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- Herausgeber: e-artnow
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rainer Maria Rilke masterfully blends diary entries, recollections, and dreamlike reflections to trace the inner world of a solitary young aristocrat drifting through the streets of early twentieth-century Paris. Malte, haunted by distant memories of his ancestral home and consumed by the specters of his own anxieties, wanders the city in search of artistic inspiration and personal meaning. As he observes the teeming crowds, he becomes acutely aware of life's fragile nature, fixating on the transience of existence and the many ghosts that quietly inhabit everyday reality. This deeply introspective work, widely regarded as a precursor to modernist literature, eschews conventional narrative for a series of poetic vignettes that challenge the boundaries between fiction and autobiography. Rilke's language resonates with a haunting lyricism, vividly evoking both urban despair and fleeting moments of transcendence. The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge delves fearlessly into questions of identity, creativity, and faith—themes that echo powerfully across the generations. Its lasting impact lies in its ability to unearth the most hidden aspects of human thought and emotion, urging readers to look beyond appearances and embrace the profound mysteries that shape our lives. Engrossing and intensely personal, it remains an essential touchstone of literary innovation. Rainer Maria Rilke, revered for his profoundly lyrical poetry, invested much of his introspective vision into The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, his only novel, which reflected his existential struggles and emerging modernist sensibilities, establishing it as a cornerstone of his literary legacy and a testament to his enduring influence.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
Table of Contents
September 11, Rue Toullier
Table of contents
So, this is where people come to live. I would rather think that people die here. I have been out. I have seen: hospitals. I saw a person who was staggering and about to fall. People gathered around him, which saved me the rest. I saw a pregnant woman. She was pushing herself with difficulty along a high, warm wall, which she sometimes groped for, as if to convince herself that it was still there. Yes, it was still there. Behind it? I searched on my map: Maison d'Accouchement. Good. They will deliver her – they can do that. Next, Rue Saint-Jacques, a large building with a dome. The map indicated Val-de-Grace, Military Hospital. I didn't really need to know that, but it wouldn't hurt. The alleyway started to smell from all sides. It smelled, as far as one could distinguish, of iodoform, of the fat from French fries, of fear. All cities smell in summer. Then I saw a peculiarly starblind house; it couldn't be found on the map, but above the door was still quite legibly written: Asyle de nuit. Next to the entrance were the prices. I read them. It wasn't expensive .
And otherwise? A child in a stationary pram: it was fat, greenish and had a distinct rash on its forehead. It was obviously healing and did not hurt. The child was sleeping, its mouth open, breathing in iodoform, French fries, fear. That was just the way it was. The main thing was that one was alive. That was the main thing .
That I can't stop sleeping with the window open. Electric trams race through my room, ringing. Automobiles pass over me. A door slams. Somewhere a window pane clatters down, I hear its large shards laughing, the small splinters giggling. Then suddenly muffled, enclosed noise from the other side, inside the house. Someone is climbing the stairs. It comes, comes incessantly. It is there, is there for a long time, passes by. And the street again. A girl shrieks: "Ah tais-toi, je ne veux plus." The elevator races up, all agitated, then away, away from everything. Someone calls. People run, overtaking each other. A dog barks. What a relief: a dog. Towards dawn, a cockerel crows, and that is unbounded relief. Then I suddenly fall asleep .
The sounds. But there is something here that is more terrible: the silence. I think that in big fires there is sometimes a moment of extreme tension, the water jets stop, the firefighters stop climbing, nobody moves. Silently, a black cornice appears at the top, and a high wall behind which the fire is raging tilts, silently. Everyone stands and waits, shoulders hunched, faces over their eyes, for the terrible blow. That is how it is here, in the silence .
I am learning to see. I don't know why, but everything goes deeper into me and doesn't stop at the point where it used to end. I have an inner self I didn't know about. Everything goes there now. I don't know what happens there .
Today I wrote a letter, and it occurred to me that I have only been here for three weeks. Three weeks anywhere else, in the country for example, could feel like a day, but here it feels like years. I don't want to write any more letters either. Why should I tell anyone that I am changing? If I change, I don't remain the person I was, and if I am something other than I was, it is clear that I don't know any acquaintances. And I can't possibly write to strangers, to people who don't know me .
