From behind the Paywall: Episode 51: The George Circle

Hello, I'm Adrienne Dobb.

And I'm Moira Donegan.

Whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.

This is our special post-Christmas Patreon episode.

We are recording on New Year's Eve.

And as Adrienne noticed off-mic, I've still got my Christmas decorations up behind me.

Which I got to admire in person in Brooklyn shortly before Christmas.

We had a very special crossover event, by which I mean that Adrian came over to my house.

And we had dinner with Adrian and Adrian's husband, Hung, and their beautiful, really funny daughter, River, who ate like all of the olives.

That's right.

And also friends of the pod, Patrick Blanchfield and Abby Kunchin of Ordinary Unhappiness were also there.

So it was like really like a special like crossover episode, like when like the Simpsons and South Park exist in the same universe.

Like that's what it was.

That's right.

We're definitely South Park in this scenario.

Yeah, it's the spin-off meeting, the returning to the mothership or something like that.

Yeah, like Frasier goes back to Boston.

Yeah.

Exactly, exactly.

And Mora has already alluded to this.

We're recording on December 31st, 2024,

because we said we were going to give you two Patreon episodes, and I'll be goddamned if I don't stick to two episodes a month.

Now, this may not actually see the light of day on the 31st, depending on your time zone, but like

I try.

Adrian is a man of his word, not me.

I like barely rolled out of bed at noon today to record this.

And that way, I am a Kantian.

I'm like, it is my duty.

What good is a contract, an implicit contract as embodied by a Patreon?

The categorical imperative: what if nobody did do Patreon episodes a month?

I know.

I feel like there are some fellow podcasters I have asked, I've wondered this about.

Come on, man, you're leaving me hanging.

I need it.

I need it.

Anyway, we don't want to be that.

But and today we're talking, you know, you always call these the freak flag episodes.

I mean, also known as like my day job.

We're going to talk about

something kind of weird.

And I'm guessing this might be something that you literally know nothing about.

So we're going to talk about the Georgia circle.

Does that ring any bells for you?

The what?

Yeah, okay.

I think think is the joke.

Fantastic.

This is good.

This is good.

And I'm guessing this might be true for a lot of our listeners too.

I hope that light bulbs are going to start going off.

And if the episode does its job, I think some contemporary resonances will be very, very clear.

Tom Cruise is going to make a cameo appearance.

So it's, yeah, it's going to be a big story.

And this, you know, may well be a two-parter.

We'll see.

So we're recording on the last day of 2024, going into 2025.

So we're going to start the story in 1933 for no reason whatsoever.

Why do you ask?

So the year is 1933.

And I wanted to

read you a lecture that a professor, a German professor, gives in May of 1933.

His name is Ernst Bertram.

Dates are 1884 till 1957.

There's no reason anyone would have to know about him.

But he kicks off his new lecture course on the history of German literature at the University of Cologne by giving a kind of an intro speech, which he calls German Awakening.

Now, for those of you who

know your history and you know what Germany is like in May of 1933, you're like, oh, brother, that's that, that can't be good.

Right?

So, just to set the scene, right?

Hitler had been

annoted chancellor in, on, I believe, January 30th of 1933, and the Nazis had very, very swiftly consolidated power

by basically

purging people from

the civil service,

by hauling folks off to jail.

A lot of the famous German authors of the time have already fled Germany, but there are those who've stuck it out, who've stayed behind.

Some of them

kind of hoping to make nice with the new rulers, and others,

Well, I'll just let Ernest Bertram speak for himself.

So his German awakening.

He

wants to get his students excited about, quote, the enormous political-spiritual breakthrough battle in the midst of which we now stand.

Our Volk requires all its spiritual powers and consciousness, and especially these.

No spiritual movement in Germany will ever remain vital for long that does not succeed in conquering the German university from the inside out.

If this battle fails, it would mean the end of the white world, chaos, or a planet of termites.

So

if you're, yeah.

If you're, if you're following along at home,

if you did not see that coming,

yeah,

that's some Nazi shit.

I mean, like, it's all there, right?

Like,

the stuff about vermin, the, you know, this, and of course, this kind of conquest of the university from the inside out.

You know, this is, you know, this is a professor kind of trying to make a case, you know, that the universities don't need to be brought to heal,

but rather that there are enough far-right professors within the academy that they couldn't sort of do the Nazis' job for them.

This turned out to be true.

The professoriate in 1933 in German universities was not particularly lefty.

There were left-wing academics, obviously, but

it was a fairly conservative voting bloc, and many of them made common cause with with the Nazis.

Not all of them, in quite as termite-heavy language as Ernst Bertram.

You know, this is a guy who, you know, really is kind of going all in on this stuff.

Meanwhile, at a large book burning down the road in Bonn, his fellow German literature professor, Hans Naumann, quotes one of his lines of poetry.

lines that are frankly, you know, scarily apropos, given what we're up against in our own present moment.

I kind of have to quote them here.

So here are the two couplets from Bertram's poem, To Youth.

Reject what confuses you, banish what seduces you.

What did not grow with pure will, throw into the flames what threatens you.

It seems like it would leave a lot of intellectuals somewhat idle, you know.

Well, it's basically

intellectual anti-intellectualism, isn't it?

Yeah.

It's saying

gray zones, confusions,

nuance are bad, right?

Like commit committed then to the flames.

Now, Bertram had written this before 1933, but Nauman is quoting this at a book burning.

So

just to make the subtext text, right?

The idea is they were literally purging libraries at this moment.

And

here he's quoting these lines from Bertram.

And so I should say that both Naumann and Bertram sort of see themselves in the tradition of the person that we're mostly going to be talking about today.

And you might think, well, this means that we're going to be talking about a Nazi.

Well, it's kind of complicated.

This is a story.

What I hope to tell you today is a story of cultural conservatism,

reactionary, openly reactionary politics, right?

In the vein that we've examined in our Nietzsche episode, for instance, in our Wagner episode.

And it's about the role of sexuality and gender in both of those things.

But at the same time, there are a bunch of people like Bertram in it who did go fashion, it seems like.

And then there are a bunch of people who don't, right?

That's the other thing.

It's about a conservative revolution of which several members,

many members, decide not to go along with the Nazis.

So Bertram is sort of like one of the people we're looking at because he's someone who very much does sort of make this connection between like my cultural conservative, my cultural reactionary politics are being served by

this new regime.

But there are others who felt very differently.

Here is a

lecture that the historian Ernst Kantorovich gave a couple of months later, November 14th, 1933.

And what he talks about, the topic that really we're going to be talking about today, which is this idea of a secret Germany.

He says, the rulers of the secret Germany are immune against weaponization, and you will not get a hold of them by dragging their image into the street.

making them resemble the marketplace and then celebrate them as your own flesh and blood.

this is the intellectual reply to Bertram, right?

He's saying,

no,

the Nazis do not realize a conservative vision for Germany.

The conservative vision for Germany doesn't work if you drag it into the marketplace.

If you drag it, if you make it real.

It was always supposed to be an idea.

Now,

you might be like, well, politically, that's kind of weird.

And we'll get there, right?

But that's the idea here.

He's saying, we are not identical with the Nazis, right?

And I should say, Kantorovich was Jewish.

That was part of it.

He would leave Germany before long and settle first at Berkeley, then at Princeton.

But he also,

you know, it's fairly clear that he just was kind of grossed out by these people begging basically like a pitch for like, hey, appoint me, you know, your...

you know, your education czar and your new Third Reich, right?

Like he said, that's gross.

Like, that's not, that's not what the conservative revolution was about either.

And then the third person I wanted to introduce you to: well, this is someone you might know.

Do you know who Klaus Schenkra von Stauffenberg is?

God bless you.

No.

This is someone you might know.

Sorry.

No, I don't know this person.

Sorry.

I'm woefully ignorant.

That is perfectly fine.

German history.

So he is associated with the events of July 20th, 1944.

So this is the day when

a group of generals plotted to overthrow Hitler, and Stauffenberg had the job of placing the bomb under Hitler's desk at the Wolfshanse in what's today Poland.

This I have heard about, yes.

And

he basically put the,

I think he put the wrong detonator in or like something.

It didn't go exactly as planned.

Some kind of slapsticky failure of the assassin.

Yeah.

It did not go well.

The table was too oaky or something.

And so basically Hitler

unfortunately lived for another,

what is it, nine months, I guess.

And he basically reports that he placed the bomb.

The generals decide to kick off the coup and hope for the best.

It does not go well.

And Stauffenberg closes out the evening of July 20th, getting

led out before an execution squad in the Bendlerblock, which is the, was then, and today again, the Ministry of Defense in Berlin.

And as he gets shot, He is reputed to have shouted out the phrase, long live secret Germany.

It's a little disputed because as in English, secret and sacred sound very similar and they were guns firing, but there is a long tradition that suggests that he basically dedicated

this attempt, very belated, one should say, one very belated attempt to rid the world of Hitler to this idea of a secret Germany.

And so that's what I wanted to trace today.

It's an episode about this secret Germany, about a strain of conservative thought that ended up leading basically these three men into very different directions, right?

Where one identifies with fascism, one says, like, I don't even understand how this is anything like what I'm doing, that Secret Germany is not fascist, and another who

seems to take it as inspiration to try and assassinate, you know, the leader of the Third Reich.

But it's also a story about masculinity, about sexuality.

It's a story about dissent and kinship,

about these these traditions.

The Secret Germany, as we'll see, is an idea of a transmission line that is non-biological, right?

