Rilke, Chronology 1910-1918

(1 June 2025)

(5 928 words)

(Reading time: 31 minutes)

Rilke spent 11-31 January 1910 in Leipzig as a guest of Anton Kippenberg, the editor of the “Insel Verlag”, and his wife. On 23 January, Rilke completed, through mechanical dictation, the manuscript of The Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge, which was published in May. He now embarked on a tour of cultural engagements, which took him to Berlin (late January to late February 1910) and Weimar (March), when he then recuperated in Rome (March to April), Duino castle (April) and Venice (April to May), before he returning to Paris (late May). The period after the completion of the Malte Notebook was a restless one for Rilke. Feeling that he had peaked with that work, he found himself in a state of literary aboulia, “beset by demons of poetic sterility, gloom and self-recrimination” (Daniel Joseph Polikoff, In the Image of Orpheus: Rilke: A Soul History. Chiron Publications. 2011, p. 448). As Rilke wrote to Lou Andreas-Salomé in December the following year, “you must understand that this book has left me stranded like a survivor, my soul in a maze, with no occupation, never to be occupied again”.

Rilke attempted to overcome this miasma of indolence in two ways (ways with which he was long familiar): travelling and romance. The former meant for the peripatetic poet constant changes of abodes and frequent visits to his cohort of often aristocratic acquaintances, as if he were being “kept alive through constant motion” (Ralph Freedman, Life of a Poet, p. 309). The latter way of romance led to his involvement (sometimes on a platonic level) with a growing number of female admirers, which included, at this point in time, Mimi Romanelli, the daughter of the Venetian art dealer, Sidonie Nádherná of Borutín, friend of a notable group of writers, such as Karl Kraus, and Marthe Hennebert, a waif that Rilke had met on the streets of Paris. At the same time, his marriage with Clara was going in the direction of an anti-Romance, towards divorce.

Later that year, Rilke was able to combine both modes of distraction. In September 1910, whilst in Munich, Rilke met Frau Jenny Oltersdorf, the wife of a wealthy businessman, who persuaded him to accompany her on a voyage to North Africa, commencing in November. Their initial itinerary, which took them to Algiers and Tunis, was followed by a second trip in January 1911 to Cairo and a journey down the Nile to Luxor and Aswan, before their return leg to Cairo. Rilke was delighted by the non-European otherness of the sights, but on a personal level there was less delight. Rilke was not inclined, much to her disappointment, to see in Frau Oltersdorf anything other than travelling companion. The journey, however, left a lasting legacy in Rilke’s deep fascination for Islamic culture and cultivated spiritual impulses that would later bear poetic fruit (Polikoff, p. 448).

Rilke returned to Paris on 6 April 1911. The round of apparently never-ending cultural activities and the obsessive travelling continued. In August, Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis invited him to stay at her castle in Lautschin (Czechoslovakia). The Princess was so sure of her maternal influence that she found a new name for the poet: “Doctor Seraphicus”, the seraphic doctor. “I explained that ‘Rainer Maria Rilke’ was too long; ‘Rilke’ too short and definitely not his true name; and ‘Rainer Maria’ disrespectful [because of its association with the Virgin Mary]” (see Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis, The Poet and the Princess: Memories of Rainer Maria Rilke. Amun Press. no date. p. 16). This was the second time that Rilke had allowed a benefactor (after Lou Andreas-Salomé’s conversion of “René ” to “Rainer”) to change his name. It is difficult to imagine Thomas Mann or Bertold Brecht permitting this.

Such an action, effectively the imposition of a new personal identity (if we see it positively), reflected the growing bond between Rilke and the princess, and Rilke probably accepted it so that he could remain part of her aristocratic world. In which case, it was the right decision, for the princess and her family possessed not one but two castles. The second was located in Duino on the Adriatic coast, and it was here, between October 1911 and May 1912, that Rilke went for his longest and most productive sojourn since his trip to Italy five years earlier. Duino offered him the necessary seclusion to make possible a reassessment of his personal and creative identity. As he wrote to Elsa Buckman in December 1911, “I have been wishing for a long time to be here by myself, completely alone in order to shed my old self”. He had to be patient: the divine afflatus cannot be willed into existence. But then one day, it came, as he was walking along the sea cliffs in front of the castle, in the midst of a storm. The Princess later recalled Rilke telling her what happened: “all of a sudden in the middle of his cogitations, he stopped still, for it seemed to him that he heard a voice call through the roaring of the wind: ‘who if I should cry would hear me then from the orders of angels?’ He stood motionless and listened. ‘What was that?’, he whispered, ‘what is coming?’ ” (The Poet and the Princess, pp. 34-35).