Have I said it yet? I am learning to see. Yes, I am beginning. It is still difficult. But I want to make good use of my time. For example, I never realized how many faces there are. There are a lot of people, but there are even more faces, because everyone has several. There are people who wear the same face for years. Of course it wears out, gets dirty, the wrinkles break, it widens like gloves worn on a journey. These are frugal, simple people; they don't change it, they don't even have it cleaned. It is good enough, they claim, and who can prove them wrong? Now, of course, the question is, since they have several faces, what do they do with the others? They keep them. Their children are supposed to wear them. But it also happens that their dogs go out with them. Why not? Face is face .
Other people put on their faces one after the other, and wear them out. At first it seems to them that they have it forever, but they are barely forty; there is already the last one. Of course, there is a tragedy in this. They are not used to saving faces, their last one is worn through in eight days, has holes in it, is thin like paper in many places, and then bit by bit the underlay comes out, the non-face, and they walk around with it .
But the woman, the woman: she had fallen completely into herself, into her hands. It was at the corner of Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. I started walking quietly as soon as I saw her. When poor people reflect, they should not be disturbed. Maybe it will occur to them after all .
The street was too empty, its emptiness was bored and pulled the step out from under my feet and flipped it over, back and forth, like a wooden shoe. The woman was startled and stood up too quickly, too violently, so that her face remained in the two hands. I could see it lying there, its hollow shape. It took me an indescribable effort to stay with these hands and not to see what had been torn from them. I dreaded seeing a face from the inside, but I was even more afraid of the mere wounded head without a face .
I am afraid. You have to do something about fear once you have it. It would be very ugly to get sick here, and if someone thought of taking me to the Hôtel-Dieu, I would surely die there. This hôtel is a pleasant hôtel, very popular. You can hardly look at the façade of the cathedral of Paris without the risk of being run over by one of the many carriages that have to get in as quickly as possible across the open space there. These are small omnibuses that ring constantly, and even the Duke of Sagan would have to have his team held if some little dying man had it in his head to want to go straight to God's hotel. Dying people are stubborn, and all of Paris comes to a halt when Madame Legrand, a brocanteuse from Rue des Martyrs, is heading for a certain place in the city. It should be noted that these devilish little carriages have extremely stimulating frosted glass windows, behind which one can imagine the most glorious agonies; the imagination of a concierge is enough for that. If you have more imagination and use it in other directions, the possibilities are almost endless. But I have also seen open cabs arrive, time cabs with the top down, driving at the usual rate: two francs for the hour of death .
This excellent hotel is very old; people were already dying in some of its beds in the time of Clovis. Now people are dying in 559 beds: in a factory-like manner, of course. With such enormous production, the individual death is not so well executed, but that is not the point. It is the mass that counts. Who still cares about a well-executed death today? Nobody. Even the rich, who could afford to take their time dying, are beginning to become careless and indifferent; the desire to have a death of one's own is becoming increasingly rare. A little while longer, and it will be just as rare as having a life of one's own. God, it's all there. You come, you find a life, ready-made, you just have to put it on. You want to leave or you are forced to: well, no effort: Voilà votre mort, monsieur. You die as it happens; you die the death that belongs to the disease that you have (because since we know all diseases, we also know that the various lethal outcomes belong to the diseases and not to the people; and the sick person has, so to speak, nothing to do ).
In the sanatoriums, where people are so eager to die and are so grateful to the doctors and nurses, one dies the kind of death that is expected at the institution; this is gladly seen. But if one dies at home, it is natural to choose the polite death of the good circles, with which, as it were, the first-class funeral already begins and the whole sequence of its beautiful customs. Then the poor stand before such a house and their eyes are satisfied. Their death is, of course, banal, without any circumstances. They are happy when they find one that fits roughly. It may be too wide: one always grows a little. Only if it doesn't close over the chest or chokes, then it has its problems .
When I think of home, where there is no one anymore, I believe that it must have been different in the past. In the past, people knew (or perhaps sensed) that theyhaddeathinthem like the fruit has a pit. The children had a small one and the adults a large one. The women had it in their womb and the men in their chest.One had it, and that gave one a peculiar dignity and a quiet pride .
