Listened to Harzer post seeing him in De Profundis. He referred to Hölderlin. I was not aware, so these are notes produced for that exploration.
The Hölderlin text Jens Harzer was invoking is Anmerkungen zum Oedipus — “Remarks on Oedipus”. Hölderlin wrote it around 1803 and published it alongside his German translation of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King in 1804. It is short, dense and rather strange, but it contains one of the most influential theories of dramatic transformation in modern European thought. Cambridge University Press
Who Friedrich Hölderlin was
Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843) was a German poet, translator and philosophical thinker. Today he is generally regarded as one of the greatest poets in the German language, although that status came substantially after his lifetime. He belongs historically around German Romanticism and German Idealism, but he does not fit neatly into either category. Poetry Foundation
His intellectual surroundings were extraordinary. At the Protestant seminary in Tübingen he studied theology alongside Hegel and Schelling; the three became close friends and participated in the intellectual ferment generated by Kant, the French Revolution and debates about religion and freedom. Modern scholarship increasingly treats Hölderlin not simply as “the poet who happened to know Hegel” but as someone whose ideas helped shape the development of both Schelling and Hegel. Cambridge University Press
He was trained for the ministry but did not want to become a pastor. Instead he worked mainly as a private tutor while writing. During a position with the wealthy Gontard family in Frankfurt he fell deeply in love with Susette Gontard, his employer’s wife. She became the “Diotima” of much of his poetry and of his novel Hyperion. Their enforced separation and her death in 1802 were profound events in his life. Goethe-Institut
His major works include the epistolary novel Hyperion, the unfinished tragedy The Death of Empedocles, extraordinary late poems and hymns such as Bread and Wine, Patmos, The Ister and Half of Life, and his radical translations of Sophocles’ Oedipus and Antigone. His poetry mixes Greek mythology and syntax with Christianity, nature, history, revolution, exile, loss and the problem of whether human beings can still experience the divine. Poetry Foundation
His life then took a tragic turn. By 1806 he was suffering a severe psychiatric breakdown and was institutionalised. From 1807 until his death in 1843 he lived in the famous tower in Tübingen under the care of a carpenter’s family. It is safer historically not to impose a confident modern diagnosis on him; the nature of his illness remains debated. For much of those decades he was regarded as essentially a ruined or mad poet. Poetry Foundation
The irony is that the twentieth century made him enormous.
What Remarks on Oedipus is actually arguing
The essay has three parts: first a theory of dramatic form; then a reading of particular moments in Oedipus; finally a much broader theory of tragedy, humanity, the gods and time. JSTOR
And the third section is where Harzer's remark comes from.
1. Art is not merely inspiration: it has a structure that can be learned
Hölderlin begins with a surprisingly technical idea.
Poetry ought to become more like a craft — mechane. Modern artists, he thinks, talk too readily about a work's “effect” or beauty without understanding the formal laws that produce it. A poet should understand the mechanics of form just as an ancient poet supposedly understood metre, structure and proportion. Cambridge University Press
This is already interesting for theatre. Hölderlin isn't saying:
Feel intensely and something beautiful will emerge.
He's closer to:
The intensity needs a form capable of containing it.
The uncontrollable and the controlled have to coexist.
That tension runs through the whole essay.
2. A tragedy has a rhythm — and that rhythm must be broken
This is perhaps Hölderlin's most famous formal insight.
Events in tragedy do not merely happen one after another. They acquire momentum. Images, discoveries, actions and emotions begin rushing towards catastrophe.
Hölderlin calls this movement “tragic transport.”
But if that movement simply continued accelerating, the spectator would be swept along without ever apprehending what was happening.
So tragedy requires an interruption.
His term is:
die Cäsur — the caesura.
He also calls it:
die gegenrhythmische Unterbrechung — the counter-rhythmic interruption.
The caesura interrupts the forward motion so that, briefly, we stop experiencing merely one event followed by anotherand perceive the event itself. ORA
That is a very modern theatrical idea.
Think of:
momentum → interruption → recognition → transformed momentum.
