ENN New Voices: Karoline von Günderrode's Philosophy: Interview with Anna Ezekiel

In this episode, Jacinta Shrimpton speaks with Anna Ezekiel, honorary fellow in the philosophy department at the University of York, about Karoline von Günderrode, a nineteenth-century German philosopher, poet, and dramatist. It is a wide-ranging conversation touching on multiple works by Günderrode, such as the unpublished essay fragment the “Idea of the Earth" and the play Udohla, and Ezekiel draws out the connections between Günderrode’s metaphysics and political philosophy, as well as explaining her concepts of the self, friendship and gender. Ezekiel’s scholarship has played an important role in increasing Günderrode’s profile in Anglophone philosophy, and she rounds out the episode by sharing the demands that are entailed by working on a figure whose works have not historically been considered philosophy.

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Works mentioned in the episode 
Ezekiel, Anna C. “Revolution and Revitalization: Karoline von Günderrode’s Political Philosophy and Its Metaphysical Foundations.” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 30, no. 4 (2022): 666–86. https://doi.org/10.1080/09608788.2020.1806033.

Wolf, Christa. No Place on Earth. Translated by Jan van Heurck. London: Virago Press, 1983.

Battersby, Christine. “Stages on Kant’s Way: Aesthetics, Morality, and the Gendered Sublime.” In Feminism and Tradition in Aesthetics, edited by Peggy Z. Brand and Carolyn Korsmeyer. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995.

Nassar, Dalia. “The Human Vocation and the Question of the Earth: Karoline von Günderrode’s Philosophy of Nature.” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 104, no. 1 (2022): 108–30. https://doi.org/10.1515/agph-2019-0028.

Delon, Michel. “Dorothea Schlegel, Florentin, trans. and ed. Alain Montandon, Paris, Classiques Garnier, coll. ‘Littératures du monde,’ 2024.” Dix-huitième siècle 57, no. 1 (2025): 727–28. https://doi.org/10.3917/dhs.057.0727. (Cairn.info)

Ezekiel, Anna C., ed. and trans. Karoline von Günderrode: Philosophical Writings. New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2026. (Oxford University Press)

Creuzer, Georg Friedrich. Friedrich Creuzers Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker, besonders der Griechen. Edited by Georg Heinrich Moser and Franz Joseph Mone. Leipzig: C. W. Leske, 1822. (Internet Archive)

Günderrode, Karoline von. Poetic Fragments. Translated and with introductory essays by Anna C. Ezekiel. 1st ed. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781438461991.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. The Sorrows of Young Werther; Elective Affinities; Novella. Edited by David E. Wellbery. Goethe’s Collected Works, vol. 11. Suhrkamp Publishers, 1988.

Bohrer, Karl Heinz. “Identität als Selbstverlust: Zum romantischen Subjektbegriff.” Merkur 38, no. 4 (1984): 367–79.

—————————. Der romantische Brief: Die Entstehung ästhetischer Subjektivität. Suhrkamp, 1989.

Ezekiel, Anna C. “Karoline von Günderrode (1780–1806).” In Women Philosophers in the Long Nineteenth Century: The German Tradition, edited by Dalia Nassar and Kristin Gjesdal, 62–84. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190868031.003.0003.

Macpherson, James. Morison’s Edition of the Poems of Ossian, the Son of Fingal: Translated by James Macpherson, Esq., Carefully Corrected, and Greatly Improved. Vol. 1. Perth: R. Morison Jr., for R. Morison & Son, 1795.