German Romantic Poetry
Romanticism, before even having the name of a movement, and with little or no communication among the original groups, erupted in various parts of Europe. A pre-Romantic movement in Germany came to be known as Sturm und Drang, after the title of Friedrich Maximilian Klinger’s tempestuous tragedy. Its participants agreed on only one goal: the liberation of German letters from the dominance of French literary classicism. Johann Gottfried Herder, later to become Goethe’s protégé in Weimar, gave it some theoretical support by stressing that the genius of each nation demanded a literary expression that corresponded to the particular character of its people. True “humanity” (Humanität) recognizes the distinctive difference of one’s own nation as well as the qualities that all nations share. Two of those early “pre-Romantics” exercised the strongest influence on the origin of a Romantic Movement: Goethe and Schiller. To understand the nature of the former one needs to know the latter.
GOETHE
Goethe’s first two works, the drama Goetz von Berlichingen (1773) and the novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sufferings of the Young Werther) (1774), may count as starting achievements of Sturm und Drang. When, partly under the impact of these works, a “Romantic Movement” originated, Goethe (1749–1832) distanced himself from them. Nonetheless, even his later works continued to influence Romanticism more than any others. Indeed, young Romantics considered his novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre as the founding masterpiece of their Movement as well as the model to imitate, while even for late Romantic poets, such as Heine and Eichendorff, his poetry remained the standard of excellence.
This remains all the more remarkable since much of his work had solid roots in the Enlightenment. Goethe admired Lessing’s tragedies: Emilia Galotti lay on Werther’s table when he committed suicide. Minna von Barnhelm, with its call for national unity among Germans, also had inspired him. His own tragedy, Goetz von Berlichingen, takes place at the time of the Reformation, the period in which Germany built its spiritual identity. Its hero is a solitary knight who defends ancient German customs of chivalry. The drama was intended to revive the nation’s former dignity and spiritual unity. Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, published a year later, made Goethe’s name known all over Europe. The story of this sensitive young man, whom an impossible love drives to suicide, marks the beginning of an overtly emotional literature in Germany. With its appearance, the Sturm und Drang struggle for a national literature scored a major victory. From Goethe’s autobiographical Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth) (1808–31), we know that the novel reflected much of the author’s personal experience. Yet, even more than both Goetz and Werther, Goethe’s lyrical poems revolutionized literary life in Germany.
In the decade from 1775 to 1785 (his first Weimar period), Goethe wrote so many poems in numerous moods and meters that he surpassed in quantity and quality all lyrical poets of the time. In many of them he reworked ancient ballads that had survived in traditional folk songs. Thus, “Heidenröslein,” now universally known in Schubert’s musical setting, goes back to an ancient story of a boy who breaks off a little flower that vainly attempts to ward him off by its thorns—probably a veiled report of a sexual violation. Some of Goethe’s ballads first appeared in his prose works, among them “Der Sanger” (The Singer) in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and “Der König in Thule” (The King in Thule) in Faust. He called them Lieder (songs), for indeed they excelled in melodious harmony, even before they were set to music. The lyrics could be frightening, as popular fairy tales and legends tend to be. In “Der Erlkönig” a dying child’s visions of the awful specter alternate with the father’s soothing words to quiet it. Many lyrics attained their effect through their great simplicity or through a powerful evocation of a “mood” induced by nature, such as “Über allen Gipfeln” (Over all the Hilltops) (1780) or “An den Mond” (To the Moon) (1778). None of them became more popular than his songs of nostalgia, with their deeply Romantic Sehnsucht for an ancient homeland, “Kennst du das Land wo die Citronen blühen?” (Knowst Thou the Land Where Lemons Grow?).
All German lyricists followed Goethe, although only Heine in his best work was able to match him. Hence Goethe in the Romantic period became a “classic” in the original sense of a model to imitate. At the same time, he, like Schiller, Hölderlin, and other early Romantics, even Friedrich Schlegel in his early period, was a “classicist” in the later sense of having been inspired by Greek and Roman classical writers. During his early years in Weimar, Goethe wrote his drama Iphigenie auf Tauris, although he postponed publishing it until 1788. One also hears echoes of Pindarus in such early poems as “Harzreise im Winter” (Journey in the Harz Mountains in Wintertime). Goethe’s desire for a direct acquaintance with the classical world led him to depart abruptly for Italy on September 3, 1786, where he remained until June 18, 1788.
A new, self-conscious classicism appears in the Römische Elegien and the Venezianische Epigramme (both 1790), as well as in the heavily reworked version of Iphigenie auf Tauris. Rome and the ancient culture attracted him by their sense of wholeness, their naturalness, and the absence of inner dividedness typical of the Gothic North. The Latin poets Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid inspired his Roman Elegies, an erotic exchange between a German male and a Roman female, written in the ancient elegiac meter of disticha (a dactylic hexameter followed by a pentameter). A more cynical tone prevails in his Venetian Epigrams, poetic reflections on Goethe’s later journey to Venice as reluctant companion of the Duke of Weimar. This time Italy appears to have lost much of its attraction to him: the people who live and work there remain unaware of the ancient world that surrounds them. But then, all who visit the classical civilization can be no more than foreign visitors. As Goethe later remarked about his own journey to Italy: “We are all pilgrims, we who seek Italy. It is only scattered bones we revere with happy credibility.” The tour cured him of any desire to return. “The Venetian Epigrams seem to have afforded a cathartic effect on Goethe; here he rid himself of black bile.”1 As the Italian experience became more distant, Goethe’s “classicism” settled down to a less literal and more formal imitation of ancient poetry.
Goethe’s Romanticism did not end with his so-called classical period. He returned to the writing of Wilhelm Meister, which he had started before 1783. The finished version would not be published until 1795, under the title Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (W.M.’s Apprenticeship). I shall postpone discussing this model of German Romanticism until chapter 6, on the novel. The endurance of Goethe’s Romanticism is also confirmed by the early versions of the later drama Faust, of which he had published a first fragment in 1790.2 Schelling and the brothers Schlegel greeted it as a Romantic masterpiece, “the dawn of genuine art and pure beauty.”3 The conflict between Faust’s ideal of self-realization and the limits of his success in the attempt to achieve it was a prominently Romantic theme. So is the vague pantheism that runs through the play. Yet Faust was also a “classical” drama. Only after having gone through a classical period, and with the critical support of Schiller, did Goethe succeed in transforming what he himself had called a “barbarous composition” into a coherent philosophical drama.4 Around the same time he started preparing the lengthy episode on Helena of Troy, which was to appear in Faust II, the strange result of a classical theme developed in a Romantic style.
