Patmos (Holderlin)

Graphic representation of the island of Patmos, 1837

Patmos is the title of a hymn completed in 1803 by Friedrich Hölderlin . The first edition took place in 1808 in Musenalmanach of Leo von Seckendorf dedicated to the poetry is the Landgrave of Homburg . The poem is named after the Greek island of Patmos , which is considered the place of creation of the prophetic Revelation of John . It is a place of refuge for the persecuted Christian and at the same time marks the apocalyptic crisis situation. The title already refers to the esoteric - eschatological horizon of the text, which is extremely rich in encrypted quotations and allusions to biblical, Christian, Greek and Latin motifs and myths that are synthetically interwoven.

Similar to the other verses from Hölderlin's late work, Patmos is a bold attempt to interpret history as a continued divine revelation. It is an expression of the failure of the early romantic political dreams, which are now sublimated into a religious, spiritual sphere. The hymn in it is particularly close to the poem The Only One , but also to the chants Peace Celebration and Remembrance .

History of origin

Pastel portrait of Friedrich Hölderlin by Franz Carl Hiemer , 1792

Friedrich Hölderlin dedicated the hymn to the Landgrave of Homburg, Friedrich V , at whose court the poet had stayed since 1804 through the mediation of his friend Isaac von Sinclair . Werner Kirchner (1885–1961) published a letter in which Landgrave Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock had asked in 1802 to write him a pietistic poem that would crown his work so far and counter the icy cold of the Enlightenment Bible examiners with the glow of piety . The poet, weakened by his old age, however, found himself unable to fulfill his wish.

The fact that Hölderlin probably knew about this correspondence and therefore possibly wanted to comply with the request himself may explain the numerous references to Klopstock's epic Messiah , which Lothar Kempter already referred to. A bitter dispute broke out in the 18th century over the Revelation of John and its authorship, in which, among others, Gottlob Christian Storr was involved, whose lectures on supranaturalism Hölderlin had attended during his studies in Tübingen .

At the same time, however, at least since his time in Maulbronn, Hölderlin's growing outgrowth of the Protestant-Pietist piety of his childhood and youth can be ascertained in his biography , partly due to his profound preoccupation with Kant and Spinozism . Correspondingly, Patmos is not the defense of the old Christian worldview against that of the Enlightenment, but rather a "draft of a new, idealistic philosophy of history that does not negate the Enlightenment process, but rather integrates it as historically necessary ".

Content and interpretation

1st verse

Verses 1-4

Print version	Later version
1 Is near 2 And God is difficult to grasp. 3 But where there is danger, 4 what saves grows too.	1 is full of goodness; but no one grasps 2 God alone. 3 But where there is danger, 4 what saves grows too.

The first four lines are probably the best known and most frequently quoted verses of the hymn. They introduce a total of fifteen stanzas of fifteen lines each, which make up the song, and give it the antithetical , dichotomous architecture of the simultaneous near and far God, of danger and rescue . Proximity and distance arise on the one hand from the opposition of God felt in faith but distanced in knowledge, on the other hand from the nature of the messianic redeemer figure, which comes from transcendence but works in the earthly. In later versions, probably created in the same year, Holderlin slightly modified the first two lines and replaced the closeness with the goodness of God, which thematically anticipated a later essential sentence, “Because everything is good”.

The organic growth metaphor by which salvation is marked alludes to the myth of Kadmos , in which the hero, at the behest of Athena , planted the teeth of a dragon he had killed in the earth and from them the branches that grew together with him City of Kadmeia founded. In the fragments of the later version, towards the end of the hymn, the reference to this myth is made even clearer by the reference to the "dragon teeth, splendid destiny" (v. 97).

Verses 5-15

Bertel Thorvaldsen , Ganymede, watering the eagle of Zeus , 1817

⁵ Dwell in the dark
⁶ The eagles and go fearlessly
⁷ The sons of the Alps across the abyss
⁸ On lightly built bridges.
⁹ So, there are heaped up all around
¹⁰ The peaks of time, and loved ones
¹¹ Dwelling close, weary on
¹² Most separated mountains,
¹³ So give water innocently,
¹⁴ O Fittige give us, most faithful mind,
¹⁵ To go over and to return.

