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Written: 1934;
Translator: Robert Anchor;
Source: Goethe and His Age Merlin Press 1968;
Transcribed: Harrison Fluss for marxists.org, February 2008.
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Oh! were there a banner ... a Thermopylae upon which I could spill my blood with honour, all that solitary love for which I can have no use.
[O gab’es eine Fahne . . . ein Thermopyla, wo ich mit Ehre sie verbluten konnte, all die einsame Liebe, die mir nimmer brauchbar ist].
Hölderlin’s glory is that he is the poet of Hellenism. Everyone who reads his work senses that his Hellenism is different, more sombre, more tortured by suffering than the radiant Utopia of antiquity envisaged during the Renaissance and Enlightenment. But his vision of Hellas has nothing in common either with the tedious, trivial, academic classicism of the nineteenth century or with the hysterical bestiality with which Nietzsche and the imperialist period envisaged Greece. The key to Hölderlin’s view lies then in the understanding of the specifics of this conception of Hellenism.
With inimitable clarity Marx uncovered the social basis of the veneration for antiquity during the great French Revolution.
“As unheroic as bourgeois society is, it nonetheless had need of heroism, the spirit of self-sacrifice, terror, civil war, and wars between nations in order to engender it. And it is in the rigorous classical traditions of the Roman Republic that its gladiators found the ideals and the art forms, the illusions which they needed to conceal from themselves the limited civic content of their struggle and to keep their passion at the pitch of the great historical tragedy.”
The peculiar situation of Germany during the transition of the bourgeoisie from its heroic to its unheroic period consists in the fact that the country itself was still far from being mature enough for a real bourgeois revolution, but that in the minds of its best ideologists the heroic flame of these “illusions” was bound to flare up; in the fact that the tragic transition from the heroic age of the polls republic dreamed by Robespierre and Saint-Just into capitalist prose had to be effected in a purely Utopian and ideological manner without a preliminary revolution.
In the Tubingen seminary three young students witnessed with enraptured rejoicing the great days of the revolutionary liberation of France. With youthful enthusiasm they planted a tree in honour of liberty, danced around it, and swore eternal loyalty to the ideal of the great struggle for liberation. Each of these three youths- Hegel, Hölderlin, Schelling-represented in his later development a typical possibility of the German reaction to the course of events in France. Toward the end of his life, Schelling lost himself in the narrow-minded obscurantism of an abject reaction, of a revived Romanticism during the preparatory period of the ‘48 revolution. Hegel and Hölderlin did not betray their revolutionary oath. But when it was a question of realizing it, the difference in their interpretation reveals clearly the ideological courses which the preparation of the bourgeois revolution could and had to follow in Germany.
The intellectual absorption of the ideas of the French Revolution by Hegel and Hölderlin was still far from being accomplished when in Paris Robespierre’s head fell, and Thermidor and afterwards the Napoleonic period came into being. The consolidation of their Weltanschauung had to be achieved then on the basis of this turning-point in the revolutionary development of France. With Thermidor, the -prosaic content of the heroic form of antiquity in bourgeois society, with its progressiveness and also-inseparable from this- its frightfulness, appeared more and more clearly in the foreground. And the altered heroic character of the Napoleonic period placed the German ideologists before an insoluble dilemma: on the one hand, Napoleonic France was a radiant ideal for the national greatness which could flower only on the soil of a victorious revolution, but on the other hand, this same French imperium brought on Germany a condition of the deepest national disunion and degradation. Since the objective conditions were lacking in Germany for a bourgeois revolution, which would have been capable of opposing to the Napoleonic conquest a revolutionary defence of the fatherland similar to that of 1793, the embryonic bourgeois-revolutionary longing for national liberation and unification faced an insoluble dilemma that was destined to lead to reactionary Romanticism. “All the wars of independence waged against France bear the common stamp of a regeneration which is coupled with reaction” (Marx).
Neither Hegel nor Hölderlin lapsed into this Romantic reaction. But their intellectual coming-to-grips with the post-Thermidorian situation develop in diametrically opposed directions. To be brief, Hegel comes to terms with the post-Thermidorian epoch and the close of the revolutionary period of bourgeois development, and he builds up his philosophy precisely on an understanding of this new turning-point in world history. Hölderlin makes no compromise with the post-Thermidorian reality; he remains faithful to the old revolutionary ideal of renovating polis democracy and is broken by a reality which had no place for his ideals, not even on the level of poetry and thought.
In a contradictory manner, both approaches reflect the unbalanced development of bourgeois-revolutionary thinking in Germany. And this unbalanced development-which Hegel himself designates in an idealist and ideological manner as the “ruse of reason"-manifests itself especially in Hegel’s intellectual accommodation to the post-Thermidorian reality which led him into the main current of the ideological development of his class, from which point further intellectual development was possible until the transformation of bourgeois-revolutionary methods of thinking into proletarian-revolutionary methods was achieved (i.e. the materialist inversion by Marx of Hegel’s idealist dialectic). Hölderlin’s intransigence ended in a tragic impasse. Unknown and unmoumed, he fell like a solitary poetic Leonidas for the ideals of the Jacobin period at the Thermopylae of invading Thermidorianism.
On the one hand, of course, Hegel’s accommodation leads to a defection from the revolutionary republicanism of his Bern period. It leads him from his enthusiasm for Napoleon to an intellectual reconciliation with the wretchedness of a Prussian constitutional monarchy. But on the other hand, it leads-although in an ideal-istically distorted and inverted manner-to the intellectual discovery and elaboration of the dialectic of bourgeois society. In Hegel, classical English political economy appears for the first time as an element of the dialectical conception of world history which is only an ideological form, an idealistic reflection of the fact that for Hegel the dialectic of capitalism itself became the foundation for the dialectic of the present. The Jacobin ideal of the struggle against the inequality of wealth and the Jacobin illusion of the economic levelling of a society based on capitalist private property disappears in order to give place to a cynical realization of the contradictions of capitalism inspired by Ricardo. “Factories and manufacturing are founded precisely on the misery of a class,” Hegel writes a few years after his turning to an evaluation of contemporary events. The polis republic disappears as an ideal to be realized. Greece becomes a thing of the past, irrevocably gone, never to return.
The world historical significance of Hegel’s accommodation consists precisely in the fact that he grasped-as only Balzac beside him -the revolutionary development of the bourgeoisie as a unitary process, one in which the revolutionary Terror as well as Thermidor and Napoleon were only necessary phases. The heroic period of the revolutionary bourgeoisie becomes in Hegel-just as antiquity does -something irretrievably past, but a past which was absolutely necessary for the emergence of the unheroic prose of the present considered to be progressive; for the emergence of advanced bourgeois society with its economic and social contradictions. The fact that this conception is marred both by all the faults of an accommodation to the wretchedness of the Prussian and German situation and by all the mystifications of the idealist dialectic cannot diminish its world-historical significance. But with all its defects it is one of the great paths which leads to the future and to the elaboration of the materialist dialectic.
Hölderlin always refused to recognize this as the correct way. But even his thinking could not remain unaffected by the reality which emerged after Thermidor. Hegel’s Frankfurt period, the period in which he turns to historical methodology, is precisely the period of their second, more mature association and collaboration. But for Hölderlin, the post-Thermidorian development suggests only a sloughing off of the ascetic elements of the ideal conception of Hellenism, only a greater accentuation of Athens as a model as opposed to the unbending Spartan and Roman virtue of the French Jacobins. He continues to remain a republican. Even in his later work, Empedocles, the hero answers the Acragantines who offer him the crown: “This is the age of kings no longer,” and he preaches-in mystic forms it is true-the ideal of a radically revolutionary renovation of mankind:
What is told and taught you from the lips of the fathers, Laws and customs, the names of the ancient gods, Boldly forget them and, like new born men, Lift your eyes to divine Nature!
[Was euch der Vater Mund erzahlt, gelehrt, Gesetz’ und Brauch’, der alten Gotter Namen, Vergesst es kiihn und hebt, wie Neugebome, Die Augen auf zur gottlichen Natur! ]
This Nature is that of Rousseau and Robespierre, the dream of a transformation of society which-without Hölderlin’s raising the question of private property in a clear manner-restores the perfect harmony of man with a society which is adequate to him, with Nature itself through a society which has become natural again. “The ideal is what Nature was,” says Hölderlin’s Hyperion some- what in the manner of Schiller, but going far beyond him in revolutionary fervour. And for Hölderlin, Hellenism is precisely the ideal which was living reality, Nature. “Formerly the peoples started from a childlike harmony,” Hyperion continues. “The harmony of the spirits will be the beginning of a new universal history.”
“All for each and each for all!” This is Hyperion’s social ideal when he enters the revolutionary struggle for the liberation of Greece from the Turkish yoke. It is the dream of a revolutionary war for national liberation which is supposed to become also the war of liberation for all mankind: almost what the radical dreamers of the great revolution itself-Anacharsis Cloots, for example-hoped from the wars of the French Republic. Hyperion says: “No one must recognize by its flag alone our people to come; it is necessary that all be rejuvenated, that all be radically different, that joy be filled with seriousness and all work be gay! Nothing, not even the least significant, the most commonplace without spirit and the gods! Love, hate, and every sound we utter must astonish the vulgar world, and not once are we to be reminded, even for a moment, of the insipid past!”
Hölderlin thus takes no notice of the limitations and contradictions of the bourgeois revolution. This is why his social theory must lose itself in mysticism, a mysticism it is true, filled with confused forebodings of a real upheaval of society and a real renovation of mankind. These forebodings are even more Utopian and mystic than those of the isolated visionaries of pre-revolutionary and revolutionary France. For in a Germany undeveloped from the point of view of capitalism, Hölderlin is unable to perceive in a concrete manner the seeds and beginnings of social tendencies which point beyond the limited and contradictory capitalist horizon. His Utopia is purely ideological. It is a dream of the return of the golden age, a dream in which the presentiment of the development of bourgeois society is joined in an illusory manner with the Utopia of something beyond this society, of a real liberation of mankind. It is very interesting to note that everywhere, and especially in Hyperion, Hölderlin struggles ceaselessly against the overestimation of the State, and that his Utopian conception of the future State, reduced to its essentials, verges very closely on the thinking of the first liberal ideologists of Germany, e.g. Wilhelm von Humboldt.