You kind of pick your own ancestors.

You construct a lineage that you like.

So it's about the family that we're born into, but much more about the family we choose, not just in the here and now, but sort of extending back in time.

Listeners who know their queer theory can imagine why I'm interested in that, because that is something that, right, this is what Armistead Maupin calls the, you know, the logical family.

Part of queerness is the rejection of the

family you were born into in favor of a community that is freely chosen.

And in that way, we are kind of doing a super right-wing 1920s queer theory.

And I hope people like it.

I think

it's a weird story, but it's an interesting one, I think.

You will only get this on in bed with the right.

That's right.

This is the kind of thing you're just not, they're just not giving this out anymore.

That's right.

It's only here for the good stuff.

Only here for the for the for the real, and and you know, like, so obviously, like super timely, possibly, possibly not.

But at the same time, we've had a lot of discussions about our gay conservatives episode.

So, I think that like gay conservatism is something that we need to think about.

The question of um and this question of traditionalism, right?

We, you and I have come up against that again and again, whether it's our trad wives or our Olympic Games, right?

This question of

why do,

what is it with, you know, why are conservative traditionalists so shitty at tradition?

Well, these are people who are conservative and who really have thought about what it means to have a tradition.

And they really think of tradition not as like, oh, it's just a bunch of shit that came before us, right?

It's what my dad did.

And so I'm going to do it too.

They're like, no, no, no, no, no.

A tradition is something something that you will and you activate, right?

These are post-Nietchean traditionalists, right?

Nietzsche, obviously, big anti-traditionalists.

And these guys are sort of trying to split the difference and say, hey,

no, no, no, no, no.

A tradition has to be kind of like freely chosen.

It has to be reactivated.

It has to be this kind of mystical communion with the past.

And it will exclude some people and it will include people that you don't think of as,

you know, your direct forebears.

this might all sound very abstract I hope we'll we'll be able to to put some some meat on them bones all right let's dig into it let's dig into it so the we have to get to the person behind it all so this is Stefan George who gives the Georgia circle his name

and

who you know spoiler alert turns out like he is easily the weirdest cultural figure, I think, in the German tradition or any tradition that I've ever studied.

I feel like that's a pretty crowded field.

It is.

But, like, well, okay, so like, I understand.

I'm throwing down the gauntlet.

I'm setting a high bar for myself.

You tell me.

It's, but already we have a guy who tried to assassinate Hitler quoting him.

So, like, that's, you know, Malarmé can't say that for himself.

It's all I'm saying.

So, Stefan George is born in 1868 near Bingen, which is in the Rhine Valley.

He's a highly gifted kid

and sort of experiments with two things.

He loves foreign languages, does a lot of translations in high school, and invents sort of secret languages.

And questions of secrecy are going to be really, really key

for most of his life, or much of his life.

The question of what happens when secrets are transmitted.

There's...

He becomes first interested in symbolist poetry.

He becomes interested in, you know, as I said, literary translation, does a lot of translation from the French, for instance, also from the Italian.

He becomes, he sort of identifies himself with this idea of la pour la, right?

Art for art's sake.

He's interested in Malame, Valene, Baudelaire.

So basically, garden variety, emo kid,

circa 1880s, right?

Like that's what they're all reading and writing.

At the same time, it's important to note that the question of secrecy

from the very first carries an extra charge.

That is to say, from the very beginning, with Georgia, it's pretty clear that the secrecy is about the fact that he's gay.

This is a kid

who's keeping a secret.

And in a time when like sharing that with someone, especially if you're interested in them,

carries a huge risk.

At the same time, it's very important that

like for a lot of these guys,

sort of, I mean, this is sort of the generation of Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust, et cetera, et cetera, who all sort of think about this.

But all of them

tend to think of the process of being in the closet, coming out, all that stuff, you know, opening yourself up to other, usually men, but also in some cases women.

They think of this as actually describing a broader structure, right?

Like there's something about having secrets that sort of gay men or queer men

have deeper insight into than anyone else.

Right.

I think we, in our contemporary discourses of the closet, we tend to understand the closet with some kind of, you know, with some reason as a

forced dishonesty, right?

But you can also sort of turn that around and see it as a way to cultivate a kind of intimacy with the self and a degree of self-knowledge that can actually transmit into a kind of wisdom.

Exactly.

And,

you know, the fact that some things are not meant for everyone, right?

It is a way of, there's a kind of elitism.

Thomas Mann is very big into this idea that there's a kind of elitism to

having, having desires that you do not share with the vast majority of people and you don't care to tell them that.

You're like, cool.

Yeah, no, that's super hot, man.

Great.

Wonderful.

So it's not the closet as a kind of fear.

It's the closet as a kind of like elite refusal, right?

It's not like, I can't tell you this because you're going to beat the shit out of me.

Or it's not only that.

It's also, I'm not going to tell you this because you don't deserve to know it.

Exactly.

Because

it's more refined.

It's more,

it's less animalistic.

It's less obvious, right?

Like there's, I mean, this is a little bit later but if you think of em forster's novel maurice which is about a perfectly ordinary young man who is made less ordinary by the fact that he's gay right like the forster you know 50 years later has this same basic idea that there's some this man would be utterly boring but thank goodness he likes dudes right um there's one thing about him that gets to be exactly unexpected exactly and and he doesn't even have to tell anyone right um this is a lot of of this idea that this is sort of a privileged secret.

It's a very, very important

idea around the turn of the century.

It's a wonderful classic study by the theorist Yvkosovsky Sejuga about this called the Epistemology of the Closet, which is all about this.

And one place I think where listeners can still test this out is that like, if you've ever had a friend who sort of like doesn't date,

and like won't say why.

And then people are like, well, maybe they're gay, right?

And it's like, like, it's this idea, like, well, people might have hundreds of reasons for not doing that.

Right.

But until sort of like asexuality sort of became, came more into focus, people sort of were like, well, they're doing anything.

If anything is weird, it must mean or if anything's unusual about my friend, it must mean they're gay, right?

And

I think that Cedric would say that that's a late leftover from

that discourse, from that idea that

the secret to have is in some way homosexuality the interesting thing is i think it is largely a male phenomenon i think that we we're gonna we find that gay women at the time right there was more of a spectrum of desire right and so i think i think that right like what what you could express was

it still happens now yeah uh like the there's something about the subordinate position of womanhood that almost creates

a field of greater permission, right?

If you're already at the bottom of the hierarchy,

you don't need to be

anxiously maintaining your place at the top of it.

So gender non-conformity is often punished

along different criteria, but often like much less severely, particularly historically.

So like, you know, classic example, Thomas Jefferson's laws banning homosexuality in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

He wrote them so that

for men, it was, I believe, castration on first offense and hanging on second.

And for women, it was a facial mutilation, right?

A non-fatal facial mutilation.

They drilled a hole in the nose, right?

And this is, these are barbaric, right?

But they reflected an asymmetry in the perceived severity of the transgression between men and women.

And that is something of which you still see a lot of like residual understanding.

Right.

And like, even now, you know, like a lot of women experiment at college, you know what I mean?

And then, and then go on to be reintegrated into heterosexuality in a very fulsome way.

Ooh, hiss.

No, it's fine.

It's fine.

You know, it's a degree of social permission that is, I think it's easy to like construe it as a kind of privilege, but I think it also stems from the notion that like women's desires are and women's lives more broadly are just kind of less serious.

Yeah.

At the same time, I should say that like

we also don't want to project kind of the values of mid-century America back onto the 1880s in Europe, where men were able to be intimate with each other in ways that were not homosexual.

But, like, frankly,

today, like, I feel like you're coming on to me, man.

I don't know.

Like, we're constantly intense together, right?

Like, right.

Like, this is the thing that they tell you when you read.

I mean, sorry to bring it back to America, which is where all my experiences, but this is the thing that they tell you over and over when you read Herman Melville's letters to Nathaniel Hawthorne, which seem, frankly like such beautiful love letters, and you're like, No, no, no, no, no, no, no, yeah, yeah, no, no, no, no, no, no, like they, uh,

you shouldn't necessarily read it that way because homo-sociality is the buzzword of the 19th century, yeah, yeah, and I mean, so

that's the thing, right?

It could be, but it doesn't have to be, and that's going to be really, really interesting because this is going to be sort of the

way Georgia's career evolves is that he keeps kind of falling in with these groups of like

usually young, usually hot, usually artistically inclined young men.

And everyone's like

kind of gay, right?

But it's like never entirely clear.

They're like, look, we're all a little bit fruity right now.

It's the 1890s.

It's the 1900s.

Are these people actually fucking

is difficult to determine from the historical record and probably was a little ambiguous to the people who knew them also.

I think it was ambiguous to the people doing it.

Like they are, like, if you look at a, if you look at a biography of George, the number of nude pictures is huge.

And yet, if you look at some of their,

of their letters, like, they're like, oh, no, this man is stone cold straight.

He just was like,

I was modeling nude for another man.

Like, what's, what's the,

what's the big deal, right?

But so like, yeah, they like it was, I think it was unclear to them.

Like, but also that ambiguity becomes itself

sometimes like a fixation, an erotic fixation in its own right.

It could be, yeah.

Or it could be that, you know, that basically they had sort of in-between gradations that, you know, in an age where we say come out, come out wherever you are, it just doesn't exist anymore, right?

Right.

And this is also still the, we're still dealing with a with people who would have inhabited a milieu in which homosexuality would have been understood more as a behavior than an identity necessarily, right?

