called back from the grave by the pressure of a whole generation, is the poet Friedrich Hölderlin. It must seem strange to people who are powerfully enmeshed in the notion of the immediate present to think that a generation of living men allows its highest thoughts to circulate about the figure of a youth who was born about a hundred and fifty years ago (1771) and vanished from this world about 1803 or 1804; not through death, but through an almost fated madness, under the cloud of which he lived on until after the year 1840. Thus, approximately, a contemporary of Shelley, evoked by the faith and will of a whole generation to serve as the symbol of a leader in one of the most sinister conditions in all history. And yet I am speaking of things which are utterly real, in any case possessing much more reality in thousands of heads than all that is going on between ministers and ministers, party leaders and party leaders, and which is filling up the ephemeral columns of the newspapers; things also which have quite external and tangible effects, in that throughout the German world one edition after another of the works of this poet who was almost forgotten during his lifetime and fifty years ago was hardly known by name, is being issued and eagerly consumed by the public. It is not easy to tell foreigners what it is that can take a long-dead lyric poet—whose hymns and elegies are of a wonderful rhythmic strength, but at the same time are linguistically very difficult and in places truly obscure—and with a single stroke make him the leader of a whole fated generation, so that they recover themselves in him after a stupor of several years, and begin building the greatest structures in accordance with him. So I must content myself with a few mere pointers. But it is remarkable enough to think that in particular the strophes of his last productive years when he was already in the shadow of madness, strophes which passed for decades as completely incomprehensible or even as simply the senseless products of a maniac, are now really understood, not only by scattered individuals, but by many; and an unending content pours from these sibylline pages into their hearts, while this content is such that it seems to be precisely the one possible solace for the present hour and situation. He is especially fitted as the leader and the symbol of a tragic hour for this reason: he was a tragic figure, and besides, of remarkable purity, misunderstood, even completely disdained by the world of his contemporaries, beaten by fate in every way, entirely alone and therefore remaining entirely good, indeed—like the noble harp—
