Hermann Georg Scheffauer

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File:Hermann Georg Scheffauer.jpg
Hermann Georg Scheffauer

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

Life and work

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

San Francisco childhood

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

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

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

Early intellectual influences

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

Protegé of Ambrose Bierce

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

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

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

Tour of Europe and North Africa 1904–1906

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

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Scheffauer as European correspondent for Town Talk

First residence in London 1905-1907

He was back in London in the summer of 1905 where he regularly "mined" the British museum. He joined the New Bohemian Club at The Prince's Head in the Strand, and drank what he thought was rather tepid English ale with literary figures such as Stephen Phillips, G. K. Chesterton and the poet and parliamentarian Hilaire Belloc.[34] He met Henry James who he found to be more English than American at a New Year's Eve party at the home of the writer Edmund Gosse.[35] He made a pilgrimage to Plymouth: "From Plymouth, as you know, sailed forth the blue-nosed Puritans to make laws just as blue and to burn witches in Massachusetts." He also studied at Oxford University although we do not yet know what lectures he was attending: "I'm spending a short time up here in this picturesque place of dead creeds and living prejudices. Have been attending special lectures and studying the life. It appears to me like an immense boy's school. There is little of the true scholastic spirit or the impetus of scientific research about the place— nothing compared with the German universities."[36]

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

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

Return to San Francisco and New York 1907-1911

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

Second residence in London 1911–1915

He moved back to London early 1911 and remained living there until 1915. He married the English poet, Ethel Talbot[40] (1888–1976) who published a collection of poems entitled London Windows (1912).[41] A review of her work said that in phraseology she follows largely Swinburne and William Ernest Henley.[42] She had written about how to read Poe in 1909 on the 100th anniversary of his birth: "The most perfect mood is a fugitive mental weariness that is neither sorrow nor longing; when you come then to Poe the lassitude gives way before the soothing sweetness of his unforgettable melodies".[43] He was struck with this "most excellent advice", as well as her youth and intelligence, already in May 1910 he had proclaimed her: “one of the most gifted as well as youngest of England’s poets”. He had found not only an English protégé but his Diotima. He had previously written a strident epithalamium published in his collection Looms of Life (1908) entitled The Forging of the Rings. After their marriage (June 25, 1912) which took place in Highgate, they moved into a house, Bank Point, at Jackson’s Lane, Highgate, North London. Satirically reflecting on the outbreak of German spy-mania in England a few years later he would write: "Our house bore little resemblance to the conventional and ugly London villas all arrow. It was just such a place as would have appealed to a German spy, for it commanded a lordly view over all London. Precisely the place to give signals to Zeppelins!”[44]

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

International success of his play 'The New Shylock'

In 1913 his play 'The New Shylock' was performed at Danzig in Germany. The New York Times under the headline: "Danzig Applauds Scheffauer's Play" wrote: "Mr. Scheffauer attended the opening and responded to a number of enthusiastic curtain-calls. The play has already been bought for production in Bonn, Strassburg, and Posen, and negotiations for its production in Berlin are pending."[45] In November 1914 the play was performed at Annie Horniman's Repertory Theatre in Manchester, the first American drama ever written and performed at this theatre. A minor legal battle ensued between Scheffauer (who had the full backing of The Society of Authors) and the Jewish theatrical producer Philip Michael Faraday who attempted to censor some of the text. It was then transferred to London in 1914–15 under the changed title The Bargain. It was also produced in America at the Comedy Theatre, New York in October 1915 in which the celebrated English actor Louis Calvert appeared playing the leading role of Simon Ehrlich.

