Abstract

"Secret Holderlin" contextualizes and critiques the German understanding of the poet Friedrich Holderlin in the first half of the twentieth century. The George Circle, Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger, the century's preeminent readers of Holderlin, may seem unlikely collaborators; nonetheless, these writers produce a surprisingly coherent discourse on the meaning of Holderlin, particularly his late hymns, for the German nation. ;Chapter One demonstrates how, around 1910, Holderlin is brought to the attention of German intellectuals through the cultural politics of the George Circle. Close readings of the Circle's periodicals, the Blatter fur die Kunst and the Jahrbuch fur die geistige Bewegung, as well as George's poetry reveal that George's turn to Holderlin, part of the Circle's return to the German literary tradition, marks the beginning of a new understanding of the poet as the key to Germany's future. Norbert von Hellingrath's dissertation, Holderlins Pindar-Ubertragungen, is shown to be situated in George's cultural project; it is Hellingrath who first argues that Holderlin's translations of ancient Greek promise a continuation of the Hellenic legacy on German soil. ;The impact of George's reading of Holderlin is such that Benjamin is compelled to engage it in his early essay "Zwei Gedichte von Friedrich Holderlin." Chapter Two reads this essay as a tribute to Hellingrath but also as a correction of his philhellenism, particularly in its introduction of a third Holderlinian mythographic topos, "the Oriental." In this way, Benjamin's essay can be seen as part of the discourse introduced by George. ;The problem of Holderlin's relationship to modern political concerns becomes even more fraught for Heidegger, whose wartime lectures on Holderlin openly support George's claims for Holderlin as the poet of Germany. Chapter Three explores the complex relationship between Heidegger's Nazism and his politics as developed in these lectures, and discovers an aporia that renders the political and ontological goals of his Holderlin project philosophically untenable. ;In analyzing the political moment of these readings, the dissertation offers a history of a critical construction and reveals Holderlin's "national significance" as a specifically twentieth-century discourse