Friedrich Holderlin, by Wikipedia

This is a broad, catch-all category of works that fit best here and not elsewhere. If you haven't found it someplace else, you might want to look here.

Friedrich Holderlin, by Wikipedia

Postby admin » Sun Jan 31, 2016 8:59 am

Friedrich Holderlin
by Wikipedia

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.




Image

Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin (German pronunciation: [ˈjoːhan ˈkʁɪsti.aːn ˈfʁiːdʁɪç ˈhœldɐliːn]; 20 March 1770 – 7 June 1843) was a major German lyric poet, commonly associated with the artistic movement known as Romanticism. Hölderlin was also an important thinker in the development of German Idealism, particularly his early association with and philosophical influence on his seminary roommates and fellow Swabians Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling.[1][2][3]

Life

Hölderlin was born in Lauffen am Neckar in the Duchy of Württemberg. His father, the manager of a church estate, died when the boy was two years old. He was brought up by his mother, who in 1774 married the Mayor of Nürtingen and moved there. He had a full sister, born after their father's death, and a half-brother. His stepfather died when he was nine. He went to school in Denkendorf and Maulbronn and then studied theology at the Tübinger Stift, where his fellow-students included Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (who had been a fellow-pupil at his first school) and Isaac von Sinclair.

It has been speculated that it was probably Hölderlin who brought to Hegel's attention the ideas of Heraclitus about the union of opposites, which the philosopher would develop into his concept of dialectics. Finding he could not sustain a Christian faith, Hölderlin declined to become a minister of religion and worked instead as a private tutor. In 1793-94 he met Friedrich Schiller and Johann Wolfgang Goethe and began writing his epistolary novel Hyperion. During 1795 he enrolled for a while at the University of Jena where he attended Fichte's classes and met Novalis.

As a tutor in Frankfurt from 1796 to 1798 he fell in love with Susette Gontard, the wife of his employer, the banker Jakob Gontard. The feeling was mutual, and this relationship was the most important in Hölderlin's life. Susette is addressed in his poetry under the name of 'Diotima'. Their affair was discovered and Hölderlin was harshly dismissed. He lived in Homburg from 1798 to 1800, meeting Susette in secret once a month and attempting to establish himself as a poet, but was plagued by money worries, having to accept a small allowance from his mother. He worked on a tragedy in the Greek manner, Empedokles, producing three versions, all unfinished.

Already at this time he was diagnosed as suffering from a severe "hypochondria", a condition that would worsen after his last meeting with Susette Gontard in 1800. After a sojourn in Stuttgart, probably working on his translations of Pindar, at the end of 1800 he found further employment as a tutor in Hauptwyl, Switzerland and then, in 1802, in Bordeaux, at the household of the Hamburg consul. His stay in that French city is celebrated in "Andenken" ("Remembrance"), one of his greatest poems. In a few months, however, he returned home on foot via Paris (where he saw Greek sculptures for the only time in his life). He arrived home in Nürtingen both physically and mentally exhausted. Susette died from influenza in Frankfurt about the same time.

After some time in Nürtingen he was taken to the court of Homburg by Sinclair, who found a sinecure for him as court librarian, but in 1805 Sinclair was denounced as a conspirator and tried for treason. Hölderlin was in danger of being tried too but was declared mentally unfit to stand trial. The state of Hesse-Homburg was dissolved the following year after the Battle of Jena. On 11 September Hölderlin was delivered into the clinic at Tübingen run by Dr Ferdinand Autenrieth, inventor of a mask for the prevention of screaming in the mentally ill.[4]

The clinic was attached to the University and the poet Kerner, then studying medicine, was assigned to look after Hölderlin for a while. The following year he was discharged as incurable and given three years to live, but was taken in by the carpenter Ernst Zimmer (a cultured man, who had read Hyperion) and given a room in his house in Tübingen, which had been a tower in the old city wall, with a view across the Neckar river and meadows. Zimmer and his family cared for Hölderlin until his death in 1843, 36 years later. Wilhelm Waiblinger, a young poet and admirer, left a poignant account of Hölderlin's day-to-day life during these long, empty years. Hölderlin continued to write poetry of a simplicity and formality quite unlike what he had been writing up to 1805. As time went on he became a kind of minor tourist attraction and was visited by curious travelers and autograph-hunters. Often he would play the piano or spontaneously write short verses for such visitors, confining himself to conventional subjects such as Greece, the Seasons, or The Spirit of the Times, pure in versification but almost empty of affect, although a few of these (such as the famous 'The Lines of Life', Die Linien des Lebens, which he wrote out for his carer Zimmer on a piece of wood[5]) have a piercing beauty and have been set to music by many composers.

Hölderlin's own family did nothing to support him but instead petitioned (successfully) for his upkeep to be paid by the state. His mother and sister never visited him, and his stepbrother only once. His mother died in 1828: his sister and stepbrother quarrelled over the inheritance, arguing that too large a share had been allotted to Hölderlin, and tried unsuccessfully to have the will overturned in court. Neither of them attended his funeral, nor had the (now famous) friends of his childhood, Hegel and Schelling, had anything to do with him for years; the Zimmer family were his only mourners. His inheritance, including the patrimony left him by his father when he was two, had been kept from him by his mother and was untouched and continually accruing interest. He died a rich man, and never knew it.[6]

Work

The poetry of Hölderlin, widely recognized today as one of the highest points of German literature, was little known or understood during his lifetime, and slipped into obscurity shortly after his death; his illness and reclusion made him fade from his contemporaries' consciousness – and, even though selections of his work were published by his friends during his lifetime, it was largely ignored for the rest of the 19th century.

Indeed, Hölderlin was a man of his time, an early supporter of the French Revolution – in his youth at the Seminary of Tübingen, he and some colleagues from a "republican club" planted a "Tree of Freedom" in the market square, prompting the Grand-Duke himself to admonish the students at the seminary. In his early years he was an enthusiastic supporter of Napoleon, whom he honors in one of his couplets.

Like Goethe and Schiller, his older contemporaries, Hölderlin was a fervent admirer of ancient Greek culture, but his understanding of it was very personal. Much later, Friedrich Nietzsche would recognize in him the poet who first acknowledged the Orphic and Dionysian Greece of the mysteries, which he would fuse with the Pietism of his native Swabia in a highly original religious experience. For Hölderlin, the Greek gods were not the plaster figures of conventional classicism, but living, actual presences, wonderfully life-giving though, at the same time, terrifying. He understood and sympathized with the Greek idea of the tragic fall, which he expressed movingly in the last stanza of his "Hyperions Schicksalslied" ("Hyperion's Song of Destiny").

HYPERION'S SONG OF FATE [36] (1799)

Ye wander there in the light
On flower-soft fields, ye blest immortal Spirits.
Radiant godlike zephyrs
Touch you as gently
As the hand of a master might
Touch the awed lute-string.
Free of fate as the slumbering
Infant, breathe the divine ones.
Guarded well
In the firm-sheathed bud
Blooms eternal
Each happy soul;
And their rapture-lit eyes
Shine with a tranquil
Unchanging lustre.
But we, 'tis our portion,
We never may be at rest.
They stumble, they vanish,
The suffering mortals,
Hurtling from one hard
Hour to another,
Like waves that are driven
From cliff-side to cliff-side,
Endlessly down the uncertain abyss.


In the great poems of his maturity, Hölderlin would generally adopt a large-scale, expansive and unrhymed style. Together with these long hymns, odes and elegies – which included "Der Archipelagus" ("The Archipelago"), "Brot und Wein" ("Bread and Wine") and "Patmos" – he also cultivated a crisper, more concise manner in epigrams and couplets, and in short poems like the famous "Hälfte des Lebens" ("The Middle of Life"). In the years after his return from Bordeaux he completed some of his greatest poems but also, once they were finished, returned to them repeatedly, creating new and stranger versions sometimes in several layers on the same manuscript, which makes the editing of his works problematic. Some of these later versions (and some later poems) are fragmentary, but they have astonishing intensity. He seems sometimes also to have considered the fragments, even with gaps and unfinished lines and incomplete sentence-structure, to be poems in themselves. This obsessive revising and his stand-alone fragments were once considered evidence of his mental disorder, but they were to prove very influential on later poets such as Paul Celan. In his years of madness, Hölderlin would occasionally pen ingenuous rhymed quatrains, sometimes of a childlike beauty, which he would sign with fantastic names (most often "Scardanelli") and give fictitious dates from the previous or future centuries.

Dissemination and influence

Hölderlin’s major publication in his lifetime was his novel Hyperion, which was issued in two parts (1797 and 1799). Various individual poems were published but attracted little attention and in 1799 he also attempted to produce a literary-philosophical periodical, Iduna. His translations of the dramas of Sophocles were published in 1804 but were generally met with derision over their apparent artificiality and difficulty caused by transposing Greek idioms into German. In the 20th century, theorists of translation such as Walter Benjamin have vindicated them, showing their importance as a new – and greatly influential – model of poetic translation. Der Rhein and Patmos, two of the longest and most densely charged of the hymns, appeared in a poetic calendar in 1808.

Wilhelm Waiblinger, who visited Hölderlin in his tower repeatedly in 1822-3 and depicted him in the protagonist of his novel Phaëthon, urged the necessity of issuing an edition of his poems and the first collection of his poetry was issued by Ludwig Uhland and C. T. Schwab in 1826. They omitted anything they suspected might be 'touched by insanity'. A copy was given to Hölderlin, but some years later this was stolen by a souvenir-hunter.[6] A second, enlarged edition with a biographical essay appeared in 1842, the year before Hölderlin’s death.

