Another Bettina Commemoration

The fourth of April has arrived, bringing more sunny weather for the flowering pomegranates and tomato and pepper plants (yes, spring came so early this year that they are already tall and beginning to flower), and today is also Bettina von Arnim’s 229th birthday.

  

     I was thinking today about Das Leben der Hochgräfin Gritta von Rattenzuhausbeiuns, the wonderful book Bettina wrote with her daughter Gisela von Arnim Grimm, available in English as The Life of High Countess Gritta von Ratsinourhouse (tr. Lisa Ohm, University of Nebraska Press, 1999).  This novella, perhaps best known, and deservedly so, for its feminist and children’s welfare themes, is also a truly captivating story that incorporates and exhibits all the elements that made the entire Kunstmärchen, or “literary fairy-tale” movement in German Romanticism so engaging.

  

      Traditional folktale and mythological elements are combined seamlessly with a complex narrative technique and ambitious poetic, spiritual, psychological, and social themes.  I am always struck by how much the book’s initial scenes, with Gritta living half-starved and neglected in her father’s castle, a victim of his crazy inventions, remind me of the shadowy, grotesque tone of the Gormenghast books--that were written so much later and in a totally different milieu.  There is so much else, too, in this little book: idyllic nature, Middle Eastern folklore, high adventure and silly romance, fairy magic and real-life drama.  The character Wildebeere (Wildberry in the English version) is one of the most enigmatic and uncanny personalities in all of literature, and certainly the most wonderful Wise Woman ever, as she slowly undergoes, through the course of the book, a transformation from a young girl trained in herbalism to a kind of mystical nature spirit (in the process losing most of her human nature).

  

     An essay I wrote about Bettina that appeared in The Copperfield Review (which is, unfortunately, no longer in their archives) included this passage:

  

     As a young woman she was passionately in love with life, with everything beautiful and spiritual, and, like her friend Karoline [von Günderrode], was terrified of being trapped by the limitations that were imposed on her because of her sex.  She married a poet and played the role of wife and mother (to seven children) for many years, often urging her husband to use his creative gifts to the fullest even though she would not have the same opportunity to use hers.

  

    I mention this because it is important to remember that the central theme of Gritta von Ratsinourhouse--the right of girls to achieve their dreams and be protected from all forms of repression and exploitation--was very much a product of Bettina’s own experience with oppression.  Bettina was able to give her daughters a bit of the freedom she was advocating for all women; and this meant, among other things, that Gisela, her daughter and co-author of Gritta von Ratsinourhouse, was able to become a writer and dramatist, and organized a “salon” exclusively for women writers.  Bettina herself, after her husband died at age fifty and her children were grown, also wrote, composed music, and became a champion of social causes and human rights, as well as the friend and confidant of many of the most important social, cultural, and artistic figures of her time.