Herman George Scheffauer (February 3, 1876 – died October 7, 1927) was a German-American poet, architect, writer, dramatist, journalist, and translator.
San Francisco childhood
Little is known about Scheffauer's youth, education and his early adult years in America, or, about his parents and siblings. His father was Johann Georg Scheffauer, a cabinet maker ("Tischler"), probably born in 1842 in the village of Unterkochen, Württemberg, who, according to Hamburg passenger lists, had first immigrated to America in 1868, returning again to Germany where he married Maria Theresa Eisele in Augsburg, and who then came back with him to America in 1872. His brother was the civil engineer, Frederick Carl Scheffauer, born in 1878 and he had another younger brother, Walter Alois Scheffauer (1882–1975). The family was related to the German painter and sculptor Philipp Jacob Scheffauer (1756–1808) who it was said was his great-grandfather, who went to the same school as the poet Friedrich Schiller and in Stuttgart moved in a circle of German poets such as Friedrich Haug, Ludwig Ferdinand Huber and Friedrich Hölderlin.
Educated in public and private schools, he attended a Roman Catholic Sunday school in San Francisco, where services were conducted in German. He later wrote about the role of the nuns there and a certain Father Gerhard, instilling into the youth of this school terrifying and hellish religious imagery. His parents were not orthodox, in fact he spoke of being shocked by his father's religious indifference and scepticism. He discovered that he was a poet from about the age of ten, on a school outing, where the pupils ascended Mount Olympus in the Ashbury Heights neighbourhood of San Francisco. He impressed his school friends with his ability to recount the ascent, as he put it:
Suddenly I burst forth into a jog-trot doggerel. I chanted the heroic deeds of the day – the ascent of the peak, the routing of a belligerent bull, the piratical manoeuvres on a pond. The delivery of this improvised epic was volcanic. My companions regarded me with awe and suspicion. Thus, primitively and barbarically, I began. The climate had had its will of me – that marvellous 'Greek' climate of California which works like champagne upon the temperament. I was fated to become one of the native sons of song.
From then on he only wanted to write poetry but his parents insisted that he pursue a proper job. He began his career as an amateur printer, printing a broadsheet called The Owl while he was still at school writing satires on his schoolmates and teachers and "mournful valedictory odes". He went through a youthful period, through which he thought all young poets with an imaginative cast of mind must inevitably pass, namely a combination of what he termed "idealistic fanaticism and Byronic romanticism". He studied art, painting and architecture at the Arts School of the University of California (The Mark Hopkins Institute). He later worked as an architect, a teacher of draughting and a water colourist.
Early intellectual influences
He was aware that "Ingersoll was in the air", a reference to the ideas of Robert G. Ingersoll the American freethinker and agnostic, and Scheffauer admitted that at first he looked upon Ingersoll and his followers as "enemies", and intellectually cowering, as it were, he read The Night Thoughts (1742) of the deeply religious English poet Edward Young to reaffirm his faith.