[LAS to RMR in Paris]
[Berlin, October 28, 1913]
Dear Rainer,
During the coming weeks could you send me the various Freud brochures? (Freud, Jung, Grosse, etc.)? Did you enjoy reading Tausk’s Spinoza? But answer only if you’re inclined just now to write. Tomorrow morning I am finally returning home; my husband joined me here, you know, and in addition I have been kept here by the analysis I am conducting, three hours every day, which has yielded up splendid insights. Now I can scarcely imagine ever being without at least one ongoing analysis. Ellen [Delp] went back to Leipzig yesterday. And I am looking forward more than words can say to my rooms and woods; to the wanderings and exploratory side-trips one undertakes so deep within oneself while trees, tiny animals, clouds, mountaintops look on in silent sympathy. It is almost divinely beautiful that life knows and can embrace this alternation from the outside to the inside and vice versa. Often, often, often I am with you in all my thoughts and discover there again and again such fullness, which I ever so gradually relive, since in the actual moment of our being together there was not nearly enough time to experience it.
Lou.
[RMR to LAS in Göttingen]
[Letterhead:] 17 rue Campagne-Première. XIVe.
Paris,
Dec. 2 [1913]
Dear Lou,
Welcome back to your own home. (If only I had such forests and pathways—, Paris seems to me like a poultice that has been allowed to soak too long—). I am sending you the brochures, will keep only the Worringer and the two volumes of Bergson unless you happen to need them right now. (I’ve enclosed an issue of Weisse Blätter with Werfel’s “Visit from Elysium,” a dramatic scene that underlies, so to speak, the poem we’d intended to explore.) The Spinoza dialogue by T[ausk] is beautiful, I agree, but somehow not self-sufficiently beautiful: more like an essay to be imposed upon a complete structure of already defined premises, so that I wouldn’t know where it might be placed. It is too short for Insel-Bücherei, and also not suitable for other reasons. But about Spinoza a request: you know about my plans for a talk on how and whether God reciprocates our love. A note I recently read somewhere brought to mind the wonderful relation that Spinoza (I think) established through his insight that the act of loving God is independent of any reciprocal motion on God’s part: so that I might not have to go any farther than this one path would take me. What part of Spinoza would I need to read to achieve a better understanding? Would you have the relevant volumes? Could you lend them to me? — (“the alternation from the outside to the inside,” yes, if one only remained in the “inside,” seeing how terribly the opposite movement has gained dominance!). Farewell, many thanks for your good memories and thoughts of me: I am sure they are working wonders.
Rainer.
(Did Rosen play the Maiden of Orleans?)
[In the margin:] read Simmel’s Goethe with continuous pleasure and agreement!
[LAS to RMR in Paris]
Göttingen, Friday [December 5, 1913]
Dear Rainer,
It is strange about the Spinoza: twice this summer I thought about talking to you about him, precisely in connection with the idea of “God’s not returning love,” and yet both times the idea seemed to slip away from me into something far too abstract. Even now I don’t know where specifically in his work you could read about it, for this idea is a stimulus present in everything he wrote and yet present only as the ardor that inspires everything, even the coldest inquiry into epistemological content and method. (Which is why he is interpreted as godless as often as divine, and why I almost worshipped him from the time I was a child.) My old volumes, purchased secretly back then with money I got from selling my jewelry, are not much good as translations, the best by far, which I will send you soon, is the Reclam edition. Thank you for the letter and its enclosures; this Werfel also strikes that very deep chord: one knows instantly that one is dealing with the same poet as before. Simmel’s Goethe I am reading resolutely, whenever I can catch a little time for it; for I have already parceled out my days according to as strict a schedule as possible. The first morning hour here is especially wondrous (and it comes early indeed, since I also go to bed early), despite the wintry harshness: it emerges in the absence of artificial illumination between the red pulsing of the coals in the stove (which fortunately is always lit!) and the almost equally rayless red disk of the sun, which slowly glimmers upward out of a damp, stormy, dark shroud of weather and then finally breaks through outside, —such that this hour becomes the harbinger of far more than just a “day,” of . . . I can’t say what . . . but an hour for miracles nonetheless; perhaps only because thoughts get into it as through a wrong door, thoughts that had meant to visit a dream in the empty bed of the adjacent room.
My husband meanwhile has (in October and unbeknownst to me) come up with a bizarre therapy: for ten days he went absolutely without food and now walks about with a veritable astral body of not quite 131 pounds—which however leaves nothing to be desired in the way of agility, capacity for work, and overall vigor. The doctor in Kassel who advised him to try this adhered to the same regimen for 20 days, with equally surprising success and without having to interrupt his extremely demanding practice. But for the likes of you and me this would be as imprudent, I think, as the glass-eating or sword-swallowing of the dervish, and I can only be glad that I had no hint of it.
At the moment I am finishing something about which I occasionally wonder: what would you make of it? It grew out of a correspondence with little Reinhold Klingenberg and is called: Three Letters to a Boy, with the letters separated by three-year intervals. Only the last two are relevant, since the first is a fairy tale: would you, sometime or other, care to read through them in typescript? Had I not known of so many similar cases, I wouldn’t have let this matter pass beyond the specific personal situation that it originally addressed. But here too Freud’s attitude regarding this issue seemed to me the right one: especially this total distancing from every previous soft-coloring of things—whereby paradoxically, I believe, the genuine hues of life are for the first time allowed to shine.—
What a lengthy piece of scribbling this has turned into! So many things have piled up. Nevertheless I won’t end with a question, since you might not want to write. But you do know how it is.
Lou.
Lia Rosen did play the Maiden of Orleans; a number of papers praised her performance highly, but I couldn’t go. For Clotilde von Derp I looked and looked until my eyes turned red, but never found a notice: her dancing in Berlin must have dropped from the program.
[LAS to RMR, picture postcard, with V. E. Gebsattel, from Würzburg to Paris, beginning of January 1914]
[Letterhead:] 17 rue Campagne-Première. XIVe.
Paris,
February 9, 1914
Dear, dear Lou, since when! for how long! I counted on your entering the New Year through double doors, wanted to stand at the inner, Russian one . . . Now it is almost a month later, one can no longer keep wishing, already the year is no longer bright enough for that. —I did receive the Würzburg card from the two of you, —before that and afterwards much reading, daily attempts at work, trying to coax it into the realm of possibility through regularly scheduled translation of Michelangelo’s poems, aside from that much correspondence, one (among it) beautiful, hopeful somehow, often engaging me outwardly, much more often inwardly; not writing you, because that letter would begin where those others leave off and because whatever of one’s own situation one chose to speak of would ring false out in the light of day. Will send you new poems by Werfel, which I copied for you out of Weisse Blätter; never heard from him, but did write him of the joy they gave me. —(I have learned just now, from Thankmar, of Wolff Dohrn’s death!) Don’t forget to send me the boy’s stories, I long for them often. Are you happy? (Cordial regards to your husband) Your
Rainer.
[In the margin:] Will send you in a few days a book by Marcel Proust, 2nd part mostly just novel, but the rest wonderful, full of inexhaustible ideas and relations and for psychoanalysis very interesting!
Göttingen, Friday [February 16, 1914]
Dear Rainer,
How welcome is your letter, dearest, I have found myself thinking of you (more accurately: conjuring you up) so often, especially during this present stretch of time. Most often, I should immediately add, on account of the weather. That sounds odd, but such weather! Never before have I experienced anything like it in German lands. For over five weeks the most radiant sun, sun, sun, at first with absolutely windless frost down to 14 and 15 degrees, such that one could walk about hatless and almost without a coat, and then, between one new moon and the next, the glittering snow-white landscape turned to spring, snowdrops burst out, the hanging catkins reddened, the moss greened as never before, the birds went wild with jubilation, and all this happened without the interference of a single cloud, in nothing but sun, sun, sun. When I went out for walks, many hours every day, your yearning for a “real” winter always came to mind. When I saw your envelope bulging with poems a huge joy befell me at first, I thought it might be the Michelangelos, but of course that was not to be, and I shall soon find the new Werfels to be just as splendid as no doubt they are; how admirable it is that you can appreciate them without that recently suffered disappointment interfering; I’ll be able to manage it now only gradually. Do you know that after a reading one evening in Berlin, when Scheler heard Werfel’s poems, he was completely spellbound? And this both by the poems and by him personally; he told me: Werfel is as a poet exactly what he, Scheler, wished to be as a philosopher. The ultimate explanation of this may reside in the: “wished to be.” For behind the intellectual import and greatness of Scheler’s philosophy lies an impulse to withdraw into it, seek refuge there. Scheler by the way is just now in Göttingen, came yesterday, missed me; before long he will spend an evening with us, together with Thankmar and my analysand from Berlin, a woman who lives up at the Rhons. Along with the sun she has been the vital part of this winter for me, due to the way the analysis has confirmed and extended earlier insights. I just remembered, by the way, something important I forgot to write you about in November re. our visit to the Egyptian Museum in Berlin. My husband, Ellen and I were there together; all three of us were quite beside ourselves, and we spent a long time inside engrossed with everything. They have acquired several new pieces since your stay in Berlin; among them a mouth with a small fragment of nose above it, so magnificent that I felt I had suddenly gained an unforgettable friend in this unknown person who once spoke through a mouth such as this. My husband tried to have a cast made of it, but to no avail, since all these works are sculpted of a sandstone that would be harmed in the process; and besides, the replicas, simply by being of a different material, turn out very poorly, as you yourself have already seen in the head for Clara. You will have no doubt noticed how many Amenhoteps IV resemble you? The one dark relief placed opposite his wife is especially like some dream-portrait of Rainer.
How irrepressible your “
” has suddenly become?! this way: “
”, —no, can’t get it right. But it has this flag-waving quality about it, or as if you were rising heavenward. You dearest you.
Lou.
The book just arrived. I thank you very much and will read it when I am good and relaxed, which is not likely to be soon. In the wake of this letter I will send you the letters to the boy; perhaps also the introductory fairy tale, so that you can tell me if it sounds too silly; it is the chronological onset of the whole thing. Any marginal or epistolary remark from you would be of value to me, any number of things can still be added or removed. I didn’t send anything so as not to risk disturbing you.
[RMR to LAS in Göttingen]
[Letterhead:] 17 rue Campagne-Première, XIVe.
Paris,
February 18, 1914
Dear Lou,
Yes, my “”s are simply inimitable, I don’t know myself what’s gotten into them. Thank you for your good, good letter, here the weather was just as splendid for a time, but I’d just as soon remain up here with myself, going out somehow vexes and shames me and then also, truth be told, Paris has become for me (and seems likely to remain) roughly what that “luminous” Gothic arch was for Salzmann when, behind us, he carried on about its falseness. And the more light and color play their effects there, the more I find myself detesting it. Thus must it always be, I suppose, in a love that has run its course. This morning your manuscript arrived; it is lying here and can feel, I hope, how much I am looking forward to it. —I am enclosing a touching little Russian letter with translations, the last one, “И вотъ одинъ . . . ,” I read with special fondness, I believe it is good (?), and at any rate the entire letter is such that it could have only come from there. Please, send it back to me by and by, it has not been answered yet. —And farewell for now, and keep up all your kind thoughts and dearest wishes.
Rainer.
[RMR to LAS in Göttingen]
Paris, 17 rue Campagne Première,
February 20, 1914
Dear Lou,
I have just read your three “Letters,” completely gripped by them, I had no idea that one could say so much to someone this age, and yet it is, as a letter to a boy, only the starting point for the beginning of true utterance. Many things pass though one’s soul as one reads—, could I, at Reinhold’s age, have grasped it the way you present it to him? Can he grasp it only because he grew up in these days and not back then—, above all, you yourself could not have said it back then: and so one finds oneself where one is, and one’s own childhood seems more puzzling for having been outgrown.
The arguing away of the miraculous for the sake of the miraculous begins beautifully with this old Father Christmas who is not at all reluctant to become obsolete, one almost feels a shudder at how he strikes back out into nature [in the margin: and I know the place], taking just one little thrush’s wish with him into its silence. And that, indeed, is the common theme that runs through all three letters: this onrush and subsequent receding of Nature, which however never really recedes but only observes us intently from one flood to the next.
In place of anything coherent I shall only jot down a few notions as they came to me while reading, all of them pointing beyond the frame of the letters at us, at me.
It was beautiful to grasp, in a way that I had never before envisioned it: how the creature, as it evolves, is transposed further and further inward, out of the world and into the inner world. Hence the exquisite position of the bird on this inward journey; its nest is indeed almost an external womb granted it by Nature, a womb it only furnishes and covers instead of containing wholly within itself. Thus it is the one creature that enjoys a very special feeling of familiarity with the outer world, as though it knew itself to share in that world’s innermost secret. That is why it sings in it as if it sang in its own interior being, that is why a bird’s note glides so easily into our own inner depths, we seem to be translating it without residue into our feelings, indeed, for a moment it can turn the entire world into an inner space, because we feel that the bird does not distinguish between its heart and the world’s. —On the one hand animals and humans gain greatly by the transposition of the ripening life into a womb: for the womb becomes more intensely world when the world outside forfeits its share in the maturing processes (and then, having lost this share, grows more insecure—); on the other hand (you will remember that question, from my pocket notebook, written last year, in Spain): “Whence comes the intense inwardness of the simplest creatures” (those other ones): from the fact of their not having matured inside the body, such that they never really have to leave the sheltering body at all. (Remain in lifelong contact with the womb.)
Very beautiful is the passage about the “two secrecies”: the one secrecy protecting what is within, the other secrecy excluding what is without.
And what’s shown there so beautifully about the plant-world—how it makes no secret of its secret, knowing, as it were, that it could exist no other way but in perfect safety—that, can you imagine, is exactly what I felt in Egypt standing before the sculptures there, and what I have always felt since then standing before things Egyptian: this open mystery, this laying-bare of the secret which is so through and through, so at every point secret, that there is no need to hide it. And perhaps everything phallic (how strongly this entered my mind in the Temple at Karnak, though I could not at that time think it) is only the human “privately secret” translated into the terms of the “openly secret” of Nature. I can never call to mind the smile of the Egyptian gods without the word “Blütenstaub” [pollen] occurring to me.
Splendid is the part about the two “eliminations” or “discharges,” —love and revulsion (as in El Greco’s Ascension of Christ, where the guard with a sword in his hand clatters downward, allowing the Savior to ascend all the higher into Heaven): the one jettisoned as no longer ours, comprehended as already no longer “life” even when it was still inside us; the other—wherever it may be, however far outside of us by now—affirmed, acknowledged in the child, in the grandchild, in all who are to come, in all who have been.
Ah, dear Lou, doubtless you could have said it back then, and had one been allowed to hear it, one could have found a way to cry about it and absorb its lesson. But if nothing else, it’s good to find such things out before it’s too late.
R.
You can see that I am writing all this (really as nothing more than very preliminary thoughts feeling their way along the edges of one corner) more poorly than if one were to say it, for then the other’s presence and demeanor would be there to prop up one’s expressions. Even so I’ll send this piece of paper just as it is, since at least it has the virtue of being written immediately after reading; by tomorrow some of it will already be deep inside the blood, and thus even farther beyond reach, while other parts will have been expelled outside; —and so this might be, between us, the right moment after all to push a few half-words, murmurish as they are, out onto the old accustomed leaves.
—Imagine, this Cornet: they are printing the thirtieth to fortieth thousand: translations have been offered to us in English, Polish, and Hungarian; an Italian one, excellent, recently passed through my hands, and I just heard that a French one is under way. (Who could have persuaded us of this back then in Schmargendorf!)
(Do you ever hear from Sidie? —Karl Krauss is spending much time with her in Janowitz, which makes me happy for Sidie, given her despondency; but Clara, I notice, views it with disapproval and indignation.) —Now farewell, for today.
Rainer.
Is there in Würzburg a nice, slightly old-fashioned hotel where one could enjoy a few days of peace and quiet? And if you know one, do you by chance remember its name? Someone has asked me.
Do you have Kassner’s new book The Chimera. The Leper.? (The whole thing only about 60 pages and very curious.) Shall I have it sent to you?
Göttingen, March 1, 1914
Dear Rainer,
Your “murmurish” words murmured so many things to me—thank you for them! In fact listening to them precluded any swift reply. It became so clear to me: you should have written these three letters to a boy, only then would each single seed that a Reinhold is meant to find lying there for him be surrounded by the rich springtime that creates the desire for this, that is the delight in this. At the very least the little bird should be fluttering around in it, your little bird, the way your words interpolate it. I confess to you that I can’t bear this absence: do permit me an “epistolary quote” in the text or in a footnote! Without this special chirping the rest will become for me mere chattering. After the third letter, the one already conceived from a Freudian point of view and sent off to Reinhold only this winter, I found myself still writing, for, regarding this strangeness one feels toward one’s own body, I was much concerned with what I remarked when you spoke of the idea that was to inform the “Phallic Hymns.” The phallus as a sign of the body seems so ridiculous next to the intricately purposeful arrangement of the body’s other parts (which in their own way seem to express us at least to “ourselves” reasonably well), because it exists as a self-contained entity that defies description and thus has so little range of expression that whatever it does express becomes something “other” and in almost no other way than symbolically. This deep purpose—to be only an image for the totality (a cow understandable as eternity, etc.)—is what ancient art attributed to material reality in general, and as a result the phallus rose in the midst of it as an integral presence: the obelisk pointing upward in much the same way as our church steeple, —whereas for us, who are accustomed to making purely practical use of material reality and regarding it as mere basis, a lowest “step” toward the spiritual, the sexual becomes a contradiction, something oddly simplistic and yet strangely fateful—our attitude toward it is part giggling and part dread. It has always been my fondest notion: to come to understand that finally everything we call “materia,” everything objectively placed outside, everything opposite (and this includes our own bodily self), is at heart nothing but the borderline that marks our arbitrary singleness, the point where our ability to keep pace (in either feeling or understanding) with essential life fails us, so that we cease saying “I” to it and in our helplessness fence it off from ourselves. In doing this, however, we only admit to its omnipresent splendor, which extends above and beyond our individual singularities, and in which we all repose, so that we are able to reach through everything surrounding us, even including our bodily nature, trustfully, the way one hand reaches in the dark toward another, and are meant to do it calmly, with the “intense inwardness of the simplest creature” for whom this relationship has never been obscured.
I am sending this with pictures Scheler hopes will interest you in the Maniasco exhibition soon to open in Paris. M[agnasco] is close to El Greco, and a friend of Scheler’s (von Heister) has recently acquired 70 of his works for twice 100,000 marks. I am also enclosing the dear Russian letter! It does make you a bit of the Orthodox slavophile in accord with the current dogmatic political climate there, but its intent is very sympathetic; the literary value of the translation I dare not judge. Strange to know it’s the Cornet who is riding ahead of you! How very different the characters toward whom he leads those readers who follow him; and yet, that is what he does, even though one overtakes him and moves beyond, as new editions of your subsequent works will show, each more clearly. But some part of you is lodged in this advance rider. Ellen [Delp] wrote just now aghast at Werfel and his reading, her every feeling being exactly the opposite of Scheler’s. From Sidie [Nádherný] I had a number of infinitely warm letters, but in response to my second letter merely a New Year’s Greetings telegram, which is why I don’t know anything further just now; I do find her so appealing. And Würzburg? We lodged at “Russischer Hof,” the rooms old-fashioned in the hotel-style, but the whole place agreeable, prices moderate, fare as in all of Bavaria not overwhelming. Where will you be in the spring?
Lou.
