Rigorous Mediacy: Addressing Mother in Hölderlin’s “Am Quell der Donau,” “Die Wanderung,” and “An die Madonna”

Hölderlin’s poem “Meiner verehrungswürdigen Großmutter” has attracted limited critical attention. It is short, dates from before its author’s most celebrated lyric poetry, and appears irrelevant to the lofty matters of translation of antiquity and German identity with which Hölderlin’s name has often been associated. But in at least one respect, “Meiner verehrungswürdigen Großmutter” anticipates what would become a preoccupation of the high point of Hölderlin’s poetic output: the problem of addressing or invoking a mother. This problem by no means achieves in this short occasional poem the intricacy and import which, as argued below, attend the role of “Mother Asia” and her counterparts Mother Swabia and Madonna in later hymns and drafts. Nevertheless, the address to mother in the short autobiographical poem is already far from uncomplicated. For despite the brevity of the text, there are two mothers, or two names for the same mother: the title names a “Großmutter,” but the text refers only to a “Mutter,” comparing her even to “die Mutter, die einst den/Besten der Menschen, den Freund unserer Erde gebahr” (1: 272, 1.7–8). Is the poem’s addressee a mother, or the mother of a mother? Is she to be identified with a specific religious or historical figure, or with a more distant origin to which the poet cannot have unmediated access?

Like other scholarship, this piece too will leave close examination of the short poem “Meiner verehrungswürdigen Großmutter” to others. Rather, it traces the problem of maternal address in what I take to be its full-fledged form in the later hymns “Am Quell der Donau” and “Die Wanderung” and the draft “An die Madonna.” These poems stage failed direct apostrophes to maternal personifications of organic totality, and in doing so they invite into their frames an origin that must simultaneously be radically prior to them. Having no comfortable residence either within or outside what presents itself as the thematic content of these poems, the figure and addressee of mother disorients them precisely as they purport to orient themselves by incorporating her.

The Womb of the Earth in Kant’s Critique of Judgment

Two of the most bizarre sentences of perhaps Kant’s entire critical project stage in natural historical terms what I am suggesting has a poetological counterpart in Hölderlin’s addresses to maternal figures. Because of its consideration of the relationship between part and whole, Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft is especially germane to the issues of completeness and incompleteness raised by Hölderlin’s speakers’ attempts to invite a maternal figure into the body of the poem discussed below. In the anatomy of Kant’s third critique, the womb is to be found in an appendix or appendage (Anhang) entitled “Method-enlehre der teleologischen Urteilskraft” (283–349, § 79–91). Perhaps not unlike the womb itself, however, this appendix seems to expand to an importance at least equal to that of the body to which it was meant to be appended, the “Kritik der teleologischen Urteilskraft” (219–282, § 61–78). In paragraph 80, the womb figures a permissible presupposition concerning nature underlying rational investigation of her secrets:

Hier steht es nun dem Archäologen der Natur frei, aus den übriggebliebenen Spuren ihrer ältesten Revolutionen, nach allem ihm bekannten oder gemutmaßten Mechanism derselben, jene große Familie von Geschöpfen (denn so müßte man sie sich vorstellen, wenn die genannte durchgängig zusammenhängende Verwandtschaft einen Grund haben soll) entspringen zu lassen. Er kann den Mutterschoß der Erde, die eben aus ihrem chao-tischen Zustande herausging (gleichsam als ein großes Tier), anfänglich Geschöpfe von minder-zweckmäßiger Form, diese wiederum andere, welche angemessener ihrem Zeugungsplatze und ihrem Verhältnisse untereinander sich ausbildeten, gebären lassen; bis diese Gebärmutter selbst, erstarrt, sich verknöchert, ihre Geburten auf bestimmte fernerhin nicht ausartende Spezies eingeschränkt hätte, und die Mannigfaltigkeit so bliebe, wie sie am Ende der Operation jener fruchtbaren Bildungskraft ausgefallen war.

(286)

The...