Eric Sean Nelson, Review of Richard Detsch, Rilke’s Connections to Nietzsche (University Press of America, 2003).

Published in: German Studies Review, May 2005, Vol. 28 Issue 2, 418-419.

Richard Detsch. Rilke’s Connections to Nietzsche. Lanham, ML: University Press of America, 2003. Pp. 127. Paper $27.00.

This book explores Rilke’s discussions of Nietzsche and his use of ideas, images, and tropes developed throughout his encounter with Nietzsche. The author focuses on Rilke’s literary works and biographical materials such as letters that help reveal important features about Rilke’s response to Nietzsche.

This short work does not attempt to systematically explore all of the connections between Nietzsche and Rilke. It does, however, meet its aim of productively and critically engaging a number of central philosophical concepts and literary strategies that resonate between their respective works as well as differentiate them in order to reconsider issues such as art, experience, modernity, and nature.

Detsch insightfully conveys their common inspiration in the natural beauty and the sublimity of nature, their preference for the "unmodern" and the archaic in face of the rapidly developing and decentering experiences of modernity, and the centrality of art and the aesthetic as the primary mode of relating to the other. For both, otherness calls forth a process that involves incorporation and self-transformation. He also examines how their use of language is shaped by the attempt to intensify life. Examples of such heightening of existence are the eternal return of the same, the will to power and the overman in Nietzsche and the poetry of roses, death, balls and angels in Rilke. Although it seems that Rilke’s attention to the transitory moment is contrary to Nietzsche’s eternal repetition, Detsch convincingly shows that eternity is not about timelessness but the intensity of the moment or the unique significance of the singular moment that cannot be justified by anything else. They express the immanence of things even as they see humans as, in some sense, strangers to the world and themselves.

Detsch argues against interpreting Rilke as radically divergent from Nietzsche by, for example, emphasizing the non-anthropocentric self-disclosure of nature in Rilke. For Detsch, Nietzsche and Rilke use natural imagery as projections of the creative will. Yet he also suggests that there is a radical difference between the human and natural for Rilke that cannot be sublimated by God, the overman or man. Much of Rilke’s poetry expresses the often tragic and melancholy distance between the human and the nonhuman. Perhaps it follows that Rilke is potentially more open to the natural and animal than Nietzsche, if Nietzsche’s understanding of earth, embodiment, and animality is still too tied to the metaphysics of the will. If this is the case, then Detsch does not give adequate due to the force of the inhuman and natural in Rilke. For example, should Rilke’s flower be understood in accordance with Nietzsche’s will to power or is the flower rather in some send an intensified fragment of nature? Is it merely a symbol for human sensuality, fragility, and finitude (which it clearly is) or like the play of the ball does it disclose something outside of human mastery? Such a reading could open up our responsiveness to the presence of the "inhuman" in the natural and supernatural phenomena described so well by Rilke.

Eric Sean Nelson, University of Massachusetts Lowell