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“... Friedrich Hölderlin was rescued from oblivion by a young German scholar called Norbert von Hellingrath, who wrote a dissertation on Hölderlin’s translations of Pindar and began the first historical-critical edition of his works. In 1915, a year before he died at Verdun, Hellingrath delivered a lecture describing Hölderlin as ‘the most German of Germans’, whose luminous hymns confide their message ‘only to the select few’ and remain ‘perhaps never penetrable to non-Germans ...”

“... Poor in deeds and rich in thoughts’ – that was Friedrich Hölderlin’s lament about his fellow Germans two hundred years ago. In one form or another the idea became familiar. Germany in the 19th century acquired a reputation as the land of poets and thinkers (the phrase was coined by Jean Paul), something that foreign observers viewed with a mixture of condescension and respect ...”

“... Perhaps it’s just the best we can do. Perhaps we should have stuck to philosophy.Caspar David Friedrich is a possible exception. Born in 1774 in Greifswald on the Baltic coast, he studied painting in Copenhagen and in 1798 moved to Dresden, the so-called or self-styled ‘Florence on the Elbe’, where he died in 1840. A major retrospective of his work is ...”

“... tweaked their ideal of Ancient Greece over time. The version of Greece that Schiller, Goethe and Hölderlin worshipped was imaginary, and they seemed to have avoided visiting the country for fear of tarnishing their ideal. Few Germans of intellectual consequence visited Greece in the 18th or 19th centuries – not during the Greek War of Independence, or in ...”

“... well, we just ate with the most famous of modern philosophers – Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.’ Hegel was certainly a celebrity. One of his reasons for being away then from Berlin was that in the previous August he’d been given a birthday party in the new Unter den Linden restaurant so extravagant as to cause the papers to devote more ...”

“... belonged to them. Before long August and Caroline Schlegel also settled in Jena, followed by Friedrich and Dorothea Schlegel. Then Hölderlin arrived, and in 1798 his brilliant young friend Schelling – a 23-year-old professor with an irresistible sulky pout. Together they formed ‘an eternal concert of ...”

“... of Heidegger – a debt that was plainly acknowledged, and formative for de Man’s thinking about Hölderlin. He was not drawn to ‘dwelling’ or Being or any other marker of serenity apart from ‘crisis’; he argued in a series of essays that the attraction of such gestures for Hölderlin had been greatly exaggerated ...”