Max Kommerell, Der Dichter als Führer in der deutschen Klassik: klopstock, herder, goethe, schiller, jean paul, hölderlin. Berlin: Georg Bondi, 1928. 486 pp.
Walter Benjamin, On Goethe. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2025. 382 pp.
“If there ever were a German conservatism that held itself upright, it would have to regard this book as its Magna Carta.” This is how Walter Benjamin began his 1930 review of Max Kommerell’s The Poet as Leader in German Classicism, only to follow its initially laudatory tone with biting criticism. The review’s title, “Against a Masterpiece,” already signals the ironic tension. It has now been newly translated by Jonas Rosenbrück for On Goethe, Stanford University Press’s collection of Benjamin’s writings on Goethe. Benjamin does not dispute the quality of the work, its style, or the author’s authority; but he objects nonetheless. His criticism, however, is aimed not only at Kommerell but also at the method and house style of the George Circle, to which Kommerell belonged: the band of young disciples gathered around the poet Stefan George, who saw himself as the master of a “Secret Germany.” Benjamin finds in the book the “diamantine certainty” long known as “the George school’s black stone of Kaaba,” places George’s “doctrine of the hero” among the occult disciplines, and hears the “phraseological thunder” that “booms in all books of the [George] circle.” At the same time, he concedes that Kommerell stands out for a radicalism that none of his predecessors in the Circle had attained. For Benjamin, then, Kommerell is at once the Circle’s quintessential representative and its culmination.
The volume appeared in the Historical Series of the “Works from the Circle of the Blätter für die Kunst,” published under George’s personal supervision. Kommerell, born in 1902, had met George in 1921 and succeeded Friedrich Gundolf as his companion and amanuensis; he wrote the book at barely twenty-six, during what he later called “nine years’ voluntary servitude.” The powerful youthful pathos and intoxicating poetic qualities of the work remain palpable in every sentence, down to the smallest letter of this densely printed book of nearly five hundred pages. Five major German writers appear in it, each in a succession of roles: Klopstock as apprentice to the Greeks and as bard; Goethe as the awakened one, as wanderer among his fellows, and as companion to Duke Carl August; Schiller as conspirator, helper, and lawgiver; Jean Paul set against Herder and the Weimar of legend; Hölderlin as pupil, as hero, and as herald of a people to come. Herder, though named in the subtitle, is not treated as a leader in his own right but appears as Goethe’s “awakener” and as the “great man” in Jean Paul’s life.
In the preface to The Poet as Leader, Kommerell explains that he means to present the poets “as models of a community, as persons of effect” therein and he warns against the danger of “seeing in the poet nothing but the mere versifier.” The poet appears not primarily as a man of letters but as a Gestalt, a figure in whom a higher form of human existence is embodied and who leads the way, since it is he who gives shape, in demiurgic fashion, to a community in the making. Kommerell’s conception of the poet who shapes life and speaks the community-forming word now seems thoroughly out of its time, or, to borrow Nietzsche’s word, untimely, and it reminds us how much we lack the guidance of poets. It is remarkable, as I shall try to show in this review, that Benjamin, for all his attack on Kommerell’s procedure, cannot refute his concept of the leader. That concept describes the effect of a Gestalt (Gestaltwirkung), and as a description it holds even against Benjamin: in Goethe, the effect is the awakening, surpassing, and shaping of an age; in Hölderlin, it is the formation of a community deferred in time.
Benjamin’s review is more generous than its title suggests. He praises the “physiognomic mode of seeing,” the precision of its portraits of friendships, feuds, and separations, and its discovery of the great antagonisms of the period: Jacobi against the young Goethe, Herder against the Weimar Goethe, Schiller against the Schlegels. He places the book in the line of Plutarch rather than of Emil Ludwig, another biographer of Goethe: Plutarch keeps the hero outside the reader, as a model, while Ludwig hands every reader “a little ‘inner Napoleon.’” The section on Goethe and Carl August he counts among the few inspired pages ever written on Goethe’s life, and he says that Kommerell gives his subjects “not the false life of empathy but the true one of tradition.”
