Being Here Read online

  In February, she celebrates her birthday with Clara and the students from the Académie Colarossi. Presents: a huge orange, a bouquet of violets, a hyacinth in a pretty pot and a half-bottle of champagne.

  The World Fair is about to open and the price of rooms soars. For an ‘almost equivalent’ rent, Paula moves to 9 rue Campagne-Première, where she has a much larger, cleaner studio. The logic escapes her father, who worries about the expense, but begs his daughter not to economise on either heating or butter. And especially not to work too hard. ‘That is stultifying. People are not meant to study all the time, but must also enjoy life so they can continue to be fresh and receptive’.

  Paula wins first prize at the Académie Colarossi. All four professors voted for her. She sends a funny, touching postcard to her parents on which she has drawn herself, medal around her neck, paintbrushes and palette in her hand, the Seine and Notre Dame in the background. ‘Life is serious, and rich and beautiful.’ But she is having trouble with something in her painting. She spends days depressed. Four long months she remains like this. She wanders around the city, through ‘the huge personality of Paris’. Paris is just emerging, in tatters, from the Dreyfus Affair; Paula doesn’t mention it, or the Commune. She finds the construction of Sacré-Cœur very beautiful. She goes to see Sarah Bernhardt, thinks the play Cyrano de Bergerac is too French, and listens to the St Matthew Passion.

  And she writes to Otto Modersohn. She talks about how wonderful it is to live in Paris in springtime. She writes to her parents about the French aptitude for pleasure: ‘After such self-indulgence, we Germans would perish from moralistic hangovers.’ The French, in her opinion, only speak about one thing: love. But she doesn’t let it bother her. Anyway, she doesn’t understand it. How good it is to be German, to be simple and better! In any case, she would be ‘extremely’ happy if Otto wrote to her.

  Liebes Fräulein Becker! For her birthday, Otto sends Miss Becker his best wishes: ‘for your body and soul, for your life as an artist, and as a person.’ He tells her about his own plans, his studio overflowing with canvases. If there are any Turners in the Louvre, could she describe the colours to him? He only knows them through reproductions.

  ‘Do you like Monet?’ No, Otto Modersohn does not like him at all. He much prefers Puvis de Chavannes. Monet is only interested in the angle and fluctuation of light. Those sorts of painters, ‘who paint outdoors with their watches in their hands’, leave him completely cold. Otto prefers to spend hours painting in the marshes. Of course he likes French art, but what he prefers is to go back tirelessly to his own work. ‘For it is a great pleasure to be a German, to feel German, to think German.’

  Nineteen hundred. Germany is huge. From west to east, the empire is at the heart of Europe, from the Alps to the Baltic and from the Vosges to the Sudetenland. Alsace and Lorraine are German, along with the present-day Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland. In 1893, the colonialist and one-time French prime minister Jules Ferry includes in his will his wish to be buried ‘facing the blue line of the Vosges mountains whence rises to my faithful soul the moving lamentation of the vanquished’.

  Yet, in Paris, Paula receives a warm welcome. It is the English who are despised. Photojournalism has just been invented and images are being published of concentration camps—the word has not been coined before. In South Africa, the English intern Boers in camps to die of starvation. Twenty-two thousand Boer children will die there—22,000 white children. In the street in Paris, people think Paula is English and call her names. So the young Saxon answers back in German. ‘But they still think I’m pretending.’

  The premature death of Paula, in 1907, means she is spared the massacres to come. Gauguin, Cézanne, Le Douanier Rousseau die in 1903, 1906, 1910, respectively. But they had lived; they had gone a long way with their work.

  Paula is a bubble between the two centuries. She paints quickly, in a flash.

  Heinrich Vogeler writes to tell Paula how demoralising the village is without her: the dreary plains of Worpswede. According to him, all the artists in the colony are eccentric and living off on their own. ‘The horizons are shrinking; they sit on their couches, anxiously protecting their small-minded feelings.’ The Overbeck couple, shut away with their secrets; Hans am Ende, who sulks and whose greeting is inevitably lugubrious, ‘and he’s my neighbour!’. And Modersohn ‘is very nice but completely blind to the terrible condition of his poor wife’. Hélène Modersohn is weak, coughs incessantly, and the recent birth of her child has not helped.