Is that still

like a workable framework for this late in time, or not really?

I mean, they're definitely living through a time when

the first

words for homosexuality are available.

So the earnings, the Iranians, whatever it is, like Georgia is a...

We're in the 1930s or 20s right now?

No, no, no, no, no.

I mean, like, so, I mean, like, the first,

I think Ulrich, the first sort of like book about homosexuality is sort of 1850s, 60s.

So

it's it's before Georgia is born.

And he read a lot of this stuff.

He would have known, he would have been conversant with that literature.

But that is a conception of gay as something you are as opposed to something you do, right?

Like the invert as

a figure more than just as a behavior.

Exactly.

And so

Kraft Ebing, who writes the Psychopathia Sexualis,

I think he might have been Georg's exact contemporary.

It's somewhere in there, maybe a little older than him.

But no, no, no, he was of a generation where, like, you know, these things undergo transitions.

Hey, that's a good.

I'm sorry.

It's a pun.

Sorry.

Oh, sorry.

That's good.

I know a lot of people who are undergoing transitions.

Sorry.

Like, if you ask the person on the street, right, they might be like, well, no, it's just a behavior.

But, like, especially people who recognize themselves in these identities, they were starting to think of this as identities.

And I think his circle generally thought that sexuality was bound up with their identity.

Whether or not they thought it exhausted their identity is another question, right?

They may have said, like, well, this commits me to do a whole bunch of other things that are way more important, but also, yeah, I'm having sex with men, right?

That's part of it.

And definitely, and definitely all the critics of the circle and all the outsiders that kind of kept making fun of them were like, you're just all, you're all just doing it, right?

Like, but it was meant to take the piss, right?

Oh, do you dress up in togas and are you wearing a

laurel wreath?

And then, like, you go to town on each other.

Is that what happens?

Right.

Like, they're like, oh I get it like the whole poetry thing is just kind of a pickup joint right um they were making doing it to make fun of the artistic pretensions of this group aside from the Nazi shit this doesn't sound that different from poets I actually know okay yeah yeah yeah it's about the work

but you guys are all going to the bar and you're all sleeping together

and actually actually like if you're look talking about New York in 2025 probably some of them are flirting with right-wing politics.

This doesn't strike me as a totally

incomparable scene.

Dime Square Polycule.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, it's the Dime Square Polycule.

But at the same time, so as in the case of Wagner, you remember how in Wagner we talked about how he has this

modernist aesthetic, but at the same time, this kind of anti-modern impulse?

Like, Georgia is sort of part of that, you know, the same kind of ideology.

He

embraces modernist poetry, but on the other hand, he kind of

hates the marketplace.

He hates, you know, the way you have to sell yourself for, you know, doing poetry nowadays, man, right?

Like, he's going to reject all that.

And it has this like very funny duality.

So his earliest volumes of poetry are these bibliophilic editions in extremely low print numbers.

They're worth a lot today.

So,

for instance, he starts putting out

this journal, this journal of poetry, Bletafu die Kunst,

Journal of Art.

It's a poetry journal, mostly his friends and then some stuff he translated

from

avant-garde poets from across Europe, usually pretty good taste.

He printed these in

a limited edition of 100 copies.

And it said on the cover, quote, this magazine, published by the editor, has a closed readership invited by the members, right?

So

yeah, right.

He's like, you can't just buy this thing.

Like you have to subscribe.

It's like that invite, it's like those invite only sub stacks, you know?

Yeah.

Yeah.

You have to be on the listserv.

Somebody has to add you.

Yeah.

Exactly.

And like Raya.

I'm sorry.

Yeah.

And the weird part is, like, I, at least one biographer is like, I'm, like, I talked to him about this and he was like, I'm pretty sure it didn't sell out.

So it's just, he's just doing that as a bit, right?

Like people are like, oh shit, now I want to have it.

Right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

You can't get it.

Like, yeah, he didn't have that many friends.

Like, it's like, you know, poetry journals are hard to sell, right?

Like still today.

Right.

And so, so he's like, oh, no, no, you can't have this, but he's got like a whole stack of them in his bedroom.

So it's which, which is like marketing genius, right?

So like on the one hand, he's like, I would never market myself in this way.

But no, this is a limited edition.

So it's going to cost you extra, right?

So he's like completely like, he's like kickstarting this shit.

He's like, no, that's his Kickstarter exclusive.

I'm sorry.

And just to give you a sense of just like the level of esotericism here,

by 1904, all of his publications started using their own punctuation and their own font.

He designed his own font and his own punctuation.

So like, it's truly like, it's, it's extra.

This is a man who is nothing if not extra.

So yeah, on the one hand, there's this pronounced esotericism, right?

There, it's only for people in the know.

It's not for the broad public.

It's not commercial.

So the work itself is elevating to the status of queerness, right?

The same kind of like queerness as elite secrecy.

Exactly.

And the esotericism is, of course, to some extent a marketing trick.

Just the way that the poetry, at least in the eyes of

his detractors, is just a nice way of getting dudes.

And I should say that there are, you know, in the early goings of this undertaking,

again and again, he sort of gets into these

very intense friendships with poets.

The paradigmatic case here is the conservative poet Hugo von Hofmannstahl, who was like 16 at the time.

And yapped.

Like 1.6.

Yes.

Yeah, okay.

Also, a trigger warning.

That's not the first, not the last time you're going to hear that.

The numbers keep getting lower here.

Yeah.

Yikes.

Okay.

Yeah.

Again, we don't know what happened, but like, it's not, it's not great.

Anyway, um, and eventually Hofmann Stahl goes to his parents and is like, I'm getting kind of icked out by these letters that this

is quite a bit older than me.

And then they're like, please don't do this anymore.

Please stop hitting on our kid.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then he basically is like, oh, we didn't see eye to eye aesthetically.

It's like, sure, Stefan.

Like, that's, that's what I'm saying.

Or, or he turned you down.

It's like, I don't like this bedtime story, Grandpa.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, he wasn't.

I mean, Gheorgh was like in his 20s.

So it's like, oh, okay, all right.

All right.

It's not like, like, totally.

I was thinking of him as like 45.

Oh, no, no.

Okay.

I mean, not that it.

It's not, it's still not good, but he keeps doing it as he ages, but he starts.

So, like, it's the kind of thing where it's like, I get older and they just stay in the same age.

Like, in what you call it?

Dasing confused.

Dasing confused, yes, yeah.

All right, all right, all right.

That's his, that's his approach to

German poets.

Okay, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

He keeps collecting these young people and like he kind of styles himself this kind of philosopher king kind of who is using pedagogic arrows to teach these young people and to sort of like transmit these secret doctrines that he sort of comes up with.

And it's it's really hard to tell like how much of that is just like

it was just a bunch of queer-coated young people hanging out and like he was genuinely like

you know promoting them and to what extent like there is there is like actual

you know child abuse or like or or or or whatever happening here um you will not be shocked to hear that that we know for a fact that like in the outer edges of this this kind of intergenerational project there was child abuse this this sort of blew up in the 21st century because this story does not end until the 21st century wow okay and part of why i have to be careful with this is that like the descendants of the circle still are around and they will, they will come for me.

This is the Patreon-only content where if you want to sue us for defamation, you're going to have to spend $5.

Yeah, try that, poets.

Good luck getting the chat book out for that.

But yeah, so before long, Stefan Georges settles down in the city of Munich, where he sort of,

which sort of became kind of a hotbed for

often right-wing avant-garde thinking.

A lot of sort of people who had read too much Nietzsche and like

hugged a horse and absolutely decamping to Munich.

This is the, this is a

Munich reputation that has like gone transatlantic.

Like, this is my understanding of Munich.

Is that where you go if you're a crazier right-winger and German?

Is that still true or no?

No, yes, but much more boring now.

Now you just go there if you enjoy champagne and hate immigrants or whatever.

But like, I'm going to get mail for this.

I love Munich.

It's fine.

It's a great city.

How do you actually say it in German?

Because I know that's München.

München, yeah.

München.

That sounds so cute.

It doesn't sound like the place where the fascists live.

It sounds like a place where the elves live.

Yeah, fascist elves.

That's

gets it right.

But at the time, it really was this kind of hotbed of of kind of um of aesthetic ferment and kind of a political ferment it is generally a more backwards looking city than berlin right berlin is where you go berlin is the city that sort of has to start over all the time it's like it's a young city it um it became really urban very very quickly in the span of 20 30 years it's kind of ugly it's kind of like industry war they're industry bombing it and then they keep like having new economic development there, and then they keep bombing it.

Is that just like the cycle of the 20th century in Berlin?

Yeah, but even before, I mean, like, it's just, you know, it's a city, it's a fairly small city at the beginning of the 19th century.

It is a city of 4 million by the end of it, right?

Like,

it's basically the Dubai of the 19th century.

It's just

everything that they build gets paved over five minutes later.

So basically, you know, it's a city that celebrates newness, brashness, and a kind of coldness, right?

There's this, there's a very good book about this, about cold conduct, about how Berlin is basically about kind of celebrating anti-sentimentality and anti-traditionalism.

If you think of Berthold Brecht, if you think of the three-penny opera, that's sort of the Berlin aesthetic, I would say.

You're done with sacred cows and you're just going to slaughter them all.

And if you don't like it, then you just don't get it and you're an idiot, right?

Ketamine and mimes and brutalist architecture.

Yeah,

that's my impression of Berlin.

I I mean, it's mostly Coke, I think.

