J.P. Stern

There can be few poets in the whole of European literature whose lives were so single-mindedly dedicated to the pursuit of poetry as was the life of Rainer Maria Rilke. Poetry was the centre and margin, ‘the field and hedgerows’, of his existence. The men whose friendships he cherished, the host of women admirers and aristocratic protectors he met and corresponded with, the women who were or may have been his mistresses, even the children he enchanted with his stories – all these form a network of intimate relationships stretching across almost the entire Continent and centred on the old Austro-Hungarian monarchy, whose decay, collapse and aftermath he witnessed. This network – the 115 women mentioned in some detail in Wolfgang Leppmann’s biography by no means exhaust those listed in Rilke’s own address-book – made his life and poetry possible when, for the last time in the history of Europe, social and economic circumstances permitted the freedom from routine, institution and permanent attachment which he needed, without his having to pay the price of squalor and anarchy in return. What gives meaning to the volumes of notes and letters, dedications, memoirs and inscriptions in which all these relationships are preserved is Rilke’s preoccupation, not with himself, but with his poetry. His immense correspondence, J.F. Hendry writes, was ‘vital to his poetry in the way that reviews, essays and lectures are to other poets’ (though the essays, reviews and lectures that he did write fill a sizeable volume). Despairing confessions of failure, self-exhortations to patience, the jubilant acknowledgment of gifts of poems – all set down in the poet’s exquisite round hand (the hand he adopted at the same time as he Germanised his name from René to Rainer, in 1897): these form the substance of poems and letters alike. Here is an example from a letter to ‘Benvenuta’ (15 February 1914), recalling his encounter with Eleonora Duse: ‘but there was so much that was doomed in each of us – piling it up together we ended by standing on top of it as on a pyre that has been raised night and day, in air that was pure but lifeless, and though we did not say so to each other, yet neither of us could imagine any future except perhaps that God might finally set light to this foundation that crackled with misery and destroy us and himself in the flames’. More than fifteen years later the pyre on which the self is destroyed became the central image of the last poem Rilke ever wrote.–

Adolf Hitler: The Medical Diaries consists of a translation of the medical records kept by Hitler’s physician, Dr Theodor Morell, and of Mr Irving’s extensive commentaries on those records. Morell, a fashionable Berlin GP specialising in venereal diseases, became the Führer’s personal doctor at Christmas 1936. The elevation, which took place during a visit to Hitler’s retreat on the Obersalzberg, was greeted by Morell’s wife with the oracular words: ‘What do we need with that!’ – a rendering, presumably, of ‘Wozu brauchen wir das?’–

Long before the English began worrying about their national identity, the Germans fought a war to assert theirs – or so many German intellectuals felt in August 1914. Thomas Mann’s contribution to this eruption of nationalist self-consciousness was delivered in a series of essays written over the following four years, and it is among the strangest things he ever wrote. Not the least paradox of this exacting, ambitious and deeply ironical work is the fact that when it was first published, in the month of Germany’s defeat, the causes and attitudes so strenuously defended in its pages seemed to the population at large all but discredited: and Mann’s own rejection of most of them was soon to follow. Whatever his motives in writing these essays, there was nothing expedient about publishing them.’

In The Conscience of Words Elias Canetti has collected 15 mainly literary essays and addresses written between 1964 and 1975 (the German edition, first published in 1975, contained a slightly different selection). The Human Province (first published in 1973) consists of aphorisms and reflections from Canetti’s notebooks, most of them written while he was working on Crowds and Power (1960), which he regards as his most important contribution to 20th-century thought. Both books contain material published in previous volumes. They have thus something of the quality of paralipomena, things omitted from, but appertaining to, earlier and perhaps weightier writings.