[RMR to LAS in Göttingen]
Berlin-Grunewald
Hubertusallee 16
Pension Bismarckplatz
March 9 [1914]
Dear Lou,
Every day I have wanted to write and let you know where your letter found me: it’s inscribed above; beautiful walks through a very early spring storm in a Grunewald that was so like the old one to me, so very like it, that it was almost as if I were still young after all. And the strangest chance happenings, and music—divine, by Busoni. And the Egyptian Museum. All manner of unanticipated, good things drew me here, I stay only until tomorrow, will then leave for a few days of Munich, Hotel Marienbad. At first I wanted to ask you for Scheler’s address here, so that I could talk with him in person about Maniasco: but it would have been too much. These reproductions also came my way so unexpectedly, they’re marvelous, I have looked at them again and again, would love to take them with me all the way to Munich, the journey there would be such a perfect time for studying them. Without doubt the finest are the portrayals of monks, they’re tremendous. —And yes, love, of course you may quote, only on Ellen Key’s desk was it written Du skall ikke citerer! —But You may. More from Munich.
Rainer.
[RMR to LAS in Göttingen]
Paris, 17, rue Campagne Première
June 8, 1914
Dear Lou,
So here I am, back again after a long, broad, heavy time, a time in which once more a kind of future became past, not lived out strongly and reverently, rather tortured incessantly till it succumbed (a skill of mine no one will easily imitate). If sometimes during these last few years I was able to plead my case by saying that certain attempts of mine to gain a more human and natural foothold in life had failed because the people concerned did not understand me, had inflicted on me violence, injustice, and pain, one after the other, and had left me stunned and bewildered—, now, after these months of suffering, I stand condemned in an altogether different sense: having to admit this time that no one can help me, no one; and were someone to approach with the most unfeigned, spontaneous heart and prove his worth to the very stars and endure me no matter how stiff and difficult I made myself and maintain his pure undeterred path toward me though I broke the ray of his love ten times over with the murk and thickness of my underwater world—: I would still (this I know now) find a way to isolate him and leave him exposed in the fullness of his endlessly fertile help, to cut him off from me inside a realm of suffocating lovelessness so that his support, rendered impotent, would hang past ripeness on his own branches and shrivel and die horribly.
Dear Lou, I have been alone again for a month and this is my first try at getting a grip on myself—: you see what a state I am in. In the end certain things will have been learned, —at present of course I observe over and over but this: that yet once more I was not equal to a pure and joyous task, one in which Life stepped up to me again, guilelessly, with no hard feelings, as if it had never had a bad experience with me before. Now it is clear that this time too I failed the exam and will not be promoted and will be kept sitting for another year in the same pain-class and every day, all over again, have those words written for me on the blackboard, those same words whose dull accent I thought I had learnt already to the very depths of my being.
What finally turned out so absolutely to my misery began with many, many letters, light, beautiful letters that came rushing out of my heart: I can scarcely remember ever having written such letters before. (That was the time, you will recall, of my exuberant “”.) In them (I realized ever more clearly) a spontaneous liveliness welled up as though I had tapped into a new eager reservoir deep in my most genuine being, which now, released in inexhaustible communication, poured forth over the most serene slope while I, writing day after day, felt both its joyous streaming and the mysterious repose that seemed almost naturally prepared for it in the recipient toward whom it flowed. To keep this communication pure and transparent and at the same time to feel or think nothing that would be out of place in it: this suddenly became, without my knowing how, the measure and law of all I did, —and if it is possible for someone inwardly turbid and muddied to become clear, that happened to me in those letters. The everyday and my relationship to it became to me in some indescribable way sacred and accountable, —and with that a powerful confidence seized me, as if now finally an alternative to my sluggish drifting had been found in a current of steady fatefulness. How powerfully, from then on, I was caught up in some process of change I could also observe from the fact that even the past, whenever I talked of it, would surprise me in the way it made its appearance; if, for instance, it involved times I had often talked of earlier, the emphasis would fall on places formerly unheeded or scarcely known, —and each assumed, with the innocence of a landscape, something like pure visibility, was there, enriched me, belonged to me, —so that for the first time I seemed to become the owner of my life, not through any exegetical appropriation, exploitation, and understanding of things past, but simply through a new truthfulness that flooded even through my memories.
June 9, 1914
I am sending you, dear Lou, this sheet I wrote yesterday; you will understand that what I describe there is now long past and lost to me; three (unachieved) months of reality have placed something like a strong, cold plate of glass over it, beneath which it becomes as unpossessable as in a museum’s display case. The glass reflects, and I see nothing in it but my face, the old, earlier, long-ago, once-again face—, which you know so well.
And now? —After a fruitless attempt to live in Italy I have returned here (two weeks ago today), resolved to throw myself headfirst into some project; but I am still so dull and numbed that I cannot do much more than sleep. If I had a friend I would ask him to work alongside me a few hours each day, no matter at what. And when, in the meantime, with heaviest heart, I think of the future, I imagine that what might best succeed is some kind of labor regulated from without and as removed as possible from true creation. For I no longer doubt now that I am ill, and my illness has spread through much of me and even lurks now in what I used to call my work, so that for the present there is no refuge in it.
I am reading slowly in your Bergson and from time to time can follow; am reading Stefan George’s strange new book (The Star of the Covenant),—spent an afternoon recently with Maeterlinck’s essay on the Elberfeld horses. (Have you read it? Neue Rundschau, June issue) In this connection I’m reminded that in Duino, where I also stayed for a while, another experiment was made in mediumistic writing, through the same person, —and the result this time also was extremely remarkable. After several manifestations in foreign tongues—Arabic, Greek—the same Spirit seemed to appear and indeed with so vehement a return that the medium could finally bear it no longer and walked about for three days with pains shooting through her arms.
But now I’m also sending you—finally—the Magnasco photographs. If you think I should write Scheler a word myself and try to apologize for my outrageous delay with these pictures—, then please, give me his address. In the interim I have seen some Magnascos here and there, most of them in Milan, and I arrived here just in time for the exhibition. It may in part be due to how unusually open and receptive I was back then, but the impression made by the reproductions was not heightened or significantly altered by a single painting; even the portrayals of monks, beautiful as they are, had already been conveyed to me completely in the photographs. Several pieces are here that Scheler did not send reproductions of: a monks’ warming room, wonderfully fantastic, with all those bare feet and begging hands hanging out of the habits, far around a gloomy fire; a workroom with clusters of busy nuns; and, above all, two of his earlier, more colorful works, interiors of a guard room, one of them with a very few grotesque figures who leave the center of the high hollow room empty, so decidedly empty that they seem to have forgotten, every single one of them, to take their place there; and in this emphasized emptiness a woman and a small child dance side by side. —He has a way in all his paintings, even his earliest ones, of distributing figures and linking them together as if they formed constellations—, this may be his most notable characteristic. Other than that I feel in the paintings themselves a kind of disproportion between the smallness of the image and the overly drawn-out brushstrokes, and then again between this fluent, almost rote contour that usually predominates and certain details where both tempo and acuity of vision change dramatically. (Certainly not a great painter, but a free observer and reproducer such as any period can use, and for this painter his own shot-up and tattered time must have been just the right era.—)
I have thought often, Lou, of your Three Letters, have talked about them at great length, and have made a list of three people who should have the little book as soon as it is published. Let me know then when it appears—, and, when you can, write me whether in the meantime there has been more from you along this line, and if so, where some of it can be read. And anyway please do write me.
Your old Rainer.
Did you find my “Dolls” essay in Weisse Blätter? —What plans are you making? I’ll be going to Leipzig in July.
[LAS to RMR in Paris]
Göttingen, June 11, 1914
My dear old Rainer, — you know I had to weep horribly over your letter, it was stupid to do so, but sometimes Life really does treat its most precious human beings in such ways that one simply must. I had been accompanying you with all my thoughts, —insofar as “accompanying” can take the form of wondering every day where a certain Someone is: whether flown up into the skies and pushing at the very boundaries of our human atmosphere, or fallen into a crater and embroiled with all the fire that has ever burned inside the earth. When you had written me about the letters, with all your “”s turned so giddy, —then it seemed to me conceivable that a creative period was about to begin in response to your new human experiences, and at such moments a terrible danger is as close as a great victory. Life is easy for those people who are granted a very small portion of creativity to go along with their strong experiences and can expend the former entirely on the latter; and now and then those others, the ones who are creative by nature, succeed the other way around; but much more often the two as it were meet somewhere in the middle and die there, since they collide on their one path rather than proceed along it together. But—even if it is true that in this death you alone are completely to blame, have no excuse, no palliation, still one thing cannot be doubted: the manner in which you bring it to life again in your words, resurrect it there, is exactly exactly exactly the old undiminished strength that makes life out of death, —and further: the grief over how things turned out is that of a person whose most delicate, innermost feeling could not be less guilty of all those things of which you accuse yourself. And yet it is you, —the same you who at other times cannot work or wastes some attempted work. And certainly it helps you nothing, can help you nothing, to be told that it really isn’t you, because standing before bread in a locked pantry does not still one’s hunger and neither does waiting for sheaves on fields that have not been mowed yet. That’s why, when I cry about it, I cry differently, because I cry as another person, as someone looking on who at the same time sees so heartrendingly that the bread itself and the fruit of the field are there. And is it not the same with what now lies there before your glance under “the hard, cold glass of a display case”: you do not possess it and the glass mirrors you to yourself; nonetheless it served as proof of the importance of your possessions; and just as you had not known this side of them—their deep, rich belonging to you as part of what you are—, in the same way they still have sides to turn toward you of which today you may not even have an inkling, and from whose perusal you may be separated by a partition even thinner than a sheet of glass. But alas, what can all this help; for now you will feel only: that something, be it thin or massive, separates you from life; and every, every word said against this is inept, stupid, weightless.
The photographs just arrived along with your letter; I’ll have them returned to Herr Heister today along with a few words; Scheler was really only a go-between in this matter (you may have even been meant to keep the pictures, but this I don’t know). What’s this in Weisse Blätter? Which issue contains the “Dolls” essay? And how long ago did you write it? The Maeterlinck article I also read: and I must go there, to see these dear singular steeds. Tell me: do we want [the rest of the letter is missing]
[RMR to LAS in Göttingen]
[Paris, around June 13, 1914]*
(Written, I believe, late January or early February—)
Just now your good letter. Thanks dear Lou.
[LAS to RMR, letter from Göttingen to Paris, middle of June 1914]
[RMR to LAS in Göttingen]
[Paris, Saturday, June 20, 1914]
Lou, dear, here is a curious poem, written this morning, which I am sending you at once, since I instinctively called it “Turning,” knowing that it represents that turning which surely must come if I am to live, and you will understand its meaning.
Your letter about the “Dolls” essay I sensed in advance; I could feel that one was on its way with something comforting, with a reaction that would somehow make sense of things. And so it did. Yes, I understand exactly what you discern there that the “words” do not achieve, including the last sentence about the doll’s having become one with the body and its most hideous undoings.
Yet is it not terrible that one should unsuspectingly write down something like that, under the pretext of a memory about dolls treating material most primordially one’s own, and then swiftly put one’s pen aside, only to live out the eeriness yet again, this time without limit and indeed as never before: until every morning one’s mouth was dry from the tow with which one, stitched hide and nothing else, was stuffed to the very lips?
Your Rainer.
Turning
“The path from inner intensity to
greatness leads through sacrifice.”
KASSNER.
He had long prevailed through gazing.
Stars fell to their knees
under his grappling up-glance.
Or he gazed kneeling,
and the scent of his urgency
lulled a Force immortal,
until it smiled on him from sleep.
Towers he gazed at with such force
that they were startled:
building them up again, abruptly, as One!
While often the landscape,
overburdened by the day,
would come to rest in his quiet gazing, at twilight.
Animals stepped trustingly
into his open gaze as they pastured,
and the caged lions
stared in, as into unthinkable freedom.
Birds flew straight though it,
feeling its welcome; flowers
gazed back into it
hugely, as they do with children.
And the rumor that a gazer existed
stirred the less clearly,
more questionably visible ones,
stirred women.
Gazing how long?
How long inwardly lacking,
imploring deep down in his glance?
When he, forever waiting, sat far from home; the hotel’s
disinterested, turned-aside room
sullenly around him, and in the avoided mirror
again the room
and later from the tormenting bed
again:
there was argument in the air,
beyond grasping there was argument
about his still feelable heart,
his heart which through the body, painfully buried-alive,
could nevertheless be felt
they held argument and passed judgment:
it does not have love.
(And forbade him further communions.)
For gazing, you see, has its limits.
And the more gazed-upon world
wants to prosper in love.
Work of the eyes is done,
begin heart-work now
on those images in you, those captive ones;
for you conquered them: but you still don’t know them.
Behold, inner man, your inner woman,
she who was won
from a thousand natures, she
the till now only won,
as yet never loved creation.
(June 20th.)
[LAS to RMR in Paris]
[Göttingen, June 24, 1914]
Wednesday
Was away 2 1/2 days (to talk with someone), am back today, and so am fully in the company of your words and with them alone. With this “Turning,” which is one, and yet scarcely one any longer, since it has been on its way for so long, has been prepared for, indeed has already almost arrived. Your body knew of its coming, as it were, before you yourself did, yet in the way that only bodies know of things, —with such infinite innocence and directness that in the end this knowledge could temporarily create for it a new misunderstanding with the mind. Do you know by what sign this revealed itself? By the eyes, —those gazing ones, those wresting to attain that being “as yet never loved,” one and the same in a thousand different guises; they wanted to love, they blasted the boundaries set for them, and (do you remember what you told me about it?) plighted their troth in a gaze, —not just figuratively, but in the most immediate corporeal sense, all the way down to that turmoil in your blood, as if more had occurred in such moments than merely a glance. (Thus in the one instance of the girl who saw herself mirrored in your eyes as she was making herself beautiful; thus also in the other, more personal instance.) But they, these eyes, left only to themselves in their arduous searchings, beyond the bounds of that which, in their normal function, they needed only to convey to the mind, —they could in their gazing only become ever more corporeal and—confusing, as it were, the more subterranean processes with those consummated at the visibly open and observable body surface—lead only to strange forms of torment; for the “heart-work” to be done on what had previously been only artistically gazed upon would have to occur in some innermost region were it to succeed. That’s why, for example, things like this happened: your blood, with a stronger onrush, pushed against your eyes, bringing pressure and pain—as if it had misguidedly wished to turn the eyes into sexual vessels, into those parts from which the bodily procreative miracles issue. And they suffered in their honest effort, which only brought them into conflict with the body instead of achieving its deliverance. Until the full heartbeat entered into this rhythm of the great love that transforms outside and inside into a completely new union, that comprehends suddenly its entire treasure and leans over it as over a bride.
What love does in this union is dark and difficult and glorious—and stands on the side of life; who would dare or even want to guess more about it than that; and indeed, you will experience it. Certainly not without interruptions and doubts. Dear, my dear old Rainer, I can’t help feeling that about such things I shouldn’t really be writing; but, after all, this isn’t just a piece of mail, rather it’s as if we were sitting somewhere right next to one another (a bit like the way it was in Dresden, with the book of train schedules, when we suddenly wanted to return to Munich), pressed close together like children, the one as tightly as the other, whispering into each other’s ear about something woeful or reassuring. And I would like to write more and more and more and talk and talk, —not because I know all that much, only because (even if quite differently from you, and probably only because as a woman one somehow is at home in these regions) I hear your heart-sounds, these deep, new ones, with all my being.
Can we, shall we, don’t we want to meet during your trip before you have to be in Leipzig, —halfway if you like, on the Rhine?
Lou.
[LAS to RMR in Paris]
[Göttingen, June 27, 1914]
early Saturday morning
Dear Rainer,
It was only after my letter to you had gone off a few days ago that I began to live with the poem itself; I couldn’t do so at first because its personal immediacy had overwhelmed me too thoroughly. And now I read, or more accurately: say it out loud to myself again and again. There is something in it as of a newly conquered domain, one whose boundaries are still out beyond one’s ken, its compass extending farther than one could walk: one senses more terrain; senses many trails and long wanderings along paths that until now had always been shrouded in fog. And adding a little daylight, just enough so that one can see where to take the next step, would be, from one poem to the next poem, like a real advance of footsteps, one never as yet achieved, on grounds where (in contrast to “mere” art) illumination and action are still as one; this domain can indeed only be made into poetry insofar and to the extent that one has conquered it and thus made it part of a new experience. Somewhere in this realm, deep down, all art begins again with renewed force, arises as from its primordial origin, where it was magic formula, incantation, —a calling forth of life in its still concealed mysteriousness, —yes, where it was at once prayer and the most intense breaking-forth of power.
I do not tire of contemplating this.
Then I reached suddenly for the Narcissus poem that you had written down for me here last summer. And discovered in it the prehistory of the “Doll.” For there is something about its effect, as if the melancholy of Narcissus (the melancholy in the myth itself and in this love collapsing back into itself) were being mysteriously intensified through the (one could say) inorganic, non-living medium in which he finds “himself” mirrored. (“Now it lies open in the indifferent scattered water—Down there is nothing but the equanimity of tumbled stones”) What is fleeing out of him, not held in by the “compliant center,” gains its full effect only through the dead materia in which it comes to a halt so as thus to change into its own opposite. But at the same time this out-fleeing contains the full suggestion of why things should be that way—why this experience full of melancholy is so inescapable: because he is also in the creative sense dissolving (“in the air and in the aura of groves”), because he “meets no enmity,” —because he, of his part, gives life to what they say is dead, is outside, is opposite, —because his life extends beyond all that. And third, there is also this suggestion: how these two aspects at a certain point incomprehensibly intersect, and in doing so necessarily produce erotic melancholy; “what forms there and so resembles me and quivers upward in tear-stained signals, it perhaps took shape just this way inside a woman; it was beyond attaining.” This running up against the inorganic, this becoming doll, in other words, this running up against our body, which for us (even though it is organic life) is yet the outermost outside in its most intimate sense, the first partition that differentiates us from ourselves, makes us the “inner being” lodged in it like the face in a hedgehog; and yet: our very body, with its hands, feet, eyes, ears, all the parts we enumerate as “us”; this perplexing tangle generally unfurls only in response to the loving comportment of an other, who alone legitimates, in a manner we can bear, our body as “us.” In a “creative person,” though, these components perpetually loosen and renew their ties: which is why, instead of repetition, new reality emanates from him.
You are in pain: I, through your pain, feel bliss.
Forgive me for that.
Lou.
[RMR to LAS in Göttingen]
Paris, June 26, 1914
Dear Lou,
You know and understand; could I but see for a moment on my own what, once you have described it, I invariably believe to be true, could I but be the insightful Other, I would return with renewed strength into my entanglements, which are unforeseeable and so long in the making. God knows how far the poem “Turning” precedes the onset of those new circumstances, I am far behind, God knows if such complete turns can still be worked at all, since the obstinate inner forces continue to abuse and exhaust each other in the most horrific misunderstandings. That’s why I did put so indescribably much hope in at last achieving the proper loving attitude toward a human being, because with that all distances would have been put in proper order: the one toward the world would = ∞ again, the one toward one’s own body would = 0, and in between all numbers in benign gradation. As it is, an exaggerated attentiveness has moved myriad separate details up close to me in larger-than-life proximity, and on the other hand interposed relationships between me and my body (probably the same as those aberrant ones I have with the bodily in general) that keep it in a state of continual excitation. In this way the havoc has gotten into every little vein, every muscle has received a spurious bulge. It occurs to me that a mental acquisition of the world that so fully utilizes the eye, as is the case with me, would pose less danger for the pictorial artist, because with him it achieves a more tangible calm, comes to rest in more corporeal results. I am like the little anemone I once saw in the garden in Rome; it had opened so wide during the day that it could no longer close at night. It was terrible to see it in the dark lawn, wide open, still taking in through its calyx, which seemed as if frantically flung open beneath an all-overpowering night that streamed down on it undiminished. And next to it all its prudent sisters, each of them closed around its own small measure of abundance. I, too, am as hopelessly turned outward, thus also distracted by everything, refusing nothing; my senses, without asking me, attach themselves to anything intrusive, whenever there’s a noise I give myself up to it and am that noise, and since everything, once it has been set for stimuli, wants to be set off by stimuli, so at heart I want to be disturbed and am so without end. From such exposure to an existence in public, some sort of life inside me has taken refuge, has retreated to an innermost place and lives there the way people live during a siege, in deprivation and perpetual worry. Makes itself felt, when it believes better times have arrived, through the fragments of the Elegies, through a first line, then has to retreat again, since outside it again and again finds itself completely exposed. And in between, between this uninterrupted outward-addiction and that interior existence I can barely reach any longer, are the true dwelling-places of healthful feeling: empty, abandoned, cleared out, an inhospitable middle zone whose neutrality also explains why all the kindnesses of people and nature are wasted on me.
