"A sign we are, uninterpreted. Painless we are and have almost / lost the language in a foreign country." Thus begins the second version of Friedrich Hölderlin's hymn dedicated to goddess of memory, Mnemosyne. "Hölderlin and the Consequences" wants to remember this 'poet of poets' and consider what his unmatched poems have stimulated, even triggered, in others. This scholarly essay examines the legacy of a poet who was, by and large, ostracized in his time, a master of language, who was declared a stranger by his contemporaries until he became a stranger to himself. Hölderlin's multiple experience of foreignness and alienation was later counteracted by often ideologically motivated attempts to appropriate him. Rüdiger Görner presents this complex context as a special case in recent literary history.
This book is a translation of an original German 1st edition, "Hölderlin und die Folgen" by Rüdiger Görner, published by J.B. Metzler, imprint of Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature in 2016. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com).  The author (with the support of Josh Torabi) has subsequently revised the text further in an endeavour to refine the work stylistically.

Rüdiger Görner is Professor of German with Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London. He is a Fellow of the German Academy for Language and Poetry as well as the recipient of the German Language Award (2012) and the Reimar Lüst Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2015). For his contribution to Anglo-German Cultural Relations he was awarded the Order of Merit by the German Federal President (2016).

The following:.- Hölderlin, following his traces of words.- Hölderlin's sense of language.- Consequential (I): Measuring Hölderlin's poetic linguistic spaces.- Consequential (II): Hölderlin and his homeland.- Consequential (III): Hölderlin and the visionary in retrospect.- The culturally critical Hölderlin.- Thus Hölderlin came under the biographers and editors Existence and Parataxis : Hölderlin's thinking is controversial.- Adorno versus Heidegger.- "We are a sign, uninterpreted" : An afterlife in literary interpretations.- "Memory of floating Hölderlin towers" or "Hölderlin poetry".- "But soon we will be singers" : Musical Hölderlin reflections.- End credits with Peter Weiss or "Hölderlin/Scardanelli as media event. Literature.