Hermann Georg Scheffauer

Hermann Georg Scheffauer

Herman George Scheffauer (born February 3, 1878 in San Francisco, US; died October 7, 1927 in Berlin), was a German-American poet, architect, writer, dramatist and translator.

Life and work

So far, little is known about Scheffauer's youth, education and early adult years in America or of his parents. His father was Johann Georg Scheffauer, a cabinet maker ("Tischler"), probably born in 1842 in the village of Unterkochen, Württemberg, who had first immigrated to America in 1868, and then returned again to Germany married his mother Maria Theresa Scheffauer (née Eisele) who came back with him in 1872.[1] He was related to the celebrated German sculptor Philipp Jacob Scheffauer (1756–1808)[2] the young school-friend of the poet Friedrich Schiller, who was his great grandfather.[3] His brother, the civil engineer, Frederick Carl Scheffauer, was born the same year in San Francisco.[4] Educated in public and private schools, he also attended a Roman Catholic Sunday school in San Francisco (probably St. Boniface Church-Franciscans) where services were conducted in German, later writing about the role of the nuns and a certain Father Gerhard instilling into the youth terrifying and hellish religious imagery.[5] He went through a youthful period, shared, he believed by many young men of the time, of a combination of "idealistic fanaticism mixed with Byronic romanticism." He began his career as an amateur printer, printing a broadsheet called 'The Owl' while he was still at school. He discovered that he was a poet from the age of ten, and only wanted to write poetry but his parents insisted that he pursue a proper job. He studied art, painting and architecture at the Arts School of the University of California (The Mark Hopkins Institute[6]). He later worked as a teacher of draughting and a water colourist in an architectural capacity. He was aware that “Ingersoll was in the air", 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 Complaint, or Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality (1742) by the English poet Edward Young to compensate. However, he soon departed from this religiosity and became aware of the heated discussions about the 'missing link'. He said that the following authors came to his aid in California and gave him "light and breathing space", namely works by Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, Arthur Schopenhauer, Herbert Spencer, Ludwig Feuerbach and Ludwig Büchner. Probably the greatest influence on his thinking, in the sense of a clearer scientific Weltanschauung, was a chance encounter with Ernst Haeckel's 'Die Welträtsel' (The world riddle) in the F. W. Barkhouse bookshop, 213 Kearney Street, San Francisco, where he discovered the massively popular book The Riddle of the Universe at the close of the nineteenth century (1901).[7] 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 seeks to unify poetry with science”. At about the same time he also began to read Nietzsche enthusiastically. His friendship with the poet George Sterling had began around February 1903, and it brought with it a whole circle of friends including Jack London, Dr. C. W. Doyle,[8] 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.

Scheffauer gave up his architectural day job and wrote poetry and short stories. He was encouraged by the journalist and short story writer and veteran of the Civil War Ambrose Bierce, who, it has been claimed,[9] 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 15 years of age had used the pseudonym Jonathan Stone, and his poem was favourably compared to the American romantic poet William Cullen Bryant.[10] Thereafter Bierce published a number of his poems in his 'Prattle' column 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 as "an unpublished poem of Poe".[11] This carefully planned 'Poe hoax' however, passed without creating much attention. 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"[12] and the nature of Algernon Swinburne's alliteration. In 1904 he would speak of Richard Wagner as "the Master". Bierce later 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.”[13][14] After his mysterious disappearance in 1913 in Mexico and his presumed death, and despite their estrangement, Scheffauer was responsible for publishing and editing translations of collections of Bierce's short stories in Germany:Physiognomien des Todes. Novellen von Ambrose Bierce (1920) and Der Mann und die Schlange: Phantastische Erzählungen von Ambrose Bierce (1922).[15]

Tour of Europe and North Africa 1904–1906

Bierce knew of Scheffauer's plans for a tour of Europe as early as August 1903[16] and invited him to Washington beforehand. 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 much,[17] 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 his own collection 'Of Both Worlds'. He maintained a correspondence with him for over 15 years and would translate some of his works. His tour of the 'old world' included Paris, Budapest, Vienna, Munich, Nuremberg,[18] Switzerland, Italy (Palermo, Rome, Milan, Naples,[19] Capri), Spain (Barcelona, Zaragoza, Madrid, Toledo, Corboda, Seville ("The Spanish Paris"), Cadiz). He also travelled to Morocco (Tangier), Gibraltar, Algeciras, Granada, Tunisia and Algeria. 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.[20] 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. 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." and was also at Oxford University: "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."[21]

In connection with his writings on Haeckel and his enthusiasm for the philosophy of Monism he worked closely with Joseph McCabe visiting his home in Cricklewood a number of times, and later with Charles Albert Watts and the Rationalist Press Association. He published 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."[22]

He eventually returned to San Francisco early 1907. He wrote his first novel entitled Niagara. An American Romance of four generations (1909) finishing it in San Francisco in April of that year. 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 (184 Eldridge St) 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.

