Günther Stern, mit Hannah Arendt, „Rilkes Duineser Elegien,“ Neue Schweizer Rundschau, 23

(1930): 855–871.

§I Rilke's Duino Elegi,es1

by Hannah Arendt and Gunther Stern

Wer, wenn ich schriee, horte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen?
[Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angel's orders?] 2

The paradoxical, ambiguous, and desperate situation from which stand-

point the Duino Elegies may alone be understood has two characteristics:
the absence of an echo and the knowledge of futility. The conscious re-
nunciation of the demand to be heard, the despair at not being able to be
heard, and finally the need to speak even without an answer-these are
the real reasons for the darkness, asperity, and tension of the style in
which the poetry indicates its own possibilities and its will to form.
The fundamental question arising out of a poetry that remains so fully
estranged from communication is the extent to which it wants to be un-
derstood, the extent to which it can be understood (understood by us, that
is): in other words, the extent to which interpretation is allowed. The diffi-
culty inherent to the subject under study is shown most dearly in the Fifth
Elegy, in which it is impossible to construe any meaning, or to forge any
links from line to line, because the association of images, in their incom-
prehensible uniqueness and situational dependency, is wholly arbitrary.
Thus we turn to the only methodology available to us: that is, to clarify the
background of the poem's attunement, which, as if it were its musical key,
forms its sole unity. The individual lines emerge disconnected and insu-
lated from this unity; it would be perfectly conceivable to arrange them
differently. Despite this complete arbitrariness, despite the absence of a
temporally irreversible process, despite the simultaneity of the images, the
poetry does not congeal into a meaningless mass of associations. This is
because every particular element, and everything resisting connection in its
particularity, rests on the ground of what is actually to be said, the ground
that first stirs up the isolated images. The ground here is the futility on the

I
2 Reflections on Literature and Culture

basis of which every image is only one among infinitely many images-a
single image that carries others along with it, as it moves by itself.
Given the religious sense of the Elegies, the disjointed juxtaposition
simultaneously signifies a lack of connection or obligation [Un-
verbindlichkeit]. 3 This, together with the aforementioned absence of an
echo (which, however, can only be expressed poetically), comprises the pe-
culiarly ambiguous situation of the "Elegies." Thus, while the poetry in-
deed contains a religious mood, it is not a religious document. The one
indication of its not being so is the remarkable fact that interme?iate enti-
ties are usually substituted for "God"-the "angels" or the "dead," or, in its
extreme indeterminacy, "one" ("denn man ist sehr deutlich mit uns [for one
is very clear with us]," 4th Elegy). The fact that the proper religious cate-
gory is left utterly indeterminate signifies the recollection of the religious as
such. The power of God is indeed felt; but who and where the Almighty
is-this remains in the form of a question that no longer hopes for an an-
swer. Still, the question does not perish from lack of an answer; rather, it
survives as disquietude, suddenly changing into despair at the very encoun-
terability [Treffbarkeit] of God. By contrast, to every non-obligatory reli-
giosity that, content with its own feeling, thinks that it can do without 'a
personal God, Rilke secures a last residuum of objectivity in the indetermi-
nacy of the "one." From this arises his singular evaluation of despair and
pain, which are not (as they still are, for instance, in Kierkegaard) the dan-
ger and the "trouble"[A.tXemir] with religion; on the contrary, they become
the religious situation as such. To be struck by God-to know it and even
to proclaim it-becomes the last possible way of experiencing God.
DaB ich dereinst, an dem Ausgang der grimmigen Einsicht,
Jubel und Ruhm aufsinge zustimmenden Engeln.
DaB von der klargeschlagenen Hammern des Herzens
keiner versage an weichen, zweifelnden oder
reiBenden Saiten. DaB mich mein stromendes Anditz
glanzender mache: daB das unscheinbare Weinen
blilhe. 0 wie werdet ihr dann, Nacht_e, mir lieb sein,
geharmte.... Sie (sc. Die Schmerzen) ... sind ja
unser winterwahriges Laub, unser dunkeles Sinngriln,
eine der Zeiten des heimlichen Jahres-, nicht nur
Zeit-, sind Stelle, Siedelung, Lager, Boden, Wohnort.
[Someday, emerging at last from the violent insight,
let me sing out of jubilation and praise to assenting angels.
,- Rilke's 'Duino Elegies' 3

Let not even one of the clearly-struck hammers of my heart

fail to sound because of a slack, a doubtful,
or a broken string. Let my joyfully streaming face
make me more radiant; let my hidden weeping arise
and blossom. How dear you will be to me then, you nights
of anguish. Why didn't I kneel more deeply to accept you,
inconsolable sisters, and, surrendering, lose myself
in your loosened hair. How we squander our hours of pain.
How we gaze beyond them into the bitter duration
to see if they have an end. Though they are really
our winter-enduring foliage, our dark evergreen,
one season in our inner year-, not only a season
in time-, but are place and settlement, foundation and soil and home.]
10th Elegy

Despite its religious ambiguity, Rilke's world is, like every religious
world, an acoustic world. 4 Never are "rank" or "Angel," or more generally
the "stronger existence [stiirkere Dasein]"s (m Elegy), objective visions; in
any case, all direct and visionary possibilities for encountering the angel are
removed into an age fundamentally prior to our own and its possibilities .