EVENING PHANTASIE[36] (1799)

Before his but reposes in restful shade The ploughman; wreaths of
smoke from his hearth ascend. And sweet to wand'rers comes the tone of
Evening bells from the peaceful village.

The sailor too puts into the haven now,
In distant cities cheerily dies away
The busy tumult; in the arbor
Gleams the festal repast of friendship.

But whither I? In labor, for slight reward
We mortals live; in alternate rest and toil
Contentment dwells; but why then sleeps not
Hid in my bosom the thorn unsparing?

The ev'ning heaven blooms as with springtime's hue;
Uncounted bloom the roses, the golden world
Seems wrapt in peace; oh, bear me thither,
Purple-wrought clouds! And may for me there

Both love and grief dissolve in the joyous light!
But see, as if dispelled by the foolish prayer,
The wonder fades! 'Tis dark, and lonely
Under the heaven I stand as erstwhile.

Come then to me, soft Sleep. Overmuch requires
The heart; and yet thou too at the last shalt fade,
Oh youth, thou restless dream-pursuer!
Peaceful and happy shall age then follow.


Only in 1913 did Norbert von Hellingrath, a member of the circle around poet Stefan George, bring out the first two volumes of what eventually became a six-volume edition of Hölderlin's poems, prose and letters (the 'Berlin Edition', Berliner Ausgabe). For the first time, Hölderlin's hymnic drafts and fragments were published and it became possible to gain some overview of his work in the years between 1800 and 1807, which had been only sparsely covered in earlier editions. The Berlin edition and von Hellingrath's impassioned advocacy of Hölderlin's work shifted the emphasis of appraisal from his earlier elegies to the enigmatic and grandiose later hymns. At the same time, Hölderlin's appeals to the Germans became all too easy to abuse among nationalists and finally among Nazi-inflected groups.

Already in 1912, before the Berlin edition began to appear, Rainer Maria Rilke composed his first two Duino Elegies whose form and spirit draw strongly on the hymns and elegies of Hölderlin. Rilke had met von Hellingrath a few years earlier and had seen some of the hymn drafts, and the Duino Elegies heralded the beginning of a new appreciation of Hölderlin's late work. Although his hymns can hardly be imitated, they have become a powerful influence on modern poetry in German and other languages, and are sometimes cited as the very crown of German lyric poetry.

The Berlin edition was to some extent superseded by the Stuttgart Edition (Grosse Stuttgarter Ausgabe) edited by Friedrich Beissner and Adolf Beck, which began publication in 1943 and eventually saw completion in 1986. This undertaking was much more rigorous in textual criticism than the Berlin edition and solved many issues of interpretation raised by Hölderlin's unfinished and undated texts (sometimes several versions of the same poem with major differences). Meanwhile a third complete edition, the Frankfurt Critical Edition (Frankfurter Historisch-kritische Ausgabe), began publication in 1975 under the editorship of Dietrich Sattler; it is still in progress. There are other editions; it should be noted that no two of them show all the major poems in congruent textual status. Strophes and readings are sometimes arranged in different ways from one edition to the next.

Though Hölderlin's hymnic style – dependent as it is on a genuine belief in the divinity – creates a deeply personal fusion of Greek mythic figures and romantic nature mysticism, which can appear both strange and enticing, his shorter and sometimes more fragmentary poems have exerted wide influence too on later German poets, from Georg Trakl onwards. He also had an influence on the poetry of Hermann Hesse and Paul Celan. (Celan wrote a poem about Hölderlin, called "Tübingen, January" which ends with the word Pallaksch - according to C. T. Schwab, Hölderlin's favourite neologism "which sometimes meant Yes, sometimes No").

Hölderlin was a poet-thinker who wrote, fragmentarily, on poetic theory and philosophical matters. His theoretical works, such as the essays "Das Werden im Vergehen" ("Becoming in Dissolution") and "Urteil und Sein" ("Judgement and Being") are insightful and important if somewhat tortuous and difficult to parse. They raise many of the key problems also addressed by his Tübingen roommates Hegel and Schelling. And, though his poetry was never "theory-driven", the interpretation and exegesis of some of his more difficult poems has given rise to profound philosophical speculation by thinkers as divergent as Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Theodor Adorno.

Music

Hölderlin's poetry has inspired many composers.

Vocal music

One of the earliest settings of Hölderlin's poetry and perhaps the most famous is Schicksalslied by Brahms, based on Hyperions Schicksalslied. Other composers of Hölderlin settings include Peter Cornelius, Hans Pfitzner, Richard Strauss (Drei Hymnen), Max Reger (An die Hoffnung), Alphons Diepenbrock (Die Nacht), Richard Wetz (Hyperion), Josef Matthias Hauer, Stefan Wolpe, Paul Hindemith, Benjamin Britten, Hans Werner Henze, Bruno Maderna (Hyperion, Stele an Diotima), Heinz Holliger (the Scardanelli-Zyklus), Hans Zender (Hölderlin lesen I-IV), György Kurtág (who planned an opera on Hölderlin), György Ligeti (Hölderlin-Phantasien), Hanns Eisler (Hollywood Liederbuch), Viktor Ullmann (who wrote settings in Terezin concentration camp), Wolfgang von Schweinitz, Walter Zimmermann (Hyperion, an epistolary opera) and Wolfgang Rihm. Wilhelm Killmayer based in 1986 two song cycles Hölderlin-Lieder for tenor and orchestra on Hölderlin's latest poems. Kaija Saariaho's Tag des Jahrs for mixed choir and electronics (2001) is based on four of these poems, Graham Waterhouse composed in 2003 Sechs späteste Lieder nach Hölderlin for (singing and speaking) voice and cello on six latest poems.

Many songs of Swedish alternative rock band ALPHA 60 also contain lyrical references to Hölderlin's poetry. Finnish melodic death metal band Insomnium has transposed and used Hölderlin's verses in several songs.

Instrumental music

Robert Schumann's late piano suite Gesänge der Frühe was inspired by Hölderlin, as was Luigi Nono's string quartet Fragmente-Stille, an Diotima and parts of his opera Prometeo. Josef Matthias Hauer wrote many piano pieces inspired by individual lines of the poems. Carl Orff used Hölderlin's German translations of Sophocles in his operas Antigone and Oedipus der Tyrann. Paul Hindemith's First Piano Sonata is influenced by Hölderlin's poem Der Main. Hans Werner Henze's Seventh Symphony is partly inspired by Hölderlin.

Cinema

• A 2004 film, The Ister, is based on Martin Heidegger's 1942 lecture course (published as Hölderlin's Hymn "The Ister"). The film features Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Bernard Stiegler, and Hans-Jürgen Syberberg.
• The 1985 film Half of life is named after a poem of Hölderlin and deals with the secret relationship between Hölderlin and Susette Gontard. It stars German actors Ulrich Mühe and Jenny Gröllmann.
• In 1986 and 1988 Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub shot two films "Der Tod Des Empedokles" and "Schwarze Sünde" in Sicily, which were both based on the drama Empedokles (respectively for the two films they used the first and third version of the text).
A 1981-82 television drama, "Untertänigst Scardanelli" (The Loyal Scardanelli), directed by Jonatan Briel in Berlin

Works

• Friedrich Hölderlins Sämtliche Werke. Ed. Gotthold Friedrich Stäudlin (Berlin: Cotta, 1846).
• Sämtliche Werke. Ed. Norbert von Hellingrath, Ludwig von Pigenot and Friedrich Seebass. 6 vols. (Berlin: Propyläen, 1913–23 and 1943).
• Sämtliche Werke. Große Stuttgarter Ausgabe. Ed. Friedrich Beißner (works) and Adolf Beck (letters and documents). 8 vols in 16 parts. (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1943–1985).
• Sämtliche Werke. Known as the "Kleiner Stuttgarter Ausgabe". Ed. Friedrich Beißner. 6 vols. (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1946–1962).
• Sämtliche Werke. Frankfurter Ausgabe. Ed. D.E. Sattler. 20 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Stroemfeld, 1975–2003).
• Sämtliche Werke und Briefe in drei Bänden. Ed. Jochen Schmidt. 3 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker, 1992–94).
• Sämtliche Werke und Briefe. Ed. Michael Knaupp. 3 vols. (München: Hanser, 1992–1993).
• Gesammelte Werke von Friedrich Hölderlin, Hans-Jürgen Balmes ( herausgegeber ) Ed.Verlag: Fischer (Tb.), Frankfurt; (Broschiert ) Auflage: 1 (4. April 2008)

