The Problem of Christ in the Work of Friedrich Hölderlin

This study sets out to challenge the usual approach to the question of Hölderlin's response to Christ, which focuses on no more than two or three late hymns, by tracing, through each major stage of Hölderlin's work, a series of latent christological debates. These debates, in which philosophy, theology, and poetry converge, represent Hölderlin's engagement with the urgent intellectual issues of his day. Dr Ogden offers a detailed account of the matrix of competing ideas in the famous Tübingen seminary and radical re-readings of his novel Hyperion and the dramatic fragments on the Empedokles theme before discussing the climax of Hölderlin's response to Christ in 'Friedensfeier' and other contemporary poems. It will be of interest not just to readers of Hölderlin but to all those interested in the intellectual history of late eighteenth-century Germany.