Interview with Katja Brunkhorst
by Angela C. Holzer
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Published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, February 2008. Copyright © 2008 Katja Brunkhorst, Angela C. Holzer, and The Nietzsche Circle. All essays, interviews, and reviews are shared copyright between author(s) and The Nietzsche Circle. All rights reserved. Please contact editors for any concerns or for usage rights.
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Katja Brunkhorst was born in Germany but spent most of her academic life in London, England, where she specialized in European Languages, Literature and Thought.
She has dealt extensively with the cognitive value of art, especially poetry, addressing and bridging the divide between aesthetics, psychology, and philosophy that often inhibits scholarly research.
Her first book, ‘Verwandt-Verwandelt’—Nietzsche’s Presence in Rilke, is exemplary of this continued effort by focusing on common themes in Friedrich Nietzsche’s and Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetic and philosophical oeuvres. It is based on the surprising and exhilarating discovery of two copies of Also sprach Zarathustra in the Rilke archive in Gernsbach, Germany. This discovery made it possible for the first time to base a study of Nietzsche and Rilke on textual evidence. Rilke—who had denied any Nietzschean influence—marked Zarathustra’s words. Brunkhorst’s study thus not only develops the story of these thematic influences but poses the theoretical question of influence and contributes to the discussion on the philosophical aspect of Rilke’s poetry and the poetic quality of Nietzsche’s philosophy.
Katja Brunkhorst was working on the electronic publication of Nietzsche’s complete works for HyperNietzsche at the Institut des Textes et Manuscripts Modernes (CNRS/ENS) in Paris, in the context of the European project DISCOVERY. She also continues to play in a rock band, study the marginal notes Lou Andreas-Salomé made in her copy of Also sprach Zarathustra, and is involved in a large research project on Nietzsche and popular culture (a volume on Nietzsche Pop is in preparation together with Mattia Riccardi).
We were already engaged in the interview in August 2007—electronically—when we met in person at the conference of the Nietzsche-Gesellschaft in Naumburg and then, incidentally, both settled in Berlin and became neighbours in the quarter of Prenzlauer Berg. The Naumburg conference turned out to be extraordinarily inspiring. We both are now busy elaborating themes that turned up in conference discussions. Katja founded ApoDio, which will be the driving force behind a series of concert-conference events, the first one to take place in Berlin on September 12-14, 2008. Our group, consisting of two young and extraordinarily interesting Nietzsche scholars, Enrico Müller and Friederike Günther, and me, is preparing another conference, also in Berlin, on September 26-28, 2008, in order to confront the affinities and discrepancies between the sociologist Norbert Elias and Nietzsche.
Katja has been amazingly active and vibrant, engaged and engaging, and full of ideas, with which the interview reverberates. On March 28, 2008, she will be in New York City to participate in the Nietzsche Circle’s first event of the season at NYU’s Deutsches Haus, to discuss Nietzsche and Rilke.
AH: Your dissertation on Nietzsche and Rilke, ‘Verwandt-Verwandelt.’ Nietzsche’s Presence in Rilke, is a study of possible influences and common themes in the work of both. You base your analysis on two copies of Zarathustra that, although partly torn, were found by Hella Sieber-Rilke and you in Rilke’s estate. They are marked and underlined and thus give credible evidence to Rilke’s knowledge and interest in this book. How did you make this exciting discovery and when did you first engage with this thematic complex?
KB: First of all, thank you, Angela, for agreeing to read my book. Early on, I came to both Nietzsche and Rilke through the gut rather than the brain, if you will. Both got to me immediately on first contact, above all through the mastery and musicality of their style. Then, it was their sheer fervor for art, and life itself: each seemed to be on fire to me, constantly echoing each other’s uncompromising love of the earthly and enquiring deeply into their selves, at any cost. Instinctively, they had always struck me as very much kindred spirits, despite their seeming discrepancies—which to me seem largely only to be perceived by superficial readers of their texts.
When studying both more closely, I soon felt their relatedness to be much deeper than just a more or less accidental, joint tapping of the Zeitgeist of their epoch. Even though that word is not well-liked, indeed almost a taboo, in what is still rather poststructuralist-dominated literary criticism (which has us believe there are no authors who write texts, that “empiric evidence” does not matter, and that there are no truths), there had to have been a more or less direct influence of Nietzsche on Rilke. The latter, of course, had always denied such an influence, as had Freud due to priority issues, but still, I began searching. Finding very little of value in existing secondary sources (with the majority of critics merely echoing Rilke’s self-stylization), and nothing of adequate depth or even book length, I decided to go back to the horse’s mouth, or at least the closest I could get: I turned to Hella Sieber-Rilke. I am fortunate enough to have met her and her husband (and Rilke’s grandson), Christoph, through Irina Frowen, herself one of the most knowledgeable readers of both Nietzsche and Rilke. Hella has been managing the Rilke archive near Baden-Baden in Southwestern Germany for a long time and knows his reading and writing like no other. At first, she answered my inquiry as to any Nietzsche books in Rilke’s possession in the negative. She, too, said she didn’t believe he had been very interested in Nietzsche, let alone read him. Stubbornly, however, I persisted and soon had an excited phone call which prompted me to return to the Gernsbach archive as soon as I could. And indeed, there were two Zarathustra copies, one of them in fragments, but both complete with handwritten notes and other reading traces. Even Hella Sieber-Rilke had all but forgotten about them and found them tucked away at the bottom of a chest. As she is a great admirer of Nietzsche herself, you can imagine our excitement that day as we immediately set to work attempting to decipher the faint pencil traces! I really cannot thank her, Christoph, and Irina often enough for their hospitality, help, and friendship.
