Germaine de Staël

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Germaine de Staël, miniature portrait by Jean-Baptiste Isabey (1810). Germaine de Staël's signature:Signature Germaine de Staël.PNG
Germaine de Staël, Portrait of Vladimir Borowikowski (1812)

Anne-Louise-Germaine Baroness von Staël-Holstein or Madame de Staël [ sta: l ], b. Necker (*  22. April 1766 in Paris ; †  14. July 1817 the same place) was one of the Republic Geneva native French writer. It is also considered to be the forerunner of literary sociology and comparative literary studies . Her most widely read work was De l'Allemagne (" About Germany "). It had an impact on the image of many French people of the German-speaking neighboring states in the 19th century.

Life and work

Childhood and youth

Madame de Staël was the only child of the Geneva citizen (full citizen) Jacques Necker and Suzanne Curchod, from the then Bernese Vaud ( Switzerland ) . She grew up in Paris, where her father had built a bank with a Geneva partner and later became French finance minister (1777–1781) or finance minister and head of government (1788/89). In her mother's salon , she met numerous Enlightenment authors and developed her diverse talents. When she was ten she was in England for the first time. She tried her hand at literary early on; so she wrote a comedy when she was twelve. At the age of fifteen, she studied Montesquieus De l'esprit des lois ("The Spirit of Laws "), which was to remain decisive for her political orientation. Through her father, who was active on the Paris political stage by 1768 at the latest, she had early contact with politics.

Time of revolution

In 1786 she married the Swedish ambassador to Paris, Baron Erik Magnus Stael von Holstein , who was 17 years her senior and who had asked for her hand eight years earlier as an embassy attaché. She was introduced by him to the royal court and benefited in other ways from her status as ambassador's wife. During her 14-year marriage to him - they officially separated in 1800, shortly before his death in 1802 - Madame de Staël had four children, the first of which, Gustavine (born 1787), died at the age of two and the last, Albertine ( born 1797), was conceived out of wedlock. She was not a faithful wife. As early as 1788 she had a first long-term lover, the Count de Narbonne . In addition, she often lived away from her husband on long journeys or in exile.

In 1788 she had her first, shorter work printed: the Lettres sur le caractère et les écrits de Jean-Jacques Rousseau ("Letters on the character and writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau" , some of which were apologetically admiring, and some were critical ). ). The two dramas written in 1786 and 1787, Sophie, ou les sentiments secrets ("Sophie, or The Secret Sensations") and Jane Gray , she published only in 1790, the 1786 novel Zulma finally in 1794.

In 1789 Madame de Staël, like so many liberal aristocrats and upper class citizens, initially sympathized with the revolution . Her salon was a meeting place for moderate revolutionaries, and large parts of the first constitution of 1791 were drafted under her eyes. In the following years she also tried to help determine the course of things, directly through a not very extensive journalistic activity and indirectly through influencing influential men such as Narbonne, who was Minister of War for a short time in 1790/91. In 1790 she had her second child, Auguste.

Lecture by Madame de Staël in the Coppet Circle (based on Louis-Philibert Debucourt)
Coppet Castle, residence of Madame de Staël

When the revolution became increasingly radical in 1792 and the moderates got into political sideline and soon as dissidents also in danger of death, Madame de Staël tried in July to persuade the royal family to flee Paris, which the Queen refused. She herself fled to her little castle in Coppet ( Switzerland ) in September , where she had her third child, Albert, a little later. Coppet Castle , which her father had bought in 1784, served her from then on as a refuge for shorter or longer stays. She often accommodated other refugees and received visits from important contemporaries, e. B. Chateaubriand or Lord Byron .

In early 1793, shortly after Albert was born, she went to England for several months. There she met with French emigrants, including Narbonne, and began the larger philosophical-political work De l'influence des passions sur le bonheur des individus et des nations ("On the influence of passions on the happiness of individuals and nations") , which was printed in 1796. In September 1793 she campaigned in vain for Marie-Antoinette with the brochure Réflexions sur le procès de la Reine (“Considerations on the trial against the queen”) .

In 1794, in Coppet, she met Benjamin Constant , a married publicist and writer who was separated from his wife . She then had a long-term, nerve-wracking relationship with him, with the somewhat younger Constant, on the one hand, being fascinated by her genius and vitality, but on the other hand repeatedly trying to break free from her spell. In the spring of 1795 Mme de Staël brought out her first book publication: an anthology with mixed writings, including a literary-theoretical Essai sur les fictions and two short stories. Her brochure Réflexions sur la paix, adressées à M. Pitt et aux Français (“Thoughts on Peace, addressed to Mr. Pitt and the French”) was also published in Geneva .

