Cupid and Psyche in Germany, 1750–1850 (2024)

1. Introduction

Scholarly and literary adaptations of Cupid and Psyche defined the tale’s German reception by professional classicists and their circles, which often included poets with classical interests: classical philology, in particular, focused on C&P, its putative relationship to Greek texts, and (at the turn of the nineteenth century) Platonic philosophy. The influence of classicism also gave rise to widespread interest in C&P in art and literature. Furthermore, there was also a specifically German reaction to the availability of French fairy tales with their own reception of C&P. This chapter will look at both sentimental and romantic literary reactions to C&P and at the specific German fairy tales based on it.

While the French fairy tales are ostentatiously literary creations (e.g. Perrault and D’Aulnoy, see Chapter 2), the German tales are rather different; although they appear deliberately naive, unresearched, and folkloristic, this is not always the case, and some of them are ultimately influenced by Apuleius, too. The French versions are complicated, with many side plots, while the German fairy-tale collectors preferred simpler stories that were decidedly oral in appearance and execution. The influential fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm are, however, as we shall see, often enough based on these French tales and on Italian/Neapolitan stories, both of which were consumed by the Grimms’ informants and by the Brothers themselves in written form. German reception of C&P both moved into a different direction from its French equivalent, while also being heavily influenced by it.

In addition, the early Romantic literary approach to fairy tales in itself fertilized and was counter-fertilized by the German fairy-tale tradition. Poets and novelists wrote fairy tales alongside their other literary output, and there were close literary and personal networks between many of the authors discussed in this chapter, leading to a fruitful interchange of ideas, no doubt contributing to the increased popularity of Psyche. Short lyric and long epic poems tend to show off their authors’ learning, and the influence of C&P on the development of the German novel is substantial. German reception in this period shows a specific interest in the female character of Psyche and its female readership, but very little focus on Apuleius as an author. His creation Psyche developed a life of her own in Germany, apart from the Metamorphoses, as a figurehead of femininity, innocence, and the philosophy of nature and the soul.

2. From French Courts to German Bourgeoisie

Some continuity between French and German reception can be traced, although there was no centralized court comparable to Versailles, around which refined literary efforts based on Cupid and Psyche could agglomerate (as shown for France in Chapter 2). There is, however, some evidence for courtly reception similar to the French pageants it imitated—for example, in the Palatine Court in Heidelberg of 1682, where a Festzug (‘pageant’) titled Heyrath zwischen Cupido und Psyche in einem beliebten Auff=Zug verschiedener Götter und Göttinnen/Helden und Tugenden/Schäfer und Nymphen1 (‘Marriage between Cupid and Psyche in a favourite pageant of diverse gods and goddesses, heroes, virtues, shepherds and nymphs’) emulates those in Versailles; the two courts shared close dynastic links.2 The Singspiel Die wunderschöne Psyche from 1701 in Hamburg (possibly based on a 1687 first edition) by the opera librettist Christian Heinrich Postel (1658–1705), who also wrote the libretto for Bach’s St John’s Passion, was staged for Sophie Charlotte, queen of Prussia, in Hamburg and in later years for various other royal events.3 The music was composed by Reinhard Keiser (1674–1739), a prominent and prolific composer of baroque opera in Germany. This continued popularity of adaptations of the story for wedding celebrations among the aristocracy noted before (see Chapter 1 on Isabella d’Este) expands during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the educated bourgeoisie.

At the same time, however, the unique novel Psyche Cretica (1685) by Johann Ludwig Prasch (1637–90) had already indicated an interest in the reception of C&P that anticipates several of the strands traceable in later German engagement with the text, even though his novel was written in Latin.4 It has a notable Protestant slant, just like the contemporary Anglican epic Psyche, or Love’s Mystery (1648, revised 1702) by Joseph Beaumont (1616–1699), who redrafted the story as an allegory of the Soul’s salvation through Christ.5

Prasch shared this interest in Christian allegory. His novel received a German translation in 1705 by Christoph Eibelhuber, which clarifies the theological underpinning of Prasch’s story in its subtitle: Psyche Cretica oder geistlicher Roman von der menschlichen Seelen (‘Cretan Psyche or spiritual novel about the human soul’). The novel’s first part follows Apuleius’ story fairly closely up to the moment when Psyche, here a Cretan princess, breaks the taboo and Cupid flees from her. Then Psyche wanders through lonely forests, only nearly to fall victim to a young man called Cosmus, who repeatedly attacks and almost kills her. The young Athenian Theophrastus saves her, but Cosmus continues to try to get hold of Psyche, until he finally abducts her. Only the intervention of Cupid and Venus saves Psyche, and Cupid kills Cosmus with his arrow. The lovers are not reunited yet, as Psyche lives her life in solitude and gratitude to her saviour. Finally, Psyche finds a pair of wings on a Cretan beach, with which she flies to Heaven to be with Cupid. The Lutheran symbolism is fairly easily deciphered, as the human soul (Psyche) finds itself constantly under onslaught from worldly things (Cosmus, ‘world’ in Greek), and is helped temporarily by priests (Theophrastus, ‘speaker for God’, whose philosopher name suggests a deeper understanding of things and a connection with the divine), but permanently only by God himself (Cupid), with whom she is finally united at the moment of the body’s death. Prasch’s Cupid had revealed himself to Psyche as a god before their marriage, and Psyche’s inability to follow his orders represents mortal men’s inability to follow God’s plan.6 The novel contains much Protestant religious teaching and allegory, and the freer adaptation of Psyche’s life after separation from Cupid is indicative of the kind of philosophical interpretations that follow in German reception (see below). This is an important difference from the French fairy tales discussed in the previous chapter, which are emblematic, as Bottigheimer argues, of a form of repuerescentia, ‘the spiritual discipline of an adult losing one’s self in the contemplation of Jesus’ infancy’,7 and the deliberate de-allegorization and de-mythologization of the story by La Fontaine (see Chapter 2).