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[23] (1888–1976) who published a collection of poems entitled London Windows (1912).[24] 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". 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. After their marriage (June 25, 1912) 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!”[25] 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."[26] 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 role of Simon Ehrlich.

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. When he published his translation of Heinrich Heine's Atta Troll (1913) Levy wrote an introductory essay for it. He knew J[ohn]. M[urray]. Kennedy, and many of that small "crew"[27] of British Nietzscheans[28] 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.”[29] Scheffauer published here a number of his poems including The Prayer of Beggarman Death and Not After Alma-Tadema he also published his 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. 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". This expressionist play that had predicted the war and had seen through the hidden mechanisms that encouraged its unfolding, had depicted the sleepwalkers, is one of his most important but neglected works. After the onset of the First World War throughout 1914–1917, during America's phase of neutrality, his articles from London for the New York based American pro-German magazines, under the aegis of the German-American Literary Defense Committee (GALDC), were widespread and numerous, chiefly for The Vital Issue (edited by Franz J. L. Dorl [30]) and The Fatherland (edited by George Sylvester Viereck who Scheffauer had known in New York since late 1909).

"Armed with my American passport": The Flight to Berlin 1915

Increasingly concerned about the anti-German riots in England and his "furrin" looking name, as well as having already received a visit from a Scotland Yard detective to his house,[31] he left London with his wife for Berlin via Amsterdam in March 1915 and after settling in Berlin-Friedenau (Taunus Strasse 13) was soon appointed editor of the pro-German American newspaper The Continental Times. A Cosmopolitan Newspaper published for Americans in Europe which was published three times a week. He used the pseudonyms R. L. Orchelle and later Sagittarius. He was a friend and colleague of Sir Roger Casement in Berlin who also wrote for the newspaper. Because of his propaganda work for this newspaper 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 "super-Tartuffe", he was indicted in absentia for treason in 1919, although, as he wrote to Haeckel[32] he had already resigned his position in December 1916 as editor before America had even entered the war. Already in March 1916 he was 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...".[33] 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”[34]

He never returned to America or England and the irony of being a persecuted poet could not have escaped him, after all he had already translated Heinrich Heine's own introductory words written in 1841 to his 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 Franzisca 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. In addition to works of Georg Kaiser and Klabund, he translated Thomas Mann's Herr und Hund that 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), as well as 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.[35] The Magic Mountain was translated by Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter instead.

Scheffauer and Thomas Mann had a collegial, friendly relationship.[35][36] 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,[35] such as Herman Melville'sMoby 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 his friend Sinclair Lewis Die Hauptstrasse (Main Street) and Babbitt appeared in the series,[37] 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.

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) or F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), that he wrote passionately about and praised as "a new stereoscopic universe" where space had been given a new voice in a "cubistic world of intense relief and depth"[38] 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. ”[39] As Anthony Vidler has written: “Scheffauer anticipates all the later commonplaces of expressionistic criticism from Siegfried Kracauer to Rudolf Kurtz.”[40] 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 killed himself and his secretary in 1927 at the age of 49 years[41] It was an act of mental derangement brought on by an extreme unimaginable depression. He wrote to his wife shortly before he killed himself, who was 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”.

The PEN Club of Berlin held a memorial service for him on October 27 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, due perhaps to his “undomiciled internationality”(der unbeheimateten Internationalität);[42] the American writer Upton Sinclair also gave a passionate speech at this memorial service for his “friend in struggle”.

Selected works

Poems, stories and plays:

Selected short stories

  • The Thief of Fame. In: Harper's Magazine, August 1913, pp. 399–408
  • The Black Fog. In: The Atlantic Monthly, February 1908, pp. 269–272.

