Wurzburg Dachau Munich
Caroline seems indeed to have departed Würzburg on 20 May 1806, possibly on 22 May, traveling to Munich by way of Ansbach and Augsburg. Schelling picked her up in Dachau just northwest of Munich on Saturday, 24 May 1806. She arrived in Munich with him on Sunday (Pentecost), 25 May 1806.
(“South West Germany and North Italy: The War of the Second Coalition 1798–1801,” The Cambridge Modern History Atlas, ed. A. W. Ward, G. W. Prothero, Stanley Leathes, and E. A. Ben [London 1912], map 88; [University of Texas, Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection]; A. Senefelder and F. Gleisner, Das Königreich Baiern [Munich 1808]; Bibliothèque nationale de France; département de Cartes et plans.)
Karlsthor Ensemble
Upon moving to Munich from Würzburg in the spring of 1806, Caroline and Schelling resided at Vor dem Karlsthor no. 7, “on the right” (i.e., in the right wing) located in the curved ensemble (Rondell) in Munich at the western edge of the original city walls, just outside the Karl’s Gate. The ensemble was begun in 1796 and finished in 1802; Here the basic location in 1803, shortly after the ensemble was completed.
(Johann Michael Schramm, Grundriss der Churbaierischen Haupt- und Residenzstadt München [München 1803].)
Karlsthor 7, 1809
Caroline writes on 28 November 1806:
“I am living here in the capital according to my usual, quiet manner, quite as if I were living in the country. We have a logis where the façe of the houses looks out onto an open area just outside the city, and I can see the Tyrolean Alps from my window. My husband is quite serene, quite healthy, and is as well placed in his job as he could possibly wish. As a member of Academy of Sciences and Humanities, his time is completely his own, and he has a salary that protects him from worry.”
Location of Caroline and Schelling’s apartment in the right wing of the ensemble at Karlsthor 7 at the western edge of town. Facing essentially west, from her windows Caroline had a view, not exactly of the Tyrolean Alps, as she will write, but rather of the Bavarian Alps. See following images.
(Königlich Baiersche Haupt und Residenzstadt München am 1. Januar 1809 [Munich 1809]; Bayerisches Landesvermessungsamt München, Nr. 558/03.)
Munich Western City Gate, 1826
Upon moving to Munich in May 1806, Caroline and Schelling initially lived in this complex of buildings constituting the western edge of the original city walls. They lived in the wing to the right, on the third floor in the next-to-last house on the right, no. 7 (house numbers read from left to right in that ensemble; the corner house was no. 3). The scientist Johann Wilhelm Ritter, their acquaintance from Jena, also lived in this complex of buildings.
(Painting by Franz Thurn [1826].)
l-640×322.jpg” alt=”Bavarian_Alps” width=”640″ height=”322″ class=”alignnone size-medium wp-image-80067″ />Munich and the Bavarian Alps
Caroline’s windows faced south and southwest; Brigitte Rossbeck, Zum Trotz glücklich: Caroline Schlegel-Schelling und die romantische Lebenskunst (Munich 2008), 329fn4, points out that “what she actually saw in front of the Tyrolean Alps was first the Bavarian Alps in the form of the [from left to right facing south] Karwendel-, Wetterstein-, and Zugspitz-massif” (ca. 120 km).
Here in a contemporary illustration looking approximately in the same direction as that of Caroline’s windows, i.e., with essentially the view she herself had to the south and southwest, to the left in the illustration.
(Frontispiece to Johann Michael von Söltl, München mit seinen Umgebungen historisch, topographisch, statistisch, 2nd ed. [Munich 1838].)
Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities
By the first week in August 1806, Schelling was informed that he would be receiving an official appointment to the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, enabling him to live essentially as an independent scholar in Munich.
Th Academy was preceded by several similar, private scholarly societies. It was dissolved by royal decree on 31 December 1806 and reconstituted on 1 May 1807 as a state-owned institution under the Interior Ministry, which is why Schelling would become a state official rather than a member of a private organization.
