Karoline von Günderrode and Sincerity (conference version)

Introduction
In 1804, when asked why she published her work, Karoline von Günderrode wrote that she longed “mein Leben in einer bleibenden Form auszusprechen, in einer Gestalt, die würdig sei, zu den Vortreflichsten hinzutreten, sie zu grüssen und Gemeinschaft mit ihnen zu haben.”1 In light of such statements, it is perhaps not surprising if, despite some exceptions, much of the still relatively scant literature on Günderrode reads her works largely in terms of how they articulate and manifest Günderrode’s desires, frustrations, and character, for the most part ignoring their imaginary, creative, and intellectual aspects. This interpretation of the author’s works as biography is, in Günderrode’s case, often accompanied by an interpretation of her biography, particularly her suicide, as literary work. This paper is not the first to question the conflation of
Günderrode’s life, death, and writing, but it is one of only a couple that aim to address the autopoietic element of Günderrode’s work in a way that does not reduce her writings to biographical and psychological expressions, or Günderrode herself to an image – or a legend – encapsulated by her writings and her relationship to them. This paper argues that Günderrode’s own position on what the self is has been largely neglected as a result of this conflation, and that taking this position into account changes how we understand Günderrode’s articulations of self in her writings. Thus this paper has two goals: to indicate some difficulties in articulating and even constituting oneself sincerely when one’s efforts are unrecognized, belittled, censored, and forced to conform to conventions imposed by a society in which one is marginalized; and to unearth a potentially rich account of the modern self.

1

Letter to Clemens Brentano, 10th June 1804. Wolf p.221.

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1. Günderrode’s Writing as Autobiography
The tendency to interpret Günderrode’s work in terms of its relationship to the life and character of its author has both legitimacy, since it is borne out by many of Günderrode’s own statements, and value, since it helps us understand some of the meanings of her work. However, the extreme emphasis on this form of interpretation in Günderrode’s case is problematic for a number of reasons. In the first place, the exposition of Günderrode’s writings on the basis of psychological and biographical factors fits a sexist mould of underplaying the creativity women as well as men use in producing literary and philosophical work, reducing women’s statements to expressions of their life-experiences and emotional states, especially where these emotional states are understood as pathological. Thus we see Günderrode’s works described as manifestations of her
“otherwordly,” “mystical,” and morbid character, her feeling for nature, or of what is depicted as her uncomfortably conflicting character as both “masculine” and “feminine.” For example,
Christa Bürger claims Günderrode had “einer Seele, die nur die Dämmerung kennt” and that she created a shadow-world in her work, peopled with schemata. Others describe Günderrode as having “no worldly weight,” and as embodying “körperliche Schwache und geistige Starke,
Weiblichkeit als Gegebenes und Mannlichkeit als Erstrebtes.” In particular, Günderrode’s suicide, sometimes in conjunction with her affairs with Friedrich Carl von Savigny and Friedrich
Creuzer, is often treated as the key to understanding both her life and works, with the result that her life may be presented by her interpreters as tending towards this conclusion as a result of her nature, while her works have their mystical and death-oriented elements emphasized and their other concerns sidelined.2

2

Apert p.12 “La seule véritable question oú la biographie de Karoline von Günderode entre en jeu est celle du suicide”; Becker-Cantorino 2000 p.225 “Sie suchte ihre aesthetische Identitaet in der Darstellung der tragisch endenden Liebe der Frau, die auch als Liebende und als Dichterin in ihrem negativen Handlungsspielraum gefangen blieb.”; Becker-Cantorino 2010 p.51 p.52 „It is my thesis that Guenderrode’s intensive study of the ‚new

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Günderrode’s work is also often described as attempting to reconcile “contradictory” elements of her character and living conditions, specifically those between “masculine” and
“feminine” elements of her character, and between her desires for action and adventure or for recognition as a poet and the reality of her life as a woman at the turn of the 18th century.3
Günderrode herself claimed to be beset by a struggle between “masculine” characteristics, which thirsted for war, glory, and intellectual achievement, and her “feminine” nature:
Warum ward ich kein Mann! ich habe keinen Sinn für weibliche Tugenden, für
Weiberglückseeligkeit. Nur das wilde Grose, Glänzende gefällt mir. Es ist ein unseliges aber unverbesserliches Misverhältniss in meiner Seele; und es wird und muß so bleiben, denn ich bin ein Weib, und habe Begierden wie ein Mann, ohne
Männerkraft. Darum bin ich so wechselnd, und so uneins mit mir.4
In early texts on Günderrode, including those by contemporaries, the so-called contradictions that supposedly underlay her writings were seen as problematic for the artistic merit of her work.
For example, Clemens Brentano wrote to Günderrode that “Das einzige, was man der ganzen
Sammlung Böses vorwerfen könnte, wäre, daß sie zwischen dem Männlichen und Weilichen