To describe the “meaning” of Faust is impossible; even Goethe declared himself incapable of doing so. Yet the hero undoubtedly represented a striving to “savor” all experiences that life has to offer, followed by a failure and a rebirth to a new life. The drama begins with a “Prologue in Heaven,” inspired by the introduction to the Book of Job. The devil, who appears in Goethe’s drama as the celestial court jester Mephistopheles, complains about the conduct of humans. They are never satisfied and always desire to possess more. The Lord refers him to his servant Faust, who, although driven by an insatiable desire for knowledge, nevertheless has remained faithful to Him. Mephistopheles replies that Faust fears God only as long as all goes well. He bets that he can lead the man so far astray that the devil will be entitled to claim him after death. The Lord merely replies that all men occasionally lose their way and allows Mephisto to “test” Faust. Goethe’s wager substantially differs from the one in the Book of Job. In God’s plan, the test will not prove that Faust’s virtue will survive the devil’s temptations, but rather that Faust, after having committed more moral errors than most humans, may still be saved. Faust thereby becomes somewhat of a Lutheran theodicy, in which God justifies the sinner (simul justus et peccator —simultaneously sinner and justified). Mephistopheles encourages Faust’s ambition to attain much of what he desires, in order to corrupt him through his success in obtaining it, and thereafter to destroy the object of his lust. The play criticizes the modern will to control all aspects of life, even its origin. Wagner, Faust’s assistant, has succeeded in creating a human spirit, named Homunculus, who is now in a laboratory tube waiting for a body.
Faust is a tragedy, as the subtitle states, because all of Faust’s enterprises, even the well-intentioned ones, fail. In his Aesthetics Hegel calls the play “the absolute philosophical tragedy.” Yet it is also a comedy, because in the end Faust is saved through the loving intercession of Gretchen, whose life he had ruined. At the conclusion of the drama appear the mysterious Neoplatonic verses that seem to confound any interpretation we might have reached about the play’s meaning: “All that perishes is only a symbol. The inaccessible here becomes attainment” (“Alles Vergängliche / Ist nur ein Gleichnis; / Das Unzulängliche / Hier wird’s Ereignis”). Perhaps Goethe intimates that success or failure is not ultimately decisive in life: human existence attains its meaning only at completion, and that completion may differ from much of what the person had been pursuing. In this work of awesome complexity, Goethe has plumbed existence to a depth that might be called “endless.” No other literary product more fully verifies Kant’s judgment that the “ideas” conveyed by a work of art are so profound that ordinary concepts cannot express them—explaining why this fictional tragedy has inspired more German thinkers than any modern philosopher has except Kant.
In his mid-sixties (1814–16) Goethe opened yet another dimension in his poetry. During Napoleon’s final year and exile, when Europe was breaking apart and royal thrones collapsed, the poet sought a more peaceful setting in which to exercise his creative powers. In his West- Österlicher Divan he turned to the fourteenth-century Persian Sufi Hafiz, who in lively, elegant songs had celebrated the joys of earthly life and love while “deeply staring into the mysteries of the godhead.” In this collection of poetic translations, descriptions, and imitations of the Sufi poet, Goethe may seem to break with classicism and to indulge in “Orientalist” diversions. Yet these poems reach the same formal perfection as his earlier ones. Some were written during Goethe’s journey through Rhineland in 1814; others during his stay with the Frankfurt banker Johann Jacob von Willemer and his young wife, Marianne. Only Book 1 remains close to Hafiz’s religious vision. A poem such as “Blessed Longing” (“Selige Sehnsucht”) is based on the mystical image of the religious lover who, like a moth, flies into the flame of divine love. Yet in the second book, the poet warns against a mystical interpretation: “They have called you, holy Hafiz, the mystical tongue, these masters of words, without recognizing the value of the word.” The Sufi poet, who owed his reputation to his exceptional knowledge of the Koran, moves beyond and occasionally against Holy Writ in this worldly translation of his infidel interpreter.
In the “Book of Love” the poet takes the part of a fictional Sufi lover, conceived in the spirit of Hafiz’s poetry, and Marianne Willemer takes that of the beloved. A poem on the beloved’s rich hairlocks introduces the partner in Goethe’s poetic dialogue. These same locks reappear in Book 8, entitled “Suleika,” which consists entirely of love poems exchanged between Goethe and Marianne, here called Suleika (the name of Putiphar’s wife in the Koran). Despite the profane nature of the elderly Goethe’s love for the young woman, a religious cloud continues to hover over the playful dialogue. The Divan remains mysterious: it is partly an attempt to enter a different spiritual universe, partly erotic lyricism, and partly lighthearted Spielerei. In the poem “Wink” (Book 2) Goethe suggests that its religion is not to be taken too seriously: “The word is only a fan. . . .”
Sehnsucht and Heimweh are words that often appear in Goethe’s poetry. But one feels that irony stands always ready to attribute the distance dividing ideal from reality to man’s fickle heart. There is nothing wrong with the world. The ideal is the real world with all that is in it. Rather than longing for what has never left us, a person should busy himself searching for his natural vocation, as Wilhelm Meister did, and once he has found it, should collaborate with nature, as Faust attempted to do at the end of Faust II. He may not succeed. Still, “Wer immer strebend sich bemüht, den sollen wir erlösen” (As long as man strives, we will redeem him). Whatever the outcome, Goethe covers all failures in the poem “Vanitas, Vanitatum Vanitas”: “Ich habe meine Sach auf Nichts gestellt /Drum ist’s so wohlmir in der Welt” (I have set my case on nothing / That’s why it goes so well for me in the world). But that is also how Goethe ceased to be a Romantic.
SCHILLER
Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805) was born in a Pietist family in Württemberg. Although he soon lost his faith, the religion of his youth never ceased to influence his work, and it strongly reappears in two of his dramas. The Duke of Württemberg, in whose army his father served, sent the boy to a military academy to study medicine. The young Schiller liked neither the studies nor the military discipline. Die Räuber (The Robbers), a play about social rebellion, which he wrote in 1781 while still a student, strongly displeased the Duke. With some difficulty the poet managed to escape from Württemberg and to have his play performed in Mannheim (outside the Duke’s jurisdiction), where he obtained a position as playwright-in-residence at the local theater. After his contract expired he faced years of bitter poverty. During those years he began writing Don Carlos, one of his best plays, as well as a number of poems. In Leipzig he met Gottfried Koerner, who was to become a lifelong friend and a judicious critic of his work. He followed Koerner to Dresden, where he completed Don Carlos and began a historical study of the sixteenth-century rebellion in the Netherlands. In 1789 he was appointed professor of history at the University of Jena. Despite his growing reputation, poverty continued to pursue him, and his health broke down. Yet nothing could prevent him from pursuing the literary task he had set himself. At last, in 1791 the Danish Duke of Augustenburg granted him a generous stipend.
In 1794 he began an intense literary collaboration with Goethe on the journal Die Horen. Although Schiller was by then respected as much as Goethe and his work had become far more popular than Goethe’s, he always felt inferior to his illustrious friend. As impressive as his literary output was his attractive personality. He devoted his life and creative powers to the political and cultural awakening of Germany and generously assisted young poets, such as Novalis and Hölderlin. Today, readers tend to appreciate Schiller’s lyrical poetry less than his contemporaries did. Nonetheless, a few poems written during and shortly after the six years he devoted to philosophy (1790–95) have recently attracted new critical attention. Together with Goethe, Schiller belonged to the early, classical period of pre-Romanticism. In “The Gods of Greece,” the poet mourns the loss of the ancient mythical religion, when gods dwelled with humans in a common world. Christianity and the rough spirit of the North destroyed that beautiful intimacy.
Alle Blüten sind gefallen
Von des Nordes schauerlichen Wehn
Einen zu bereichern unter allen
Muszte diese Gotterwelt vergehn.
(All those blossoms have fallen
under the freezing northern wind.
To enrich one above all others
this divine world had to perish.)
