Weimar

The cultural blossom which leads Weimar to achieve eminence and significance in the decades around 1800 going far beyond its modest geopolitical circumstances has as its starting point Duchess Anna Amalia von Sachsen-Weimar und Eisenach’s love of art. During the decades following the regency of this noblewoman coming from Wolfenbüttel, there will arise a remarkable series of important female players in the literary field – either coming from Weimar or (temporarily or permanently) settling there. With the geographically and historically limited label “Weimarer Klassik”, one does, at best, partial justice to the diverse creativity and productivity of these female authors. This is the case even if some of them are quite involved in the establishment – carried out by all kinds of agents, instances and individuals – of what literary history would call “Weimarer Klassik”. The ways in which their involvement takes shape include as poets, actresses, singers or instrumentalists, illustrators, craftswomen and textile artists. Without in any way overvaluing their aesthetic weight, one may more aptly characterize the participation of female authors from Weimar in the cultural life of the period between 1800 and 1860 using the term world literature – a term first influenced by Christoph Martin Wieland and later brought again into play by Goethe. This participation in world literature is, without thereby exhausting itself, particularly clear in the area of translation (especially when the action field of the authors is expanded to the sociocultural whole of the ‘event space’ Weimar–Jena). Sophie von Schardt translates Shakespeare and Byron; Charlotte von Stein renders into German Rousseau and Voltaire; Louise Marezoll (author and musician active in Jena) publishes German versions of works by Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen; Henriette Schubart (likewise living in Jena) comes out with translations of Walter Scott, Herman Melville and Washington Irving – one could keep adding to the list, which includes unpublished translations preserved in manuscript form.

Among the eight female authors selected for this project, three grow up in or around Weimar: Charlotte von Ahlefeld, née von Seebach, Amalie von Helvig, née von Imhoff, and Amalie von Voigt, née Ludecus. These take part in the forms of social life cultivated there and contribute to the inner molding of the art-centred way of life and to its capacity of being integrated in the national context. Only Amalie von Voigt, however, also spends the greater part of her life in Weimar. Helvig, who produces important translations of Swedish texts, lives for a time in Stockholm and later in Berlin. Meanwhile, though Herder officiates Ahlefeld’s marriage in Weimar, she then lives during her marriage to Johann Rudolf von Ahlefeld and also after her separation from her husband in the Duchy of Schleswig, belonging to Denmark. She then returns to Weimar in 1821.

Against the background of the dominance of the ‘Weimar’ paradigm (lasting for the first decades after 1800), the intensity of the Weimar-relations of every author researched in this project – different and shifting over time – can be understood as a consequence and expression of their respective positioning in the literary field. The socially and aesthetically more conservative among them, such as Charlotte von Ahlefeld or Fanny Tarnow, are more strongly inclined to mobilize their relations to Weimar during difficult situations than the more progressive ones, such as Amalia Schoppe. It must be stated that, at the same time, the radiant attractiveness of Weimar changes over the years. More precisely: the spectrum of this radiance shifts during the darker registers of the transfiguration of the past in the face of the “ending” (“Endschaft”) of the “Goethean artistic period” (“goetheschen Kunstperiode”, as Heinrich Heine points out in the “Romantische Schule”). The letters written by the imperial-Russian diplomat Apollonius von Maltitz from Weimar to Helmina von Chézy bear eloquent witness to this nostalgia. Yet, at the same time, Franz Liszt – director at the archducal music theatre and court chapel since 1848 – already formulates the program of a new time of blooming in his text “Zur Goethe-Stiftung in Weimar” (1849). The authors in this project still alive at the time, however, no longer participate in the beginning development of the program formulated by Liszt. Still, the fact that the manuscript collection compiled by Karl August Varnhagen von Ense and Ludmilla Assing already since the start of the 1840s is unthinkable without the reference to Goethe’s Weimar makes it then plausible to suppose, within the framework of a “praxeology of letter-collecting” (“Praxeologie des Briefsammelns”; Konrad Heumann), that the letters gathered from all directions to constitute the “Sammlung Varnhagen” also contained a second order clandestine Weimar address.

(trans. Pedro Kauffmann Amaral)