of the many picture books of the feminine soul of that
complex period of simplicity and enlightenment. Chodo-
wiecki, the great painter, is perhaps the best delineator of
those typical figures of German womanhood.

Sophie La Roche, who had in her youth revolutionized
the mind of the great poet Christoph Martin Wieland, was
one of the most remarkable women of her time. Wieland,
in his youth, conceived a passionate love for Sophie, whom
he introduced into the treasure house of poetry, but his
enthusiastic love for her did not terminate in marriage.
She remained, however, during all her life his intimate
friend, though Goethe's overwhelming genius made Wie-
land's star pale in her later estimate. As' the wife of
Maximilian La Roche, councillor of the Elector of Mainz,
she turned to French literature, especially to Voltaire and
Rousseau, and made her home "the place of spiritual pil-
grimage on the Rhine for German authors. Young Goethe
was received there, and according to his disposition,
against which he was quite helpless revered the mother
for the sake of her two beautiful daughters, who were just
approaching womanhood. When her husband lost favor
with the prince, Sophie supported her family by her writings
as "the teacher of Germany's daughters." Her novels,
written in the spirit of Richardson, are valuable records
of the many-colored court life and of the activities of the
social personages of her time. A modern author, Ludmilla
Assing, has described the life of this extraordinary woman,
who is to be remembered not only for her own merit, but
as the grandmother of Clemens and Bettina Brentano;
because of whom Sophie La Roche may be called the
grandmother of German "Romanticism."



THROUGH STORM AND STRESS 319

It is impossible to give even the most cursory account
of the remarkable German women of this later period, for
at every step we meet with such an embarras de richesse
of extraordinary women, of whom voluminous biographical
accounts have been written, that we can only select typical
characters.

Besides Caroline Neuberin, the pioneer and founder of
a respectable German stage, only one important woman
played a role in the life of the grand Lessing. A great love
awoke in his heart for Eva Konig, "the only woman with
whom he would venture to live." To realize his desire, he
accepted a poorly paid position as librarian at Wolfenbiittel.
He was forty years old when the betrothal took place, but
six years later his circumstances for the first time permitted
him to marry. His happiness lasted but a short time. On
Christmas eve, in 1777, a son was born to him, who died
at birth; and two weeks later, to his inconsolable grief, he
lost his beloved wife. His literary references to this great
sorrow belong to the most pathetic passages in literature,
just as his correspondence with Eva Konig, edited by
Alfred Schone, furnishes the most charming portrait of a
great man.

Lessing's correspondence with Eva Konig is but an
additional proof that among the most valuable documents
adduced for the characterization of German womanhood
are love letters to and from German women. Such let-
ters are accessible to us from the thirteenth century.
During the fourteenth century they become more nu-
merous: a nun corresponds, perchance, with her father
confessor; presents are exchanged, and sentiments, not
always of a purely religious nature. Now and then the
tender phrase is wanting, but is replaced by a crude pic-
ture of a heart pierced with an arrow. Later on we find
an address like " lovable, subtle, beneficent, well-formed,



320 WOMAN

overloved woman." Luther greets his "friendly, dear
'lord,' Frau Catherine von Bora, Doctor Lutherin in
Wittenberg" with teasing endearments, as he complains
of the fare at the court of Saxony and expresses his longing
for home: "What a good wine and beer have I at home,
besides a charming wife, or should I say 'lord!'" An
attractive originality shines forth from the letters of
Duchess Elizabeth Charlotte of Orleans, and from those
of Goethe's mother. Naturalness was the ideal in letter
writing of the late eighteenth century, as artificiality had
been that of the preceding era. Frau Gottsched, in her
letters, reveals a roguish grace that contrasts with the
stilted style of her tyrant husband. Goethe's letters of
love and longing in Werther will stand as a model as long
as literature shall be esteemed in the world, although
there is a realistic and totally indefensible sentimentality
in Werther's love of Lotte, the wife of another man.

Werther, beautiful of form, spiritual, and highly gifted,
had, naturally, frequently aroused love without returning
it; now Nemesis seizes him; he loves, loves to madness
the wife of another man. The loveliness of Lotte (by the
way, she is a real person, Charlotte Buff; while the lover
is a composite of Goethe himself and young Jerusalem, who
had actually shot himself at Wetzlar for the love of another
man's wife), as we see her in pictures of German artists,
feeding her numerous brothers and sisters, who cling to
her, fans Werther's love, which is stronger than all the
other forces of his heart. Unable to resist his passion, he
chooses death as an inevitable necessity. The romance
presented in the letters of the hero only concentrates the
sequence of events forcibly upon the tragic climax. Lotte
is the passive instrument in bringing about Werther's
suicide. As to Werther he is Goethe himself, the novel
is simply a fragment of a great confession.



