How to read Hölderlin in a literary exhibition

Abstract

With over 150 exhibits and various installations, the exhibition Hölderlin, Celan, and the Languages of Poetry (2020/21) at the Museum of Modern Literature of the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach showcases different ways of reading Hölderlin: close reading, distant reading, scalable reading, hermeneutic and formalist-structuralist reading, text-genetic reading, production- and material-esthetic reading, as well as reception-historical-oriented reading. In addition, the exhibition explores the reading of Hölderlin’s poems with the involvement of its visitors through empirical reading research. In essence, it delves into the experience of reading Hölderlin in both the archive and in the laboratory. This article presents these Hölderlin readings in relation to literary-scientific and cognitive-psychological dimensions, and scrutinizes them concerning the particularities of the “literature exhibition” genre. It raises questions about which forms of reading and aesthetic experience of literature are at all possible in a literature exhibition, and what defines their distinctiveness in this context.