Baladine Klossowska was a painter, a divorcee, and the mother of two sons—the younger of whom would become famous as Balthus—when she reunited with Rainer Maria Rilke in 1919. They had barely known each other in Paris. What developed between them left a lasting mark on the poet’s final years: it was she who, in 1921, discovered the Château de Muzot high above the Rhône Valley—the tower where, in February 1922, he completed the Duino Elegies and wrote the Sonnets to Orpheus. In his letters, he called her “Merline.”
It was a love he both needed and feared—an intimacy that sustained him, yet from which he fled into solitude. In *Ich ertrinke in den Wassern meiner eigenen Liebe. Rilkes letzte Geliebte* (*I Am Drowning in the Waters of My Own Love. Rilke’s Last Lover,” Pfaueninsel, 2026), Julia Franck traces this story through their correspondence, from their first months together to the letter Rilke wrote to her shortly before his death. A book about a feminine obsession, about the tension between attachment and independence—and about the price Rilke’s work exacted.
Julia Franck, born in 1970 in East Berlin, is one of the leading voices in contemporary German-language literature. *The Woman at Noon* earned her the Deutscher Buchpreis in 2007; her books have been translated into more than thirty languages.
Following the reading, Julia Francks will speak with Philippe Imwinkelried, co-director of the Fondation Rilke. The event will be held in German.
A collaboration between the Fondation Rilke and Schloss Leuk