THROUGH STORM AND STRESS 321

Goethe's numberless works, touching upon universal
interests, are among the most profound and most exhaus-
tive treatises on womanly nature ever written. Women
accompany him through his long life and influence him at
every step of his career as poet, philosopher, and states-
man. His extraordinary mother, of a patrician Frankfort
family, spirited, natural, poetic, with a melodious, beau-
tiful soul, instilled into him the sense of the beautiful and
perchance gave him creative force.

Cornelia, Goethe's only sister, also powerfully influenced
and inspired him. She was to Goethe what Frederick the
Great's favorite sister, Wilhelmine, was to her brother.
Goethe delineated the characteristics of his charming
mother in the character of Elizabeth, wife of Goetz von
Berlichingen. Poor abandoned Maria is, according to
Goethe's allusions, the martyred Friederike. Sister Cor-
nelia inspired the play.

The abiding effect of woman's love upon Goethe be-
comes manifest when we realize that an unhappily ending
early love affair with Gretchen, a young girl of Frank-
fort, remained imprinted upon his soul for more than forty
years, and served him as a prototype for his greatest,
most complex, and most pathetic heroine, Gretchen in
Faust. It is true that after the unfortunate ending of
that romance at Frankfort he found sufficient compen-
sation in his love for Ka'the Schonkopf, the daughter of a
wine dealer in Leipzig, at whose restaurant he boarded
when a student of seventeen at the university. According
to the portrait taken from the gallery of Goethean women,
Ka'the was a fascinating, round-faced girl. She gave up
her ardent lover when he tortured her too much with
his jealous whims, and the pain of that separation was
dramatized by Goethe in his earliest play, The Caprice of
tJie Lover.



322 WOMAN

We have briefly mentioned Goethe's return, broken
in health and spirit, from Leipzig to Frankfort, the influ-
ence exerted upon him by Katherine von Klettenberg, his
transfer to the University of Strassburg, and his idyl with
Friederike of Sessenheim, which the most eminent German-
American literary critic Julius Goebel calls, however, more
fittingly "a tragedy." His famous poem, The Rose on the
Heath, in which the rose is passionately broken by the
wanton boy in spite of her protest, sums up in charming
symbolism the sad story of Goethe's love for the unfortu-
nate Friederike. What this charming flower of the par-
sonage had been to his youth, how he left her, the pangs
of conscience which tormented him for a long time, his
unfailing memory of her who never forgot him, and who
died unmarried in 1813, all this Goethe's genius charac-
terized with psychological delicacy in his autobiography:
Fiction and Truth.

Perhaps even more profound was the storm aroused in
Goethe's soul somewhat later by his love for Lili Scho'ne-
mann, who inspired many of his most beautiful songs and
reminiscences. The daughter of a rich Frankfort banker,
highly educated by her French mother, young and very
beautiful, blond and graceful, in the enjoyment of all the
social advantages of her position, she keenly aroused
Goethe's emotions, while she also was deeply stirred to
see that extraordinary man at her feet. She succeeded
absolutely: Goethe became hers with life and soul, while,
at the same time, he enjoyed with young Countess Auguste
von Stolberg, sister of the two poets, a deep romantic
friendship which survived all the storms of his eventful
life. He never saw the countess, whom he nevertheless
addresses familiarly as " Gustchen " and "thou." His
correspondence with her sheds a wondrous light on his
soul, especially with reference to his love for Lili. Lili



THROUGH STORM AND STRESS 323

tried to win him, now paining him by jealousy, now
soothing him by love. At last a formal betrothal was
arranged, which was but the beginning of the end. He
tried "whether he could live without Lili," and went on
a journey to Switzerland with Count Stolberg. But he
never forgot her. In a letter to Gustchen he calls her
"the maiden who makes me unhappy without any fault
of hers, she with the soul of an angel whose serene days
I sadden!"

