Eda Sagarra

Therese Huber – Letters

• Therese Huber: Briefe. Band 1: 1774–1804. Hg. von Magdalene Heuser in Zusammenarbeit mit Corinna Bergmann-Törner, Diana Colemann Brandt, Jutta Harmeyer und Petra Walbusch. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer 1999. 16 Abbildungen. VI, 852 S. Gebunden. EUR 134,00.
  ISBN: 3-484-10801-0.
• Therese Huber: Briefe. Band 4: 1810–1811. Hg. von Magdalene Heuser, bearbeitet von Petra Walbusch. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer 2001. 9 Abbildungen. V, 944 S. Gebunden. EUR 148,00.
  ISBN: 3-484-10804-5.

Commenting some two decades ago on the significance of the feminist movement for our discipline, the Munich Germanist Georg Jäger suggested that the ideological battle to establish the validity of feminist Literatur-
wissenschaft had been effectively won. What the scholarly community now required was access to historical source material; the research priority must now be to initiate the task of preparing critical editions of the work of significant women authors. But who would do it?

Generations of German professors had trained their academic sons to assist them, and eventually to succeed them in preparing critical editions of canonical writers. Who had trained their daughters for such tasks? It must, therefore, have taken a degree of courage on the part of the fourteen-strong, over 90% male Germanistische Kommission of the Deutsche Forschungsgemein-
schaft when in the late 1980s they finally agreed to the proposal by Magdalene Heuser to part-subvent a major enterprise of this type, namely the edition of some 4.500 surviving letters of the minor female writer, Therese Forster-Huber, née Heyne (1764–1829). But the courage demanded of the editor was surely of a far greater order.

The first two volumes

The difficulties to be faced were considerable. It is important to be clear about what was actually involved in order to appreciate what has now been achieved. This edition, in providing what is a major research resource, represents a truly historic step in the slow evolution of feminist literary and social historiography. The first such difficulty encountered by the editor and her small team in 1987 was the state of research into her subject. By contrast with the canonical writers which the DFG traditionally funded, the corpus of Huber scholarship on which the editor could draw scarcely deserved the name.

True, there existed Therese’s own editions of Georg Forster’s life and letters (1829) and of Ludwig Ferdinand Huber’s collected works (1806–19). The edition of Forster’s collected works (1986–93) by the Berlin Academy of Sciences had already begun to appear. But of Therese’s own voluminous oeuvre, scattered over a multiplicity of locations, there was only a slender published record, to which Andrea Hahn and Barbara Leuschner would shortly add their contribution. Ludwig Geiger’s pioneering biography of 1901, written with his usual empathy and sense of period in the past, but by now requiring substantial correction, had found no modern successor. Heuser had herself published an edition of Huber’s novel of revolutionary France, Die Familie Seldorf of 1796 (referred to by Therese in a letter to Carl August Böttiger in 1811 as »eine meiner dicksten Sünden« [IV/289/31f.]. Helmut Peitsch had drawn attention to the rarity by a woman writer of her age of such an overtly political novel in an article on it in the Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft in 1984.

For the rest, a putative editor could only draw on scant references to Therese in the editions of correspondence of others, such as Schmidt’s Briefe der Fruhromantik or the Herder correspondence, or Christian Gottlob Heyne’s few letters to his daughter, published by Albert Leitzmann back in 1883 or, in our own day, Ilse Schreiber’s edition of Luise Mejer’s correspondence with Christian Boie (1980 2. ed.). A far greater challenge, however, lay in the fact that the vast majority of Huber’s letters still required to be identified, assembled and transcribed before the actual work of editing could begin. How many existed in private collections was something only to be ascertained by literary ›detective‹ work.

Following completion of this stage of the task, the editor evidently took the bold but critical decision to prepare the commentary on all nine planned volumes simultaneously. Bold in the sense that this would inevitably delay publication, something that funding agencies do not appreciate, critical, because it has enabled the editorial team to provide each volume with a degree of cross-referencing which greatly enhances the value to the scholarly community of the published volumes.

The first two volumes to appear, covering the years 1774–1803 and 1810–11, contain just under 300 letters each. Most of these are substantial, even some voluminous, extending to up to 400 lines in length. Though printed, no doubt for reasons of economy, in 10-point typeface, the edition is user-friendly, with its broad margins and clear numbering of the lines throughout. The commentary, constituting about one third of each volume, tends by its succinctness and focus to conceal the amount of scholarly investigation which went into its creation. A note on the manuscript / textual variations precedes the information notes on persons, works, events etc in each letter.

