Project Introduction

Caroline. Letters from Early Romanticism

Edited and translated by Douglas W. Stott

  I am preparing an annotated translation of the correspondence of Caroline Schelling (1763–1809) based on Caroline. Briefe aus der Frühromantik, ed. Erich Schmidt (Leipzig 1913) (1510 pages, 2 vols.).

  The daughter of a renowned professor in Göttingen, Caroline (as she is known in German literary history) married at twenty a local physician chosen for her by her family. Widowed four years later, she then lived with various relatives; during this period she also lost her youngest daughter. In 1792 she moved to Mainz, where her childhood friend Therese Forster was living with her husband, Georg, a sympathizer of the French Revolution. Here Caroline experienced firsthand and to a certain extent participated in the emergence of the Mainz Republic; her letters document the sometimes startling events associated with this period.

  She was arrested on suspicion of sedition while attempting to flee Mainz. While imprisoned, she realized she was pregnant by a French officer. If unable to secure her release before her condition was discovered, she could be sure not only, as the mistress of a French soldier, of remaining incarcerated but also, as an “unfit mother,” of losing custody of her daughter. Although her brother secured her release, in the meantime WilhelmSchlegel, who had known Caroline from his student days in Göttingen, had provided her with the poison she insisted she would use to commit suicide to spare her daughter the inevitable shame.

  Schlegel arranged for her to carry the child to term under a false name in a village outside Leipzig (the child died in infancy). It was here that her closer association with the Schlegel brothers—Wilhelm and Friedrich—began, including her marriage to Wilhelm Schlegel in 1796 and their move to Jena, the emergence and florescence of the early Romantic group in Jena, and her eventual marriage to F.W.J. Schelling in 1803 after her divorce from Schlegel.

  Caroline is best known for having been at the center of that Romantic circle (“without any exaggeration, . . . the first ‘avant-garde’ group in history,” P. Lacoue-Labarthe/J.-L. Nancy, The Literary Absolute [1988], 8). The group included her husband, Wilhelm Schlegel; his brother Friedrich; the latter’s future wife, Dorothea Veit (daughter of Moses Mendelssohn); the writers Novalis and Tieck; the scientists Steffens and Ritter; the theologian Schleiermacher (in Berlin) and the writer Hülsen; and her later husband, the philosopher Schelling, among others. Equally important, the circle had regular contact with the philosopher Fichte, with Goethe and Schiller, and with an astonishing range of prominent academics, journalists, booksellers, and theater personalities. Virtually every figure associated with the Weimar-Jena literary period either knew her personally or otherwise appears in these letters.

  During this period, an episode took place that has long captivated biographers and even cultural historians: the illness and death of her only remaining child, Auguste, in which her future husband, Schelling, was implicated as having been at least partially responsible (a bitter public dispute resulted). This episode involved Caroline’s own preceding illness and apparent cure by Schelling according to the emergent and controversial healing methods of the Scottish physician John Brown and offers a glimpse into the practice and perils of early nineteenth-century medicine.

  By virtue of her marriage to Schelling in 1803, Caroline’s life was also touched, directly and indirectly, by developments in the philosophy of nature and it various ramifications in other fields (most notably medicine; in Würzburg Schelling had more contact with physicians than with philosophers), as well as by the extraordinary developments in European history during the period.

  In his history of German literature (Deutsche Literaturgeschichte, 15th ed. [Stuttgart 1968], 326), Fritz Martini refers to these letters as part of the “essential documentation” of early Romanticism. Wilhelm Scherer, reacting to the first (abridged) edition of the letters (1871), called her “one of the greatest epistolary geniuses Germany has produced” (Deutsche Rundschau 32 [1882]: 473), and in his discussion of all the women associated with Romanticism in his history of German literature, he resolutely concludes that “Caroline Schelling ranks first among all the literary women of the time; her graceful chatty letters are full of good sense and imagination, of refined malice and charming raillery, and their clear yet thoughtful descriptions, their charming language, and their hidden poetry raise them to the level of true works of art” (Geschichte der deutschen Literatur [1883], 618; Eng. trans., 2 vols. [1906–8] 2:233). In the classic monograph on F. W. J. Schelling, Schellings Leben, Werke und Lehre (3rd ed., 1902), Kuno Fischer remarks similarly that “she is not merely a master, but genuinely a genius in letter writing; her letters are completely herself, always just as light and graceful and, should the moment or subject matter so dictate, also just as substantial and profound” (66).