The mainstay of a social renovation for Hölderlin therefore can only be a new religion, a new church. In the social development of Germany the bases for his Utopias could not be found: objectively because in fact they did not exist in the bourgeois reality; subjectively because the seeds of a development tending to surmount capitalism could not possibly He within Hölderlin’s purview. So it was inevitable that he should seek the source of a social renovation in a new religion. This turning to religion, despite a complete break with the old religions, is inevitable for all revolutionaries in this period who wish to pursue the bourgeois revolution to its conclusion, but who shrink back at the same time from its necessary result: the unleashing of capitalism with all its social and cultural consequences. Robespierre’s cult of the “Supreme Being” is the greatest practical historical example of this inevitable return to religion.
It is clear that Hölderlin also could not escape this dilemma. If his Hyperion wishes to limit the effect of the State, he nonetheless dreams of the rise of a new church which is supposed to become the bearer of his social ideals. The inevitability, and at the same time, the bourgeois-revolutionary character of this conception manifest themselves in the fact that Hegel also, still during the period of his transition to a complete acknowledgment of the capitalist development of the revolution, is seized by the idea of a new religion. It is a religion “in which the infinite anguish and the whole weight of its opposite are admitted but resolved without trouble and in a genuine manner when there is a free people and Reason will have regenerated its reality as a moral spirit which is able to have the audacity to assume its pure form on the basis of itself and its .peculiar majesty.”
This is the ideological framework within which the action of Hyperion unfolds. The point of departure of the action is the attempt of the Greeks to revolt against the Turks in 1770, an attempt which occurred with the support of a Russian fleet. The contradictory character of this theme, which is both revolutionary and reactionary, is highly characteristic of Hölderlin’s historical situation. But it is also highly characteristic that he has a certain insight into the reactionary tendencies of the situation he depicts; an insight which is incomparably more penetrating and progressive than the illusions of the national revolutionaries of the war of liberation with regard to Russia. Hölderlin’s martial heroes view the Russian aid without illusions and with a Machiavellian and realistic political attitude. “One poison thus destroys the other,” says Hyperion when the Turkish fleet is demolished by the Russians. On this point also then Hölderlin was not a Romantic reactionary.
The internal plot of the novel is formed by the ideological struggle of two tendencies competing to realize Hölderlin’s revolutionary Utopia. The warrior hero, Alabanda, who is endowed with certain Fichtean characteristics, represents the tendency of armed insurrection. The heroine of the novel, Diotima, incarnates the tendency of the religious and ideological, peaceful Aufklärung. She wants to make of Hyperion the educator of his people. At first the conflict ends with the victory of the martial principle. Hyperion joins with Alabanda to prepare and carry out the armed uprising. The fame of Alabanda awakens him to self-reproach as regards his hitherto contemplative inactivity. “I have become too idle . . . too ethereal, too indolent. Yes, to be soft at the right time is fine, but to be soft at the wrong time is odious because it is cowardly! And to the warning of Diotima: “You will conquer and forget what for,” Hyperion replies: “Servitude kills, but a just war enlivens every soul.” Diotima too sees the tragic conflict which at this point confronts Hölderlin-Hyperion. “Your whole soul bids you to it; not to obey it often leads to ruin, but to obey no doubt also does.”
The catastrophe begins. After a few victorious skirmishes the insurgents take Misistra, formerly Sparta. But the conquest is followed by pillage and massacre, and Hyperion, deceived, turns his back on the insurgents. “In truth, it was an extraordinary project to entrust the planting of my Elysium to a gang of thieves.” Soon afterwards, the insurgents suffer a crushing defeat and are dispersed. In the battles of the Russian fleet Hyperion seeks death, but in vain.
Hölderlin’s attitude to armed revolution is not new in Germany. The repentance of Hyperion after the victory repeats on a higher level the despair of Schiller’s Karl Moor at the end of the Robbers: “that two men like me should destroy the whole structure of the moral world.” It is no coincidence that the phil-Hellenic classicist Hölderlin esteemed so highly until the end of his conscious life the youthful dramas of Schiller. He justifies this esteem by means of analyses of their composition; but the true reason lies in the similarity of their formulation of problems, in their longing for a German revolution, and at the same time-inseparable from this-in their shrinking back from the facts and consequences of such a revolution. Along with the similarities, however, it is also necessary to stress the differences in their approach to problems. Young Schiller does not merely recoil from the severity of revolutionary methods, but also from the radical content of the revolution itself. He fears that the moral foundations of the world-of bourgeois society-might collapse in a revolution. This Hölderlin does not fear: he does not feel inwardly related to any of the visible manifestations of bourgeois society. As we have seen, what he hopes foils precisely a radical revolution of his world whereby nothing of the present would survive. He shrinks from the revolutionary methods about which he fears, very much like the idealistic ideologists of the revolution, a perpetuation of the evils of the present in another form.
This tragic discord of Hölderlin was insurmountable for him since it resulted from the relations of the classes in Germany. For all the historically necessary illusions concerning the renovation of the democracy of the polis, the revolutionary Jacobins of France derived their verve and energy from their association with the democratic-plebeian elements of the revolution, with the petty bourgeois and semi-proletarian masses of the towns and with the peasantry. Relying on these elements, they could combat-only temporarily, of course, and in a very contradictory manner-the egoistic baseness, the cowardice and avarice of the French bourgeoisie and drive the bourgeois revolution forward along plebeian lines. The anti-bourgeois characteristic of this plebeian method of revolution is very salient in Hölderlin. His Alabanda says of the bourgeois: “One does not ask if you want! Slaves and barbarians, you never want! It is not you we wish to improve, for this would be in vain! “We wish to take care only that you get out of the way of the victorious advance of mankind.” A revolutionary Jacobin in Paris in 1793 could have spoken such words amid the rejoicing of the plebeian masses. In Germany in 1797, such a view signified a despairing and disconsolate solitude, for there was no social class to which these words could be addressed, none in which they could have found so much as an ideological echo. After the failure of the Mainz uprising, Georg Forster could at least take refuge in revolutionary Paris. For Hölderlin there was no homeland either inside or outside Germany. It is no wonder that, after the failure of the revolution, the way of Hyperion gets lost in a despairing mysticism, and that Alabanda and Diotima perish with the downfall of Hyperion. It is no wonder that the next and last great work of Hölderlin, the tragedy Empedocles, which remained a fragment, has for its theme mystic self-sacrifice.
The reaction always fastens on to this mystic dissolution of Hölderlin’s Weltanschauung. After official German literary history had long treated Hölderlin episodically as a representative of a secondary current of Romanticism (e.g. Haym), he was rediscovered in an openly reactionary manner in the imperialist period and utilized for the ideological aims of the reaction. Dilthey makes him a precursor of Schopenhauer and of Nietzsche by the simple trick of completely detaching the Hellenism and the effects of classical German philosophy from the influence of the French Revolution and by reducing these latter in significance to the level of an episode. Gundolf already separates in Hölderlin the “original experience” [Urerlebnis] and the “acquired experience” [Bildungserlebnis]. “Acquired experience” is everything revolutionary, everything “merely temporal”; and as such all this is irrelevant to the understanding of the “essential” Hölderlin. The “essential” Hölderlin is an “Orphic mystic.” In Gundolf also the lines lead from Hölderlin to Nietzsche, and beyond him to the “deification of the body” by Stefan George. The Hölderlin, who fell tragic victim to a belated Jacobinism, becomes in Gundolf a precursor of rentier parasitism. Hölderlin’s tragic elegy on man’s loss of political, social, and cultural liberty ends up in Stefan George’s decadent Parklyrik. Hölderlin’s Hellenic and republican cult of friendship, for which his models were the [would be] tyrannicides, Harmodius and Aristogiton,[1] is transformed into a prefigurement of the aestheticist, decadent, homosexual George circle.
Both Dilthey and Gundolf imagine they are able to get at the essential core of Hölderlin by leaving out the “temporal” aspects of his life and work. Hölderlin himself knew very well that the mournful elegiac aspect of his poetry, his longing for vanished Greece, in a word, the essential quality of his poetry was altogether temporal. Hyperion says:
“But this, this anguish, which is like no other, is a ceaseless feeling of total annihilation when our lives lose their significance, when the heart tells itself: you must descend and nothing more remain of you: no flowers have you planted, no cottages have you built only that you might say: I leave a trace behind on earth. ... But enough! enough! Had I grown up with Themistocles or lived among the Scipios, my soul surely would never have come to know this side of life.”
And for a liberated fatherland – in his sense of the term – Hölderlin celebrates a heroic death:
Oh, take me, admit me into the ranks,
So that one day I may never die a common death! To die in vain is not my wish, but To be killed on the altar of sacrifice
For the fatherland ...
And heralds of victory descend: the battle Is ours! Live on above, oh fatherland, And reckon not the dead! For you Beloved, not one too many has fallen.
[O nimmt mich, nimmt mich mit in die Reihen auf, Damit ich einst nicht sterbe gemeinen Tods! Umsonst zu sterben, lieb ich nicht, doch Lieb ich, zu fallen am Opferhiigel
Furs Vaterland ...
Und Siegesboten kommen herab: Die Schlacht 1st unser! Lebe droben, o Vaterland, Und zahle nicht die Toten! Dir ist, Liebes! nicht einer zu viel gefallen].
He also celebrates his own destiny as a poet, his longing for at least one fulfilment of that which is of central concern to his soul:
Grant me but one summer, you mighty ones! And one autumn to ripen my song,
So that my heart, sated with sweet play, Might die then more willingly.
The soul, denied in life its divine right, Rests not even in Orcus below;
Yet should I ever achieve that sacred thing, The poem which is my heart’s desire,
Then welcome, repose of the world of shadows!
I am content, even if the music of my strings
Does not escort me down; once
I shall have lived like the gods, and there is no need of more.
[Nur einen Sommer gonnt, ihr Gewaltigen !
Und einen Herbst zu reifem Gesange mir,
Dass williger mein Herz, vom siissen
Spiele gesattigt, dann mir sterbe.
Die Seele, der im Leben ihr gottlich Recht
Nicht ward, sie ruht auch drunten im Orkus nicht; Doch ist mir einst das Heil’ge, das am Herzen mir liegt, das Gedicht gelungen.
Willkommen dann, 0 Stille der Schattenwelt!
