HÖLDERLIN 2020 INADVERTENTLY became Hölderlin 2021. In the wake of COVID-19, an entire year of exhibits, readings, concerts, lectures, and even a musical had to be postponed or moved to other, often virtual venues for the ambitious program, planned to celebrate the 250th birthday of the great German poet Friedrich Hölderlin. Some events were deferred to 2021. Celebrations began in Lauffen am Neckar with the opening of the “Hölderlin House” at Nordheimerstr. 5, which, since the 1970s, has been thought to be the residence of the family into which Hölderlin was born on March 20, 1770. There were also celebrations in Nürtingen, where Hölderlin moved with his mother after the death of his father, and where the poet spent his childhood years; in Maulbronn, where, lonely and unhappy, Hölderlin wrote his first poems in the strict monastic school; and in Tübingen, where, together with Hegel and Schelling, he studied in the Tübinger Stift in times of great political and aesthetic change, and where he returned years later, sick in the Autenrieth clinic, thereafter to be cared for by the Zimmer family. Hölderlin remained in Tübingen for thirty-six years. He lived there as a recluse in the now-famous tower until his death on June 7, 1843, when he was laid to rest in the City Cemetery. The list of celebrations hardly stops in Tübingen. There was a Hölderlin Festival week in Frankfurt am Main, a light and sound installation by the artist Philipp Geist in Bad Homburg, and an exhibition of pictures of Hölderlin's favorite local places by the well-known photographer Barbara Klemm in the House of the Romantics in Jena. In Stuttgart, where the Hölderlin archive is housed today, the Jubilee Exhibit “Aufbrüche—Abbrüche. 250 Jahre Friedrich Hölderlin” opened in the fall of 2020. Verona, Zürich, Bordeaux, Barcelona, Venice, and Vienna have all hosted commemorations, as has, of course, the German Literature Archive in Marbach, where one can study the hidden history of the reception of Hölderlin in the papers of German poets, writers, and scholars.

Hölderlin still counts as a founder of modern poetry, a poet who continues to enchant, captivate, and challenge his readers. At the annual meeting of the GSA, a panel, sponsored by the American Friends of the German Literature Archive in Marbach, presented on the topic of “Hölderlin 2020: Reading and Exhibiting.”