mythology’ explored and advocated by the early Romantics and elaborated by Creuzer led her to an aesthetic position in which she identified with mythology’s love-death paradigm in her poetic works as well as in her own life.“ p.52 „fascination, if not obsession, with death and sacrificial love.“; Buerger 1995 p.36 “Guenderrodes geschriebens und gelebtes Leben steht wie unter der Herschaft eines unheimlich konsequenten Willens, der sie zwingt, das chaotische Durcheinander ihrer Empfindungen und Sehnsuechte [....] der Vorstellung eines wirklichen
Ich aufzuopfern. [....] Guenderrode aber geht, unbeiirt und sehr leise, ihren Weg zur Form, wissend, dass an seinem
Ende die Kunst oder der Tod stehen wird.” p.36 “Ihre ganze formale Anstrengung scheint darauf gerichtet, einem
Gedanken bleibende Gestalt, ihm die Form zu geben: dem Geheimnis der Verwandlung oder dem Tod in allen seinen Formen.” p.41 “Guenderrode’s Leben und Schreiben steht unter einem Gesetz, da sie zur Ohnmacht verdammt, in das sie aber einwilligt.” p.42 “Die Gemeinschaft der Meister, in die Guenderrode aufgenommen zu werden sich sehnt, steht im Zeichen der Trennung von Kunst und Leben.” [?!] p.42 “Guenderrode toetet ihr Selbst im ‘Werk.’”; Burwick 1995 p.207 “Darüber-hinaus gehorte der Tod zum wesentlichen Bestandteil ihres philosophischen Systems.”; Gooze 1990 p.420 ”Life and art are intimately tied in Karoline von Guenderrode’s short oeuvre.”; Horn 1998 p.166 „einer Poetik des Sich-zu-Tode-Schreibens“ described in BvA’s book
3
Gooze 1990 p.419 conflict: „Karoline von Guenderrode’s life and work are defined by irreconcilable conflicts: her desire to be loved and accepted conflicted with her passion for writing; her financial situation undermined her social standing; her longing for action was thwarted, as she saw it, by her femaleness.“; Burwick p.209 “korperliche
Schwache und geis-tige Starke, Weiblichkeit als Gegebenes und Mannlichkeit als Erstrebtes.”, p.210 longing for aloneness, to create an I, and for socialness, to see self reflected in another, p.222 androgynous soul; Goerner 1996 pp.73, 77 masc and fem; Hoff et all 1995 pp.101 “her ambivalence between the desire for uninhibited selfexpression and the idea that a human being is an actor who disguises himself or herself – or plays a role.”; Schaerf.
4
To Gunda, Aug 29 1801, Wolf p.160.

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schwebt[.]”5 The fact that Günderrode’s work did not fit ideas of the time about women’s writing was clearly difficult for critics and contemporaries to swallow, and affected the reception of her work. Since around 1980, the understanding of Günderrode’s writings as attempts to deal with the “contradictions“ of her character and situation has allowed Günderrode to figure as a feminist prototype, a woman struggling to create and articulate a new form of selfhood beyond the gender roles of her times.6 This is valuable work, but it only reflects one aspect of Günderrode’s writings, and more problematically, continues to view them primarily in terms of their psychological and biographical significance, and even as resulting from a pathology, now understood as conditioned by an oppressive social situation.7 As in earlier interpretations
Günderrode’s suicide tends to figure as a working-out of her character also visible in her writings. What are we to make of the claims that Günderrode’s work reflects an orientation towards death and/or her own lack of reconciliation with herself and her social situation? Even if we accept that a personal or even pathological element underlies a focus on themes of heroic death and tragic love – and even to admit this much neglects other important themes in
Günderrode’s writing – the use of one’s own experiences and desires to inform one’s work need not negate their intellectual or aesthetic value. For example, Günderrode often foregrounds the conflict between the passive roles granted women in a patriarchal society and their need and desire for action. Recent literature addresses this theme in Günderrode’s writings, but tends to construe this as an attempt to respond to the situation of women particularly, or even more specifically as an attempt to cope with or escape her own circumstances. For example, according
5