  Heinrich Vogeler is the son of a rich hardware merchant from Bremen. He spends his inheritance painting in the Pre-Raphaelite style, and sets up Barkenhoff, a superb Art-Nouveau house in Worpswede. He becomes a Communist, turns the house into an orphanage, paints in the Socialist-Realist style and marries an anarchist after his first wife refuses to live in a commune. He fights against Nazism, leaves for the USSR, is unable to return after the German–Soviet Pact is broken and dies in the gulag in Kazakhstan, in 1942, of famine and exhaustion—in accordance with the violent logic of a particular type of passage through the slaughterhouse of the twentieth century.

  The very long letter that Paula writes to the Modersohn couple in May 1900 is irresistible. ‘I must talk, really talk.’ They must come immediately to Paris to see the Exposition Universelle. It is ‘stupendously fine’. She went yesterday and again today, and she will go tomorrow. It is filled with wonders. From every nation. For you, Otto, who so appreciate colour, there is so much to see. Dear Frau Modersohn, I know you are not well, what with all these flus and colds this winter, but if you are not up to the trip, do send your husband. Of course, he will say no; he won’t want to leave without you, but be firm, don’t give in to him. A week will suffice. He will return to you full of vivid impressions.

  Indeed, Paula has arranged everything: accommodation, expenses, cheap meals. And French artists. What a pity, she says, that Otto’s work is not exhibited in Paris, because she has high hopes for his future: ‘Excuse me for saying that so directly. But I just had to get it off my chest.’ And Montmartre. And the flowers in spring. And the Louvre sculpture gallery. ‘And Rodin—he is a titan.’ And the Hungarian orchestras beneath the Chinese lanterns. And the Eiffel Tower, and the giant Ferris wheel. Paris, honestly, what a city. ‘Herr Modersohn, reply by return to tell me you are coming!

  ‘You must come.

  ‘Your Paula Becker.

  ‘But soon, before it gets too hot.’

  ‘Dear Fräulein Becker,

  ‘Your last letter, which we had long been looking forward to, caused quite a storm.’

  Otto says no. Because of the modern painters. He wants to stay in Worpswede to avoid being exposed to their influence. ‘It is finally the value and charm of our life here in this rural peace that none of these modern movements can draw us into their orbit… No, I prefer to stay here; I prefer to become more and more inward, to say in my way the things that move me, no matter what else others do.’

  And then: a telegram. He’s coming.

  ‘Dear Herr Modersohn,

  ‘I am so enormously happy that you are coming. What a treat that will be.’

  She has to dash to curl her hair for a costume party, but she offers her very best wishes to Frau Modersohn and promises to send her some roses very soon. ‘But the most splendid thing is your visit. Viva Modersohn! Hurray!’

  Monday, 11 June, Otto Modersohn arrives in Paris, along with the Overbeck couple and Marie Bock.

  Thursday, 14 June, Otto rushes back to Worpswede. His wife, Hélène, has just died.

  Paula decides to return too. ‘My dear parents… This is a very sad ending to my stay in Paris, and my next period in Worpswede will also be sad and difficult. I have gained so much from being with Herr Modersohn over these last few days.’

  II

  September 1900. Rainer Maria Rilke has come to visit his friend Heinrich Vogeler, in that peaceful, isolated and artistic village of Worpswede. He has arrived from Russia, on his way t
o France, and then on to Italy.

  Rilke is the incarnation of Europe. He was born in Prague, and will die in Switzerland. He speaks a dozen languages. His lover, Lou Andreas-Salomé, introduces him to Nietzsche, Tolstoy and Freud. The hero of his only novel (the marvellous The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge) is Danish. As the story goes, he died from the thorn prick of a rose he was picking for an Egyptian woman. (In actual fact, Rilke died in 1926 from leukaemia.)

