A LIFE IN THE SERVICE OF SINGING BEAUTY: ALFRED GRÜNEWALD
BY C. CAUNTER, December 2024

Fühle, Kind, / wie alle Schwere, die mein Leben litt, / beflügelt nun zu deinem Lächeln steigt. (Feel, child, / how all the heaviness my life has borne / now rises up on wings to your smiling.)

Doch du erzähle, wie dein Leben floß, / eh ich dich kannte. Komm, wir wandern weit / auf allen Wegen deiner Knabenzeit. (Come, tell me what your life was like / before I knew you. Let’s roam far and wide / along all the roads of your boyhood.)

These and many other memorable lines can be found in Sonette an einen Knaben und andere Gedichte (Sonnets to a Lad and Other Poems), a 2013 selection from the poetry of Austrian architect, poet, storywriter and dramatist Alfred Grünewald (1884-1942). Classical in form and diction, metrically sure-footed, his poems touchingly express the rapture inspired by the beauty and way of being of boys. The book is a trove of undisguised boy-love poetry of the highest quality, originally published across nine volumes that appeared between 1912 and 1937 – largely the same period in which an English Uranian poet whose life and work I’ve written about, E. E. Bradford, published his own poetry openly singing the love of boys. In the case of both, this theme suffuses a substantial body of work, though the two poets are different in character: Bradford more cheerfully assertive, Grünewald more melancholy – both, however, finding in their love a way of communing with the divine. For the present article I am principally indebted to Volker Bühn’s biographical essay on Grünewald in the said anthology. A fuller biography by Bühn was published in 2016 as Alfred Grünewald: Werk und Leben.

Alfred Grünewald was born Alfred Werner Grünwald into a Jewish family in Vienna in the Austro-Hungarian Empire on 17 March 1884. (He later added the e to distinguish himself from a contemporary librettist of the same first and last name.) ‘Fredo’ had protective, indulgent parents and was close especially to his mother and his elder sister Jenny. There was also a favourite uncle, Onkel Adi, with whom he devised a wolf language. His father, who had started out modestly, ended up managing the Austrian branch of an English cosmetics firm. A timid boy of delicate health, Fredo read voraciously and by age ten was writing poetry, including love poems in code. He recited his poems to his family; his recitations in adulthood would be critically acclaimed. He was also skilled at drawing and went on to study architecture. In his student days he left the Jewish community, converting to Catholicism.

He began to publish from 1906 onwards, around the time of his military service. Among the young literature lovers he associated with was Stefan Zweig, soon to be considered one of the world’s foremost writers. Grünewald found employment with avant-garde architect Alfred Loos. His early writing was gothic, romantic, mystical and archaising; he then began to express his inner life more personally through dreamy love lyrics addressed to beautiful striplings. The themes that would come to typify him included the beauty of an adored boy, often experienced only through seeing him, and expressed in religious terms; seeking salvation through the purgatory of beauty; the precedence of feeling over thought; melancholy evening moods; the consolation of dreams and a belief in the force of good. Beauty made him suffer on the one hand and consoled him on the other. About his 1918 collection Das Vöglein Süzelin, the Austrian author Alma Johanna Koenig (a lifelong friend, Jewish like him and murdered in 1942) wrote: ‘Each term of endearment appears to ask the sung one to forgive the poet for singing him, for loving him.’

Ich stand in Einsamkeit und gottgesellt. […] // So grüßte mich die unvergeßne Stunde, / eh du zum erstenmal vorüberschrittest. (I stood in loneliness and god-companioned. […] // So did the unforgotten hour greet me / ere for the first time you walked past.)

Darf ich mein Haupt in deine Helle heben, / der ich verstrickt in so viel Schatten bin? / Wird zum Verlust nicht jeglicher Gewinn? (Can I lift up my head towards your light, / I, who entangled am in so much shade? / Will any gains not turn to loss?)

