Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin (, ; ; 20 March 1770 – 7 June 1843) was a German poet and philosopher. Described by Norbert von Hellingrath as "the most German of Germans", Hölderlin was a key figure of German Romanticism. Particularly due to his early association with and philosophical influence on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, he was also an important thinker in the development of German Idealism."Because of his small philosophical output, it is important to indicate in what way Hölderlin's ideas have influenced his contemporaries and later thinkers. It was Hölderlin whose ideas showed Hegel that he could not continue to work on the applications of philosophy to politics without first addressing certain theoretical issues. In 1801, this led Hegel to move to Jena where he was to write the Phenomenology of Spirit.... Schelling's early work amounts to a development of Hölderlin's concept of Being in terms of a notion of a prior identity of thought and object in his Philosophy of Identity." Christian J. Onof, "Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin", Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Accessed 15 January 2011."Hegel is completely dependent on Hölderlin—on his early efforts to grasp speculatively the course of human life and the unity of its conflicts, on the vividness with which Hölderlin's friends made his insight fully convincing, and also certainly on the integrity with which Hölderlin sought to use that insight to preserve his own inwardly torn life." Dieter Henrich, The Course of Remembrance and Other Essays on Hölderlin, Ed. Eckart Förster (Stanford: Stanford University, 1997) p. 139."Indeed, the Pietistic Horizon extended for generations up to and including the time when Hegel, together with his friends Hölderlin and Schelling, spent quiet hours strolling along the banks of the Neckar receiving the theological education they would eventually challenge and transform through the grand tradition now known as German Idealism." Alan Olson, Hegel and the Spirit. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 39.
Born in Lauffen am Neckar, Hölderlin had a childhood marked by bereavement. His mother intended for him to enter the Lutheran ministry, and he attended the Tübinger Stift, where he was friends with Hegel and Schelling. He graduated in 1793 but could not devote himself to the Lutheran faith, instead becoming a tutor. Two years later, he briefly attended the University of Jena, where he interacted with Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Novalis, before resuming his career as a tutor. He struggled to establish himself as a poet, and he was plagued by mental illness. He was sent to a clinic in 1806 but deemed incurable and instead given lodging by a carpenter, Ernst Zimmer. He spent the final 35 years of his life in Zimmer's residence, and died in 1843 at the age of 73.
Hölderlin followed the tradition of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller as an admirer of Greek mythology and Ancient Greek poets such as Pindar and Sophocles, and melded Christian and Hellenic themes in his works. Martin Heidegger, upon whom Hölderlin had a great influence, said: "Hölderlin is one of our greatest, that is, most impending thinkers because he is our greatest poet."
Biography Early life
Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin was born on 20 March 1770 in Lauffen am Neckar, then a part of the Duchy of Württemberg. He was the first child of Johanna Christiana Heyn (1748—1828) and Heinrich Friedrich Hölderlin (1736—1772). His father, the manager of a church estate, died when he was two years old, and Friedrich and his sister, Heinrike, were brought up by their mother.
In 1774, his mother moved the family to Nürtingen when she married Johann Christoph Gok. Two years later, Johann Gok became the burgomaster of Nürtingen, and Hölderlin's half-brother, Karl Christoph Friedrich Gok, was born. In 1779, Johann Gok died at the age of 30. Hölderlin later expressed how his childhood was scarred by grief and sorrow, writing in a 1799 correspondence with his mother:
Education Hölderlin began his education in 1776, and his mother planned for him to join the Lutheran church. In preparation for entrance exams into a monastery, he received additional instruction in Greek, Hebrew, Latin and rhetoric, starting in 1782. During this time, he struck a friendship with Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, who was five years Hölderlin's junior. On account of the age difference, Schelling was "subjected to universal teasing" and Hölderlin protected him from abuse by older students. Also during this time, Hölderlin began playing the piano and developed an interest in travel literature through exposure to Georg Forster's A Voyage Round the World.
In 1784, Hölderlin entered the Lower Monastery in Denkendorf and started his formal training for entry into the Lutheran ministry. At Denkendorf, he discovered the poetry of Friedrich Schiller and Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, and took tentative steps in composing his own verses. The earliest known letter of Hölderlin's is dated 1784 and addressed to his former tutor Nathanael Köstlin. In the letter, he hinted at his wavering faith in Christianity and anxiety about his mental state.
Hölderlin progressed to the Higher Monastery at Maulbronn in 1786. There he fell in love with Luise Nast, the daughter of the monastery's administrator, and began to doubt his desire to join the ministry; he composed Mein Vorsatz in 1787, in which he states his intention to attain "Pindar's light" and reach "Klopstock-heights". In 1788, he read Schiller's Don Carlos on Luise Nast's recommendation. Hölderlin later wrote a letter to Schiller regarding Don Carlos, stating: "It won't be easy to study Carlos in a rational way, since he was for so many years the magic cloud in which the good god of my youth enveloped me so that I would not see too soon the pettiness and barbarity of the world."
