How do Africans feature and fare in Rilke’s work? A group of men, women, and children from West Africa (most likely today’s Ghana) were put on display like animals in the Jardin d’Acclimatation in Paris, where Rilke saw (or, as it turns out, didn’t see) them in the spring of 1902. Before that there had been similar shows of individuals and groups of people from the African continent in 1896 in Vienna and shortly afterward in Budapest: A village full of Africans from the Gold Coast (today’s Ghana) alongside antelopes, parrots, and flamingos, put on show for predominantly white Europeans....

Can Rilke’s writings, from the perennially popular and often-citedLetters to a Young Poetto the hard-won consolations ofDuino Elegies, offer a guide to life?

In 1907 the Viennese bookseller Hugo Heller began a survey, the results of which were published by Hermann Bahr in a paperback volume entitledBooks for Real Life(Die Bücher zum wirklichen Leben) that in a very short time sold forty thousand copies, an appreciable figure. In addition to bankers, philosophers, and politicians, famous authors listed the books that might be “indispensable […] necessities for existence” for young people.¹ In his foreword, Hermann Bahr...

In late fall of 1926, Rilke was on his deathbed. He was suffering terribly from leukemia, which had been diagnosed too late, and entrusted himself to the Swiss doctor Dr. Haemmerli despite his lifelong fear of having his body interpreted by another person. “It’s bad enough that the needs of my body have forced me to hand myself over to an intermediary and negotiator, that is, to a doctor.”¹

In his despair, Rilke had, a year before his death, called on another person as “intermediary and negotiator”: the friend of his youth and his erstwhile lover Lou Andreas-Salomé, who as...

In the charming Hollywood romantic comedyOnly You(1994), Peter Wright (played by Robert Downey Jr.) tries to convince the beautiful Faith (Marisa Tomei) that he is the right man for her as they take an evening stroll through Rome. As her name suggests, Faith is a firm believer in prophecy and fate. When she was eleven she learned the name of her true love, Damon Bradley, from a Ouija board and now travels through Italy in pursuit of the thus-named prince. By happenstance Peter knows about Faith’s idée fixe and acts as though he is the Bradley in question....

What, exactly, is “world’s inner space (Weltinnenraum)”? Hardly any other word of Rilke’s has provoked so much skepticism from critics and so much mystical approval from admirers. “Through all beings reaches theonespace: world’s inner space.” Says Rilke.

With “world’s inner space,” a neologism that fuses three words,Welt(world) +innen(inside) +raum(space), Rilke describes an experience that accords as much significance to the imagination as to reality. He calls this the “deep dimension” of consciousness, which “does not even need the dimensions of space in order to be nearly immeasurable in itself.”¹ In a posthumously...

In her memoirs, Rilke’s close friend and confidante Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe explains that she and Rilke’s other wealthy patrons “received so much more” from the poet than they could ever give him. Rilke regularly received money from various supporters. He was invited by different patrons to stay at their vacation homes off season, or was allowed to live rent free for months at a time on their estates, among them the Duino castle of the Thurn und Taxis family near Trieste and their property in Lautschin in Bohemia, while the owners were traveling. The contributions that Rilke...

Is Brecht correct? He writes, “[T]he way Rilke expresses himself when he writes about God is totally gay. No one who has ever noticed this can ever read a single line of these poems without a disfiguring grin on his face.”¹

“Totally gay” (absolut schwul). This is typical early Brecht, in the twenties, when the words “gay” and “queer” were still decades away from being rehabilitated by activists. When Brecht spoke about God, he adapted the Marxist bon mot about “the opium of the masses”—he called religion the circus of the masses. Rilke, on the other hand, used the...

A change of perspective can sometimes make it easier to recognize the significance of an experience or an object (objects, for Rilke, always contain the possibility of an experience). Rilke follows this principle in a series of poems where he upends the expected relationship between the subject to be closely described and the descriptive adjectives used to do so. He transforms this relationship in such a way that the description takes on more weight than the thing it is meant to describe. But the resulting poems are not poems about language, or poems that privilege their mode of expression over...

