Friedrich Hölderlin

Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin (Lauffen am Neckar, 1770 – Tübingen, 1843) was a German poet whose work joins the classical tradition with the new Romantic sensibility. His close friendship with Hegel and Schelling in their student years also gives him a place in the history of German idealism, not only in the history of poetry.

Born into a middle-class family in Württemberg, he lost his father at the age of two. His mother, who came from a pietist background, wanted him to follow a church career. In 1788 he entered the Tübinger Stift, the Protestant seminary in Tübingen, where he befriended Hegel and Schelling. There he read Spinoza, Leibniz and Kant, and became absorbed in Plato and Greek culture, which gradually drew him away from Christian faith. The ideals of the French Revolution gave him hope for a new golden age for humanity, a hope he never fully gave up.

After completing his theological examinations in 1793, he declined a church career and earned his living as a private tutor. Thanks to Schiller he secured a first post at Waltershausen, which he soon left. He then went to Jena, where he attended Fichte's lectures, and later worked in Frankfurt for the Gontard family. His love for Susette Gontard, whom he called Diotima in his writings, shaped both his life and his work. The epistolary novel Hyperion, or The Hermit in Greece, in which the protagonist seeks the lost harmony between humanity and nature, and the tragedy The Death of Empedocles belong to these years. After he was forced to separate from Susette, his mental crises grew worse.

In 1806 he was placed in a clinic in Tübingen and was later judged incurable. From 1807 he lived in the home of the carpenter Ernst Zimmer, who cared for him until his death in 1843. His illness was later described in terms that did not exist in his own time, and our understanding of his late years rests largely on fragments.

His reputation grew slowly. Twentieth-century readers rediscovered his hymns and elegies, and Martin Heidegger's readings of his poetry made him a key reference for contemporary philosophy. Norbert von Hellingrath called him the most German of Germans, a phrase admired by some and disputed by others.