But like, actually,

Munich also likes Coke, as I'm sure.

Everybody likes Coke.

Coke is very popular.

Coke is very popular.

It was also very popular back then.

Yeah, okay.

We're just speed running the 20th century, but this time stupider and worse.

Yeah.

With less Coke somehow.

Yeah, so, and Munich is right.

Like, it's a Catholic city.

It's, it's, it's, um, was long dominated by the church.

It's in Bavaria, which is not unimportant.

We'll get to why that might matter later on.

I'll be quizzing you on your German geography,

but keep that in mind, dear listeners.

So he falls in in the district of Schwabing, which is part of Munich,

with a first sort of circle of friends, which overlaps with this other circle who call themselves the Cosmics that he's also sort of part of.

So this is people like, I mean, this is not, there's no reason people have to know this, but Karl Wovsky, Ludwig Klages, Friedrich Gundorf.

I'll maybe briefly tell you

what the cosmics are all about, just to give you a sense of just like, because I feel like so far we've been describing this as kind of like,

these people are maybe a little light on the loafers, but they're basically queer modernists.

Okay.

Well, get ready

for me to open up a fire hose of just absolute bat shittery.

Okay, all right, I'm strapped.

So

his friend Alfred Schuller, big influence on him, regarded himself as a reincarnated Roman who wanted to prepare the ground for what he called bloodlights,

which are basically reincarnated ancient Romans,

which would

bring about or portend somehow an ancient and original unity of feeling and reason, which had been lost in modernity, which seemed to mean with Christianity.

Okay.

Yeah.

Alfred Schuller's very pragmatic program.

I have here his collected works,

which he would read from publicly.

And, you know, I teach a seminar on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

I think I can make sense of an impenetrable text.

Holy shit.

I'm like, what the fuck is this?

It is, it's, people were just sitting and nodding.

And I'm like, I don't know, man.

It seems like this guy is having aneurysm.

Get him to a hospital.

This is how I feel when I try and read Lacan.

I'm like, no, you're all full of shit.

No, No, no, you're lying.

No, but this doesn't make sense to anybody.

But so I think I'm just going to describe a few more of these people just to sort of, you can sort of hear the

like, get a sense of the vibe.

The vibe, yeah.

Yeah.

So the next guy I'm going to talk about is Ludwig Derlit, who's basically this sort of low-rank Nietzsche clone who wanted to kind of create a highly hierarchized, purified Catholic Christianity.

He wanted to organize it through orders, right?

So like think of like Knights Templar.

He was sort of trying to create like a Knights Templar in Munich with a bunch of poets.

Um, and they were going to have like sacraments and all that stuff.

So, he's like trying to sort of create a more purified Catholic church.

I think there's a bunch of anti-Mary shit in there, too.

Of course, yeah, because the feminization of Christianity, this is also happening in the US at the time.

Yeah, yeah, so you can imagine Georgia being like, All men, you say.

And he did these like very impressive readings where he'd sort of rave and rant for a live audience.

Um, and Thomas Mann went to see him in the 1890s and wrote an early short story about it called At the Prophets or Visiting the Prophet, which is entirely a send-a-bout of this guy.

He's like, get a load of this fucking asshole.

He's like, this is hilarious.

Mann himself lived in Munich at the time, but he sort of, he's on the outside of this looking in.

He's a gay man who's about to marry or who's just married a woman.

and who but who whom he told i'm gay by the way right and and he's like but i want to be bourgeois.

I want to be a father.

I want to be, I want to commit to marriage.

And, you know,

but I'm also a queer man, right?

For a 19th century woman, that's probably not the worst deal.

Yeah, no, she was okay with it.

Basically, and eventually like his kids are in on this too.

It's like, it's very, very strange.

But he thought of this as like...

a turn towards the bourgeois.

And he thought that all the posing and the affectation of these much more openly, well, comparatively openly gay men was basically, it was just posy and juvenile.

He's like, you gotta, you gotta settle that.

It's self-regard.

It's a performance for the purposes of like social positioning.

It's kind of insincere.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So the, so the third person I want to talk about, though I think this is someone we should maybe at some point devote an entire episode to because he's just like such a rebarbative shit.

By far the creepiest of the bunch.

Dialet and Chula are just cranks, basically.

But now we're getting into the real shit.

Real shit.

Gudwig Klages is basically a Bachoven redux.

I don't know if you know, but Josef Jakob Bachoven.

He's the guy who wrote the mother right,

very, very influential in the 19th century.

So he's the guy who's like, there's an original martyr cut that basically got, or matriarchy that basically got

supplanted.

And basically, all of Greek myth is the story of how the Greeks destroyed the matriarch.

This is also a

like wild goose chase through anthropology.

Sometimes like radical feminists went, like Adrienne Rich's Of Women Born has a huge section devoted to this.

It's like a very popular idea for which there is candidly just like zero historical evidence.

Well, and 19th-century feminists were really big into this.

The idea that like there is some

distant past

that

justifies our worldview either by being an example of utopia or an example of like a primal horror that needs to be suppressed and prevented from its return.

Yeah.

so basically, Glages thought that basically, so he was famous for the science of character.

He thought you could like, he could, you had an essential character.

There were ways to figure it out.

He thought that one was through your handwriting.

So he became sort of the father of graphology, basically.

But his main thing was this opposition of soul and spirit, right?

The soul is materialistic, it's rationalist, it's scientific, it's quantifying and ultimately uncreative.

It discovers what the world happens to be like and orders things accordingly.

And the soul, by contrast, lives in the world, is one with the body, is creative,

but therefore also doesn't know progress, really.

Progress is, in fact, identical with the destruction of life.

Life, both in the sense...

of the unity of body and soul, right?

He thinks it's just progress is bad for us physically, for you and me physically, and the literal destruction of humans in industry and mass war.

So he has this kind of anti-modernist bent where he says, like, where you see progress, I see the making disposable of human life.

Very kind of proto-ecological, I would say,

anti-progress position.

Just to give you an idea of what he sounds like, in 1913, he gives a very famous speech to a youth gathering.

It was very big in the Second German Empire, where he says, quote, under the pretext of utility, economic development, culture, progress in reality aims at the destruction of life.

So like, it's kind of, kind of impressive for like 1913.

You can see why people who didn't agree with Klages on much else could find something to like in that.

Klages was neo-pagan, which meant he was, like Nietzsche, deeply hostile to Christianity and to traditional morality.

He also had some kind of weird thing with, I think, younger girls in his case.

And unfortunately, it also meant just that he was, again, like Nietzsche, quite anti-Semitic.

Just

all-around sweetheart.

And so these were all people.

So just stepping back, like what's true of these three folks that I've told you, right?

Like they're all conservative revolutionaries.

They're all reactionary mystics in some way.

And also, and this is very, very crucial, absolute fucking weirdos.

Just huge fucking weirdos.

So it's a male-dominated group.

But this group is not largely gay, as far as we can tell.

And it's not exclusively men.

Huh, okay.

There are women who hang out with them.

Mostly aristocratic women are drawn to this circle.

And, you know, there's, for instance, Francisca von Reventlo, who I like, who was friends with all these dudes.

then spent like decades writing very funny satires about them, which are great.

She dated Klagas for a while and dumped him after he demanded quote-unquote purity from her.

What does that mean?

Yeah.

It does not mean what you think it means.

I mean,

I think you should dump any guy who talks about women's purity in any context.

Like, dump that guy immediately.

But what does this guy mean?

He wanted her to stop smoking.

Isn't that awesome?

And she's like, fuck you.

You're out.

She's like, fuck you.

Me and my cigarettes.

We'll be together forever.

She like lights up.

She like blows smoke right in his face.

Yeah.

In his face.

And it's like, hippie scum.

Okay, I like that about her.

I like that about her.

Yeah, cool.

Yeah.

And also on him, like, good on him.

Like, I mean, like, he could have been like, stop sleeping with other people.

And he's like, I think it's bad for your lunch.

And she's like, fuck off.

Like, I get both of them.

Yeah.

You're making me like these people.

Like, you have to stop.

We've got to get, we've got to get back to how they're Nazis because they all go Nazi, right?

Klagus definitely does go Nazi.

The other ones died before.

Oh, well, that's that's their saving grace is just like dropping dead in the early 1930s.

Is that it?

Yeah, I mean, that is, that is definitely that definitely helpful.

Uh, God, why didn't I think of that?

Anyway, sorry.

So in 1906, Georgia breaks with these people and founds basically his own group and his own Ersatz religion.

It's a little hard to tell who broke with whom.

As with all this, it's basically like these are just very messy bees, if you will.

And both sides are like, oh, we broke with the other, right?

The reason Klages gives, he's like, well, I basically gave Georg an ultimatum about Karl Wolfski, who's another member of the circle,

because Georgia had lots of Jewish people in his circle.

And Klagas is like, we can't have that.

And according to him, Georgia wouldn't disown them,

in which case, good for Georgia.

And Klages was committed to a deep sort of Weininger-style anti-Semitism.

But it's kind of characteristic of

his circle.

There's this weird duality.

On the one hand,

the circle is a bunch of fellow travelers to nascent reactionary and fascist movements, and it had a bunch of Jewish members, right?

And that would persist until the end, right?

Like in 1933, you have a

straight-up Nazi kind of mouthing off about how like Georgia would have wanted the Nazis to win.

Georgia himself is at that point dying and won't say one thing one way or the other.

And then you have Kantolovich saying, like, no, obviously not.

Right.

