for the interpretation of Hölderlin that emerges in our century, nor is Heidegger's the only prevailing one, particularly in Europe27. Heidegger, as it has been argued, essentializes and nationalizes Hölderlin, the way for this—scarcely noted by either critics or advocates of Heidegger's Hölderlin interpretations—was long prepared for by a nationalist and even racialist Literaturwissenschaft, by Norbert Hellingrath's editorial interpretations upon which Heidegger relies (GA 52, 16-17, 44-6; EHD 152; OWL 78),28 and by the then only recent adoption of Hölderlin into the German canon. Wilhelm Scherer was among the first in 1874 to take up Hölderlin during the formation of the notion of "national" literature He was followed, in 1894, by August Sauer30 and later by Josef Nadler, who, as the rector of the German University in Prague, organized a "literary science" according to a regionalist theory of the Stämme and Herkunft of the author.31 Long before Heidegger, the move to set up Hölderlin as the "voice of the people" of early-twentieth-century Germany was in process and it was not a uniformly affirmative one32; and if Heidegger is credited with discovering the "essential" and the "pure" in Hölderlin's poems, it was already anticipated in Dilthey's 1906 Das Erlebnis und Die Dichtung.33 Hölderlin had been ignored as a "German" poet since Goethe's complaint about Hölderlin's "heftige Subjektivät"34 (a surprising criticism next to Heidegger's claim that Hölderlin poetizes beyond subjectivity) and did not, until almost the turn of the century, enter into the ranks of national literature with Schiller and Goethe. Hölderlin had been adopted by National Socialism quite independently of Heidegger's interpretations35—an appropriation tethered to the heroism of the George school36 around the time of World War I. Lukács protested against the Nazification of Hölderlin before Heidegger's elaborations on the "poet of the Germans,"37 and Hölderlin was furthermore employed after the war as a mantra for leftist student protests and celebrated for his humanism.38 Nevertheless, Heidegger—following Hellingrath's elaboration of the "väterlandische Umkehr"39—takes Hölderlin significantly out of context; for whatever the complexities of Heidegger's understanding of the national, Hölderlin's aim for revolution is democratic, which Heidegger's is not, and Hölderlin's aim involves furthermore a utopian longing for community "beyond the state."40
Yet Heidegger finds in Hölderlin as well the mourning promise for a recovery—if only in awaiting the new gods—from the ills and technological violence of modernity, and from belligerently reductive forms of thinking. If Heidegger's political entanglements do not exhaust his contributions to the radical reorientation of thinking in the wake
Introduction 11