Wie wortreich ist die Sehnsucht

Rudolf Borchardt (1877-1945) showered a torrent of words - and feelings - on Christa Winsloe (1888-1944), the sculptress and later writer who was eleven years his junior and whom he had met in Munich in 1912 and met again in Florence in 1913. It remained a one-sided relationship, just as the transmission of the correspondence is one-sided, for after two reciprocal return campaigns, only Borchardt's letters from 1913 have survived more or less in their entirety. As a document of an amour fou, they are a monument to a singular rhetoric that reaches out to several foreign languages as needed, but at the same time they are also an example of a value-conservative attempt at conversion and a touching testimony to the loneliness of the poetic self.