IN HIS 1965 address to the Hölderlin-Gesellschaft, the Elsassian Germanist Robert Minder sketches with hyperbolic precision the singular significance of the French Revolution for Hölderlin's life work: for Hölderlin the Revolution had “shined into the narrow-minded domesticity of the Swabian and German feudal state ‘like an unceasing weather’ [wie ein unaufhörlich Wetter] and pushed open the gate to worlds where the antique republic seemed to arise again in the spirit of the eighteenth century, borne by the genius of an enraptured [hingerissen] youth.” The French Revolution was a decisive event for Hölderlin's life without exactly being an event in or of his life. Its consequences for his life and work can be traced out from his school years, when he and his fellow seminarians, Friedrich Hegel and Friedrich Schelling among them, planted a “tree of freedom” on the Neckar's banks and joined Jacobin clubs, to his friendship with Isaak von Sinclair, his travel to Bordeaux, and even his institutionalization for mental illness and confinement in the tower by the Neckar, which was perhaps a ploy to escape prosecution after the failed attempt, in which he might have been involved, on the archduke's life. Yet revolution was not in the first instance something that happened to him; not a “life event” like the humiliations of his work as a private tutor or his thwarted affair with Susette Gontard and her subsequent death. Rather, it was a world event, a historical event; happening to, for, against all of Europe, all of humankind, all planetary life. Moreover, the French Revolution was not just something that happened, one event among many, but was that which opened up the state, with its closed domestic order— its closed economy of significations and values and ranks—to the tempest of revolutionary time, a time that is in its innermost gesture turning, bent, fermenting. Not merely an event in the world—a single revolutionary event, situated within and understood in terms of the horizon of a progressive or cyclical historical time—it opens the gates to the world.

Hölderlin was certainly receptive, as very few could have been, to the world-historical fulgurations of a revolution occurring just as he stood at the cusp of adulthood.