Notes, Apparatus, and Additional Letters

  I have interpreted the subtitle of the 1913 edition of Caroline’s letters very broadly. These “letters from early Romanticism” now include voluminous additional correspondence and documents not only from the early Romantic school itself, but also from virtually everyone whose correspondence or memoirs touched on Caroline’s life, including persons more directly involved in the lives and careers of her acquaintances.

  My guiding principle has been to include as much material as possible that throws light on Caroline’s personality, life, and letters, and on the personalities and lives of her more intimate acquaintances to the extent such illuminates Caroline or her letters, especially since such material is in almost all cases in German and is moreover often extremely difficult to find.

  A complete index of letters can be found on this site (volume 1, volume 2). Generally speaking (though not in every case), letters whose numbers include a letter (e.g., 381g) have been added to the original edition of 1913.

  The considerably expanded scope and nature of the notes and scholarly apparatus for this edition derive from the nature of Erich Schmidt’s original apparatus in the edition of 1913 and his target audience. Although Schmidt’s annotations are invaluable and are essentially included in full (I have also been able to correct some of Schmidt’s errors), they have severe limitations for English-speaking readers:

  • (1) The apparatus was prepared for specialists and historians whose educational background, as a shared cultural heritage, familiarized them both with the period itself and with many of the attendant figures and works.

  • (2) Schmidt similarly presupposed that these readers had ready access to what today, often even in Germany, are largely specialized library resources (in German, of course). My notes and apparatus will address both issues for the benefit of the English-speaking, nonspecialist reader.

  Because referring English-speaking readers of a translation to materials in another language is of questionable value, and in many instances such materials are difficult or virtually impossible to access, my main strategy for making the edition more useful to English-speaking readers has been simply to resolve Schmidt’s cross-references and allusions.

  In most cases, “resolve” means actually including a translation of the cross-referenced material––be it a letter, an extensive passage from a memoir, a passage from a work published at the time, lines from a play, a newspaper announcement, a literary review, a satire, a letter to the editor, in short, virtually every genre of writing common during the period. Lengthier materials have been included in supplementary appendices to each volume lest the endnotes become too cumbersome. The amount of material is voluminous. For general information on these and Erich Schmidt’s original appendices, see the introduction to the appendices on this site; copious samples of the types of materials included there can be found in the individual pages for each volume (volume 1, volume 2).

  I have also included translations of the anonymous literary reviews that can reliably be attributed to Caroline (though doing so is extremely difficult in some cases; problems of attribution will be discussed and the attendant correspondence included in the translated volume); in some instances, notes to these reviews are included. Another addition is the translation of extensive passages from works discussing in considerable detail Caroline’s contribution to Wilhelm Schlegel’s pioneering translation of Shakespeare .

General Editorial Material Not Included in Original Edition

  • (1) Introductions to the various historical periods. Such will include information on the concurrent European wars constituting the background to this correspondence (e.g., vol. 2:423: “The worst thing is that we will now be getting French troops as well, whereas the imperial troops will be retreating”).
  • (2) Caroline’s biography for each volume.
  • (4) General index, including specialized subindexes (Erich Schmidt has only a personal index).
  • (5) Personal index with biograms. Schmidt’s personal index does not provide glosses. He identifies some figures in footnotes, others not at all. Every person appearing in the translation will be included in the personal index, and almost all will be identified in a biogram. (For a tentative list of persons, see the index of persons on this site; galleries similarly introduce many of the persons and places involved in Caroline’s life.)
  • (6) Index of contemporary periodicals with a description of each. Caroline was a voracious and regular reader of these dailies and weeklies, which played a role in the literary culture of the time that is difficult to appreciate today, often even affecting alliances and friendships. Their profusion and changing titles and editors, however, are often difficult for even specialists to oversee.
  • (7) Memoirs of Luise Wiedemann (Caroline’s younger sister).

  Finally, the primary purpose of this edition is to make documentary material available rather than to provide an overall assessment of Caroline Schelling. Though elements of such an assessment have invariably entered into my choice of supplementary letters and documents and affected my decisions about annotations in the larger sense, when facing the choice of either explicating an issue or providing an original document I have generally chosen the latter.