'Here vomited Goethe'

This year is the 250th year of his birth, and Tübingen, a charming town southwest Germany where Hölderlin was once a student, is gearing up to celebrate the anniversary

If you get off the bus at the Neckarbucker — the bridge on the Neckar — you might want to wait for a few minutes and look down on the waters and try to imagine what the river might have been in the days of Friedrich Hölderlin. I’m told it was choppier before a network of grids and dams tamed it. You can take a boat ride, and your boatman might point out to you the wooden tower, Hölderinturm, in which the poet lived for the last 36 years of his life, after being diagnosed with schizophrenia. This year is