The Insane Poet on the Stage: Friedrich Hölderlin in Twentieth-Century Theatre

Friedrich Hölderlin was depicted as the insane poet par excellence in a number of plays and representations in the 20th century in Europe. On the stage, Hölderlin’s insanity almost turned into a cliché, symbolizing the incompatibility of life and art, of personal commitment and success, of idealism and reality. A good example is the play Hölderlin by Peter Weiss (1971), where the poet is confronted with the characters of his own writings, such as Empedocles, and with his contemporaries: a remarkable intertextual nexus is achieved, giving rise to multiple levels of expression and possible interpretations of folly, up to its very denegation. My contribution aims to describe and compare the major examples of this literary, theatrical and cultural trend, setting it into the general frame of the 20th century reflection on the boundaries between health and disease, the role of the intellectual inside the community and the tragic dimension of a poetry rejecting compromise.