She was a banker’s wife, beautiful, cultured and sensitive. He is a poet of great hopes, called to educate her son. Both were under thirty, in a world that was changing. When their relationship overstepped the tolerated limit, he was forced to leave the tutor’s post and the banker’s home. He moved to a neighboring town, but he didn’t give up seeing it. They continued to meet in secret, exchanged passionate letters, told each other the days, hours and minutes spent in mutual waiting.
The love between Susette Borckenstein-Gontard and Friedrich Hölderlin has entered the literary chronicles and has ignited the imagination of artists and writers over time. How to imagine a love triangle more poignant and dramatic than the one that opposes money to the ideal of art? On the one hand, a poet who will end his days in isolation and madness; on the other, a banker who had chosen as his motto “Business first“. Among them is a young woman, mother of four, who plays the piano, draws, reads and writes. And he falls madly in love.
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The poet walks away
Love will not triumph. The poet definitively distances himself from his beloved and from the city, in search of a new economic sustenance, starting that tormented path that will lead him to mental clouding in a few years, while the woman, undermined by a lung disease, dies of rubella. The banker will not be long in remarrying.
Her letters will remain, some sketches of his, the writings inspired by this clandestine relationship. There will remain imaginative reconstructions, hardly credible anecdotes, unfounded speculations. Around the unhappy destiny of Friedrich and Susette, novels, dramas and poems will be written, films will be made, the aura of a tragic love will spread because it is absolute. The pages left blank by the scant documents received will be filled with imaginary dialogues. Already in the nineteenth century the stylized icons of the two lovers appear joined, in a sort of double medallion.
Diotima
Soon the historical figure of Susette Gontard will be identified with the literary character of Diotima, as Hölderlin represents him in the novel Hyperion and elsewhere in his verses. And when in the twentieth century her letters will finally be “rediscovered” – that is, torn from the reserve imposed by current morality – the publishers will find it appropriate to publish them under the title Diotima’s letters, as if it were not really a woman in flesh and blood who wrote them, but a literary projection, a shadow of the poet, or rather his “inspiring muse”.