A version of the original German text can be found here. Rather than providing a new translation of the poem, I’ll send you to an existing one here.

“The Prisoner and the Singer” was written in 1805 or 1806 and included in Günderrode’s third collection, Melete. The verses describe a singer who grants a prisoner’s request to alleviate his loneliness, only to become trapped due to falling in love with the prisoner. The singer feels unable to leave the prisoner and remains stuck beside his dungeon.

This poem has been read as describing Günderrode’s relationship with her married lover, as expressing a Romantic longing to escape social conventions, and as portraying the perspective of a woman attempting to realize her artistic potential in the restrictive atmosphere of early nineteenth-century Germany. 

Interestingly, all these interpretations assume that the gender of the singer is female, even though Günderrode uses the male “der Sänger.” Günderrode sometimes referred to herself in letters with the masculine “der Freund,” which adds plausibility to these interpretations. But the poem could also be read as having homoerotic overtones.

The most common interpretation of the poem is biographical. On this view, the singer and the prisoner represent, respectively, Günderrode and her married lover Georg Friedrich Creuzer. By the time Günderrode wrote this poem, Creuzer had made and broken several promises to leave his wife for Günderrode or arrange some sort of ménage à trois with them, and wrote often that he felt trapped by his marriage and life circumstances. The self pitying language of the prisoner in the poem echoes Creuzer’s letters. For example, Creuzer writes to Günderrode that he is “very sad. It is the sadness of a prisoner who may not escape his position and the prison to which the State has banished him [i.e., his job as a university professor] in order to live his life for himself.“[1]

On this interpretation, the poem depicts the consequences faced by Günderrode due to becoming attaching to someone who could not or would not change his situation. The singer’s happy wandering is curtailed; she has lost the freedom to pursue her own life course and develop her creative expression through her singing, and is likely to fade away in useless longing for the prisoner. 

Karen Daubert reads an additional layer of meaning into the poem. As Daubert points out, Günderrode’s work was often inspired by the Early German Romantics, who thought self-realization and artistic creativity could be stifled by social conventions.[2] Early German Romantic writers such as Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel saw poets as exemplifying the quest of the individual to find and express their authentic self, and often contrasted this lifestyle with the social expectations of the time, e.g., to work a paying job and support a family. They saw these kinds of conventions as restrictive and as dampening creativity. 

On Daubert’s reading, the prisoner of Günderrode’s poem represents someone trapped in a position that has been imposed on them by society, longing for the free life of creative expression represented by the singer. Creuzer seems to have seen himself in just such a role: in the letter quoted above, he contrasts remaining in his marriage and job with leaving them to follow his own wishes, adding that living life for himself would mean “the undisturbed, free holy remembrance of Poesie.”[3] And Günderrode, of course, was a poet who Creuzer claimed to long to be with.

“The Prisoner and the Singer” can also be read as a commentary on the extreme difficulty of realizing one’s poetic talent as a woman of Günderrode’s time. On this reading, the prisoner represents Günderrode herself, restricted by the ideologies and institutions of early nineteenth century Europe, which limited the role of the artist to men while relegating women to the household. The female poet is a prisoner trapped in her own life, longing for the freedom and creativity represented by the singer. Alternatively, one could see the singer as trapped by the expectations that were held of women once they became attached to a man. After marriage, women would have been expected to focus exclusively on the wellbeing of their husband, family and household and give up any creative enterprises they had been engaged in.

Daubert relates the above points to what she calls the “double restriction” faced by creative and intellectual women of Günderrode’s time. They were subjected both to the social and cultural limitations bemoaned by the Early German Romantics (which affected both men and women) and to the much tighter restrictions for women. Daubert argues that Günderrode’s poem provides the beginnings of an answer to the question: “How would a female Romantic poet have used the language of boundaries, limits, and Sehnsucht [longing] to express the inevitable frustration of the movement toward cultural transcendence?”[4]

Why didn’t I provide my own translation of this poem like usual? Well, it’s for a very subjective reason: I hate it. It annoys me that the topic and vocabulary are sorrowful but the meter trucks along merrily and boisterously. Sometimes that can work but I don’t think it works here. I appreciate that Günderrode is communicating the serious problems that can happen if you fall for someone who is willing to drag you down with them, but I’m irritated by the self pity of the prisoner. In an actual prisoner this would be fair enough, but I can’t help but read it as Creuzer whining to the much less fortunate Günderrode. Overall, the poem just makes me want to travel back to 1805 and give Creuzer a smack. But it’s an interesting piece and I hope you enjoy it more than I do – follow the links at the top of this page for the original German and an English translation.

[1] Creuzer, Letter to Günderrode, 23 July 1805, in Karl Preisendanz, ed., Die Liebe der Günderode. Friedrich Creuzers Briefe an Caroline von Günderode (Bern: Peter Lang, 1975 [1912]), 135.

[2] Karen F. Daubert, “Karoline von Günderrode’s ‘Der Gefangene und der Sänger’: New Voices in Romanticism’s Desire for Cultural Transcendence,” New German Review 8 (1992): 4.

[3] Creuzer, Letter to Günderrode, 23 July 1805, in Preisendanz, Die Liebe der Günderode, 135.

[4] Daubert, “Der Gefangene und der Sänger,” 3.

REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING

Christmann, Ruth. Zwischen Identitätsgewinn und Bewußtseinsverlust. Das philosophisch-literarische Werk der Karoline von Günderrode (1780-1806). Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2005. p.251ff.

Daubert, Karen F. “Karoline von Günderrode’s ‘Der Gefangene und der Sänger’: New Voices in Romanticism’s Desire for Cultural Transcendence.” New German Review 8 (1992): 1–17.

Preisendanz, Karl, ed. Die Liebe der Günderode. Friedrich Creuzers Briefe an Caroline von Günderode. Bern: Peter Lang, 1975 [1912].