Rilke,1875-1900

(20 June 2025)

(4 963 words)

(Reading Time: 26 minutes)

Rilke was born, as René (later to be changed to Rainer) Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke, in Prague on 4 December 1875. His parents were Josef Rilke and Sophie (known as “Phia”). Josef was a minor railroad official who had been a member of the Austrian Army but had failed to secure a commission as officer, disappointing thus the social aspirations of his wife. The discrepancy between the needs of her social climbing and the bleak, lowly reality of her actual domestic situation led to serious marital tensions. Rilke’s parents separated in 1884.

This was a “very dark childhood”, Rilke was later to recall. “My mother was highly nervous, slim, a woman who wanted something from life, something undefined” (Rilke quoted in Donald Prater, A Ringing Glass: The Life of Rainer Maria Rilke. Oxford. 1986, Prater, p. 5). “She dressed always in black and affected the demeanor of a grande dame … Religious observance and the ritual of the Catholic Church occupied her to the point of bigotry” (Prater, p. 4). “Every time he saw her, Rilke relived his struggle as a child to get away from her, and felt, after years of running, he still had not gotten far enough” (Prater, p. 5). Rilke harboured the same negative feelings towards his father, whose “stiff conventionality gave little room for love”. Looking back long after Josef’s death in 1906, Rilke said that “right to the end he had a kind of inexpressible fear of the heart towards me” (Rilke quoted in Prater, p. 6). These bitter accounts of his parents would later inform his rejection of them in his Duino Elegies.

The year before Rilke had been born a daughter had died soon after birth, and Sophie tried to compensate for this loss by treating her young son as if he were a girl, by giving him two female names, René and Maria, and dressing him in girls’ clothing. There was one positive to this unsettling transgender practice. “For the growing child, this feminine posture was soon associated with a gift for writing verse” (Ralph Freedman, Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke. New York, 1996. p. 10). It was a gift that the mother cultivated; only to be stymied by the father. As Rilke later wrote, “ah, if our parents were only born with us, how much bitterness and retracing of paths we might be spared. But parents and children can only walk along next to each other, never with each other; a deep trench runs between them, across which they can now and then extend each other only a small tenderness” (see Rainer Maria Rilke, Diaries of a Young Poet. Translated by Edward Snow and Michael Winkler. Norton.1997, p. 65).

In 1882, Rilke went to school at a German-speaking Catholic establishment belonging to the Piarist Order. He was to stay, enjoying a good deal of academic success, until 1886, when he enrolled in the Military Junior School at St. Pölten in Lower Austria. He was to remain there for four years, until 1890. Four unpleasant years. “In retrospect, Rilke’s confrontation with the military became a metaphor for hell” (Freedman, p. 14). Perhaps for that reason, Rilke began writing home describing repeated bouts of illness. He did well in the subjects that were purely academic, but the military side of his education caused him constant distress. It also led to something else: distance from his fellow students who, like most young men, took to the physical dimension of military training in a way that the rather poorly Rilke did not. As he later plaintively described it, the time he spent as a military cadet constituted “a painful training in loneliness amongst the crowd” (quoted in Prater, p. 9). According to one account, “he endured his schoolmates’ blows without returning them or even talking back, because he actually believed that ‘the will of an infinite, unchangeable fate’ demanded of him a posture of a heroic patience. He took pride in the way he bore his tortures. Martyrdom, too, was a game that he learned from his mother” (Freedman, p. 16). He would greet his own painful death forty years later in the same spirit.

Rilke suffered a recurring illness at the military academy, which was finally diagnosed as “pneumonia aggravated by severe nervous strain” (Freedman, p.19, although it was possibly psychosomatic) and he was allowed to transfer to a non-military institution at Linz in September 1891. The curriculum of the latter combined “a scientifically based general education with a comprehensive preparation for various commercial professions” (Prater, p. 11). Its non-regimented environment allowed greater scope for Rilke’s literary pursuits and in the following year, 1892, he was able to publish his first collection of poetry, Life and Songs. “We can set the beginning of his vocation as a poet to the winter of this year” (Wolfgang Leppmann, Rainer Maria Rilke: Leben und Werk. Heyne. 1981, p. 65). Rilke took his final examination at the Linz school in 1894 and was now free to begin a course of study at Prague University. He had been granted a monthly allowance from the family estate of his uncle, Jaroslav, to support him whilst a student. The assumption was that he would study law, but Rilke chose instead to enroll in courses in history of literature, art history and philosophy.

