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  The Diaries of a Young Poet was published in Germany in 1942, well after the death of Rilke. His Germany is a country of young girls and of roses, of the fantastical, and of metamorphosis. Rilke is the heir to Hoffmann; he is also the translator of Russian folk tales, a reader of Gogol, travelling between the realms of the imagination and of languages, his horizon always Lou Andreas-Salomé—the woman whom Nietzsche’s sister, a member of the Association of Nazi Writers from as early as July 1933, will accuse of being a ‘Finnish Jew’.5 Nineteen forty-two was a triumphant year for the Third Reich: the year of its greatest territorial expansion. What was Rilke’s publisher Insel intending? To hear voices other than the Nazi chorus? Or to console readers with the vision of an eternal Germany that was healthy, fresh, heterosexual, full of forests, virgins and rose gardens?

  Your hair of gold Margarete

  Your hair of ash Sulamith…6

  A meridian extends between Celan and Rilke. Meridians mark imaginary lines on the planet. From point Rilke to point Celan, a bridge of meridians stretches over Germany. They translate one German language into another German language. They carry it somewhere else where they preserve it. Rilke, born in Czechoslovakia, in Prague, Bohemia, in 1875; Celan, born in Romania, in Czernowitz in Bukovina, in 1920. Between Rilke and Celan is ‘what happened’. That is how Celan referred to the destruction of the European Jews. In between the two men, death changed in Germany.

  Paula, as seen by Rilke in her studio was ‘all beauty and slenderness, the new lily flowering…It was a long pathway, the end of which no one could see, in order for us to arrive at this timeless moment. We looked at each other, with a shiver of amazement, like two beings who suddenly find themselves before a door behind which there may be a god, already…I escaped, running over the moorlands.’

  Escaping, Rilke came across Clara. ‘The lissome Clara, like a radiant green reed…so ineffably pure and tall that each one of us, on our own, was caught up in that apparition and was entirely immersed in it.’

  For Rilke, meeting a woman is to head off into the realm of the mysterious. He takes off, like an aeroplane. He is gripped by something bigger than him—the sky, beauty. He plummets towards the summit.

  Paula, Clara, Rainer Maria. The waltz draws its fairy circles on the moorlands. Once back down to earth again, Rilke feels ‘pious’, fromm. It is a word that recurs often in his writing, and in Paula’s too. A word that defines a time, 1900, their tremendous youth. Fromm flies to Worpswede on the wind, through Paula from Bremen, through Rilke from Prague. They break piety free from its religious cage and return it to childhood and to the sacred. Piety allows them to see the invisible.

  Meetings mark us. We become visitors’ books. We learn to speak words given to us by our loved ones. When Rilke sees Paula again, ‘her voice had folds like silk’.

  Paula to Rilke, after taking a stand against the pervasive aesthetics of death infiltrating their contemporary culture: ‘You’ll permit me my point of view, won’t you? In fact, please do permit me everything.’

  I call her Paula and I call him Rilke. I can’t bring myself to call him Rainer Maria. But her, especially, what do we call her? Modersohn-Becker, the name of her future husband, also the name on the catalogues devoted to her work? Becker-Modersohn, as in her museum in Bremen? Becker, her maiden (virgin) name, which is the name of her father?

  ‘The simple and honest name of Becker’ is a common surname in Germany. Paula Becker is the name of a girl whose father was called Becker and who was given the first name of Paula.

  Women do not have a surname. They have a first name. Their surname is ephemeral, a temporary loan, an unreliable indicator. They find their bearings elsewhere and this is what determines their affirmation in the world, their ‘being there’, their creative work, their signature. They invent themselves in a man’s world, by breaking and entering.

  Clara and the swans. Long conversations about the theatre.7 About Clara’s childhood. Like Clara, Rilke’s plan is to stay in Worpswede to experience the seasons. Paula, with her hair the colour of the sky, the colour of evening’s amber yellow. Clara on the bicycle, breathless: ‘I waved to her for a long time.’

