Schmitt’s mentioning of Hamlet. Rather, he hones in on his apparent obsession with another tragic Shakespearean character: the jealous hero — Othello, or “Otto,” as he sometimes called him. “Othello haunts me,” he wrote to his Australian mistress in November of 1921. The Moor seemed to represent the “blackness” that he feared lurked inside of him, like a Hyde within Dr. Jekyll’s educated, “everyday normality.”^[17] After suddenly “interrupting a string of thoughts on Othello,” he exclaimed:

At 8 o’clock I was ready to commit suicide, to sink into the world of night and into silence in calm superiority . . . A few hours later I did not care about anything and wanted to become a soldier. This inconstancy is driving me mad; what shall I do? In an hour, I will shoot myself out of fury over my own triviality!^[18]

Next, Höfele cites another desperate, soul-searching entry:

What a jumble of things I am! A money-grubbing, ambitious serveling; a lazy, a solitary, proud Roman, a vain, anxious to please sensualist; all poise and dissolute; cruel and compassionate; hard and soft; believing and unbelieving!^[19]

These examples, however, were separated by over a decade, the first written in 1915 and the second jotted down in his diaries that span the years 1925-29. If those who maintained records didn’t want to engage in the occasional “self-dramatization,” they would keep planners, not diaries.^[20]

But it was his “erotomania” that Höfele chooses to highlight in his chapter about Schmitt, his analysis more than once veering into prurience. Readers might come away with the idea that the author enjoys exploring these sexual obsessions too much. The world was a slightly happier place before I was aware of Schmitt’s degenerate affairs, and the constant, guilty logging of his “ejaculations.” Are we better off knowing that Schmitt once “[snuck away] from a conference so horny [that he had] to bite [his] fingers”?^[21] More matter with less dirt.

There are moments of clarity in this largely disorganized, messy chapter when Höfele more seriously links Schmitt’s clichéd “permanent crisis of faith” (how Catholic!) to Othello and his political philosophy. In Shakespeare’s play, Othello was a “blackamoor” who had “done the [Venetian] state some service.”^[22] Partly in exchange for his loyalty, he married a wealthy Venetian’s daughter, Desdemona — a union that served only to emphasize his “otherness,” rather than his belonging to an adopted land. His insecurity caused his suspicion towards the faithful and credulousness towards the faithless to skyrocket. In the end, Othello murdered his wife — presumably to avenge her (made-up) infidelity, but perhaps more importantly, to prevent her from ever being unfaithful in the future. Desdemona’s actual guilt was immaterial. Othello was the perpetual stranger; he was not the alien wanderer, because unlike the latter, the stranger does not leave. He remains within the body politic, but is not of it — a peculiar melding of closeness and distance that has bedeviled many a society and its Othellos.

For Schmitt, Othello represented a special kind of “homelessness . . . [which was] the impossibility of trust: ‘I think my wife be honest and think she is not; I think that thou art just and think thou art not.’”^[23] In a manner strikingly similar to Nietzsche’s constant accusations of treachery (his signing off as the “Crucified One”), Schmitt lamented that he “must always be the betrayed one.” And yet, like Hamlet and Othello, he had trouble believing in his own suspicions. Such is the curse of the eternal doubter — that even mistrust is mistrusted. We can perceive how the sexual jealousies and lingering disbelief in Schmitt’s own mind might have contributed to his appreciation of this particular Shakespearean tragedy, and how these meditations on Othello might have then led to the maturation of the “friend-enemy” binary for which Schmitt was so famous. Or, the “logic of xenophobia,” in Höfele’s rather hostile interpretation.^[24]

Carl Becker, Othello Relating His Adventures, ca. 1900

Only at the very end of the book does he discuss Schmitt’s provocative 1956 essay Hamlet or Hecuba, and it, too, receives uncharitable treatment: supposedly little more than Schmitt’s “crass” attempt to wheedle out of any guilt by association that linked him with Hitler and the Nazis. The “mask of Hamlet enable[d] him to enshroud the moral and political shortcomings of his life with the sombre radiance of tragedy.”^[25] At a time when almost everyone was/is shrilly demanding an “explanation,” or an “apology” from ex-“Nazis” and German thinkers, should they have expressed shock or contempt when their targets answered them? To rephrase a near-contemporary of Shakespeare, what else is to be concluded from this but that you first make apologists, then punish them?^[26]

On another note, let this unfortunate Schmitt analysis be a warning: Discretion is not only the better part of valor, but the better part of glamor. Make arrangements to burn your sensitive papers.

