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2 - Nature and Poetic Consciousness from Hölderlin to Rilke
- Edited by Rochelle Tobias, The Johns Hopkins University, Maryland
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- Book:
- Hölderlin's Philosophy of Nature
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 08 October 2020
- Print publication:
- 15 April 2020, pp 23-43
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Summary
Introduction
While the poets Hölderlin and Rilke each invite voluminous exegesis and are often evoked together in a common thematic context – not least because of the interest Heidegger took in both poets and, in his wake, that of Blanchot and Gadamer – they have invited little direct comparison in literary scholarship. Rilke, coming upon Hölderlin's work via Norbert von Hellingrath around the beginning of a decade of relative poetic silence (ending in February 1922), may be thought to have drawn some sense of the importance of the poet's role, and some images and linguistic mannerisms, but little by way of philosophical or poetological influence from his romantic predecessor. In contrast to this view, it has been argued that Rilke's relation to Hölderlin can be considered his ‘bid to situate himself in a distinctly German poetic lineage’, yet Hölderlin's direct influence has been demonstrated in respect to but a few minor poems. There has been little, if any, scholarly indication that Rilke's distinct poetic accomplishments, or even his central preoccupations, bear distinctly Hölderlinian features. Turning then to two undeniably singular bodies of work, we would conclude that they remain, after all, very different poets. While this is no doubt the case, I will here argue that the poetics of Hölderlin and Rilke are in fact deeply connected by a common notion – that of distinctly poetic consciousness – and by a common problem – the relation of poetic consciousness to nature. Reading these poets together may illuminate the possibilities for a poetic contribution to revising our relation to the natural world.
It is worth reviewing the differences between these poets before setting out to demonstrate their common problematic. Hölderlin's poetry, in the context of Romanticism, is steeped in Enlightenment philosophy and contends with idealism, Pietism, and revolution; Rilke aims to make sense of modernist visual art, in the cultural shadow of Baudelaire and Nietzsche, and largely avoids national themes. Both poets engage the novel form to express the bereftness of the modern age. But the protagonist of Hölderlin's novel, Hyperion, for all his contemplation, is centrifugally directed, attempting to find wholeness in love, friendship and political action – recounting these entirely in letters to others.
11 - The Tragic Dimension in Postwar German Painting
- Edited by Stephen D. Dowden, Brandeis University, Massachusetts, Thomas P. Quinn
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- Book:
- Tragedy and the Tragic in German Literature, Art, and Thought
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 22 February 2023
- Print publication:
- 29 December 2014, pp 255-286
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Summary
There is an undeniably tragic dimension to central motives of postwar German painting, particularly in the works of Anselm Kiefer. The imagery of devastated landscapes, charred fields and forests, empty attics and bunkers, flames, and ashen skies in Kiefer’s paintings evoke the devastation wreaked by Germany during the Second World War and by National Socialism. References to the poetry of Paul Celan and a lost Judaic heritage render such scenes extraordinarily haunting. The use of such materials as ash, lead, burnt canvas, human hair, and straw contribute to both the material innovation and the provocative nature of these works. Invoking Goethe, Wagner, Hölderlin, and other significant representatives of German culture, Kiefer renders this tragic dimension a particularly German one, revisiting these figures in light of the central disaster of the twentieth century. Melancholic and darkly distorting works by other painters of his generation, for instance Georg Baselitz, may also be associated with tragic history.
Yet it is not clear which aesthetics of tragedy may be most adequate or appropriate for approaching and assessing these works. Tragedy hosts a range of resonant associations with the sublime, with the notion of fate, with the poetics of sacrifice, concepts recurrent in modern German thought from Kant to Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. Walter Benjamin, too, theorizes a poetics of mourning and a poetics of melancholy to contrast classical tragedy and tragic drama of the German baroque. In this context, the concept of tragedy may resonate in heroic and violent terms, or serve as an index of the unrepresentable, of immeasurable rupture and incalculable loss.
A differentiation of the tragic, proposed in this essay, may reflect this conceptual complex and its rich history. Central issues that may arise include to what extent a tragic aesthetic can be adapted to the theme of historical disaster in the postwar context; in what ways such disaster may remain outside the grasp of any aesthetic expression or reflection; and how this evasiveness or ineffability of the subject-matter is reflected in artistic works and their respective media. Friedrich Hölderlin advances the notion that at the pinnacle of tragedy, signification is nullified. As he puts it, the sign “= 0.” If this is so of tragic poetic language, in what ways must painting overcome the limits of representation in order to indicate the Holocaust as its theme? The Holocaust, in its totality, cannot be fully depicted.