Karoline von Günderrode

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Karoline von Günderrode, anonymous painting, around 1800; Historical Museum, Frankfurt Main

Karoline Friederike Louise Maximiliane of Günderrode (* 11. February 1780 in Karlsruhe , † 26. July 1806 in angle ) was a German poet of romance .

life and work

origin

Karoline von Günderrode was born on February 11, 1780 in Karlsruhe as the eldest child of a Baden government councilor. She lost her father, the councilor and writer Hector Wilhelm von Günderrode , at the age of six. The mother, Luise Sophie Victorie Auguste Henriette Friedrike, b. von Günderrode from the Frankfurt branch (1759-1819), then moved to Hanau with her five daughters and her son .

The family Günderrode was a leading since the 16th century patrician families of Frankfurt am Main , resulting in the ganerbschaft Old Limpurg had joined forces. Karoline's brother was the future Senator and Senior Mayor of the Free City of Frankfurt , Friedrich Carl Hector Wilhelm von Günderrode . The Günderrodes always spelled themselves with a double "r", which was later occasionally disregarded - hence the name form Günderode , which is often read - and only found its way into literature again since the 1970s.

Childhood and youth

After the father's death in 1786, the family lived in cramped conditions, as the mother only received a small pension. Karoline's early years were marked by a legal dispute that she and her mother had over the inheritance.

At seventeen, Karoline was accepted as a "Stiftsfräulein" of the evangelical Cronstetten-Hynspergischen noble ladies' monastery in Frankfurt am Main. The foundation secured penniless female members of the Alten-Limpurger families a material livelihood. The canonesses were required to lead a “decent lifestyle”. As a canon, Karoline studied philosophy, history, literature and mythology and developed a deep longing for a fulfilled, self-determined life. She was enthusiastic about the French Revolution . Her love stories kept her busy. The topics that would occupy her for a lifetime became apparent early on: captivity and freedom, love and death.

Karoline von Günderrode House;
in Hof Trages , the estate of
Friedrich Carl von Savigny in Freigericht-Somborn in
Hesse

Her first great love was Friedrich Carl von Savigny , later the most important lawyer of his time and minister of the "Romantic on the throne", King Friedrich Wilhelm IV. Savigny was a law student at the time and introduced the young girl to the circle of romantics. “I love, wish, believe, hope again, and maybe more than ever,” the nineteen-year-old confessed to a friend. Little did Savigny know that his admirer was writing poetry. She had every reason to hide it.

"The realm in which we met fell down like a cloud that opened to take us into a hidden paradise," Bettina von Arnim later recalled in her book Die Günderode of the time together. Karoline von Günderrode's close friendship with Bettina von Arnim, who was also very thirsty for knowledge, abruptly broke off shortly before her death because her lover Friedrich Creuzer did not appreciate the Brentano family.

Karoline complained of headache and eye pain all her life. The description of their temporary blurred vision can be a disease of the glaucoma appear possible.

"Sappho of Romanticism"

When Karoline von Günderrode published her first book, Poems and Fantasies , under the pseudonym “Tian” at the age of 24 , Goethe wrote to the poet: “These poems are a really strange phenomenon.” Clemens Brentano , who was two years older, was also surprised: “ I still can't understand how she could hide your serious poetic talent from me ”.

Clemens Brentano became famous shortly afterwards. The work of Karolines von Günderrode is still in the shadow of her life. In doing so, she wrote some of the most beautiful poems of European Romanticism, such as the deathly longing Hochroth . Her poems are melancholy, bold and catchy. As early as the nineteenth century, Karoline von Günderrode was called the “ Sappho of Romanticism”.

Karoline's poems express the conflict in which a loving woman found herself at the time, who at the same time sought to realize her own ideas; they also anticipate the end of their tense life:

“Into the cheerful, free blueness
Into the unlimited expanse
I want to walk, I want to wallow
Nothing should captivate my steps.

Light bonds are chains to me
And home becomes a dungeon.
So on and on into the distance
From the narrow, dull life. "

The unusual appearance of the canoness and poet was a mystery even to contemporaries. The unconditional nature of her poetry also irritated many of her readers. Karoline's poetry appeared “a little too bold and masculine,” as the head of a Heidelberg girls' boarding school, Karoline Rudolphi, judged. One doubted her femininity. Karoline von Günderrode apparently violated the conventions of the time, how a woman should behave and how she should write poetry.

