Max Kommerell

Max Kommerell (25 February 1902 – 25 July 1944) was a German literary historian, writer, and poet. A member of the Stefan George circle from 1921 to 1930, Kommerell was a prominent literary critic associated with the Conservative Revolutionary movement in the Weimar Republic and subsequently a leading intellectual in Nazi Germany and a member of the Nazi Party from 1941, though one of his works was banned by the Nazi government in 1943.

Max Kommerell
Born	25 February 1902 Münsingen, German Empire
Died	25 July 1944 (aged 42) Marburg, Nazi Germany
Spouse(s)	Eva Otto ​ ​ (m. 1931; div. 1936)​ Erika Franck ​ (m. 1938)​
Academic background
Alma mater	University of Marburg
Thesis	Jean Pauls Verhältnis zu Rousseau ("Jean Paul's Relation to Rousseau") (1924)
Doctoral advisor	Ernst Elster[1]
Influences	Stefan George
Academic work
Discipline	Literary history
School or tradition	George circle (1921–1930) Conservative Revolution
Institutions	University of Frankfurt am Main (1930–1941) University of Marburg (1941–1944)

Early life

Born on 25 February 1902 in Münsingen, Württemberg, Kommerell studied briefly at the University of Tübingen in 1919 before transferring to Heidelberg in 1920.[2] There, Kommerell started a doctorate in German literature and attended lectures by Friedrich Gundolf, a close associate of the poet Stefan George.[3] He became interested in the thought of the George circle, and after transferring again to the University of Marburg in 1921 he was introduced personally to Gundolf and George himself through a friend who worked there as an assistant of Friedrich Wolters, another member of the circle.[4] George nicknamed Kommerell "Maxim" and "the Smallest One" (das Kleinste) on account of his short stature.[5] He completed his doctorate in 1924 with a thesis on the Romantic novelist Jean Paul.[6]

Career

George circle

Under George's influence, Kommerell adopted a position of elitist disdain for democracy and support for irrationalism and German nationalism,[2] becoming identified with the Conservative Revolutionary movement.[7] In 1928, Kommerell published a programmatic work, Der Dichter als Führer in der deutschen Klassik ("The Poet as Leader in German Classicism"), embodying the views he had received from George. The critical theorist Walter Benjamin reviewed the book in 1930 in an article titled "Wider ein Meisterwerk" ("Against a Masterpiece"). Though he described the work as "amazing" and betokening an "extraordinary precision and boldness of ... vision", Benjamin attacked Kommerell for what he saw as repetitive images of violence and service to a dangerous nationalist ideology.[8][9]

Later studies

After clashing with Ernst Morwitz, another member of the George circle, in 1929, Kommerell broke with George entirely in 1930, aiming to establish his independence from the poet's influence.[10] He completed his habilitation at the University of Frankfurt am Main in the same year and taught there throughout the 1930s;[6] his first lecture at Frankfurt concerned Hugo von Hofmannsthal, a rival of George, whom Kommerell praised as a poet who was not a "leader".[11] He criticised George's "liturgical pathos", which he compared to "Philistinism dressed up as spirit".[12]

In 1933, Kommerell published a monograph on Jean Paul, titled simply Jean Paul, which became one of the most influential studies of that writer. Contrasting Paul's trenchant humour with the artistic sensibility of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kommerell suggested that Paul's spirit may have represented the beginning of a general "crisis of art" in modernity.[13] Both writers were members of the bourgeoisie, but in Goethe, Kommerell argued, "the bourgeoisie is still a class [Stand]"—in Jean Paul it is "only in disorder [Mißstand]". Paul's humour represented a condition in which exterior life, formerly a realm of aesthetic potential, had fallen into "pettiness".[14]

Kommerell failed to secure a chair at Frankfurt,[6] and returned to Marburg after he was offered a professorship there by the Reich Education Ministry in September 1941. He joined the Nazi Party in 1941, likely after originally applying in 1939, and served as a member of the Sturmabteilung (SA).[15] Nevertheless, in 1943 the Nazi government banned an anti-Soviet drama by Kommerell, Die Gefangenen ("The Prisoners"), for its "depressive character", perceiving in the play a critique of the German system itself.[16]

Poetry

Though it has been overshadowed by his works of literary criticism, Kommerell also wrote poetry of his own. Between 1929 and 1944, he published seven compilations of poems and one novel.[17] His final publication, a poem collection titled Mit gleichsam chinesischem Pinsel ("With a Sort of Chinese Brush", 1944), is heavily influenced by Chinese aesthetics.[18]

Personal life

Kommerell's sexuality was ambiguous: in 1919, he remarked that he had "actually never loved girls but rather only boys"; though he stated that he did not engage in gay sexual practices, he opposed any moral censure of them. Within the George circle he became attached to another male member, a student named Johann Anton. Kommerell and Anton lived together in Marburg from 1923 on.[19] Following Kommerell's departure from the circle in 1930, however, Anton became distraught, writing to Kommerell that he was "threatened by something like insanity". Anton committed suicide on 25 February 1931.[20] Kommerell went on to marry two women: Eva Otto from 1931 to 1936, and Erika Franck in 1938, with whom he had one daughter, Yvonne.[21]

