[“I ask myself, isn’t this man somehow the most important among all of us writing and expressing ourselves?” did Rainer Maria Rilke write about his friend Rudolf Kassner (1873-1959) in 19111. Not only Rilke thought this way: Eliot, Auden, Gide, Valéry, Yourcenar, de Man, Kafka, Hofmannsthal all had great esteem for this Mitteleuropäer traveller, translator and essayist — not to mention physiognomy theorist. This beginning of a list is nothing short of remarkable, yet despite having been praised by such peers — many of whom were personal friends — for his prose, his subtlety, his very acute eye, Rudolf Kassner has been severely overlooked: his works for example have never been translated at length into English. He has almost never been studied by Anglo-Saxon scholars2. The situation in the rest of Europe is not so different; however some countries can at least access a couple of discreet, sometimes long out-of-print translations of whole books of his3, some more focused studies4. This feels all the more unjust when one knows Kassner was an ardent anglophile and a great ferryman of British culture from his youth on5. T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden however repaid their debt to him: their tribute for his 80th Anniversary Festschrift will serve as an introduction to Kassner’s Reminiscence of Rilke, taken from his 1928 Narciss, or Myth and Imagination. It will be followed by a short portrait of his by Hofmannsthal, an attempt at a bibliography of all existing translations, and bits quoting Kassner, gathered here and there.]

Gratulation: A tribute to Rudolf Kassner, T. S. Eliot

Zahl und Gesicht, W. H. Auden

Rainer Maria Rilke: A Reminiscence

June, 1914 — We were both guests at Duino, the castle on the Adriatic Sea where Rilke had written the first of his Duino Elegies three years earlier. (Since then the castle has been destroyed by Italian shells and rebuilt by its owner.) One afternoon, in the so- called “game-park,” a walled-in reservation of very old oak trees and laurel bushes from whose branches a wild dove rose now and then, we came to speak of Christ — of Christ the god-man and mediator rather than the anguished heroic figure of the gospel. What Rilke told me then seemed to me characteristic of him. He said he did not want a mediator between himself and God; he was unable to understand such a mediator, who would only prevent him from acknowledging God and from approaching Him. Christ, he felt, was in his way…

One of his poems deals with Jesus Christ: “The Garden of Olives” (in the “New Poems”) :

Ich bin allein mit aller Menschen Gram,
den Ich durch Dich zu lindern unternahm,
der Du nicht bist. O namenlose Scham…

(I am alone with all the sorrow of mankind,
That I set out to soothe through Thee,
Thou who art not; O bitter, wordless shame…)

Yes, he could love this disillusioned and doubting Jesus whose “forehead was covered with dust”; but not the one whom the apostle calls the king of life, not Him who became lord and master through His sacrifice.

Rilke wanted only the Father. Rilke’s world was in every respect the world of the father, the world of the child, of childlike games, of childlike guilt. There was no other guilt but that:

Und manchmal brachen Knaben aus den Bergen
der Kindheit, kamen zagen Falles nieder
und spielten mit den Dingen auf dem Grunde,
bis das Gefälle ihr Gefühl ergriff…

(And sometimes boys broke from the mountains
Of childhood, came down the sides with hesitating steps
And played with things they found there at the bottom
Until they sensed the steepness of the slope.)

And thus Rilke’s poetry (until the Duino Elegies) was a pledge of allegiance to the realm of the Father from the realm of childhood and of boyhood. Among his early works there is one play; but Rilke was not a dramatist at all and later he would not have attempted a drama even for the sake of the form. The final reason remains this: in a drama he would somehow have had to deal with the world of the Son, with the world of guilt, of responsibility, of freedom.

Once, when I reproached him for his leniency towards a certain poetic work, he told me with great excitement he did not want to criticize, he did not care. In truth, the conflict between judgment and feeling which is so masculine, so peculiar to men, did not exist for him. He did not understand such men at all. In Rilke’s world the man remained an intruder; only children, women, and old people were at home in it. And in the world of children, women, and old people this conflict is, after all, senseless. In the realm of the Son there is only one who has overcome the conflict: the mystic. But Hermann von Keyserling is right when he writes that Rilke is not in the least a mystic.

