(10 June 2025)
(4 073 words)
(Reading Time: 22 minutes)
On 22 May 1919, Rilke wrote to his publisher, Anton Kippenberg, explaining that he had decided to leave Germany and go to live in Switzerland. “My body longs for helpful change, and everything suspended and watchful in me is indescribably ready to think that this is right. So, I grasped the friendly hand, offered to me again yesterday in a telegram from Switzerland, with an affirmative answer. It now seems possible to get in through the Hottingen Reading Circle”.
Rilke cites reasons of health for his decision, but he also refers earlier in the letter to “the experiences we had here in April, and particularly to those infringements and interferences that have been going on since the first of May”. The allusions are cryptic, but what Rilke was alluding to was the ongoing state of violent civil unrest in Munich and the rest of Germany. The assassination of Kurt Eisner on 21 February 1919 was just one in a series of bloody events in which extreme nationalist groups attempted (successfully) to reclaim the revolutionary impetus from the left-wing inspired revolution of 1918. Rilke left for Switzerland (Zurich) on 11 June.
The Hottingen Reading Circle based in Zurich was an organisation which, apart from its local goal of bringing serious readers together, was devoted to inviting writers of international standing to Switzerland. It offered these writers both renumeration and accommodation. Apart from speaking in Zurich, Rilke travelled in his first year there to other centres in the country, giving talks in St. Gallen, Lucerne and Bern (November 1919) and Locarno (December).
The ostensible purpose of his coming to Switzerland (and which had made acquiring a visitor’s visa possible) was to give his course of public readings in Zurich and elsewhere, but, as always with Rilke, social and personal contact was also a priority. And (equally as always) that contact largely involved contact with women. On arrival, he was greeted by the Countess Mary Dobrcensky, a benefactor of the Arts who had helped organise and fund Rilke’s trip. Soon after he got back in touch with a former flame, Sidonie Nádherná of Borutín (also in June), Dorothée Klossowska (otherwise known as “Baladine”, in July), Also in July, Rilke met Yvonne de Wattenwy, and he resumed his relationship in the same month with Marthe Hennerberg. In September, he became friends with Lisa Heise and in November with Nanny Wunderly-Volkart, “the epitome of unpossessive love” (Prater, p. 309). In December, he took under his wing the destitute Angela Guttmann. Rilke’s engagement with these women crossed a broad and indeterminable spectrum, that included their roles as benefactors, hostesses, soul companions, the materially dependent, intellectual associates and lovers. Rilke’s biographers tend judiciously not to place a clear dividing line between these roles. Little poetry was written at this time.
Rilke found much in Switzerland that appealed to his feeling for the material aesthetic of the surrounding world. As he told Countess M. on 13 August 1919, after reaching the isolated village of Soglio, “old houses, old things can acquire the most compelling power over me, the smell of old cupboards and old drawers is so familiar to the nostrils”. And lest we should think this is quaint, second-hand Proust, Rilke is quick to disabuse us of that view. As he wrote to Prince Schoenburg on 11 January 1920,” I am just ashamed to be so entirely dependent on externals”, “and my wishing for old things about me, that is not aesthetic affectation and being fussy either; what humanness have they not brought me (how often have I experienced it!) in the very times when all social intercourse had been given up: how much they tell, how much destiny passes from them”.
So, positive words, but Rilke seems to have experienced Switzerland on several levels, and none of them quite cohere. The poet, in fact, came to Switzerland full of misgivings and prejudices. In his biography of Rilke, Ralph Freedman tells us that “his sensibility became quickly attuned to this pristine world, seemingly untouched by war”. “It was a fairy-tale world”. “Here, it seemed the artist had found his proper refuge, a still point where his kind of poetry could be safely composed” (Freedman, Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke. New York. 1996. p. 435). But this was not the case. As Rilke wrote to the Countess Aline Dietrichstein on 6 August 1919, “I always regarded Switzerland as a country of transit, harboring a sort of mistrust of its too famous, too obvious, too pretentious ‘beauty’. Mountains are just naturally difficult for me to grasp”. And he added, in the tone of the disappointed but aesthetically informed viewing tourist, “anyway, they seem to me something of an obstacle; there are appallingly so many of them. Their shapes cancel each other out”.
