Charles Explorer logo
🇬🇧

"Remember Nemesis!" – Hölderlins Hyperion and Philosophy

Publication at Faculty of Science |
2020

Abstract

In the article entitled "'Remember Nemesis!' - Hölderlins Hyperion and Philosophy", I propose a reading of Hölderlin's novel as showing the difficulty of the basic human task, i. e. to do justice to one's fate. Hyperion loses any contact with his fate, or with any proper measure.

Seeing the whole of the novel in this "tragic" way, I understand its end in the same way as it has already been understood by Jürgen Link - for many reasons, I claim that Hyperion dies after finishing the last letter. (In footnote 47 I also suggest that the addressee of the novel's letters bears the same name as the cardinal Roberto Bellarmino because it was the latter who caused the execution of Giordano Bruno with whom Hyperion is parallelized.)