Wahrheit aus Morgenträumen: Biographical and Historical Contexts

At the end of 1812, shortly after the second part of Goethe’s autobiography Aus meinem Leben. Dichtung und Wahrheit (From My Life: Poetry and Truth, ed. Müller: 1986) had appeared,193 the well-known German-Danish poet and salonnière Friederike Brun (1765 – 1835)194 wrote from Copenhagen to her friend Caroline von Humboldt (1766 – 1826) – who had been her next-door neighbor in Rome for several years – to describe a private reading, held at Christmas time, of her nearly-completed memoir of her childhood and adolescence, her Kindheits- und Jugenderinnerungen: “Die Leute sind vergafft drin, und lachen und weinen eins ums andern dabei. Es soll bis ins 15. Jahr gehen, und mit dem Morgenroth der ersten Liebe enden” (‘People are much taken with it, and laugh and cry in turns hearing it. It is to proceed into my fifteenth year, and end with the dawn of my first love’) (Foerst-Crato 1975: 91 – 92).

According to its foreword, Brun had already begun work on the autobiography at Christmas 1810; that is, a year before the publication of the first part of Goethe’s famous autobiography; revisions and publication of Brun’s autobiography, in fact, took place afterwards. Notwithstanding such intertextual antecedents and aftermaths, the genesis of both texts shares the same historical background. Moreover, the biographical context for the composition of Brun’s Wahrheit aus Morgenträumen is, as it was in Goethe’s case (Jeßing 2004), a period of crisis and lack of creativity, (Foerst-Crato 1975: 38, 48) and among other things, the result of Brun’s separation from her Roman and Swiss friends. In light of the foreseeably brief political calm after the Treaties of Tilsit (1807: Prussia) and Schönbrunn (1809: Austria), Brun’s husband, an influential ‘global player’, had insisted that his wife and daughters, after several long stays in Switzerland, France and Italy (1806 – 1810), return to a Northern Europe marked by the depredations of war, economic crisis, misery, and growing nationalization. There, further partings ensued, from Brun’s daughter Auguste and from the family of the German-Danish statesman Christian Bernstorff, Brun’s childhood friend who in 1810 resigned as Denmark’s foreign minister and moved to Vienna. In Brun’s words: “Meine ganze heilige Jugend, das Paradies der Erde, versinkt mit ihnen” (‘My entire sacred youth, this paradise on earth, is swallowed up with them’). (Foerst-Crato 1975: 48) More was to come. By the time the memoir of her childhood finally appeared fourteen years later (1824), repeatedly revised and furnished with a critical apparatus of footnotes, Brun had also been separated from her youngest daughter Ida de Bombelles (1792 – 1857), singer and artist in her own right who had married in 1816 and moved to Dresden and Vienna, as well as from her famous friend Mme. de Staël (1766 – 1817) who had passed away in 1817. Significantly, in addition to Brun’s autobiography of her childhood, the publication also contains a biographical account of her daughter’s youth and education, dedicated to de Staël, and entitled Idas ästhetische Entwickelung (‘Ida’s Aesthetic Development’). A third addendum to the publication was a small collection of poems called Scherflein für Hellas niedergelegt auf den Altar der Menschlichkeit (A Poor Contribution for Hellas, Laid Upon the Altar of Humanity) that were paeans to the Greek national struggle for liberation from the Turks. This last part is dedicated to Brun’s distant friends, the Swiss poets Bonstetten (1745 – 1832), Matthisson (1761 – 1831) and Salis-Seewis (1762 – 1834). The first, main, and most extensive part of this publication from 1824, Brun’s childhood autobiography, however, does not address Goethe, the “friend of children and those who are forever young”, as had been anticipated (Foerst-Crato 1975: 209); and this despite the fact that she had enjoyed a personal acquaintance with the great man, underlined by the success of their pair of poems Nähe des Geliebten (“Nearness of the Beloved”, Brun 1792) and Ich denke Dein (“I Think of You”, Goethe 1796). (Schiller 1796: 5) Rather, the 170-page work of Brun’s childhood autobiography, divided into 71 chronological chapters, is dedicated – as an oblique critical reply to Goethe and an indirect tribute to her friend Salis-Seewis and his poems – to an allegoric female figure, to “Erinn’rung, [die,] lächelnd … [m]it rückwärts gewandtem Gesicht [den] Schleier [der] Wehmuth [hebt]” (“Memory, who, smiling … with backwards-turned face, lifts the veil of melancholy”). (Salis-Seewis 1780: 11 – 12)

Wahrheit aus Morgenträumen: Some Methodological Preliminary Notes

Regardless of whether one reads Brun’s autobiography together with the added biography of her daughter as a heteronomous text, as Karin Hoff (2003) does, or whether one treats it, as we subsequently will, as a ‘single’ autonomous text – it is impossible to overlook the author’s threefold identity. Brun constructs her publication of 1824 as a triptych: In terms of her childhood memoir, this woman poet is 1) a self-oriented autobiographer; in the account of Ida’s education, Brun is 2) a maternal biographer, oriented toward her child; and with the hymns and odes to freedom, she is 3) a political poet, oriented toward the world and humanity. This triple climax directs our attention to the discursive triangle of poetics, politics and gender – and it does so even before we have the chance – in the words of the famous French theorist of autobiography, Philipp Lejeune (1982) – to enter into an ‘autobiographical pact’ with Brun’s childhood memoir and to ascribe referentiality to them, based on the nominal identity of author, first-person narrator and first-person protagonist. The ‘autobiographical pact’ means that the text we have at hand is not fictive, rather, it is bound to the historical reality of Brun’s life and person. The degree of the text’s ‘truthfulness’ or (rhetoric) ‘fictionalization’ remains, for the time being, undetermined.

