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Arts & Communication Reading Hölderlin in an exhibition

eye movements are documented as a trace of lines, nets, poems have been characterized by visible artificial forms
and dots, our gestures and body movements as a moving like no other literary genre. Stanza shapes, verse measures,
outline figure, the slower or faster heartbeat as a rhythm line indents, and free space on the paper determine a
of smaller and larger circles, the voice with its pitches poem’s outline and its internal rhythmic structure. Poems
and volumes as a pattern of thicker and thinner strokes, arise because linguistic form and linguistic individuality
sometimes lower, sometimes higher. At the reflection rub up against each other. Poetry manuscripts are often
station, words can be selected in multiple-choice. In written so purely that apparent externalities, such as
the projected word cloud, the word selected by the most writing and paper choice, become part of the poem. In
visitors appears the largest. (cf. https://www.blubbmedia. cases where form makes the poem, as in concrete poetry,
com/hoelderlin-beatbox-making-of/) there is no other way.
6. Condensing. Reading Hölderlin in the “Verklären” (“Transfigure”) applies to the particular
Archive dating of poems. In the case of the late Hölderlin,
misdating and incorrect information are evident (the
Hölderlin, more than any other German-language poet, Scardanelli poems have, in part, fictitious dating from the
has shaped the image we still have of poetry today — a 18 and 20 centuries). In Celan’s case, there are numerous
th
th
dark, not entirely comprehensible, but beautiful and re-datings and, ultimately, deletions of datings. The
touching expression of an ego in a state of emergency. Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach hold corresponding
Celan takes up this tradition. Poetry becomes, for him, manuscripts on this phenomenon, including those by
an existential concern, which, to express itself adequately, Rilke, Benn, and Hesse. To preface this: “one of the first
is highly artificial and, in parts, hermetic. Hölderlin, like poets to date his poems was Friedrich Georg Klopstock.
Celan, wrote poems over and over again, placed them in He chronologically arranged his odes to autobiography
personal life contexts, dedicated them to a person, and in poems. Poetry appears inseparable from a very special
dated them. On paper, Celan stages scriptural exchanges, moment. This transfiguration of ordinary dates goes
word fields, and axes, signs of pauses and breathing, blank hand in hand with the opposite—a gradual distancing of
spaces, and “shattered words” that appear to undermine the author from his poem. “Only ‘gedichtlang’ are we the
Hölderlin’s writing as he works his poems out of the depths confidants of our own poems,” writes Celan in his sketches
of the paper, layer by layer, like a plastic form. Now and for the so-called Meridian-Rede . “If we were it beyond
[5]
then, dotted lines can still be found in his manuscripts. the duration of its creation, our poem would thereby lose
He must have tapped the beat on the paper with his pen. the mystery of the one who encounters us — we are also,
But what do poems actually look like when they are as its ‘I,’ the first ‘you’ of our poems — it would be, since it
created? What visible processes are used to “condense” a would no longer come to us, from us and thus producible
poem? What comes from poetry into the archive? How do at any time, and thus no longer a poem.” Words go through
Hölderlin’s and Celan’s poetry manuscripts compare with a process, undergo a qualitative change to become “the
others? The curatorial team has taken examples from the word in the poem.”
Marbach holdings of, among others, Rainer Maria Rilke,
Else Lasker-Schüker, Jakob van Hoddis, Gottfried Benn, 7. Quoting. Reading Hölderlin with Others
Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Sarah Kirsch, Marie Luise Hölderlin’s poems are, for the most part, too long to fit on
Kaschnitz, Eduard Mörike, Helmut Heißenbüttel, Ilse one page. Their readers, therefore, often look to him for what
Aichinger, Rudolf Borchardt, and Franz Mon, and arranged Paul Celan referred to as “compact passages” (unpublished
the found objects into a fragmentary glossary of poetry in note in Celan’s estate, D 90.1.3305, March 1966, as a mark to
the archive, ranging from “Schön” (“beautiful”) and “Nur a Hölderlin verse) — beautiful, enigmatic, memorable, and
für Dich” (“only for you”) to “Atmen” (“breathe”) and quotable on their own, but also resistant, ambivalent word
“Zerlegen” (“disassemble”), “Formatieren” (“formatting”), combinations. Which Hölderlin words affected writers in
and “Verklären” (“transfigure”) to “Unsicher” (“uncertain”). the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries? The

The keywords in this glossary are each briefly explained curatorial team has searched the archives and library for
with a text and then shown with examples. For “Schön,” Hölderlin quotations. One focus is on Celan, the Hölderlin
“Beautiful,” for example, there are examples by Rilke, reader, whose extensive estate is housed in the Deutsches
Hofmannsthal, Hoddis, Else Lasker-Schüler, and Celan, Literaturarchiv Marbach. This exhibition chapter is
which correspond to Hölderlin’s Marbach Quartheft, the characterized by suspended text cards and vitrine tables
fair copy of his early poems from his school days, designed placed across the otherwise geometric order in the room
for cleanliness and order, which are introduced in the as an intervention within the context of the permanent
exhibition text as follows: “since the eighteenth century, exhibition in the twentieth century, allowing it to unfold

Volume 1 Issue 2 (2023) 5 https://doi.org/10.36922/ac.1467