Elisa von der Recke
Elisabeth Charlotte von der Recke Constanzia ( born May 20, 1754 Schoenberg, Courland ( Latvian: Skaistkalne, now the town Bauska, Latvia), † April 13, 1833 in Dresden) was a Baltic German poet, writer and hymn poet.
Life
Elisa von der Recke was the daughter of Count Friedrich von Medem, and his wife Louise Dorothea von Korff. After the early death of his mother Elisa received only a meager education in the house of her grandmother. This forbade her from reading books. After her father had married again in 1767, Elisha lived again in his house, where her stepmother Agnes Elizabeth of Brukken ( 1718-1784 ) tried to give her a certain amount of general education.
In 1771 she married for reasons of state reasons, the Chamber Mr. Georg Magnus von der Recke at Neuchâtel. The marriage of convenience was divorced in 1781 childless. She worked as a diplomat for her sister, the Duchess Dorothea of Courland. In 1787 appeared from Recke's signature message from the infamous Cagliostro stay in Jelgava in 1779 and his magical operations, which introduced her to a beat throughout educated Europe. Von der Recke reckoned it with the amorous advances of Cagliostro towards her - with simultaneous display its hochstaplerischer machinations - relentlessly from. Catherine the Great turned her in recognition of this work a lifetime income from the Domänengut Count Palatine of the Jelgava to. This was financially independent of the warrior.
Her life she toured Europe, in particular the former thinkers - to know, for example, Nicolai, Klopstock, Gleim, Claudius, Graves, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Graff, table leg, Kant, Hamann, the actor Schröder, Goethe and Schiller, and this to intensify contacts through years of correspondence. They maintained friendly relations with those regarded as enlightened princely courts of Anhalt- Dessau and August Castle and the Count Stolberg and had access to the royal courts in Berlin and Warsaw.
From 1798 she lived almost exclusively in Dresden, since 1804 together with her friend Christoph August Tiedge. She was friends with the family grains in which they took over the godfather Office of Theodore, with Anton Graff, August Gottlieb Meissner and many well-known contemporaries in Germany, Poland and the Baltic states. At the meetings, there was a religious- sensitive clay, there were chorales by Johann Gottlieb Naumann sung.
Elisa von der Recke supervised a total of 13 foster daughters. It is located on the inside of the New Town Cemetery in Dresden buried next to her longtime friend Christoph August Tiedge.
Works
Her work consists mainly of pietistic sentimental poems, diaries and memoirs. The Evangelical Lutheran hymnal for worship Four Parts of the city and the Duchy of Magdeburg from 1805 contains 16 written by her hymns.
Selection:
- Message from the infamous Cagliostro stay in Jelgava in 1779 and its magical operations, (Berlin 1787 digitized ). Enlightenment polemic about Alessandro Cagliostro, usually considered to be her magnum opus.
- Johann Lorenz Blessig (ed.): Life of Count Johann Friedrich von Medem, together with his correspondence mainly with the Women's Chamber mistress von der Recke, his sister, 1792 ( digitized )
- Family = Entwickelungen scenes or on the Masquenballe, 1794, 1826 published ( digitized )
- About Naumann, the good people and great artists, articles in the New German Mercury, 1803
Posthumous editions
- Spiritual songs, prayers and religious considerations; Leipzig 1833; New Edition: Leipzig: Teubner, 1841.
- Rachel Paul (ed.): Elisa von der Recke. Records and letters from her childhood days, Volume 1; Leipzig: Dieterich'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1900.
- Rachel Paul (ed.): Elisa von der Recke. Diaries and letters from their years of wandering, Volume 2; Leipzig: Dieterich'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1902.
- Heinrich Conrad (ed.): Elisa von der Recke: heart - stories of a Baltic noblewoman. Memoirs and letters; Stuttgart: Lutz, 1921.
- Christiane carrier (ed.): Elisa von der Recke: diaries and personal testimonies; Leipzig: Koehler and Amelang; Munich: Beck, 1984; ISBN 3-406-30196-7.