ABSTRACT
No birds fly through clouds of mustard gas. In his letter to Getrud Ouckama Knoop on 26 November 1921, Rainer Maria Rilke mentions the “deep rupture” of years standing “empty! Oh, empty: overflowing with terror and sorrow”. The unmitigated paradox of the empty yet overflowing rooms appears in parentheses: “(Und stehen leer! Ach: leer: sind überfüllt mit Entsetzen und Kummer),” as if the phrase with its brackets, exclamations, and emphatic punctuation wanted to express, but also to contain, the simultaneous paralysis and upheaval Rilke suffered during and after the savagery of World War I. The unexpected violence in the enunciation of the “collapse” of life and death implies Rilke’s own as yet not fully processed grief, restrained, muted, perhaps even repressed throughout this long letter in which Wera remains studiously unmentioned—except at the very end when Rilke abruptly asks her mother for “a little thing that Wera loved, perhaps one that was often and truly with her”.