(I, 85)5
In the bitter poem “Resignation” (I, 60), Schiller blames the severe religion of his childhood, which promised joy but brought only hardship: “Auch ich war in Arkadien geboren / Auch mir hat die Natur / An meiner Wiege Freude zugeschworen” (I also was born in Arcadia / To me also nature / at the cradle promised joy). But, according to Christian doctrine, the promise was to be realized only after death. Rather than waiting for it, the poet, like Heracles, decides to overcome the sufferings of existence by a proud refusal to seek happiness from any powers but his own.
Two poetic genres were Romantic favorites: the idyll and the elegy. If the ideal turns out somehow to be harmonious with existing reality, Schiller calls it an idyll. If the two remain opposed, he refers to it as an elegy. Following ancient usage, we have come to link both forms to a prosody of dactylic disticha. Yet for Schiller, the meter is less important than the mode of experiencing. Thus, despite Goethe’s artful use of the ancient elegiac meter, he regards his Roman Elegies as elegies only in form, not in content. Schiller did not even consider his own poem “Das Ideal und das Leben” (The Ideal and Life) (I, 93–98) sufficiently subjective to qualify as an elegy, even though it opposes ideals to realities and is written in the traditional meter.6
From that same period of poetic output date Schiller’s prose works on literary theory: the elegant Über Anmut und Würde (On Grace and Dignity) (1793), the influential Über naïve und sentimentalische Dichtung (On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry) (1795), and the philosophical Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen (On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters) (1795). All were written in reference to Kant’s moral philosophy. At the beginning of On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Schiller states: “It is for the most part Kantian principles on which the following theses will be based.”7 Finding no adequate literary tradition on which to build his poetry, Schiller turned to Kant for inspiration. In his practical philosophy Kant had solidly justified the ideal of freedom as the goal of ethical life. In his Critique of Judgment, he had philosophically legitimated the aesthetic experience as the sensuous incarnation of this idea. Considering the modesty of Kant’s aesthetic contribution, one cannot but admire what Schiller accomplished with it. He reintegrated the aesthetic realm with the moral one in his two theoretical treatises, On Grace and Dignity and On the Aesthetic Education of Man. In the former he argued that no moral life could be complete without graciousness of conduct. (Kant, in a footnote to his later work on religion, conceded the truth of Schiller’s insight.) In the latter, Schiller argued that only an aesthetic education enables humans to recognize the full comprehension of the moral life. I shall return to both works in chapter 7, on Romantic ethics.
A further critical problem demanded Schiller’s attention: How could the transcendent ideals of poetry be more than illusions? How could reality, for the secular mind, still be symbolic of a transcendent meaning, as it had been for the Greeks and even more so for Christians? For Goethe that problem had never existed. He had never sought his ideals beyond the actual world. He was both bemused and intrigued by Schiller’s predicament. To him, Schiller’s search for transcendent ideals appeared to create an unnecessary obstacle that could result only in a dualist conception of reality. Neither the aesthetic intuition nor its poetic expression required a transcendent foundation. They provided their own ideals and their own symbolic power. Ideal and reality coincide, for Goethe, in the aesthetic intuition. Schiller’s religious nostalgia had needlessly taken him through the byways of German philosophy and created the need for a complicated process from intuition to abstraction, which then had to be retransformed to poetic intuition. From Goethe’s point of view, in the poetic intuition the particular perception coincided with the universal idea. In this judgment, expressed in the course of his Conversations with Eckermann, Goethe reveals the very issue that had increasingly removed him from Romanticism. For him, no unreachable ideal distanced him from actual reality. The absolute consisted in the totality of what existed, of which he himself was a central part. In his essay “In Two Minds about Schiller,” Erich Heller has appropriately called Schiller the tragic poet of Idealism.8 Tragic, because he considered the ideals of the transcendental philosophy he embraced doubtful in their claims upon reality. “Idealism cannot be absolutely certain of its conclusions: it lacks the ultimate sanction of a theological faith” (p. 70). This unresolved tension between ideal and reality became the main theme of Schiller’s tragedies.
Schiller’s reputation has survived primarily through his dramatic and his theoretical works. His tragedies tend to follow the classical model of a hero or heroine struggling with an inescapable fate that in the end destroys him or her. In his dramas the male hero, intensely aware of his power, plays a more active part than he does in the Greek tragedy. He attempts to impose his ideals upon reality, but unfavorable circumstances combine with his own tragic blindness to prevent him from succeeding. Despite repeated warnings, he continues to challenge fate, and in the end ruins himself as well as those whom he intended to save. Hans Urs von Balthasar has called the various modes in which Schiller’s tragic heroes cope with destiny “Einubungen in die Aneignung des Schicksals” (exercises in the appropriation of fate).
Goethe’s Goetz von Berlichingen (1773) had marked the beginning of Sturm und Drang, and Schiller’s first play, Die Räuber (The Robbers) (1781), marked the end of it. Its hero, Karl Moor, banned from his ancestral castle by the intrigues of his brother, joins a band of outlaws to repair the injustices suffered by himself and others. He remains naïvely unaware of the limits of his power to change the established social order. Only in the fatal outcome of his noble intentions does he realize that his criminal activities have accomplished much evil and no good. We must overcome evil in ourselves before we can overcome it in others. The later Don Carlos (1787) (III, 5) is the tragic story of Count Posa, a sixteenth-century minister of Philip II, who in his attempt to liberate the Netherlands through his friend, Crown Prince Carlos, ruins the prince’s life as well as his own, without attaining his goal. The tragic outcome of the play is due to Posa’s failure to realize Carlos’s weakness and his father’s political rigidity.
Wallenstein (1800) (IV, 5) differs from Schiller’s earlier plays in that the German general, Albrecht von Wallenstein (in the Thirty Years’ War), knows from the beginning the danger he runs by following a strategy that conflicts with the explicit orders of his emperor. He decides to initiate a peace treaty with Sweden and thereby score a decisive victory for the empire. To achieve his ideal he relies on his unique military power: “Freiheit ist bei der Macht allein” (Freedom belongs only where power is). While realizing the risk inherent in an act of extreme insubordination, the general challenges fate by steadfastly ignoring its warnings and attempting to circumvent it by magic as well as by military skill. In the end, he pays with his life for his presumptuousness. The play differs from earlier ones because, as Schiller explains, Wallenstein’s fate resulted from a self-inflicted blindness. He wrote to Goethe: “It is a wholly different operation to idealize realism than to realize the ideal” (Letters to Goethe, May 1, 1798, emphases mine). Idealizing reality was essentially what the playwright had been doing in his earlier dramas. Wallenstein was different: here, Schiller followed Goethe’s poetic realism rather than his own idealism. The play approaches a Greek drama. But Wallenstein’s attitude toward fate differs from that of ancient heroes, who in the end accept its inevitability. Wallenstein resists fate even after he learns that it will defeat him.
