Lou Andreas-Salomé (née Louise von Salomé or Luíza Gustavovna Salomé) was born in St. Petersburg, Russia to parents of French Huguenot and northern German descent. Her diverse intellectual interests led to friendships with an astounding array of luminaries, including Nietzsche, Wagner, Freud, and Rilke. Andreas-Salomé was a prolific author, writing several plays, essays and more than a dozen novels. It was Andreas-Salome who began calling Rilke "Rainer" instead of "René." Her Hymn to Life so deeply impressed Nietzsche that he was moved to set it to music. She was one of the first female psychoanalysts (a career she maintained until a year before her death) and also one of the first women to write on female sexuality. Her book, Lebensrückblick, written toward the end of her life, is based on her memories as a liberated woman.

A mystic lyricism and precise imagery often marked verse of German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, whose collections profoundly influenced 20th-century German literature and include The Book of Hours (1905) and The Duino Elegies (1923). People consider him of the greatest 20th century users of the language. His haunting images tend to focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude, and profound anxiety—themes that tend to position him as a transitional figure between the traditional and the modernist poets. His two most famous sequences include the Sonnets to Orpheus , and his most famous prose works include the Letters to a Young Poet and the semi-autobiographical The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge . He also wrote more than four hundred poems in French, dedicated to the canton of Valais in Switzerland, his homeland of choice.