The referential aspect of the autobiography is reinforced through the two co-texts (the daughter’s biography and the hymns to freedom), which, like the childhood memoir, similarly makes mention of real people, circumstances, and events. All in all, the publication of 1824 thus emphasizes the hybridity of the genre of autobiography, even if modern scholars have been quarrelling over its ‘authenticity’ or ‘textuality’, following, for example, the postmodern positions of Paul de Man (1979). Brun’s publication follows the conventions of autobiographical texts, as Holdenried (2000) or Wagner-Egelhaaf (2005) argue, always refering to an already culturally formed and mediated biographical reality, even while inevitably reshaping and performing this reality. At the same time, as Heuser (1996) points out, a comparison of the respective textual construct with other sources, and with the author’s biographical substrata, helps clarify the construct’s particular textuality – for Women’s Studies, in particular, sometimes generating a methodological dilemma, since autobiographical research of lesser-known or forgotten authors is hampered by a limited corpus of texts.

Although there is little recent research into Brun’s biography, Brun’s social proximity to such intensively researched cultural elites as the Copenhagen Circle, the Göttinger Hain, or the famous Roman colony mentioned at the beginning, makes the situation of this forgotten author a relatively happy one. Thus, the comparison of the childhood memoir with Brun’s letters to Caroline von Humboldt cited earlier, allows us to formulate two initial theses regarding the ‘fictionality’ of Brun’s concept of her own identity.

In particular, the discrepant interpretations of her own body that Brun produces in both texts allow us to infer the conscious shaping of the facts of her world, depending upon the particular addressee and context; that is to say, she exhibits a tendency to fictionalize. Thus, for example, the omnipresent discourse of illness in her ‘private’ letters to her intimate friend Caroline is markedly gendered; it explains Brun’s multifarious nervous complaints in terms of the pathological paradigm of the hystera, that is, the womb, and interprets them in conformity with the discursive model of a passio hysterica as researched by Geitner (1985), among others. Befitting her advanced age, Brun focuses on the ‘grand crisis’ of menopause, which supposedly turns older women into sexless drones (Foerst-Crato 1975: 181).

It is a different matter, however, in Brun’s ‘public’ childhood autobiography. The diagnosis of hysteria is here marked as a historically outdated discourse, and moreover, disposed of in a comical fashion. Thus, in the narrative context of linguistic misunderstandings between the little Friederike and the world of adults, the following anecdote about a “gelehrter und verdienstvoller Professor der Historie” (‘learned and venerable professor of history’) will serve as an example:

[D]ieser hatte eine schöne und elegante Frau, welche sehr an den Nervenzufällen litt, welche seitdem unter den Frauen so häufig geworden sind, und die man damals mit dem allgemeinen Namen histerischer Beschwerden abfertigte. Da ich nun diese schöne Frau hier und dort, und da, in Gesellschaften übel und ohnmächtig werden sah, Zuckungen kriegen u.s.w. entfuhren mir einmal ganz laut die Worte – “Nun, Gott soll mich bewahren, wenn ich einmal groß werde, einen Professor der Historie zu heirathen!”195 (WaM: 19)

To be sure, Friederike’s ‘nervous bouts’ are also amply documented in her autobiography, and commented upon both in her narrative and in the footnotes. In contrast to the letters, however, the elderly first-person narrator here interprets these complaints in gender-neutral terms: they are alleged to be the result of vague ‘inflammations’ (WaM: 100) or – and this is more interesting for our investigation, the autobiographer links them, as we shall examine later in more detail, to melancholy, a topos of genius coded as ‘masculine’.

Although her letters and autobiography differ, there are also convergent statements by Brun regarding her own identity and its history. Among the latter belongs the perception of herself as member of a cultural élite who possesses the authority to speak, a notion that is supposed to legitimize her writing. Conversely, however, her life history includes details that we can describe, following Sloterdijk (1979), as ‘Störerfahrungen’ (‘disruptive experiences’) in her elitist self-image. In his monograph of 1979, which is still important in terms of theorizing the genre, Sloterdijk identifies two functions of autobiographical narrative: social action, in which a backward-gazing autobiographer makes reference to his current social milieu, its values and fantasies, and asserts relevance of the past and present (‘Relevanzproduktion’); and a future-oriented mental blueprint of an ‘I’ rich in life experiences, who – particularly in times of crisis – has to face up not only to successes but also to disruptions in his personal mythology, who must learn ‘lessons’ from them, and who, in accordance with collective patterns and educational concepts, has to employ narrative to set all this in order. The central aspects for Sloterdijk are the presence, nature, and function of such disruptive experiences in the text: are they suppressed or taken up as a theme, do they stand in isolation or do they become part of the self-image, and of a ‘fictive’ biographical coherence? With this in mind, we return to Brun, and we can now formulate our second thesis. It too owes its existence, methodologically speaking, to the comparison with Brun’s letters to Caroline von Humboldt; it refers, however, only to the function of autobiography insofar as it serves the politics of subjectivity. Unlike the letters, the contemporaneous childhood memoir recounts events tragic and triumphant; that is, such events that prompt, in the mixed emotion of “Wehmut” (‘melancholy nostalgia’, ‘joy of grief’), both “lachen und weinen,” (‘tears and laughter’). Thus Brun’s autobiography appears to be a ‘disrupted’ narcissistic fantasy of restoration to health. Before discussing this notion below, I want to draw attention to Sloterdijk’s view of the ‘Relevanzproduktion’ (‘production of relevance’) for literary-historical ‘classification in the field’ – to use Bourdieu’s (1991) term of contemporary autobiographical theory.