  Look at Rilke, a stem popped out of a bouquet, standing, waving, in a horse-drawn carriage that is upholstered in scarlet velvet and filled with ‘enormous sunflowers, gossamer-rimmed red dahlias, carnations’. Look at these charming people entwining the world with flowers and garlands. The day before, Clara had made him a crown of heather. Now he grasps the crown in his hands. ‘Sitting opposite me was the blonde painter under a marvellous hat from Paris.’ And, beneath the hat, her eyes match the roses in full bloom. He is spiralling from one young girl to the other, red roses and white lilies, curling petals over fleshy centres. ‘That autumn, there was no lack of roses…’

  Rilke to Paula: ‘You are goodhearted and virtuous…You are goodhearted and virtuous…After I have said it for the third time, it will be irrevocable.’

  October. The whole colony of artists visits Hamburg. Theatre. Museums. Walks and conversations. November. A batch of poems sent to Paula on two Sundays; to Clara on one Sunday. Clara has him carry a basket of grapes. Paula has him carry chestnut tree branches, over which he utters prayers like a Catholic over his rosary beads, a prayer for each chestnut: ‘As I impersonate this religious practice, I am sparing a tender thought for you, and for Clara Westhoff.’

  Rilke has a very precise idea about what a young girl should be. She must be not only goodhearted and virtuous and beautiful and pure, but blonde and brunette at the same time.

  What is beautiful, pure, virtuous and goodhearted is to have both young girls. Their two-stemmed innocence and the bloom of their skin. Rilke invents a caress for himself. Over his eyes he places a rose and its freshness cools his eyelids.

  The three friends all read a wonderful Danish novel, forgotten these days: Niels Lyhne by Jens Peter Jacobsen. Niels Lyhne seeks purity. He knows it is a fantasy. Female desire is real, and reality makes him unwell. The novel, set on a farm at the bottom of a fjord, tells the story of a young couple destroyed by their aversion to sex.

  Listen to the young bride:

  Woman’s purity! What do you mean by woman’s purity?…More polite absurdity. A woman can’t be pure, and isn’t supposed to be—how could she? It is against nature! And do you think God made her pure? Answer me! No, and ten thousand times no. Then why this lunacy! Why fling us up to the stars with one hand, when you have to pull us down with the other! Can’t you let us walk the earth by your side, one human being with another, and nothing more at all? It is impossible for us to step firmly on the prose of life when you blind us with your poetic will-o’-the-wisps. Leave us alone! For God’s sake, leave us alone!’

  There are encounters, incidents, love affairs. And there is also what Paula is constructing for herself during these years: solitude, a place of her own, her studio on the edge of the village, owned by the Brünjes.

  Mackensen says that strength is the most important thing. That strength is at the beginning of everything…I agree, but I also know that it won’t be the thing most central to my art. Inside me I can feel the soft threads of a web, a stirring, wings fluttering, trembling at rest, breath held. When I’m truly up to painting, that’s what I’ll paint.

  Paula’s female models are from the surrounding countryside. Her paintings are untitled. When Vogeler complied the first catalogue raisonné after her death, he listed them as ‘Seated woman’, ‘Old peasant woman’, ‘Young girl standing’. But there are descriptions in her journal: ‘Frau Meyer, sexual right down to the tips of her fingers, huge white breasts shining like those of the Venus de Milo’, and who has done time in prison for having abused her child; ‘my blonde’, another young mother she could have painted ‘a hundred times’; Anna Böttcher, and Frau Renkens, and Fat Lisa ‘who could be out of a Rubens painting’. Nudes of children, especially little girls: Meta Fijol, to whom, hating herself, she slips a mark so that the girl will undress. Knock-knees, s
wollen bellies, the dirty ears of models from the orphanage and from the asylum for old men. Old Frau Olheit, old Jan Köster, old von Bredow who quotes Schiller during the sitting, and mother Schröder, and old Frau Schmidt who tells her that she has lost her five children and her three pigs. And who shows her the cherry tree planted by her daughter, dead at the age of eight, and quotes the old German proverb: ‘When the tree grows high, the planter will die.’ 8

  Those people in the paintings: they have been there. Lives traversing each other, passing through each other. What she gave them, what they gave her. A sitting takes a long time. ‘My bum has gone blind,’ one of her models, an old man, told her. Faces, bodies, appearing against a background of heath, then buried in the peat of Worpswede.

