Anna Louisa Karsch as Sappho.

Anna Louisa Karsch became known as "the German Sappho" in the early 1760s and she performed this social and poetic role self-consciously to develop and market her public literary persona. In poems written for the public, Karsch performs the role of Sappho to position herself aesthetically as a female poet of tender sentiment and natural genius. She strives to balance an embrace of Sappho as poetic ancestor with an assertion of difference and independence from her, pointedly distancing herself from the image of the female poet inspired by passionate love. The specific German "fictions of Sappho" of the mid-eighteenth century--namely, her image in the popular imagination, the philological consideration of her fragments, and the interpretation of Sappho in vying aesthetic theories--provide an important context for the dimension that the Sappho-persona brings to Karsch's poetic self-fashioning. (CB)

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Anna Louisa Karsch (1722-1791) has been known as "the German Sappho" since 1761, when her friend and literary advisor Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim complimented her poetic skills by likening her to that famous poet from Lesbos, "the mother goddess of poetry." (1) Karsch willingly took on this role and engaged the name of Sappho in both her published poems and her unpublished letters, especially in those to Gleim himself. In her first years after moving to Berlin in 1761, she was celebrated as a poetic sensation and natural talent, paraded and published, but also criticized, not least because of her adoption of "Sappho" as a poetic alias.

What representations of Sappho were predominant around 1760 and how did Karsch define and employ the role of Sappho to fashion her public persona? In what follows I will present the over-determined image of Sappho current in the German cultural imagination of the mid-eighteenth century and argue that it offers an important framework of interpretation for both Karsch's poetic self-understanding and the reception of her writing. As Joan DeJean has shown, the "fictions of Sappho" that hold sway in a particular historical moment and place can reveal much about that culture's attitudes toward creative women. Most of Karsch's published poetry in which she alludes to Sappho, including those poems collected in the posthumously published Gedichte (Poems) of 1792, (2) dates from the early 1760s, the period in which she first adopts the name Sappho as a social and a poetic role. Karsch draws on the popular, philological, and poetic reception of Sappho of the time to stage her public persona through her poetry. In doing so, I argue, she strives to balance an embrace of Sappho as poetic ancestor with an assertion of her difference from Sappho, and she even distances herself from what is arguably the primary association with Sappho's poetry, the image of the female poet inspired by love.

A closer look at Karsch's public performance of Sappho in her poetry contributes to the current scholarly investigations of Karsch's poetic adoption of first-person roles, which have centered on the nexus of her biography and her poetic persona. Critics have illuminated how Karsch's effective stylization of details in her biography supports the image of herself as poet that she wished to convey (Becker-Cantarino; Barndt, "Mein Dasein"; Schaffers). Her life was circumscribed by hardship: she suffered under extreme poverty as a member of the fourth estate, her family relationships were difficult, as a child she had but a brief reprieve from toil followed by her return to work for her mother, she endured two marriages to abusive husbands, she faced difficulties as a single, impoverished mother disgraced by divorce. To increase her earnings, Karsch composed occasional verse and encomiums celebrating the battles of Friedrich II. The attention this poetry received eventually led to her change of fortunes and brought her to Berlin.