KATRIN PAHL
University of Southern California
A Reading of Love in Hölderlin’s
“Andenken”1
At the heart of my reading of Hölderlin’s poem “Andenken,” lies the question of mutuality: how best to understand mutuality and how to realize it.
Drawing on my unconventional rendition of Hegel’s theory of recognition, I
will read the blowing of the wind presented by “Andenken” as a conversation
between lovers—indeed as the intersection of two conversations, one between Friedrich Hölderlin and Susette Gontard, and one between the poet and
the reader. Working with the lines “Doch gut / Ist ein Gespräch” and “Mancher
/ Trägt Scheue” as the main coordinates of this interpretation, I will develop a
theory of reading that calls on the reader to contribute to the poem’s efforts to
facilitate a love that is mutual. In a further multiplication of crossed couples,
the human lovers are interlaced with the poem’s several pairs of trees until finally a Gespräch not so much in, but among, words emerges in the form of
asymmetrical chiasms—that is, of unfinished, non-reciprocal but nevertheless mutual exchanges.
Andenken
Remembrance
Der Nordost wehet,
Der liebste unter den Winden
Mir, weil er feurigen Geist
Und gute Fahrt verheißet den
Schiffern.
Geh aber nun und grüße
Die schöne Garonne,
Und die Gärten von Bourdeaux
Dort, wo am scharfen Ufer
Hingehet der Steg und in den Strom
Tief fällt der Bach, darüber aber
Hinschauet ein edel Paar
von Eichen und Silberpappeln;
The north-easterly blows,
Of winds the dearest to me
Because a fiery spirit
And happy voyage it promises
mariners.
But go now, go and greet
The beautiful Garonne
And the gardens of Bordeaux,
To where on the rugged bank
The path runs and into the river
Deep falls the brook, but above them
A noble pair of oaks
And white poplars look out;
Noch denket das mir wohl und wie
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192
Still well I remember this, and how
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193
Die breiten Gipfel neiget
Der Ulmwald, über die Mühl’,
Im Hofe aber wächset ein Feigenbaum.
An Feiertagen gehn
Die braunen Frauen daselbst
Auf seidnen Boden,
Zur Märzenzeit,
Wenn gleich ist Nacht und Tag,
Und über langsamen Stegen,
Von goldenen Träumen schwer,
Einwiegende Lüfte ziehen.
The elm wood with its great leafy tops
Inclines, towards the mill,
But in the courtyard a fig-tree grows.
On holidays there too
The brown women walk
On silken ground,
In the month of March,
When night and day are equal
And over slow footpaths,
Heavy with golden dreams,
Lulling breezes drift.
Es reiche aber,
Des dunkeln Lichtes voll,
Mir einer den duftenden Becher,
Damit ich ruhen möge; denn süß
Wär’ unter Schatten der Schlummer.
Nicht ist es gut,
Seellos von sterblichen
Gedanken zu seyn. Doch gut
Ist ein Gespräch und zu sagen
Des Herzens Meinung, zu hören viel
Von Tagen der Lieb’,
Und Thaten, welche geschehen.
But someone pass me
The fragrant cup
Full of dark light,
So that I may rest now; for sweet
It would be to drowse amid shadows.
It is not good
To be soulless
With mortal thoughts. But good
Is converse, and to speak
The heart’s opinion, to hear many tales
About the days of love
And deeds that have occurred.
Wo aber sind die Freunde?
Bellarmin
Mit dem Gefährten? Mancher
Trägt Scheue, an die Quelle zu gehn;
Es beginnet nämlich der Reichtum
Im Meere. Sie,
Wie Mahler, bringen zusammen
Das Schöne der Erd’ und verschmähn
Den geflügelten Krieg nicht, und
Zu wohnen einsam, jahrlang, unter
Dem entlaubten Mast, wo nicht
die Nacht durchglänzen
Die Feiertage der Stadt,
Und Saitenspiel und eingeborener
Tanz nicht.
But where are the friends? Where
Bellarmine
And his companion? Many a man
Is shy of going to the source;
For wealth begins in
The sea. And they,
Like painters, bring together
The beautiful things of the earth
And do not disdain winged war, and
To live in solitude, for years, beneath the
Defoliate mast, where through the night
do not gleam
The city’s holidays
Nor music of strings, nor indigenous
dancing.
Nun aber sind zu Indiern
Die Männer gegangen,
Dort an der luftigen Spiz’
An Traubenbergen, wo herab
Die Dordogne kommt,
Und zusammen mit der prächt’gen
But now to Indians
Those men have gone,
There on the airy peak
On grape-covered hills, where down
The Dordogne comes
And together with the glorious
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Garonne meerbreit
Ausgehet der Strom. Es nehmet aber
Und giebt Gedächtniß die See
Und die Lieb’ auch heftet fleißig
die Augen,
Was bleibet aber, stiften die Dichter.
(Friedrich Hölderlin, 1803–05)2
Spring 2005
Garonne as wide as the sea
The current sweeps out. But it is the sea
That takes and gives remembrance,
And love no less keeps eyes attentively
fixed,
But what is lasting the poets provide.