Letter from Clemens, 2 June 1804. Wolf p.218.
Daubert, Dischner, Drewitz, Frederkisen, French 1989.
7
Dormann, p.234.
6

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to Roswitha Burwick, “Was ihr in der Realität versagt war, blieb in der Poesie erlaubt[.]”8 This misses the ways in which Günderrode’s work responds to questions in mainstream philosophy and literature. Günderrode’s circumstances may have informed her perspective on questions of agency, freedom, determinism, power, and social constraint, and encouraged her to use female protagonists; however, she articulates responses to these questions that are just as universally relevant as those framed by contemporaries such as Fichte, Schelling, Novalis, and others.
In short, the emphasis on attempting to retrieve “die Günderrode” through biographical and psychological interpretations of her work has de-emphasized the literary and, especially, philosophical merits of Günderrode’s writings and the extent to which she contributed, and saw herself as contributing, to an intellectual tradition.

2. Authorial Production
This paper takes seriously both the notion that writing can serve as a form of self-construction and evidence that Günderrode used her writing as a means of self-creation, but it attempts to avoid reducing her writing to this function. Writing herself is not the only thing Günderrode used her work to do, nor is it, in my opinion, the most interesting. In the rest of this paper, I hope to separate the conflation of author and authorial production that has pervaded the literature, in the process beginning to retrieve Günderrode’s own conceptions of selfhood and of writing the self.

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Burwick pp.211-12; Buerger 1995 p.26 „In ihrer kleinen Wohnung [...] lebt sie in Tagtraeumen. Sie macht sich die
Philosophie, die sie aufnimmt, wirklich. Zunaechst, in der Form der Wunschautobiographie, phantasiert sie sie aus,“,
p.27 Geschichte: „Der Parabelcharater dieses kleinen Textes der jungen Stiftsdame [...] ist durchsichtig. Sie erzaehlt ihre eigene Geschichte, und die Geschichte ihrer Generation“, p.27 „Aber da ist etwas, das sie von den romantischen
Philosophen und Dichtern trennt, von Schelling wie von Novalis. Sie will mehr als dichten, sie will diese Sprache, nach der sie alle suchen, sein.“, p.27 „Es ist da diese Luecke in ihrer Seele, dieses Verstummen, das sich in der
Abstraktheit ihrer Dichtungen verbirgt.“; Helfer 2004; Licher 1995; Goerner 1996 p.74; Peter; Martinson 1995
p.315 “The fact is, however, that Karoline von Giinderrode could not separate her vocation as a poet-writer from her social life. [....] In the end, Giinderrode believed that the divide between theory and practice, the intellectual and the practical, could be overcome only in death, which meant new life.”

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In suggesting that Günderrode’s writings played a limited role in her enactment of self, I am concerned in particular to avoid basing our understanding of the historical Günderrode or her writings on her suicide, which has often been treated both as if it defined Günderrode’s selfhood almost entirely and as itself a form of literature. For example, Hoff, Friedrichsmeyer and
Herminghouse state that Günderrode “crossed herself out, just as one might do with a text to make it unreadable,” and Alice Kuzniar writes of Günderrode’s suicide that “first her body is written upon. She has her doctor mark on her bosom the location of her heart, and she carries a dagger with her at all times. She then makes her body write.”9 These are odd claims, not just because they seem to make too much of what is, in the end, a metaphorical connection between writing and suicide, but also because they construe Günderrode’s death, which marks an end to agency and self, as her ultimate act of self-assertion and self-creation.10
To compound these problems, this kind of claim often involves the statement that
“writing with her body” – that is, committing suicide – was the outcome of Günderrode’s failure to create a coherent self in her works. So, for example, Christa Bürger writes that Günderrode
“hat nur den Willen zur Form, aber nicht die Kraft, sich ihre eigene zu schaffen[.]”11 This type of
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p.108; Helfer 2004 p.240 “one might read Guenderrode’s suicide as the highest expression of Romantic theory.
Writing on her breast – writing with her breast – the poetess kills herself in a self-reflexive act of aesthetic selfdefinition, incising her wretched roman – the fialed love affair or roman in the true sense of the word – into her female body. In so doing, she critically enacts Friedrich Schlegel’s ‘theory of the feminine’ to the letter” [this is citing Kuzniar]
10
Saul 2006 p.598 “The paradoxical sense of aesthetic self-creation through self-destruction which I have argued to be at the core of the Romantic theory of suicide seems to be at its most potent when it comes tot he self-authorship of the woman writer.”
11
Buerger 1995 p.37 followed by description of “obvious” lacks of her writing (pp.37-38), see also p.42; Eigler;
Becker-Cantorino 2000 p.204 “Ihr Selbstverstaendnis und ihre Wuensche als Frau konnte sie in ihrer Zeit nur in der
Sprache der Maenner formulieren. Guenderrode hat die Diskrepanz von erstrebter Autonomie und realer
Gebundenheit leidvoll erfahren und produtiv in kuenstlerisches Schaffen umgesetzt, als Steigerung uhrer kreativen
Sensibilitaet.”; Becker-Cantorino 2010 p.52 „It is my thesis that Guenderrode’s intensive study of the ‚new mythology’ explored and advocated by the early Romantics and elaborated by Creuzer led her to an aesthetic position in which she identified with mythology’s love-death paradigm in her poetic works as well as in her own life.“ p.68 „Was the project of an ‚aesthetic self,’ today belabored repeatedly in recent articles on Guenderrode, a meaningful way of life or did it lead to death?“; Behrens 1995 p.11 „So bedingungslos wie Karoline von
Guenderrode hat sich keine von den Frauen der Romantik dem Streit zwischen Phantasie und Wirklichkeit ausgesetzt.“ Buerger 1995 p.26 „In ihrer kleinen Wohnung [...] lebt sie in Tagtraeumen. Sie macht sich die

