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first serious girlfriend, “a bright shooting-star” called Valerie. The sentimental verses were sodden with the dewy flowers and singing maidens of German Romanticism, and the book did not reward him with the immediate glory he thought he deserved.
    When Rilke’s psychodramatic playwriting fared no better, he did not consider the possibility that his work was amateur. Instead, heblamed readers for failing to understand it. Prague was a town of the bygone, filled with graveyards, castles and parochial dilettantes, he concluded. The people there were so stuck in the past they even looked old. “The only progress they know is when their coffins rot to pieces or their garments fall apart,” he wrote. While Rilke admired many Slavic traditions, including their folk history and reverence for the land, the people were too poor to concern themselves with literary pursuits. The Austrians were worse because they could afford to embrace the arts, but cared only about status and money.
    When Rilke turned twenty, he realized that if his poetry didn’t take off soon his parents would have their doubts validated. He would be forced to take a job at a bank or law firm in Prague and stay there, maybe forever. The city was not an environment hospitable to creativity, with its air that could hardly “be breathed, thick with stale summer and unconquered childhood,” he wrote.
    Rilke had met young people who moved to cities known for nurturing artists. Many had gone to Paris, but Rilke believed the French exerted too much influence over the artistic production of Eastern Europe. He saw a better option in Munich, then the intellectual nerve center of Europe, where the most coveted social seat in town was at the lecture hall. At the cafés, secular youth debated Nietzsche’s declaration of “the death of God,” while the artists revolted against the academy, resulting in the Munich Secession of 1892—five years before Gustav Klimt led the movement in Vienna.
    Rilke could continue living on his uncle’s stipend there as long as he was in school. So, in the fall of 1896, he enrolled in classes at the University of Munich with the intention of rejecting everything that had defined him thus far. His mother’s zealous Catholicism, his father’s military aspirations, Prague’s provincialism—even his own name—he was prepared to leave it all behind.
    AN INTELLECTUAL TREND in German-speaking countries at the end of the nineteenth century was the study of individuals and howthey functioned within societies. Philosophers and neurologists were combining expertise to create new sciences of the mind. Phenomenology was founded to study the nature of consciousness; psychoanalysis for the unconscious. Art, and the study of art known as aesthetics, became a common point of convergence within these disciplines. Psychologists began to see how looking at people’s emotional responses to art, and the motivations that drove some to create it, could help explain aspects of human nature that had never been tested in laboratories.
    The German doctor Wilhelm Wundt accidentally forged the birth of psychology in the 1860s, while he was conducting some routine research on reaction times. He had rigged the pendulum of a clock into a timer he called a “thought meter,” when it occurred to him that perhaps his experiment measured not only a neurological phenomenon, but an unconscious one. Reaction times seemed to bridge the gap between voluntary and involuntary attention, between the brain and the mind. If science could measure the former, he couldn’t see why it wouldn’t also apply to the latter. In 1879, Wundt founded the world’s first laboratory for psychological experimentation in Leipzig.
    It took a philosopher from the next generation, Theodor Lipps, to draw the link between Wundt’s new discipline and his own, aesthetics. Lipps had been a forerunner in the creation of