The following lines of the first stanza illustrate the facts described at the beginning; Danger and separation are metaphorically represented by the gaps that have become deeper and deeper as the mountains have grown over time. The eagles and the "Sons of the Alps" are saved by the wings and the skill of building bridges, which enable them to overcome the abysses. The innocent water symbolizes the unifying moment, love for the unifying principle.

The eagle, a very common motif in Hölderlin's poetry, is an attribute of John, but at the same time it echoes the myth of the kidnapping of Ganymede into the divine spheres of Olympus by Zeus in the form of an eagle. In addition, the bird of the gods is the symbol of the goodness of the biblical God ( Ex 19.4  EU ) and ultimately also for the poet par excellence.

2-3 verse

Kidnapped by a genius , the lyrical self travels east to the land of God's revelation. In the second and third stanzas, the process of distance “from one's own house” (v. 20) from the familiar home, the center of one's own life, which is accompanied by a certain melancholy, progresses rapidly and unstoppably. Blinded by the sun, it crosses the wide sea. The shady forest that has been left behind and the wistful brooks contrasts with the fresh shine and golden smoke of the impressively portrayed foreign parts of Asia.

4th-6th verse

Jacopo Vignali , John on Patmos , 17th century

The fourth stanza leads to Patmos and also evokes the New Testament revelation situation with the “dark grotto”. From here on, Holderlin follows the traditional interpretation of the author of the Apocalypse as being identical to the Evangelist and the Apostle John . The island is described as "hospitable" but "poor", possibly referring to Bethlehem ; In his poem, Hölderlin drafts a sacred topography, transferred to the Aegean and Asia Minor regions between the Occident and the Orient , in which the Alps described at the beginning can already be understood as an echo of Mount Sinai . In the later version of the poem, at this point of the fifth stanza, he enumerates the life stages of Jesus - Jordan , Nazareth , Capernaum , Galilee , Cana - which then symbolize his fate.

Finally, in the sixth stanza, the Last Supper is directly blended with Dionysian feasts through the reference to the vine . At a central point, the Passion concludes with the formula: “Because everything is good.” It ultimately sums up the task of the song itself, namely to interpret the existing well , while the “anger” of the world ultimately remains speechless.

7th-9th verse

The third triad of stanzas is all about mourning; it is probably the oldest fragment of the hymn. A single ray of light, the Pentecost event, goes down in the face of the diaspora and the experience of loss: "But it is terrible how here and there / infinitely the living God is scattered." The loss of midlife goes so far that the verse remains ambiguous in the Ask who the doer is; whether it is God who scatters the living, or whether the living scatters God. Only the exegesis of the moment in the following stanzas helps him to get a good interpretation.

10-12 verse

¹⁴⁵ … when the honor
^{146 of the} demigod and his own
¹⁴⁷ blows away and his face himself
¹⁴⁸ The Most High turns
¹⁴⁹ That there is nowhere
^{150 an} immortal to be seen in heaven or
¹⁵¹ On green earth, what is this?

¹⁵² It is the sower's throw when he takes hold of it
¹⁵³ With the shovel the wheat,
¹⁵⁴ And throws it to the clear, swinging it over the threshing floor.
¹⁵⁵ The bowl falls at his feet, but
¹⁵⁶ the grain comes to the end ...

The tenth stanza uses the phrase " demigod and his own" to relate Christ to mythomessian figures of antiquity such as Heracles and Dionysus . The following explanation with the help of the picture of the throwing sower has initially hardly been problematized in research; It is very likely, however, that this is a hidden criticism of the internal Christian interpretation of the history of salvation , the nonsense of which is expressed in the obviously wrong sequence of actions. The throwing of the sower does not lead to the subsequent gathering in accordance with Jesus' parable, but persists in the senseless diversion, which results in particular from the fact that the gathering authority is no longer present as a result of the destruction of the temple and the death of Jesus. Finally, in the eleventh and twelfth stanzas, it is no longer just a question of forming the remembered Christ, but of forming and seeing his true, divine “face”, as John once was able to do as his dearest disciple.

