Hölderlin and the Möbius Strip: The One-Sided Surface and the 'Wechsel der Töne'
Author: Lewis, Charles
Source: Oxford German Studies, Volume 38, Number 1, 2009 , pp. 45-60(16)
Publisher: Maney Publishing
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Abstract:
In German poetics of the early Romantic period, an important part is played by analogies based on geometrical figures such as the hyperbola and the ellipse. In Hölderlin's 'Homburg poetics' of the years 1799-1800, we can witness an even more striking phenomenon. Hölderlin's theory of the 'alternation of tones' seems to provide a precise description of a structure (the 'Möbius strip') which did not come to the attention of mathematicians until more than fifty years later. The one-sided surface of the Möbius strip correspondingly suggests a way of visualizing Hölderlin's rules for the sequence of 'tones' within a poem. Hölderlin begins by characterizing the meaning of a poem as having two faces or aspects, corresponding to a duality of hidden and manifest meaning ('Grundton' and 'Kunstkarakter'). The rules for the 'alternation of tones' then provide a framework in which those two aspects are united. A poem can be seen as describing a path along a one-sided surface, in which the reader of the poem returns to the starting-point only after having undergone a reversal of perspective at the poem's central turning-point or 'caesura'.Document Type: Research article
DOI: 10.1179/007871909x429888
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