Lili Schonemann became later the wife of the Alsatian
Baron von Turckheim, with whom she lived in happy
marriage till her death in 1817. She confessed to her
daughter as the true reason of her broken betrothal
to Goethe the revelation made to her by her mother of
Goethe's former relation to Friederike Brion and of his
conduct toward her. Lili, though pure and true to her
husband, never forgot Goethe; while the latter, in his age,
confessed to Eckermann that "he had loved her deeply
as no one before or afterward." Lili's biography, Lilt's
Portrait, written by her grandson, Count Turckheim, is
an important chapter in the history of a cultured, high-
minded, energetic, and exquisite womanly character, loved
and lost by the poet-prince of Germany. It is not acci-
dental that Goethe, distracted by the loss and not knowing
where to turn, plunged into and translated just at that
time Solomon's Song of Songs, which he described in a
letter to his friend Merck as "the most glorious collection
of songs of love God ever created." It is also almost
providential that he received, even at that period of regret
and despair, the renewed invitation of Duke Karl August
of Saxe- Weimar, who had recently ascended the throne of
his fathers, and who was destined to become the greatest
Maecenas of the century and, as it were, the sponsor of
Germany's greatest intellectual bloom, to establish himself



324 WOMAN

at Weimar. There he arrived on November 7, 1775, at
the age of twenty-six, received with universal rejoicing
and enthusiasm. "New love, new life," arises for him
in Weimar, and with his new love and new life a new era
for Germany the era of Goethe, or Classicism proper.



Emancipation of ffierman ffl^omen



XI

EMANCIPATION OF GERMAN WOMEN

WE have shown at length how the cultural, literary, and
artistic grandeur of Germany during the Minnesong period
was a direct consequence of the high elevation of woman,
and due to the worship accorded to her on account of her
lofty station. Just so woman was one of the strongest
impelling factors in bringing about well-nigh all that was
great and good in the second period of Classicism. The
world-famed Court of the Muses at Weimar, presided over
by Duchess Amalia, "as unique in her way as Frederick
the Great was in his," and her circle of noble women,
aroused all the poetic power of the genius of Goethe, and
later that of Schiller. All the courtliness and elegance of
their art, which had been evolved in storm and stress,
sprang from their intercourse with noble women, a fact
which Goethe again and again frankly confessed, and from
which Schiller derived the loftiest inspiration. The ancient
Minnesingers' glorification of ennobling love was renewed
by Goethe, whose highest ideal of feminine perfection was
one illustrious woman, in whom he discovered "all the
lofty happiness that man in his earthly limitations calls
with divine names," Frau Charlotte von Stein alas! the
wife of another man at the same court. She and Shake-
speare a strange combination gave Goethe the incen-
tive and stimulus by which were produced his immortal

327



328 WOMAN

works. This is proved by his statement: " Lida, happi-
ness ever present, William, star of loftiest height, to you
I owe all that I am." Goethe's relations with this extraor-
dinary woman, says Scherer, developed in his nature all
the tenderness of which he was capable. She was frank
and true, not passionate, not enthusiastic, but full of
spiritual warmth; a gentle earnestness gave her majesty;
a pure, correct feeling, combined with a thirst for knowl-
edge, enabled her to share all the poetic, scientific, and
human interests of Goethe. In his numberless letters and
fleeting notes to her we find strewn broadcast a thou-
sand germs of the grandest poetry. Her spirit hovers
around him everywhere; she possesses him entirely, body
and soul; his feelings are expressed constantly in inex-
haustible lyrical, frank, and caressing terms, more concise
and natural than those in Werther. But the impetuous
lover in Werther' s Sorrows is here a brother and true friend.
He becomes helpful, noble, and good, his own words,
eager to cherish his friend, to smooth her pathway
through life; his extraordinary and extravagant genius is
calm and tempered. Frau von Stein brings forth the pure
and religious forces of his nature. His hot blood becomes
chastened; he himself calls the higher inner life that grows
and strengthens itself within him " Purity," and his poesy,
too, becomes Purity realized. The ethereal, ethical world
in which his love for Charlotte forces him to live is re-
flected in his lofty creations of immortal beauty, in his
superhuman contemplation of the universe, which is
subject to change, it is true, but a change according to
firm, logical, and eternal laws. Such is the influence
of Frau von Stein upon Goethe, such her influence upon
the loftiest expression of German thought and feeling,
or, briefly, upon supreme German Classicism. Thus
the dramas of the soul arise: Iphigenie and Tasso. In the