The Academy was located just around the corner from the Karlsthor, where the Schellings’ apartment was located. Here the academy’s building complex in 1810; to the right the Church of St. Michael, to its left the L-shaped complex of the Academy, in the left background, down the street, the towers of the Karl’s Gate, just outside of which the Schelling’s apartment was located at Karlsthor 7 (see next image).
(Frontispiece to Friedrich Alberg Klebe, Skizze von München im Jahre 1810 [Munich 1810].)
Karlsthor, 1837, inside town
The interior view of the Karlsthor ensemble, that is, the gate complex inside town; the towers are visible in the previous image, and the curve of the Rondell is visible in the buildings to the right. Caroline and Schelling lived outside the gate and to the left (facing out of town).
(Illustration from Ludwig Lange and Ernst Rauch, Original-Ansichten der vornehmsten Städte in Deutschland, ihrer wichtigsten Dome, Kirchen und sonstigen Baudenkmäler alter und neuer Zeit [Darmstadt 1832], n.p. [unnumbered plate 47 in the section on Munich].)
Max Joseph Square
Here an 1805 illustration of the opera building or Residence Theater (“b” at center left) within the larger context of the recently established Max Joseph Square, Munich’s grand square at the center of town next to the royal residence (on the left).
Caroline writes on 4 January 1807:
“I hardly ever attend the theater here, and when I do, it is only for the opera. The building itself is too small, one cannot find a seat, and the entire institution suffers from an annoyingly stingy style. I heard Brizzi sing in Achilles this [past] summer, and Brizzi, Mademoiselle Bertinotti, and Mademoiselle Schmalz in the Horatii, all of which was certainly worth the effort.”
Ferdinando Paër’s two-act opera Achille, libretto by Giovanni De Gamerra (1801), was performed in Munich in June 1807 with Antonio Brizzi, Teresa Bertinotti, and Auguste Schmalz. The other piece was Dominaco Cimarosa, Gli Orazi e i Curiazi, opera in three acts, libretto by Antonio Simeone Sografi (1797).
Back on 3 May 1805, a decree from (then) Prince Elector Max Joseph stipulated that two grand Italian operas were to be performed each year in Munich.
During Caroline’s time in Munich, the opera house was located on Max Joseph Square just next to and connected with the residential palace. This “opera house,” however, was also known as the Residence Theater, whence Caroline’s reference to it as the “theater.” It was originally built solely for the performance of Italian operas during the carnival period and solely for an audience of those who were socially accepted at court, which explains not only its limited number of seats (here Caroline is quite right), but also the later impetus for the construction of a larger royal theater.
(Münchner Polizey-Uebersicht (1805) xxv and xxvi [Saturday, 29 June 1805], n.p., here plate xxvi.)
Jena Town Church, 14 October 1806
The town church in Jena is located just around the corner from Caroline’s former residence.
In mid-October 1806, French troops descended upon Jena, occupied the town, and on 14 October 1806 soundly defeated and put to flight the Prussian forces just outside Jena. Essentially everyone and everything in town was subject to the sometimes quite angry French troops, including Hegel. Caroline, of course, still corresponded with former acquaintances in town, including Johanne Frommann, wife of the publisher Friedrich Frommann.
Caroline writes to her sister, Luise, on 30 November 1806:
“The Frommanns also managed to get through without being plundered even though they did have to feed 130 men for almost a week. I received a letter from Wesselhöft, her brother, who lives in the former Schütz house and who fared all the worse. He was subjected to the attacks of the marodeurs for 3 days, was disrobed with his wife and housemates down to their shirts, abused, and more than once had a bayonet at his breast — on the morning of the battle itself, fire broke out in the Johannisgasse; no one could extinguish it, the streets were blocked with reinforcement troops, indeed, no one even wanted to extinguish it, as if people simply wanted everything to perish. . . . Hegel’s house was plundered.”
(Illustration: “The [Jena] town church after 7 p.m. on 14 October 1806,” Jacob Roux, Die Gegenden um Jena, no. 1 [Jena, Weimar 1806], plate 15.)
