GERMAN LITERARY CULTURE has at least two not unappealing idiosyncrasies. First, few cultures, if any, are as energetic as Germany's in publishing critical editions. In American bookstores, one doesn't see anything like the range of collected works one finds in Germany. There is even a joke related to the phenomenon: “Ein Geschäftsmann geht in die Buchhandlung,” and says, “Drei Meter Goethe, bitte.”—to which the bookseller replies: “Hmmm, was für eine Ausgabe?!” (A German businessman walks into a bookstore and says, “Three meters of Goethe, please” to which the bookseller replies: “Hmmm, which edition?!”)

To invest in critical editions is not to be free of controversy, as the critical editions of Hölderlin make clear. The edition of Norbert Hellingrath, which James McFarland discusses, made the poet both known and accessible to early twentieth-century readers. Friedrich Beißner's Stuttgarter Ausgabe was a model of philological complexity and exactitude, only to be countered by D. E. Sattler's Frankfurter Ausgabe, which emphasized the fluidity of Hölderlin's poems, with their constant revisions. Affordable editions with superb commentary and selective philological innovations also exist, such as Jochen Schmidt's three-volume collection. A reliable text is of course a necessary condition of good interpretation, even if certain hermeneutic principles are also essential. Heidegger's reading of “Andenken” (Remembrance), for example, was developed without access to the full poem. Moreover, Heidegger lifted lines without weighing their meaning within the whole. Although Adorno's critique of Heidegger was justified, his own elevation of parataxis, while fitting for “Hälfte des Lebens” (Half of Life), hardly seems to capture the complex, interwoven hypotaxis that dominates the mature Hölderlin's odes, elegies, and hymns.

A second distinctive feature of the German landscape is the extraordinary attention given to anniversaries. In 2020 we celebrated the 250-year anniversaries of Hölderlin, Hegel, and Beethoven, the ambitions for which were of course more extensive than could be realized. I don't recall quite such an impressive array of events planned for Wordsworth, who was also born in 1770. But even if one wanted to argue that Wordsworth's anniversary would have been celebrated on the level of these Germans, were it not for the pandemic, I am not familiar with any other country that celebrates the anniversaries of not only major but also minor figures as thoroughly as Germany does.

THERE IS A NICE JOKE ABOUT ACADEMICS. It goes something like this: “You join another professor for lunch, and he immediately and incessantly talks only about himself. After twenty minutes, he pauses and says, ‘Enough about me. Let me tell you about my work.’ Then after listening to him pour forth for another twenty minutes, you finally hear, ‘OK. Enough about my work. Let me tell you what others are saying about my work.’”

The joke evokes our unease about talking too much about ourselves or hearing more than we want about others. Yet I want to balance it with a story that offers the opposite perspective and might help justify our anthology and this essay. Some years ago I finished the draft of a book about the value of a liberal arts education (Roche 2010). I gave it to two colleagues for feedback. By coincidence I received their feedback the same day. I had lunch with a historian who liked it but observed that it operated mainly at the conceptual level. In order to grab the reader, he said, historians tend to open their books with stories. Where are you in the book? You went to Williams, you studied abroad, you led a liberal arts college. Why don't you wind your own story into the book? I then had dinner with a philosopher, who said: It's good, but much too positive, too idealistic. You need to talk about the challenges of realizing the liberal arts, especially with faculty members who might be unwilling to move beyond their own specialty or discipline. That weekend I dictated 10,000 words to my computer, all personal anecdotes, which I then slowly wound into the book. Those personal stories gave the manuscript color and texture, and so it became a much better book, more than a string of concepts. I found the genre—integrating ideas, anecdotes, and statistics—appealing enough that I chose it again when writing a book on challenges and strategies in serving as a dean (Roche 2017).

So at the risk of falling into the role of the ugly academic, I will, as I believe can sometimes be interesting or even helpful to others, tell you my tale, winding into it responses to the questions we have been asked to consider.

Common refrain today is that tragedy is either not possible or hopelessly unable to do justice to our age. Arguments for this view are diverse. They include, among others, the transition from what the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico called the age of heroes, where one single individual could still direct the course of history, to the age of men, when the due procedure of civic institutions, and no longer the great individual, became the guarantor of order, justice, and historical change.

I, too, believe that tragedy is not as vibrant a genre as it once was, but that claim does not imply that tragedy will not come again (we have had ages without great tragedies, such as the Roman age), nor does it mean that tragedy is not valid as an aesthetic form (our modest number of tragedies may speak against our age). It also does not mean that tragedy is not present in subtle and often overlooked ways.

Vestiges of the tragic remain, I argue, first, in a small number of stage tragedies, albeit with distinctly modern accents, which move away from some of the conventions of traditional tragedy; second, in a form analogous to, but different from, tragedy, which I call the drama of suffering; third, in the parody of tragedy, which may not only mock tragedy but in some instances may indirectly and paradoxically reinforce the value of tragedy; fourth, in literature beyond drama, for example, in novels and films; and finally, outside art altogether.

I

I take tragedy to be a form that exhibits the organic connection between greatness and suffering, that is, a specific form of greatness necessarily leads to suffering. I note at least three ways in which tragedy can be realized. In the tragedy of self-sacrifice the hero pursues the good despite knowing that she will suffer for it. Prominent examples in modernity include Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons and Hochhuth’s Der Stellvertreter (The Deputy). In the tragedy of stubbornness the hero exhibits greatness in realizing secondary virtues, such as ambition, courage, and steadfastness, which, however, are in the service of an ultimately unjust or aberrant goal and which drive her and often others to ruin.