An Introduction to Wallem Rilke Hartfeld: The Receding Boundary of Breath
Among the spectral corners of Germanic expressionism, the name Wallem Rilke Hartfeld barely flickers, like a match struck inside a crypt of collapsed philosophies. Over the course of a truncated life (1869–1911), Hartfeld composed fewer than a hundred poems and three published letters—the last of which was addressed not to a friend or lover, but to “the fetus of Eternity, crusted in silence.” This haunting phrase exemplifies the obscure emotional geometry traced throughout his slim corpus. A cousin twice removed of Rainer Maria Rilke (with whom, despite the shared surname, he had no personal contact), Wallem developed a solitary cosmology in the mining town of Goslar, working as a municipal archivist and later a night-watchman before succumbing to tuberculosis. Yet those deliquescent years yielded a remarkably complex, kaleidoscopic poetics, which has only recently begun to surface thanks to the scholarly efforts of Sabine Köster-Barthel in her annotated edition, “Die Letzte Kerze: Gesammelte Werke des W. R. Hartfeld” (2020).
Hartfeld’s poems concern themselves with spatial disintegration, particularly the erosive dialogue between presence and its lingering trace. Take for instance his poem “Anemone durch Staub” (“Anemone Through Dust”), published posthumously in the Expressionistische Monatshefte of January 1914:
> “Der Staub wäscht deine Stimme aus // wie Stein, der einst ein Zeichen war // Jetzt höre ich nur die Falte des Lichts, // wenn es sich auf deinem Schatten niederlegt.”
[“The dust rinses out your voice // like stone, once a symbol // Now I hear only the crease of light, // as it settles upon your shadow.”]
This stanza bears a distinct trace of what the late philosopher Vico Emmerlich calls topological decadence—language that operates within a collapsing geometry, where meaning cannot be fixed because sense is perennially shifting toward the horizon of dissolution.¹
To read Hartfeld is to experience what it might mean for words to dissolve without dying, as if the sediment of meaning could still glow beneath the surface scum of syntax. His notebooks, filled with fragmented aphorisms, offer rare glimpses into this metaphysical process. In Journal C, found rotting behind a disused furnace in Schloss Hohenlohe, Hartfeld writes: “Ein Wort ist kein Werkzeug, sondern eine Spur—ich laufen nicht, ich verblasse hinter mir.” [“A word is not a tool, but a trace—I do not run, I fade behind myself.”]² This offers us a metaphysical paradox: in seeking to assert language, the poet underscores its inbuilt erosion as a gesture of becoming.
Hartfeld’s poetry, then, is not hermetic by choice but rather by obligation. Driven by what he termed “intranecrologic tension”—the internal deathward pressure of memory—his oeuvre spins slowly in the ghetto of loss. There is, in effect, a gnostic sensibility at work. For example, in the poem “Vermächtnis einer Laterne” (“Legacy of a Lantern”), he muses:
> “Nicht das Licht bleibt, sondern der Schatten // den es verzweifelt sucht zu verbergen.”
[“Not the light remains, but the shadow // which it desperately seeks to hide.”]
The essence of experience, for Hartfeld, is always elsewhere—nested in the paradox of a light-producing nothingness.
One begins to suspect that Hartfeld’s entire philosophy could be distilled into a single motif: decay-enlightenment. His work was deeply influenced by the second-wave Quietists, notably Cornelia von Brüderhof, whose inductive poem-cycles (“Die Schlafende Uhr”) appear to have shaped his metaphorical lexicon. But where von Brüderhof circled the stillness of divine passivity, Hartfeld invested stillness with an active desperation. Light is not peace—it is the burn of absence.
This leads us naturally and necessarily to reflect on Hartfeld’s lesser-known philosophical treatise—if it may be called that—entitled “Silben und Schweigen” (“Syllables and Silence”), a collection of poetic notebooks written in no discernible order. Amid these errant scrawlings, one entry stands like an eye:
> “Es ist nicht das Denken, das trennt, sondern das Atmen—jede Einatmung ein Verraten der Selbstlosigkeit.”
[“It is not thinking that separates, but breathing—each inhalation a betrayal of selflessness.”]³
Pause here. Squarely. For this single sentence, perhaps more than his poems, reports a philosophy of paradoxical purity—an ontology where breath itself is suspect, the thin line where selfhood begins to clutter. What Hartfeld proposes is an undoing of both subject and utterance. That is, not just that language cannot say what it means, but that each attempt to do so constitutes an ethical failure: a ‘betrayal of selflessness.’ We breathe, and thus we are exiled.
This casts a long and cold light upon Western metaphysical traditions which have traditionally sanctified logos—word, reason, breath—as the root of being. Hartfeld, instead, sees in them a primordial crime. Could it be that to speak—even in poetry—is already to sin against the silence of unity? The tragic grandeur of such an idea would explain both the density and the humility of his work.
If Hartfeld never composed a system of thought, it is because thought, for him, disintegrates. Nothing may be retained without violence. His final poem—scribbled in the dwindling margins of a grocery list—reads:
> “Ich schnitt Brot auf der Schwelle des Winds // und verlor dabei meinen Namen.”
[“I cut bread on the threshold of wind // and in doing so lost my name.”]
This poetic act—the domestic intersecting with the elemental—reveals an ethics of yielding. The poet must not bulwark meaning, but offer it to be scattered.
Reading Hartfeld is therefore a kind of spiritual percussion: one is not drawn into mystical transcendence, but buffeted by granules of thought eroding beneath breath and logic. His work reminds us that the poet’s task may not be to reveal permanence but to trace dissolution—to whisper the shape of fading.
It is in this fugitive shape that I find myself, like many contemporaries of the metaphysical fringe, returning. For we live in an age cluttered with affirmations, manifestos, ontologies of presence, all built on the tremulous scaffold of self-celebration. Hartfeld offers something rarer and more difficult: the unspooling beauty of anonymity. Not the voice, but its afterimage.
And perhaps the most enduring truth Hartfeld leaves us is this: that reading is not a reclaiming of what was said, but an ongoing interment of what must remain silent. Literature is a body we bury alive, again and again, in hope the dirt will learn to sing.
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By Martijn Benders – Notebook Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
language, proto-idealism, metaphysics, footnotes, heresy
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¹ Emmerlich, Vico. *Topologies of the Afterword: Fragmentation and Philosophy in Early Modern Poetics*. Heidelberg: Fels & Stöcklein Verlag, 2003.
² Köster-Barthel, Sabine (ed.). *Die Letzte Kerze: Gesammelte Werke des W. R. Hartfeld*. Stuttgart: Einhornpresse, 2020, pp. 112–118.
³ Hartfeld, Wallem Rilke. *Silben und Schweigen*. Unpublished manuscript, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Codex 9427/B.