Hölderlin, Kleist, and Nietzsche by Stefan Zweig

Readers expecting standard literary biographies will be disappointed, as will those looking for a systematic analysis of each writer's works. Quotations are often unacknowledged or described casually as 'from a letter' and, apart from a head-and-shoulders portrait of each writer, graphical illustrations are absent. The text is unsupported by the usual academic buttresses: there is no citation of referenced works, no bibliography, and no appendices. This, the second volume, presents Hölderlin, Kleist, and Nietzsche under the title The Struggle with the Daemon. Volume one deals with Balzac, Dickens, and Dostoevsky volume three deals with Casanova, Stendhal, and Tolstoy. This book is the second volume of a remarkable trilogy Master Builders: An Attempt at the Typology of the Spirit, each volume of which presents essays on three European writers, and is thus a trilogy within a trilogy. I am glad that after so many decades an English translation is now again in print. This is a fundamental book that must be in all personal libraries of those concerned with intuitive psychology. However, unlike Miller's slim chapter on Nietzsche, Zweig's lyrics in his triple biography are a literary treat. Zweig committed suicide in 1942, forty-six years before Alice Miller finally deciphered with The Untouched Key: Tracing Childhood Trauma in Creativity and Destructiveness why did Nietzsche lost his mind. I would agree with him to a certain point. According to Walter Kaufmann, Zweig's chapter on Nietzsche is still unsurpassed. Zweig's Struggle with the Daemon is a good starting point to understand the tormented souls. Holderlin and Nietzsche became mad Kleist committed suicide. It is a scandal that we still lack what in The Divided Self Laing called a 'science of the persons'.

This category error permeates the academia (to understand concrete people it's necessary a subjective or an empathetic history of these people). Unfortunately, by pretending to approach the subject of the human psyche on the basis of abstract principles, psychoanalysis, academic psychology and psychiatry usurped the study of the inner self and approached the human soul from the impossible viewpoint of objectivism. I have read quite a few of Stefan Zweig books, but his study of Holderlin, Kleist, and Nietzsche in The Struggle with the Daemon ('Daimon' in the older 1930s editions) is the most insightful of all.Īfter Romanticism the genre of confessional autobiography cropped up.

Hölderlin, Kleist, and Nietzsche by Stefan Zweig