tkp: KvG: Comprehending a Suicide?

The Life and Death of Günderrode

There are three types of links in this document. If you follow a numbered link (which represents a footnote reference), you will arrive at the appropriate footnote. If you follow a link of a person's name, you will arrive at that person's entry in a series of capsule biographies. And if you follow a link associated with a city, you'll then view a map of central Europe, where you can hopefully associate the city's name with its location. Even considering the relatively small number of German women who made their mark upon cultural and intellectual life around 1800, Karoline Frederike Louise Maximiliane von Günderrode was unique. Unlike many of her contemporaries, who emerged from wealthy bourgeois or Jewish backgrounds, Günderrode was an impoverished noblewoman, born on February 11, 1780 in Karlsruhe, [1] the eldest daughter of six children of Hektor von Günderrode, a writer and an adviser to the court of the Duke of Baden, and his wife Louise von Günderrode, a learned woman who had anonymously published her essays and poems. As a result of her family's financial troubles (compounded by her father's death when she was only six years old), the death of a sister when she was fourteen, and difficulties with her mother, she received special permission to enter the Cronstetten-Hynspergisches Adelige Damenstift--a Lutheran cloister for widowed and unmarried women of the nobility--in Frankfurt am Main on April 4, 1797. [2] She was only nineteen at the time, and apparently condemned to live out the quiet, lonely life of a canoness, among women who were at the time much older than she. [3] Consequently, she turned to private intellectual pursuits as solace, straining her already weak eyesight in the study of history and philosophy. Fortunately, she made the acquaintance of several educated women, among them the half-sisters Lisette von Mettingh and Susanne von Heyden, who brought her into their circle of friends. Among these new acquaintances was the historian and legal scholar (and later Prussian Minister of Justice) Friedrich Karl von Savigny, with whom Günderrode fell in love in 1799. However, Savigny, who was frightened of both her passion and her intellect, diverted their relationship into a frightfully complicated intellectual friendship. Two years later, Günderrode befriended Bettina and Gunda Brentano at the house and salon of their grandmother Sophie von La Roche in Offenbach, and soon afterward met their brother Clemens--with whom she then fell in love. However, Clemens Brentano was far more unstable psychologically than Günderrode eventually was thought to be; consequently, their relationship quickly cooled. (He eventually married the writer Sophie Mereau.) In the meantime, her friendship with Bettina Brentano grew ever stronger, producing a volumnious correspondence concerning theories of history and philosophy, religion, love, and Bettina's education. [4] But on a visit to Heidelberg in 1804, she met the famously unattractive and married professor Friedrich Creuzer, and another love affair began. This affair somehow became the most complicated of all, characterized by secret meetings throughout the Rhine valley, Creuzer's broken promises to divorce his wife, the involvement of Savigny (who was by then safely married to Gunda Brentano) and other friends, and even Günderrode's abortive plan to follow Creuzer to Russia dressed in men's attire. [5] Ultimately, however, Creuzer broke off the affair with a letter, which reached Günderrode--despite several attempts by her friends to intercept this potentially cataclysmic piece of correspondence--in Winkel am Rhein. She thereupon went down to the Rhine with the dagger she had always on her person, weighted a handkerchief with