Today, according to the day’s date, it has been a month since I arrived here. I have spent it under a strict vegetarian regimen, with the great task of sleeping every night from 9 until 6 o’clock in the morning, which I’ve mostly been able to accomplish, catching up on missed portions during the day (so moved that my nature at least in the matter of sleep does not yet subject me to that incapacity of which in everything else I provide myself with countless examples). Otherwise before every sheet of paper and over every kind of book held back like a goat on a very short tether, and, in becoming aware of this constraint, getting myself so clumsily tangled up in it that most of the time I don’t even have use of the rope’s whole length. Within such a periphery, wandering about among books left unopened a hundred times before, nibbling at them listlessly, a bit here, a bit there, scarcely recognizing the various herbs from one time to the next; for this also I have in common with the goat: of what I have previously eaten there remains absolutely no evidence that would link me to that earlier meal: it simply turns into goat; and for the goat, once he has begun to get frustrated, that is no source of relief.
On how wonderful and inexhaustible a foundation would a life have to be built that, later on, finds its raison d’être in the construction of artistic edifices. The young Goethe becomes ever more amazing to me in this respect; how there is never any doubt that his harvest will be the full measure of what he can endure, but the full measure also of his great good fortune. To take in hand nothing that is not usable and to use well what is; from early on to collect in oneself memories of capability and of achievement, the most various and contradictory ones: so as to be armed with a hundred things when one comes up against that unending stretch of dearth that the gods can prepare for one at any instant.
Today (29th) after your second letter.
Perhaps, dear Lou, perhaps.
But is my situation not all the worse the more it has been prepared in the innermost part of me, since I have indeed turned out to be something so inwardly constrained? Between Narcissus and the recent poem lies a year, a dull year, and when I look back over it, I feel, from where I’m standing now, yet another degree heavier, harder to get through to, deader. How much time I require merely to lift my arm for a task like this, and how quickly it falls again—and I just can’t do it any longer. My body has become like a trap; in the places where it earlier absorbed and transmitted, it now snaps shut and imprisons; a surface full of traps in which agonized impressions slowly die; a rigid unconducting terrain, and far far away as in the midst of a constellation growing cold: the miraculous fire, which can’t emerge any longer except volcano-like, here and there, amidst occurrences that to the indifferent surface are, like outbreaks of havoc, bewildering and full of danger. Is that not the pattern of a true illness, this separating-out of life into three zones, of which the uppermost demands stimuli to the same degree that it is no longer being reached and shaken by the inner powers? Oh how in my youth I was One, amid all my need, in every aspect unknowable, but then also in every aspect known again and taken up and to someone’s heart. And thus worthless enough to be thrown away and yet again cryptic and mysterious enough to be healed. How a joy, flitting about my face, would already be orbiting my most secret soul; when I felt the morning’s air, it went through all of me, the morning’s lightness and outset diffused through all the gradations of my nature; when now and then I tasted a piece of fruit, as it dissolved on my tongue, it was already like a word of the spirit I felt dissolving; the experience of what it had indestructibly accomplished, the pure savoring of it, already was rising high in all visible and invisible vessels of my innermost self.
And now journeys and powers and changes that should have the most dramatic effects—: and it is all being lost to a desperately fervent way of making my face and limbs available, which exhausts and so to speak overcharges my bodily self, while my soul, turned aside, otherwise occupied, withdrawn into itself, does not relieve me of my tensions. I offer myself, but my soul does not; it’s the same in gazing as in loving, and so my body becomes contorted by this gaunt imploring intensity into which the sap does not spread that would make twig after twig of the gesture green and supple. The reason, the more I look into this, must be that I have one attitude (the one I have trained myself to assume in certain moments of work) and my soul has a different attitude—the subsequent one, the one further on—and so I serve it no longer and there is no one who does serve it. My soul is the bell-metal, and God again and again stokes it to white heat and prepares the tremendous hour of casting: but I am still the former mold, the obstinate mold that has done its job and does not want to be replaced—, and so there will be no casting. —Can a person understand so much and still not help himself?! And for years.
Renewal, change, hallowing—and the soul would plunge across toward it—, I know. But who would make himself new and not first shatter himself? And I treat myself like a delicate flower, all my life, lest some tiny little piece of me be broken off. Ah Lou, how much is sense, how much nonsense in all of what I’m scribbling here, don’t pay it too much heed.
That we might be together in rural and yet comfortable surroundings for a few days and talk: that seems to me beautiful and important, perhaps more so even than a year ago. Only I am afraid of leaving, the closer my day of departure comes, again that whole overturning of effects, the preponderance of the external, the necessity again of making an outward show of oneself, of saying to other people “I” . . . , with this one word obliged to be well prepared and ready again, a tea perfectly steeped, whereas I have been steeping now so quietly (this whole month) from the ground up, silent, beneath an unlifted lid, and it is no one’s business whether I turn a gold color or black and bitter. That is invariably the state of affairs which gives me the greatest sense of security, even where, half as someone sick, half as someone imprisoned, I can barely endure it and (as now) more give myself up than over to it—.
Are you free enough that we can decide as changes may require? (Please think about the Where you’d most prefer.) From mid-July on I’ll be welcome at the Kippenbergs’ house, and I should arrive there not much later, since I have other plans for August—about which I’ll tell you. Farewell, dear—finally beautiful weather! But Paris so aggravates me that I don’t want to see it, —only walk in the early morning through the magnificent avenues of the Observatoire, and then at noon go to my little vegetarian restaurant where salad and yogurt, in their slightly overdeliberate way, strengthen my sense of the good, the difficult good. I can scarcely describe to you how badly I manage to look beyond myself; the neighborhoods here around me are my ruination, since they have become, in part, witnesses to other days lost and wasted with self-recriminations, and have helped, in part, to mislead me into many a hopeless, uncontrolled, and irresponsible thought. And how should that not be the case, since during the last years I have managed to spoil for myself every other environment so quickly, have imposed on each one of them an obligation and made it oppressive and ambivalent—, the high forest last summer, the sea—, there was scarcely an hour when they meant World to me and not somehow an excuse and temptation—, and the good thing about this place is that at least I don’t have to crawl into a hotel room but can draw around myself four high white walls that occasionally do stand by me a little.
Is it beautiful where you are, with many roses?
Rainer.
[LAS to RMR in Paris]
Göttingen, Thursday [July 2, 1914]
Yes, —and yet! However strongly you yourself may perpetually experience complete inhibition, it is simply not true that only now and then, in brief moments apart from, as it were, your actual continuity, that which creates the impression of plenty and strength erupts in the form of an isolated poem; no, —it is not that way, for while you are perpetually feeling sick and miserable you are also perpetually finding expressions for that experience, and those expressions, in the distinctive form you give them, would be quite impossible unless somewhere inside you there is a flowing together, an experiencing in unison, of what you feel as so torn into one impulse fleeing outward and another burrowing inward, with only an empty, self-deserted middle space between them. Those words with which you articulate this condition, and that passage, for example, about the anemone—they are nothing if not works, works accomplished, the coming about of deepest unities in you! A great deal of poetic work has arisen from various despairs, certainly; but if it arose out of that despair, the despair of not being capable of just such poetic syntheses, there’d be a contradiction, don’t you think? To your consciousness of yourself it appears that way, your consciousness finds itself on the side of what is being blocked, and therefore is not party to those moments which show again and again that you are not so lacking throughout in unity as you feel and think “yourself” to be; you suffer yourself as a person blocked, and that piece of happiness which is lodged in this situation remains hidden from you, withheld, even though all its requirements are inside you and express themselves; for one cannot write about the anemone the way you do without some store of happiness (which is just not fully working its way into consciousness!). Certainly nothing could be further from my intentions than trying to pour you a serving of sugar water, —you, of all people, you know how, in earlier years, I would always exhort you to know the “Other”; but now it seems that your knowledge of him overreaches him, would become a knowledge of yourself rather than solely of this other one, so that you, in an exact reversal of that earlier time, now no longer notice, absorb, emphasize yourself at all, simply overlook yourself and know only him; but just as back then this “Other” really did exist in spite of your not wanting to know him, so now YOU. This may not factually change anything, since one has nothing of that which eludes one’s feeling and thoughts; yet proof that it is real and is present remains important, —somewhat the way an insensate limb does not stir the same terror as an amputated one: the paralysis may be connected with processes that can at any moment resolve, and that do not block the flow of food and nourishment, etc. And yet I say to myself, again and again: it is of no help to the present moment, and truly I am leading you by the nose between grain fields while you are in need of your daily bread. Perhaps more could be accomplished in an actual conversation. But on no account should you consider it before you will have to think about traveling anyway—especially not in this midsummer heat that has finally arrived and is wonderful to be in but painful to journey through. I had thought of Elberfeld; it’s half the distance,* and you’ll have to pass by there anyway. But only if you’re still interested in seeing the horses there (I mean before going on to Leipzig); I’m also free to meet you some other place or time. Here it is splendid now, yes, many, many roses and berries (strawberries and raspberries and gooseberries), and yet I’m afraid staying here will stir up too much for you; there are many people in the house where your little room was; it might be emptier much later. Where, geographically, will your August lie? You said: only during the summer is Paris possible for you, —will you return? Throw a word my way however it suits and pleases you.
Lou.
[In the margin:] One could surely find a rural place to stay along the Rhine? And ask Krall about a visit?
[RMR to LAS in Göttingen]
Paris, July 4, 1914
Five weeks of a steady pulse of living along and going to bed, and no benefit from it, not the one which should have resulted after only two: the steady horizontal rhythm of one’s bodily existence, in relation to which fatigue, pain, disquiet, listlessness are only vibrations above and below the natural, and do not destroy one’s feeling for and confidence in that steadiness as the string on which one is being played, however well or badly. If I were briefly to articulate it to a doctor: I have lost the bodily level; the least influence, a single exertion (whether the mental one of reading and writing or the alternating submission to and control over a productive moment, —or whether just some simple physical effort of the stupidest kind, the opening, say, of a somewhat difficult door) now no longer gives rise to this or that in my body but creates a general wavering in all its relationships: and as such it forces itself on my consciousness as something disrupted and disturbed, overwhelms everything that would like to exist there, colors it through and through with one of its needs and withdraws only to flood back at the slightest provocation with yet a new color of need. Even sick people are able to gauge during the pauses in their illness the mean-level of their bodily situation and rely on that, whereas I, so to speak, am constantly being moved out of one matrix into a completely different one. Even as I am accepting the present condition tant bien que mal, fitting myself out in it and, painful though it is, crediting it as the neutral, it takes on such strikingly different accents and emphases that I’ll recognize it next time only by the cleverness with which it works its transformation. To say “I” and mean by this something constant in which the bodily as a matter of course and almost imperceptibly conducts its arguments with itself, to have the confidence that one can get this steadiness through a single day unchecked and unsubverted, to carry it safely across one (even the friendliest) night: that is something that I have not succeeded in doing now for years. Had this compliant nature been balanced by an intellectual occupation that is continuous and mostly documentary, it would not have gotten so far out of hand. But in my case, where everything depended on maintaining the intellectual in the most precarious balance, on exposing it to heaven and earth with no predictable outcome, it was only to be expected that the body, in its dullness, would draw from this attitude the worst possible lesson, mimic the mind and within its own conditions, given the slightest cause, become “productive” in its manner. One might think of an embroiderer whose pattern constantly keeps changing beneath her hands, its mesh expanding or contracting or demanding threads of ever different strength, while she is supposed to continue taking pleasure in the most beautiful cross-stitch or the most touching design.
This horrendous reaction I have come to understand quite clearly again in the course of these hot days; I did not spend them foolishly, and yet even so the heat (it concentrated fiercely in my rooms, which are located directly under the roof) caused me the most torturous nights, and yesterday, when the weather rebounded, I remained in a state for which “exhaustion” is not even close to the right word. The exaggerated tightening and slackening of the tissues, which I know so well at my temples and gullet, had spread through my entire body, in such a way that I felt as though a yawning-spasm had come alive in my every limb and were trying to bring forth a thousand little mouths, which would then finish what it started. I forced myself to remain at my desk as long as I could, but in the end I had to lie down; the strain in my body lessened, but in the afternoon it returned in my head and neck with such vehemence that I had to abandon the day as half lost and could not even keep my mind on reading.
Thus the heat’s effect. But tomorrow it will simply be another influence, since influences are constantly intruding, from the atmosphere, from people, from objects, and my body answers even where no one asks its opinion, and thus the whole affair is hopeless. —My barber’s hand, with its mixture of scents (every morning combined differently) can make such an impression on me that I leave him in a completely changed mood; but in my current state this annoyance has reached physical proportions: the trying to keep at a distance from it, the forced economy of breathing whenever it is in front of my face, eventually produces tightenings in my forehead and throat (this being only one example—), in short, it is the most piteous and ridiculous sight of someone being tortured.
To take this body, filled as it is with perturbations, it and my false behavior toward it, to take them to a doctor: in the end that will be the only solution after all. Not to a psychoanalyst, who assumes original sin as his point of departure (—for to confront original sin with its counter-magic is the very essence of my innermost calling and the motive force for all lives lived in the name of art)—but to a doctor, who, starting from the physical, would be able to venture far into the mental—, I can tell you, dear Lou, that I am thinking of Stauffenberg (how this came about, how my leanings toward him were recently confirmed, more about that when we talk). He wants to take time for me in August, and so I will probably be near him next month (in Munich or out in the country near Munich). I regret that I can’t go now, for here I suffer like a dog who has a thorn in his paw and limps and licks and with every step he takes is not a dog but a thorn, something that he does not comprehend and that cannot be.
It is unimaginable that there should not be good, simple forms of help to remove from me, little by little, symptoms that so to speak extrude themselves toward the bodily surface like the swallowed needles of the hysterics. It is not a matter (Stauffenberg should understand this—) of helping me in places that are innermost and primordial—help is being kept in store there; but only of freeing my hands so that I can reach for that help. Just eight, indeed just three days of that state one calls “well-being,” i.e., of physical neutrality (of the non-partisan body)—and the power inside me would prevail and would attend to me, instead of my having to drag this power around with me like a sick bird the weight of its wings.
Dear Lou, the Kippenbergs (he wrote me yesterday) could put me up in their house starting the 20th; I would thus, if need be, remain in Leipzig from then until August 1; then go to Munich. Before? If the least good could come of it, I would prefer to stay on here, at least until the 15th, which would also accord best with my meager funds (in a month when rent is due). If only things were not at times so completely unbearable in my muggy body and in my sullen heart.
As you can see, I am as timid about going as I am about staying; if you detect anything more definite in my scribbling, then please, advise—; if some deciding factor occurs to me, I’ll write you on the spot; it would be quite good to see the horses; but whether it “appeals” to me, I don’t know; for where (alas) is my own place of appeal?
Take this as merely a few annotations for which your letter this morning gave me the heart; such complaints are about all there is; when I try anything weightier, I’ll wrench a muscle somewhere and lift it half way and drop it again.
Greetings to your roses and berries; God knows how these things happen, but the avenues here are changing into their best brown, and three times a day they have to sweep out of the way the autumn that the poor chestnut trees (which this year almost didn’t bloom) keep scattering down.
Rainer.
[RMR to LAS, letter from Paris to Göttingen: “Rainer’s letter,” diary entry by LAS, July 8, 1914]
[LAS to RMR, letter from Göttingen to Paris, probably inviting him for a stay in Göttingen or assenting to his request to visit there—middle of July 1914]
[RMR to LAS in Göttingen, telegram]
Cologne, VII 19 1914 9:34 am
Arrive Göttingen this evening Hotel Railway Station Will come to see you tomorrow morning
Rainer
July 19 through July 22 (23), 1914: RMR’s third stay in Göttingen.
[LAS, Diary]
Evening of the 19th went to pick up Rainer at the station amid the gymnasts’ milling around. Murderous heat. We lose our way laughing.
While I have my meeting with Gebsattel, Rainer wants to see his publisher in Leipzig: then we’ll meet in Munich, —but I’ll travel there ahead of him.
[Entry by RMR in LAS’s Diary]
“One must die because one has known them.” Die
of their smile’s unsayable flower; die
of their light hands. Die
of women.
Let the youth sing those deadly ones
as they come spiraling up through his heartspace.
let him sing to them:
unattainable! Ah, how strange they are.
Over the peaks
of his feeling they rise and pour
sweetly transfigured night into the desolate
vale of his arms. Breeze of their
rising leafs through his body’s boughs. Glistening
his brooks run forth.
But may the grown man
keep silent more shakenly. He
who, pathless, at night on his feelings’
far ranges has strayed:
keep silent.
(Paris, July 1914)
[LAS to RMR, postcard from Munich (shortly after her arrival) to Leipzig, July 24, 1914]
[LAS to RMR in Leipzig, July 24, 1914, picture postcard, Portrait of a Girl, drawing by the young Goethe]
[RMR to LAS in Munich]
[Leipzig, July 26, 1914]
Thanks for your card: the “traveling weather” was good but not being by myself was very tiring. Here also much tiredness, went over business matters, everything hopeful; unfortunately it is true that Princess L[ichnowsky] committed to Kurt Wolff, but even that can be straightened out. Kurt W. is away on a trip until Wednesday, which is why I haven’t been able to talk to him yet about your little book. I saw Werfel yesterday, even in his manner of appearance this time he caused me no discomfort, but beyond that: he recited a wonderful poem for me; is leaving for Forte-de’-Marmi today. Clara wrote me a good letter, is in Munich until Aug. 1, has a good doctor, the right one, she valiantly believes. —The first thing I read here was a manuscript of Carossa’s. —How is Munich!? —I will leave, I think, on the first or second.
Greetings Greetings
R.
[LAS, Diary]
Letter to Rainer [August 1], who is expected at the hotel the next day but now will probably not be able to come.
[LAS, Rainer Maria Rilke, p. 72]
At the outbreak of the war I assumed he would no longer be able to leave and took the last possible train home. But he assumed the same thing about me, rushed away, and so we traveled past one another.
[Telegram from LAS in Göttingen to RMR in Munich, probably in response to news from Rilke]
[RMR to LAS in Göttingen]
[Letterhead:] Pension Landhaus Schönblick
Irschenhausen—Mailstation Ebenhausen
Isar Valley RR Bavaria
September 9, 1914
How often, dear Lou, in this monstrous August, have I known that there is but a single place where one might truly survive it: with you, in your garden; for if one can imagine two people to whom this unlooked-for time brings exactly the same pain, the same daily horror: it is us, —how could it not be?
Thus I felt and inexpressibly understood your telegram, but even now I stand helpless in the face of its questions, —so little thought have I given yet to what else one should do now on one’s own initiative.