. . . . Wohin sind die Tage Tobiae,

da der Strahlendsten einer stand an der einfachen Haustiir,
zur Reise ein wenig verkleidet und schon nicht mehr furchtbar;
Qiingling dem Jungling, wie er neugierig hinaussah).
trate der Erzengel jetzt, der gefuhrliche, hinter den Stemen
eines Schrittes nur nieder und herwans: hochauf-
schlagend erschliig uns das eigene Herz....
[.... Where are the days of Tobias,
when one of you, veiling his radiance, stood at the front door,
slightly disguised for the journey, no longer appalling;
(a young man like the one who curiously peeked through the window).
But if the archangel now, perilous, from behind the stars
took even one step down toward us: our own heart, beating
hil?11er and higher, would beat us to death .... ]
2nd Elegy

The sole thing that remains audible to whoever lives in futility is the
"Wehende [whatever blows like the wind]" between the ranks. Listening
is so little bound to an object that, on the contrary, it receives "seine
4 Reflections on Literature and Culture

ununterbrochene Nachricht, die aus Stille sich bildet [the ceaseless mes-
sage that forms itself out of silence]" (m Elegy) whenever the objects are
lost and blown away: it is not a listening to a particular, articulated mes-
sage; rather, it is a listening to the urgent beseeching of a heart ("Hore,
mein Hertz [Listen, my heart]"), therefore a mode of being ("so waren sie
hOrend [such was their listening]," 1st Elegy). A beseeching of this kind
does not presuppose the presence of the responding voice; nor does the
beseeching of the prayer with which it is actually identical. In its inten-
sity, however, it is independent of the voice's presence. Indeed, as a state
of being, listening is already its own fulfillment, since it pays no attention
to whether its beseeching may be heard.
. . . . Hore, mein Herz, wie sonst nur
Heilige horten: daB sie der riesige Ruf
aufhob vom Boden; sie aber knieten,
Unmogliche, weiter und achteten's nicht:
so waren sie horend. . ..
[.... Listen, my heart, as only
saints have listened: until the gigantic call lifted them
off the ground; yet they kept on, impossibly,
kneeling and didn't notice at all:
such was their listening.... ]

Rilke still seeks to rescue something from the religiously alienated situ-
ation in which he "Gottes Stimme bei weitem nicht mehr errriige [was far
from being able to endure God's voice]," in which he "verginge von
seinem starkeren Dasein [would perish from his stronger existence]." This
"something" consists in an in-stance of hearing, being-in-hearing [In-
stii.ndigkeit des Harens, Im-Horen-sein]. Today, there has to be a condition
and an occasion for being-in-hearing. In place of complete objecdessness,
for which our heart is no longer adequate, the occasion for being-in-
hearing becomes the disappearance of the object, which we pursue with
our ears: the sound of the wind from the "gap" that the dying, in the
transition from our existence to the "stronger" one, from one rank to an-
other, rip in the circle of the living. What is experienced is no longer "der
andere Bezug [the other relation]" (9th Elegy), but only the approach to it
that we hear in missing one who has just departed. ("Es rauscht jetzt von
jenen jungen Toten zu dir [It is murmuring toward you now from those
who died young].")
 Rilke's 'Duino Elegies' 5

It is from the impossibility of experiencing transcendence immediately

that the dying person, in his transcending of one existence toward an-
other, acquires a fundamentally religious meaning: he becomes one of the
intermediaries and one of the preconditions for being able, not indeed to
experience the "other relation," but just barely to hear from it. In this lis-
tening to the dead as they are escaping, we disappear along with them,
and while we do not reach the other relation ("Und das Totsein ist milh-
sam und voller Nachholn, da.B man allmahlich ein wenig Ewigkeit spurt
[And being dead is hard work and full of retrieval before one can gradu-
ally feel a trace of eternity]"), we are already estranged from our human
earth and hover ambiguously between a no-longer and a not-yet:

Freilich ist e~ seltsam, die Erde nicht mehr zu bewohnen,

kaum erlernte Gebrauche nicht mehr zu iiben,
Rosen, und andern eigens versprechenden Dingen
nicht die Bedeutung menschlicher Zukunft zu geben;

Seltsam, die Wiinsche nicht weiterzuwilnschen. Seltsam,

alles, was sich bezog, so lose im Raume
flattern zu sehen ....
[Of course, it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer,
to give up customs one barely had time to learn,
not to see roses and other promising things
in terms of a human future;

Strange no longer to desire one's own desires. Strange

to see meanings that clung together once, floating away
in every direction .... ]
rst Elegy

Although human existence and human calling-out remain basically fu-

tile for Rilke, his poetry does understand itself to be a "mission [Auftrag]"
(in contrast to the Sonnets to Orpheus, where song is called "existence [Da-
sein]," even though this song, too, remains futile: "Wann aber sind wir?
[But when will we be?J" Orpheus I.III.) This mission is not handed down
from "the Angels' hierarchies," which the "Elegies" vainly attempt to woo
("Engel, und wiirb ich dich auch! Du kommst nicht [Angel, and even if I
were to woo you, you would not come]," 7th Elegy), nor does it come
from other people; rather, it comes from things. ("Ach, wen vermogen
6 Reflectiom on Literature and Culture

wir denn zu brauchen? Engel nicht, Menschen nicht.... Es bleib uns

vielleicht irgendein Baum an dem Abhang.... es bleibt uns die StraBe
von gestern.... [Ah, whom can we ever turn to in our need? Not angels,
not humans.... Perhaps there remains for us some tree on a hillside ....
there remains for us yesterday's street.... "], 1st Elegy). The fact that
whatever remains of the relation to the world flees to what is relatively
most distant-in any case does not turn to the other, to what is closest,
but rather commits itself to this distant entity and claims closeness to it-
shows the extent to which human existence has here been estranged from
the world: .

