Friedrich Holderlin. Die Jahreszeiten / The Seasons

Friedrich Holderlin is probably Andre Butzer's favorite poet and ranks alongside Walt Disney and Henri Matisse among his “favorite people ever.” His identification with the poet goes even further, as Holderlin's day of death is Butzer's own birthday. As Butzer moved to Los Angeles, the land of his youthful dreams, for the first time in 2001, he got homesick. The home he longed for lay neither in the old world nor in the new. In California, he read Holderlin's Hyperion and was shaken: “As I read, I felt that I understood every word. I thought these words came from me.” Butzer recognizes himself in Holderlin's fateful protagonist and invents the figure of the homeless Wanderer. His home is in painting, and so he sets off down “Hyperion Ave”-the street on which The Walt Disney Studio opened in 1926. According to Butzer, “Holderlin, just like Disney, expresses longings. And these can be put to use.” For Holderlin, poetry is the place that makes human existence on earth possible.