Joseph Goebbels’ “Sorrows of Young Michael”

The inclusion of Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945) — devoted Hitler follower and Propaganda Minister for the Third Reich — in No Hamlets is both mysterious and predictable. Mysterious, because he was never considered to be an intellectual on par with Nietzsche, Schmitt, George, or Gundolf; nor did he have much to do with Shakespeare, or Hamlet. Predictable, because Höfele’s primary mission is, like most German studies it seems, to talk about Nazis. It is on page 125 of the book that we see what Höfele has been after all along:

Railing at outrageous fortune, forever yearning but forever unable to achieve, Hamlet epitomizes the unresolved tensions . . . of a time drifting towards cataclysmic upheaval. We have encountered this mood in the millennialism of George’s New Reich. Hamlet is clearly not . . . “the one who . . . breaks the chains and sweeps aside the rubble.” But he spoke to, and was made to speak for, the fears and frustrations from which such millennial hopes arose and drew their dangerous attraction.^[27]

Fidus, Michael Breaks the Chain,1933

One of the men “dangerous[ly] attract[ed]” to these chialistic fantasies was a young Joseph Goebbels, fresh from the bad ending of the First World War and embittered at the subsequent “rummage in the land.”^[28] Contemporary and more recent studies have proven that Germany’s defeat in 1918 was “a close-run thing.”^[29] The Stab-in-the-Back story that many Germans clung to had as much truth as it did myth. During the profligate 1920s, Hamlet did not disappear from German minds or stages, and Höfele mentions several interesting Weimar performances, including Asta Nielsen’s female Hamlet and Fritz Portner’s blond-bewigged, but obviously Jewish Hamlet.

The bulk of his Weimar chapter, however, is concerned with Goebbels’ 1929 book, Michael, A German Fate on Diary Pages. He had tried to have it released in 1922, but failed to find a willing publisher. Years later, and against his wishes, the NSDAP published a revised version. Höfele describes it as a “shelf-warmer,” but nevertheless considers it important enough to warrant an extended analysis.^[30] The only allusion to Hamlet in Goebbels’ book is the quick (misquoted) line: “Commerce, Horatio!”^[31] Höfele justifies Michael’s inclusion by explaining that its antecedent was Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, a much earlier German classic whose author did not hide the fact that his inspiration was the “melancholy prince” of Denmark.

Michael was a thinly-veiled autobiographical novel that followed the young male protagonist — a veteran of the Great War — around 1920s Germany as he confronted various romantic, social, and political crises, then suffered a Christ-like sacrificial death. It was nationalistic and deeply conflicted about the German state, making it somewhat similar to the oppositional literature written by our other Right-wing dissidents. Goebbels could not fight in the Great War due to a congenital handicap, but he clearly idolized the returned soldiers, and prefaced his novel with a dedication to a friend who had died in a mine blast. In half-prose, half-verse that mirrored the pastoral militarism and youth-worship of George, Goebbels began:

We wait for the day that brings the wind storm.
At the present moment, we have the courage
The will to pull together for the Fatherland.
We want life: therefore we will win life.
Michael’s diary is a monument of German fervor, dedication,

And the will of fortitude.^[32]

While Michael attends university, he goes for long, contemplative walks:

Around noon, I sit in the quiet, old cemetery.
I stood before a fountain
And felt its fine water in this hot air . . .

Blackbirds are singing!

