In Hölderlin, Peter Weiss recreates the life and revolutionary times of one of Germany’s greatest and most influential poets, Frederich Hölderlin. ‘I wanted,’ Weiss wrote, ‘to describe something of the conflict that arises in a person who suffers to the point of madness from the injustices, the humiliations in his society, who completely supports the revolutionary upheavals, and yet does not find the praxis with which the misery can be remedied . . .’ As Robert Cohen notes in his introduction, ‘As a theater of the senses, Hölderlin is a successor ‘ to Marat/Sade.'

PETER ULRICH WEISS (1916–82) was a German playwright, novelist, filmmaker and painter. His works include the play Marat/Sade and The New Trial and the novels The Shadow of the Body of the Coachman and The Conversation of the Three Walkers. The Georg Büchner Prize was awarded to Weiss posthumously in 1982.

JON SWAN is the author of two collections of poems, Journeys and Return and A Door to the Forest, and a collection of one-act plays, a number of which were performed off-Broadway and elsewhere.