Hölderlin was born on March 20, 1770 in Lauffen on the Neckar, a small town in the region of Swabia in southwest Germany. His father, who held an administrative position at a cloister, died soon after Hölderlin’s birth, in 1772, the same year that his sister, Heinrike, was born. His mother remarried in 1774, and the family moved to Nürtingen, where her new husband became burgomaster. Hölderlin’s stepfather, whom he loved as a father, died in 1779. The experiences of loss that marked Hölderlin’s early childhood profoundly influenced his disposition and his poetic sensibility. In a letter to his mother in 1799, he traced his “tendency toward mourning” to the “incomprehensible pain” brought on by the death of his “second father” and by his mother’s “daily mourning and tears.” This self-reflection suggests that the grief and melancholy that pervade his work and the elegiac tone that is characteristic of his poetic style emanate from his acute awareness of mortality at so young an age.
Hölderlin’s mother, the daughter of a clergyman, intended her son for the Lutheran ministry. From 1784 to 1788, he attended two preparatory cloister schools, Denkendorf and Maulbronn. During this time, he composed his first verses, modeled on Schiller and Klopstock. In 1787, his poem Mein Vorsatz (“My Resolution”) testified to his growing literary ambition, his longing to attain “Pindar’s flight” and “Klopstock’s grandeur.” Even as his dream of pursuing a career as a man of letters took hold, his years of formal theological training left their mark indelibly on his thinking. His immersion in Pietism – a movement within Lutheranism that had a strong tradition in his native Swabia – became a source of motifs that run through his oeuvre. His poetry and Hyperion, his only novel, unmistakably reflect the pietistic emphases on subjective intimacy with the divine and on the imminence of the kingdom of God.
In 1788, though already in doubt about his calling to the church, Hölderlin went on to study for his ordination at the prestigious Tübingen seminary, known as the Stift. There he forged close intellectual and emotional bonds with Hegel and Schelling, and founded a poetry club with his friends Neuffer and Magenau. His readings of Rousseau, Spinoza, Leibniz, Plato, and, above all, Kant awakened his enthusiasm for philosophy. Magenau offered a memorable description of the Kantian fervor among the students at the Stift: “Kant’s philosophy made most of our heads reel, and the pulpit resounded with space and time.” Through his ongoing discussions with Hegel and Schelling, Hölderlin engaged continuously with the philosophical movements of his day and played a decisive role in the formation of German Idealism. The three companions adopted as their motto the Greek phrase hen kai pan – “one and all” – and pursued in their individual ways an understanding of the universe as a harmonious whole.
In 1791, Hölderlin’s poetry saw print for the first time in the Musenalmanach published by his friend Stäudlin. His poems of this period, known as his Tübingen hymns, are rhapsodic songs of praise for ideals of beauty, freedom and harmony. Like Hyperion, on which he began work in 1792, they are infused with the republican spirit of the French Revolution. Along with many of his fellow seminarians, Hölderlin strongly sympathized with the Revolution. When France and the Austro-Prussian coalition went to war in 1792, he wrote a letter to his younger sister decrying the “abuse of princely power” and instructing her to “pray for the French, the champions of human rights.”
Hölderlin’s early poems share another similarity with Hyperion that is also essential to his work as a whole: his celebration of ancient Greece. Hellenism had been prevalent among German intellectuals ever since the art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann lauded the “noble simplicity and quiet greatness” of ancient Greek painting and sculpture in a study in 1755 that influenced, among others, Goethe and Schiller. Hölderlin’s writings constantly invoke the Hellenic past as a model to be emulated and surpassed in art, culture, philosophy and democratic freedom. The poet’s idealization of antiquity was intimately linked to his commitment to contemporary political change.
Hölderlin’s poetic, intellectual and political development increasingly steered him away from an ecclesiastical career. Even before he entered the Stift, his letters conveyed misgivings about a future in the clergy and the constraints of family life that would accompany the vocation. In 1789, he dissolved his engagement with Luise Nast, blaming his “morose, ill-humored, ailing” nature and his “unsatisfied ambition.” Not long after he completed his studies in 1793, he rejected the prospect of marriage to Elise Lebret, whose father’s influence as chancellor of the Stift could have secured him a position as a pastor.