In light of Brun’s text’s intertextual ‘sisterhood’ with Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit, the ‘famous woman’ Friederike Brun makes an extremely convincing ‘claim to relevance’: This claim is nourished by three facets (corresponding to her triptych) of her social identity. As the quotation in my title of her indicates, it results 1) from Brun’s poetic calling, her lifelong disposition to be a writer; it also results 2) from her ‘womanly’ vocation, her ‘natural destiny as a wife and mother’, according to the contemporary anthropology of gender, and it results 3) from her familial and transnational background. The so-called ‘Nordic Sappho’196 was the beloved daughter of the famous evangelic court chapelist, proponent of the Enlightenment and poet of spiritual poems Balthasar Münter (1735 – 1793), and as a member of the well-known Münter family, belonged to the bicultural, cosmopolitan Copenhagen social élite and to a European network of political and cultural circles of friends in Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, Vienna, France, and Italy. She was a Roman by choice, an enthusiastic fan of Switzerland, and a specialist in classical antiquity, art critic, and cultural mediator, translator, editor, poet, and travel writer. She was the sophisticated spouse of a wealthy citizen of the world, a famous salonnière, and mother-creator of the celebrated gestural artist Ida. This claim to relevance allows Brun to take up the challenge of her father’s friend Herder, who had called on women to provide descriptions of their lives (Herder 1883: 587, Münter 1937, 1793) and which allows her to link back to the very few previously published autobiographies by women writers such as Sophie de La Roche (1783, 1799, 1800, 1806)197 or Isabella von Wallenrodt (1796/97). Unlike these women, however, Brun restricts herself to her childhood and youth, a phase highly regarded since Rousseau, Jung-Stilling, Moritz or Goethe. Consequently, Brun is the first woman writer to publish a literary childhood memoir in German – long before Johanna Schopenhauer or Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach – and for a long time she has been insufficiently considered by German autobiographical scholarship (Niggl 1971).

Wahrheit aus Morgenträumen: Textual Analysis (Poetics)

In the crisis that forms the context of the work’s composition, as I hinted in my introduction, is the public huge ego of the ‘famous woman’, which I have just sketched, that moves into the center of her autobiographical self-construction. Like Goethe, she attempts to synthesize and bind together the multifarious individual facets of her image and authenticates them by means of an exalted lineage and innermost ‘essence’ (“Wesen”).198 Once again, and entirely in Herder’s terms, the text thus takes on the function – to our eyes nowadays, of course, a mythic function – of stabilizing the crisis-endangered self-esteem of its aging authoress in the reminiscent contemplation of a youthful and original wholeness now lost.

This function dictates the stylistically pleasing, often humorous discourse, the careful selection of biographical data and its skillful ‘emplotment’ – to use Hayden White’s (1978) term – in accordance with contemporary narrative models and ideological concepts; a process that reminds us of the impish little artist Friederike, who manipulates “Thatsachenwahrheit” (WaM: VI) (‘factual truth’) by means of shrewd omissions. Accordingly, it is inevitable that the poetic aspect of her identity moves into the foreground – after all, since Plato, poets have been considered liars and fantasts. And also accordingly, it is inevitable that the elderly Friederike’s text falls under the suspicion of being fictive – and the text, self-consciously, has nothing less in mind from the very beginning.

Thus, then, Brun’s Wahrheit aus Morgenträumen is permeated throughout by a metapoetic – and highly ambiguous – discourse on the question of ‘Dichtung und Wahrheit’, be it in the title or in the many critical comments on memory with which the autobiographical narrator accompanies her account. The pattern evident in the work’s reception is already present in the “Vorbericht an den gütigen Leser” (WaM: III-VI). (‘Foreword to the Gentle Reader’) The work’s ‘birth myth’ unfolded here argues away any doubt about its veracity, only to ‘give birth’ to doubt anew. Thus, the first-person narrator metaphorizes her treasury of remembered images, which she shares as a threefold hallucinatory Wesensschau, an intuition of essences – first of all as a puppet theatre, then as the ‘psychological hocus-pocus’ of a camera obscura or laterna magica (Kosenina 2004) – and so refers with great clarity to the stage-managed character of the entire presentation. The two-phase process of production, recounted immediately after this inspirational moment, of course, separates into: the initial, spontaneous and imaginary ‘throng of images’ before the ‘innermost eye of the soul’ that now appears “Thatsachen-wahr” (‘factually true’) and the first transposition of those images into language scribbled on ‘cartons’, the tracing-paper of the camera obscura, by the fevered, ‘half-blind’ and only ‘half-awake’ first-person narrator. ‘Untruth’ emerges only at the end:

Der erste Anstoß war nun, und ganz ohne mein Zuthun gegeben. Am nächsten Morgen (ich war noch immer bettlägrig vor Schwäche) war’s wieder dieselbe Geschichte! Frühes Erwachen, Bildergewimmel anfangend, wo ich’s gestern ließ, und keine Ruhe, eh‘ ich aufschrieb, was ich sah. So gieng’s drei Morgen auf einander, bis ich die ganze Bildergallerie ausgeleert hatte, welche plötzlich mit dem Ausgange des 15ten Jahres erlosch – Gestalten und Farben verdämmerten, und ich war herzlich froh, wieder ungestört meinen Morgenschlaf vollenden zu können. Die Cartons dieser innern Camera obscura (Kaum leserlich hingekritzelte Notizen) wurden zu anderen Papieren geworfen und vergessen: Bis ich eines Tages mit einigen Hausfreunden von diesem sonderbaren psychologischen Hokuspokus redete, und ihre Neugier durch Mittheilung der kaum dechiffrablen Notitzen befriedigte. Sie fanden Stoff zum Leben darin, und ich mußte versprechen, solche wenigstens lesbar auszuschreiben: und that es ihnen zu lieb. Allein nun fingen diese Morgenträume an, mich selbst zu erheitern und zu belustigen; und so ließ ich mich gehen, setzte äußerst wenig hinzu (denn die Thatsachen hatten wahrlich die Marionettengeister treulich geliefert), sondern ordnete und erweiterte durch Umstände berichtigend, nur das Ganze, so gut ich wußte und konnte. Man verzeihe also, wo ich vielleicht in Zeit- und Gedankenfolge geirrt ward, den kleinen kindlichen Wesen, die der Cyklus der Logik nicht einengt, und welche die Zeit nicht berechnen.199 (WaM: III – VI)

‘Untruth’ thus emerges not in the first inspirational, really creative moment, but rather only during the alienating process of working out this unchronological, alogical, hardly decipherable material. Translated into modern terms: untruth is the effect of an irreconcilable discrepancy between the psychological substratum and the symbolic order.