In October 1788, Hölderlin began his theological studies at the Tübinger Stift, where his fellow students included Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Isaac von Sinclair and Schelling. It has been speculated that it was Hölderlin who, during their time in Tübingen, brought to Hegel's attention the ideas of Heraclitus regarding the unity of opposites, which Hegel would later develop into his concept of dialectics. In 1789, Hölderlin broke off his engagement with Luise Nast, writing to her: "I wish you happiness if you choose one more worthy than me, and then surely you will understand that you could never have been happy with your morose, ill-humoured, and sickly friend," and expressed his desire to transfer out and study law but succumbed to pressure from his mother to remain in the Stift.
Along with Hegel and Schelling and his other peers during his time in the Stift, Hölderlin was an enthusiastic supporter of the French Revolution. Although he rejected the violence of the Reign of Terror, his commitment to the principles of 1789 remained intense. Hölderlin's republican sympathies influenced many of his most famous works such as Hyperion and The Death of Empedocles.
Career After obtaining his magister degree in 1790 and completing his theological examinations in 1793, his mother expected him to enter the ministry. Defying her wishes, he chose a literary path. Through Friedrich Schiller's mediation, he secured his first major position as a private tutor for the son of Charlotte von Kalb in Waltershausen, serving from December 1793 to January 1795. For over a century, biographical scholarship assumed Hölderlin left this post in disgrace after fathering an illegitimate child with von Kalb's companion, Wilhelmine Kirms. However, a 2020 archival discovery in Weimar proved the child was actually fathered by Major Heinrich von Kalb, fully exonerating Hölderlin from the long-standing rumor. In early 1795, Hölderlin relocated to the University of Jena, where he attended Johann Gottlieb Fichte's lectures, befriended Novalis, and frequently interacted with Schiller and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe while composing his epistolary novel Hyperion.
There is a seminal manuscript, dated 1797, now known as the Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus ("The Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism"). Although the document is in Hegel's handwriting, it is thought to have been written by Hegel, Schelling, Hölderlin, or an unknown fourth person.Kai Hammermeister, The German Aesthetic Tradition, Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 76.
As a tutor in Frankfurt am Main from 1796 to 1798, he fell in love with Susette Gontard, the wife of his employer, the banker Jakob Gontard. The feeling was mutual, and this relationship became the most important in Hölderlin's life. After a while, their affair was discovered, and Hölderlin was harshly dismissed. He then lived in Homburg from 1798 to 1800, meeting Susette in secret once a month and attempting to establish himself as a poet, but his life was plagued by financial worries and he had to accept a small allowance from his mother. His mandated separation from Susette Gontard also worsened Hölderlin's doubts about himself and his value as a poet; he wished to transform German culture but did not have the influence he needed. From 1797 to 1800, he produced three versions—all unfinished—of a tragedy in the Greek manner, The Death of Empedocles, and composed odes in the vein of the Ancient Greeks Alcaeus and Asclepiades of Samos.
Mental breakdown During the late 1790s, Hölderlin increasingly suffered from severe bouts of what his contemporaries called "hypochondria" (melancholy), a condition that worsened after his forced separation from Susette Gontard. While 20th-century psychiatrists retrospectively diagnosed his subsequent breakdown as schizophrenia, no such clinical framework existed during his lifetime. After a sojourn in Stuttgart at the end of 1800, likely to work on his translations of Pindar, he found further employment as a tutor in Hauptwyl, Switzerland, and then at the household of the Hamburg consul in Bordeaux, in 1802. His stay in the French city is celebrated in Andenken ("Remembrance"), one of his greatest poems. In a few months, however, he returned home on foot via Paris (where he saw authentic Greek sculptures, as opposed to Roman or modern copies, for the only time in his life). He arrived at his home in Nürtingen both physically and mentally exhausted in late 1802, and learned that Gontard had died from influenza in Frankfurt at around the same time.
At his home in Nürtingen with his mother, a devout Christian, Hölderlin melded his Hellenism with Christianity and sought to unite ancient values with modern life; in his elegy Brod und Wein ("Bread and Wine"), Christ is seen as sequential to the Greek gods, bringing bread from the earth and wine from Dionysus. After two years in Nürtingen, Hölderlin was taken to the court of Homburg by Isaac von Sinclair, who found a sinecure for him as court librarian, but in 1805 von Sinclair was denounced as a conspirator and tried for treason. Hölderlin was in danger of being tried too but was declared mentally unfit to stand trial. On 11 September 1806, he was delivered into the clinic at Tübingen run by Dr. Johann Heinrich Ferdinand von Autenrieth, the inventor of a mask for the prevention of screaming in the mentally ill.Constantine (1990), p. 299.