In December 1895, he published his second book of poetry, Offerings to the Lares. Whereas the first book had been the voicing of a juvenile lyrical poet, intended to express a post-romantic sensibility, this volume looked outwards to the customs and physical world of Prague. Some of the short poems were of a descriptive topographical nature, as if this were a poetry guidebook. The poems laid the basis for his later concern with the integrity of the object world. “Whenever he described precisely what he saw, Rilke was able to draw on his power to shape images, which was to be the strength of his maturity” (Freedman, P. 37): “there I see towers, some domed like acorns / others pointed like slender pears; / there lies the city; the evening nestles / against its thousand brows with tender care”. Other poems deal with historical moments in the history of the city. One such poem was written to the memory of the Czech hero, Josef Kajetan Tyl, who penned the national hymn for the country, but whose fame did not provide him with material success. “There had the poet Tyl / his song written: “Kde domov muj’ / Those whom the muses love / do not grant them much” (quoted in Leppmann, p. 61).

It was at this time that Rilke encountered the first love true of his life. Valerie von David-Rhonfeld was a friend of his cousins in Prague and Rilke met her through that social contact. She would be the first of many women that Rilke would love only to decide that serious commitment would be detrimental to his career with literature. The latter was progressing with speed and Rilke was a supreme self-promoter. “In dogged determination to succeed, he showed astonishing industry” (Prater, p. 15). It was self-evident that to reach the heights of his literary influence he would need to move beyond the provincial scene of Prague to somewhere bigger, more cosmopolitan, where noted writers of German literature lived and had the greatest effect on the public. He chose Munich and moved there from Prague on 29 September 1896, living in an apartment in 48 Briennerstrasse. It possessed an unreal atmosphere. It was, as Rilke wrote in his autobiographical story Ewald Tragy, “a small flat, with two windows and old fussy furniture, and quite full of shadows, so that one had the feeling that one was renting a host of things beyond one’s dreams” (Rilke, Ewald Tragy. Insel Verlag. 1989. p. 35).

Rilke enrolled at the university to study art history and philosophy, attending amongst other classes a seminar on aesthetics held by Theodor Lippe. It was essential for him to maintain the pretext that he was a student, so that he could continue to receive his monthly allowance from the family trust, but his principle activity was artistic. He wrote further poetry and plays but, above all, attempted to make social contact with other writers and artists, such as Ludwig Ganghofer, Max Halbe and Jakob Wassermann. In December 1896, he published his third book of poetry, Crowned with Dreams. It represented a return to an introspective mode after the outward-looking realism of the Lares volume. As he wrote in one poem, “my heart resembles a forgotten chapel”. Adding in a subsequent poem, “a memory that I call holy / lights my way through my innermost soul, / just as the white of marble gods / glows through the twilight of sacred groves”. Rilke returned to Prague during the Christmas period to organise a reading of the work of Detlev von Liliencron, a poet who had shown him, “a city child, whose road to distinction was still strewn with tears”, the way to “the open heath” of real life. (Rilke quoted in Prater, p. 30).

Rilke returned to Munich, and in February 1897 moved into a new apartment in Blütenstrasse near the artists’ district of Schwabing. Rilke read much at this time, including the works of the spiritualist Baron du Prel, to whom he wrote a letter on 16 February 1897. The author of Studies from the Realm of Secret Knowledge (1890) and Spiritualism (1893), du Pre adhered to the key tenets of spiritualism, “maintaining that man is a dual being whose second self appears in somnambulistic states and reaches to the Beyond” (see Notes to Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke. Translated by Jane Bannard Greene and M.D. Herter Norton. New York. Vol. 1, p. 367). Rilke wrote to du Pre explaining his attraction for the latter’s work: “apart from the charm of the mysterious, the domains of spiritualism have for me an important power of attraction because in the recognition of the many dormant forces and in the subjugation of their power, I see the great liberation of our remote descendants” (Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke. Vol. 1, p. 25).

