Rilke came to Berlin on 1 August 1898 and wrote in his diary: " The first thing I discovered was: Bismarck has died … The mood is Bismarck is dead-long live-Berlin."
He writes sensitively about art, that the artist should trust in solitude, and that art at its highest cannot be national. Every artist being born with a homeland nowhere but within his own self, therefore those of his works that proclaim the language of this self are his most deeply genuine.
He does as well, write the sort of sentimental tosh about women who are artists being no longer compelled to create once they have become mothers, and artists (implying ‘true artists'), are male that was written in those days and probably still is in backward pockets. That the Artist must find Himself whilst Woman finds fulfilment in the Child. Sound familiar?
However to overlook that, hear Rilke on Rodin: "One thing especially seems to me to be of utmost importance to Rodin: that his works do not look out, do not from some point turn toward one personally as if to make conversation, but remain always an artwork …And this is one of the most superb qualities of Rodin's sculptures-that they always remain within this untransgressable magic circle toward which one may approach, and from whose border one gazes toward the work of art as toward something near that becomes feelable from far away."
