Rainer Maria Rilke and Paula Modersohn-Becker An inspiring dialogue in the Requiem for a Friend

Abstract

This paper presents Rilke’s Requiem to a Friend (with a translation at the end of the article) with some essayistic reflections on the place of this poem about Paula Modersohn-Becker’s death in the life and the work of the poet. We will begin with biographical observations about Clara Westhoff and her friend Paula meeting Rilke in Paris in 1900 – an encounter that occasioned the study of landscape painting and a small book by Rilke about the artist colony of Worpswede in northern Germany. The strong impact that these encounters - and in particular the analysis of Paula Modersohn-Becker's canvases in 1905 - had on Rilke's poetic sensibility contributed to the new stylistic form (Dingwendung) that manifests itself in Rilke's mature work. We thus present a moment in life and a specific aspect of the development of the relationship of the poet and his work to the fine arts, and of poetry as an artistic process of mourning which announces the mature phase of the Sonnets and the Elegies.