Scheffauer's translations of Heine and Nietzsche

In London he was a close friend of Oscar Levy, the editor of the first complete edition of Nietzsche's Collected Works (1909–1913) and contributed many English translations of Nietzsche's poems. Some of his Nietzsche translations appeared in his Drake in California Ballads and Poems (1912). When he published his translation of Heinrich Heine's Atta Troll. Ein Sommernachtstraum (1913) Levy wrote an introductory essay for it. He knew J[ohn]. M[urray]. Kennedy, and many of that small "crew"[46] of British Nietzscheans[47] and Imagists that centered around The New Age. A Weekly Review of Politics, Literature and Art, edited by A. R. Orage. In one letter to Ezra Pound,who also contributed regularly to The New Age, he assured him of their spiritual affinity: “Mr. Pound’s opinion of things American is, I take it through his confessions, quite as healthy and unabashedly modest as my own.”[48] Scheffauer printed here a number of his poems including 'The Prayer of Beggarman Death (A Rime Macabre)' and 'Not After Alma-Tadema', as well as his English translation of Gabriele D'Annunzio's homage to Nietzsche "Per la Morte di un Distruttore". He published many short stories in the leading literary magazines such as the Pall Mall Magazine, the Strand Magazine, the Lady's Realm and T. P.'s Weekly and appears to have adopted a transatlantic strategy of publishing his stories in both English and American magazines.

Anti-war writings

Some of his earliest poems The Ballad of the Battlefield (1900), or those from his Of Both Worlds (1903), such as The Song of the Slaughtered, Disarmament and Bellomaniacs, showed that his pacifist tendencies were quite pronounced. In 1906 he had even advocated an entente cordial between England and Germany. England ought to seek her "natural ally... in a race and nation more closely related in all essential and significant points."[49] In 1925 he declared: "War is the most terrible hostage of mankind. My voice has always been loud for peace, long before it became a passion, a mode or a necessity to be a pacifist. I have not only spoken for peace, I have even fought against war.”[50]

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Coloured plate on cover, designed by Scheffauer?

His truly visionary expressionist play The Hollow Head of Mars: A Modern Masque in Four Phases appeared in April 1915 but it had been finished in 1913, written in staccato blank verse he said that it was not "an insurrectionary experiment in vers libre" and that "It is useless to seek for parallels between the nations actually at war and these visionary combatants". His play had predicted the war and had seen through the hidden mechanisms that had encouraged its unfolding, depicting the sleepwalkers listening to the artificially produced voice of Mars, it is one of his most important but neglected works. The character of the 'Mountebank' is clearly presented as a Mephistophelean figure, whispering affectionately into the ear of ‘The Minister of War’ and gleefully drinking every drop of blood in his beaker and toasting “To Liberty”. It is a character that is deliriously happy at the increasing numbers of soldier recruits that join him, their blood as he says: “manure for the victory of lilies”. This macabre play on war shows him as a true protégé of Bierce. After the onset of the First World War throughout 1914–1917, during America's phase of neutrality, his articles sent from London back to the New York based American pro-German magazines, under the aegis of the German-American Literary Defense Committee (GALDC), were widespread and numerous, it was here that he "fought against war" and attempted to influence America's position. He wrote chiefly for The Vital Issue (edited by Franz J. L. Dorl [51]) and The Fatherland (edited by George Sylvester Viereck who Scheffauer had known in New York since late 1909).

The flight to Amsterdam and Berlin 1915

Increasingly concerned about the anti-German riots in England[52] and his "furrin" looking name, as well as having already received a visit from a Scotland Yard detective to his house,[53] he left London with his wife for Berlin via Amsterdam in March 1915. He wanted to familiarize himself with the circumstances in Germany and “better orientate himself” so that he could write better, and was considering returning to America. However, after finding a flat in Berlin-Friedenau he was soon appointed editor[54] of the pro-German American newspaper The Continental Times. A Cosmopolitan Newspaper published for Americans in Europe which was published three times a week. It boasted of sales in Austria, Italy, Switzerland, United States and the Netherlands and proclaimed itself in its headed paper as “The Leading Newspaper for Americans on the Continent”. It was said to have been founded as early as 1909. Writing for this newspaper he continued to use the pseudonym R. L. Orchelle and later used Sagittarius. He was a friend and colleague of Sir Roger Casement in Berlin who also wrote for the newspaper. His propaganda work and his ferocious attacks on President Woodrow Wilson who he said was "the most despicable miscreant in history,- a man whose incapacity, dishonesty and treachery brought about the most terrible failure in human history" calling him "...a new kind of monster- a super-Tartuffe, unimagined even by Moliere, unachieved even by Shakespeare."[55] made him a marked man. He was indicted in absentia for treason in 1919, although, as he wrote to Haeckel[56] he had resigned his position as literary editor in December 1916 before America had even entered the war. In March 1916 he had been attacked in The New York Times as one of a triumvirate of American poets (together with Ezra Pound and Viereck) who had turned their backs on their country: "In childish wrath they seek a foreign shore; / There, turning on the land they loved before,/ They smear foul rhymes upon her honoured name...".[57] It was a letter to J. M. Kennedy (who wrote in The New Age using the pseudonym "S. Verdad") that was cited by the Federal Grand Jury as an example of his treason:

“You say that I turned upon a country to which I professed allegiance in favor of a country now its deadly enemy. I have never professed allegiance to any country. To England I owe none. To America, as a born citizen, I owed it only according to the dictates of my conscience. I oppose the policy of America now- or that of the powers which have my unfortunate country in thralls- as I have always opposed the English policy which dictated it, because I knew it to be hopelessly, damnably wrong”[58]

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

Friendship with Thomas Mann, setting the tone

In April 1924 Scheffauer wrote about Mann's "crisp, skeptic, [and] collected mind..., a mind almost pedantic in its precision of expression, its tortuous searching for the exact word, the luminous phrase. Mann, who might in his externals pass for an English M.P. or a youngish major...."[59] He had by then already translated Thomas Mann's Herr und Hund which had appeared in The Freeman (1922–23) in six installments, it was then published as a book Bashan and I. Translated by H. G. Scheffauer. (Henry Holt, New York, 1923). Scheffauer also translated Mann's Disorder and early sorrow that appeared in The Dial. Thomas Mann wanted to entrust him with the translation of his novel 'Der Zauberberg'(The Magic Mountain), but failed, due to opposition of his American publisher Alfred A. Knopf.[60] The Magic Mountain was translated by Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter instead.

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

Scheffauer and Thomas Mann had a collegial, friendly relationship.[60][61] Scheffauer told Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche in 1924 that Mann had assured him that he much preferred reading his English translation of Herr und Hund rather than the original German. In April 1927, they took over the editorship of a series Romane der Welt (Novels of the World), published by Thomas Knaur Nachfolger Verlag in Berlin. Each week a novel for about 2,85 Marks appeared, approximately 58 vols. were published in the RdW series,[60] such as Herman Melville's Moby Dick oder Der Weisse Wal and Taipi and Cashel Byrons Beruf by G.B.Shaw (with forewords by Scheffauer); works by Hugh Walpole, Hillaire Belloc, G. K. Chesterton, P. G. Wodehouse, John Galsworthy, Radclyffe Hall, Arnold Bennett, Francis Brett Young, Liam O'Flaherty et al. The choice of American literature very much reflecting his ideas in a key lecture he gave at the University of Berlin in 1921 and contained in nuce in his chapter on 'Art and Literature' from his work Das Land Gottes (1923), thus, the work of Sinclair Lewis Die Hauptstrasse (Main Street) and Babbitt appeared in the series,[62] novels by Joseph Hergesheimer such as Java Head; and Tampico (also with a foreword by Scheffauer), Floyd Dell, 'George Challis' the pseudonym of Max Brand, Lesley Storm and Mary Borden, as well as many westerns by Zane Grey. Also German works by Eugen Binder von Krieglstein and Conrad Ferdinand Meyer and the series also included many French and Spanish authors. The democratic intent of the series was palpable, and it was attacked in some conservative literary circles as unnecessary 'flooding' of the German market. Scheffauer was present at the first meeting of the German PEN-Group on December 15, 1924 that had named Ludwig Fulda as its first president, and he was also a close friend of Walter von Molo.

