Henriette von Crayen

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Henriette Crayen. Painting by Anton Graff around 1783

Henriette von Crayen (born November 1, 1755 in Berlin ; †  February 26, 1832 in Berlin) was a Leipzig and Berlin salonnière around 1800.

Life

Henriette von Crayen came from the wealthy French Réfugié Leveaux family . In 1777 she married the banker August Wilhelm Crayen (1751–1803), who lived as the Prussian consul in Leipzig and was ennobled in 1788. After the death of her husband in 1803, she moved back to Berlin and became a celebrated and touted icon of social life there. Henriette is said to have had numerous love affairs in accordance with the lifestyle of the Ancien Régime as well as the early bourgeois, liberal sensitivity of the Enlightenment : among others with King Friedrich Wilhelm II. , Duke Karl August of Saxe-Weimar , Duke Friedrich IV. Of Saxe-Gotha , Prince Georg von Waldeck , with the Duke of Richelieu , Prince Charles Joseph de Ligne , Count Rostoptschin and Baron Alexis von Krüdener (Burchard Alexis Constantin Baron von Krüdener, 1744–1802), the husband of the famous mystic Juliane von Krüdener .

Mrs. von Crayen was in contact with numerous important personalities of her time from politics, science, culture and society. Although her own intellectual interests were outweighed by social interests, she acted as a salonnière in an era of strict social distinction between representatives of contradicting tendencies and members of different classes and thus made a significant contribution to the intellectual shape of her age.

Henriette von Crayen died in Berlin in 1832. However, her grave in the cemetery of the French Reformed Congregation is no longer preserved.

family

August Wilhelm and Henriette von Crayen had three children:

Charles Marc Antoine is said to have been an illegitimate son of Duke Karl August; on Victoire, see Fortleben . A niece of Henriette was Pauline Wiesel , lover of Prince Louis Ferdinand ; a great niece Caroline Mayer , later married to the poet Jean Paul .

salon

Henriette von Crayen. Painting by Anton Graff around 1783

Henriette von Crayen was one of the first salons of the Sattelzeit and significantly shaped the type of literary salon as a place of intellectual exchange and casual conviviality, which was typical for the period around 1800. The young consul already ran a hospitable house in Leipzig, in which, in addition to international guests, many greats of the early Weimar Classics frequented. After returning to Berlin, she opened a new salon in her house at Unter den Linden 32 / Charlottenstrasse in 1805 , which became a meeting place for learned and gallant Berlin society and attracted numerous famous contemporaries. The salon, which could easily be measured in its appeal with the soirées of Rahel Varnhagen or Henriette Herz , survived the Napoleonic occupation and the wars of liberation and did not close its doors until 1830.

A specific feature of salon life, which was particularly evident in the Crayen salon and in her own biography, was the juxtaposition and intertwining of intellectual and erotic interests, which led to many notable amours. Her niece Pauline Wiesel, daughter of her sister Elisabeth César , often visited her aunt's salon together with her, not at all secret, partner Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia (1772–1806) - a detail that highlights the fact that she renounced noble- class conventionality on the one hand, bourgeois moralistic rigor on the other, which constituted the essential existence and the essential charm of salon life and gave it its peculiar freedom.

Well-known habitués

Duke Karl August, with whom Henriette von Crayen probably had an affair

In Leipzig

In Berlin

Survival

Henriette von Crayen also lives on in literary terms. In his novella Schach von Wuthenow (1882), Theodor Fontane depicted the fun and loving Salonnière in the shape of the clever and attractive Frau von. Carayon a permanent monument. The plot itself takes its motive essentially from the circle of Frau von Crayen: The protagonist, Rittmeister v. Schach , is the guard officer Otto Friedrich Ludwig von Schack (1763-1815), the figure of Victoire v. Carayon of Victoire von Crayen, daughter of Henriette, copied.

The unhappy love story between the two is also based on the affair between Schack and the real Victoire, with whose mother he perverted just as much as - in the novel - chess with Josephine v. Carayon, the mother of his unloved bride. Major v. Schack committed suicide in 1815 through deep indebtedness; Fontane's chess - only Rittmeister , albeit like the one in the Prussian elite regiment Gensdarmes (dissolved in 1807) - already shot itself in 1806, before the double battle at Jena and Auerstedt , for fear that his pearly wife might cause him the ridicule of his comrades. Victoires - 1818 by King Friedrich Wilhelm III. legitimized - son Otto von Crayen probably comes from Schack; The fictional Victoire also gives birth to a child soon after Schach's suicide. Unlike the couple at Fontane's, Victoire von Crayen and Otto von Schack were not married.

literature

  • Joachim Kühn: The beautiful Mrs. von Crayen and yours. An epilogue to Fontane's “Schach von Wuthenow” . In: The Bear of Berlin . Volume 21, 1972, pp. 89-109.
  • Petra Wilhelmy: The Berlin Salon in the 19th Century . Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 1989, pp. 55-57, pp. 486-88 and 626-28.
  • Petra Wilhelmy-Dollinger: The Berlin salons. With historical walks . Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 2000.

Web links

Commons : Henriette von Crayen  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ deaths. In: Königlich-privilegirte Zeitung von Staats- und schehrten Dinge (Vossische) No. 201, September 8, 1865, 2nd supplement, p. 7.
  2. ↑ Otto von Crayen died in March 1873 according to the military weekly paper, vol. 1875, No. 63, Col. 1239 f. He was married (July 14, 1833) to Juliane Emmeline Louise , b. von Bessel (1815–1872).
  3. ^ See Wilhelmy, p. 57.
  4. ↑ See Wilhelmy, pp. 628-630.
personal data
SURNAME Crayen, Henriette von
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German salonière
DATE OF BIRTH November 1, 1755
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH February 26, 1832
Place of death Berlin