Ein light gray sheet of paper, small format, folded in the middle, office supply quality. On the left, written in pencil, nine lines of varying lengths: “In the midst of the way there has / no other refuge / than thy transforming / heart to be invisible / there. / So bring the clear with you of this / inclination to / the local –“. A poet’s note, that’s clear. But the really dramatic thing happens on the right side of the sheet. Here the text begins at an angle, seems to derail, becomes gigantic and finally almost illegible: “in the way there has no other refuge” – then the sheet is full.

The year is 1922, in the Chateau Muzot in the upper Swiss Rhone Valley, it is early February, and Rainer Maria Rilke is writing the “Duineser Elegien”. He finishes what he started ten years ago in Duino Castle, Italy, and again it is as if he were hearing voices dictating his world poem to him, as if a foreign power were guiding his hand. “Voices, voices. Hear, my heart, as otherwise only / saints heard”: Wherever he goes or stands, he writes in exercise books and on loose sheets of paper, and this is one of them. “In the way there has no other refuge” – the sentence belongs in the notes to the ninth elegy, which ends with the poet’s declaration of love for the earth, whose dream is “to be invisible one day”. She was always right, writes Rilke, “and your holy idea / is confidential death.” Four years later he dies of leukemia in a Swiss sanatorium.

As of today, the manuscript page from 1922 is one of the treasures of the German Literature Archive in Marbach and thus one of the world’s largest archive holdings on the life and work of the Prague-born poet, whose voice will not fall silent even in the twenty-first century. The reason for the sensational enlargement of the Marbach holdings is the acquisition of the estate kept in Gernsbach in Baden from the hands of Rilke’s great-granddaughters (FAZ of November 30). The Literature Archive is still silent about the exact amount in the single-digit millions that was said to have been paid for the documents, but the list of institutions that supported the purchase is openly revealed. In addition to the authority of Minister of State for Culture Claudia Roth, there are the Baden-Württemberg Foundation, the Cultural Foundation of the Federal States, the Wüstenrot Foundation, the Siemens Foundation and the Berthold Leibinger Foundation. Apparently, the share of the federal government, compared to that of the foundations, is limited: a cultural federal triumph.

The Gernsbach estate includes more than ten thousand handwritten pages, 8,800 letters, two and a half thousand of them from Rilke himself, and a good four hundred books from his library. The Marbach Archive and its sponsors presented a selection of these on Thursday in Berlin. It was, there is no other way to put it, a historic day for German literature. Not much is left in the collective memory of the poetry of the twentieth century; even Stefan George, who for a long time was mentioned in the same breath as Rilke, is now a matter for specialists. Brecht, Rilke and Benn survived from the first half of the century, Bachmann and Celan from the second half. An autograph of the creator of the “Duino Elegies” and the “Book of Hours” is seen in this way not just written material, but national cultural heritage. But ten thousand such heirlooms are a treasure whose value cannot be quantified in money.

For example the notebook from 1909, in which Rilke recorded impressions of a trip to Spain – everywhere he saw El Greco’s pictures, in Madrid the “Resurrection” and the “Outpouring of the Holy Spirit”, in Toledo the “Burial of Count Orgaz”. Or the first of the “Sonnets to Orpheus”, which he copied for an admirer in his beautifully curved handwriting, crowned by large O and S slurs: “There rose a tree. O pure transcendence!” Lou Andreas-Salomé, the woman who taught him this calligraphy, says goodbye to her lover in a letter from January 1901, also shown in Berlin: “Now that everything around me is in pure sunshine and silence and the When the fruit of life has rounded itself to tears and sweetness, a last duty comes to me. . .” Above the page instead of a salutation: “Last call”.

And so it goes: a letter from Rilke to Hugo von Hofmannsthal, in which he announces that he will be sending him poems; the manuscript of the first version of the “Notes of Malte Laurids Brigge”, an invitation to dinner from colleague Paul Valéry with the virtuoso ink drawing of a snake, a version of the fifth Orpheus sonnet provided with corrections. In three years time, on the poet’s 150th birthday, the Marbach Literature Archive intends to present its Rilke holdings in a major exhibition that will be on view for a whole year, up until the 100th anniversary of his death. Until then, one can console oneself with the insight that all of this, from the smallest piece of paper to the library, must first be viewed, sorted and digitally processed.

Incidentally, Rilke did not include the note from 1922 in the ninth Duino Elegy. Instead, the poem’s final version reads that ‘these things living on from death understand that you extol them; ephemeral / do they credit us, the most ephemeral, with something of salvation”. One thing that saves: This is the archive.