Ulrich Raulff opens his book with a remarkable proposition. The poet Stefan George (1868–1933) created two works of art of outstanding weight and originality. The “George Circle” was one. In Raulff's deft formulation this was not so much a circle as a “vast mobile of men, images, and ideas, with George the ‘Master’ at the center, constantly adjusting it like a great clockmaker.” The second, however, was “perhaps George's greatest work of art of all”: the break-up of the vast mobile in the absence of its master. Evidently Raulff (who thinks little of George's actual poetry) is being paradoxical: a work of art created by a dead man whose claims to weight and originality lie in the work's dissolution. Yet this “perhaps greatest” of George's art works is the subject of his book. With his customary wit Raulff notes that whereas Aby Warburg once half-jokingly said that he existed for reminiscences, George might have said that he was made for a beautiful ghost story.

The author designedly calls his book that runs to 530 pages an “essay,” presumably because like Burckhardt's famous “essay” of comparable length, it is an experiment that could have been done in other ways. Its seven sections treat: 1) the immediate reaction of the disciples to George's death, at the “death watch,” the grave, in the execution of George's will; 2) different ideological directions taken in the 1930s by “disciples”: Kurt Hildebrandt, Edith Landmann, Ernst Kantorowicz, and Hubertus zu Löwenstein (a latitudinarian choice); 3) various attempts to create new “colonies” in the 1930s to uphold the master's goals; 4) later careers of three emigrants to the United States: Ernst Morwitz, Erich Kahler (another latitudinarian choice), and again Ernst Kantorowicz; 5) postwar events in Germany, featuring a “battle of memoirs” and attempts to rescue George's reputation by trumpeting a connection with the officer's plot against Hitler; 6) an “afterlife” as seen in postwar German theories and practices of upbringing and education; and 7) events of the “fateful year” 1968, the year of George's hundredth birthday, when seminars, editorials, and a youthful “Ge-orgie” (as pronounced in German, a multivalent pun) nailed down the coffin of the master's reputation.

Raulff accomplishes his research with wonderful commitment, alertness, and bravura. Startling revelations, quotations, or at least intriguing tidbits appear on virtually every page. A characteristic example is a passage from a paper that Edith Landmann addressed in 1933 “to the German Jews who held to the secret Germany” in which she argued for a resettlement somewhere in Africa. As Landmann wrote, “we cannot eliminate our Jewish blood despite all our German spirit [deutscher Geist]; should we now perhaps expunge the German spirit and transform ourselves back to old pious, or modern national, or even international Jews? Better that we kill ourselves.” Much more lighthearted is a report of the latest news of her husband that Josefine (“Fine”) von Kahler playfully sent to her lover, Ernst Kantorowicz: “Der Erich is frightfully significant [grässlich bedeutend]. He began a new work, ‘Gens, Natio, Status,’ but suddenly interrupted it in the recognition that he first needed to write another, much more far-reaching one, and is now at work on that. It is entitled simply ‘Foundations of a New Universal Theory.’”

Although Raulff without question offers “can't be put down” reading, it seems fair to ask whether his book is “frightfully significant.” The author himself seems to doubt that. For him the three most consequential George disciples were Friedrich Gundolf, Max Kommerell, and Ernst Kantorowicz, but only the last is part of his story. His range of tones for all the other disciples (and disciples of disciples), runs from the wryly ironic, to the mocking, to the acidly condemnatory. If there is an overarching thesis, it is that George's “state” had no significant existence or influence after the master's death—neither political nor cultural. From the political point of view, the several Jews of the one-time circle passed quickly out of the German picture, and the Nazis needed no help from a few other toxic scribblers. After the war some second-generation disciples became prominent in the Federal Republic, but the only one of them who teetered on the brink of exerting political weight was the SPD politician Carlo Schmid, who came close, but not close enough. As Raulff observes with none too heartfelt ruefulness, never again after the collapse of Schmid's ambitions in 1949 would there be a chance for a “lovely reality of a rule of poets.”

Raulff appropriately pays considerable attention to the thesis that George's ideals stood behind the attempted assassination of Hitler in July 1944. Given the poet's public silence about the Nazi takeover in 1933, and his well-known statement of May 1933 in a letter to a Nazi minister that he “by no means denied his role as forefather of the new national movement nor wished to shunt aside his intellectual collaboration with it,” Raulff considers it difficult to maintain that the poet was the catalyst for the explosion in the Wolfenschanz. The best case for that view is the briefcase full of dynamite brought by Claus von Stauffenberg, an ardent George-disciple who had sat by the poet's deathbed and continued to worship his memory in the ensuing years. As Raulff observes, “only Stauffenberg's deed can rescue George from the anathema of posterity.” Still, he is having none of that. He pours scorn on the claim that Stauffenberg shouted a Georgean credo, “long live the secret Germany,” as he fell to the firing squad. Displaying his research skills to their best, Raulff shows how this claim began as a supposition offered by the George-acolyte Edgar Salin and was hardened into established fact as a result of publicity by the Countess Dönhoff, editor and publisher of the influential weekly, Die Zeit. (Dönhoff had been a student of Salin's; given that she came from the East Prussian nobility, Raulff has her building a myth of a “good Prussian” plot against Hitler.) All told, the author does not deny that Stauffenberg revered George but, slipping atypically out of his ironic mode, he vehemently insists that this is insufficient to explain Stauffenberg's decision to act heroically on the twentieth of July.

