Caroline Schelling

Leonberger Kreiszeitung
8 September 2009

“A tour de force of spirit.”

Maulbronn: Caroline Schelling, a strong, intellectually independent woman, died two hundred years ago.

By Gabriele Müller

      About a hundred fifty persons gathered but a few meters from the stone obelisk standing against the monastery wall near the church, an obelisk recalling the death of Caroline Schelling in Maulbronn during the night of 7 September 1809.

      The International Schelling Society together with the towns of Leonberg and Maulbronn held a commemorative event on Sunday for Caroline Schelling in the City Hall on the monastery grounds. The smartly organized program illuminated the historical signficiance of this unique woman within the circle of the early Romantics in Jena and offered considerable insight into her life, a life representing more than merely a biography of emancipation.

      After a plenary greeting from Lore Hühn, president of the International Schelling Society, the Karlsruhe Theater Troupe, directed by Heide Harmsen, performed a piece whose title, “An Inhospitable Island,” is actually a quote from one of Caroline Schelling’s letters. At first the play seems to involve simply clearing out a house after an aunt’s death. But the actors constantly come across letters whose content prompts all sorts of developments–letters from Caroline.

      These letters prompt the women to examine their own lives, break through borders, and depart from well-worn paths. A year after marrying, Inge (Swantje Wasmer / Nelli Fritzler), the wife of a historian (Michael Draese), feels like a “hothouse flower who enjoys life only through glass,” trapped in day-to-day family life. Resonance with the first marriage of convenience of the educated daughter of a professor–Caroline–are obvious.

      Parallels with single mother Madame Jeanette (Bettina Lörz) are equally obvious: Caroline, at the time bearing the last name Böhmer, was an early widow who more or less had to manage her three children by herself. It is no accident that one particular sentence from Caroline is mentioned repeatedly: “A young lady is appreciated only for what she is as a young lady.” A “young lady”: here that means spouse, housewife, mother–perhaps also the beloved, but never the equal partner. Not even in the social group of the early Romantics, often referred to as “Commune 1.”

      In the meantime, Caroline, now with the married last name Schlegel, leaves that group because of her love for the young Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, twelve years her junior. As has already often been the case in her life, she encounters considerable hostility. But she remains true to herself. And when she dies, Schelling, who is left behind to grieve, refers to her as a “tour de force of spirit” and a “rare woman with such masculine greatness of soul, with the most incisive spirit, united with the softness of the most feminine, most delicate, loving heart.”

      Just how accurately the theater ensemble ferreted out the various aspects of Caroline Schelling’s personality and related them to the present became clear in the ensuing lecture presentation by Eckart Klessmann, an authority on that period and author of an important biography of Caroline Schelling. His interweaving of original quotes from Caroline’s own pen as well as from those of her contemporaries directly evoked the era of the early Romantics in Jena, as whose center Caroline herself is often viewed. A portrayal of the political circumstances in which she lived and which once even resulted in her being incarcerated for several months rounded out the colorful picture.

      To the question of why after, so many years, he was still so inclined to study Caroline’s life, Klessmann responded: “I am quite taken first of all by the enormous courage with which she mastered her own life, which was, after all, not an easy one at all, and with which she achieved such intellectual independence.”

      The profusely inscribed obelisk next to the monastery church recalls this fascinating woman, though no one now knows the exact location where Caroline Schelling, who died at forty-six years of age, lies buried there.