By inventing the seamless RainerMariaRilke as his signature and what we would today call “brand,” Rilke put himself in the tradition of many authors’ rechristening themselves, from Voltaire (born Arouet) to Mark Twain (born Samuel Clemens) to George Orwell (born Eric Blair). Such rechristenings are also well represented in the history of German writing, with such figures as Novalis (born Georg Hardenberg), Klabund (born Alfred Henschke), Theodor W. Adorno (born Wiesengrund), and, after Rilke, Paul Celan (born Antschel). The binding of many editions of Rilke’s works sports an understated, embossed metallicRMR, and the reader can rest assured: The brand...

“And you, as a Jewess,” writes Rilke to Ilse Blumenthal-Weiß on December 28, 1921, in a letter he later entitled “Letter on Faith,” “with so much immediate experience of God, with such ancient fear of God in your blood, ought not to be concerned with ‘faith.’ But simplyfeelHis presence in yours. And where He, Jehovah, had wanted to befeared—there this fear arose in many cases only because there was no other means but fear available for a mutual closeness between man and God […]—You have, and do not forget this, one of the greatest Gods...

Rilke spent the winter of 1911–1912 in Duino Castle, a somewhat stark and somber residence owned by the Thurn und Taxis family that was usually locked up during the off-season but had been kept open for the poet. In January 1912, in the middle of solitary weeks filled with letter-writing and leafing through dusty volumes pulled off the shelves of the unheated library, Rilke heard a disembodied voice on the steep stairs leading down the cliffs to the foaming waters of the Mediterranean. In a letter written a few days later, he recalled this “dictation … so tumultuously recited...

In a letter to his Polish translator Witold Hulewicz, Rilke remarks on a historical change in the relationship between man and his surroundings: “What has been lived, what has been experienced, thethings that know usare vanishing and have no way of being replaced.We are perhaps the last ones who will have known such things. The responsibility rests with us, to preserve the memory not only ofthem(that would be inadequate and irresponsible), but of their humane and larean value. (‘Larean’ in the sense of household deities).”¹

With the epochal discovery that with his generation, the first...

In a letter to Duchessa Aurelia (Lella) Gallarati-Scotti in 1926, Rilke expressed his admiration for “Mister Mussolini.” In subsequent correspondence Rilke attempts to justify this political gesture, which he quickly recognizes as a mistake, with an uncharacteristically naïve account of that process by which his own words come into the world. When the recipient of Rilke’s letter, an Italian aristocrat, criticizes his stance on Mussolini, the poet appears surprised by the effect of his words, which had taken on an unexpected “firmness” when he set them on paper. Rilke’s failure to anticipate this reaction by his close Italian friend, who...

“Never nowhere without the No” (“und niemals Nirgends ohne Nicht”), it says in “The Eighth Elegy,” in which Rilke focuses on the difference between human and animal.¹ All of the elegies seek a space where we can be truly ourselves, since we are woefully lost in a universe with strangely elusive, angelic messengers of redemption in whose embrace we would instantly “expire.” Animals live in such a “pure space” without concepts, expectations, and projections. Man, on the other hand, recognizes the world around him only when he can conceptualize it with the aid of thought. We, as humans, are aware...

A group of children hardly has any idea what a “proletarian” is. In the cycle of poemsVisions of Christ, Rilke borrows the word “proletarian” from the often unpoetic and demystifying discourse of Marxist class analysis. “Proletarian” comes from “proles,” Latin for “offspring”; in ancient Rome the word referred to the portion of the population whose only value—as opposed to that of the ruling class—rested in the children they bore. The word was first used in the German context in 1826 by Joseph Maria von Radowitz. Since Karl Marx, “proletarian” (Hegel used the word “Pöbel,” “the mob,” instead)...

“Vladimir, the Cloud Painter” is one of Rilke’s finest prose texts. Like a cloud, it lingers in your memory after you read it, and then drifts away. In addition to the pleasure of reading it, the text offers another layer of meaning: It is a piece of experimental prose, in which Rilke with subtle irony presents his poetics of the autonomy of words and, as if in passing, marks a historical shift in the European artist’s relationship to his work.

One dreary Prague afternoon, three world-weary and deliciously bored artists leave their habitual café and go “out for a dusk...