English translations

• Some Poems of Friedrich Holderlin. Trans. Frederic Prokosch. (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1943).
• Alcaic Poems. Trans. Elizabeth Henderson. (London: Wolf, 1962; New York: Unger, 1963). ISBN 0-85496-303-0
• Friedrich Hölderlin: Poems & Fragments. Trans. Michael Hamburger. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966; 4ed. London: Anvil Press, 2004). ISBN 0-85646-245-4
• Friedrich Hölderlin, Eduard Mörike: Selected Poems. Trans. Christopher Middleton (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1972). ISBN 0-226-34934-9
• Poems of Friedrich Holderlin: The Fire of the Gods Drives Us to Set Forth by Day and by Night. Trans. James Mitchell. (San Francisco: Hoddypodge, 1978; 2ed San Francisco: Ithuriel's Spear, 2004). ISBN 0-9749502-9-7
• Hymns and Fragments. Trans. Richard Sieburth. (Princeton: Princeton University, 1984). ISBN 0-691-01412-4
• Friedrich Hölderlin: Essays and Letters on Theory. Trans. Thomas Pfau. (Albany, NY: State University of New York, 1988). ISBN 0-88706-558-9
• Hyperion and Selected Poems. The German Library vol.22. Ed. Eric L. Santner. Trans. C. Middleton, R. Sieburth, M. Hamburger. (New York: Continuum, 1990). ISBN 0-8264-0334-4
• Friedrich Hölderlin: Selected Poems. Trans. David Constantine. (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1990; 2ed 1996) ISBN 1-85224-378-3
• What I Own: Versions of Hölderlin and Mandelshtam. Trans. John Riley and Tim Longville. (Manchester: Carcanet, 1998). ISBN 1-85754-175-8
• Holderlin's Sophocles: Oedipus and Antigone. Trans. David Constantine. (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 2001). ISBN 1-85224-543-3
• Odes and Elegies. Trans. Nick Hoff. (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Press, 2008). ISBN 0-8195-6890-2
• Hyperion. Trans. Ross Benjamin. (Brooklyn, NY:Archipelago Books, 2008) ISBN 978-0-9793330-2-6
• Selected Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin. Trans. Maxine Chernoff and Paul Hoover. (Richmond, CA: Omnidawn, 2008). ISBN 978-1-890650-35-3
• Essays and Letters. Trans. Jeremy Adler and Charlie Louth. (London: Penguin, 2009). ISBN 978-0-14-044708-8
• The Death of Empedocles: A Mourning-Play. Trans. David Farrell Krell. (Albany, NY: State University of New York, 2009). ISBN 0-7914-7648-0

Bibliography

• Internationale Hölderlin-Bibliographie (IHB). Hrsg. vom Hölderlin-Archiv der Württembergischen Landesbibliothek Stuttgart. 1804-1983. Bearb. Von Maria Kohler. Stuttgart 1985.
• Internationale Hölderlin-Bibliographie (IHB). Hrsg. vom Hölderlin-Archiv der Württembergischen Landesbibliothek Stuttgart. Bearb. Von Werner Paul Sohnle und Marianne Schütz, online 1984 ff (depuis 1.1.2001: IHB online). Homepage vom Hölderlin-Archiv : http://www.wlb-stuttgart.de/archive/hoeld2.htm

Selected secondary literature

• Martin Heidegger, Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1944; Elucidations of Hölderlin's Poetry. Trans. Keith Hoeller. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2000.
• Jean Laplanche, Hölderlin et la question du père. Paris: PUF, 1961; Hölderlin and the Question of the Father. Trans. Luke Carson. Victoria, BC: ELS Editions, 2007. ISBN 978-1-55058-379-3
• Berman, Antoine. L'épreuve de l'étranger. Culture et traduction dans l'Allemagne romantique: Herder, Goethe, Schlegel, Novalis, Humboldt, Schleiermacher, Hölderlin., Paris, Gallimard, Essais, 1984. ISBN 978-2-07-070076-9
• Paul de Man, “Heidegger’s Exegeses of Hölderlin.” Blindness and Insight. 2nd Ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1983, pp. 246–66.
• Dieter Henrich, Der Gang des Andenkens: Beobachtungen und Gedanken zu Hölderlins Gedicht. Stuttgart: Cotta, 1986; The Course of Remembrance and Other Essays on Hölderlin. Ed. Eckart Förster. Stanford: Stanford University, 1997. ISBN 0-8047-2739-2
• Andrzej Warminski, Readings in Interpretation: Hölderlin, Hegel, Heidegger. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1987.
• Martin Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymne >>Der Ister<<. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1984; Hölderlin's Hymn "The Ister". Trans. William McNeill and Julia Davis. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University, 1996.
• David Constantine, Hölderlin. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1988, corrected 1990. ISBN 0-19-815169-1.
• Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert, "Heidegger and Hölderlin: The Over-Usage of "Poets in an Impoverished Time"", Heidegger Studies (1990). pp.59-88.
• Theodor W. Adorno, "Parataxis: On Hölderlin's Late Poetry." In Notes to Literature, Volume II. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. pp. 109–49.
• Gert Lernout, The poet as thinker: Hölderlin in France. Columbia USA : Camden House, 1994.
• The Solid Letter: Readings of Friedrich Hölderlin. Ed. Aris Fioretos. Stanford: Stanford University, 1999. ISBN 0-8047-2942-5
• Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, Heidegger, Hölderlin, and the Subject of Poetic Language. New York: Fordham University, 2004. ISBN 0-8232-2360-4
• David Michael Kleinberg-Levin, Gestures of Ethical Life: Reading Hölderlin's Question of Measure After Heidegger. Stanford: Stanford University, 2005. ISBN 0-8047-5087-4
• Roseline Bonnellier, Sous le soleil de Hölderlin: Oedipe en question - Au premier temps du complexe était la fille. Paris: L'Harmattan, Collection "Études psychanalytiques", février 2010. ISBN 978-2-296-10411-2

Notes

1. "Because of his small philosophical output, it is important to indicate in what way Hölderlin’s ideas have influenced his contemporaries and later thinkers. It was Hölderlin whose ideas showed Hegel that he could not continue to work on the applications of philosophy to politics without first addressing certain theoretical issues. In 1801, this led Hegel to move to Jena where he was to write the Phenomenology of Spirit.... Schelling’s early work amounts to a development of Hölderlin’s concept of Being in terms of a notion of a prior identity of thought and object in his Philosophy of Identity." Christian J. Onof, "Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin", Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Accessed 15 Jan 2011.

2. "Hegel is completely dependent on Hölderlin - on his early efforts to grasp speculatively the course of human life and the unity of its conflicts, on the vividness with which Hölderin's friends made his insight fully convincing, and also certainly on the integrity with which Hölderlin sought to use that insight to preserve his own inwardly torn life." Dieter Henrich, The Course of Remembrance and Other Essays on Hölderlin, Ed. Eckart Förster (Stanford: Stanford University, 1997) p. 139.

3. "Indeed, the Pietistic Horizon extended for generations up to and including the time when Hegel, together with his friends Hölderlin and Schelling, spent quiet hours strolling along the banks of the Neckar receiving the theological education they would eventually challenge and transform through the grand tradition now known as German Idealism." Alan Olson, Hegel and the Spirit. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 39.

4. Constantine (1990), p. 299.

5. Constantine (1990), p. 302.

6. Constantine (1990), p. 300.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36126
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Friedrich Holderlin, by Wikipedia

Postby admin » Sun Jan 31, 2016 9:01 am

Records from the Trial of Isaak von Sinclair, Accused of High Treason
from the Stuttgart State Archives
From Friedrich Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, Kritische Textausgabe, Bd. 9: Dichtungen nach 1806 - Mündliches, hrsg. v. D.E. Sattler, Darmstadt & Neuwied, Luchterhand Verlag, 1984, S. 115 - 117.]
(translation from the German by Scott J. Thompson. D.E. Sattler's remarks introducing each document have also been included.)

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.


A. Alexander Blankenstein to Count Wintzingerode, 7. February 1805.

In 1803, Count Friedrich Ludwig von Homburg authorized the establishment of a State Lottery. The Count appointed an advocate by the name of Euler to be a consultant, and through Euler the 21 year-old A.L. Wetzler was also appointed. Wetzler's reputation in Frankfurt had been bad enough to motivate him to be christened in Homburg with the name Blankenstein. Herr "Baron von Blankenstein," as consultant to the Count, was able to inveigle the trust of Sinclair and became his friend. In fact, they are said to have become good friends [1].

When Sinclair returned to Homburg, after being invited to attend the crowning of Napoleon in Paris in January of 1805, he was informed of corruption and swindling in the lottery, and he decided to terminate it. Prior to this action, however, a weekly paper printed by the lottery's press had been prohibited for publishing barbs aimed at both Sinclair and Hölderlin. In the weekly Tiresias or German Annals, the following sentence had been printed: "The newer philosophical systems have made far more buffoons than the older systems have made sensible people."

Baron von Blankenstein's response to Sinclair 's terminating of the Homburg State Lottery was to publish an anonymous denunciation, alleging that Sinclair had conspired in Württemberg to assassinate the Elector and his Minister, Count Wintzingerode. Blankenstein's denunciation had its desired effect: on the 26th of February, Sinclair was arrested and placed in solitary confinement.

Friedrich Hölderlin had also been implicated by Blankenstein, and his shouts of outrage which Blankenstein "quoted" in a letter to Count Wintzingerode were to play an important and incriminating rôle in the treason trial.

--D.E. Sattler

***

"Regarding Your Excellency's most favorable decree of the the 3rd of this month, it is my most obedient honor to disclose the communications made to me by Privy Councillor Sinclair, to the effect that Swabia is to become the first scene of anarchy, and that there is reason to expect an insurrection on the Rhine.

Since the greatest part of Swabia's populace is hardly inclined toward rebellion, and one could hold out but little hope for a popular uprising, the scene there is to unfold with a horrible blow: the assassination of His Highness the Elector and Your Excellency, in the course of which a certain Gruthofer in Worms [2] would assist, and to which end has also been delegated a former university friend of Sinclair's by the name of Bauer [3], currently to be found in England. Until the effects of this are perceived, His Highness will be summoned under certain conditions to the head of the government. (...)

