Hölderlin shared a student room with Hegel and spent 35 years in a carpenter's tower
At the Tübingen seminary, Friedrich Hölderlin studied alongside Hegel and Schelling and may have handed Hegel the ancient idea of the unity of opposites. He went on to become one of Germany's great poets, then was judged incurably ill and lived his last 35 years in the home of a carpenter named Ernst Zimmer.
Lauffen am Neckar, in the Duchy of Württemberg, was his birthplace, on 20 March 1770. His father died when he was two, and his beloved stepfather, a mayor of Nürtingen, died when he was nine; in a 1799 letter he told his mother that grief had settled a heaviness on his soul that never lifted. She intended him for the Lutheran ministry, and at school he protected the younger Schelling from bullies. At Maulbronn he fell for Luise Nast, the administrator's daughter, and discovered Schiller and Klopstock.
At the Tübinger Stift from 1788 he and his friends cheered the French Revolution. He rejected the Terror but kept faith with the ideals of 1789, and those republican leanings shaped Hyperion and The Death of Empedocles. A 1797 manuscript known as the Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism survives in Hegel's handwriting, yet its author may have been Hegel, Schelling, Hölderlin or someone else. After graduating in 1793 he refused the pulpit and became a tutor. A long-standing rumour that he fathered a child in one household was overturned by a 2020 archive find in Weimar showing the father was his employer's husband.
The central love of his life was Susette Gontard, wife of a Frankfurt banker who employed him from 1796. When the affair was discovered he was dismissed, and for two years they met secretly once a month. He tutored in Switzerland and Bordeaux, a stay remembered in his poem Andenken, then walked home via Paris, where he saw genuine Greek sculpture for the only time. He reached Nürtingen exhausted in late 1802 and learned Susette had died of influenza.
Contemporaries spoke of hypochondria or melancholy; 20th-century psychiatrists later proposed schizophrenia, a diagnosis unavailable in his time. After a clinic stay in 1806 he lodged with Zimmer until his death on 7 June 1843. Blending Christian and Greek themes in the manner of Pindar and Sophocles, he later deeply influenced Martin Heidegger, who called him Germany's greatest poet.
Source: Friedrich Hölderlin