Translations

  • Friedrich Nietzsche: Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Vol. 17, 1911
  • Heinrich Heine: Atta Troll, 1913
  • Rosa Mayreder: Zur Kritik der Weiblichkeit, 1913
  • Gabriele D’Annunzio: On the Death of a Destroyer. Friedrich Nietzsche, XXV August, MCM. From the Italian of Gabriele D’Annunzio. By Herman Scheffauer., in: The New Age. A Weekly Review of Politics, Literature and Art, Vol. XVI. No.20. Thursday, March 18, 1915, pp. 542–544.
  • Ernst Müller-Meiningen: "Who are the Huns?" The Law of Nations and its breakers, 1915
  • Friedrich Stampfer: From Versailles to Peace!, Berlin, 1920
  • Siegfried Mette: The Treaty of Versailles and other peace treaties of the era Napoleon-Bismark, 1921
  • Allemand Daudet: Tartarin on the Rhine, 1922
  • Thomas Mann: Bashan and I, 1924
  • Georg Kaiser: Gas, 1924
  • Eric Mendelsohn: Structures and Sketches, 1924
  • Klabund: Peter the Czar, 1925
  • Leo Tolstoy: Letters from Tolstoi, 1926
  • Thomas Mann: Children and Fools, 1928
  • Thomas Mann: Early Sorrow, 1930
  • Thomas Mann: A Man and His Dog, 1930

Essays

  • Haeckel, A Colossus of Science, in: The North American Review, August 1910, pp. 217–226.
  • Nietzsche the Man, in: Edinburgh Review, July 1, 1913
  • A Correspondence between Nietzsche and Strindberg, in: The North American Review, July 1, 1913
  • Whitman in Whitman's land, in: The North American Review, 1915
  • The German Prison-House. How to Convert it Into a Torture-Chamber and a Charnel. Suggestions to President Wilson, Selbstverlag des Verfassers, Berlin 1919.
  • The Infant in the Newssheet. An Ode against the Age, The Overseas Publishing Company, Hamburg 1921
  • Blood Money: Woodrow Wilson and the Nobel peace prize, The Overseas Publishing Company, Hamburg 1921
  • The Lear-Tragedy of Ernst Haeckel, in: The Open Court, 1921
  • Das Land Gottes. Das Gesicht des neuen Amerika, Verlag Paul Steegemann, Hannover 1923[ It was dedicated to his friend John Lawson Stoddard "Meinem teuren Freunde John L. Stoddard dem Vorbild edelsten Amerikanertums gewidmet"]
  • Joaquin Miller, der Dichter der Sierras, in: Deutsche Rundschau, January 1923
  • The New Vision in the German Arts, Ernest Benn, London 1924
  • The Work of Walter Gropius, in: Architectural Review, July 1924
  • Das geistige Amerika von heute, Ullstein Verlag, Berlin 1925
  • Wenn ich Deutscher wär! Die Offenbarungen eines Amerikaners über Deutschlands Größe und Tragik, Verlag Max Koch, Leipzig 1925

Works about Scheffauer

  • Heinz J. Armbrust, Gert Heine: Herman George Scheffauer. In: Wer ist wer im Leben von Thomas Mann. Ein Personenlexikon. Verlag Vittorio Klostermann, Frankfurt a.M. 2008, p. 247. ISBN 978-3-465-03558-9
  • Online Archive of California: Herman George Scheffauer Photograph Album, ca. 1885-ca. 1925 (Short biography, selected bibliography and photographs)
  • The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley: Photograph of Hermann Georg Scheffauer and his wife Ethel Talbot, undated
  • Herman George Scheffauer papers, 1893–1927 BANC MSS 73/87 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Correspondence, manuscripts and other writings of Herman George Scheffauer. A good portion of the material pertains to Scheffauer's mentor, Ambrose Bierce (including copies of Bierce's correspondence with Dr. C.W. Doyle). The letters from Bierce to Scheffauer include references to Jack London, George Sterling and other writers (and include transcriptions as well as originals). Also included in the collection is a small amount of correspondence and writings of Scheffauer's wife, Ethel (Talbot) Scheffauer.) http://www.oac.cdlib.org/search?style=oac4;titlesAZ=h;idT=UCb110038071
  • Herman George Scheffauer Photograph Album, ca. 1885-ca. 1925. The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. The Herman George Scheffauer Photograph Album contains 130 photographs taken circa 1885-1925. Nearly all the photographs in the album feature Scheffauer, many of them being portraits taken by professional photographers in San Francisco, London, and Berlin. Other notable persons featured in the collection include Ambrose Bierce, George Sterling, Haig Patigian, James Hopper, Frederick Bechdolt, as well as Scheffauer's wife Ethel and their daughter Fiona. Identifiable locations featured in the collection include the Bohemian Grove, London, Scotland, Spain and Germany. A few of the photographs feature sculptural or painted portraits of Scheffauer.
  • There are 93 letters of Scheffauer to H. L. Mencken (1921–1927) amongst the H.L. Mencken papers 1905–1956 (MssCol 1962) in the New York Public Library, Archives & Manuscripts.

