Christiane Karoline Schlegel

Christiane Karoline Schlegel's grave in the Inner Neustädter Friedhof in Dresden.

Düval and Charmille , 1778.

Christiane Karoline Schlegel (born Christiane Karoline Lucius ; * December 7, 1739 in Dresden ; † August 21, 1833 there ) was a German writer . She also became known through her correspondence with Christian Fürchtegott Gellert , who called her "Babet".

Life

Christiane Karoline Schlegel was the second of three children of Christiane Sophie and the secret cabinet registrar Karl Friedrich Lucius (1708–1783). Her brother was two years older than she, her sister Friederike Auguste was born in 1748. Christiane Karoline Schlegel was raised by her mother and a private tutor, and she wrote letters in French early on. She taught herself Italian and English in self-study and did small translations.

She was fascinated by Christian Fürchtegott Gellert's writings, so that she contacted him by letter in 1760. Gellert exchanged letters with her until his death in 1769, during which Schlegel copied his answers at his request in order to be able to pass the correspondence on to posterity. Gellert appreciated the natural and uneducated language in her letters. Christiane Karoline Schlegel was also in writing with Johann Georg Jacobi , but, unlike Gellert, never got to know him personally.

In 1774 she married the pastor Gottlieb Schlegel, and the couple moved to Burgwerben . The marriage remained childless, so that Christiane Karoline Schlegel could devote herself entirely to reading and writing. After a murder committed in Dresden in 1777, which was reported to her by her sister, she wrote her play Düval und Charmille , based on the crime , which was published in 1778. In the following years, translations from English and French were published. After Gottlieb Schlegel died in 1813, Christiane Karoline Schlegel returned to Dresden in 1814, where she died in 1833. She is buried in the Inner Neustädter Friedhof in Dresden.

Works

Dramas and letters

• Dormont and Julie. A play in three acts. Made by a woman. Schniebes, Hamburg 1777. ( digitized version )
• Düval and Charmille. A Bourgeois Tragedy in Five Acts from a Woman's Room (1778)
• Correspondence between Christian Fürchtegott Gellert and Demoiselle Lucius (1823)

Translations

• Abr. Trembley - Teaching a father to his children about nature and religion (from the French; Vol. 3 and 4. 1776–1780)
• D. Harwood - Joyful Thoughts on the Bliss of a Religious Life (Translated from English; 1781)
• P. Blanchard - The sensitive dreamer (from the French; 1799)

literature

• Karin A. Wurst (Ed.): Women and Drama in the Eighteenth Century . Böhlau, Cologne / Vienna 1991, p. 58f. (also contains a reprint of the play Düval and Charmille )
• Erich Schmidt :  Lucius, Christiane Caroline (1. Art.) . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 19, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1884, p. 352.
• Franz Brümmer :  Lucius, Christiane Caroline (2nd Art.) . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 31, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1890, p. 372.
• Carl Wilhelm Otto August Schindel: The German women writers of the nineteenth century , Second Part M – ZFA Brockhaus, Leipzig 1825, pp. 248–259.
• Sibylle Schönborn, Tanja Reinlein, Ulrike Bardt: Corresponding life. Media networking using the example of the correspondence between Christiane Caroline Lucius, Karoline Kirchhof and Christian Fürchtegott Gellert . In: International Archive for the Social History of German Literature . No. 27.2, 2002, pp. 20-44.
• Franz Blanckmeister: Demoiselle Lucius. Gellert's friend from Dresden. in: Dresden history sheets. 1896, No. 2, p.253 ( SLUB work view )

Web links

• Literature by and about Christiane Karoline Schlegel in the catalog of the German National Library