Die Stellung der Dichterin Anna Louisa Karsch in der Geschichte der deutschen Schriftstellerinnen

2004 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary

• Project/Area Number: 14510586
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Single-year Grants
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: 独語・独文学
• Research Institution: HIROSHIMA UNIVERSITY
• Principal Investigator: SATO Masaki Hiroshima University, Fakulty of Integrated Arts and Sciences, Professor, 総合科学部, 教授 (90131143)
• Project Period (FY): 2002 – 2004
• Keywords: German Literature / the Enlightment / Anna Louisa Karsch / women's history / the 18th Century / genius cult / history of education / Johann Georg Sulzer

Research Abstract

A.L.Karsch[in] (1722-92) survived in Silesia her extremely poor girlhood days as a nursemaid, a cowherd girl, and a maid of all works, and also two-time married lives with her rough and vulgar husbands, and ten sie became finally a woman poet in Berlin.
1.Why could our poet publish her 》Auserlesene Gedichte《 (1763) which recorded the maximum sales as one book throughout the whole 18th century, although she wasn't blessed with any school educations as one of the most important media of the Enlightment programs-one should become independent and come of age, in Kant's word, by having courage to use his own reason all by himself-, and also she could acquire neither german orthography nor punctuation, to say nothing of literary techniques (arts)? In short, why could she be the first independent woman writer in the German-speaking area?
2 Where should Karsch find her place from a view of women's history? The strategy she used, whether by accident or design, in order to overcome or dodge her di sadvantageous conditions that she had hardly any necessary professional, i.e.literary practice, far from it, she could never get any formal school educations-the strategy was the assertion that she was a child of nature whose genius, a gift of nature or God was never damaged by any artificial educations. According to Sulzer, one of her benefactors whan she owed her success, a genius creates through enthusiasm, feelings, emotion, and sentimentality. Karsch as well as cultured arid educated men around her also utilized on die one hand such a trend in the arts of the period for her life and career. Frederic II on the other hand was her liberator in double meaning : the king first as a legislator for divorce in Silesia conquered by Prussia liberated her from the yoke of matrimony-Karsch was die first divorced woman in Silesian common people-and secondly from her dire poverty, for Frederic and his victories gave her always promising literary materials. Karsch as a child of nature, a child prodigy provided with genius and full feelings, and also as a patriotic poet for Prussia could keep happy and proud of her honourable life.
Karsch who came from the in reality illiterate social class and could be therefore hardly draw into the Enliglitment programm, so to speak, gave it up already very soon and changed from it to die genius cult with emphasis on feelings, enthusiasm, sentments etc set up as an antithesis to the Enlightment as well as into die Patriotism widi die Frederic cult, so diat Karsch could finally make an unprecedented brilliant career from the social bottom to die honour and respect as Friedrichs Volksdichterin (E.Hausmann).