"E quando venne il tempo dei confini...". Stefan George e il rapporto tra cultura olandese e tedesca nella (ri)costruzione di Albert Verwey

This contribution critically reconsiders the way the poet and publi-cist Albert Verwey used and represented his relation to Stefan George and the German culture in order to position himself in the Dutch lite-rary field. In the Nineties, after the break with Willem Kloos, Verwey abstracts523needed international contacts to better stabilize his somewhat contended reputation at home. The friendship between the two poets would lead in their intentions to a better mutual understanding, at a personal level and between the German and the Dutch people: that’s why they transla-ted each other’s work. However, they became gruadually estranged from each other since the beginning of the new century, as Verwey tried to uphold Holland’s reputation in Germany by celebrating those periods in history (especially in the seventeenth century) when the Dutch expressed their international-cosmopolitan genius, becoming reference-models for the Germans. Since the publication of George’s Der siebente Ring, Ver-wey detected moreover in his colleague’s poetry a growing cultural orien-tation – which he put down to a typical German ethnotype: monarchic, absolutistic, antidemocratic – which he considered incompatible with his own, that of a Dutchman. The First World War would lead to a com-plete break between the two. After the publication of Friedrich Wolters’ biography-hagiography of George, the Dutch poet – in the meantime appointed professor at Leiden University – felt the urge to clarify his own view on his relation to George.