[Histonet] nice one Kemlo

Robert Richmond rsrichmond <@t> gmail.com
Sun Apr 5 12:33:34 CDT 2009


The well known German poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) was
originally named René, and Germanized the name to Rainer when he was a
young man. His mother supposedly gave him the name in memory of a
recently deceased older sister, but the story that she dressed the
future poet as a girl may be untrue. Bernhard Blume, my major
professor in 1959 and an elderly man then (I majored in German in
college, and wrote my senior thesis on Rilke, back before he got
famous in English) told me that his baby pictures showed him dressed
quite like the young Rilke.

Bob Richmond
Knoxville TN



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