This spiritualist ethos may well have fed into Rilke’s then current writing, such as his poem cycle Visions of Christ. These were not published until twenty years later, although certain poems were circulated to individuals at the time. As Polikoff notes, “each of the eleven poems narrates in verse Christ’s appearance in often dramatically rendered dialogues, shares his charged encounters with various figures (a child, a prostitute, a painter). Many of the settings – a Prague graveyard, Munich fairgrounds, a tavern – are recognizably drawn from real scenes. At the same time, the appearance of the Christ figure often transports the action into a different dimension in which ordinary time and space are effectually suspended – the almost surreal domain of The Visions, closely akin to dream” (Daniel Joseph Polikoff, In the Image of Orpheus: Eilke: A Soul History. Chiron Publishers. 2011. p.29).

In Munich, Rilke was introduced by Wassermann to the work of the Danish writer Jens Peter Jacobsen, whose novel Niels Lyhne, a melancholy story of unrequited love and suicide, committed by an overly sensitive aesthete, found a wide readership. It is a novel that “reflects many of the themes of Rilke’s later work: the unheard music of the souls, the allure of old furniture, the concept of all the gods as the creation of men, Lyhne’s thirst for knowledge, and the notion that each man should die his own death” (Prater, p.32).

In March 1897, Rilke paid his first visit to Italy, including Venice, “which he found mysterious like a collection of fairy tales fashioned into stone” (according to Freedman, p. 59). But these were fairy tales shot through with a bitter streak of realism. As Rilke wrote in one poem, “it always seems to me as though the quiet / gondolas travel through the canals / to welcome someone or other. / And yet the waiting lasts long, / and the people are poor and ill, / and the children are like orphans”. On 10 April, Rilke returned to Munich, and to his writing and the cultivation of social contacts. His demenour at this time has been described as a combination of ” the cult of personal friendship, with an obsession with coteries and entrepreneurial activity”. This was “an interaction between the mind and the social” (Leppmann, pp. 69 and 70).

There was one interaction that would be particularly decisive in Rilke’s life. On 12 May 1897, at a party organised by Jakob Wassermann, he met Lou Andreas-Salomé. Russian born, from a French Huguenot German family, of the haute bourgeoisie, Andreas-Salomé had achieved notoriety as a putative fiancé of Friedrich Nietzsche, but she had also won serious intellectual acclaim (although this is not to say that any association with Nietzsche could not be serious) as an author of works on philosophy and religion, including the essay “Jesus, the Jew”. The latter had been read admiringly by Rilke and that intellectual bond, “a devout fellow-feeling” (as he described it in a letter to her of 13 May), now became a personal one. They arranged to meet four days later, when he read to her three poems from his “like-minded” work in progress, Visions of Christ.

Rilke was twenty-one; Lou was thirty-six. She was married but in an open marriage with her husband Karl Friedrich Andreas, professor of oriental languages in Berlin. She led a varied love life, combining attraction of the mind with desire of the body. “She made eroticism itself a spiritual iconography” (Freeman, p. 63). Intellectual affinity turned, for Rilke, immediately into romance. He wrote to her on a daily basis. One letter reads: “you come to me from all that is, beautiful, my breeze of spring my summer rain, my June night with a thousand ways that none before me was blessed to tread: I am in you” (quoted in Prater, p. 39). On 14 June 1897, Rilke and Lou moved out of Munich to a small cottage in nearby Wolfratshausen. “The idyll that would come in the summer marked in every sense a new epoch for Rilke”. “Lou’s feelings for nature, her habit of observing the animals at dawn, and walking barefoot through the dewy grass brought him for the first time down to earth from the insubstantial romanticizing of the city poet” (Pater, p. 39). Lou became part lover, part mother. As Rilke later wrote, “I came to you then so poor, almost like a child comes to the bountiful mother. And you took my soul into your arms and cradled it. At that time, you kissed me on my brow, and you had to bend down deeply to do this” (quoted in Wolfgang Leppmann, Rainer Maria Rilke. Heyne Verlag. 1981, pp. 99-100).

