"You Can Kill, but You Cannot Bring to Life": Aesthetic Education and the Instrumentalization of Pain in Schiller and Holderlin

Pain and physical violence are instrumental for German Classicism, that is, their representation serves an aesthetic and cultural ideal. This article locates pain and violence within the discourses of Bildung and aesthetics in late 18th Century Germany, and analyzes Friedrich Schiller's and Friedrich Hölderlin's responses to these discourses. Hölderlin, in his novel Hyperion, rejects the tendency of this era to instrumentalize pain. Initially, Hölderlin modeled his ideas of aesthetics and development on Friedrich Schiller's, which privilege pain in order to further aesthetic and social ideals (i.e. the concept of Bildung). Ultimately, however, Hölderlin rejects Schiller's approach and posits a model of aesthetic Bildung that privileges the expression rather than the instrumentalization of pain. In doing so, he asserts a poetics of empathy, one that privileges expression of both individual and communal pain, yet that likewise must also forsake the ideals and totalities espoused by this epoch.