Hölderlin, Johann Christian Friedrich (1770–1843)

1. Life and writings

Hölderlin grew up in a sheltered, intensely Pietist domestic environment. His mother directed his education towards a career in the ministry, a later source of much psychological conflict since he never subsequently gained the financial independence necessary to pursue his chosen literary career. In 1788 Hölderlin entered the Tübingen Stift, ostensibly to study theology, but was soon preoccupied with developments in contemporary literature and philosophy, and the beginnings of the French Revolution. He shed his earlier orthodox religious beliefs under the influence of Kant and the classicizing humanism of Friedrich Schiller, and became friends with his fellow-students Schelling and Hegel. His early poetry celebrated humanistic ideals using a rhyming, hymnic style indebted largely to Schiller. Hölderlin encapsulated his central interests at this time: ‘Kant and the Greeks are my only reading’ (1946–85 vol. 6: 128). His attempts to mediate his Graecophile enthusiasm with the rigorous republicanism of Fichte, and with the latter’s radicalization of Kantian ethics, is documented in the mid 1790s through the various evolving versions of his first major work, the novel Hyperion (1798–9).

Almost alone among his writings Hyperion enjoyed a certain celebrity in Hölderlin’s lifetime, becoming something of a ‘sentimental’ classic, not entirely unlike Goethe’s Werther, by which it was probably influenced. Set in the contemporary context of the Greek struggle for national independence, the structure of the first-person epistolary narrative presents the spiritual evolution of its idealistic eponymous protagonist, combining the personal theme of transforming love with broader concerns for the nature of genuine political freedom. The hero moves from an initial pantheistic identification with the totality of life, through painful but educative experiences of failure and disappointment with a recalcitrant human reality, towards a more mediated and differentiated relationship between self and world. Hyperion contains numerous allusions to contemporary debates concerning the possibilities of revolutionary social transformation and the appropriate means for its realization. But the narrator also undergoes a process of personal transformation in the act of narration itself, culminating in an emancipatory vision of what it means to become an artist dedicated to the projection of a human future free of despotic coercion. The lyrical, poetic prose celebrates a religio-aesthetic conception of the world as an intrinsically harmonious totality that requires no external theological legitimization, and recognizes the experience of mortality and finitude as a necessary moment of the life of the whole, concluding upon a prospective rather than a resigned note of chastened aspiration.

Hölderlin’s next major project, a tragedy on the death of Empedocles, continued and deepened many of these central themes. Hölderlin never brought the play to a satisfactory conclusion, but three fragmentary versions survive, together with an exceedingly compressed and obscure related prose study known as the Grund zum Empedokles (The Groundplan of Empedocles), all composed between 1797 and 1799. Here, too, he concerns himself with the possibility of revolution and the necessity of an accompanying moral-spiritual reformation. But a newer note is also struck through emphasis upon the theme of tragic hubris on the part of the protagonist, and the poet’s increasing concern with the dangers of human identification with the divine – the seductions of pantheism – and the concomitant tendency to exalt human power in a unilaterally dominating relationship with the natural world and other human beings. This arguably represents an incipient critique of the ‘Promethean’ tendencies of Fichtean idealism and its subordination of nature as object to the subject as free power of total self-determination. None the less, Hölderlin equally emphasizes the importance of ‘maturity’ and autonomy in the Kantian sense if the potentially authoritarian excesses of revolutionary despotism are to be avoided. If Hölderlin originally conceived his drama as a contribution to contemporary political enlightenment and an encouragement to social renewal, it is unsurprising that he finally abandoned work on it when Napoleon became First Consul in 1799 and the hopes of a peaceful ‘German’ Revolution receded dramatically.

In the poetry written between 1800 and his apparent mental collapse in 1806, Hölderlin turned increasingly to more explicit engagement with the decisive actualities of European history, particularly the ambivalent relationship between the classical heritage and the claims of the Christian tradition. The implicit and semi-secularized eschatological dimension of Hölderlin’s thought now comes insistently to the fore, and he concentrates upon the aporias of the poet’s proclamation in a barren age characterized by a thankless and essentially instrumental attitude to the world. The concern with preserving a sense of proper limitation is reflected in the constant reference to ‘mortals’ and the powerful apocalyptic tone of the final hymns. After his breakdown (arguably exacerbated if not actually precipitated by drastic contemporary ‘treatment’) Hölderlin was taken under benevolent care until his death. In this last phase he reverted to a more detached and naïve style of composition in which the tensions and problems of his earlier life and work seem fictively resolved and dissolved into an eerie catatonic calm.