An unusual stroke of luck has contributed to making Sinclair very distrustful. His comrade Friedrich Hölderlin of Nürtingen, who was also instructed of the whole event, has fallen into a kind of madness. He constantly rails at Sinclair and the Jacobins, and to the astonishment of the local residents he continually shouts: 'I don't want to remain a Jacobin' ["ich will kein Jacobiner bleiben"]. "

B. Blankenstein's Elucidations, 8. February 1805.

Without waiting for an answer to his letter of 3. February, Count Wintzingerode had Justice Wucherer of the Higher Regional Court sent to Frankfurt. Wucherer met with Blankenstein in Rödelheim on 8. February. Here, Blankenstein composed his elucidations to the denunciation which he had sent anonymously to Elector Friedrich II on 29. January. On 25. February, Blankenstein acted out his own feigned arrest. During the hearing which followed, his elucidations were reshaped into a preliminary draft, Species-Facti of the Grand Württemberger Commission of Inquiry. ---D.E. Sattler

"Shortly before the departure from Stuttgart, Sinclair had fetched a certain Hölderlin from Nürtingen, and in the company of both of them, I rode to Homburg. During the journey, I had the occasion to notice that Hölderlin knew of Sinclair's plan. This Hölderlin has recently become nearly mad, and he strongly reproaches Sinclair and the Jacobins, continually shouting: I will not be a Jacobin, Vive le Roi!"

C. Explanation of Count Friedrich Ludwig von Homburg.

The Count had not been able to prevent Sinclair's arrest. Now he attempted to at least shield Hölderlin from the grip of Württemberg justice. Through the Homburg Privy Councillor, Schleussner, the Count dictated an explanation concerning Hölderlin to Justice Wucherer, who was carrying out the proceedings on Homburg soil. Wucherer had arrived in Homburg again on 5. March 1805. ---D. E. Sattler.

"The friend of Sinclair's, M. Hölderlin from Nürtingen, has been living in Homburg since July of last year. Since a few months ago, he has fallen into a most sad state of mind, so that he really must be treated as a raving madman. He shouts almost incessantly: "I will not be a Jacobin, away with all Jacobins! I can step before my gracious Elector's inspection with a good conscience."

Should the investigation desire his testimony, it is the Count's wish that the extradition of this person be avoided. But if it is found to be necessary, the unfortunate man must be placed in someone's care and provided for, for he could not be allowed in this case to return to Homburg."

D. The Medical Opinion of Dr. Georg Friedrich Karl Müller; [State Archives of Stuttgart]

On 5. April, the Commission of Inquiry requested a medical opinion of Hölderlin, which was issued on 9. April by a doctor who had treated Hölderlin during his first stay in Homburg. -- D.E. Sattler.

"To the instructions given me concerning Magister Hölderlin, I can only comply in a one-sided fashion, for I was not and still am not his doctor, nor do I know the precise nature of his circumstances. I can only say the following about him.

When he was staying here in 1799, the aforesaid Magister Hölderlin was already suffering greatly from hypochondria (at that time, he had asked me for advice concerning his malady). No cure relieved it and he took it with him when he changed residence. I heard nothing more of him after that until last summer when he returned and I was told that "Hölderlin is here again, but he is insane." Bearing in mind his old hypochondria, I did not find this tale particularly striking, but decided to seek him out and find out the truth for myself by speaking to him. How shocked I was, however, when I found the poor man so deranged. Not a rational word was to be spoken with him, and he was in a continual state of the most violent movement. I repeated my visits a number of times, but the sickly man appeared to be worse each time, and his speech more incomprehensible. And now his insanity has intensified so much that it has passed over into madness, and his speech which sounds half-German, half-Greek, and half-Latin can no longer be understood."

E. Statement of the Elector's Consistory, 8. March 1805.

"During his course of study in the Seminary, M. Hölderlin has always acted irreproachably. His talents and industry have lent a superior quality to his studies; it is only to be regretted that the very sick activity of his fantasy soon transported him from his main vocation, so that he was not able to avail himself of the offices of the Church and the Curacy. One always hopes to see curatives effect the seemingly near, then seemingly distant recovery of his spirit's constitution."

_______________

Notes:

[1] In his important article, "Baron von Blankenstein -- The Career of an Early Nineteenth-Century Imposter," [Leo Baeck Yearbook, Vol. , pp. 229 - 245] Walter Schwarz asserts that "Blankenstein made friends with everybody if it was in his interest. Sinclair made friends with those who appealed to him as human beings. He succumbed immediately to the charm of this young rascal and later was to say that Blankenstein had been his best friend. This rashness was to cost him dear." [trans. note -- S.T.]

[2] Gruthofer was active in Moreau's General Staff. [-- D.E. Sattler]

[3] Bauer and Sinclair had belonged to a secret society in Jena called "The Black Brothers." At Fichte's insistence, the society had disbanded earlier that summer. [-- D.E. Sattler]
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36126
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Friedrich Holderlin, by Wikipedia

Postby admin » Sun Jan 31, 2016 9:03 am

HYPERION'S SONG OF FATE (1799)
by Friedrich Hoelderlin

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.


Ye wander there in the light
On flower-soft fields, ye blest immortal Spirits.
Radiant godlike zephyrs
Touch you as gently
As the hand of a master might
Touch the awed lute-string.
Free of fate as the slumbering
Infant, breathe the divine ones.
Guarded well
In the firm-sheathed bud
Blooms eternal
Each happy soul;
And their rapture-lit eyes
Shine with a tranquil
Unchanging lustre.
But we, 'tis our portion,
We never may be at rest.
They stumble, they vanish,
The suffering mortals,
Hurtling from one hard
Hour to another,
Like waves that are driven
From cliff-side to cliff-side,
Endlessly down the uncertain abyss.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36126
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Friedrich Holderlin, by Wikipedia

Postby admin » Sun Jan 31, 2016 9:03 am

EVENING PHANTASIE (1799)
by Friedrich Hoelderlin

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.


Before his but reposes in restful shade
The ploughman; wreaths of smoke from his hearth ascend.
And sweet to wand'rers comes the tone of
Evening bells from the peaceful village.

The sailor too puts into the haven now,
In distant cities cheerily dies away
The busy tumult; in the arbor
Gleams the festal repast of friendship.

But whither I? In labor, for slight reward
We mortals live; in alternate rest and toil
Contentment dwells; but why then sleeps not
Hid in my bosom the thorn unsparing?

The ev'ning heaven blooms as with springtime's hue;
Uncounted bloom the roses, the golden world
Seems wrapt in peace; oh, bear me thither,
Purple-wrought clouds! And may for me there

Both love and grief dissolve in the joyous light!
But see, as if dispelled by the foolish prayer,
The wonder fades! 'Tis dark, and lonely
Under the heaven I stand as erstwhile.

Come then to me, soft Sleep. Overmuch requires
The heart; and yet thou too at the last shalt fade,
Oh youth, thou restless dream-pursuer!
Peaceful and happy shall age then follow.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36126
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Friedrich Holderlin, by Wikipedia

Postby admin » Sun Jan 31, 2016 9:07 am

The Influence of the Illuminati and Freemasonry on German Student Orders (and Vice Versa)
by Terry Melanson
January 7th, 2010

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.


Not widely known is the fact that some of the key ideas behind the creation of the Bavarian Illuminati came from a member of a German Studentenorden.

In 1776 Adam Weishaupt confided to one of his students, eighteen year-old Franz Anton von Massenhausen, that he was thinking of creating a secret society (at the University of Ingolstadt) to combat the influence of both the Jesuits and the Rosicrucians. Massenhausen had told Weishaupt that this was good idea, and that he already had some experience in this area. Before matriculating at Ingolstadt, Massenhausen informed his teacher, he had been a member of a student secret society in Göttingen; he went on to describe the manner in which they operated, its statutes, and the attire they wore. Taking this as a model, then, on May 1st 1776 Weishaupt, Massenhausen and three others, formed the Order of the Perfectibilists. [1]

It is ironic that such should be the case, for afterwards the Illuminati, in turn, had not only infiltrated various educational establishments but student societies as well. As Klaus Epstein explains it:

The famous Karlsschule in Stuttgart (Schiller’s alma mater) had several Illuminati on its staff. The educational movement headed by Basedow taught Illuminati principles, though Basedow himself apparently never joined the order. The University of Göttingen had several Illuminati among its professors, which led Weishaupt to exclaim with surprise that Ingolstadt was giving the law to its far more distinguished North German rival. Tutorial positions offered excellent leverage for working for the future triumph of the Aufklärung: the prominent Illuminat Leuchsenring served, for example, as tutor to the Prussian crown prince who became Frederick William III (though the later conduct of his pupil must have disappointed him). [2] The two leading student societies (Studentenorden), the Konstantisten and the Schwarze Brüder, were both infiltrated by Illuminati. The actual influence of the order upon the education of Germany’s youth obviously cannot be quantitatively defined, and statistical calculations of the infiltration of the professorate are equally impossible to make. [3] These examples suffice to explain, however, the fact that Conservatives called for a drastic purge of educational institutions. [4]


There’s a description of the German student orders, in an 1859 book by Karl von Raumer, which specifically mentions both the Konstantisten and the Black brothers (or the Black Order):

[The Students' Orders] arose about the middle of the eighteenth century. The first prohibition of them appeared at Göttingen, in 1748, and was repeated in 1760 and 1762. In the latter year appears the first trace of the same at Erlangen, in 1765 at Tubingen; in the same year, 1765, appeared the first prohibition of them at Jena, and another in 1767. A third came out in 1795, in connection with an imperial edict against secret societies; and a similar one was then issued in the Prussian universities and at Altdorf. In 1802, Meiners announces, with satisfaction, of Gottingen, that “it is now some years since the strictest inquiry could detect any of the orders at our university;” although he naively adds, in a note, that “within a very short period traces of an order have been discovered.” An accident, as I myself remember, led to this discovery. A student was drowned, and in sealing up his effects, a list was found of names of members (Konstantisten). Thus the orders lasted until the first years of the nineteenth century. At the time of the rise of the Burschenschaft (1816), they seem to have disappeared. I find no record of any contest of the Burschenschaft with the orders, but only against the Landsmannschaften.