Raulff does find some Georgean influence in postwar educational trends. In a keen-sighted original contribution he exposes the common goals of members of three “Federalist Families” of the early Bundesrepublik, all descended from George disciples, that aimed at founding an elite humanism to be propagated by elite boarding schools. There would be no memorization and no strict discipline; rather “pedagogical eros” and “seduction” of “bright young people” into a realm of intellectual challenges and ethical-esthetic fulfillment. Via George the spirit of Plato hovered over these efforts, but also the spirit of John Dewey. Nevertheless, elite education had no chance to take hold in a time of “baby boom.” (Raulff has a “with-it” penchant for Americanisms that would drive Stefan George howling out of his “totgesagter park”: not just “baby boom,” but “business as usual,” “self-fashioning,” “output,” and “cool”; to use his own neuologism, the implicit purpose is usually to “ridikülisieren.”)

Were it not for the presence of Ernst Kantorowicz one might wonder whether Raulff has genuine respect for any of his characters. “EKa,” however, emerges intact, indeed magnified. The book's very dust jacket pays reverence to him. One wonders at first how in earth's name a photo of a lush beach on a bay in the Virgin Islands relates to a book about the legacy of the icy poet Stefan George. But then one learns that this is where Kantorowicz's ashes were scattered, as per his instructions. Raulff may perhaps have been inspired in choosing his cover by the words of Walter Elze, a one-time circle member: “may the ashes in the Caribbean remain so unforgotten for E.K. as the wreath in Palermo that he made so famous.” But he surely intends a more subtle meaning: the veneration of George's remains at his grave in Switzerland by a motley collection of narcissists, buffoons, and Nazi sympathizers had a quality of absurdity—perhaps even necrophilia; the invisible presence of George's greatest heir hovering over remote waters symbolically perpetuates aspects of the master's thought and reminds us that immortality does not reside in corpses or monuments.

Raulff had already shown a proclivity for EKa in several elegant and insightful articles; here he draws on some of his earlier findings but goes further in presenting what I think is the best estimation yet written of Kantorowicz's post-Heidelberg thought and intellectual accomplishments. Let it be said that Raulff even here is no worshiper. His Kantorowicz is a dandy, endowed with “pan-like eroticism”; a shade patronizingly (and with no recognition of the agonies of the California loyalty oath crisis) he writes that “the Saul of Heidelberg and Frankfurt became the Paul of Berkeley and Princeton, a sensible Democrat [Vernunftrepublikaner].” Let it also be said that Raulff makes several mistakes. To take the most glaring example, he associates Kantorowicz with a group of “San Francisco Renaissance” homosexual poets, when in fact Kantorowicz's attitude toward them was one of contempt. (“He called me EKa!!”) All who knew the extraordinarily fastidious Kantorowicz knew that he would never go near this scruffy lot; there may well have been a roiling of the Caribbean waters when a book was published that connects Ernst Kantorowicz with, one shudders, Allen Ginsberg.

But given his insights Raulff may be forgiven his mistakes. Sustained treatment of EKa appears in two different parts of his book. Early on he treats Kantorowicz's “Geheimes Deutschland” speech, given as a “re-inaugural lecture” at Frankfurt in November 1933. A penetratingly close reading reveals this to be the most coherent expression of George's ideology ever set forth, as well as a manifesto of an alternative to National Socialist ideology. For Raulff, Kantorowicz in 1933 was combating one outcome of “German political prophecy” with a different and putatively better one. A decade later, however, the same Kantorowicz had reached the sober conclusion that one political myth cannot drive out another. Accordingly the “late work” places such myths in the laboratory for dispassionate analysis. Yet Raulff's consideration of the “later Kantorowicz” by no means eliminates the influence of “the Master.” Instead he finds understated continuities everywhere, not only in The King's Two Bodies, but in many of the articles that most readers of the big book tend to neglect. Letting his author speak for himself, Raulff quotes the following from a letter of 1954 to Robert Boehringer, a fellow disciple from the old days: “Perhaps less often than others have I sought the opportunity to express myself on the subject D.M. [viz. “Der Meister,” whose full name the disciples often avoided out of hushed reverence]. But there is not a single day when I am not aware that everything that I may perhaps be able to accomplish is fed by a single source.”

Raulff is not intent on explaining. (And how to account for that last quotation, along with so many other stupefactions presented in this book, is the ultimate challenge.) But he is an absolute master of juxtaposing, portraying, and recounting. The scores of fascinating photos included in Kreis ohne Meister alone justify use of the word marvelous, and the book's verbal photos are a spectacular exhibition of a flamboyant historian's camerawork.