Hermann Georg Scheffauer

Hermann Georg Scheffauer

Herman George Scheffauer (born February 3, 1876 in San Francisco, US; died October 7, 1927 in Berlin), was a German-American poet, architect, writer, dramatist, journalist and translator.

Life and work

Very little is known about Scheffauer's youth, education and his early adult years in America, or, about his parents and siblings. His father was Johann Georg Scheffauer, a cabinet maker ("Tischler"), probably born in 1842 in the village of Unterkochen, Württemberg, who, according to Hamburg passenger lists, had first immigrated to America in 1868, returning again to Germany where he married Maria Theresa Scheffauer (née Eisele) in Augsburg, and who then came back with him to America in 1872.[1] His brother was the civil engineer, Frederick Carl Scheffauer, born in 1878 [2] and he had another younger brother, Walter Alois Scheffauer (1882-1975). The family was related to the German painter and sculptor Philipp Jacob Scheffauer (1756–1808)[3] who it was said was his great grandfather,[4] and who went to the same school as the poet Friedrich Schiller.

San Francisco childhood

Educated in public and private schools, it appears he attended a Roman Catholic Sunday school in San Francisco (probably St. Boniface Church-Franciscans), where services were conducted in German. He later wrote about the role of the nuns there and a certain Father Gerhard, instilling into the youth of this school terrifying and hellish religious imagery.[5] His parents were not orthodox, in fact he spoke of being shocked by his father's indifference and scepticism. He discovered that he was a poet from about the age of ten, on a school outing, where they ascended Mount Olympus in the Ashbury Heights neighbourhood of San Francisco.[6] He impressed his school friends with his ability to recount the ascent, as he put it:

"Suddenly I burst forth into a jog-trot doggerel. I chanted the heroic deeds of the day- the ascent of the peak, the routing of a belligerent bull, the piratical manoeuvres on a pond. The delivery of this improvised epic was volcanic. My companions regarded me with awe and suspicion. Thus, primitively and barbarically, I began. The climate had had its will of me- that marvellous "Greek" climate of California which works like champagne upon the temperament. I was fated to become one of the native sons of song."[7]

From then on he only wanted to write poetry but his parents insisted that he pursue a proper job. He began his career as an amateur printer, printing a broadsheet called 'The Owl' while he was still at school writing satires on his teachers. He went through a youthful period, through which he thought all young poets with an imaginative cast of mind must inevitably pass, namely a combination of what he termed "idealistic fanaticism and Byronic romanticism."[8] He studied art, painting and architecture at the Arts School of the University of California (The Mark Hopkins Institute).[9] He later worked as a teacher of draughting and a water colourist in an architectural capacity.

Early intellectual influences

He was aware that "Ingersoll was in the air",[10] a reference to the ideas of Robert G. Ingersoll the American freethinker and agnostic, and Scheffauer admitted that at first he looked upon Ingersoll and his followers as "enemies", and intellectually cowering, as it were, he read The Night Thoughts (1742) of the English poet Edward Young to reaffirm his faith.[11] However, he soon departed from his religiosity and became aware of the heated discussions about the 'missing link' in the writings of John Augustine Zahm, the priest and professor of physics at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. He said that the following authors came to his aid in California bringing him "light and fire",[12] namely works by Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, Arthur Schopenhauer, Herbert Spencer, Ludwig Feuerbach and Ludwig Büchner.[13] Probably the greatest influence on his thinking, in the sense of a clearer scientific Weltanschauung, was a chance encounter with a work of the German zoologist, biologist and philosopher, and popularizer of Darwin's evolutionary theory, Ernst Haeckel. He came across the massively popular book 'Die Welträtsel' (The world riddle) in the F. W. Barkhouse bookshop, 213 Kearney Street, San Francisco, which was translated as The Riddle of the Universe at the close of the nineteenth century (1901).[14] He bought a copy and read half of it the same evening and the rest in his architect bureau the following day. He later described himself as a monist poet, and claimed that together with Sterling they represented "a new school of poetry" in California, developing "a poetry that sought to unify poetry with science".

Protegé of Ambrose Bierce

Scheffauer later gave up his architectural day job and wrote poetry and short stories. He was encouraged by his friend and mentor Ambrose Bierce the journalist and short story writer and veteran of the Civil War, who, it has been claimed,[15] had first noticed a poem of his The Fair Grounds that he had entered in a literary competition in 1893 organised by the San Francisco newspaper 'The Call'. Scheffauer who was only 17 years of age had used the pseudonym Jonathan Stone, and his poem was favorably compared to the American romantic poet William Cullen Bryant.[16] Bierce who was 36 years older was clearly an alternative father figure for him. Bierce published a number of his poems in his 'Prattle' columns, and in 1899 Bierce was responsible for the so-called "Poe-Scheffauer affair". One of Scheffauer's poems The Sea of Serenity (1893) was published in the San Francisco Examiner on March 12, 1899 not under his own name but heralded as "an unpublished poem of Poe".[17] This carefully planned 'Poe hoax' passed without creating too much attention. However, it elicited some of the greatest praise from Bierce for the young poet:

