The Dear (le tout cher)

“Mein Karl!” Friedrich Hölderlin writes to his half brother from Hauptwil in March 1801, “I feel we no longer love one another as before and have not done for a long time, and this is my fault. I was the first to introduce the cold tone” (Werke 897/Essays 198).³ Already several themes are introduced. A provisional outline of some of them will help to separate several layers that have been merged. Once we have worked on them a bit—a lighter note here, a warmer tone there, an increase in emphasis or contrast elsewhere—we may merge them again.