AH: It was a pleasure to read your book. Not only were you thus able to provide evidence for Rilke’s engagement with, at least parts of, Zarathustra, by analyzing the themes that you claim might be inspired by Nietzsche, you also argue, against a number of previous studies, that the Nietzschean influence on Rilke was continuous, which Rilke himself would probably have denied. Can you summarize briefly the arguments for this view?
KB: The key lies both in the concept of total affirmation of our earthly life as well as in the continuity of the Rilkean œuvre in general. Scholarship tends to divide it into three phases, which can of course at times be handy or even necessary for the critic’s work, but it does no justice, as Görner has observed, to the complex processes of poetic creation, nor does it, as I have found, take into account Rilke’s own, very explicit view. In a 1925 letter to his Polish translator, he testifies to the continuity of his œuvre a year before his death in what reads like his poetological testament: he does not seem to see a major break between the essential conditions created in the Stunden-Buch and the Neue Gedichte and the praise of totality thus achieved in the late phase; rather, he sees the Elegien as a mere ‘weitere Ausgestaltung,’ a continuing development, of those preconditions. Thereby, in a manner highly evocative of Nietzsche’s definition of ‘the thought of the eternal return, that highest form of affirmation,’ as the ‘basic concept’ of Zarathustra [KSA 6, 335], Rilke himself attests the quality of ‘final affirmation’—along with the rejection of a split between the here and the beyond—not only to his mature work, but to his work as a whole.
AH: The book is divided into three parts. First you analyze the existing scholarship on the nexus between Rilke and Nietzsche. There is surprisingly little, and a lot of redundancy, which might partly be due to the fact that Rilke denied any influence by Nietzsche. Yet, obviously he wrote the “Marginalien zu Nietzsche” and was a friend of Lou Salomé, which, however, brings up other problems with regard to his relationship to Nietzsche. Second, you turn to available evidence on his knowledge of Nietzsche and you compare the biographical circumstances of Nietzsche’s writing Zarathustra and Rilke’s reading it. Finally, you analyze the marked passages in the Zarathustra copy and isolate themes that were of interest to Rilke. The central methodological problem that you had to confront, as I see it, is the stringent characterization of ‘influence,’ since you can neither solely rely on biographical or psychological affinities or rejections, nor on direct quotations. Could you describe the basis on which you confront this problem, the method that you call “reader-response-poetics”? Also, it seems that you are not drawing extensively on poststructuralist textual theory, e.g., Kristeva or Gérard Genette, to legitimize your approach. Is there a specific reason for this?
KB: You are quite right, the problem of “influence” detained me far too long as it is a highly contested field within literary studies, as I had to experience. It seems a most personal matter to many scholars: I was amused during my viva when my examiners said they were impressed with the textual interpretation of the findings but suggested I could have done without nearly the entire methodology chapter. That chapter, however, was what my internal examiners at the pre-viva, both of them poststructuralists, wanted me to focus on, to the exclusion of nearly everything else. Having considered Bloom, Barthes, Foucault, and Jauss already, they suggested Bakhtin, Baudrillard, and many others; but luckily, I did not heed their advice. The viva examiners probably would have let me fail if I had! So I hope this answers your question on what you perceive a comparative lack of poststructuralist theory: as far as I am concerned, there is too much of it already, at the expense of simply telling the story of Rilke’s reading of Nietzsche. I would do that differently today. So I guess the matter of influence is one of the most subjective areas in our “Geisteswissenschaft” and it all depends on by whom one is—influenced.
As far as my “reader-response-poetics” are concerned, I simply read what the subjects of my study had to say on matters of influence and criticism—and heeded their voices. As I found to my surprise, that is something which cannot be taken for granted from some of those important names in the theory of influence: a key passage of Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence, for example, is based on Bloom’s own mistranslation of a paragraph from the second Untimely Meditation, in which he represents “Kritik” as “critic” rather than “criticism.” Contrary to Bloom’s construction, in that Unzeitgemäße Betrachtung, Nietzsche really speaks with disdain about the ineffectivity of criticism, disapproving of its perceived lack of performativity.
Similarly, Rilke held that there is nothing by means of which one is less able to touch a work of art than critical words. He spoke of the delicately floating quality of the poetic image as untouchable by systematic interpretation, and that it was prone to imprint a different “edge of its precision” into each “understander.” Interestingly, elsewhere he uses the same word, “Schwebe,” also to describe Nietzsche’s quality of floating lightness and warns of attempts at tying him down to meanings.
