Die Krokodile

Die Krokodile ("The Crocodiles") was a small poets' society in Munich which existed from 1856 to the 1870s.

King Ludwig I had constructed the Glyptothek and the Pinakothek to house art collections. Part of his intention was to attract intellectual luminaries to Munich, with little result before the efforts made by his successor Maximilian II. Among others came the chemist Justus von Liebig, the ethnologist Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl and the historian Heinrich von Sybel.

Two poets who arrived in Munich were Emanuel Geibel and Paul Heyse. In 1852 they joined the cultural society Die Zwanglosen, founded in 1838, which was intended to serve as a meeting-place for both native Bavarians and the new arrivals, the so-called Nordlichter ("northern lights"). However the two groups became fractious and in 1858 Geibel left. Heyse had already created a new society, following the model of the Tunnel über der Spree in Berlin, of which both he and Geibel had been members.

Heyse and Julius Grosse held the inaugural meeting on 5 November 1856 in the coffee-house Zur Stadt München. In the first years Friedrich von Bodenstedt, Felix Dahn, Wilhelm Hertz and Hermann 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 poem Das Krokodil von Singapur was the sole inspiration.

Im heil'gen Teich zu Singapur
Da liegt ein altes Krokodil
Von äußerst grämlicher Natur
Und kaut an einem Lotusstil.

Es ist ganz alt und völlig blind,
Und wenn es einmal friert des Nachts,
So weint es wie ein kleines Kind,
Doch wenn ein schöner Tag ist, lacht's.

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Wikipedia