My grandfather, old chamberlain Brigge, still bore within him a death that could be seen in his eyes. And what a death it was: for two months and so loudly that it was heard as far away as the neighboring estate .
The long, old manor house was too small for this death; it seemed as if wings had to be added, because the chamberlain's body was getting bigger and bigger, and he constantly wanted to be carried from one room to the other and flew into a terrible rage if the day was not yet over and there was no room left in which he had not already lain. Then the whole procession, with the servants, maids, and dogs that he always had around him, went upstairs and, led by the head butler, entered his blessed mother's death chamber, which had been kept exactly as she had left it twenty-three years earlier and which no one else was ever allowed to enter. Now the whole pack broke in there. The curtains were drawn back, and the robust light of a summer afternoon examined all the shy, frightened objects, turning awkwardly in the torn mirrors. And so did the people. There were maids who, in their curiosity, didn't know where their hands were at any given moment, young footmen who stared at everything, and older servants who walked around trying to remember what they had been told about this locked room, in which they now found themselves lucky enough to be .
Above all, the dogs seemed to find their stay in a room where all the objects had a particular smell to be extremely stimulating. The tall, slender Russian greyhounds ran busily back and forth behind the armchairs, crossing the room in long, swaying dance steps, lifting themselves up like heraldic dogs, and looked, their slender paws on the white-gold window sill, with pointed, tense faces and furrowed brows, to the right and to the left into the courtyard. Small, glove-yellow dachshunds sat, with faces as if everything were quite in order, in the wide, silk-upholstered armchair by the window, and a dour-looking, sable-haired pointer rubbed his back against the edge of a gilded-legged table, on the painted top of which the Sèvres cups trembled .
Yes, it was a terrible time for these absent-minded, sleepy things. It happened that rose petals tumbled out of books that some hasty hand had opened clumsily, and were crushed; small, delicate objects were picked up and, after being broken immediately, quickly put back down; some bent objects were also tucked under curtains or even thrown behind the golden mesh of the fireplace grate. And from time to time something fell, fell covered onto the carpet, fell brightly onto the hard parquet floor, but it smashed there and there, burst sharply or broke almost silently, because these things, pampered as they were, could not withstand any fall .
And if anyone had thought to ask what had caused all the signs of doom to descend on this jealously guarded room, there would have been only one answer: death. The death of chamberlain Christoph Detlev Brigge on Ulsgaard. For this lay, bulging over his dark blue uniform, in the middle of the floor and did not move. In his large, strange face, no longer familiar to anyone, his eyes had fallen shut: he did not see what was happening. They had tried to put him on the bed at first, but he had resisted because he hated beds since those first nights when his illness had grown. Also, the bed had proved to be too small up there, and there was nothing left to do but to lay him on the carpet like that; because he hadn't wanted to go downstairs .
There he lay, and one might think that he was dead. The dogs, as dawn was slowly beginning to break, had one by one dragged themselves through the crack of the door; only the harsh-haired one with the sullen face sat with his master, and one of his broad, shaggy front paws lay on Christoph Detlev's large gray hand. Most of the servants were now standing outside in the white corridor, which was lighter than the room; but those who remained inside looked furtively at the large, darkening heap in the middle, and wished that it were nothing more than a large garment over a rotten thing .
But it was something. It was a voice, the voice that no one had known seven weeks ago: for it was not the voice of the chamberlain. It was not Christoph Detlev who had this voice, it was Christoph Detlev's death .
Christoph Detlev's death had been living on Ulsgaard for many, many days, talking to everyone and demanding. Demanded to be carried, demanded the blue room, demanded the small parlor, demanded the hall. Demanded the dogs, demanded that one laugh, speak, play and be quiet, and all at the same time. Demanded to see friends, women and the deceased, and demanded to die himself: demanded. Demanded and screamed .
