Und hinter tausend Stäben – Welche Welt? Ein Rilke-Abend von Clemens J. Setz. Mit Barbara Auer

Rainer Maria Rilke as Santa Claus?! Serious, cheerful and threatening at the same time? This is the image with which the Austrian writer and translator Clemens J. Setz begins his biography of Rilke. That sounds like a different perspective - and we need it! Because 2025 is not only the 150th anniversary of Rilke's birth, but also the 100th anniversary of his death in 2026.

The mystery of life and the mystery of death are such essential motifs in Rilke's work that it seemed fitting to set an evening almost exactly between the anniversary of his birth and death to celebrate this classic and popular work. An evening that departs from the smooth and common Rilke receptions that have established themselves all over the country.

How can that work? Well, ask Clemens J. Setz and Barbara Auer if they would take on the task. And lo and behold, they unearth a few oddities. Big and small things from the life of Rainer Maria Rilke and above all from the mine of his texts and their observations by the outside world. For the Mannheim evening, Clemens J. Setz has selected and arranged passages from Rilke's poems, letters and prose. Barbara Auer will read them, with her captivatingly sensitive sense for the comic and sad sides of the all-too-human life that Rainer Maria Rilke put into language and lived himself.