What distinction existed between these Orders and the Landsmannschaften or Nations? There must have been one, because they were always at enmity. Meiners says that they had much in common in their organization, and that the orders differed from the Landsmannschaften “only in that they admitted members without regard to their nationality.” This was, it is true, one distinction, but not the only one; a second was, the adoption by the orders of symbols analogous to those of the Free Masons. Thus, there were found, in 1765, “traces of a lodge of Free Masons among the students at Tübingen.” Klüpfel says, “most of the orders in the universities were off-shoots of Free Masonry.” In like manner, Englehardt says that the Order of the Cross, founded in 1762, was organized throughout in the forms of Free Masonry. “In the place of assembly of the order, there was a basin with water, whose symbolic meaning was explained to those initiated; a statue of friendship, and one of virtue, skulls, a cross of the order, with sun, moon, and stars, and a crucifix.” The university senate reported, in 1767, that it had taken away some insignia of an order from some students, and that the orders, in spite of prohibitions, were universal, both in Erlangen and the other German universities, and that scarcely a student could be found who did not belong to an order.

In 1770 the Order of Coopers was discovered, which held lodges, had degrees, and had a destructive influence. The Black Order, or Order of Harmony, arose in 1771, at Erlangen, and had members in Nuremberg and Coburg. Its grand lodge was in Brunswick. In 1797 were found in the papers of this order catechisms of the first, second, and third grades, with symbols having an ethical signification. “The ceremonies of admission were adopted from the Free Masons, with whom the Black Order seems to have maintained very friendly relations. The statutes of this order named Pythagoras as their first known master.” So much will serve to describe this order as such; and it also appears that they were not confined to the universities, nor to students. The same was the case with the Constantists, who existed at Halle in 1786, and had afterward (about 1798), members in civil and military stations at Berlin. Their laws seem to have included the reckless Jacobinical religious and political opinions; and the Prussian ministry believed “that the revolutionists sought to make use of the students in their designs.”


What I find interesting about the above account is not only had the student orders cribbed from the Masons for their initiation ceremonies, but in Tübingen there was even a Masonic lodge discovered at the University. The Black brothers, it was mentioned, were also said to have “maintained very friendly relations” with the Masons. This happens to coincide with what Illuminati historian René Le Forestier had written as well.

The four major student orders during the time of the Illuminati were the Amicisten (or Amizisten), Constantisten, Unitisten and the Harmonisten. According to Le Forestier, the Amicists were formed in 1771, at Jena, by a few members of an even earlier society called the Mosellaner (or Moselbund), and had formed lodges or cenacles in Giessen, Marburg, Göttingen, Erlangen, Erfurt, Tübingen, Leipzig, Wurzburg, Frankfurt an der Oder and Vienna. In 1779, the authorities in Jena had relegated a number of Amicists and dissolved their lodges. They reformed in 1784, but the dissolution of the Mosellaner in 1792 signalled the beginning of the end (though some Amicists were still operating in 1811 at Leipzig, Jena and Halle). The Constantists, founded at Halle in 1777, established themselves at Jena in 1783 and spread to Giessen, Erlangen, Leipzig, Heidelberg, Frankfurt an der Oder and Vienna. Their appearance at Jena, Wittenberg and Göttingen had caused strife with other already-established student orders; quarrels and duels quickly ensued. The Constantists, writes Le Forestier, had disappeared by 1803. In the same year the Unitists had gone extinct as well. They were formed in 1771 at Halle, had rites composed of three degrees, and founded lodges at Jena, Göttingen, Leipzig, Erlangen and Frankfurt an der Oder. The Order of the Black Brothers was created by former members of the Amicists in 1781. They had adopted the Scottish rite degrees in 1785, and thenceforth took the name of the Order of Harmony – thus it would seem that they maintained more than just “friendly relations” with the Freemasonry. One of their lodges, “Christian among the Seven Golden Stars” [Christian zu den sieben Goldenen Sternen], was suppressed in 1796, and they were the subject of an inquest in 1797. The Lodges of the Black Brothers/Harmonists still existed in 1799 at Heidelberg, Giessen, Marburg, and Göttingen; and in 1804 they had voluntarily dissolved. [5]

Image

Perhaps Le Forestier was mistaken about the date, place and founding of the Constantists, for it seems there was a Constantisten Order at the University of Göttingen in 1770, where, according to Arnold Brügmann, none other than Illuminatus Baron von Knigge (1752-1796) was a member. [6] Knigge had indeed been studying at the University of Göttingen from 1769-1771, and an account in Steven Luckert’s invaluable thesis lends further support to the notion.

During his years of study at Göttingen, Knigge had been a member of the so-called Constantists (one of the popular student secret societies). Right from the start, he exhibited great skills as well as his ambition to rule. Within a short time, he made himself known in the order, and even proposed a new plan, that was eventually accepted, which extended beyond one’s years of study – for one’s lifetime. This change in statutes, however, brought with it new responsibilities. Knigge expected that each member, following graduation, would continue to submit monthly reports detailing his circumstances as well as information taken from government cabinets. While his plan failed because many students, having attained a post, ceased to send in their reports, the article’s author emphasized that this example showed that a student order could even be manipulated to commit acts of espionage, if a “wily man” stood behind it. But failure in no way hindered Knigge – he continued his personal odyssey in search of the ideal clandestine organization, until he found in Weishaupt a worthy companion, equally determined to rule the world. [7]


Luckert’s source was the counter-revolutionary journal Eudamonia oder Deutsches Volksglück: Ein Journal für Freunde von Wahrheit und Recht [Eudamonia or the Happiness of Germany: A Journal for the Friends of Truth and Justice], extant from 1795 to 1798. (If Luckert had doubts, however, the paragraph cited above would have included cautionary prepositions such as “according to,” “it is claimed” or “we are led to believe,” etc.) The “Eudamonists” were reactionary ex-Illuminati/Masons-turned-conservatives. Authors such as L. A. C. von Grolmann (1741-1809), J. A. Starck (1741-1816), H. A. O. Reichard (1751-1828) and L. A. Hoffmann (1760-1806) – all former Illuminati except for Starck. [8]

Image
Adolph Franz Friedrich Ludwig, Baron von Knigge (1752 Bredenbeck, Germany – 1796 Bremen, Germany) -Philo (Judaeus)

One of Knigge’s friends and defenders, the revolutionary activist and widely-read liberal journalist, G.F. Rebmann (1768-1824) was known to also have been a member of a student order – the Black Brothers. (And he’s listed in Schuttler’s Die Mitglieder des Illuminatenordens, but with an asterisk i.e. not confirmed). [9] Rebmann was a supporter of the French Revolution, once praised the Illuminati as the precursors of the Jacobins, and was a favourite target of the Eudamonists.

By liberating oneself from matter, then, one regains his place within Soul and, eventually, within Intellect, where nonetheless he retains his first sort of individuality -- his distinguishability or divisibility from Intellect, Soul and other souls. Even this individuality is set aside when a soul ascends beyond Soul and Intellect to become one with the One and thereby achieves well-being (eudaimonia) above being.

-- Neoplatonism and Gnosticism, by Richard T. Wallis


In 1792/93, apparently the Erlangen authorities were after Rebmann for incendiary writings. “According to one published report,” wrote Luckert:

during the course of his flight to asylum, he stopped off in Göttingen, where he was given a hearty reception by his “brothers,” the members of the Black order, as a “martyr for the order’s principles.” During the course of the festivities, Rebmann regaled the audience, which also included non-members, with the tale of his flight to freedom. He succeeded in escaping with the aid of two accomplices – a “black brother” and his wife who lived in a neighbouring city. The couple drove up in a carriage to his hideout in Erfurt and Rebmann was able to escape by concealing himself under the woman’s skirts. [10]


Another link between the student orders and the Illuminati concerns the activities of Illuminatus J. L. J. Greineisen (1751-1831). [11] Greineisen was arrested for giving “Jacobin” speeches at the University of Giessen and for “participating in an illegal student order.” The Eudamonist Grolmann was directly involved in Greineisen’s persecution and subsequent conviction, and recounted that “the authorities found in his possession some papers that not only contained what they determined were many principles of Illuminatism, but a completed new grade for a student order. In addition, Grolman cited one of these confiscated documents, which urged members to seek out and make friendly contact with the Illuminati.” [12]

Image
Friedrich Wilhelm Ludwig von Beulwitz (1755 Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, Germany – 1829) -Claude Fleury-


German idealist, philosopher J. G. Fichte (1762-1814) was another target of the counter-revolutionaries. He was accused of being an atheist, an Illuminatus (though he wasn’t), [13] and a corruptor of youth. Fichte’s unwavering support for the French Revolution, even during the Great Terror, hardly helped the situation. (The Eudamonists didn’t know it at the time, but Fichte became a member of the Rudolstadt Masonic Lodge ‘Günther zum stehenden Löwen,’ in 1794. The Master of the Lodge was none other than F. W. L. von Beulwitz (1755-1829), the head of the Rudolstadt Illuminati since 1784.) [14]

More significantly still, it was while he was engaged in the studies provoked by Aenesidemus that Fichte first arrived at the central and original idea that underlies all of his subsequent writings. Here is the version of this discovery that Fichte himself is reported to have presented in later years:

I recall how, in a close, intimate circle, Fichte used to tell us about the origin of his philosophy and how he was suddenly surprised and seized by the fundamental idea of this philosophy. For some time he had dimly realized that truth consists in the unity of thought and object. He had realized as well that such unity could never be found within the realm of the senses and that where, as in mathematics, it was to be found it produced only a rigid and lifeless formalism completely alien to life and to action. At this point he was suddenly surprised by the thought that the act by which self-consciousness seizes and holds onto itself is clearly a type of knowing. The I recognizes itself as something produced through its own activity; thinker and thought, knowing and its object, are here one and the same. All knowing proceeds from this point of union, not from the sort of unfocused contemplation which is supposed to yield time, space, and the categories. "Now," he asked himself, "if one were to isolate this first act of self-knowing, an act which is presupposed by every human thought and deed and is contained in the most divergent opinions and actions, and if one were to trace the pure consequences of this act, would this act not reveal and display the same certainty which mathematics possesses, though in a form which is living, active, and productive?"

