On the wing: Friedrich Nietzsche

The story sounds like one of this morning's headlines. A brilliant young woman has a teacher she admires, who offers to be her mentor. She studies with him privately and even moves in with his family, but then discovers he wants to divorce his wife and marry her. This shattering MeToo moment is from Ruth, an 1895 novel by Lou Andreas-Salomé.

The Russian-born novelist challenged many accepted ideas of thinking, and her books struck a nerve among her mostly female readers. They wrote her emotional letters; some came to visit her at her home in Berlin. Yet today Lou (as she preferred to be called) is known primarily for her friends. A tumultuous summer with Nietzsche led to her writing the first full-length study of his works; by Rilke's own admission, her support made the Duino Elegies possible; and, under Freud's own tutelage, she became the first female psychoanalyst.

Cordula Kablitz-Post's film sets the record straight, establishing Lou as a highly original thinker in her right, with the force of character to live independently in a society that expected women to be subservient. Liv Lisa Fries (above), acclaimed for her performance in the Netflix series Babylon Berlin, plays Lou as a rebellious St. Petersburg teenager who dares to read Spinoza but finds her intelligence only makes her more attractive to a predatory male mind.

Katharina Lorenz has the challenge of playing Lou in her prime: Nietzsche called her "by far the smartest person I have ever became acquainted with." From the moment the two meet, at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, Lou sees that Nietzsche (Alexander Scheer), already a well known author, intends to dazzle her. She quickly turns the tables, engaging him and their friend Paul Rée (Philipp Hauß) in a deliciously funny mock confession.

Scheer gives us Nietzsche's geniality, as well as his volatility. When he and Lou climb the hills above Lake Orta, debating their future together, there is no question that she is his match, in both wits and will. In fact, their headstrong minds may be too alike; just months later, Lou decides to live with Rée, but eventually marries the Persian scholar Friedrich Carl Andreas (Merab Ninidze).

Thirteen years later, Lou meets a 21-year-old art history student named René Maria Rilke (Julius Feldmeier). She rechristens him "Rainer," and they become the closest of confidantes. My one quibble with the script is it does not make clear how closely they stayed in touch after their three-year romance ended; they visited one another and corresponded until Rilke's death in 1926.

Julius Feldmeier as Rainer Maria Rilke

Nicole Heesters plays Lou near the end of her life, confined by ill health to her Göttingen home, yet still changing in ways that let her form a final bond with the young scholar Ernst Pfeiffer (Matthias Lier), who will edit her memoirs.

The script, by Susanne Hertel and Kablitz-Post, deftly interweaves the story of Lou's earlier life with the new relationship between the elderly writer and the young man who will help keep her legacy alive. Matthias Schellenberg's nimble camera is equally at home in the elaborate, 19th-century interiors; out on a mountain lake; or following Lou and Paul Rée through the gaslit streets of "Rome" (shot in the oldest part of central Vienna; see the clip).

If viewers like this film as much as I did, I hope they will try Lou's fiction. A good place to start is "Before the Awakening," from The Human Family, a short story collection translated by Raleigh Whitinger. Lou's empathetic account of both sides of a failed seduction is the work of an extraordinary and life-enhancing imagination. Warmly recommended.

Matthias Lier (Erst Pfeiffer) and Nicole Heesters (Lou Andreas-Salomé)

Katharina Lorenz as Lou Andreas-Salomé and Julius Feldmeier as Rilke

Was Lou Andreas-Salomé a writer or a muse, a feminist or a femme fatale? Perhaps Julia Vickers, one of her biographers, evokes her elusive spirit best when she calls Lou "a genius of inspiration."

Moviegoers will see the extraordinary extent of her motivating genius in a new film by Cordula Kablitz-Post, Lou Andreas-Salomé. (I reviewed the film for World Literature Today in June 2016.) Lou--the name she preferred to be addressed by--not only guided and aided the creative process; she had an uncanny instinct for where her help would do the most good.

Nietzsche said "only after knowing her was I ripe for my Zarathustra." Decades later Freud, who sometimes referred patients to Salomé, told her, "I strike up a melody, usually a very simple one; you supply the higher octaves to it. I separate one thing from another; you combine what was separated into a higher unity." Her role in Rilke's life was even greater, continuing for more than two decades.

Kablitz-Post's film, which was released in Europe in 2016 and will open in US theaters in the Spring of 2018, traces the whole course of Lou's life from her childhood in the German colony of St. Petersburg to her final years in Goettingen, Germany. In the restlessly creative years before the First World War, she bridged the worlds of philosophy, psychology and literature, making contributions to each one. Her ability to guide and inspire came from an extraordinary intelligence and an unshakable sense of her own autonomy, which freed her to encounter others--whoever they were--on an equal footing. When she was just 21, she set down how she meant to live:

What I shall quite certainly do is make my own life according to myself, whatever may come of it. In this I have no principle to represent, but something much more wonderful--something that is inside oneself and is hot with sheer life, and rejoices and wants to get out.