Resisting his mother’s pressure to enter the ministry, Hölderlin instead traveled to Jena. At the time, Jena was the hub of German literary culture, and in the years that followed, the city witnessed the efflorescence of Early Romanticism. During the several months that he spent there, Hölderlin crossed paths with Friedrich von Hardenberg, who later became a leading figure of the Romantic movement under his penname Novalis, and whose writings display thematic parallels with Hölderlin’s work, particularly in the veneration of nature and the yearning for spiritual renewal. Most significantly, Hölderlin attended Fichte’s lectures at the University of Jena, and met Schiller, Herder and Goethe. Schiller provided mentorship and sponsorship to the literary aspirant. In 1794, Schiller published a fragment of an early version of Hyperion in his journal Neuer Thalia, and shortly thereafter, as a result of his advocacy, the publisher Cotta agreed to take on the novel.
Schiller also recommended Hölderlin to his friend Charlotte von Kalb as resident tutor to her son in her home in Waltershausen. Thus began the poet’s difficult and unstable life as a private pedagogue in a series of affluent households. In 1795, his intense frustration over the incorrigibility of his first pupil drove his employer to relieve him of his post. Motivated in part by his urge to escape from under Schiller’s shadow, Hölderlin left Jena for Nürtingen, where he was overcome with emotional distress, which he described in a letter to Schiller: “I freeze and harden in the winter that surrounds me. As my heavens are of iron, so I am of stone.” From his philosophical exchanges with Schelling in Tübingen and Nürtingen at this time emerged the seminal text known as the Älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus, or the “Oldest System-Program of German Idealism,” which scholars generally believe was produced collaboratively by Schelling, Hegel and Hölderlin.
In 1796, Hölderlin accepted an appointment as private tutor in the household of the wealthy Frankfurt banker Gontard. The love affair that soon commenced between him and his employer’s young wife, Susette Gontard, was perhaps the most pivotal experience of his life. He called her “Diotima,” the same name he gave to the exalted figure of the beloved in Hyperion. Hyperion’s reverence for Diotima, who incarnates his goal of merging with “the All of nature” and resembles the divine in her contentment and serenity, echoes the soulful relationship between Hölderlin and Susette. As Hölderlin described it in a letter to Neuffer in 1797, the same year that the first volume of Hyperion was published, his profound connection to Susette was “an eternal, joyful, holy friendship with a being that has strayed into this poor, spiritless, disordered century.” Hölderlin took the name Diotima from Plato’s Symposium, in which Diotima is the priestess who teaches Socrates the primacy of the experiences of love and beauty in disclosing the unity of all things. In Hyperion, the character of Diotima exemplifies this insight. Susette no doubt embodied and illuminated it for Hölderlin, thus earning her the name Diotima.
While living at the Gontards, Hölderlin began work on a tragedy, Der Tod des Empedokles (The Death of Empedocles), which he never completed. After the publication of Hyperion, he sent a copy of the novel to Schiller, enclosing two poems that Schiller then passed on to Goethe, who dismissed them as excessively “subjective” and “overstrained.” At Schiller’s urging, Goethe received Hölderlin in Frankfurt and judged him “somewhat depressed and sickly” and yet “quite kind, and humbly, indeed anxiously open.” Goethe advised him “to write short poems and to choose for each of them
an object of human interest.”
In 1798, after his relationship with Susette had gone on for about two years, the atmosphere of suspicion and tension in the Gontard household grew intolerable, and Hölderlin quit his post. But through secret correspondence and occasional meetings, the lovers’ intimacy persisted over the next two years. In 1799, Hölderlin took up residence in Homburg, where he had close ties with Isaak von Sinclair, a jurist in the service of the Landgrave of Hessen-Homburg. Hölderlin had first befriended Sinclair in Jena when the latter was expelled from the university for participating in radical student disturbances. In Homburg, Sinclair introduced him to politically subversive acquaintances. In the course of the year, Hölderlin worked on Empedokles and wrote several essays articulating his philosophical and poetic thinking, including his theory of the “alternation of tones,” which elucidates his dynamic technique of literary composition and his musicological approach to language. Also in this year, the second volume of Hyperion appeared. Hölderlin’s short-lived attempt to found his own literary review, soliciting works from Schiller and Schelling, met with scant support. When Napoleon installed himself by coup d’état as First Consul of France, Hölderlin condemned this despotic turn, referring to him as a “type of dictator,” but in spite of the poet’s disenchantment with the self-betrayal of the French Revolution, he continued to espouse republican politics and to frequent radical circles.
