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The young Hugo von Hofmannsthal was really a phenomenon.
At 17 he published the first of his dream-lost dramolets in verse, tellingly, it was already called “Yesterday”.
The young nobleman was immediately
celebrated
as
the
new great hope of Austrian literature.
His appearance played a not insignificant role in the admiration that met him everywhere.
"Something delicate, girlish," one observer attested to him.
The older colleague Hermann Bahr, already a little malicious, noticed Hofmannsthal's "caressant hand of the great amorous".
And the bosom friend Leopold von Andrian even thought that "dear Hugo" was "as sensitive as a hysterical woman".
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In any case, Stefan George was always on the lookout for nobly formed youths whom he could recruit for his project of a renewal of poetry, when he first met Hofmannsthal.
Mid-December 1891: George discovered the handsome boy in the “Griensteidl” café while reading the journals and immediately approached him, “without any intermediary,” as the young talent would later write with a little indignity.
Stefan George in 1929, four years before his death
Source: De Agostini via Getty Images
They talked about books, what else? But George must have shown his non-literary interest in the six-year-old younger.
In any case, he immediately wrote a poem, based on George's lower case, entitled "Mr. stefan george, someone who passes by".
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It contains the now famous lines: "You reminded me of things / that are secretly inside me / you were for the strings of the soul / the nocturnal whispering wind."
No wonder that the person addressed said “I was deeply delighted by your beautiful confession” and immediately visited the young man at home.
Still in the afternoon of December 24th.
It then continued over the holidays with mutual compliments, which apparently burdened Hofmannsthal more than pleased; at any rate, another poem was immediately written in which he wrote his irritation off his mind, now again in correct capital letters: “In a hall he has receive me / Which mysteriously scares me with violence / Pervaded by sweet smells disgustingly ”.
Meeting place: Café Griensteidl in Vienna in a photo taken around 1900
Source: Getty Images
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Then it got even bigger.
The stormy George sent the wooed, who had to go to school again after the New Year, a pompous bouquet of red roses into the classroom, "to the lively amusement of his classmates", as Leopold von Andrian would later recall with relish.
As a result, for dear Hugo, "who feared nothing more than ridicule, the situation became untenable".
It went back and forth for a while with letters, corrections and a threat to a duel.
Finally he asked Mr. Papa to settle the matter.
And he asked George in clear words not to “want to force” the “intercourse” with his son.
This is how it happened, which did not rule out occasional collaboration later on.
And many enthusiastic male friendships including violent declarations of love on the part of Hofmannsthal no less.
However, "the border with Sodom", so Andrian sums up, was "probably never crossed".
Rather, Hofmannsthal married at 27, had three children and then continued to devote himself to his love affairs with men.
You can't
want to
be gay either
.
And split off his sexuality for the wife.
All life as a writer is said to be paper
.
In this series we provide counter-evidence.
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