We Are Like Fire: Waiblinger and Hesse on Hölderlin

by Hermann Hesse, Wilhelm Friedrich Waiblinger, Eric Miller

The great German poet Friedrich Hoelderlin (1770-1843) won the love and care of his younger contemporary, the rebellious writer Wilhelm Waiblinger (1804-1830). This love found durable expression in Waiblinger's passionate novel Phaethon, translated in the present volume. It is based, in part, on Hoelderlin's own Hyperion, in which the protagonist claims that We are like fire, an assertion substantiated in Waiblinger s work. In Phaethon, the flames of the sun, youth, eros, art and the ideal of liberty incandescently burn. This story, whose eponymous hero recollects Hoelderlin as Waiblinger knew and imagined him, preserves among its pages several of Hoelderlin's most famous verse fragments. Phaethon appeared in 1823, when Hoelderlin was considered mad. Waiblinger scrupulously contests this verdict in his circumstantial essay 'Friedrich Hoelderlin's Life, Poetry and Madness.' Published in 1831, after Waiblinger's death, this essay is also included in the present volume. Waiblinger himself attracted the astringent affection of a later German writer, Hermann Hesse (1877-1962), whose 'In Pressel's Gardenhouse' (1914) depicts the conduct of Hoelderlin, Waiblinger and the poet Eduard Moerike (1804-1875) among the vineyards above Tuebingen. This story celebrates and indicts Waiblinger for his kindness and his impatience, in vivid relation to the figure of Hoelderlin. Hesse's story constitutes an act of literary criticism; he consents to step from behind the storyteller's mask in his essay, 'On Hoelderlin' (1924). These documents, rendered elegantly by Eric Miller, form a picture of greatness and of the reciprocity sometimes possible between the young and the estranged of an older generation.

192 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2007

About the author

Many works, including Siddhartha (1922) and Steppenwolf (1927), of German-born Swiss writer Hermann Hesse concern the struggle of the individual to find wholeness and meaning in life; he won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1946.

Other best-known works of this poet, novelist, and painter include The Glass Bead Game , which, also known as Magister Ludi, explore a search of an individual for spirituality outside society.

In his time, Hesse was a popular and influential author in the German-speaking world; worldwide fame only came later. Young Germans desiring a different and more "natural" way of life at the time of great economic and technological progress in the country, received enthusiastically Peter Camenzind , first great novel of Hesse.

Throughout Germany, people named many schools. In 1964, people founded the Calwer Hermann-Hesse-Preis, awarded biennially, alternately to a German-language literary journal or to the translator of work of Hesse to a foreign language. The city of Karlsruhe, Germany, also associates a Hermann Hesse prize.