Zufrieden bin ich, wenn auch mein Saitenspiel Mich nicht hinabgeleitet; einmal
Lebt’ ich wie Gotter, und mehr bedarfs nicht].
Nothing can be considered in isolation here. Hölderlin is too genuine a poet, he always echoes the momentary and concrete occasion of his experience, he has no need therefore to rehearse constantly in abstract terms the ultimate bases of the individual experience he expresses. And especially with Hölderlin, the yearning after poetic fulfilment cannot be understood in a formal-artistic sense. Form and content here too are inseparable. Poetic success presupposes that the central content of the poetry will somehow be realized in life, in his life. And Jacobin principles constitute the whole atmosphere of his poems. Only he whose perspective is dulled or blinded by class conformity will not perceive this all-determining atmosphere.
But what about the mysticism of nature; the fusion of nature and culture, man and the godhead in the experience of Hellas ? This is what a modern admirer of Hölderlin, influenced by Dilthey and Gundolf, might perhaps retort. “We have already alluded to the Rousseauesque and Robespierrian character of Hölderlin’s cults of nature and Greece. In his great poem, The Archipelagus (which Gundolf made the point of departure for his interpretation of Hölderlin), Greek nature and the grandeur of the Athenian culture which grew out of it is expressed with overwhelming elegiac pathos. But toward the end of the poem, Hölderlin speaks with equally moving pathos and equally accusatory elegy about the cause of his sorrow over vanished Greece:
Alas! It wanders in the night, it dwells as in Orcus,
With nothing godlike, our race. To their own bustle
Alone they are fastened, and in the raging workshop
Each hears only himself, and the wild ones with mighty arms
Work much without respite; yet ever more
Sterile, like the Furies, remains the toil of the poor.
[Aber weh ! Es wandelt in Nacht, es wohnt, wie im Orkus,
Ohne Gottliches unser Geschlecht. Ans eigene Treiben
Sind sie geschmiedet allein, und sich in der tosenden Werkstatt
Horet jeglicher nur, und viel arbeiten die Wilden
Mit gewaltigem Arm, rastlos, doch immer und immer
Unfruchtbar, wie die Furien, bleibt die Miihe der Armen].
This conception is neither incidental nor unique in Hölderlin.
After the Greeks are defeated in their struggle for liberty and Hyperion experiences his disillusionment, we find at the end of the novel the terribly accusing chapter on Germany, the enraged ode in prose on the degeneration of man into misery, into the narrow philistinism of early German capitalism. The invocation of Greece as a unity of culture and nature is in Hölderlin always an indictment of his age, a vain appeal to action, an appeal for the destruction of this miserable reality.
The “refinement” of the analysis of Dilthey and Gundolf, their eradication of all traces of the great social tragedy in the life and works of Hölderlin, forms the foundation of the grossly demagogic and flagrantly false disfigurement of his memory by the Brown-shirts of literary history. Just as fascist ideologists berated the unconscious, or not yet conscious, petty bourgeois with the hopelessness of their path, the. literary S.A. men befouled the memory of many sincerely despairing German revolutionaries by juggling away the true social cause of their despair and by explaining it as despair over the fact that they could not witness the “deliverance” by the Third Reich and the “saviour” Hitler.
This is also how Hölderlin fared at the hands of German fascism. Among German fascist writers it is good breeding today to idolize Hölderlin as an important precursor of the Third Reich. Naturally, the attempt to carry through this claim in a concrete manner, the attempt to show concretely the evidence of fascist ideology in Hölderlin involves serious difficulties. They are much more serious than they were for Gundolf whose formalistic, art-for-art’s-sake viewpoint, emptied of all content, allowed for the adoration of the formal aspects in Hölderlin, the idealization of his supposedly mystical conception of Hellas, without any immediately apparent inner contradiction. (The contradiction existed “merely” between Gundolf’s image of Hölderlin and the true Hölderlin).
On this basis Rosenberg makes Hölderlin a representative of “authentic” Germanic yearning. He tries to harness Hölderlin to the social demagogy of National Socialism by turning his critique of the times into a fascist critique of “the bourgeois.” “Did not Hölderlin suffer from these people even at a time when they did not yet hold sway as omnipotent bourgeois, even when Hyperion, in search of great souls, was obliged to state that they had only become barbarous by their diligence, their science, and their very religion? Hyperion found artisans, thinkers, priests, and title-holders, but no human beings, only fragmented beings without inner unity, without inner drive, without wholeness of life.” But Rosenberg also takes care to concretize as little as possible this social critique of Hölderlin. This whole great sally ends with a leap into the void. Hölderlin is simply stamped as a representative of Rosenberg’s nonsensical “aesthetic will.”
The same mixture of bombastic grandiloquence and anxious evasion of all facts characterizes the later evolution of the fascist image of Hölderlin. In a series of essays a “major turning-point” in the life of Hölderlin is discovered: his renunciation of the “eighteenth century,” his conversion to Christianity and with it to the fascist and Romantic “German reality.” In a Romanticism constructed to be the prelude to fascism, Hölderlin is inserted into a series extending from Novalis to Gorres. The worth of this falsification of history is shown by the fact that even the official side of National Socialism had to reject it as being “deviant” and “erroneous.” This occurs in an article by Matthcs Ziegler in the Nationalsozialistische-Monatsheft. in which Meister Eckart, Hölderlin, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche are presented as the great precursors of the National Socialist Weltanschauung. But whereas Baumler could succeed in delineating the romantic, anti-capitalist, irrationalist-mystic features of Kierkegaard without overt historical lies, only with some light brown retouching, Ziegler’s article remains a pitiful stammer encased, of course, in crude apodictic bombast. Scrupulously avoiding anything concrete in the quotations, he too only centres on Hölderlin’s opposition to contemporary culture (to the “bourgeoisie”) and his longing for a form of community. And he twists this longing, of which we already know the true social basis and the true social content, into a longing for Hitler, into anticipation of the Third Reich. Summarizing, he writes: “It was the tragedy of Hölderlin that he had to separate himself from the community of men without it being allotted him to contribute to the formation of the community of the future. He remained a solitary man who was misunderstood in his time but who bore within him the future as a certainty. He wished no revival, no new Greece, but he rediscovered in Hellas the Nordic heroic attitude to life which was atrophied in the Germany of his time, the only attitude, however, from which the community of the future could grow. He was obliged to express himself in the language and in the conceptions of his time, which is why it is often difficult for us, men of today, formed by the experience of our age, to understand him properly. But our struggle for the formation of the Reich is the struggle for the same achievement that Hölderlin was unable to accomplish because the time was not yet ripe.”
The objective result, even measured by a standard applicable to a National Socialist literary history, is extremely pitiful; Ziegler himself lets slip the admission that he scarcely understands Hölderlin, if at all. National Socialist writers are obliged to make the image of Hölderlin even more abstract than it is in Dilthey and Gundolf, even more devoid of all individual as well as social and historical features. The Hölderlin of the German fascists is some sort of Romantic poet who is scarcely distinguishable any longer from Georg Biicnner-also repeatedly slandered of late-who has been twisted in turn into a protagonist of “heroic pessimism,” and thereby into a precursor of the “heroic realism” represented by Nietzsche and Baumler. In the spiritual night of the fascist falsification of history, every figure becomes brown.
But the “methodology” of these falsifications nonetheless shows, if unintentionally, a result: namely the intrinsic relation between the inability of liberalism to understand German history and the increasingly conscious falsification of it by fascist imperialism. Dilthey challenges the interpretation of Hölderlin by Haym as being a “lateral shoot of Romanticism,” but only to enrol Hölderlin among the decadent belated Romantics of the end of the century and to make him a precursor of Nietzsche. Gundolf goes further and makes Hölderlin a precursor of Stefan George. And the National Socialists misuse the romantic and anti-capitalist features of Hölderlin, which at that time were still by no means unequivocally reactionary, in order to mount this deformed image of the tragic revolutionary as an ornament on the facade of the fascist prison for working Germany.
In his essence, however, Hölderlin is no Romantic, although his criticism of emerging capitalism is not without some Romantic traits. But whereas the Romantics, from the economist Sismondi to the mystic poet Novalis, see a refuge from capitalism in a simple merchandise economy, and oppose to anarchic capitalism the “ordered” Middle Ages, oppose to the mechanistic division of labour the “totality” of artisan labour, Hölderlin criticizes bourgeois society from another side. In a Romantic manner, he too hates the capitalist division of labour. But in his eyes the most essential aspect of the degradation to be combated is the loss of liberty. And in him this conception of liberty strives to transcend-in mystic forms, as we have seen, and with a vague Utopian content-the narrow notion of political freedom in bourgeois society. The difference in choice of themes between Hölderlin and the Romantics-Greece versus the Middle Ages-is not merely a difference in themes then but a difference in ideology and politics.
When Hölderlin celebrates the festivals of ancient Greece, he celebrates the vanished democratic public character of life. In this respect he not only follows the same course as the friend of his youth, Hegel, before his transformation, but ideologically he moves also in the direction of Robespierre and the Jacobins. In his great speech to the Convention on the introduction of the cult of the “Supreme Being,” Robespierre declares: “The true priest of the Supreme Being is Nature; his temple the universe; his cult virtue; his festivals the joy of a great people united under his eyes in order to draw tighter the bond of universal brotherhood and to offer him the veneration of pure and sensitive hearts.” And in the same speech he refers to the Greek festivals as an example of this strengthening of a democratic republican education aimed at realizing the virtue and happiness of a liberated people.
It is true that Hölderlin’s mysticism far surpasses the inevitable and heroic illusions of Robespierre. Moreover, it is a flight into mysticism and a mysticism of flight: a mysticism of yearning for death, the death of self-sacrifice, death as a means to become united with nature. But this nature mysticism in Hölderlin is by no means uniformly reactionary.
In the first place, its Rousseauian revolutionary source is always perceptible. The immediate point of departure of Hölderlin’s flight into mysticism lies precisely in the fact that he was obliged to raise the socially necessary hopeless tragedy of his idealistic aspirations to the level of a cosmic tragedy. Secondly, his mysticism of self-sacrifice has a distinctly pantheistic and anti-religious character. Before going to his death, Alabanda speaks of his life “that no god created.” “If the hand of a potter has fashioned me, then let him smash his vessel as he pleases. But what lives must be uncreated; must be of divine nature in its origin, superior to any power and all art, and thus invulnerable, eternally.” And in a similar manner, in her farewell letter to Hyperion, Diotima writes of the “divine freedom which death gives us.” “And if I should become a plant, would the loss be so great? I shall still exist. How could I vanish from the sphere of life wherein the eternal love, which is common to all, joins all natures? How could I sever myself from the union which links all beings?”
