„Ich erfinde Gestalten, die es gegeben hat.“ – Auto-Biographische Annäherungen bei Peter Härtling
“I invent characters that already existed.” – Auto-Biographical Approaches by Peter Härtlingd

Summary/Abstract: In his book Hölderlin Peter HÄRTLING writes about a very famous German poet. Already in the first sentence HÄRTLING’s narrator points out that he is not going to write a biography, but “perhaps an approach” – which means: HÄRTLING’s approach to HÖLDERLIN. Here, this article takes its starting point, arguing that HÄRTLING’s writing about HÖLDERLIN includes both biographical and autobiographical elements, as biographical writing described as an “approach” necessarily contains self-descriptions of the author. This becomes very evident when HÄRTLING compares his own life-experiences to HÖLDERLIN’s. Moreover it is totally obvious when the narrator reflects on his own way of writing about and portraying HÖLDERLIN. In this literary process of approaching, HÄRTLING’s narrator retrieves and invents HÖLDERLIN. By literizating his literary portraits and images, HÖLDERLIN seems to come alive by having his true image implyed. In this case, this is nothing but HÄRTLING’s very own image of HÖLDERLIN. On the whole even the process of fictionalizating HÖLDERLIN’s images by HÄRTLING says more about the narrator himself than about HÖLDERLIN. HÄRTLING only knows HÖLDERLIN as a character described by other authors or painters. This fact requires some clarification, namely that HÄRTLING’s portraying can be nothing but an approach to a fictional character. Furthermore, it is important to notice that this approach takes place in the fictional space. This means that HÄRTLING puts himself into this fictional space where he becomes a fictional character. More precisely, the fictional characters of HÖLDERLIN and HÄRTLING are approached to each other in this fictional space, and in this very process, both the biographical aspects (related to HÖLDERLIN) and the autobiographical aspects (related to HÄRTLING) come up. Therefore I call this kind of writing “auto-biographical writing”.

• Details
• Contents