However, the venerable platonic narrative of inspiration, according to which the first-person narrator textualizes her work’s origin myth and its presentation in the first place also belongs to this symbolic order. The divinely gifted authoress, inspired by the images in her memory and psyche, is evidently also a well-read, classically educated connoisseur of contemporary theories about dreams and the imagination, which the classical mythology of genius (inspiratio, ingenium, melancholia, technica and iudicium) had made generally available to the epistemology of the Enlightenment (Alt 2001). Thus, from the beginning, the first-person narrator designs herself as an extraordinary, culturally competent personality. She moves this ambitious self-design into the twilight of a regressive presentation, of an autopoietic act (Luhmann) and “Weihnachtsmärchen” (‘christmastale’), of a literary work, a “Dichtung” (‘poetry’).

The story of youth that follows this preface, paints – evoking Goethe’s self-imagination in the first parts of Dichtung und Wahrheit – the ‘poet’ in bright colours. There is an image of the storyteller Friederike (WaM: 75, 123, 157 – 158, 166), watching over children; other images show her in heartfelt prayer for a ‘divine gift’ which would enable her to write poetry like her favorite and idolized poet Gellert. We see her at her ‘consecration’ as a poet at the bedside of the ill poet Ewald, who recognizes her poetic destiny, and as Ossian-inspired versifying Philomele in a poetic bird’s nest, high in the paternal willow tree (WaM: 166).200 Friederike’s calling to be a poet thus follows the narrative of teleological development in phases, offering anecdotal evidence from the first secret sign to the point of public acceptance, keeping with the humanistic and unified ideal of subject and environment.201 Above all, however, she is socially licensed in her vocation to poetry through the goodwill of both Danish and German poetic authorities – elder and younger and mostly male, which means, for example, Johannes Ewald (1743 – 1781), Christian zu Stolberg-Stolberg (1748 – 1821), Friedrich Leopold zu Stolberg-Stolberg (1750 – 1819), her brother Friedrich Münter (1761 – 1830) and particularly her beloved father, who is said always to have taken ‘great pleasure’ (“herzliche Freude” (WaM: 160)) in young Friederike’s childish early poems. Admittedly, the autobiographic fiction of the adult narrator Friederike does not recognize the clandestine discrimination, inherent in father Münter’s sexual differenciation between the poems of his son Friedrich and his daughter Friederike. The first ones earn his constructive criticism and fair comments, while the poetic efforts of the girl gain only smooth and tender ones (WaM: 163 – 164, 160, 124 – 125).

This poetic identity of the first-person narrator thus fits harmoniously into the narcissistic construction as beloved ‘sunday’s child’ (WaM: 126), whose ego components are considered to show ‘genius’202 – and are granted a generous psycho-social moratorium (WaM: 136). Well into the late 1770s, the beloved ‘daddy’s girl’ Friederike – unlike her elder brother, the firstborn ‘mama’s boy’ (WaM: 13) Friedrich – is wild, loud, frivolous, courageous and willful, temperamental, full of natural wit and contrariness, hates needlework, plays nothing but deadly games with her dolls, turns her doll’s kitchen into a chemical laboratory, experiments with the electrostatic generator, goes climbing and rowing –preferably à la Klopstock, in stormy weather (WaM: 137). More importantly, only the reading and writing life, the “Leben und Weben” in worlds of fantasy (WaM: 115 – 116), is spared later inevitable frustrations. Dichtung and Dichten, the written word and the act of writing, thus gain a compensatory function, and are passionately cultivated relics of a childish identification with her learned poet-father, with her learned poet-brother Friedrich and family friends, such as the poets Herder, Klopstock, Ewald, Esmarch, Baggesen, and Christian and Friedrich Stolberg. This identification extends into the medical self-diagnoses of the present. Both, the German Klopstock and the Dane Ewald, suffer – like the backward-gazing narrator Friederike Brun (WaM: 123) – from nervous disorders. Brun’s father as well composed his “herz- und geistvolle[n]” Geistlichen Lieder (his ‘heartfelt and witty’ ‘Spiritual Songs’, 1772) (WaM: 24, 70 – 73) in the blackest melancholy hypochondria.

Wahrheit aus Morgenträumen (Politics)

Friederike’s father fell into a poetically productive depression after he was separated, for political reasons, from his soulmates. Similarly, Friederike’s fate was both tragic and painful. Brun’s autobiographical life story as the foundation myth of her poetic destiny ends with an unfulfilled first love and with the “Donnerschlag” (‘thunderclap’) of the catastrophic separation from her closest childhood friends, when their father, the German Andreas Peter Bernstorff, is dismissed from the Danish government. To quote Brun: “Wir sollten so recht lebendig auseinander gerissen werden!” (‘We were to be torn apart alive!’) (WaM: 191). This incisive metaphor illustrates the latent political potential of this ‘Schmerz- und Sehnsuchts-Poetik’ (‘poetics of pain and longing’) – beyond its manifest textualization of contemporary discourses of melancholy and friendship (Mauser and Becker Cantario 1991). On the one hand, the daughter repeats the supposed ‘ur-scene’ of all her poet-father’s poetically productive crises of separation, the Münter family trauma; that is, the Struensee affair (WaM: 25 – 29),203 which was a cause célèbre throughout Europe. In 1772, Balthasar Münter, an opponent of the ousted German minister and radical reformer Struensee, was involved in a conspirative coup against him. As pastor, he had been obliged to visit him frequently in prison, but eventually befriended him and in the end was forced to attend his new friend’s public torture and execution, which involved cutting off his hands, beheading, quartering and display his limbs which were hoisted on a wheel. He poured his heart out in a contemporary best-seller describing Struensee’s conversion and execution. On the other hand, at the end of her childhood, with Bernstorff’s removal from power in 1781, Friederike also experienced the Danishizing and division of the mixed German-Danish culture, which had begun in 1770 with Struensee’s brief revolution. It continued during the nationalist impulses of the Napoleonic Wars and Restoration, and thus at a time when the autobiography was composed – against all attempts in day-to-day life to restore the old, multinational politics to which Brun programmatically declared her allegiance at the very beginning, when she introduced her parents, and particularly her father’s cosmopolitan political credo. Thus, Brun writes in the first chapter:

