Günderrode, Karoline von (also Günderode) (Karlsruhe, 1780-1806, Windel, Rhineland), was only six when her father died leaving the family in modest circumstances. At the age of seventeen she was admitted to the evangelical Cronstetten-Hynspergische Damenstift in Frankfurt, where, however, she enjoyed sufficient freedom to entertain social contacts. Her circle of friends included Bettina von Arnim, who in later life reconstructed their close relationship in her epistolary novel Die Günderode (1840), in which she also recalls Karoline's poetic ambitions. They resulted in the volumes Gedichte und Phantasien (1804), Poetische Fragmente (1805), and Melete von Ion (1806, posth.), and appeared under the pseudonym Tian. Some of her poems belong to the best of poetry reflecting inner experience, which she perceived as the basic requirement of the genre when referring to it as the mirror of the soul (Spiegel der Seele). She impresses by her flexible use of form and rhythm, and especially by the controlled and unembellished language with which she relates dreams of passion nurtured in loneliness and bitter frustration, as in the poem ‘Vorzeit und neue Zeit’ (Des Glaubens Höhen sind nun demolieret, / Und auf der flachen Erde schreitet der Verstand / Und misset alles aus, nach Klafter und nach Schuhen. Last stanza).
Deeply in love with Friedrich Creuzer, she took her own life when Creuzer decided against dissolving his marriage. It was, after Brentano and Savigny, the third time that her dream of a lasting attachment had been shattered. Ill at ease in society, she had emancipated herself from stifling conventions and rejected sexual discrimination obstructing women's self-realization. Christa Wolf has promoted renewed interest in her, both in her fiction and as editor of the volume Karoline von Günderode: ‘Der Schatten eines Traumes’ (1979), a selection of poetry, prose, correspondence, and profiles by those who knew her; she has also edited Bettina's novel Die Günderode (1981).
The Oxford Companion to German Literature. Copyright © 1976, 1986, 1997, 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