13-15 verse

In the last two stanzas, God, who appears completely impersonal at the beginning, finally changes into the familiar "father" (verses 202, 221), which underlines the process of history and knowledge presented in the course of the hymn - and that, although the God of him Hölderlin speaks, ultimately only a "remembered God" is:

²¹¹ Too long, too long already,
²¹² The honor of the heavenly is invisible. […]
²¹⁹ We have served the mother earth
²²⁰ And recently we have served the light of the sun,
²²¹ Ignorant, but the father loves,
²²² Who rules over all,
²²³ Most of all , that we care
²²⁴ The fixed letter, and the existing
^{225 interpreted} well . This is followed by German singing.

Hölderlin does not ascribe redemption to a divine act of grace, but to a timid process of conscious recognition on the part of the transcendent human individual. The fact that the hymn not only describes this process, but also to a certain extent carries out this process itself, gives it a linguistically magical and prophetic character. The German song is a gedeuteter singing .

reception

Martin Heidegger , who worked extensively on Hölderlin's poems from the thirties and developed the essential foundations of his philosophy from them, remarkably avoided a deeper engagement with Patmos . He only commented in more detail on the verses "But where there is danger, grows / The saving too", which he makes the starting point for his considerations on the relationship to technology . The reason can be seen in the fact that it is precisely here that the essential differences in their approaches to the world can be recognized. This can be illustrated, for example, by the very different conception of the abyss , in which Heidegger assumes “ being ” itself, while Holderlin localizes the “wrath of God”, the turning point.

The in Patmos central word "All is well" looked Theodor Adorno as "desperate affirmation of Christ's death," as the "dismal by such reduction quintessence of idealism." Even Peter Szondi disagreed with this view, as the sentence is not something Anticipated, but refer to what has gone before. According to Johann Kreuzer , the sentence does not affect the death of the demigod, but the "changeable nature of the temporal", the end of mediation by demigods, which must now be replaced by individual becoming Logos.

literature

• Wolfgang Binder : Hölderlin's Patmos anthem . In: Bernhard Böschenstein, Alfred Kelletat (ed.): Hölderlin-Jahrbuch 15. Mohr, Tübingen 1967–1968 pp. 92–127.
• Karl-Heinz Stierle : seal and order. Holderlin's 'Patmos' hymn . In: Bernhard Böschenstein, Gerhard Kurz (ed.): Hölderlin-Jahrbuch 22. Mohr, Tübingen 1980–1981, pp. 47–68.
• Jochen Schmidt : Holderlin's historical-philosophical hymns. ›Peace Celebration‹ - ›The Only One‹ - ›Patmos‹ . Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 1990, ISBN 3-534-10869-8 .

Web links

• Patmos at Projekt Gutenberg-DE ( archive version )
• Full text of the poem and its later versions at Zeno.org

