Sebastian Truskolaski: “The Life of the Community”: Gustav Landauer Reads Friedrich Hölderlin

Lecture in the Carolina-Duke Graduate Program in German Studies, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and Duke University

On 13 March 1916, at the height of the First World War, the German-Jewish writer, philosopher, and anarchist activist, Gustav Landauer, gave a lecture at the Berlin Women’s Club of 1900 bearing the indistinct title “Friedrich Hölderlin in his Poems.” The lecture—which focuses on the Hölderlin’s hymn “The Thine” (1802), and which forms part of a cycle on the theme of “Celestial and Terrestrial Love in the Poetry of Goethe and the Romantics”—is remarkable for its characteristic double movement: on the one hand, its effort to derive from Hölderlin the resources for a resolute rejection of German militarism; on the other hand, its attempt to outline a mode of community beyond the modern nation state, which Landauer describes emphatically as a “community of love”. In this talk, I propose that the ‘community’ in question, here, exceeds the text’s stated intentions, thus inviting a renewed reflection on what is common in community, or, put differently, what it might mean to think a non-coercive form of sociality in the medium of poetry—with Hölderlin and Landauer, and, indeed, beyond them.

Sebastian Truskolaski is an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation research fellow at the ZfL with the project Gestures of Community: Reading Hölderlin with Benjamin, Landauer, and Rosenzweig.