Friedrich Hölderlin

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The German poet Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) sought to express a religious vision in which man would be reconciled to the world of nature and to all the forms through which God had revealed Himself.

Friedrich Hölderlin was born in Lauffen am Neckar on March 20, 1770. After his father's death the family moved to Nürtingen in Württemberg, where Hölderlin spent his childhood. In 1784 he went away to school at Denkendorf and later at Maulbronn. In 1788 he entered the Lutheran Seminary at Tübingen to prepare for the ministry. However, his attention soon turned to philosophy and poetry, and he became friends with the future philosophers G. W. F. Hegel and F. W. J. von Schelling. He at first wrote verses in the style of local Swabian poets and the older poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock. He later began a series of philosophical hymns under the influence of Friedrich von Schiller.

Hölderlin soon met Schiller himself, who helped him get a position as private tutor after leaving the seminary in 1794. After several months as tutor, he went to Jena, where he studied the philosophy of Johann Gottlieb Fichte and was introduced to the poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Meanwhile, he continued to write poetry and worked on a novel, Hyperion, which he had begun while still in Tübingen.

In 1796 Hölderlin obtained his second position as tutor, with the family of the banker Gontard in Frankfurt am Main. He soon fell in love with Gontard's wife, Suzette, to whom, as "Diotima, " he addressed poems. He saw her as the personification of the ideals he had celebrated in his earlier poetry. However, their relationship was discovered, and he was forced to resign in 1798.

Hölderlin then moved to Homburg, near Frankfurt, where he devoted himself to literary work. His poetry began to show more spontaneity of feeling and a greater richness of natural detail. He also wrote theoretical essays on poetic form and three versions of an uncompleted tragedy, Empedokles, about a Greek philosopher and religious prophet who is rejected by society and by his gods and who decides to commit suicide by jumping into a volcano. In 1799 Hölderlin finished Hyperion. In its final form the novel tells of a young Greek who, inspired by the same religious and philosophical ideals as Hölderlin himself, falls in love with a girl, Diotima, and later joins a Greek war of independence against the Turks. The revolt fails, and Diotima dies. In the end, Hyperion can only reconcile himself with the powers he feels are present in the natural world.

After leaving Homburg, Hölderlin lived for a while with friends in Stuttgart. About this time he perfected the style of his elegiac poetry. His most famous elegy, Brot und Wein (Bread and Wine), commemorates the religious happiness of the ancient Greek world and concludes with a decision for the poet to commit himself as a priest of Dionysus, who is here identified with Christ.

In 1801 Hölderlin began to develop his final religious vision in irregular hymns modeled after the Greek poet Pindar. One of the greatest of these, Der Rhein, turns from a meditation on the course of the Rhine to speculation on the reconciliation of mankind with all the gods ever worshiped.

In 1802 Hölderlin received his last appointment as tutor with a German family in Bordeaux, France. While there he suffered a mental illness and later returned home. After partial recovery he wrote the hymn Patmos, but for the next 2 years he suffered from occasional recurrences of insanity. After attempts at rehabilitation, Hölderlin was committed to an asylum and finally, in 1808, to the care of a carpenter in Tübingen. His condition remained virtually unchanged until his death on June 7, 1843.

Further Reading

The best study in English of Hölderlin is Ronald Peacock, Hölderlin (1938), which provides the literary and philosophical background necessary for an understanding of his poetry. Perhaps the best brief introduction to Hölderlin's poetry and thought is in Michael Hamburger, Reason and Energy: Studies in German Literature (1957). Walter Silz, Early German Romanticism (1929), considers Hölderlin's place in the German romantic movement. The question of Hölderlin's attitude toward Greek religion and culture is treated in E. M. Butler, The Tyranny of Greece over Germany (1935), and in Henry Hatfield, Aesthetic Paganism in German Literature: From Winckelmann to the Death of Goethe (1964).

Additional Sources

Constantine, David, Hölderlin, Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

George, Emery Edward, Hölderlin and the golden chain of Homer: including an unknown source, Lewiston: E. Mellen Press, 1992.

Hölderlin, Friedrich, in full Johann Christian Friedrich (Lauffen/Neckar, 1770-1843, Tübingen), invariably referred to as Friedrich Hölderlin, was the son of an estates bailiff, who died when the boy was two. In 1774 the mother married Burgomaster Gock of Nürtingen, who died five years later. Hölderlin's childhood was happy, and his relations with his mother, sister, and half-brother were harmonious. In 1784 he was sent to a boarding-school at Denkendorf, and transferred in 1786 to a similar establishment (Klosterschule) at Maulbronn, where he began to write poetry. In 1788, while at Maulbronn, he became engaged to Luise Nast, but broke off the engagement in April 1789. At 18 he went to the theological seminary at Tübingen (see Tübinger Stift), studying for entry into the Evangelical Church. Hegel and Schelling were his contemporaries and friends at Tübingen. Hölderlin became disinclined for the Church, but for the sake of his family continued his studies. His poetry at this time is full of a political idealism fostered by the French Revolution.