During these fifteen days out here in the country I have been vacillating, from the very beginning, between what are really only two choices: moving back into the city, or, if getting well is the foremost purpose, going to take the cure at Ebenhausen, where at least spas, sun baths, etc., would be available to me. Merely staying on in the country is, this year especially, a tepid prospect, since one lacks the innocence to be with Nature; her influence, her quiet insistent presence, is outweighed from the start by one’s awareness of the nameless human doom that is grinding on day and night, unstoppably. I was on the verge of going back to Munich; but then Clara wrote that she planned regardless to return with Ruth for the opening of school, which would be around the end of this week—, and so I hesitate, for she is almost penniless, and if I am to help her I can do so best from here, where I need little for myself and each week the same amount. My arrangements with Insel Verlag, which appeared so secure, have not exactly been canceled, but they remain valid, as Kippenberg told me in the end, only “while possible.” That of course does mean a great deal, since how many things have not become simply impossible. Freiburg, for instance: as we were weighing everything in Leipzig, a glimmer of likelihood finally fell on the prospect of my attempting certain studies there, in the Black Forest air, not too far from Paris, near Colmar and other lovely places. And I would still like, even now, to make my next choice of abode with these aims in mind—which, by the way, if you can imagine, caused Stauffenberg the most unexpected pleasure, since he privately had been planning and desiring something quite similar for me. He was prepared for me, good old Stauffenberg, as honestly and prudently as my books and his power to empathize with them would allow—, so that our talk seemed really only the continuation of all the inner intercourse with me that had long been natural to him. It was not easy against this background, in the perpetually shattered present, to find the calm for our conversations, but he always did find the time, whole hours, even when work in the hospital was mounting around him on all sides; then he would come to me or we would hastily arrange for a walk together—. The outcome? He kept trying to reach that area where he believes his greatest power lies, and we did traverse it now and then; it was just that all digging and weeding and real work there remained out of the question. With terror I felt at times a kind of mental nausea which he was doing his best to bring on; it would be horrible to vomit up one’s childhood like that in lumps, horrible for someone who is less concerned to resolve its unmastered aspects within himself than to expend it transmuted (and this as the very thing he does) on felt and imagined matter, on things, animals, and yes, even if need be, on monstrosities. —At one of his thorough examinations Stauffenberg discovered an old pulmonary lesion, harmless and insignificant in itself, and from then on there was at least a basis for dealing with me in mostly physical terms, which made things easier for both of us. (Sils Maria, where he would have liked to send me, was for the present impossible, and so it became—Irschenhausen.)
Dear Lou, this is about where things stand with me. Write me about yourself, what you might be thinking. Enclosed a few pages from August: to be in harmony with the prevailing voice. How one’s own part beneath it looks, what will become of it, I am very slow to understand—, I keep thinking, with something perilously like gladness, of those who have died in the last few years, and how they would be spared observing all that we are now seeing from our vantage. —Write me, meanwhile I shall form a better estimate of what is to be done.
Your old
Rainer.
Wolfrathshausen, which I went to see on my very second day here, is beyond recognition; especially up in our neighborhood there must have been much planting and building and altering, —I couldn’t even find my way. —Will there be lectures at the University in Göttingen? —Many regards to your husband.
I
For the first time I see you rising,
faintly rumored most distant incredible War God.
How thickly among our peaceful fruit had
terrible action been sown, suddenly sprung mature.
Small even yesterday, in need of nurturing, now it stands
tall as a man: tomorrow
it overtops all men. For the glowing God
in a single sweep tears his crop
out of the nation’s roots, and harvest begins.
Human sheaves are heaved up into the human thunderstorm. Summer
is left behind among the games on the green.
Children remain, playing, old men remain, remembering,
trustful women remain. Tender fragrance
of flowering lindens pervades the general farewell,
and for years to come it will hold meaning
to breathe this, to keep this consummate scent.
Brides walk more auspiciously chosen: as if not some one
had joined lots with them, but the whole nation
had ordained them to feel. With slowly measuring gaze
boys surround the youth who already extends
into the more hazarded future: he who moments ago
was prey to a hundred voices, not knowing which was right,
now that single call has lightened him; for what
would not be caprice next to the joyous, the positive hour of need?
At last a God. As here the peaceable one so often
eluded our grasp, suddenly the God of Battles grips us,
hurling his bolt: while over the heart full of home
there screams his thunderous dwelling, his blood-red sky.
II
Hail, to see men in the grip of something! It’s been so long
since the spectacle seemed real to us
and the invented image cut through to our hearts.
Now, beloved, the time, like a prophet,
speaks to us blindly, possessed by age-old soul.
Listen. This you’ve never heard before. Now you are trees
in which a mighty wind grows louder and louder;
over the level years it storms toward us
from the fathers’ feelings, from loftier deeds, from high
heroic ranges that soon now, in the new snow
of your jubilant glory, will shine fresher and nearer.
Behold the living landscape in transformation:
a youthful fragrant coppice passes, and the older trunks
and recent saplings bend toward those moving on.
Once before, as you gave birth, you felt separation, mothers,—
feel again the happiness of being also those who give.
Give as if you were infinite, give. Be to these burgeoning days
a rich nature. Bless the sons as they leave.
And you, girls: to think that they love you, that in such
hearts you are felt, that such fearsome impulse
walked beside you, disguised as mildness, you so like flowers.
Prudence restrained you: now you may love more lavishly,
embrace your passions like those maids in the legends of long ago:
she who hopes, standing as though in a garden that hopes;
she who weeps, kneeling as though in a constellation that high above
is named “Weeper”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
III
Three short days ago, and what now? Am I really hymning horror,
really the God whom I’d wondered at from afar, believing him
one of the earlier, now only remembering gods?
Like a volcanic mountain he lay in the distance. Sometimes
flaming. Sometimes in smoke. Godlike and sad.
Perhaps only a nearby hamlet, one built into its side,
felt tremors. But we raised the hallowed lyre
to other—oh, to what other future’s gods?
Then up he stood: stands: higher
than standing towers, higher
than the air breathed during our once billowing days.
Stands. Overstands. Stands to stay. And we? Annealed into One,
into a new creation, fired to life by his deadly force.
So I too exist no longer, my heart beats
with the beat of the general heart, and the general mouth
is what forces my lips apart.
And yet, at night there howls within me like a ship’s siren
the perpetual question: where, where, does this lead?
Does the God from his tall shoulder perceive the path beyond?
Does he blaze like a lighthouse beacon out into a struggling future
that has long been seeking us? Is he a Knower? Can
he be a Knower, this rapacious god?
Since he destroys everything known. Everything known by us
so long, so lovingly, so trustfully. Our houses
merely lie strewn about now like debris around his temple.
Standing up, he shoved it scornfully aside and rose into the skies.
A moment ago skies of summer. Summer skies. Summer’s
tenderest skies over the trees and us.
Now: who can feel, who can sense their infinite solace
over the meadows? Who
doesn’t stare into them like an alien?
We’ve been changed, changed into sameness: like a meteor,
One heart plunged into our suddenly no longer personal breasts.
Hot, an iron heart from an iron cosmos.
IV
Our older heart, oh friends, the intimate heart
that stirred in us even yesterday: who could have thought it
irretrievably gone? No one will
ever feel it back again. No one who still exists
after the high transformation.
For a heart of time, an older age’s
more distant heart, beating with residual rage,
has displaced the near one, whose intricate difference
we so slowly achieved. And now
bring to a close, friends, this suddenly
reassigned heart, consume the violence left in it!
With praise: for it’s always been glorious
to live not in the caution of private cares, but in one
adventuring spirit, in those holiest sharings
of supremely felt danger. In the field
Life stands equally tall in innumerable men, and in each
A newly crowned Death walks with princely strides.
But amidst your praising, oh friends, praise pain as well,
praise without wistfulness the pain of not being those to come,
but of being, even now, so much more nearly related
to all that is past: praise and lament it.
Don’t be ashamed to lament. Shout out in lament. For man’s
destiny, which is unknowable,
which no one can comprehend, becomes true only
when you lament it without restraint and yet, unrestrained, live it,
this most deeply lamented fate, behold: like something craved.
V
Rise, and terrify the frightful God! Confound him.
For ages he’s been pampered by Joy of Battle. Now let
Pain, let a new, astounded Pain of Battle impel you
ahead of his rage.
Even if a blood usurps you, a blood coming high
from the place of your fathers: let the feeling it fosters
be yours alone. Don’t strive
for earlier stances, don’t practice obsolete moods.
Ask yourself only: are you Pain. Pain entered into action. For Pain
also has its Jubilation. Oh and then the flag unfurls
above you in the wind from the enemy.
What flag? Pain’s. The flag of Pain. The heavy
beating cloth of Pain. Every one of you has dried his sweating
hot imperiled face on it. The face common to you all
coalesces there and imprints its features.
Features of the future perhaps. So that hatred would not
permanently abide there. But an amazement, but a resolute Pain,
but an imperious rage that the blinded nations around you
should have suddenly disturbed your contemplation:
they, from whom you gravely, as from air and excavation,
won yourself breath and earth. For to comprehend,
to go on learning, and to honor inwardly
disparate things, even foreign things, was your heartfelt task.
Now you’re confined once more to what’s your own. But
it has grown greater. Even if it is far from World,—
take it as World! And employ it like the mirror
that catches the sun and turns it, aims it
upon the Erring. (May your own error
burn itself out in the painful, the terrible heart.)
[LAS to RMR in Irschenhausen]
Göttingen, Saturday [September 12, 1914]
Dear Rainer,
This is how I took in what came from you today: the way someone reaches hold of a fruit-tree branch and pulls down to his lips the sweetness that alone of all food he has all this time been thinking of. For my solitude has become something now in which I suffocate: because, as never before, it seems to have been annulled, suspended, declared irrelevant; because the “general mouth” does indeed “force open” one’s own lips that have been keeping silent and one’s own voice does shout within: “Hail, to see men in the grip of something!” —and yet somehow remains flat and listless in a sobbing contradiction. This present unity is neither the simple unquestioning kind, such as when a people unites in the face of a natural catastrophe to wrest victory from death, nor is it that almost supernatural bliss of the: “All as One!”: it is made true and real only at the cost of one’s closest fellow-humans and only by virtue of their deaths. (Even if the most natural-seeming causes for hostility may issue from those fellow-humans we know only as aliens and outsiders, that hostility is nevertheless rooted in matters that have everything to do with politics and nationalities—much more than with race and ethnicity—, as one can see from Ukrainians and Poles against Russians, Teutonic English against Teutonic Germans, etc.).
The most deeply horrifying thing, which causes me such trepidation, I can barely put into words: it has to do, I can tell you at least, with this: that “the War” has elements in it of (in our sense) “the Doll.” The other day I read that they had hung an enemy uniform with all its accoutrements at the head of a locomotive like a quivering effigy, and I thought to myself instantly: “There’s the image, there’s the metaphor!” It’s at heart the same misidentification that results from the compulsion to delimit oneself, to establish one’s own boundary lines, and for which children are given dolls so that they may “learn” this. Such substitution must have gone on for long periods of archaic time in anything but a spirit of play—rather as a spontaneous, enmity-fueled dissociation from a world felt to be hostile to a particular tribe, a world over against which that tribe was united as a single creature. Today it is as if at some point one forgot that over the course of time it became a mere doll’s body, and was meant to retain its function only until one was sufficiently mature to be allowed to embrace the unity of the world again unpunished and alive; instead of shooting into the stuffing, one is suddenly shooting into breathing bodies, shooting at one another, as if in war games one had accidentally been given live ammunition. And the misidentification goes unnoticed: the doll, like all dolls, has its horribly realistic aspect, and this causes the blood to heat up and talk itself into any sort of reality. You see: this deed arising from the blood is not quite genuine after all, cannot be so, —not genuine in the way that all the primordial reality that is eternally alive in us is genuine and can break forth because it has an everlasting connection to the present and is in fact nothing but the eternal present of that which is. One only pretends that these bloody doings have an organic connection with the blood of life: every war is elaborately draped, aside from its flags, in almost everything that has ever been utilized in the way of big words, convictions, ideals, etc., and only this instills that tempestuous, jubilant courage; but how thoughtlessly has it all been picked up here and there, trotted out from how much narrow-minded thinking, dust-covered morality, —just as there are any number of scraps left over to sew into the glittering finery of dolls: and if, using the stuffed effigy as one’s guide, one pursues this line of thought to its very end, one will inevitably arrive at what you, describing Lotte Pr[itzel]’s creations, so revealingly discovered to be the doll’s unreality.
And I must say: this, this! —not the horrifying reality but the secret unreality, the insidious spectral “life” in it that must first sate itself, like a vampire, with blood of our most deep-searching and high-reaching thoughts in order to work its effects, in order to achieve credibility, in order to obtain sacrifices, —never has anything in all my years horrified me more than this, and thus if my mouth were to come open, it could only start screaming senselessly, —but not join in with the collective voice. At no previous time in my life could I have read your remark: “I keep thinking, with something perilously like gladness, of those who have died in these last few years, and that they have been spared observing all that we are now seeing from our vantage,” with such intense agreement.
And yet one does not turn away, no, nothing would be more impossible; one ventures out and learns, learns, laboriously and with deep obedience toward these days and nights and what they have to teach, and does not grow tired and almost forgets to sleep as on the field of battle. And I must also share with you—though I can express it even less clearly than the previous matter—a chilling notion whose obviousness I have come to feel with full force: that there can only be war-murder because we are all continually murderers of ourselves and of one another. That is probably inescapable, but it makes the guilt an enormously general one; through the world there is passing a single unfolding action, which one has no choice but to enter: it is as if the only possibility of liberation lies in doing so, in understanding it this way, and in feeling, through the unity of blame, through that all-too-human guilt, the “heavy, beating cloth of pain” in which “the face common to you all coalesces and imprints its features,” and because of which no feature which once was excluded and exposed will any longer remain uncovered and without its active, harmonious inclusion in the whole.
When I had reached this point, I realized with amazement: that for precisely these reasons, if I were a man or had borne sons, I too would have fought and sent sons off into the fight.
But it is more than time now to stop; and so I’ll refrain from telling you about how carefully I’ve read again everything you said about yourself and Stauffenberg. That key point of ours: why and by what means analysis is disastrous for all creative production—I’ve only become clear about during the past month; the areas in us that are left unmastered—and there are really just a very few and specific such areas—are exactly those needed for productivity, and it is equally necessary that they remain inviolate, no matter what the danger. This is enormously important. Munich now, because of Clara’s presence, will not be without its dangers: since it appears that she construes wrongly any encounter with you and any show of the most natural interest (such as your postcard on the bells-of-Chartres-day), as if you wanted to come back and just hadn’t quite become conscious yet of that desire. In his new analysis with her, Gebsattel tried out an idea that probably suited Clara well; but he also suddenly saw everything through her eyes and from her perspective. This results from his own insecurity, which seems to me to have intensified; I am left feeling much concern for him and basically nothing but that, since his thinking, for all its abstractness, can no longer counter what is neurotic in him. There were moments when he himself felt that his analyses of others were merely a substitute for a self-analysis that had not been taken far enough, and that precisely as such, they were likely to be incorrect.
When, how, where will we be able to see and talk to each other again? My fondest thought: to have you here. There is a deathly quiet everywhere now, even up on the Rhons, but Thankmar’s room is also vacant, as are the other rooms at the Keudells. The University? Yes, it will be opened as scheduled in every discipline, all the head lecturers no longer being green enough for war.
Right now I am going to Leipzig for a few days. My mailing address there will be: Grassistrasse 14, c/o Prof. Dr. E. Spranger.
Anything you propose will be fine with me. Aside from any other personal need, I bear it as if under a heavy burden that I am not living through this present time with you.
Lou.
Suddenly from everywhere splotches on these pages, —all on their own, it seems, dabbed directly from the inkwell.
[RMR to LAS, letter from Berlin to Göttingen, December 13, 1914. Only the envelope survives. “January 16 (1915) Rainer’s telegram” (probably from Munich to Berlin): LAS, Diary]
[RMR to LAS in Berlin]
Munich, Finkenstrasse 2, iv right
last day of January 1915
Dear Lou,
Never to let anything call me away unexpectedly, no matter what its source, unless it makes itself felt as an absolutely inner prompting: how often have I promised myself this. And yet this time that is exactly what happened; otherwise I would not have made this trip, would be in Berlin, would have seen you, would see you now, we’d be talking, sometimes I think, would perhaps be working together a little . . .
I came here for three or four days, so I thought; after some eight I really could have left again. But then, despite numerous annoyances, Munich prevailed, due to its easier environs and—this was really the deciding factor—the chance it gave me to move into my old rooms and live in them all by myself; my lady friend, with whom I had rented the apartment in the fall, is temporarily away in the country (only her little daughter—a child of three and a half years who does not bother me—and the maid who takes care of me are here). I have actually had a week now without having to see anyone or say a single word, have spent it reading, i.e., pouring words into myself, the way I imagine someone gets drunk to escape where he is. What I have just gone through is the ever-relapsing fate of these recent years: the entering into a dear heartfelt connection, then, more and more, the painful certainty that every closeness exposes me to violence, then terror, flight, retreat back into the forfeited solitude, —though this time so many different external factors were also in play, and they caused so much damage, that who knows whether without them some sort of quiet supportive togetherness might not have come about in spite of everything. The apartment here was a wonderful start, and at first everything seemed so simply to happen as it should; indeed, none of the most likely difficulties materialized—Clara, for instance, who since she has been under regular medical care (for an intestinal problem) seems a different person, friendly and open without ulterior emotions. But then wicked things approached from a different direction, and even my weeks in Berlin were darkened by the shadows they cast, for they went on tirelessly working their effects.
Many things there did fall in place wonderfully: Frau Marianne Mitford (the daughter of Friedlaender-Fuld) lodged me in her beautiful, practically empty little house (in Bendlerstrasse) and extended me her most helpful friendship; at her home I saw Schleich and spent many lovely hours at her parental house (Pariser Platz), which (since her divorce two months after the wedding) she has made into a wonderful world all her own; my rooms in Bendlerstrasse are still available (since I only intended to be away for a few days); however, I was so little capable and composed that I have no idea how things would have turned out there or might still turn out—if, that is, I decided to return there after all. But Berlin seemed to me so unmanageable: there was, to begin with, all the trouble of eating out every day, and eating bad vegetarian meals at that, much too far away from where I stayed, and requiring that whole laborious effort of making one’s way through Berlin’s atmosphere and mood; on top of that, people were constantly announcing themselves (here all that is simple and straightforward). And even though I had been prepared (to a certain extent at least) with Prof. Loeschcke’s help to make use of the University, that opportunity remains unexplored. (In this respect too, all those long distances to walk and those expenditures of time!) So here I am again, you see, trapped in between everything, with everything too far away because my own center shrinks back from everything. I don’t know how to live, even when I ignore the things going on outside, much less when I see myself caught up in them all. Tell me now how you are doing, Lou; I think, given all this uncertainty of mine, that you shouldn’t wait for me in Berlin; but if you think we need to talk now, I might be able to come to Berlin with Stauffenberg early in February; he wants to go there to take a short break from his duties. If in the meantime I decide to continue living here, I would come on my own to fetch my things that are still at Bendlerstr. and stay three or four days. (But I must be very careful with my money, since I have incurred the most foolish expenses!) Write me a word. What would your further plans look like, completely apart from mine? Enough; can you make any sense of these scribbles? In heart’s confusion your old
Rainer.
Have you read Annette’s very beautiful letters? (Enclosed.)
[LAS to RMR, letter from Berlin to Munich, probably beginning of March 1915]
[RMR to LAS in Berlin, telegram]
Munich, 3/4/1915, 10:55 am
Suits perfectly Anticipate your arrival Sooner the better Can probably let you have the room Please telegraph exact time of arrival
Rainer
[RMR to LAS in Berlin, telegram]
Munich, 3/7/1915, 10:20 am
Went to look at pension Fürstenstrasse 18 Good But think it better you try here Finkenstrasse 2 first thing Room ready If you arrive here at 6:14 leaving Berlin 7:08am could attend an interesting lecture that evening Please telegraph time of arrival Greetings to Druzhok Won’t he be coming?