stones from the riverbank, plunged the dagger into a spot she had had marked upon her heart some time before, [6] and leapt into the river, thus ending her life on July 26, 1806. At first glance, this was simply the death of a twenty-six year old woman who has just heard from her married lover that their relationship is over, the death of a woman whose two previous liaisons were similarly unsuccessful, the death of a woman almost depressingly obsessed by death. However, in her short life, Günderrode had already produced three volumes of poetry, essays, and fragmentary works, of which two were published (under her chosen masculine pseudonym of Tian, a camouflage swiftly uncovered by the noted critic August Friedrich von Kotzebue) [7] by her friend Christoph Nees von Esenbeck in 1804 and 1805. Because of her notoriety, and her connections to the intellectual circles of the Rhine valley, Günderrode's death echoed far beyond the riverbank where her body inadvertantly washed ashore. The death of a shy canoness--a young, reportedly beautiful woman who cared little for self-presentation, and who spent much of her time studying in her room or seeking out professors in order to practice her Latin--was even noted by Goethe, who compared the feeling he experienced at the place of her death with the sensation he felt at Eger, where Wallenstein was murdered. [8] And Goethe was not alone in his attempt to understand Günderrode's suicide--not in the early years of the nineteenth century, not when the much older Bettina Brentano von Arnim recalled a friendship that had died over thirty years before, not around the turn of the twentieth (when a renewed interest in Romanticism attracted the attention of a new generation). Even today, at least in part due to Christa Wolf's efforts in rediscovering and re- presenting Günderrode's works, the death of Karoline von Günderrode still provokes interesting questions, tentative answers, and innovative theories. Among these innovative theories is one offered by Friedrich Kittler, who uses Günderrode's death as a metaphor for the elimination of women from the German intellectual discourse network of 1800. Unfortunately, his image of Günderrode is that of a woman unable to affect her own fate, an independent woman steadily reduced by Creuzer into the image of an untutored boy, and eventually into the mere depersonalized embodiment of poetry. As a result, Kittler views Günderrode's suicide as an event determined by the cultural impossibility of resolving her femaleness within the academic context [9]--an interpretation about as satisfying and accurate as the historically patronizing view of her as a love-blind, immature, emotionally distraught girl-woman driven by passions she could never comprehend or master. Günderrode was not the passive putty in Creuzer's mind that Kittler believed her to be; as Wolf notes, she had convinced Creuzer to refer to her in masculine terms, and not the other way around. [10] She rarely used her first name at all, often referring to herself simply as "Günder(r)ode," or, as in letters to Savigny and Creuzer, as "der Freund" (the masculine form of "the friend"), or through the male pseudonyms of her published works. However, her attempts to break free of the limitations imposed upon her (through self-redefinition) were received disdainfully. Although he indulged her desire to be referred to in masculine terms, Savigny mocked her beliefs, claiming in 1804 that she had "downright republican attitudes," and then asked if they were "a little hangover from the French Revolution," [11] at a time when republican sympathies were looked upon unkindly by a Germany horrified by the memories of the Terror, and of the French occupations and annexations of German territory. Indeed, Savigny's consistently patronizing tone throughout his correspondence with Günderrode (further emphasized by his references to her as "Günderrödchen," a dimunitive form of her name) [12] suggested that, although he was still fascinated by her, he believed her incapable of

discussing larger political and philosophical issues. For him, Günderrode's intellectual development was a clearly limited project, that could only be aided so much by friendly men before it was time to turn to other issues. Perhaps in response to such masculine belittling of her intellectual inclinations, Günderrode once asked Bettina Brentano for lessons in "inconsequentiality." On the most superficial level, such a request might be viewed as the attempt of the serious, "consequential" student to discover how her younger correspondent--careless, gloriously exuberant, more concerned with natural instinct than with intellectual understanding--managed to maintain a sunny disposition when her opinions were automatically discounted. However, such an interpretation would neglect the great irony of the request--irony that Günderrode, with her keen understanding of her own fate, was undoubtedly aware of. In the key social terms of family and prospects for marriage, Günderrode was already utterly inconsequential. Living in a Lutheran cloister, she had no concrete connections with family or society, and few consistent connections with her own friends. And her only possible opportunity to become integrated into that society rested upon the shoulders of an already married man. On the other hand, Bettina Brentano still lived in her grandmother's prosperous, exciting household; she would have every opportunity to make a good marriage (which she did in 1811, marrying the writer Achim von Arnim). And her effervescent joy in nature was far less suspicious than Günderrode's intellectualism; in terms of the cultural expectations for young women at the time, Bettina Brentano was perfectly normal, perfectly non-serious, and, accordingly, quite prepared to become a societally consequential wife and mother. Günderrode was a woman caught between her own desire for individual understanding and the limitations blindly imposed upon her by society, between her knowledge of the past (especially of India and the East) [13] and her bleak expectations for the present. Given such a situation, it is unsurprising that she could see no future for herself beyond a cold and lonely maturity within the cloister walls, and consequently committed suicide (whether Creuzer's rejection was the direct cause or simply a convenient pretext). However, there remains one exceedingly perplexing piece of the puzzle to consider in attempting to comprehend the death of Günderrode. She evidently was not simply planning to kill herself; her attempt to weigh herself down (in the hope that her body would forever vanish beneath the waters of the Rhine) suggested that she did not even want to leave behind the mute testament of her corpse, or any other indication of her existence. [14] She was seeking not merely death, but self-annihilation. The question is: why?