Bühn remarks that some of the verses ‘are suggestive of pedagogical eros, that friendship and erotic tie between teacher and student which moderns look on askance because they no longer understand it.’ In his life as in his work, the poet was open about his attraction to males of adolescent age and into early adulthood. They crop up everywhere in his poems, short stories and plays. His family knew about his preference – it was virtually expected of a poet, as a niece of his would later remark. Although displaying an arresting openness about his love of boys, he never became a defender of such love, as John Henry Mackay and others were. Grünewald declared himself tolerant of all sexual tastes, but found sexual philosophies nonsensical and pitiful. The critics generally praised his way with words but expressed reservations about his work’s relatability, which the Austrian writer Oskar Jan Tauschinski later attributed to his theme. According to Tauschinski, the negative reactions he did receive contributed to his embrace of loneliness, asceticism and outsiderness as a calling. Nonetheless, the fact that open boy-love poetry could be published at all owes much to the spirit of toleration of idiosyncratic artistic expression in Western countries following World War I and through the 1920s. Over the 1930s, the persecution of same-sex sexuality intensified again in Europe.

Three of Grünewald’s friendships with youths are known. One intimate friendship was with the later physician and author Fritz Jensen (born Friedrich Albert Jerusalem, 1903-1955). He met Grünewald in adolescence and was part of a youth group active by 1918 called the Felonen – a name probably conferred by Grünewald – who discussed literature and left-wing politics, including at the poet’s home. At the time, Grünewald lived in a flat that was neatly decorated in the Biedermeier style, complete with Persian rugs. He was tidy in personal appearance, too, and dressed with some sophistication. His father had died early and his mother lived with him until her death in 1917. Jensen’s joining the Communist Party in 1929 led to a rupture between him and the poet. From the mid-1920s, Grünewald had a literary and erotic friendship with Franz Golffing (1910-2012). For some years they met almost daily, talking about literature, music and the visual arts. Golffing eventually helped him prepare his Ausgewählte Gedichte (Selected Poems), which came out in 1931. In 1939, a year after publishing his own first volume of poetry, Golffing fled Europe from the Nazis. He spent the rest of his life teaching and writing in the US, where he was known as Francis Golffing. He identified Eros as a ‘necessity both lovely and fearful’ in Grünewald’s poetry, such that the poet was ‘a direct descendant of Platen’ (the ephebe-attracted poet August von Platen). A third friendship of Grünewald’s, towards the end of his life, will be discussed below.

Mit jedem Tag, der blühte und verblich, / hab ich umengt mein g a n z e s Leid gelitten. / Gott wurde klein und harrte kalt inmitten, / und um sein starres Antlitz kreiste ich. // Bist du die Pforte mir zu neuen Wegen? (With every flowering and fading day, / hemmed in, I suffered all my pain. / God grew small and bided coldly in the middle, / and round his rigid face I went in circles. // Are you my gateway to new roads?)

Wind Wonne kam und warb um meinen Weier, / den ruhig atmenden, den knabenklaren. (The wind of rapture wooed my little water, / the pond so calmly breathing, boyish-bright.)

Grünewald had a genial, mild personality, though some found him reserved and, being unable to relate to him, treated him less than kindly. Several persons commented on his dreamy way of being, his seeming not entirely of this world. He had a fine sense of humour and recognised in himself a tendency to take a childlike delight in things. He saw childhood as a goal unto itself, not a preparation for adulthood, and wrote: ‘I rue those who have forgotten their childhood.’ An aphorism of his ran: ‘I strongly incline to the view that reaching adulthood is, in most cases, a process of destruction and degeneration.’ In the summers, he would visit the spa town of Baden with his sister Jenny. Here he wrote much, including short plays. In 1919 a play of his was performed for the first time, in the Wiener Komödienhaus. The critics found it polished in language but lacking in dramatic tension, with the dialogues too long and poetical. His later play Narziß und Foningtunso (1927), about an artist who descends into degeneracy when his companion, a godlike 15-year-old, is taken away from him, was staged once and earned him an honourary mention in the prestigious annual Kleist Prize.