Just one caveat: in future volumes, the editorial team should learn to trust its readers’ memory more. The constantly repeated identification of family members in the footnotes is superfluous. By contrast, the system of cross-referencing with regard to public persons, is entirely appropriate. This section is supplemented by the imaginative use of an index of persons, containing brief bio-bibliographical information where appropriate, and a short bibliography of major reference works. Very much in the spirit of Therese Huber’s own practical nature, is the thoughtful provision of a table of the myriad weights, measures and currencies, including their value, in Huber’s day, their number reflecting the extraordinary diversity of the Holy Roman Empire which long outlived its own demise in 1806.

Naturalness as cultivated Stylisation

The decision to initiate the edition with the letters of Therese’s formative years, including more than 100 extant Jugendbriefe, was a sound one. It allows the reader to trace, often in wonderfully nuanced detail, her formation by the age of sensibility. Secondly, we learn to recognise in the coping skills evident in the record of the later volume, the fundamental, corrective role which reason so often played in that cult of feeling. »… man sollte doch im Grunde mit dem Kostbarsten, was doch das Gefühl ist, wenigstens so ökonomisch umgehen wie mit andern Vorrath, und etwas aufsparen«, writes the forty-seven-year-old Therese Huber to Herder’s son, Emil [IV/254/2 f.]. This was a counsel she herself had not always followed in her youth, but which characterised the stoic attitude of her later years (but see her indulgent qualification: »Aber für die Jugend unsrer Zeit gehöre Ergießungen.« as above, 7 f.).

In the form of her letters to female friends, and later male friends, notably Forster’s companion, Samuel Thomas Soemmering, volume 1 provides abundant source material to exemplify the different emotional registers in which Therese liked to try her hand. But the prevailing epistolary culture of the age of sensibility which afforded privileged young bourgeois women the option of a wide variety of correspondents also provided built-in correctives. Thus Therese might wallow in her sentimental friendship for the somewhat dubious Auguste Schneider. But when Auguste became terminally ill, she spent half a year nursing her, attending personally to her friend’s most basic physical needs. Therese might describe in lurid detail (to Soemmering) every moment of the death scene and the manifestations of her own grief, yet at the same time her rational, ordering mind conveys almost clinically what such a death was actually like.

The centrepiece of Therese’s private epistolary novel of education are the
c. fifty letters of the seventeen- to nineteen-year-old to Luise Mejer between December 1781 and December 1783. In these we see Therese trying on moods as one tries on clothes, striving to impress Luise with the immediacy of her feelings, but all the while decking her emotions out in borrowed literary plumes, in quotations from some modish poem or novel from her voracious reading. »…wenn ich recht von Herzen schreibe, so schreib ich eben wie ich spreche«, she writers in 1783 [I/44/115 ff.]. But of course she doesn’t. Naturalness is studied, the fruit of carefully cultivated stylisation. In time, her eager efforts developed not only fluency and expressiveness, but more particularly the capacity to enter imaginatively into the mind of her correspondent. The epistolary mode served Therese, as it did others of her contemporaries, as emotional outlet and as confessional. However, the cool rationality of Luise Mejer, nearly a generation her senior, provided the young woman with a stern mother confessor.

The reader can witness in these letters, and in those to her stepmother and father, and with prominent friends of the family to whom she writes uninhibitedly, how well Therese learned to balance the demands of reason and feeling in a life rarely spared »the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune«. Because, by contrast with the epistolary culture of the following century, this personal correspondence was not simply a private affair. Therese’s letters were generally, it seems, written in the family living room. It appeared perfectly natural to their author that her stepmother (and others) would read the letters she received. Thus at a general level, this corpus permits us to appreciate how the age of sensibility, in nurturing the articulation of an intelligent young woman’s emotional life through a range of correspondents, also provided the rational framework for the development of critical self-analysis. Indeed, the very freedom of self-exploration to be enjoyed was predicated on the parallel requirement to develop and nurture a lifelong habit of such self-criticism.