If the modern reader wishes to gain a historically correct perspective on German nature mysticism at the beginning of the nineteenth century, he must never forget that at that time the dialectic of nature and society was discovered and elaborated of course in idealistic and mystical forms. It is the period of the nature philosophy of Goethe, young Hegel, and young Schelling. (Marx speaks of the “honest thoughts of Schelling’s youth”). It is a period in which mysticism is not merely a dead weight carried over from the theological past, but frequently, and very often in a manner difficult to distinguish, an idealistic haze which veils the still unknown future methods of dialectical thinking. Just as at the beginning of the development of the bourgeoisie, in the Renaissance and in the emerging materialism of Bacon, the intoxication of new knowledge assumes exuberant and fanciful forms, so too now, in the intoxication of the dawn of the dialectical method, a philosophy emerges “on which no member is not drunk” (Hegel). What Marx says about the philosophy of Bacon is valid-mutatis mutandis-also for this period: “Matter smiles on the total man with a poetically sensuous radiance; the aphoristic doctrine itself, on the other hand, still abounds in theological inconsequentialities.”
Hölderlin himself takes a very active part in the formation of the dialectical method; he is not only the friend of youth of Schelling and Hegel, but also their philosophical fellow-traveller. In his important discourse on Athens, Hyperion speaks also of Heraclitus. And the “One differentiated in itself” of Heraclitus is for him the point of departure of thought: “It is the essence of beauty, and before this was found, there was no philosophy.” For Hölderlin also then philosophy is identical with dialectic.
Identical, it is true, with an idealistic dialectic which loses itself in mysticism. And the mysticism is particularly obvious in Hölderlin because in increasing measure it has the task for him of glorifying on a cosmic plane the social tragedy of his existence and of pointing an apparent way out of the historical impasse of his situation in a meaningful death. But this horizon, which gets lost in mystical haziness, is also a common characteristic of the whole epoch. The end of Hyperion and Empedocles is no more mystical than the fate of Makarie in Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre or that of Louis Lambert or Seraphitus Seraphita in Balzac. Just as this mystic horizon, which cannot be disjoined from the work of the great realists, Goethe and Balzac, also cannot invalidate the fundamental realism of their work, so too Hölderlin’s mysticism of death cannot impair the fundamentally revolutionary character of his heroic elegy.
Hölderlin is one of the purest and most profound elegiac poets of all time. In his important definition of elegy, Schiller writes that “in elegy, the sorrow must result only from an enthusiasm aroused by the ideal.” And with perhaps too much severity, Schiller condemns all elegists who lament a purely private fate (e.g. Ovid).
In Hölderlin’s poetry individual and social destinies fuse into a tragic harmony rarely achieved. Throughout his life Hölderlin was a failure. He never got beyond the general transitional stage in which the destitute German intelligentsia existed at that time: tutorship; moreover, he did not even succeed in creating an existence as a tutor. Despite the benevolent protection of Schiller and notwithstanding the commendation of the most significant critic of the period, A. W. Schlegel, he remained completely unknown as a poet and without the prospect of a livelihood. His great love for Suzette Gontard ended in a tragically despairing resignation. Both his outer and his inner life were so desperately hopeless that many contemporaries and biographers have perceived something fatefully necessary even in the insanity which put an end to his youth.
But the elegiac sorrow of Hölderlin’s poetry never has the character of a petty private recrimination for his ruined personal life. Even if Hölderlin cosmically mystified the social necessity for the failure of his decisive aspirations, this mystification also expresses the feeling that the failure of his private aspirations was only the inevitable consequence of this great general failure. This is always the point of departure of the elegiac lament running through his poetic works.
The contrast between vanished Hellas, which must be renewed in a revolutionary manner, and the miserable condition of contemporary Germany constitutes the constant, though always variously recurring, content of his lament. His elegy is therefore a pathetic and heroic accusation against the age and not a subjective and lyrical lamentation of a private fate, however pitiable.
It is the complaint of the best bourgeois intellectuals over the loss of the revolutionary “illusions” of the heroic period of their own class. It is the grievance over a solitude, a cry of distress issuing from a solitude which is insurmountable because, although manifesting itself in all moments of private life, it was created by the iron hand of economic and social development itself.
The revolutionary fire of the bourgeoisie is extinguished. But the heroic ardour of the great Revolution gives rise everywhere in the middle class to fiery souls in whom this brand continues to smoulder. Their ardour, however, no longer inflames the class as a whole. The revolutionary flame of Jacobinism still burns in Stendhal’s Julien Sorel just as it does in Hölderlin. And if the hopelessness of the situation of that belated Jacobin differs deeply in an external sense from Hölderlin’s destiny, if Julien’s fate is not an elegiac lament, but rather a power struggle carried on with hypocritical and Machiavellian means against the ignoble society of the Restoration, the hopelessness is nonetheless the same and has similar social origins. Julien Sorel also gets no farther than to take flight, at the end of an unsuccessful life, into a pseudo-heroic and tragic death; than to fling his plebeian and Jacobin contempt in the face of society after a life of shameful hypocrisy.
The creative form in which this last late-born Jacobin of France appeared was ironical and realistic. In England, such late-comers also manifest classicist, elegiac, and hymnic qualities: Keats and Shelley. But whereas the fate of Keats presents, even externally, a great many features relating him to Hölderlin, a new sun pierces the horizon of Shelley; a new rejoicing intrudes into his elegiac lament. In his greatest poetic fragment, Keats mourns the fate of the Titans overthrown by the ignoble new gods. Shelley too poetizes the destiny of an ancient god, the struggle of the miserable new gods against the ancient gods of the golden age (the golden age, the “reign of Saturn” being in most mythologies the myth of the period prior to private property and the state), and the struggle of Prometheus bound against the new god, Zeus. But in Shelley the new usurper gods are vanquished and his hymns celebrate the liberation of mankind. Shelley has already glimpsed the rising new sun, the sun of the proletarian revolution. He was able to celebrate the liberation of Prometheus because already he could summon the men of England to revolt against capitalist exploitation:
Sow seed-but let no tyrant reap;
Find wealth-let no imposter heap;
Weave robes-let not the idle wear;
Forge arms-in your defence to bear.
In Shelley the prospect of a transition to the real struggle for the liberation of humanity presents itself to Jacobins born too late for their own class.
What was possible socially in England around 1819 for a revolutionary genius, at least as a poetic visionary prospect, was not possible for anyone in Germany at the end of the eighteenth century. Because of the contradictions of the internal and world situation of Germany at the time, the course generally followed by the German bourgeois intelligentsia led to the spiritual morass of Romantic obscurantism. The accommodation of Goethe and Hegel saved and continued the best of the heritage of bourgeois thought, although in a form which in many ways is distorted and trivial. The heroic intransigence of Hölderlin was bound to lead him into a desperate impasse. He is truly a unique poet who did not have and could not have any successors. He is unique, however, not in the sense of those who defile his memory today by singing the praises of his shortcomings and obscurities, but because his tragic situation could no longer recur for the bourgeois class.
A later Hölderlin who did not follow Shelley’s course would not have been a Hölderlin, but rather a narrow classicist liberal. When Arnold Ruge begins his letter in the Correspondence of 1843 with Hölderlin’s famous lament on Germany, Marx replies: “My dear friend, your letter is a good elegy, a breathtaking dirge; but politically it is nothing at all. No people despairs; and even if for a long time its hope is based only on stupidity, after many years all its pious wishes are fulfilled by a sudden intelligence.”
Marx’s praise applies to Hölderlin, for Ruge does nothing more than to vary his quotation in a trivial manner. His rebuke applies to all who have revived the lament of Hölderlin after the basis upon which it was founded, the objective hopelessness of his situation, was negated by history itself.
Hölderlin could have no poetic successors. The later elegists of the nineteenth century bewail, on the one hand, much more private destinies, and on the other hand, in their lament on the misery of their age, are incapable of preserving their faith in humanity with the same purity it had in Hölderlin. This contrast raises Hölderlin far above the generally false dilemma of the nineteenth century. He is neither an insipid optimist nor a despairing irrationalist pessimist. His style neither sinks into an academic classicistic objectivism nor into an amorphous, impressionist subjectivism; his poetry is neither dryly and didactically intellectual not atmospheric and void of thought.
Hölderlin’s lyricism is a lyricism of ideas. Its point of departure is formed by the inner contradiction of the bourgeois revolution raised to the level of a Weltanschauung (and mystified, of course, in an idealistic manner). Both aspects of the contradiction exist in this poetry of ideas: the Jacobin Hellenic ideal and the ignoble bourgeois reality. The imperishable greatness of Hölderlin lies in his superb stylistic mastery of the insoluble contradiction which was basic to his social existence. He not only fell bravely as a belated martyr on an abandoned barricade of Jacobinism, but he also expressed this martyrdom-the martyrdom of the best sons of a once revolutionary class-in immortal song.
His novel Hyperion also has this lyric and elegiac character. It is less epic than plaintive and accusatory. Nevertheless, the bourgeois critics are wrong who see in Hy-perion a lyric dissolution of the epic form such as in Novalis’s Hcinrich von Ofterdingen. Even stylistically Hölderlin is no Romantic. On the theoretical level he goes beyond Schiller’s conception of the ancient epos as “naive” (in opposition to modern “sentimental” poetry). But he does so in the direction of a revolutionary objectivism. He writes: “The epic poem, naive in appearance, is heroic in its significance. It is the metaphor of great aspirations.”
The historical tragedy of Hölderlin affects his artistry in that its epic heroism never advances beyond a mere beginning; in that he was only able to express the elegiac metaphor of the great aspirations. The epic fulness must be transferred from the action into the souls of the actors. But to this inner action Hölderlin imparts a very palpable plastic and objective character, having an intensity such as was possible only on account of the tragically contradictory foundations of his conception. In this respect also, his failure is not only heroic, but is transformed into a heroic song. To Goethe’s “educational novel,” which teaches adaptation to the capitalist reality, he opposes an “educational novel” which teaches heroic resistance to this reality. He does not wish, like Tieck or Novalis, to “poetize” in a Romantic manner the “prose” of the world of Wilhclm Meister; rather he opposes to the German paradigm of the great bourgeois novel the project of a novel of the citizen.