"I am very far from saying that I think the poem mentioned was written by Poe.....As to internal evidence— evidence inhering in the poem itself— that is strongly in favor of Poe's authorship. If not written by him it was written by his peer in that kind of writing— by one who has so thoroughly mastered the method that there is nowhere a slip or fault. The writer, if not Poe, has caught the trick of Poe's method utterly, in both form and manner, the trick of his thought, the trick of his feeling and the trick of that intangible something which eludes nomenclature, description and analysis..... He need not fear any dimming of his glory, for distinctly greater than the feat of hearing "a voice from the grave of Edgar Allan Poe" is the feat of discovering a ventriloquist with that kind of voice." [18]

Another early poem of his, also written in the spirit of Poe,The Isle of the Dead (1894) was published the following year under his own name in the Overland Monthly. Scheffauer translated Goethe, read Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman and Rudyard Kipling avidly, adored W. B. Yeats and discussed with Bierce the poems of Thomas Moore who he declared to be "the greatest of the lover poets"[19] and the nature of Algernon Swinburne's alliteration. His correspondence with Bierce has not yet been published but the encouragement and belief in him shown by Bierce is palpable: "I so like the spirit of your letter of July 7! It gives me assurance of your future. You are to do great work, believe me. I shall not see it all, but that does not greatly matter, having the assurance of it."[20] The publication of his first collection of poems Of Both Worlds (1903) was dedicated to Bierce. It has a number of translations from Goethe, including Der König in Thule from Faust. At about the same time he also began to read Nietzsche enthusiastically. His friendship with the poet George Sterling had begun around February 1903, and it brought with it a whole circle of friends including Jack London,[21] Dr. C. W. Doyle,[22] Herman Whitaker, James Hopper and especially other members of the Bohemian Club who regularly met at the Bohemian Grove amidst the magnificent red oaks at Monte Rio in Sonoma County, California. Later in 1904 Scheffauer would speak of Richard Wagner as "the Master".[23] This was in the context of a major row and exchange of poems he had with an Irish-American playwright, John Fitzgerald Murphy (1869-1906), about his production of Wagner's opera Parsifal that was performed in San Francisco at the Alcazar Theatre on March 14, 1904. Bonnet reports in Town Talk of how "the local literati", and he specifically names Sterling, Scheffauer and Harry Cowell, of how they were all outraged and had formed a veritable war council. It was generally considered that Murphy had mutilated Wagner, and Scheffauer stepped forward and published a piece of doggerel that roundly defended the German composer. Bierce claimed his "idols" were George Bernard Shaw and Henrik Ibsen and fell out with him much later, irritated, as he wrote to him with "the German ichor in the lenses of your eyes", an acute and perceptive awareness from Bierce of Scheffauer's troubled state of being as a hyphenated German-American:"You think your German blood helps you to be a good American. You think it gives you lofty ideals, knowledge, and much else. The same claim could be (and is, doubtless) made for every other nationality. Each tribesman thinks his tribe the best and greatest- even the Hottentot."[24][25] Bierce, however, was pleased with the effect that his study of Nietzsche's writings had had on him: "I can bless your new guide for at least one service to you—for overturning one of your idols: the horrible God of the Hebrew mythology, horrible even in his softened character, as we now have him."[26] Bierce's ‘blessing’ of Nietzsche reveals the depth of Scheffauer's Roman Catholic upbringing. As late as 1900 Scheffauer had written an Ode to Father Mathew for the occasion of a 10,000 gathering of the "League of the Cross" in San Francisco, in memory of the Irish Catholic priest Theobald Mathew (1790-1856), who was described as "the great apostle of temperance".[27] After his mysterious disappearance in 1913 in Mexico and his presumed death, and despite their estrangement, Scheffauer's devotion to his former master was such that he was responsible for publishing and editing translations of collections of Bierce's short stories in Germany and made his name known to a German literary public:Physiognomien des Todes. Novellen von Ambrose Bierce (1920), in which he wrote an introduction, and Der Mann und die Schlange: Phantastische Erzählungen von Ambrose Bierce (1922).[28]

Tour of Europe and North Africa 1904–1906

Bierce knew of Scheffauer's plans for a tour of Europe as early as August 1903[29] and invited him to Washington beforehand. He provided him with letters of introduction for the English part of his journey. In July 1904 he left New York and sailed to Glasgow, before that he and Bierce were together in New York for about a month, and they also visited Percival Pollard the Anglo-German literary critic at Saybrook, Connecticut. Scheffauer went on a tour of Europe and North Africa 1904–1906. After about a month in England and Scotland where he cycled or 'wheeled' much,[30] and clearly came to loathe English food, he went to Germany in October 1904 and was mesmerized by Berlin- which he spoke of as "the modern Babylon" and "the Chicago of Europe". He made what was almost a pilgrimage to Jena in Thuringia to see Ernst Haeckel. He presented Haeckel with works of poetry by his friend George Sterling The Testimony of the Suns and Other Poems (1903) and his own collection of poems Of Both Worlds (1903). He maintained a correspondence with him for over 15 years and would translate some of his works. As the European correspondent for the San Francsico magazine Town Talk in which he regularly sent back accounts of his travels and poems, his tour of the 'old world' included Paris, Monte Carlo,[31] Nice, Budapest, Vienna, Munich, Nuremberg,[32] Switzerland, Italy (Palermo, Rome, Milan, Turin, Naples,[33] Capri), Spain (Barcelona, Zaragoza, Madrid, Toledo, Corboda, Seville ("The Spanish Paris"), Cadiz). He also travelled to Morocco (Tangier), Gibraltar, Algeciras, Granada, Tunisia and Algeria.

