Peter Szondi's Essays and Lectures on Hölderlin
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DIETER BURDORF What is Different is Good: Peter Szondi’s Essays and Lectures on Hölderlin Friedrich Hölderlin is the only poet to whom Peter Szondi exclusively dedicated one of the four books that he published during his short lifetime, Hölderlin-Studien,1 five essays published by Insel-Verlag in 1967. Three essays Celan-Studien,2 on the poet Paul Celan, were pub- lished posthumously in 1972. Christoph König stressed that Szondi followed Hölderlin’s own theory when he claimed the “priority of lyrical poetry in modern literature” (“Vorrang des Gedichts in der Moderne”).3 In the following paper I will outline the development, the essential features, and the importance of Szondi’s Hölderlin-Studien as well as his university lectures on Hölderlin’s œuvre from 1961 to 1971. Szondi is the last of the intellectuals that can be called “textual scholars”4 in the field of Critical Theory. He was in close contact with other prominent Jewish scholars, including Georg Lukács, Ernst Bloch, Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Siegfried Kracauer, and Ger- shom Scholem. Szondi played an important role together with Adorno and Scholem in preparing the new editions of the works and letters of Walter Benjamin during the 1960s. Born in 1929 in Budapest and a survivor of the Holocaust, Szondi was the youngest of the “textual scholars,” starting his career in the early 1950s. Coming from the mar- gins a lateral entrant, so to speak, he studied Romance and German literatures at the University of Zürich, attending lectures and seminars 1 Peter Szondi, Schriften I, ed. by Jean Bollack et al. (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1978), 261-412. 2 Peter Szondi, Schriften II, ed. by Jean Bollack et al. (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1978), 319-398. 3 Cf. Christoph König, Engführungen: Peter Szondi und die Literatur (with Andreas Isenschmid; Marbach: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, 2004), 41. I am citing the English translations followed by the German originals. All translations for which no preexisting English version is avavilable are my own. 4 “Textgelehrte,” cf. Dieter Burdorf, “Der letzte Textgelehrte: Bemerkungen zu Peter Szondi,” in: Nicolas Berg and Dieter Burdorf (eds.), Textgelehrte: Literaturwissen- schaft und literarisches Wissen im Umkreis der Kritischen Theorie (Göttingen: Vanden- hoeck & Ruprecht, 2014), 409-425. F5653_Zepp.indd 117 27.06.15 06:23 118 DIETER BURDORF by Emil Staiger, Max Wehrli, and Theophil Spoerri.5 While learning to speak and write German, which was a foreign language for him, Szon- di’s main field of interest in his early years was French literature, par- ticularly from the eighteenth century to the present. Submitted to his professors in German Studies, his 1954 dissertation Theory of Modern Drama (Theorie des modernen Dramas), which was published in 1956, is a masterpiece of comparative literature studies that still enjoys great commercial success to this day. The work, however, did not immedi- ately open up an academic career for Szondi. He worked as a French teacher in Zürich schools for many years in the 1950s and was offered a Swiss habilitation grant in 1958. Walther Killy, a famous professor of German, invited Szondi to take up a teaching and research post at the Free University of Berlin (Freie Universität Berlin) in 1959, giving him the opportunity to qualify for a university career. Szondi received his habilitation degree at Freie Universität Berlin in February 1961 on the basis of his Essay on the Tragic (Versuch über das Tragische), published that same year. This second and, once again, very short book on drama and dramatic theory would become yet another milestone in the field of general and comparative literature studies. His habilitation lecture on Heinrich von Kleist’s Amphitryon6 was positioned in the same field of study, while his inaugural speech, given some weeks later, dealt with Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood around 1900 (Berliner Kindheit um Neu- nzehnhundert), pointing out Szondi’s growing interest in Jewish litera- ture and culture and in Critical Theory.7 Szondi was not quite sure how to further his career as a young pri- vate lecturer (Privatdozent) in the spring of 1961. As a Hungarian Jew having been educated in Switzerland, he was not sure there would be a future for him in German universities in the first place and so he de- cided to seek a broader field of opportunity by working on canonical subjects and texts on German Studies. However, he did not focus on highly valued poets such as Johann Wolfgang Goethe, whom most of his successful colleagues were writing on, but rather chose to focus on authors who stood by the side lines of their own times, such as Kleist and the young Friedrich Schlegel. From 1961 to 1967 (and in some 5 Cf. Andreas Isenschmid, “‘In mancher Hinsicht ein Glaubensbekenntnis.’ Peter Szondis Benjamin-Rezeption,” in: Detlev Schöttker (ed.). Schrift—Bilder—Den- ken. Walter Benjamin und die Künste (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2004), 82-93. 6 Szondi, Schriften II, 155-169. 7 Peter Szondi, On Textual Understanding and Other Essays, transl. by Harvey Men- delssohn (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 145-159; and Id., Schriften II, 275-294. F5653_Zepp.indd 118 27.06.15 06:23.