The composed, picture-postcard quality of the Swiss countryside is a topic that Rilke (rather condescendingly) returned to time and again in his letters. The country had provided him with asylum, but he found himself, in his sensibility, not at home there. As he wrote to Elisabeth von Schmidt Pauli on 14 August, “Switzerland is certainly no country for me; it strikes me like one of those painted or modeled nudes intended to make apparent all the ‘beauties’ of many women in a single figure; that is, if I am not mistaken, the aesthetic of Switzerland – for us an abominable one; which is why her artists so quickly turn pedagogical, for where examples of every type are present together, what remains but to point to them, to consider them picture books and to educate through them”. It is not just inert nature that partakes of this picturesque monumentality: it is also found in its population. As Rilke explained to Gertrud Ouckama Koop on 12 September: “the wonderfully picturesque fountains make even the water into good citizens. One readily decides to explain the Swiss himself as part of this security: that is the easiest way of understanding his outlines and his structure, the ground material of which seems indeed to have been kneaded from the most homogeneous mass and cut from the whole; so that in each individual the nation is present”. “What sort of an inner life can take place in his mind, which is germ free and shadowlessly lighted like an operating room!”.
The Swiss, Rilke told Kippenberg in a letter of 2 December, “are stolid, often arid and hard to penetrate”. For that reason, he decided to begin his poetry readings (which began in October. The first on 27 October attracted six hundred people) with general introductions explaining what he was trying to achieve. This he followed, in the second part of the evening, “with an absolutely impromptu causerie, flexibly adapted to the particular place, which led back over various subjects … to my work and quite imperceptibly prepared and explained it in such a way that even very difficult and ‘personal’ poems were unusually well received”. The poetry readings were interlarded with anecdotes relating to his contact with Tolstoy and Rodin. In spite of the condescending impetus behind this strategy, it proved a great success. The overfilled auditoriums greeted Rilke’s talks and readings with enthusiasm, a fact reflected in the positive press reviews they received.
In spite of such public success, Rilke sought to find an isolated place where he might retain the silence of his inner self. As he explained to Dorothea Baroness von Ledebur on 15 January 1920, his greatest pleasure is to seek out deserted country churches: “I sit in one, now here, now there, and sometimes the tears come into my eyes for sheer joy over the pure serene silence in these churches. Such silence, it seems to me, I must be allowed to have around me for a year, to become aware of myself again and of that little spring of renewal in the middle of me, which is the secret of every life”.
But this yearning for solitude and tranquility did not exclude the need for movement, to be in constant motion. Rilke spent a good deal of early 1920 attempting to procure a Czech passport that would allow him to visit other countries, including Italy, and it was here, in Venice that he spent most of June and July. It had been eight years since his last substantial stay in the city and he returned there now hoping to reconnect with the past, as a step towards “restoring the lost continuity of his life” and “the pervading sense of a lack of personal identity” (Donald Prater, A Ringing Glass: The Life of Rainer Maria Rilke. Oxford. 1986. pp. 316 and 310). If so, he did not succeed. As he wrote to the Princess Marie on 23 July, “I only observe that life cannot be joined on to the broken surfaces of the pre-war days in the way I thought”. “Whoever thinks he can live from now on as he was ‘accustomed’ to live, will find himself continually facing the sheerest repetition, the bare once-again and its whole desperate unfruitfulness”.
His trip to Paris in October saw greater rewards, bringing the past to life into Rilke’s present identity. “Here begins the unsayable”, he recorded in his notebook (quoted in Freedman, p. 460). He basked in his asocial solitude and anonymity. As he wrote to Fanette Clavel during his stay, “I have seen no one but things, and it is always through them that I have always composed my life” (quoted in Freedman, p. 460). But as Freedman shrewdly notes, “he allowed himself to be coaxed out of his solitude by persons with glittering names” (Freedman, p. 460). And glittering long names, we might add.