“I have no sense for female virtues, for female happiness,” she confessed in 1801 in a letter to Kunigunde Brentano at the age of twenty-one. “I only like the wild, the big, the shiny. There is an unhappy but incorrigible disproportion in my soul; and it will and must remain so, because I am a woman and have desires like a man, without man's strength. That's why I'm so changeable and at odds with myself. "

The great love

On a trip to Neuburg Abbey near Heidelberg , Karoline met the important philologist and mythologist Friedrich Creuzer and his wife, who was thirteen years older than him. Now her life issues got a boost - and so did her conflicts. Creuzer valued her poetry and helped her to publish it.

Karoline von Günderrode and Friedrich Creuzer promised to love each other until death. “I couldn't bear to lose your love,” the young woman wrote to the researcher in one of her letters, which some consider to be the most beautiful love letters in German literature.

Friedrich Carl von Savigny, meanwhile, married Clemens Brentano's sister Kunigunde (Gunda), Clemens Brentano married Sophie Mereau . But Karoline von Günderrode could not imagine a life as a professor's wife. And Friedrich Creuzer complained: "Lina is not going to marry ..."

The scholar toyed with the idea of ​​a ménage à trois . “My wife should wish to stay with us - as a mother, as a leader of our household. Your life should be free and poetic, ”he suggested to Karoline. It was the time of new concepts for living together. Creuzer's utopia is related to the revolutionary ideas that Henri de Saint-Simon and his circle of friends tried to live out in France at the same time . Nonetheless, some connoisseurs of the time classify her as a character weakness - the ailing Friedrich Creuzer did not have the courage to part with his wife.

Under the influence of Friedrich Creuzer, Karoline von Günderrode studied earlier studies, including matriarchal societies. In this, too, she was ahead of her time. She wanted to attend Friedrich Creuzer's lectures in men's clothing in order to be as close as possible to her lover.

death

Grave of Karoline von Günderrode in Winkel (Rheingau)

When Friedrich Creuzer fell ill and his wife nursed him well, he swore to her that he would part with his young lover. On July 26, 1806, Karoline received the news.

She had long owned a dagger with a silver handle. She had taken advice from a surgeon on how best to use it against herself. Out of unhappy love, but also burdened by the insoluble conflict between her need for freedom and the role of women at the time, she stabbed herself on the river bank in Winkel (Rheingau) .

The next day, her body was found in the water. “A deep wound, not quite an inch long; the sting penetrated the left ventricle between the 4th and 5th rib, ”notes the medical protocol. She was buried in the cemetery of the Winkel parish church of St. Walburga.

Friedrich Creuzer did everything to prevent Karoline's posthumous work Melete from being published. He appeared in the book as Eusebio and did not wish to be recognized: “The suppression of this writing is absolutely necessary.” Melete could only be published 100 years after the poet's death .

effect

Historical meaning

Despite her extraordinary life story, Karoline von Günderrode is not an isolated phenomenon. It can be used in the context of contemporaries like Bettina von Arnim , between the “torn ones” of the era like Ferdinand Raimund , Friedrich Hölderlin , Heinrich von Kleist and Lord Byron , but also in relation to artists like Rosalba Carriera and Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun , Angelika Kauffmann and women living later, such as the Russian painter Marie Bashkirtseff , who also died early, can be seen.

Reception today

The life stories of women in the early nineteenth century have been receiving great attention for a long time, starting with the play by Albert Steffen Caroline von Günderrode. A tragedy from the German Romantic era . Books like Ingeborg Drewitz ' Bettina von Arnim and Carola Stern's biographies about Rahel Varnhagen and Dorothea Schlegel are not only devoured by the female audience. Hans Magnus Enzensberger edited the correspondence between Auguste Bußmann and Clemens Brentano under the title Requiem for a Romantic Woman ; it became one of the most successful volumes in the Other Library and was filmed in 1998 by Dagmar Knöpfel. Also Sigrid Damm "research" novel Christiane and Goethe is to be mentioned here.

The radicalism with which Karoline tried to live out her feelings fascinated even her contemporaries. After her death, several selected volumes of her poetic work and especially her letters were published. In the 1970s, Karoline became a figure of identification in the women's movement. The anthology The Shadow of a Dream was published in the "Luchterhand Collection" . Poems, prose, letters, testimonies from contemporaries , edited by Christa Wolf. Wolf wrote a very precise and at the same time sensitive essay about Caroline. At the same time, Wolf made Karoline von Günderrode a protagonist in her story Kein Ort. Nowhere in which there is a fictional encounter between Günderrode and Heinrich von Kleist , as the fates of the two poet contemporaries Kleist and Günderrode show certain parallels.

