Abstract

The Celebration of Concepts. On the Homology of Festival and Hymn in Hölderlin and in the French Revolution

The present contribution aims to show that Hölderlin’s Tübingen hymns from 1790 to 1794 are influenced by the festivals of the French Revolution and its hymns. The Revolutionary festivals are staged as epochal rites of passage seeking to enact the turn towards a new age. Hölderlin’s hymns follow the dramaturgy of the festivities and thus represent a festive poetics. The homology of festival and hymn, typical of the period, conditioned their convergence in the political movement of the eighteenth century. Self-expression through joy serves the bourgeois self-assertion; it is reflected both in a new, self-referential festival type and in the release of the movere principle in literature. Against this background, the solemnity inherent in the hymn becomes topical, and in the context of the republican emotional culture, hymnal enthusiasm serves as self-affirmation. The movement of language and emotion that has been inherent in the hymn since Klopstock thus gains political valence and makes it the ideal genre for staging the movement of awakening and departure. In the late, post-revolutionary hymns the festival is a commemorative ritual recurrently executing the temporal transition in the historical present.