'... Die Freiheit, Aufzubrechen...: Holderlin Hegel Beethoven'

"... the freedom / To be gone ...", as Friedrich Holderlin wrote in "Lebenslauf" ("The Course of Life"), can be seen as the key to the culture of the turn before and after 1800. The impulse to think freedom, which determined Holderlin's poetry and thinking, Hegel's speculative philosophy, Beethoven's composing, is an impulse that also guided Schiller, Goethe, and many others, and is valid even today.