The interruption isn't outside the rhythm.
The interruption is part of the rhythm.
3. In Oedipus, Tiresias is the caesura
Hölderlin identifies the prophet Tiresias as performing this function.
Oedipus is racing towards knowledge. He wants the murderer of Laius found; every answer produces another question.
Then Tiresias appears.
His intervention does not solve the drama. Instead it changes its axis.
Before Tiresias, Oedipus is the brilliant king investigating a crime.
After Tiresias, the investigation increasingly becomes an investigation of Oedipus himself.
Formally, Hölderlin thinks Tiresias' appearance divides and balances the tragedy. Because Oedipus accelerates heavily towards its conclusion, the caesura occurs relatively early; in Antigone, whose rhythm is different, the corresponding interruption comes later. Rhuthmos
So the caesura is both:
dramatic structure
and
existential rupture.
4. Oedipus' tragedy is partly a tragedy of knowing too much
Hölderlin's interpretation of Oedipus is unusual.
Oedipus does not simply make a mistake because he lacks knowledge.
His characteristic danger is almost the opposite:
he cannot stop interpreting.
Hölderlin says that Oedipus interprets the oracle too infinitely. Instead of responding within ordinary civic limits, he pursues its meaning absolutely and relentlessly. dokumen.pub
This gives the tragedy a philosophical dimension.
Oedipus wants complete consciousness:
Who did it?
Why?
What happened?
Who am I?
What is the truth?
And he succeeds.
That is precisely what destroys him.
One modern account of Hölderlin's position nicely describes Oedipus' quest as an almost insane drive towards complete consciousness: philosophy's desire for absolute knowledge is fulfilled only at the price of the person seeking it. Cambridge Assets
That idea is very Hölderlin:
knowledge is necessary, but complete possession of reality may exceed what a human being can bear.
5. Tragedy occurs when human and divine come impossibly close
Here Hölderlin becomes much stranger.
He describes tragedy as a moment in which human beings and the divine become excessively joined.
The human being reaches beyond ordinary human limits.
But this cannot endure.
The excessive union has to be corrected by an equally radical separation.
One of his central formulations is essentially:
limitless union purifies itself through limitless separation. dokumen.pub
Oedipus therefore passes through something much larger than a reversal of fortune.
He begins as someone extraordinarily close to mastery:
king, solver of the Sphinx, protector of Thebes, interpreter of signs.
He ends as someone radically dispossessed:
blind, exiled, stripped of status, knowledge having destroyed the identity that sought it.
There is no easy return to equilibrium.
6. Then comes Hölderlin's extraordinary idea: God and man become “unfaithful” to one another
This is one of the hardest but most important parts of the essay.
At the extreme point of tragedy, Hölderlin says, human beings and the divine turn away from one another.
The human forgets himself because he is entirely caught in the moment.
God becomes, as it were, nothing but time.
They become “unfaithful” to one another.
Hölderlin does not mean moral infidelity.
He means that the old relationship between human and divine can no longer continue.
There is a rupture.
The world before the catastrophe and the world afterwards belong to different orders. Goldsmiths Research Online
And this brings us directly to Harzer.
7. “Beginning and end cannot rhyme”
Hölderlin then writes the line Harzer was remembering.
The essential formulation is:
“Anfang und Ende sich … schlechterdings nicht reimen läßt.”
Literally:
“Beginning and end can no longer rhyme with one another.”
And then Hölderlin says that because the human being must follow this “categorical reversal” — kategorische Umkehr —
afterwards he cannot be what he was at the beginning. Goldsmiths Research Online
This isn't simply character development.
It's much more radical.
Something happens in tragedy that breaks continuity.
You don't go:
A → B → C → A improved.
You go:
A → B → rupture → something that can no longer be A.
That is Hölderlin's categorical reversal.
What “categorical reversal” means
The word categorical carries some Kantian philosophical weight, although I would not reduce it to Kant's “categorical imperative.”
It means something closer to:
fundamental, unconditional, applying to the structure of experience itself.