Scheffauer as European correspondent for Town Talk

First residence in London 1905-1907

He was back in London in the summer of 1905 where he regularly "mined" the British museum. He joined the New Bohemian Club at The Prince's Head in the Strand, and drank what he thought was rather tepid English ale with literary figures such as Stephen Phillips, G. K. Chesterton and the poet and parliamentarian Hilaire Belloc.[34] He met Henry James who he found to be more English than American at a New Year's Eve party at the home of the writer Edmund Gosse.[35] He made a pilgrimage to Plymouth: "From Plymouth, as you know, sailed forth the blue-nosed Puritans to make laws just as blue and to burn witches in Massachusetts." He also studied at Oxford University: "I'm spending a short time up here in this picturesque place of dead creeds and living prejudices. Have been attending special lectures and studying the life. It appears to me like an immense boy's school. There is little of the true scholastic spirit or the impetus of scientific research about the place— nothing compared with the German universities."[36]

In connection with his writings on Haeckel and his enthusiasm for the philosophy of Monism he worked closely with Joseph McCabe, who had translated Haeckel, visiting his home in Cricklewood, north-west London, a number of times, and later writing articles for Charles Albert Watts and the Rationalist Press Association. He continued to publish many short stories and poems in both English and American literary magazines.

He was still in London at the time of the San Francisco earthquake and fires (April 18, 1906), and as vice president of the San Francisco Architectural Club, and one of James D. Phelan's lieutenants in the movement for beautifying the city, it was reported in Town Talk: "He is vindicating his loyalty to San Francisco in a way that should prove far more beneficial to the city than he could be were he at home. He is acting as a San Francisco promotion committee of one, and through him, since the fire, the readers of some of the European papers are learning more of this city than they ever knew before."[37]

Return to San Francisco and New York 1907-1911

He eventually returned to San Francisco early 1907. His second major collection of poems Looms of Life was published by Walter Neale in 1908, and in August of the same year his The Sons of Baldur. A Forest Music Drama was performed at the Bohemian Club of San Francisco. "These plays, part masque, part music-drama, part allegory, are a direct outgrowth of the nature-worship of the Californian, and are given in the majestic forest amphitheatre of the club in Sonoma County, amidst colossal redwoods older than the Pyramids. Here my "Sons of Baldur" was produced on a beautiful midsummer night."[38] He wrote his first novel entitled Niagara. An American Romance of four generations finishing it in San Francisco in April 1909. A newspaper report suggested his journey to New York was connected with his novel. "On his way East Mr. Scheffauer will take in the North, in a roundabout way; will visit Seattle, attend the exposition, go on to Niagara Falls and remain there for some time before reaching New York. This young and brilliant author has met with instant appreciation and success."[39] He then lived in New York from 1909 to 1911 where he was a "worker" for more than two years at the University Settlement, very little is known about this period. As part of the University Settlement he lived in a house in the neighbourhood of lower east side, where he was clearly inspired to write his very successful play The New Shylock (1912), a study on Jewish-American life.

Second residence in London 1911–1915

He moved back to London early 1911 and remained living there until 1915. He married the English poet, Ethel Talbot (1888–1976) who published a collection of poems entitled London Windows (1912).[40] A contemporary review of her work said that in phraseology she follows largely Swinburne and William Ernest Henley.[41] She had written about how to read Poe in 1909 on the 100th anniversary of his birth: "The most perfect mood is a fugitive mental weariness that is neither sorrow nor longing; when you come then to Poe the lassitude gives way before the soothing sweetness of his unforgettable melodies".[42] Scheffauer was struck with this "most excellent advice", as well as her youth and intelligence, already in May 1910 he had proclaimed her: "one of the most gifted as well as youngest of England's poets". He had found not only an English protégé but his Diotima. Scheffauer's romantic notions of love and marriage are contained in a strident epithalamium published in his collection Looms of Life (1908) entitled The Forging of the Rings. Their marriage (June 25, 1912) took place in Highgate, where they also moved into a house, Bank Point, at Jackson's Lane, Highgate, North London. Satirically reflecting on the outbreak of German spy-mania in England a few years later he would write: "Our house bore little resemblance to the conventional and ugly London villas all arrow. It was just such a place as would have appealed to a German spy, for it commanded a lordly view over all London. Precisely the place to give signals to Zeppelins!"[43]

Bank Point, Jackson's Lane, Highgate, North London

International success of his play 'The New Shylock'