1806 Edition of Ludwig Ferdinand Huber’s Works
Ludwig Ferdinand Huber, the husband of Caroline’s childhood and thereafter perennial nemesis Therese Huber, née Heyne, had died on Christmas Eve 1804, and Theresa had in the meantime been busy editing his works for publication and composing a biography.
Caroline writes on 30 November 1806:
“Madam Huber just finished writing her husband’s biography, a bizarre work of art with respect to what she has both omitted and veiled, and one that quite frankly made me ill and disgusted me.”
The reference is to volume 1 of L. F. Hubers sämmtliche Werke seit dem Jahre 1802, nebst seiner Biographie, 4 vols., ed. Therese Huber (Tübingen 1806–19), which contains letters and a biography that Therese had indeed considerably retouched and sanitized. Similarly, in letters to her daughter in 1803 Therese had also massaged the truth about Caroline’s past.
Schiller responds to Christian Gottfried Körner on 25 April 1805, whom Therese had solicited for letters to include ( Schillers Briefwechsel mit Körner, 2 vols. [Leipzig 1878], 2:485):
“You must extricate yourself from Huber’s widow as soon as you can. One only soils oneself with such iniquitous personalities, and the only gain is annoyance and vexation. How impertinent for the woman even to approach you; she is capable of even more if you do not frighten her away.”
Dowsers
After moving to Munich, Schelling and Caroline took an interest in the alleged powers of the Italian Francesco Campetti to divine metals and water, whom Johann Wilhelm Ritter had brought to Munich on behalf of the Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
As early as late January 1807, both Schelling and Caroline regularly attended the experiments, which lasted into the late spring of 1808, when Campetti returned to Italy.
(Pierre Le Lorrain de Vallemont, La physique occulte, ou Traité de la baguette divinatoire de son utilité pour la découverte des sources d’eau, de miniéres, des tresors cachez, des voleurs & des meurtriers fugitifs: avec des principes qui expliquent les phénoménes les principes obscurs de la nature [Amsterdam 1693] [the book came out in several subsequent editions]; the first two plates are found following p. 18, the third following p. 98, the fourth following p. 106.)
Joujoux de Normandie
Caroline writes (with a bit of jesting skepticism) on 31 January 1807 about these experiments with Francesco Campetti:
“That said, people both at court and in town have gotten quite into the ‘swing’ of these pendulum swings. Diamond and gold rings are all being set into motion, and only few people are not able to make things rotate in this way, e.g., a few rather obdurate people at court who have already become rather fusty themselves and who presumably are more subject to the power of the metal than the metal is to them (like a person with cramps). This alternation reminds me of the joujoux de Normandie, so I have already suggested calling it the joujoux de Campetti.”
The joujoux de Normandie (Fr., “toys of Normandy”) was the original European name of the yo-yo (JoJo), so-called because it presumably came to Germany by way first of Normandy, then Flanders and the Netherlands; it was enjoyed not just by children, but also by adults as a kind of fashionable pastime.
Caroline’s comparison makes particularly vivid sense when considered in view of the first two images of yo-yos and (on the right) the early twentieth-century photograph of the vertical positioning of the sort of pendulum about which she is writing.
(In order: anonymous, “Mode-Neuigkeiten 1: Aus England,” Journal des Luxus und der Moden 6 (1791) 10 (October), 574–79, here p. 584a, plate 30; first photograph via cordial communication from Sabine Schierhoff; second photograph from Friedrich Kallenberg, Offenbarungen des siderischen Pendels: Die Leben ausströmende Photographie und Handschrift [Diesen 1913], 30.)
Here an illustration of a presumably comparable experiment with pendulums and the indicated human magnetic force fields.
(Anonymous, [Frolob., engraver], Technische Versuchsanordnung mit diversen Apparaturen, einer weiblichen Versuchsperson und zwei Büsten im Hintergrund; Herzog August Bibliothek;Graph. Res. C/ 21.)
Galvanic Experiments
Caroline and Schelling were also privy in Munich to Johann Wilhelm Ritter’s ongoing conjectures and experiments concerning the extreme possibilities of galvanism and galvanic piles (note the galvanic pile at the head of the cadavers).
