stand—admittedly in a way still wholly unmastered and misunderstood—in the course of our history, then we would have no right to the demand to begin with the beginning.
That these two knew the Greek beginning, in a more original way than all previous ages, has its ground uniquely in the fact that they experienced for the first time the end of the West. To put it more sharply, they themselves, in their existence and work, became the end, each of them in a different way. Conversely, it also holds that they experienced the end and became the end only because the beginning overawed them and elevated them into greatness. Both the reflection on the first beginning and the founding of its end, an end equal to it and to its greatness, belong together in the turning.
The fact that both Hölderlin and Nietzsche have now become so fashionable is surely no proof that we understand what it signifies that they stand in our history as the end of its first beginning and therefore reach beyond us. On the contrary, all indications, especially the ever growing number of books and dissertations about them, testify that we are now on the verge of accounting for Hölderlin and Nietzsche historiographically and are thereby making each of them historically a dead letter.
To mention only the ill treatment of Hölderlin— mostly well-meant, as is everything we do—either his work is thought to be on behalf of the “fatherland,” and excerpts are made of those passages where the words “people,” “hero,” and the like occur, or he is openly or surreptitiously transposed into a “Christian” and then becomes a component of a quite dubious “apologetics.” Or else he is extolled as the mediator between Classicism and Romanticism. In each case, we somehow catalog the poet as just another composer of poems, dramas, and novels, next to authors such as Klopstock, Herder, Goethe, Schiller, and Kleist, instead of letting him be the decision he is, a decision whose fruitfulness literary philistines will never surmise—in the first place because they do not want to be touched by it! It is a decision over the final flight or new advent of the gods, a decision which, like every one, includes a pre-decision over our preparedness or unpreparedness with regard to such decisions.
What is the purpose of this reference to Hölderlin and Nietzsche? It is only meant to drive in this one point, that with regard