So like, there is this kind of interesting duality where on the one hand...

It's more ambiguity.

It's more weaponized ambiguity.

It's will they or won't they, but for Nazism?

You know, it's, and I don't know whether George ever like had a sort of a principled stance here or whether he just kind of liked having friends and like didn't want to lose any of them.

But it is very clear that he like he, he, you know, the Nazis made overtures to him in 1933 and he went to Switzerland.

I mean, like, I feel like that does speak a clear language.

He's like, nah, not, not feeling this.

Yeah, this is not going, this is not going to be good for me in one way or the other.

Or it's not good for my friends.

I mean, like, he did think of the circle as like his legacy and he didn't want that.

So he, as I said, he founds his own Ursat's religion.

He admits.

Yeah, what?

It seems like this was kind of a trend, right?

Oh, yeah.

Like, everybody was coming up, like, the modernists, the modernists got weird and they came up with new religions.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, but this is this is going a step beyond.

All right, tell me about it.

Again, like, like this is going weirder places.

Okay.

So, so I keep being like, oh, this is something that I kind of recognize.

And you keep being like, no, no, no, no, no.

It's so much weirder.

It's so much weird than that.

Because I mean, like, we almost yada yada defounding his own religion.

You're like, yeah, cool.

That's fine.

Wait, what?

But so in 1906, when he breaks with the cosmics, he founds his own religion based on a young man he met in 1902 named Maximilian Kronberger.

He had sort of,

well, he says, like, oh, I saw him walking down the street in Munich and I started following him because I was so taken with like this religious experience.

And you're like,

okay, so you cruised him.

That's that's great.

Kronberger at the time, 14.

I saw this guy walking down the street and I was so overcome with what was definitely a profound spiritual experience.

Yeah.

And this is also not some guy.

This is like literally a teenage boy.

Yeah.

And he basically loops him into

his circle.

Kohnberger turns out to be kind of have a touch of the poet himself.

You there.

Do you want to do some like conservative

like modernist poetry?

Like imagine being approached on the street for that purpose.

And also nude modeling.

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, like, I have to say, given the weirdness of the pitch, he has a shocking success with this stuff.

He must have had a lot of charm.

It's like, yeah, I'll pose nude for you.

Yeah, he must have had something going for him.

It's not charm.

Like, I wish I had some pictures to show you.

There's a kind of severity and kind of like mysteriousness to the guy.

It's like, oh, it must be serious and important that I posed nude.

Yeah, maybe that's it.

People will sort of do these profile pictures of him.

He only approved pictures from a very specific angle to be taken of him.

Because you had to see his nose.

That's where Klagus gets the whole characterology from.

That is like, no, like this is the essential expression.

Like normal photography is

evacuating us of our essence, but this is the true face.

And people would like have his, like, would have masks of his face on their desk.

And like, it gets fucking weird.

That's, that's weird.

Okay, so he drafts this kid into his new weird cult.

Who then dies.

Oh.

Yeah, he, I think it's Typhus.

I forget what it is.

I should have looked this up.

But he dies in 1904.

Does he become the Messiah?

Yeah.

Like Antonous, like Hadrian and Antonus.

Exactly.

That's where he goes.

He's like, you know, what if this guy was just God, this like very pretty teenage boy I met like a couple weeks ago?

Now you're thinking like a cult leader in 1904.

Well done.

That's exactly what he does.

He's like, hey, like this is exactly a kind of Hadrian kind of motif.

This is exactly a kind of...

Do our listeners basically know, has anybody read the Marguerite Yorsonar book, Memoirs of Hadrian, is great on this, but it's actually real history of the Emperor Hadrian, famous, I think, for destroying the Second Temple and

igniting the Jewish diaspora.

So like, you know, that was him.

What a dick.

Also had a

much younger boyfriend who he met as a dancer in Turkey.

And this kid like mysteriously died during a cruise up the Nile under like...

possibly suspicious circumstances.

And because Erkoud Poirot was not there to be like, my suspicions were first aroused when the centurions.

The

grief that resulted after Antonous's death really consumed Hadrian, drove him a little crazy.

And Hadrian started to create a cult around his dead teenage boyfriend that was briefly a rival to Christianity.

They still do.

unearth sometimes in these archaeological excavations in the Mediterranean world, these pictures, these like statues of Antonous,

who looks like a pretty boy.

He looks like he was a beautiful boy and R.I.P.

Antonous.

I don't think he was God, but

this is an established pattern that sometimes curvy gay guys do is what I guess I'm trying to say.

Yeah, and he's also

drawing on the Al Gabal Heliogabalus myth,

like the very late Roman Emperor Heliogabalus, who kind of also appears to have been a teenager and about whom these like very queer rumors got spread, sort of, I think, as a Demnazio memoriae, after he was overthrown, basically.

And I should say that Georges, I think, second volume of poetry was called Al Gabal after Heliogabalus.

So, like, okay, so that was the tradition he was.

He was kind of scouting for this.

Like, this is like, like, on the one hand, like, clearly, the, you know, Kornberger's death did hit him hard, but he was also in a weird way primed.

He probably had had the idea to make like the beauty of boys into a semi-divine

project

before.

And that is, you know,

that's a tune that a lot of people have sung.

So he starts basically creating kind of, we don't know to what extent, but he's like, none of this is ever written down.

Or if it's written down, it's never shared with the outside.

But some kind of cult.

grows up around this child who's now venerated as Maximin.

That's how they call him.

And he writes poetry about him.

There's a 1906, he publishes a collection of poems called The Star of the Covenant, right, which is which has all these poems about Maximin, a whole cycle.

But it's pretty clear that there was a kind of cultic dimension, a ritualistic dimension, that is not exhausted in the poetry, or at least he wanted us to believe there was.

I have no idea.

Maybe they didn't.

But like, and that's the interesting part, right?

Like, so far, everything's been kind of la poor la, and everything's like kind of performance art.

But like, the moment you have this kind of cultic dimension that you then don't put in the books, right?

Like, there's something else going on.

This covenant, he sort of starts insisting has a political dimension, right?

So he's trying to say, we are setting up a state.

We are setting up a new community, a new covenant, right?

Like, the biblical echoes there are not are not lost in German either, right?

In order to sort of create a better

a better Germany in some way, right?

Like

it gets a religious and a kind of

a political dimension at the same time.

So was there any element of like race science in the worship of this boy?

Was he like a particular

specimen, or is it just that he was pretty?

Or is that stuff not like present in the archive?

I don't know.

I mean, like in the

in the poetry, it's not evident.

Okay.

I mean, Georgia is too.

I mean, we're going going to read some Georgia poetry later together, but like, he's too good a poet to sort of go on about someone's blue eyes.

Okay.

Yeah.

Right.

Like, so it's a little hard to tell.

I think that generally the politics were about racial purity, but in a much more abstract way.

Right.

And this is really, really important to sort of drill down on what kind of nationalism.

This is the moment when the conversation about secret Germany sort of enters into the vernacular and the mythology of the Georgia circle.

The idea of a secret Germany had been around before, but this is when Georges starts sort of thinking about it.

Although the cycle of poems about secret Germany is still a bit in the future.

But it's probably easiest to describe sort of where George and his groups, his various groups diverged from what we might call the kind of conservative or reactionary mainstream in the German-speaking world, because again and again they didn't quite behave the way you'd predict right like you have a garden variety and like right like the way you're saying like there must be race signs in there somewhere it's like eh not quite like they're weirder than that yeah this is these people keep surprising me so like for one thing they were not really nationalists right or rather they were fiercely committed to a germany but that germany was not identical with the actual existing country.

Okay.

Right.

So now this is what we have to get into.

We have to quiz you a little bit on your German history.

Uh-oh.

When did Germany first become a country?

Do you happen to know this?

I know

that it involved somebody named Otto von Bismarck.

That's right.

Whose great-grandchild just broke up with Kate Moss.

You'll be sad to learn.

Oh, shit.

Yeah.

Because he wanted to get sober and she wasn't into that.

This is my tabloid habit, you know, coming to bear back on Inbid with a right.

And I believe that was like, I want to say the first half of the 19th century like fairly recently maybe even later yeah yeah 1870 1871 1870 is the franco-prussian war i thought it was older than it really was it's yeah germany is 1870 to 1871 is but then before that it was a kind of incomprehensible yeah hodgepodge series of douche a lot of douches

a lot of like very very small territorial um

like governance well few fewer by the time they had been consolidated under what Like the Austro-Hungarian Empire?

No, various potentates, right?

Well, I can walk you through it.

It's actually an interesting story.

Germany became a country when Georg turned three.

Oh, wow.

Okay.

So he's almost an exact contemporary of his nation.

So he probably really feels a lot of investment in this project.

Yeah.

No.

Oh.

Oh, my God.

He keeps surprising me.

This guy is like,

I should know.

I feel like...

Like I'm at the magic show and they keep on pulling out rabbits and like ribbons and I keep on, I'm like just floored every time yeah so yeah the situation was right like you mentioned otto von bismarck germany basically was united by

by and under the prussian monarchy right it annexed the rainish provinces after 1815 after napoleon was defeated uh though bingen where georgia was born remained instead part of the state of hesse

um

and

And over the next 50 years, it started gobbling up more and more of...

was this a military conquest or largely a peaceful enterprise?

It was largely military.

Okay.

So the well, some of it is through administrative reform, and then a lot of it is the

wars of unification.

The war against the Danes, which allows the Prussians to gobble up Schleswig and Holstein in the north, then a war against the Austro-Hungarians

in 1866.

