ABSTRACT
Hölderlin lives on as a tragic figure in the history of literature. Shortly after his thirtieth year the earnest, tender-hearted, over-sensitive poet became a victim of incurable insanity and under the shadows of schizophrenic psychosis he passed away his life in Hölderlin's Tower on the Neckar at Tϋbingen until, at seventy-three, he died. There one could see him, a pointed white cap upon his head, wandering, irresolute and phantom-like, to and fro, before the window. That sight awoke in Mörike, as a young student, the phantastic romance of the fire rider: “ See yonder at the little window the red cap comes again.” Many years before the outbreak of the actual psychosis, the emotional coldness and rigidity gradually creeping over him can be perceived in the tones of his poems, from which the horror of the schizophrenic breathes at us, and in which the world and his own living spirit became gradually transformed into an icy world of phantoms.
“ Where art thou ? Life still lingered
With me as my evening closed coldly,
And quiet as the shadows I am here,
My shuddering heart asleep in my bosom”
