The German Genius

Eichendorff, the latter in Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts ( Diary of a Ne’er-do-well ). There was also a raft of writers who responded to the new circumstances—Heinrich Heine and Georg Büchner in particular, and the “agitatory” poets Ferdinand Freiligrath and Georg Herwegh. But this division, and the “cultural lag” in Germany, the fact that industrialization and urbanization occurred later there than elsewhere, and the fact that these writers lived in the shadow of Goethe and Schiller, meant that though their genius was well (if belatedly) recognized, nevertheless they are simply not international household names as are Victor Hugo and Honoré de Balzac, or Edgar Allan Poe and Ralph Waldo Emerson, or William Makepeace Thackeray, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Charles Dickens, all of whom were contemporaries. These German authors are classic examples of a culture that needs to be made more familiar to us all. 2
    T HE S UPERIORITY OF P OETRY
     
    Friedrich Hölderlin, born in Württemberg, studied theology at Tübingen, where he formed a triumvirate of friends and roommates with Georg Hegel and Friedrich Schelling. They were a big influence on each other, and many scholars believe it must have been Hölderlin who brought Hegel’s attention to the ideas of Heraclitus, whose theory about the “union of opposites” finds such an echo in Hegel’s concept of dialectics. Hölderlin’s stature as one of Germany’s greatest poets has been acknowledged since the beginning of the twentieth century but he has only recently been recognized as a philosopher. This perhaps reflects his belief that poetry provided the best access to the truth (another view predominant in the age between doubt and Darwin). 3
    Hölderlin’s life was compromised by the fact that he fell hopelessly in love with Susette, the wife in the family where he was working as a tutor, and by the fact that, early on, he showed signs of what was then termed “hypochondria.” He made Susette the heroine of his novel Hyperion , which, in the form of letters, tells the story of one man’s “eccentric path” in life. The novel reflects Hölderlin’s view that too much self-consciousness (à la Hegel) is potentially dangerous, that an individual’s exploration of life risks his losing the original unity with nature into which he is born and which it is the purpose of poetry to describe. Hölderlin thought that Kant’s noumenal world was ultimately (as Kant himself had insisted) unknowable but that poetry could, from time to time, capture glimpses of it, and this was another of its primary functions. In Hyperion , the central idea is that beauty cannot be so much created as uncovered . It is always there, in the world, and it is the poet’s task to reveal it. This view would be echoed by Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer. 4
    In early 1802 Hölderlin again found employment, again as a tutor, this time to the children of the Hamburg consul in Bordeaux. This necessitated his traveling there on foot. The time for observation and reflection that this provided gave rise to one of his greatest poems, “Andenken” (Remembrance):
    The northeast blows,
My favourite among winds,
Since it promises fiery spirit
And a good voyage to mariners…
     
    I remember well
how the crowns of the elm trees
lean over the mill,
and a fig tree grows in the courtyard.
     
    Hölderlin returned to Germany a few months later but was now showing frank signs of mental disorder, which got worse when he heard that Susette had died. He was, fortunately, saved when in 1807 a Tübingen carpenter and literary enthusiast, Ernst Zimmer, who had admired Hyperion , took him in, and gave him a room overlooking the Neckar valley. Zimmer cared for Hölderlin until his death in 1843.
    His poetry was admired enough in his lifetime for Hölderlin’s friends to club together and publish the work. After his death, however, he sank into oblivion, partly because of his madness and partly because he was dismissed as a “melancholy imitator” of Schiller. He was rediscovered only in the early twentieth century, by the circle around Stefan George but also by the philosopher Martin Heidegger, and Hölderlin’s work is now regarded as one of the high points of German literature. 5 In his late madness, he would write poems of childlike beauty which he would sign with fantastic names such as “Scardanelli”:
    where shall I
When it is winter, find the flowers,
And the sunshine
And shadows