It was the autumn of 1910 in Paris. At that time I was writing my Elemente der menschlichen Grösse, in which I dared for the first time to speak of Christ in what seemed to me to be a proper manner. Rilke and I were together almost daily from five o’clock in the afternoon until late at night. Once, on returning to my hotel after talking to him about himself and his work, I wrote in my notebook: “From fervor to greatness there is only one road: it leads through the sacrifice.” Later when Rilke read this in Sätzen des Joghi (Sayings of the Yogi) he wrote me: “I have copied this sentence for myself. It is somehow for and against me.”

He did not want the sacrifice, or rather, he wanted only the sacrifice of the Old Testament (the fruits of the field, a lamb or whatever else is dear to man), but not that of the New Testament. He did not want to find value in sacrifice, or in conversion. Read the eighth of his Duino Elegies. It is dedicated to me and in it he turns against the idea of conversion which he found in my books. The animal is not converted — the animal lives in the world of the Father. The greatness of the Father world was entirely contained in being, and that is right. With the Son greatness becomes divorced from being. The Son is great, but the Father is. Rilke was not without rancor towards the Son. Examples of this may be found in a few poems in the second volume of the “New Poems.” In the struggle between character and conviction — that is, between the inherent, the intuitive, and the attitude which is formed by judgment — Rilke chose character. Of Germany’s important poets none was less burgherlike than he. And only insofar as the German spirit is in every way the most burgherlike of all Europe was Rilke un-German. In no other respect. He loved France because he saw in it the superior character. It would be entirely wrong to regard Rilke’s love for France merely as the German love for the foreign. Thus the English manner, the English language always remained strange to him, and he could not be persuaded to go to London. An American seemed to him monstrous; the Italian not quite clear and therefore not very important. Conviction, attitude could never replace for him the absent character. Character came before convictions. Rilke has been contrasted with Richard Dehmel. But the basis of all antithesis is equivalence. Richard Dehmel’s entirely overrated work is full of conviction, full — if you like — of titanic conviction, but without character.

The Son has not been here in vain. We cannot disregard him. Without greatness the world, however glorious its beginning, is bound to become in the end a place of isolation, of the lonely in the sense of young Malte, of people with a tic (of the soul). There are two kinds of humor: one kind is that of Sterne, Jean Paul, Kierkegaard, that of men of the spirit. The man of the spirit sees both aspects of things. Those who see the world thus live in the realm of the Son in spite of everything. Rilke’s very definite humor was of a different kind: of the realm of the Father. There things develop a tic, become a little ridiculous as they grow old. They become distorted through too much or too little experience, through the loneliness of experience. Because there arises a break between existing — the existing of childhood — and experience. Rilke’s asceticism was not that of the spiritual world; his asceticism, too, was rooted in pleasure. That is what I call soul, Father world, Mother world. Many years ago he had developed the habit of going barefoot. Over long periods. What delighted him was the fact that by touching the earth with his naked soles he had developed, so to speak, a new sense in them. Or so he told me.

As a child Rilke grew up among eccentrics. In the old Austria, which has produced more types than any other country of Europe. In Prague, where the eccentric is endemic. When I visited him for the last time — 1923 — in Muzot, I asked him urgently to record his childhood reminiscences. We will soon have at our disposal an exceedingly great number of the very beautiful letters which he bestowed upon his friends (for many years his entire work consisted of the writing of such letters). I fear, however, that his childhood reminiscences were never recorded. During his last years he was preoccupied with his French poems or rather with the fact that he was now writing poetry in French. I remember a wonderful story from his childhood and I will tell it here as well as I can. His friends will know immediately what he, the incomparable storyteller among the many whom I have known, would make of something like this. In Prague there lived an elderly uncle of his, a bachelor. He had a single passion, a tic of the soul: birds. He filled a whole room with them. On a certain day of the week Rilke was allowed to visit the uncle. For lunch. Together with a little girl cousin. The uncle came from the bird room which was next to the dining room. Feathers stuck in his hair, in his beard; his suit was covered with them. No one else was allowed to enter the bird room. Whenever the uncle got up during the meal to bring the birds a small bone or a piece of fruit, the singing, calling, and screeching of many, many birds could be heard through the opened door. But one day all this was over. No more cages, no singing and screeching, no more feathers in the uncle’s beard and hair. Instead of the birds, a red-haired, freckled, colorfully dressed person with a loud voice. All those many birds, whom no one had ever seen, had transformed themselves into this woman who from then on never left the uncle and who finally buried him.