EMANCIPATION OF GERMAN WOMEN 329

former, a pure priestess, though of an accursed house,
brings liberation, purification, happiness, not only to her
family, her race, but also to the barbarians, to the world
at large. In the latter, women are again the guardians of
culture and morality: in the character of the princess
Leonore d'Este, who had learned toleration in the hard
school of sorrow, who saves the poet Tasso from false
and impure instincts, "as the enchanted man is easily and
gladly saved from intoxication and delusion by the pres-
ence of the divinity," Goethe has united the traits of
his guardian angels, Charlotte von Stein and Louise,
Duchess of Saxe-Weimar, daughter of the Landgravine
Caroline of Hesse, a great woman, of whom Wieland said,
she would be queen of Europe if he once were ruler of
the Fates.

But such exaltation, such freedom from passion could
not last forever. That soul which Goethe knew so well,
which "with tenacious organs holds in love and clinging
lust the world in its embraces," in the course of time
began to assert itself. And his intense need of sensual
love was at last satisfied by Christiane Vulpius, a woman
strangely inferior to the other women who had possessed
his love, yet handsome, good-hearted, cheerful, natural,
physically desirable, and devoted to him body and soul.
Since the summer of 1788 she was really his wife, though
the Church was not called upon to consecrate their union
until October 19, 1806. In the high circles in which he
moved, a storm of indignation was aroused by this union,
which also lost for him the friendship of Frau von Stein,
a loss which he deeply regretted. However, Christiane
Vulpius gave him a calm and ordinary happiness that
compensated him somewhat for his ideal losses; she was
sufficiently dear to him to move him to the characteristic
simile: " On the bank of the sea I wandered and looked



330 WOMAN

for shells: in one I found a pearl, it remains well guarded
in my heart;" and again the beautiful allegory of the
sweet flower, brilliant as the stars, which he dug out
with all the roots and carried home, where it continues to
blossom.

Women's love bore, from the first, quite a different
character in the case of Schiller. He also had a good
mother who believed in his genius and his future great-
ness, but born and raised in needy circumstances, and
struggling with poverty all her life, she stood at an im-
mense distance from the patrician and associate of princes,
Frau Aja, the mother of Goethe.

Three widely differing women especially affected Schil-
ler's life and works. The influence upon his youth of
Charlotte von Kalb, an extraordinary, demoniacal woman,
was, according to his own confession, not beneficent. In
later years, this highly gifted and unhappy woman had the
misfortune of affecting the lives of two other great poets:
Jean Paul and Holderlin. The former escaped from the grasp
of the "Titanide" whom he immortalized, nevertheless, in
his "Titan"; the latter, the God-gifted poet of "Hyperion,"
the singer of the passionate, soul-stirring lyric poems in
honor of another love, Diotima, died early in the darkness
of insanity. Schiller's love for Caroline and Charlotte von
Lengefeld, the former of whom was married to Wilhelm
von Wolzogen, presaged a terrible danger, similar to that to
which Burger succumbed, but which was averted by Caro-
line, who saved Schiller by smoothing the path to a lawful
and happy marriage with her young sister. The corre-
spondence between the three, Schiller and the Lengefeld
sisters, published by Schiller's daughter Emilie, Baroness
von Gleichen-Russwurm, sheds much light upon the
thought and life of Germany's greatest dramatist and of
two noble women. Caroline's biography of Schiller,



EMANCIPATION OF GERMAN WOMEN 331

which appeared in 1830, collected from reminiscences of
the family, his own letters, and information furnished by
his friends, still breathes her love and admiring affection
for her immortal friend. The greatest record, however,
of the powerful influence women exerted upon Schiller
is to be found in his works, not only in the dramas,
but especially in the lyric poems, wherein a wonderful
galaxy of noble women appear, and in which there is not
one chord untouched that ever vibrated through man's
heart.

