Rilkes Korrespondenzen ed. by Alexander Honold und Irmgard M. Wirtz (review)

After all these years, nearly a century since his death, Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) still fascinates. An impressionist, a symbolist, a kind of Central European Oscar Wilde, Rilke was the very archetype of the fin-de-siècle early modern aesthete. He was also astonishingly industrious. Famous as a poet, he was also a playwright. He wrote prose fiction, criticism, reviews, and reportage. He devoted great care to his diaries. And he wrote heaps of letters. As Alexander Honold and Irmgard M. Wirtz note in the text reviewed here, one can rightly speak of Rilkes immense collection of letters as itself a kind of literary work, a "Werk neben dem Werk" or a "Werk im Werk" (7).

The Literaturarchiv of the Swiss National Library in Bern holds a fine collection of Rilkes letters, and in 2017, it hosted a colloquium devoted to Rilkes correspondence. The fourteen essays in Rilkes Korrespondenzen, edited by Alexander Honold und Irmgard M. Wirtz, were contributions to that colloquium. The essays explore not only Rilkes life and work but also the wider category of letters-as-literature.

Yes, letters can provide more or less accurate information about a letter writer's thoughts, mood, and whereabouts, and historians have long relied on them as primary sources. Letters, though, are funny things, as Honold and Wirtz point out in their article, "Rilkes Korrespondenzen: Das Briefwerk als Medium kommunikativer Selbstentwürfe und literarischer Interaktion." There is, of course, the odd time lag in letter writing; the recipient receives the letter sometime after the writer has written it, such that the meanings the recipient reads are, like starlight finally reaching earth, asynchronous, and in the interval, all sorts of things can intrude. By the time the recipient receives the letter and learns what the writer thinks, the writer may well be thinking something else. Lessing encouraged people to write the way they spoke, and letters might well reflect the writer's voice, but the language of letters is sometimes as fictive as fiction. Writers craft their letters to suit the recipients; a letter, especially in Rilkes case, might well reflect one of the several different Rilkes flowing within Rilke. Moreover, letters, whatever the writer's intent, might also reflect both the cultural assumptions of the day and the specific literary conventions of the time. It is no easy thing reading another's mail.

The essays in Rilfces Korrespondenzen examine all these complexities. All are acutely sensitive to the letters' language. Jörg Schuster, in his "Brief-Bewegungen: Rainer Maria Rilkes Epistolographie," for instance, notes how often metaphors of movement appear in some of Rilkes letters and the ways these metaphors reflect Rilkes wider concerns. Several essays examine Rilkes correspondence with specific people—Alexander Honold, in "Ein Durchgang, kein Haus: Rilkes Briefwechsel mit Lou Andreas-Salomé als Reflexionsmedium einer transitorischen Alltäglichkeit," and Torsten Hoffmann, in "'Aber ich bin ein Ungeschickter des Lebens': Figuren des Scheiterns in Rilkes Briefwechsel mit Lou Andreas-Salomé," discuss Rilkes complicated relationship with the remarkable Lou Andreas-Salomé. Women played a key role in Rilkes life, and Manfred Koch, in "Vom Werk des Gesichts zum Herzwerk," looks at Rilke's correspondence with Magda von Hattingberg; Gesine Bey in "'Dort, in der Buchhandlung, traf ich. . . eine seltsame Frau,'" discusses Rilke and Angela Guttmann; Ilma Rakusa, in "Marina Zwetajewas Beziehung zu Rainer Maria Rilke," considers Rilkes relationship with Marina Zwetajewa; and Brigitte Duvillard, in "Die Korrespondenz zwischen Rainer Maria Rilke und Marietta de Courten: Inventar der Briefe," writes about Rilke and Marietta de Courten. Christoph König, in « 'Faites la récolte, la première récolte d'amour,' » provides an overview of Rilkes rich correspondence with women and the role that correspondence played in Rilkes poetry.

Letters not only illuminate relations with real people. Rilke was fond of using letters in fiction, as Stephan Kammer shows in "Schlechte Einheit: Zur Epistolarität des Erzählens in Rilkes Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurias Brigge" One of Rilkes most popular texts, Brief...