Friedrich Hölderlin

Born in Lauffen am Neckar in 1770, Hölderlin lost family early and was steered toward the Lutheran ministry. At the Tübinger Stift he roomed with Hegel and Schelling, graduated in 1793, but couldn't commit to the church and drifted into tutoring. He studied briefly at Jena in 1795, crossing paths with Fichte and Novalis, then returned to tutoring while trying to make his name as a poet. Mental illness overtook him; in 1806 a clinic declared him incurable. A carpenter named Ernst Zimmer took him in, and Hölderlin remained in that house on the Neckar for 36 years until his death in 1843. His poetry - steeped in Pindar, Sophocles, Goethe, Schiller - wove Hellenic and Christian threads into a vision that would shape German Idealism and, a century later, pull Heidegger toward the idea that Germany's deepest thinking lived in verse.