Berlin

The former Prussian capital is, in several respects, of special significance to the life and literary work of the eight authors of this project and many of their correspondents. Perhaps its most important aspect, however, is its influence on the creation of the Varnhagen Collection, in which the diverse and geographically far-reaching correspondence relationships of these individuals were preserved and organized in archival fashion.

The start of Karl August Varnhagen von Ense’s collecting of memorable pieces of writing (ca. 1830), at first primarily those of his then-living wife Rahel, occurs precisely 50 years after King Friedrich II of Prussia lays down the inadequacy and backwardness of German literature – particularly in relation to French literature – in his work “De la litterature allemande”, published by Decker in Berlin. The cultural and especially literary dynamic beginning to unfold in Berlin and elsewhere at this time had, as is generally known, all but completely eluded the monarch. Varnhagen’s collection idea unfolds itself, nonetheless, in full cognizance of the literary, musical, artistic and scientific blooming which comes out since the close of the 18th century from a combination of classical-idealist, Romantic and early Realist currents in Berlin. The lived and endured contradictoriness of these positions is, then, also a particular quality not only of the social life of the Berlin of this time, but also of the documents in the Varnhagen Collection. In these documents’ long genesis, the spirit of urban tolerance continues far beyond the end of the age of tolerance – it is not least recognizable in the high proportion of otherwise marginalized groups, especially of women. This applies also to the excerpt of the collection containing the documents covered in this project. The majority of the edited authors live at least temporarily in or around Berlin, with constant or changing addresses in this royal seat which, around the year 1820, crosses the threshold of a 200,000-inhabitant metropolis. While Amalie von Helvig temporarily leads one of Berlin’s best-known salons and Caroline de la Motte Fouqué often changes her whereabouts between Nennhausen and Berlin, Helmina von Chézy and Karoline Woltmann are born Berliners whose life treads a path through such other central European cities as Paris, Vienna and Prague (though her biographies remain in many respects dependent on Prussian politics). Moreover, many of the publishers of the books mentioned in the letters have their publishing houses in Berlin. Karl August von Varnhagen knew well that his collection would be a kind of sum total of this peculiar set of circumstances. If he is able to write that the present stands out due to the fact that it tries to conserve “the idiosyncrasies of each place and of each landscape” by collecting them, then this assessment undoubtedly also applies in large measure to the Prussian capital.

(trans. Pedro Kauffmann Amaral)