Rilke returned to Switzerland and to a romance that would occupy (uplift but disturb him) for the rest of his life (he has six years more to live). This was with Dorothée Klossowska (otherwise known as “Baladine”, but she also chose for herself the name “Merline”. A sorceress indeed). Rilke had met her in Paris before the war when she was then married to the art historian Erich Klossowska. They were now divorced and Dorothée was living with her two sons in Geneva. The years between 1921 and 1926 ushered in a turbulence in Rilke’s life that initially prevented further work on the Elegies, and then, paradoxically (through the same energies), made them possible.
From 12 November 1920 to middle of May 1921, Rilke lived in Schloss Berg am Irchel, a seventeenth-century manor house north of Zurich. It was a version of Duino in Switzerland. It should have been the place where the Elegies were finished, but it wasn’t. In his autobiographical recall of his time there, the semi-diary, Testament, Rilke blamed it on external pressures (a sawmill operating in the early hours of the morning), but the real disturbance was in Rilke’s mind and in his confused emotions towards Merline. They were not internally conflicting (he knew that he wanted to be with her); they were conflicting in terms of their interference with his wish to write. Merline was not physically present at Schloss Berg, but as an invoked loved one she was, as Testament shows, permanently, with Rilke. She was the pivotal person in his life. It was with her that he discovered Valais, the valley of the Rhone (reminding Rilke of France), which was soon to provide his final resting place and the background to (and perhaps inspiration for) his completion of the Elegies.
In the meantime, however, Rilke was in Schloss Berg, where he struggled to move forward in his work. In his six months stay, nothing was written beyond the preface to a pictorial book that Merline’s son had produced on cats, and a book of occasional poems, titled From the Literary Remains of Count C.W., an imaginary figure who was “a kind of pretext, a personality which could be responsible for what was taking shape at this highly inadequate stage of concentration” (Rilke quoted in Prater, p. 326). The (often incomplete) poems are whimsies on the whole, but they contain gestures at what would later find their way into the Elegies, such as a musing on childhood: “don’t let the fact that childhood has been, that nameless / bond between heaven and us, be revoked by fate.” Other than these Remains, it was a period of stagnation: just reading and letter-writing (although this was an essential activity). “For Rilke, it was as though fate had nursed a ‘secret hostility’ towards his work” (Prater, p. 331).
The poet left a record of these days of immobility and frustration in a quasi-diary that he called Testament, where he tells of his hope that the castle would provide “that inner thoughtfulness that has to precede the constellation of his work” (Das Testament. Insel Verlag. 1974. p. 81). Rilke concluded that, torn between love of the Other and love of himself, “he was no longer at one with himself”, a victim of “the game of acceptance and refusal” (Das Testament, pp. 92 and 95). Choosing to go down the path of non-love, the past of asceticism, was, however, not an option for someone who was committed to the senses, “who, on earth, he who had to believe in the purity of appearance and the truth of form, could start with denial!? And even if it proved to be helpful and useful at the outset, it would remain a fraud for him, a ruse, a misappropriation, and in the end it would take its revenge somewhere in the liniments of his work, as a hardness, as something arid, a miserliness, the result of cowardness” (Das Testament, p. 98). Rilke cannot, thus, renounce love, but he must keep it at a distance (in this case with Merline). “That being-alone, in which I have anchored myself for the last twenty years, must not become an exception, a ‘vacation’, which, bringing many justifications into play, I would have to beg from a supervising happiness. I must live in it without any boundaries. It has to remain this basis of my consciousness, to which I can always return, without hoping for a quick gain, without expecting that it should prove productive for me, but almost involuntarily, unstressed, innocent, the place to which I belong” (Das Testament, p. 113).