  The arrival of Rilke in the artists’ colony constitutes an event; not that the young poet is well known yet, but his is a new face in the enclosed group on the northern moorlands.

  A dozen or so artists now live in the village. The founders of the colony—Otto Modersohn, Fritz Mackensen and Hans am Ende—arrived in 1889. Heinrich Vogeler followed them in 1895. Carl Vinnen, Fritz and Hermine Overbeck, Clara Westhoff and Marie Bock then joined them. Most of them are there because they were born not far away. And because it’s a pretty place. And uninhabited. And because it’s flat, and they have their own ideas about landscape, about the way to look at a landscape: no more wide perspectives; they favour one viewpoint, a locality, a tree, a house.

  They are also there because it is authentic. The farm workers are poor and pious, in a countryside that has scarcely changed. Marshes, forests, sky, sand dunes in the distance. The vast sweep of pale light, the northern sun, the winter snow, the stormy skies of summer. The ladies’ white dresses. The neighbours’ old rags. Rustic gentleness, pink faces, blond complexions, porcelain.

  We could reproach Rilke for having left Paula out of his monograph on the Worpswede painters.3 Or we could say that Paula was not really part of the group.

  In Worpswede, she paints the black-and-white bark of the birch trees, the peat on the marshes. In Paris, she does battle with the grey light, the high walls above the chestnut trees. In the Mississippi, she would have painted the huge Spanish moss, the rootless air plants, green Old Man’s Beard on the massive oaks.

  Summer 2014. Canoeing on the Hamme, a small river in Worpswede, short but wide. Seen from Google Earth, it is a centipede: the canoes on its banks form thousands of feet. The Hamme turns into the Lesum River, then plunges into the River Weser. ‘Plunges’ is not the word: the water is slow, the soil spills into the water. It is not a river, it’s a swamp regulated by the farm workers, canal by canal, pine forest by pine forest.

  At the back of the canoe: the sun is high, the hedgerow towers above, the poplar tree is huge. The sky is everywhere. The trees are thrusting into the air. The moorlands around Worpswede are one of the few empty spots in Germany. Further to the west, towards the North Sea, it’s already like Holland, fields of windmills that modernise the traditional landscape. All of a sudden it’s mills and flat countryside and lots of people. Germany stops at the sea with a landscape of polders.

  It is only an hour and a half by plane from Bremen to Paris, but in 1900 Rilke takes four hours to travel forty kilometres in a yellow horse-drawn cart ‘that flew along at a great rate under the whispering trees’.

  Rainer Maria Rilke and Paula Becker are twenty-four. The young woman who does not want to be a governess meets the young man who does not want to be a soldier. She arrives from Paris; he arrives from Russia. It is the end of summer 1900. The world is beginning for them.

  The blonde painter, ‘smiling beneath a big straw hat’.

  Rilke has just found out that his friend Heinrich Vogeler has decided to marry Martha, a beautiful young local girl, ‘gentle and down-to-earth’. Rilke approves of the news: ‘The struggle is over.’

  For Rilke, the struggle begins. Lou Andreas-Salomé has distanced herself from him. He is seeing Paula and Clara for the first time. He assumes they are sisters, the small blonde and the tall brunette, in their white dresses, eager to dance.

  On the first evening, Rilke speaks to Paula about the colours of the moorlands. About the anxiety these colours induce in him. About skies and twilight. About the times when he no longer knows how to live.

  When there are storm clouds in the sky in Worpswede, the colours gather in the trees. The houses glow. The canal water shines as if light itself sprang from there.

  Rilke thinks that painters know how to live, always. They depict anxiety. In hospital, Van Gogh paints his hospital room. The bodies of painters and sculptors are active. Their work is given over to this movement. He, the poet, doesn’t know what to do with his hands. He doesn’t know how to be alive.

  Clara joins them on this first evening. She has encountered death in the marshes. An old woman, a ghost. The deathly calm of the night, the birch trees, the moon, the candles in the dark studio. Between Clara Westhoff’s account of this evening of September 1900 and our reading of it is Rilke’s writing. Every night, Rilke records his life in a vast serial letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé, published posthumously under the title Diaries of a Young Poet, in which Rilke explores different places, vistas, depths. Gardens that don’t exist in time. Boats on canals, crewed by phantoms.