Zu welchem Volk ich nun eigentlich gehöre, weiß ich wirklich nicht: und daher mag wohl mein gänzlicher Mangel an ausschließender Vaterlandsliebe herrühren, welcher mir Sinn, Herz und Augen offen erhalten hat, für die Vorzüge und Gebrechen der Völker und Länder, so ich gesehn. Auch sagte mein Vater oft: Christus habe gegen nichts früher und anhaltender gearbeitet, als gegen die ausschließende Vaterlandsliebe, und den noch ausschließendern Vaterlandsstolz und nichts eifriger zu befördern gesucht, als offenen Weltbürgersinn. Auch mir scheint dies aus allen Evangelisten klar hervorzugehen. Allein herzlich innig liebte er [mein Vater] das Land seiner Wahl, das liebe Dänemark, herzlich ist er von dem gütigen Volke wieder geliebt worden. Alle meine Erinnerungen, alle Erfahrungen meines Lebens, sind von Seiten der Dänen Liebe – freundliches herzliches Anerkennen des Guten, was an uns war. Vom Vater herab bis auf die Kinder und Enkel, ist Münters Namen in uns geliebt.204 (WaM: 6 – 7)

This takes us back to our opening thesis of the text as a fantasy of restoration. Against a historical background of division and war, Brun’s supposedly ‘private’ camera obscura reads as a symbolic restoration of the once omnipotent German-Danish circle, now destroyed, and the multiethnic Danish conglomerate state, which had since been divided. Moreover, Brun’s textual images of memory also symbolically remake material markers of memory destroyed by war: her parents’ house, her father’s grave and the poetic willow tree. In 1807, the hail of British bombs on Copenhagen had reduced them to ruins. And even the striking cosmopolitan declaration against chauvinistic patriotism that the autobiographer makes in the name of her father in her introduction, (WaM: 6 – 7) reads as part of a historical complex, on both the general and the individual levels, of poetics and politics, which after 1810 gives the current crises of separation – personal as well as political – a new psychic dynamic.

Wahrheit aus Morgenträumen (Gender)

Finally, Brun’s Wahrheit aus Morgenträumen is also a narcissistic fantasy of restoration in its gendered plot, which envisions the beloved, impish child before all gender-specific restrictions in her original omnipotence – with library key, quill pen, oar, and key to the larder. And like the discourse of poetological identity, that of gender identity is also politically laden. Unlike the topic of writing, which was never forbidden, the theme of gender confronts the backward-gazing narrator with a via dolorosa of insult and loss: for the drama of Struensee’s dismemberment occurs when the five-year-old “wilde Biene” (‘wild bee’) “den Stachel auf immer verloren hat” (‘lost her sting forever’) (WaM: 21 – 25) and was dethroned by a new member of the family. At the cradle of her little brother, christened with their father’s name, Balthasar, Friederike learns how to mother. It is from this very period that her love of reading and of invented worlds results; and it is from this that the retrospectively reflecting first-person narrator first dates the loss of her gaiety and the “Grundaccord meines Wesens” (‘basic chord of my being’), her melancholy (WaM: 24).

Mein Witz erstarb im eigentlichen Sinne: die Gutmütigkeit gewann; allein ich versichere heilig, in spätern Jahren der Kindheit, aus Furcht wehe zu thun, so waffenlos geworden zu seyn, daß sehr an intellectuellem Vermögen untergeordnete Gespielen, mich ungestraft neckten und sich über meine Treuherzigkeit lustig machten; die Biene hatte den Stachel auf immer verloren. [….] Wenn die Kinderwärterin ungeduldig ward, das kleine unruhige Kind zu wiegen, gab sie mir ein Buch in die Hand, und ich wiegte treulich fort, Himmel und Erde vergessend, in Richardsons Zauberwelt verloren.205 (WaM: 21, 25)

However, fixated on the ego-ideal of a poet, formed after her father’s image and sentimental poetics, Brun seeks the origin of this melancholy in her being torn away from her loved ones and missing them – and not, for instance, in the gender-specific shrinking of her world. Compared with Brun, the intimate correspondent mentioned at the outset, however, this is now a conspicuously gender-blind view of the autobiographer. In order to understand this striking discrepancy, I would now like to invoke the pedagogical and didactic discourse that permeates Brun’s childhood autobiography and elucidates the theme of gender. This will also now lead us back again to our opening considerations on genre theory.

Wahrheit aus Morgenträumen: Pedagogics or Dialectic Learning?

From her adult perspective, Brun portrays the child Friederike in her elitist educational environment who is provided with three goals for her development: 1) morally exemplary social conduct, primarily willingness to take responsibility, ability to empathize and personal moderation, 2) the acquisition of a high degree of literacy appropriate for a privileged social class, and 3) the formation of a sexual identity suitable for her gender. The authorities of this difficult scenario are the two overpowering father-gods, Klopstock and Münter, who impose upon the “Sonntagskind” (‘sunday’s child’) two ‘disruptive experiences’ (Sloterdijk). Father Klopstock is willing to feel affection (“lieb haben”) for the ‘intolerable roaring wind’ (“unausstehlich[er] Brausewind”), once she has turned ‘fifteen years old’ (“15 Jahr alt”) and settled down somewhat (WaM: 105). Father Münter, with an eye to the domestic relationship between his precursor’s erudite daughter, who served as a challenging model for Friederike, refuses to tolerate a Latin- and Greek-reading, ‘scholarly fool in the house’ (“gelehrte Närrin im Haus”) (WaM: 32). Inspite of his indulgence and liberality, he limits Friederike’s acquisition of literacy and, indirectly, her poetic ambitions as well. For the rest of her life, Friederike, later almost deaf, is forced to learn and reproduce classical meters only by ear, not by instruction and lessons.