Lou’s influence on Rilke was all-forming: psychological (indeed, psychoanalytical), intellectual, aesthetic and amorous. “Lou tried to help him deal with his sudden outbursts of temper and sudden withdrawals. She also sought to cure him of his extravagant, sentimental style in poetry and prose, although she was quite capable of indulging in purple prose herself. Here she was not immediately successful, but as a first step she made him improve his handwriting, which he changed at once, from a loose, highly expressive but fairly uncontrolled form to self-consciously precise exquisitely chiseled letters. Henceforth, even the physical task of handwriting became part of Rilke’s art” (Freeman, p. 68). Lou was also responsible for persuading Rilke to change his name from what she saw to be the affected “René” to the more manly “Rainer”. It was a form of benign control, which Rilke freely (Indeed, willingly) accepted. Polikoff comments on “the contradiction latent in the image of a man who preached the gospel of self-reliance while relying so deeply on various forms of communion with others throughout his life” (Polikoff, p. 62).

Rilke wrote a series of love poems celebrating Lou and his relationship with her and collected them in a volume titled In Celebration of You. Lou found the poems too intimate and asked Rilke not to publish them. One poem reads:

“Tear out my eyes: I still can see you,

Stop up my ears: I can still hear you,

Without feet, I can still walk,

Without a mouth, still plead to you.

Break off my arms: I’ll grasp you yet

with my heart as with a hand.

Tear out my heart, my brain will beat.

And if you set my brain afire

I will carry you still in my blood”

In Celebration of You, Rilke posited Lou “as extending as well as withholding love’s mystery” (Freedman, p. 64). Lou did, indeed, hold to a complex model of love and male-female relationships. As decidedly as ever, she maintained in her association with Rilke a clear distinction “between friendship, physical love and marriage. Marriage, she wrote should be ‘not a binding but a being-bound’, ‘something lying beyond all interests of friendship, much deeper, much loftier’, a kind of pinnacle that the partners are striving to reach, ‘the recognition that each belongs in and not just to the other, in an almost religious or at least ideal sense’. ‘I have never been able to understand why people physically in love with one another get married’ (quoted in Prater, p. 40). And Pater dryly notes, “that this was her feeling would only gradually become clear to Rilke” (Prater, p. 40).

In December 1897, Rilke published a further book of poetry, Advent. “The title refers not only to the pre-Christmas season but also to its literal meaning of impending arrival” (Freedman, p. 76). The volume represented an “episode”, like all his other books of verse, “a small moment in a great becoming” (Rilke quoted in Freedman, p. 76).Many of the poems are laudatorily descriptive and return to the people and places that he had met in Prague, Venice and Munich (and a good number are dedicated the writers and artists he most admired), but others were more inward looking and speak of the intensity of his poetic mission:

“This is my fight

dedicated to longing

to wander the paths of all my days.

Then, strong and prepared

to send my thousand roots

grasping deep into life –

and through the pain

to ripen far beyond life,

far beyond time!”

Lou Andreas-Salomé and her husband moved to Berlin in October 1987 and Rilke moved with them. Lou found an apartment in the suburb of Wilmersdorf, and Rilke in one nearby, no. 8 Im Rheingau. He enrolled at the university at the start of the academic year to study art history and to learn Italian. Under the guidance of Lou, the Italian Renaissance art became an idee fixe for Rilke and in February he started to plan a trip to Italy. It was decided that he should keep a diary, not to record his daily activities (too personal and irrelevant for Lou) but as a way of registering what he was learning about art and his appreciation of art, a project that led to “many pages of quasi-aphoristic, largely theoretical reflections on selfhood, art, religion and culture” (Polikoff, p. 69). Prior to his departure, he traveled to Prague on 5 March 1898 to give a lecture on “The Modern Lyric”. Rilke drew heavily on an essay recently published by Lou called “Basic Forms of Art” and largely followed her in his description of modern poetry. The terms of reference are largely those of fin de siècle aestheticism. “Where earlier poets where in touch with nature and ‘the dimension of things’, recent poets have learned ‘to look into their own minds’. ‘In this way subjectivism has reached its highest form’. The lyrical poet has become ‘a solitary who can acknowledge no one but himself’, a ‘cosmic hermit’ able to hear what no one else has heard. Listening and loneliness are the attributes of the modern poet” (quoted in Freedman, p. 79).