References

  1. ↑ Who's Who in America: a Biographical Dictionary of Notable Living Men and Women of the United States. 1908–1909.
  2. ↑ "Scheffauer, Philipp Jacob" in: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie 30 (1890), S. 672–676 [Onlinefassung]; URL: http://www.deutsche-biographie.de/pnd117185191.html?anchor=adb
  3. ↑ „Die Tragodie eines Publizisten. Der Schriftsteller Hermann George Scheffauer ersticht seine Sekretaerin und veruebt Selbstmord. Die Motive bisher unbekannt.“, in: Hamburger Anzeiger (08 October 1927), p.4.
  4. ↑ The National Cyclopædia of American Biography,Vol.57, p.611.
  5. ↑ Was wir Ernst Haeckel verdanken. Ein Buch der Verehrung und Dankbarkeit (1914). It is highly probable that Scheffauer had read the serialisation of James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man that, through Ezra Pound's help had originally appeared in The Egoist (1914-1915).
  6. ↑ http://www.sfmuseum.net/1906.2/hopkins.html
  7. ↑ online edition https://archive.org/details/riddleoftheunive034957mbp
  8. ↑ Dr. Charles William Doyle (1852–1903)
  9. ↑ Edward F. O'Day, "The Poetry of San Francisco", in: The Lantern. Edited by Theodore F. Bonnet and Edward F.O’Day, Vol.3. No.6, September 1917, p.176.
  10. ↑ San Francisco Call, Vol.74, Number 179, 26 November 1893.
  11. ↑ See Carroll D. Hall, Bierce and the Poe hoax. With an Introduction by Carey McWilliams (San Francisco, The Book Club of California, 1934.)
  12. ↑ Walter Neale, Life of Ambrose Bierce (New York, 1929),p.222.
  13. ↑ Ambrose Bierce to Herman Scheffauer, Washington, November 11, 1903, in: A Much Misunderstood Man: Selected Letters of Ambrose Bierce. Edited by S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz (The Ohio State University Press, 2003) p.115
  14. ↑ Roy Morris, Ambrose Bierce. Allein in schlechter Gesellschaft. Biographie. Haffmans Verlag, Zürich 1999, p. 347, 370.
  15. ↑ See Friedel H. Bastein, „Bierce in the German-Speaking Countries (1892-1982); A Bibliography of Works by and about Him“, in: American Literary Realism, Vol. 18, No. 1/2 (Spring - Autumn, 1985), p.231.
  16. ↑ “When am I to see you on your way to Europe?” AB to HS, August 4, 1903, in: A Much Misunderstood Man: Selected Letters of Ambrose Bierce. Edited by S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz (The Ohio State University Press, 2003), p.109.
  17. ↑ AB to HS, July 17, 1904, Ibid., p.125.
  18. ↑ His stay in Nuremberg inspired him to write the poem "The Iron Virgin in the Five-Cornered Tower "(1905)
  19. ↑ Scheffauer later wrote about his experience in Naples climbing Vesuvius: See Scheffauer "A Victory over Vesuvius", in: Macmillan's Magazine, Vol. 1.-New Series November 1905 to October 1906, (London Macmillan and Co., Limited New York: The Macmillan Company, 1906),pp.613–616. “That morning in February I awoke and found all Naples white with snow. Such a thing, said the natives, had not occurred for twenty years.”
  20. ↑ Belloc had visited California in 1890 and returned again in 1896 where, at Napa, he married Elodie Hogan.
  21. ↑ Town Talk, Vol. XIV. No.724, San Francisco, July 14, 1906,p.10.
  22. ↑ See Scheffauer's 'The City Beautiful-San Francisco Rebuilt, in: The Architectural Review A Magazine of Architecture the Arts of Design, Vol. XX, No.117, August 1906.
  23. ↑ His wife should not be confused with another English author of the same name, Ethel Talbot (1880–1944), who wrote over sixty adventures, school stories, and Girl Guide novels: http://www.booksandwriters.co.uk/T/ethel-talbot.html).