  When Paula writes to Rilke, she never mentions big breasts or blind bums, but rather their ‘marvellous evenings beneath the moon’. She ends with ‘I often think about you’. In her imagination she takes his hand and signs off with ‘Your Paula Becker’. They always address each other formally. He likes her studio, filled with lilies. She painted the walls navy blue and turquoise, with a red stripe in between. ‘The evening is always immense when I leave that house.’

  And as he’s leaving for Berlin, she asks him to visit her cousin Maidli. When Paula was a child in Dresden, Maidli’s sister, Cora, died, buried alive in the sandpit where the three were playing. ‘At the moment of her death, Maidli and I hid our faces in the sand so as not to see the horrible thing that we sensed was happening.’ Cora was eleven. She had lived in Java. She had given Paula her ‘first glimmer of self-awareness’.

  Why do we tell our deepest secrets, and to whom? At the beginning of a love affair. When you are Paula Becker and you are writing to Rainer Maria Rilke—you are also sealing a pact about art and sorrow.

  Of course, she also talks to him about Otto Modersohn. A man whose paintings she admires and whose soul is ‘deep and beautiful’. A godsend of a man. A man she wants ‘to shield with my hands’. A man to whom she wants ‘to be good’.

  If Rilke does not understand, it’s because he does not want to understand.

  Paula has already arranged the details of the wedding. She writes to her father, telling him it will be very modest. ‘You know how sensible Otto and I are.’ On 12 September, for their engagement at Heinrich Vogeler’s, they simply ‘opened a bottle of red wine’. Heinrich was charming but oddly embarrassed, as she tells her father: in her opinion, he was frightened the ceremony would turn into a big song and dance.

  ‘Otto’s great simplicity and depth make me pious,’ she writes to her Aunt Marie. That word she shares with Rilke bounces back, shimmering. ‘I am such a complicated person, always so trembling and intense, that such calm hands will do me a world of good.’

  On 10 November, Rilke sends Paula his magnificent poem ‘Blessing for the Bride’. Paula has finally told him that she is engaged to Otto.

  December. The young poet sinks into what he calls ‘humiliation’. After a whole autumn devoted to two young girls, he goes to see, as might be expected…girls. And there’s alcohol. ‘Impure heat.’ ‘Hours badly spent.’ ‘Sticky hands touching what, out of respect, I had never dared touch before.’

  Lou visits him. Things seem a bit better. Outings to the theatre with Lou. Once again, he thinks life is grand. And he writes her a programmatic poem, a prayer all about work and frugality. ‘I had to write this down, for memory’s sake. Would that God might come to my aid.’

  And he marries Clara. On impulse. He takes the leap. For the dream life of angels. For the cabin on the moorlands. ‘A gold ring, and the mornings lit by sunlight.’

  Nineteen hundred and one is the year of weddings. Paula and Otto, Clara and Rainer Maria, Heinrich Vogeler and Martha.

  When you line up the diaries—Rilke’s, Otto’s, Paula’s, Clara’s—there are gaps. Some mention what others don’t. Or mention things differently, creating even more gaps. And each of the individual diaries is full of gaps. Reading what has been published, I can’t tell if the gaps in time are the result of pages that have been lost, or omitted, or not written. The complete picture is elusive.

  When they try to match life and words they come up with dead people’s words. Only Rilke manages to encompass time with almost as many words as there are seconds.9 At night, after the events of the day, he tips into an imaginary world of auto-fiction, with princesses and ghosts, mummies of the moorlands and black milk.

  And, through all these gaps, I in turn am writing this story, which is not Paula M. Becker’s life as she lived it, but my sense of it a century later. A trace.

  All through the autumn of 1900, just before their wedding, Paula Becker and the ardent Otto write love letters to each other. But part of her still wants to remain his ‘little Madonna’. She appeals to her ‘King Red’ to concentrate on his art: ‘Please let your “hot-blooded iconoclasm” slumber for a bit longer…Let us both plan to paint all this week.’ Like good children, they will meet on Saturday, when she promises to come to him. ‘Please sleep well, and eat heartily. Won’t you? Dear you!’ They have to pick thousands of flowers from their garden of love before choosing, at exactly the right moment, the marvellous rose of the deepest red.

