Reading with Julia Franck

Baladine Klossowska was a painter, divorced, and the mother of two sons—the younger of whom became famous as Balthus—when she met Rainer Maria Rilke again in 1919. They had known each other briefly in Paris. What developed from this encounter shaped Rilke’s final years: it was she who, in 1921, found the Château de Muzot overlooking the Rhône Valley—the very tower where, in February 1922, he completed the Duino Elegies and wrote the Sonnets to Orpheus. He called her “Merline” in his letters. It was a love he both needed and feared—intimacy that sustained him, and intimacy from which he fled into solitude. In *I Am Drowning in the Waters of My Own Love: Rilke’s Last Lover* (Pfaueninsel, 2026), Julia Franck traces this story through the couple’s correspondence, from their first months together to the letter Rilke wrote to her shortly before his death. It is a book about female obsession, about the struggle between connection and independence—and about the price that Rilke’s work exacted. Julia Franck, born in East Berlin in 1970, is one of the defining voices of contemporary German-language literature. She received the German Book Prize in 2007 for *Die Mittagsfrau*; her books have been translated into over thirty languages. Following the reading, Julia Franck will speak with Philippe Imwinkelried, co-director of the Fondation Rilke. The event will be held in German.

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