Hyperion also bears stylistically the marks of the hopelessly problematical character of this genre. The attempt to depict the citizen in epic was bound to fail. But from this failure emerged a unique style which is both lyrical and epic: the objective style of a profound indictment of the abjectness of the bourgeois world after the light of its heroic “illusions” is extinguished. The lyric novel of Hölderlin, of which the action is almost solely “metaphorical,” remains then, even in terms of style, isolated in the evolution of the bourgeoisie. Nowhere else has purely internal action been shaped in a manner so palpable and objective; nowhere else has the lyrical attitude of the poet been so thoroughly integrated into an epic work.
Unlike Novalis, Hölderlin never criticized the great bourgeois novel of his age. Nonetheless, his opposition to Wilhelm Meister is more profound, for he opposes to it a completely different type of novel. “Whereas Goethe’s novel grows organically out of the social and stylistic problems of the French and English bourgeois novel of the eighteenth century, Hölderlin takes up the threads of the problem at the point where the revolutionary ideals for the transformation of life by the bourgeoisie gave rise to the attempt to create an epos of the citizen; where Milton had made the great unsuccessful attempt to depict, with classical plasticity, the necessarily idealistic existence and destiny of the citizen. The epic plasticity for which Milton strove, however, breaks up into magnificent lyrical descriptions and purely lyrical-pathetic explosions.
From the very start Hölderlin renounces the impossible aspiration to create an epos in a bourgeois world. In accordance with the requirements of the novel, he situates his characters and their destinies in a setting-however stylized-of everyday bourgeois life. This compels him to depict the citizen without separating him entirely from the world of the bourgeois. And even if he is understandably unable to endow the idealized citizen with a full-blooded material life, he nonetheless approaches much more closely than any of his predecessors a really plastic creation in his depiction of the citizen.
His historical and personal tragedy, the fact that the heroic “illusions” of the bourgeoisie could no longer be the banner for real revolutionary heroism, but only that of the yearning for such heroism, constitutes precisely the stylistic presupposition of this (relative) success. Never have the emotional conflicts expressed by a bourgeois poet been less exclusively emotional, less exclusively private and personal, so directly public than in his works. Hölderlin’s lyric and elegiac novel-despite its inevitable failure, precisely because of its failure-is the most objective epic poem of the citizen to be written in the course of the development of the bourgeoisie.
1934.
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1. Harmodius and Aristogiton, said to be lovers, conspired to assassinate Hyppias and the tyrants of Athens (514 B.C.). The plot failed and the two conspirators were killed, but the tyrants were eventually overthrown. Both men then were celebrated in song and the sculptor Antenor built a monument in their honour.
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Georg Lukacs Archive
Friday, December 9, 2011
Thursday, December 8, 2011
From a Walter Benjamin Website
- Hölderlin, On Judgment & Being trans. H.S.Harris
- Hölderlin,On Jacobi's Letters Concerning the Teaching of Spinoza (1790) trans. by S.J.Thompson
- Hölderlin, Letters to G.W.F. Hegel and Friedrich Schelling trans. by S.J.Thompson
- Wilhelm Waiblinger's essay: "Friedrich Hölderlin's Life, Poetry and Madness" (1830) trans. by S.J.Thompson
- Alleged Account of Madame de S....y [From Moritz Hartmann, "Eine Vermutung" ("A Supposition," 1852)] trans. by S.J.Thompson
- Documents from Isaak von Sinclair's Trial for High Treason trans. by S.J.Thompson
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Charlie Chaplin final speech in The Great Dictator
Lo siento, pero no quiero ser emperador. No es lo mío. No quiero gobernar o conquistar a nadie. Me gustaría ayudar a todo el mundo, si fuera posible: a judíos, gentiles, negros, blancos. Todos nosotros queremos ayudarnos mutuamente. Los seres humanos somos así. Queremos vivir para la felicidad y no para la miseria ajena. No queremos odiarnos y despreciarnos mutuamente. En este mundo hay sitio para todos. Y la buena tierra es rica y puede proveer a todos.
El camino de la vida puede ser libre y bello; pero hemos perdido el camino. La avaricia ha envenenado las almas de los hombres, ha levantado en el mundo barricadas de odio, nos ha llevado al paso de la oca a la miseria y a la matanza. Hemos aumentado la velocidad. Pero nos hemos encerrado nosotros mismos dentro de ella. La maquinaria, que proporciona abundancia, nos ha dejado en la indigencia. Nuestra ciencia nos ha hecho cínicos; nuestra inteligencia, duros y faltos de sentimientos. Pensamos demasiado y sentimos demasiado poco. Más que maquinaria, necesitamos humanidad. Más que inteligencia, necesitamos amabilidad y cortesía. Sin estas cualidades, la vida será violenta y todo se perderá.
El avión y la radio nos han aproximado más. La verdadera naturaleza de estos adelantos clama por la bondad en el hombre, clama por la fraternidad universal, por la unidad de todos nosotros. Incluso ahora, mi voz está llegando a millones de seres de todo el mundo, a millones de hombres, mujeres y niños desesperados, víctimas de un sistema que tortura a los hombres y encarcela a las personas inocentes. A aquellos que puedan oírme, les digo: “No desesperéis”.
La desgracia que nos ha caído encima no es más que el paso de la avaricia, la amargura de los hombres, que temen el camino del progreso humano. El odio de los hombres pasará, y los dictadores morirán, y el poder que arrebataron al pueblo volverá al pueblo. Y mientras los hombres mueren, la libertad no perecerá jamás.
Soldados. No os entreguéis a esos bestias, que os desprecian, que os esclavizan, que gobiernan vuestras vidas; decidles lo que hay que hacer, lo que hay que pensar y lo que hay que sentir. Que os obligan a hacer la instrucción, que os tienen a media ración, que os tratan como a ganado y os utilizan como carne de cañón. No os entreguéis a esos hombres desnaturalizados, a esos hombres-máquina con inteligencia y corazones de máquina. Vosotros no sois máquinas. Sois hombres. Con el amor de la humanidad en vuestros corazones. No odiéis. Sólo aquellos que no son amados odian, los que no son amados y los desnaturalizados.
Soldados. No luchéis por la esclavitud. Luchad por la libertad. En el capítulo diecisiete de san Lucas está escrito que el reino de Dios se halla dentro del hombre, no de un hombre o de un grupo de hombres, sino de todos los hombres. En vosotros. Vosotros, el pueblo tenéis el poder, el poder de crear máquinas. El poder de crear felicidad. Vosotros, el pueblo, tenéis el poder de hacer que esta vida sea libre y bella, de hacer de esta vida una maravillosa aventura. Por tanto, en nombre de la democracia, empleemos ese poder, unámonos todos. Lucharemos por un mundo nuevo, por un mundo digno, que dará a los hombres la posibilidad de trabajar, que dará a la juventud un futuro y a los ancianos seguridad.
Prometiéndoos todo esto, las bestias han subido al poder. Pero mienten. No han cumplido esa promesa. No la cumplirán. Los dictadores se dan libertad a sí mismos, pero esclavizan al pueblo. Ahora, unámonos para liberar el mundo, para terminar con las barreras nacionales, para terminar con la codicia, con el odio y con la intolerancia. Luchemos por un mundo de la razón, un mundo en el que la ciencia y el progreso lleven la felicidad a todos nosotros. Soldados, en nombre de la democracia, unámonos.
Monday, December 5, 2011
Reflexión histórica # 0001
En quinientos años se han construido ideas que son más ideología que historia. De ahí que se hable de:
Por eso surgen, de las crecientes contradicciones entre los discursos nacionalistas y oficialistas y la historia sería, las provocaciones e irreverencias que llaman a reinventar este México como nuestro… un nuestro que contruya a la persona y la proyecte al futuro. Y aunque parezca doler cuando se dice lo que se dice acerca de nuestra historia, dicho dolor es más bien hipocondriaco. Educados, como lo hemos sido, en la hipocondría histórica:
Nos obliga a cambiar y reconocer a los fantasmas crueles, como la independencia y la revolución que, en nada ayudaron a este país, sino que México existe a pesar de ellos.
Para saber más (requiere registrarse, pero vale la pena):
JUANDIEGUITO: EL MEXICANO CHIQUITO
- Conquista de México (¿México en 1521?)
- y por España (¿cuál España en 1521?)
- Independencia de México (¿Independencia?)
- Revolución mexicana (¿revolución en 1910?)
Por eso surgen, de las crecientes contradicciones entre los discursos nacionalistas y oficialistas y la historia sería, las provocaciones e irreverencias que llaman a reinventar este México como nuestro… un nuestro que contruya a la persona y la proyecte al futuro. Y aunque parezca doler cuando se dice lo que se dice acerca de nuestra historia, dicho dolor es más bien hipocondriaco. Educados, como lo hemos sido, en la hipocondría histórica:
- la de los mitos y dogmas,
- la de las canonizaciones y satanizaciones,
- la de lo blanco y negro.
Nos obliga a cambiar y reconocer a los fantasmas crueles, como la independencia y la revolución que, en nada ayudaron a este país, sino que México existe a pesar de ellos.
Para saber más (requiere registrarse, pero vale la pena):
JUANDIEGUITO: EL MEXICANO CHIQUITO
Saturday, December 3, 2011
'Test' Un poema de Nicanor Parra
Qué es un antipoeta:
un comerciante en urnas y ataúdes?
un sacerdote que no cree en nada?
un general que duda de sí mismo?
un vagabundo que se ríe de todo
hasta de la vejez y de la muerte?
un interlocutor de mal carácter?
un bailarín al borde del abismo?
un narciso que ama a todo el mundo?
un bromista sangriento
deliberadamente miserable?
un poeta que duerme en una silla?
un alquimista de los tiempos modernos?
un revolucionario de bolsillo?
un pequeño burgués?
un charlatán?
un dios?
un inocente?
un aldeano de Santiago de Chile?
Subraye la frase que considere correcta.