For when night had come and those of the over-tired servants who were not on guard tried to fall asleep, then Christoph Detlev's death screamed, screamed and groaned, roared so long and persistently that the dogs, which howled with him at first, fell silent and did not dare to lie down and, standing on their long, slender, trembling legs, were afraid. And when they heard it in the village through the wide, silver, Danish summer night, they got up as they would in a thunderstorm, dressed themselves, and sat around the lamp without a word until it was over. And the women who were close to giving birth were laid in the furthest rooms and in the densest bedsteads; but they heard it, they heard it as if it were in their own bodies, and they begged to be allowed to get up too, and they came, white and wide, and sat with the others with their blurred faces. And the cows that calved during this time were helpless and secretive, and one had the dead fruit with all its entrails torn from its body when it did not want to come at all. And everyone did their daily work badly and forgot to bring in the hay because they were frightened by the night during the day and because they were so exhausted from all the waking and the frightened waking up that they could not think of anything. And when they went into the white, peaceful church on Sundays, they prayed that there would be no more master on Ulsgaard: because this one was a terrible master. And what they all thought and prayed, the parson said aloud from the pulpit, for he too had no more nights and could not grasp God. And the bell said it, which had gotten a terrible rival that droned all night and against which it could do nothing, even when it began to ring out of all its metal. Yes, everyone said so, and there was one among the young people who had dreamt that he had gone to the castle and killed the master with his pitchfork. People were so upset, so at an end, so overwrought, that everyone listened as he told his dream, and then, without knowing it, looked at him to see if he was up to such an act. That was how they felt and spoke in the whole area, where the chamberlain had been loved and pitied just a few weeks earlier. But though they spoke thus, nothing changed. Christoph Detlevs Tod, who was staying at Ulsgaard, would not be hurried. He had come for ten weeks, and he would stay for ten weeks. And during that time he was more master than Christoph Detlev Brigge had ever been; he was like a king, whom one calls the terrible, later and always. This was not the death of some water-sick man, but the evil, princely death that the chamberlain had carried within him and nourished throughout his life. All the excess pride, will and lordly power that he had not been able to consume even in his quiet days had gone into his death, into the death that now sat on Ulsgaard and wasted away .
How would the chamberlain have regarded Brigge if anyone had asked him to die any other death than this. He died his heavy death .
And when I think of the others I have seen or heard of, it is always the same. They all had their own death. These men, who carried him in his armor, inside, like a prisoner, these women, who grew very old and very young and then, on an enormous bed, like on a stage, passed away in front of the entire family, the servants and the dogs, discreet and grand. Yes, even the children, even the very young, did not have just any child's death; they gathered themselves together and died that which they already were and that which they would have become .
And what a wistful beauty it gave to the women when they were pregnant and stood, and in their large belly, on which the slender hands involuntarily remained, weretwo fruits: a child and a death. Didn't the dense, almost nourishing smile in their completely cleared-out face come from the fact that they sometimes thought both were growing ?
I have done something about the fear. I sat up all night writing, and now I am as tired as if I had walked the long distance across the Ulsgaard fields. It is hard to realize that it is all gone, that strangers live in the long old manor house. It may be that the maids now sleep in the white room up in the gable, sleeping their heavy, moist sleep from evening till morning .
And you have no one and nothing and travel around the world with a suitcase and a book box and actually without curiosity. What kind of life is that: without a house, without inherited things, without dogs. If only you had your memories. But who does? If only your childhood were there, it's as if it were buried. Perhaps you have to be old to be able to reach out to all of that. I like being old .
Today was a beautiful autumn morning. I walked through the Tuileries. Everything facing east, away from the sun, was dazzling. The sun-drenched area was shrouded in mist, as if by a light gray curtain. Among the still-veiled gardens, the statues basked in the gray within the gray. A few flowers in the long flowerbeds stood up and said, "Red," in a frightened voice. Then a very tall, slender man came around the corner from the Champs-Elysées; he carried a crutch, but no longer under his shoulder – he held it in front of him, lightly, and from time to time he placed it firmly and loudly like a herald's staff. He couldn't suppress a smile of joy and smiled, past it all, at the trees. His step was shy like a child's, but unusually light, full of memories of earlier walking .
What a little moon can do. There are days when everything around you is light, easy, barely indicated in the bright air and yet distinct. The near has the sounds of the far, is removed and only shown, not brought forward; and what has relation to the distance: the river, the bridges, the long streets and the squares that squander themselves, have taken in this distance behind them, are painted on it like on silk. It is impossible to say what a light-green carriage on the Pont-Neuf might be, or what kind of red it is, which cannot be held, or even just a poster on the firewall of a pearl-gray group of houses. Everything is simplified, reduced to a few well-chosen highlights, like a face in a Manet painting. And nothing is superfluous or insignificant. The second-hand book dealers on the quay open their boxes, and the fresh or well-worn yellow of the books, the purplish brown of the volumes, the deeper green of a folder: everything is right, valid, participates and forms a totality in which nothing is missing .