  No, there was no lack of roses at Worpswede that autumn. In her journal, Paula pours out torrents of writing about them. She has read Maeterlinck and Rilke but they do not have the same effect on her writing as Cézanne and Gauguin do on her paintings. As humorous and accurate as she is in her letters, in her journal she goes off into some landscape of desire where the sun, on its throne in the firmament, golden-haired and silver-eyed, brandishes a sword and proclaims glory and honour and creation…Like an oil-covered seagull, she gets bogged down in symbolism all about swans and princesses.

  The engagement takes place only four months after the death of Hélène. We can trace Vogeler’s embarrassment in the chronology of events.

  There has to be an official version and Paula comes up with it in her letters to her family. You can hear the gears grinding when she mentions the dates. In November, she writes to her Uncle Arthur (the generous provider of funds): ‘We will get married next year. Last spring he lost his wife, to whom he devoted a rare love during the last three years when she was ill. After her death he longed again for life and love. And then all at once we found each other.’

  A thought here for Hélène Modersohn, Frau Otto Modersohn the First, dead at thirty-two from tuberculosis, and about whom there is hardly any record, apart from a few mentions in artists’ letters at the turn of the twentieth century. I am only aware of one photograph of her, standing at Otto’s side. Bright eyes, a chignon with curls, the charm of someone tall and thin. I don’t know her maiden name.

  Worpswede, summer 2014. The clouds and the sun are throbbing and the ground is agitated like the surface of a lake. The landscape is streaked with canals and reflections. I am trying to look with Paula’s eyes, to see what she saw. The birch trees, their black-and-white trunks tilting against the bright blue canal, the sky plunging into the water like a knife. The scattered red houses. The cows. The emptiness of the fields. The haystacks have been built; here summer ends in the middle of summer.

  On moonless nights it is so dark you can’t see your hand in front of you. But a phosphorescent light is rising from the sand. Huge bubbles of hot air hang in the trees. When you go in there, it’s like walking into butter; it smells of herbs and summer. You come out under the stars; it’s cold all of a sudden. Two distinct seasons.

  You could say that nothing has changed. But between Paula’s Germany and this Germany, there has been World War I and 1933 and World War II and ‘what happened’. Germany was cut in two, then reunified. The forests are not the same as they were.

  Sebald in The Emigrants:

  When I think of Germany, it feels as if there were some kind of insanity lodged in my head …To me, you see, Germany is a country frozen in the past, destroyed, a curiously extraterrestrial place, inhabited by people whose faces are both lo
vely and dreadful. All of them…wearing headgear that does not go with their clothing at all—pilots’ helmets, peaked caps, top hats, ear-muffs, crossover headbands, and hand-knitted woollen caps.10

  Paula, the heads she painted, her countless hats: up until her time, everything was going fine in Germany…Paula was born and died in an innocent Germany. A ‘large, simple and noble’ country, as Rilke describes it to the Modersohn couple when he sends his best wishes.

  Paula’s parents place one condition on her marriage: their daughter has to take cooking lessons. It must not be said that Fräulein Becker set up house without knowing how to feed her husband.

  She agrees, as does Otto. Everyone agrees. No one finds anything wrong with this arrangement: Paula Becker abandons her paintbrushes and moves in with an aunt in Berlin for two months in order to attend classes at a cooking school.

  In Berlin in 1901, the culinary arts begin with the potato: peeled, unpeeled, boiled, roasted, jacket potato, pureed, in soups, in salads. Then there’s beef stew, meatloaf, veal fricassee. A session all about carrots. One on desserts. Paula’s accounts to Otto contain the same gentle irony as her descriptions of the society around her: she bleakly describes people ‘who live their lives in strict adherence to their social status’. Her chic neighbourhood, Schönberg, makes her miss the Latin Quarter; she thinks of herself as a wildflower among conservatory flowers, but she does not identify with the women who do not wear a corset: not that she has a particular liking for this sort of accoutrement, but, she insists, ‘it must not be obvious if you don’t wear one’. And then ‘all this powder, all this vanity’: she misses the simplicity of her village. Here there are only walls. She wants birch trees, wild roses, and she wants to paint. She tells Otto that she will not be able to put up with this ‘culinary century’ any longer than the two prescribed months, despite the trips to museums with her cousin Maidli.