The aim of this conference is to open up the fundamental question that Friedrich Hölderlin posed in his engagement with the Greeks: how do we learn what is proper to our own being? In the notes to his own translation of Sophocles’ Antigone, it was precisely a lack of destiny, a “fatelessness” (das Schiksallose), that defined modernity, which strives “to hit upon something, to have destiny” but which it is ultimately ill-fated (das δύσμορον) to possess. The Greeks, Hölderlin says, have a fundamental sense of destiny and so their main tendency was “to be able to come to terms with themselves”, which was their weakness (GSA 5: 269-270). In a letter to his close friend Böhlendorf in December 1801, Hölderlin expands on the distinction between the Germans and the Greeks. Here he writes, “what is proper to one’s own must be learned as well as the foreign (das Fremde), so the Greeks are indispensable to us. Only we will not follow them in our own, our national, because, as I said, the free use of one’s own is the most difficult” (GSA 6.1: 426). While his master’s thesis, “History of the Fine Art among the Greeks”, written at Tübingen in 1790, endorsed Winckelmann’s idea of becoming great, even inimitable, by imitating the Greeks, by 1799 Hölderlin’s engagement with Hellenism had shifted away from the neoclassical-humanist model.
In his essay, “The Perspective From Which We Must Look At Antiquity”, Hölderlin bemoaned modernity’s dream of a “culture” (Bildung) grounded in “originality and independence” (Originalität und Selbstständigkeit), of saying nothing but “new things”, which he attributes to “a kind of mild revenge against the slavery (die Knechtschaft) with which we have been constrained by antiquity (das Altertum)”. For Hölderlin, against neo-classicism and humanism, the mere imitation or appropriation of the Greeks will never bring the German spirit to its own sense of destiny. And yet it is only through an original encounter with the Greeks that “the free use of one’s own” becomes possible. If “what is proper to one’s own must be learned as well as the foreign”, then it is the grounding unity of “one’s own” and “the foreign” that must be enquired into. “Es klingt paradox”, Hölderlin exclaims, but it is through this apparent paradox that Hölderlin’s translations of Greek texts became possible.
Hölderlin’s historical legacy could be characterised by two polarising descriptions of the poet articulated barely 50 years apart. In 1861, Friedrich Nietzsche, only 17 years of age, composed for a school project at Schulpforta a letter, addressed “an meinen Freund”, for whom the young philologist recommended his “Lieblingsdichter”, an obscure poet by the name of Friedrich Hölderlin. Herr Koberstein, his teacher, awarded the ‘letter’ a B- and encouraged Nietzsche to study a “healthier” and “more German” (deutscheren) poet. By contrast, in a lecture delivered in München in 1915, Norbert von Hellingrath called Hölderlin “den deutschesten Dichter”, the most German poet. It was von Hellingrath who, between 1912 and 1914, revived the work of Hölderlin through the compilation of his Sämtliche Werke. Until then, Hölderlin remained an entirely marginal figure.
The assessment of Herr Koberstein was not without precedent. Following the release of Hölderlin’s translation of Sophocles’ Antigone in 1804, Heinrich Voß Jr (the son of the great translator of Homer) wrote a letter to a friend asking, “what do you say to Hölderlin’s Sophocles? Is the man mad or is he just pretending? Is his Sophocles a hidden satire on bad translators? The other evening when I was sitting with Schiller at Goethe’s, both of them were quite amused with it. Read the fourth Chorus of Antigone – you should have seen Schiller laughing…”. In the same year, Schelling wrote in a letter to Hegel that the poverty of Hölderlin’s translation of Sophocles’ Antigone must be attributed to “his degenerative mental state” (GSA 7.2: 296). Such was Hölderlin’s deteriorating health that barely two years later he would be consigned to a tower in Tübingen composing fragmentary poems until his death in 1843.
The revival of Hölderlin through von Hellingrath had profound consequences for post-war Germany in the 1920s, when Hölderlin began to influence new trends in German thought. In 1923, Walter Benjamin published his Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers, wherein the translations of poets such as Hölderlin and Stefan George are contrasted against the translations of the great philologists, such as Voß and Schlegel. For Benjamin, a distinction must be upheld between traditional translators and poets in the act of translation, wherein for the former “the echo of the original (das Echo des Originals) is awakened” but for the poet – and Benjamin means precisely Hölderlin here – the task is to find the path of access to the ground of language itself, which Benjamin takes to be “pure language” (die reine Sprache). In this way, “true translation” (die wahre Übersetzung) allows pure language “as if amplified by its own medium, to fall all the more fully on the original” (GS 4: 9-21). Martin Heidegger, like Benjamin, was deeply influenced by Hölderlin’s approach to language in the 1930s, while Georg Lukács, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Theodor Adorno, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault were also strongly inspired by the poet.
Despite the misappropriation and manipulation of Hölderlin’s poetry by the Nazis, his legacy after the Second World War remained relatively untarnished and by the end of the 20th Century his name had become entrenched in the fields of comparative literature, textual criticism, and literary theory. That being said, the question of Hölderlin’s Hellenism – the possibility of the ground of his engagement with the Greeks – remains obscure. This conference addresses the question of Hölderlin’s Hellenism in three fundamental and connected ways:
1) What is the grounding unity of antiquity and modernity that Hölderlin identifies in the opposition between “one’s own” and “the foreign” that makes the “free use of one’s own” possible? How did Hölderlin bring this unity to bear in his interpretations and translations of the Greeks?
2) What does the reception of Hölderlin in terms of the ridicule he faced by his contemporaries and his renaissance in the 20th Century reveal about Hölderlin’s own historical understanding of destiny? In the same way, to what extent did the historical trajectory of Germany after Hölderlin affirm his assessment of modernity?
3) How do Hölderlin’s interpretations and translations of Greek texts allow us to attend to the question of the unity of antiquity and modernity in the 21st Century?