Mist and Mountain with Modern Paris, the Notebooks of Malte Come to Mind As High Points, Featuring As They Laurids Brigge

erman culture has a history of lifting ence and, in particular, his theorizing about creative friendships into an ideal. urban modernity is all over Rilke’s reckoning GThe Classicist and Romantic periods Mist and mountain with modern Paris, The Notebooks of Malte come to mind as high points, featuring as they Laurids Brigge. For with its seemingly ran- did a whole parade of vaunted relationships: dom recounting of events and its atmosphere Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Moses Men- Friendships in German culture of sensory assault, the novel, the only one delssohn, Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Rilke wrote, appears to dramatize lines from Friedrich Schiller, Henriette Herz and Wil- the seminal essay that Simmel published helm von Humboldt, and many more. But the PAUL REITTER while Rilke was living in Paris for the first modernist moment, too, saw a programmatic time, “The Metropolis and Modern Life” elevation of friendship, this time in the spirit Rachel Corbett (1903). There Simmel speaks of “the rapid of setting oneself apart from the ethos of bour- telescoping of changing images” and “the YOU MUST CHANGE YOUR LIFE geois individualism and conventional family The story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste unexpectedness of violent stimuli” as charac- values. The circle of friends around Franz Rodin terizing the experience of places like Paris Kafka and Max Brod in Prague, the coffee- 310pp. Norton. $26. and Berlin at the turn of the century. If Rodin house groupings in Vienna, ties formed in art- 978 0 393 24505 9 taught Rilke how to work, perhaps Simmel ists’ colonies and youth movements, Gershom taught him how to think. Scholem and Walter Benjamin in Berlin: Elizabeth Goodstein Anyone interested in understanding the these connections and dynamics are staple character – and especially the fate – of GEORG SIMMEL AND THE topics when talking of German modernist cul- Simmel’s thought would do well to consult DISCIPLINARY IMAGINARY ture. 480pp. Stanford University Press. £25.99 Elizabeth Goodstein’s Georg Simmel and Certainly friendship and the rejection of (US $29.95). the Disciplinary Imaginary. Born in 1858, conventional family life have loomed large 978 1 5036 0073 7 Simmel had become a major figure in and in accounts of Rainer Maria Rilke’s work. beyond the world of German letters by the Scholars have devoted much attention to time he died sixty years later. In his master- Rilke’s long connection to the psychoanalyst the 1890s, empathy was used to describe the piece, The Philosophy of Money (1903), Lou-Andreas Salomé. Eric Torgersen’s process whereby viewers are moved to invest the focus is on the levelling effects of the excellent study Dear Friend (1998), named a work of art with feeling. Empathy thus money economy. An effect as well as a driver after the title of a poem by Rilke, assessed the carried novel implications for the question of modern society, the money economy, importance of Rilke’s friendship with the of how it is that an artwork achieves its force, Rilke at Rodin’s studio, Meudon, France Simmel claims, compels the reduction of painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, whom he a question that was much on Rilke’s mind value to exchange value, devaluing whatever met in the artists’ colony of Worpsurede. And when he went to Paris to write about and learn tion and deadening of sensory experience. resists the departicularizing logic of abstract now there is You Must Change Your Life, under Rodin. Both were deeply concerned with expressing exchange. Money comes to govern the rela- Rachel Corbett’s perceptive evocation of But the force of You Must Change Your Life what these processes meant for how we relate tionship between the world of values and the Rilke’s relationship with the sculptor is less a function of its (very brief) theoretical to objects, words and each other. And both world of real things, and thus “money is”, in Auguste Rodin, the subject of one of Rilke’s musings than of its granular reimagining. wrote in searching and innovative ways that Simmel’s phrase, “the spider that weaves first books. Corbett seems not to have German; she has, resonated with readers, though Rilke’s writ- the social web”. Rilke went to Paris in 1902 to write about however, clearly made a careful study of the ings have stood up somewhat better to the test Such images had a significant impact on Rodin for a new series of monographs about materials available in translation, and she of time. some of the most important social theorists of artists. He was happy to have received the evokes the interaction between Rodin’s and In 1924, a Germanist named Hermann the age, especially Max Weber. Yet Simmel’s assignment, not least because he needed the Rilke’s circumstances and mental states in Pongs asked Rilke to comment on what he path through the academy was a rocky one. money. With a baby at home, Rilke was also vivid detail. Here is a representative moment, owed to Simmel. It would be kind to call His first attempt at obtaining a regular restless. But above all, he hoped that spend- which comes from Corbett’s account of Rilke Rilke’s reply evasive. He had in fact been a appointment ended in failure. Moreover, he ing time with Rodin, whom he venerated, beginning to compose his Rodin book: “He student of Simmel’s in Berlin. He had also did not have a tenured position until the Uni- would help him find his way to a mature style. stared out the window at the brick wall on produced a small but ardent record of his versity of Strasbourg offered him one in Fragile, uncertain