This Dagger, My Heart

Historical fiction centered around the life and tragic death of the German Romantic poet and philosopher Karoline von Günderrode. In 1806, when she was only twenty-six, Karoline von Günderrode plunged a dagger through her heart. She was a gifted poet and philosopher, a member of the circle of Romantic writers such as Bettine Brentano, Clemens Brentano, and Achim von Arnim. Women were not admitted to universities at the time (1780–1806) and so Karoline educated herself with the help of mentors and a library of books. She was devoted to the greatest writers, philosophers, and thinkers of her time and of all times, among them Goethe, Kant, Schelling, Novalis, Hölderlin, Plato, Heraclitus, and Empedocles. Yet neither her learning nor her intense love of nature were able to sustain her life. Karoline fell in love with a Heidelberg professor of classics who was married and unable or unwilling to leave his wife. There were of course other factors that led to her suicide—and the novel details them in its eighty-six episodes narrated by twenty-six different characters. Each character tells her or his or its own version of the story, and the reader is left to piece it all together—which is what one must do when confronting any case of suicide. We are called upon to understand the catastrophe but also to realize that our understanding will never satisfy us. Tragedy is not about understanding. When the old men of Thebes see Antigone marching to her tomb, they can only cry, "Child! Child!"