Klara Staiger

Klara Staiger (born November 19, 1588 in Schongau as Katharina Staiger, † December 25, 1656 in Eichstätt ) was an Augustinian choirwoman and from June 30, 1632 until her death prioress of the Marienstein monastery in Eichstätt. During her time as Prioress, she kept a detailed "diary" in which she recorded the presence she had experienced herself. These records are almost completely preserved to this day and thus represent an important testimony to the civilian experience of the Thirty Years' War .

Live and act

Childhood and youth

Klara Staiger was born in 1588 as Katharina Staiger - Klara later became her spiritual name - in Schongau , south of Landsberg am Lech . Her father, Erhard Staiger, was a businessman; her mother, Ursula Staiger, did not have a permanent job.

How she spent her early childhood is not known. In 1599, however, at the age of ten, she was admitted to the Marienstein monastery just outside the city of Eichstätt . The tenth prioress of the convent at that time was Katharina's aunt Clare I. In 1604 Staiger became a novice , took the religious vows the following year and, like her aunt, was given the religious name Clare.

Prioress of the Marienstein Monastery

The Swedish War, which had been going on since July 4, 1630, did not spare the Marienstein monastery either. In February 1632, the Swedish army under Gustav II Adolf was on the so-called spring campaign , in the course of which the army managed to advance from Mainz to Munich . On the subsequent march back to northern Germany , the Swedish army crossed the diocese of Eichstätt and for the first time in the course of the war came close to Eichstätt. The city itself was not challenged, but the Marienstein Monastery suffered from troops on both sides , mainly due to its location outside the city ​​walls . Constant raids and looting led to the illness and ultimately to the death of the eleventh prioress of the monastery, Agnes Mayr. A little later Staiger was unanimously elected as her successor and officially took office on June 30, 1632. She held this office for a quarter of a century until her death in 1651.

From then on Staiger began to record her life and events relating to the monastery in a diary.

Destruction and reconstruction of the Marienstein monastery

From January 1634, a larger Imperial Bavarian army again moved into quarters in the Eichstätt diocese, but soon had to retreat to Ingolstadt in front of a superior Swedish army under Landgrave Wilhelm von Hessen-Kassel . This cleared the way for the Swedish troops to Eichstätt again. Staiger, who was in exile in Ingolstadt at the time, reported on the following looting and partial destruction of Eichstatt from February 6 to 12, 1634 , based on eyewitness reports . Those days represented the worst visitation of Eichstatt during the Thirty Years War: Swedish troops first looted the city and then burned it down completely. It is assumed that the extreme severity with which the Swedish troops acted against the city, which was driven out of the city on October 28, 1633, meant that Landgrave Wilhelm von Hessen-Kassel wanted to make an example of the city. The so-called “Great Swedish Fire”, which was triggered by this, also hit the Marienstein Monastery and almost completely destroyed it.

The Marienstein Monastery after the reconstruction. Engraving around 1680.

According to Staiger, the second half of the 1630s and the early 1640s were characterized by “great uncertainty”. The main scene of the war had moved west to the Rhine with the beginning of the Swedish-French War . The armies in Franconia and the Upper Palatinate seldom met to a large extent; instead, the civilian population in particular suffered from the constant raids and raids of the mercenary armies . For the Mariastein monastery, however, its location in the immediate vicinity of the city of Eichstätt required a certain amount of security. During this period, Staiger largely devoted himself to leading the reconstruction work of the monastery. In doing so, she succeeded in building up a network of donors from which the reconstruction of the monastery could be financed. Another important source of income for the monastery was the begging trips , on which numerous sisters of the convent had to go.

Last years and death

On November 1, 1648, Staiger and the convent returned one last time, and now finally, to the monastery from an escape caused by the Thirty Years War . This happened shortly after another looting of the monastery by soldiers , about whose origins Staiger no longer made any statements in their records. Staiger's entries are becoming increasingly rare and shorter , in a development that has already become noticeable in previous years. The last five years of records only take up 20 of the 552 pages of the work. Over the following years, which were likely to continue to be characterized by reconstruction work on the monastery (now 16 years after the destruction in 1634, mind you), Staiger , who is now marked by old age and regular illnesses, hardly mentions any details. On July 7, 1650 - the reason for the declaration of peace in Eichstätt by Prince-Bishop Marquard II. Schenk von Castell - Staiger made her last longer entry, a review and summary of the war years before she died on December 25, 1651 in the Marienstein monastery .

The diary"

The records are in a small, 20 × 8 cm book. It comprises approx. 550 pages, which are almost completely preserved. The less than ten missing pages were forcibly (and probably deliberately) removed. The work is now in the Bavarian State Library in Munich.

The actual diary covers a period of around 20 years. After a brief, retrospective summary of the author's life up to the start of writing, which spanned another 30 years, the author's first timely entry was made in September 1631. The work ends on October 1, 1651.

The records are often referred to as a diary , but this can be misleading in some ways. Staiger himself introduced the work with the following sentence:
“Directory and description when I born sister Clara Staigerin. In the monastery come and what the jar thinks. Vnd published. ”
Staiger himself did not use the term“ diary ”. The actual reference point of the work is therefore less itself than the monastery or convent. The primary reason for writing is not so much the war, but rather Klara's election as prioress of the monastery, which means that a large part of the responsibility for the monastery has passed to her. This results in a wide range of topics covered , which in addition to the events of the war also deal with far more everyday matters.

literature

• Ortrun Fina: Klara Staiger's diary. Records made during the Thirty Years' War in Mariastein Abbey near Eichstätt. Regensburg 1981, ISBN 3-7917-0721-3 .
• Ortrun Fina: The Mariasteiner Anniversar: Book of the Dead - Book of Life; Delay d. Memorial days in the former Augustinian convent in Mariastein near Eichstätt / Bay. Regensburg 1987, ISBN 3-7917-1111-3 .
• Volker Meidt (ed.): The German literature in the age of the Baroque: from late humanism to early enlightenment. Munich 2009, ISBN 3-4065-8757-7 .
• Uta Nolting: Linguistic usage of south German monastery women of the 17th century. Münster 2010, ISBN 3-8309-2229-9 .
• Joseph Schlecht : Eichstätt in the Swedish War. Diary of the Augustinian nun Clara Staiger, prioress of the Mariastein monastery, about the war years 1631 to 1650 . Brönner, Eichstätt 1889 ( Eichstätt-Ingolstadt University Library (PDF) [accessed on April 12, 2014]).

Individual evidence

1. ^ O. Fina: Das Mariasteiner Anniversar, p. 114.
2. ↑ O. Fina: Klara Staiger's diary, p. 41f.
3. ↑ O. Fina: Klara Staiger's diary, p. 52ff.
4. ↑ O. Fina: Klara Staigers diary, pp. 111-122f.
5. ↑ O. Fina: Klara Staiger's diary, p. 158ff.
6. ^ O. Fina: Klara Staigers diary, p. 324ff.
7. ↑ O. Fina: Klara Staigers diary, pp. 11–33f.