Hölderlins Orient (review)

Chapter VIII of the book, entitled “Das Orientalische, das Griechische und das Hesperische,” ends with the following line from Hölderlin’s fragmentary poem “Der Adler”: “Wo wollen wir bleiben?” (117). Within the framework of the relationship between Hölderlin’s poetics and the topography of cultural (and poetic?) memory, providing an answer to this question can be seen as the primary concern of Hölderlins Orient. By considering the three cultural realms of the Oriental, the Greek, and the Hesperian in terms of poetic orientation, Eva Kocziszky reads Hölderlin’s lyric poetry after 1800 particularly in order to determine the poetic and cultural function of the expansion of topography into Oriental space in Hölderlin’s later poems and poetic fragments (mainly, in Homburger Folioheft). In her analysis, Kocziszky also draws on Hölderlin’s earlier works, such as “Versuch einer Parallele zwischen Salomons Sprüchwörtern und Hesiods Werken und Tagen,” to delineate how certain poetic and cultural concerns remained vital for Hölderlin throughout his life and how these interests can illuminate Oriental landscape, cities, rivers, mountains, and flowers in Hölderlin’s later lyric poems.

One of the major trajectories of the book is to show how Hölderlin’s Orient cannot be categorized in terms of Said’s notion of Orientalism. The central argument of the book is most certainly to distinguish the poetic and cultural function of the Orient in Hölderlin’s work from German Classicism on the one hand and from Hegel’s philosophical concept of linear history on the other. Kocziszky emphasizes two things in particular: first, the Orient in Hölderlin’s lyric poetry does not figure as a historical concept or as an epoch but as cultural and poetic space; and second, Hölderlin’s lyric poetry does not envision the Orient, as Kocziszky writes, “als ein geschlossenes Kulturkonzept in der Einzahl” (12). And Hölderlin’s interest in the Orient, as Kocziszky argues against the widely held view, cannot be explained exclusively as the cultural origin of a Greece that constitutes one particular stage in the course of world history from the East (past) to the West (present). In contrast, Kocziszky shows how Hölderlin’s poetics is steeped in cultural memory and envisions temporal (past and present) and spatial (“Nähe” and “Ferne”) registers as simultaneous. Kocziszky’s reading of Hölderlin’s poem “Andenken” is informed by this notion of simultaneity as she illustrates how often Hölderlin’s poetic imagination strives to go beyond ‘the familiar’: “das Abendländische und das Griechische” (51).

Kocziszky’s work is particularly valuable as it manages to show how Oriental landscape and cities are central both to Hölderlin’s poetic topography and his poetics. By arguing that Hölderlin’s interest in the poetic (Hölderlin was not interested in plastic art) and cultural legacy of Greece finally led to Greece’s fragmentation for Hölderlin as he began looking toward the Orient, she offers insight into how Hölderlin’s modern poetics cannot be fully grasped without acknowledging his fascination with “Kleinasien” as a cultural “Begegnungsstätte” (25). Hence, in contrast to the more common interpretation of mountains as great examples of the sublime, Kocziszky considers not only the presence of mountains (Greek and Caucasus Mountains, the Sinai, the Alps) but rivers (Nile, Danube, Ganges) as well as the Arabian Desert in Hölderlin’s poetry as mediums and places of (cultural) mediation. And as Kocziszky points out, figures such as Heracles, Dionysus, and Christ are also mediators in Hölderlin’s poetic world. Kocziszky’s work foregrounds the significance of both the encounter with the unfamiliar and mediation / translation as source for poetry.

As Kocziszky rightly points out, Hölderlin’s interest in the Orient was not merely of historical nature; the engagement with the Orient was central to Hölderlin’s poetics: “In diesem radikal Fremden, das wir zumeist nur in den Termini unserer eigenen Junonischen Kultur (miss)‘verstehen’ können, versucht Hölderlin jedoch die längst...