If you are a regular visitor to this blog, you know that Friedrich Hölderlin is my favourite poet and I consider his novel Hyperion one of the most profound and meaningful books ever written (in a league with Camus' La peste). He spent the last decades of his life (from 1807 to 1843) in the town Tübingen (where I went to university), imprisoned in the little yellow tower you see in the picture. Scholars still discuss whether he was actually mad or only pretended to be mad to escape a world that had become unbearable to him since the discovery (and therefore the end) of the secret relationship with the love of his life, Susette Gontard, a banker's wife from Frankfurt to whose children Hölderlin had been a tutor.

My family and I are in Southwestern Germany to visit my parents and the rest of my family. It was the first time in almost ten years that I had returned to Tübingen. Amazing, that almost nothing has changed. Only my favourite bookstore had moved, but when we finally found it I got some great German books (to keep my German in shape).

Tomorrow, we are off to Salzburg for the last week of the Festival.