Amid Germania’s Holidays

Heidegger begins his first lecture course on Hölderlin in a curious manner. Lest we think Hölderlin was a “pacifist,” Heidegger cites two letters and a poem meant to prove that Hölderlin was ready to “throw the pen under the table” and “deny the Muses love” for the sake of the “beautiful sacrifice” of battle, should duty call. This quickly complicates, as Heidegger argues, the then common view of Hölderlin’s poetry as “unheroic” and advocating the “defenselessness” (Wehrlosigkeit) of Germania, particularly in the last verses of the eponymously titled poem: “Amid your holidays / Germania, where you are priestess /and defenselessly (wehrlos) proffer all round counsel / to kings and peoples.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, Heidegger bookends the lecture course with another reference to the word “defenselessly,” insisting that it does not denote “the laying down of weapons, weakness, or the avoidance of struggle.” In this paper, I attempt to draw connections between Heidegger’s militaristic readings of “Germania” and a provocative verse from the untitled poem “As when on a holiday…” that evokes “the clang of weapons” as nature is awakened from her deep sleep. I shall be relating Heidegger’s reading of this verse to a sinister “equivocality” so brilliantly diagnosed by Jacques Derrida in “Geschlecht IV.” In the wake of Derrida’s provocative suggestion that Heidegger’s treatment of polemos can offer Hitler “the worthiest and the most thinking justification” for ontic warmongering, I look at how Heidegger’s militaristic readings of Hölderlin only deepen the equivocality of polemos, and this in spite of Heidegger’s efforts to dissipate any ambiguity between Kampf as he thought it and the Kampf of the author of Mein Kampf.