In Die Braut von Messina (1803) (The Bride of Messina) (V, 284), Schiller deliberately attempted to imitate the classical form of the ancient tragedy of vengeance. Here, fate destroys all hopes without ever becoming intelligible: “What are hopes, what are projects which man the perishable builds?” The opposition between this ancient fatalism and the idea of self-determination, typical of the modern tragedy, makes this drama less credible. Schiller realized that his experiment with the ancient form had failed and never tried it again. Ancient fate conflicts not only with the modern concept of freedom but also with the premodern recognition of a benevolent Providence. The religious believer is inclined to accept the divine will and thus to justify tragic events before they occur. Schiller presents this inner acceptance in the persons of Mary Stuart in Maria Stuart (1800) (V, 6) and of Jeanne d’ Arc in Die Jungfrau von Orleans (1801) (V, 145). Piccolomini in Wallenstein (1800) comes close to adopting a similar attitude.9
Schiller possessed a more developed sense of the tragic than Goethe, who, even in plays with such catastrophic endings as Egmont and Tasso, remains more lyrical than tragic. Iphigenie auf Tauris, originally intended to be a drama in the ancient style, fell so far short of meeting this goal that Goethe, after his acquaintance with classical antiquity in southern Italy, decided to rewrite it. For Goethe, as for Hegel, everything had its proper place within a meaningful totality, while Schiller’s view remained more in line with Kant’s concept of freedom as an ideal that must direct our actions yet is never fully achieved. Goethe expressed the difference in his blunt statement: “All Schiller’s works are pervaded by freedom. But what is the good of a freedom we can never use?” (Conversations with Eckermann, January 18, 1827).
NOVALIS
Novalis, the pen name of Georg Philipp Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772–1801), began his studies in Jena, where Schiller advised him to study law rather than poetry. Having moved to Leipzig in order to continue his studies, he met Friedrich Schlegel. As inspector of the salt mines of the Duke of Saxony, he soon became an accomplished mineralogist and developed a strong interest in philosophy. The event that determined his poetic life was the death in 1797 of his fifteen-year-old fiancée, Sophie von Kühn. A mystical experience at her grave inspired his Hymnen an die Nacht (Hymns to the Night), which he published in Friedrich Schlegel’s literary magazine Athenäum (1800). It appeared there as a work of prose with some passages in poetic form. Yet in a manuscript that emerged early in the twentieth century, almost the entire composition is written in free verse. I follow the manuscript version, although the Athenäum edition contains a few improvements in the poetic parts. The Hymnen may have been inspired by a German translation of Edward Young’s Night Thoughts on Death and Immortality.10
The Hymns are the first masterpiece issued by a member of what was later called the German Romantic Movement. Novalis’s poetry differs from that of his contemporaries in that it does not record a past experience but rather coincides with the actual one in which it originates.11 The First Hymn begins with praise of the awakening day. Yet soon the poet begins to long for the return of the night, when, removed from the noise of day, he can give his memories and dreams free rein. Only the silence of night reveals our secret feelings and aspirations to ourselves. The recent death of his beloved has driven the poet into solitude, yet at night the deceased takes full possession of his mind.
The night is there
Enraptured is my soul
Past is the earthly day
And you are mine again.
This priority of night over day, of darkness over light, and of mystical depth over rational clarity, is typical of Romantic anti-illuminism. Yet one should not mistake it for anti-scientism. Novalis considered the scientific study of nature the most effective preparation for understanding her symbolism.
In the Third Hymn, the poet interrupts his nocturnal meditation to recall in a prose fragment the event that changed his life. While visiting Sophie’s grave, suddenly a shudder descended on him and “the bond of birth broke the chains of light.” During the following slumber, he enters into a different world. In a cloud the features of Sophie appear to him. Ordinary days follow, but they do not disrupt his sense of having entered a new life. Death has lost its sting. He rejoices that on his final day, light will no longer follow night and interrupt the union with his beloved. The Hymn concludes with verses that appear only in the Athenäum version. I quote from Charles E. Passage’s translation:
I feel now Death’s
Youth-giving flood,
To balm and aether
Is changed my blood.
For I live by day
Full of faith and desire,
In the nights I die
In holy fire.12
In the Fifth and Sixth Hymns the mystical awareness of the night expands into a Christian vision of history. The ancient gods of Greece were gods of light, celebrating their victory over the titanic forces of chaos. Humans partook of their bliss. “Life was an eternal feast of gods and men.” Yet “one thought fearsome [the idea of death] walked to the merry tables / And enveloped the hearths with wild fear.” As the old world declined, and its pleasure gardens wilted, the gods disappeared and nature lost its life. Christ arrived in this night of the gods, dispelling the fear of death in his resurrection: “Gehoben ist der Stein / Die Menschheit ist erstanden” (The stone has been lifted / humankind is arisen). The fifth Hymn abruptly changes the mood of the preceding ones. Novalis was to develop its central idea in an essay entitled “Die Christenheit oder Europa.” In the final Hymn he resumes his poetic reflection on night and death. The poet longs for a transfigured state after death, and he decides to die a year later, not by killing himself but by the intensity of his desire for liberation. “Gelobt sei uns die ewige Nacht, / Gelobt der ewige Schlummer” (Praised be the eternal night / Praised be the eternal slumber). Among his philosophical Fragments, one aphorism repeats the same desire for death, although he attributes it to Plato. “The true philosophical act consists in inflicting death upon one-self [Selbsttötung, which might also refer to an ascetic killing of the selfish ego]. This is the real beginning of all philosophy.” One year after Sophie’s death, Novalis, rather than dying, became engaged to Julie von Charpentier. He did not forget Sophie, but her image changed: losing all individual, earthly traits, it took on the character of a celestial feminity, occasionally merging with that of the Virgin Mary.
Next to the Hymnen, Novalis wrote a collection of Geistliche Lieder (Spiritual Songs) (1802), which were actually used in the Lutheran liturgy. His unfinished novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen also contains a number of Romantic songs, including an apocalyptic hymn that introduces the second unfinished part. In his Journals and his Fragments Novalis constantly refers to Goethe and Schiller as his literary authorities, more so than his Romantic friends Ludwig Tieck and Friedrich Schlegel. Two short pieces influenced later critics. In a one-page essay on language, “Monolog,” Novalis argues that true discourse is nothing but a play of language with itself, of which poetry is the music.13 The French Symbolist poets considered this essay a manifesto for the self-sufficiency of poetry.14 Novalis’s symbolic theory appears in his prose poem Die Lehrlinge zu Sais (The Disciples of Saïs). Isis, the “Queen of the Night,” represented with a veiled face, had been a central figure in Hellenistic mystery cults. Rosicrucians and Freemasons had revived the tradition. Schiller wrote a poem on this mythical figure, in which a young man presumes to tear down the veil. The next day his friends find him lying lifeless beneath the statue of Isis. In his sketch, Novalis has transformed Schiller’s version of the ancient story. A pyramid in Saïs bears the inscription: “I am all, what is, what was, what will be. No mortal has ever lifted my veil.” The goddess has revealed herself only to one. What did he see? “Himself” (Werke, 101–31). Thus Isis becomes a symbolic representation of that inner universe in which time and eternity are conjoined in a coincidence of opposites. The Delphic exhortation “know thyself” may be rephrased to read: “Raise the veil of Isis.” Here, the injunction against raising the veil has turned into a command.
Novalis’s concept of poetry has been called a magic-idealist vision of Being achieved through the imagination rather than through reason. The magical quality of this poetic vision constitutes a virtual universe, an ideal counterpart of the real one. Inspired by the theosophist Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, Novalis considered the physical world a symbol of a spiritual universe. When the poetic imagination converts the world into poetry, “the world becomes dream and the dream becomes world.” Novalis’s poetry went further than that of any other Romantic in a quest for an invisible mystery that hides behind the visible world. The reality of his world is entirely spiritual.
