HÖLDERLIN, JOHANN CHRISTIAN FRIEDRICH

HÖLDERLIN, JOHANN CHRISTIAN FRIEDRICH (1770–1843), German poet.

Born in Lauffen (Swabia) in 1770, Friedrich Hölderlin was an exact contemporary of William Wordsworth, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Ludwig van Beethoven. Instructed in music and foreign languages, he studied at the Protestant seminary in Tübingen (with Hegel and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling), where he read widely in philosophy. When he graduated in 1793 he had already given up plans for the ministry and begun work on his novel Hyperion. He supported himself modestly off and on as a tutor during the next nine years.

Although Hölderlin met some leading German writers of his time—Johann Gottfried von Herder, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Novalis (Friedrich Leopold von Hardenberg)—and was encouraged by Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller in the beginning, he belonged to neither the classicist nor the Romantic literary circles. By contrast, he studied philosophy with Johann Gottlieb Fichte in Jena in 1794–1795 and maintained his friendship and collaboration with Hegel and Schelling, documented in a fragment from 1795 known as "The First Program for the System of German Idealism." Historians of philosophy continue to debate the significance of Hölderlin's contributions to German idealism in this text and other philosophical fragments from the late 1790s.

works

In 1796 Hölderlin finished his Hellenophilic epistolary novel Hyperion (published in two volumes in 1797 and 1799) with its dominant themes of Greek beauty, political freedom, philosophical idealism, and sublimated love, and then until 1800 he worked on an unfinished tragedy, The Death of Empedocles, also set in Greece, about a philosopher-king's felt need for self-sacrifice as a form of totalization of experience. If these were all Hölderlin had ever written, he would be remembered at best as a minor writer with a passion for ancient Greece. But during an intense period of seclusion in Homburg near Frankfurt from 1798 to 1800, everything changed: he wrote fragmentary essays on philosophy and theory of literature that are still appreciated for their original insights; undertook his close study and brilliant translations of the Greek poet Pindar (c. 522–c. 438 b.c.e.), believed to be the best translations of Pindar into any language; and began to write the great poems for which he is famous.

Hölderlin's poetry from 1799 to 1805, most of it unpublished at the time, is highly varied, remarkably unique, and thus difficult to characterize. He wrote in many forms, principally elegies, odes, and one form he sometimes called "hymns," sometimes, idiosyncratically, "patriotic songs" (vaterländische Gesänge). From Pindar he adopted the long triadic form for his own dialectical manner of argument and counterargument, and also the loosely structured syntax that Pindar's Greek employs. With a style exploiting daring metaphors and frequent ambiguity, Hölderlin treated themes of great complexity. In his elegies ("Bread and Wine," "Homecoming"), longing and despair—for a Hellenized past or a contemporary Germanic homeland—could in the end turn toward a tenuous hope. Some of his hymns are "river poems" ("At the Source of the Danube," "The Migration," "The Rhine," "The Ister") with geographically and historically shaped narratives of the destinies of gods and men. Several of his hymns are detailed accounts of Christ and Christianity ("Celebration of Peace," "The Unique One," "Patmos") with a pronounced but uncertain messianic subtheme; a very late and enigmatic hymn ("Mnemosyne") blends Greek and Christian references with considerable personal pathos. Perhaps his greatest single poem, "Remembrance"—written after an eventful journey on foot to Bordeaux in the years 1801 and 1802, and learning upon his return of the death of his lover—combines an elegiac treatment of love with a mythic handling of the possibilities of human action.

In his last productive years Hölderlin continued to write ambitious poems that exist only as fragments; translated Sophocles' (c. 496–406 b.c.e.) Oedipus Tyrannus and Antigone into a bizarre German; and appears to have become involved in his friend Isaak von Sinclair's political intrigues. But his mental health declined rapidly and in 1806 he entered a Tübingen clinic. Probably schizophrenic, he remained under care until his death in 1843. During these years he wrote numerous surprisingly but deceptively simple poems, sometimes under the name "Scardanelli."

controversies

Several controversies surround Hölderlin's life and work: political, philosophical, and literary. While he was first an enthusiast of the French Revolution and then, like many of his generation, disappointed by it, he was not a Jacobin and probably never participated in any serious political conspiracy. Revolutionary themes appear throughout his poetry, but they are neither consistent nor sustained, and he can scarcely be called a "political poet." Hölderlin may have had a decisive influence on early German idealist philosophy, but he was undoubtedly one of the fundamental influences on Martin Heidegger's mature ("ontological") philosophy. Heidegger's many commentaries on Hölderlin's poems argued that they enact an original encounter of men, gods, being, and language, sometimes couching this interpretation in nationalist mythography. However confused and inaccurate Heidegger's commentaries now often appear, they contributed to a more vulgar nationalist mythification of Hölderlin during World War II that was as misrepresentative as it was widespread. More careful philosophic commentary since Heidegger (Maurice Blanchot, Paul de Man) has brought out the seriousness and difficulty of Hölderlin's engagement with problems of language, mediation, and death. Finally, while Hölderlin is probably the most "ancient Greek" of all modern Western writers, he is not a "German classicist" as literary historians understand this term. Rather, he breaks with literary history in anticipating the Dionysiac Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844–1900), the German expressionist Georg Trakl (1887–1914), and the postapocalyptic Paul Celan (1920–1970). He has become the most internationally influential German poet of the last two centuries, surpassing even Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926), and he is arguably the German language's greatest poet.

See alsoFichte, Johann Gottlieb; Germany; Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich; Novalis (Hardenberg, Friedrich von).

bibliography

Primary Sources

Hölderlin, Friedrich. Sämtliche Werke. Edited by Friedrich Beissner et al. 8 vols. Stuttgart, 1943–1985.

——. Hymns and Fragments. Translated by Richard Sieburth. Princeton, N.J., 1984.

——. Hyperion. Translated by Willard Trask. New York, 1965.

——. Poems and Fragments. Translated by Michael Hamburger. London, 1966.

——. Sämtliche Werke. Edited by D. S. Sattler et al. 18 vols. to date. Frankfurt, 1975–present. Complete works.

——. Essays and Letters on Theory. Translated and edited by Thomas Pfau. New York, 1988.

Secondary Sources

Fioretos, Aris, ed. The Solid Letter: Readings of Friedrich Hölderlin. Stanford, Calif., 1999. A selection of post-Heideggerian interpretations, with an extensive bibliography of Hölderlin scholarship and translations in English.

Heidegger, Martin. Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung. 4th ed. Frankfurt, 1971. The commentaries.

Timothy Bahti