Sonette an einen Knaben (Sonnets to a Lad) appeared in 1920, reportedly about a deceased boy, as per the dedication. The boy becomes a divine symbol, recalling Stefan George’s Maximin cycle, though Grünewald’s tone remains personal and tender. The cycle Dithyrambischer Herbst (Dithyrambic Autumn, dithyrambic poetry being poetry that expresses Dionysian ecstasy), which came out that same year, is addressed to one B. H.. Reviewers mostly praised the sonnets, one seeing in them ‘revelations of pure feelings’ and associating the tradition of the sonnet with chaste feeling. Der Eigene, the German monthly on male-male love including Greek love, praised Grünewald’s artistry but regretted that the poet’s warm, personal experience was mostly only hinted at. Hans Dietrich Hellbach in his 1931 study Die Freundesliebe in der deutschen Literatur (Love Between Friends in German Literature) glossed over Grünewald’s sonnets, finding them to have a ‘disagreeable pederastic undertone’.

Dem Herbst obsiegtest du, mein schöner Gast, / da du die Tage dunkelnden Verzichtes / mir mit der Helle deines Angesichtes / so übergoldet, überfrühlingt hast. (My pretty guest, you’ve overpowered autumn, / so strongly has the brightness of your presence / covered in gold and smothered in spring / the days abstention had been darkening.)

Von Dämmerung und Düften / umschmeichelt, schreitet zart, / den Gurt um schmale Hüften, / ein Kind von Eros’ Art. (By fragrant sunrise wooed / he passes by with grace, / a belt round slender hips, / a child of Eros’ race.)

Grünewald’s collection of aphorisms Ergebnisse (Outcomes) was published in 1921 and reissued in 1996. Considered rich and self-assured by some and pedantic by others, it contrasts with the dreamy surrender omnipresent in his poetry. In the twenties, he joined the Austrian chapter of PEN, the then new association for solidarity among writers and defence of the written word. He increasingly wanted to and eventually did give up his job as architect so as to dedicate himself fully to writing, even though he was not a popular writer. Magazines and newspapers carried his poems, aphorisms and short prose, and he was featured in anthologies and literary lexicons, but, in Bühn’s words: ‘The public response after sixteen publications was clear: linguistically sophisticated, Grünewald failed to capture hearts. His poetry, his drama, his aphorisms barely resonated, except among a few committed fans. In the turbulent times of the First Republic, torn by the traumas of the lost war, hyperinflation and growing social tensions, people had no use for the blessings of solitude and the quiet worship of youthful beauty.’

Several composers in Grünewald’s friendship circles set poems of his to music, and three expressionistic one-act plays were each performed once in 1931. The theme of one of them anticipated Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, while another is about an adolescent boy whose fear of growing up leads to sleeplessness. In 1934, he was honoured on his fiftieth birthday with a radio special. That same year, however, a writer in the antisemitic smearsheet Der Stürmer asserted it was impossible for him to imagine Grünewald as forming part of German literature. The next year, Grünewald’s tragedy Walpurga und Agathe was performed three times to mixed reviews. In it, an orphan of 17 goes to live with his two aunts, bringing joy to the good-hearted one but aggravating the overbearing one.

Although Grünewald kept writing for the stage, no further plays were produced. The poetry collection Die Brennende Blume (1937) contains ghazals and rubaiyat – Arabic and Persian verse forms, respectively, which had notably been employed in German by Goethe and Platen. His novella Reseda (reviewed by me here) was first published in 2013, along with a selection of short stories, in a companion volume to the poetry selection. In the novella, the 50-year-old accountant Reseda falls for the beautiful 15-year-old Walter. Walter is unattainable, and Reseda instead finds himself the object of flirty attention from another boy, the unctious and unattractive intern Lazarus.

