Elisa von der Recke. Aufklärerische Kontexte und lebensweltliche Perspektiven ed. by Vera Viehöver, Valérie Leyh, and Adelheid Müller (review)

Enlightenment cosmopolitanism was a defining discourse of the eigh teenth century—a global event, comprehensible only in a global context connected through “contact zones” (Mary Louise Pratt), “zones of exchange,” and cultural transfer (Greenblatt, Espagne) in a process of complex mutual exchanges and influence. The lens of cultural transfer questions the usefulness of the concepts of “nation” and “country,” particularly in a period when nationalism and the nation state as a political entity had only slowly been emerging. It is also useful in geopolitical regions where borders of dukedoms, kingdoms, and states had been in constant flux, and where different cultures and ethnic groups had intermingled. This is particularly valid for the Baltic territories in the eighteenth century and the small Dukedom of Courland, home to the writer, diarist, and salonnière Elisa von der Recke. The history of the Enlightenment in the Baltic regions has only recently become a focus of scholarly interest. In this context, scholars have identified von der Recke’s important contribution to Baltic German literature and her political engagement for the survival of Courland, and the liberation of the serfs.

Elisa Charlotte von der Recke, the focus of this fascinating collection of essays, was born in 1754 in the Duchy of Courland. She spent some of her childhood with her grandmother, Starostin Constanze von Korff, in Mitau, the capital of Courland, a centre of polite society. Through her stepsister, Anna Charlotte Dorothea von Kurland, wife of Peter Biron, the Duke of Courland, von der Recke was also well connected to European aristocratic circles, and was indeed, as Anna Gajdis explores in her essay in this volume, an important negotiator in Poland and Russia for the future fate of Courland. In another essay, Doris Schumacher uses the portraits of von der Recke as evidence that she tried to downplay her aristocratic background by fashioning herself as a classical, enlightened, and educated woman.

The political position and government of the small Dukedom of Courland, now in Latvia, had been chaotic since the collapse of the German Order State in 1560. The Treaty of Wilna in 1561 created the Dukedom Courland as a Polish fief, with Gotthard von Ketteler as the first Duke of Courland in 1562. When the last member of the Ketteler family passed away, Ernst Johann Biron (1690–1772) was elected Duke in 1737. After a difficult reign, he abdicated in 1769 in favour of his son, Peter Biron. With the gradual annexation of Poland at the end of the eighteenth century by Russia, Prussia, and Austria, Courland’s independence was compromised. Finally, on 16 March 1797, Russia seized control of Courland, and the dukedom ceased to exist. Though the region was ethnically diverse, the Baltic German nobility dominated, both culturally and socially.

In 1771, Elisa married Kammerherr Georg Peter Magnus von der Recke (1739–95), but they separated in 1776, and divorced in 1781. Her diaries, travel accounts, poetry, and epistolary exchanges with Europe’s most illustrious characters, such as Catherine the Great, Alexander I, King Stanislaus August, Rahel Varnhagen, Moses Mendelssohn, David Friedländer, Giacomo Casanova, and Friedrich Nicolai, reveal the cosmopolitical outlook and socio-cultural inter connectedness of von der Recke. The essays by Dorothee von Hellermann, Helmut Watzlawick, and the whole of section 5, “Networks and Sociability,” document these intricate networks.

The fifteen essays collected in Elisa von der Recke. Aufklärerische Kontexte und lebensweltliche Perspektiven continue these explorations but widen the scope to a transdisciplinary and transnational enquiry. As the editors highlight in their introduction, the essays are dedicated to a range of disciplines, including Jewish Studies, History, Theology, Art History, Music, Gender Studies, and Cultural Studies, to underscore that von der Recke moved around a Europe that was culturally heterogeneous as well as socially and politically entangled through dynamic, dynastic networks and cultural transfer.

This important and valuable collection...