Below is the following arrangement: a small handcart pushed by a woman; on it, lengthwise, a hurdy-gurdy. Behind it, crosswise, a child's basket, in which a very small child stands, firmly on its legs, happy in its bonnet, and does not allow itself to be sat. From time to time, the woman turns the organ box. The very small child then immediately stands up again in its basket, stamping, and a little girl in a green Sunday dress dances and beats a tambourine up to the windows .
I think I should start to work a little now that I am learning to see. I am twenty-eight, and almost nothing has happened. Let me repeat: I have written a study of Carpaccio that is bad, a drama called 'Marriage' that tries to prove something false with ambiguous means, and verses. Oh, but verses are of so little use when written early. You should wait with them and gather meaning and sweetness throughout your whole life and a long one at that, and then, at the very end, maybe you could write ten lines that are good. Because verses are not, as people think, feelings (you have those soon enough) – they are experiences. To write a verse, one must see many cities, people and things; one must know the animals; one must feel how the birds fly and know the gestures with which small flowers open in the morning. You have to be able to think back to paths in unknown areas, to unexpected encounters and to farewells that you saw coming a long time ago, to childhood days that have not yet been explained, to parents who had to offend you when they brought you joy and you did not understand it (it was a joy for someone else), to childhood illnesses that take such strange turns with so many profound and difficult transformations, days in quiet, reserved rooms and mornings by the sea, the sea in general, the sea, traveling nights that rushed up and flew with all the stars – and it is not enough to think about all that. One must have memories of many nights of love, each unlike the other, of the screams of women in labor and of light, white, sleeping women in childbed, who close themselves. But one must also have been with the dying, must have sat with the dead in the room with the open window and the intermittent sounds. And it is still not enough to have memories. You have to be able to forget them if there are many, and you have to have the great patience to wait for them to come back. Because the memories themselvesare not it yet. Only when they become blood in us, in our gaze and gestures, nameless and no longer distinguishable from ourselves, only then can it happen, in a very rare hour, that the first word of a verse arises in their midst and comes forth from them .
But all my verses came into being differently, so they are none. – And when I wrote my drama, how I erred there. Was I an imitator and a fool that I needed a third party to tell of the fate of two people who made it difficult for each other? How easily I fell into the trap. And yet I should have known that this third party, who walks through all lives and literature, this spectre of a third party who never was, has no significance, that one must deny him. He belongs to nature's pretexts, which is always at pains to divert human attention from its deepest secrets. He is the screen behind which a drama is enacted. It is the noise at the entrance to the voiceless silence of a real conflict. One might think that it has been too difficult for everyone so far to talk about the two of them involved; the third, precisely because he is so unreal, is the easy part of the task, they could all do it. Right at the beginning of their dramas, one notices the impatience to get to the third, they can hardly wait for him. Once he arrives, everything is fine. But how boring it is when he is late; nothing can happen without him, everything stands still, falters, waits. And what if it remained this way, in this state of expectation and waiting? What if, playwright, and you, audience, who know life, what if he were lost, this popular bon vivant or this presumptuous young man who enters into all marriages like a duplicate key? What if, for example, the devil had taken him? Let's assume it. Suddenly you notice the artificial emptiness of the theaters; they are walled up like dangerous holes, only the moths from the edges of the boxes tumble through the unstable cavity. The playwrights no longer enjoy their villa districts. All public attention searches for the irreplaceable in faraway parts of the world, which was the plot itself .
And yet they live among people, not these 'third parties', but the two, about whom there is so much to say, about whom nothing has ever been said, although they suffer and act and don't know how to help themselves .
