In the first edition of the General Psychopathology in 1913 there is already a hint that Jaspers was preoccupied with the role that Friedrich Hölderlin’s medical history played for his poetry. With a study by the Tübingen psychiatrist Wilhelm Lange in mind Jaspers writes: “Pathography is a delicate matter” (Jaspers 1963, p. 729). His scepsis toward psychopathographical thinking was largely prompted by Lange’s attempt not only to dismiss Hölderlin’s Tower Poems, written after 1806, as “a product of mental illness” but also to pathologize the earlier poems from the period starting in 1800, the so-called late poetry (Lange 1909, p. 100; Oelmann 2002, p. 423).

The Heidelberg philologist Norbert von Hellingrath’s view of these poems could not have been more different. Indeed it was with the first edition of this controversial late poetry that he launched the “Hölderlin renaissance” of the time. The first sentence of his foreword is a direct rebuttal of Lange: “This volume contains the heart, core, and pinnacles of Hölderlin’s oeuvre, his true legacy” (Hölderlin 1916, p. XI). So it comes as little surprise that with his background in psychiatry, Jaspers opened his study of Hölderlin a decade later with the controversy between Lange and Hellingrath, demonstrating obvious affinity with the philologist and his “foreword” (Jaspers 1926, p. 100).

The focus of this essay is Jaspers’ pathographical reading of Hölderlin from 1913/14 onward, and the positive influence that Jaspers felt the poet’s psychopathology had on his modernity . The German literary scholar Walter Müller-Seidel had made this point several years beforehand in his interpretation of Hölderlin, making direct reference to Jaspers’ topos of the “boundary situation” and emphasizing that the psychiatrist had aligned himself in his anthropology with Dilthey (Müller-Seidel 1995, p. 71).

In his essay Müller-Seidel posited an “epochal affiliation” between romanticism and modernism on the basis of their shared receptiveness to the idea of illness as “a means of higher synthesis” (Müller-Seidel 1995, p. 42 ff). Müller-Seidel paid tribute to Dilthey for championing the morbid poet in the positivistic interim of the nineteenth century, when good health was glorified: “It is the highest form of pathological interest that so intrigues us about this poet” (Müller-Seidel 1995, p. 59). Even as a young psychiatrist Jaspers impacted upon Müller-Seidel’s perspective. So it is not surprising than in his late portrait of the poet, Müller-Seidel alludes directly to Jaspers when he writes: “Hölderlin’s mental state, as is often the case in the modern period, is a boundary situation in many respects” (Müller-Seidel 1993, p. 244).

The conceptual nexus of psychopathology and modernity is not only key to Jaspers’ study of Hölderlin; it informs his entire pathographical oeuvre, as will become clear by comparing his thoughts on van Gogh, Nietzsche, and Max Weber. Amazingly, this view also surfaces in his Notizen zu Martin Heidegger [notes on Martin Heidegger] when Jaspers compares Heidegger’s famous interpretation of Hölderlin with the edition published by Hellingrath two decades earlier. Jaspers also read the elegy “Bread and Wine,” which was to become so central for Heidegger, with remarkable intensity. No other poem in Jaspers’ personal copy of the Hellingrath edition is surrounded by a greater profusion of pencil markings and notes (Hölderlin 1916).

As part of the inner circle around Max Weber, Jaspers doubtless joined other scholars from the circle at the enthusiastic readings and elucidations on Hölderlin that made Hellingrath legendary in Heidelberg around 1913/14 (Rilke and von Hellingrath 2011, p. 100). As a former psychiatrist who was now influential as a psychologist among philosophers, Jaspers would have made an attractive conversation partner for the young philologist, at a time when the late poetry was still widely regarded as an expression of psychopathological experience. Indeed in a letter dated June 1914 to Gustav Radbruch, an historian of law who belonged to the Weber circle, Jaspers writes: ’Hellingrath has published a Hölderlin volume which brings almost everything together in an entirely new way. I recently looked at some of Hölderlin’s manuscripts with him. It was most moving to have his whole life right there before me in his own handwriting. H[ellingrath] had specimens from all phases of his life’. The two men shared a graphological interest that had been kindled by Ludwig Klages in Munich, perhaps at a similar time (Schmidt 1963/64, p. 148).