Rilke’s abrupt revelatory words formed the opening lines of a series of ten poems that would be given the title The Duino Elegies, although the cycle would not find its completion until 1922. Rilke completed the first elegy on 21 January 1912. Around the cry and the angels, around the hope for transcendence and the pained recognition of the impossibility of the same, Rilke built a poetic monument. The first elegy introduces the major themes of the cycle: the common imperfection of humankind compared to the unreachable perfection of the Angel; the debilitating effect of self-consciousness that inhibits our belonging to the world; the failure of love to escape games and dissimulation; and the living presence of the dead. The Angel, in particular, is a central figure. It is an object of longing, but it also represents something that should only be wished for but not attained, for should we succeed, it would crush us with its beauty, “and beauty is nothing else / than the beginning of terror”. But as Rilke had written in a letter to Countess Sizzo in April 1924, “he who has not accepted the terror of life, definitely and decisively, yes even come to welcome it, has not taken possession of the ineffable fullness of our existence”, and he added, “to demonstrate the identify of terror and beatitude … that was the essential meaning and significance of my two books [Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus]”.

The second elegy was finished soon after the first, between the end of January and the beginning of February 1912. The Angel appears once more (invoked in the opening lines as both a promise and threat), but beyond its appearance we are in this elegy exclusively in the low mimetic world of the human (the all-too-human). The poem explores the absolute requirements of absolute love compared to the inconstant affections of relative “love”; the attainment of an earthly beauty that should belong to us (but does not); and the instability of the human realm in contrast to the stability of the object world. The elegy ends with a vignette celebrating (albeit in elegiac tones) a bucolic landscape, in which we might finally be at home. In the face of Rilke’s endemic restlessness and constant feelings of displacement, the evocation of this material utopia tells us much about his state of mind at this time: “If only we could find some modest place, pure and secluded, /our own fruit-bearing land, something human, between river and stone. / For our own hearts always exceed us”. It is a plaintiff voice that helps explain perhaps Rilke’s almost pathological concern with habitation, which plagued him throughout his life.

Perhaps to relieve the intensity (almost painful, if we read his letters) of poetic introspection, Rilke left Duino on 9 May for Venice, an old haunt and one that he seems to have come to regard as his personal retreat, although he wrote little during his stay. A more radical change of place was needed for the Muse to return. On 28 October 1912, Rilke (now temporarily in Munich) boarded a train for Spain, the initial destination being Toledo. This was where the artist El Greco had lived for most of his life, whose paintings Rilke had been inspired by in Paris. That sense of inspiration has now been made manifest. As he wrote to the Princess on 2 November, “what is it like here? That I shall never be able to say (it would be the language of angels)”. And yet even this glimpse of the celestial cannot satisfy Rilke’s restless soul. In spite of the achievements of the first two Duino elegies, he is forced to confess to Andreas-Salomé in a letter of 19 December 1912: when I look back to a year ago, “it does honestly seem to me that I haven’t moved since, except for going round in circles”.

Rilke stayed in Toledo only three days before travelling to Seville and from there to Ronda, where he remained until 18 February 1913. It was in Ronda that Rilke started to write again, producing a series of poems known as “The Spanish Trilogy”. As so often in Rilke’s poetic idiom, universal statement and the autobiographical (indeed, confessional) mode inform one another. The first poem begins, “from this cloud, look! which has so wildly covered / the star that just now shone there – (and from me), / from these dark clustered hills which hold the night, / the night-winds, for a while – (and from me)” (translated Stephen Mitchell). The pained state of nature is reinforced by an anaphoric repetition of the presence of the lyrical subject, who is likewise pained. As Rilke wrote in a letter to Andreas-Salomé’ on 19 December 1912 from Ronda, “once more, I am a burden on my own heart, with all the weight and with the heaviness of I know not what”. He went into greater detail concerning his malaise to Anton Kippenberg the following month: “my indispositions are not due to the climate but are only a new chapter in this singular overcoming or renewal which my entire nature is having to accomplish in these years”. This involved “a digging-up process of the entire soil of my being whereby the uppermost goes down to the very bottom”. These are times “when it would be most propitious to have no consciousness at all”.