As part of her identity politics of self-mythologizing, Brun attempts to revalue these deficits to positive effect. Thus, the outward absence of coercion during her educational and formative years, marked by her experience and stimulating to her imagination, corresponds to both recognized pedagogical theories (Fénélon, Basedow) and to the character of the freedom-loving ‘wild tomboy.’ Moreover, this lack of external constraints presents an opportunity for unobserved self-education, that is, her independent construction of her own identity. Furthermore, the methods, media, and instruments through which the girl independently and playfully develops “all her inner senses” (‘alle inneren Sinne’) and claims to have acquired (WaM: 92) the learning she sought, are not infrequent abstract lessons and regulated instruction but, rather, her conversational participation in the domestic culture of story-telling and gregariousness, the grown-up readings that give wings to her fantasy, and the practical experience on her own body. The awkward scenes in which Friederike’s appearance, conduct and level of knowledge are pilloried on the so-called ‘chair of shame’ (“Beschämungs-Catheder”) (WaM: 16) constitute painful ‘disruptive experiences’ in the child’s narcissistic self-esteem. In Brun’s interpretive retrospection, however, they become important catalysts of her development, and thus central components of the autobiographer’s (wishful) elitist self-image. Indeed, these experiences recount the externally imposed civilizing process (Elias 1974) and how they play into ‘feminine’ weakness and shyness (Basedow/Rousseau) as an independent educational achievement produced qua shame and conscience. This shrew has been tamed in exemplary fashion, outwardly ‘zwanglos’, through a synthesis of social and self-control.

Wahrheit aus Morgenträumen: Father Images

Despite Brun’s appreciative, loving mentioning of her mother (Magdalena Ernestina Sophia Friederika née von Wangenheim), it is her father Balthasar Münter whom she mentions about 80 times in her autobiography, forming a textual mirror of remembrance, in which the biography and character of her father, as well as the close relationship with him, lead to an indirect and projected self-characterization of a problematic, as ‘masculine’ identified father-daughter. Despite this cross-gendered configuration, the text parallels Goethe’s self-characterization, which also links the coming-of-age plot of the child with that of the father.

For example, Friederike’s first reading lessons are taught from the ‘beautifully sounding verses’ of her father’s oratorio, and by practicing the musical versions. She learned how to play the organ and how to sing (WaM: 15, 90). In conversation, with ‘many a brilliant word’ (WaM: 90), her father introduces her to scientific, historical, ethical, and religious topics:

Wenn dann die Nacht heranzog, dann wandelte ich an der Hand des Vaters, unter dem Sternenhimmel, und lauschte mit leisem Beben auf die hohen Lehren und Offenbarungen der Weisheit und ewigen Güte, im unermesslich Großen, wie bei Tage im unermeßlich Kleinen.206 (WaM: 109)

In the end, it is her father who impresses on her and steers her literary socialization, who leads her, according to her age, to Goethe’s Werther, Klopstock’s Messias or Wieland’s Oberon. Her father shapes her critical discernment and tenderly praises her for developing the right taste: “Der Vater umarmte mich […] die Messiade ward mir gewährt”207 (WaM: 106, 134, 159, 149).

The above mentioned unsystematic casualness and unconstraint of this educational path, Brun’s shaping of the father-child relationship and the positive father-image, contrasts with Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit. From the beginning, her father appears as an exemplary representative of an honorable intellectual and moral elite, and at the same time as a loving and beloved, yet sensible, mild, and good-willed character, who is both cheerful and melancholic. From the perspective of the young child (except for the Struensee affaire), the influential pastor and theologian appears not as a public but rather as a private person with intellectual and literary interests. He is at the center of a circle of friends with similar interests and affinities, an exemplary family man (Erhart 2001), and represents in many situations the sensible ideal of a strong and tender father – in which he supersedes the difficult ‘private man’ that was Johann Caspar Goethe. In the end, the constructed nature of the father-image becomes apparent when Friederike changes her concept of her father and no longer remembers him in an ideal and sentimental way but, rather, in a ‘classical’ form:

Meinen Vater aber erinnere ich selten nur unpäßlich gesehen zu haben. Seine ganze Gestalt und sein heiterer Gleichmuth bei der zartesten Empfänglichkeit des Herzens, sprachen die erhörte Bitte der Alten: ‘Gesunden Sinn im gesunden Körper’, und ‘das Schöne zu dem Guten’, aufs vollständigste aus.208 (WaM: 49 – 50)

The image of the father, confirmed through the explicit and episodically documented similarity by which father and daughter alternately identified over the years, becomes a mirror identity for Brun. This is also true in the physical sense (except for Brun’s connoted ‘motherly-feminine’ weak health):

[D]iese Ähnlichkeit aber mit dem geliebten Vater nahm immer zu, (besteht wachsend bis auf diesen Augenblick) und wenn der liebende Vater, mein rundes Gesicht zwischen beide Hände nehmend, mich recht herzlich küßte, sagte er oft lächelnd: ‘Mädchen, du siehst doch deinem Vater schändlich ähnlich!‘ Und ich ließ mir das recht gern gefallen, denn die Eitelkeit war ganz klein in meinem Herzen; die Liebe aber zum Besten der Väter, sehr groß.‘209 (WaM: 104)

And this mirror image manifests not only in the physical and mental sense but also has consequences for Brun’s concept of self as a sunny, ‘impish’ and highly cultured cosmopolitan and social writer who is predisposed to happiness but suffers from world weariness: “[T]iefer war der Schmerz meines Vaters, und von der Tochter wie innig mitempfunden und getheilt!”210 (WaM: 183) The ‘sympathetic’ becomes the key element in the characters and the father-daughter relationship that reaches into the writing present and the autobiographical texts. Brun mirrors her identity on the imaginary autobiography of her father’s childhood who, like her, “selbst in dem Alter, ein äußerst durchtriebner Schelm gewesen war – wovon, wenn ich wagen dürfte Kindheitsgeschichten in aufsteigender Linie zu schreiben, manche aus seinem Munde geschilderte Kindheitsscene zum Belege anzuführen wäre.”211(WaM: 94) Much like the growing purported similarity of father and daughter, the empathetically described constriction (‘like in Elysium’, ‘bliss’ (WaM: 70, 137)) of their relationship also increased from childhood to adolescence, with obvious oedipal connotations in the described walks they took together, in the prayer, music, and reading lessons, boat excursions or time spent together in the garden, at which occasions the little ‘warbler’ increasingly occupied the role of the matron of the house: “Ach wie schmeckte dem zärtlichen Vater, die Lieblingsschüssel von der Hand der Lieblingstochter bereichert [sic!], so wohl!”212 (WaM: 165, 157) From this perspective, Brun’s wistfully autobiographical ‘restorative imagining’ of her ‘childhood paradise’ also includes her in 1773 deceased father and the narcissistic function of his mirror image that helped shape her own identity.