Ritter writes to Schelling on 24 May 1808 concerning the
attempt to determine whether death might not be held in abeyance if the severed nerves of the 8th pair were tied into the circle of an active strong or weak Voltaic pile and maintained there? If all the essential organs are all still present, an electrical impulse, properly applied, would certainly substitute for the brain completely and in every respect. I am returning here to an idea I already ventured to express earlier in my Beweis etc.. Once we understand the brain, and to this degree (by equivalent stimulants) represent it, we will also be able to conquer death in all cases where it derives from brain failure or exclusion (through death or separation), and artificially maintain the phenomenon of life.
Ritter had written earlier in that work that
one might introduce somewhere into the course of the effective circle an extremely strong action efficacious to life in the same direction and with considerable strength, e.g., that of two different metals, and which in the latter scenario would be strong enough to leave in the reversed chain an action sufficiently strong to stimulate the constituent parts of this chain system even after the removal of the opposite action grade; what might conceivably happen? The pulse would begin anew, and the dead person would awaken.
(Johann Wilhelm Ritter, Beweis, dass ein beständiger Galvanismus den Lebensprocess in dem Thierreich begleite (“Proof that a constant galvanism accompanies the life process in the animal kingdom”) [Weimar 1798], 166; plate: Jean Aldini, Essai théorique et expérimental sur le galvanisme: avec une série d’expériences faites en présence des commissaires de l’Institut National de France, et en divers amphitéatres anatomiques de Londres [Paris 1804], plate 4 following p. 398.)
Art Gallery Arcades in Munich
Caroline writes to Luise Gotter and her daughters on 4 January 1807, reminiscing also about her visit to the Dresden Art Gallery during the summer of 1798:
“If you were still an artist, St. Cäcilie [Cäcilie Gotter], what stories could I tell you about the treasures in our gallery here, which through the acquisition of the Düsseldorf gallery has grown into what is at least the 2nd best collection in Germany. (May God grant that Dresden remain the first!) Of course, despite this, I could still tell you about it, since you have doubtless remained an aficionado, it is merely difficult to know where to start. Among the various advantages of our present circumstances, the one I treasure most is being in a position to view such a collection daily. Although I have not yet really acquired as many or as unequivocal points of tranquility there as in the Dresden gallery, I would nonetheless wish that all those whom I wish well in any case might also have the opportunity to view the Ascension of Mary by Guido Reni and St. John the Baptist in the Wilderness.”
The art gallery in Munich during Caroline’s time there was located above the arcades that ran along the northern perimeter of the Royal Gardens; by 1837 that street would appropriately be named Galleriestrasse. Here an illustration of the exterior arcades from 1835.
(Frontispiece to Skizzen aus dem Münchner-Leben, vol. 2: Der Hofgarten [Hamburg 1835].)
The Museum Reading Society
Location of the Museum Reading Society, to which Schelling belonged and which provided various social events for its members during the year, many of which Caroline and Schelling attended. The society officially opened on 4 November 1802, with 165 members, in their rented space at Prannerstrasse 220 with its redoute hall or ballroom at the rear of the property, a hall the royal theater had been renting for years (the Museum seems to have sublet or shared the lease).
Here the edifice at Prannerstrasse 20 (the later house number) ca. 1880, with street numbers 17, 18, and 19 on the left, 21 on the right (print by an unknown artist).
The society passed the following resolution in 1805, to wit, that because
“this winter has taught us that concerts and social gatherings cannot flourish without the participation of the fairer sex, the board resolves (1) to maintain its lease from next Saint George’s Day [23 April] on the second story of the Redoute house for the purpose of using it for social entertainment; (2) to invite ladies as well to the concerts this winter; and (3) to give occasional balls.”
Redoute Hall of the Museum Reading Society
Concerning her initial experiences with Munich social life, Caroline writes to her sister Luise on 31 January 1807:
“They do have one really nice institution, what they call the Académie masquée. There is a grand hall . . . at one end of which they set up a theater, before which there are then 3–4 rows of chairs, then gaming tables dispersed throughout the hall; a gallery encircles it above with seats for spectators.”