This is the inscription on Rilke’s gravestone, which he wrote in 1925, one year before he died of leukemia in Switzerland on December 29, 1926. In Rilke’s will, which he entrusted to his friend Nanny Wunderly-Volkart on October 29, 1925, the poet dictated that these lines be inscribed on his tombstone. “It may be possible to get hold of anoldstone (something of the Empire style) […] If you rub off the older inscriptions, then this can be in their place: my family coat of arms […] my name, and, set a bit apart, these lines of verse.”² Rilke...

Forget it. Give it up, let it be, don’t even think about it. Rilke idolized, fetishized, and elevated unsatisfied, abandoned old maids who lost themselves in their love for a man. O yes, some of these mystics of unrequited love became almost holy because of their ostentatious abstinence. As nearsaints they furnished a compelling model for the existence of thepoet’s poet: Everything—especially great suffering, great pain—is sublimated. S stands for Stampa, the saint, and for suffering and sublimation. The catch is that Rilke consistently formulates the artist’s existence as exactly the opposite of sublimation: as acceptance and...

When Rilke describes his conception of art, he names two seemingly mutually exclusive tasks for the modern poet. First, the poet is to grant each individual word such weight that it stands on its own in the poem and ultimately becomes autonomous. Yet, at the same time, each word is to contribute to a greater meaning that surpasses everything else. These opposing tendencies in Rilke’s poetics underline the main concern of his poetry, which is the question of how to live truly in the modern era. Rilke is absolutely convinced that we can move beyond ourselves entirelyon our own...

“He was a poet and hated the approximate [das Ungefähre],” notes the narrator in Rilke’s novelThe Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, first published in 1910, in reference to an author who puts off dying just long enough to explain to “a rather uneducated nun” at his deathbed how the word “corridor” should be pronounced correctly.¹ “[O]r perhaps he was concerned only with the truth; or it annoyed him to be taking along as his last impression the thought that the world would continue to go on so carelessly.”² The narrator, who unlike the nun is in no way “uneducated,”...

Where is the outside of a poem? In a love letter to his fiancée, Clara Westhoff, written on October 23, 1900, Rilke paints a picture of a country idyll on the moor of Worpswede (an artist’s colony in northwestern Germany) that presents the young woman with her husband at her side.

“In a little house a soft light would burn, a gentle, shrouded lamp, and I would stand at the stove preparing your dinner: some nice vegetables or grits,—and on a small glass plate thick honey would glisten, and cold butter as pure as ivory would stand out against...

In a letter written on May 3, 1944, the German poet Gottfried Benn describes his irresolute attitude toward his predecessor Rilke: “My feelings about him will always be ambivalent. I can never imagine him otherwise than creeping along, as a worm, who has a unique way of moving along and can segment himself without any breaks, but doesn’t quite belong to the proper animals. This feeling is foremost in my mind …”¹

With his toxic remark, Benn wants to distance himself from his predecessor. This ambivalence extends even to Benn’s most intimate and personal moments, when the poet wants, perhaps...

In 1929, the Rilke Archive published, at the initiative of Rilke’s widow, Clara Rilke; his daughter, Ruth; and his son-in-law, Carl Sieber, the small volume of ten letters that have made Rilke famous with art students everywhere:Letters to a Young Poet. Only a few letters but no full collection had been published before that date. With the first comprehensive edition of letters, beginning in the year 1930, Rilke’s editor Anton Kippenberg, in collaboration with Clara and Ruth Rilke and Carl Sieber, sought to cultivate a particular image of the poet. For the first few decades after Rilke’s death, his...

Everything was supposed to be an impetus and a mission for Rilke—even a Y. When writing, to carry out this mission would be

as if one were flipping through an encyclopedia and, immediately following something completely different, suddenly starting reading under Th or Y.

Indeed, if one were as confident in one’s work as one ought to be, even with a head cold, one wouldn’t be unnerved by this: one would simply encounter and create new things out of this state of affairs.¹

Were,ought to,wouldn’tbe unnerved,wouldencounter,wouldcreate. But since one is rarely as...

Rilke from A to Z: Z promises a summary, a completed picture, closure. Z is the end. Everything has been spelled out: zero left. But Rilke did not want to believe in the end any more strongly than in the beginning. Death was supposed to become a part of life; we are supposed to lose our fear of it. To come to Z and not yet be at the end, to always stay in motion, those were Rilke’s goals. “The Ninth Elegy” ends with the great and enigmatic discovery that there is always more:

Look, I am living. On what?...