2025/05/01 by Meindert Peters · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · #German Literature and Culture Studies #Literature and Cultural Memory #Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Hegel
paper · doi:10.3366/drs.2025.0443
openalex publication_date 2025/05/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
This article closely reads Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's 2015 engagement with Rainer Maria Rilke's prose poem Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke (1899; 1904; 1906) in a dance piece by the same name. De Keersmaeker's piece sheds new light on Rilke's often-dismissed early prose poem and its neo-Romantic medievalist as well as modernist poetics. I focus on two entangled motifs: the use and representation of air and the repeated gesture of a vertically outstretched right arm. By bringing De Keersmaeker's piece in conversation with Anselm Kiefer's performances of the Nazi salute, I show how her work critically engages with the text's afterlife in the Second World War.