On 23 February 1913, Rilke returned to Paris, to resume his occupancy of 17, rue Campagne-première, in (the for Rilke aptly named) district Montparnasse. The inner man must now look outwards; indeed, he sees the latter as a refuge from his debilitating plight of introspection. Social life, cultural contacts and romance now moved into the centre of Rilke’s life. Paris is his base, but it is just the starting point for further bouts of travelling: in June-July, he goes to Bad Rippoldsau (seeking a respite from his incessant illnesses); to Göttingen in the same month (visiting Lou), followed at the end of the month with a visit to Kippenberg in Leipzig. The restless movement continued, taking in Berlin and Munich. As Freedman concludes, “each month took him yet a further step from his writing” (Freedman, p. 363). During this period, Rilke’s erotic life intensified, with the arrival of three new women in his life: Ellen Schachian, Helene von Nostitz-Wallwitz and Hedwig Bernhard, whom he had met through his ever-expanding network of acolytes and well-wishers, all admirers of his poetry and impressed (perhaps even seduced) by his growing reputation.

Rilke has discovered the eroticised body, shorn from sentiment and aesthetic adornment (but not of its place in mental play). In October 1913, he returned to Elegy 3, begun the previous year in Duino. It begins: “the sing of the beloved is one thing, but, oh, yet another / to sing of that hidden guilt-laden river-god of the blood”. The ethereal, the transcendent idiom of the first two elegies (and the Angelic, however forbidding that was) gives way to the low-mimetic realm. Perhaps lacking any further source of inspiration, Rilke returned to his writing on Rodin. In the first of his two essays, he had described the sculptor’s art as emerging out of the “language of the body”, a language that brought to the surface “a thousand emanations for all that was nameless and new” (Rilke, Auguste Rodin. Dover Edition. 2018, p. 4). In Elegy 3, the body is depicted as a visceral massif, a dark realm that belongs to the individual but seems to exert itself in a non-individual way, as “this inner wilderness, / this jungle within”. In this Elegy, physical Immanence replaces spiritual transcendence.

It is within this context that we should perhaps see the next major moment in Rilke’s personal life. On 22 January 1914, he received a letter from a young woman called Magda von Hattingberg, saying how much the poet’s Stories of God had moved her. Rilke had received many letters of appreciation from female admirers before, but this time it was different: her simple words, “I wish I could be Ellen Key [to whom the book was dedicated] even for a little while” “transformed him into someone else, an instrument of feeling and singing”. He wrote back to thank her, in profuse terms in “effusive poetic prose that displaced any further poetry” (Freedman, p. 373). But the letters included poetry. On 25 February, he wrote: “Can you imagine how for years / I’ve travelled thus, strange among strangers? / And now at last you take me in, to home -” (quoted in Prater, p. 243). They eventually met in March and moved in together into a Berlin apartment. Roles of dependency developed: “they travelled less as lovers than as brother and sister – or once as patient and nurse” (Pater, p. 245).

In the midst of his personal imbroglios (“my entanglements, which are unforeseeable and so long in the making”, as he described them to Andreas-Salomé’ in a letter of 26 June), Rilke went through a major change (perhaps a crisis) in his artistic self-image and in his poetics. To date, Rilke’s greatest poetic achievement, his New Poems (1907), had been founded on an aesthetic of perception where, as in the “Dinggedicht”, the integrity of the phenomenal world had been given fullest realisation through the impartiality of a narrating gaze. On 20 June 1914, Rilke sent Lou Andreas-Salomé a poem, simply titled “Turning” (“Wendung”). The poet speaks of himself here in the third person voice, as if he is talking of another, previous self: ” he had long prevailed through gazing. / Stars fell to their knees / under his grappling up-ward glance”. This was earlier poetic disposition that the “new” Rilke rejects: “work of the eyes is done, / begin heart work now / on those images in you, those captive ones”. In a letter sent six days later, 26 June, to Andreas-Salomé, Rilke explained the background to the poem: “a mental acquisition of the world that so completely makes use of the eye, as is the case with me, would be less dangerous for a visual artist because it would be comforted more tangibly by physical results”. And he adds, “some sort of life within me has saved itself from being exposed like this”, concluding “and between the uninterrupted addiction to outwardness and this inner existence that is hardly accessible even to me, there exist the true habitations of healthy feeling, empty, abandoned and stripped bare”.

