The Woman at the Heart of German Romantic Philosophy
This article is in a series on women who have been erased from the history of philosophy. The series is titled “Discovering the Women at the Heart of Philosophy.” The first article can be found here.
Karoline von Günderrode in front of the former Cronstetten Stift am Rossmarkt by Ferry Ahrlé
The life and work of German writer Karoline von Günderrode has inspired poems, plays, novels, music, and paintings. Described as a prophetess, a priestess, and “the German Sappho,” she is known as a tragic Romantic and a mystical and lyric poet. Her spectacular suicide in 1806—a dagger through the heart at the age of 26—led to a fascination with her biography and a proliferation of biographical interpretations of her work. But, quite aside from her biography, Günderrode’s writing is exciting, original—and has the potential to solve, or at least address in a unique way, philosophical problems that occupied her contemporaries, especially in Idealism and Early German Romanticism.
Günderrode, the eldest of six siblings, was born in 1780 in Karlsruhe in southwest Germany to a family of cash-strapped minor nobility. The children were educated by a tutor, and Günderrode retained an interest in languages, sciences, and especially philosophy throughout her life. Her father died in 1786; her sisters Louise, Charlotte, and Amalie in 1794, 1801, and 1802. Philosophy and literature became an escape from these tragedies. Writing to a friend just before Charlotte’s death, Günderrode beseeched: “I’m inwardly totally miserable. Advise, help me, and don’t say your cold it must be so, or at least let’s spin dreams around this dire theme. / A little while ago I was able to soar in a beautiful sublime fantasy world, in Ossian’s half-dark magical world. But the blessed dreams dissolve; they seem like love potions, they intoxicate, exalt and then disappear.”
From the age of 17, Günderrode lived in a convent in Frankfurt. Despite strict rules of dress and comportment, she was able to meet friends, travel, and continue writing and studying. She gained access to texts in philosophy and other areas of interest, as well as to publishers, through wealthy, well-connected acquaintances. She was friends with the Brentano family, especially the siblings Kunigunde (“Gunda”), Bettina (later von Arnim), and Clemens, the latter two of whom became famous writers. Their grandmother, the author Sophie von la Roche, published Günderrode’s short story “Story of a Brahmin” in her journal Herbsttagen (1805).
Through the Brentanos, Günderrode met the jurist Friedrich Carl von Savigny, whom she expected to propose. However, Savigny—perhaps put off by Günderrode’s poor health, financial situation, and intellectual pursuits—eventually married Gunda. Subsequently, Günderrode began an affair with a married man, the influential mythologist Georg Friedrich Creuzer. It was a letter from Creuzer ending their affair that triggered Günderrode’s suicide. She left him a bloodstained handkerchief and a poem as a “pledge” of their reunion in the afterlife.
Günderrode’s writings comprise a mixture of published and unpublished works, notes, and letters, encompassing many genres: essays, fragments, dialogues, dramas, short stories, and lyric and epic poetry. She published two collections of writings, Poems and Fantasies (1804) and Poetic Fragments (1805), and had completed a third, Melete, when she died. She also published four pieces separately: the short story mentioned above, and the plays Udohla and Magic & Destiny (in 1805 in Creuzer’s journal Studien) and Nikator (in Willmann’s Taschenbuch für das Jahr 1806).
Günderrode’s notes and writings demonstrate, among other interests, her studies of Schelling, Kant, Fichte, Herder, Hemsterhuis, the Early German Romantics Novalis and Friedrich Schelling, and the history and religious thought of Northern Europe, Asia and North Africa. Her work shows a highly original and independent engagement with these sources, which she syncretized into a remarkably consistent philosophical outlook. Her philosophy included a metaphysics, a theory of identity, nascent social and political theories, and the beginnings of an ethics and an aesthetics. She is also known for her commentary on gender.
At the core of Günderrode’s philosophical commitments are her metaphysics, which present every individual being and object in the world as made up of many “elements.” When individual entities die or break down, the elements fall apart and are mixed again in new combinations with the elements from other entities, creating new forms. “Thus,” she writes, “Life is immortal and surges up and down in the elements [. . . . I]ndividual life is only a life-form given through this determinate connection, attraction and contact, which can last no longer than the connection.”