In 1913 his play 'The New Shylock' was performed at Danzig in Germany. The New York Times under the headline: "Danzig Applauds Scheffauer's Play" wrote: "Mr. Scheffauer attended the opening and responded to a number of enthusiastic curtain-calls. The play has already been bought for production in Bonn, Strassburg, and Posen, and negotiations for its production in Berlin are pending."[44] In November 1914 the play was performed at Annie Horniman's Repertory Theatre in Manchester, the first American drama ever written and performed at this theatre. A minor legal battle ensued between Scheffauer (who had the full backing of The Society of Authors) and the Jewish theatrical producer Philip Michael Faraday who attempted to censor some of the text. It was then transferred to London in 1914–15 under the changed title The Bargain. In 1915 it was performed at the Hague and in Amsterdam by the great Dutch actor Louis Bouwmeester (1842-1925) who was well known for his Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. It was also produced in America at the Comedy Theatre, New York in October 1915 in which the celebrated English actor Louis Calvert appeared playing the leading role of Simon Ehrlich.

Scheffauer's translations of Heine and Nietzsche

In London he was a close friend of Oscar Levy, the editor of the first complete edition of Nietzsche's Collected Works (1909–1913) and contributed many English translations of Nietzsche's poems. Some of his Nietzsche translations appeared in his third major collection of poems Drake in California Ballads and Poems (1912). When he published his translation of Heinrich Heine's Atta Troll. Ein Sommernachtstraum (1913) Levy wrote an introductory essay for it. He knew J. M. Kennedy, and many of that small "crew"[45] of British Nietzscheans[46] and Imagists that centered around The New Age. A Weekly Review of Politics, Literature and Art, edited by A. R. Orage. In one letter to Ezra Pound,who also contributed regularly to The New Age, he assured him of their spiritual affinity: "Mr. Pound's opinion of things American is, I take it through his confessions, quite as healthy and unabashedly modest as my own."[47] Scheffauer printed here a number of his poems including 'The Prayer of Beggarman Death (A Rime Macabre)' and 'Not After Alma-Tadema', as well as his English translation of Gabriele D'Annunzio's homage to Nietzsche "Per la Morte di un Distruttore". He published many short stories in the leading literary magazines such as the Pall Mall Magazine, the Strand Magazine, the Lady's Realm and T. P.'s Weekly and appears to have adopted a transatlantic strategy of publishing his stories in both English and American magazines.

Anti-war writings

Some of his earliest poems The Ballad of the Battlefield (1900), or those from his Of Both Worlds (1903), such as The Song of the Slaughtered, Disarmament and Bellomaniacs, showed that his pacifist tendencies were quite pronounced. In 1906 he had even advocated an entente cordial between England and Germany. England ought to seek her "natural ally... in a race and nation more closely related in all essential and significant points."[48] In 1925 he declared: "War is the most terrible hostage of mankind. My voice has always been loud for peace, long before it became a passion, a mode or a necessity to be a pacifist. I have not only spoken for peace, I have even fought against war."[49]

Red & black plate on cover, designed by Scheffauer?

His truly visionary expressionist play The Hollow Head of Mars: A Modern Masque in Four Phases appeared in April 1915 but it had been finished in 1913, written in staccato blank verse he said that it was not "an insurrectionary experiment in vers libre" and that "It is useless to seek for parallels between the nations actually at war and these visionary combatants". His play had predicted the war and had seen through the hidden mechanisms that had encouraged its unfolding, depicting the sleepwalkers listening to the artificially produced voice of Mars, it is one of his most important but neglected works. The character of the 'Mountebank' is clearly presented as a Mephistophelean figure, whispering affectionately into the ear of ‘The Minister of War’ and gleefully drinking every drop of blood in his beaker and toasting "To Liberty". It is a character that is deliriously happy at the increasing numbers of soldier recruits that join him, their blood as he says: "manure for the victory of lilies". This macabre play on war shows him as a true protégé of Bierce. After the onset of the First World War throughout 1914–1917, during America's phase of neutrality, his articles sent from London back to the New York-based American pro-German magazines, under the aegis of the German-American Literary Defense Committee (GALDC), were widespread and numerous, it was here that he "fought against war" and attempted to influence America's position. He wrote chiefly for The Vital Issue (edited by Franz J. L. Dorl [50]) and The Fatherland (edited by George Sylvester Viereck who Scheffauer had known in New York since late 1909).