And finally, basically, we are left with Prussia, which is basically at that point two-thirds of what's called the German confederation, right?

So huge, just the absolute elephant in the room.

And then I forget how many exactly.

It's like something like 12 to 14 other states.

So Bavaria is one of these.

This is why the people of München do not like the people in Berlin because they feel they got annexed.

But

it's also a lot of

the southwestern states.

So Baden, Württemberg, Hesse, where Georgia was born.

That's where your family's from, right?

Around like...

My family's from Baden, yeah, and Palatinate, yeah.

So these were, and these really only got integrated into what was then, what then became the German Empire.

They were essentially independent until

1870, 71.

And so there's this big, like,

moneyed military empire taking these people by force, and that's probably not entirely harmonious.

Exactly.

And people felt themselves not,

they might have felt themselves German, but they didn't feel themselves Prussian.

And this, the German identity before unification, was it largely linguistic?

Okay.

It was a lot of linguistic.

Well, this is the other thing, right?

Like it's largely around language because it has trouble being around about other things, right?

If you think about like, is Germany Protestant or Catholic?

It's both.

Yeah.

It's both, right?

Was Germany part of the Roman Empire?

Yes and no.

Yes and no, exactly, right?

Is Germany part of Western Europe or more like East Central Europe?

It depends.

Yeah.

Right?

So that's really, really interesting.

Okay.

If you think about like a guy like George who grows up on the Rhine, right, where there are Roman ruins everywhere, moves to Munich.

And he probably feels like he's got a lot in common with the French.

He thinks he has Roman ancestries, right?

Think of Alfred Schuler and his bloodlights, right?

He's like, where I used to walk, there are now, there once were Roman emperors.

Whereas like these Prussian barbarians would have been soiling themselves in their bearskins, right?

but also the barbarians won.

So like, like, it's not, it's not an ethos of domination.

It's an ethos of refinement.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

Right.

And it's, it's one of resignation.

Throughout the

19th century, German nationalists really thought, like, hey, we're going to bring about, like, when we say we want a united Germany, what we mean is we want to get rid of all these assholes.

who run our current states, right?

We want to get rid of these dynastic heads of families.

This douchey that's the size of a postage stamp and extracts

like extortion and taxation on the locals.

We're going to get rid of them.

Okay.

Yeah.

I understand that.

The French, the English all did this.

Why are we not getting with this program?

Right.

And what they got, of course, was that one of those potentates just took over everything.

Yeah.

And so there are a lot of, there's a big place for German nationalists to be like, well, not like that.

Okay.

Right.

This sucks.

Right.

And Gheorghe's nationalism falls into that.

Right.

It's a nationalism that is weirdly international.

Right.

He's like, I don't want this kind of like blood and iron shit from Otto von Bismarck.

I want a Catholic, a Roman, a refined, you know, a church-based kind of German nationalism.

And all I will do is retreat from this official,

this mercantile Germany.

Also, of course, like Prussia was the industrial powerhouse.

It was richer, right?

It was also kind of a like.

Look, we're a little bit more traditional.

If you think of Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, right?

That entire book is about like, hey, why are Catholics so poor?

Right?

Like, why are Protestants so wealthy?

Like, he's trying to grapple with the reality of post-unification Germany, where he's like, Yeah.

Like, there are real,

right?

Like, there's a little bit of like real Germany kind of like red state, blue state kind of thing going on here where people are like.

Right.

So there's the like the elites who industrialized, even though there's a like a large proletarian working class in those industrial centers, they don't have the nostalgic claim to an agrarian authenticity that characterizes a lot of like nationalist imaginations in the European 19th century.

Is that basically where you're going?

The contradictions of modernity, it's a little bit of a Wagner thing, right?

The contradictions of modernity would have been a lot clearer in Berlin, right, than they were in Bingen, where he grew up.

And so, like, this anti-modernism does also have a kind of anti-capitalist edge.

Oh my God, this is so real.

I'm sorry.

This is just like reactionary, anti-establishment, traditionalism.

Yeah.

It is, it's like, is this just Peter Thiel?

Like, is Peter Thiel funding this guy?

That's what I want to know.

I mean, there is some, there's something like that, right?

Like, I was thinking of Peter Thiel here, too, that like this idea of just, right?

I mean, or, or William F.

Buckley, right?

Yeah.

Standing athwart the train of history yelling, stop, right?

Like, that is to some extent, like, progress was bad.

Yeah.

This is not the progress that we wanted.

Um, I will just, I will opt out.

I will nope out of all of this.

It's interesting that this arises, this traditionalism arises from a gay milieu.

Like, that is really fascinating to me.

Yeah.

I mean, it's not just them, but like, of course, the idea of a identity that contains multitudes, right?

He's like, I'm a hyper-nationalist.

Also, I'm a Roman.

Right?

Like, it's so funny, right?

Like, if you think of someone like this, like the dumbest kind of national, German nationalism of the time, someone like Heinrich von Treitschke, who's just like, the Germans are the descendants of the Germanic tribes that beat the Romans.

And this is our, you know, this, you know, Siegfried ideal is our national ideal.

Yeah, it's domination, domination nationalism.

That's very trumpy.

Yeah.

Exactly.

And then you.

It's like we kick their ass, and then we're going to go back to our pre-Roman influences, which are superior by virtue of having kicked their ass.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

And Georgia is not that.

He is someone who's

the identity he wants is one that contains kind of multiplicities.

Thomas Mann has a really interesting book during his conservative phase in World War I.

He sort of switches sides during the Weimar Republic, where he gets invited to do a talk about the evils of the Weimar Republic.

He's like, actually, I'm for this.

Sorry.

I can refund

your honorarium.

I feel like everyone's looking real bummed right now.

A lot of us probably should have done that at some point when we were invited to give a talk.

It's like, actually, I think I've switched sides.

Yeah.

And so basically, but he wrote this book, The Reflections of a Non-Political Man in 1918, where he sort of says, Germany, the German identity is to have carried to term

all the contradictions of Europe, right?

He says, like, all the things,

right, like Catholic versus Protestant, modern versus traditional, like, right, the Brits know where they fall, the French know where they fall, the Russians know where they fall.

We're like,

can I hear option A again, right?

Like, he's like, the idea of Germanness is to be kind of

riven between these two things.

We, like, he thinks Germans know all the advantages of what it would be like to be a Western European and all the lure of not being that, right?

Like, that's that's his idea.

Like, we feel both is his idea.

George is sort of the same way.

He sort of says, the nationalism that secret Germany implies is multiple, and it is the queerness and the multiplicity are maybe not the same, but they are not distinct.

They're linked.

Yeah, so basically, right, German nationalism had been forward-looking, right?

Intensely forward-looking.

It had all been about the country, but creating a country that didn't exist, right?

And its creation implied a massive reshaping of what was then this kind of, as you say, this hodgepodge of states.

And when unification actually happened

in 1871, that left a lot of people very disappointed.

And so this is where part of that response, there were different people responding different ways.

Nietzsche is someone who responds to that one way.

But there is this idea of the secret Germany that emerges as like a real Germany that like isn't represented by Wilhelm Wilhelm I, Friedrich Wilhelm and Wilhelm II, right?

Like they're like the Hohnzollerns with their spiked helmets and their weird marching and all that shit.

That's not really Germany.

Like what's what we want now is secret Germany.

And I can,

this is a very early version of this,

Paul de Lagarde in 1875.

formulating basically an early version of this idea, quote, the Germany that we love and long to see has never existed and perhaps never will.

The ideal is something that is and is not at the same time.

People only thrive in the mysterious warmth of a star that has never yet been glimpsed.

Germany would have been founded if we were to take a negative stance against the current vices of a time that was obviously influenced by un-Germans.

If we formed an open alliance to ward off and combat these vices, which would not lack external signs and symbols, nor the strictest discipline.

Right?

So,

like, I don't want wanna i don't wanna

sugarcoat this this is also like you can see how this shades into anti-semitism yeah anti-democratic politics right one of the things that they reject from the west is parliamentary democracy right like these are died in the wool reactionaries at the same time they're looking at the kaiser and they're like nah not like that um

so it's it's both right he's he's it's it's a germany

that is a star that has never yet been glimpsed, right?

It has its political role only in not being real.

This is what Kantorovich was going on about in 1933.

Just be like, guys, we can't make this real.

The whole point of secret Germany is it's not real.

Yeah, right?

You can't do it.

Like the moment it becomes realized, it is part of the same problem that it's meant to combat, right?

And if you think about the negative stance, this is very much what the Georgia Circle would sort of end up with.

Be like, not like that.

We are, we reject the contemporary world, we reject modernity, we reject

just everyday politics, we reject, you know, the industrialized world in favor of this, this other thing that, that will never come.

Yeah, return, but only to my imagination.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

Return to this thing that I hope will never show up.

If you look at, I mean, this is, it was a little hard to render this in English, but if you look at Lagarde's, right,

Germany would have been founded, right?

He's like very careful to be like.

Yeah, that's an extreme.

What is that, like like subjunctive tag tense?

Yeah.

It's like it's past tense and also subjunctive.

In the past, there was a possibility.

Yeah.

Right.

And it will not happen, but yeah.

Right.

And so in this context, Georgia and his set sort of have an interesting position, right?

They are serious nationalists, but a nationalism.

that was sort of like not interested in the actual German nation, right?

They're obsessed with a racialized German essence, right?

