Poetry and rebellion

(Written on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the attempt on Hitler's life on July 20, 1944)

Abstract

The failure of the attempt against Hitler on 20th July 1944 carried out by the Colonel and Chief of the Defense Staff, Count Claus von Stauffenberg had terrible consequences for the conspirators, Germany, and Europe in general. Around five thousand per sons, direct or indirectly linked to the Resistance movement, were executed between that date and the end of the war. The attempt was not well understood by the allied countries nor by the German people itself. The first recognition of Resistance heroism w as paradoxically expressed by Winston Churchill in 1946. The Resistance against the Nazi dictatorship was much more important and started earlier than people think. Many of the high ranking officers of the Wehrmacht participated in it. Among them stand o ut the last general in chief of the army before Hitler assumed power Kurt von Hammerstein, Field Marshall Erwin Rommel, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, General Ludwig Beck and many others. They made innumerable attempts, first of coups d’état and later of murderi ng the tyrant, which all devilishly failed. In contrast to Nazi authorities, most of the conspirators were very refined people of great culture. In this study I try to go deeper into the relationships that the executor of the last attempt, Count Claus von Stauffenberg, has with poetry and with music, by contributing some unpublished data in this regard. I also reproduce, in my own translation into Spanish, the two poems which the poet Stefan George gave the hero on his death bed eleven years before the atte mpt, and which undoubtedly constitute a mission which Stauffenberg became aware of only later. Another important element of this story is that many of them have great admiration for the poet Rainer Maria Rilke to such extent that they employ as a motto for recognizing themselves the last lines of his “Requiem For Wolf Graf von Kalckreuth”: “Who speaks of victory?To endure is all.”