One of the first modern poets to assume the role of the ancient vates (prophet-poet), Novalis thought of himself as a religious prophet, a successor of Orpheus, the mythical visionary who domesticated humans and animals by his song and lyre. Trained as a mine inspector, he considered it his vocation to interpret nature from a transcendent perspective and thus reveal nature’s inmost secrets. This kind of poetry required a maturity attained only after a direct exposure to death. Death alone reveals the full meaning of life. Orpheus too had visited the underworld. Persephone, the queen of the dead, seduced by his music, had allowed him to accompany his deceased Eurydice back to the land of the living. Yet by looking back as she followed him, he lost her again with no hope of ever retrieving her. Neither should a poet, once he has looked death in the face, ever attempt to return to ordinary life. In a mystical vision experienced at the tomb of his beloved Sophie, Novalis came to look at death as an essential part of life. Only a person who had crossed the border to that fuller life knows the light it sheds on the present one. Viewed from the perspective of eternity, all things dispersed in this life become intergrated within an ultimate unity.
The night foreshadows the transition from this life to the chthonic kingdom. In its silent darkness, mortals briefly enter through the door that by day remains closed. Then, they receive dreams and become infused with a hidden energy that transforms their view of life. Death ceases to exist. Such had been the essential meaning of the Hymnen an die Nacht. The nightly visions liberate the dead from the bonds of earthly life. Gradually, Novalis had come to view Christ as the fulfillment of the ancient Orphic symbolism. He also had gone to visit the dead at Sophie’s grave. With some of the Church Fathers, he regarded the mythical hero as a forerunner of Christ, who, in liberating the dead from the underworld, had given a new content to the ancient legend. The poet transferred this alternative version of the Orphic myth into his unfinished novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen (Werke, 132–286). The first part, the only one completed, acquaints the reader with the preparation of life after death. Heinrich encounters the ancient Count von Hohenzollern, who is spending the final period of his life hidden as a hermit in the deepest part of a mine. In this solitude, he is anticipating his nearby transfer to the other shore. To the Count, as to Novalis, death was the entrance to the true fatherland, the blessed life.
In the second part of this novel, the poet intended to write about the kingdom of death, which he introduced with his most otherworldly poem, the “Lied der Toten” (Song of the Dead). It contains fifteen strophes, of which I have translated the first and the penultimate ones. In this song, the poet attempts to penetrate the minds of those who have died and who continue to live in a spiritual realm. They remember the past, yet are no longer burdened by it.
Lobt doch unsre stillen Feste
Unsre Gärten, unsre Zimmer,
Das bequeme Hausgeräte,
Unser Hab und Gut.
Täglich kommen neue Gäste,
Diese früh, die andern späte,
Auf den weiten Herden immer
Lodert neue Lebensglut.
(Praise our silent fortresses
Our gardens and our rooms,
Our handy utensils,
Our belongings and possessions.
Daily other guests arrive,
Some come early, others late,
On the ample herds ever
Burns new glow of life.)
The song concludes with an address to the living:
Könnten doch die Menschen wissen,
Unsre künftigen Genossen,
Dass bei allen ihren Freuden
Wir geschäftig sind:
Jauchend würden sie verscheiden,
Gern das bleiche Dasein missen —
O! die Zeit ist bald verflossen,
Kommt, Geliebte, doch geschwind!
(Could humans only know,
They our future companions
That in all their joys
We have part [or: we are active]:
Happily would they leave this life
Gladly miss their pale existence —
Oh! The time will soon go by.
Come, beloved, promptly now!
Amazingly, a mine inspector held this symbolic view of the world. In him, as in Blake, poetic awareness consisted essentially in a search for the absolute, beyond nature and beyond selfhood. The poetry of this quintessentially Romantic visionary suffers under the weight of its spiritual transcendence. Yet in his best poems he is sublime.
HÖLDERLIN
Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843), the greatest lyrical poet of the Romantic era in Germany, was born in Lauffen, a small town in Swabia. He received his higher education at the Tübinger Stift, a Protestant seminary in a former Augustinian convent, where Hegel and Schelling were his roommates. The three young men, who influenced one another, were to revolutionize philosophy and poetry in Germany. It was probably Hölderlin who inspired the earliest fragment of an idealist system of philosophy.15 Like Schiller, whom he greatly admired and who provided him with his first position as Hofmeister (private educator of a family’s children), he dreamed of raising his contemporaries to a higher spiritual level. The political emancipation begun by the French Revolution, he believed, was to be completed by a cultural one. This humanist ideal inspired Hölderlin’s early hymns—To Truth, To Humanity, To Beauty, To Friendship, To Courage.16 Today these rhetorical imitations of Schiller rarely arouse the enthusiasm they were intended to evoke. In the “Hymn to the Goddess of Harmony,” the young poet praises Urania, the creative principle that unites all things in a comprehensive harmony. In it, the young Hölderlin tried to express a vision centered around the words Hen kai pan (One-and-All), which he had written in Hegel’s album in Tübingen. The words were well known among German Romantics. Jacobi had attributed them to the older Lessing, who had claimed to have no other religion left than this “Spinozistic” principle (although Spinoza himself had never used these words). The saying is ambiguous: it could be either pantheistic (all is God) or panentheistic (God is the being of all that exists). In the later hymns the poet distinguished the one creative principle from the multitude of created, finite beings.
Eventually the mother of his first pupil, realizing that her son was incapable of serious learning, enabled her young Hofmeister to attend the University of Jena. He flourished in this center of early Romanticism, where at that time Fichte and Schelling were teaching. Yet having no further means of support, he was forced to seek another tutoring position and ended up at the house of the Frankfurt banker Jakob Gontard. Soon Gontard’s well-educated young spouse, Susette, joined the children as his pupil and fell in love with their instructor. This sensitive woman inspired the poet to write some of his best work, including a large part of his poetic novel Hyperion, which he dedicated to her. After four happy years, an unpleasant confrontation with her husband drove Hölderlin from the house. Yet Susette’s image continued to haunt him, and her later death may have been partly responsible for his mental collapse. Under the name of Diotima—the priestess of love in Plato’s Symposium—Susette became the living image of classical harmony, the part taken in his early hymns by Urania.
Two poems directly express the poet’s pain at the separation from the beloved: “Der Abschied” (The Farewell) and “Die Liebenden” (The Lovers). During the following months Hölderlin wrote the three elegies that initiated a succession of great poetry: “Menons Klagen um Diotima” (Menon’s Lament about Diotima), “Der Archipelagus,” and “Brod und Wein.” In the first, the poet laments that the loss of Diotima has transformed the brightness of nature into the darkness of a forest, where the wounded animal retires to die. The second, the long elegy “Der Archipelagus,” reflects a less melancholy mood. It is spring, the time when human hearts tend to reawaken their first love. The season reminds the poet of the golden age of Hellas, when people lived in harmony with nature. A mystical light spreads over the waters and islands of the Ionian archipelago, animating the sea with a godlike spirit. In this elegy, perhaps more intensely than in any other, Hölderlin expresses his attachment to the land and the culture of ancient Greece. While writing Hyperion, he had given form and substance to his classical dream. He had come to know and to admire Greek poets: Homer, Pindarus, and Sophocles. Above all, he had become acquainted with the gods, who conveyed life and beauty to the ancient land and who continued to inspire his poetry. Of course, he knew that they were gone. Yet, he muses:
Your islands are still there—and none of their bloom is lost.
