ALLT FÖRGÄNGLIGT ÄR BARA EN BILD – ONLY THE IMAGES REMAIN

BY SEM-SANDBERG, STEVE

In 1919, in the turbulent aftermath of the First World War, the city of Munich fell into the hands of a band of communist revolutionaries. Trapped in the beleaguered city were some of Germany’s foremost intellectuals at the time. Through documents, diary-entries and eyewitness accounts, Steve Sem-Sandberg traces the steps of three of these artists that lived through some of the most dramatic days of their lives. The playwright Ernst Toller, who gave his life for the revolution; the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who desperately wanted to save poetry from the spoils and perversions of war; and Rilke’s former lover and long-time friend Lou Andreas-Salomé, an early devotee of Freud and psychoanalysis, who, amidst the death and destruction on the streets of Munich, suddenly came to recognise the sources of love and happiness in her life.