. . . . drum zeig
ihm das Einfache, das, von Geschlecht zu Geschlechtern gestaltet,
als ein Unsriges lebt neb~ der Hand und im Blick.
Sag ihm die Dinge. Er wird staunender stehn; wie du standest
bei dem Seiler im Rom, oder oeim Topfer am Nil.
[.... So show him .
something simple which, formed over generations,
lives as our own, near our hand and within our gaze.
Tell him of things. He will stand astonished; as you stood
by the rope-maker in Rome or the potter along the Nile.]
9th Elegy

Things are a mission; but the fact that the human being does not belong
to them in a primary way is shown both in the explicimess as well as in the
belatedness of human agreement "von weit her [from far away]" (9th El-
egy). For the human being actually hangs in the air, un-related to anything.
In contrast to every other historically recorded estrangement from the
world, this estrangement is not directly or originally determined as tran-
scendence, nor does it escape into transcendence; it is rather characterized
by the detour it makes. The detour consists in what Rilke calls "rescue"
[Rettung]. The background to this rescue is as follows: things are transient
and therefore need rescuing. Rescuing is not simply a spontaneously human
act, but a task and an urge imparted by things (" drangender Auftrag [urgent
mission]," 9th Elegy), and also-and herein.consists the detour, and the
only thing the human being can possibly achieve regarding the "other
relation"-an "escape" [Hinuberretten] into the "stronger existence." The
"other relation" is for Rilke the "unsayable," but things are capable of being
said ("Sind wir vielleicht hier, um zu sagen: Haus, Briicke, Brunnen, Tor,
 Rilke's 'Duino Elegies' 7

Krug, Obstbaum, Fenster,-[Perhaps we are here in order to say: house,

bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window,-]," 9th Elegy). Rescu-
ing, however, is naming, in other words, preservation from destruction. In
the end, naming is extolling. But being extolled does not simply mean being
left in its unaltered state-and praised for this reason. Being extolled basi-
cally means being transformed into a stronger being:
.... aber zu sagen, verstehns,
o zu sagen, so, wie selber die Dinge niemals
innig meinten zu sein....
[.... but to say them, you must understand,
oh to say them more intensely than the things themselves
ever dreamed of existing.... ]
9th Elegy

It is not enough for the transformation simply to say the sayable to the
angel; it endures only in repeated retelling (7th Elegy). The human being
undertakes this rescue because he therein finds access to the "other rela-
tion." Things expect it of hi~, for
.... Mehr als je
fallen die Dinge dafiin, die erlebbaren, denn,
was sie verdrangend ersetzt, ist ein Tun ohne Bild.
[.... More than ever
the things that we might experience are vanishing, for
what crowds them out and replaces them is an imageless act.]
9th Elegy

This urge and this "Zumutung [demand]" (m Elegy) are all the more
remarkable since, for Rilke, things have a higher rank in existence than do
human beings; they are more permanent relative to the human being,
who no longer properly belongs to the world in his extreme fleetingness,
who is "endured" by things in their relative endurance, and who is merely
tolerated by them:
.... Siehe, die Baume sind; die Hauser,
die wir bewohnen, bestehn noch. Wir nur
ziehen allem vorbei wie ein luftiger Austausch.
Und alles ist einig, uns zu verschweigen, halb als
Schande vielleicht und halb als unsagliche Hoffnung.
8 Reflections on Literature and Culture

[.... Look: the trees exist; the houses

that we live in still stand. We alone
fly past all things, as fugitive as the wind.
And all things conspire to keep silent about us, half
out of shame, perhaps, half as unutterable hope.]
2nd Elegy

The transformation of the "visible into the invisible" is for Rilke a task
springing from the contemporary situation, a task whose motivation he de-
scribes as follows: the contemporary world is only interior ("immer. geringer
schwindet das AuBen [the exterior disappears more and more]," 7th Elegy);
life is becoming an "imageless act." For this reason, things are becoming ru-
ins, "pushed away" and "replaced" by this act. This falling into ruin also en-
tails that no new things arise. The idea now suggests itself to understand
interiority itself as a determination <?f transcendence. However, only as long
as the interior became manifest in an exterior was the non-questioning rela-
tion to transcendence secured, and a handing-over, like praise and rescue,
superfluous. Only today, because the exterior is vanishing ("Wo einmal ein
dauerndes Haus war, schlag sich erdachtes Gebild vor [Where there was
once an enduring building, a mental image suggests itself]," 7th Elegy)-
and limiting oneself to the unsayable simply indicates a deprivation, rather
than an original transcendence-we "disinherited ones" need things as our
last possibility for praising and for reaching out into the other order:
Preise dem Engel die Welt, nicht die unsagliche, ihm
kannst du nicht groBtun, mit herrlich Erfilhltem; im Weltall,
wo er fiihlender fiihlt, bist du ein Neuling, drum zeig
ihm das Einfache ....
[Praise this world to the angel, not the unsayable one,
you cannot impress him with glorious emotion; in the universe
where he feels more powerfully, you are a novice, so show him
something simple.... ]
9th Elegy

This privation, however, refers not only to a retreat from the world, but
also-and this is what is decisive-to a "defense" against the angel:
Engel, und wiirb' ich dich auch! Du kommst nicht. Denn mein
Anruf ist immer voll Hinweg; wider so starke
Stromung kannst du nicht schreiten. Wie ein gestreckter
 Rilke's 'Duino Elegies' 9

Arm ist mein Rufen. Und seine zum Greifen

oben offene Hand bleibt vor dir
offen, wie Abwehr und Warnung,
UnfaBlicher, weit auf.
[Angel, and even if I were to woo you, you would not come. For my call
is always filled with a departure; against such a powerful
current you cannot move. Like an outstretched arm
is my call. And its hand, held open and reaching up
to seize, remains in front of you, open
as if in defense and warning,
Ungraspable One, far above.]
7th Elegy

