ABSTRACT
His temperament, Rilke recalls in one of his letters, was generally thought to be “zart” (Mitten 90), the word denoting gentleness, tenderness, sensitivity, wispiness, fragility, not a flattering term for a little boy with an androgynous first name René and female middle name Maria, whose mother made him wear girls’ dresses until he was six, who grew up in late nineteenth-century militaristic Prague and was sent to military school when he was eleven. From his remembrances of his miserable five years there, we gather that Rilke must have stuck out sorely. The school’s sports field, he recalls in his essay “Remembrance” (1914), was trampled by “the anger, impatience, brutality, and vengefulness of these clueless boys.” As if reminiscing about a childhood crush, he muses: “were you not the first meadow that I knew? Ah, I walked on you more cautiously, as if you should recover under me” (Werke 6, 530). In another essay, “Experience” (1913), again underscoring his tender constitution, Rilke remembers nature’s benevolent effects on him, writing in the third person: “he had never been permeated by softer [leiseren] movements, his body was treated, so to speak, like a soul.” In the same text we find him determined “sich gerade im Leisesten immer Rechenschaft zu geben” “to give himself account, above all, of the gentlest” (Werke 6, 522–23).