Crete stands and Salamis grows, shaded by laurels
From all sides surrounded by rays Delos
At sunrise raises its animated head.
(“Der Archipelagus,” 12–14)
The soil remains sanctified by the bodies of its heroes. Like Pindarus, the poet will revive the memory of their deeds and return to the heart what the tomb had stolen. Like the Orphic singer, he will step across the threshold of death and once again converse with the spirits of the land.
Dort im schweigenden Thal, an Tempes hangenden Felsen
Will ich wohnen mit euch, dort oft, ihr herrlichen Nahmen
Her euch rufen bei Nacht und wenn ihr zürnend erscheint
Weil der Pflug die Graber entweiht, mit der Stimme des Herzens
Will ich mit frommen Gesang euch sühnen, heilige Schatten!
Bis zu leben mit euch, sich ganz die Seele gewöhnet.
(There in the silent valley, at Tempe’s hanging rocks
Will I live with you: there often invoke your glorious names
And call them at night. And when you angry appear
When the plow desecrates the tombs with the voice of the heart
Shall I with pious song appease you, holy shades
Until my soul becomes fully wont to live with you.)
Soon, however, the mood darkens. Greece has become a garden of the dead. All who lived there are gone. Ruins fill the places where once the ancient temples stood, and the Delphic god has become silent. Lonesome and empty are the roads that once guided hopeful pilgrims to the god’s sanctuary. Instead of reviving the gods, the poet can only envy the shades who inhabit the peaceful Elysian Fields:
O, children of happiness, pious ones, now walking with their fathers
In blessed forgetfulness of the days of their fate
Above at river Lethe, will you no more return?
Then, the poet remembers Mnemosyne, the oldest and most powerful of the Muses who may grant new, spiritual life to the deceased. Remembrance, in German Erinnerung, interiorizes what remains in the mind and thereby renders it more intimately present. As the poet sings in his elegy:
May then the feast [of year’s end] preserve also you, days of the past!
Let the people look up at Hellas, and weeping and thanking
May the proud day of triumph become meek in remembrance.
“Mnemosyné,” one of the last poems Holderlin wrote before his mental collapse, suggests how much he was concerned to keep the dead spiritually present.
In “Brod und Wein” (Bread and Wine), the poet searches more deeply than he did in “Der Archipelagus.” The culture of Greece is irretrievably past, and, since the gods have left us, we are forced to search for meaning in our barren present. The poet laments the absence of gods in his age. The elegy begins with a meditation on night, a time of darkness but also of merciful forgetfulness and holy remembrance. It was during the night that the poets of Corinth, Thebes, and the lands around Olympus dreamed of the coming gods. Through their songs, they brought the gods out of the sacred darkness into the clarity of living persons by giving names and human faces to the nameless revelation of the One-and-All. Where are their successors now? Have all gods departed and closed the heavenly feast because our vessels were too weak for their messages? “We have come too late. The gods still live, but high above our heads in another world.” The earth has ceased to concern the heavenly ones. They no longer care whether we live or die. Henceforth they grant us only an occasional dream to remember them. We must harden ourselves to live without gods until we regain the strength to sustain their presence. At this time only poets, priests of Dionysus, wander from land to land reminding us of the heavenly ones. Yet who listens to poets in our time of scarcity? “Wozu Dichter in dürftiger Zeit?”
The last god to leave the earth was Dionysus. In Tübingen, Hölderlin and Schelling had often discussed the significance of this god of many names—both one of the oldest and the youngest of the Greek pantheon. Much later, in his Philosophy of Mythology, Schelling was to present him as the herald of a new era. In “Bread and Wine” Hölderlin anticipates this interpretation. Christ the Redeemer appears as Dionysus’s successor, who, having “descended to the shades,” has brought new hope.17 A “quiet genius,” announcing the end of the gods, he has left us a memory of his short presence among us and a sign of his future return in the gifts of bread, the fruit of the earth, and wine, “the joy of the thundering god.” Do these words symbolize the departure of Dionysus or the coming of Christ? The poem leaves it undecided. Later, when he resumed the image, Hölderlin was to distinguish the time of promise clearly from the time of fulfillment. After even the traces of the fleeing gods have vanished, he wrote, “a torchbearer, the son of the Highest,” appears out of the darkness bringing new light. The night is not over yet, but “divine fires burn also during the night.” The poet was to continue his search for a transcendent presence in his final great hymns “Friedensfeier” (Feast of Peace), “Der Einzige” (The Only One), and “Patmos.” What was the meaning of a historical process wherein one deity had to make place for another? “Bread and Wine” does not answer this question. It remains a transitional poem.
Nor does the beautiful “Wie wenn am Feiertage” (As When on a Holiday) shed new light on the subject, although it also has a profoundly religious meaning. At first the poet seems to return to his early poetry of nature: “As when on a holiday, to see the field / A farmer goes in the morning, after / Out of a hot night the lightning fell. . . .” The land has suffered no damage; the early spring rain has awakened it from the sleep of winter, and creative powers are, once again, drawing ordered life from chaos. They inspire the poet to compose new songs reminding him of his prophetic vocation at the turning of the time. The lightning suddenly reminds him of the vehemence of divine revelation in poetry. The poet becomes aware that to fulfill his prophetic task, he must be willing “to stand bareheaded under the divine storm and to grasp the Father’s thunder beam with his bare hand in order to give the people the divine gift wrapped in song.”18 The poet is anxious “to name the divine All-Unity,” but he finds no words. He merely mentions the powers that wander forth between heaven and earth. The conflict with the celestial powers remains unresolved, and the poet left his work unfinished.
Equally ambiguous and no less profound is the elegy “Heimkunft” (Homecoming). After leaving the Gontards in Frankfurt, the poet had accepted yet another position as Hofmeister, this time in Switzerland. Yet after a few months he abandoned it. In the darkness of the early morning of his departure, the poet, sailing home on Lake Konstanz, is in an expectant mood. Suddenly the luminous snow on top of the Alps appears filled with roses. Joyfully he anticipates bringing the message of his new insights to his loved ones. While reflecting, however, on how powerful the idea of God’s immanence in the world has grown in him, he is overcome by a vague fear. How will his relatives and neighbors receive this message? The happy prospect of seeing them eventually dispels his unrest: “They are still the same!” But soon anxiety returns as he foresees the necessity to divulge what he, during his absence, has learned of “the great Father.” How will that sound to their pious ears? “When we bless the meal, whom may I name? And when we rest from life each day, say, how shall I give thanks? Shall I name the High Ones then? No God loves what seems unseemly.” In this poem again, the poet is at a loss of words for naming the holy. He attempts to quiet his soul with the thought that the beauty of his songs might prepare the hearers to accept his message. Still, worries about his welcome have not fully vanished. Such is a singer’s fate: “Cares such as these, a singer must bear in his heart, gladly or not—and often; but the others not.” In an essay on this poem, Heidegger, a sensitive though not always reliable interpreter of Hölderlin, reminds us that the final “not” is a mysterious call to those “others” to become hearers and thereby learn to know the true meaning of “homeland.”19 But is home-coming still possible in an age that has broken the bond of communion with the heavenly ones? The name of God has become frozen in a dead concept. Words that once united now divide.