They are interested in dissent, in purity, and all that stuff, but one that seemed to transcend any actually existing Germans, right?

They thought the Kaiser was degenerated.

Like they, they weren't so worried about Jewish people.

They were worried about the Kaiser, right?

Like, what an oaf, right?

And

like, at the same time, the interesting question becomes,

you know, what's the relationship between the actual Germany and the real Germany, right?

Like, and this is sort of going to become the big,

the big

thing that consumes them all throughout the Weimar Republic because they're like, oh, not like this either.

We hate this too.

But it was, of course, a republic that right-wing forces, many of whom they were allied and friends with, were actively starting to destroy.

And so that is where you get, that's where you get people like Tomas Mann being like, okay, this is where the fun stops.

Yeah.

Unlike the Empire, like I actually would be pretty sad if this ended.

And I think what comes after is much worse.

Stop doing this, right?

This is also like the complaint that a lot of people

on the left have right now.

It's like, oh, liberal democracy is terrible.

And also there's such small portions, right?

It's like, this is not, this is inadequate and you're really going to miss it now that it's leaving.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

And in some way, they sort of never made,

they made their sort of baseline rejection kind of this.

this pose that they would take vis-a-vis everything.

And like, and, you know, Mon really is the sort of big antipode here.

He's like, what are you doing?

It's like, Thomas Monn is what happens when you mature out of this like kind of dime-squary-y

bullshit and become a serious intellectual.

You wind up in the position of Thomas Monn, which is like, no, people's actual lives

are on the line

and we have to

do what is necessary to preserve them.

Yeah, I mean, it's so funny.

On the one hand, you're like, oh, that delusional fop like.

marries a woman because he thinks it's like a maturation process because he thinks he can achieve yeah but actually he's like a he's he does a good job of maturing, right?

He's like.

At least this way.

Yeah.

And he's on to something with like all your weird, like gay posing is kind of juvenile, right?

He's like, you, the, the big moral test is how, how will you prevent this from happening?

And you can't, right?

That's, that is really bad.

Oh my God, that's too close to home.

I know.

But now you know why I wanted to talk about this on December 31st, 2024.

So we have the nationalism, right?

Where they're nationalist and anti-nationalist at once.

They're traditionalists and anti-traditionalist at once, right?

They hated most actual traditions, right?

This is the post-Nietzsche generation.

So the story is not

like they think, like Nietzsche, that there is something wrong with modernity, but it's not that straightforward.

They're not sort of typical returners, right?

They thought that part of

their

provenance was to construct their own secret Germany back in time, right?

right?

So that is to say, like Dante was for them a German ancestor.

Shakespeare was a German ancestor, right?

And then like other people, they hate it.

So they do this weird, like Emperor Frederick II in the 11th century is like a forebear for them, right?

Algebal, Heliogabalus, Hadrian, right?

Like they start creating

this kind of lineage that's both kind of like very traditional, hyper-traditional, but also very selective, right?

It's never just like straightforwardly everything that used to be was good, right?

Everything that, right?

What keeps us from doing stuff like this, right?

Like they're like, oh no, also the past had a bunch of bad people.

A bunch of things were very, very terrible.

We're selecting.

And of course, they very often selected people who were queer, which is the other interesting thing, or who didn't sort of fit into their...

into their into their own times.

The yoga circle sort of is important for, for instance, rediscovering the poet Friedrich Hölderlin, who you may know, right?

had basically gone crazy and then like written incomprehensible poetry in a tower for 40 years and everyone was like well the good the early stuff's good and too bad what happened with him and they're like no the later stuff is better right so they like inaugurated the serious study of this guy's late poems like 40 years of them basically um wow they they they've left a huge trace on the study of german literature because they they basically re-evaluated everything they were like oh this person is much much better much more interesting.

You know,

they're a true ancestor.

The other ones are the reason why we're in this mess in the first place.

And so, you know, when I still have here a book by Geographers' follower Friedrich Gundolf about Goethe, and I don't, I can't grab it right now because I'm mic'd in.

But

so it's both a very, very influential book about the poet.

If you look at the dust jacket, I sometimes have visitors to my office who stare at it and are like, what?

Because it has a swastika on the outside of it.

And Gundolf, briefly the advisor to one Dr.

Josef Goebbels.

So like, oh, yeah.

Wow.

Okay.

Yeah.

I mean, like, you can't make this shit up.

It's not that big a country, I guess.

They do this thing where they kind of assemble this canon of people they think are cool.

And often enough, those tend to be kind of people who are somehow queer-coded.

But there's more than that.

It's like, it's also they think that there's an intellectual lineage here that they're, that they're kind of, um,

that they're kind of drawing towards.

And the other thing that they said was like, well, really, what we're trying to transmit here is a sense of aristocracy.

These are the best.

These are the elect.

These are the few.

We read Goethe in ways that others couldn't read him.

We read Höderlin in ways that others can't read him.

We understand Dante in ways that...

even his Italian readers can't understand him.

We understand the secret messages that they're sending us, right?

And this idea of a transmission of aristocracy is extremely important here.

There's an amazing passage that Zaladin Schmidt, a distant cousin of Georges and sort of member of the circle at one time, wrote to Ans Bertram, whom we've already met, that I think is worth reading in full.

It's about Thomas Mann, who we talked about.

It's about Stefan George and about the Danish poet Hermann Bang.

Bertram and Schmidt were at the time in some kind of sexual relationship.

Schmidt was very openly gay.

Bertram, we don't really know, but probably.

He writes about these three men.

Behind all their asceticism, there hides an outraged hunger.

Oh, they would love to seize hold of the things if things didn't keep retreating from them.

It's not that they learned to live without things.

The things taught them to live without them.

They are aristocrats only because they are wanting.

All their posture, their lack of illusion, is arrangement, is pose.

Their hatred for pose is the hatred of small difference, like Nietzsche's hatred for Wagner.

He's basically doing the Maximin Hoffmann style thing.

He's saying

they're casting as nobility what is actually rejection.

Yeah.

The people they like don't like them back.

And I'm sorry for you, man, but that's not a poetics.

That's, you know,

that seems like something you should take up with your psychoanalyst or whatever.

Something that I do kind of admire about these people is how much they seem to have gotten under the skin of their contemporaries and just annoyed the shit out of other German modernists.

Well, they're just, what it is, it's just all, it's funny that it's all so serious and also so catty.

Like they, they read each other like drag queens, honestly.

They are

vicious.

It's beautiful.

And yet, this idea of an aristocracy of need, this idea that like queerness confers a kind of

outsider status that is kind of aristocratic in its own way, right?

You're not part of

the humdrum everyday existence, right?

There's a story that Thomas Mann writes and that he then

withholds for 20 years because he based it on his in-laws, which is about a set of twins

named Siegmund and Sieglinde.

And they go to see Wagner's Die Valkure, right?

The Valkyrie, where two twins, Siegmund and Sieglinde, have sex.

As we covered canonically on Invest of the Right.

Yeah.

And then they get home.

Like she's supposed to marry this boring, I forget what he is, banker or something like that.

And then they go home and what else are you going to do but have sex?

They have sex with each other.

And as they lie there, she says, and that's the final exchange of the short story.

Well, what are we going to do about this guy?

What are we going to tell this guy?

And he replies, well, he'll have a less trivial existence from now on.

Oh, yeah.

The idea that like sexuality takes you out of triviality, right?

It takes you out of, like, there's something there's a being grossed out by heterosexuality in the way these guys live their traditionalism, right?

They're saying, like, we don't want the kind of rote kind of academic traditionalism of like, this is what our immediate predecessors taught us.

Fuck our immediate predecessors.

We seek out our own ancestors, and they're going to be cool.

They're going to be rock and roll.

They're going to be wild.

It's going to be bachanalia.

We're going to commune with them and then we're gonna like have a 16-year-old God.

Like, wait, what?

There is a resistance to a kind of pedantic, trivial, humdrum existence that they equate both with heterosexuality, with capitalism, and with modernity.

I think we should look at this

poem that will give you a sense of like why.

this problem comes to a head in 1933.

Just I don't want to leave that out.

So this is a poem called The Poet in Times of Confusion.

Confusion, right?

Maybe I'll just read a couple of passages for you, which gives you a very good idea of like just how Georgia's negative stance to his own time works, how his conservatism works, but also how his critique of kind of everyday conservatism works.

So I'll read.

In placid times, they say the poet is a winged child who sings his tender dreams and showers beauty on a busy world.

But when abuses swell into a storm and destiny pounds at the door, his verses ring like a prick on oar and arm is heard.

When all are blinded, he, the only seer, unveils the coming doom in vain.

But though the cries of Acassandra fill the house, the frantic rabble sees one thing alone, the horse, the horse that rushes to its death.

Then prophets may foretell the anger of the tribal god, the trot of Asur's thousands which drag the chosen people into bondage.

The clever council has more sure report, derides the warner, shuts him in a cell.

And when the holy city is besieged, burghers and warriors jostle in confusion.

Within, the lords and priests have bloody quarrels for broomsticks.

While without the stoutest bulwark is falling, he is silent and he sighs.

You could read this

as tragic, you know, like I was waiting for Cassandra and then there she was.

You could also read it as kind of a drag, you know, like this is like, oh, you guys,

you you can't make your work effacious.

And maybe

I think this,

what I'm reading is like, this is from somebody who doesn't actually want their work to be afacious, right?

You don't actually maybe want it to have stakes.

There's something about that like

refusal.

of an attainable political project or the refusal of having your politics be realized in the actual world.

