Feature photo: Hölderlin Tower in Tübingen | © Pixabay
250 years ago Friedrich Hölderlin born in Lauffen am Neckar, ergo just outside Heilbronn, almost two hundred years before my wife, who went to the Hölderlin Gymnasium as a student; actually only logical if you celebrate your birthday on the same day as the poet. Since 2013, this day, initiated by the United Nations, has also been celebrated worldwide as Happy Day.
Although he spent most of his life in Nürtingen and Tübingen, efforts are being made in Lauffen to preserve his parental home at Nordheimer Straße 5, which the family owned from 1743 to 1775, as a memory of Hölderlin; just today, after a somewhat longer renovation, this house should even be called Holderlin House and Museum be opened.
The man Hölderlin wants the Hölderlin Society, which is based in the Hölderlin Tower in Tübingen, and at the same time an understanding of the work Friedrich Hölderlins deepen, as well as promote the study and presentation of his poetry, his life and his time.
I remembered Hölderlin for the following advice, which I only really understood much later.
If you have brains and a heart, show only one of the two, they condemn you both, you show both at the same time.
Friedrich Hölderlin, Collected Works (1959: 180)
Even if Friedrich Hölderlin gained importance as a philosopher (“Judgment and Being”), he is still better known to us today as a poet. But he also worked as a translator, and at least I like his translation of Sophocles Antigone best of all translations into German.
So that you can get an impression of Hölderlin for yourself, here are three of his poems, which I had previously presented briefly on other websites.
higher humanity
People are given the meaning within,
That they choose the best as acknowledged,
It's the goal, it's real life
From which the spiritual years of life count.
Then and now
In younger days I was glad in the morning
In the evening I wept; now that i'm older
I start my day doubting, yes
His end is holy and happy for me.
The comfort of this world
I have enjoyed the pleasant things in this world,
The youth hours are, how long! how long! passed,
April and May and Julius are far away,
I'm nothing anymore, I don't like living anymore!
And also today has us Friedrich Hölderlin If I still have something to say, I am sure that in the coming days his work PATMOS will be quoted more often:
is near
First four lines from PATMOS (Hölderlin 1959: 270ff)
And elusive the god.
But where there is danger, it grows
The rescue too.
