At the end of Peter Weiss's play Hölderlin, the eponymous poet is visited by the young Karl Marx. It is an entirely apocryphal encounter, but one which is revealing in terms of the relationship between writers and politics in the 1960s and 1970s. Marx describes how the encounter with Hölderlin's poetry has led to his realisation of the need for a materialist, dialectical political philosophy. He concludes that in furthering the aim of societal change the artist's individual vision is of equal status with political analysis.

Hölderlin appeared in 1971. Just a few years previously West Germany had experienced the most radical questioning of this position. The student movement had sought to enlist all aspects of social life in the cause of global revolution. In September 1968 the influential journal Kursbuch contained no fewer than three articles which proclaimed that literature was ‘dead’: in the current world-political situation, belles lettres had no discernible function; rather it was the duty of writers to document exploitation and oppression, whether of the South Vietnamese peasants or of the foreign workers in West Germany, and to engage themselves directly in combatting the concentration of the mass media in the hands of a few reactionary figures, such as Axel Springer. Peter Weiss himself had embraced this line.