Praise only grows from the futility and despair of wooing. Only in praise is
there a being-heard [Gehortwerden], namely the being-heard of what is told,
even if it has nothing to do with being-harkened-to [Erhortwerden]. The first
impulse of the call is thus a religious impulse, the failure of which gives rise
to poetry, which contains a double ambiguity for this very reason: measured
in accordanee with its religious origin, poetry is already the falsification of
that origin. As poetry, however, in other words, as expression of the interior
world, it fails to live up to its own premises. 6 "Listen, my heart, as only saints
have listened"-this is the impulse that, as is shown by what follows ("Nicht
daB du Gottes ertriigest die Stimme, bei weitem [Not that you could endure
God's voice, far from it]"), already contains the failure of listening.
The peculiar thing here consists in the fact that the echolessness of the
"andern Ordnung [other order]," which "es gelassen verschmaht, uns zu
zerstoren [serenely disdains/to destroy us]" (1st Elegy), does not in fact
destroy us; rather, it suddenly changes into something positive: here arises
the concept of the beautiful .
. . . . Denn das Schone ist nichts
als des Schrecklichen Anfang, den wir noch gerade ertragen,
und wir bewundern es so, weil es gelassen verschmaht,
uns zu zerstoren ....
[.... For the beautiful is nothing
but the terrible's beginning, which we still are just able to endure,
and we marvel at it so because it serenely disdains
to destroy us.]
1st Elegy
IO Reflections on Literature and Culture

The terrible is, therefore, the beautiful insofar as it can be endured. For its
part, though, beauty in the Duino Elegi.es is not autonomous, as it presents
itself in the "attic steles" of the Greeks, but is only a beginning, namely the •
beginning of the terrible. Thus, although this poetry does not recognize a
clean separation between the beautiful and the terrible, or between divine
and human competence ("diese [sc. die Greichen] Beherrschten wuBten
damit: soweit sind wir' s, dieses ist unser, und so zu berilhren; starker stem-
men die Gotter uns an. Doch dies ist Sache der Gotter [These (namely the
Greeks) self-mastered ones thereby knew: we can go this far, I this is ours,
to touch one another this lightly; the gods I can press down harder upon us.
But that is a matter for the gods]," 2nd Elegy), and although it is affected by
the terribleness of the "stronger existence," it is still possible, since it is able
to marvel at this existence as something beautiful. This poetry is thus di-
rectly grounded in futility: at the point of non-differentiation in which reli- '
gious intention and religious denial are sublated, a peace and balance,
hence a beauty arises that has nothing to do with religion in its origin. The
secularization of the religious, which in every atheism represents a non-
obligatory exploitation of religious property, arises here from a specific re-
ligious experience-the experience of futility.7
Futility, meanwhile, is for Rilke only an index of the human being
writing the poetry, who almost always, as an embodiment of futility,
stands tacitly for human existence and its situation in general. This exis-
tence, however, does not count as genuine existence. Rilke thus places the
respective human situation of the poet alongside various authentic situa-
tions, or possibilities of being-in-the-world. Situation, here, does not refer
to an ephemeral position within a life but, rather, to a specific life consid-
ered as a position in itself: the animal represents not a species of life, but
a particular situation, a particular being-in-the-world, namely the "death-
less" and futureless merging into pure presence. Thus the "hero" is not
one who commits glorious deeds, but rather the situation of ongoing dy-
ing, of "von der Dauer Nicht-angefochten-seins [not-being-in-contest
with permanence]" (6th Elegy), in' other words, being without deadlines,
thus without death; the dying person is not the human being whose life is
ending, but being-in-death; put another way: not having death before one
as a terminus and therefore being deathless and futureless. Thus the child
refers not to an early phase in a human being's existence, but to the situa-
tion of not-yet-having-a-future, of pure presence. Thus the lover, finally,
is not one bound to another human being, but is prior to every object of
 Rilke's 'Duino Elegies' II

love, independent of it; indeed, he is being-in-love pure and simple,

which the object of love can falsify.
What thus becomes clear is that there is genuine existence, for Rilke,
only where it is de-substantivized and de-objectified, where it is neither
bound to a personal fate, nor delimited, i.e., for him, "concealed" by an
Other, whether through death, as a terminus, or through the beloved, as
a singular person. Such existence refers positively to a pure presence free
of opposition, a "pure occurrence" that does not contain the other tempo-
ral dimensions of human being [menschliches Sein]: future and past. 8
Rilke then opposes this existence to what he calls "fate" [Schicksal]. Fate is
being temporal: being confronted by an Other and being limited by
death. This being-limited by death, the terminality of human life, is the
ground of time as bad duration, transience as fear of loss, and desire (cf.
8th Elegy), whose highest manifestation is wooing.

Dieses heiBt Schicksal: gegenilber sein

und nichts als das und immer gegeniiber.
[This is what is called fate: to be over-against,
and to be nothing but over-against now and forever.]
8th Elegy

Fatefulness, however, is the precondition for being a poet in the sense

proposed by the Duino Elegies, for being over-against means nothing
other than letting oneself get involved with those things, the praise of
which opens the door for us to the "other relation":

warum dann
Menschliches milssen-und, Schicksal vermeidend,
sich sehnen nach Schicksal?

Aber weil Hiersein viel ist, und weil uns scheinbar

alles das Hiesige braucht, dieses Schwindende, das
seltsam uns angeht. Uns, die Schwindendsten. Einmal
jedes, nur einmaL Einmal und nicht mehr. Und wir auch
einmal Nie wieder. Aber dieses
einmal gewesen zu sein, wenn auch nur einmal·
irdisch gewesen zu sein, scheint nicht widerrufbar.
[Why then
have' to be human-and, escaping from fate,
12 Reflections on Literature and Culture i
keep longing for fate?

