Karoline von Günderrode's biography - and in particular her early death - have long overshadowed an appreciation of her literary works. Closer attention to her poems, prose writings and plays reveals Günderrode's remarkable engagement with the philosophical, literary, and scientific debates of her age. Joanna Raisbeck's study is the first to uncover a consistent theme throughout Günderrode, one which stems from the desire to combat the prevalent philosophical dangers of both materialism and atheism. Günderrode, it emerges, is the most consistent thinker of Spinozist pantheism - the idea that God and nature are the same - not just in German Romanticism, but in her age. Günderrode uses a new interpretation of Spinoza as a means to write about questions of determinism, autonomy, and what differences there might be, if at all, between humankind and nature.
Joanna Raisbeck is Lecturer in German at St Hilda's College and Wadham College, University of Oxford. She is the winner of both the Klaus Heyne-Award for Research in German Romanticism (2021) and the Novalis Prize (2022) for her work on Günderrode.