After the fall of Robespierre in July 1794 and the end of the reign of terror , she returned to Paris with Constant in May 1795. While he began a career as a well-respected political speaker and publicist who briefly took part in high politics in 1799, the new rulers on the board of directors suspected her in October of sympathizing with an uprising loyal to the king. She was banned from Paris and was only allowed to return at the end of 1796. She then initiated a meeting of an intellectual conservative elite in the Hôtel de Salm . The circle called Salmklub also offered her long -time lover Constant the possibility of political activity.

In June 1797 she gave birth to her fourth child, Albertine, in Paris, whose father was probably Constant. At the end of the year she got to know Napoleon Bonaparte , who, after his victorious Italian campaign, was preparing to enter politics and whom she, together with Constant, initially supported. However, she did not gain any kind of love, and when she spoke out against France's intervention in favor of the Helvetic Revolution at another meeting in 1798, she was finally disliked by him. After his coup d'état in 1799 , at the latest , she went into opposition to him and became one of the cornerstones of the resistance to his increasingly dictatorial regime.

Empire period

Madame de Staël with her daughter Albertine, around 1805 ( Marguerite Gérard )
Madame de Staël as Corinne at Cape Misenum , 1808 ( Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun )
Madame de Staël around 1810 ( François Gérard )

After two unsteady years spent in Paris, Coppet and traveling, in April 1800 she published the important treatise De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales ("On literature in its relationship with the social institutions and the spirit of the time" ). In this, she was one of the first to formulate the theory that literary works are shaped by the specific environment in which they are created, by which she primarily understood the respective social conditions, but also the climatic, geographical and other external conditions. With this in mind, she called on the French writers, who were positioned between the north and south, to no longer only draw inspiration from the pagan Mediterranean culture of antiquity , but also from the Christian-Germanic culture of medieval Central and Northern Europe. With this she showed the way to the beginning romanticism . As a result of her insights, she herself began to learn German and to deal with German culture.

In 1802 her first long narrative work appeared, the epistolary novel Delphine , which was written partly in Coppet and partly in Paris . The focus is on a woman who was relatively emancipated at the time, who does not find her happiness with the man she loves and who also loves her because he turns away from her in a crisis situation, marries and then does not have the strength to find herself to break away from this marriage. The novel visibly reflects Mme de Staël's disappointment with Constant, who, after being widowed and free, could not separate from a lover and bring herself to marry her.

Since Madame de Staël had participated in activities against Napoléon in 1802, she was forbidden to stay in Paris in December. When the ban was extended to the Paris area in October 1803, she undertook, e.g. Partly accompanied by Constant, a six-month trip through Germany. The first stop was Weimar in winter , where she u. a. Wieland , Schiller and Goethe met. An inscription in the Red City Hall in Berlin reminds of her next stop in the following spring: “The drama that Berlin offered was like no other in Germany. Berlin can see itself as a focal point of enlightenment and light. Science and the arts are in the bloom. ”Here she met, along with many other intellectuals, the literary critic and historian August Wilhelm Schlegel , whom she won as a mentor for herself and as a tutor for her children.

At the end of 1804, she and Schlegel embarked on a month-long trip to Italy. This inspired her to write her second, very successful novel Corinne ou l'Italie ("Corinna or Italy"), which was written in 1805/1806 and published in 1807. It shows a lively woman who is enthusiastic about literature and art, whose love for an initially benevolent and apparently soulmate man fails because he ultimately cannot cope with her emancipation and prefers to marry a less stressful and conspicuous person. Also Corinne is certainly a reflection of the frustrations that Mme de Staël had suffered through the fickle Constant, from which they, in turn, finally broke up in 1805 after a sudden marriage proposal.

In 1807 she began her most widely read and long-term most effective book De l'Allemagne (" About Germany "), for which she collected further information and suggestions in the winter of 1807/1808 in Vienna after her first trip to Germany in 1803/1804, and in which her correspondence with the The scholar Charles de Villers who lived in Germany was influential.

Last years

De l'Allemagne was completed in 1810, but banned by the Napoleonic censors immediately after printing, and the manuscript was confiscated and pulped. Because it showed the French a strongly idealized Germany as a contrast and partly also as a model for their militaristic and centralistic, dictatorially ruled and silenced own country of those years by Napoleon. The image of a regionalist, diverse, music, philosophy and literature enthusiast, emotional and imaginative, medieval-picturesque, but also somewhat backward and harmless Germany, which Madame de Staël designed, was to shape the view of the French elites for decades after 1815. The designation of Germany as the “land of poets and thinkers ” goes back to De l'Allemagne .