It's ridiculous. I'm sitting here in my little room, me, Brigge, who has turned twenty-eight and whom nobody knows. I'm sitting here and I'm nothing. And yet, this nothing starts thinking and, five flights up, on a gray Parisian afternoon, it thinks this thought: 'Is it possible, it thinks, that one has not yet seen, recognized and said anything real and important? Is it possible that people have had thousands of years to look, think and record, and that they have let the millennia pass like a school break, during which one eats one's sandwich and an apple ?
Yes, it is possible .
Is it possible that despite inventions and progress, despite culture, religion and world wisdom, we have remained on the surface of life? Is it possible that even this surface, which would at least have been something, has been covered with an incredibly boring material, so that it looks like the parlor furniture during the summer vacation ?
Yes, it is possible .
Is it possible that the whole of world history has been misunderstood? Is it possible that the past is false because people always talk about the masses as if they were a gathering of many people instead of talking about the one around whom they stood because he was a stranger and dying ?
Yes, it is possible .
Is it possible that people felt they had to make up for what happened before they were born? Is it possible that each individual had to be reminded that they had arisen from all those who came before them, and so knew and should not let themselves be persuaded by others who knew differently ?
Yes, it is possible .
Is it possible that all these people know a past that never was exactly? Is it possible that all realities are nothing to them; that their lives run their course, unconnected to anything, like a clock in an empty room –?
Yes, it is possible .
Is it possible not to know anything about girls who are still alive? Is it possible to say 'women', 'children', 'boys' and not realize (not realize, no matter how educated you are) that these words have long since ceased to have a plural, but only countless singulars ?
Yes, it is possible .
Is it possible that there are people who say 'God' and mean that it is something common? – And just look at two schoolchildren: one buys a knife, and his neighbor buys an exactly the same one on the same day. And they show each other the two knives a week later, and it turns out that they only look remotely similar – that's how differently they have developed in different hands. (Yes, says the one's mother: even if you always have to wear everything out.) Oh, and one more thing: is it possible to believe that you can have a God without using him ?
Yes, it is possible .
But if all this is possible, if it has even the slightest possibility, then something must be done at all costs. The next person, the one who has had this disturbing thought, must start to do something of what has been neglected; even if it is just anyone, not at all the most suitable person: there is simply no one else. This young, inconsequential foreigner, Brigge, will have to sit down five flights up and write, day and night, yes, he will have to write, that will be the end :
I must have been twelve or thirteen at the time. My father had taken me with him to Urnekloster. I don't know what had prompted him to visit his father-in-law. The two men had not seen each other for years, since my mother's death, and my father had never been to the old castle where Count Brahe had retired late in life. I never saw the strange house again, which came into foreign hands when my grandfather died. The way I recall it in my childishly labored memory, it is not a building; it is entirely divided up within me; there is a room, there is a room, and here is a piece of a hallway that does not connect these two rooms, but is kept to itself, as a fragment. In this way, everything is scattered around in me – the rooms, the staircases that settled with such great laboriousness, and other narrow, round staircases, in the darkness of which one walked like blood in veins; the tower rooms, the high balconies, the unexpected altans that you were pushed out onto from a small door: – all of this is still in me and will never stop being in me. It is as if the image of this house had plunged into me from infinite heights and shattered my very foundations .
It seems to me that the only part of it that is completely preserved in my heart is the room where we used to gather for lunch every evening at seven o'clock. I never saw this room during the day, I don't even remember if it had windows and where they looked out; every time the family entered, the candles in the heavy candelabras were lit, and for a few minutes one forgot the time of day and everything one had seen outside. This tall, I suspect vaulted room was stronger than anything; it sucked out all images from you with its dark height and corners that were never fully illuminated, without giving you a specific replacement for them. You sat there as if dissolved; completely without will, without reflection, without desire, without defense. You were like an empty space. I remember that at first this devastating state almost made me feel sick, a kind of seasickness that I only overcame by stretching out my leg until I touched the knee of my father, who was sitting across from me. It was only later that I noticed that he seemed to understand or at least tolerate this strange behavior, although we were on somewhat cool terms, which did not explain such behavior. It was, however, that gentle touch that gave me the strength to endure the long meals. And after a few weeks of convulsive endurance, I had become so accustomed to the uncanniness of those gatherings, with the almost unlimited adaptability of the child, that it no longer cost me any effort to sit at the table for two hours; now they even passed relatively quickly because I was busy observing those present .
