Year, you are old now; once so green and fair
Your looks have faded, snow is in your hair
Your gait is weary, death now walks with you
And so will I, for I am dying too.
Along the fearful path the heart must go
The winter seeds sleep trembling in the snow
The wind has taken from me many a bough
But all the scars are my protection now!
How many bitter times have I been slain!
But with each death, I have been born again.
And so you’re welcome, death, gateway of night!
Beyond, life’s choir is singing of the light.
I have the same attitude towards death as I had before—I do not hate it and I do not fear it. If I were to ask who and what—apart from my wife and my sons—I love and cherish most, it would transpire that they are all dead people, the dead of all the centuries, composers, writers, painters. Their being, compressed into their works, lives on and is more present and real to me than most of my contemporaries. And it is the same with the dead whom I have known, loved and ‘lost’: my parents and siblings, the friends of my youth—they belong to me and to my life; today just as before, when they were still alive, I think of them, I dream of them, and I regard them as part of my daily life. This attitude towards death is therefore not madness or some sweet fantasy, but is real and integral to my life. I am well acquainted with grief over the transience of things, and I can feel it with every flower that fades. But it is grief without despair.
From a letter written in July 1955
to Hans Bayer
In the last few days I have been reading one of the old Chinese writers—if one calls dead people homecomers, then the living are wanderers. Whoever wanders and does not know where he is going is homeless. If a single person has lost his home, one considers that unfair. But now that the whole world has lost its home, there is no one who would find it unfair.
From an undated letter to Alice Leuthold
Young people like talking about death, but never think about it. With old people it’s the other way round. Young people think they will live for ever and so can direct all their wishes and thoughts towards themselves. Old people have realised that somewhere there is an end, and that everything one has and does for oneself ultimately falls into a hole and was for nothing.
From Gertrud, 1909
The dead person was not torn away by chance, or senselessly, or cruelly, or wickedly, but his life’s work was over, and he has gone away in order to come back and continue in a new form. ‘His work was over’ does not, of course, mean that he could not have gone on for many more years achieving valuable things, or that he was replaceable. But for himself, for the innermost meaning of his life, the goal had been reached, he had ripened, and even if he died reluctantly, today he knows it, and of that which he was there is nothing lost or fragmented. That is my belief. There is no death. Every life is eternal, every person returns. There is in every person an innermost self which no death can destroy … I do not believe in a personal reunion, or a return in the form of ‘ghosts’. But I believe with all my heart in a common goal for all humans, and in our bond through mind and deed with those who have left us. Not in death but only in life do we find again what is eternal and immortal in the dead.
From a letter written on
30th December 1920 to Anne
Rümelin
To be able to go to sleep when one is tired, and to be able to let fall a burden that one has carried for a long time—that is a precious and wonderful thing.
From Das Glasperlenspiel
(The Glass Bead Game) 1943
With those whom we can no longer see we commune in a different way than with those who are still ‘there’. But they cannot be less present for us, and indeed they are often closer than the others.
From a postcard written in
August 1942 to Lene Gundert
The dear departed, with the essential being that made its impact upon us, remain alive with us so long as we ourselves are alive. Sometimes we can even have a better conversation with them, consult with them, and get better advice from them than from the living.
From a letter written on
4th January 1939 to Lydia Link
Our life is short, and soon we shall be on the other side, and even if we don’t ‘know’ anything about the Great Beyond, nevertheless we have experienced the fact that a dead person may often be dearer and closer to us and more alive than the living all around us, and herein lies the solid foundation of our heart’s natural connection with the other side.
From a letter written on 17th May
1947 to Grete Gundert
Every route, whether to the sun or to the night, leads to death, leads to rebirth, of whose pains the soul is afraid. But all follow this path, all die, all are born, for the eternal Mother returns them eternally to the day.
From a letter written in September
1940 to Rolf Conrad