The tower was built in the late 18th century on a former defence tower base of the city fortifications. The path from the Neckar Bridge to the Hölderlin Tower leads across the narrow Zwingel, the open space between the inner and outer city walls. The tower is named after Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843), who lived here from 1807 until his death on 7 June 1843. Today, the Hölderlin Tower is a place of literary remembrance.
Friedrich Hölderlin, who studied together with Hegel and Schelling at the Protestant Monastery from 1788-1793, already wrote poetry during his student days and - encouraged by Schiller - embarked on a career as a tutor and freelance writer. Hapless and restless, he was brought to the first university hospital in Tübingen in 1806 due to mental "madness" (see also Burse). Diagnosed as incurable after 231 days, Hölderlin was admitted to the nearby tower of master carpenter Ernst Zimmer, where he was patiently cared for by Zimmer's daughter Lotte until his death. Throughout his life, Hölderlin was deeply honoured by the students of Tübingen, who loved to visit him.
The Hölderlin Tower building, burnt to the ground in 1875, has been rebuilt in a historicist style with a pointed spire.
The museum contains a permanent multimedia exhibition that provides an insight into Hölderlin's biographical stages in Tübingen. It extends over all three floors of the tower, allowing visitors to experience Hölderlin's approach to language and rhythm through the senses and showing the poet as a radical worker on language and an inspiration for the arts. At the centre of the exhibition is the poet's only surviving piece of furniture: the table on which he "banged his hand when he had arguments - with his thoughts", as Lotte Zimmer once wrote. A language laboratory invites visitors to experiment with syllables, words and verses. In the neighbouring garden, Hölderlin's texts can be translated into movement on a poetry trail.