Here the assembly hall where the society held its social gatherings with dancing, card playing, and other entertainment. The layout of the hall with the balcony is still evident in a later illustration depicting the meeting of parliament in the hall after the reading society and theater company no longer used the building.
(“Geschichte der Gesellschaft ‘Museum,'” Die Gesellschaft Museum in München: Festschrift zur Hundertjahr-Feier 1802–1902 [Munich 1902], 7.]
Pantomime Académie
Four characters from the pantomime académie; top right: Queen Caroline and King Maximilian I of Bavaria; bottom right: a woman in a traditional Bavarian costume with a golden breast bib.
Caroline continues in her letter describing the colorful and entertaining Académie masquée:
“Anyone may attend, and indeed everyone does so; the king and queen along with the members of the court, ministers, etc. are there almost every time and usually sit at the first gaming tables just behind the chairs, holding playing cards and watching a pantomime that is always performed in two acts on the theater stage, Italian farces, including some quite earthy ones, with Arlekin, Pierrot, Pantalone, Colombine in their characteristic costumes. Some corpulent brewer’s wife or other will be sitting right up close to the king wearing a golden bonnet and with chains on her breast bib . . . . I greatly enjoy the pantomimes, in particular one extraordinarily delightful Pierrot who is able to come up with such unprecedented faces and gestures.”
(Pantomime characters: from Maurice Sand, A. Manceau, and George Sand, Masques et Bouffons: Comédie italienne, texte et dessins, 2 vols. [Paris 1860], in order: Cassandre [Casnar, Papus, Pantalon]: plate following 2:40; Colombine: plate following 1:203; Arlequin [Harlequin]: plate following 1:66; Gilles [Giglio, Pierrot]: plate following 1:280; illustration of Maximilian I and Queen Caroline: frontispiece to Johann Michael Söltl, Maximilian Joseph, König von Bayern: sein Leben und Wirken [Stuttgart 1837]; Bavarian woman with golden breast bib: from Fritz Launer, Gallerie der Menschen: Ein Bilderbuch zur Erweiterung der Kenntnisse über Länder und Völker, vol. 1, rev. ed. [Pest 1813], 5, with plate 1.)
The Grottenhof in the Royal Residence
Caroline writes on 24 August 1807:
“Frau von Fladt (Weishaupt’s niece) brought [the musician] Herr Schlick and his daughter to see me — but since no one was home, I knew nothing about the visit until the following morning, when purely by chance we were accompanying a visitor to see the crowns of our king and queen along with the sword and apple that had come from Paris.”
The reference is to the the royal crown, imperial sword, imperial orb, scepter, queen’s crown, and the queen’s diadem that had been made in Paris for the coronation of Maximilian Joseph and his wife, whose royal status had become effective on 1 January 1806, making Maximilian the final prince elector of Bavaria and its first king of Bavaria — as Max I).
Although Caroline does not specify where she, Schelling, and their companion went to view these objects, it can hardly be any other location than the Royal Treasury Chamber itself in the Residence complex, which in 1807 was still in its original location adjoining the Ahnengalerie, or Ancestors Portrait Gallery, on the ground floor of the south wing of the Grottenhof (alongside the Kapellenhof) in the complex of the royal residence.
(The Grottenhof courtyard, from Marie Luise Schroeter Gothein, Geschichte der Gartenkunst […] … hrsg. mit Unterstützung der Königlichen Akademie des Bauwesens in Berlin, 2 vols. [Jena 1914], 2:109.)
Sutler in Schiller’s Wallenstein, Germaine de Staël
Wilhelm Schlegel and Madam Germaine de Staël stopped in Munich on their way to Vienna from Coppet in December 1807, spending 15–21 December in Munich and dining with Schelling and Caroline on the evening of Wednesday, 16 December 1807. Caroline brings an in part unkind comparison to expression in a letter on 15 January 1808:
“Schlegel was quite healthy and serene, the atmosphere as cordial as could be and void of any tension. He and Schelling were inseparable. Beyond all the intellect she already possesses, Frau von Stael also had intellect and heart enough to become quite fond of Schelling. She is a phenomenon full of vitality, egoism, and incessant intellectual activity. Her external appearance is transfigured by her inner soul and is indeed in need of such, for there are moments — or rather clothes — when she looks quite like a sutler, and yet one can nonetheless simultaneously imagine her fully capable of playing the role of Phaedre in the loftiest tragic sense.”