  In Roman times adulterous women were buried in the peat with their breasts facing up. Their intact bodies can be found in the marshes today. For a thousand years, their mouths have been open to the horror of the peat, to the disintegration on contact with the air, to the dust gathering in the church, the one where Clara and Paula rang the bells in honour of the dusk…writes Rilke to Lou.

  Rainer Maria Rilke is in two minds. Paula, Clara. His heart is torn. He has a preference for threesomes, which will continue his whole life.

  Paula is wearing her green dress, the one she wore for the first time at Modersohn’s studio.

  The reddest roses never showed so red

  as on that evening that was cloaked in rain.

  I thought so long about your softest hair…

  The reddest roses never showed so red.

  The bushes never darkened quite so green

  as on that evening in that time of rain.

  I thought so long about your gentle dress…

  The bushes never darkened quite so green.

  The slender birch trunks never stood so white

  as on that evening that was dark with rain;

  and then I saw your hands, their perfect shapes…

  The slender birch trunks never stood so white.

  The water mirrored there a land of black

  that very evening I found misting rain;

  and thus in your eyes I recognized myself…

  The waters mirrored there a land of black.4

  Clara is wearing her white dress, ‘an Empire-style, corsetless, baptismal dress with long vertical pleats, a ribbon tied loosely under her breasts. Around her beautiful, sombre face, her dark hair floated in gentle curls that fell freely over her cheeks…’ That was the evening of their second meeting. Rilke had promised to read his poems to his friends. They pass a heavy table out through the window so everyone can have a seat. The poet records that Paula christens the scene ‘the battle of the table’. But that evening it is Clara who is ‘truly the queen of all of us’. He sees her as ‘more beautiful than before despite the sometimes overly pronounced character of her face’.

  At the third meeting, he gives Paula the diary of his travels in Russia, including a photo of Spiridon Drozhzhin, a peasant poet and one of Tolstoy’s serfs. It is a strong face, like those she loves to paint. Clara joins them on her bicycle. They have dinner at the Overbecks, where it is Paula who sits next to Rilke, and to whom he talks, a lot. As well as listening to Otto, who explains how difficult it is to please animals. If you remove the female spider’s egg sac, which she hauls around everywhere with her, she panics. If you put the sac back on the path to her web, she is instantly relieved, and surprised, wondering: but I haven’t come this way before? Rilke writes to Lou: ‘I will never forget how Modersohn told this story, wide-eyed—you could almost read the movements of the spider in those eyes. And his hand gestures to show how the spider put the sac on her back again.’

  And in Paula’s own journal? Rilke appears as ‘sweet and
pale…a refined lyrical talent, gentle and sensitive, with small, expressive hands’. He talks with Carl Hauptmann, a tall, fat friend of Otto’s who philosophises like one does battle. Poem-toasts. Drinking. ‘By the end of the evening, the two men were incapable of comprehending each other.’ Rilke said of the same evening that he could not stand ‘the buffoonery…the frightful endpoint of German conviviality.’

  Rilke is a man who does not like men, except Rodin, whom he endows with this epithet of virility: the sculptor-statue, the totem. Rilke likes women and the company of women. Otherwise, he’d rather be alone. But thinking about one or two women.

  The night of the 1900 equinox, Clara and Paula go to milk the neighbour’s goat. A magical night. They laugh and drift about like fairies. The men, drunk, are waiting for them. Paula places a ceramic cup in front of Rilke. The milk is black.

  Forty-five years and two wars later, this black milk is the best known poem by Paul Celan, ‘Death Fugue’:

  Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown

  we drink it at noon in the morning we drink it

  at night

  we drink and we drink it

  we dig a grave in the breezes there one lies

  unconfined…

  Celan wrote it three months after the liberation of Auschwitz. It is a poem that stands beside the great witness accounts, those of Primo Levi, of Elie Wiesel, of Charlotte Delbo. It is a poem that transforms the person who reads it.