The relationship between Rilke and Magda von Hattingberg did not (perhaps, could not) last: by June it was all over. As Rilke wrote to Sidie Nadherny, “I’ve unwittingly drawn a person more intimately into my life than I really intended” (quoted in Prawer, p. 267). If that, however, were the case, what was the purpose the extensive personalising rhetoric and the self-pitying cry for acceptance? As Rilke wrote to Lou Andreas-Salomé, I have experienced “three months of reality (which I couldn’t face up to)” (quoted in Prater, p. 247).

But reality in a different form was about to happen. In August 1914, war was declared amongst the major European powers. Rilke had left France earlier that month to visit Lou, but now found himself stranded in Munich, unable to return to Paris and his possessions (most of which he would soon lose). “For the first time, therefore, he was really homeless” (Prater, p. 252). Rilke initially responded to war (as did many German writers, including Thomas Mann) positively: it represented the principle of heroic selflessness that had now emerged over and beyond an increasingly materialist civilisation. “Who, who would have thought it?”, he wrote to Anna Baroness von Münchhausen on 15 August. “And now one thinks nothing but this, and everything former has become as if it were immemorial, separated from one through abysses and heights of no longer feelable feeling. The high heart of all who are out there [at the Front] must sustain us over the still water of not-knowing and not grasping, which sometimes threatens to engulf us”. Rilke wrote “Five Songs” welcoming the war. The initial poem begins: “for the first time that I saw you arise / you legendary, unbelievable distant one: the war god”. All poems invoke the war as a divine visitation. In the words of a further one: “at last a god. So, we’ve so seldom seized a god /of peace, the Battle-God suddenly seizes us, / flinging fire, and over our hearts full of homeland/ screams the reddened sky in which he dwells in thunder”.

The euphoria was collective, sustained by the false belief that German victory would be swift. Such a belief was, however ill founded. Rilke’s enthusiasm soon wilted. Within weeks of penning his homilies to the war, he could write (also to the Baroness on 29 August 1914), “I am having a very hard time finding, by myself, across this span, the valid and if possible somehow fruitful attitude towards the monstrous generality”, adding, “an impatience and discontent are growing in my breast”. Not a rejection of war, certainly, but an expression of Rilke’s now ambivalent feelings towards it. The First World War was not the Franco-Prussian war writ large (as many had hoped). The former had been conducted according to rules that were centuries old. The First World War, on the contrary, was a modern war, a “Materialschlacht”, and fought along lines of an industrial operation. As trench warfare became the norm, it consumed large amounts of fighting men in a seemingly pointless competition for small amounts of land. On 12 September, Andreas-Salomé wrote to Rilke to express her horror of the war and its conduct. She wrote that she understood those who had welcomed it, seeing men “in the grip of something”. But such sentiments were “made true and real only at the cost of one’s closest fellow humans and only by virtue of their death”. The words are pointed, and pointed at Rilke and his poems (that he had sent Lou the previous month) celebrating the god of war. And she continued, “nothing has anything in all my years horrified me more than this, and it is if my mouth were to come open, it could only start screaming senselessly”.

It is difficult to believe that such sentiments would not have had an effect on Rilke who, in their frequent correspondence, hung off her every word. Indeed, as early as September (in a letter to Lou), Rilke made reference to “the continually disturbed present” that was making creative work and communication impossible. By October, his tone had become even darker, as he talked (writing to Frau Helen von Nostitz on the 21st of that month) of the “monstrosity” of war and its “unspeakable suffering”. By November, he seems to have taken back his earlier stance on the war entirely: it is “no longer a god but the unleashing of a god over the people”. “Everything visible has simply been cast once again into the boiling abysses, to be melted down”, he wrote on the 6 November to Karl and Elizabeth von der Heydt.