Bue because being here is a lot; because everything here

seems to need us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way
concerns us. Us, the most fleeting of all. Once
for each thing, just once. Once and no more. And we too,
just once. And never again. But to have been
this once, even if only once:
to have been earthly, seems irrevocable.]
9th Elegy

Fate is therefore a provisional measure, indeed as irrevocable in its one-

timeness [Einmaligkeit] as it is unrepeatable. This, then, constitutes the
poet: taking being-provisional seriously. Yet, it seems t~ be bluntly contra-
dicted by the opposing statement that characterizes being-here at another
point: there it signifies the lingering that hides us from our one-timeness-a
lingering in one's bloom (6th Elegy), for instance, or in the gratuitous
breadth of time from which the hero escapes: ·

... Dauern,
fiche ihn nicht an. Sein Aufgang ist Dasein; bestandig
nimmt er sich fort und tritt ins veranderte Sternbild
seiner steten Gefahr....
[... Permanence
does not concern him. His ascent is existence; constantly
moving on into the ever-changed constellation
of his perpetual danger....]
6th Elegy

Solitude arises, for Rilke, from the transience and unreliability of this
world: the transient things abandon us, we "ziehen allem vorbei wie ein
luftiger Austausch [fly past all things, fugitive as the wind]" (2nd Elegy).
This unreliability of the world is therefore doubly determined: things
abandon us, we who "nicht sehr verlaBlich zu Hause sind I in der gedeutete
Welt [are not very reliably at home I in our interpreted world" (1st Elegy),
and we abandon things, "denn Bleiben ist nirgends [for there is no place
where we can remain]" (1st Elegy). This double abandonment, which Rilke
tacitly makes into the positive quality of abandonability [~rlafi'barkeit],
acquires an independent meaning as solitude. It is thus clear that love, for
 Rilke's 'Duino Elegies' 13

Rilke, becomes an exemplary situation, for love is principally love of the

abandoned. As a situation, love never cleaves to a single opportunity or a
single beloved; these are only occasions for it. Nor is love to be under-
stood as one feeling among others. Love overcomes and at the same time
forgets the beloved, since it intends more than the accidental individual,
and its horizon is obscured by the beloved' s closeness ("Ach, sie verdecken
sich nur miteinander ihr Los [Alas, they use each other to hide their own
fate]," 1st Elegy). Love lies in this abandonment alone. Freed from the
beloved into the breadth of its own horizon, it can become an organon for
understanding world-relations. As an organon, it remains entirely within
its abandonment and estrangement from the world. For the world that is
disclosed to love is a fundamentally different world from the one that
presents itself to us in our daily lives. It is a world in the cosmological-
hierarchical understanding of the term, within which, according to
Rilke's terminology, "ranks" and "orders" form the higher layers. There-
fore, it is precisely the near world concerning us immediately that is not
given in this "cognition" (Erkennen), and this fact once again explicitly
demonstrates the estrangement from the world that is only seemingly op-
posed to cognition of the world. When the this-worldly sphere is sur-
passed, it is not for the sake of a radically other world, but for the sake. of
the higher layers of the world, which are not properly other-worldly de-
spite their fundamental inaccessibility. And yet, these layers are not prop-
erly this-worldly despite the possibility that they could be experienced
in the singular situation of love. They are, in sum, still parts of a hierar-
chically ordered Being. The ambiguity of the religious situation from
which the Duino Elegies have grown is once again made visible in this ap-
proach, which neutralizes the crude opposition of this-worldly and other-
worldly by means of a plurality of layers of being, and through the absence
of any absolute transcendence radically absolving us of everything this-
worldly.
Because there is no true transcendence in this ordered world, one also
cannot exceed the world, but only succeed to higher ranks. This succes-
sion is actually a merging-into [Aufkehen] that is only accomplished
purely by the lover. Merging-into, which is to say, downfall [ Untergang],
is, however, the most radical possibility of being ("For there is no place
where we can remain"). Only in this downfall, which guarantees the self-
destruction of the lover and his inclination toward the beloved, does the
lover liberate himself completely from the beloved, from the inclination
14 Reflections on Literature and Culture

toward her and away from himself. In his giving-himself-up, the lover
distinguishes himself from the hero, whose existence is likewise in his
downfall, but "selbst der Untergang war ihm I nur ein Vorwand zu sein:
seine letzte Geburt [even his downfall was I merely a pretext to be: his fi-
nal birth]" (ISt Elegy), and thus the last refinement and the final confir-
mation of his individually singular existence. This singularization of
being is what the lover has just relinquished in his downfall, because there
is, for Rilke, actually only one lover:
Aber die Liebende nimmt die erschopfte Natur
in sich zurilck, als waren nicht zweimal die Krafte,
dieses zu leisten ....
[But nature, spent and exhausted, takes lovers back
into herself, as if there were not enough strength
to create them a second time ....]
Ist Elegy

Every singular person is but the natural repetition; the bloom that is new
every year and still the same. This natural repetition, however, is pecu-
liarly uncertam, and in every case would actually have to be performed by
the lover himself. Making the repetition explicit in this way is the renun-
ciation of one's individual being, a radical de-individuation:
.... das, was man war i:a unendlich angstlichen Hand~n,
nicht mehr zu sein, und selbst den eigenen Namen
weglassen wie ein zerbrochenes Spielzeug.
[... no longer to be
what one was in infinitely anxious hands; to leave
even one's own name behind, forgetting it
as easily as a child abandons a broken toy.]
1st Elegy