As mentioned above, the disruptions and caesuras in this process are being ‘restored,’ too. In this vein, the (rarely enough) ‘disciplining father’ is justified and even during puberty – once more: unlike Goethe! – the relationship between him and the ‘wild child’ Friederike was untarnished by rebellions and open conflicts. At the same time, the relationship harbored a great potential for conflict and disturbances for Friederike’s identity: It is fueled by cross-gender identification and shaped by increasingly conflicted messages the father sent her in regards to ‘femininity’ and his highly contradicting worshipping of educated amazons and domestic women that Friederike, caught between ‘warbler’ and ‘favorite cook,’ had to reckon with.

Wahrheit aus Morgenträumen: Summary or Truth and/or Dream

With regard to Sloterdijk and my own interpretation, it needs to be restated that the discourses of gender and educational theory, particularly with Brun’s autobiography in mind, take as their theme numerous disruptions of the narcissistic self-image on the level of the narrated child, and thus they substantiate our opening thesis that the text is a “disrupted fantasy of recreation.” In so far as these disruptive experiences are rewritten on the level of the narration into an exemplary “biography of education and formation history” and myth of the poet, they serve in turn the author’s elitist claim to relevance. However, part of the logic of such a “disrupted fantasy of recreation,” refracted by melancholy, is that it also brings the remains and the traces of the “old identity” to light. And thus the plot of the little bumptious hobbledehoy indeed ends, of course, with a 15-year-old “Klopstock girl” becoming lonely, sensitive and shy, and who has found her way, through a series of refusals, to literature. Her delicate talent for contradiction and rejoinder has certainly not been lost, but rather only displaced from life into art. It returns in the poetological program of papering over reality with poetic reveries – including those of the longed-for object of an undamaged, integrated Goethe-like personality. And so Brun’s fantasies define themselves as the old, aesthetically transformed “Widerspruchsgeist” of the “wildeste kleine Katze,”213 (WaM: 2, 9, 15) which even in the textual “hocus-pocus” of her childhood autobiography mounts resistance to imposed separations, made in the name of father and the patriarchal, nationalized order: to sexual separation, to national separation, to the separation of Dichtung and Wahrheit, and to the separation of myths of authorship and the critique of those myths.Walter ErhartVoßkamp

Works Cited

Alt, Peter-André. 2001. “Der Schlaf der Vernunft. Traum und Traumtheorie in der europäischen Aufklärung.” Das achtzehnte Jahrhundert 25.1., 55 – 82.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1991. “Le champ littéraire.” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 89.9., 4 – 46.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1999. Die Regeln der Kunst. Genese und Struktur des literarischen Feldes. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

Brun, Friederike. 1795. Gedichte. Friedrich Matthisson (ed.). Zürich: Orell, Gessner, Füssli & Comp.

Brun, Friederike. 1799 – 1801. Prosaische Schriften. 4 vols. Zürich: Orell, Füssli.

Brun, Friederike. 1800 – 1801. Tagebuch über Rom. 2 vols. Zürich: Orell, Füssli & Comp.

Brun, Friederike. 1806 – 1809. Episoden aus Reisen. 3 vols. Leipzig: Hartleben.

Brun, Friederike. 1812. Neue Gedichte. Darmstadt: Heyer & Leske.

Brun, Friederike. 1824. Wahrheit aus Morgenträumen und Idas ästhetische Entwickelung. Aarau: Sauerländer Verlag.

Brun, Friederike. 2000. Wahrheit aus Morgenträumen, ed. Brian Keith-Smith. Lewiston, N.Y.: E. Mellen Press.

De Man, Paul. 1979. “Autobiography as De-Facement.” Modern Language Notes 94:5, 919 – 930.

Elias, Norbert. 1974. Über den Prozess der Zivilisation. Soziogenetische und psychogenetische Untersuchungen [1939]. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp.

Walter Erhart. 2001. Familienmänner, Über den literarischen Ursprung moderner Männlichkeit. München: Fink.

Foerst-Crato, Ilse, ed. 1975. Frauen zur Goethezeit. Ein Briefwechsel. Caroline von Humboldt, Friederike Brun. Düsseldorf: Selbstverlag.

Geitner, Ursula. 1985. “Passio hysterica – die alltägliche Sorge um das Selbst. Zum Zusammenhang von Literatur, Pathologie und Weiblichkeit im 18. Jahrhundert”. In: Renate Berger et al. (eds.): Frauen, Weiblichkeit, Schrift. Dokumentation der Tagung in Bielefeld vom Juni 1984. Berlin: Argument, 130 – 144.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. 1795/96, “Ich denke dein”. Musenalmanach für das Jahr 1796. ed. Friedrich Schiller, Neustrelitz: Michaelis, 5.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. 1986. Aus meinem Leben. Dichtung und Wahrheit. Sämtliche Werke, Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche. Frankfurter Ausgabe. Vol. I.14. Ed. Klaus-Detlev Müller. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag.

Herder, Johann Gottfried. 1883. Sämmtliche Werke. Ed. Bernhard Suphan. Vol. 18, Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung.

Heuser, Magdalene. 1996. “Einleitung.” Autobiographien von Frauen. Beiträge zu ihrer Geschichte. Ed. Magdalene Heuser. Tübingen: De Gruyter, 1 – 12.

Hoff, Karin. 2001. “Grenzenlose Erinnerung: Friederike Bruns kosmopolitischer Selbstentwurf.” Dänisch-deutsche Doppelgänger. Transnationale und bikulturelle Literatur zwischen Barock und Moderne. Ed. Heinrich Detering, Anne-Britt Gerecke and Johan de Mylius. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 95 – 107.

