Charlotte Mörike

Charlotte Dorothea Mörike (born Bayer or Beyer ; born June 3, 1771 in Grafenberg ; † April 26, 1841 in Cleversulzbach ) was a pastor's daughter, doctor's wife and mother of Eduard Mörikes .

Life

Charlotte was the fifth child of the pastor of Grafenberg, Christian Friedrich Beyer (1735-1808) and his wife Augustine Friederike (1741-1809), née Weckherlin . In her parents' household she was given a more humanistic than a pietistic view of the world. In 1779 the family moved to Beuren . During a visit to Ludwigsburg in 1791, she met the city ​​and official physicist Karl-Friedrich Mörike, who was seven years her senior . The couple married in 1793, despite initial concerns from their father. The union gave birth to thirteen children between 1794 and 1816, but several of them died at a young age. The young mother devoted herself fully to caring for the children and conveyed her own joie de vivre and sensitivity to the seriousness and knowledge of the educated father. Her poet son, her seventh child, valued these character traits in her very much.

In September 1817, her husband died of the long-term effects of a stroke that he suffered in the crisis years of the Napoleonic Wars, and she was forced to distribute the not yet adult children among the relatives because as a widow she could not raise them alone. She now moved frequently and occasionally took in her children when they found work nearby. The two older sons Karl and Adolph Mörike came into conflict with the law several times, but the son Eduard felt obliged to always pay for all relatives. In 1834 she finally moved with Eduard in his rectory in Cleversulzbach. She died there in 1841. Her son buried her in a grave next to Schiller's mother , which he had provided with a self-carved plate ("Schiller's mother") years earlier.

swell

• Gudrun Maria Krickl : Beloved children - The life of the poet mother Charlotte Dorothea Mörike . Silberburg Verlag, 2009, ISBN 3-874078-39-6 .
• Antonius Lux (ed.): Great women of world history. A thousand biographies in words and pictures . Sebastian Lux Verlag , Munich 1963, p. 348.