The flight to Amsterdam and Berlin 1915

Increasingly concerned about the anti-German riots in England[51] and his "furrin" looking name, as well as having already received a visit from a Scotland Yard detective to his house,[52] he left London with his wife for Berlin via Amsterdam in March 1915. He wanted to familiarize himself with the circumstances in Germany and "better orientate himself" so that he could write more convincingly, and was seriously considering returning to America. However, after finding a flat in Berlin-Friedenau he was soon appointed editor[53] of the pro-German American newspaper The Continental Times. A Cosmopolitan Newspaper published for Americans in Europe which was published three times a week. It boasted of sales in Austria, Italy, Switzerland, United States and the Netherlands and proclaimed itself in its headed paper as "The Leading Newspaper for Americans on the Continent". Writing for this newspaper he continued to use the pseudonym R. L. Orchelle and used Sagittarius. He was a friend and colleague of Sir Roger Casement in Berlin who also wrote for the newspaper. His propaganda work and his ferocious attacks on President Woodrow Wilson who he said was "the most despicable miscreant in history,- a man whose incapacity, dishonesty and treachery brought about the most terrible failure in human history" calling him "...a new kind of monster- a super-Tartuffe, unimagined even by Moliere, unachieved even by Shakespeare."[54] made him a marked man. He was indicted in absentia for treason in 1919, although he had resigned his position as literary editor in December 1916 before America had even entered the war. In March 1916 he had been attacked in The New York Times as one of a triumvirate of American poets (together with Ezra Pound and Viereck) who had turned their backs on their country: "In childish wrath they seek a foreign shore; / There, turning on the land they loved before,/ They smear foul rhymes upon her honoured name...".[55] It was a letter to J. M. Kennedy (who wrote in The New Age using the pseudonym "S. Verdad") that was cited by the Federal Grand Jury as an example of his treason:

"You say that I turned upon a country to which I professed allegiance in favor of a country now its deadly enemy. I have never professed allegiance to any country. To England I owe none. To America, as a born citizen, I owed it only according to the dictates of my conscience. I oppose the policy of America now- or that of the powers which have my unfortunate country in thralls- as I have always opposed the English policy which dictated it, because I knew it to be hopelessly, damnably wrong....The ultimatum presented to Wilson from Wall Street and the war profiteers, and its acceptance, constitute the most infamous betrayal of a nation that the world has ever seen."[56]

He never returned to America or England and the irony of being a persecuted poet could not have escaped him, he had translated Heinrich Heine's own introductory words written in 1841 to his great comic masterpiece Atta Troll "I am therefore celebrating my Christmas in an alien land, and it will be as an exile in a foreign country that I shall end my days". He wrote a trilogy of critical works on the theme of America (1923–25) believing that America was a natural 'biological' connecting link between Germany and England. A daughter was born, Fiona Francisca Scheffauer. After a visit by his very close friend H. L. Mencken to Berlin in 1922, she is spoken of as a two and a half-year old daughter. He translated works of Georg Kaiser and Klabund.

Friendship with Thomas Mann

In April 1924 Scheffauer wrote about Mann's "crisp, skeptic, [and] collected mind..., a mind almost pedantic in its precision of expression, its tortuous searching for the exact word, the luminous phrase. Mann, who might in his externals pass for an English M.P. or a youngish major...."[57] He had by then already translated Thomas Mann's Herr und Hund which had appeared in The Freeman (1922–23) in six installments, it was then published as a book Bashan and I. Translated by H. G. Scheffauer. (Henry Holt, New York, 1923). Scheffauer was aware in July 1924 that Mann was close to finishing his "... study of a sick man in the environment of an Alpine sanatorium" and Mann wanted to entrust him with the translation of this novel 'Der Zauberberg'(The Magic Mountain), but failed, due to opposition of his American publisher Alfred A. Knopf.[58] The Magic Mountain was translated by Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter instead. Scheffauer also translated Mann's Disorder and early sorrow that appeared in The Dial.

Romane der Welt [RdW] (Novels of the World)

Scheffauer and Thomas Mann had a collegial, friendly relationship.[58] He acknowledged his translation skills and looked upon him as an authority in Anglo-American literature.[59] Scheffauer told Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche in 1924 that Mann had assured him that he much preferred reading his English translation of Herr und Hund rather than the original German. In April 1927, they launched a series Romane der Welt (Novels of the World), that was published by Thomas Knaur Nachfolger Verlag in Berlin. Each week a novel that cost only 2,85 Marks appeared in the RdW series, on the back of the dust-jacket it proclaimed: "Every Friday a new volume/ Every novel an experience". It included authors such as Herman Melville's Moby Dick oder Der Weisse Wal and Taipi and Cashel Byrons Beruf by G.B.Shaw (with forewords by Scheffauer); works by Hugh Walpole, Hillaire Belloc, G. K. Chesterton, P. G. Wodehouse, John Galsworthy, Radclyffe Hall, Arnold Bennett, Francis Brett Young, Liam O'Flaherty. The choice of American literature very much reflecting his ideas he gave in a key lecture at the University of Berlin in 1921 and contained in his chapter on 'Art and Literature' in his Das Land Gottes (1923), thus, the work of Sinclair Lewis Die Hauptstrasse (Main Street) and Babbitt appeared in the series,[60] novels by Joseph Hergesheimer such as Java Head; and Tampico (also with a foreword by Scheffauer), Floyd Dell, 'George Challis' the pseudonym of Max Brand, Lesley Storm and Mary Borden, as well as many westerns by Zane Grey. Also German works by Eugen Binder von Krieglstein and Conrad Ferdinand Meyer and the series also included many French and Spanish authors. The democratic intent of the series was palpable, and it was attacked in some conservative literary circles as unnecessary 'flooding' of the German market. Scheffauer was present at the first meeting of the German PEN-Group on December 15, 1924 that had named Ludwig Fulda as its first president, and he was also a close friend of Walter von Molo.