The present reading of Hölderlin’s religious message rests on the three great hymns he wrote at the end of his active life.20 The occasion for writing “Friedensfeier” (the final copy of which was discovered only in 1954) had been the Peace Treaty of Lunéville in 1801, where France, after its victory over Austria, acquired the right to preserve its natural borders. Napoleon had organized a feast of peace to celebrate this agreement. He presented it as the ending of all wars in Europe, notwithstanding the fact that one year later he resumed the war with greater intensity. In Hölderlin’s poem, the gods have convened to celebrate the peace. One divine guest is referred to as “the Son,” “a young man who likes to be near the water source under Syrian palm trees.” All commentators agree that this guest refers to Christ, yet a great deal of controversy surrounds the identity of the “Prince” who presides over the banquet. Several commentators understand him to be a different person than the Son, leaving them with the problem of finding a suitable person for filling the Prince’s part. For lack of a better interpretation, I follow those who identify the Prince with “the Son,” although I admit that the Prince could also be the Spirit who convened the gods. This hymn, like “Bread and Wine,” follows the Pindaric model of triads of strophes. It abounds in biblical allusions, such as “Christ is our peace” (Eph. 2:14) and “Peace to the nations” (Zech. 9:10). Hölderlin here attempts to answer the question he posed in “Bread and Wine”: Did Christ peacefully succeed the Greek gods, or did he simply overrule them, as Schiller had suggested in his famous poem? Hölderlin intimates that in Christ all earlier gods find their final meaning. But his answer remains tentative. No single interpretation fits all elements. The political and world-historical dimension of the setting further complicates its religious symbolism. What distinguishes this poem from Hölderlin’s earlier poetry is that God here acts as “the God of time,” who forms an image of himself in history.
Hölderlin’s question about the meaning of the gods comes to a head in the unfinished poem “Der Einzige” (The Only One). Three times he had tried to write this hymn, but no version satisfied him. The poet’s inability to conclude the poem is symptomatic of a basic religious problem, for which Holderlin found no solution. In “Friedensfeier” the poet had reconciled the gods and their cults with one another by showing that in the end all will be united. In “Der Einzige” he argues that we can adore only one god, even though he includes all others. The hymn begins with a question, raised in the nostalgic manner of the classical elegy, that sets the tone of the poem: “Was ist es, das / An die alten seligen Küsten / Mich fesselt, dass ich mehr noch / Sie liebe als mein Vaterland?” (What is it that binds me to the old blessed coasts that I love them more than even my fatherland?). Why does this emotional home lie distant in space and time from the poet’s actual one? The bond with his spiritual fatherland recalls his imagination to the places where once Apollo walked and where Zeus sired his sons and daughters. High thoughts and great men sprang up in this land of the gods. They inspired poets to sing of God’s presence among us. Why are the gods of a long-gone ancient world still able to distract the poet from the one God of his own time and place? If Christ is the successor of Heracles and Dionysus, as the poet claimed in “Friedensfeier,” why is he, the last of the divine race and the crown of their house, missing among the gods and sons of gods? Although the poet’s mind dwells in Greece, it is nonetheless the forgotten One he adores.
The tone abruptly changes as the poet exclaims, “Mein Meister und Herr! / O du, mein Lehrer! / Was bist du ferne / geblieben?” (My Master and Lord! Oh, you, my teacher. Why have you remained so far?). Why was Christ excluded from the many? And why does serving him make all others into idols? Hölderlin found no answer, and several times he tried to rewrite the following verses. In one version, he accuses himself of having remained too exclusively attached to this one Lord, even though he considered him the brother of Dionysus and of those who preceded him. In another version, the poet expresses remorse at having compared Christ with those “worldly” children of Zeus, even though all stem from a common Father. This tense dilemma lies at the root of the hymn. Was it perhaps Christ’s own law of love that brought him to this predicament? For though love ultimately reconciles all, it also is, by its very nature, exclusive. “Es hänget an Einem die Liebe” (Love clings to a single one). The poet wonders: Have I too much become attached to you as to the only One? “Denn zu sehr, O Christus, hang ich an dir” (Too exclusively, O Christ, do I cling to you). Hölderlin’s concern does not stem from theological scruples. He had long ceased to be an “orthodox” Christian. But he blames himself for not having recognized that his own religious ideas are incompatible with his Romantic love for Hellas and its gods.
This central question assumes a new urgency in the later hymns: What was the meaning of the coming of Christ after the ancient gods had vanished? In “Heimkunft” he wonders: How in our time can we still speak of God? The very disappearance of classical culture and its gods induces the poet to question all names of the holy. The gods’ disappearance is as mysterious as was their appearance. At this point, the ancient myth of Dionysus, the god who comes, moves to the center. Were the ancient gods forerunners of a more definitive parousia, and was Dionysus the last to precede it? Has the surpassingness of Being become more manifest in the final revelation (by Christ) than in the succession of all earlier gods? By exploring these primary questions poetically rather than philosophically, Hölderlin enhances their significance. What we know only in symbols will best be expressed in symbols.
The clearest interpretation of Hölderlin’s worry about the relation between Christ and the ancient gods appears in Walther Rehm’s Orpheus, der Dichter und die Toten (Orpheus, the Poet and the Dead).21 For Hölderlin, the Greek gods, although they had ceased to be objects of a cult, represented an aesthetic truth which, to him, surpassed that of Christian theology. Nonetheless, Jesus occupied a supreme and definitive position in Hölderlin’s piety. Christ’s vision of God surpassed that of any ancient god. To the poet, Jesus remained a living divine presence, whereas the Greek gods are dead, never to rise again. This raises him beyond any comparison with them. Still, to Hölderlin, even as to Schelling, Christ appeared to fulfill an expectation that had been aroused by the Greek gods and especially by Dionysus, whom Hölderlin considered the last of the gods. This made Dionysus the conclusion of a historical progress in which he filled an essential part. Dionysus came out of an ancient, pre-Christian space. That space had ceased to be religious; it had become purely aesthetic. Religion and aesthetics belonged to two different spheres. The question the poet asks thus became unanswerable. Indeed, in one of the three versions, the poet himself rejects the very possibility of comparing the ancient gods with Christ in a continuous line of progress. At the same time, while strongly expressing his religious devotion to Christ as “the only one,” he cannot let go of the other gods, who have played such an important role in his poetic inspiration. Hölderlin ends with a prayer: “O Gottlicher, sei gegenwärtig und schöner wie sonst, o sei Versöhnender” (O divine One, be present and more beautiful, as before. O be the one who reconciles!).
