The Modersohn-Becker/Rilke Correspondence, ed. Rainer Stamm, translated from the German by Ulrich Baer, Columbia University Press, 2024
“And so you died like women long ago, died in the old warm house, old-fashionedly, the death of those in child-bed,” wrote Rainer Maria Rilke in the moving “Requiem for a Friend”. The piece, dedicated to the painter Paula Modersohn-Becker a year after her death in 1907 at the age of thirty-one, has since immortalized her in the stead of her own achievements as one of the most important figures of early expressionism, turning her—through Rilke’s vision—into a literary muse, with views that Modersohn-Becker herself rejected. The Modersohn-Becker/Rilke Correspondence, edited by Rainer Stamm and translated into English by Ulrich Baer, allows room for this poem in its final pages, but it also gives an equal voice to the two artists whose asymmetry in cultural history is tangible, and traces a friendship that was characterized by both companionship and disagreement, intimacy and coldness.
After their meeting in 1898 at an artists’ colony at Worpswede, the artists began their correspondence two years later. That German village would go on to figure centrally in the friends’ relationship, with Modersohn-Becker telling Rilke in 1900 that he is “the only piece of Worpswede for me in Berlin, and that means a lot”. It was there that the two artists gained respect for the other’s medium, an important facet of their relationship that is present in the Correspondence. Rilke recommends contemporary authors and sends poems in his letters; they discuss Paul Cézanne at length; and Rilke thinks of Paula when he is in Capri, as “[s]uch peculiar, unheard-of experiences of colour are possible here”, “things here that have never been properly seen and turned into art”. It was also at Worpswede that the two artists would meet their respective partners: Modersohn-Becker met fellow artist Otto Modersohn, getting engaged in secret at the colony, whilst in 1901 Rilke would marry Modersohn-Becker’s close friend, Clara Westhoff.
The entry of these two other figures marred the friendship at points, upending its intimacy. If the beauty of correspondence lies in the knowledge that each writer tries to think only of the person who is going to read it, then the presence of added characters threatens the pact. Through their letters, we see an intimate and beautiful friendship flourish rapidly over the first year, but as each writer became more occupied by their own marriages—Rilke and Clara would have a child shortly after their marriage—the pace of their literary exchanges slowed. Other characters are then introduced, with the Correspondence containing exchanges between Clara and Paula. Gradually, the temporal suspense of these exchanges shows a burgeoning alienation between Rilke and Modersohn-Becker; starting from 1901, there are unanswered letters, no correspondence for months. Still, the underlying tenderness of their relationship persists. In 1906, following Paula’s momentary decision to leave her husband, the rate of the letters quickened, and the writers found an ability to appreciate the other once again.
One of the points of tension in the friendship was related to Modersohn-Becker’s belief that Clara, both artist and friend, deserted her artistic hopes by starting a life with Rilke. In 1902, Paula wrote to Clara: “it seems to me that you have stripped off a lot of your old self and put it down as a coat for your king to walk upon”, and communicated the hope that, “for art”, Clara would “put on the golden coat again”. This particular disagreement over Clara’s diminished artistic output contains the central point of friction between Modersohn-Becker and Rilke, producing tens of intellectually productive letters on the question of how an artistic life should be led. For Paula, life and art were compatible; for Rilke, they were not.
Some of the most beautiful lines in the Correspondence stem from the artists’ contemplation of this question. Paula writes captivatingly of her zeal for life, for observing and participating in life:
To me it feels as if during this time the kind of barriers that we erect so laboriously and pettily against so much and against so many people have fallen away, as if we were becoming more expansive and our surroundings more encompassing, so that each year a new, white rose should blossom in the vessel that contains us and beckon others over, and cast its light on them, gently touching their cheek with its shimmer and filling the world with beauty and scent.
For Rilke, this was pure idealism. Studying and writing, for the poet, meant “a way back from each of my flights; the life above which one can rise only once one has come into full ownership and mastery of it; the quiet shoreline of all my waves and words”. There are, however, times in which Rilke’s vision of artistic life influenced Modersohn-Becker, notably when she left her husband in 1906, moving to Paris to try to focus on her work. This rift would not last long—financial reasons compelled her back to her husband, and within a few months, she was pregnant—but Modersohn-Becker believed that motherhood (an act totally in favour of life) was the creative act, and her desire to be a mother often spurred her art. Her self-portraits, possibly her most outstanding work, transgressively featured her pregnant belly.
It is for this very reason—the painter’s desire to reconcile life and art—that Rilke’s memorialization of Modersohn-Becker is an act of distortion, despite stemming from admiration of his friend: “I’m perplexed that you, just you, should wander, who surpassed all other women here in transmutation.” For Rilke, Modersohn-Becker’s brief life, cut short by her fatal pregnancy, was a tragic affirmation of the “old hostility between our human life and greatest work”. The poem opens hauntingly with Rilke unable to reconcile Modersohn-Becker’s life with the way she died—he speaks of his friends who are dead and are “so soon at home in being-dead” but: “You, you alone, return; brush past me, move about, persist in knocking something that vibratingly betrays your presence.” The Modersohn-Becker/Rilke Correspondence thus resurrects Modersohn-Becker from the annals of Rilke’s poetry, lifting her out of and separating her from the poet’s own views, and, whilst not able to grant her a response to Rilke’s ode, reveals a tender and fruitful friendship, filled with the disagreements that were at the very heart of each of the artists’ projects.
Iona Tait is a writer and editor based in London. She is also a copy editor and senior executive assistant at Asymptote.
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