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| German Literature | Friedrich Hölderlin
This German lyric poet,
was perhaps one of the greatest ever in German literature.
Hölderlin was born in Lauffen-am-Neckar, into a lower
class family, and despite being a theology student at Tübingen
University - where he met and made friends with Hegel - ,
he never aspired to a career in the Church.
His first publications appeared in the magazines
directed by Friedrich
von Schiller. Soon afterwards, he moved to Frankfurt to
work tutoring the sons of the Gontard banker family and fell
in love his employer's wife, Susette, who was his muse for
the figure of Diotima in his poems and in the epistolary novel
Hyperion (1797- 1799).
After living in Hamburg,
where he polished his unique lyric style in free verse, and
in Jena, where he tried unsuccessfully to obtain a position
as professor at the University, he traveled to Bordeaux, France
to work as a tutor for another wealthy family, being attracted
by the revolutionary that country was going through at the
time.
In 1802 he left France and traveled back to
Germany on foot, where he heard of the death of his muse,
Susette. That same year he suffered his first of several attacks
of schizophrenia, an affliction that would stay with him until
the end of his days. His work, ignored for the greater part
of the 19th Century, was rediscovered in the early 20th Century
by writers such as Rainer Maria Rilke and Thomas
Mann.
