What is This Dagger, My Heart about?
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!\"
\"The subject matter of this epistolary novel is certainly in part the biography of Karoline von Günderrode, but it is much more. The manuscript moves relentlessly on two interrelated and coherent fronts, around the themes of eros and thanatos, love and death. Krell puts you along the path that Günderrode travelled and allows you to travel alongside her and intimately share her experience of love and loss, freedom and restrictive societal norms, passion and logic, life and death. Krell's originality lies in his ability to play at the margins between reality and fantasy, between history and fiction, between imaginative embellishment and precise accounting.\" — Walter Brogan, Villanova University