But as Ralph Freedman dryly observes, “he found a cure of sorts” (Freedman, p. 382). Attending a cultural function in Munich in September, he met a young artist, Loulou Albert-Lasard. Romance would divert Rilke from history. This was just one in a number of relationships that Rilke, almost obsessively, entered into during this period. As the lyrical muse wilted, romance flourished. He was now a fully mature man, with a growing reputation as a major poet. His successes were significant. Throughout the final period of the war, he entered into relationships with Mia Mattauch, Elya Nevar, Elsa Hotop and Claire Studer. All were part of the increasingly wide cultured social circle that Rilke enjoyed in Munich. The relationships were, on the whole, intense, complicated and short lived. As one biographer has noted about his earlier relationship with Magda von Hattingberg, “their life together fell into a pattern that many of Rilke’s serious relationships with women would follow, beginning with sensitive caring, tender endearments, small, sophisticated gifts, and an almost domestic tranquility”, “followed by her sinking realization of his slow, barely accelerating withdrawal” (Freedman, p. 375). But, as Freedman also observes, such a pattern in his love life may have been tactical, “a pattern of living through failure as part of a process that turns denial into art”, representing “a power of creating and denying desire as a way of forging a poet’s self” (Freedman, p. 377).

Rilke, however, had already known this. In Elegy 4, written In Munich in November 1915, he had celebrated the pure unselfconsciousness of animals. They act with integrity out of sheer instinct. “But we, as we speak of one thing / already mean its opposite. / Hostility is second nature to us. / Lovers get no further than their boundaries, / although they had promised one another / open plains, the chase, and homeland”. Indeed, Elegy 4 is the most autobiographical of the Elegies. Midway through it, we read: “who has never sat anxiously before the stage curtain / of the heart?”. The curtain is lifted to reveal a complex and psychologically ambivalent portrait of the father, who with temporal ambivalence occupies a space between the living and the dead. He is invoked in a confrontational recall in tones that move between animosity and compassion: “you, my father, since you died, deep within me, / often within my hopes, / you have remained anxious for me, and have surrendered /those realms of serenity that the dead possess, / for my paltry future. Am I not right? / And you, am I not right?”.

At one time, the son had also been a child, and the fourth Elegy contains one of Rilke’s most evocative portrayals of childhood: “oh, hours of childhood, behind whose figures / lay something that was always more than the past / and what lay before us was not just the future”. It is an idyll, where the child exists for itself and in itself in a place “of pure happening”. But the idyll is short lived because, as Rilke will tell us in a later elegy, the child is subject to “Gestaltung”, formation, the controlling presence of the adult world. Here what is childlike within the child is extinguished: “who makes / a child’s death out of grey bread that has become hard, – / or leaves it there in its round mouth / like the core of an apple? … Murderers are easier to understand”.

As an Austrian citizen, Rilke was obliged to present himself for military duties. On 24 November 1915, he underwent an army medical inspection, which found him fit for active service and ordered him to report on 4 January 1916 to a barracks in Turnau, north Bohemia, for service with the “Landsturm” (territorial Home Guard).After three weeks, he was transferred to the War Archive in Vienna, contributing to the writing up of reports of successful Austrian offensives for journalistic purposes. The task was demeaning and took him away from his own writing. As he complained to Kippenberg, on 15 February 1916, “being spent and weary, as it came over me in the barracks, has understandably enough not been removed by the new position; at three, I get out of the office, eat, go home by trolley-car (i.e. Parkhotel, Hopfner, Hietzing, Vienna XIII) and yet not in a condition to give the little remainder of the day its own stamp and its own meaning. For that, I am too full of the stones rolling from the mountains of strangeness that have fallen over me. I taste, if I try myself for a moment, nothing but patience, patience in which nothing is dissolved, pure, colorless patience”.

By this time, Rilke could now only see in the war a manifestation of a mechanical and power-hungry materialist ethos. As he wrote in a letter at the time, the war was lying on him “like a hand on the mouth, a hand on the heart” In particular, “he mourned the loss of the open Europe that had been his home” (quoted in Freedman, pp, 386 and 399). Rilke was also unhappy in Vienna, with its dissipation and formlessness. The city was “a torment, as it must be to anybody with a tidy and precise mind: it is inexactitude, and the sloppy enjoyment everyone takes in this hopeless slovenliness gives the city’s spirit its own particular sad bloom” (Rilke quoted in Prater, p. 275).

