Alexander Kissler explores the conditions under which Rudolf Borchardt aspired to create a new understanding of self and world through the act of writing. A familiar image begins to falter: since 1994, when the correspondence started to be published, the most famous unknown figure in German literature can no longer be discussed in clichés. Rudolf Borchardt (1877-1945), the language-obsessed storyteller, speaker, poet, translator, and playwright, conservative by conviction and anarchistic out of necessity, must be rediscovered. The “unnatural monstrosity of my spiritual existence” now reveals itself as the result of a lifelong and risky self-experiment. Borchardt aimed to transform the world into writing and himself into its sole creator. Everything he encountered was perceived as an affront; it had to be reshaped and fictionalized to lose its terror. This is based on all of his writings.