Hölderlin’s mental problems became apparent after he had served yet another unhappy period as Hofmeister in the south of France. While still in France, he suffered a complete mental breakdown. On his way home, he learned that Susette Gontard had died. As soon as he had somewhat recovered, his friend Isaac von Sinclair took him to Homburg, where he procured for Hölderlin an undemanding position as librarian of the local Landgraf. In the following months of recovery, he wrote his last great poem, “Patmos,” as a birthday present for the Count. “Patmos,” the poet’s last meditation on the existential and religious issues that had occupied his previous years, restructured the motifs of the two preceding hymns, the reconciliation of the gods and the devotion to one. Christ remains the focus of his devotion, but all other gods are now enclosed in him. The hymn is not a “synthesis” but rather an all-inclusive vision that, bypassing the paradoxical multiplicity in the divine, reflects on the living religious act, within which those tensions cease to exist. The poet introduces the poem by a dark saying: “Near is the God and hard to grasp. But where danger threatens, saving also waxes” (“Nah ist / Und schwer zu fassen der Gott / Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst / Das Rettende auch”). Many interpretations have been given of these Delphic verses. Does the danger consist in the very nearness of God or in the risk of misrepresenting God? Hölderlin symbolizes the holy danger through images of awe-inspiring mountains separated by deep gorges, with eagles flying in the dark and travelers crossing tenuous bridges linking one peak to another. The poet prays for wings to cross those “peaks of time,” now that his meditation is coming close to God. In response to his prayer, a rapture transports him to the Ionian coast, where he boards a boat to the Greek islands. He lands on Patmos, “an island less lovely than the others, but hospitable to the shipwrecked and the exiled,” where, according to Christian legend, the apostle John wrote the apocalyptic Book of Revelation. In the half-dark of a mystical cave, his identity is taken over by that of the visionary. With him, the poet remembers that Last Supper when “the Son of the Most High” taught the beloved disciple that, despite the raging of the world, the divine unity preserves the peace.
The apostle recalls how, after Jesus’ death, the disciples lamented the divine absence, and the Master sent his Spirit to comfort them. The vision vanishes, and the poet returns to his own identity. The holy places have now become deserted, the memories of Christ have paled, and the heavens appear empty. The poet realizes that he would not even recognize an image of the divine Servant. To find some meaning in this emptiness, he turns to the parable of the sower: some of the wheat is lost, yet at the end the harvest will come. “God’s work resembles our own, in that He wills not everything at once.” Humans should not attempt to hasten the process. Yet when it reaches completion, all will recognize “the jubilant song of the Most High.” In conclusion, the poet addresses the man who rescued him after his mental collapse, the pious Landgraf of Homburg, who had asked him to write a religious poem.
Und wenn die Himmlischen jetzt
So, wie ich glaube, mich lieben
Wie viel mehr Dich,
Denn Eines weisz ich
Dasz nämlich der Will
Des ewigen Vaters viel
Dir gilt.
(And if, as I believe, the Heavenly Ones love me, so much more
will they love you. For one thing I know: that the will of the
Father greatly concerns you.)
The hymn closes with the threnody previously heard at the end of “Brod und Wein” and “Der Einzige”: “Zu lang, zu lang schon ist / Die Ehre der Himmlischen unsichtbar” (Too long, too long already has the glory of the Heavenly Ones remained invisible). Then follow the cryptic words: “But God wants us to preserve the written letter and the right reading of it.” Hölderlin may have added this final line to put the traditional Landgraf at ease. Yet their meaning is anything but traditional. The written letter remains that of Scripture, but its interpretation must not be left to theologians alone. We must also listen to the poets.
Shortly after he wrote this hymn, his friend Sinclair was arrested on unsupported suspicions of treason. The investigation also included Hölderlin. He lost his position as librarian and, in a state of aggressive insanity, was brought to a mental hospital in Tübingen. After the doctors declared him incurable, he was placed with a master carpenter’s family. In the tower of their house, he spent the rest of his life. There were moments of remission in his sickness, during which he wrote snippets of poetry. A final echo of the poet’s suffering still reaches us out of his mental darkness in an invocation of the deceased “Diotima”:
Wenn aus der ferne, da wir geschieden sind,
Ich dir noch kennbar bin, dir Vergangenheit,
O du Teilheber meiner Schmerzen!
Einiges Gute bezeichnen dir kann . . . [here it ends]
(If from the distance that separates us
I still am knowable to you, if your past,
Oh you partaker in my sorrows!
Can still mean some good to you . . .)
In the one drama he wrote, Der Tod des Empedokles (The Death of Empedocles), Hölderlin relived the spiritual struggles that had consumed so much of his life. It became a life work often resumed but never completed. The first and second versions of the play are identical: Empedocles is declared guilty. Yet his fault and the characters differ. Little remains of a third version, written during his period of insanity. Since hearing Fichte’s lectures in Jena, the ideal of the sage who raises the minds of his fellow citizens had inspired Hölderlin. He saw it realized in the fifth-century Sicilian philosopher, poet, and magician Empedocles, who had taught that the four uncreated elements of the cosmos attract each other by “love” (philia) and that natural as well as human history consists of strife between love and its opposite, hatred. Cycles of love alternate with cycles of hatred. The idea of universal love appealed to Hölderlin, as did the image of the suffering hero. Empedocles had been banned from his city of Agrigentum because of his role in a movement to install a democratic government. His enemies later spread the rumor that he had ended his life by leaping into the crater of Mount Etna.
Hölderlin’s two-act play represents the Greek sage as a healer who, through some violation of divine law, loses the magic power that the gods had granted him. In the first version, his enemies accuse Empedocles of identifying himself with the Heavenly Ones, as if he were a god. His main crime thereby consists in raising himself above nature, the source of his power. In doing so, he has become forgetful of the One-and-All, for the poet the ground of all true religion. In the later version, the philosopher is guilty of failing successfully to mediate between gods and men: to the former, he owes uninterrupted devotion, to the latter, total dedication. His love of humans induces him to reveal divine secrets and thus to betray the gods, while humans do not forgive him for his frequent withholding of divine gifts. Thus Empedocles has estranged himself from humans as well as from gods. Like the hero of Oedipus at Colonus, Sophocles’ drama, which Hölderlin had begun to translate, Empedocles mysteriously disappears. “And when tomorrow you do not find me, he admonishes his followers, say then: he should not have grown old and counted the days, nor should he have become subject to anxiety; unseen did he go away and no human hand buried him and no eye knows of his ashes.” Empedocles’ death initiates the new order that he had preached.
Hölderlin wrote only three scenes of a third version, in which he absolves the hero from all guilt: Empedocles dies as a sacrificial victim for the salvation of humankind. Again, he appears as a mediator between gods and men, a half-god charged with the task of bringing the gifts of the gods to the human race. Although the different versions of the play appear to move ever closer to a Christian idea of redemption, the playwright remained unambiguous in his critique of institutional religion. In the first act, a citizen of Agrigentum blames the priest Hermocrates, Empedocles’ main antagonist, for having deprived religion of all meaning and having robbed men of “the love of the half-god” (an allusion to Christ?). The play reflected much of Hölderlin’s own search for meaning. This also explains its dramatic weakness: the action remains almost entirely interior.
No poet, no thinker, has more poignantly expressed the longing for a divine presence and the frustration of seeing that desire unfulfilled in the modern age than Hölderlin. In expressing the sadness caused by the absence of God, he formulated a negative theology for late modernity. He viewed his poetry as an act of keeping the memory of the sacred mystery alive after the sacred signs of the past had vanished and the new ones had not yet appeared. He spoke the language of those who were waiting between remembrance and hope. Nowhere is the quest of the absolute, the general theme of this study, more prominent than in German Romantic poetry. For Novalis, the very purpose of life consists in exploring how all things are symbolic of the absolute. In Hölderlin’s poetry, the quest of the absolute appears in the form of nostalgia for the ancient Greek culture in its harmony with nature. The distance between the poet and the fulfillment of his desire is augmented by a painful awareness of living at a different time, in a different place, with a sense of religious absence.