(trans. Michael Hamburger)3
“Andenken” is a wind poem. It initiates its own movement in the first line
by saying “Der Nordost wehet.” Why Nordost? Why not any other wind? And
precisely what direction does this northeasterly poem take? Most interpreters, among them most influentially Heidegger, take for granted that the act of
‘thinking-toward’ (“Andenken”) follows the blowing of the wind from northeast to southwest. Presuming that recollection is only possible from the
perspective of home and presupposing that this home must be Germany, Heidegger emphasizes that the poem knows only one direction, that is, southwest: “Der Nordost zeigt und führt hinweg aus dem heimischen Land in die
einzige Richtung des südwestlichen Himmels” (my emphasis).4 Beißner, in his
edition of Hölderlin’s works, follows Heidegger and, with a surprising lack of
critical sensibility, conflates empirical and poetic realities when commenting,
“Der Nordost weht nach Südwesten, das bedeutet vom Ort des Dichters aus:
nach Bourdeaux.”5
Dieter Henrich complicates this reading somewhat, by integrating a
change in perspective. He argues that, after moving southwest to Bordeaux,
the wind and with it the poem’s gesture of remembrance turns northwest and
toward the sea.6 Nevertheless, Henrich’s interpretation still leaves untouched
the presupposed directionality of the first stanza and thereby of the poem’s
greeting, its original and self-originating address: “Geh aber nun und grüße.”
Eberhard Baumann is, to my knowledge, the first to point out how counterintuitive these claims about the orientation of the poem really are. Reading
the first line, “Der Nordost wehet,” he asks:
Was für Gedanken löst denn diese Richtungsangabe im Hörer oder Leser aus?
Nur die der Richtung, in die der Wind weht und damit den Blick nach Südwest,
wie er im weiteren Gedicht angesprochen zu werden scheint, oder vielmehr die
Blickrichtung nach Nordosten als dem Ursprung und dem Herkommen des Windes?7
Since the geographic coordinates included in the descriptor of a particular
wind do not indicate into which direction the wind blows but rather from
which direction it is blowing, the line “Der Nordost wehet,” locates its writer
—and reader—in the southwest facing northeast and feeling the wind (of the
poem) blow in his/her face.
Even though the poem points in the north-easterly direction with its opening phrase, a slight fear blows most readers away from the source and turns
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195
them toward the south-west. “Mancher / Trägt Scheue, an die Quelle zu
gehn.” Hölderlin tries to be among the few, a “mancher,” who carries the
burden of moving against the wind instead of being carried away by it.8
Hölderlin travels northeast from Bordeaux back to Frankfurt; he does so in real
life, but also with the lines of this poem. In May 1802, Hölderlin sets out on his
walk from Bordeaux, where he had assumed a position as tutor, to Frankfurt,
the home of Susette Gontard. Drawn toward the impossible reunion with the
forbidden love, this journey is marked by several detours and delays (in Paris,
Stuttgart, Nürtingen, and again Stuttgart) until Hölderlin is struck by the
news of Gontard’s death. Written between one and three years after this
agonizing (non-)experience, “Andenken” forms an attempt to re-enact the
journey in a way that keeps Gontard alive for him.
Admittedly, “Geh aber nun und grüße / Die schöne Garonne” seems at first
to unequivocally address a greeting to the river Garonne, which flows through
Bordeaux. This would affirm the idea that the poem’s “Andenken” turns
from Germany to Bordeaux. But Baumann convincingly argues that the
northeasterly is “der liebste unter den Winden” because it tells “von Tagen der
Lieb” and reminds Hölderlin of Gontard. During his stay in Bordeaux,
Hölderlin receives the northeasterly with special ardor. As this wind is a rare
phenomenon in the region of Bordeaux, Hölderlin treasures it because, coming from the direction in which Gontard lives, it makes him hot with its promise of fiery spirit, “feurigen Geist … verheißet.”9 If one understands the wind
as a medium of communication between the lovers, the “schöne Garonne,”
with its initials S.G., is to be read as an encoded evocation of Susette Gontard.
With the line “Geh aber nun und grüße / Die schöne Garonne,” Hölderlin invites the northeasterly to move northeast, from Bordeaux to Frankfurt, to
greet S.G., Susette Gontard.10 He asks the wind to blow backwards.
Such a reading brings out the reversal of the wind direction and has the
advantage of conveying meaning to the “aber” in the fifth line.11 When understood as an appeal to blow from northeast to southwest, it makes little sense
to say to the wind: “geh aber nun.” The “aber ” would indicate that the wind
is not already blowing, but the first line says clearly “Der Nordost wehet.” We
might want to read this “aber” as an empty filler not meant to correlate contradictory terms.12 But since the poem contains a series of “aber,” and since as
Heidegger points out, this wording “gives the poem its hidden tone,” we
would run the risk of affecting the rest of the poem with its emptiness.13 “Geh
aber nun” unfolds its potential to signify only when we take the “aber” seriously as initiating a turn, that is, when we read the phrase as asking the wind
to blow in the opposite direction. “Geh aber nun” then means something like:
“You are the dearest among the winds to me because you give me fever, but
now go back and greet S.G.; make her feel what I feel …” And, since Susette
Gontard died of a pulmonary infection associated with the measles and, thus,
literally had difficulties breathing, “geh aber nun” also suggests something
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like: “I love you because through you I get wind of the fever she suffers from,
but now help her to get back her wind …” The movement of “Andenken”
thus exceeds the word’s sense of remembrance or recollection. It combines
this retrospective thought process with the forward-oriented and open-ended
activity of thinking-of or of thinking-toward, i.e., denken an.