Rainer
[LAS, Diary]
Rainer’s letter and telegrams: but I cannot— [Death of her oldest brother, Alexander von Salomé, in St. Petersburg on February 20; thereafter trip repeatedly postponed]
[LAS to RMR, letter from Berlin to Munich, probably on March 8, 1915]
[RMR to LAS in Berlin]
Munich, Finkenstrasse 2 iv
(with Frau L[oulou] Albert-Lazard)
March 9, 1915
Dear, dear Lou,
How strongly have my feelings been with you since your letter arrived—now you only need know that each day your room awaits you—, but also can wait. As can I; only my friend Lulu can scarcely manage any longer; she has been looking forward to you with such unbridled impatience, and yesterday evening she felt saddened. To what extent (if at all) she might find her own place among your daughters—is, I know, impossible to foresee, but if you were to grow fond of her, her life would once more enter a good season. I have not, all things considered, brought her anything good at all, after the first joyous weeks of giving and hoping (you know how I am) I have taken back most of it, all those revocations of my heart, which withdraws so quickly from human contacts, and now it is clear between us that I cannot help and that there is no help for me. Nevertheless she does still need me a while; when you see her you will understand immediately; her little daughter is with her, Ingeborg, even though for the time being the child is still being treated as a boy and called Nuckel. The path of her life has been strewn with the most unspeakable tribulations, and regrettably even last fall, when we, as far as our own relationship was concerned, were still all wonderment and hope, she herself had to undergo the very worst of them, at the very same time, in intimately nearby regions of her heart . . . Back then we had secured this apartment for ourselves, looking beyond the expected closing of Pension Pfanner (which, by the way, has since come about). It is the fourth floor, thus perhaps too arduous for Druzhok’s needs, though there is a lift that could take him upstairs; Lulu also asks me to tell you that for certain emergencies there is a quite large terrace, which indeed could almost pass for real, all-embracing nature. Therefore if separation would be unbearable for Druzhok or if his upbringing as a good middle-class dog would suffer from it, he would not be lacking here in licenses and liberties. We will then each have a bedroom and a room where we can work, except that yours would have to serve as the dining room whenever we decide to take our meals upstairs. There is a vegetarian restaurant close by, most of the time we eat there, though in the evening it is often pleasant to have yogurt and some additional little something brought to us. We each arrange this, by the way, according to our own particular needs, without any regard for household schedules or restrictions, and you too, love, should avail yourself of all the solitude and quiet you desire, just as in any pension. This to give you a general idea of the external circumstances in which I await you here; as for the internal ones, —I am sure you feel them.
Yesterday’s third (the final one) of Schuler’s lectures will, when you arrive—and even if that should take weeks—still be resonating in us; an eccentric who has gained insights into the world’s fundamental mysteries through his studies of Imperial Rome; a man who is important first and foremost because the hellish events taking place now have not damaged his ability to perceive the deeper inner connections —(and who can say that of oneself?)
I saw Gebsattel recently—by now probably four weeks ago—at my place; he seemed overly preoccupied, and in general seems to have all but disappeared from view.
Now give your heart time, love, don’t think that I am impatient. A terminus only exists insofar as poor Austria, as I have just heard, is now ordering further call-ups of those previously deferred and considered unqualified; of my age-group, those between April 6 and May 6 are in line next—, and since there is a tendency to enlist anyone, it’s quite possible after all to imagine that one will be whisked off to who knows where. In which case we would have to see each other before! —Goodbye.
Your old Rainer.
Munich, Finkenstr. 2 iv
March 13, 1915
Dear Lou,
Even a few days ago it seemed to me that a disconcerting gap might open up in Druzhok’s biography were you and he to separate at this present time; now I learn on top of everything that yours too would be burdened with an otherwise quite unnecessary trip [from Charlottenburg] to Berlin. Beyond all doubt, then: Druzhok must come with you. We have held counsel once more and have decreed that the terrace shall belong to those mythological processes in which his nature is still entangled. This terrace is a vast open space, yet at the same time there are a number of objects standing around there that allow for a certain discretion—.
And besides, your little friend is advancing in his upbringing, and he will, after all, be able to come down to the street occasionally with one or the other of us. And at any rate we are sure that the innocence [Unschuld] of his occasional duties [Schuldigkeit] will teach us important truths about our earthly indebtedness [Verschuldung] and that its lessons will not be lost on us.
You must, of course, so far as living here is concerned, be our guest, since the apartment is vacant anyway, and if Lulu (since I am already paying rent to her) has one fear, it is of sinking so low as to become a Munich landlady; you would not want to inflict that on her.
Board and everything else is, given Munich prices and our own vegetarian diet, very affordable; so you will be able to settle in quite frugally.
Just come soon now, love, with you will come comfort, help, and future, even though you yourself are still burdened with a heavy heart.
Goodbye.
Rainer.
P.S.
You will notify me of your arrival, won’t you?
Sidie, in Rome, became engaged to Count Carlo Guicciardini, will marry in April. I’m very glad!
[Munich, March 13, 1915]
Postscript:
Our very proper housekeeper, Helene Frank, says with reference to Druzhok: “He may do on the terrace whatever he wishes.”
Nuckel, even, when he heard of the impending visit, implored his mother: Druzhok, oh, please, telephone him, he must come today.
So there . . . read that to him and then let yourself be persuaded by his own response.
(Saturday)
Rainer.
March 19 through May 27, 1915: Together in Munich. Time with Loulou, also with Clara. Long spells reading Hölderlin. Meetings with Gebsattel, Scheler, Hans Carossa, Karl Wolfskehl, Ricarda Huch, Regina Ullmann, Annette Kolb, Hertha Koenig (to see Picasso’s Saltimbanques), Lotte Pritzel, Paul Klee. Séances, excursions to Herreninsel.
[RMR to Carl Andreas in Göttingen]
Finkenstr. 2 iv Tuesday, April 13 [1915]
Dear Professor Andreas,
For tomorrow, since this year I know [it is your birthday], most cordial greetings and all my sincere wishes! I am munching happily (as are we all) on the beautiful Göttingen apples, and the liverwort from the Loufried garden (since it recovered in water) has been a feast for my eyes. We have had few traces of spring here (Lou will probably not find it until she returns home), but all sorts of remarkable people keep us occupied—though none outdoes Druzhok, who with his pranks and turns and all his curiosity and zest is a source of perpetual amusement.
When you see him what will you say?! He is growing rapidly, has, since he arrived here, already passed through various stages, will, by the time he arrives in Göttingen, be all but definitive and complete. I hope that before long I too can be there once again. I make no plans; perhaps Time will make some in the absence of mine, and thus help itself beyond my impasse. All my things are in Paris, —but I will gladly consign them to the past, if only the future will come soon.
Cordially
Your
devoted
Rainer
[LAS, Diary]
February 20. Sasha’s telegram [death of this brother]. Most of all, to see no one. March 4. Rainer’s telegram. Still can’t do it. March 13. Rainer’s dear new call to come. Will travel soon. March 19. With Druzhok at Rainer’s. Then with Lulu A.-L. in her studio. How good and wonderful to be with him, again-to-be. [Many evenings] at home with Rainer, reading aloud. March 25. Another delightful long walk on Herreninsel with Rainer, Clara, and Ruth. . . . Two dreams of Rainer in Munich, May. . . . One of the most radiant Munich memories will remain for me Clara and how well she has taken herself in hand.
[RMR to LAS in Göttingen, in a letter from Loulou Albert-Lazard]
[Letterhead:] Pension Pfanner
Finkenstrasse 2
June 9, 1915
L A L
It is a senseless undertaking, dear Lou, to sit down at the desk to write at a time when every spoken word breaks apart in my mouth. I do so only to thank you, to tell you how beneficial your good words were to me. I very much wish at some point in my life to stand before you not quite so poor, without merely a negative effect.
Meanwhile we have read together the book van Eden recommended. Its initial impact is devastating. If there is just a fragment of truth in it, then it seems horrible to go on living here without some huge revolt. We lent it to Hausenstein, but haven’t heard yet what he thinks about it.—
Yesterday, after long unintended detours, I went with Rainer to Holzhausen on Ammersee to look over a small villa for him owned by Professor Erler. A beautiful quiet park at the lake, a delightfully furnished little house seemed to us an obvious choice. He is wavering only because he would have to commit himself for the summer months. I think being alone in nature will do him infinitely good.
We are looking for a vegetarian cook. Starting tomorrow, housepainters and carpenters will be rampaging about here.
A truly strong joy: the new book by Franz Werfel. Even in these present days he is strong.
Lou, forgive me for closing already, I can’t continue.
Nuckel says: a little birdie has called Druyock. He talks about both of you often and sends greetings.
Soon I will write again.
(Kätie says to thank you.)
I kiss you
Loulou
Dear Lou, tired, so tired. You must be glad to be at home, tucked in amid your laburnum bushes. Will send you these next few days Ropshin and soon a new Werfel (Einander) that I received yesterday, a splendid book. And then more soon, just as soon as I find quietness somewhere and solitude finds me. If only it would!
Your old
Rainer
[LAS, Diary]
April 1916: News about Rainer! In Vienna judged to be fit for field duty, drills for a month, then taken sick and sent off to the War Information Office where he sits until three in the afternoon. May 1916: Rainer exempt from military service.
Munich, Keferstrasse 11
before Epiphany 1917
Dear Lou,
There is now, in spite of everything, a little tree standing in my room and it sends its greetings and shines over to you around this Russian Christmastime. How are things with you?
About myself it is difficult to speak; time has greatly reduced the portion allotted me for communication, and rest and work are still nowhere to be found in me following the Vienna rupture.
At least the unrest of the past month was one of restless angels, due to the presence of a beautiful beautiful young girl who was with me here. —When I was sorting through things at New Year’s I found the Russian photographs that I had held back all this time but that are properly yours, and yesterday I had them sent off to you. Most cordial regards to your husband—and confidence in this year and that it might bring a good long reunion.
Прощай!
Your
Rainer.
[LAS to RMR, letter from Göttingen to Munich, June 1917]
[RMR to LAS in Göttingen]
Chiemsee, Herreninsel, Schlosshôtel
June 28, 1917
Dear, dear Lou,
I have been walking for the past two weeks on trails you know well (Druzhok knows them also!). This time living on Herreninsel itself, at the Schloss-Hôtel, which has beautiful rooms and a board that is still quite affordable. On Saturday I’ll be back in Munich, on Monday at the latest a photograph of my portrait (luckily one is available) will be sent to you for Ilse [Erdmann]. I’m glad that you are happy in her company. That I cannot say anything about myself, you will understand; I must truly hold myself rigid and unresponsive, else the knowledge will suddenly break in on me of how terrible a time and future we have been allotted. If I can keep summer free, I might come to Westphalia in July to stay at Frau Koenig’s estate and would then, I believe, be more or less in your vicinity for a few weeks.
Greetings to your husband and all who are with you, dearest.
Your Rainer.
[LAS to RMR in Munich]
Göttingen, July 9, 1917
Dear Rainer, I thank you: a few hours ago the picture arrived. For me it is not you. It does show some person inside you, but—I know this sounds crazy—he is there like a person in whose look* you are somehow reflected, who would gaze over toward you, gaze out to find you—; and so you are there and yet not there: for me, who may not be the best judge of art. When I look at the two little Russian photos on my desk which have captured you so poorly and in random moments, it is the same as when a single little blade of grass has been plucked from an entire garden: but it did grow there.
I am so very happy about the surprise awaiting Ilse! She is finally, though only after weeks, going to be called back to her vocation here as nurse, so I won’t let her know anything yet. I am enclosing part of a letter from her brother (a sociologist): will you return it to me by registered mail? I hope it won’t be an imposition. I want you to read what a true German writes there. For the rest I well understand if you don’t want to hear or say anything now. We both surely know this: that what Russia is doing now has little relation to what revolutions at other times did; that even all her negating is only (again) a kind of governing by her God. Even if in practice she should come to ruin because of it—as indeed those are easily destroyed in whom a feeling of the unity of God and Earth is lodged too deep (too deep for “Realpolitik”!), —it is in the end only the land of Russia that lives now and “is victorious” for all.
When I suddenly envisioned you walking about on Herreninsel as in the old Whitsun days [of 1915], this whole pocket notebook became fully present to me; though its words are little more than abbreviations, it brings back to me all the conversations, all the impressions of those Munich days, almost without loss. And little Druzhok, —ah, how in the meantime he has proved his name! All the solace of the animal world is in him, —knowing nothing of war, of peace everything.
Westphalia? a reunion, whether from your or my direction? You will let me know in good time? The thought of Frau König has become for me inseparable from little plum cakes; give her my regards. And farewell, you dear.
Lou.
[RMR to LAS in Göttingen]
[Munich, July 14, 1917]
Thank you, dear Lou: what a good letter and what a good brother! I had no idea that he is still so close to Ilse and in such intimate correspondence with her. That must be a great help to her.
Lulu’s portrait seems to me also more like a question searching for me and for a bit of information. At first it surprised everyone who saw it evolving (Kassner, Hofmannsthal), but Lulu’s portraits do not ultimately win through; in the end they fail to contain what appeared to enter into them with such intensity—that intensity would have to be upheld in order to truly “fill” a painting, and that would require a long, uninterrupted, imperturbable strength.
I don’t remember if I wrote you that I am giving up my Keferstrasse apartment? Therefore indescribable packing. But the worst is done, and I hope finally in two or three days to travel via Berlin to Böckel, where I have long been expected. From there I will write you soon about how we can best see each other again.
Прощай!
Rainer.
In Politiken there are some very touching letters from the literary estate of Amalie Skram, who had been so completely forgotten.
[RMR to LAS, two unsent fragments*]
Munich, Continental Hôtel
February 20, 1918
Dear Lou,
Like a sleepwalker I went into Jaffe’s a few days ago and headed straight for your little book, even though it was lying inconspicuously among many things with its title downward.
Since then I have read the Three Letters again and again, and they are still important and relevant to me, just as they were back then in Paris: as if at any moment I could instate in myself in all three stages of growing up and at each one of them, the rest of my life notwithstanding, be receptive. But this time, even more clearly than before, I find myself wanting you to treat the same material for my own present age and for each subsequent one. For this imagining oneself a child and young boy, however strongly it may bring the issue to the fore, also seriously limits it: for it cannot make the experience of death weigh equally alongside the experience of love. In this regard the remark about the plant’s fruit and its twofold (white and black) birth seemed to me this time especially provocative. Were you the first to observe this process in such a light?
. . . that a host of creatures which are born from seeds left exposed outside have that as their womb, that wide, excitable freeness, —how at home in it they must feel their whole lives long, since they do nothing but leap for joy in their mother’s body, like little Saint John; for it is this very same space that conceived them and carried them through to full term, they never leave its security at all.
Until in the bird everything becomes a bit more apprehensive and cautious. His nest is already a little maternal womb lent to him by nature, which he only covers instead of fully containing. And suddenly, as if it were no longer safe enough outside, the wonderful maturing process withdraws wholly into the creature’s darkness and emerges only at a later turn back into the world, which is then regarded as a second world by this creature that will never be fully weaned from the conditions of the earlier, more fervently inner one.
(Rivalry between Mother and World . . . )
Munich, Ainmillerstrasse 34 iv
January 13, 1919
My dear Lou,
Can I be sure you have this address that has been mine since last May? You can imagine what a drought there is inside me, since I went without writing you for both German and Russian Christmas: seeing you, talking with you, has been an absolute necessity for so long now, but picking up the pen is hard for me, and it is made even more difficult by this accumulation of postponed letters; and the blockage which these years of waiting in line have created in me has become even worse now, instead of changing at the war’s end, as was my hope, into outflow and surge.
Recently I happened once more on the letter I had begun to write you about the Letters to a Boy, back then when in the bookstore here I had walked straight to your little book even though I could only see its back cover: I turned it over with a feeling of certainty, and behold: miraculously it was by you. Such surprises you have effected but rarely during these most recent years and the ones behind them. At that time (I was still at the Continental) I began immediately to write you, —now I find it again, a leaf turned yellow—, and I don’t have the heart to go on with it. Dear, dear Lou, how completely I am without composure, my inmost being has withdrawn and erected safeguards and gives out nothing, and my desire not to admit anything from outside grew so extreme that finally neither the War nor even the purest and most innocent manifestation of Nature could work its effects on me. Never have I been so unreachable by the wind blowing through from space, by trees, by the nightly stars; ever since I was forced to stare at all this out of the evil costume of the infantryman’s tunic, it has retained a quality of estrangement, that non-relatedness I forced upon it back then in order not to ruin it for me. Awareness of this made actually spending the summer of 1918 in some familiar place impossible: i.e., my apartment here was new, I planned to become its resident, but that was really only a pretext for the sentence of immobility to which I had inwardly condemned myself. During the first days of the revolution, perhaps indeed only on its first morning, I thought that I’d been stirred out of inaction; and even if I weren’t more mobile in any actual direction, I still felt moved as a whole, in one piece as it were, toward some sort of future! But the storm was not there, and thus it became obvious that one had no right to give up one’s private future for a collective one—to which, so it seems, no one was compelled by pure impulse anyway. Now one sits yet again and singles out one’s own existence and ponders it and plans it and holds it up against the murky background. And everything one was lies in the past—when one begins to count, six years back and farther. How this disaster has squandered us!
Imagine: I have a studio apartment, a few pieces of my own dear furniture, a second growth of books, —a complete household. Only it’s not really Munich at all; but perhaps someday, someplace or other, I’ll possess the calm to erect it around myself as something whole and coherent. But where? And when? —I desperately need some close-fitting sense of place—instead of all these approximations, this constantly adjusting to what never quite precisely and suitably fits my needs. The expanse of space I left unfilled in my time and employment here was filled many times over with people whom the great vacuum of Munich’s streets was only too happy to squeeze into its cracks and interstices. Only with the beginning of the new year, which at least helps bring things to a close, have I resolved to be more energetic in refusing dates and appointments, —even if only to catch up on at least a hundred letters and a few long
star falling without haste, beneficent and intense, through night-space and my own innermost being simultaneously—. These would be the two experiences that, along with the experience I had leaning against a tree at Duino, would come together like a first design for inner being. (As yet tentatively.)
Greetings to all, your husband, your dear room which in my imagination I always set before my own as the example from which it would have to learn ——— well, what else but this: to be both space and inner space!
Will you write some time?
Rainer.
From the pocket notebook, following the entry titled “An Experience”:
“Later he thought he could remember certain moments in which the strength of this moment already gestated as in the seed. He thought back to the hour in that other southern garden [in the margin: Capri] when a bird’s call sounded outside him and deep within him in perfect simultaneity—so that it did not break off, as it were, at his body’s boundary, but merged both sides into an uninterrupted space in which, mysteriously sheltered, there dwelt only a single region of purest, deepest consciousness. With that he closed his eyes, so as not to be dissuaded of so all-inclusive an experience by the external contour of his body; and the infinite passed over into him from all sides so trustingly that he could believe he felt within his breast the gentle composure of the stars which one by one had been appearing.