The lover loses the specificity of his individual destiny when he compares
his own fate to the identical fate of all other and earlier lovers, equates
them, and finally identifies his fate with this one fate:
.... Hast du der Gaspara Stampa
denn genugi.igend gedacht, d~ irgend Madchen,
dem der Geliebte entging am gesteigerten Beispiel
dieser Liebenden filhlt: d~ ich wilrde wie sie?
r Rilke's 'Duino Elegies'

Sollen nicht endlich uns diese altesten Schmerzen

fruchtbar warden? 1st es nicht Zeit, da£ wir liebend
uns vom Geliebten befrein und es bebend bestehen:
wie der Pfeil die Sehne besteht, um gesammelt im Absprung
mehr zu sein als er selbst....
[... Have you imagined
Gaspara Stampa intensely enough so that any girl
deserted by her lover might be inspired
by that fierce example of soaring, objectless love
and might say to herself, "Perhaps I can be like her"?
Shouldn't this most ancient suffering finally grow
more fruitful for us? Isn't it time that we lovingly
freed ourselves from the beloved and, quivering, endured:
as the arrow endures the bowstring's tension, so that
gathered in the snap of release it can be more than
it5el£]
Ist Elegy

Love is the more loving the less it is gratified; if it wants to be loved,. it

flees from the abandonment of its own love into the sure protection of be-
ing loved: "Alas, they use each other to hide their own fate."

Liebende, seid ihrs dann noch? Wenn ihr einer dem andern
Euch an den Mund hebt und ansetzt-: Getrank an Getrank:
o wie entgeht dann der Trinkinde seltsam der Handlung.
[Lovers, is it still you? When you lift yourselves up
to each other's mouth and your lips join, drink against drink:
oh how strangely each drinker seeps away from his action.]
1nd Elegy

The difference between Rilke's approach and all those theories that
likewise approach love as the organon of cognition (Augustine, Pascal,
Kierkegaard, Scheler) becomes clear in this possibility of "using one an-
other to hide one's fate."9 Whereas, for these other philosophers, love is
understood as a singular act, and, furthermore, the very object fixated by
love becomes cognizable to the lover, here love refers primarily to the sit-
uation of objectless being-in-love, in which, conversely, the beloved per-
son is forgotten and surpassed in favor of a transcendence: in this situation,
love exceeds its supposedly immanent area of authority in order to open
 Reflections on Literature and Culture

one's sight to world- and rank-relations, to the "other relation" and the
"angels' hierarchies," which the lover not only recognizes in his abandon-
ment, but to which he belongs:

.... Doch selbst nur

eine Liebende, o, allein am nachdichen Fenster....
Reichte sie dir nicht ans Knie--?
[... But even
just one woman in love--, oh, alone at night by her window....
didn't she reach your knee-?]
7th Elegy

In love, human existence also exceeds the boundary of its own individ-
uality in another direction. Just as it gives itself up in its abandonment
and climbs into higher ranks,- so it finds its way back to its roots by climb-
ing down into the abyss of its own origin, "wo seine kleine Geburt schon
iiberlebt war [where his little birth had already been outlived]" (3rd El-
egy). This return to the "violent origin" does indeed require the beloved
as an occasion:

Zwar du erschrakst ihm das Herz; doch a.ltere Schrecken

Stiirzten in ihn bei dem beriihrenden AnstoB.
[Yes, you did frighten his heart; but more ancient terrors
plunged into him at the shock of tliat feeling.]
3rd Elegy

Her call helps him find his way back, not to her, but to

.... seines lnneren Wildnis, ·

diesen Urwald in ihm, auf dessen stummen Gestiirztsein
lightgriin sein Herz stand....
[... his interior wilderness,
that primal forest inside him, where among decayed treetrunks
his heart stood, light-green .... ]

When he finds his way back to the abyss of his own existence, this abyss
pulls him deeper over the boundaries of his authentic self, so that now the
descent into the ground of his individuality descends further into the in-
finite pre-history of his race,
 Rilke's 'Duino Elegies' 17

.... In das altere Blut, in die Schluchten,

wo das Furchtbare lag, noch satt von den Vatern.
[... into more ancient blood, to ravines
where Horror lay still glutted with his fathers.]

The abyssal quality of the race (of the "verborgenen schuldigen Fltill-
Gott des Bluts [hidden, guilty river-god of the blood]") is first constituted
when one's own blood and the "more ancient blood" are stirred up at the
same time. This does not mean that one's individual ancestors are now
viewed in clear, historical sequence: "the seething multitudes" arise, the
primal ground from which the individual, historical generations first
emerge, and toward whose succession it remains indifferent in its absolute
pastness. Everything coming later is already foreseen and overtaken in
this ground, the lover as well as the beloved. This land of primeval ages,
from which the "floods of ancestry" rise, belongs to the boy, since

.... jedes
Schreckliche kannte ihn, blinzelte, war wie verstandigt.
Ja, das Entsetzliche lachelte .... Selten
hast du so zartlich gel~chelt, Mutter. Wie sollte
er es nicht lieben, da es ihm lachelte ....
[... every
Terror knew him, winked, as though it were advised.
Yes, atrocity smiled.... Seldom
had you smiled so tenderly, mother. How could he help
loving what smiled at him.]
3rd Elegy

Since he now, once again, belongs to those immemorial times that are ad-
vised about him, he has been estranged from his natural world, from his
mother as from his lover: even from his mother, who only seems to be his
origin and past; for in comparison with this absolute past, which as genos
contains every future in itself, the mother is already "outlived," just like
everything else in the present and in the future, and what passes away is
more past than the absolute past itself.