The accumulation of f and s sounds in “liebste,” “feurigen,” “Geist,”
“Fahrt,” “verheißet,” “Schiffern,” “grüße,” and “schöne” not only imitates the
wind’s blowing, but also transmits the initials of the two lovers, Friedrich and
Susette. With the wind, the lovers whisper each other ’s names across time
and space. Nevertheless, it is an overstatement when Baumann writes that
“der Nordost ist in Hölderlin’s Empfinden bereits Gespräch und geistiger
Austausch, also Wechselwirkung” (Baumann 19). The north-easterly might
be a medium for communication and a promise of mutuality between the lovers, but the realization of this Gespräch is far from being a given. It requires a
constant battle against death.
A Weh accompanies the wehen of “Andenken.” “Gespräch,” as the realization of mutuality in the back and forth movement of thinking-of, proves to be
difficult and dangerous. It requires to be struggled for without relent. Even
though it might be sweet to drowse amid shadows, this is not good as we can
see in the fourth stanza: “süß / Wär’ unter Schatten der Schlummer / Nicht ist
es gut.” One might tire of the constant labor and yearn for a rest, but “gut / Ist
ein Gespräch.” With the contrast that the poem establishes in the middle
stanza between the sweetness of “Schlummer” and the value of “Gespräch,” it
acknowledges the difficulty of keeping the conversation mutual.14 The work
of love includes the almost impossible task to send the wind in the other
direction while the danger to lose the beloved lurks at the turn of every line.
One-sidedness persistently threatens the conversation with arrest. Naturally, everything flows in one direction: the wind blows, the spirit is fiery, and
the river Dordogne flows downward (“wo herab/ die Dordogne kommt”).
Before long the movement is extinguished: “ausgehet der Strom.” Quickly, the
poem gets effaced in its all too transparent message. When nothing is read
between the lines, this nothing grinds the verses to sharp edges, “scharfe
Ufer,“ that speed up the reading and rush the water into the abyss where deep
falls the brook, “tief fällt der Bach.”
But the words themselves fight against their death. “Darüber … / Hinschauet” stretches out its ambiguities allowing the “edel Paar” to overlook and
look beyond the abyss, toward which the water races. “Der Steg” smoothes
out the sharp edge when it nonchalantly “trails along” the bank (trans.
Chadwick, “am scharfen Ufer / Hingehet”) distracting from the other, more
gloomy meaning of “hingehet,” namely “to pass away.”
The reader also contributes to the task of a loving conversation. She joins
the lovers, thereby opening their potentially destructive tête-à-tête. The interpretation of the line “geh aber nun” is, thus, not merely a question of right
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197
or wrong. More is at stake. For us to invest this “aber” with negating power is
to rescue the poem’s potential for love, its ability to move back and forth
between the lovers.15 For us to understand this “aber” as initiating a turn of
address between S.G. and F.H. means also to reverse the blowing of this wind
poem that comes to us from the author, and to participate actively in the
conversation that moves back and forth between author and reader. It
amounts to giving the poem some of the meaning it offers—responding in
kind to the love that it gives.
Our difficulties with receiving the poem as a love letter and Friedrich’s
difficulties with receiving Susette’s greetings are, in both cases, tied up with a
frustration about the evasive character of the beloved. She is unreliable. I do
not know what I have in her. I do not even know where she is, from where she
sends her love, and if she will keep sending it. True, there is a promise: “Der
Nordost verheißet feurigen Geist Mir.” Yet, how long can I wait for the promise to come true? Even if it is coming true right now I remain in the position of
awaiting its realization since I cannot bear the thought of her love ever ending.
Already, empty words are creeping up on me, habitual turns, without an
individual address. But who am I to force her to speak to me? The poem might
refuse to yield meaning in order to avoid the grasp of a reader who only
pretends to be a lover.
Yet, to accept the “aber”’s refusal to signify is barely an act of chivalry that
preserves the other’s freedom. Instead, it infects the poem with the reader’s
own helplessness. Abandoned by the reader, amidst the beauty of the Garonne, Friedrich feels a sharp pain of despair “am scharfen Ufer” and struggling not to slide into the abyss of solitude he tries to make sure that Susette
will remember to greet him: “geh aber nun und grüße.” This might be an
understandable desire, but the fact that he takes charge of the continuation of
the loving discourse means that Friedrich stops to hear her voice in the wind.