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Facsimile of the first edition from 1808 in the Musenalmanach. In: www.hoelderlin.de. Retrieved July 14, 2016 . 
2. ^ Werner Kirchner: Hölderlin's Patmos hymn. Manuscript presented to the Landgrave of Homburg , 1949. In: Alfred Kelletat (Ed.): Hölderlin, essays on his time in Homburg. Vandenhoeck, Göttingen 1967, pp. 57-68.
3. ↑ Lothar Kempter: Hölderlin and the mythology . Verlag der Münster-Presse, Horgen-Zürich 1929, pp. 19–21.
4. ↑ Jochen Schmidt: Hölderlin's historical-philosophical hymns. ›Peace Celebration‹ - ›The Only One‹ - ›Patmos‹ . Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 1990, p. 189.
5. ↑ Compare for example Wolfgang Wirth: Transzendentalorthodoxie? A contribution to the understanding of Hölderlin's Fichte reception and to the criticism of the scientific teaching of the young Fichte based on Hölderlin's letter to Hegel from January 26th, 1795 . In: Uwe Beyer (Ed.): Hölderlin. Readings of his life, poetry and thought . Königshausen and Neumann, Würzburg 1997, pp. 159–234; in particular p. 170 ff.
6. ^ Wilhelm Michel: Friedrich Hölderlin. A biography . Severus, Hamburg 2013, p. 59 f.
7. ↑ Jochen Schmidt: Hölderlins historical-philosophical hymns , p. 189 f.
8. ↑ Bernadette Malinowski: "The holy be my word". Paradigms of prophetic poetry from Klopstock to Whitman. Königshausen and Neumann, Würzburg 2002, p. 154.
9. ↑ See also Johann Kreuzer : Philosophical Backgrounds of the Gesänge Der Einzige and Patmos by Friedrich Hölderlin . In: Edith Düsing , Hans-Dieter Klein (Hrsg.): Spirit and literature: models in world literature from Shakespeare to Celan . Königshausen and Neumann, Würzburg 2008, pp. 107–136; here p. 131 f.
10. ↑ Compare Robert Charlier: Heros and Messias. Holderlin's messianic mythogenesis and Jewish thought. Königshausen and Neumann, Würzburg 1999, p. 11.
11. ↑ Jochen Schmidt: Hölderlins historical-philosophical hymns , p. 189 f.
12. ↑ Wolfgang Braungart : "Where do we want to stay?" Poetry as cultural hermeneutics. On Friedrich Hölderlin's fragment The Eagle. In: KulturPoetik 1, 2001, pp. 56–74, here p. 60.
13. ↑ Jochen Schmidt: Hölderlins historical-philosophical hymns , p. 195.
14. ↑ Wolfgang Binder: Hölderlin's Patmos hymn . In: Bernhard Böschenstein, Alfred Kelletat (ed.): Hölderlin-Jahrbuch 15. Mohr, Tübingen 1967–1968 pp. 92–127; P. 105.
15. ↑ Bernadette Malinowski: "Let the holy be my word" , p. 157.
16. ↑ Michael Knaupp (Ed.): Friedrich Hölderlin. Complete works and letters, I-III. Hanser, Munich 1993, p. 464.
17. ↑ Johann Kreuzer: "Everything is good". Notes on a movement in Hölderlin's Patmos hymn . In: Anke Bennholdt-Thomsen, Irmela von der Lühe, Anita Runge (eds.): Change of places. Studies on the change in literary historical consciousness . Wallstein, Göttingen 1997, pp. 14-22; compare also Marion Hellwig: Everything is good. Investigations into the history of a theodicy formula in the 18th century in Germany, England and France. Königshausen and Neumann, Würzburg 2008.
18. ↑ Bart Philipsen: »to the letter«. kenosis of signs, time and the subject in Holderlin's later and latest poetry . In: The eighteenth century 30/2: Concepts of time. On the pluralization of the discourse of time in the long 18th century , 2006, pp. 238–254; here p. 247.
19. ^ Robert André: Conversations from text to text. Celan - Heidegger - Holderlin . Meiner, Hamburg 2001, p. 139.
20. ↑ Anke Bennholdt-Thomsen, Alfredo Guzzoni: Analecta Hölderliniana III. Hesperian promises . Königshausen and Neumann, Würzburg 2007, p. 154.
21. ↑ Anke Bennholdt-Thomsen, Alfredo Guzzoni: Analecta Hölderliana. On the hermetics of the late work. Königshausen and Neumann, Würzburg 1999, pp. 96-105.
22. ^ Robert André: Conversations from text to text , p. 140.
23. ↑ Johann Kreuzer: Philosophical Backgrounds of the Chants Der Einzige and Patmos by Friedrich Hölderlin , p. 135.
24. ↑ Bernadette Malinowski: "Let the holy be my word" , p. 154.
25. ^ Andrzej Warminski: Readings in Interpretation. Holderlin, Hegel, Heidegger . University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1987, p. 75.
26. ↑ Compare Martin Heidegger: Die Technik und die Kehre . Fifth edition. Verlag Günther Neske, Pfullingen 1962, p. 28 ff.
27. ^ Robert André: Conversations from text to text , p. 137 ff.
28. ↑ Theodor W. Adorno: Parataxis . In: Rolf Tiedemann (Ed.): Theodor Adorno. Collected Writings 11 . Notes on literature . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 1974, pp. 447-491; here p. 486.
29. ↑ Johann Kreuzer: "Everything is good" , pp. 17-22.