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Arts & Communication Reading Hölderlin in an exhibition

die Liebeszeichen/Die Blumen im kahlen Felde suche/u. 8.8. Moving reading
dich nicht finde.” (“The rose/fair sister!/Where will I take Reading in a literature exhibition, unlike reading at home,
the flowers when it is winter/To make wreaths for the is always a public and moving act. We stand and move,
celestials?/Then it will be as if I never knew of the divine/ and when we sit down, we do so consciously. We become
For the spirit of life has departed from me/When I seek the more aware again of the body as a coplayer of the mind,
signs of love for the heavenly ones/The flowers in the barren as well as of reading as an act. In the exhibition Hölderlin,
field/And do not find you.”, translated into English by Celan and the Languages of Poetry, we have shown this
DeepL [manuscript: Württembergische Landesbibliothek, physicality of reading by putting the visitors in different
Hölderlin-Archiv, Stuttgarter Foliobuch, Cod.poet.et.phil. viewing and reading postures. For example, finding
fol.63, I, 6, folios 17 and ). elements that invite you to walk upright (like the chapter
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8.6. Deconstructive reading “Understanding”), things that you have to bring towards
you (like the suspended reading cards from the chapter
This insight into the “made-ness” of literature can invite “Quoting”), or chairs that you have to sit on (like in the
a reading that is self-continuing writing or a reading that chapter “Sensing”). In addition to the sense of sight, the
critically takes apart and also takes into view what is not sense of touch and hearing are challenged, as well as one’s
there or what is somewhere else. This deconstruction is own voice.
invited not only by methods of arranging the exhibition in
space (such as rows and layers, isolating and contrasting) 8.9. Meta-reading
but also by the objects themselves. For an author like Paul Reading in a literature exhibition is always a staging of
Celan, whose parents died in a labor camp in 1942 (the reading. We feel like readers here simply because of the
father of typhus, the mother slain by an SS soldier), reading objects on display or even just a certain atmosphere that we
Hölderlin and writing after Hölderlin means, above all, associate with literature — even when we are not reading.
deconstructing him, uncovering these texts obscured by Rüdiger Campe has called this reading, in which the text is
an interpretive tradition. From Hölderlin’s Andenken/ materially experienced through psychophysical affectations
Souvenir, Celan took the words “Augen” (“eyes”) and such as an ornamental script or a ritualized practice of
“Feigen” (“figs”). In Tübingen, Jänner/Tübingen, January, handling books, “allegorical reading” — the mediatory
he underlined the two Hölderlin quotations: “ein/Rätsel ist consummation of reading on the reader’s body, imagining
Rein-/entsprungenes” (in this ambivalent sense: “a/riddle the text whole and in the literalness of what is narrated .
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is in/out,” “purebred,” and “Rhine risen”) from Der Rhein Aleida Assmann describes the opacity of writing, its
and “Pallaksch. Pallaksch,” the “yes” and “no” significant resistibility, and illegibility, and thus also the transformation
favorite turn of the old Hölderlin. Celan reduced and of texts into images and exhibitable objects, as well as the
fragmented the Hölderlin material to a substance that reading method belonging to it — deconstruction — as a
stands for what remains when almost nothing is left. consequence of digitalization and the media multiplicity
This substance eludes. It resists any attempt to establish that exists with it — after the technique of refraining from
unambiguity. In one of his hitherto unpublished notebooks, the mediality of texts, we are now developing a technique
Celan wrote of a Hölderlin verse: “Das Gedicht und seine of concentrating on precisely this mediality . In a literary
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kompakten Stellen. Widerstand — auch — von daher.” exhibition that focuses per se on the mediality of literature,
(“The poem and its compact passages. Resistance — also we imagine literature and aesthetic experiences associated
— from there.” translated into English by DeepL). with it, such as atmosphere, silence, immersion, sign-
thickness, ambiguity, complexity, understanding, feeling,
8.7. De-automated reading sensitivity, individuality, education, boredom, excessive
Reading in a literary exhibition is often the experience of demands, and non-understanding.
alienation. Texts can only be deciphered with difficulty or
not at all and are then also often available in a different 9. Resume: Staring at the reading
version or order than published. Unlike books, exhibitions There is one way of reading in a museum, in an exhibition,
are not, or only very rarely, organic reading worlds with that I have left out of this list: immersive reading. We do
a beginning, middle, and end, but rather usually places not lose ourselves in novels in an exhibition, but we can still
of multiple and multimedia reading, where different text lose ourselves in the exhibition space, for instance through
genres and media stand side by side. In this mixture, they immersive exhibition techniques (such as light, projection
are more like illustrated newspapers, where we repeatedly and sound, virtual and augmented reality). Also, looking
develop new reading attitudes at short intervals and can become immersive, and in looking, we can forget
practice cross-reading. ourselves on the things we otherwise read — we stare at

Volume 1 Issue 2 (2023) 9 https://doi.org/10.36922/ac.1467