This metaphysical picture is the basis for several further, novel claims. Crucially, Günderrode re-imagines death as a site of rejuvenation and recreation: an individual may die, but in a real sense they continue to exist, their parts now scattered among many other entities and joined with elements from other individuals. Günderrode even indicates that some form of consciousness may continue after a person’s individuality is fragmented by death. In “An Apocalyptic Fragment” the narrator rises from the dead after having “muffled and tangled dreams.” In “A Dream” Günderrode describes the dead as “spellbound,” “stupefied,” and “numb,” yet aware, in some sense, of their surroundings: they are sleepers, struggling to awaken.
This metaphysical model also underpins Günderrode’s understanding of love, which she claims is how we experience the harmony of some of our elements with those of someone else. Similar elements within ourselves and a friend or lover are attracted to each other on a chemical or magnetic level, and we feel this attraction as an emotion. As explained by a teacher in Günderrode’s dialogue “The Manes”: “A similar or identical thought in different heads, even if they never know of each other, is, in a spiritual sense, a connection.” The teacher adds: “The death of a person connected with me in this way does not cancel out this connection.” Not only that, but in death we are literally united with friends and lovers. As Günderrode writes in “The Malabarian Widows”: “Death becomes love’s sweet celebration, / The separated elements unified.”
Günderrode’s political theory is directly related to her metaphysics. Günderrode saw political entities such as states or religious groups in much the same way as individual creatures and objects: as temporary constellations of elements (or individuals), subject to collapse and dissolution and therefore requiring periodic transformation and revitalization. Political revolution and death are therefore necessary in the same way: both allow old and failing entities to die away so that new entities can be formed from their remains.
Günderrode’s claims about ethics, while relatively undeveloped, also fit within this metaphysical picture. In “Idea of the Earth” and “Letters of Two Friends,” she claims that virtuous acts are those that contribute to harmony and unification: “where virtue is, there is the same striving for acts of justice, goodness and concord.” In “Story of a Brahmin,” she claims instead that morals relate only to human beings’ interactions with each other and cannot satisfy our craving for spiritual fulfillment. In this piece, her narrator “discovered aptitudes within me that these finite relations would no longer satisfy. [. . . . M]y appetite sought an infinite object for its striving.” The question of how these claims—and the terms “virtue” and “morals”—relate to each other in Günderrode’s work is still to be explored.
Günderrode’s work is philosophically interesting for its own sake, but also because of its likely influence on the thought of better-known philosophers, historians, and writers. In particular, Günderrode is an important link between Early German Romanticism and Heidelberg Romanticism, which counted among its members Creuzer, Clemens, and Bettina and Achim von Arnim (Bettina’s husband), as well as Joseph Görres, the Brothers Grimm, and, on some accounts, Hölderlin.
It is particularly likely that Günderrode’s ideas influenced Clemens and Bettina. Clemens is known for his role in the development of Romantic ideas of selfhood and individuality—a topic that Günderrode discussed in letters to him. Bettina, who also wrote a “Report on Günderrode’s Suicide” for Goethe’s mother, Katharina Elisabeth Goethe, published an edited version of her correspondence with Günderrode, Die Günderode, which was an influence on American Transcendentalism (more on this in my next post).
It is also highly likely that Günderrode influenced Creuzer’s developing ideas about mythology. Although most of Günderrode’s letters to Creuzer were destroyed (his friends feared a scandal after her suicide), those that remain show that the pair often discussed ancient mythology, philosophy, and religion. Creuzer’s Symbolism and Mythology of the Ancient Peoples (1810–1812) was one of the dominant influences on nineteenth-century European ideas about religious and cultural history, and was published only a few years after his affair with Günderrode.
Cultural marker in honor of Karoline von Günderrode in Oestrich-Winkel
Like many historical women philosophers, Günderrode’s contributions to the history of ideas have been occluded and forgotten. At the time she was writing, women’s intellectual efforts often went unacknowledged, meaning that we will likely never know the true extent of her influence on the people around her. Nonetheless, it is exciting to recover the original ways Günderrode addressed philosophical questions that were at issue among her contemporaries, as well as her possible impact on philosophers and other thinkers whose writings are already well-known.
Anna Ezekiel is a feminist historian of philosophy and translator working on post-Kantian German thought. Her translations of Karoline von Günderrode’s work are available as Poetic Fragments (SUNY Press, 2016) and Philosophical Fragments (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). She has also translated the writings of eight historical women philosophers for the forthcoming OUP volume Women Philosophers of the Long Nineteenth Century: The German Tradition, edited by Kristin Gjesdal and Dalia Nassar. Quotations in this piece are taken from these works.