This thought seized him with so much clarity, power, and assurance that he could not give up trying to establish the I as the principle of philosophy. It was as if he were forced to do so by the spirit which had grown mighty within him. [This is the version of the story recounted by Henrick Steffens, one of Fichte's former students, in vol. IV of Was ich erlebte (Breslau: J. Max, 1841), pp. 161-62 (quoted also in Fuß, p. 9). Another briefer but equally fascinating version of the same story is included in the collection of anecdotes compiled by Fichte's nephew Eduard, in Johann Gottlieb Fichte, p. 46: "Let us here mention something which he later told his friends -- how, before a warm winter stove and after he had been meditating long and continuously upon the highest philosophical principle, he was suddenly seized, as if by something self-evident, by the thought that only the I, the concept of the pure subject-object, could serve as the highest principle of philosophy" (also quoted in Fuß, p. 9)

Charming as this account is, there is considerable evidence that Fichte's "discovery" was somewhat less sudden than this story suggests and that the idea of turning to the unity of the I as a solution for the problems inherent in Kantian dualism was one that had been gradually dawning on Fichte for several years prior to the winter of 1793-94. [Indeed Fichte himself, notably in the "Second Introduction" to the Wissenschaftslehre (1797), as well as in some passages in his correspondence, affirmed that the idea of constructing his philosophy upon the pure I had already occurred to him in 1792. Willy Kabitz long ago substantiated this claim, which has been more recently defended by Reinhard Lauth and criticized by Peter Baumanns. For the evidence and arguments on both sides of the issue, see Kabitz, Studien zur Entwicklungsgeschichte, pp. 32-55; Reinhard Lauth, "Genese du 'Fondement de toute la doctrine de la science' de Fichte a partir de ses 'Meditations personnelles sur l'elementarphilosophie,'" Archives de Philosophie 34 (1971): 51-79; and Baumanns, Fichtes Wissenschaftslehre, pp. 69-70n.] In any case, it was certainly only at this later date, in the months immediately after his marriage, that Fichte first seriously attempted to formulate this idea and to recast the Critical Philosophy in conformity with it.

-- Fichte: Early Philosophical Writings, by Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Daniel Breazeale


Fichte was appointed professor of philosophy at the University of Jena in 1794, where he was “a sensational lecturer, attracting streams of students who became his personal devotees. He eloquently preached the liberty and equality of all men, lectured on Sundays, became involved in the affairs of the student orders, and engaged in journalistic controversy on the nature of God.” [15] This conforms to what the Eudamonists wrote, that Fichte “held secret meetings at night with students.” [16] In addition, it is now known that Fichte, while a student at Leipzig, became a member of the Black brothers/Harmonists (c. 1781/82). [17] They were still active at the University of Jena while he was there. In fact, the Harmonists’ Lodge ‘Christian among the Seven Golden Stars,’ mentioned above (which was suppressed in 1796), was in Jena. [18] In 1795, however, Fichte criticized the student orders for “encouraging drunkenness, debauchery and duelling,” which resulted in a disruption of his lectures followed by insults and the stoning of his house. [19]

During the five years he spent in Jena, Fichte was not only engaged in preparing and delivering his lectures and in writing the books and essays upon which his fame, for the most part, continues to rest; he was also embroiled in nearly constant controversy. Indeed, the story of his career at Jena could readily be presented as a series of successively more serious "incidents" -- culminating in the "atheism controversy" that led to his dismissal.

The first crisis proved to be a minor one, but Fichte's reaction to it is indicative of the attitude that eventually served him so poorly. Shortly after Fichte had arrived in Jena and assumed his new post, a rumor reached the court in Weimar that he had asserted in his public lectures that "in twenty or thirty years there will be no kings or princes anywhere." C.G. Voigt, the court administrator in charge of academic affairs, recognized this rumor as malicious slander, instigated by the same parties at the university who had opposed Fichte's appointment on political grounds. At this point Fichte still enjoyed the full confidence of the administration and the court. Yet when he received word that the rumor in question had reached the court, he responded with a vigorous letter of self-defense in which he magnified the threat represented by the rumor and proclaimed his innocence. [Letter to Goethe, June 24, 1794] Asserting that he would not be intimidated or silenced by pressure from Weimar (though none had been applied or even contemplated) and demanding the protection and support of the court (both of which he already enjoyed), he announced his intention to come to Weimar for a personal confrontation with his accusers. He further wrote that he would bring with him the written texts of the lectures in question and announced that he intended to have them printed at once -- without the slightest alteration. The letter concluded with a thinly veiled threat to return to Zurich if assurances regarding all these points were not forthcoming. Fichte did travel to Weimar, where his ruffled feathers were smoothed in a meeting with Voigt and Goethe. The lectures, titled Some Lectures concerning the Scholar's Vocation, appeared in print as promised, and the first crisis passed without serious incident.

The second crisis arose over Fichte's decision, in the winter semester of 1794-95, to schedule for Sunday mornings a continuation of his phenomenally popular public lecture series, "Morality for Scholars." To reach the largest possible audience he sought a time that would not conflict with other lectures or university events. The only time that seemed available was the hour on Sunday morning following the worship services in the municipal church and preceding those in the university church; accordingly he chose this hour for his lectures.

In the eyes of Fichte's conservative critics -- including some powerful persons in the university senate -- this act by an "enemy of throne and altar" amounted to a flagrant affront to the established religion and an offense against the law. Hoping to build this incident into a major scandal, they began spreading the rumor that Fichte intended to replace the Christian religion with a "cult of reason." [The leading role in the conservative campaign against Fichte was taken by Eudamonia, oder Deutsches Volksgluck, a somewhat scurrilous journal that, according to the declaration of its anonymous editors, was founded in order to combat all instigators of disorder and purveyors of principles dangerous to religion and the state. Defenders of the French Revolution and followers of the Enlightenment were especially singled out for attack in the pages of this journal. In an article published in 1796 in Eudamonia, "Verungluckter Versuch im christlichen Deutschlande eine Art von offentlicher Vernunft-Religionsubug einzufuhren," Fichte was accused of trying to turn his philosophy lecture hall into a "temple of reason." In the years that followed, Eudamonia continued to publish personal attacks on Fichte, reiterating the charge of atheism and accusing him of Jacobism as well. These attacks helped create the climate of opinion which led to the atheism controversy.] The local consistory met and formally accused Fichte of illegally violating the Sabbath and disturbing the public worship; these charges were then brought before the higher consistory in Weimar. As soon as he learned of these events, Fichte wrote another indignant letter to Goethe, again appealing for the protection of the court. The duke, who was personally sympathetic to Fichte, responded by ordering an investigation of the affair by the academic senate. Until their report was completed, however, the Sunday lectures were to be suspended.

Fichte wasted no time in drafting a lengthy and sharply worded account of his actions and reply to the charges against him. In this report he argued that he had made inquiries before scheduling the series for Sunday, that Sunday lectures were not unprecedented, that they offended against no statute, and that, since the lectures were specifically concerned with the inculcation of virtue, they were especially well suited for Sunday presentation. He sent this report, along with a transcript of a previous lecture in the series, to the university senate, which, over the objections of his opponents, vindicated Fichte in its own report on the matter. In the wake of this official report, Fichte was directed by the court to resume his Sunday lectures. But this directive was not issued until the end of January 1795, by which time Fichte was embroiled in a new, even more bitter controversy. This new controversy led him to suspend his public lectures almost immediately after their resumption and led eventually to a period of self-imposed exile in Osmannstadt.

The third crisis, which began before the second was resolved, was provoked by Fichte's crusade against the student "orders" or fraternities. Though officially banned, three of these semisecret brotherhoods existed at Jena, where they exercised a profound influence over the lives of their members, other students, and, on occasion, the entire university and town. Not only did these organizations encourage drunkenness, debauchery, and (sometimes fatal) dueling among their members, but they were frequent disturbers of the peace and, on occasion, threats to public safety. They paid little respect to the rights of others, nor were they reluctant to employ intimidation and violence against their critics. In many respects these "orders" bore a closer resemblance to street gangs than to present-day student fraternities. [Leon describes these fraternities as "veritable mutual protection societies, whose secret organization was a constant threat to public safety, and which the university authorities and even the government -- whether out of timidity or fear -- did not dare to suppress." Fichte et son temps, I: 317. Without a proper appreciation of the genuine mayhem committed by the orders it is difficult to have a proper appreciation of Fichte's campaign against them and his consequent flight from Jena. The contemporary reader can gain some appreciation of the situation from the memoirs of a former student of Fichte's, Georg Rist. On pp. 51-52 of vol. 1 of his Lebenserinnerungen, Rist provides a graphic description of a series of student disturbances (though riots might be a better word) which occurred in Jena in June 1795. In the course of these conflicts citizens were assaulted on the street, the contents of several houses were destroyed, and there was a pitched battle between municipal garrison and the students, in which one of the participants was fatally wounded. The town was subsequently occupied by five hundred troops, which provoked a counter-mobilization by the students. Thus when Fichte inveighed against the against of the student fraternities it was not schoolboy pranks he had in mind.]