Qué es la antipoesía:
un temporal en una taza de té?
una mancha de nieve en una roca?
un azafate lleno de excrementos humanos
como lo cree el padre Salvatierra?
un espejo que dice la verdad?
un bofetón al rostro
del Presidente de la Sociedad de Escritores?
(Dios lo tenga en su santo reino)
una advertencia a los poetas jóvenes?
un ataúd a chorro?
un ataúd a fuerza centrífuga?
un ataúd a gas de parafina?
una capilla ardiente sin difunto?
Marque con una cruz
la definición que considere correcta.
un comerciante en urnas y ataúdes?
un sacerdote que no cree en nada?
un general que duda de sí mismo?
un vagabundo que se ríe de todo
hasta de la vejez y de la muerte?
un interlocutor de mal carácter?
un bailarín al borde del abismo?
un narciso que ama a todo el mundo?
un bromista sangriento
deliberadamente miserable?
un poeta que duerme en una silla?
un alquimista de los tiempos modernos?
un revolucionario de bolsillo?
un pequeño burgués?
un charlatán?
un dios?
un inocente?
un aldeano de Santiago de Chile?
Subraye la frase que considere correcta.
Qué es la antipoesía:
un temporal en una taza de té?
una mancha de nieve en una roca?
un azafate lleno de excrementos humanos
como lo cree el padre Salvatierra?
un espejo que dice la verdad?
un bofetón al rostro
del Presidente de la Sociedad de Escritores?
(Dios lo tenga en su santo reino)
una advertencia a los poetas jóvenes?
un ataúd a chorro?
un ataúd a fuerza centrífuga?
un ataúd a gas de parafina?
una capilla ardiente sin difunto?
Marque con una cruz
la definición que considere correcta.
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
POEMS BY Durs Grünbein
German Poetry in English Translation
POEMS BY Durs Grünbein
Quid magazine: Five poets
Durs Grünbein
from Variation auf kein Thema
translated by Keston Sutherland
case beneath a verge of glass, the door
was hardly shut, stiffened, an object
for pedestrians at the streetside
you stare at the touchtone panel, numbers
like the stellar enchanted forest
there at the night sky / decimal mandala
which with its reachable sum lures,
with sudden nearness, whispers, betrayal,
love even — everything coded
as long since planned ahead a life
on call and hardly dialed
a voice explodes in your head.
Monday, November 28, 2011
The unfathomable & ungraspable friend
To Hölderlin
Near is salvation
unfathomable & ungraspable
but where there is a possibility
no matter that surrounded by danger
him, the poet, grows as well...
almost touchable as a fate.
El enigma imperecedero tomado de EFE
Heinrich von Kleist sigue siendo un enigma 200 años despues de su muerte: ALEMANIA LITERATURA
EFE News Service [Madrid] 20 Nov 2011.
Abstract (summary)
La obra y la vida de Heinrich von Kleist sigue siendo para muchos un enigma 200 años despues de su muerte, que se cumplen mañana tras un año lleno de conmemoraciones, homenajes y simposios que tratan de acercarse a una de las figuras más contradictorias y…
Full Text
Berlín, 20 nov (EFE).- La obra y la vida de Heinrich von Kleist sigue siendo para muchos un enigma 200 años despues de su muerte, que se cumplen mañana tras un año lleno de conmemoraciones, homenajes y simposios que tratan de acercarse a una de las figuras más contradictorias y complejas de la literatura alemana
Su figura ha sido reclamada por diversas corrientes esteticas y ha intentado, a lo largo de los años, ser instrumentalizada por las mas variadas ideologías políticas.
Un ejemplo es la historia de la recepción de su drama "Die Hermannschlacht", basado en la batalla de Varus, una rebelión germana contra el Imperio romano, considerada como uno de los mitos fundacionales alemanes y que Kleist vio como ejemplo a seguir, aunque el enemigo ya no era Roma sino las tropas napoleónicas.
Posteriormente, en 1914, tras una representación del drama, se leyeron partes de victoria de las tropas alemanas en los campos de la Primera Guerra Mundial, cuyas batallas quedaban así vinculadas simbólicamente con la batalla de Varus.
Su narración "Michael Kohlhaas", otra de sus obras más famosas, cuenta la historia de un hombre al que "el sentimiento de la justicia hizo asesino y bandolero".
Esa obra, para muchos la más representativa del autor, ha hecho que algunos relacionen a Kleist con la banda terrorista "Fracción del Ejercito Rojo" (RAF) y, por extensión, con el terrorismo de izquierdas en general.
En todo caso, las contradicciones que atraviesan la obra de Kleist y las percepciones que se puedan tener o se agotan en el terreno político sino que parece haber algo más esencial. Goethe y Thomas Mann, por ejemplo, parecían sentir una mezcla de atracción y repugnancia por la obra de Kleist.
Es posible que ello se deba a la radicalidad de sus narraciones y sus dramas, en donde suele haber descripciones y representaciones de la violencia que muchas veces resultan difíciles de digerir
Para muchos esa radicalidad, que impedía que Kleist hiciese compromisos y lo mantenía en litigio permanente con la gente que manejaba el mundo teatral del momento, fue lo que terminó llevándolo al suicidio.
Kleist se suicidó el 21 de noviembre de 1811, junto con su amiga Henriette Vogel, al lado de un lago entre Berlín y Potsdam. El escritor tenía 34 años, sus obras de teatro no tenían el exito esperado y sus esfuerzos por conseguir un empleo como director dramático habían fracasado.
Nacido en Fráncfort del Oder en 1777, Kleist era hijo de un oficial. En 1804, Kleist debutó como dramaturgo con el estreno en Graz (Austria) de "La familia Schroffenstein", drama con el que se inicia una producción dramática y narrativa abundante.
A esa actividad literaria, se agrega su producción periodística, en el "Berliner Abendblatt", periódico fundado y dirigido por Kleist, quien lo aprovechaba para hacer crónicas policiales y para insultar desde sus páginas a los empresarios de teatro que rechazaban sus obras.
Mientras que en vida le fue negado el reconocimiento, despues de su muerte ha habido olas de admiración por Kleist que han ido cambiando la percepción de su obra. La primera de ellas, en la segunda mitad del siglo XIX, asumió a Kleis como un símbolo del nacionalismo alemán.
A comienzos del siglo XX, los expresionistas lo reclamaban como su "hermano mayor" -la expresión es del poeta Georg Heym- lo que no impedía que oficialmente se le siguiera instrumentalizando por parte del imperio alemán.
Mientras que en 1911, en el primer centenario de la muerte, había quien definía a Kleist como culminación del clasicismo, cincuenta años despues otros lo definían como precursor de la vanguardia y ahora el poeta Durs Grünbein ha relacionado su teatro con el de Samuel Becket.
Del año Kleist, que se cierra mañana con una vista a la tumba restaurada del poeta, quedan nuevas ediciones de sus obras, dos nuevas biografías, de Peter Michelzik y Günter Blamberger, y muchas preguntas abiertas sobre la obra del que ha sido probablemente el escritor alemán más radical de todos los tiempos.EFE
© EFE 2011. Está expresamente prohibida la redistribución y la redifusión de todo o parte de los contenidos de los servicios de Efe, sin previo y expreso consentimiento de la Agencia EFE S.A.
Word count: 665
Saturday, November 26, 2011
Hoelderlin’s Hyperion
The “Real” Greece – Part II: Philosophy and Poetry in Hoelderlin’s Hyperion
Κυριακή, 28 Φεβρουαρίου, 2010
“But then she [Gaia] did couple with Ouranos
to bear deep-eddying Okeanos,
Koios and Kreios, Hyperion and Iapetos,
Theia and Rheia, Themis and Mnemosyne,
as well as gold-wreathed Phoebe and lovely Tethys.”
(Hesiod, Theogony, 132-136)
to bear deep-eddying Okeanos,
Koios and Kreios, Hyperion and Iapetos,
Theia and Rheia, Themis and Mnemosyne,
as well as gold-wreathed Phoebe and lovely Tethys.”
(Hesiod, Theogony, 132-136)
“Hölderlin is one of our greatest, that is, most impending thinkers,” wrote Heidegger, “because he is our greatest poet.
The poetic understanding of his poetry is possible only as a
philosophical confrontation with the manifestation of being in his
work.”
(η αποπειρα μου ειναι περισσοτερο να αναδειξω τον πλουτο που ενυπαρχει στην ελλαδα, στον ελληνισμο, και με βαση αυτην την αποπειρα να προσδιορισω και το τι ειναι η ελλαδα και ο ελληνισμος! ειναι μια κυκλοειδης διαδικασια, ειναι μια διαδικασια που για να μη γινει “φαυλος κυκλος” θα πρεπει να εισχωρησουμε στον κυκλο!)
I have chosen Hoelderlin’s Hyperion, as it is the perfect ground where poetry and philosophy cross each other, and because it opens the door to some very interesting considerations regarding the path of life. This topic in my view exemplifies what are some of the elements that constitute the “real” Greece. By necessity, I have used long quotes to get the basics of the story across, and then to convey some thinkers’ views and interpretations. The reader who endures the difficult read will be rewarded.
“The novel Hyperion presents different practical approaches to dealing with the bi-polarity of the “eccentric path.” This novel is a collection of letters, mostly written by the novel’s modern Greek hero, Hyperion, to his German friend, Bellarmin, in which he recounts his adventures, states of mind, and longings. The original unity which Hyperion was, from the outset, keen to recapture, is understood in different ways by Hyperion at different stages of his life. Ultimately, he will realize that none of these is satisfactory, but that they represented ways of approaching that which is the underlying unity, i.e. Being, throughout the course of his life.
These different representations of unity are of ancient Greece (also reflected in childhood), of modern Greece liberated from Turkish rule, and of aesthetic beauty. This trilogy is not random but corresponds to different temporal understandings of the idea of the fundamental unity of Being. It is first grasped as belonging to the past (Childhood/Ancient Greece), then the future (liberated Greece), and finally the present (immediacy of aesthetic beauty). Each way of life is exemplified by a character with whom Hyperion is connected, respectively through a master-pupil relationship (Adamas), friendship (Alabanda) and love (Diotima).