Just as Rilke was not religious in any significant sense, so he was not a man of pity nor indeed in any way socially disposed. Especially as to the religious element in him the prevalent notions are quite mistaken. I admit openly that I find the idea of the “neighbor God” unbearable. He did not love the poor for the sake of the Son but because they stand outside the ordinary, because they are un-burgherlike. Poverty and wealth find their meaning in each other. In the realm of the Father. The Son has shifted their emphasis. I can even now hear his laugh, that very large mouth’s strange laugh, which was like a reversed sucking and before which everything flew and scattered, when I said to him — at the station in Brig where he had accompanied me — “Rilke, I personally have certainly found a strange confirmation of your world, your ending world: you see, I have met so many wonderful old maids in my life and so incredibly many foolish mothers. It really seems as though the clever virgins of the parable had all become old maids and the foolish ones all mothers. At the same time it is clear proof that we have been forever cast out of the Mother world of Bachofen and Schuler.”

Rilke always showed a special liking for those beings whom the world of men calls old maids. Not so much from pity in the vague sense of the “careless” man, but because he approached the woman from the woman’s point of view. Rilke was devoted to women as perhaps no other man before him. That is why the so-called beautiful woman did not exist for him. She too is a creation of the “careless” man, the dilettante who does not penetrate at all or merely in a “careless” manner. His love too is without the Son’s greatness or has been proven false by it. That is why only women can truly give this kind of love. “We are spoiled by the easy enjoyment of mastery, like all dilettantes, and we have the reputation of mastery,” Rilke writes in The Journal of My Other Self. “How would it be, though, if we scorned our successes; what if we returned to the very beginning to learn the work of love that has always been done for us.”

It is only because everything is love and all “greatness” lies in love and never outside it that some things in Rilke are, perhaps decoration, flourish, ornament, and play. But nothing, nothing is cliche. Which accounts for his wonderful unity. Rilke was poet, was personality even when he merely washed his hands. The only entirely dreadful memory of his life were the years he spent in the St. Pölten military academy. The military was to him a cliche of the devil; it was the world become cliche. Thus even his education was without cliche. I can still see the astonishment on Geheimrat Bode’s military face when Rilke confessed to him at Duino that he had never read Hamlet.

That which might be considered aestheticism in his work was not a lack of greatness but the absence of the cliche of greatness. Or: his real greatness lay in the unity of form and content. But he wanted to go beyond that. He wanted to reach a new “greatness” which, by his nature, he must have conceived of not as the greatness of the hero, but as the greatness of mythos. He too saw in the late poems of Hölderlin the triumph of art over art — a new mythos or the attempt at one. The immortal Duino Elegies are an attempt in this direction: to achieve the triumph of art over art.8

Rudolf Kassner, by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, circa 1928.

The philosophical work of Rudolf Kassner, one of the most singular and sealed of contemporary thought, is made of a certain number of small books, seemingly heterogeneous, whose titles are as discreet as is fresh and significant their philosophical tenor.

Here, no system and no jargon; not even a formal allusion to the real unity of this work: to the fierce temper of the author, interpreting oneself would appear undignified. Nevertheless, he who can sense the meaning of this timely work will precisely grasp its organic unity, which appears to be given, and from which the work draws its strength.