“He also remembered the times when, leaning against a fence and similarly disposed, he would grow aware of the star-filled nocturnal sky through the gentle branches of an olive tree: and how then the universe would look back at him face-like inside this mask—; or how, if he but submitted to it long enough, it would be absorbed so perfectly in the clear solution of his heart that the savor of creation would be dispersed throughout his being. He thought it possible that such moments of ecstasy might be found as far back as his heavy childhood; he had only to recall the passion that always seized him whenever he had to venture out into the storm—how, striding across the wide plains, moved to his inmost core, he would break through the wall of wind that perpetually rebuilt itself before him—or how, standing at a ship’s prow, his eyes closed, he would let himself be borne through thick distances that closed even more tightly behind him. But even if from his earliest days such things as the elemental onrush of air, the pure and infinitely varied conduct of water, the sense of the heroic in the march of clouds, had moved him beyond all measure (or better, since he could never comprehend them in human terms, had confronted his soul like Fate)—it could not escape him that now, with these last influences, he had been delivered over totally to such relationships. Something whose function was to keep things gently separate maintained between him and people a pure, almost luminous interspace, and though individual elements might reach through it from one side to the other, it soaked up every relationship and, saturated with it, obscured like thick mist figure from figure. He still did not know how far the others had any impression of his separateness and seclusion. As for himself, this lent him for the first time a certain freedom vis-à-vis people, —the small beginning of poverty by which he was lighter gave him among those bound to one another in hope and worry, in life and death, a mobility that was uniquely his own. He felt the temptation to hold his lightness out toward their burdenedness, even though he realized that he would be deceiving them in this, since they could not know that he (unlike the hero) had arrived at his kind of overcoming not by fighting through all their bonds and commitments, not in the heavy air of their hearts, but outside, in a spaciousness so little furnished for human comfort that they would call it only “the void.” Perhaps all he could turn to them with was his simplicity; it was left for him to speak to them of joy whenever he found them too much ensnared in the contraries of happiness, perhaps also to share with them some of the particulars from his dealings with Nature, things they overlooked or only attended to in passing.”
[LAS to RMR in Munich]
Göttingen, January 16, 1919
Dear Rainer,
Your letter entered my life during a moment of death, while I was holding my little dead Druzhok in my lap. (Isn’t it strange: you here during Schimmel’s illness and death, and now after all these years here again; you and I together in Meiningen when Lotte-Moppelchen fell ill, and then rushing home to find her dead.)
Ah, Rainer, it was such a help. And will continue helping, and I need such help so very badly, for it is my dear little Solace who lies here dead. It was he who bore me through the war on his small white shoulders so that I remained alive.
(Fit as a fiddle his entire life, he was suddenly struck last evening by tetanus-like seizures, and then at nine o’clock this morning—was murdered by them, I want to say, since in the intervals between them (shorter and shorter) he would become perfectly fit again, finally taking his leave with an inner intensity and depth of awareness that was incredible, incredible, incredible.
How much forbearance and love you showed back then in the face of his youthful transgressions!)
Rainer, so many times I’ve wanted to write you. It seemed to me that we should see and talk to each other before it will be too late. All these months you have been so intensely present to me, and in the way you always are; especially as regards my writing, which during the last three years has suddenly become, along with my professional work, as important to me as it was in my early youth. And then came a wish: from among the books (eight by now) that are kept in a safe-deposit box, to send you the one that rightly belongs to you: Rodinka, many pages long, admittedly, but at least neatly typewritten. When I read it again (read it to Ilse, who is in Bonn now), I still felt close to it; but even that feeling will not last forever, and once it’s gone I’ll no longer be able to send it.
At two places in the passage from your pocket-book I almost cried out in a burst of agreement. But my eyes and my soul are so mist-shrouded today, that I can’t bring myself to verbalize it or write it down. So I can only thank you today,— so much, so much!
Where exactly is Ainmüllerstrasse? Is it an area I know?
Be careful about Ellen. There is something not right about the way she laughs. I could only explain it in person—and why, for all that, I still feel attached to her. But try not to poetize her.
Dear, dear Rainer, that today I should suddenly see you again! That I can greet you! And my husband (who is very, very old now and yet not at all the typical “old gentleman” but a character uniquely his own) also greets you, —from the wind blowing in the garden where he is digging a grave, deep and dry and lined with roof tiles and arched over by them like a treasure chest.
Lou.
[RMR to LAS in Göttingen]
Munich, Ainmillerstrasse 34 iv
January 21, 1919
My dear Lou,
Given the sluggish pace of my correspondence, it was only thanks to a set of peculiar and stubborn exigencies (among them a visit to the pension in the “Fürstenhäuser” which I set foot in again for the first time since . . .“back then”) that I was able to be with you more intimately during this hour of death. Your letter moved me to recall your boundless loyalty to this little friend. And now you are suffering through long days of grief—; and yet I know how you and only you are able to experience in such moments a certain intimate confiding.
To be privy to these small heart-planets as they move through their whole course and fulfill their orbits: is it not also to be initiated into one’s own life? And even though these serene moons reflect for us only purest world-sun, it was perhaps (who can say?) their always averted other side that linked us to the unending life-space behind them.
How splendid that you have accomplished so much work and with such youthful vigor: eight books securely in your bank-safe!—
I am newly resolved now to sit at home and—excepting perhaps occasionally Kassner and two or three others—to see no one; so that I could indeed ask you now to send me Rodinka. I only hesitate when I think how much better it might be to have you read it to me (as you did to Ilse). For there have been so many occasions when it was urgent that we see each other, and yet always, because everything I took up was weighed down by ever so many inhibitions, the moment passed. Are you by chance thinking about coming to Munich?
Ainmillerstrasse you should know if you ever visited old Keyserling (I can’t recall if you did). It is a side street of Leopoldstrasse, left, the third one past Georgen- and Franz Josefstrasse. The view from my workroom (a studio) extends across roofs above which in the middle distance the steeple and cupola of Saint Ursula rise: toward evening the whole scenery is apt to turn into a bit of Italianate pastiche, somewhat like those intarsia made of little marble pieces that tourists would bring back from Florence.
I see Ellen Delp very rarely and always with an instinctive sense of caution. She thrives, I think, on having things “turn out well,” and for that reason cannot be quite trustworthy.
Thanks, Lou; this little epistolary closeness has helped me immensely.
Rainer.
Last night I finally translated the Lermontov poem I had copied into my pocket-book long ago:
Выхожу одинъ я на Дорогу:
When I step out alone onto the path
that winds through mists, gently shimmering;
I can see the Void and God whispering
and every star conversing with other stars.
Solemn miracle: quiescent Earth
suspended amid the heavens’ majesty . . .
Ah, why then my melancholy mood?
Whence this expectancy? Whence this pain?
I have nothing to demand of life;
let freedom and repose wrap me
in the oblivion of sleep.
But not the cold sleep in a grave.
For centuries I’d like to sleep and sleep
feeling every strength inside me
and in my calm breast the steady pace of breath.
And hearing day and night the sweet, fearless
voice sing to me that rises out of love,
and knowing how the solemn oak
keeps whispering, darkly turned my way.
Прощай!
[RMR to LAS in Göttingen; inscribed in a copy of Insel-Almanach for 1919]
[Munich, mid-January 1919]
Lou
(in time for the Russian New Year’s at least!)
[LAS to RMR in Munich]
[Göttingen, February 4, 1919]
Dear Rainer,
—had started to write you at once about the Lermontov, also about that tremendously moving continuation in the Almanach of the passage from Spain (the original passage I remember vividly from listening to you read it, but not the continuation), but I want to leave all that aside, want only to answer your question: yes, I would like to try that, to be in Munich, if not just now, then sometime in March. Any time closer toward summer and I won’t be able to leave here, but this year could conceivably be my last chance to travel to Munich. And so as I think about it: Two such age-old confidants as we are should be able to take that risk, —if then at assorted hours their individual paths converge, they can be sure that these meetings always take place purely of their own accord and at any time may take a different turn. This way, without in the least violating your freedom, I could enjoy a short stay where I feel most at home.
I’m not familiar with Osw. Spengler’s book The Decl. of the West; should I read it? Or anything else you’ve read lately, just the title. Also—was Schuler’s book ever published?
Auf Wiedersehn, Rainer: how odd that sounds to me; for my own deepest being tells me that I have always lived where you are, and have always seen you.
Lou.
And there were times when I was scarcely able to keep something most deeply experienced to myself alone—and yet, conveyed in a letter, in the language of the approximate, it couldn’t reach you directly enough. Especially last spring.
[RMR to LAS in Göttingen]
Munich,
Ainmillerstrasse 34 iv
February 7, 1919
—by all means, dear Lou, if there exists the slightest chance that you could come in March, then the trip to Switzerland, which has become a constant preoccupation, could be kept on hold a while longer (perhaps April might bring it about) . . . I feel anyway as if my mind and mood could not yet tolerate the impetus from new impressions and changes, since for the last four years I’ve done nothing but stand and wait and grow inwardly stagnant. Behind closed doors that are truly sealed off this time from anything outside, I am trying to set my inner life in motion again, slowly, and restore it to innocence: for which task the Spengler is proving in part to be quite an advanced school-for-walking. You will see! I am still reading it, so I had another copy sent to you today special delivery: for I’m eager to know us both immersed in the very same thing.
Aside from Spengler, only Hamsun’s Growth of the Soil has meant anything to me. Ruth was inspired by this book to hire on as a “maid” with a farmer in a village near Fischerhude, and now she sometimes writes, sweating and exhausted, a little word to assure me how much she relishes all this hardness, all this work in which one grasps things with one’s hands, and how fully she is up to it, how she has always wished to find something exactly like it.
Now again, in the midst of writing, as so often these days, I am overwhelmed by the joy that you will be coming here, dear Lou: we need only consider sufficiently in advance the question of your dwellings, since I just now heard again that there is not a single room available anywhere. In my neighborhood there is really only Pension Elvira, where the Kaysslers always stay; but they scarcely ever have a vacancy. Would you consider Gartenheim, Ellen D[elp]’s lodging? It is easily the best and quietest pension in Munich, and Ellen might be able to use her influence to secure space there. Or would you rather not live in the same house with her?
Farewell for today.
Is there anything, tell me, that could begin my future—if in fact one still remains—more honestly and deeply than our reunion?
Rainer.
Schuler has not published anything; revising and polishing his lectures, I hear, is slow work-in-progress. I never see him.
[RMR to LAS, note from Munich to Göttingen, mid-February 1919]
Göttingen, February 17, 1919
Rainer,—
The thick wonderful Spengler arrived the morning of my birthday, and this day which I have never observed before shall henceforth be remembered; I spent all of it reading, reading and nothing else, from its morning well into its night, and have continued ever since as if even today were birthday without end. Does one’s heart not exult that such broad, deep minds still exist? —minds that can completely enwrap and undergird one’s own and yet also permit the most intimate affiliations. I did of course have to leave the printed page again and again and get out into the open, where I could absorb in yet a different way what a hundred hasty notes could not retain. And that too was like a birthday gift: since it was the first time that I had actually managed to feel myself again in the landscape, which without Druzhok had become inaccessible to me, veiled and blocked off. Even now, without having finished the book, I am looking forward to reading it a second time, no doubt through different eyes, —but a little time will have to go by first. And how all these pleasures combine with the foretaste of seeing you! Just now your note arrived; what is to be done about a place to stay (and about heating it and eating)? —all of this further complicated by a nearly empty purse! Here we have practically gone hungry these years (I’m quite thin and gray), I even resorted to medical certificates for milk and butter; would bringing such things be useful there also? I don’t like it at all that you are out looking for a place for me; it is the most miserable of all occupations, and any of the engagements which you are now refusing would seem all glitter and gaiety in comparison.
I am completely at a loss and can only hope that the Good Lord will show us favor of his own accord; just as we, on our part, love him even without requiring from him any assurance that he exists.
Hard to finish today, but otherwise I will begin again right where I started.
Dear Rainer, thank you, thank you!
Lou
Too bad I won’t see Ruth in Munich this time. But how lovely and to my liking what she has undertaken: I can imagine her picture so vividly in this sturdy frame.
Munich, Ainmillerstr 34 IV
February 21, 1919
Of a sudden, Lou, I’ve come to believe that the Good Lord has already done his share—for in the interim an unusually large royalty draft has arrived from Insel, completely unexpected and undeserved. In these present circumstances it must, must, must mean that you are to be my guest here! It’s true, Lou, I need to invent no ruse to persuade you of this reading of God’s intentions!
I have in fact been wondering all along if I couldn’t set up my bedroom here for you and move myself into the studio. But no—that just won’t work. The more I think about it: it must be the Gartenheim, except that your room there would have to be considered strictly as an annex to my apartment, as my guest room.
For I already know from Ellen that you would have no objection to the Gartenheim. If one looks for a room just anywhere, so many things are sure to be unsatisfactory: going out to eat is now a torture—irksome and inconvenient and in the end disappointing. Board at the Gartenheim, on the contrary (judging from the few times I’ve tried it), is first-rate; and in addition Ellen constantly has her hands on the most wonderful “extras” that come from a farmwoman she’s friends with. One eats at small tables, undisturbed, and the company is such that one may actually enjoy turning around occasionally for a brief chat if one happens to be in the mood for it. So all that’s important now is that you do get a room; I asked Ellen yesterday to make sure of that for you. Considering the favor and fondness she enjoys at the Gartenheim, she will, I hope, succeed; she is going to write me at once how things stand.
And if then a small room does await you there, will not preparations be complete? When did you want to come? It would probably be wise to wait and see how the old parliament here holds out, so that you don’t, on arrival, find the station at the center of gunfire, as was the case again the day before yesterday.
It’s splendid that the Spengler came at just the right time: and indeed, it is quite the thing for a birthday! I am now in the final section, after having been sidetracked by Goethe’s Metamorphosis of Plants, then by Charles Louis Philippe, and most recently by Blüher. (Do you know Hans Blüher’s books? In his second, just-published volume of The Role of the Erotic in Male Society there are some wonderful things—: well, you will find it at my place.)
But by your coming you will bring me so much more than you will find here!
The Spengler is the first thing in a long time to focus me and knit me together again—but not to the point yet of giving me back the landscape. That whole realm has still not become mine again, my circulation is still too weak to incorporate it—and perhaps for that to happen there will have to first be a change, a trip, in the end wholly different surroundings.
When you write back, I will read it also as a confirmation of your coming, dear Lou!
Rainer.
I almost forgot: I spent two long evenings this week in Rodinka, indescribably received in all of it. The childhood-chapter does not have quite the same power as the rest, it seems to me, but everything thereafter is full of life experienced and also is experience! Thank you.
[LAS to RMR in Munich, middle of March 1919, preceded by a short note]
[RMR to LAS in Göttingen]
Munich, Ainmillerstrasse 34 IV
March 19 [1919]
(my father’s name-day, on which as a child I always went out for a walk with him in my new spring outfit—, at the cost of an enormous cold)
But quickly to what’s most important:
When, yesterday, your letter arrived, I was just on my way to consult with Ellen D[elp]; she hears much more in her pension about the general circumstances than I do, since I scarcely ever see anyone. Our conclusion was:
You really should travel as soon as possible, perhaps on the 22nd or 23rd; whether a “general strike” on the 25th really will come about, no one seems to know; if the room at the Gartenheim is not vacant by then, I can certainly arrange for you to stay at the Marienbad for the first few days. But do telegraph your arrival time the moment you have scheduled it, so that a place may be reserved there. I have already spoken with the doorman. That would be the nearest dépendance in Ainmillerstrasse, the next and certainly more comfortable one being the Gartenheim.
Concerning your arrival: Ellen or I will be at the station; but one can only wait, I hear, at the main exit, as the platforms have all been barred.
But now the most frustrating news: visitors are allowed to remain, everyone tells me, no longer than two weeks; only for this period does one receive food coupons. Otherwise one must have official papers documenting the necessity for a longer stay. They are being very strict and precise about this, since they want to make moving to Munich as difficult as possible. Two weeks! That seems out of all proportion to your long trip—, but we who need not make this trip have it easy; we simply say: come! The rest will take care of itself.
That the fare at the Gartenheim is good and plentiful I was able to confirm again yesterday; this really should become a reinvigorating vacation for you.
What else? Two letters arrived: one from Helene Stöcker, the editor of Die Neue Generation, and another one today from Munich; I think they may expect you here.
Spengler lives in obscurity in Munich, had earlier, so I heard, taught mathematics as a professor at middle schools, —I’ve met one person who visited him (though it wasn’t someone from Munich), and he was received rather gruffly and grudgingly, even though the man had invaded his place in a spirit of pure adulation.
Many many greetings also to your husband, and now on to our reunion.
Rainer.
My trip to Switzerland, for which I still lack the all-important official permit, would have to begin immediately after April 15.
After an almost three-day-long journey by LAS, RMR and LAS together in Munich from March 26 until June 2, 1919.
[LAS, Diary]
Monday [March 24] left early. Wednesday at night Munich. Ellen and Regina in my room, with flowers, eggs, milk and crackers. Flowers and letter from Rainer. April 7: The deposed University at dinner. May 16: Rainer read the two elegies, discussion of the phall[ic hymns?]. April 27: Around noon Frau von Hattingberg here with the permit; at the same time Regina. Frau v. H. very gracious and beautiful. [Notations:] Regina Ullmann. About Regina’s way of writing poetry. With Rainer at Walt Laurent’s. About Mallarmé [and Rilke]. June 4: Telephone with Rainer, his passport business.
[RMR to LAS in Munich, card in letter envelope]
Tuesday [March 25, 1919]
Dear Lou,
When is your train scheduled to arrive? It appears that there is no way of finding out the hour, they say it’s often late by five or six hours: I hope you won’t have to endure that! Under these circumstances I did not go to the station, everyone advised against it. But I welcome you, with many, many greetings, from my bed, and tomorrow, mid-morning, you can tell me, I hope, that you arrived at the hotel without complications. Good night, Lou, how wonderful that you are here!
Rainer.
[RMR for LAS in Munich]*
I
I held myself too open, I forgot
that outside not just things exist and animals
fully at ease in themselves, whose eyes
reach from their lives’ roundedness no differently
than portraits do from frames; forgot that I
with all I did incessantly crammed
looks into myself: looks, opinion, curiosity.
Who knows: perhaps eyes take shape in space
and watch intently. Ah, only as it rushes down to you
does my face cease being on display, grows
into you and twines on darkly,
endlessly, into your sheltered heart.
II
As one puts a handkerchief before pent-in breath—
no: as one presses it against a wound
out of which the whole of life, in a single gush,
wants to stream, I held you to me: I saw
you turn red from me. How could anyone express
what took place between us? We made up for everything
there was never time for. I matured strangely
in every impulse of unperformed youth,
[and you, love, somehow had
wildest childhood over my heart].
III
Memory won’t suffice here: from those moments
there must be layers of pure existence
on my being’s floor, a precipitate
from that immensely overfilled solution.
For I don’t look back; all that I am
stirs me because of you. I don’t invent you
at sadly cooled-off places from which
you’ve gone away; even your not being there
is warm with you and more real and more
than a privation. Longing leads out too often
into vagueness. Why should I cast myself far,
when, for all I know, your influence falls on me,
gently, like moonlight on a window seat.
. . . . . . . . . . Elegy*
Someday, at the end of the nightmare of knowing,
may I emerge singing praise and jubilation to assenting angels.
May I strike my heart’s key clearly, and may none fail
because of slack, uncertain, or furious strings.
May the tears that stream down my face
make me more radiant: may my hidden weeping
bloom. How I will cherish you then, you grief-torn nights!
Had I only received you, inconsolable sisters,
on more abject knees, only buried myself with more abandon
in your loosened hair. How we waste our afflictions!
We study them, stare out beyond them into bleak continuance,
hoping to glimpse some end. Whereas they’re really
seasons of us, our winter-
long foliage, meadows, ponds, innate landscape
where birds nest and animals live among the reeds.
High up there: doesn’t half the sky arch
over the sadness in us, over disquieted nature?
Imagine you no longer walked through your thicket of grief,
saw the stars no longer through the more acrid boughs
of black pain-foliage, and that the magnifying moonlight
no longer displayed fate’s ruins for you so supremely
that among them you felt like a bygone race?
Smiles would also exist no longer, the consuming smiles of those
you lost to the other side—, with how little force,
as they were wafting past you, did they purely enter your grief.
(Almost like the girl who has just said yes to the suitor
who for weeks has been urging her, and she brings him, startled,
to the garden gate, and the man, jubilant and unwillingly
takes his leave: then, amid this newer parting, a step disturbs her,
and she waits and stands: her glance in all its fullness
meets utterly the stranger’s, her virgin’s glance
which infinitely grasps him, the outsider who was meant for her,
the wandering other, outside, eternally meant for her.