In addition to the historical-critical complete edition published by Walter Morgenthaler , a detailed biography by Dagmar von Gersdorff has been available since February 2006 of Günderrodes, who is a representative woman of Romanticism in her radicalism. In her life and work she embodies the genius, loneliness, love and death of a woman around 1800 and, with her specifically female urge for freedom, can be seen as a forerunner of the liberalization movement: "Oh, what a damnation it is not to be able to move the wings!"

A small house on Trages farm is still named after her today. She used to live there when she met the Arnims, Brentanos, and Savignys with whom she was friends.

In the opera Kleist by Rainer Rubbert and Tanja Langer there is a fictional encounter between Günderrode and Kleist.

expenditure

  • All works and selected studies. Historical-critical edition ; ed. by Walter Morgenthaler; Basel, Frankfurt am Main: Stroemfeld / Roter Stern, 1990–1991; ISBN 3-87877-970-4 ; New edition 2006; ISBN 3-87877-964-X
    • Volume 1: Texts; 1990
    • Volume 2: Variants and Selected Studies; 1991
    • Volume 3: Commentary; 1991
  • Works and letters . 5 vols. Vol. 1–4 ed. by Gustav Konrad. Vol. 5 ed. by Joachim Müller. Frechen / Cologne 1959–1963.
  • Poems, prose, letters ; ed. by Hannelore Schlaffer; Stuttgart 1998; ISBN 3-15-009722-3
  • The shadow of a dream. Poems, prose, letters, testimonies from contemporaries ; ed. by Christa Wolf ; Book publisher Der Morgen Berlin 1979; New edition Munich 1997; ISBN 3-423-12376-1

literature

Non-fiction
  • Dagmar von Gersdorff : "The earth has not become my home." The life of Karoline von Günderrode . Insel, Frankfurt am Main 2006
  • Martin Glaubrecht:  Günderrode, Caroline Friederike Louise Maximiliane. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 7, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1966, ISBN 3-428-00188-5 , p. 261 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Markus Hille: Karoline von Günderrode (= Rowohlt's monographs). Rowohlt, Reinbek 1999, ISBN 3-499-50441-3
  • Hyacinth Holland :  Günderrode, Caroline von . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 10, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1879, p. 126.
  • Margarete Lazarowicz: Karoline von Günderrode. Portrait of a stranger (= European university writings; I.923). Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1986
  • Christa Wolf (Ed.): Karoline von Günderode. The shadow of a dream. Poems, prose, letters, testimonies from contemporaries. Der Morgen, Berlin 1981, frequent reprints, also in Germany. Therein von Wolf as author: K. v. G .; this again in Marlis Gerhardt (Ed.): Essays of famous women. Insel, Frankfurt 1997, ISBN 3-458-33641-9 , pp. 137-169
  • Hans Peter Buohler: Karoline von Günderrode. In: Killy Literature Lexicon. Authors and works from the German-speaking cultural area. Lim. by Walther Killy, ed. by Wilhelm Kühlmann (among others). Second, completely revised. Edition. Volume 4. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter 2009, ISBN 978-3-11-021389-8 , pp. 500–502.
Fiction and dramas

Web links

Commons : Karoline von Günderrode  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Karoline von Günderrode  - Sources and full texts
Wikiquote: Karoline von Günderrode  - Quotes

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The look that dreams. Where Karoline von Günderrode and Friedrich Carl von Savigny kissed each other in: FAZ from August 4, 2012, page 47.
  2. ↑ Bettina von Arnim: Works and Letters. Vol. 2. Ed. By Gustav Konrad. Frechen / Cologne 1959–1963. P. 49.
  3. ↑ Ulrike Landfester: Self-care as statecraft: Bettine von Arnim's political work. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2000, p. 205.
  4. ↑ Birgit Weißenborn: "I am sending you a tender pledge". The letters from Karoline von Günderrode . Insel Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1992, p.  234 .
personal data
SURNAME Günderrode, Karoline von
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Günderode, Karoline von; Tian (pseudonym); Ion (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German romantic writer
DATE OF BIRTH February 11, 1780
PLACE OF BIRTH Karlsruhe
DATE OF DEATH July 26, 1806
Place of death Winkel (Rheingau)