Rilke survived the present of the war by keeping in mind his past. As he wrote later to Elisabeth Baroness Schenck zu Schweinsberg on 5 January 1919, “the longer the exceptional period of the war lasted, the denser and more impenetrable it grew, the more did I take pains not to be separated from all that had been, the more did I insist on keeping what was happy, open, guileless in my past, indeed, on nourishing and prolonging myself, across the terrible interruption, out of this very past. Practically my only achievement in these dreadfully annihilating years was to remain believing in what once in the past was mine, in Capri, in Rome, in Paris, in Russia, in Egypt and Tunis – all the marvellous sheer happenings of my life, to which a different future seemed to belong”.

Rilke enlisted help in high places to get himself removed from his duties. After four months, he was successful and allowed to return to Munich in June 1916. His pleas succeeded largely because it was clear to all that Rilke was acting out of cultural rather than political motives. Freedman summarises the general attitude of those in authority to Rilke’s case: it was clear “that he was no conscientious objector publicly acting from pacifist convictions but rather an artist acting from a strong belief that he was a cultural monument” (Freedman, p 408).

Rilke was allowed to return to Munich, but that return did little to lift his spirits. To be sure, the immediate pressure had gone, but he was now subject to an equally oppressive influence that came from and with history (what he called in a letter to Kippenberg, on 5 July 1917, “the perpetual weight of the time”). As he had written to the latter (who may have been worried about his author’s lack of productivity) on 15 April , “I am proceeding but very slowly along the course of the translations [of The Sonnets of Michelangelo], and the attempts to continue with my own very particular work [the Elegies], interrupted by the military enlistments, have simply moved into my daily experience a torturous inability to work. Those broken surfaces have gone hard and cold, and the warmth of simple joy is lacking to melt them”. In such despondency, even his attempts to communicate via letters (Rilke’s life source) must suffer. As he explained to Elisabeth Taubmann on 18 May 1917, “how long I have left you without an answer. By this, I clearly see the degree of my numbness and apathy. The present time with all its hindrances and its activity, gone to the most frightful ruin, is like lead poured around me – I cannot move outwardly or inwardly. And should there still be some life in my inmost being, I am too blunt and too untransparent to feel and recognise myself in it”.

The four war years were indeed unproductive years for Rilke. He finished translating the Michelangelo sonnets and September 1917 saw the publication of five poems in the journal, Die Dichtung, almost all of which date from 1914. The war itself continued on its tragic course with much cost in human life, with the failed and bloody offensive at Verdun (February-December 1916) leading to the death of some of Rilke’s friends, such as the promising young scholar and Hölderlin editor, Norbert von Hellingrath. Rilke felt compelled to look for a deeper meaning in such senseless slaughter. As he wrote on 19 September 1917 to Marietta Baroness von Nordeck zur Rabenau (the fiancée of Hellingrath), “I think how much salvation and relief will be implanted in my spirit the moment the great healing process of the world has begun”.

That great healing process would not begin until the war was over, which happened with the armistice of November 1918 (although Germany’s military defeat was evident well before then). Rilke tried to find a compensation for this loss. As he wrote to Marie von Bunsen on 22 September 1918, “if only each loss were a full pledge and relentless in demanding of us a life more serious, more responsible and more sensitive to the mysteries of the world!”. The war had shaken Rilke, but it had not shaken his faith in the human soul, as he told the Countess Aline Dietrichstein on 9 October 1918, “with all this affliction, confusion and disfigurement of the world, I still believe in the great, in the consummate, widely inexhaustible possibilities of life”, and he added, “I hold life to be a thing of the most inviolable preciousness, and that the entangling of so much doom and horror, the prostituting of such countless destinies, everything that has been, in these last years, unconquerably growing for us into a still augmenting terror, cannot dissuade me of the fullness and goodness and congeniality of existence”. These are sentiments that will inform the future Elegies which, in spite of their often pessimistic portrayal of the insincerity of human (inter)action, give voice to an existential euphoria, as in the concluding lines of Elegy 9: “look; I am living. From what? Neither childhood nor future / is diminishing … superabundant being / springs from my heart”.