Steps fading, he walks by.) Thus you always lost.
Not like someone who possesses: like someone dying,
leaning forward into the moist oncoming breeze of a March night,
Ah, and losing spring to the throats of birds.
. . . . . . . . . . . Elegy
(Hero Elegy)
O fig tree, how long I’ve pondered you—
the way you almost skip flowering completely
and release, unheralded, your pure secret
into the sprigs of fruit already poised to ripen.
Like a fountain’s pipe, your bent boughs drive the sap
downward and up: and it leaps from sleep, almost
without waking, into the joy of its sweetest achievement.
Like the god into the swan—
But we, for our part, linger,
ah, flowering flatters us; the belated inner place
that is our culminating fruit we enter spent, betrayed.
Only a few feel the sap of action rise so strongly
that they’re stationed and glowing in their heart’s fullness
when the allure of flowering caresses their eyelids,
touches their lips’ youthfulness, like soft nocturnal air—
heroes perhaps, and those destined to leave early,
whose veins gardener Death twists in a different fashion.
These plunge on, in advance of their own smiles,
the way those teams of chargers precede the conquering
kings in the gentle bas-reliefs at Karnak.
Oddly, the hero resembles the youthful dead. Permanence
does not concern him. Ascent is his existence; time and again
he annuls himself and enters the changed constellation
of his unchanging danger. Few would find him there. But Fate,
which wraps us in mute obscurity, grows ecstatic
and sings him into the storms of his tumultuous world.
I hear no one like him. But suddenly I’m pierced
by his darkened music, borne swiftly by the rush of air.
Then how gladly I would hide from that longing! If only,
oh if only I were a boy with the unknown yet before me
as I sat propped on my future’s arms, reading about Samson,
how his mother bore nothing at first, then—everything.
(Mothers of Heroes)
(Fragment:)
Even as the hero stormed through love’s arbors,
each heartbeat meant for him bore him upward and on, —until,
turned away already, he stood at the end of the smiles:
someone new.
From one of the Elegies/
(written in Autumn 1915)
O trees of life, how far off is winter?
We’re in disarray. Our minds don’t commune
like those of migratory birds. Left behind and late,
we force ourselves abruptly on winds
and fall, exhausted, on indifferent waters.
Blooming makes us think: fading.
And somewhere out there lions still roam, oblivious,
in all their splendor, to any weakness.
We, though, even when intent on one thing wholly,
already feel the cost exacted by some other.
Conflict is our next of kin. Aren’t lovers always
reaching boundaries, each in the other,
despite the promise of vastness, royal hunting, home?
Then: for an instant’s virtuoso sketch
a ground of contrast is prepared, laboriously,
so we can see it; for they’re very clear
with us. We don’t know our feeling’s contour,
only what shapes it from outside.
Who hasn’t sat anxiously before his heart’s curtain?
It rose: the scenery for Parting.
Easy to understand. The familiar garden,
swaying slightly: then—the dancer.
Not him. Enough! However light his entrance,
he’s in disguise and turns into a burgher
who enters his kitchen to reach his living room.
I loath watching these half-filled masks;
give me the puppet. At least it’s real. I can take
the hollow body and the wire and the face
that is pure surface. Right here. I’m out in front.
Even when the lights go out, even when someone
says to me: “It’s over—,” even when from the stage
a gray gust of emptiness drifts toward me,
even when not one silent ancestor
sits beside me anymore—not a woman, not even
the boy with the brown squint-eye:
I’ll sit here anyway. One can always watch.
Aren’t I right? You, father, for whom life
turned so bitter when you tasted mine—
that first murky influx of what would feed my drives—
who kept on sampling it as I grew older, and,
intrigued by the aftertaste of so strange a future,
tried looking through my vague upward gaze,—
you, father, who since your death have been here
often in my hope, far inside me, afraid,
forfeiting that equanimity the dead possess, whole
kingdoms of equanimity, for my bit of fate—
Aren’t I right? And you women—aren’t I right?—
who loved me for that small hesitating
love for you I always veered from,
because I felt the realm in your faces, even
as I loved it, changing into worldspace
where you were absent . . . : what if I do choose
to wait in front of the puppet stage—no,
to stare with so much force that finally, to counteract
my stare, an Angel will arrive here as an actor,
and jolt life into these hard husks.
Angel and Puppet: then, finally, the play begins.
Then what we keep apart, simply by our
presence here, conjoins. Then from the separate
seasons of our life that one great wheel
of transformation arises. Above us, beyond us,
the Angel plays.
The dying—surely they
must guess how full of pretext
is all that we achieve here. Nothing
is what it is. O childhood hours,
when behind each shape there was more
than mere past, and before us—not the future.
True, we were growing, and sometimes we spurred ourselves
to grow up faster, half for the sake of those who
had nothing left but their grown-up-ness.
And yet, off alone, we were happy
with what stayed the same, as we stood there
in the space between world and plaything,
upon a spot which, from the first beginning,
had been established for pure event.
Who shows a child just as he is? Who places him
in a constellation and hands him the measure
of distance and interval? Who makes a child’s death
out of gray bread that hardens, —or leaves it
in his round mouth like the core
of a beautiful apple? . . . . . . . . . . Murderers are
easily understood. But this: one’s death,
the whole reach of death, even before one’s life is under way,—
to hold it gently and not feel anger:
is indescribable.
(Transcribed for you, in Munich, May 18, 1919.
R.)
Beginnings and Fragments / from the Material of the Elegies
Shall I once again have spring, once again
accept her earthly domain’s close, assured future
as my own destiny? O fate more pure
But whoever is seized by the zeal of suffering, how little
does he remember how from time let go
to retrieve what is truly his? He, for whom a god
cuts up in little pieces the meal
that feeds him meagerly.
Unknowing before the heavens of my life
I stand in wonder. O the great stars.
The rising and the going down. How quiet.
As if I didn’t exist. Am I part? Have I dismissed
the pure influence? Do high and low tide
alternate in my blood according to this order?
I will cast off all wishes, all other links,
accustom my heart to its remotest space. Better
it live in the terror of its stars than
seemingly protected, soothed be something near.
What, what could your smile force upon me
that Night did not freely give me
Assault me, music, with rhythmic fury,
lofty reproach, hurled up high before the heart
that didn’t feel so surgingly, that spared itself. My heart: there
behold your glory. Can you almost always make do
with lesser pulsing? But the arches wait,
the uppermost, to be filled with thundering onrush.
Why do you long for the unknown loved one’s withheld face,
has your craving not breath to blast echoing storms
from that angel’s trumpet who announces the world’s judgment:
then she too does not exist, is nowhere, will not be born,
she whose absence you parchingly endure.
You sing me, nightingale:
here, in my heart, this voice becomes pure force,
no longer evadable
Here, where we, pressing into one another, never fail
to find each other: here the angels begin
to sense each other, and through the deeper closeness
with sacred hastening endlessly approach
Ah, women, that you are here on earth, that you
move here among us, grief-filled,
no more watched over than we and yet able
to bless like the blessed.
Again and again, even though we know love’s landscape
and the little churchyard with the lamenting names
and the terrible reticent gorge in which the others end:
again and again the two of us walk out together under
the ancient trees, lay ourselves down again and again
among the flowers, and face opposite the sky.
Look, I am living. On what? Neither childhood nor future
lessens. Superabundant existence
wells in my heart.
[RMR to LAS, letter from Munich to Höhenried, June 3, 1919; only envelope survives]
[LAS, Diary, summarizing entry about what was to be hers and RMR’s last time together]
When I think back on Munich, I see no one but Rainer. As if he were still standing there, as if I were still standing next to him as I did during those months.
[LAS, Rainer Maria Rilke (1928)]
No one was thinking about his moving to Switzerland: he was simply accepting an invitation for a few summer months. We agreed on a rendezvous in Germany for as early as October. And we talked about it even at the last moment, on the station platform, when I left [for Höhenried] shortly before his departure. His wife, a few friends were standing there with us. Everything seemed so propitious. But even as we spoke and joked and the train was slowly beginning to move, worries came over me, and a heavy word from one of his old Parisian letters cast its shadow across my thoughts:
but I move the way the animals move
when the hunting season is upon them.
June 11, 1919: RMR departs Munich for Switzerland for a planned reading in Zürich and a stay at Nyon on Lake Geneva as guest of the widowed Countess Mary Dobrženský. After a few days he travels again, to Bern, back to Zürich, Geneva, Sils-Baseglia, finally to Soglio, a town in the mountains near the Italian border, where he stays in a small hotel through August and September.
October 27–November 28, 1919: RMR’s lecture tour: Zürich, St. Gall, Basel, Winterthur. In Zürich he meets Nanny Wunderly-Volkart (“Nike”), who will become his dearest friend and the person to whom he entrusts himself in the last weeks of his illness. Upon his return he rents two rooms in a pension in Locarno, where he lives alone from December 1919 through February 1920.
June 11–July 13, 1920: RMR resides in Venice (after June 22 as guest of Marie Taxis in the mezzanino of the Palazzo Valmarana), where he had spent several months in 1912.
August 1920: Back in Geneva, RMR seeks out the painter Baladine Klossowska (“Merline”); their friendship quickly develops into a passionate love relationship that will endure until RMR’s death in December 1926.
End of October 1920–mid-May 1921: RMR briefly visits Paris (alone) before taking up residence (at first alone, then in the spring with Baladine) in Schloss Berg am Irchel, an eighteenth-century manor house near Zürich.
Late July 1921: RMR and Baladine, traveling together in search of a place for RMR, find available (“for sale or rent”) the Château de Muzot, a tiny medieval castle-tower near Sierre (Valais). It will become RMR’s last retreat, and Baladine, though she spends time with him there, will perpetually be frustrated in her attempts to join him there in something like a marriage.
February 9–February 23, 1922: RMR, alone in Muzot since November, experiences his great poetic breakthrough, writing all the remaining Elegies and both parts of the Sonnets to Orpheus in a single two-week deluge of inspiration.
December 1923: The symptoms of RMR’s final illness become noticeable, then more pronounced, and he commences a back-and-forth existence between Muzot and the Sanatorium Valmont above Lake Geneva.
Beginning of January–August 18, 1925: RMR visits Paris for the last time.
December 29, 1926: RMR dies in Valmont at the age of fifty-one.
February 12, 1921: LAS turns sixty, is fully absorbed in her psychoanalytical work—both her lay practice and her theoretical writings. Her correspondence with Freud continues.
End of 1921: LAS visits Freud for five weeks, staying in his house for the first time. There she meets his daughter, Anna, with whom she forms a lasting friendship.
October 4, 1930: Andreas dies in Göttingen at the age of eighty-four.
February 5, 1937: LAS dies in Göttingen at the age of seventy-five.
[LAS to RMR in Munich]
[Höhenried near Tutzing, June 6, 1919]
Dear Rainer,
Now it’s over, and I won’t see you anymore. I must always remind myself that the magic of our subterranean connection does remain with me, and that it would persist even if neither of us were to be aware of it. But I didn’t tell you even once what it meant to me to feel such connectedness enter my bright day, such hour-by-hour reality of knowing you were only a few streets away. When we went to the dance-recital that morning I was so close to being able to say it, and yet even then I could not.
May these last days in Munich not roll away from you too furiously, may all difficulties and whatever is sure to pile up at the end work out smoothly. Even so, you’ll lose some time on my account, for Frau Purtscher’s sake, and in getting Rodinka to Franz: but he can come and fetch it himself. I shall talk to Rosa in person after all, but I wanted anyway to write down her grandmother’s exact address, and if she can still get the “sugar package” for me she should go ahead by all means. Here everyone is disappointed about your not coming,* and all send their warmest regards.
Прощай, Rainer, dearest, and cпасибо эа все. As your gift you presented me with a piece of life, and I needed it more fervently than you can know.
Lou.
P.S.: The name of Baba’s people is “Dittweiler,” right? Friday morning. Tel. Tutzing 26.
[LAS to RMR in Munich]
[Höhenried near Tutzing, June 7, 1919]
Dear Rainer!
I am ashamed of myself to be pestering you again as I did just yesterday, but surely if you were in my place you’d think no differently: it was too beautiful to see how much Frau Heyseler delighted in your telegram, —like a child, and equally so on behalf of her husband in Russia! Now: Sunday is Bernt’s, her younger son’s, birthday; and though she finally managed to purchase the Cornet somewhere, she couldn’t muster the courage to ask you in Munich to inscribe your name or that of her son in the book. Wouldn’t it be possible to write a little something on a piece of paper (smaller than the Insel pages) and send it to me by registered mail? Then I’ll paste it in. The boy himself would charm you. He’ll very likely someday be in the company of those for whom you, in the truest sense, came into this world; he is (along with the doe!) my every hour’s joy. And so please do forgive me. To make the woman a present of this will be quite wonderful (in many ways I am just now really getting to know her).
Today only this!
Lou
[RMR to LAS in Höhenried]
[Munich, June 10, 1919]
Dear Lou,
Here is my little rhyme for Bernt Heyseler; I wrote it just now as the next-to-last thing before going to bed; the last is thinking of you: of the fact that before long you will be staying here for a few days (Rosa is anticipating this with the best intentions), —that the weeks in Munich were as heartfelt for you as, in my own heart, I was hoping to make them; that you, despite all my inhibitions, were able to draw comfort from me, directly and unequivocally—: this latter gives me some confidence in my own strengths, for which there is often such questionable evidence. Thank you: for being here, and for being here that way, with so much closeness and presence and belief in me.
My final days here have been wicked: as if to test with all sorts of perverse labors whether I really did want to take this trip (I do). Unfortunately the last hours today have not been as leisurely as I would have wished; I did not find the time to go by the Dittweilers (that is their name, you spelled it correctly), something I didn’t want to leave to Franz, since I wished to see Baba before departing: but there was no time left. Perhaps you can write them about the student not coming and make a reservation there for later. By the way, Baba is now officially yours; I paid the agreed-upon price for her, Frau May Purtscher had a hard time deciding, sends her best regards, and asks you to write her sometime how “Eli” is bearing up and accustoming herself to her new surroundings in Göttingen. (May Purtscher lives at Türkenstrasse 52, in the adjacent building—Studio-house in the courtyard right, third floor. All business matters with her have been settled.)
On Friday, Franz and Fräulein Richter were here with me at what was still a relatively quiet hour, —but ever since there’s been little time that I can call my own; I had to give up on reading The Devil’s Grandmother: that play and the two issues of Imago are in a large envelope on my desk where they await you. It’s a pity I had to spend so much time working to leave the apartment in decent order—though the majority of it passed while I “stood in line” at all kinds of desks, doors, and counters—the Swiss consulate proved especially wearisome and time-consuming in this regard. I have never really been up to this sort of waiting, and now all these endless difficulties seem even more surly and insurmountable. Poor Be de Waard: on Saturday, when I tried to take her passport to her, after it had finally been obtained (and considerably in advance of mine), —I saw an ambulance at her door and she was just that moment being carried down and now lies, somewhat weakened, her patience strained but otherwise calm, in the Schwabingen hospital: men’s section, room 114: I would have waited had there been the slightest prospect that she could travel on the next express train, —but there is no chance; in a week at the earliest, but even that isn’t at all likely.
Now I have to get some sleep, for I’ll need to be up at five o’clock tomorrow. Прощай: enjoy many good things where you now are and then back here and be always at home.
I would very much like for everyone in Höhenried to believe that my coming there has really only been postponed; especially since during so many moments I am almost there with you: on this late evening, for instance.
Rainer.
The next address is Lesezirkel Hottingen, Zürich; then I hope quite soon: Nyon, Villa Ermitage. (c/o Countess Mary Dobrženský.)
[RMR to LAS, presumably from Bern, received in Höhenried July 14, 1919]
[LAS to RMR, letter from Höhenried to Zürich, middle of July 1919]
[RMR to LAS in Göttingen]
Zürich, Baur au Lac
July 20, 1919
My dear Lou,
If these lines, these few hasty words, find you already in Göttingen, then may they welcome you home.
Your letter reached me very late, since it first went to Bern, from which I had just departed, and then had to turn around and come here.
First the matter of Franz above all: nothing of course could more please me than for Franz and Lotte [Richter] to take over my place; I hope that by now they have already moved in and not for too short a time. As far as the apartment itself is concerned, it will actually be an advantage to have someone live in it and for it not to be occupied by strangers. Unfortunately I forgot to write down Rosa’s address, but presumably you will have had it and therefore were able to notify her quickly. I relied on Else Hotop as an intermediary: she was to keep a few keys in Rosa’s absence so that she could send me things I might unexpectedly require. But now Else, after a falling-out with her parents, has left (which was not all that unexpected), and I am not sure how often she will get to Munich; she is living with the Seilings in Söcking (Starnberg), so far as I know.
Dear Lou: I won’t start a long story today; that will come later. You read “Baur au Lac” and can well imagine that this doesn’t mean I’ve settled into a really restful place; on the contrary, I’ve been on my feet this whole time. Nyon, offered with the friendliest of gestures, proved on the very first day, even by the second hour, to be the wrong place—at least for now. Later, should there be fewer visitors and the Countess D[obrženský] be alone, it might be more feasible. And so I went from spot to spot, to Geneva, to Bern: where, through Swiss connections, I was granted fourteen truly beautiful days that I absorbed into an admittedly still quite irregular inner life. It is not an easy matter to readjust to life lived in the open, and the worst confusions that result from this change tend to be purely physical. The idea of taking a short cure (based on diet and sun baths) at Dr. Bircher-Benner’s brought me back to the not very welcome Zürich; but now, after an examination and a subsequent consultation, it appears that I should go from here to the Engadine (because after five years of having been closed off inside, the regimen of a sanatorium might be unnecessarily oppressive for me). My first destination is Sils (Baseglia), so that I can go through Malte Laurids with its Danish translator, a woman who has already sent me the most beautiful flowers from the high alpine meadows there; but my stay is only to be for a few days. In the Bergallon, on the terraces that slope down from Maloja toward Italy, I hope to come upon some place that seems so perfect that it will be as though I had found it neither by plan nor accident. Then from there I will write you in the way you deserve.
My first letter to Marthe (from Nyon to her old address in Paris) came back undeliverable. But of course that could not be the end of it. Now random chance has brought here to me one of her closest friends, a young Parisian painter—: she is doing well, and, imagine, in a few weeks she is coming to Tessin, to see friends who have invited her to stay several months.
By now little Baba will have grown well acquainted with her new home. Give her my regards! Have rich summer days!
Rainer.
[LAS to RMR, letter from Laubach (Hesse) to Zürich, August 26, 1919]
[RMR to LAS in Göttingen]
at present Locarno (Tessin) Switzerland
January 16, 1920
Dear, dear Lou, if it is possible let me hear from you again, —it’s been a long time since August 26—, now you’ll always have my address so that what comes from you won’t have to take the roundabout way through Zürich, —mail from Germany being so excruciatingly slow as it is.
Christmas, New Year’s, Russian Christmas: I have thought about you often. How are things with you?