Susette disappears as an agent in the conversation. The imperative forms
“geh” and “grüsse” neglect to acknowledge that the wind already blows, and
fail to recognize that S.G. in fact sends her love. This redundant imperative
spreads its impotence to overshadow the promise of the wind. It catches up
with the wind by apostrophizing and enclosing it in a “nun” that interrupts
the wind’s movement, breaks the promise of “verheisset,” and acts as a brake
on the futural drift of the prophecy. The imperative transforms the love for
the wind into a suffocating clasp. It thrusts its will into the open flesh of the
future and forecloses the advening movement of futurity. In its final turn,
this “aber” turns the loving conversation off.
This reading melancholically re-enacts a loss of which the reader is barely
aware: the immense and always frustrated desire to be overwhelmed by the
other’s address. It projects onto the poem the reader’s own refusal to receive
the poem in its precariousness and unreliability. The attempt at indifference is
not motivated by the wish to preserve the beloved intact in her difference, but
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by the desire to protect the self from the beloved’s caprice. In the parameters of
this reading, loving and respecting the integrity of the other turns into a holding on to the other and anticipating her moves. The beloved thus loses the very
qualities for which one loves her: her liveliness, her unforeseeability, or, in
Hegelian terms, her negativity. We are left with no future, nothing that comes
to us from the other. Nothing can move us. The result is stagnation, an empty
repetition of nothing, an accumulation of a habitual “aber” that does not turn
or move anything, but pitches the poem in a melancholy tone. The insistence
of a meaningless “aber” as a marker of indifference and distrust isolates the
reader and encloses the poem in a circle of non-understanding and loneliness
from which, at best, one cry emerges: “Wo aber sind die Freunde?”
In a truly mutual relation, as Hegel conceives it, that is, in the process of
mutual recognition between two equally free parties, killing the other is not
an autonomous act. Its agency is shared and each party negates herself
while negating the other. At the same time, self-negation—when it is not
one-sided and therefore violent—is crucial to freedom. Hegel witnessed the
love between Hölderlin and Gontard after he moved to Frankfurt in 1797.
During the same time, he drafted a philosophy of love.16 After their forced
separation (Gontard’s husband fired Hölderlin from his post as a tutor in his
household), Gontard involved Hegel as a middleman in her communication
with Hölderlin.17 Hegel, the future philosopher of Spirit, then played the role
of the wind. Both in practice (delivering secret letters) and in his theoretical
endeavors he was concerned with enabling mutuality. Hegel contends that
the experience of love—or of the process of recognition, as he calls it in his
Phänomenologie des Geistes—brings with it the realization that the other is
not a passive object of mine, but a free subject who compromises my agency.
In Hegel’s words: “Das erste [Selbstbewußtsein] hat den Gegenstand [i.e., das
zweite Selbstbewußtsein] … vor sich … [als] einen für sich seienden selbstständigen, über welchen es darum nichts für sich vermag, wenn er nicht an
sich selbst dies tut, was es an ihm tut.”18 Hegel is far from imagining mutual
love as a peaceful and stable relationship: the two subjects move in a vertiginous struggle, ceaselessly negating each other and themselves. These negations can be blissful if they manage to realize a form of death that is moving
without ending the encounter in definite destruction. As the most important
safeguard against destruction, both parties need to recognize each other as the
subject, that is, both the agent and the patient of their negativity. According to
Hegel, “der Gegenstand des Selbstbewußtseins ist … selbstständig in dieser
Negativität seiner selbst” (127).
We encounter this negativity in Hölderlin’s poem. “Der Nordost wehet;”
the poem speaks to us. But while Hölderlin writes this poem Susette is already
dead, and when we read the poem the author is already dead. The wind may
have come from the north-east, but by the time it hits Friedrich Susette is
somewhere else. Once we read the poem, we no longer know in what sense it
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was written. Even though Susette’s death is a historical fact, “Andenken”
demonstrates that Hölderlin did not experience this death as a fact, but struggled to stay in communication with Diotima Susette Gontard.19 Her death
figures as a trope for the experience of the negativity of the other. Because her
freedom consists in being the subject of and subject to her own self-differentiality, the lover is always already somewhere else as soon as she presents
herself for identification. In the very act of sending a loving message the
sender herself changes. The source is gone, and it does not make sense to
search for it at the point of its departure unless one wants to arrest the greeting.
If Friedrich wants to communicate his love to Susette it is, in fact, not
enough to simply reverse the direction of the greeting, and to give back what
he received. Reciprocity does not realize mutuality. The wind would not reach
the source even if it blew in the opposite direction. Friedrich has to speak without knowing where exactly to direct his words. He has to approach someone
who is gone, dead, so to speak. Likewise, we have to communicate with the
poem without knowing from where exactly it addresses us. To bear the
embarrassment — “die Scheue zu tragen” — of articulating words against the
wind without any certainty as to where and how the other will receive the
greeting is the only way to recognize the other’s negativity without killing
her.