Mme de Staël spent most of the years 1810–1812 in Coppet, where she was practically under house arrest. During a stay in nearby Geneva, a younger, war disabled officer fell in love with her, John Rocca, from whom she had a fifth child, Louis Alphonse, in 1812 and whom she secretly married in 1816. In Coppet she began to write her memoirs in 1811, but they only appeared posthumously as Dix années d'exil (“Ten Years of Exile”). She also worked on other scripts.

In May 1812 - shortly after the last delivery - she embarked on a long journey without permission, which she apparently understood as a propaganda mission against Napoleon, who had just reached the height of his power. Via Austria, which had reluctantly become a Napoleonic satellite state in 1809, she traveled to Russia, which had also reluctantly made peace, but was invaded by Napoleon's troops while she was there. When Central Europe then turned into a theater of war, she went to neutral Sweden, in whose army her son Albert had become an officer. Here she spent the winter as a guest of Crown Prince Karl Johann and tried to stir up a mood against Napoleon.

From Sweden she traveled to London in May 1813, where soon after her arrival she received the news that Albert had died in a duel. Due to the war, she stayed in London for almost a year. She had her book De l'Allemagne printed, from which Schlegel had saved a set of proofs , and began her writing Considérations sur les principaux événements de la Révolution française (“Reflections on the main events of the French Revolution”, printed in 1818). At the same time it was the center of a lively social life.

She gained even more attention in Paris when she returned there in May 1814 after the defeat and abdication of Napoleon and held court like a princess. The Hundred Days of Napoleon , from March to June 1815, Madame de Staël once more spent in Coppet. In September she went back to Paris and demonstratively joined the new King Louis XVIII. on. In gratitude she received from him the two million francs that his older brother Louis XVI. borrowed from her father during the Revolution.

In 1816 she married her daughter Albertine to Duke Achille-Léon-Victor de Broglie in Pisa and thus became the ancestral mother of a number of important French personalities of that name or of this family. In February 1817 , when she was almost 51 years old, she suffered a stroke in Paris that paralyzed her on one side and caused her death in July of the same year.

Works

  • Journal de Jeunesse, 1785.
  • Sophie ou les sentiments secrets (piece in three acts and in verse), 1786 (published 1790).
  • Jane Gray (Tragedy in Five Acts and in Verse), 1787 (published 1790).
  • Lettres sur les ouvrages et le caractère de J.-J. Rousseau, 1788 (expanded new edition 1789).
  • Éloge de M. de Guibert.
  • À quels signes peut-on reconnaître quelle est l'opinion de la majorité de la nation?
  • Réflexions sur le procès de la Reine, 1793.
  • Zulma: fragment d'un ouvrage, 1794.
  • Réflexions sur la paix adressées à M. Pitt et aux Français, 1795.
  • Reflections on the interior set.
  • Recueil de morceaux détachés (contains: Épître au malheur ou Adèle et Édouard, Essai sur les fictions and the novellas Mirza ou lettre d'un voyageur, Adélaïde et Théodore and Histoire de Pauline ), 1795.
  • De l'influence des passions sur le bonheur des individus et des nations, 1796.
  • Des circonstances current qui peuvent terminer la Révolution et des principes qui doivent fonder la République en France.
  • De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales, 1800.
  • Dolphins, 1802.
  • You caractère de M. Necker et de sa vie privée, 1804.
  • Epîtres sur Naples.
  • Corinne ou l'Italie, 1807.
  • Agar dans le désert.
  • Geneviève de Brabant.
  • La Sunamite.
  • Le Capitaine Kernadec ou sept années en un jour (comedy in two acts and in prose).
  • La Signora Fantastici.
  • Le Mannequin (comedy).
  • Sapho, 1811.
  • De l'Allemagne (ready for printing 1810, published 1813). Digitized
  • Réflexions sur le suicide, 1813.
  • De l'esprit des traductions.
  • Considérations sur les principaux événements de la Révolution française, depuis son origine jusques et compris le 8 juillet 1815, 1818 (posthumously).
  • Œuvres complètes de Mme la Bonne de Staël, publiées par son fils, précédées d'une notice sur le caractère et les écrits de Mme de Staël, par Mme Necker de Saussure, 17 volumes, 1820/21 ( digitized versionhttp: //vorlage_digitalisat.test/1%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.digitale-bibliothek-mv.de%2Fviewer%2Fresolver%3Furn%3Durn%3Anbn%3Ade%3Agbv%3A9-g-4878919~GB%3D~ IA% 3D ~ MDZ% 3D% 0A ~ SZ% 3D ~ double-sided% 3D ~ LT% 3D ~ PUR% 3D ).
  • Dix années d'exil, 1821 (posthumous).
  • Essais dramatiques, 1821 (posthumous).