Female Socialisation
and traditional Patriarchy

Of course not many of Therese Heyne’s sisters were as privileged as she. She was right to speak in a letter of 1793 to her father of her »glänzende Jugend« [1/158/17]. Like Caroline Michaelis or Dorothea Schlözer, she was one of those »Göttinger Mamsells«, to whom she herself half disparagingly refers. As such, she enjoyed access to the Göttinger university library in a way other young women of her time could only dream of, thanks to the good offices of the understanding librarian Meyer. (Later, when living in Günzburg in relatively straitened circumstances, she still showed herself adept at maintaining an abundant source of books from the Munich court library; her fluent epistolary comments on them to her various correspondents in volume 4 offer a vivid insight into the reading culture of her time.) In her youth, moreover, she and her fellow ›Mamsells‹ enjoyed the contact with students of many nationalities who came for tuition to their fathers’ houses, with some of whom she remained in lifelong contact.

In Therese’s case, there was the additional advantage of her father’s open views on religion, and his evident tolerance not only towards Jews but even Roman Catholics, which she came to share. This enabled her to observe with a degree of dispassion the very different religious climate obtaining in her many and varied domiciles, such as Poland, Mainz, Switzerland and Bavaria under Ludwig I. More particularly, her father’s attitudes instilled in her a thoroughly modern view of the cultural conditioning of religious belief, unusual in her sex and for her time. »Ich habe nie beten können, seit ich dencken lernte«, she writes as an adult to Caroline Michaelis [1/166/21]. Given the traditional role of religion for female socialisation, this might seem surprising, more particularly since these letters also show her to be very much the product of traditional patriarchy. Christian Gottlob Heyne’s firmly held views on »die Bestimmung des Weibes« barred her way to a proper education – a deficit always evident in the syntax and spelling of this prolific writer.

Her relationship as eldest surviving daughter with her father conforms to Sørenson’s model of eighteenth-century patriarchy as being characterised by the bipolarity of fear and tenderness: »Ich weiß nicht was an einer Art Zwang und Furchtsamkeit schuld ist, die nie sich trennen läßt von dem Verhältniß zwischen mir und meinem Vater« [I/90/22 f.]. Heyne placed very considerable demands on his eldest surviving daughter: having lost her own mother at twelve, the thirteen-year-old was taken out of boarding school to act as her new stepmother’s deputy in household management, and from the following year to act as surrogate mother of, in time, half a dozen young step-siblings. Yet arguably these were the life skills she was to need above all others.

More importantly, in listening to her views on her reading and in his sparing praise of her household management skills, Heyne gave his daughter the self-confidence which underlay her later stoic acceptance of misfortune and penury. And incidentally, made her feel uninhibited in addressing her concerns to influential men in public life, besides her father’s circle, such as the Herders, also to men such as Bertuch, Böttiger or, somewhat later, Cotta. The instilling of self-confidence in the child became the axis of her educational philosophy and practice, as elaborated in the some hundred letters to her eldest daughter Therese Forster (1786–1862) in the period represented here, and exemplified in her relationship with the children of her second daughter, Claire von Greyerz.

»Es ist d a s L e b e n was die Wunden trägt«

»Es ist d a s L e b e n was die Wunden trägt« [4/155/6 f.], writes Therese Huber in January 1811 to Emil von Herder, son of Johann Gottfried and Caroline, future husband of her youngest daughter Luise (1795–1831) and recipient of over half the letters in volume 4. In her own case the wounds were indeed many. She married at twenty-one, »aus Schwärmerei« [1/162/19] and against the wishes of her father, the »unglucklichen« Georg Forster, whose political prominence in the abortive Republic of Mainz led to her own flight in 1793 to Switzerland with her children and whom she divorced in 1793.

Following Forster’s death in Paris in January 1794, she married Ferdinand Ludwig Huber who proved better at siring children than providing for them. At forty she found herself a widow, solely responsible for the surviving four of her ten children. For the rest of her life, she proved a perspicacious, energetic and, no doubt, occasionally tiresome provider and counsellor of a growing circle of children, foster children and friends. To do so involved juggling child-rearing, writing, translating, editing, keeping paying guests, housekeeping, and even producing the raw materials for the clothes and household linen they made. At the same time she instituted and operated a complex female networking system across Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

How did she manage it all? How did nineteenth-century widows and orphans survive? This is what these letters reveal. They are, in short, an authentic record of women’s social history not often found in such eloquent detail. Therese Huber was a survivor. She made great demands on herself and no mean demands on others, among them Emil von Herder. Of melancholy temperament, Emil had attempted suicide the previous year, following his incarceration in the Napoleonic wars and loss of his state post as a result of the territorial realignment of Bavaria and Wurttemberg. Showing herself ready and able to ›take on‹ Bavarian government officials in pursuit of justice on his and others’ behalf, Therese is equally prepared to chide Emil for his self-destructive brooding, as unworthy of him and »unmännlich, unchristlich« [1/155/119 f.].