Symposium, Tomb of the Diver, Paestum
Hyperion’s departure for battle is followed by several letters addressed to Diotima and a couple of her replies. After initial success in the fight against the Turks, Hyperion’s men are delayed by the long siege of Mistra. Nonetheless, as they finally enter the town, they go on a]rampage, pillaging and killing indiscriminately. Rather than face the enemy, Hyperion’s army disperses once its lust for plunder is satisfied. This leads to the death of forty Russian soldiers who stood alone fighting the common foe. Hyperion takes his army’s dishonour to make him unworthy, in his eyes, for Diotima’s love: “I must advise you to give me up, my Diotima” (ibid., p.98) [“ich muβ dir raten, daβ du mich verlässest, meine Diotima” (ibid., p.597)]. In letters to Bellarmin, we discover more details of the battles fought by Hyperion and Alabanda. Their friendship flourished again, but Alabanda’s lust for battle eventually came to an end, thus pointing once more to the limits of his way of life.
In a letter from Diotima that arrives later, it emerges that she lost her will to live as her lover did not return, and she finally let herself die. In a development which reflects Hölderlin’s understanding of human life, the effortless harmony of Diotima’s world of beauty, once disturbed by the fire of Hyperion’s free aspiration to noble deeds, could not simply return to its original form. Rather, it became something to aim for, something Diotima thought Hyperion could achieve for her: “You drew my life away from the Earth, but you would also have had power to bind me to the Earth” (ibid., p.122) [“Du entzogst main Leben der Erde, du hättest auch Macht gehabt, mich an die Erde zu fesseln” (ibid., p.626)]. It is, thus, through its very destruction, that Diotima’s way of life ceases to represent that which Hyperion could have sought to take refuge in. Diotima’s words illustrate the whole problem of life as an “eccentric path,” but her death, apparently, only leaves Hyperion confused: “as I am now, I have no names for things and all before me is uncertainty” (ibid., p.126) [“wie ich jetzt bin, hab ich keinen Namen für die Dinge, und es ist mir alles ungewiβ” (ibid., p.632)]. At the end of the novel, however, the beauty of Nature once again fills Hyperion with joy, and this poetic sense of oneness reaches beyond separation and death to Alabanda and Diotima. Somehow, he has made some sense of his experiences. Thus, after all these tragedies, an overall feeling of unity prevails: “You springs of earth! you flowers! and you woods and you eagles and you brotherly light! how old and new is our love!- We are free, we are not narrowly alike in outward semblance; how should the Mode of life not vary? yet we love the ether, all of us, and in the inmost of our inmost selves we are alike” (ibid., p.133) [“Ihr Quellen der Erd! Ihr Blumen! Und ihr Wälder und ihr Adler und du brüderliches Licht! Wie alt und neu ist unsere Liebe! – Frei sind wir, gleichen uns nicht ängstig von auβen; wie sollte nicht wechseln die Weise des Lebens? Wir lieben den Äther doch all und innigst im Innersten gleichen wir uns” (ibid., p.639-640)]. However, the last words of the novel suggest an open ending: “So I thought. More soon” (ibid., p.133) [“So dacht’ ich. Nächstens mehr” (ibid., p.640)]. Thus, after all the ordeals that he has worked through in these letters, Hyperion’s life goes on. This seems to point to new experiences and the possibility of revisiting his interpretation of his life thus far.”
(Source: Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
“…..The main work of this period is the novel
Hyperion oder Der Eremit in Griechenland (2
volumes, 1797-1799; translated as Hyperion; or, The
Hermit in Greece, 1965). Hölderlin had begun the
novel during his student days in Tübingen and
had revised it continually during his stays in
Waltershausen and Jena. In 1794 a preliminary
version was published under the title “Fragment
von Hyperion” (Fragment of Hyperion) in Friedrich
Schiller’s literary journal Neue Thalia. This version
of the novel is cast in the form of letters from
Hyperion, a young late-eighteenth-century Greek,
to his German friend Bellarmin. The letters depict
his constant struggle to attain the moment of
transcendent experience in which all conflict is
resolved and temporality is suspended: “Was mir
nicht Alles, und ewig Alles ist, ist mir Nichts”
(What for me is not All, and eternally All, is
nothing). In nature, in love, in a visit to Homeric
sites, Hyperion experiences momentary
intimations of his ideal, which constantly eludes
him, so that his aspirations remain unfulfilled.
The image of the “exzentrische Bahn” (eccentric
path), which constantly diverges from the center
of Being that it always seeks but can never
permanently attain, becomes a symbol of the
course of human existence.
Hyperion oder Der Eremit in Griechenland (2
volumes, 1797-1799; translated as Hyperion; or, The
Hermit in Greece, 1965). Hölderlin had begun the
novel during his student days in Tübingen and
had revised it continually during his stays in
Waltershausen and Jena. In 1794 a preliminary
version was published under the title “Fragment
von Hyperion” (Fragment of Hyperion) in Friedrich
Schiller’s literary journal Neue Thalia. This version
of the novel is cast in the form of letters from
Hyperion, a young late-eighteenth-century Greek,
to his German friend Bellarmin. The letters depict
his constant struggle to attain the moment of
transcendent experience in which all conflict is
resolved and temporality is suspended: “Was mir
nicht Alles, und ewig Alles ist, ist mir Nichts”
(What for me is not All, and eternally All, is
nothing). In nature, in love, in a visit to Homeric
sites, Hyperion experiences momentary
intimations of his ideal, which constantly eludes
him, so that his aspirations remain unfulfilled.
The image of the “exzentrische Bahn” (eccentric
path), which constantly diverges from the center
of Being that it always seeks but can never
permanently attain, becomes a symbol of the
course of human existence.
Fichte
In Jena Hölderlin had revised this version, partly
in order to take account of his attempt to come to
terms with the philosophy of Fichte. In a metrical
version and a fragment entitled “Hyperions
Jugend” (Hyperion’s Youth), he abandoned the
epistolary format in favor of a retrospective
technique in which the older Hyperion looks back
on his youth. The narrator, relating his story to a
young visitor, acknowledges that the process of
reflection has made him “tyrannisch gegen die
Natur” (tyrannical toward nature), in that he has
reduced nature to the material of selfconsciousness.
This theme echoes Hölderlin’s
criticism of Fichte’s philosophy and its
preoccupation with the autonomy of the “absolute
ego.” Hölderlin’s new orientation finds expression
in the Platonic view of love as the longing of the
imperfect for the ideal, and in a new conception of
beauty, which emerges as the only form in which
the unity of Being, unattainable precisely because
it is the object of striving, is incarnated: “jenes
Sein, im einzigen Sinne des Worts … ist
vorhanden–als Schönheit” (Being, in the unique
sense of the word … is present-as Beauty). With
this subordination of self-consciousness to the
realization of beauty, Hölderlin establishes the
conceptual framework that he follows in
completing the novel.
The final version of the novel, the greater part of
which was completed during the period he was in
Frankfurt am Main, shows Hölderlin’s increasing
stylistic and formal mastery. He returns to the
epistolary form of the first version, but now
endows it with a particularly sophisticated
structure. Hyperion presents a retrospective view
of his life, beginning at the stage at which, after
having lost his beloved and his friends, he returns
bitterly disappointed to his native land, intending
to take up the life of a hermit. The main focus is
not the sequence of events but the act of narration
itself. The seemingly disconnected fragments of
his experience are integrated through the process
of reflective recapitulation and gradually assume
a dialectical structure in which union and
separation, joy and suffering come to be seen as
inseparable parts of a complex unity.
in order to take account of his attempt to come to
terms with the philosophy of Fichte. In a metrical
version and a fragment entitled “Hyperions
Jugend” (Hyperion’s Youth), he abandoned the
epistolary format in favor of a retrospective
technique in which the older Hyperion looks back
on his youth. The narrator, relating his story to a
young visitor, acknowledges that the process of
reflection has made him “tyrannisch gegen die
Natur” (tyrannical toward nature), in that he has
reduced nature to the material of selfconsciousness.
This theme echoes Hölderlin’s
criticism of Fichte’s philosophy and its
preoccupation with the autonomy of the “absolute
ego.” Hölderlin’s new orientation finds expression
in the Platonic view of love as the longing of the
imperfect for the ideal, and in a new conception of
beauty, which emerges as the only form in which
the unity of Being, unattainable precisely because
it is the object of striving, is incarnated: “jenes
Sein, im einzigen Sinne des Worts … ist
vorhanden–als Schönheit” (Being, in the unique
sense of the word … is present-as Beauty). With
this subordination of self-consciousness to the
realization of beauty, Hölderlin establishes the
conceptual framework that he follows in
completing the novel.
The final version of the novel, the greater part of
which was completed during the period he was in
Frankfurt am Main, shows Hölderlin’s increasing
stylistic and formal mastery. He returns to the
epistolary form of the first version, but now
endows it with a particularly sophisticated
structure. Hyperion presents a retrospective view
of his life, beginning at the stage at which, after
having lost his beloved and his friends, he returns
bitterly disappointed to his native land, intending
to take up the life of a hermit. The main focus is
not the sequence of events but the act of narration
itself. The seemingly disconnected fragments of
his experience are integrated through the process
of reflective recapitulation and gradually assume
a dialectical structure in which union and
separation, joy and suffering come to be seen as
inseparable parts of a complex unity.
Heraclitus
The principle of “das Eine in sich
unterschiedne” (the one that is differentiated
within itself), which Hölderlin adapted from a
formulation of Heraclitus, defines at once the
essence of the Athenian and the nature of beauty–as opposed to the one-sidedness and
fragmentation characteristic of the Egyptians and
the Spartans, and, in Hölderlin’s view, also of
modern times.”
unterschiedne” (the one that is differentiated
within itself), which Hölderlin adapted from a
formulation of Heraclitus, defines at once the
essence of the Athenian and the nature of beauty–as opposed to the one-sidedness and
fragmentation characteristic of the Egyptians and
the Spartans, and, in Hölderlin’s view, also of
modern times.”
Source: Hoelderlin, Duke University
Gothe
Hyperion’s Song of Destiny
by Fr. Hölderlin
by Fr. Hölderlin
Holy spirits, you walk up there
in the light, on soft earth.
Shining god-like breezes
touch upon you gently,
as a woman’s fingers
play music on holy strings.
in the light, on soft earth.
Shining god-like breezes
touch upon you gently,
as a woman’s fingers
play music on holy strings.