Benjamin’s objection lies elsewhere. For the Circle, he writes, history is never an object of study but always an object of its members’ own aspirations; they award themselves the past “as a title of origin or as a paradigm.” Ernst Bertram, a scholar close to the Circle who published under its imprint, had made this procedure a method eight years earlier. In his essay “Nietzsches Goethebild” (“Nietzsche’s Image of Goethe,” 1920), he argued that the images of Goethe formed by spiritual leaders become “transparent autobiographies.” Bertram does not mean thereby to unmask Nietzsche but to read his mask as mythology. What Benjamin reproaches as a lack of historicity (Historizität) would, on this view, be the attitude that Nietzsche, in “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” called monumental history, which seeks in the past the exemplar that shows the one who acts what is possible. Benjamin and Kommerell thus measure history by different standards: the present, and the exemplar.
To Benjamin, Kommerell’s classicism was built to serve as the first case of “a German insurrection against time.” Classicism, Benjamin answers, was not a heroic stance at all but one of resignation. The decisive sentence comes near the end: “The genuine image may be old, but the genuine thought is new.” Kommerell’s book is all image. What it lacks, Benjamin argues, is the “deadly thrust of thought” that seizes the present in order to question the past and present alike.
How deeply Kommerell nonetheless tries, despite his youth, to grasp the great exemplars is evident from the fact that he does not begin with the poets once they have reached their full stature but attends closely to their formation, so much so that he opens the Goethe chapter not with Goethe himself but with his “awakener,” Johann Gottfried Herder, the theologian and philosopher of language and culture, five years Goethe’s senior: “The priest in the long black silk cloak who, in September 1770, was addressed by the young Goethe on the stairs of the inn Zum Geist in Strasbourg was, though not old, already in full possession of his mysteries.” The future “prince of poets” first appears as a pupil, a young man who already surveyed the world like a prince but still needed a spiritual director. Goethe’s wild striving demanded the rigor and discipline of the spiritual shepherd, to guard him, Kommerell writes, against the danger of losing, “in striving for all, the striving for the One.” For the poet’s art lies not only in looking at his objects but in seizing and shaping them—and only what has itself taken firm shape can give form, or Gestalt, to others.
How far this formative power is conceived, beyond the pupil, as leadership is shown by the chapter “Die Gesetzgebung” (“The Lawgiving”) in the Schiller section. Here, Kommerell sets out what it means to lead. “The more discordant what is to be brought together,” he writes, “the higher the Gestalt-giving, affirming power of the artist, the brighter the insight of the leader.” Seen by such a sculptor’s eye and formed by such a sculptor’s hand, the petty, divided age attained in its images “every purity and dignity of which it was capable,” the purity and dignity for which we still know classicism today. The creator, he adds, sees “no past at all” that he cannot master by shaping it; from the beauty of the ancients Goethe took only what was least remote from present life, in order to bring the latter “gently” into accord with it, and so to form a norm “binding on all.” Artistic leadership, on Kommerell’s account, consists not merely in the power of command and the claim to rule but in giving form to what resists.
Benjamin chose this chapter to show how little chance of success Kommerell’s “rescuing” of classicism had: the chapter, he argues, reveals how estranged we have become from what Goethe’s Italian journey brought him as the revelation of ancient art. Kommerell’s image of classicism, he adds, lives, insofar as it endures, on the claim to authority that he discerns in it. What Benjamin left out is that Kommerell had made part of the concession himself. He grants that much in Goethe’s work had to accommodate itself to the unity of his age’s mores and has outlived itself along with it; only “the poetically immediate,” in which the images of the age are “raised to legend,” is “as effective as on the first day.” Where Benjamin sees a claim that has lost its power, Kommerell reports, as a discovery, that it still works.