of his poetic path, given the other side. He paced and procrastinated. enthusiasm for Simmel’s work. Yet Rilke 1914, a good job but certainly not what he had to procrastination, and inclined to abstrac- Unaccustomed to shutting his windows, he claimed that he had known the late philoso- been hoping for. tions, the twenty-six-year old Rilke seemed suffered the fatty stench of pommes frites pher only “socially”, having been introduced Goodstein doesn’t discount the role of anti- Rodin’s opposite. At sixty-one, Rodin was wafting in and commingling with iodine to him in 1899 by Andreas Salomé, a friend Semitism in Simmel’s institutional difficul- still robust, and one of the most famous artists vapors from the hospital”. they had in common. ties. She cites him speculating that a in the world. He had a clear sense of what It should also be said that Corbett is a fine To be sure, scholars haven’t taken Rilke’s government minister passed him over for a he wanted to do in his work, and he pursued reader of Rilke’s poetry. For example, she pronouncement at face value. An artist tamp- job in Heidelberg, even though the faculty his vision with great single-mindedness and astutely links the haunting line about beauty ering with the facts of his life isn’t, after all, there supported him, because his was thought energy. His person, like his sculpture, had an from the Duino Elegies – “for beauty is noth- unusual. A prominent critic has observed that to be a “hypercritical” intellect rather than a intense physicality. “If Rodin was a moun- ing / but the beginning of terror which we can Rilke seems to have lived out the diagnosis of creative one, something that was often said to tain, Rilke was the mist encircling it”, reads a still barely endure” – with a view about the the modern condition Simmel set forth in his belittle German-Jewish authors. But it is Sim- particularly lovely line in Corbett’s book. ephemerality of natural beauty that Rilke is essay “The Adventurer”, according to which mel’s style of philosophizing that Goodstein Rilke’s fulsome essay on Rodin may not supposed to have communicated to Freud. art and love affairs are all that can give time sees as the more significant cause. For her, rank among his best writings, but in Paris The result of her efforts is a beautiful exercise the fullness it had for a more religious age. Simmel was a “modernist philosopher” and Rilke got what he came for. In his gruff way, in compact, interwoven double biography. Although mostly in passing, Rilke’s biogra- not, say, a philosophical sociologist or a theo- Rodin took a liking to the poet and gave him There is an ample record of the ups and phers have drawn attention to letters – Rilke’s rizer of modern experience. His very combi- advice about when to work (always) and how downs of Rilke’s friendship with Rodin, own as well as third-party accounts – suggest- nation of strengths made for a liminality that, to see (into the heart of things – what Rilke including its low point. This occurred in ing that Simmel and Rilke had a real affinity in turn, has hindered a fuller reception. Nei- called “inseeing” or einsehen). Rilke wasn’t 1906, when Rodin, a notoriously difficult for each other, even if they were never close ther a polemic outsider like Nietzsche, nor a shy about acknowledging his debts to Rodin, boss, dismissed Rilke, who seldom held a friends. More specifically, scholars have radical innovator whose eye was nevertheless and Corbett reaches a bit when she presents regular job, as his secretary. Where the noted that Rilke sat in Simmel’s classes in recognizably trained on big philosophical Rodin as a hidden voice speaking through the figures involved in a friendship have said 1899 and again in 1905, and that in an unusual questions, Simmel, according to Goodstein, missives to Franz Xaver Kappus that became little about it or have downplayed its import- step, one betraying a high level of trust and produced works that “do not, as has so often Letters to a Young Poet, which Rilke began ance, scholars and critics have been, unsur- comfort, Rilke asked Simmel about the possi- been asserted, simply affirm or uncritically writing in 1902. Rilke actually underlines prisingly, stingier with their attention, even bility of one-on-one study sessions. This register modern experience, with all its frag- Rodin’s importance in the Letters, more than if what is at stake is understanding a truly despite the fact that Simmel was nothing if mentation and contradictoriness, but embody once. Much fresher is Corbett’s bringing into consequential episode in the circulation of not busy, lecturing for his supper as a non- a mode of reflection deliberately shaped by play, in thinking about Rilke’s appreciation ideas. A striking example of such neglect is regular member at the University of Berlin the striving to make the modern world intelli- for Rodin and his techniques, of the new the case of Rilke and the philosopher Georg while publishing at a feverish pace. One com- gible in its own terms”. Simmel’s affinity for notion of empathy, or Einfühlung, which Simmel, two of the great observers of modern mentator has even speculated that Rilke had “particularity”, Goodstein argues, is, partly, Rilke may have been exposed to some years life. Both represented their times as entailing in mind to make Simmel Rodin’s successor as at least, what has led to people to see him as earlier. Coined by Robert Vischer in 1873, complicated, disorienting push-pulls of liber- his mentor. a highbrow bricoleur and not a philosopher of and made more popular by Theodor Lipps in ation and new constraint and the intensifica- Another has argued that Simmel’s influ- the most serious kind.

TLS NOVEMBER 3 2017