Inevitably, the man who lectured on "Morality for Scholars" and who sincerely meant by his words and actions to improve the moral climate of the university and to combat the notorious corruption of student life would eventually recognize the deplorable influence of the fraternities and would work for their abolition. Fichte made no secret of his opposition to the student orders; not that he was the only member of the faculty to oppose these secret societies, but he was almost alone in his refusal to be intimidated by them. He spoke against them in public and with increasing vehemence and frequency. Unlikely as it seems, Fichte's efforts at persuasion were rewarded with temporary success: the groups agreed to disband in return for a promise of amnesty, negotiated with the court by Fichte himself. In the end, however, this plan fell through. But Fichte's efforts to dissolve the orders continued, and when he resumed his public lectures in February 1795, he used these as a forum in his campaign against the fraternities. The recalcitrant members replied to Fichte's public pressure by launching their own campaign of harassment against him and his family. Beginning with disruptions of his classes and lectures, they next resorted to public insults to Fichte and his wife, and finally engineered a series of increasingly violent attacks on his home. Though an attempt at forcible entry failed, the house was stoned and Fichte's elderly father-in-law was very nearly killed by a paving stone that landed in his sickbed. [This is the incident that prompted Goethe to quip that having a stone thrown through one's window is "the most unpleasant way possible to be convinced of the existence of the not-I." ("Tag-und-Jahres-Hefte" (1795), in Goethes Werke, XXXV: 53).]

As the intensity of this campaign of abuse and insult mounted, Fichte again turned to the court for assurances of his own safety and that of his family -- assurances he had been unable to obtain from the university and municipal authorities. (Undoubtedly Fichte had again antagonized powerful elements by his behavior in this affair, particularly by his temerity in acting as the direct intermediary between the fraternities and the court, thus bypassing university and municipal authorities.) When the desired assurances were not immediately provided, Fichte reacted by discontinuing his public lectures and, shortly thereafter, fleeing Jena altogether for the physical and mental refuge of a house in the country, in the village of Osmannstadt, not far from Weimar.

-- Fichte: Early Philosophical Writings, by Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Daniel Breazeale


During the Napoleonic Wars German nationalism took hold and the old student orders were displaced with Burschenschaften.

The dream arose that the liberation of the fatherland would result in a spiritual revival and territorial unification of the German people. Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) provided the intellectual legitimacy for this cultural nationalism with political consequences in the winter of 1807-8, in his Reden an die Deutsche Nation (Speeches to the German Nation). And Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769-1860) continued the emotional tone in 1813 in the song he composed with the question ‘Where is my German Fatherland?’, with the reply ‘as far as the German tongue rings’. His article Über den deutschen Studentenstaat, in which he pinned great hopes on the student generation of that time, also found great resonance in the academic world.

Under the influence of this new spirit, student movements emerged in many cities. In Berlin, Friedrich Ludwig Jahn (1778-1852) – the founder of the gymnastics movement – together with his friend, the philosophy professor much admired in student circles, Jakob Friedrich Fries (1773-1843), started in 1811 the secret student association Deutscher Bund which would prepare them for the coming war of liberation. Two years later, students from Jena with support of some professors founded a first Urburschenschaft under the motto ‘Ehre, Freiheit, Vaterland’. It was a fighting German national association, which aimed to promote the establishment of a liberal constitutional state for the whole of the fatherland. [20]


This helps put into perspective a curious and descriptive account, found in an 1813 official report from Mainz special police commissioner, auditor to the Council of State, intelligence bureau chief for Germany, François-Charles de Berckheim [Baron Franz Karl von Berckheim (1785-1836)]:

Monseigneur, they write to me from Heidelberg … that a great number of initiates into the mysteries of Illuminism are to be found there.


These gentlemen wear as a sign of recognition a gold ring on the third finger of the left hand; on the back of this ring there is a little rose, in the middle of this rose is an almost imperceptible dint; by pressing this with the point of a pin one touches a spring, by this means the two gold circles are detached. On the inside of the first of these circles is the device: “Be German as you ought to be”; on the inside of the second of these circles are engraved the words “Pro Patria.” [21]

There were more radical, conspiratorial, and revolutionary groups within the Urburschenschaft, such as the Unbedingten (Unconditionals) and the “Giessen Blacks” – Karl Follen (1796-1840) and his protégé, Karl Sand (1795-1820) were amongst its leaders. Sand would politically assassinate the conservative dramatist August von Kotzebue in 1819, which led to the Carlsbad Decrees and the repression known as the Demagogenverfolgung. Follen was suspected of being involved and he eventually fled to Chur, Switzerland. “None of Follen’s political associates in Jena had the slightest doubt that he was a ‘German devil’ and a ‘bloody revolutionary.’” [22] Prussian historian Heinrich von Treitschke would famously describe Follen as a “petty Robespierre … endowed with great terroristic powers.” [23]

A recent remarkable biography of Karl Follen consolidates and assesses the scattered, but increasingly voluminous research into his life and times. [24] Follen et al. – the Giessen Blacks and the Unconditionals – it turns out – were akin to terroristic nihilists. On July 1st in the same year as the Kotzebue assassination there was a failed attempt on the life of Karl von Ibell (1780-1834) by a Giessen Black and Follen associate, Karl Löning (1791-1819). Löning was arrested, imprisoned, and committed suicide by swallowing broken glass. Löning was practically brainwashed, much like Sand, by the rhetoric of the radicals in Jena and Giessen. Reminiscent of the all-too-familiar Muslim Jihadists, Löning was convinced he was doing “something good, which pleased God and humanity.” Friedrich Münch (1799-1881), a friend of both Karl and his brother Paul Follen, wrote that Karl Follen wished “to intimidate government authorities” and make them think “that his secret conspiracy of political murderers could strike anytime and anywhere they chose to.” [25] Löning’s justification for the attempted assassination was in whole the doctrine of Karl Follen, Jakob Fries, the Giessen Blacks and the Unconditionals. “Follen may not have directly ordered Sand and Löning to murder specific individuals,” writes Spevack; “he did, however, explicitly recommend murder to them as a political tool as often as he could.” [26]

In Spevack’s book the doctrine espoused is described as the “principal of conviction,” while Treitschke calls it a “cult of personal conviction”:

It was bluntly declared that for the righteous man no law was of account. What the reason recognises as true must be realised by the moral will, at once, unconditionally, uncompromisingly, even to the point of annihilating all those who hold different opinions; there cannot be any talk of a conflict of duties, for the realisation of the reason is a moral necessity. This proposition was known simply as “the principle,” and it was on its account that Follen’s confidants termed themselves the “Unconditionals.” To the members of this sect it seemed that anything was permissible for the sake of popular freedom - lying, murder, or any other crime - for no one had the right to withhold freedom from the people.

Thus did the evangel of the overthrow of all moral and political order make its first appearance in Germany, that terrible theory which, under many different cloaks, was ever and again to disturb the century, and which was finally to receive its extremest development in the doctrine of the Russian nihilists. But Follen draped his nihilism in a Christian mantle: Jesus, the martyr of conviction, was the Unconditionals’ hero; their association-song declared “A Christ shalt thou become!” [27]


In 1819 the assassinations of the Duchess Dowager of Russia, as well as Czar Alexander I, were also contemplated by the Follen Unconditionals. [28] Russia was, after all, integral to the Holy Alliance and the Metternichian suppression of real and imagined revolutionaries. Kotzebue was assassinated because of his ties to the court of Russia, as well as his vilification of various radical factions within Germany.

The Kotzebue assassination had an “electric effect on wavering revolutionaries,” wrote James H. Billington. [29] Chief among them was the Filippo Buonarroti (1761-1837) accomplice – Mason and Carbonaro, Philadelphe and a Sublime Maître Parfait – Joachim Paul de Prati (1790-1863). To Prati, this was a striking example of the “power of fanaticism,” and an inspiring “signal for a general combat.”

…from that moment all my mind became as it were inflamed for political strife; from that moment I plunged headlong in a continual series of conspiracies and revolutionary commotions. [30]


It was while in exile in Chur that Karl Follen had met Prati, [31]

and, together with Wilhelm Snell (1789-1851) committed to forming a conspiratorial triumvirate-junta, in April 1820.

Twelve men, from different countries, should act as leaders. Each of the twelve were entitled to form as many secret societies as they thought proper, in order to associate the army, the nobility, the students, the craftsmen, and others, whilst the political creed was adapted according to their peculiar notions, but leaving them in the dark as to the first and more secret union. Thus the mysterious “Männerbund” was established with the aim to unite and republicanise Germany, whilst for the students the “Jünglingsbund” was organized. It was planned to recruit political associates in Italy, France and Germany. Snell left for Germany, Follen for Paris, Prati for Italy. Follen was in Paris from May-July 1820, where he met Voyer d’Argenson and Joseph Rey, who had founded in 1816 at Grenoble a secret society “Union”, of which in Paris Lafayette and Voyer d’Argenson were members. Implicated in the conspiracy of Nantil, 19th August 1820, Rey fled to Switzerland. There, at the end of that year, he met Prati and Wilhelm Snell, and then discussed plans to internationalize “Union” and the “Männerbund”. The “Männerbund” was dependent, as was stated in the “mémoire” for Metternich “on that secret centre which has secretly directed the greater part of the secret societies of Europe for years”. In other words: on Buonarroti. [32]


Follen’s Jünglingsbund (Youth League) seems to have been formed, but the directing body, Männerbund (League of Men) was not.

