Rainer Maria Rilke, or the Open Life. Author Reading by Sandra Richter

To be open and to write - that was all Rilke wanted: a modest yet demanding wish. As an author, he experienced "the whole of life [...], as if with all its possibilities it passed right through him". But also with all its contradictions. In "The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge" he created one of the first modern novels, along with groundbreaking poetry cycles whose expressive power resonates to this day.

Sandra Richter, a literary scholar and director of the German Literary Archive Marbach, works with new sources that came to Marbach with the acquisition of the major Rilke Archive in 2022. In her biography, the author appears in a new light: not as the world-renouncing hermit he liked to style himself as, but as robust, assertive in society, cheerful and self-ironic, and more knowledgeable about financial matters than is commonly assumed. This biography makes clear why it is especially worthwhile to read Rilke again today: he lived in difficult times and processed them with a force that perhaps only seems credible in the face of existential threat.