Articulate Precision and Ineffable Meaning in Hölderlin: A Commentary

Summary

GERMAN LITERARY CULTURE has at least two not unappealing idiosyncrasies. First, few cultures, if any, are as energetic as Germany's in publishing critical editions. In American bookstores, one doesn't see anything like the range of collected works one finds in Germany. There is even a joke related to the phenomenon: “Ein Geschäftsmann geht in die Buchhandlung,” and says, “Drei Meter Goethe, bitte.”—to which the bookseller replies: “Hmmm, was für eine Ausgabe?!” (A German businessman walks into a bookstore and says, “Three meters of Goethe, please” to which the bookseller replies: “Hmmm, which edition?!”)

To invest in critical editions is not to be free of controversy, as the critical editions of Hölderlin make clear. The edition of Norbert Hellingrath, which James McFarland discusses, made the poet both known and accessible to early twentieth-century readers. Friedrich Beißner's Stuttgarter Ausgabe was a model of philological complexity and exactitude, only to be countered by D. E. Sattler's Frankfurter Ausgabe, which emphasized the fluidity of Hölderlin's poems, with their constant revisions. Affordable editions with superb commentary and selective philological innovations also exist, such as Jochen Schmidt's three-volume collection. A reliable text is of course a necessary condition of good interpretation, even if certain hermeneutic principles are also essential. Heidegger's reading of “Andenken” (Remembrance), for example, was developed without access to the full poem. Moreover, Heidegger lifted lines without weighing their meaning within the whole. Although Adorno's critique of Heidegger was justified, his own elevation of parataxis, while fitting for “Hälfte des Lebens” (Half of Life), hardly seems to capture the complex, interwoven hypotaxis that dominates the mature Hölderlin's odes, elegies, and hymns.

A second distinctive feature of the German landscape is the extraordinary attention given to anniversaries. In 2020 we celebrated the 250-year anniversaries of Hölderlin, Hegel, and Beethoven, the ambitions for which were of course more extensive than could be realized. I don't recall quite such an impressive array of events planned for Wordsworth, who was also born in 1770. But even if one wanted to argue that Wordsworth's anniversary would have been celebrated on the level of these Germans, were it not for the pandemic, I am not familiar with any other country that celebrates the anniversaries of not only major but also minor figures as thoroughly as Germany does.