You Must Change Your Life by Rachel Corbett

“maiden” Westhoff never seemed to doubt him. Her admiration felt refreshingly pure and uncomplicated.
    Rilke and Westhoff surprised everyone with their engagement announcement the following month. When they returned to Worpswede to share the news with their friends, Otto Modersohn wrote to Paula Becker asking if she could guess who he saw that day: “Clara W. with her little Rilke under her arm.” By then Becker was away at a cooking school in Berlin, having submitted to pressure from her father to devote herself completely to her fiancé. He told her in a rather depressing birthday letter that she ought to “have his welfare constantly in sight” and not let herself “be guided by selfish thoughts . . .”
    By March, Becker was miserable. “Cooking, cooking, cooking. I cannot do that anymore, and I will not do that anymore, and I am not going to do that anymore,” she wrote to Modersohn, warning him, “You know, I can’t stand not painting much longer.” Becker promised herself that she would wait to have children until she had fulfilled her own dreams. But she feared that Westhoff was not so strong-willed. Becker predicted from the start that her friend’s new union would prove to be Westhoff’s sacrifice alone. Becker had felt Westhoff slipping away ever since she met Rilke. Why couldn’t they all live together again as a community, like they’d always dreamed? Becker wondered. “I no longer seem to belong to her life,” she wrote. “I have to first get used to that. I really long to have her still be a part of my life, for it was beautiful with her.”
    The news of the engagement dismayed Andreas-Salomé even more. Her objection did not stem from jealousy, she claimed, but from a concern that the commitment would stifle Rilke’s creativity just before it blossomed. She also knew he wasn’t mature enough to shoulder the responsibilities of a family. She wrote him a “last appeal” urging him to reconsider—or else not to contact her again. At the last minute she enclosed a concession, writing on the back of a milk receipt that she would in fact see him if he was desperate, but only in his very “worst hour.”
    The ultimatum was harsh, but not unfounded. Family had been a mythology to Rilke ever since he was born. He had embodied his mother’s fictions as a daughter, as fake nobility, and now he was concocting his own domestic fantasy. He once described in a letter to Westhoff his baroque mental picture of marriage: He was standing at a stove, cooking for her in dim lamplight. There would be honey gleaming on glass plates, cold ivory slices of butter, a Russian tablecloth, a rocky loaf of bread, and tea that smelled of Hamburg rose, carnations and pineapple. He would drop lemon wedges into the teacups to “sink like suns into the golden dusk.” There would be long-stemmed roses everywhere.
    In reality, Rilke was eating oatmeal every night. But he believed that marriage was part of becoming a man, and that a child had to firstbecome a man before he could be an artist. Plus, it seemed like everyone in their Worpswede community was getting married that spring: Heinrich Vogeler had just wed a young woman from the village, Martha Schröder, and Becker and Modersohn were engaged to marry the following month.
    Rilke married Westhoff at the end of April 1901, in her parents’ living room in Oberneuland. He told a friend, with no shortage of condescension, that “the meaning of my marriage lies in helping this dear young person to find herself.”

    Rilke in Westerwede in 1901, the year he married Clara Westhoff .
    The following month they moved into a thatched-roof cottage in Westerwede, a village neighboring the artist colony. At first, the dead-end road isolated the couple in their work. Over the next year, Westhoff filled the house with sculptures and Rilke wrote a monograph on five of the