Kassner maybe shares with Kierkegaard, whose work these days finally has been recognised in its whole magnitude, a specific kind of dissimulation: both of them are attached to present the gravest, the broadest of problems in a skillfully convoluted way, as if they were but details, and even insignificant. Highly philosophical position, which may be completely opposite to the mighty exhibitionism and to the dynamic exaltation of the later Nietzsche.

Works of this scope, by the very density of their spiritual frame, exclude any quick comprehension. We will find in the future (and maybe soon), not without surprise, that an era so avid of new contents and forms as ours will have neglected forms and contents so new. It will not be difficult then to recognise the original sequence, properly existential, by which the most subtle threads of European spirituality, thanks to the power of an absolutely personal mind, make a full-fledged compendium of the wisdom of living of this philosophy; but of a wisdom far more elevated than that of the French moralists, with the exception of Pascal.9

An attempt at a bibliography

• The Leper, Apocryphal pages from the Emperor Alexander I Notebook, The Open Court, Vol. XL (No. 7) July, 1926 (No. 842). [from Die Chimäre, 1914]

• The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The Calendar of Modern Letters, April-July 1927: Vol 4. (tr. Hedvig Kuranda) [from Die Mythen der Seele, 1927]

• Empedocles - The Mother, The Open Court, Vol. XLII (No. 2) February, 1928 (No. 861). [from Der Tod und die Maske, 1902]

• Mary and Martha, The Open Court, Vol. XLII (No. 3) March 1928, (No. 862). [from Kleine Schriften aus der Frühzeit, 1903]

• Rilke: A Reminiscence, Partisan review, Vol. 16, No. 1, 1949. (tr. Maria Gassler) [from Narciss oder Mythos und Einbildungskraft, 1928]

• Transfiguration, Times Literary Supplement, 487, 1950. [from Transfiguration, 1946]

• Sulla and the Satyr, Arion 1, 1970, later in Literary Imagination 3, 1, 2001; also in Saul Bellow & Keith Botsford, editors : the best from five decades, 2001. (tr. Christopher Middleton) [from Das Buch der Gleichnisse, 1934]

• A Small Lump of Earth, Arion 8, 4, 1970. (tr. Christopher Middleton) [from Der goldene Drachen, Gleichnis und Essay, 1957]

• On Goethe's Greatness and his Fortune, Delos 5, 1970. (tr. Christopher Middleton) [from Umgang der Jahre, 1949]

• Notes on Rodin’s sculpture, in Rodin in perspective, 1980, pp. 101-104. (tr. Sabina Quitslund) [from Motive, Essays, 1906]

• The Second Voyage, in Anthology of modern Austrian literature, 1981, pp. 84-91. (tr. Gerdald Chapple) [from Die zweite Fahrt, 1946]

The late poet Christopher Middleton, in a 1976 conversation, said that among “the only things [he has] translated which haven’t been published are seventeen essays by Rudolf Kassner (…)”. It could be interesting to try having them finally published; may this article help this idea come to fruition.

Fragments

“Recently I wrote the following sentence about Kassner and some other matters:
There are things we have never seen, heard, or even felt, whose existence moreover cannot be proved — although no one has as yet tried to prove them — which we nevertheless run in pursuit of, even though the direction of their course has never been seen, and which we catch up with before we have reached them, and into which we someday fall with clothes, family memories, and social relationships as into a pit that was only a shadow on the road.” (Franz Kafka to Max Brod, December 15, 1908.)

“I agree with Rudolf Kassner when he observes this:
‘In the West it looks as if a few minds, philosophers, or historical personalities had thought themselves up, and as if in India the soul had done the same… as if their thoughts were too pretentious, always too sparse or too abundant, anarchic or tyrannical, ‘mental reservations,’ a detour, parvenu; as if they were thinking because they did not love.’ [Der indische Idealismus: Eine Studie, 1915]” (Hugo Ball, Critique of the German intelligentsia, 1919.)

