It is indicative of the peculiar status of Rudolf Borchardt within German letters that the anthology of his work edited by Hans Hennecke (1954) should appear in a series entitled "Verschollene und Vergessene" (The Disappeared and the Forgotten). Even during his lifetime his presence on the German literary scene was imbued with a curious and self-willed marginality, as the astounding variety of his literary production failed to find a wide audience. Yet this situation is appropriate for an author who described his own age as a "Verfallzeit ohne lebendige Literatur" (period of decay without a living literature) and whose self-proclaimed mission was "Verwerfung der Zeit und Heimkehr in die Ewigkeit" (rejection of time and return to eternity). The breadth of subjects on which Borchardt wrote and spoke and the number of languages from which he translated are perhaps unparalleled in twentieth-century German literature. Yet, as in his translation of...