Hoff, Karin. 2003. Die Entdeckung der Zwischenräume. Literarische Projekte der Spätaufklärung zwischen Skandinavien und Deutschland. Göttingen: Wallstein.

Holdenried, Michaela. 2000. Autobiographie. Stuttgart: Reclam.

Jeßing, Benedikt. 2004. “Dichtung und Wahrheit”. Goethe Handbuch. Vol. 3. Ed. Bernd Witte et. al. Stuttgart: Springer Verlag, 278 – 330.

Kosenina, Alexander, “Schönheit im Detail oder im Ganzen? Mikroskop und Guckkasten als Werkzeuge und Metaphern der Poesie [2004]”. Goethezeitportal. http://www.goethezeitportal.de/db/wiss/epoche/kosenina_mikroskop.pdf, 2014 – 02 – 11.

La Roche, Sophie von. 1800. Schattenrisse abgeschiedener Stunden in Offenbach, Weimar und Schönebeck im Jahr 1799. Leipzig: Gräff.

Lejeune, Philippe. 1982. “Le Pacte Autobiographique.” L’Autobiographie en Espagne. Aix-En-Provence: Points, 7 – 25.

Loster-Schneider, Gudrun. 2003. “‘Laß mir noch/ Manch kleines Liedchen glücken,/ Das weiche Schwesterseelen einst/ An ihren Busen drücken‘. Zur Lyrik der ‚Erzieherin’ Caroline Rudolphi.” Johann Friedrich Reichardt und die Literatur. Komponieren, korrespondieren, publizieren. Ed. Walter Salmen. Hildesheim, Zürich, New York: Olms, 271 – 290.

Loster-Schneider, Gudrun. 2009. “Gewalt, Genre, Poetik. Friederike Bruns Ballade ‚Die sieben Hügel‘ (1793).” Lyrik im historischen Kontext. Festschrift für Reiner Wild. Ed. Andreas Böhn et.al. Würzburg: KIT Scientific Publishing, 117 – 134.

Loster-Schneider, Gudrun. 2012. “‘[I]n der tiefen Camera obscura der Erinnerung‘. Technifizierte Ego-Nostalgie in Friederike Bruns Autobiographie Wahrheit aus Morgenträumen (1824).” Technikfiktionen und Technikdiskurse. Ed. Simone Finkele and Burkhardt Krause. Karlsruhe: KIT: Scientific Publishing, 71 – 96.

Luhmann, Niklas. 1981. “Ist Kunst codierbar?” Soziologische Aufklärung. 3. Soziales System, Gesellschaft, Organisation. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 245 – 265.

Mauser, Wolfram and Becker Cantarino, Barbara, ed. 1991. Frauenfreundschaft – Männerfreundschaft. Literarische Diskurse im 18. Jahrhundert. Tübingen: De Gruyter.

Mix, York-Gothart. 2001. “Patria ubique – überall ist Vaterland. Einleitende Bemerkungen zum Thema deutsch-dänischer Kulturtransfer.” Das achtzehnte Jahrhundert 25.2, 179 – 183.

Bohnen, Klaus. 2001. “Johann Friedrich Struensee und die Folgen. Aus Anlass von Christine Keitschs ‚Der Fall Struensee‘”. Das achtzehnte Jahrhundert 25.2, 272 – 278.

Müller, Adelheid. 2012. Sehnsucht nach Wissen: Friederike Brun, Elisa von der Recke und die Altertumskunde um 1800. Berlin: Reimer.

Münter, Balthasar. 1772. Bekehrungsgeschichte des vormaligen Grafen und Königl. Dänischen Geheimen Cabinetsministers Johann Friedrich Struensee […]. 2nd ed. Kopenhagen and Leipzig: Rothens Erben & Proft.

Münter, Balthasar. 1772. Geistliche Lieder. Kopenhagen: Rothens Erben & Prost.

Münter, Balthasar. 1774. Zwote Sammlung geistlicher Lieder. Leipzig: Dyck.

Münter, Friedrich. 1793. Balthasar Münters Leben und Charakter. Kopenhagen: Høecke.

Münter, Friedrich. 1937. “Selbstbiographie [1784].” Frederik Münter et Mindeskrift. Vol IV, Kopenhagen: Haase, Leipzig: Harrasowitz. 1 – 22.

Niggl, Günther. 1971. “Fontanes ‚Meine Kinderjahre‘ und die Gattungstradition”. Sprache und Bekenntnis. Sonderband des Literaturwissenschaftlichen Jahrbuchs. Ed. Wolfgang Frühwald. Berlin: Duncker & Humbolt, 257 – 279.

Salis-Seewis, Johann Gaudenz von. 1780. “An die Erinnerung.” Gedichte. 4th ed. Zürich. vol. 2.

Sloterdijk, Peter. 1979. Literatur und Organisation von Lebenserfahrung. Autobiographien der zwanziger Jahre. München, Wien: Carl Hanser.

Voßkamp, Wilhelm. 1977. “Gattungen als literarisch-soziale Institutionen.” Textsortenlehre – Gattungsgeschichte. Ed. Walter Hinck. Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer, 27 – 42.

Voßkamp, Wilhelm. 1989. “Der Bildungsroman als literarische-soziale Institution. Begriffs- und funktionsgeschichtliche Überlegungen zum Deutschen Bildungsroman am Ende des 18. und Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts.” Zur Terminologie der Literaturwissenschaft. Akten des IX. Germanistischen Symposions der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft. Ed. Christian Wagenknecht. Stuttgart: Metzler, 337 – 352.

Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina. 2005. Autobiographie. 2nd ed. Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler.

Wallenrodt, Isabella von. 1797. Das Leben der Frau von Wallenrodt in Briefen an einen Freund. Leipzig: Stillerische Buchhandlung.

White, Hayden. 1978. “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact.” The Writing of History. Literary Form and Historical Understanding. Madison: Penn State University Press,41 – 52.