Caroline, of course, is here referring to the coarse, rough, often frumpy impression such sutler’s clothing made compared with normal women’s clothing.
In any event, it was the last time Caroline and Wilhelm would see each other.
(Illustrations: sutler from Schiller’s play Wallenstein’s Camp, from Schiller’s Works, ed. J. G. Fischer, vol. 2 [Philadelphia 1883], plate following p. 118; Lady Charlotte Julia von Leyden Blennerhassett, Madame de Staël: Her Friends and Her Influence in Politics and Literature, 3 vols [London 1889), frontispiece to vol. 3.]
Apartment behind the Art Gallery
By May 1808, Caroline and Schelling were living in a tranquil garden apartment at “Hinter der Galerie 63 ¾” behind the Royal Art Gallery and to the west of the English garden.
(Map: Max-Vorstadt, Stadtviertel [1809]; Bayerisches Landesvermessungsamt München Nr. 558/03; Bayerische Landesbibliothek.)
André-Jacques Garnerin’s Hot-Air Baloon
On 10 June 1808, after attending lectures on the event earlier, Caroline and Schelling observed the extended hydrogen-balloon ascent of the French “aeronaut” André-Jacques Garnerin over Munich, during which he also dropped a cat to the ground in a parachute.
Regrettably Caroline says little about the exhibition, though Garnerin’s hot-air balloon at the time was depicted on a poster advertising his appearance at the Frankfurter Michaelmas book fair on 15–16 September 1805, his thirty-ninth ascension at the time (his ascension in Munich would be his forty-second). The illustration shows Garnerin in his gondola waving a flag to the crowd of waving spectators below. Although hot-air balloons had already been aloft for twenty years, no German had yet attempted such a flight.
(Antiquarian poster offering.)
Balloon Flight of André-Jacques Garnerin
A map from 1743 indicating the locales mentioned in an account of André-Jacques Garnerin’s balloon flight over Munich and the surrounding area on 10 June 1808; the account was published the day after the flight in the Baierische National-Zeitung (1808) 138 (Saturday, 11 June 1808), 561.
(Carte des environs de Munich la capitale de Bavière dessinée suivant le dernier etât [1743]; source: Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Cartes et plans.)
Dramatic Reading by Ludwig Tieck
Caroline writes in November 1808:
“For some time now, there has certainly been no lack of familiar faces. We have now even gotten to the point that Tiek is providing many a wonderful evening with his reading performances, a gift he has developed to such an exquisite degree that he really does provide us with an utterly singular experience, presenting and transforming himself — a single person — into a complete theater ensemble.”
Ludwig Tieck, who had arrived in Munich with his sister, Sophie Bernhardi, in October 1808, had often done similar dramatic readings back when the Romantic circle had been gathered in Jena. Here an illustration of such an evening with Tieck, seated at the table on the right, reading before friends after he moved from Dresden to Berlin in 1840 (Schelling is seated at far left).
(Ludwig Pietsch, “Ein Abend bei Ludwig Tieck,” Der Bazar. Illustrirte Damen-Zeitung [1866] 42 [8 November 1866], 337–38, illustration on p. 337.)
Friedrich Tieck’s Bust of Schelling in Valhalla
Caroline writes on 21 February 1809 concerning the bust of Schelling that Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria had commissioned:
“The sculptor [Friedrich Tieck] will also eventually find his way here, coming from Coppet, then all of them except Ludwig Tieck intend to return to Italy. The sculptor will be doing a bust of Schelling, something the crown prince wants for his marble collection of great German men, about which you have probably already read in public newspapers, though in reality it includes some less great men as well. He chose Schelling alone from Munich and the Academy, passing over even the president, a move which, as he himself says, will doubtless arouse at least some feelings of envy.”