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

Scheffauer never relinquished his original vocation as both poet and architect, he regarded words as things with which to build. His love of architecture in the 1920s was reaffirmed again with articles on Erich Mendelsohn, Walter Gropius, Hans Poelzig, Bruno Taut and the Bauhaus movement. Scheffauer played an important role in describing some of the contemporary art-movements in Germany for a wider English and American audience. This was particularly the case with German expressonist cinema such as Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), and much later Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927)[63] He wrote passionately about film and praised it as "a new stereoscopic universe" where space had been given a new voice in a "cubistic world of intense relief and depth"[64] As both poet and architect he would write on this Vivifying of Space: “Space - hitherto considered and treated as something dead and static, a mere inert screen or frame, often of no more significance than the painted balustrade background at the village photographer's - has been smitten into life, into movement and conscious expression. A fourth dimension has begun to evolve out of this photographic cosmos. ”[65] As Anthony Vidler has written: “Scheffauer anticipates all the later commonplaces of expressionistic criticism from Siegfried Kracauer to Rudolf Kurtz.”[66] He would acclaim: “the function of the German film is to give the American film that which it does not possess —and that is soul”. His aesthetic and sociological criticism was tinged with his own incomplete attempt at “de-americanisation”["weil er nicht gänzlich ent-amerikanisieret ist"]- as his friend Oscar Levy once put it, and it was also very clear to Levy that Scheffauer still retained a fair share of American puritanism that so animated all of his criticism. Scheffauer’s collection of essays: The New Vision in the German Arts (London,1924) was testimony to this unique German-American poetical and philosophical sensibility.

Scheffauer's suicide 1927

Scheffauer killed himself and his secretary in 1927 at the age of 51 years.[67] It was a horrific act of mental derangement brought on at a time when he was suffering from an extreme depression. He wrote to his wife shortly before he killed himself, who was staying with their daughter at their villa in Dießen am Ammersee, Bavaria (on the shores of Ammersee lake), that he was in great “mental torment”, and that each day it felt as if he was “...suffering the death of ten thousand mortal agonies”. A couple of letters between Scheffauer and his wife were published (in German translation[68]) to scotch some of the rumours that had arisen about their own relationship and of the moral integrity of his secretary.

The PEN Club of Berlin, of which he was a founding member and its secretary, held a memorial service for him on October 27 together with a madrigal choir. Karl Oscar Bertling the director of the Berliner Amerika-Institut at the University of Berlin, gave a speech and spoke of Scheffauer’s “poetic mission”(dichterische Sendung) and his “artistic priestliness”(kunstlerisches Priestertum); Thomas Mann praised his ability as a translator of his works and attempted to explain his unhappiness at the end of his life, of which he had not the slightest idea, he thought it was due to the nature of his “undomiciled internationality”(der unbeheimateten Internationalität);[69] the American writer Upton Sinclair also gave a passionate speech at this memorial service for his “friend in struggle”. According to newspaper reports his body was transferred to Dießen am Ammersee (which is twinned with Windermere in Cumbria, England), where he was buried.

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Autograph from Berlin, May 1925

Selected works

Poems, stories and plays:

  • The Isle of the Dead. In: Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine, Vol. 35, Issue 205, Jan 1900; p. 40.
  • Of Both Worlds: Poems. A. M. Robertson, San Francisco 1903
  • Looms of Life: Poems. The Neale Publishing Company, New York 1908
  • Drake in California: Ballads and Poems. A. C. Fifield, London 1912
  • The Ruined Temple, 1912 (Online edition)
  • The Masque of the Elements, J. M. Dent & Sons, London und E. P. Dutton & Co., New York 1912 (Online edition)
  • Der neue Shylock. Schauspiel in vier Akten, Berliner Theaterverlag, Berlin 1913
  • The Hollow Head of Mars. Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., Ltd., London 1915
  • Das Champagnerschiff und andere Geschichten, Ullstein Verlag, Berlin 1925
  • Atlantis, London in Snow, Manhattan, undated (Online edition)

Selected short stories

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