One such moment of the fullness of existence seems to have been the “November Revolution” of 1918, which took place around his very dwelling in Munich. On 5 November, the radical socialist, Kurt Eisner, in the wake of anti-war sentiment, succeeded in organising forces against the state. Soldiers’ and Workers’ Councils were set up, and Bavaria was declared a Republic. The normally apolitical Rilke participated empathetically in the event. As he wrote to Clara on 7 November 1918, there was much turmoil and conflict between the different revolutionary groups, each of which had a different vision of what the new government should look like, “and in every hesitation in the strife of that which eventually has to come, one’s heart stops as though this future, still going on foot through the crowd, might stumble or turn back again”. Rilke not only participated empathetically with the dramatic political events (viewing them with enthusiasm and hoping that they might augur a more compassionate and human form of society; he also participated directly, being present (in spite of the incongruity of this lofty spirit normally only at home in aristocratic circles) at a number of beerhall meetings, where the foment of radical change was promoted by demobbed soldiers and sailors. As he told Clara (clearly a supporter of the change) in the same letter, “I too was among thousands on Monday Evening in the Hotel Wagner” where Max Weber, the noted Professor of national economy, rubbed shoulders with the Expressionist playwright and anarchist, Erich Mühsam. And Rilke adds, “the fumes of beer and smoke and people did not affect me uncomfortably”. Brave words from the non-smoking, teetoler Rilke. Such demotic sentiments did not, however, last.

The new guard, however, soon adopted the modus operandi of the old guard. As Rilke wrote to Anni Mewes on 19 December 1918, “under the pretext of a great overturn the old lack of principle works on and gives itself airs under the red flag”. The Revolution had become largely a matter of power, with competing groups (often espousing the same ideology) seeking dominance. As he shrewdly observed to Baroness Heyl zu Herrnsheim on 1 March 1919, “those who do not want to raise the question of the maturity of the multitude for its rights, try to secure their position by all the antiquated means”. As he concluded in a letter to Countess Aline Dietrichstein on 6 August 1919, “for behind so much upset, racket and malicious crowding there was after all no will to real change and renewal, to share and take part in which I would have been only too ready”. The utopian idealism, which had promised so much, gave way in the hard reality of day to different motives: “the preponderance of material aspirations and inferior, if indeed not evil and vengeful impulses, almost in [the Revolution’s] first hours, destroyed the cleaner future of this forward drive, joyful at first, but later desperate and finally totally senseless – in the whirlpools of which many innocent persons went under as did almost all those who thought to carry ahead a vision of humanity, impatient indeed, but noble”. And Rilke now adds a final word on what being involved in this maelstrom meant for those standing on the sidelines trying to make sense of what was happening: “strictly speaking, the unswerving intellectual could side with neither party in this chaotically confused struggle”. Such people shared the ideals but not the ruthless pragmatism of the political. “To the future, the intellectual is after all allied and sworn, not in the sense of the revolutionary, who would presume to create from one day to the next a humanity freed (what is freedom?) and happy (what is happiness?), but in that other patient understanding that he is preparing in people’s hearts those subtle, secret, tremulous transformations out of which alone will proceed the agreements and unities of a more clarified future”.

The Revolution soon degenerated into a quasi-civil war, conducted by left wing (largely communist) factions, and right-wing groups made up from paramilitary units (returned soldiers, now known as the “Freikorps”) and a police force sympathetic to the values of the previous conservative state. All who were suspected of pro-revolutionary sympathies (however idealistically held) were targets for retribution. The Revolution devours its children. In May 1918, police and right-wing militia ransacked Rilke’s apartment looking for evidence of possible Communist sympathies (he was known to have befriended the playwright Ernst Toller, who for a short time had been President of the Bavarian Soviet Republic). They found no such evidence but clearly politics in the wake of the failed November Revolution had become more divisive and more dangerous than ever. Exitum sit. Almost immediately after this event, Rilke took up a long-standing invitation to go on a lecturing tour of Switzerland, arriving there on 14 June 1919. He would never return to Germany.