With Hölderlin, Kommerell deepens and widens his conception of the poet and brings it to its final culmination. He writes that Hölderlin, unrecognized in his own time, “was a leader through his deepened vision of the people” and “is becoming ever more a leader” of that people. For whereas in Goethe leadership was defined by its coming to Gestalt in his own person, in Hölderlin it is a spiritual leadership that, according to Kommerell, reaches its full Gestalt only when an entire people takes form through his poetry. Here, the leader works not as a person but as the founder of a world that begins with him and rises only after his death. Between Hölderlin and Goethe, as Kommerell describes the one meeting at which they stood “a hand’s breadth” apart, there falls “a starry distance.” Hölderlin’s path to his following was long. He had studied at the Tübingen seminary alongside Hegel and Schelling, but from 1807 until his death in 1843 he lived, mentally broken, in a tower room in Tübingen in the care of a carpenter’s family. His late hymns went almost entirely unpublished in his lifetime; Norbert von Hellingrath recovered them from the manuscripts and published them, and the George Circle made him its poet. Little read in the nineteenth century, he is now counted among the greatest German poets.
In the chapter “Das Volk” (“The People”), it becomes clear how Kommerell conceives of the community led by the poet. For Hölderlin, he writes, the people is “not the lowest but the highest”: not the mass but the genius of the tribe, rarely visible, appearing in song and deed, in the highest men the tribe produces, and in the forms its festivals and rivalries take. The given people can be for him only “raw material,” from which the Gestalt will one day be formed, and any talk of the people that derives its law from this raw material is, for Hölderlin, “betrayal of the spirit.” A people in this sense, he adds later in the chapter, can be only one in any age; “all other peoples are then peoples of the second rank,” beneath it “as the hero stands among men of common stature.”
The community, then, is not presupposed but formed by the Gestalt in the first place: the poet follows no popular will; on the contrary, he founds the people by giving it its image and vouching for “the nobility of this people.” This is the core of his conception of “deferred leadership,” for a people conditioned only “by star and moment” may be disowned even in times of state power and the richest flowering of the spirit. From here Hölderlin’s contrast to Goethe also becomes more legible: he alone, Kommerell says, had the right to charge Goethe’s spiritual foundation with being unpatriotic, since he alone occupied an equal and opposing position; for to his eye, and Schiller’s, the German destiny had been fulfilled only at the level of Bildung, not at the level of political powers. The secret knowledge of Germany’s future, Kommerell writes, is “the deification of a whole people in war,” and Hölderlin, the poet “whom a breath of air seemed to wound,” praised war fearlessly, though only “the war that an awakened people wages.” The book ends on a fateful dawn when youth feels “the birth of the new fatherland in glowing union and in the clang of weapons buried all too deep.”
Benjamin praises Kommerell for discovering not only what happened but what, “in accordance with truth,” did not, an image of history drawn “out of the background of the possible.” That is near to his own later idea of a “secret rendezvous” between past and present generations. Wohlfarth calls the two men “secret antipodes,” whose positions mirrored each other all too closely. He also rightly warns against reading the review as envy: it praises a mode of seeing that is “in a strictest sense unpsychological,” and the rivalry, if there was one, was between two methods that were dangerously close to each other. Benjamin even assembled his own Secret Germany: Deutsche Menschen (1936), a collection of German letters from 1770 to 1870, published in Switzerland under the pseudonym Detlef Holz.
Benjamin’s praise of Kommerell’s The Poet as Leader was written as a conditional compliment: indeed, if there were a German conservatism worthy of the name, this book would be its charter; but for eighty years, he adds, there has been none. Benjamin’s conditional, in other words, denies the book the very people it was written to engender. A charter without a nation: the book thereby shares the fate it assigns its Hölderlin, of being a Gestalt that waits for the people it is to form. Benjamin attacked the book’s procedure with journalistic sharpness, but he did not thereby refute its concept of the leader, which holds even against him as a description of the effect of a Gestalt: in Goethe, as the awakening, surpassing, and shaping of an age; in Hölderlin, as an effect that needs time and has yet to form a people. It holds beyond the book as well. Between the poet who waits for his people and the poet who acts with it lies the space that Kommerell’s concept measures out. The cool scalpel of Benjamin’s critique of historicism may have severed the bond to community-forming myth, but the emptiness and fragmentation it left behind still await something to revive them. What our time needs, as Kommerell’s did, is not an administrator of the past but a sculptor’s hand, one that can give back measure, purity, and Gestalt to what resists it.