Nothing disturbs the peace of the dead.
A bee buzzes.
I read Nietzsche’s Zarathustra from noon to devotions.
Still . . . Still. . . Everything is going on in space.
Everything.^[33]

Frequent interjections such as, “Oh, you mountains! You Ashlar towers!”, “Blessed hiking!”, and “Year! I reflect” all make for hilarious reading.^[34] He shot out Nietzschean lines like cannonballs. But then, he was an ad-man. Michael evolved from a “melancholy” thinker who meandered through graveyards to a soldier, once again. Before death he exhorted his countrymen to

[A]ttack. The attacker is always stronger than the defender.
Let us free ourselves, then we can also free the community of workers
Which will loosen the chains from our country . . .
The most beautiful thing is that you live by your words of truth.
You do not just say phrases like the others.
You act.^[35]

Here, we recall the poem that began No Hamlets: Freiligrath’s piece criticizing his country for its dreaminess, for its Hamletian vacillation. Germany, “You [must] act!” in order to break free of history and claim your birthright, Freiligrath and Michael/Goebbels declared as one Teutonic voice. Michael’s usefulness lay in its being an example of how the intellectual currents of the previous half-century filtered into the public consciousness. We perceive echoes of Nietzsche and George (if not Shakespeare) in Goebbels’ narrative message and style. Höfele is correct that Michael does not rise to great, or even good, literary standards.^[36] Let’s just call it bad.

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But Höfele can’t help himself. He gilds the derogatory lily with relentless put-downs, like: “drab mediocrity,” and “penniless suitor with a limp.” Goebbels was “smarting under [a] double handicap, physical and social.” His idol was a “creator of vapid watercolors ranting at those who had dared to thwart his artistic ambitions.” “If Hitler was a failed artist, his most devoted disciple was a failed writer.” Burning books “must have been deeply satisfying to the man who could now triumphantly obliterate those whom he had struggled in vain to emulate.” Michael was indicative of “glaring immodesty,” “foaming bombast,” “‘flatulent inanity,’” not to mention “‘laughable inadequacy.’” His entries were the obvious “ravings of a fanatic sociopath.”^[37]

More scholarly distance would be preferable. No one would mistake the rest of No Hamlets for a paean to Right-wing German thought; to whom Höfele is writing and why he feels the need to express his anti-Nazi bonafides again, and again . . . and again is the puzzler. There is a Hamlet gibe that would be appropriate to quote here, but pundits doth use it too much, methinks. So, I won’t.

As in the Weimar period, Shakespearean interest remained active during the Third Reich. Goebbels himself was instrumental in blocking the movement to replace the official translation of Shakespeare’s works from the old-fashioned Schlegel-Tieck German into more modern language, but not before giving the matter due consideration. Performances continued under National Socialist auspices, including that of Gustaf Gründgens’ famous portrayal of Hamlet during the 1936 season, to which “he brought all his technical brilliance and physical dynamism.” Whether or not Germany was Hamlet, Hamlet and its “exemplary Nordic ‘soul drama’ ”^[38] transcended each passing empire, and like the German spirit itself, outlived them.

Gustaf Gründgens as Hamlet, 1936

Should we blame philosophers, composers, poets — or a 500-year-old playwright — for Germany’s catastrophic twentieth century? Is “this” what happens after reading too much Shakespeare? The book’s fundamental premise is that intellectuals — even marginalized ones — can wield enormous power; can decide the fate of nations and whole worlds. This would seem to contradict the figure in Hamlet, a story about a disaffected and ineffectual student-“loiterer.” But was he ineffectual, or simply a late-bloomer? Most of the thinkers surveyed here were complex, even contradictory men whose philosophies altered over time. Shakespeare’s characters, too, invited multiple interpretations. After every rereading of Hamlet, I draw slightly different conclusions about his character. Was Hamlet a slothful boor whose unkind behavior towards Ophelia was only matched by his inability to perform elsewhere — in the Roman arena of revenge? Or, was he a noble soul, a Prince possessed of a temper that warred with painful self-awareness, staying his hand in doubt? How should we judge the jealous Othello, the tyrant Caesar, or his assassin Brutus? Macbeth and his Lady were certainly villains, but ones whose humanity often matched their wickedness. These characters are sometimes hard to like, but also hard to dismiss for the flashes of ourselves we see in them. Hamlet is one of the purest examples of dramatic tragedy and its eternal question: What is to be done?

