Rainer Maria Rilke

Rilke radically devotes himself to poetry in order to throw light on the border areas of human existence: the uncertainties of love, transcendency and death. He is the author of the first modern novel in German-speaking literature, of the most suggestive sounds in the turn-of-the-century poetry and of a multifaceted œuvre of letters that inspires artists to this day. After an introduction to Rilke’s impecunious poetry, to his biography and to central aspects of his œuvre, Hoffmann presents the most important dramas, prose texts, volumes of poems and correspondence. He also addresses the multimedia reception history of an author who is still being as passionately adored and despised as no one else in classical modernism.