Therefore, his influence can be best described in musical terms, and has indeed been seen as a song of sentence-ideas by Roland Barthes, and as the unfinished melody of his, Nietzsche’s, looking by Oswald Spengler. Nietzsche, the music-making artist-metaphysician, of course, was aware of having created a most effective intellectual and poetic echo chamber in Zarathustra. What one needs to ask is where Rilke immersed himself into this chamber and how he produced echoes in his own work. Certain Zarathustrian motifs indeed resound more or less directly in the poet’s writings, whilst others have undergone a poetic transformation.
AH: The third part of the book is the substantial analysis of themes that influenced Rilke. The markings that you have to rely on, however, are few. There are, if this is correct, 15 meaningful marks in Salomé’s copy and merely eight underlined or otherwise marked passages in Rilke’s copy, of which not all point to an engagement by Rilke (e.g., the drawing inserted into the Vorreden, which is probably by Clara Westhoff, or the photograph of Paula Modersohn-Becker in the chapter “Von der Nächstenliebe,” or the pressed cyclamen). How sure can we be that the pencil underlinings stem from Rilke himself?
KB: Fairly sure; according to Hella Sieber-Rilke, they are typical of him in their tidy execution—Clara, in contrast, “did everything on a whim” and apparently, that showed.
AH: And what, again, do we do with the manner in which he might have taken up but certainly transformed Nietzschean themes? The themes that you identify are emotional ones. Thus, in comparing Nietzsche’s chapters “Von der Nächstenliebe” and “Von Kind und Ehe” with Rilke’s “Requiem,” Duineser Elegien, and Sonette an Orpheus, you conclude that both work toward redefining or re-evaluating the notion of love. You also see the theme of loneliness dominant in both. At times, it seems to me, the psychologization of Nietzsche is very direct, e.g., when you write on the Übermensch, which you consider a frightful spectre out of reach, engendered by unfulfilled love: “Herein, the impossibility of ever achieving the elusive goal of turning into the perfection that is the Übermensch is demonstrated vividly. All this suggests that Nietzsche actually despised himself for his imperfection, manifested most clearly by the Salomé/Rée episode” (90). You state that Nietzsche became an Übermensch, a type of inhuman and isolated “Gespenst” after his descent into insanity, which is a “price for his dangerous submission … of the free and unbounded divine” (93). You state that his thinking and his isolation resulted in this mental decline.
I am also sometimes surprised by your application of Rilkean utterings to describe Nietzsche’s situation (93), or by your recurrence to Nietzsche’s own ideas at argumentative cross-roads. Does your biographical approach allow for a clean separation of work and life, or would you consider this separation invalid? And, aside, did Nietzsche really die of brain cancer (93)?
KB: To answer your last question first, while the precise nature of his insanity is of course still debated and probably will remain so, I would maintain that, whatever the medical reason, Nietzsche’s excessive ‘Denken am Abgrund,’ along with his human isolation, cannot have furthered his mental health. By convincingly reassessing Nietzsche’s symptoms, however, the latest research shows that the organic part of the cause of his decline was not, as customarily assumed, syphilis; but that the philosopher almost certainly died of brain cancer.
Secondly, there cannot ever be a ‘clean separation’ of life and work. I believe the bad reputation biographical elements encounter when it comes to methodological choices needs to be re-thought still. After deconstructivism, we not only can but must dare to engage with the personal history behind the work again, which is, as Montinari has observed, following Nietzsche himself, inextricably linked to it, anyway. I am not saying that is all there is to a Nietzschean text, but it is part of it, and a very important one! That is what I realized when I studied the circumstances of the conception and the birth of Zarathustra. Importantly, as I state in my methodology chapter, all this of course implies a redefinition of the term ‘the author,’ as it is often misleadingly believed to be a monolithic concept when, in fact, it is a composition of many voices and many selves. A composite, then, but nonetheless with delimiting boundaries.
As for the ‘direct psychologization’ of Nietzsche: indeed, the trinity of Nietzsche, Zarathustra, and the Übermensch is not always an easy one to split up into its constituent parts. My choice of this word from Christian theology is not accidental, for Zarathustra is of course not purely to be seen from a biographical angle, but also, among various other things, as the attempt at a ‘philosophically religious and morally prophetic substitute for religion and morals,’ as his friend Ida Overbeck put it. Nietzsche apparently heeded his own advice of ‘unablässige Verwandlung,’ ‘incessant transformation’ (KSA 9, 519), and forced himself through many different personae in a short space of time in order to get closer to that ever elusive goal of throwing off all his ballast and becoming the ideal version of himself.
Lastly, I have been reading Nietzsche on a daily basis for a living for a year now and never cease to be amazed at how much he saw himself as a psychologist, prefigured Freud, and regarded a philosopher’s work as his ‘stammered memoirs.’ Only yesterday I came across this amazing statement in the 1883 fragments:
But this innocence also exists in the great philosophers: they are not conscious of the fact that they are talking about themselves—they are convinced it is “about the truth”—but basically, it is all about themselves.
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