These busts were to be housed in an edifice built specifically as a place for commemorating great figures and events in German history, though the edifice could understandably not be built until after the fall of Napoleon. Tieck began the bust in April 1809, just after arriving in Munich. Here the bust and a later view of the interior of the edifice, the Valhalla (see next image).
(Bust: frontispiece to Schelling als Persönlichkeit: Briefe, Reden, Aufsätze, ed. Otto Braun [Leipzig 1908]; interior view: from B. Grueber, Walhalla: Geschildert und in Abbildungen erläutert [Regensburg 1843], plates following p. 5.)
Valhalla near Regensburg
By the time Ludwig was crowned king in 1825, sixty busts had been completed, and in 1826 he commissioned the construction of the edifice itself modeled after the Parthenon in Athens (Schelling will later refer to it in a letter as the “Pantheon”). The cornerstone was laid in a dramatic location just northeast of Regensburg in 1830 and the hall itself inaugurated on 18 October 1842 with ninety-six busts and sixty-four plaques. The edifice still stands today.
(Illustration from Adalbert Müller, Walhalla, 6th ed. [Regensburg 1844], following p. 11.)
Schliersee in the Bavarian Alps
On 16 September 1808, Caroline recounts in a letter:
“We together with two others took a most charming trip up to the Bavarian mountains and lakes this past August. Munich itself is situated in the worst part of Bavaria, whereas with respect to strangeness and amiability those areas surpass anything I have ever experienced in the way of mountains.”
Schliersee is located ca. 50 km southeast of Munich. The fragment of a Schnaderhüpfl Caroline brought back from the area around the Schliersee in the Bavarian Alps, a type of improvised epigrammatic song, suggests that this lake was indeed included in the Schellings’ itinerary.
(Illustration of the Schliersee from Herman Schmid and Karl Stieler, The Bavarian Highlands and the Salzkammergut (London 1874), 48; map: Wandkarte der Alpen… unter der Leitung des Vinzeux von Haardt [Vienna 1882]; Bibliothèque nationale de France.)
Count Maximilian von Arco’s death in Tyrol
The final year of Caroline’s life was accompanied by the events associated with the War of 1809, during which the Bavarians fought alongside the French and at times took considerable losses, including among the officer corps.
Caroline writes on 16 August 1809 about the Tyrolean insurgents:
“Hence they were able to bring their entire force to bear against ours, albeit not in a pitched battle, since they are too cowardly for that, but rather by shooting down at them from the heights. They even blew up boulders and then cast them down, smashing both people and cannons to pieces. The day before yesterday, Count Arco, who is the brother-in-law of our prime minister and has been leading a militia corps against the rebels for several months now, was killed during a different affaire when a bullet from above went through the top of his skull and came out beneath his chin. There is no end to the lamentation. . . . Although the French envoy celebrated the emperor’s [Napoleon’s] birthday yesterday, the celebration was dampened when the count’s body arrived here unannounced the night before and was brought to the house of the elderly father. Understandably, no one belonging to this extended family was present.”
(Gottfried Wilhelm Becker, Andreas Hofer und der Freiheitskampf in Tyrol 1809: mit 24 Stahlstichen, vol. 3 [Leipzig 1841], plate following p. 60.)
Im Rosenthal 144
Following their initial residence at the Karlsthor, the Schellings moved twice into apartments whose locations are difficult to determine. The last apartment in which Caroline lived, however, was located in Munich at the address Im Rosenthal 144.
She and Schelling moved into this building during the autumn of 1808. Here the apartment’s location essentially in the center of town..
(Königlich Baiersche Haupt und Residenzstadt München am 1. Januar 1809 [Munich 1809]; Bayerisches Landesvermessungsamt München, Nr. 558/03.)
Im Rosenthal 144
Caroline’s final apartment was in the house on the left, no. 144 (its later number was 15, handwritten at top), apparently on the third floor.
(Illustration: Münchner Polizey-Uebersicht (1805) xxv and xxvi [Saturday, 25 June 1805], plate xxv.)