Phia Rilke

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Sophie Entz (born May 4, 1851 in Prague ; died November 21, 1931 in Weimar ) became known as Phia Rilke , the mother of Rainer Maria Rilke .

Life

Sophie Entz was the daughter of Carl (or Karl) Entz, a merchant and imperial councilor . She grew up in the small baroque palace of the Prague industrialists' family.

The intelligent but sensitive woman developed social ambition and hope for an elegant life early on. She had a sociable artistic nature who liked to travel and had alternating highly euphoric and deeply depressive phases. She was very religious and a vegetarian .

On May 24, 1873 she married Josef Rilke (1839–1906), who would later become a railway official, with whom she lived in Prague. Your first pregnancy ends in a premature birth ; the daughter does not survive. From then on, she preferred to wear completely black mourning clothes. The son René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke, who later called himself Rainer Maria Rilke, was born on December 4, 1875, and was born after only seven months of pregnancy. She had him baptized four days later on the Conception of Mary ; she saw herself closely connected with Mary and many other Catholic saints . With high hopes in René, she taught him French at an early age and promoted his artistic education, for example by copying and reciting classical poems. At the same time, she lived out her wish for a daughter in her son, who, under the guidance of her, often wore girls' clothes.

In 1884 the marriage with Josef Rilke broke up because Phia did not see her expectations met. Without getting divorced, she and her husband lived separately from then on. She had already caused displeasure in the family with her willingness to travel, but this also gave René his first Italian experience. Now she raised him alone for a short time and then, by mutual agreement, gave him to the St. Pölten cadet institute so that she could take a nervous cure in Vienna herself. After that, she never lived with her son permanently. Instead, René stayed with his paternal uncle.

Phia Rilke began to travel more often from 1890 and now left Prague for good. She frequented large European cities and quiet sanatoriums alternately, with Arco being particularly preferred. This emancipatory freedom was interpreted by contemporaries as an addiction to pleasure. She kept in close correspondence with her son, but also visited him. She outlived her son by nearly five years.

reception

The image of women and the preferences of Rainer Maria Rilke were strongly influenced by his mother. In doing so, Rilke circulated numerous caricature images of his exaggerated, pretentious and spoiled nature and often exaggerated negative character traits of his mother. Phia Rilke was subsequently judged on the basis of reports from Rilke's contemporaries: As a child, she forced him to wear girls' clothes, dust him off and let him speak in a high-pitched voice. In addition to the delusion of being aristocratic and the attempts to fool guests into a larger apartment through optics, she was excessively pious and gave him a lost childhood full of privation. Phia Rilke was a suffering woman that her son had to work on all his life. Poems like Oh woe, my mother tears me up, served Rilke students for decades as the main source to shape an image of Rilke's mother as his neurotic antagonist.

However, other poems and Rilke's letters in which he addresses or alludes to his mother also reflect his gratitude and solidarity with her. His reports about the Christmas parties of his childhood that she designed are known for this. The correspondence between mother and son, fully developed in 2009, comprises over 1,100 letters and provides a picture of the son who understood, loved and adored his mother despite some tensions. This contradicts the repeatedly formulated assumption of an oedipal love-hate relationship with the mother.

Sentences written by Phia Rilke, which she wrote in her diary, were published as her ephemeris in 2002 .

literature

  • Sophie Rilke, Hella Sieber-Rilke (Ed.) Thoughts for the day. Ephemeris. Frankfurt am Main 2002.
  • Rainer Maria Rilke: Letters to the mother. 1896-1926. Published by Hella Sieber-Rilke. Insel Verlag, Frankfurt am Main / Leipzig 2009, ISBN 978-3-458-17318-2 .
  • Rainer Maria Rilke: Christmas letters to the mother. Frankfurt am Main 1995.
  • Hertha Koenig : Rilke's mother. Pfullingen 1963, ISBN 978-3-86532-217-3 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e Heimo Schwilk: Rilke and the women. Munich / Berlin 2015. ISBN 9783492970259
  2. ^ Antonius Lux (ed.): Great women of world history. A thousand biographies in words and pictures. Sebastian Lux Verlag, Munich 1963, p. 392
  3. ^ Tineke Ritmeester: Heterosexism, Misogyny, and Mother-Hatred in Rilke Scholarship: The Case of Sophie Rilke-Entz (1851-1931). In: Women in German Yearbook, Volume 6 (1990), pages 63-81.
personal data
SURNAME Rilke, Phia
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Entz, Sophie (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Mother of Rainer Maria Rilke
DATE OF BIRTH May 4, 1851
PLACE OF BIRTH Prague
DATE OF DEATH November 21, 1931
Place of death Weimar