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Arts & Communication Reading Hölderlin in an exhibition

as something holistic, great, and profound develops. show how texts can not only be visualized as a data series
This idea can only be experienced and comprehended and thus become visible in a new way but can also be
adequately through ascetic, silent, and private reading. If experienced differently. This allows us to see them more
this historical and completely non-obligatory equation of a abstractly and tangibly at the same time, making us aware
genre and a particular form of reading is dissolved, literary of aspects we might otherwise overlook, fail to consciously
exhibitions as sites of particular literary experiences perceive, or take for granted.
become renegotiable. (i) Punctuation marks do structure a text, direct
In the following, I would like to describe some of accentuation, and pauses and are decisive for the
these literary experiences that I believe readers can meaning of a sentence. Unlike everyday language,
make particularly well — and perhaps only — in literary however, poetry can completely omit punctuation
exhibitions. The examples are taken from the exhibition marks, thereby gaining a sense of auditory
Hölderlin, Celan, and the Languages of Poetry (Deutsches enchantment. Young Hölderlin used punctuation
Literaturarchiv Marbach/Literaturmuseum der Moderne, marks to emphasize the verse boundaries, as well as
May 23, 2020 – August 1, 2021), which focuses on lyrical to use commas, exclamation marks, question marks,
texts as a genre of text that can be particularly well exhibited and dashes to interrupt the flow of words within a
due to its special, compact, dense, and thus structural- line and cross the verse boundaries. These complex
visual nature. I will describe the concept of this exhibition, and unstable tensions between verse and sentence
which I curated and which invites visitors to different structure gradually dissolve in Hölderlin’s work,
literary experiences. Then, I will attempt to analyze as verse and sentence boundaries fall into one. Of
Hölderlin’s 13,989 lines of verse, 5874 end without
this exhibition from the perspective of communication punctuation marks. They feature commas 9889 times,
psychology through a theoretical excursus on reading and periods 2929 times, exclamation marks 1840 times,
text understanding. My aim is to unfold in this way the semicolons 663 times, dashes 550 times, question
special potential of the genre of literary exhibitions for marks 430 times, and colons 72 times.
the esthetic experience of literature and to illuminate this (ii) Nouns are lonely, verbs are docile, adjectives are
genre as a poetic reading and thinking laboratory.
helpless — this is how the Danish writer Inger
[4]
2. Counting. Reading Hölderlin with Your Christensen once interpreted the relationships
Fingers in our language. If one reduces Hölderlin’s texts
to the main activity and characteristic words that
In this chapter of the exhibition, the Hölderlin poem occur most frequently in them, a framework of
Hälfte des Lebens, first published in 1804, is presented simple and everyday words remains. Of a total of
as an interactive model of poetry with two views (text 21788 nouns, 3579 fall among the 20 most frequent:
or structure) and a sound body. The aim is to open up to “Gott” and “Götter” (“god” and “gods,” 351 times),
all visitors the many possibilities with which we can read “Mensch” (“human,” 274), “Leben” (“life,” 261), “Tag”
poems (cf. also: https://www.literatursehen.com/projekt/ (“day,” 260), “Herz” (“heart,” 218), “Seele” (“soul,” 206),
hoelderlin-celan-und-die-sprachen-der-poesie/and https:// “Geist” (“spirit,” 203), “Liebe” (“love,” 193),
www.literatursehen.com). Poems resemble bodies, have “Himmel” (“heaven,” 191), “Erde” (“earth,” 184),
something like surface and depth, center, edges and “Zeit” (“time,” 181), “Vater” (“father,” 160), “Freude”
borders, top and bottom, front and back, are outline, (“joy,” 136), “Auge” (“eye,” 131), “Nacht” (“night,”
scheme, and filling. When we take a closer look at them, we 118), “Natur” (“nature,” 114), “Kind” (“child,” 113),
often use our fingers and pencils to tackle them and count “Gesang” (“song,” 96), “Mann” (“man,” 95), and
signs and sounds, letters, syllables, vowels, feet, rhymes, “Welt” (“world,” 94). The result of this noun counting
words, lines, sentences, figures, places, motifs, threads is a poetic and visual kind of text profiling. Eleven
of action, and levels of meaning. This poetic-analytical thousand six hundred and twenty of Hölderlin’s words
reading, scaling between proximity, depth, and distance, is are verbs. Normalized to a basic form, the verbs
the opposite of flow and exegesis, of translating a text into “sein” (“be,” 1767) and “haben” (“have,” 236) are the
a sense outside of it. Digital analyses of Hölderlin’s poems most frequently used, followed by the process and
complement this model of poetry in this room: Which perception verbs “kommen” (“come,” 194), “sehen”
words are at the beginning of Hölderlin’s verses? Which (“see,” 177), and “gehen” (“go,” 169). Modal verbs,
rhyming words are at the end? What does he do with verse like “wollen” (“want,” 134), “müssen” (“must,” 86),
boundaries and punctuation marks? What function do “lassen” (“let,” 77), “sollen” (“should,” 77), and
vowels and consonants, nouns, adjectives, and verbs have? “können” (“can,” 69), are also common, as are poetic
Three examples that I would like to reproduce in detail to verbs that fit the direct speech of a poem like “singen”

Volume 1 Issue 2 (2023) 2 https://doi.org/10.36922/ac.1467