“As Rudolf Kassner says in his fascinating book, Zahl und Gesicht [1919]:
‘The pre-christian man with his Mean (Mitte) bore a charmed life against mediocrity. The Christian stands in greater danger of becoming mediocre. If we bear in mind the idea, the absolute to which the Christian claims to be related, a mediocre Christian becomes comic. The pre-christian man could still be mediocre without becoming comic because for him his mediocrity was the Mean. The Christian cannot.’” (W. H. Auden’s presentation of The Living Thoughts of Kierkegaard, 1952.)

“With Joyce one sees how right Kassner was when he said that the imagination is the only remedy, infinitely more positive than the disease itself, for modern inhibition, which an alternative current of intro- and extra-version does not suffice to explain, since our incapacity to project a world comes from an equal incapacity to absorb another.” (Armand Petitjean, transition, 23, 1935.)

“The essayist Rudolf Kassner gives the following account of Treitschke (1834-1896) and his effect on the students:
‘In fact there was nothing Prussian about Treitschke, whose lectures I did not miss once, certainly not in language and accent. The Slavonic trait in his features which of course came from a long way back seemed to me to be unmistakable. And his whole drunken style, heightened — it must be said — by his deafness, was not really Prussian. He was a deaf hero. So Mommsen and Treitschke were the great opponents at the university. However, Treitschke won; he was the idol of the students. When they felt that their beloved teacher had thought enough about the past for that day and it was time to return to the present state of politics, they needed only to stamp their feet impatiently in the middle of the lecture for their wish to be fulfilled’ [Buch der Erinnerung, 1938].” (Drescher, Ernst Troeltsch : his life and work, 1992.)

“When [Otto] Weininger visited him, Kassner was working on a translation of the Symposium and on a series of parables about Eros in the style of the Platonic dialogues, which appeared in 1902 under the title Der Tod und die Maske (Death and the Mask). In the first of these parables, ‘Psyche und der Faun,’ Psyche asks the Faun, ‘Then you have never heard of the king of Arcadia and his three daughters, and how Eros, the gods’ son, courted me, Psyche, the youngest daughter?’ The two authors certainly would have discussed the progress of their respective works on Eros, and Weininger’s poetic, ambivalent title for his psychobiological study may have been born in this way. […]
Kassner recalled decades later that:
‘Chamberlain was an anti-Semite and dedicated his Foundations of the Nineteenth Century to a racially pure Jew. He claimed that Jews were incapable of creative genius, and only called Weininger, the author of Sex and Character, a genius because Weininger had himself desperately denied Jews genius and, himself a Jew, was nonetheless an anti-Semite. Weininger had visited me several times before the publication of his later famous book. Never in my life have I met such a gifted person, a person gifted in so many different areas, who at that same time was not at all what one would call a personality, who exuded so little fascination or power. If one may say so, Weininger looked and carried himself like a deeply disturbed young man from the business world’ [Buch der Erinnerung, 1938].” (Harrowitz, Hyams (eds.), Jews & gender : responses to Otto Weininger, 1995.)

“Rudolf Kassner had a similar reaction [to Stefan George declamations]:
‘He read from his Dante translation: murmuring word after word, avoiding any emotion, as if he were reading magic spells or prayers in a language that no-one needed to understand, because it is holy and designed for purely magical effects.’ [Buch der Erinnerung, 1938]” (Berman, Cross (eds.), Schoenberg and Words : the modernist years, 2000.)

“As Kassner has pointed out:
‘The difficulty about the God-man for the poet lies in the Word being made Flesh. This means that reason and imagination are one. But does not Poetry, as such, live from there being a gulf between them? What gives us so clear a notion of this as metre, verse measures? In the magical-mythical world, metre was sacred, so was the strophe, the line, the words in the line, the letters. The poets were prophets. That the God-man did not write down his words himself or show the slightest concern that they should be written down in letters, brings us back to the Word made Flesh. Over against the metrical structures of the poets stand the Gospel parables in prose, over against magic a freedom which finds its limits within itself, is itself limit, over against poetic fiction (Dichtung), pointing to and interpreting fact (Deutung).’ [Die Geburt Christi, 1951]” (W. H. Auden, ‘Postscript: Christianity and Art’, in The New Orpheus: Essays Toward a Christian Poetic, 1964.)