In 1793 Hölderlin completed his course at the seminary and became, through Schiller's mediation, private tutor to the son of Frau von Kalb at Walters-hausen near Gotha. He had begun to write a novel with a Greek setting, Hyperion (1797-9). In 1794-5 he was for a few months in Jena, where he made contact with Schiller. In December 1795 he took up a new post as tutor in the house of a Frankfurt banker, J. F. Gontard. Here he fell in love with his employer's young wife Susette (see Gontard, Susette), who returned his affection. She became for him an embodiment of the Hellenic ideal, symbolized by the name Diotima, by which he refers to her in his poems and in Hyperion. In 1798 he left after a scene with Gontard, and spent the next two years at Homburg with a devoted friend, Isaak von Sinclair (1775-1815). He did not see Susette Gontard after 1799. It was during the years 1796-9 that Hölderlin's characteristic style of poetry developed; the change is perceptible in the drafts made in 1797-9 for a tragedy on Empedocles. In 1800 he returned home for a time, becoming a tutor once more at Hauptwil near St Gall in 1801, and again at Bordeaux in 1802. In the same year he returned home to Nürtingen in a seriously disturbed state of mind. He recovered, made a visit to Regensburg with Sinclair, and was appointed librarian at Homburg. But the mental illness recurred, and after a period at an institution in Tübingen he was entrusted to the care of a local master carpenter, named Zimmer. With him Hölderlin spent the rest of his life (1807-43).

During his lifetime Hölderlin published, apart from Hyperion (which includes his best-known poem, the ‘Schicksalslied’), two volumes of translations of Sophocles (1804). Some of his poems appeared in periodicals, and the first collected edition (Gedichte) was published in 1826. Hölderlin was a man of intellectual passion, and his early humanitarian ideals were increasingly dominated by an aching longing for Greece, with which he successfully fused his love for Diotima. Conscious of his poetic powers, he believed that he had a mission to regenerate Germany in an age in which all that ancient Greece had stood for seemed lost, and he found himself tragically unable to fulfil this task.

Hölderlin's early poetry leans on Schiller's ideals, and on Schiller's strophic manner. His poems in classical metres, written mainly between 1796 and 1801, include a number of epigrams, among them ‘Ehmals und Jetzt’ and ‘Lebenslauf’, the Diotima poems, including ‘Der Abschied’, and the odes, ‘Mein Eigentum’, ‘Heidelberg’, ‘Der Neckar’, ‘ Die Heimat’, ‘Dichtermut’, and ‘Der gefesselte Strom’. Towards the end of this period he wrote the three great elegies ‘Der Archipelagus’, ‘Menons Klagen um Diotima’, and ‘Brod und Wein’. In the last years of his sanity, after the loss of Diotima, he turned to hymnic verse, writing poems of haunting beauty in free rhythms; many of these exist only as unfinished drafts. They include ‘Am Quell der Donau’, ‘Germanien’, ‘Der Rhein’, ‘Friedensfeier’, and ‘Patmos’. In some of the later poems Hölderlin seeks to reconcile Christianity (which he never completely abandoned) with his beloved Hellas. Hyperion and the dramatic fragments of Der Tod des Empedokles are concerned with the Greek ideal, the mission of the poet, and the deafness of the world around him.

An edition of Hölderlin's works appeared as Sämtliche Werke in 1846. His works, letters, and documents are included in the Große Stuttgarter Ausgabe, ed. F. Beißner and A. Beck (8 vols. incl. concordance, 1946-85). Part I of Wörterbuch zu Friedrich Hölderlin, ed. H.-M. Danhauser et al. appeared in 1983 Sämtliche Werke. Frankfurter Ausgabe, ed. D. E. Sattler, appeared 1975 ff. Notable translations were furnished by J. B. Leishman in Selected Poems (1944) and M. Hamburger in a bilingual edition, Poems and Fragments (1966).

Hölderlin, Johann Christian Friedrich (1770-1843) German lyric poet. Hölderlin trained as a theologian at the university of Tubingen where he met Schelling and Hegel. In his novel Hyperion (1797/99), Hölderlin venerated the sacred aspects of nature, and attempted to unite religion and art as ‘overseers of reason’. But his interest to philosophy derives not from any theory or doctrine, but from his influence on a variety of thinkers from Schiller to Heidegger. He epitomizes the poet as youthful, idealistic, Romantic, blessed with superior knowledge, and above all as someone standing ‘bare-headed beneath God's thunderstorms’, midway between the Gods and man, and so inevitably doomed. He became incurably but harmlessly insane in 1807.

Hölderlin, Friedrich (frē'drĭkh höl'dərlĭn), 1770-1843, German lyric poet. Befriended and influenced by Schiller, Hölderlin produced, before the onset of insanity at 36, lofty yet subjective poetry, modeled on classic Greek verse. Little known outside Germany, he is highly regarded by critics and is generally considered to be a link between the classic and romantic schools. Besides lyrics (1820), he wrote an elegiac novel in prose, Hyperion (1797-99; tr. in Pierce and Schreiber, Fact and Fancy of German Romance, 1927), and a dramatic fragment, Der Tod des Empedokles (1799). Selections of his verse were translated by Christopher Middleton (1973) and Michael Hamburger (1980)

Bibliography

See studies by E. E. George ed.(1972), and R. Unger (1984).