Schloss Berg am Irchel was not the right place for Rilke’s “being-alone” but he was soon to find that place. On 30 June 1921 (a month after leaving the Schloss), Rilke came across in Sierre an advertisement for a small “castle” at Muzot. Rilke, assisted by Merline, moved in on 26 July. It was here that he would complete his cycle of elegies. The castle lay in the Valais valley (“where here in the physiognomy of the landscape Spain and Provence so strangely interact”), which was, as he wrote to Princess Marie on 25 July, “so wide and so grandly filled out with little heights within the frame of the big border mountains that the eye is continually provided with a play of the most delightful changes, a chess game with hills, as it were”. And as for the castle, the chateau? (which was no more than a country house: “a square, step-gabled tower set in a small garden” (Prater, p. 337): “it lies about twenty minutes steep above Sierre, in a less arid, happy rusticity with many springs rumbling through it, with views into the valley”. For the spiritualist-minded Rilke it possessed an important feature – a ghost: Isabelle de Chevron, who wandered at night looking for her murdered husband.
In its antiquity, distinguished lineage, ethereal atmosphere, Muzot was conducive to work, but Rilke still could not find the right words for the continuation of his Elegies. He knew, however, as he told the Countness Nora Purtscher-Wydenbruck on 25 September 1921, what those words would look like: “I must more and more remind myself that my now nearly ten years’ silence lies upon the words, with which I want to break this silence, is an extraordinary responsibility. Those words, indeed, all those that I ever as yet have to form, are made from the indescribable hindrances that have been put in my way through the years, and especially since 1914, and such words will be heavy and massive by nature. Never was I less in a position to produce light and pleasant words of an occasional sort. It seems to me as though from now on but one thing, something final and valid, the one thing that is needful, will give me the right to speak”.
The one thing that was needful came in the form of a letter from Gertrud Ouckama Knoop, whose daughter, Wera, had been a friend of Rilke’s daughter, Ruth, in Munich. Rilke now wrote to Gertrud, telling her of Ruths impending marriage. It started a train of correspondence, which included letters written by Wera when she was on the point of death. As he wrote back to Gertrud at the beginning of January 1922, the letters “were all at once the introduction into something so manifoldly moving, affecting, overwhelming to me”. Rilke, the believer in death as a form of spiritual integrity, now found his way to new poetry: the Sonnets to Orpheus,
Orpheus, a figure of legend who had visited the dead and found poetry amongst them, had provided a poetic theme once before, in the poem “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes”, written in Italy in 1904. The first sonnet begins: “Oh, Orpheus sings! Oh, tall tree in the ear!”. “These were words that came to Rilke on the morning of 2 February 1922, finding their concrete shape from restless imagining” (Freedman, p. 482). At Berg, Rilke had read Ovid’s Metamorphosis, and this served as inspiration for the transfiguring Sonnets. “The Orphic myth – the power of Orpheus over animals and trees, his descent into the Underworld – was particularly fitting as a symbolic expression of Rilke’s ideas of the unity of life and death, and especially of the poet’s vocation” (Freedman, pp. 350-351). Unlike what will come later in the form of the Elegies, the Sonnets are a “pure” poetry shorn off any murky engagement with the world: their idiom is timeless myth, and their autobiographical origins (which do exist) belong to the achieved transcendence of transfigured death.
It is almost as if the vatic inspiration of the purely poetic of the Sonnets (of a flight uprising “guilelessly into the pure, pellucid skies”, as he wrote to Gertrud Ouckama Knoop on 18 March 1922), had to cleanse his sensibility before he could face the challenges of the Elegies, with their hybrid mix of shifting stylistic registers, their discussive engagement with matters personal and visceral, and their vision of earthly incompleteness. On 7 February 1922, Rilke finally resumed work on them. To the four that already existed, Rilke added a fifth. The sixth elegy, which Rilke had begun in in Duino, with additions made in January and February 1912 in Ronda, Spain, was now completed. Entirely new elegies, the seventh and eight were written, and the ninth, begun in March 1912 in Duino, was also finished at this time. The composition of the final tenth elegy had followed a fragmentary trajectory. Its initial lines had been written in February or March 1912 at Duino, with new sections added towards the end of 1913 in Paris, and now the final draft was finished at Muzot in February 1922.