Whatever the case, the meeting in Heidelberg certainly informed the Hölderlin chapter that Jaspers added in 1921 to Strindberg and van Gogh. An Attempt of a Pathographic Analysis with Reference to Parallel Cases of Swedenborg and Hölderlin. Initially he seems keen to intercede in the controversy with Lange, writing: “Both opinions, excluding each other in their evaluation, need not be incompatible in every respect, concerning the facts on which their observations are based. Lange can be correct by declaring the psychosis to be the cause of the changes in the poetry, and so can v. Hellingrath when he detects changes without asking questions in regard to the psychosis” (Jaspers 1977, p. 165). But Jaspers by no means persists in maintaining a diplomatic stance. On the one hand he rejects—in an allusion to Lange—the pathographical application of “crude categories” to such magnificent poetry: “It is quite dangerous to be quick about declaring something ‘incomprehensible’, therefore ‘crazy’, to call something void, trivial, farfetched, confused” (Jaspers 1977, p. 135 f). On the other, he reveals his admiration and respect for Hellingrath’s philological reading of Hölderlin: “If we ask what experts have said about these changes, we find the answers exceedingly instructive. We wish to refer to the excellent analyses of v. Hellingrath who makes profitable use of the difference between a rough and a smooth construction” (Jaspers 1977, p. 136).

It follows that in his pathographical outline of Lange’s thesis, which argued that from 1802 onward the psychotic process had a solely destructive impact, he directly endorses Hellingrath’s view. Namely that the late poems represent a “continuous development” which “took place until the complete collapse” and which “from a mental standpoint, is entirely understandable” (Jaspers 1977, p. 136). In Jaspers’ personal copy of the Hellingrath edition, the passages in the foreword that draw a distinction between the intelligible development of the poetry until 1806 and everything that followed, are heavily underlined and marked. Here Hellingrath writes: “This development proceeds without leap or jolt: neither the year 1801 nor the stay in France and the outward signs of madness constitute a discernible break of any kind. However, a clear line can be drawn after the final baroque step of this path: that which I have allocated to the sixth volume is no longer the directly logical continuation of the path pursued at the outset (some might call it the path to madness): there is a rupture. These are no longer the works of an artistic will striving clearly onwards (some might call it straying); the creations of effort and strain. It is a relaxed drifting, untethered by the will […]” (Hölderlin 1916, p. XIX f).

To anyone with a knowledge of psychiatry, it is clear that in differentiating between intelligible development and unintelligible process, Hellingrath is applying the famous category which became the methodological premise of Jaspers’ General Psychopathology. This is referred to in psychiatric circles today as Jaspers’ theorem of unintelligibility. Central to its pathographical relevance for Jaspers is that in “the analysis of incomprehensible causal relationships, e.g. between the onset of mental illness and an artist’s creative work” unequivocally genealogical explanations are avoided. Ultimately Jaspers regarded the sick but prodigiously talented artist as a mystery that no science could fully fathom in either psychopathological or existential terms. As he wrote in the foreword to the second edition of the pathography which was published in a series of “Philosophical Studies” in 1926: “Not by supposedly supreme insights, by which we might perhaps discover ‘the truth’, but by insights which provide the perspective from which the actual problems can be recognized” (Jaspers 1977, p. IX). Even the advanced psychotic process could have a beneficial impact on the innovative quality of the artwork, he believed: “Just as a diseased oyster can cause the growth of pearls, by the same token schizophrenic processes can be the cause of mental creations of singular quality” (Jaspers 1977, p. 134).

It is not clear whether Hellingrath arrived at this opinion in the course of his conversations with Jaspers, through the study of his methodological classic, or whether he developed it quite independently. Even in his appraisal of Hölderlin’s “Pindar Translations,” he dissociates himself from the right, claimed by Lange, to draw genealogical conclusions between work and illness, “because I must not leave the territory of pure descriptiveness and literary observation” (von Hellingrath 1944, p. 42). Like Jaspers he felt he had no authority to investigate any hidden connections to the process of the illness, his subject being the intellectual relevance of the unusual words and their idiomatic application. Thus in the speech he gave in Munich on “Hölderlin’s Madness” in 1915, Hellingrath also talks about the “mysterious” and “incomprehensible” pathology of the artist, which in the minds of many has obviously “overshadowed […] the miracle of the work.” Yet the “madness” constitutes, he suggests, “the signature of the form of his talent,” whose intellectual contours cannot be fathomed by “unbidden professional verdicts on his illness” (von Hellingrath 1944, p. 152). Von Hellingrath was undoubtedly alluding to Lange’s pathography , which rejected all productive influence of mental illness and only underscored its destructive effects: “Catatonia on the other hand completely diminished or destroyed his abilities; Hölderlin’s ‘madness’ has nothing to do with his genius” (Lange 1909, p. 216 f).

While Lange essentially sought to apply psychiatric categories to apprehend the formally and linguistically unusual nature of Hölderlin’s art as an expression of alterity, Jaspers wanted to learn from the philologists. He was inspired not only by Hellingrath but also by Wilhelm Dilthey, whose 1906 collected volume Poetry and Experience included an essay on Hölderlin (Dilthey 1916). Jaspers describes this as the “most brilliant” interpretation of Hölderlin he had encountered (Jaspers 1926, p. 102), and shows particular fascination for the way in which Dilthey—like Hellingrath—distinguished between the later poems as the highpoint of productivity and the poetry of the final period, which he describes as a mere expression of the destructive pathology: “It is the fatefulness of Hölderlin’s last epoch that his entire poetic development surged toward a complete liberation of the inner emotional rhythm from the restrictive metric form, but that he does not take this last step until he has touched the line of insanity.” Jaspers is also delighted that in reference to “Hälfte des Lebens” (The Middle of Life), Dilthey talks of the “strange and eccentric hues” in Hölderlin’s richly metaphorical language; it reminds Jaspers of the paintings by van Gogh which, on Max Weber’s recommendation, he had so enjoyed seeing in an exhibition at the Cologne Werkbund in 1912 (Jaspers 1926, p. 102).