Höfele does something else that is valuable and that Counter-Currents has sought to do as well: talk about “second nations” opposed to their official regimes, and to complicate what “Right” really means. If I have learned one thing about the Right and political history, it is that conservatism, as promoted by the representatives from the “bourgeoisie,” will conserve nothing in the face of their greater raison d’etre, which is to preserve their status. If it is to emerge at all, true political victory of a Rightist nature — that is, anti-progressive and truly pro-Life — will be from its small, revolutionary wing that looks for rebirth, not “conservation.” The latter is but a rearguard action ordered by generals who have acknowledged the battle’s loss before they have ever ordered it. We need men who see paths to victory, not those who seek to temper defeat.

Hamlet has always been a popular literary topic, in Germany and elsewhere, but I have rarely come across anyone who has explored the significance of Fortinbras’ name, including Höfele: French for “Strong” in “Arm.” He and his name were foils for the intellectual Hamlet. We are still left with the question of how to hold such intellectuals responsible. Should we expect them to be action-men; would it even be advisable? Philosopher-statesmen, or philosopher-kings are that rare combination, that sum of the golden-mean: High-of-Mind + Strong-in-Arm = Noble-of-Deed. Hamlet and Fortinbras in one, heroic ideal. Should we await the coming of this future Platonic king of the air, or look back and “seek for [our] noble father[s] in the dust?”^[39] The central question at the core of all tragedies is “What do I do?” — and it is also ours.

* * *

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Notes

^[1] Ibid, 55.

^[2] Stefan George, “Afternoon” in The Works of Stefan George, Olga Marx and Ernst Morwitz, trans. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1974), 12. Access the full collection here.

^[3] Höfele, 58.

^[4] There are 154 Shakespearean sonnets.

^[5] Höfele, 63.

^[6] William Shakespeare, “Sonnet 104,” in Shakespeare’s Sonnets (New York: Folger Shakespeare Library), 112.

^[7] Höfele, 90.

^[8] George, “In the Park” in The Works of Stefan George, 10.

^[9] Höfele, 69-70.

^[10] Höfele, 79.

^[11] Ibid, 80.

^[12] Ibid, 82.

^[13] Ibid, 82-3.

^[14] Ibid, 85.

^[15] Ibid, 162-63.

^[16] Ibid, 160.

^[17] Ibid, 163.

^[18] Ibid, 163.

^[19] Ibid, 164.

^[20] Ibid, 163.

^[21] Ibid, 165; these are far from the most graphic examples from which Höfele quotes.

^[22] William Shakespeare, Othello (New York: Folger Shakespeare Library), V.ii., 263.

^[23] Höfele, 184.

^[24] Ibid, 187.

^[25] Ibid, 275.

^[26] A reference to Sir Thomas More (1478-1535). William Shakespeare is thought to have lived from 1564 to 1616.

^[27] Höfele, 125.

^[28] Hamlet, I.i., 15.

^[29] See, for example, Holger Afflerbach’s On a Knife Edge: How Germany Lost the First World War (2022).

^[30] Höfele, 137.

^[31] Joseph Goebbels, Michael: Pages from a German Destiny, Joey McGoebbels[!], trans. (Jett and Jahn Media), 106; the original line from Hamlet, Act I, scene ii, reads: “Thrift, thrift, Horatio.”

^[32] Goebbels, 4.

^[33] Ibid, 10.

^[34] Ibid, 109.

^[35] Ibid, 180.

^[36] The poor English translation doesn’t help matters.

^[37] Höfele, 136, 137, 136, 198, 137, 139, 140, 147.

^[38] Ibid, 230.

^[39] Hamlet, I.ii., 25.