Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin – one of the most famous German poets of all time – was born 250 years ago. In this interview, the Oldenburg-based philosopher Johann Kreuzer discusses what makes Hölderlin’s work so fascinating and its role in the history of philosophy.
Professor Kreuzer, Hölderlin knew Goethe and Schiller and was friends with important philosophers such as Schelling and Hegel. However, when it comes to Hölderlin’s life, there is one thing in particular that many people know – namely that the poet apparently spent the second half of his life in a state of madness in a tower room in Tübingen. Is this notion even accurate?
Hölderlin suffered from an illness, an experience of psychosis; that much is clear. However, the image of the mad poet was shaped above all by the poet and writer Wilhelm Waiblinger, who visited Hölderlin from 1822 onwards and went for walks with him. Earlier, in 1805, a doctor from Nürtingen had written in a medical report that Hölderlin’s ‘madness had turned into delirium’. However, it is important to bear in mind that this was the period following the French Revolution. In Württemberg, too, there were circles that were considering how the authoritarian system of government might be changed. Hölderlin was friends with some of these people, such as Isaac Sinclair. He had attended a dinner with Sinclair in June 1804, at which an informer was present. Sinclair was convicted in a trial for high treason. The Nürtingen doctor’s medical report thus ultimately protected Hölderlin from political persecution.
Hölderlin was admitted to Tübingen University Hospital at the age of 36 and was discharged in 1807 with a medical certificate stating that he had two to three years left to live.
However, he went on to live for another 37 years at in the building belonging to master carpenter Zimmer on the Neckar in Tübingen. Zimmer had read Hölderlin’s epistolary novel *Hyperion*. The first volume of the novel was published in 1797, the second in 1799. Zimmer was fascinated by it and wanted to help Hölderlin. After Zimmer’s death, his daughter Charlotte took over his care. Hölderlin found peace in his tower room, a sheltered environment. There were other people who had rooms there too; Hölderlin would play cards or smoke a pipe with them. But he was nervous! This is evident, for example, from the fact that the master carpenter Zimmer often sent Hölderlin’s mother bills for shoe soles during the early years. The poet must have paced up and down a great deal.
How did it come about that, as a philosopher, you came to study Hölderlin the poet?
Hölderlin’s work comprises not only poetry and the famous novel *Hyperion*, but also theoretical texts, mostly fragments. My doctoral thesis focused on the two most important of these theoretical fragments. In them, he developed his understanding of what constitutes and necessitates poetic language, and what language can and should achieve. These are reflections on the philosophy of consciousness, history and language. They drew me in.
What role does Hölderlin play in the history of philosophy?
Hölderlin is one of the central figures in the formative phase of German Idealism – particularly in the debate around 1800 following the revolution in philosophical thought initiated by Immanuel Kant. A central point in Kant’s magnum opus, *Critique of Pure Reason*, is: ‘The “I think” must be able to accompany all my ideas.’ This means that self-consciousness is to be conceived as a self-relationship that is aware of itself. This is the basic structure of what Hegel later termed ‘Spirit’ – that is, the entity which recognises itself as a relation-to-itself within its relation-to-other things, and is thereby real. This distinguishes consciousness from that to which it relates. My thesis is – and I would defend it tooth and nail – that it was Hölderlin’s original insights upon which Hegel developed his ideas. Hölderlin was, for instance, already attending the lectures of the Jena philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte during the winter semester of 1794/95. In response to what Fichte put forward for discussion there, he jotted down notes on a flyleaf torn from a book, notes which can be regarded as something of a birth certificate for speculative idealism. However, this page was not published until 1961 under the title ‘Urtheil und Seyn’. By this time at the latest, however, Hölderlin’s significance in the development of German Idealism was clear.
What do you find particularly special about Hölderlin’s poems?
I am particularly fascinated by the reality of language. It must be said that many of the significant poems are merely fragments. But there is, for example, the elegy ‘Brot und Wein’ (‘Bread and Wine’), of which we have a complete fair copy. The first stanza begins as follows: ‘All round the city lies still; the illuminated street grows still / And, adorned with torches, the carriages rush by /…’ The poet Clemens Brentano had already praised the entire first stanza in the highest terms, calling it an unrivalled benchmark of poetic language. Another quotation had already impressed me when I was a student. I had read it in a programme for a production of Hölderlin’s *The Death of Empedocles* at Berlin’s Schaubühne: “But soon, like a dog, it will wander / In the heat, my voice through the alleys of the gardens …”. I read that back then and thought: I’ve understood that. And then I asked myself: What exactly have I understood here? That’s how it all began.
And what went through your mind back then?
Hölderlin doesn’t actually say ‘I see this and that’. Rather, the verses convey underlying layers of language in a way that perhaps only music can manage. The Hölderlin sound is unmistakable. In the text published in 1961, which I mentioned above, it is phrased as something ‘communicating itself through language’. This has a double meaning, because for Hölderlin, ‘to express itself’ means not only to communicate, but also that something is shared and thus becomes communicable in the first place.
What does this mean in concrete terms?
Every sentence takes the form of a judgement – thus ‘sharing’ what is originally, as Hegel calls it, a ‘sensual certainty’, ‘the One’. One cannot express this One oneself, because words in sentences always pass judgement. But one can convey what eludes the words through the very form in which the words are arranged in language. In Hölderlin’s ode ‘Friedensfeier’, for example, it is stated that ‘when silence returns, let there also be a language’. Language is not reducible to propositional content – that is, ‘meanings’ that we ‘communicate’. Rather, it also has a sensory, gestural and musical dimension. Capturing this dimension in linguistic form – that is what is so fascinating about Hölderlin. This is what sets his language apart. Incidentally, it is not decisive whether a text or poem is finished. What matters is the act of finding the right words.
Why is Hölderlin still relevant today?
Hölderlin is, after all, primarily a discovery of the 20th century. This is evident in the work of two major authors of the last century: the philosopher Martin Heidegger once said that the aim of his work was ‘to give Hölderlin’s words a voice’. In an interview with the news magazine *Spiegel*, he even called Hölderlin ‘the poet who points to the future’. But for Heidegger’s polar opposite, Theodor W. Adorno, too, contemporary philosophy is about doing justice to what, as he puts it, “philosophically precedes philosophy in Hölderlin’s late hymns”. This ties in with the reality of language that finds its fulfilment in his work. At the start of the 21st century, it is no less important than it was before. Recently, for example, the Russian writer Olga Martynova wrote in an essay in the *FAZ*: No matter where one stands politically or on which continent one lives – wherever poetry is discussed, Hölderlin is in the picture. Hölderlin has been translated into 83 languages – so there is an enormous resonance.
So should we tell young people: ‘Read Hölderlin – there’s more to it than just the words’?
Yes, I think that works. If we look at what language has been reduced to in the age of social media, my experience is that there is a keen sensibility, particularly amongst younger people. It’s not about a stodgy Hölderlin standing on some pedestal. You have to engage with his texts. And it does work – not least because they have an intrinsic closeness to music, to musical structures. This opens up a way of connecting with young people that can still inspire them to take an interest in Hölderlin today.
Interview: Constanze Böttcher