Like sleeping infants the gods
breathe without any plan;
the spirit flourishes continually
in them, chastely kept,
as in a small bud,
and their holy eyes
look out in still
eternal clearness.
breathe without any plan;
the spirit flourishes continually
in them, chastely kept,
as in a small bud,
and their holy eyes
look out in still
eternal clearness.
A place to rest
isn’t given to us.
Suffering humans
decline and blindly fall
from one hour to the next,
like water thrown
from cliff to cliff,
year after year,
down into the Unknown
isn’t given to us.
Suffering humans
decline and blindly fall
from one hour to the next,
like water thrown
from cliff to cliff,
year after year,
down into the Unknown
We have no footing anywhere,
No rest, we topple,
Fall and suffer
Blindly from hour
To hour
No rest, we topple,
Fall and suffer
Blindly from hour
To hour
like water
Pitched from fall
To fall, year in,
Year out, headlong,
Downward for years to the vague abyss
“Philosophy then, is not born out of the nostalgia for an absent
unity, nor out of the exile from the All, but out of an accord with that
which is in the difference of its multiplicity. For what is thus
achieved is a concept of beauty different from that of Platonism and
from that of the classicism of Goethe and Winckelmann: no longer the
becoming-visible of the idea, but the harmony of opposites, no longer
the static concept of an atemporal beauty, but the dynamic one of a
living beauty that Plato himself, citing Heraclitus, has not perhaps
ignored, as Hoelderlin implies in the preface to Hyperion, when he
exclaims, after having alluded to the already realised presence of being
as beauty:Pitched from fall
To fall, year in,
Year out, headlong,
Downward for years to the vague abyss
Plato
For it is on the basis of such a sensible presence of beauty and of the effective presence of the union of the infinite with the finite that Greece is defined in Hyperion as the homeland of philosophy, in opposition to Egypt and the North:
Do you see now why the Athenians in particular could not but be a philosophical people too? Not so the Egyptian. He who does not live loving Heaven and earth and loved by them in equal measure, he who does not live at one in this sense with the element in which he has his being, is by his very nature not so as one with himself as a Greek, at least he does not expewrience eternal Beauty as easily as a Greek does.
It is, in fact, only Greece that is capable of this harmony with the sensible and with exteriority which procures it the harmony with the intelligible and interiority: neither the Oriental (the Egyptian), subject to an exteriority which appears like a “terrible enigma”, nor the Nordic (the German), enclosed in an interiority without an outside, are capable of such a harmony and can be open to a beauty at the same time “human and divine”. Must Greece, then, be resurrected?” (Source: Francoise Dastur: Hoelderlin and the Orientalisation of Greece)
“Oh! were there a banner … a Thermopylae upon which I could spill my blood with honour, all that solitary love for which I can have no use.”
“Hölderlin’s glory is that he is the poet of Hellenism. Everyone who reads his work senses that his Hellenism is different, more sombre, more tortured by suffering than the radiant Utopia of antiquity envisaged during the Renaissance and Enlightenment. But his vision of Hellas has nothing in common either with the tedious, trivial, academic classicism of the nineteenth century or with the hysterical bestiality with which Nietzsche and the imperialist period envisaged Greece. The key to Hölderlin’s view lies then in the understanding of the specifics of this conception of Hellenism.”
Georg Lukacs, Goethe and His Age, 1934
In lieblicher Blaue – In lovely blue: A poem by Friedrich Holderlin
Δευτέρα, 25 Απριλίου, 2011
Louise Keller, Holderlin (1842) drawing
In Lovely Blue
by Friedrich Hölderlin
(Translated by Glenn Wallis)
Yves Klein, Blue Monochrome, MOMA, Ney York (See Note 1)
In lovely blue blooms the steeple with its metal
roof. Around the roof swirls the swallows’ cry,
surrounded by most touching blue. The sun rises high
above and tints the roof tin. But in the wind beyond, silently,
a weathercock crows. When someone comes forth from
the stairs of the belfry, it is a still life. And though the form
is so utterly strange, it becomes the figure of a
human being. The windows out of which the bells resound are as
gates to beauty. Because gates still take after nature
they resemble forest trees. Purity, too, is beauty. From within, out
of diverse things, a grave spirit emerges. So simple,
these images, so holy, that one often fears
to describe them. But the heavenly ones, always
good, possess, even more than the wealthy, virtue and
joy. Humans may follow suit. Might a person, when
life is full of trouble, look up and say: I, too,
want to be like this? Yes. As long as friendliness and purity
dwell in our hearts, we may measure ourselves not unfavorably
with the divine. Is God unknown? Is he manifest
as the sky?(a) This I tend to believe. It is the measure
of the human. Deserving, yet poetically, we dwell
on this earth (b). The shadow of night with its stars,
if I may say so, is no purer than we
who exist in the image of the divine (c).
Andre Butzer, Nasaheim (See Note 2)
the creator’s worlds can never contain the clap of thunder.
Because it blooms under the sun, a flower, too, is beautiful.
In life, the eye often finds creatures to call more beautiful
still than flowers. Oh! I know this well!
For to bleed in body and heart and cease to be whole—
does this please God? The soul, I believe, must remain
pure, or else the eagle will wing its way to the almighty
with songs of praise and the voice of so many
birds. It is substance and it is form. Beautiful little
brook, so touching you seem as you roll so clear,
like the eye of God, through the Milky Way. I know
you well. But tears stream from my eyes. A clear
life I see in the forms of creation that blooms around me
because I do not compare them unreasonably with the lonely pigeons
in the churchyard. People’s laughter seems
to grieve me—after all, I have a heart. Would I
like to be a comet? I believe so. For they have the quickness
of birds, they blossom in fire, and in their purity is as children’s.
To wish for more is beyond the measure of human nature.
The clarity of virtue also deserves praise from the grave
spirit that blows between the garden’s three pillars. A beautiful virgin must
garland her head with myrtle, for to do so is simply
her nature and her sensibility. But myrtle trees are found in Greece.
Samuel Francis, In lovely Blueness 2 (1955-56) (See Note 3)
his image, as if painted, that is like the Manes.
The human form has eyes, but the moon has light.
Perhaps King Oedipus (e) had an eye too many. This
man’s suffering seems indescribable, unspeakable,
inexpressible. When the drama presents it so, so it is. But how is it with me?
Am I thinking now of your suffering? Like brooks, the end of
Something as vast as Asia is carrying me toward it. Oedipus, of course, suffered like this, too;
and certainly for the same reason. Did Hercules suffer as well? Of course.
Did not the Dioscuri, too, in their friendship bear pain?
As Hercules fought with God—that is
suffering. And immortality in envy of this life—
to divide these two—that, too, is suffering. But it is also
suffering when a person is covered with freckles—
to be completely covered with freckles! The beautiful
sun does that, for it draws out everything. The path
seduces the young with the charm of its rays, like roses.
Oedipus’s suffering is like a poor man
wailing that he is deprived. Son Laios, poor
stranger in Greece. Life is death, and
death is also a life.
Emil Nolde, March Landscape in the evening (See Note 4)
(a) Note that in German, Sky is Himmel, which also stands for Heaven.
(b) This is the phrase that Heidegger used in his essay “…poetically man dwells…”.
(c) Book of Genesis, Chapter 1 verse 26: ‘And God said: Let us make man in our image’.
(d) Holderlin seems to imply that only in the heavenly skies one can find measure, therefore introducing a metaphysical element in the poem. Werner Marx, who was the professor who took Heidegger’s teaching post at the University of Freiburg, wrote a book with the same question in its title, and “Foundations for a nonmetaphysical ethics” as its subtitle.
(e) Holderlin translated Sophocles’ tragedies Oedipus and Antigone. These translations are significant interprpetations of the works.
Notes accompanying the pictures
(1) Note to Yves Klein’s painting: Monochrome abstraction—the use of one color over an entire canvas—has been a strategy adopted by many painters wishing to challenge expectations of what an image can and should represent. Klein likened monochrome painting to an “open window to freedom.” He worked with a chemist to develop his own particular brand of blue. Made from pure color pigment and a binding medium, it is called International Klein Blue. Klein adopted this hue as a means of evoking the immateriality and boundlessness of his own particular utopian vision of the world.(Source: MOMA)
(2) Question: On the other hand, perhaps it is Friedrich Holderlin who has organized you? Why is Friedrich Holderlin ‘Kommando’, rather than, e.g., ‘Muse’?
No.
Holderlin is just one of my main heroes and he is my favorite poet in
my private library. He is my choice and therefore I myself am Holderlin,
I can call myself N-Holderlin, which means NASAHEIM(*)-Holderlin, a
self-fullfilling prophecy of abstract art. There is no form of art
without a relation towards utopia and therefore abstraction. The show is
called Kommando because it was a very high or a very low order from
heaven that initiated the show. Within the world of art, which is a
completely useless world, a Kommando can be a group of people, or an
individual that tries to find a way out of this world.
(*) “Nasaheim” – the outerspace station of Anaheim/Disneyland.
(Source: An Interview With Andre Butzer, Artist And Curator Of ‘Kommando Friedrich Holderlin’ At Max Hetzler, Berlin, Saatchi Online Magazine)
(3)
This at once airy and expansive composition by Sam Francis
brilliantly demonstrates the artist’s unique combination of Abstract
Expressionist and late Impressionist influences. With its soft pastel
palette, the monumental abstract work creates the sensation of standing
before a vast and boundless space. Francis, who often found his
inspiration in literary sources, titled the painting after a poem by the
German Romantic writer Friedrich Hölderlin which begins with
the narrator looking to the sky: “In lovely blue the steeple blossoms/
With its metal roof. Around which/ Drift swallow cries, around which/
Lies most loving blue.” (Source: Art Institute of Chicago)
(4) Nolde’s landscape is a landscape dominated by the sky of North Germany, near the Danish borders, Nolde’s home.
Δημοσιεύθηκε από panathinaeos
Καταχωρήθηκε στο abstract expressionism, art, expressionism, germany, greece, ποιηση, τέχνη, ελλας, ζωγραφικη, literature, painting, poetry
Με ετικέτα: andre butzer, Art institute of chicago, Emil Nolde, heidegger, holderlin, MOMA, samuel francis, yves klein
Με ετικέτα: andre butzer, Art institute of chicago, Emil Nolde, heidegger, holderlin, MOMA, samuel francis, yves klein
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