Romanticism, the reaction against Classicism which had
become icy and petrified in the "epigons," or weak suc-
cessors of the great classical poets, entered upon its vic-
torious course at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
The group of women-authors, who stand, as it were, in
the second zone from classicism, Amalie von Hellwig, Elisa
von der Recke, Louise Brachmann, Agnes Franz, Hel-
mina von Chezy, Johanna Schopenhauer, all authors of
considerable talent and grace, are nevertheless far sur-
passed by the versatility and poetic impressiveness of
the literary women of Romanticism. They are the in-
spire rs and coworkers of the founders of the movement,
the brothers Schlegel, Tieck, Novalis, Brentano, Arnim,
Kleist, and others. It is true that the "blue flower of
Romanticism " was not conducive to virtue in love. Roman-
ticists respected marriage the least of all sacred things, and
a marriage a trois, says Theobald Ziegler, was quite a
common thing, and the question only remained whether
a marriage a quatre was not even a pleasanter thing. In
this, however, Romanticism was but a reaction against the
Philistinism and prudery of the opposite pole of civilization
at that period, where woman was oppressed, and a dif-
ferent standard of morality, and even of religion, was
demanded from her than from man. Frederick Schlegel



332 WOMAN

is not far wrong when he says that in the ordinary wedded
life of the time both parties "live on, side by side, in a
relation of mutual contempt." As, at the time of Pericles
the great and superior hetaira, Aspasia, raised the social
status of woman in general, and succeeded in elevating
her in culture to the standard of the most intellectual men,
so, during the first decades of the nineteenth century
woman was raised to a higher plane through a long series
of moral aberrations. Emancipation was frequently mis-
understood, and liberty degenerated into the license of the
will of the flesh. It would be impossible to absolve Roman-
ticism from the reproach of license in thought and life.
We owe it to Caroline Schlegel and to Dorothea Schlegel
not to unveil their antecedents, and the way in which they
became the wives of the two romanticists. Their share
in the movement of liberation and in the work of their
respective husbands is very considerable, and, mayhap,
is meritorious enough to cover their sins. Tieck's sister
Sophie wrote perhaps the finest novel of the romanticists,
Evremont (published in 1836 in Breslau), and his daughter
Dorothea was a classical translator of Shakespeare.

Bettina von Arnim (died 1859), Brentano's sister, is one
of the most ingenuous of poets. She possessed a rich im-
agination, but upon her was the common curse of womanly
genius, eccentricity, and inconstancy. These frustrated
her intense desire to attain a lasting fame. Her daughter,
Gisela von Arnim, wife of Hermann Grimm, is a notable
writer of fairy tales, and a dramatist of considerable merit.
Another romanticist, Caroline von Gunderode, who evinces
much talent in her Poems and Fancies, had no time for the
development of her genius. An unhappy love caused her to
commit suicide at an early age. Such was also the end of
Heinrich von Kleist, the greatest romanticist, who died
with Henriette Vogel, the wife of another man, whom he



EMANCIPATION OF GERMAN WOMEN 333

killed at her own desire, in 1811. Theodor Korner, the
patriot and soldier-poet of Lyre and Sword, died young, on
the battlefield, with a pure and noble love in his heart for
Toni Adamberger, a charming actress in Vienna, who was
worthy of him in every respect. K5rner's letter of 1812
to his father, Schiller's friend, characterizes this noble
type of German womanhood: "I may confess without
blushing, that without her I should indeed have perished
in the whirlpool beside me {i.e., in Vienna]. You know
me, my warm blood, my strong constitution, my wild im-
agination; imagine this impetuous soul of mine in this
garden of delight and intoxicating joy, and you will under-
stand that only the love for this angel helped me to be able
to step forth boldly from the crowd and to say: Here is
one who has preserved a pure heart."

In spite of the many eminent women who arose during
the first third of the nineteenth century, there is nowhere
in Germany anything like the salon which has made
French society so brilliant, the literary circles and centres
so compact, and the great French authoresses and episto-
lographers so world-famed.

Schleiermacher, the philosopher-theologian of that transi-
tion period, said once that society on a grand scale could at
that time be found only in the houses of the Jews. Though
still disfranchised in many respects, their admission to
all the rights of citizenship being accorded first in 1812 on
account of Stein's reforms, some eminent Jewish families
possessed sufficient wealth and aspirations for culture to
form such social and intellectual circles. Marianne Meyer
became the wife of Prince Reuss, and as such assembled
an aristocratic literary society in her house at Berlin. But
the climax of a German salon was realized by two brilliant
women of Jewish origin, Henriette Herz and Rahel Levin.
The former, wife of the famous physician and philosopher



334 WOMAN

Marcus Herz, formed the first Goethe community in Berlin
and scattered his fame broadcast through Berlin society.
Without original talent, she exercised, nevertheless, great
influence by her beauty, her social skill, and her ability in
presenting the intellectual treasures of others. She was