Hölderlin encountered Susette for the last time in 1800. Among her last words to him were “All my surroundings are mute and empty without you.” Two years later, she died. In the intervening period, Hölderlin translated Pindar and wrote a number of his major elegies, notably Brot und Wein (“Bread and Wine”), in which he famously posed the question Wozu Dichter in dürftiger Zeit? (“What are poets for in times of need?”) and deployed the motifs of the retreat of the gods and the anticipation of their return; obtained a private tutor-ship in the Gonzenbach household in Hauptwil, Switzerland, and then quit after a few months to return home to Nürtingen; unsuccessfully sought a lectureship in Greek at Jena through Schiller, who did not reply to his inquiry; journeyed, in large part by foot, a thousand kilometers to Bordeaux for a tutoring job in the household of a wine merchant and consul of Hamburg, only to depart abruptly after three months, most likely for Paris; and finally appeared in Stuttgart, in the words of a friend, “pale as a corpse, emaciated, with hollow wild eyes, long hair and beard, and dressed like a beggar.” On a brief visit to Nürtingen, he exhibited, according to his half-brother, “the clearest signs of psychic breakdown.” Shortly after he returned to Stuttgart, the news of Susette’s death plunged him into a state of emotional shock so severe that his family placed him in the care of a physician in Nürtingen. To prevent him from succumbing to an “outbreak of rage,” the physician called upon a Latin student to read him passages from Homer, which exerted a calming effect upon the poet.
By 1803, Hölderlin had recovered sufficiently to produce some of his greatest work. He wrote several new hymns, the most celebrated of which is “Patmos.” Commissioned by and dedicated to the Landgrave of Homburg, the poem is one of Hölderlin’s most philosophically and structurally far-reaching creations and contains the famous opening lines: Nah ist / Und schwer zu fassen der Gott / Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst / das Rettende auch (“Near is / the god, and hard to grasp / But where danger lies / also grows what saves”). He also prepared his Sophocles translations for publication. And yet the precariousness of his sanity was visible to others who came into contact with him. After a visit from Hölderlin, Schelling wrote to Hegel, “He neglects his appearance to the point of repugnance and, though his speaking does not entirely indicate madness, he has assumed its outward mannerisms.” Several years later, Schelling stated of the encounter: “I was convinced that this tenderly strung instrument was destroyed forever.” Following this unsettling meeting, Schelling asked Hegel to take care of Hölderlin in Jena, but Hegel’s response was non-committal.
In 1804, Sinclair created and secretly funded a position for Hölderlin as court librarian to the Landgrave of Homburg. En route to Homburg, Sinclair and Hölderlin participated in political meetings with Stuttgart radicals, in which there was talk about assassinating the Elector of Württemberg. The following year, Sinclair’s acquaintance Blankenstein reported the discussions to the authorities, and Sinclair was arrested and charged with high treason. Blankenstein’s testimony implicated Hölderlin in the Jacobin conspiracy, but went on to recount that the poet “fell into a sort of madness, berated Sinclair and the Jacobins incessantly, and cried on and on: ‘I will not remain a Jacobin. Vive le roi!’” After a medical examination, Hölderlin was declared of unsound mind. The doctor described his speech as “incomprehensible … half German, half Greek and half Latin.” Sinclair was ultimately released for lack of evidence.
In 1806, Hölderlin was admitted to a psychiatric clinic in Tübingen. He had to be forcibly transported to the clinic, for he put up fierce physical resistance in the belief he was being abducted. After several months of observation and treatment, he was released into the care of Ernst Zimmer, a carpenter and an admirer of Hyperion. Though the doctors gave the poet “at most three years” to live, he spent the next thirty-six years housed in the tower attached to Zimmer’s home on the Neckar River, playing piano, reading the classics, taking walks, receiving visitors with excessively courtly formality and addressing them deferentially as “Your Majesty” or “Your Holiness,” signing letters Scardanelli and writing occasional verse under the same enigmatic alias. He died in 1843 at the age of seventy-three.