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claim carries with it an implicit devaluation of Günderrode’s skills, creativity, and control as a writer. It may well be the case that Günderrode’s suicide was partly motivated by frustration, feelings of repression, and depression at the often critical reception of her work and the refusal implied by this of her contemporaries to recognize her as a creative, intellectual individual. But this does not mean that her works were unsuccessful, either as articulations of selfhood or as literary and philosophical endeavours.
Furthermore, whether it makes sense to evaluate Günderrode’s works as failing in creating a coherent self depends on whether Günderrode intended to create a self in her works at all, and if so, whether she intended to create a self that was coherent, that is, that unified various aspects of her personality into something relatively stable and enduring. In the last part of this paper, I will show why it is unlikely that Günderrode had this aim. First, though, we should look briefly at why interpreters claim that Günderrode’s attempts at aesthetic self-creation fail.
Günderrode’s attempt to use her writing to create an identity for herself as a poet, intellectual, and active agent of a certain sort is often construed as having failed, although the reasons given for this failure vary. As we have seen, some describe Günderrode’s authorial identity as occupying an uncomfortable middle ground between irreconcilable opposites, with
“masculine” and “feminine” styles and themes mixing unhappily, or her work is described as a synthesis of varied philosophical, religious, literary, and mythical ideas. As Helga Dormann has pointed out, while the latter claim is true, it can be taken to imply that Günderrode’s writings are an incoherent mishmash of copied ideas rather than potentially consistent and rich original
Philosophie, die sie aufnimmt, wirklich. Zunaechst, in der Form der Wunschautobiographie, phantasiert sie sie aus,“
p.27 „Es ist da diese Luecke in ihrer Seele, dieses Verstummen, das sich in der Abstraktheit ihrer Dichtungen verbirgt.“; Buerger 1995 p.36 “Ihre ganze formale Anstrengung scheint darauf gerichtet, einem Gedanken bleibende
Gestalt, ihm die Form zu geben: dem Geheimnis der Verwandlung oder dem Tod in allen seinen Formen.” p.41
“Guenderrode’s Leben und Schreiben steht unter einem Gesetz, da sie zur Ohnmacht verdammt, in das sie aber einwilligt.” p.42 “Guenderrode toetet ihr Selbst im ‘Werk.’”; Horn 1998 p.166 „einer Poetik des Sich-zu-TodeSchreibens“ described in BvA’s book