The lack of orientation resulting from the inability to locate the position of
the beloved combined with the strain of moving against the wind provoke a
wish for quietness that has strong suicidal undertones:
Es reiche aber,
Des dunkeln Lichtes voll,
Mir einer den duftenden Becher,
damit ich ruhen möge; denn süß
wär’ unter Schatten der Schlummer.
The desire of the lover would be appeased, “es reiche,” if he could drink up her
cup and rest in the beloved. Since it is impossible to find quietness in S. who is
alive with negativity, constantly moving and moved, F. wishes to rest with
Susette’s nonexistence. To put an end to their missed encounters—feeling
that “es reiche aber nun”—he is ready to go where she is clearly not, if only to
secure the certainty of her full absence. He is ready to die. Like the reader who
is tempted to give in to the lure of nothingness that threatens to collapse the
poem into the one meaning of non-communication, F. is tempted to give himself over to destruction.
According to Baumann, the next line, “Nicht ist es gut,” forms the heart of
the poem. Located at the exact mid-point of the poem, it marks its turning
point: when Hölderlin resolves to tear himself away from the temptation of
actively or passively dying.20 The struggle for recognition in Hegel’s Phä-
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nomenologie initiates a similar turn when its protagonists realize that a dead
opponent will not provide the desired recognition.21 Death is not good; so
much might safely be said. But on which side are we to locate death: here or
there, in this world or hereafter? The central line of the poem is so insignificant in its transparency that we have to consult the neighboring verses to give
it more substance. Like the other pivot with which we have been concerned,
the potentially void “aber,” “Nicht ist es gut” reads like an empty heart until
we widen our focus and analyze the blood that will have crossed in it:
Wär’ unter Schatten der Schlummer.
Nicht ist es gut,
Seellos von sterblichen
The preceding verse speaks of drowsing amid shadows. Shadows might refer
to the underworld, the dominion of the dead and its shadowy inhabitants. Or,
if we adhere to Platonic ideas, it might remind us of the fact that our empirical
world consists of only shadows. Or the line might simply draw the picture
of a nap in the shadows of the wooded homeland.22 The next line reads
“Seellos von sterblichen.” To be soulless would mean to be dead. More precisely — since even the dead are considered to be souls, albeit nothing but
souls—it means to dwell in a death that entertains no relation to life. Those
who have a soul are mortal, they are able to die or to live, they are affected by
death, divided between death and life. But to be soulless would mean to be
without death or life, to rest in an absolute beyond or a total immediacy. The
line break between “sterblichen” and “Gedanken,” isolates the adjective
“sterblichen” from the term it is adjected to, so that it establishes its own
substantiality and asks to be read as a substantive. Read on its own, as “Seellos
von Sterblichen,” the line evokes a state of soullessness caused by mortals
who never recognized F. as being with soul, or alive and affected by death,
subject of and subject to his negativity. He walks around on earth like a dead
man amid shadows. The central line pivots between the line before and the
line after, which themselves are ambiguous in their relation to this world and
the hereafter. “Nicht ist es gut” is itself a “sterblicher Gedanke,” impossible to
pin down, crossing blood containing oxygen with blood that carries carbon
dioxide, divided in itself between life and death.
The first stanza of “Andenken” names a noble couple: “ein edel Paar / Von
Eichen und Silberpappeln.” The lovers in this pair are quite different. White
poplars are known to be fickle. They like to grow near the water so the liquid
can flow in abundance through their supple stems. With the help of the water
they grow silvery leaves that flicker in the wind. Oscillating between their
two faces, these leaves enrapture with the music they sing in the breeze. The
oak, on the other hand, is ancient and unfaltering. It was Jupiter’s tree and
gave honey to the Golden Age.23 In the imagination of Hölderlin’s time, in
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201
texts of German Romanticism and Idealism, it figures as the German tree. Big
and steady, oaks lend themselves to mediate between gods and humans or, as
Hölderlin phrases it in another poem: “unter Gottes Gewittern … zu stehen /
Des Vaters Stral … zu fassen und dem Volk’ ins Lied / Gehüllt die himmlische
Gabe zu reichen. ”24 Solitary, free, and wild, they attract the lightning, like
Semele, and are likely to be burnt for their love.25
The obvious difference between these trees as lovers could be a source for
misunderstanding and death. But a certain shyness or shame earns the pair its
attribute of ethical nobility (“ein edel Paar”).26 They do not address each other
directly. Their gaze is twice diverted. Overseeing together the gardens of
Bordeaux, the river Garonne with its sharp bank, the falling brook, and the
footbridge, they glance at each other across the entire world of their surroundings. But even this world is not the direct object of their gaze, they “hinschauet darüber” with a squinting look that looks at and looks beyond at the
same time.27 Recognizing negativity, their gaze is attentive without identifying its object.
