we simply run around somewhere and everywhere. Our interpretation of the poem “Germania” thus far was to provide us with the sign pointing the way to this door. Why we began the lecture course with precisely this poem may now have become clearer. It should also have become clear, however, that we must now leave this poem standing, untouched, as it were, until we gain a richer and more intimate comprehension of the poetic saying of the poet, in which the poet struggles to attain the locale to which the fundamental attunement of the poem “Germania” tears us, and which its authentic content precisely denies. Only at the end of our endeavors may we venture to accompany the telling of the poetizing of “Germania” that we have interrogated thus far.
We have indeed on a number of occasions already drawn on ‘excerpts’ [Stellen] from the circle of poetic works in which “Germania” stands, but only ‘excerpts’. From the course that our interpretation of the poem “Germania” has taken hitherto—a course that for some was perhaps already too tedious and laborious—we ought to have learned how inadequate an extrinsic appeal to ‘excerpts’ remains, especially when we have not sufficiently comprehended the fundamental orientation of the poetic telling. In view of the fact that we are now drawing the circle of poems to be interpreted more broadly, and seeking to grasp the poetizing in a more comprehensive way, it is necessary, at the transition point where we now stand, to undertake a fundamental reflection on Hölderlin’s poetizing and on the poet.
What is most concealed with respect to our everyday dealings with beings, and most forbidden with respect to our ever contingent and roaming curiosity, is the “fatherland.” Certainly, this is not something remote lying somewhere behind things or hovering above them. The “fatherland” is beyng itself, which from the ground up bears and configures the history of a people as an existing [daseienden] people: the historicity of its history. The fatherland is not some abstract, supratemporal idea in itself; rather, the poet sees the fatherland as historical in an original sense. The proof that this is the case lies in the fact that the poet’s fundamental metaphysical reflection on that being and remaining that the poets found, thus standing firm in the face of dissolution, from the very outset refers to the “fatherland.” The “fatherland” does not, in this context, play the extrinsic role of a case that suggests itself in order to cast light upon dissolution and becoming in dissolution by way of an example. Rather, the beyng of the fatherland—that is, of the historical Dasein of a people—is experienced as the authentic and singular beyng from which the fundamental orientation toward beings as a whole arises and attains its configuration.