Heimat is a central and recurring theme in Hölderlin’s poetry and is
readily identified with the poet’s birthplace: a land of rolling hills traversed by
the river Neckar, where nature seems to bestow a harmonious order on things,
offering the poet emotional security, shelter and refuge. And yet, Hölderlin’s
Heimat often appears as a desire to visit distant lands or as the destination of
an emotionally poignant homecoming, and thus in opposition to an «elsewhere»,
which itself overlaps with other dialectical oppositions in Hölderlin’s thought –
idyll/sublime, familiar/alien.