The 1820s were a prime time for secret societies of all stripes. Follen’s exploits and connections enabled him – however briefly – to rub shoulders with the “crème de la crème” of the European-wide revolutionary movement. He stayed in Switzerland until 1824, escaping the authorities in Germany and Prussia for five years. Finally, he realized it wasn’t safe any longer and fled for good to the United States. Through the aid of Lafayette, Karl Follen was accepted into the faculty at Harvard, becoming the University’s first professor of German.

_______________

Notes:

1 See René Le Forestier, Les Illuminés de Bavière et la Franc-Maçonnerie Allemande [Paris: 1915], Archè reprint, 2001, p. 29, quoting from the Bavarian government interrogation of Massenhausen in 1787. Weishaupt confirmed the account as well, in his 1790 book Pythagoras. “[H]e had admitted, in his own defense,” wrote Steven Luckert, “that he had received the idea of forming a secret society from a student, and that the founding members of the Illuminati order were, for the most part, his current or former pupils” (in Jesuits, Freemasons, Illuminati, and Jacobins: Conspiracy theories, secret societies, and politics in late eighteenth-century Germany, Ph.D. dissertation, State University of New York at Binghamton, 1993, pp. 588-9).

2 Referring, of course, to the fact that Frederick William became an initiate of the Golden and Rosy Cross and a determined adversary of the Illuminati and the Enlightenment (see Perfectibilists, pp. 19-20, 24-25 and notes).

3 Epstein was writing in 1966, before the membership studies of Richard van Dülmen and Hermann Schüttler. With the publication of Schüttler’s Die Mitglieder des Illuminatenordens 1776-1787/93 [The Members of the Order of the Illuminati 1776-1787/93] (Munich: Ars Una 1991), in particular, it seems very likely that the impossibility of the situation has definitely become feasible (should someone wish to undertake such a study).

4 The Genesis of German Conservatism, Princeton University Press, 1966, p. 84.

5 Le Forestier, op. cit., pp. 704-5.

6 Zucht und Leben der deutschen Studenten, 1648-1848 (Berlin: Limpert, 1941), p. 118.

7 Luckert, op. cit., pp. 589-90.

8 See Perfectibilists, op. cit., pp. 121-3 and notes.

9 In the Rebmann bio in Schüttler (p. 123), we read: “Mitglied der ‘Schwarzen Brüder’ in Göttingen” [Member of the ‘Black Brothers’ in Göttingen].

10 Luckert, op. cit., p. 594.

11 Listed as a member in Schüttler, op. cit., p. 63; it’s suspect, however, because there is only one citation for the claim, and though it is a reliable one, the work is far from a primary source: Manfred Agethen, Geheimbund und Utopie. Illuminaten, Freimaurer und deutsche Spätaufklärung (München 1987), p. 189.

12 Luckert, op. cit., p. 595.

13 A good many of Fichte’s friends were indeed Illuminati, and he was active as a Mason in the 1790s. For a meticulous look into Fichte’s association and correspondences with Masons and Illuminati, see the excellent work Radrizzani et al., J.G. Fichte: Philosophie de la maçonnerie et autres textes (Vrin: 1995).

14 See Ibid., p. 167 and Schüttler, op. cit., p. 23.

15 R.R. Palmer, The Age of Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760-1800 – II: The Struggle, Princeton University Press, 1970, pp. 449-50.

16 Luckert, op. cit., p. 591.

17 Bernhard Schroeter (ed.), Für Burschenschaft und Vaterland: Festschrift für den Burschenschafter und Studentenhistoriker Prof. Dr. Peter Kaupp, Jena 2006, p. 207.

18 Ibid., p. 206.

19 Immanuel Kant, Arnulf Zweig (ed.), Correspondence (Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 527; cf. Luckert, op. cit., p. 592.

20 Gevers and Vos, “Student Movements,” in Walter Rüegg (ed.), A History of the University in Europe: Volume 3, Universities in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (1800-1945), Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 273.

21 Nesta H. Webster, Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, A & B Publishers Group, 1998, p. 259.

22 Jürgen Heideking, James A. Henretta (eds.), Republicanism and Liberalism in America and the German States, 1750-1850 (Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 240.

23 Heinrich von Treitschke, Eden & Cedar Paul (trs.), Treitschke’s History of Germany in the Nineteenth Century, v. 3, London: 1917, p. 606.

24 Edmund Spevack, Charles Follen’s Search for Nationality and Freedom: Germany and America, 1796-1840 (Harvard University Press, 1997).

25 Ibid., pp. 77-8.

26 Ibid., p. 79.

27 Treitschke, op. cit., p. 71.

28 Spevack, op. cit., p. 80.

29 James H. Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men (Basic Books, 1980), p. 138.

30 Ibid.

31 Curiously, Prati was for a time a teacher at Illuminatus Pestalozzi’s communitarian school at Yverdon, and had even become a practising Mesmerist: see, Richard Haven, “Dr. de’Prati: A Note and a Query,” in Victorian Periodicals Newsletter, No. 16, [Vol. 5, No. 2] (Jun., 1972), p. 47.

32 Arthur Lehning, “Buonarroti and His International Secret Societies” in International Review of Social History (1956), I, p. 125.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36126
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Friedrich Holderlin, by Wikipedia

Postby admin » Sun Jan 31, 2016 9:12 am

Philippe Buonarroti
by Wikipedia

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.


Philippe Buonarroti. Filippo Giuseppe Maria Ludovico Buonarroti more usually referred to under the French version Philippe Buonarroti (11 November 1761 Pisa, Grand Duchy of Tuscany – 16 September 1837, Paris) was an Italian egalitarian and utopian socialist, revolutionary, journalist, writer, agitator, and freemason; he was mainly active in France.

Life

Early activism


Buonarroti was born in Pisa to a family of local nobility. He studied jurisprudence at the University of Pivora, where he founded what was seen by the authorities of Grand Duke Peter Leopold as a subversive paper, the Gazetta Universale.

Though under constant surveillance by the authorities, the outbreak of the French Revolution encouraged him to support the revolution. He traveled to Corsica to spread the revolutionary message with the Giornale Patriottico di Corsica, the first Italian language paper to openly support the French Revolution. In Corsica, Buonarroti joined the Jacobin Club, and became a friend of the Bonapartes.

Under the Convention

Buonarroti was expelled from the island in June 1791 and returned to his native Tuscany whereupon he was arrested and imprisoned. It is thought that he joined a Masonic Lodge some time in 1786.

In 1793 he traveled to Paris, and became a member of the Society of the Panthéon. Maximilien Robespierre placed him in charge of organizing the expatriate Italian revolutionaries, which he did from a base in Nice. After denouncing Pasquale Paoli to the National Convention, he was rewarded for his revolutionary activities by a special decree of French citizenship in May 1793.

In April 1794 he was nominated National Commissioner in Oneglia, Imperia's port, the site of refuge for many pro-French Italians during the French attack on Northern Italy.

Babeuf conspiracy and later life

He was recalled to Paris in 1795, after the Thermidorian Reaction, whereupon he was imprisoned in the Plessis prison after his friends in office had been deposed by the Thermidorian Reaction. There he met Gracchus Babeuf, and became one of his most fervent supporters and co-conspirators during the time of their mutual imprisonment from March to October.

Buonarotti was rearrested by the French Directory on 8 May 1796, along with Babeuf and other conspirators. Babeuf was guillotined, and Buonarotti formally imprisoned in February 1797, and held on the island of Oléron. Napoleon Bonaparte allowed him to go free after he had become First Consul in 1799.

He exiled himself to Geneva during the Empire, and to Brussels during the Bourbon Restoration; he returned to Paris after the 1830 July Revolution. In 1808 Buonarroti formed a Masonic Lodge, Les Sublimes Maîtres Parfaits, to which only serving freemasons were admitted. Within this lodge he formed an inner circle which he used to further his political dreams and aspirations.

He died suddenly in Paris.

Influence

Buonarroti's revolutionary principles were to prove important during the 1830s and early 1840s; Auguste Blanqui learned many of his insurrectionary skills and tactics from Buonarroti, and the Conspiration pour l'Egalité dite de Babeuf, suivie du procès auquel elle donna lieu may be seen as an important text in this respect.

Later, the 1848 revolutionaries in France and elsewhere placed much emphasis on this work as a cornerstone.

Mikhail Bakunin praised Buonarroti as "the greatest conspirator of his age",[1] and was heavily influenced by the revolutionary practice of Buonarroti. The Bakunin scholar Arthur Lehning has written of Buonarroti: “He too built up on an international scale, though over a much longer period, an elaborate underground network, on a freemason pattern, sometimes using Masonic institutions, to work for his egalitarian creed of 1796, for a social revolution and for the republicanisation of Europe. For forty years the principles remained the same: the leadership was secret; the existence of the higher grades was unknown to the lower; protean in character, this network took advantage of and used other societies.”[2] Some argue that these principles are clearly evident in Bakunin's writings.

Writings

• Histoire des sociétés secrètes de l'armée 1815
• Conspiration des égaux 1828
• Conspiration pour l'Egalité dite de Babeuf, suivie du procès auquel elle donna lieu 1828

Notes

1. Avrich, Bakunin and Nechaev, 22.

2. Arthur Lehning, “Bakunin’s Conceptions of Revolutionary Organisations and Their Role: A Study of His ‘Secret Societies’,” in Essays in Honour of E.H. Carr, ed. C. Abramsky (London: The Macmillan Press, 1974), 58.

References

• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. In turn, it cites as references:
Alexander Philippe Andryane, Mémoires d'un prisonnier d'état (1839), and Souvenirs de Genève (1839)
• Eisenstein, Elizabeth (1959). The First Professional Revolutionist : Filippo Michele Buonarroti. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0674304000.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36126
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am


Return to Articles & Essays

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 13 guests