His attraction as a correspondent lay in part in the role she clearly enjoyed as maternal counsellor and support. But Emil was surely also the intellectual companion she had sought and found in both her husbands. So many of the letters of her adult life demonstrate a capacity for empathy with others and a readiness to accept people’s individuality on their own terms. Some of the most arresting letters of this volume concern her insights into developmental child psychology, such as the importance of eye contact, the role of punishment in child-rearing and the critical importance of the child’s own temperament as determining the form of punishment, the relationship between marital tension and childish ills.

The letters in these volumes include illuminating reflections by Therese in correspondence with private individuals and public persons on her decision to publish anonymously until after her father’s death when she was nearly fifty years of age. But while volume 4 offers some material on her own writings and the process of their production, and on the issue of women writer’s need for anonymity, this is very much less than one would wish – so much so that one suspects she took her writings less seriously than some of her readers. Certainly the evidence here suggests that she regarded them as a means to an end, and that she deliberately fashioned her oeuvre according to her perception of the market.

It is to be hoped that the later volumes covering the time of her close association with Cotta will provide much more material on the early nineteenth-century literary market for women writers. What the volume does provide is sharp insights into the political upheavals brought about by Napoleon in southern Germany, as seen ›from below‹. Politics is filtered through its impact on her circle of family and friends – vividly so, specifically with regard to the tangible manner in which territorial realignment in Bavaria and Wurttemberg affected individuals.

Result

These letters are memorable and the edition constitutes a truly significant contribution to women’s history, not primarily because it is a record of the life of an intelligent woman of unusual resourcefulness and character, buffeted by fate and history. Rather does its significance lie in the exemplary character of so much of that life’s documentation. What becomes particularly evident here is the rational understanding of the world underpinning the two epochs she inhabited and exemplified, the age of sensibility and that of the Biedermeier. The first formed her, the second saw her develop a public profile as editor and writer of fiction, and to her large network of acquaintances, an always resourceful counsellor and even patron.

At the same time, each age contributed subtly yet powerfully to the articulation of human feeling, a process of which her letters are a vivid record. Even when Therese Huber writes of the particular, one is aware of her character as witness to her age. Her eye for eloquent detail, as instanced, for example, in her authoritative comments on the design of a new type of chair for giving birth, which she discusses with the local doctor, lead on to general comments on the subject of child-bearing. Her capacity for scenic presentation, almost invariably matched by her self-irony, as when she describes herself sitting down at night, her hair down (a bit thin on top, now, alas), spinning flax for her daughter’s dowry and for all the world like a tired old Fata, also draws our attention to a salient fact: the nature of and need for endless physical work by women in a bourgeois household of limited means.

Striking, and very much of her age when writing intimate letters to female friends, is the lack of prudery evident in her down-to-earth discussion of matters sexual (such as to Michaelis [I/162] or Regula Böttiger [IV/162]). And yet Therese and her daughters also managed, mainly by reading aloud over long periods as they worked, to keep themselves abreast of what was happening on the literary scene. Therese also showed in her reading a particular interest in the political biography and history of her age, which she had through her marriage to Forster experienced at first hand. She also evidently succeeded via a voluminous correspondence in making her home a kind of information bureau and even employment agency for a whole host of friends, acquaintances and their dependants. Her letters show, as few historical documents do, just how the system of survival for women affected by public or private misfortune, actually worked. Collectively, they provide many answers to the perennial question: how did they live, how did they manage?

Finally, these volumes also give us the answer to the question posed some twenty years ago and referred to at the outset of this review: who would train the ›daughters‹? Therese Huber: Briefe makes evident that the editor has trained and is in the processing of training her successors, part of the first cohort of younger female editors. Our discipline is in her debt.

Prof. Dr. Eda Sagarra
University of Dublin
Trinity College, Department of Germanic Studies
IE - Dublin 2

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Eda Sagarra: Therese Huber – Letters. (Rezension über: Therese Huber: Briefe. Band 1: 1774–1804 Hg. von Magdalene Heuser in Zusammenarbeit mit Corinna Bergmann-Törner, Diana Colemann Brandt, Jutta Harmeyer und Petra Walbusch. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer 1999. – Therese Huber: Briefe. Band 4: 1810–1811. Hg. von Magdalene Heuser, bearbeitet von Petra Walbusch. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer 2001. 9 Abbildungen. V, 944 S. Gebunden. EUR 148,00.)
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