In numerous respects, Hölderlin helped usher in the great philosophical and literary developments of the nineteenth century. His descent into insanity at the dawn of that century truncated the creative period of his life after scarcely more than a decade, but his achievements within such a short time were extraordinary. Nonetheless, he was nearly forgotten until the early twentieth century, when Norbert von Hellingrath’s publication of the first critical edition of his works kindled renewed interest in the poet.
Hellingrath belonged to the so-called George Circle, the literary group surrounding the poet Stefan George. In line with its own national vision, the George Circle promoted an image of Hölderlin as a specifically German prophetic figure. In 1919, George pronounced Hölderlin “the great visionary for his people … the cornerstone of the imminent German future and the herald of the new God.” This reading of Hölderlin as the forecaster and founding poet of a glorious German national future disregarded the poet’s powerful expressions of alienation toward his homeland – most notably in the famous passage toward the end of Hyperion, known as the Scheltrede, or invective, in which Hyperion-Hölderlin chastises the German people as “barbarians” who are “profoundly incapable of any divine feeling” and degrade all that is holy. The George Circle also misconstrued his use of the term Vaterland in his poems, more likely a reference to his native Swabia than to a German nation that did not yet exist in his lifetime. Lastly, it neglected the critical influence of French republicanism on his sense of patriotism.
But the nationalist interpretation continued to bedevil the reception of his work through the first half of the twentieth century. In 1943, the centenary of Hölderlin’s death, the Nazi regime issued a Feldauswahl, a special edition of his poetry for the troops. That the words of this passionate opponent of autocracy were pressed into the service of the Nazi enterprise is the supreme irony of Hölderlin’s posthumous destiny. It was also during the Nazi era that Heidegger published his influential commentaries on Hölderlin. On the one hand, Heidegger’s analysis was distinct from the Nazis’ ideological appropriation of Hölderlin: Heidegger declared him the “poet’s poet,” who gives voice to the fundamental poetic calling to prepare the way for a new world. In his essays on Hölderlin’s Heimkunft (“Homecoming”) and Andenken (“Remembrance”), he demonstrated how the complex themes of origin and homeland in these poems are in fact alien to German patriotic and nationalistic thinking. On
the other hand, the philosopher infamously lent support to the Nazi movement, most explicitly when he was elected Rector of the University of Freiburg in 1933, a post he resigned the following year. Heidegger wrote his meditations on Hölderlin after his resignation, but due to his political involvement and his effort to articulate a vision of Germany’s place in history through exegeses of Hölderlin’s verse, the poet remained unjustly associated with the dangerous myth of national awakening.
The countless literary and philosophical studies of Hölderlin that have been produced since the Second World War have done much to dispel this perception. Today, scholars who evaluate his importance in poetry and philosophy commonly stress the individuality of his thought; the idiosyncratic nature and poetic intensity of his language, at once highly expressive and disconcertingly unfamiliar; and his considerable influence on such figures as Hegel, Nietzsche, Rilke and Celan. In the postwar era, Celan’s affinity to Hölderlin was a potent testament to the enduring force of Hölderlin’s poetry. A Romanian-Jewish Holocaust survivor whose poems are the most disquieting expressions in German of the devastation wreaked by the Nazis, Celan reached back to Hölderlin in his search for a poetic language that could reveal the anguish of the Holocaust. Perhaps it is because Hölderlin was so keenly attuned to the momentous upheavals of his own time that his legacy has become inseparable from the catastrophic events of the twentieth century.
Hölderlin’s Hyperion is perhaps the most comprehensive manifestation of the poet’s preoccupations. With stirring lyricism and philosophical sublimity, the novel explores an array of themes, among them the search for an all-embracing unity amidst life’s dissonances; the struggle for freedom and a better world; the resistance against the soulless constrictions of modern life; and the divinity of nature and love. Written during the ascendance of the novel in Germany, which culminated not long after with the Romantics, Hyperion typifies the early conventions of the genre. By the time the young author began work on his debut novel, the Bildungsroman (novel of education) and the Briefroman (novel in letters) had been established as successful forms. Hölderlin adopted both traditions. Akin to Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther), which was published in 1774, the narrative of Hyperion traces its protagonist’s development from youth to maturity through a series of letters.
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