At the start of the nineteenth century, Karoline von Günderrode burst onto the German intellectual scene with multi-genre collections of philosophical literature that were read by Goethe, Clemens Brentano, and other famous writers and academics. But Günderrode's philosophical insights were largely ignored or adopted without credit and in 1806 she died by suicide, leaving behind a small but powerful set of reflections on the nature of the self, friendship, life after death, human-nature relations, social progress, epistemology, religion, ethics, and many other topics. Long celebrated as an embodiment of tragic Romantic poetry, Günderrode has recently been rediscovered as the author of an original and exciting philosophy.
Günderrode was a nuanced thinker with a gift for using literary forms to engage readers with philosophical ideas. This volume makes many of Günderrode's most significant published and unpublished works, along with excerpts from her letters and notes on philosophical topics, available for the first time in English. The short introductions accompanying each text explicate the ideas embedded in Günderrode's writing, connecting them to intellectual debates of the day and to relevant work by better-known philosophers including Kant, Plato, Schelling, Herder, Schleiermacher, Hemsterhuis, Schlegel, and Novalis. The general introduction provides a more comprehensive orientation to Günderrode's philosophy, considering her metaphysics, epistemology, social and political thought, ethics, aesthetics, and reflections on gender, death, friendship, and human identity.