The divine and the open text: Five steps for reading Hölderlin's Homburger Folioheft

Abstract

This article deals with Hölderlin's Homburger Folioheft. It elaborates on the thesis that the question of God or the divine can contribute to exploring both the richness of the poet's extensive manuscript, which fans out in many textual stages, and its fragmentary form. I argue that, despite its fragile textual form, the collection must be perceived as a unity and that reading it means oscillating between the textual stages without privileging the last version. I show that the reference to the divine often can be found at the core of the poet's vast changes to the text. The absence and return of the divine introduces a transformative dynamic into the text, a dynamic about which Hölderlin himself reflects in some passages.