. . . . OMadchen,
dies: daB wir liebten in uns, nicht Eines, ein Ki.inftiges, sondern
das zahllos Brauende; nicht ein einzelnes Kind,
18 Rejlecti.ons on Literature and Culture

sondern die Vater, die wie Trilmmer Gebirgs

uns im Grunde beruhn; sondern das trockene FluBbett
einstiger Mi.itter-; sondern die ganze
lautlose Landschaft unter dem wolkigen oder
reinen Verhiingnis-: dies kam dir, Madchen, zuvor.
[... Oh, dear girl,
this: that we loved, inside us, not one who would someday appear, but
the seething multitudes; not just a single child,
but also the fathers lying in our depths
like fallen mountains; also the dried-up riverbeds
of ancient mothers-; also the whole
soundless landscape under the clouded or clear
sky of its destiny-: all this, dear girl, preceded you.]

Love is a possibility, or guarantee of being, not only for the lovers

themselves, but also indirectly for the third party, the questioner. Of
course, the third party asks very different questions: for him, the lovers
seem the most indubitable guarantees of human existence in general, al-
though not guarantors of a transcendent world. If the lovers guaranteed a
possibility of this-worldly existence rescued from transience,

weil die Stelle nicht schwindet, die ihr, Ziinliche,

zudeckt; weil ihr darunter das reine
Dauern verspi.in ....
[because the place you so tenderly cover
does not vanish; because underneath it
you feel pure duration ....]
2nd Elegy

then the third would also be allowed a question:

Liebende, euch, ihr ineinander Geni.igten,

frag ich nach uns. Ihr greift euch. Habt ihr Beweise?
[Lovers, gratified in each other, I am asking you
about us. You hold each other. Do you have proof]?

A remarkable shift in aspects is thus effected through the introduction of

the third: the lovers are no longer the ungratified for whom the present
 Rilke's 'Duino Elegi.es' 19

disappears in favor of an eschatologically determined future, but those

"gratified in each other," for whom the present is absolutized and elevated
to "eternity" in the fulfillment of the moment ("So versprecht ihr euch
Ewigkeit fast I von der Umarmung [So you promise eternity, almost, I
from the embrace]"). Time and transience are thereby paralyzed, and an
existence rescued from transience is guaranteed within the fullness of love.
There are, then, three ways that Rilke sees love as the human being's
authentic existence: once, as abandonment and possibility of transcen-
dence, then as abandoning and possibility of returning to the origin, to
the "mothers," and finally, as the this-worldly possibility of "pure dura-
tion." Transience is paralyzed three times in three completely different
ways. Yet one thing remains the same in all three cases: love is authentic
only when it is freed from every binding goal and every worldly fixation.
The estrangement from the world that is made explicit in love is, origi-
nally, not a positive human characteristic. For this reason, all of Rilke's
statements about being released from the world become ambiguous and
ambivale~t. In its positive sense, as a benefit of love, estrangement from
the world is freedom from and freedom for; in a negative sense, it is ban-
ishment from the world. This being-banished gains a characterization:
"Nichtverstandigtseins [not being advised about the world] ." The animal
is "advised," belongs to this world, its rhythm, its seasons in such a way
that its participation [Teilhaben] in this world bespeaks nothing less than
its being a part [Teilsein] of it. When we, by contrast, try to take part
[teikunehmen] in and thus try to belong to the world,
so drangen wir uns plotzlich Winden auf
und fallen ein auf teilnahmslosen Teich.
[we force ourselves abruptly onto the wind
and fall through onto some indifferent pond.]
4th Elegy

We thereby meet failure in the world's indifference to us, for "Wir sind
nicht einig. Sind nicht wie die Zugvogel verstandigt [We are not in har-
mony. Are not advised like the migratory birds]," who, in searching for
summer, in need of experience, find their South-who, when summer
comes, are summery, and when winter comes, are wintry. Because of his
foreignness, however, the human being is so rhythmically unsure that not
only is the summer given him in summer, and the winter in winter, but in
20 Reflections on Literature and Culture

every case there is an uncertainty with respect to both-disconnected

from the world, they are non-binding possibilities: "Bliihn und verdorrn
ist uns zugleich bewuBt [Flowering and fading come to us both at once]."
The explicit dialectic that Rilke ascribes to human experience-
Uns aber, wo wir eines meinen ganz,
ist schon des andern Aufwand filh.lbar.
[But we, while we are entirely intent upon the one,
already feel the pull of another.]-

is thus not theoretical but, rather, an index of the human being's insecu-
rity and relative non-being-in-the-world.
From the perspective of being one with the world, the animal acquires
cosmological significance for Rilke. One with this world to which it not
only belongs but which -it helps to romprise, the animal knows no final
having-to-leave-the-world, is "frei von Tod [free of death]" (8th Elegy)
and in the "pure duration" of its existence. ·
.... Dicht sein Sein ist ihm
unendlich, ungefaBt und ohne Blick
auf seinen Zustand, rein, so wie sein Ausblick.
[... But it feels its being
as infinite, boundless, and without regard
to its own condition: pure, like its outward gaze.]
8th Elegy

The animal .is thus non-transient; it has eternity, and its existence takes its
course in the mode of futurelessness and in that of the so-on-and-so-on:
.... und wenn es geht, so gehts
in Ewigkeit, so wie die Brunnen gehen.
[... and when it moves, it moves
already in eternity, like the fountains.]

We, however, who are fundamentally out of place because of death, never
face the "open":

Wir haben nie, nicht einen einzigen Tag,

den reinen Raum vor uns, in den die Blumen
unendlich aufgehn ....
r
Rilke's 'Duino Elegies' 21

[Never, not for a single day, do we have

before us that pure space into which flowers
endlessly open ....]