Both Scheffauer and his wife Ethel contributed regularly to The Bookman providing fascinating details about the German literary and publishing world. They also both wrote regularly for the English monthly edition of the Berliner Tageblatt. Scheffauer was also the Berlin correspondent for The New York Times and some other newspapers, and he worked tirelessly as a literary agent for a number of British and American publishing companies. In 1925 eleven of his short stories were published in German translation Das Champagnerschiff und andere Geschichten (Berlin, 1925). He had already published the story that he gave as its main title "The Champagne Ship" back in January 1912 in New York in one of Frank Munsey's so called pulp magazines The Cavalier and the Scrap Book.

Scheffauer never relinquished his original vocation as both poet and architect, he regarded words as things with which to build. His love of architecture in the 1920s was reaffirmed again with articles on Erich Mendelsohn, Walter Gropius, Hans Poelzig, Bruno Taut and the Bauhaus movement. Scheffauer played an important role in describing some of the contemporary art-movements in Germany for a wider English and American audience. This was particularly the case with German expressonist cinema such as Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922), and much later Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927)[61] He wrote passionately about film and praised it as "a new stereoscopic universe" where space had been given a new voice in a "cubistic world of intense relief and depth"[62] As both poet and architect he would write on this Vivifying of Space: "Space - hitherto considered and treated as something dead and static, a mere inert screen or frame, often of no more significance than the painted balustrade background at the village photographer's - has been smitten into life, into movement and conscious expression. A fourth dimension has begun to evolve out of this photographic cosmos. "[63] As Anthony Vidler has written: "Scheffauer anticipates all the later commonplaces of expressionistic criticism from Siegfried Kracauer to Rudolf Kurtz."[64] He would acclaim: "the function of the German film is to give the American film that which it does not possess —and that is soul". His aesthetic and sociological criticism was tinged with his own incomplete attempt at "de-americanisation"["weil er nicht gänzlich ent-amerikanisieret ist"]- as his friend Oscar Levy once put it, and it was also very clear to Levy that Scheffauer still retained a fair share of American puritanism that so animated all of his criticism. Scheffauer's collection of essays: The New Vision in the German Arts (London,1924) was testimony to this unique German-American poetical and philosophical sensibility.

Scheffauer's suicide 1927

Scheffauer killed himself and Katherine von Meyer, 23, his private secretary, in 1927 at the age of 51 years.[65] It was a horrific act of mental derangement brought on at a time when he was suffering from an extreme depression. He wrote to his wife shortly before he killed himself, who was staying with their daughter at their villa in Dießen am Ammersee, Bavaria (on the shores of Ammersee lake), that he was in great "mental torment", and that each day it felt as if he was "...suffering the death of ten thousand mortal agonies". A couple of letters between Scheffauer and his wife were published (in German translation)[66])to scotch some of the rumours that had arisen about their own relationship and of the moral integrity of his secretary.

The PEN Club of Berlin, of which he was a founding member and its secretary, held a memorial service for him on October 27 together with a madrigal choir. Karl Oscar Bertling the director of the Berliner Amerika-Institut at the University of Berlin, gave a speech and spoke of Scheffauer's "poetic mission"(dichterische Sendung) and his "artistic priestliness"(kunstlerisches Priestertum); Thomas Mann praised his ability as a translator of his works and attempted to explain his unhappiness at the end of his life, of which he had not the slightest idea, he thought it was due to the nature of his "undomiciled internationality"(der unbeheimateten Internationalität);[67] the American writer Sinclair Lewis also gave a passionate speech at this memorial service for his "friend in struggle". According to newspaper reports his body was transferred to Dießen am Ammersee (which is twinned with Windermere in Cumbria, England), where he was buried.

Autograph from Berlin, May 1925

Selected works

Poems, stories and plays:

Selected short stories

Translations

Essays

Works about Scheffauer

References

  1. ↑ Who's Who in America: a Biographical Dictionary of Notable Living Men and Women of the United States. 1908–1909.
  2. ↑ The National Cyclopædia of American Biography,Vol.57, p.611.
  3. ↑ "Scheffauer, Philipp Jacob" in: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie 30 (1890), S. 672–676 (Onlinefassung)
  4. ↑ "Die Tragodie eines Publizisten. Der Schriftsteller Hermann George Scheffauer ersticht seine Sekretaerin und veruebt Selbstmord. Die Motive bisher unbekannt.", in: Hamburger Anzeiger (08 October 1927), p.4.
  5. ↑ Haeckel, 1914, S. 75. It is highly probable that Scheffauer had read the serialisation of James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man that through Ezra Pound's help had originally appeared in The Egoist (1914-1915). Heinrich Schmidt translated Scheffauer's English essay into German.
  6. ↑ "Ascending Mt. Olympus". Johnnycomelately.org. October 3, 2007. Retrieved October 25, 2016.
  7. ↑ O'Connor, 1914, p. 419
  8. ↑ O'Connor, 1914, p. S. 77. "Ich war jetzt in jener unglücklichen, jugendlichen Periode von idealistischer Schwärmerei und Byronscher Romantik, durch welche alle, besonders die mit phantasievollen gemüt, hindurchgehen müssen."
  9. ↑ "1906 Earthquake and Fire Destruction of the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art". line feed character in |title= at position 70 (help)
  10. ↑ Was wir Ernst Haeckel verdanken, op. cit, S.76.
  11. ↑ "Ich führte gegen sie flammende Stellen aus dem durch und durch düsteren Werk Youngs, den "Nachtgedanken", an." op. cit., S.77.
  12. ↑ Was wir Ernst Haeckel verdanken, op. cit., S. 77.
  13. ↑ "Huxley, Schopenhauer, Spencer, Feuerbach, Büchner kamen mir nun zu Hilfe und brachten Licht und Luft. Aus ihren verschiedenartigen Gedanken, Tendenzen und Lehren heraus und den Bedürfnissen meines eigenen Temperaments begann ich mir, eine etwas verschwommene Weltanschauung zusammenzustückeln." Ibid., S. 77.
  14. ↑ Ernst Haeckel (January 1, 1934). "The Riddle Of The Universe". Watts And Company – via Internet Archive.
  15. ↑ Edward F. O'Day, "The Poetry of San Francisco", in: The Lantern. Edited by Theodore F. Bonnet and Edward F.O’Day, Vol.3. No.6, September 1917, p.176.
  16. ↑ San Francisco Call, Vol.74, Number 179, 26 November 1893.
  17. ↑ See Carroll D. Hall, Bierce and the Poe hoax. With an Introduction by Carey McWilliams (San Francisco, The Book Club of California, 1934.)
  18. ↑ Ibid., 1934, p.11. (San Francisco Examiner, March 19, 1899)
  19. ↑ Walter Neale, Life of Ambrose Bierce (New York, 1929),p.222.
  20. ↑ AB to HS, Aug. 4, 1903, p.110.
  21. ↑ Scheffauer went sailing with him on his yacht 'Spray'. See Alex Kershaw, Jack London: A Life (St. Martin's Griffin, 2013), p.131.
  22. ↑ Dr. Charles William Doyle (1852–1903)
  23. ↑ See his poem "The Master and the Murphy," in: Town Talk, Vol. XII, San Francisco, March 19, 1904.
  24. ↑ Ambrose Bierce to Herman Scheffauer, Washington, November 11, 1903, in: A Much Misunderstood Man: Selected Letters of Ambrose Bierce. Edited by S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz (The Ohio State University Press, 2003) p.115
  25. ↑ Roy Morris, Ambrose Bierce. Allein in schlechter Gesellschaft. Biographie. Haffmans Verlag, Zürich 1999, p. 347, 370.
  26. ↑ Ambrose Bierce to Herman Scheffauer, February 12, 1904, in: A Much Misunderstood Man: Selected Letters of Ambrose Bierce. Edited by S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz (The Ohio State University Press, 2003),p.118.
  27. ↑ See The San Francisco call., Sunday, October 28, 1900, p. 28.
  28. ↑ See Friedel H. Bastein, "Bierce in the German-Speaking Countries (1892-1982); A Bibliography of Works by and about Him", in: American Literary Realism, Vol. 18, No. 1/2 (Spring - Autumn, 1985), p.231.
  29. ↑ "When am I to see you on your way to Europe?" AB to HS, August 4, 1903, in: A Much Misunderstood Man: Selected Letters of Ambrose Bierce. Edited by S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz (The Ohio State University Press, 2003), p.109.
  30. ↑ AB to HS, July 17, 1904, Ibid., p.125.
  31. ↑ "Thus It Befell at Monte Carlo", in: Town Talk, The Pacific Weekly, Vol. XIV. No. 698, San Francisco, January 13, 1906, p/7; 38-39.
  32. ↑ His stay in Nuremberg inspired him to write the poem "The Iron Virgin in the Five-Cornered Tower "(1905)
  33. ↑ Scheffauer later wrote about his experience in Naples climbing Vesuvius: See Scheffauer "A Victory over Vesuvius", in: Macmillan's Magazine, Vol. 1.-New Series November 1905 to October 1906, pp.613–616. "That morning in February I awoke and found all Naples white with snow. Such a thing, said the natives, had not occurred for twenty years."
  34. ↑ Belloc had visited California in 1890 and returned again in 1896 where, at Napa, he married the American Elodie Hogan.
  35. ↑ "In the Heart of Literary London", in: Town Talk, Vol. XIV. No. 700, Saturday, January 27, 1906, p.13.