  24. ↑ See photos at http://content.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/tf400007dv/ – courtesy of UC Berkeley, Bancroft Library.
  25. ↑ See “London in August, 1914. Sleuth-Hound and “Spy. By R. L. Orchelle”, in: Issues and Events. A Weekly Magazine, pp. 179–181, this was originally published in The Continental Times.
  26. ↑ October 12, 1913
  27. ↑ The Nietzsche Movement in England: A Retrospect, a Confession, and a Prospect. By Dr. Oscar Levy. II., in: The New Age (December 26, 1912), p.181.
  28. ↑ On Levy, see Dan Stone, Breeding Superman. Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain, Liverpool University Press, 2002,pp.12–32.
  29. ↑ “Through Alien Eyes”, in: The New Age, February 6, 1913, p.335
  30. ↑ On Dorl's correspondence with Johann Heinrich von Bernstorff and later internment, see Jörg Nagler, Nationale Minoritäten im Krieg "Feindliche Ausländer" und die amerikanische Heimatfront während des Ersten Weltkriegs (Hamburg, 2000), 517.
  31. ↑ See “London in August, 1914. Sleuth-Hound and “Spy. By R. L. Orchelle”, in: Issues and Events. A Weekly Magazine, pp. 179–181.
  32. ↑ Scheffauer to Ernst Haeckel, Berlin-Friedenau, Dez. 30, 1916 (Archiv des Ernst Haeckel Hauses Jena, Nachlass Ernst Haeckel) "Ich habe jetzt meine Stellung als literarischer Redakteur der "Continental Times" aufgegeben"
  33. ↑ The Poets Without a Country By Robert Haven Schauffler, in: The New York Times, March 5, 1916
  34. ↑ ‘POET HELD A TRAITOR: Herman Scheffauer Indicted for Hun Propaganda. Open Letter Denounces U.S. His Sympathies With Germany. Californian Wrote of “Serfdom of America”- Pro-German Literature Strewn Over Allied Battle-Lines by Enemy Ballons”(By the Associated Press.), in: The Washington Post, January 9, 1919, p.1.
  35. 1 2 3 Heinz J. Armbrust, Gert Heine: Herman George Scheffauer. In: Wer ist wer im Leben von Thomas Mann. Ein Personenlexikon. Verlag Vittorio Klostermann, Frankfurt a.M. 2008, p. 57, p. 247.
  36. ↑ "Ich hatte den Mann persönlich gern, ich war ihm dankbar, weil er mehrere meiner Arbeiten mit außerordentlicher Kunst und Liebe ins Englische übersetzt hatte, zudem galt er als ausgezeichneter Kenner der angelsächsischen Literaturen." [GW 11: 760–1]
  37. ↑ "Dieser Bücher zeigen den Wurm, der am Herzen des amerikanischen Lebens nagt, den tiefen Zweifel und die Unseligkeit, die aus der inneren Hohlheit und äußeren Flachheit des Lebens entspringt und die sich in unaufhörlicher äußerer Tätigkeit zu zerstreuen sucht.(These books show the worm that gnaws at the heart of American life, the deep doubting and salvation that arises from an inner hollowness and outward flatness of life, and which through unceasing external activity seeks dissipation.)" Scheffauer, Das Land Gottes. Das Gesicht des neuen Amerika (1923), S.189.
  38. ↑ "Cubism on the Screen", in: The New York Times, Nov. 28, 1920, p.79
  39. ↑ Scheffauer, "The Vivifying of Space," Freeman (24 November-1 December 1920); reprinted in Lewis Jacobs, ed., Introduction to the Art of the Movies (New York: Noonday Press, 1960), pp.76-85.
  40. ↑ Anthony Vidler, Warped Space: Art, Architecture and Anxiety in Modern Culture (MIT Press, 2002), p.104.; cf.J. P. Telotte, Animating Space: From Mickey to Wall-E. (University Press of Kentucky, 2010) pp.223-4.
  41. ↑ See the biographical information in Online Archive of California: Herman George Scheffauer Photograph Album, ca. 1885-ca. 1925
  42. ↑ „Trauerfeier für Herman George Scheffauer“, in: Berliner Tageblatt (28 Oct 1927),p.3

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