Jaspers follows the two humanists a considerable way in their hermeneutic attempts to interpret Hölderlin’s late poetry as a sublime experience of modernity . Yet he also accentuates the psychiatric understanding that strange-seeming phenomena are the expression of a pathological process. He writes, with obvious ambivalence: “I read in the fourth volume of the v. Hellingrath edition, a different atmosphere in the linguistic and formal expression (except for a number of poems at the outset of the volume, which date back to 1800 or to the end of 1799), but I am not about to objectify this feeling” (Jaspers 1977, p. 138). Jaspers resolves the conflict with a reference to partial ruptures: “It is self-evident that we are not dealing with an absolutely sudden leap. For after all the severe state of his insanity, which undoubtedly actually represents a break, a complete snap in the development came about in the extremely slow transitions. Off and on the early process flickers more strongly, only to disappear almost altogether, until a first heavy attack changes everything almost completely” (Jaspers 1977, p. 138).

One could say that Jaspers regarded Hölderlin as a poetic mystery in whom the psychopathology acted as a productive force which enhanced his modernity, until the point where it shifted to pure destructiveness around 1806. The “understandability boundary,” which he had originally applied to otherness in psychopathology is now brought to bear on otherness in modernity . The sick artist thus appears as a doubly distinguished figure of alterity. The prerequisite for this, however, is his personal genius, which Jaspers believed links Hölderlin with van Gogh. As Jaspers wrote about van Gogh and his ability to express the spiritual and psychological destitution of the time: “The shaping and disciplining power is capable of dissolving the shock. Just as his painting serves van Gogh as a lightning rod, so Hölderlin’s poetry is his salvation” (Jaspers 1926, p. 112).

At the beginning of 1888, Nietzsche described the new fashion for discrediting unusual thinking as an expression of illness, exactly a year before he himself was overcome by mental illness in Turin: “But a man is constantly paying for holding such an isolated position by an isolation which becomes every day more complete, more icy, and more cutting. […] They are now getting out of the difficulty with such words as ‘eccentric’, ‘pathological’, ‘psychiatric’” (Nietzsche 1921). Several years earlier in the first essay of his Untimely Meditations he had already struck out against the conservative educated classes, positing the huge value of psychopathology over psychological well-being in the quest for deeper knowledge: “For it is a cruel fact that ‘the spirit’ is accustomed most often to descend upon the ‘unhealthy and unprofitable’, and on those occasions when he is honest with himself even the philistine is aware that the philosophies his kind produce and bring to market are in many ways spiritless, though they are of course extremely healthy and profitable” (Nietzsche 1983, p. 28). The target of his attacks was the “cultural philistine” of the Gründerjahre who had a tendency to try to ignore points of view that he considered uncomfortable and unusual, and to therefore brand them as pathological: “Finally he invents for his habits, modes of thinking, likes and dislikes, the general formula ‘healthiness’, and dismisses the ever uncomfortable disturber of the peace as being sick or neurotic” (Nietzsche 1983, p. 12). It is no accident that Nietzsche responded by taking a stand for “the memory of the glorious Hölderlin,” distinguishing him from the others as a “non-philistine” with the ironic question as to “whether he would have been able to find his way in the present great age” (Nietzsche 1983, p. 12).

Nietzsche’s criticism of the Gründerzeit ideology of good health contrasts starkly with the psychiatric topos of genius and madness, whose considerable popularity at the time was largely due to Cesare Lombroso’s genio e fillia of 1887 (Lombroso 1887). The artistic avant-garde, which was pushing vehemently, subversively and provocatively for political, social and economic change, was diagnosed as degenerate, and Lombroso was regarded as its chief enemy (Nordau 1892, p. VIII). The German equivalent of the Italian psychiatrist was, Max Nordau was the leading champion of this pathologizing discourse. His standard work Degeneration from 1892 psychiatrized entire social groups which, like the modernist artists and their followers, did not conform to the moral ideals of the ruling middle classes (Nordau 1892, p. 469). “Degenerates are not always criminals, anarchists, and pronounced lunatics; they are often authors and artists” (Nordau 1913, p. VII). In the cultural crisis it is the doctor, he said, who takes on the important task of examining questionable intellectual works, specifically seeking out their pathological genesis, in order to warn against them with the authority of a professional.