The film recreates Bohemian life in the Berlin of the 1880s

Lighting the way to the Duino Elegies

Lou's most celebrated relationship was with Rainer Maria Rilke. When they met in May 1897, she was a 36-year-old author working on her fifth novel and married to philologist Friedrich Carl Andreas. Rilke, at 21, was an art history student visiting Munich from Prague.

Their friendship quickly became a love affair, although Lou had never had a sexual relationship before. (Believing that sex placed women in a subordinate role, she had married Andreas on the condition the marriage not be consummated.)

The difference in their ages may have seemed natural to her: she and Andreas were 15 years apart, her own parents 16. When Lou and Rilke met, he had published three poetry collections, but those poems were rather cautious and conventional. Now, he wrote Lou, he would do better:

Songs of longing! . . . But they will be different from how they used to be, these songs. For I have turned and found longing at my side, and I have looked into her eyes, and now she leads me with a steady hand.

Lou and Rilke were lovers for three years and stayed close until his death in 1926: she played a crucial role in his development as a writer. Rilke was prone to many doubts and fears, and it is hard to imagine how he could have written the Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus without Lou's guidance and support.

Lou Andreas-Salome in 1897, the year she met Rilke

A leading role shared three ways

Kablitz-Post has chosen three actresses to portray Lou in the three stages of her life. In the central portion of the film, Katharina Lorenz, who's had leading roles in plays by Shakespeare, Schiller and Albee, plays Lou as a young woman.

Liv Lisa Fries, who won the Bavarian Film Award for Best Young Actress last year, has the role of Lou as a teenager. Nicole Heester, a veteran of stage and screen, plays the writer in her final years. The cast includes Julius Feldmeier as Rilke, Alexander Scheer as Nietzsche and Harald Schrott at Freud. (See the link below for photos of the principal cast.)

Some film biographies rely on an existing interpretation of their subject. Milos Forman's Amadeus, for example, is adapted from the play by Peter Schaffer. Kablitz-Post has based her film on her own extensive research, which began many years ago.

"When I was 17," the director told me, "I read the first biography of Lou Andreas-Salomé, written by H.F. Peters, and it fascinated me. She was one of those first emancipated women who lived 100 years ahead of her time.

"She never accepted a 'no' from family or society regarding her plans for her freedom and choice of education. She was one of the first women who studied in Zurich in 1881--the first European university that accepted women. For me, she has always been a role model."

Liv Lisa Fries, who plays Lou Andreas-Salome as a teenager, and director Cordula Kablitz-Post on location in Lower Saxony (Photo: Janine Kluge)

Writing fresh dialogue for familiar voices

Kablitz-Post wrote the film's script in collaboration with Susanne Hertel. One of their challenges was writing dialogue for historical figures who already have strong voices in print. Another was adjusting their 19th-century diction so that today's audiences could understand them.

"Lou's German is very old-fashioned and complicated," Hertel explained. "We had to 'translate' her quotes into a more modern--of course, not too-modern--German."

In December of the year Rilke met Lou, he published a new book of poems, entitled Advent. This one ("Weisst du, ich will mich schleichen") is a slender poem, but the way it links autonomy with intimacy sums up what that momentous year had meant to both of them:

You know I'd like to slip
from the loudly buzzing room
when the first pale stars,
high above the darkened oaks,
catch fire.

I want to make my way
through paths that few can find
in the hushed evening meadows
--and with no dream but this:
you're there too.

On location in Wrisbergholzer (L to R): the film's director, Cordula Kablitz-Post; camera operator Matthias Schellenberg; Matthias Lier (Ernst Pfeiffer) and Nicole Heesters (Lou) (Photo: Meyfarth)

Lou's letter translated by Angela Livingston, from Salomé: Her Life and Work (Gordon Fraser, 1984), p. 36. Rilke's letter translated by Edward Snow and Michael Winkler, from Rilke and Andreas-Salomé: A Love Story in Letters (W.W. Norton, 2008), p. 7. Rilke's poem translated by Frank Beck.

On the wing

Lou Andreas-Salomé: The Audacity to Be Free

A "genius of inspiration" heads for the screen

New and selected poems

Selected translations

Recent reviews and articles

Favorite poems by other poets

Favorite lyrics in translation

Favorite quotations

Other recent writing and photographs

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