This Summer Semester 1942 lecture course is the last one Heidegger devoted to Friedrich Hölderlin. It is an interpretation of the hymn The Ister (The Danube) and consists of three parts. In the first part, Heidegger exposes the ebb and flow of the stream. Hölderlin distinguishes the dynamic of the stream by the tension of being-at-home and wandering. The poet cares for the homecoming of the people. To what is ownmost and singular to homecoming belongs the wandering in foreign places.
The second part is an interpretation of wandering in a double dialogue between Hölderlin and Sophocles, on the one hand, and Heidegger and the Greeks, on the other. As Sophocles showed in his tragedy Antigone, the human being is the most homeless of all entities. The hearth is the place where human beings are at home. According to Heidegger, we must understand the hearth to be being itself.
The third part is a further exposition of being homeless and homecoming in which Heidegger shows that what Hölderlin has named in the stream is the essential nature of the demigods. The spirit of the stream is the poetic spirit.