Friedrich Hölderlin is probably André 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 Hölderlin’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 Hölderlin’s Hyperion and was shaken: “As I read, I felt that I understood every word. I thought these words came from me.”