Hölderlin’s Hymns: “Germania” and “The Rhine”

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Reading group

October 2024 - May 2025

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The Heidegger and Classical Thought research project will resume its weekly reading group in October 2024 when we’ll begin working through Martin Heidegger’s lecture course, Hölderlins Hymnen: “Germanien” und “Der Rhein”. The text contains lectures delivered at the University of Freiburg during the Winter Semester of 1934/35 and was published as Volume 39 of the Gesamtausgabe in 1980. A second slightly revised version was published in 1989. The text was translated by William McNeill and Julia Ireland as Hölderlin’s Hymns: “Germania” and “The Rhine” and was published by Indiana University Press in 2014.

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While Heidegger discovered a Reclambändchen of Friedrich Hölderlin’s work in 1908, it wasn’t until the publication of Hölderlin’s Pindar translations and his late hymns by Norbert von Hellingrath in 1914 that the significance of the poet for Germany became clear for Heidegger. As he put it in 1957, “these two works hit us students like an earthquake” (GA 12: 172). In a letter to a friend in March 1933, Heidegger wrote, “we will only discover the new ground of Dasein, and at the same time the calling of the Germans in the history of the West, if we expose ourselves to Being itself in a new way and enowning (Aneignung)”. In another letter to the same friend written in December 1934, midway through delivering these lectures, Heidegger confirms that it is through Hölderlin that such a way and appropriation is possible: “Hölderlin has anticipated the new inceptual need of our historical existence so that it awaits us”. For Heidegger, Hölderlin opened the way to the unity of language that grounds the relation of Dasein and Being through which the destiny of Germany reveals itself.

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According to Heidegger, it was Hölderlin, not Nietzsche, who was the first to liberate “the classical” from the neoclassical and humanist interpretations of antiquity, which began with Winckelmann and Goethe. In a lecture delivered in 1929, Heidegger suggested that “we are only now, today, beginning to realise that the whole of linguistics, and thus philology, rests on a fragile foundation”. Shortly thereafter, between 1932 and 1944, Heidegger embarked on a long and sustained engagement with the Greeks, particularly Anaximander, Parmenides, and Heraclitus. For Heidegger, the possibility of understanding the fundamental relationship between Dasein and Being lay in the question of ground itself, out of which the history of Western thought unfolded, which began with these three crucial thinkers.

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In 2021/22 the reading group worked through Heidegger’s 1932 lecture course on Anaximander and Parmenides, which focuses on the question of the inception of Western thought, and in 2022/23 we worked through his 1943/44 lecture course on Heraclitus, through whom Heidegger identified the essential ground of language in terms of Greek logos. Having last year (2023/24) worked through Heidegger’s 1935 lectures, Introduction to Metaphysics, where he attends to the problem of questioning of the question of Being itself, it is appropriate now to turn to the 1934/35 lectures on Hölderlin in order to observe the importance of the poet on Heidegger’s conception of both the relation of Being and language underlying the spiritual fate of Germany at this time and the role of Greek thought therein.

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This reading group will be of interest not only to readers of Heidegger, but also classicists interested in the fundamental relation of ancient and modern philosophy. Some working knowledge of Greek is advised, as is a willingness to work with German terms. Fluency in either Greek or German is not required.

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The first session will take place on Wednesday 16th October 2024, 16:00 – 17:30 (UK time), and sessions will proceed weekly from then on (every Wednesday at the same time). To indicate your interest in participating in the reading group, please email aaron.turner@knappfoundation.ac.uk for more details. 

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