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considerations of philosophical questions or literary themes. Once again, this fits a sexist model in which women are seen to ape the ideas of others – that is, men – rather than producing original insights. It is also worth noting that the reading of Günderrode’s writings as narcissistic efforts to create an identity for herself that has a rightful place among philosophers and poets conforms to sexist ideas about women who write, not because they have something valuable to say, but because they want to be seen as intellectual and interesting.12 These interpretations present
Günderrode’s authorial identity as insincere in some respects: instead of writing works that fit her nature or that she has generated herself, she copies others or tries to be someone she is not and cannot be.
Other commentators lay the blame on society for what they see as Günderrode’s failure to establish and maintain a coherent authorial identity in her writings: The failure of her contemporaries or subsequent readers to interpellate her as a poet and thinker, and/or the incompatibility of this identity with the roles that Günderrode, as a woman of her time, was expected to fill, meant this identity was unsustainable. For example, Hoff, Friedrichsmeyer and
Herminghouse claim Günderrode’s suicide “could be seen as a consequence of the tension between her desire to express herself and the censorship to which she was subjected, and, in the final instance, of the impossibility of finding a form for compromise[.]”13 This is an interesting and valuable point, highlighting the extent to which the self is not created in a vaccuum, but depends on one’s social environment and requires recognition. The question is, how can you create or sustain an authentic self in a society that treats you according to forms that do not fit?
12

Clemens’ question about why she published also fits this model. Burwick 1980: “die Narzissnatur der Dichterin”;
Goerner 1996 p.78; Hilmes 1996 claims KvG ID with Narcissus in her poem; Waegenbauer 1997 (egoistic aesthetic self-creation); Wocke 1950.
13
1995 p.108; Similarly, in her influential introduction to her 1979 collection of Günderrode’s works, Christa Wolf assimilates Günderrode to a company of young people of her time who “sterben [...] an der Unfähigkeit der deutschen Öffentlichkeit, ein Geschichtsbewusstsein zu entwickeln, sich dem Grundwiderspruch unserer Geschichte zu stellen.“ Entwurf p.6.

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I suggest that much recent literature on Günderrode, including literature that uses her as a case study in addressing this question, continues to view Günderrode through the lens of her society – as Günderrode herself did, in large part. For example, in a world in which women were not supposed to want travel, adventure, and intellectual pursuits, Günderrode was under pressure to understand herself, not just as wanting different things than were permitted, but as actually incorporating a masculine soul, which could not be reconciled with a feminine nature which she also possessed. This struggle, and Günderrode’s difficulty in reconciling herself to the realities of her situation, have been taken as decisive for both understanding Günderrode herself and for interpreting her work. Contemporaries as well as later commentators have addressed this contradictory, death-oriented, mystical and emotional woman, while ignoring Günderrode’s creativity as a thinker and writer. Thus Günderrode’s authorial self continues to be forced to fit a limiting mould that misses her identity as a potential interlocutor for the philosophical and literary traditions of her time.

3. Günderrode’s Model of the Self
Günderrode’s letters are often taken to support an image of Günderrode as suffering from irreconcilable contradictions.14 However, I suggest that rather than providing grounds for establishing the breakdown of Günderrode’s identity, these letters are where we start to see how untenable it is to describe Günderrode as having failed to create a coherent self in her writings.
For example, Günderrode writes “Ich glaube mein Wesen ist ungewiß, voll flüchtiger
Erscheinungen, die wechselnd kommen und gehen, und ohne dauernde, innige Wärme.”15 Taken in isolation, this suggests an otherworldly, unstable self in danger of disappearing, in line with

14
15

Buerger 1995 p.37; Schaerf.
To Savigny, 26 February 1804, Wolf p.192.

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many characterizations of Günderrode and her work. However, when we examine her philosophical works and other of her letters, we see that this description of herself fits her account of identity in general, and even more generally, her cosmology. In her philosophical fragment “Idee der Erde” she presents the self as an aggregage of disparate elements that are altered, ideally for the better, through the life of an individual and, upon this individual’s death, return to a universe which is itself a collection of such elements. Laws of attraction and similarity then determine new constellations of elements and new individuals. The focus on metempsychosis as the merging and reconfiguration of identities also appears in “Ein apokalyptisches Fragment,” “Die malabarische Witwen,” and other works.
Furthermore, Günderrode’s description of this process in “Idee der Erde” should not lead us to expect the elements combined in an individual to necessarily be harmonious; the establishment of harmonious relations between the elements progresses gradually through this process of recombination, which entails that at the outset, at least, this harmony does not exist. In fact, Günderrode states that it is by no means certain that the process will eventually result in harmony at all. This account of the self is an almost Nietzschean picture of an unstable aggregate of potentially conflicting elements, held together only provisionally. One implication is that
Günderrode’s claim that she is a conflicting and changeable self does not support the conclusion that her identity was unstable in a pathological or unusual way; this instability is a characteristic of all selves, according to Günderrode.
In another frequently cited letter Günderrode writes, es kommt mir sonderbar vor, daß ich zuhöre wie ich spreche und meine eignen
Worte kommen mir fast fremder vor als fremde. Auch die wahrsten Briefe sind meiner Ansicht nach nur Leichen, sie bezeichnen ein ihnen einwohnend gewesenes
Leben und ob sie gleich dem Lebendigen ähnlich sehen, so ist doch der Moment ihres Lebens schon dahin: deswegen kömmt es mir aber vor (wenn ich lese, was ich vor einiger Zeit geschrieben habe), als sähe ich mich im Sarg liegen und meine

