Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: The Tender Gaze
- 1 Toward a Theory of the Tender Gaze: Affect, Critical Insight, and Empathy in Contemporary German Cinema
- 2 The Tender Gaze, Embodied Politics, and Perspective-Taking in German Postdramatic Theater
- 3 Face to Face: Race, Gender, and the Gaze in Mo Asumang’s Die Arier
- 4 “Risse, hinter denen man einen Kern entdeckt, der so ähnlich ist wie die Herzen von uns allen”: The Tender Gaze in Umut Dağ’s Risse im Beton
- 5 Looking through the Eyes of Empathy: Encouraging a Culture of Caring and Compassion in Doris Dörrie’s Keiner liebt mich
- 6 The Tender and Transgressive Beast Within: Escape Narratives in Films by Krebitz, Stuber, and Speckenbach
- 7 Looking at Looking in Margarethe von Trotta’s Das Versprechen
- 8 A Queer Phenomenology of Gender in Maren Ade’s Alle Anderen and Toni Erdmann
- 9 Rilke’s “Schauen”
- 10 Pity Stares or Tender Gaze? Seeing Disability in Nineteenth-Century Austrian and German Literature
- 11 The Sociohistorical and Gendered Implications of Gazing Tenderly in Ludwig Tieck’s “Liebeszauber”
- 12 Mothering, Animals, and the Surveillance State in the Anthropocene: An Ecofeminist Reading of Birgit Vanderbeke’s Die Frau mit dem Hund
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
9 - Rilke’s “Schauen”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: The Tender Gaze
- 1 Toward a Theory of the Tender Gaze: Affect, Critical Insight, and Empathy in Contemporary German Cinema
- 2 The Tender Gaze, Embodied Politics, and Perspective-Taking in German Postdramatic Theater
- 3 Face to Face: Race, Gender, and the Gaze in Mo Asumang’s Die Arier
- 4 “Risse, hinter denen man einen Kern entdeckt, der so ähnlich ist wie die Herzen von uns allen”: The Tender Gaze in Umut Dağ’s Risse im Beton
- 5 Looking through the Eyes of Empathy: Encouraging a Culture of Caring and Compassion in Doris Dörrie’s Keiner liebt mich
- 6 The Tender and Transgressive Beast Within: Escape Narratives in Films by Krebitz, Stuber, and Speckenbach
- 7 Looking at Looking in Margarethe von Trotta’s Das Versprechen
- 8 A Queer Phenomenology of Gender in Maren Ade’s Alle Anderen and Toni Erdmann
- 9 Rilke’s “Schauen”
- 10 Pity Stares or Tender Gaze? Seeing Disability in Nineteenth-Century Austrian and German Literature
- 11 The Sociohistorical and Gendered Implications of Gazing Tenderly in Ludwig Tieck’s “Liebeszauber”
- 12 Mothering, Animals, and the Surveillance State in the Anthropocene: An Ecofeminist Reading of Birgit Vanderbeke’s Die Frau mit dem Hund
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
Summary
THE PROJECT OF CULTIVATING a special kind of looking (“Schauen”) engaged Rainer Maria Rilke from approximately 1900 until 1914. The initial poem in Das Buch der Bilder (The Book of Images), “Eingang” (“Entrance,” 1900), encourages the reader, “whoever you might be,” to create the world afresh “with your eyes.” The poem “Wendung” (“Turning Point,” 20 June 1914) explicitly documents Rilke's turn from “Schauen” (looking) to “Herz-Werk” (heart work). This poem, which begins, “Lange errang ers im Anschaun” (For a long time he won it through looking), ends with the stanzas:
Denn des Anschauns, siehe, ist eine Grenze.
Und die geschautere Welt
will in der Liebe gedeihn.
Werk des Gesichts ist getan,
tue nun Herz-Werk
an den Bildern in dir, jenen gefangenen; denn du
überwältigtest sie; aber nun kennst du sie nicht.
Siehe, innerer Mann, dein inneres Madchen,
dieses errungene aus
tausend Naturen, dieses
erst nur errungene, nie
noch geliebte Geschöpf.
[For see, there's a limit to looking. And the more looked-upon world wants to prosper in love. The work of vision is done. Now do heart work on the pictures inside you, the trapped ones. For you overpowered them; but now you do not know them. See, inner man, your inner girl, won from a thousand natures, this creature only just won, as yet never loved.]
Here Rilke sets up antitheses: “Anschaun” (looking) vs. “Liebe” (love) that, moreover, are gendered. In suggesting that for the “inner man,” learning “Herz-Werk” is bound up with acquiring and loving one's “inner girl,” he picks up on an idea he develops at much greater length in his autobiographical novel Die Aufzeichungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, 1910). In Malte, Rilke's first-person narrator proposes that women have historically been the great heroic lovers, having cultivated and perfected an art of love that in men has largely remained undeveloped potential. Specifically, women have shown themselves capable of unrequited love—or “intransitive love” as it has come to be known in Malte criticism. To Malte, this history testifies not to their victimhood but to their strength.
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- Information
- The Tender GazeCompassionate Encounters on the German Screen, Page, and Stage, pp. 159 - 176Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2021