Hegel understands shame among lovers, quite counter-intuitively, as a
force against separation. To him, “Scham” is not a feeling that leads lovers to
restore propriety and property, but rather the expression of an aversion
against the proper. In his 1797/98 fragment on love, Hegel writes: “Die Liebe
ist unwillig über das noch Getrennte, über ein Eigentum; dieses Zürnen der
Liebe über Individualität ist die Scham.”28 Reversing the common values of
decency, he regards the messy fusion of two bodies in love as an example of
purity, whereas lovers who resist their intimacy trying to preserve some
proper independence present to him an image of indecency: “Ein reines
Gemüt schämt sich der Liebe nicht, es schämt sich aber, daß diese nicht
vollkommen ist” (247). Striving to overcome the obstacles that hinder love’s
culmination, shame is thus an agent in the service of love.
Hölderlin rephrases the role of “Scham” as “Scheue.” In his poem, shyness
does the work of preserving dynamic differences within the pair. The stimulation of difference against the idea of an unqualified union is also part of
Hegel’s account of shame. Werner Hamacher highlights the ambiguity of the
work of shame in Hegel.29 He shows that shame splits up the unity that it has
produced in order to work towards a more inclusive unity. Shame relentlessly
takes offense in the results of its own efforts because no union is radical
enough to be absolutely pure.30 The work of shame is limitless. Its infinity can
be frustrating when merely numerical, that is, when we presume separate
countable entities. If we presuppose a clear-cut distinction between identity
and difference, every newly achieved unity opposes the difference which it
resolved and therefore adds to the series of terms to be reconciled. But a different logic gives rise to a pleasurable infinity. This is the case when the lovers
prevent their union from collapsing into an exclusive unity and make a love in
which “das Getrennte noch [ist], aber nicht mehr als Getrenntes, [sondern] als
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Einiges” (Hegel 246).31 Then, like Hölderlin’s noble pair, those who are
ashamed of the fact that they are separated also take pleasure in letting more
and more obstacles come between them. Rubbing against these hurdles they
actively enjoy their love:
Diesen Reichtum des Lebens erwirbt die Liebe …, indem sie unendliche Unterschiede sucht und unendliche Vereinigungen sich ausfindet, an die ganze
Mannigfaltigkeit der Natur sich wendet, um aus jedem ihrer Leben die Liebe zu
trinken. (Hegel 248)
The infinite work of shame opens the closed relationship between two individuals, their potentially violent tête-a-tête, and allows for more and more
interference from the manifold riches of the outside world or, in Hölderlin’s
words, of the gardens of Bordeaux. As Hamacher puts it: “Für die Scham gibt
es Sein — ihr eigenes nicht ausgenommen — nur im Plural” (105).
Indeed, the seemingly exclusive couple has always been a play of multiplicities in Hölderlin’s poem: the pair does not consist of one oak and one
white poplar, but oaks and white poplars in the plural: “ein edel Paar / Von
Eichen und Silberpappeln.” The poplar-oak couple has also always been interlaced with other pairs. Oaks and poplars are crossed with other trees. The
poem abounds with exchange, with “Gespräch,” with care, with confusion,
with mutation, and with mutuality. There is care in the elm wood that protectively “neiget die breiten Gipfel … über die Mühl’.” The house takes the fig tree
“Feigenbaum,” into its courtyard and shelters it from storm and weather.32
Der feige Baum, the cowardly tree, needs protection. Yet, by its involvement in
another pair, the fig gains a divine power to keep the house safe in return.
When Hölderlin translates Euripides’ Bacchants, he confuses fig tree (Greek:
sykon) with sanctum (Greek: saekon).33 The fig now offers protection precisely
because it is der Feigen Baum, the holy tree of the cowards. In the context of
love, cowardice turns into a special courage. It becomes the strength of not
being afraid to let shyness show, “Scheue zu tragen.” Hegel asserts: “[Die
Liebe] fürchtet ihre Furcht nicht, aber von ihr begleitet hebt sie Trennungen
auf ” (248).34 The lover bears, or trägt the brave timorousness of the fig tree like
she wears, or trägt a fig leaf. The fig leaf “hebt Trennungen auf ” by denying the
difference between lovers. Since neither of them can be sure that their love can
tolerate their separation they prefer to wear their shame. But the coy fig leaf
also highlights the difference between them, if only as something that is impossible to pinpoint. The excessively shy love of the noble pair keeps differences moving.35
The second stanza presents this movement of differences across the
multiple interlacing pairs that form a noble pair. It begins with “Die braunen
Frauen daselbst / Auf seidnen Boden.” The adjective “seidnen” is here used in
the plural and is thus grammatically aligned with “Frauen” rather than
“Boden.” But it would not exactly make sense to exchange the adjectives and
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to say: “Die seidnen Frauen daselbst auf braunem Boden.” The exchange is not
reversible; there is no identifiable point of origin. The “daselbst” functions as
the eccentric pivot for an asymmetrically chiasmic exchange that never fully
lines up and therefore never comes to rest.36 Both sides are imperfectly drawn
into the other so that both can neither be separated nor unified. Around the
disempowered identity, the Selbigkeit, of the “daselbst,” as the empty heart of
the chiasm, the verses keep insisting on the plural.
We find a similar structure in: “Und über langsamen Stegen, / Von
goldenen Träumen schwer, / Einwiegende Lüfte ziehen.” Here, the converse
explicitly engages more than two terms. The “Gespräch” moves in a round.
