Hölderlin, Kleist, and Nietzsche by Stefan Zweig

He continues, indeed, to speak through their lips when other- wise they would be dumb and his strength makes itself manifest in them when nothing else remains to quicken the spirit and when the bodily forces are far advanced in decay. The uncanny light of the daimon flashes from their eyes, and it is he who speaks through their lips. INTRODUCTION Holderlin, Kleist, and Nietzsche were of the Promethean race which is in revolt against customary forms and tends thereby to destroy itself.

My Note I have selected at least each chapter heading and its accompanying aphorism. Yet Zweig was aware that Hoelderlin, Kleist, and Nietzsche were more daring explorers of the dangerous and destructive aspects of man that needed to be seen and comprehended in the clarifying light of poetry and philosophy.I love those who know not how to live except through surrender, for they are on the way elsewhere.

The image of Goethe recurs here as the ultimate upholder of Zweig's own ideals: scientist and artist, receptive to world culture, supremely rational and prudent. Zweig's choice of subjects reflects a division in his own soul. Nietzsche set himself as a destroyer and rebuilder of philosophy and critic of the degradation of the German spirit through nationalism and militarism. Hoelderlin and Kleist consciously opposed the worldly harmoniousness of Goethe's classicism in favor of a visionary inwardness and dramatisation of the subjective psyche. Whereas the nineteenth-century novel is socially capacious in terms of subject and audience, the three figures treated here are prophets or forerunners of modernist ideas of alienation and exile. Each led an unstable life ending in madness and/or suicide and not until the twentieth century did each make their full impact.

Zweig's subjects here are respectively a lyric poet, a dramatist and writer of novellas, and a philosopher. In 'Hoelderlin, Kleist, and Nietzsche', Zweig concentrates on three giants of German literature to portray the artist and thinker as a figure possessed by a powerful inner vision at odds with the materialism and scientific positivism of his time, in this case, the nineteenth century. This is the second volume in a trilogy in which Stefan Zweig builds a composite picture of the European mind through intellectual portraits selected from among its most representative and influential figures.

Hölderlin, Kleist, and Nietzsche by Stefan Zweig