Hölderlin, Kleist, and Nietzsche by Stefan Zweig

Nietzsche set himself as a destroyer and rebuilder of philosophy and critic of the degradation of the German spirit through nationalism and militarism.Zweig's choice of subjects reflects a division in his own soul. Hoelderlin and Kleist consciously opposed the worldly harmoniousness of Goethe's classicism in favor of a visionary inwardness and dramatization of the subjective psyche. Whereas the nineteenth-century novel is socially capacious in terms of subject and audience, the three figures treated here are prophets or forerunners of modernist ideas of alienation and exile. Each led an unstable life ending in madness and/or suicide and not until the twentieth century did each make their full impact. In Hoelderlin, Kleist, and Nietzsche, Zweig concentrates on three giants of German literature to portray the artist and thinker as a figure possessed by a powerful inner vision at odds with the materialism and scientific positivism of his time, in this case, the nineteenth century.Zweig's subjects here are respectively a lyric poet, a dramatist and writer of novellas, and a philosopher. In these essays, Zweig depicts the tragic and sublime lifelong struggle by three great creative minds with their respective daemons.This is the second volume in a trilogy in which Stefan Zweig builds a composite picture of the European mind through intellectual portraits selected from among its most representative and influential figures. towards danger, immoderation, ecstasy, renunciation and even self-destruction.”

Stefan Zweig’s literary portraits of three tormented giants of German literature, Friedrich Hölderlin, Heinrich von Kleist, and Friedrich Nietzsche, contrasts them with Goethe who was anchored in place by profession, home and family.įor Zweig, “everyone whose nature excels the commonplace, everyone whose impulses are creative, wrestles inevitably with his daemon” which Zweig describes as “the incorporation of that tormenting leaven which impels our being.

The Struggle with the Daemon: Hölderlin, Kleist, Nietzsche by Stefan Zweig (translated from the German by Eden and Cedar Paul, with a chronology of Stefan Zweig's life and a bibliography of works by and about Stefan Zweig in English by Randolph Klawiter 82,000 words)

(cover: Susan Erony, Unseeing Eyes/Unspeaking Lips, pencil, burnt paper, paper, acrylic medium on canvas, 44' x 44', 2011) $9.99 on Kindle, Nook, Apple Books, Kobo, Google Play

Hölderlin, Kleist, and Nietzsche by Stefan Zweig