Translations

See Kindler's new literature lexicon (2nd edition), 1988, vol. 15 .

  • Attempt on the poems, 1796 (translation by Goethe in the Horen ).
  • Delphine or the ghost in love , Leipzig 1800/1801; further editions.
  • On literature in its relationships with social institutions and the spirit of the time , ed. by KG Schreiter, 2 parts, Leipzig 1804.
  • Corinna or Italy , Berlin 1807/08, ed. by Friedrich Schlegel ; further editions.
  • About Germany . Insel-TB, Frankfurt ISBN 3-458-32323-6 ; countless German editions from 1814.
  • Memoirs. The unmasking of Napoleon. Ed. Ulrich Taschow, Avox, Leipzig 2011, ISBN 3-936979-03-0 .
  • Reflections on Suicide , ed. and annotated by Gottfried Mühlhof, Saldenburg 2014, ISBN 978-3-9815841-1-0 .
  • Save the queen! Call for Defense of Marie-Antoinette and other documents related to the French Revolution. Translation and epilogue by Ruth Schirmer. Manesse Bücherei 22, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-7175-8147-3 .

literature

  • Ulrich Taschow: Introduction to the life and memoirs of Germaine de Staël. In: Germaine de Staël: Memoirs. Pp. 11-53. Avox Verlag, Leipzig ISBN 3-936979-03-0 .
  • Sabine Appel : Madame de Stael. Biography of a great European. Artemis & Winkler, Düsseldorf 2006, ISBN 3-538-07231-0 .
  • Gertrude Aretz : The women around Napoleon. Aretz, Zurich 1912. 1
  • Anne Amend: Between “Implosion” and “Explosion”. On the dynamism of melancholy in the work of Germaine de Staël. Wissenschaftsverlag, Trier 1991 ( Literature, Imagination, Reality series, 2) ISBN 3-88476-028-9
  • Monika Bosse: Metamorphoses of the literary 'Contre-pouvoir' in post-revolutionary France. Mme de Staël, Saint-Simon , Balzac , Flaubert . Wilh. Fink, Munich 1981, ISBN 3-7705-1586-2 .
  • Gerhard Danzer (ed.): Women in the patriarchal culture. Psychographies on Rahel Varnhagen , Mme de Staël, Karen Horney and Simone de Beauvoir. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1997, ISBN 3-8260-1392-1 .
  • Klaus-Werner Haupt: Madame de Staël and the moral, sociable, literary Weimar. In: OKZIDENT & ORIENT. The fascination of the Orient in the long 19th century. Weimarer Verlagsgesellschaft / Imprint of the publishing house Römerweg Wiesbaden, 2015, ISBN 978-3-7374-0220-0 , pp. 11-30.
  • Christopher Herold: Madame de Stael. Mistress of a century. Übers. Lilly von Sauter. List, Munich 1968.
  • Gerhard Kaiser, Olaf Müller (ed.): Germaine de Staël and her first German audience. Literary politics and cultural transfer around 1800. Winter, Heidelberg 2008.
  • Gerlinde Kraus: important French women. Christine de Pizan , Émilie du Châtelet , Madame de Sévigné , Germaine de Staël, Olympe de Gouges , Madame Roland , George Sand, Simone de Beauvoir . Schröder-Kraus, Mühlheim am Main 2006, ISBN 3-9811251-0-X .
  • Anna Mudry (Ed. & In.): Madame de Stael. Union, Berlin 1989, ISBN 3-372-00195-8 .
  • Eduard Maria Oettinger (arr.): Jules Michelet : The women of the French Revolution. Leipzig 1854, pp. 74-83 online
  • Julia von Rosen: Cultural Transfer as Discourse Transformation. The Kantian aesthetic as interpreted by Mme de Staël. Winter, Heidelberg 2004 ( Studia Romanica series , 120.) ISBN 3-8253-1642-4 .
  • Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve : Literary Portraits. Translator and master Rolf Müller; Outs. And In. Katharina Scheinfuß. Dieterich'sche Verlagbuchhandlung, Leipzig 1958; Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft WBG, Darmstadt 1958. pp. 174–250
  • Udo Schöning, Frank Seemann (ed.): Madame de Staël and the internationality of European romanticism. Case studies on intercultural networking. Wallstein, Göttingen 2003. ( Contributions to the nationality, internationality and intermediality of literature and film, 2.)
  • Olga Countess Taxis-Bordogna: Madame de Staël. The ordeal of a spirited woman who paid homage to Europe. (Reprint of the Müller edition, Salzburg / Leipzig 1939.) Olms, Hildesheim 1999, ISBN 3-487-10810-0 .
  • Michel Tournier: Germaine Necker de Stael - Portrait of a woman. In: Sinn und Form , 2/1992, pp. 198–207.
  • Birgit Urmson: Germaine. Passion and power. Novel. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2003, ISBN 3-8260-2595-4 .
  • Melitta Wallenborn: Germany and the Germans in Mme de Staël's “De l'Allemagne”. States, landscapes and people. Peter Lang, Frankfurt 1998 (= European University Papers, Series 13: French Language and Literature, 232). ISBN 3-631-32932-6 .
  • Brunhilde Wehinger: Conversation around 1800. Salon culture and literary authorship with Germaine de Staël. Tranvía, Frey, Berlin 2002 (= Gender Studies Romance Studies; 7) ISBN 3-925867-62-7 .
  • Winfried Wehle : Trauma and Eruption. Literature as the 'lieu de mémoire' of the unconscious. Mme de Staël's novel "Corinne ou l'Italie". In: Kirsten Dickhaut (Ed.): History, Memory, Aesthetics. Narr, Tübingen 2010, ISBN 978-3-8233-6441-2 , pp. 313-349. ( PDF )
  • Winfried Wehle : De l'Allemagne - a book about France or: of the aesthetic education of man. In: Anja Ernst, Paul Geyer (eds.): Pictures of Germany from Coppet: Two hundred years “De l'Allemagne” by Madame de Staël. / Des images d'Allemagne venues de Coppet: "De l'Allemagne" 'de Madame de Staël fête son bicentenaire. Olms, Hildesheim / Zurich / New York 2015, pp. 161–177. ( PDF )
  • Michel Winock: Madame de Staël. Fayard, Paris 2010, ISBN 978-2-213-65451-5 .
detailed Review: Jerôme Pascal: Germaines love for Germany. In: Zs. Documents-Documents, H. 4, Bonn 2010, ISSN  0012-5172 , pp. 81-88
  • Peter Winterling: withdrawal from the revolution. An investigation into the image of Germany and literary theory by Madame de Staël and Charles de Villers . Schäuble, Rheinfelden 1985. (= Roman Studies series; 63) ISBN 3-87718-763-3 .
  • Emil Wismer: The influence of the German romantic Zacharias Werner in France. The poet's relations with Madame de Staël. Peter Lang, Bern 1968 (= European University Papers, 1; 9.)
  • Virginie Wortmann-Lacouronne: Germaine de Staël and George Sand . A substantive study of the influence of her women's novels on contemporary German women authors. Röhrig, St. Ingbert 1997 (= Mannheimer Studien zur Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft, 11th) ISBN 3-86110-120-3 .