It's a little bit of cowardice, right?

It's an avoidance of responsibility.

Yeah, it's the idea really is that if you were to drag the poet out of poetry, if you were to really listen to this Cassandra, they wouldn't be a Cassandra anymore.

Yeah.

And therefore, they would have to let go of their privileged status.

Exactly.

And be among the muck of those whose actions have consequences.

Yeah.

Part of being a seer is not being heard.

Right.

Or part of being the poet is to be a seer that isn't heard.

Right.

All these are warnings that were not heeded.

He is silent and he sighs.

Of course, the funny thing is, like, there is an emphasis on silence in a, frankly, pretty long poem.

I'm only giving you certain bits of it.

So there is kind of a, you're right to detect a certain kind of internal contradiction.

Like, this is someone who does seem to want to have

an impact, but he's worried about the kind of impact, right?

There's a, and you can see where someone like Kantorovich is like, well, clearly Stefan didn't want us to be like, yeah, it's kind of like Hitler, right?

Like, like whether or not he was this kind of conservative, right?

Like, he didn't want to be politicized in this straightforward way.

Right.

There's a kind of proto-politics or super-politics at work here.

Right.

It's above the squabbling, the bulwarks falling, the generals, et cetera, et cetera.

So I'll keep reading, maybe.

But in a mournful age, it is the poet who keeps the marrow sound, the germ alive.

He stirs the holy flame that leaps across and shapes the flesh in which to burn, discovers the truth of tidings which our fathers gave, that those elected to the highest goal begin by passing through the waste that once the heart of Europe shall redeem the earth.

So you keep the marrow sound.

Now we get to the creepy biologistical shit, right?

Like the poet keeps some kind of biological inheritance alive.

Now,

in his defense, right?

Like on the one hand, this sounds a lot like you're keeping some kind of genetic inheritance alive.

Yeah, and especially with the evocation of the like transcendent nature of sexuality, it's like, oh, this is what's bringing you into contact with a time greater than your own lifespan, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

The coming into immortality, as they say.

Yeah, and exactly.

There are two things here, right?

Like on the one hand, there is a kind of idea that you form the next generation, but there's also clearly an invocation, there's a sexual dimension to this.

Part of Avrid Schuler's whole idea of bloodlights was very clearly that like...

you know, part of how this is transmitted is by having sex with younger people, right?

This is here too, right?

So it's a weird kind of mixture of like creepy kind of racialized stuff,

but also just kind of an explanation of why you gather young people around you, which is like totally fine, right?

Like the poet gathers people around himself.

Like he's writing this like in the immediate aftermath of World War I.

He's like, how do we salvage a youth that was made to do that?

Right.

The Gyoga Circle hated World War I.

pretty strongly pacifist in at a time when, frankly, social democrats and socialists were not pacifists, right?

They were like, this is bad.

This is really bad.

right?

And when he's talking about Europe's spirit, like this might sound kind of creepy to people, but he's also thinking about like,

this was really bad, you guys.

And, you know, we have to find a way

like to have young people not do that, right?

Like, like, we, there are ones we can save, basically.

So, while I've steel manned his point here, let me now see where, where it all goes, right?

And when the final hope has almost perished, in sternest grief, his eyes already see a coming light.

Unstained by venal mobs, by threadbare minds and follies steeped in poison, a younger generation rises towards him.

The youth who stealed by times of galling pressure again have honest standards for the probe of men and things, who, fair and grave and proud, in alien worlds accept themselves for what they are, avoid the rocks of brazen boasting and the morass of would-be brotherhood, spat out the lifeless, stale, and base, base, and from their consecrated dreams and deeds and sorrows, begot the only one who can restore.

He breaks the chains and sweeps aside the rubble, the scourges home, the lost to lasting law, where Lord again is Lord, the greatest great again, where poise again is poise.

He fastens the true device upon the nation's banner through tempests and the dread fanfares of dawning.

He leads his tried and faithful to the work of sober day and founds the kingdom come.

So, a couple of things.

First, right,

you can see why George, who starts out as this kind of decadent poet, like,

sounds totally different here, right?

This is

prophetic.

This is a prophet poet, right?

Like, this is,

it's not meant to be, there's nothing reflective.

This is propulsive.

This is, this is almost political.

You can see why people thought this was political speech, right?

This was religious teaching.

This is zealotry, right?

A deliberate poetic zealotry.

The other thing we do have to point out is the man who comes to fasten the true device upon the nation's banner.

It's the kind of thing that, like, yeah, writing that, and then, like, you know, you can see why how people got there in 1933, right?

Yeah, yeah.

So, there is this kind of idea of a leadership, and he will call this, by the way, he's no longer calling it a circle, he's no longer calling it a covenant, it's a Reich.

Of course, it is, yeah,

This is from a cycle of poem called Las Neue Reich, the new, the Neu Reich, right?

Like, so he's, he wants to set up an empire now.

He's its leader, right?

And he's about this one man who will,

who will, you know, draw these tides of youths into his hand and write his will across the sky with the stars.

Um, or T.E.

Lawrence, right?

You wouldn't be totally crazy for thinking this was calling for exactly what ended up happening.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

It's so

depressing to see the way that like the like the fascist kind of clouds gather, you know?

Yeah.

Like I feel like I've gotten a picture of what happened at least in Munich where it just sort of like gets

the air gets heavier.

Yeah.

And you can tell it's going to rain.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And you get the sense also how political emotions sort of get mobilized when they're thwarted and frustrated, right?

Like I think about this again about the young people who have who again have honest standards for the probe of men and things who fair and grave and proud in alien worlds accept themselves for what they are right like on the one hand like this is again about queerness right he's saying accept yourselves like it's fine to be the way we are right free to be you and me yeah right and then With the stuff about the avoid the rocks of brazen boasting and the morass of would-be brotherhood.

Like, that's the other thing that I think is so interesting that he's always ready to to be pre-disappointed, right?

Like, oh, not like that.

Like, brotherhood, but not like that.

You know, we are awesome.

We are aristocrats, but not boastful or anything, right?

Like, this way of like pre-disappointment

as a stance of a kind of reactionary politics, I think we're going to see a lot of that in the next year or two as things get darker in the United States.

I think we're going to get a lot of people being like, well, no, I didn't, well, I'm not part of that anymore, right?

Like, Peter Thiel is going to run the other way in like T minus two months.

Cause like, it's a fucking easy pose to take, right?

To sort of be like, I didn't, I didn't want any part of that, right?

And you're like, well, what did you think?

I only wanted my enemies crushed.

I didn't like the people I was neutral to warm about to also be crushed.

We were a metaphor.

We were just speculating.

It was just an essay.

It was the spirit of, it was the imp of the proverb.

It was just Curtis Yarvin's blog.

Yeah.

Which is now going to be all.

It's quite known that someone would do this, right?

And this preformed disgust at seeing the very clear implicates of your politics in action.

That's another thing that this circle very much models.

What we're going to see in the next year or two.

And I think this is why I wanted to make sure to get this one in under the wire.

Like you're calling shotgun on the rise of fascism in America.

You're like, I called it.

I called it.

I read the poetry on my podcast.

Also, the way

the intelligentsia is going to relate to it.

There are poses of disaffection, of of not me, of withdrawal that are being modeled here.

That on the one hand, I understand.

And I think that like, I'm not faulting Stefan Georgia necessarily, right?

Like he was a very old man by the time the rubber did end up hitting the road and he did what he could, I would say.

But it's important to note that like the seductiveness of that pose is pretty enduring.

right like the idea that you're like well i just i just won't occupy myself with that that's also stupid right it's like no the

the humdrum, the everyday, the trivial is where a lot of these battles are waged and decided.

And this kind of aristocratic withdrawal from it

is its own kind of danger, is its own kind of

problem, frankly,

in modern society.

There's

no backsees, guys.

You have to take accountability for.

the logical conclusions of your own ideas.

So exactly.

Don't be like these dweebs.

Be like Thomas Mann.

Yeah.

Well, in some ways.

But I mean, yeah, overall,

a better, a better ideal.

Yeah.

We have to do an episode at some point about Thomas Mann.

The other thing that he was very good at that I thought think about a lot was he was implacable after it was all over.

He kept the receipts, right?

Every time someone's like, well, I didn't really support Hitler.

He's like, this you?

He was like, that guy on Twitter.

Like, oh, really?

Right.

What about this essay?

Like, well, it was a different time.

He's like, I didn't say say it.

You said it.

I didn't say it.

How come?

Right.

And I do think that like, yeah, if more of that spirit had won out after

in 2021 onwards, we might be having a very different conversation.

And Stefan Georgia might be more securely historical than he unfortunately is.

Yeah.

Whoever is last

left alive in America,

make sure you don't let anybody else get away with it.

That's right.

Thank you so much for taking me on this weird journey.

These are these are hilarious cranks and I had so much fun getting to know them.

I'm glad.

I hope people like this.

We said the Patreon was going to get experimental.

Well, this is experimental.

Yeah, I think this is the kind of thing that is perfect for the Patreon because it's only for the true heads.

It's weirder and wackier.

It's international.

It's evocative.

This is Inbed with the Right at its best.

At its best.

Well, thank you so much for being part of.

this journey, Moira.

Thank you all for being part of this journey this year.

It's been a great year for Inbed with the Right, and I can't wait to see what the next year brings, which means we're basically recording in like four days already.

It's gonna be great.

It's gonna be great.

All right.

Awesome.

Bye.

See you next time.