Death and influence

Kommerell died of cancer in Marburg on 25 July 1944.[2][3] Following World War II, his conservative positions fell out of favour in academic literary history.[22] He is remembered primarily through Benjamin's critique of his work and his engagement with Martin Heidegger,[23] whose analysis of Friedrich Hölderlin was once described by Kommerell to Hans-Georg Gadamer as a "productive train-wreck".[24] He was a formative influence on the historian and critic Arthur Henkel (1915–2005).[25] The historian Robert E. Norton describes Kommerell as "arguably the most original philosophical literary critic" of twentieth-century Germany, behind only Benjamin;[3] the philosopher Giorgio Agamben similarly calls Kommerell "certainly the greatest German critic of the twentieth century after Benjamin".[26]

References

1. Weber 2011, p. 66.
2. Glaubrecht 1980, p. 481.
3. Norton 2002, p. 627.
4. Norton 2002, p. 628.
5. Norton 2002, p. 629.
6. Hohendahl 2013, p. 174.
7. Weber 2011, p. 345.
8. Norton 2002, pp. 673–74.
9. Wohlfarth 2005, p. 32.
10. Norton 2002, pp. 709–10.
11. Wohlfarth 2005, p. 33.
12. Agamben 1999, p. 82.
13. Fleming 2006, pp. 14–15.
14. Agamben 1999, p. 83.
15. Weber 2011, p. 425.
16. Müller-Seidel 2002, p. 302.
17. Klawitter 2014, p. 96.
18. Klawitter 2014, p. 111.
19. Norton 2002, pp. 631–32.
20. Norton 2002, p. 711.
21. Ligniez 2014, p. 57 n. 141.
22. Glaubrecht 1980, p. 482.
23. Bambach & George 2019, p. 17.
24. Warminski 1987, p. 204.
25. Hohendahl 2013, p. 173.
26. Agamben 1999, p. 77.

Bibliography

• Agamben, Giorgio (1999). "Kommerell, or On Gesture". In Heller-Roazen, Daniel (ed.). Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. pp. 77–85. ISBN 978-0-8047-3278-9.
• Bambach, Charles; George, Theodore (2019). "Introduction". Philosophers and Their Poets: Reflections on the Poetic Turn in Philosophy since Kant. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. pp. 1–20. ISBN 978-1-4384-7703-9.
• Fleming, Paul (2006). The Pleasures of Abandonment: Jean Paul and the Life of Humor. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. ISBN 3-8260-3247-0.
• Glaubrecht, Martin (1980). "Kommerell, Max". Neue Deutsche Biographie (NDB) (in German). 12. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. pp. 481–483.
• Hohendahl, Peter Uwe (2013). The Fleeting Promise of Art: Adorno's Aesthetic Theory Revisited. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ISBN 978-0-8014-5236-9.
• Klawitter, Arne (2014). ""Kein Umriß – nur ein weißer Schatte". Fernöstliche Ästhetik in Max Kommerells Gedichten Mit gleichsam chinesischem Pinsel". Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte (in German). 88: 95–111. doi:10.1007/BF03375729. S2CID 169702771.
• Ligniez, Rolf Krafft (2014). Schöntag, Roger (ed.). Nachhall: Gedichte. Petrarkistisches Dichten in der späten Neo-Romantik (in German). Göttingen: V&R unipress. ISBN 978-3-8471-0314-1.
• Müller-Seidel, Walter (2002). "Schiller im Verständnis Max Kommerells. Nachtrag zum Thema »Klassiker in finsteren Zeiten«". In Alt, Peter-André; Košenina, Alexander; Reinhardt, Hartmut; Riedel, Wolfgang (eds.). Prägnanter Moment: Studien zur deutschen Literatur der Aufklärung und Klassik. Festschrift für Hans-Jürgen Schings (in German). Würzburg: Königshauen & Neumann. pp. 275–308. ISBN 978-3-8260-2311-8.
• Norton, Robert E. (2002). Secret Germany: Stefan George and His Circle. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ISBN 0-8014-3354-1.
• Warminski, Andrzej (1987). Readings in Interpretation: Hölderlin, Hegel, Heidegger. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 0-8166-1239-0.
• Weber, Christian (2011). Max Kommerell: Eine intellektuelle Biographie (in German). Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. ISBN 978-3-11-023752-8.
• Wohlfarth, Irving (2005). "Walter Benjamin's "Secret Germany"". In Kettler, David; Lauer, Gerhard (eds.). Exile, Science and Bildung: The Contested Legacies of German Emigre Intellectuals. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 27–46. ISBN 978-1-349-73456-6.