Even the "open" is only the non-limited for us, understandable only
through its opposite, which is constantly perceptible in it: "lmmer ist es
Welt I und niemals Nirgends ohne Nicht [Always there is world I and
never nowhere without a 'no']." We are thus dependent upon an indirect
possibility of seeing the "open": "Was drauBen ist, wir wissens aus I des
Tiers Antlitz allein [We know what is out there only from I the animal's
gaze]." Otherwise only the child has a deathless existence, the child "mit
Dauerndem vergniigt [gratified by what endures]" (4th Elegy), who thus
lives witl"iout desires in the "reinen Vorgang [pure occurrence]" (4th El-
egy). But when the child grows out of childhood, he or she grows out of
being at home in the world in contrast to the animal, who does not even
know this growing-out-of, or this estrangement, and is advised about the
world from the beginning without needing to learn anything. We, the fi-
nally estranged, circle around the animal and place our gazes like traps
around its gaze, in order to experience wide-open space and death-free
existence.
Mit allen Augen sieht die Kreatur
das Offene. Nur unsre Augen sind
wie urngekehrt und ganz um sie gestellt
als Fallen, rings um ihren freien Ausgang.
[With all its eyes the creature sees
the Open. Only our eyes are turned
backward and placed around them
like traps; all around, their way out is open.]
8th Elegy

Although animal existence confronts human existence here as something

limited; although death here, as a limit that cannot be exceeded, renders
life hopelessly out of place, transience, for Rilke, still has a second mean-
ing that is so wholly independent of this confrontation, that-as with
some other terms as well-the search for a systematic lowest common de-
nominator and for seamless self-consistency would entail an idle over-
interpretation of the work inappropriate to its philosophical intention.
This other version of transience nonetheless stands within the work's
22 Reflections on Literature and Culture

unified horiwn of meaning; it is inconceivable without the non-objective

character of the world-a world that can still be heard and tasted-and it
is inconceivable without the hierarchical orders that have excluded the
possibility of absolute transcendence.
This transience is not the fact of having-to-die-sometime, but constant
passing and drifting away; it is not an index of the future, but life itself as
it is constantly using itself up and living itself out. As passing away, how-
ever, transience bears the thither of passing away, and, as something
which does not end abruptly, transience contains its possible dwelling
within the very process of passing away itself. Transience, then, no longer
has anything to do with that which is usually placed in radical opposition
to it, namely immortality. When transience is posited as passing away,
then the question arises (which is posed in Rilke without being answered),
whether the thither of our transience has predestined and predetermined
us, or whether it is a foreign space in which we--irrelevant to it, acciden-
tal to ourselves--Orift away.
. . . . Schmeckt denn der Weltraum,
in den wir uns losen, nach uns? Fangen die Engel
wirklich nur Ihriges auf, ihnen Entstromtes,
oder ist manchmal, wie aus Versehen, ein wenig
unseres Wesens dabei? ....
[... Does the world-space
we dissolve into, taste of us then? Do the angels really
reabsorb only what streamed out from themselves,
or sometimes, as if by oversight, is there a trace
of our essence as well?]
2nd Elegy

The fact that the Duino Elegies are scarcely known; the fact that they
remain completely isolated among publications of the times-all of this is
secondary in comparison to the echolessness that they know about them-
selves and from which they spring. They cannot be allotted their place
in today's literary production, which either dismisses God as a matter
of course, without misgivings, or exploits religious property in a non-
obligatory manner, or, finally, satisfies our so-called "religious needs" with
surrogates. For the impossibility of encountering God is not proof of his
non-existence as far as the Elegies are concerned; this impossibility explic-
itly becomes God's distance from us-a distance that can be experienced,
r Rilke's 'Duino Elegies'

in its negativity, again and again, and thus becomes a religious fact. We
therefore stand before a remarkable situation: the failure to encounter
23

God, usually regarded as a neutral fact, becomes the despair of being able
to encounter Him. As long as human life stood under the unquestioned
determination of God, being human, as creatum esse [created being], as a
being-before-God, meant being nothing. With the denial of the experi-
ence and existence of God, nothingness disappears as a determination of
human b~ing: the human being finds a natural home in the world. If the
human being still understands himself as nothing, then it is not as noth-
ing before God, but as nothing as such: his life no longer lives in nothing-
ness, but in the meaninglessness of his being. When he admits this
meaninglessness, he lives in nihilism. In Rilke, by contrast, nothingness is
neither the human being's nothingness before God, nor meaninglessness
(being without God); it is, rather, being human, insofar as a being of this
kind is not at home in the world and finds no entrance into it. Here as
well, human life does indeed hang in the air, but not because there is no
God; on the contrary, it does so because the human being has been re-
jected and abandoned by Him. This abandonment by God and world,
this belonging-nowhere constitutes both the poetry's religious and its ni-
hilistic character. In this way, nihilism becomes "positive nihilism," for it
despairs of its own godlessness and understands this godlessness to consist
in the act of God's abandonment. Rather than being the start of, and spur
to heresy, as it would be in times defined by confessional concerns, de-
spair thus becomes the last residuum of religiousness, and elegy becomes
the last literary form of religious certification-not the lament over what
has been lost but, rather, the expression of loss itself.

Originally published as "Rilkes 'Duiniser Elegien' " under the co-authorship of

Hannah Arendt and Gilnther Stern in Neue Schweizer Rundschau [= Wtssen und
Leben] 23 (1930): 855-71; translated by Colin Benert.
Gilnther Anders, originally Stern (1902-1992), studied phenomenology with Ed-
mund H\isserl and Martin Heidegger. His marriage to Arendt lasted from 1930 to
1936. Among his many later works, Die Antiquiertheit des Memchen (The Obsoles-
cence of the Human Being, 1956) is perhaps the most prominent.
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), who was born in Prague, ranks among the great
lyric poets in the German language. Duino Elegies, one of his major achievements,
was begun in 1912 but not completed until 1922.-Ed.