Max Kommerell

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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. Born on 25 February 1902 in Münsingen, Württemberg, Kommerell studied briefly at the University of Tübingen in 1919 before transferring to Heidelberg in 1920. There, Kommerell started a doctorate in German literature and attended lectures by Friedrich Gundolf, a close associate of the poet Stefan George. 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. George nicknamed Kommerell "Maxim" and "the Smallest One" (das Kleinste) on account of his short stature. He completed his doctorate in 1924 with a thesis on the Romantic novelist Jean Paul. Under George's influence, Kommerell adopted a position of elitist disdain for democracy and support for irrationalism and German nationalism, becoming identified with the Conservative Revolutionary movement. 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").