J M Coetzee: Late Essays

Interrupting Flaubert & Sand and entertaining Coetzee. A friend sent me a sample: Beckett, the White Whale (White Wall), Kafka. How could I refuse? Anyway, these "clips" are from an essay on Holderlin, which may prompt (imminently) yet another rereading.

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There is no doubting Hölderlin’s revolutionary sympathies – ‘Pray for the French, the champions of human rights,’ he instructed his younger sister – but his poems say nothing direct about politics. To a degree this was because he had no models for political poetry; but it was also because of a strong tradition among Germany’s intellectual class of not involving itself in politics. The writer with the strongest following among young idealists was Schiller, and Schiller’s political line after 1793 was that the consciousness of the people needed to evolve before true political change could take effect. In his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind of 1794–5 Schiller argued that the human spirit could best be enlightened and liberated by participating in aesthetic play. For proof, one need look no further than ancient Athens, a democratic society that prized the life of the mind.

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Nevertheless, the self-betrayal and defeat of the revolution left its mark on Hölderlin as on many other disappointed young Europeans of his generation. ‘It would make terrible reading,’ wrote his younger contemporary Achim von Arnim in 1815, the year when the autocracies of Europe reasserted their sway, ‘to count off all the beautiful German souls who surrendered to madness or suicide or to careers they detested’.