Rilke remained in Prague for three weeks before setting out for Florence on 4 April 1896, “trembling with expectations” of a city where “spring became eternal in name and deed” (Rilke quoted in Prater, p. 44). Rilke opened his diary on 15 April with a homily to Lou in the form of a poem (where the final upper case “YOU” foregrounds the importance of the recipient). Its first two stanzas read:

“From our winter-shaped terrain,

I’ve been cast far out, into spring;

as I hesitate at its edge,

the new land lays itself out lustrously

into my wavering hands.

And I take the beautiful gift,

want to mould it quietly,

unfold all its colours

and hold it, full of shyness,

up towards YOU.”

(Rilke, Diaries of a Young Poet. Translated by Edward Snow and Michael Winkler. Norton.1997, p. 4).

Rilke was overcome by his initial impressions of Florence. He wrote on 19 April, “I felt at first so confused, and thought I was drowning in the breaking waves of some foreign splendour”. His immersion in this culture soon produced an empathy that was total: “I have entered into the very midst of it. I sense it as it were the rhythm of a deeper breathing, compared to which mine is a tapping of children’s feet, and I become strangely free and fearful”. Rilke’s encounter with the great civic art of Florence, the statues, for example, in St. Marks, took on, at times, a almost surreal animistic dimension, as the statues come towards him while he faces them: “as my eye coasts back along the arcades, there is a movement: out of the dark a line of bright figures emerges, as if they wanted to approach someone. I look around but there is no one – can their welcome be meant for me? Suddenly I feel it clearly. And with a shy awkwardness I, the small, the nameless, the unworthy one, hasten toward them, and pass devoutly and gratefully from one to the next, blessed by each”.

It is impossible to separate Rilke’s acts of aesthetic appreciation in the diary from a consistent existential refashioning of self and sensibility, undertaken for the eyes of Lou. On 17 May, he describes to her how he approaches the great beauty of the masters, such as Raphael. “A longer contemplation [in term of time spent in front] of their works would be superfluous; devout absorption can make many a beautiful aspect more intense and deeply felt, but there is no sensation so strong that it will project beyond the ripeness of that first enjoyment”. Rilke is not alone in his travels around Florentine art. There are others too, whom Rilke seeks to avoid: tourists. The latter, as he tells us in the same letter, have a philistine fear of the unpleasant in art, of the sad or tragic”. On the basis of a rejection of their “guidebook” mentality, Rilke begins to elaborate, as in this letter, his own theory of art and art appreciation, seeing in it “a path towards freedom”, “the means by which singular, solitary individuals fulfill themselves”. The modern artist must absorb not only the work of the great artists of the past but also their store of inner values. As he says later in the diary, these must be internalised: “how completely like the best amongst us they were. Their longings live on in us. And our longings will, when we are used up, remain active in others, until they fulfill themselves in whomever are the last ones. Only these last ones will be a beginning. We are presentments and dreams” (Rainer Maria Rilke, Diaries of a Young Poet, p. 20).

Rilke left Florence on 6 July 1898, returning, via Viareggio, Sopot and Prague, to Berlin on 31 July and to a new apartment in Villa Waldfrieden, no. 11 Hundekehlstrasse. He came back to Berlin and to Lou and (much to his dismay) to her disappointment with the Florentine diary. Rilke’s self-indulgence and hyperbolic style were precisely elements of his personality that Lou had been trying to expunge. She was also hoping, as later events would show, after the second Russian trip, to undo his childlike worship of her which came with a dependency “which he both hated and craved” (Freedman, p. 87). The crisis in their relationship seemed to have returned, but by the autumn of that year some form of reconciliation had taken place, as Lou began to encourage Rilke to undertake a number of projects, including the learning of Russian (at that time a vogue culture and country in Germany). The fruits of this new enthusiasm were soon to manifest themselves in a planned trip to Russia.

