Abstract
Friedrich Hölderlin’s Hyperion oder der Eremit in Griechenland (1797–1799) plays with the Bildungsroman as a literary form. As a story of the coming-of-age of the novel itself, it is a Künstlerroman as well. When the narrator fails in his worldly aspirations, he chooses the life of a hermit. His book becomes his cloister. This essay will study Hölderlin's novel as a response to Friedrich Schiller's philosophy of freedom in and through art. In his letters Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (1795), Schiller posits a two-fold relationship between art and freedom. Art is freedom in the ideal and allows for freedom in history. In other words, moral freedom requires aesthetic freedom as a pledge to its possibility. But in Hyperion, aesthetic freedom appears as freedom itself, absolutely and without any ‘and’. History may have yet to separate itself out from life, but art does so, making a prophet of Hölderlin's Hyperion.
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