Web links

Commons : Anne Louise Germaine de Staël  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Anne Louise Germaine de Staël  - Sources and full texts (French)
Wikisource: Anne Louise Germaine de Staël  - Sources and full texts
Wikiquote: Anne Louise Germaine de Staël  - Quotes

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Son of a law professor who was born in Küstrin ( Prussia ) in Brandenburg at the time .
  2. ↑ Albert Soboul The Great French Revolution , Athens, 1988, p. 481
  3. ↑ Fritz Corsing: Jean Baptiste Bernadotte. Nauck, Berlin 1946, p. 203.
  4. ↑ approx. 20 pages about de Staël. See web links
  5. ↑ detailed description of life and time.
  6. ^ Remaining parts about Jean de La Fontaine , Molière , Alain-René Lesage , Jean de La Bruyère , Diderot , Pierre-Jean de Béranger , Victor Hugo and Balzac
  7. ^ French in Wikisource online . Sainte-Beuve's text, this information is missing here, comes from the "Galerie des femmes célèbres" from 1862. It has very often made literary comments about the protagonist.
  8. ↑ Persecuted by Napoleon, de Staël travels to Germany. Your friendship with AW Schlegel, Schelling, Caroline Schlegel-Schelling.
  9. ↑ German; French short version.
  10. ^ Reprint of the 1928 edition.
personal data
SURNAME Staël, Germaine de
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Staël-Holstein, Anne Louise Germaine de (full name); Staël, Madame de
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French writer
DATE OF BIRTH April 22, 1766
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris , France
DATE OF DEATH July 14, 1817
Place of death Paris , France