Reflections on Rilke and Jojo Rabbit

Oscar season has NYU's James Devitt thinking about, of all things, Rainer Maria Rilke! Rilke's poem "Go to the Limits of Your Longing "and his letter "Requiem for a Friend" are given a place of importance in Jojo Rabbit, Taika Waititi's Oscar-nominated film featuring a young boy coming of age in Nazi Germany toward the latter part of the war. To help understand the use of Rilke's works in the film, Devitt turns to NYU professor and translator of Rilke, Ulrich Baer. We'll share a slice of their conversation:

Jojo Rabbit concludes with a line from Rilke’s “Go to the Limits of Your Longing”: “Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. / Just keep going. No feeling is final.” What is the poet saying in this passage?

In the context of the movie, the message is that love can conquer hate, even if we will experience terrible loss. The poem further says that even the most extreme experiences and emotions will not last, and that sometimes just keeping faith in the passage of time—rather than worrying about it— can relieve us from pain which threatens to overwhelm us. I absolutely think that the filmmaker captured something essential about Rilke’s poetry, namely the belief that acknowledging the beauty and terror of a given moment allows us to experience the world fully, without being overwhelmed or overlooking much of it. The story in the film also dramatically captures Rilke’s famous line that if you love someone, you must set them free. The movie’s child protagonist has to learn what many of us never learn: that to love someone means to allow them their freedom to become truly themselves, rather than confine them to our image of them.

I also found it deeply moving to use Rilke in this film about the horrors of World War II, and whether innocence can be preserved for a German boy in a country committing such atrocities. For countless young Germans, Rilke had been the poet who conveyed hope in a better humanity. I spent the last two years reading Rilke to an ailing gentleman who had escaped Nazi Germany as a boy but retained his love of German poetry: Peter Stern, the founder of the Storm King Art Center in Orange County, New York. He was very ill for the last two years of his life but when I read Rilke to him, he seemed to relax and experience some joy for an hour or so. Jojo Rabbit conveys the hope that love can survive in the midst of terrible violence, injustice, and hopelessness.

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