  36. ↑ Town Talk, Vol. XIV. No.724, San Francisco, July 14, 1906,p.10.
  37. ↑ See Scheffauer's 'The City Beautiful-San Francisco Rebuilt, in: The Architectural Review A Magazine of Architecture the Arts of Design, Vol. XX, No.117, August 1906.
  38. ↑ How I Began, in: T.P.'s Weekly, April 3, 1914, p.419.
  39. ↑ Santa Cruz Sentinel from Santa Cruz, California, Wednesday May 26, 1909, p.3.
  40. ↑ "Herman and Ethel Talbot Scheffauer".
  41. ↑ The Athenaeum, No. 4406, April 6, 1912, p.364.
  42. ↑ "The Baiting of Poe ", in: Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine, Vol. LIII-Second Series January–June 1909 (06-01-1909), p.191
  43. ↑ See "London in August, 1914. Sleuth-Hound and "Spy. By R. L. Orchelle", in: Issues and Events. A Weekly Magazine, pp. 179–181, this was originally published in The Continental Times.
  44. ↑ October 12, 1913
  45. ↑ The Nietzsche Movement in England: A Retrospect, a Confession, and a Prospect. By Dr. Oscar Levy. II., in: The New Age (December 26, 1912), p.181.
  46. ↑ On Levy, see Dan Stone, Breeding Superman. Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain, Liverpool University Press, 2002,pp.12–32.
  47. ↑ "Through Alien Eyes", in: The New Age, February 6, 1913, p.335
  48. ↑ Scheffauer quoted in "The Peace Movement", in: The Review of Reviews, (Aug. 1906) 34, 200, p.161..
  49. ↑ Wenn ich Deutscher wär!, 1925, S.33. Cf. "My pen still spoke for Peace. Always it wrought for Reason. / Still it obeyed Truth's mystic gravity- A loyal needle in and out of season/" Scheffauer, Infant, 1921, p.23.
  50. ↑ On Dorl's correspondence with Johann Heinrich von Bernstorff and later internment, see Jörg Nagler, Nationale Minoritäten im Krieg "Feindliche Ausländer" und die amerikanische Heimatfront während des Ersten Weltkriegs (Hamburg, 2000), 517.
  51. ↑ See Panikos Panayi, "Anti-German Riots in London during the First World War", in: German History, Vol.7, Issue 2, 1989, pp.184-203.
  52. ↑ See "London in August, 1914. Sleuth-Hound and "Spy. By R. L. Orchelle", in: Issues and Events. A Weekly Magazine, pp. 179–181.
  53. ↑ The NYT called him a "sub-editor", whereas the Military Intelligence Bureau in Washington said he was the "editor", Scheffauer described himself as literary editor.
  54. ↑ Blood Money: Woodrow Wilson and the Nobel peace prize, 1921, p.9.
  55. ↑ The Poets Without a Country By Robert Haven Schauffler, in: The New York Times, March 5, 1916
  56. ↑ ‘POET HELD A TRAITOR: Herman Scheffauer Indicted for Hun Propaganda. Open Letter Denounces U.S. His Sympathies With Germany. Californian Wrote of "Serfdom of America"- Pro-German Literature Strewn Over Allied Battle-Lines by Enemy Ballons"(By the Associated Press.), in: The Washington Post, January 9, 1919, p.1.
  57. ↑ "A Panorama of German Books by Herman George Scheffauer", in: The Living Age, July 12, 1924, pp.72-75.
  58. 1 2 Heinz J. Armbrust, Gert Heine: Herman George Scheffauer. In: Wer ist wer im Leben von Thomas Mann. Ein Personenlexikon. Verlag Vittorio Klostermann, Frankfurt a.M. 2008, p. 57, p. 247.
  59. ↑ "Ich hatte den Mann persönlich gern, ich war ihm dankbar, weil er mehrere meiner Arbeiten mit außerordentlicher Kunst und Liebe ins Englische übersetzt hatte, zudem galt er als ausgezeichneter Kenner der angelsächsischen Literaturen." [GW 11: 760–1]
  60. ↑ "Dieser Bücher zeigen den Wurm, der am Herzen des amerikanischen Lebens nagt, den tiefen Zweifel und die Unseligkeit, die aus der inneren Hohlheit und äußeren Flachheit des Lebens entspringt und die sich in unaufhörlicher äußerer Tätigkeit zu zerstreuen sucht.(These books show the worm that gnaws at the heart of American life, the deep doubting and salvation that arises from an inner hollowness and outward flatness of life, and which through unceasing external activity seeks dissipation.)" Scheffauer, Das Land Gottes. Das Gesicht des neuen Amerika (1923), S.189.
  61. ↑ "An impression of the German film Metropolis", in: New York Times, 6 March 1927, p. 7.
  62. ↑ "Cubism on the Screen", in: The New York Times, Nov. 28, 1920, p.79
  63. ↑ Scheffauer, "The Vivifying of Space," Freeman (24 November-1 December 1920); reprinted in Lewis Jacobs, ed., Introduction to the Art of the Movies (New York: Noonday Press, 1960), pp.76-85.
  64. ↑ Anthony Vidler, Warped Space: Art, Architecture and Anxiety in Modern Culture (MIT Press, 2002), p.104.; cf.J. P. Telotte, Animating Space: From Mickey to Wall-E. (University Press of Kentucky, 2010) pp.223-4.
  65. ↑ "Herman George Scheffauer Photograph Album, ca. 1885-ca. 1925".
  66. ↑ "Scheffauer's Abschiedsbrief", in: Hamburger Anzeiger (13 Oct 1927), p. 10.
  67. ↑ "Trauerfeier für Herman George Scheffauer", in: Berliner Tageblatt (28 Oct 1927),p.3
  68. ↑ "Herman George Scheffauer papers, 1893-1927.".

Sources

External links

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 12/3/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.