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beiden Ichs starren sich ganz verwundert an.16
Karl Heinz Bohrer has argued plausibly that in this passage Günderrode does not just describe herself, but makes a general point about the impossibility of constructing a stable identity, revealing a conception of the self as momentary or “catastrophic.” That Günderrode extrapolated the above self-description to a general statement about identity is borne out by letters that make similar claims about other individuals or about biographies in general. Even more interesting are the connections of this points with Günderrode’s philosophical works: taken in conjunction, these suggest that, according to Günderrode, not only are individuals aggregates of elements that dissolve and reassemble after death, but these changes to identity take place while still alive, from one moment to the next.
The above quote has been taken by other writers as evidence of Günderrode’s alienation from herself and others, and/or her difficulties in expressing herself sincerely and constructing an authentic self.17 It is true that the corpse-and-tomb imagery conveys a sense of sadness and strangeness, and we have plenty of evidence for Günderrode’s unhappiness with herself.
However, in light of the problems I have been outlining, I suggest that we should not focus on this point to the exclusion of other possible meanings of her claim. For example, in “Idee der
Erde,” “Ein apokalyptisches Fragment” and other works, Günderrode presents death as neither a state of non-consciousness nor a termination of individual existence, but as a process of casting off one identity and progressing to another. Whatever its biographical and psychological import, the above quote echoes this notion of reincarnation, suggesting that reincarnation takes place not

16

Guenderrode to Clemens Brentano, probably 1803. Schatten eines Traumes, p.211.
“Guenderrode’s image of Brentano’s multiple ‘souls’ parallels that used to describe her own ‘selves’; once again, she challenges the possibility of expressing through words any one single identity, truth, or reality.” French 1989
p.78; Horn 1998; Riley, Zwischen (check this).
17

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only in death, but also continuously during life. This is an interesting and original idea that has not been carefully explored by the secondary literature on Günderrode.
In any case, this discussion suggests that the relevant question emerging from
Günderrode’s writings on selfhood is not whether or how she created a coherent self, through writing or otherwise – such a goal mistakes both the scope of her statements and what it is to be a self, on her account. Rather, the questions are more general: how are human beings to create articulations of self that are sincere despite their lack of completeness or durability, and how are they to use these selves to relate to others? The latter includes, minimally, the question of how to have these selves recognized and how to recognize others. A partial and provisional answer also emerges from Günderrode’s work and its reception: we must recognize that a person manifests many identities, and we should not restrict ourselves or others to preconceived and static notions of what a person – or worse, a type or gender of person – is or should be. Perhaps Günderrode only made a beginning to the investigation of this matter, and certainly it was only one of the many concerns that she wrote about. What else is certain is that only some of her literary selves have been addressed by the literature, while others have been ignored or rejected.
Of course, we do not have to accept that Günderrode’s portrayal of selfhood is either accurate or viable as a perspective from which to understand oneself and engage with others.
Perhaps it is an outlook on the self that leads to dissatisfaction and alienation. I do not think that this is necessarily the case, however, and I suggest that Günderrode’s model of the self warrants further investigation, not primarily in order to tell us about Günderrode and her literary constructions of self, but as a potentially fruitful contribution to the philosophy of subjectivity within both the post-Kantian and post-modern traditions. Most basically, if it is true that
Günderrode’s claims about the self are attempts to articulate a view of subjectivity – with

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implications for questions of agency, the possibility and nature of freedom in a physical universe, power, ethics, and eschatology – then we should take them as such. It matters to our interpretation of Günderrode’s work whether these statements relate only to Günderrode herself or also to humanity in general, and as I hope the rest of this paper has shown, these statements have usually been taken to be the former, with problematic results. When we begin to unravel the conflation between author and authorial production that pervades the literature on Günderrode, we can see that the idea of selfhood that she projects in her writing is not only different to the one usually read onto it, but that it is a unique and original contribution to questions about the nature of the self.

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