Margareta Klopstock’s Silenced Voice: Feminism in Thought and Form

Lecture by Frauke Berndt, Professor of Modern German Literature at the University of Zurich.

Margareta Klopstock (1728–1758), née Moller, was one of the most popular and influential public intellectuals of the mid-eighteenth century. She corresponded with well-known European contemporaries, wrote literary texts, and collaborated with her renowned husband, the German author Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock. Her silenced voice witnesses the emergence of a bourgeois feminism forty years before Olympe de Gouges produced the "Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne" in 1791. The lecture seeks to provide new insights into the “female” or even “feminist Enlightenment.” On the one hand, Klopstock, in her letter on fashion, contributes to a feminist aesthetics. On the other hand, her aesthetic feminism, which arises from social practices of women’s everyday life (family, friendship, love, marriage, fashion, secretarial work, etc.), shapes new aesthetic forms in her letters and literary texts. 

Moderator: Irina Hron

The seminar is organised by the CEMES research group, Thinking the European Republic of Letters, in cooperation with WHENCE.

Contact: Irina Hron

Frauke Berndt is a Full Professor of Modern German Literature at the University of Zurich, after having taught at the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, the University of Chicago, and Eberhard Karls University Tübingen. Berndt has also been a visiting professor at several American universities. She has published widely on rhetoric, aesthetics, poetics & literary theory, focusing on German literature, history & thought from the 18th & 19th centuries. She is the author of numerous monographs and anthologies and the founder of the Zurich Aesthetics Lab.