Light and heavy at the same time, it is a slow dance over the abyss where deep
down the river rages: “Über langsamen Stegen”? One is tempted to correct
this peculiar expression into “über einwiegenden Stegen,” and this sets the
dance in motion: “von goldenen Träumen schwer, Lüfte ziehen langsam,
langsam einwiegende Stege, Träume ziehen schwer, schwer einwiegende
Lüfte ziehen langsam Stege, wiegen ein in goldene Träume, träumen goldene
Stege …”
Would this be a “Gespräch,”das sagt des “Herzens Meinung?”
Notes
1
The phrase “a reading of love” is borrowed from Werner Hamacher, Pleroma—Reading in Hegel, trans. Nicholas Walker and Simon Jarvis (Stanford UP, 1998)
89. Original: “eine Lektüre der Liebe.” Werner Hamacher, “Pleroma — zu Genesis und
Struktur einer dialektischen Hermeneutik bei Hegel,” in G.W.F. Hegel, “Der Geist des
Christentums”: Schriften 1796–1800, ed. Werner Hamacher (Frankfurt/M: Ullstein,
1978) 105. He uses the phrase to describe a mode of reading that seeks to keep going a
movement of multiple differences within the unity of the text.
2 Text from Friedrich Hölderlin, Bevestigter Gesang: die neu zu entdeckende hymnische
Spätdichtung bis 1806, ed. Dietrich Uffhausen (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1989) 164f. The
exact date of the poem’s composition is uncertain. Uffhausen assumes 1805 (BG
261ff.). Beißner dates it spring 1803 between “Patmos” and “Der Ister,” see Friedrich
Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, Große Stuttgarter Ausgabe, vols. 1–5, ed. Friedrich Beißner,
vol. 6–7 ed. Adolf Beck (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, Cotta, 1943–1977) 2,2,800. Sattler
dates it fall 1804 in the vicinity of “Germanien,” “Tinian,” “Der Ister,” “Der Adler,” and
“Die Schlange” (“Mnemosyne”); see Friedrich Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, Frankfurter
Ausgabe, ed. D.H. Sattler (Frankfurt/M.: Verlag Roter Stern, 1975) 15,11f.
3 Selected Poems and Fragments (London: Penguin, 1994) 251–53. Other translations: Vernon Chadwick in Anselm Haverkamp, Leaves of Mourning: Hölderlin’s Later
Work (Albany: SUNY P, 1996) 58–59; Taylor Carman in Dieter Henrich, The Course of
Remembrance and Other Essays on Hölderlin, ed. Eckart Förster (Stanford: Stanford UP,
1997) 253–55; Richard Sieburth, Hymns and Fragments (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1984)
106–09.
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4 Heidegger, “Andenken,” Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung (Frankfurt/M:
Klostermann, 1981) 84.
5 Sämtliche Werke, Große Stuttgarter Ausgabe 2, 2, 802.
6 Dieter Henrich, Der Gang des Andenkens (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1986), especially
chapter II. 9.
7 Eberhard Baumann, Das Geheimnis wird Licht (Essen: Blaue Eule, 1997) 17.
8 “Mancher” can mean both “many” and “some.” Chadwick translates: “Some / are
reluctant to go to the source.”
9 About the rarity of the north-easterly in the region of Bordeaux, see Baumann
17–18.
10 Baumann extends the cryptonym to D.S.G. (Die schöne Garonne).
11 While I focus here on the turn and the inverse movement because it is usually
overlooked, the poem evokes both directions and perspectives as part of its attempt to
realize mutuality (from the north-east to the south-west and from the south-west to
the north-east, from Susette to Friedrich and from Friedrich to Susette, from author to
reader and from reader to author).
12 Eric Santner, in his piece “Sober Recollections: Hölderlin’s De-idealizations of
Memory in ‘Andenken’” (Germanic Review 60.1 [1985]: 16–22), affirms the non-adversative but rather additive use of the conjunction “aber” as liberating and as a sign of
Hölderlin’s new, more relaxed style, see esp. 19.
13 Heidegger 151: “Diese Fuge des wandernden Heimischwerdens im Eigenen ist
dichterisch gefügt in das aber, das dem Gedicht den verborgenen Ton gibt …
‘Andenken’ ist eine einzige in sich gefügte Fuge des aber.” Heidegger, despite these emphatic remarks, offers no interpretation of the use of “aber.”
14 Santner argues that the later Hölderlin breaks away from his idealization of a
monological “Gesang,” toward embracing the mutuality of “Gespräch”: “In the poem
Andenken the poet explores and seems to discover, if only very briefly, a positive aspect
of such a disintoxication, the possibility of survival and perhaps even fulfillment,
within the immanence of Gespräch” (21).
15 I do not want to argue here that all uses of “aber” in this poem should be read as
adversative. The automatic repetition of the same “aber” brings to the fore that generalizing the procedure of reversal (what we usually identify with Hegelian dialectic)
results in its erosion. But I think that this poem moves beyond staging the general
impotence of the pivot toward a call for individual, local, and pro tem reading. I agree
that some “aber”s are better read as additive. But I am concerned here with showing
that the dialectic reversal can be used in less facile and more interesting ways than it
commonly is, and that—especially if we resist its resolution in some higher synthesis—it can enable mutuality.