Their trip commenced in Berlin on 24 April 1899, with the couple arriving in Moscow on 27th, and finished on 28 June 1899 in Saint Petersburg. It was to be a transformative experience. “The sights and sounds of Russia, its mythical peasants and icons, the infinite expanse of its land, provided the canvas on which this transformation took place. It allowed Rilke to mystify reality in a new idiom that was not to be demystified until years later in Paris and later in Muzot” (Freedman, p. 92). A priority was a visit to Tolstoy in his apartment in Moscow, “a revered figure with and against whom Rilke could define his aesthetic, his work, himself” (Freedman, p. 94). The meeting was only a partial success (Rilke was an unknown entity, and he would have the same problem when he and Lou visited Tolstoy on his estate on the second trip to Russia the following year). Rilke found, however, the greater sights, sounds and art of a (for Rilke) thoroughly spiritualised Russia overwhelming and spent much of his time in Moscow visiting the cathedrals, where art merged with religion. Their stay in Moscow was short. On 2 May, they travelled to Saint Petersburg, Lou’s former home. Rilke found the modern city “internationalised” and lacking the chthonic depth that he had expected from Russia. Tensions were now becoming evident in their relationship, and soon after they went their separate ways: Lou remained in Saint Petersburg, while Rilke left for Prague at the beginning of June, but typical of their contradictory synergy, they met up again in Sopot (near Danzig) in June, remaining there until the end of July, when they both returned to Berlin.

Had the Russian trip been too short, or a disappointment, or both? Had their knowledge of Russian, its language and its culture, been insufficient? By the end of 1899, they were planning a second trip, this time without Andreas. The princess Maria von Meiningen made her summer cottage on the Bibersberg mountain (Thuringia) available to them, and here, between 30 July and 12 September, they immersed themselves into all things Russian. At the end of that month, Rilke returned to Berlin to continue his university studies (with further private study of the Russian language).

Once back in Berlin (and possibility in total seclusion), he gave full reign to the poetic fruits of his Russian trip and wrote between 20 September and 14 October 1899 the first group of a cycle of poems, which would later form the first of three volumes in The Hour Book (Das Stunden-Buch). The first was titled “Of Human Life” (“Vom menschlichen Leben”). Here “Rilke placed most of the poems in the mind and mouth of a persona, a pious monk whose voice holds the sequence together. God becomes a humanised presence, animated, close by, concrete. The entire atmosphere is permeated by the naive and pious spirit that he and Lous had celebrated since their Russian trip” (Freedman, p164). Typical of this spirit is “I find you in all things present”, where the monk addresses, in assertive pantheistic terms, God as master, friend and confidant:

“I find you in all things present,

to which I am good and like a brother;

you sun yourself, a seed, within the small

and in the great you give yourself even more.

This is the mysterious play of forces,

and go through things so serving,

growing high in the roots, dwindling in the stems

and in the crowns rise to a resurrection”.

The writing of the poems in The Hour Book was an eruption of creativity, which was now a defining feature of Rilke’s mode of composition, where months of inactivity were often followed by days of almost phrenetic activity. It was Rilke’s practice to write poems but leave them lying before seeking publication. In this same period, between September and December 1889, there followed an early draft of The Stories of God (written for children, and published a year later), and in December 1899 a volume of poetry, In Celebration of Myself (the title, perhaps a rejoinder to Lou’s rejection of the earlier non-published In Celebration of You volume), a collection of poems that he had composed over a three-year period from 1897. Heterogeneous in style and subject matter (Rilke did not seek as he had done with previous volumes of poetry to bring the individual poems under a single rubric or categorise them), a number are self-conscious about the poetic activity and the role of language within it, as in the following poem that almost borders on the idiom of prose in its matter-of-fact style:

“I was so scared of people’s words.

They say everything so clearly:

this is called a dog, and that is called a house,

and here is the beginning, and there is the end.

I am scared also of their meaning; their mocking play,

they know everything, what was and what will be;

mountains don’t thrill them anymore;

their gardens and their estates directly border onto God.

I will always warn about them and ward them off: stay away.

I love to hear things sing.

You can touch them, and they are firm and silent.

You, however, are the very destroyer of things”.

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