And myself? I can’t even begin to tell you now—perhaps later, in person. You’ll notice that I am still Swiss, too cowardly to come back to the old gloom and doom. Several times since November I was close to returning—now because of my difficulties with my German money, now for other reasons. But again and again I managed to delay, and now I am hoping to hold out on Swiss soil throughout the two winter months of February and March, and then return with early spring. If only it were not Munich! How weary I am of this homelessness, of this forever readapting to conditions half-agreeable or just barely so: for once now the fit needs to become exact. How dramatically I saw again in Soglio last summer the effect that good, genuinely intimate external circumstances can have on me: the small old library there, the garden, and overnight I was fitted snugly into myself; yes, the rest was lacking, solitude, quiet, the benefit of a wholesome diet—; and yet, how happy even these few circumstances made me. I had originally intended to remain abroad during the winter only if a kind of “Soglio” could be found for these months also—. But I was drawn here by false expectations. Tessin’s atmosphere is fatally akin to that of Capri: there’s that same effusive German admiration and that certain softening of German emotions under the influence of a scenic “beauty,” like bread-rolls in water. Many things here are lovely and unspoiled, even though all of it feels a bit cramped: it was wondrous to hear the pealing of the bells in the myriad country churches, beginning around Christmas and continuing into the new year up to Epiphany: all striking of the hour was absorbed into it: how often one would take the event seriously, begin to count—and then it was not an hour at all, it grew into the bells’ pealing and out beyond into the pure play of the celestial. And the quiet in the deserted churches. I often sit in one of them all alone, and tears come, simply out of happiness for this intense inner quiet. Outside a scrawny village rooster will crow and the whole place becomes even quieter, fills with the quiet of a rustic holiness . . . Ah, dear Lou, might I be granted to fold this about my heart for half a year! Even during these few moments it transforms me, gives me back to myself, and one receives oneself strengthened and intensified. Dejected at the thought of breaking off.
All through November I was among people; after my first evening of reading in Zürich, there followed a second one and then five more in St. Gallen, Lucerne, Basle, Bern, and Winterthur. Thus many new connections, some good and enduring. Each time I understood better how to do this, and the one at Winterthur I got just right, but that unfortunately was the last. I recited only a very few poems, filled the time (often two hours) with a discours adapted to the specific place and moment, through which a factual connection and a shared foundation was established for the individual poem, which then often stood among us with an exactitude that was startling and deeply moving even to me. A beautiful experiment, and that it could succeed with the Swiss, who are so difficult to penetrate, is evidence on its behalf.
When you last wrote, dear Lou, you spoke of Marthe: I have seen her three times! First we were together alone for three days in Bégnins above Nyon, then I found her, for a stretch of hours, again in Geneva, and then, for the last time, unexpectedly, in Zürich. That this is only an “episode” in my time in Switzerland! I had forgotten so many things; how little we had seen of one another during our last year; that she had lost her voice, so that I often didn’t understand her! In general, I felt as if something had died out in her, she came from the milieu of her mother, whose poverty she once tried to describe to me; she started, broke off, said briefly: c’est même pas laid, puisque ça n’est pas . . . I did feel that spark of genius in her heart whenever she told me about things in her past: how wonderfully she told such stories, first about a circus and what she had experienced there—, no, I can’t convey it in writing, you’ll have to hear it directly from me. Marthe: everything still resonates in that name for me just as before, but it didn’t go straight through to my heart again, even though her feelings were so strong and unequivocal, so childishly breathless and at the same time a bit older and more knowing than before.
Dear Lou, so write me! How is it in Göttingen? How is your husband getting along, and Baba, does she remember me a little? Have you been away at all? Several times I asked Rosa if you had not announced your arrival at Ainmiller-Strasse; the apartment has been vacated again, except for Rosa. —Did you read my suggestion for an experiment in Insel-Schiff, number 1? The second part doesn’t really fit—Be [de Waard], with her pragmatist’s severity, drew my attention to the fact that in it incompatible categories of experience are being brought to bear on one another, and I think that she is right. Nor can I really say that I expected from the original experiment a result that would extend into those spheres. Only because I can’t at all imagine the experiment actually being performed did I feel free to suggest a certain direction in which it might be taken. But that path, no doubt, leads to the realm of the purely inaccessible, and Be says quite rightly that none of our wishes actually desires such attainment anyway. But the experiment itself! Koelsch, with whom I’ve had many enjoyable conversations, takes it very seriously and expects from it who knows how many discoveries.
Are you reading his new book?
And aside from it, what have you picked out for your reading? Kassner? And: the Aksakovs’ family chronicle. (How wonderful it is!) What has come of your negotiations with the people at Musarion? I took it upon myself once to write [Johannes von] Guenther concerning the matter of Prince Alexander Hohenlohe (whom I visit whenever I am in Zürich); they have taken over his writings from his previous publisher without giving him a contract, without having even the least discussion with him about business matters, in short, behaving not exactly in a manner that would be of help in my laborious little effort to build up trust with them. I wrote G[uenther] a long, urgent letter, requesting a reply, which never came.
Is Ilse [Erdmann] in Laubach? (By the way: your stay in the Laubach château, where you wrote so happily: might something similar be arranged for me?)
And Ellen: has she drawn yet again on our “extraordinarily close relationship” to pass on to you some better understanding of me? How does she get her information! She wrote me around Christmas—, back then when everyone in Munich thought I would be returning (there were even claims that I had been “seen,” writes Kassner angrily). He sits in Oberstdorf, not exactly by choice, and laments the “quality” that has now finally appeared, from among so many, as Austria’s own: homelessness.
Прощай, dear; turn your thoughts toward me, write!
и всего хорошаго.
Rainer.
[LAS to RMR, letter from Göttingen to Locarno, around January 25, 1920]
[Locarno,] January 28, 1920
[A note on the cover of a copy of Inselschiff for October 1919 reads: “Page 14,” where the following words are written above the title of Rilke’s essay “Primal Sound”:] Lou!
At the same time as your letter, a few copies of this issue also arrived!
[RMR to LAS in Göttingen]
Schloss Berg am Irchel
Canton of Zürich
Switzerland
Last day of December, 1920
Dear Lou,
This time between the two Christmases (with the Russian one now approaching) mustn’t pass without our having reached each other again more demonstrably—, first of all there are questions: where are you now? When, during this past year, were you in Munich and Höhenried—? And I failed to arrive; and Rosa, even though I seldom hear from her, must have behaved rudely, I fear, toward those I love most—, word has it that she is getting married very soon, and I’ll breathe a sigh of relief to be rid of her. The apartment on Ainmillerstr. has been sublet to a Dr. Feist (I don’t know him personally) who has stayed on there without ever knowing when I would return—for until the beginning of October, from month to month, even from week to week, I constantly thought I was on the verge of returning . . . , seeing no other way out and yet deep down filled with a voice warning me not to come back and with a kind of determination to keep myself in Switzerland at any cost since I had not yet received that peace which had been the sole reason for my journeying here. To continue my life in Munich seemed futile to me—, it was no different for me than a time of war and felt in so many ways unusable. Beyond that, Lautschin was waiting for me; I had seen Princess Taxis in Venice toward the end of summer, it had been agreed that I should live in a small house in the park, separate from the château—, but the closer the time came to implement this, the more uncertain I became about finding peace and undisturbed seclusion in Czechoslovakia, especially on a princely estate where no day passes without complications that the proprietors themselves would be the last to know how to prevent. Yes: Venice: it was my first contact with the days before; I was there for five weeks, resided, after the departure of the Prince and Princess T[axis], as I had years ago, alone in the beautiful mezzanino, was served exactly as before by my Gigia with her exuberant rushing about, and was received above at the Valmaranas with exactly the same friendship and indeed familial warmth as back in the days of 1912. That was wonderful, —but my desire to find everything unchanged, as unchanged as possible, was fulfilled so literally that I perpetually found myself standing at the edge, experiencing across the unspeakable years pure repetition, the yet again, and in the most uncanny manner: for while circumstances were constantly appealing to me as still the same as before, my heart, whose stagnation and arrestedness during the war years had turned “being unchanged” into its utmost and intensest attribute—, kept taking all this sameness in the old spirit: and when it did I would feel setting in that sense of nothing but repetition, which filled me almost with dread if I but glimpsed it in the distance. When, to make matters worse, I learned that Eleonora Duse had arrived, ill, to look for a place in Venice, the fact that even this was now to repeat itself seemed so horrible to me that in one day’s time I fled from it and traveled back to Switzerland!
How different Paris! For just think, Lou, I was there! Six days, end of October. Repetition was not even an issue. My heart, to be sure, encountered the old place there with its fractures, but the healing was accomplished in the first hour, and from then on the stream of the hundred thousand transformations, new and old, unheard of and unnamable, rushed through the great circulatory system of consciousness restored at last. What days! It was autumn, the sky was suffused with that light cast by Parisian splendor, which heightens this season of nature with the season of a city that long ago became nature: what profusions in the light, what penetrability of objects, which allow the atmosphere to swing and vibrate through them and then pass this vibrating on; what unison of object and opposite, of nearness and profundity of the world, —what newness in the mornings, what age in the waters, what tenderness and fullness in the wind, even though it comes blowing through streets. And these streets: oh they had not lost anything, nothing had been suppressed, disfigured, diminished, or selectively rearranged—: they had retained their old completeness, their flow, their ceaseless activity, their invention at play everywhere and in no place failing. People walked toward me: I recognized them, one and the other, as those whom I had encountered at the same spots, for example on the rue de Seine, so many years ago: they had survived. One of them was wearing the same cravat. I recognized the merchants in the stores, barely any older—, the women selling newspapers in their kiosks, —even the blind man on the Pont du Carrousel, about whose life I had been so concerned back in the winter of 1902—, he stood there, rain-soaked and gray, at his spot: I can’t tell you how strongly at this moment the joy of healing flooded through me and rose beyond me, —only then did I understand that nothing had been lost, and that continuing would be possible, in spite of these deep interruptions in my heart. —The books in the bouquinistes’ boxes were still the same books, small items I recognized, specific ones, in the display windows of the antique dealers, and where a small, less dusty circle revealed the place from which something had been removed, I thought I could surmise what had stood there. There was a feeling in my heart that needed no sentiments. An emotion that could scarcely be taken up, so perfect was it in itself, so untouchable: instead one stood continually at the entrance to this first heaven that was filled with its haleness, —it was Malte’s Paris in all its aspects, and now at last it seemed to recompense me fully for all that I had been forced to bear on its account, —now it bore me, I scarcely made the movements of a swimmer, the element bore me and spared my rapt volition all expense. —You can imagine that I sought no one out, not even Marthe. No place in my being was untouched, contact was absolute, I was wedded everywhere, and this being received and taken in from the first moment was so incredible that it would have cost me no effort to leave again after an hour: I was already fulfilled and assured of the whole inexhaustible reconciliation. In such a state six days were an incomprehensible abundance, especially with all of them lit by that same autumn splendor. Even the moon, with which my relationship has always been uncertain: I could swear that throughout the course of all those nights it remained full and round, high up in the skies until the dawn’s paleness passed it on, dissolved, into the radiance of the sun.
And now imagine: scarcely had this wondrous experience returned me to myself, to my widest awareness—, when the next favor, for years hoped for and now all the more essential, was to be granted: this small old château Berg was offered to me, to me alone, as a retreat this winter, and it was so completely ready and prepared for my special uses that after the second day of being here I didn’t have to change or rearrange anything nor say even the slightest word to make my wishes clear to the reticent housekeeper. Suddenly, much as with Duino, my world and I were solitary and in agreement (though at Duino a long period of acquaintanceship and mutual adjustment had first been necessary), something that I’d always sought but that in recent years had become the single most necessary thing, a need felt all the more urgently since the convulsed and adulterated world scarcely seemed able to offer any longer such remoteness and stillness anywhere. Berg, far away from all train connections, is difficult to reach, and now it has been cut off even further by a strict quarantine imposed to prevent the spread of hoof-and-mouth disease. I myself have for many weeks not been allowed to leave the area of the park; but every restriction of this sort only fortifies my shelter and safety.
Dear Lou, I won’t go on today telling you about everything, about the region, about the park (its fountain, the measure of my quiet, will have been my only companion for this winter!), the old sturdy little château and my beautiful rooms in it—, or else this letter will grow and grow beyond all measure. In comparison to all you didn’t know about me, now suddenly you know so much that this may well suffice. Now it’s your turn to let me read the most important things about you—, how are things with the two of you, with your husband—, with little Baba (—did you find her the March bridegroom you were looking for in Munich?).
You gave me just now a dear present for Christmas. I received several issues of Litterarisches Echo in the mail, read your essay on Bonsels, thought I had seen both books (Indienfahrt and Menschenwege) in a bookcase here—, found them and spent my evenings reading them—, engrossed, completely amazed yet deep down on easy terms with them. Several individual passages in Menschenwege mean more to me than Indienfahrt—, what poise to seize on pure life in the midst of all this confusion and look into its face or into the lines of its hand. Who is this man?! And about Hermann Keyserling’s foundation I hear contradictory news; were you in Darmstadt, is something taking shape there that could be of interest to us, or that would at least welcome our occasional participation? —Rumor has it that Hermann Keyserling and his sister Léonie Ungern spent considerable time in Bökel with Hertha Koenig, but I don’t have any more detailed news from her either about these Darmstadt ventures.
And now farewell for today, dear Lou. Have you made many new Freudian discoveries and written and published them . . . ? You know that Thankmar [von Münchhausen] started a publishing house together with his friend Dr. Erich Lichtenstein (Lichtenstein Publishers in Jena): I heard about it several weeks ago, one of the few pieces of news that came my way from Germany when I received proof sheets of the beautiful poems by a young Baltic poet, Veronika Erdmann.
Please, write.
And I would so very much like to read you while my little tree is still with me; that should be until Epiphany! —Greetings to your husband, to all and everything that is part of Loufried, of which company, mentally stepping into my sandals for a while, I count myself a member!
Rainer.
[LAS to RMR at Schloss Berg]
Göttingen, January 5, 1921
Dear Rainer,
It will not have been my fault if the Three Kings arrive in advance of me and snatch the little tree away before I’m there with my reply: I’ve been hurrying to get to you since this morning, but your letter took six full days to make its way here. And just listen to how strangely and palpably I received it: having gone to sleep very late at night for a change, I had the early morning mail tossed to me in bed, —was reading, —was reading your letter and unbeknownst to me was already dreaming it: that you yourself were standing there, even though you were saying the same words as those written on the page, that you were showing me what you were writing, —showing me Paris until I saw it in all its distinct details, the end of October had materialized here just as vividly, and in that strange unceasing moonlight which actually existed, which I too was experiencing back then full of wonder, for I could have sworn that the moon against the sky “would never end.” But at the same time that you were speaking to me so intimately, we were off together in the park of your Berg château, near the fountain, and this now is the strangest part of all: the park behind the château was not that park at all but a spacious garden into which, when you were a child, you would run very early in the morning, before your parents were awake, until you came to a kind of grotto with a water basin. And now you had come back to it, and you called it the “primal castle” [ Urschloss] and said that not even all princes and kings (referring to Duino and T[hurn] and T[axis] and Lautschin in your letter) had been able to give you this refuge for your deepest needs, meaning this place within which one is taken back completely into what is deepest and most protected in order to be “born into the world,” —and then you were pointing again to Paris as if to a picture. And when I awoke, with your letter in my hands, I was so filled with knowledge and joy through what you had said—as if one could find written there not just what is most important about this intervening time, but what is most important about you. For you are without a doubt the most symbolical person I know, and what you experience are ultimate things, key confirmations, for which the lax stuff of material existence only now and then pulls itself together with sufficient concentration to make them visible; that is why so often you find yourself unable to live. From early childhood on, life happened to you only as such a symbol; as early as back then even your mother did not suffice, and you longed for a deeper secret stillness from which you would emerge into plentitude. And to this day, in your alternating need for solitude and sense impressions, you are still struggling “to achieve childhood again”: once more, completely, resurrection, work accomplished. Ah, you need worry about nothing, what is yours will happen to you, and at a time, I can absolutely assure you, when you are feeling helpless and perplexed, for it happens to you completely independent of your intentions, in signs and miracles. The way you experienced this return to Paris is a perfect example: it was all miracle and sign, and as such it required no temporal unfolding, those few days were from their outset abundance and overflowing, were in themselves consummation, completed at the instant of the event, whereas in Venice the personal demands made on you thwarted this; indeed it had to be utterly personal in your “recognizing again” [Wiedererkennen] those most particular instances of human kindness and persistence and imperfection, —and yet at the same time far removed from anything like real human interaction; it is incredible how the two experiences of “seeing again” [Wiedersehen] can be so closely akin and yet as dissimilar as horror and the uncanny are to bliss and being at home again in life. But also: that you can find words for such things! One might well ask what in all the world one is living for if not perhaps, just once, to experience something of this kind, and to experience it with such consciousness that it can find expression: but no doubt this scarcely ever happens, not even to those one calls the Blessed. And thus the pleasure you take in Bonsels comes to mind; for in spite of all his great abilities I’ve come to feel somehow that he is not blessed; his less accomplished books are the result not of an inability, but of his stumbling over himself, over his most banal personal feelings, and on such occasions slipping into the deepest kitsch, —since to hash these things out in books is an abuse of art no matter what (and of course the added dollop of kitsch has greatly enhanced his fame). His latest book, Eros und die Evangelien, is again not much good. Your copies of Menschenwege and India (the ones you loaned me) are being kept for you in Munich. I was there from February until the end of June, stayed with the Schönberners whenever I was not in Höhenried or at Frau Heyseler’s beautiful farmhouse in the mountains above Rosenheim; but Frau Heyseler, unfortunately, is pathologically disturbed; you couldn’t talk to her for long these days. I’d very much, terribly much, have liked to see Ruth; but the totally unvirtuous Rosa thwarted that with the most willful malice. Who would have thought that she who reminded me so vividly of my first wax doll could change so much that now, the moment one sees her, one is reminded of those oldest primers on morality with their warnings against the “devastations wrought by sensuality.” That someone is actually going to take her off your hands by marrying her seems to me scarcely credible; is that the only way you can be rid of her? Marriage is also turning out to be a problem for dear virtuous Baba; first of all, I can’t find her a husband whom I approve of; secondly, she is in her little heat every other month instead of twice a year. I didn’t take her to Munich with me for fear of breaking my husband’s heart; when I got back she (as he explained) had grown into a princess and was a lazy lump of fat; for instance, when it was too hot where she was lying in the sun, instead of simply moving to a cooler spot she would whistle very specifically for my husband (so he says) to come and push her chair into the shade. In little time I had her slimmed down and bouncing around again. For spring I’ll probably go again through Munich—to Vienna: for years now I’ve felt the urgent need to be there due to everything coming from Freud, but haven’t found a way to make the trip; now such an opportunity has arisen in the form of an invitation (I have no idea who arranged it) to visit Hilmstreitmühle near Vienna, a “welfare institution for working people” owned by a certain Frau Dr. Eugenie Schwarzwald. Until November I had several patients over quite a long period; among them a case you especially would have found interesting. (If only it weren’t so rare that a Someone finds himself stranded here!) It’s remarkable to see the interaction that almost every time sets in between these treatments and the rest of my work, which I always completely abandon and set aside; it’s as if the one makes me thirst and hunger for the other; and so in the end it is the practical person who feels the need to do work as a physician; listening fully passive, helping fully active, and yet drawing the true healing drink from the ultimate spiritual sources, as from those my twin activities hold in common. In this, no doubt, there is a certain evening-out, a compensatory rectification that here and there protects one from the sense of exhaustion and emptiness that follows the outcome of that other kind of work. And probably my only means of compensation, since I have certainly never been up, as one tends to say, “to the demands of life”: apparently I never quite got around to giving it a try, and only this cheeky slice of infantilism has kept me cheerful. Incidentally, I’d like to come back once more to the way you experienced things in Paris: if you imagine this as an ongoing, perpetual mode of living, you’ll see that it’s got everything we think of as divine consciousness, a timeless containing of everything, without “sentiments,” as you write so tellingly, —for all that is within would also be the outside and would be borne by it, “sparing its rapt volition all expense”; when one has chosen a reclusive way of life, in the “château,” in the primal womb [ Urschoss], one is sustained by the strength that comes with having experienced this and with knowing it to be the true essence of all that exists. That there exists one person who has met with something like this provides sustenance for all the others! It warrants them, as the fact of Heaven vindicates the believer. Dear Rainer, how splendid that you are among us! I must close with this quick and fervent prayer.
Lou.