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Die Krokodile ('The Crocodiles') was a small poets' society inMunich which existed from 1856 to the 1870s.
KingLudwig I had constructed theGlyptothek and thePinakothek to house art collections. Part of his intention was to attract intellectual luminaries to Munich, with little result before the efforts made by his successorMaximilian II. Among others came the chemistJustus von Liebig, the ethnologistWilhelm Heinrich Riehl and the historianHeinrich von Sybel.
Two poets who arrived in Munich wereEmanuel Geibel andPaul Heyse. In 1852 they joined the cultural societyDie Zwanglosen, founded in 1838, which was intended to serve as a meeting-place for both native Bavarians and the new arrivals, the so-calledNordlichter ("northern lights"). However the two groups became fractious and in 1858 Geibel left. Heyse had already created a new society, following the model of theTunnel über der Spree in Berlin, of which both he and Geibel had been members.
Heyse andJulius Grosse held the inaugural meeting on 5 November 1856 in the coffee-houseZur Stadt München. In the first yearsFriedrich von Bodenstedt,Felix Dahn,Wilhelm Hertz andHermann Lingg joined. It was claimed by Felix Dahn that the name of the society came about because of the coincidence that both Geibel and Lingg had recently written poems about crocodiles, but it seems more probable that Lingg's poemDas Krokodil von Singapur was the sole inspiration.
| Das Krokodil von Singapur Im heil'gen Teich zu Singapur Es ist ganz alt und völlig blind, | The Crocodile of Singapore The Holy Pond of Singapore It's old and now completely blind, |
"The sublime character of this amphibian seemed to us an admirable example to idealistic poets, and we hoped that in our 'holy pond' we should be able to armour ourselves against the base prosaic world, just as we always used to, minding nothing except maybe changes in temperature." (Paul Heyse:Jugenderinnerungen und Bekenntnisse)
At meetings, recent works both foreign and local were examined and discussed. As in theTunnel über der Spree, members adopted pseudonyms: Geibel for example was theUrkrokodil. A complete list of members has not survived.
The group is distinguishable from theYoung Germany movement by its non-political stance. The Crocodiles preferred to see poetry as a pure and almost sacred art, ideally following ancient, medieval, and even Oriental models; the result was an eclectic body of work, often of the highest craftsmanship but lacking literary substance. Not coincidentally, most of what has survived has been translations and adaptations, such as Bodenstedt's reworking of Oriental sources and Hertz's poems based on medieval material.
After the death of Maximilian II in 1864, policies changed and the grooming of immigrant artists was discontinued.Die Krokodile had lost their main sponsor and public role. An attempt to produce a second group anthology in 1866 was a failure. The society remained in existence chiefly as a social club.