Die Poesie des Uebergangs: Hoelderlins spaete Dichtung im Horizont von Friedrich Schlegels Konzept der 'Transzendentalpoesie'

In the years between 1795 and 1801 Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich Holderlin developed--independently of each other--a concept of poetry which strives to "interfere" in history and eventually precipitate a cultural revolution in Germany. This study compares the poetic theories of both writers, and then employs Schlegel's romantic poetics as a hermeneutic framework within which Holderlin's difficult and often obscure later poetry can be interpreted from a new perspective.; Relying on Holderlin's commentaries on his Empedokles tragedy and Schlegel's early literary essays and philosophical notebooks, the first three chapters of this investigation adumbrate Schlegel's and Holderlin's concepts of "Bildung" and "History," in order to lay the groundwork for a discussion of "transcendental poetry" and Holderlin's cycle of poems known as "Nachtgesange" in the last two chapters.; The task of Schlegel's "historian" and of Holderlin's "poet" is to "divine" the future in order to reconstruct the past, thus providing a sense of historical continuity in times of revolutionary changes. During Schlegel's "Athenaum" period, this hermeneutic postulate culminates in the definition of "transcendental poetry" (1798/99)--a highly complex model which represents both a fragmented prescriptive poetics and a poetological redefinition of Kant's and Fichte's term "transcendental self-consciousness." Schlegel envisions a "critical" and "self-mirroring" poetry in which the author's consciousness, as the producing agent of the work of art, is inscribed in and virtually identical with the poetic artifice it is producing (chapter four). The fifth chapter applies this theory to Holderlin's "Nachtgesange" and shows how each of these poems displays stylistic and structural ruptures, confirming his shift from a poetry which is a mere expression of the "sentimental" poet (Schiller) toward an "objective," "self-conscious" and self-generating poetry which reflects on its own poetic procedure. This "transcendental poetry," however, is not merely a narcissistic gratification of the poet's ego, but, as both Schlegel and Holderlin conceived it, a cultural-historical medium of transition: a tool to overcome the subject-centered idealist philosophy of their age, in order to establish a new and socially relevant art form which Schlegel called a "New Mythology" and which the late Holderlin hoped to institute with his "patriotic" hymns.