The world has not merely changed within time.
Time itself seems to have turned.
There is a before and an after that cannot simply be reconciled.
Hence:
Beginning and end cannot rhyme.
Harzer's acting principle makes much more sense in this context
When Harzer said:
“There is one sentence for me as an actor very important. The beginning and the end, they have to be different. Said Hölderlin…”
he wasn't quoting a neat maxim like:
“A character should undergo an arc.”
He was invoking a much more radical conception of theatre.
The actor enters into a sequence of experiences.
At some point there is a caesura — an event, discovery, reversal, break.
And once the actor/person has genuinely passed through it:
he cannot simply be who he was before.
Hence the performance has to leave some trace in the body, voice, relation to space or consciousness of the figure.
That maps extraordinarily well onto the De Profundis performance you saw.
At the beginning:
contained → enclosed → scarcely moving → finding words → imprisoned
At the end:
washed → changed clothes → altered hair → almost childlike → standing → leaving the box → addressing Bosie/the other directly.
The visual transformation is not decorative.
It embodies Hölderlin's proposition:
The ending must not rhyme with the beginning.
Why Hölderlin matters beyond this one essay
His importance comes from several different directions.
As a poet
His late poetry radically stretched German syntax. Greek forms and sentence structures enter German; clauses become suspended; ordinary grammar is disrupted; gods, rivers, landscapes and historical time become almost physical presences.
This difficulty was initially taken as evidence of illness. It later became one reason modern poets revered him. Poetry Foundation notes his major influence on figures including Rilke and Paul Celan. Poetry Foundation
As a philosopher
His philosophical fragments helped alter the trajectory of German Idealism.
Against Fichte's attempt to ground philosophy in the self-conscious “I”, Hölderlin argued that subject and object must already presuppose a more fundamental unity — Being — which cannot itself simply become another object of consciousness.
This thinking influenced Schelling and helped shape the intellectual environment from which Hegel's philosophy emerged. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
That is a remarkable fact about him: a man remembered primarily as a poet helped shape the philosophical movement that produced Hegel.
As a theorist of art
His idea of the caesura became very influential.
The artwork is not simply harmonious.
Its truth may appear precisely when harmony breaks.
That becomes important later for Walter Benjamin, modernist aesthetics, critical theory and ideas of rupture and discontinuity. OUP Academic
For Heidegger
Hölderlin became absolutely central to Martin Heidegger.
From the 1930s onwards Heidegger repeatedly lectured on Hölderlin and increasingly treated poetry — particularly Hölderlin's poetry — as capable of revealing aspects of being that conceptual philosophy could not reach. Some accounts of Heidegger go as far as saying that much of his later philosophy becomes an extended engagement with Hölderlin. Cambridge University Press
This relationship is philosophically enormously important, although Heidegger's appropriation of Hölderlin — including national and historical claims about Germany — is itself something later scholars treat critically.
For twentieth-century poetry
The rediscovery of Hölderlin around the beginning of the twentieth century, particularly through Norbert von Hellingrath's editions, turned him from a marginal, supposedly mad Romantic into a central ancestor of modernism. Stefan George's circle, Benjamin, Heidegger and later Celan all engaged deeply with him. Cambridge University Press
The really distinctive Hölderlin idea
…to compress his worldview into one tension, it would be this:
Human beings long for unity — with nature, with another person, with society, with the divine, with themselves — yet mature existence requires us to endure separation rather than falsely abolish it.
You find different versions of that throughout his work:
unity / separation
home / exile
human / divine
Greece / modernity
nature / consciousness
love / loss
presence / absence
beginning / ending
And crucially, the answer is usually not simply to restore the lost first term.
Something must be passed through.
That is why the Hölderlin quotation works so well for Harzer:
You don't want the ending to restore the beginning.
The experience should have made restoration impossible.
….Harzer means by “storytelling of the soul.” The story isn't primarily the sequence of external facts. The story is the irreversible difference between the person who enters and the person who leaves. Goldsmiths Research Online