Weil du mich so begnadet hast, / bin ich auf grosses Leid gefasst. (Now that you have blessed me so / I am prepared great pain to know.)

Mein Beten ist: Ich denke dein. / O sprich, kann Sterben andres sein, / als dass ich dein gedächte? (My prayer is to think of you. / Oh tell me, could dying be anything other / than my thinking of you?)

When in March 1938 Austria was taken over by Nazi Germany, Grünewald overdosed on a sleeping aid in a suicide attempt, of which there were many in those days. He survived as a result of a neighbour’s intervention. Hitler’s voice over the radio, heard in hospital, haunted him permanently afterwards. He confined himself mostly to his flat. On 10 November the Gestapo came for him and he was imprisoned in Dachau, where he was beaten up and witnessed beatings. He was released in January on the condition that he leave the German Reich. About this detention he later wrote the novel Tulipanien, which he tried but failed to get published; the manuscript has since been lost. No state he applied to wanted him, and he managed to cross the ‘green border’ (i.e., away from checkpoints) to Switzerland on his fifth attempt. Via Italy he reached Nice on the French Mediterranean. Here he lived in poverty, but out of pride he would not brook anyone buying him so much as a coffee.

He wrote a lot, his creative high making exile more bearable, and fell in with a Viennese circle around fellow exile and writer Otto Zoff. The French government repeatedly interned Grünewald in camps de rassemblement, which had been set up for undesirable foreigners, many of whom were Jews and political refugees from Germany and Austria.

In 1940, in spite of not generally involving himself in ideological movements, he was persuaded by his long-standing friend Kurt Hiller (1885-1972), a poet and homosexual activist, to join the leadership of the Freiheitsbund deutscher Sozialisten. This socialist but anticommunist splinter group’s activities never took off. After the war, Hiller was one of the few who kept his friend’s memory alive. In Nice, at age 56, Grünewald fell in love with a youth of 20 who inspired him to fresh waves of poetry, and whom he pampered with cinema tickets and sweets despite barely being able to eke out an existence for himself. This seems to have been a nonsexual friendship, full of furtive longing on the part of Grünewald. In his poems he addresses the youth as Kind (child), a word which in his poetry must therefore not necessarily be taken to mean a young child. He recreates the youth as a persona who enables mystical unification with the divine. According to the diary of Otto Zoff, the youth eventually came up with excuses in order not to have to spend so much time with the poet anymore.

Grünewald’s sister was able to escape to the US in 1940, and Zoff went there the next year. In 1941, a book of 370 fables by Grünewald came out. In 1942, after the German government had decided on the Final Solution, the Vichy regime began to round up Jews and hand them over to the Gestapo; Grünewald was among them. He arrived in Auschwitz on 9 September 1942 and was promptly gassed to death.

O mach mich wieder schmerzerkoren. / Du bist der Sturm. Ich bin dein Spiel. / Du bist die Welt. In dir verloren, / im All verstreut, bin ich am Ziel. (Oh, make me marked by pain once more. / You are the storm. I am your game. / You are the world. Dispersed in you, / lost in the All, I reach my aim.)

Daß du schön bist, macht dich gut. / Deine Güte gibt mir Mut. / Meines Mutes bin ich froh. / Liebe brenne lichterloh. (Because you’re beautiful you’re good. / Because you’re thoughtful I take heart. / In my new valour I delight. / May love flame up, intense and bright.)

Grünewald was certainly persecuted, and eventually murdered, for being Jewish. Whether his love of boys played a role in his persecution is not known. His subject matter, despised more now than it ever was in his lifetime, may well have prevented him from receiving proportionate posthumous recognition for the high quality of his poetry. It is remarkable that a selection showcasing his boy-love poetry appeared as recently as 2013. This is thanks to the series Bibliothek rosa Winkel, for much of its existence an imprint of publisher Männerschwarm. Some 90 fiction and non-fiction titles appeared from 1991 until the death of the series’ founder, Wolfram Setz, in 2023. Mixed in with titles of androphile interest are Greek-love titles, often critical reprints of historical works. These include books by and about John Henry Mackay, Achille Essebac and Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen, work from authors around Der Eigene, a translation of the 17^th-century pederastic dialogue L’Alcibiade fanciullo a scola, and a collection of poetry about the ‘formosissimus puer’ Alessandro Cinuzzi, a papal page whose death at age 16 in 1474 inspired a cult to his beauty. Just like Alfred Grünewald deserves recognition, so does Wolfram Setz for having given a voice to Greek love in inauspicious times.

