ABSTRACT
For the grandparents, a thing used to be a vessel in which they used to find the human (“Menschliches”), Rilke recounts in his long explanatory letter to his Polish translator, and into which they poured their own humanity, all the while, he deplores, “empty, indifferent things, mere semblances, mere copies are shipped to people from America”. Opposed to the concept of the (American) thing as alien, mass-produced, machine-made, is the authentic Rilkean thing whose origin and destiny are human. Of things and animals, Rilke conceives intuitively, creatively, gently, of women, it seems, by cultural mediation, which may account for some of the patriarchal stereotypes he inherits from his culture. Animals, meanwhile, Rilke claims mysteriously, are the confidantes (“Mitwisser”) of the whole (Muzot). “In every thing, there is a prisoner,” Rilke declares in an early poem (Briefwechsel).
