What can a German Understand about Hölderlin?”¹ The Hölderlin experts to whom this question was addressed had no doubt been expecting a more diplomatic overture from the man who posed it, Pierre Bertaux, when they invited him to appear as guest speaker at their 1968 conference. That he should begin his speech by casting doubt on their own interpretative credentials amounted to a slap in the face. In itself, the fact that they were being lectured by a foreigner on this, the most German of poets, was unusual enough. It was a moot point and, since the early twentieth century,...

In November 1946, Günter Eich published his poem “Latrine” in Der Ruf (The Call), a forum established earlier that year for young, disillusioned, and often embittered German writers, many of them returning veterans. The third stanza reads:

Irr mir im Ohre schallen

Verse von Hölderlin.

In schneeiger Reinheit spiegeln

Wolken sich im Urin.¹

[Mad in my hearing echo

Verses by Hölderlin.

In snowy pureness, mirrored,

Clouds in the urine are seen.]

The poem’s narrator thinks of verses by Hölderlin while squatting over a makeshift open-air latrine. Specifically, he thinks of verses from Hölderlin’s “Andenken,” for the fourth and final stanza...

Martin Heidegger’s reception of Hölderlin’s poetry is characterized as much by its remarkable constancy and longevity as by its metamorphoses, discontinuities, and occasional U-turns. The leitmotif in the conversation is easy enough to identify: the conviction he announced in 1934, at the beginning of his first lecture course on Hölderlin, that the poet’s “still space-time-less work has already overcome our petty historical affairs and founded the inception of another history, that history that commences with the struggle for the decision about the arrival or flight of the god,” will never waver.¹ It animates the two other lecture courses devoted to...

Theodor W. Adorno’s speech had been announced under the title “Parataxis: Zur philosophischen Interpretation der späten Lyrik Hölderlins” (Parataxis. On the Philosophical Interpretation of Hölderlin’s Late Poetry). The renowned social theorist was scheduled to deliver the keynote address at the 1963 convention of the Hölderlin Society, held for the first time in a divided Berlin, before an audience that included some of the finest literary critics in the German-speaking world. Although Adorno was not known as a Hölderlin specialist, it was hoped that he might be able to open up a fresh perspective on familiar terrain, to illuminate some of...

On 31 October 1947, while Heidegger was still laboring on his “Abendländisches Gespräch,” Bertolt Brecht boarded a plane from New York bound for Paris, never to set foot on American soil again. He was glad to be leaving. The six years he had spent there had been lean ones, embittered first by the sense of impotence and frustration shared by every exile, then by the wave of anti-Communist hysteria that followed upon the euphoria of Allied victory. On the day before his flight he had been summoned to Washington by the House Committee for Un-American Activities to face questions about...

The jubilee of a renowned cultural figure may be likened to the long-expected appearance of a comet in the night sky. Much as the comet’s approach transforms astronomy, however briefly, from a boffinish pursuit into a popular pastime, so the commemoration of an author ordinarily discussed by none but academics has the potential to bring him to the attention of a much broader reading public. As each celestial body shoots into view, it excites a flush of interest conditioned by the knowledge that decades may elapse before it again blazes across the firmament. Luther, Bach, and Nietzsche years follow one...