Hölderlin's Hymns "Germania" and "The Rhine". Martin Heidegger
and intensity within beyng itself. For Heidegger’s own discussion of Hölderlinian Innigkeit, see especially §10 of the present volume.
Throughout the lecture course, Heidegger’s focus is on the essence of poetic Sagen, a word that we have rendered as both “saying” and “telling,” depending on context. According to Heidegger, understanding Hölderlin’s poetry entails the task of mitsagen, which we have translated as the task of “following the telling” of the poetry. The word “poetry” generally translates the German Dichtung, which has also been rendered on occasion as “poetic work,” but for the most part as “poetizing,” since Heidegger’s attentiveness is to the inner movement and flow of the poetic telling. It should be kept in mind that Dichtung in ordinary usage refers not simply to the narrow sense of the poetic, of poetry as poesy (Poësie), but to literature and the composition of literary works quite generally. See §4(b) for Heidegger’s discussion of this.
Since the term Dasein, referring to the being of humans, has a rigorously defined and by now well-known meaning in the early Heidegger, we have for the most part followed convention and left it untranslated. In those places where it appears to convey a more general sense of “existence,” we have indicated the German in brackets. Consistent with our translation of the “Ister” course, the word “people” translates das Volk, a term that has a specific political resonance in the Third Reich, yet also a broader spectrum of meaning that extends back to Hölderlin’s poetry and beyond.
Finally, it should be noted that the noun Bestimmung, which we have rendered as “vocation,” implies “determination” in the sense of that to which something is by its essence or nature determined or “called.” For Heidegger, such Bestimmung is fundamentally related to the Stimme, the “voice,” and to the Stimmung, the “attunement” of Hölderlin’s poetic telling. See especially §8 for details.
References to Hölderlin are to the von Hellingrath edition used by Heidegger. Translators’ notes are indicated in square brackets and provided at the end of the volume. Regarding the use of single versus double quotation marks, see the Editor’s Epilogue. A German–English and English–German Glossary indicating the translation of key terms are also provided.
The translators would like to thank David Farrell Krell and Mathias Warnes for their assistance and helpful suggestions regarding earlier versions of the translation. We are especially grateful to Ian Alexander Moore of DePaul University for his thorough review of the entire manuscript, which resulted in many improvements, and to Lara Mehling of Whitman College for her suggestions on an early draft of Part One of the lecture course. The translators thank our readers Charles Bambach and Christopher Fynsk for their careful review of the manuscript and helpful suggestions. We are further grateful to Andrew Mitchell for his input on the translation. William McNeill would like to thank DePaul University for a University Research Council grant that funded the review of the translation, as well as the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences for a summer research grant that enabled completion of the translation. Julia Ireland would like to thank Whitman College for the Louis B. Perry Summer Research Grant, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for a summer research grant that enabled her to review Heidegger’s original manuscripts at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach am Neckar, Germany. We owe special thanks to our copy-editor, Dawn McIlvain Stahl, for her careful work on a difficult manuscript. Last, and not least, we are grateful to Senior Sponsoring Editor Dee Mortensen and to our project manager/editor, Michelle Sybert, at Indiana University Press for their enduring patience with what has been a longer than anticipated project.
1. The three lecture courses are published as Gesamtausgabe Bd. 39. Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein,” Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1980; Bd. 52. Hölderlins Hymne “Andenken,” Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1982; and Bd. 53. Hölderlins Hymne “Der Ister,” Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1984. An English translation of the third lecture course has been published as Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” translated by William McNeill and Julia Davis, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. For an overview of the three lecture courses, see William McNeill, “The Hölderlin Lectures,” in The Bloomsbury Companion to Heidegger, edited by François Raffoul and Eric S. Nelson, New York: Bloomsbury, 2013, 223–35.
2. See Gesamtausgabe Bd. 4. Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung (1936–1968), Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1981. Translated as Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry by Keith Hoeller, Amherst, New York: Humanity Books, 2000.
3. Hamburger’s translations have appeared in a number of different editions. Those we have consulted are: Friedrich Hölderlin: Poems and Fragments, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980; and Friedrich Hölderlin: Selected Poems and Fragments, Penguin Classics Edition, London: Penguin Books, 1998.
4. Les hymnes de Hölderlin: La Germanie et Le Rhin. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1988.
5. Nevertheless, as the German editor notes, it appears that Heidegger was not always consistent in his marking of this distinction. See the Editor’s Epilogue for details.
6. For an exception, see the passage from Hölderlin’s essay “On the Operations of the Poetic Spirit” in §8, where it seemed more appropriate to render innig as “collected.”
Hölderlin’s Hymns
“Germania” and “The Rhine”
PRELIMINARY REMARK
Hölderlin
A silence must be maintained around him for a long time to come, especially now, when ‘interest’ in him is thriving and ‘literary history’ is seeking new ‘themes.’ People write now about ‘Hölderlin and his gods.’ That is surely the most extreme misinterpretation whereby this poet, who still lies ahead of the Germans, is conclusively stifled and made ineffectual under the illusion of now finally doing ‘justice’ to him. As if his work needed such a thing, especially on the part of the bad judges running around today. One treats Hölderlin ‘historiographically’ and fails to recognize the singular, essential point that his work, still without time or space, has already surpassed our historiographical rummagings and has grounded the commencement of another history: that history that starts with the struggle over the decision concerning the arrival or flight of the God.
INTRODUCTION
Was bleibet aber, stiften die Dichter.
Yet what remains, the poets found.
(“Remembrance,” IV, 63, line 59)
The work that we are attempting demands that Hölderlin himself begin and determine it. We shall first listen to the poem that is entitled “Germania.”
§ 1. Outline of the Beginning, Manner of Proceeding, and Approach of the Lecture Course
Before we do so, some brief mention should be made of three things: (a) concerning the nature of the beginning of our lecture course, (b) concerning our manner of proceeding in general, and (c) concerning our particular approach.
a) Concerning the Nature of Our Beginning. Commencement and Beginning
What is the significance of our beginning with the poem “Germania,” and what does it not mean? A ‘beginning’ [Beginn] is something other than a ‘commencement’ [Anfang]. A new weather pattern, for example, begins with a storm. Its commencement, however, is the complete change in air conditions that brings it about in