16 Preserved in fragmentary form and published under the title “Die Liebe” first by
Nohl and now in Werke 1 (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1986) 244–50.
17 See The Recalcitrant Art. Diotima’s Letters to Hölderlin and Related Missives, ed. and
trans. Douglas F. Kenney and Sabine Menner-Bettscheid (Albany: SUNY P, 2000) 22.
18 G.W.F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1988) 128–29.
19 In his letter from June 30, 1802, informing Hölderlin of Gontard’s death, Sinclair
tries to remind him that she survives her death: “Du glaubtest an Unsterblichkeit, da sie
noch lebte, Du wirst gewiß itzt (sic!) mehr denn vorher glauben … Und was ist größer
und edler, als ein Herz, das seine Welt überlebt” (StA 7,1,170).
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20
205
Baumann 38.
See Phänomenologie 131.
22 See Heidegger 118: “Zwar ist der Dichter in das Erfreuende der Schatten der
heimischen Wälder gekommen.”
24 See Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Frank Justus Miller (Cambridge: Harvard UP,
1984) 9–11: “And, men, content with food which came from no one’s seeking, gathered
… acorns fallen from the spreading tree of Jove. … and yellow honey was distilled from
the verdant oak.” Ovid’s “The Four Ages” is an important text for Hölderlin. He evokes
Ovid’s description of the golden age, for example, in “Emilie vor ihrem Brauttag” (v
117–23). “Andenken” includes another reference to “The Four Ages” in the fourth
stanza: “Zu wohnen einsam, jahrlang, unter / Dem entlaubten Mast” evokes the brazen age in which “Men … spread sails to the winds, though the sailor as yet scarce knew
them; and keels of pine which earlier had stood upon high mountain-sides, now leaped
insolently over unknown waves” (11). With the phrase “entlaubten Mast,” Hölderlin
draws attention to the fact that the mast has a history, that it was once a living tree.
25 Hölderlin, ”Wie wenn am Feiertage …”
25 In “Die Eichbäume,” Hölderlin, mobilizing anti-French sentiments, describes oak
trees as Titans who refuse to subject themselves to the cultivated garden of society
(“gesellige Leben”). Hölderlin uses the Semele myth in the sixth stanza of “Wie wenn
am Feiertage….” Semele, the mortal mother of Dionysos, asked her lover Zeus to show
his true shape. When he appeared to her as the god of thunder, she was struck by lightning and died.
26 Hölderlin uses the word “Scheue” while Hegel opts for “Scham.” Hegel often prefers the more carnal term to the more ethereal connotation Hölderlin chooses.
27 “Darüber hinschauen” carries a similar ambiguity as “to overlook" in English
meaning both “to survey” and “to fail to notice.”
28 G.W.F. Hegel, “Die Liebe,” Werke 1 (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1986) 247.
29 I am not as confident as Hamacher that we can neatly distinguish between
Hegel’s intention (which is supposedly to identify shame as working in the service of
unity) and his presentation (Darstellung—which Hamacher sees as undermining former intention). It is the presentation that counts, also and especially for Hegel.
30 See Hamacher 104–05.
31 In the same fragment, Hegel calls this identity of love that preserves its difference
within, a “vollendete Einigkeit” as opposed to the “unentwickelte Einigkeit” which is
only the seed of life but not life itself. The unity of love is mature precisely because it
preserves difference between the lovers while eliminating “allen Charakter eines
Fremden.” That love does not kill otherness in favor of an abstract identity is of foremost importance to Hegel already in the early writings.
32 Haverkamp, in “Secluded Laurel—Andenken,” pairs the fig tree with the laurel,
the figure that is forgotten and excluded from this remembrance. He traces a rhetorical
tradition from the New Testament through Augustine and Petrarch to Hölderlin that
uses the fig tree as a figure for conversion.
33 Beißner notes: “In der Übersetzung aus den Bacchantinnen des Euripides steht er
(der Feigenbaum) für saekon (Heiligtum), verwechselt mit sykon (Feige)” (StA 2,2,
803).
21
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34 As the figure of conversion (see Haverkamp), the fig tree also figures the vacillation and anxiety involved in such a turning, as well as the brave cowardice that is open
to and endures this fear.
35 If some have interpreted the scene that is depicted in the first and second stanzas
of the poem as paradisiacal, I would add that this paradise knows the fig leaf, knows
shame, and knows death or negativity. It is Paradise after humans have eaten from the
tree of knowledge. These stanzas, thus, work against the separation of knowledge and
love.
36 While in the prose form of this phrase the word “daselbst” stands in the middle between the two terms “die braunen Frauen” and “auf seidnen Boden,” the layout of the
poem invites the reader to draw the chiasmic exchange between the parallel structures
braunen Frauen and seidnen Boden with “daselbst” standing off center in the upper right
corner of this imaginary X.