I close with three poems by Grünewald, each followed by my translation.

Sonette an einen Knaben, VII

Wie damals unsere Gespräche waren!
Freuden und Sorgen mußtest du bekennen
und mir die Namen deiner Freunde nennen.
Du kanntest viele Spiele und Gefahren.

Oft kam ein tiefres Licht in deine klaren,
enthüllten Blicke. Sanftestes Entbrennen
wies deine Wange. Glanz, der nicht zu nennen,
lag ausgebreitet über deinen Haaren.

Gedenkst du, Knabe, noch des Anbeginnes,
da unsrer Rede Fäden sich verbanden,
und viele Dinge neue Deutung fanden?

Und die Beglückung ihres süßen Sinnes
uns weit entführte auf den schönen Fährten,
und Träume kamen, die den Tag verwehrten.

From: Sonette an einen Knaben (1920)

Sonnets to a Lad, VII

The conversations between me and you!
You let me in on hidden joys and pains
and talked about your friends, told me their names.
You knew of many games, and dangers too.

I often saw appear a deeper light
in your bright, candid eyes. The softest trace
of red was on your cheeks. A sheen would grace
your hair, by which my words cannot do right.

When first the strings of our discussion twined,
new meanings surfaced in so many things.
Do you remember, lad, how it began?

Do you recall the joy new meaning brings
and how it led us pleasant paths to find
and dreams that would harsh daylight ban?

Trennung nach erstem Besuch

Kann es denn sein, daß ich dich wiedersehe?!
Dies Zimmer war verzaubert. Deine Nähe

gab leise Glorie jedem Ding und war
schon fast Erinnerung. Dein helles Haar

berührte dieses Kissen. Fänd ich doch
die Schmiegung deines schönen Hauptes noch!

Dies Glas, das eingereiht im Schranke steht,
du trankst daraus. Welch heiliges Gerät!

Du hieltest dieses Buch in deinen Händen.
Nur zitternd kann ich seine Seiten wenden.

Durch jene Türe tratst du schüchtern ein.
Der Spiegel fing dein Bild. O blieb es mein!

Dort saßest du und dort. – Ich faß es kaum:
Altäre standen im vertrauten Raum.

From Tröstliche Kantate (1928)

Separation After a First Visit

Could it be true that I’ll see you once more?
The room was spellbound as you walked its floor.

Your presence softly glorified this den
and seemed a reminiscence even then.

The golden hair around your lovely face
this cushion pressed, where still I seek its trace.

Mundane this glass, but I remember how
you drank from it. A sacred object now!

Examining this book, here you did stand.
I turns its pages now with trembling hand.

That door is where you entered shyly in.
The mirror caught your form. Could I it win!

This chair is where you sat, and there as well.
Familiar objects into altars swell.

Hymne

Dich anschaun, das ist süßer Tod.
Dich denken, das ist Beten.
Dein Lächeln ist mir Wein und Brot.
Ich bin vor Gott getreten,

da ich zum erstenmal dich sah.
Muß ich darob erblinden?
Kann der, dem Schönheit so geschah,
zur Erde wiederfinden?

From Tröstliche Kantate (1928)

Hymn

To look at you is sweet demise.
To think of you is prayer.
My wine and bread: your presence fair.
I stood before God’s very eyes

when you at first I got to know.
Will this high meeting leave me blind?
Can they who witness beauty so
the way to Earth no longer find?