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 _______________________________________________ Histonet mailing list Histonet@lists.utsouthwestern.edu http://lists.utsouthwestern.edu/mailman/listinfo/histonet