Rilke was ecstatic about the completion of the Elegies. As he wrote to Baladine on 9 February: “Merline, I am saved! What weighed me down and caused me anguish most is done, and I believe gloriously so … I am still trembling from it – tonight I was afraid that I had collapsed, but no, I won … And I went on to caress old Muzot, just now, in the moonlight” (quoted in Freedman, p. 492). The Elegies brought together the major themes of Rilke’s work: the authenticity or inauthenticity of selfhood; the precariousness but necessity of love; the machinations of failed “love”; the spirit’s struggle against the weight of banality and habit; the urge to transcendence stymied through the imposed definitions of a prescribed world; death and dying as positive conditions of living; the will to constructivism and to art and writing; the glory of existential being in the world and the simple facticity of life; the fluid experience of time; the redeeming power of nature; the joy of childhood that is not allowed to survive under adult control; and the terrifying attraction of Angelic Otherness. That thematic complex is mediated and finds figuration through its dramatis personae, notably the Angel, the lovers, the puppet and the young dead. These may be all fabulations of the mind, but the Elegies also represented a culmination of many experiences in Rilke’s life and drew upon the places where he had been and the people he had seen: the churches in Naples and Rome (Elegy 1), the Athenian stele (in the second Elegy), Egypt and the Sphinx (in the seventh and tenth Elegies), and the Parisian travelling street performers (Elegy 5). Within the text, all contribute to the autobiographical pull of the Elegies, its personal inflexion and its distinctive tone of rapture but also of departure and loss. The latter (the emotive centre of the elegy genre) manifests itself in the “Abschied” motif of the second, fourth and eighth Elegy, but also in the recognition of cultural loss in the age of modernity, as in Elegy 9.
But after the triumphal mood of the Elegies came depression. “Whatever the vicissitudes of the hand-to-mouth life of the previous ten years, the one great task had always been before him: in the calm now after the storm of its achievement, he was left without the sense of purpose that it had given him” (Prater, p. 359). Rilke chose an unusual solution to this crisis: he started to write much of his new poetry in French. “It was part of his class-bound, supranational European vision, in which the language of poetry could be spoken in several tongues” (Freedman, p. 503). The inspiration was provided by his decision to translate, between December 1922 and January 1923, a volume of verse, Charmes, by Paul Valery into German. As for the poems Rilke wrote in French, these were collected in a volume completed in February 1924 and titled Tendres impôts à la France (Affectionate Duties to France).
Rilke’s poetry in German was occasional and infrequent. One series of poems, however, was more substantial. In May 1924, the poet was contacted by an eighteen-year-old Viennese student, Erika Mitterer, who had been impressed by Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus. The letter that she wrote was, in fact a poem, and Rilke replied to her in a similar vein, initiating a poetic correspondence that lasted until his death. They would eventually meet in late November 1925, when Rika visited Rilke in Muzot for three days.
In the first of her “letters”, Erika had called herself a “Fremder”, someone talking to the Unknown. Rilke replied in his “letter”: “oh, how we treasure the unknown / all too swiftly a dear face takes form / from contrasts and analogies”. In their final exchange of letter-poems, in August 1926, Erika had given praise to the heavens for having survived a difficult medical operation. Rilke replied, sharing her praise in a poem of which the central stanza reads: “the dove of all doves best sheltered, of all doves least / open to danger, knows least, too, of tenderness; / heart that has convalesced makes the most lived-in home; / strength returns delight all the more boundless (translated Ranson and Sutherland. Rilke Selected Poems. Oxford World Classics. p. 269).
Rilke may have been aware of the irony of his words, for he would have known by then that he was suffering from a probably terminal illness – leukemia – from which no operation would save him. Rilke first became seriously concerned about his health in January 1924, after returning from a Swiss sanitorium. Although his illness had not been identified by the doctors (the X-Rays were inconclusive), his condition gradually worsened to the point where he drew up his last will and testament at the end of October 1925. This included instructions on his preferred place of burial (Raron, in the Valais valley) and the headstone and the inscription to be used on it: “rose, oh pure [‘reiner'[ contradiction, delight / in being nobody’s sleep under so many / eyelids”.
Rainer Maria Rilke died on 29 December 1926. He was fifty-one.
Rilke, Duino Elegies Comparing Translations Martin Travers 