GERMAN
LITERATUR by Michaela Anchan
When I first moved to Germany and started thinking about the German “ greats ” I wanted to read , Rainer Maria Rilke was high on the list . A master of love poetry , I ’ d heard . I purchased the slim anthology Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties , translated by John Mood , as a start . Soon after that , however , I read an article that infuriated me : the writer claimed that when Rilke moved to Paris in 1902 to study the Rodin sculptures , his wife , Clara Westhoff , was pregnant . He left her to raise their daughter , giving up her own career as a sculptor , while he lived and worked in the epicenter of art and culture , free to think and create and muse and be inspired . I shelved my poetry collection — how could I take his thoughts on love seriously ? Ugh , men .
A couple of years later , I stumbled on an online seminar , through the excellent Roundtable NY , about Cezanne ’ s influence on Rilke , Gertrude Stein , and Virginia Woolf . We read Letters on Cezanne , Rilke ’ s letters to Clara , about what he was seeing in Paris and the profound impact Cezanne was having on him . I learned that their personal story was not so black and white , that she encouraged him to go to Paris , that she joined him there for some time . I softened my stance . The fact remains , though , that her career never reached its potential , and I do still hold that against Rilke .
The Deutsche Welle list of “ 100 German Must-Reads ” places The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge as the selection for 1910 . It was Rilke ’ s only full novel , and he wrote it in Paris over six years , during a time of immense creativity and change in the worlds
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