3. Translations and Adaptations

The availability of Apuleius’ C&P in German translation for average readers was patchy for a long time. Instead, hundreds of artistic images of Cupid and Psyche not necessarily linked to Apuleius’ work popularized the couple as an exemplar of ideal lovers. There was such an explosion of literature with a specific focus on Psyche as a character rather than the Apuleian story in its entirety in the one hundred years between 1750 and 1850 that only some examples can be treated here.8 For a long time, the only available German translation of the complete Metamorphoses was that of Johann Sieder (1538).9 Cupid and Psyche on its own, however, was more popular, with several adaptations and translations of the tale before 1850: Ludwig Kosegarten (1789), Johann Jacob von Lincker (1804, in verse), Joseph Kehrein (1834, in eight-verse stanzas),10 Christian Martin Winterling (1836), and Reinhold Jachmann (1843) all offered translations ranging from the loosely poetic to the scholarly.11

A boost for the reception of Apuleius in Germany were the two influential translations by August von Rode (1751–1837). Rode was a politician and administrator at the Anhalt-Dessau court, and the teacher of Graf Franz von Waldersee, an illegitimate son of Leopold III, Friedrich Franz, Fürst und Herzog von Anhalt-Dessau. His 1780 translation of C&P was well received and was followed in 1783 by a witty and entertaining translation of the whole novel dedicated to the Hofrath Le Roy, a fellow lover of Latin literature and history.12 (See Chapter 4 for Thomas Taylor, who a short time later also translated first C&P separately and then the whole Metamorphoses into English.) Other translations by Rode included Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Vitruvius. His 1780 C&P translation was a deliberate attempt to separate the story from its uncouth environment, the rest of the novel, as Rode declares in 1780, in his Vorrede or ‘preface’. The translation is enhanced by Rode’s comments, where he explains his choices of omission, which are often, but not always, directed by a desire to purge the text. For example, the German translation omits Apuleius’ joke on Milesian Apollo speaking Latin instead of Greek (Met. 4.32), but Rode translates the omitted passage in his relevant note.13 The few sexual scenes in C&P are softened, but Psyche’s pregnancy is not omitted from the translation (as it would be later in some Victorian versions, see Chapter 5), although the annotations often give the Latin with a comment on its unsuitability or obscenity.

The 1783 preface to the translation of the novel as a whole is philological, discussing its presumed Greek origins and Apuleius’ biography. The translation was extremely successful and received several reprints in quick succession.14 It is still in print and perhaps the most important and influential German version of the story. Rode seems to have followed the Horatian idea that poetry should delight as well as instruct (Ars poetica 333), as he hopes in his preface that his translation will entertain his readers as well as help them to understand the paintings of Raphael in the Loggia of Psyche in Rome’s Villa Farnesina, which were widely known in Germany via etchings—for example, those by Nicolas Dorigny (1658–1746) (see Fig. 2)15 and even encourage further paintings on the topic.16 His influential adaptation tries to lift Apuleius’ language and adjusts it to contemporary German style for his intended audience, the Weltmann or ‘cosmopolitan gentleman’. Since Goethe’s travels to Italy (1786–8), well-to-do Germans who had succumbed to Italiensehnsucht, a desire to visit and experience Italy, would attempt to include Rome and the Villa Farnesina in their programme,17 and Goethe’s dining room (Gelber Salon) in Weimar featured Dorigny’s etchings. Rode’s translation is spirited, full of rococo charm, and covers Apuleius’ whole stylistic range, while offering a certain squeamishness at the lower end of his content and language, and faithful Apuleian playfulness at its higher end.18

In 1783, Rode felt he needed to apologize to his dedicatee about some ‘üppigen Stellen’ (‘lush passages’) of his text, but excuses himself by claiming to follow in the footsteps of Catullus, Petronius, and La Fontaine, among others. He argues that a book like his can be easily hidden from the eyes of the innocent. In his ‘Ankündigung’ (‘announcement’), which follows the dedicatory letter in the 1783 edition, he sets out what he knows about Apuleius. He was no great fan of Apuleius’ style, which he called ‘kostbar’ (‘pretentious’) and ‘schwülstig’ (‘overblown’), while criticizing his long sentences. He blames Apuleius’ tasteless times, African origin, and distance from Rome; none of these criticisms would hold any longer today but were echoed in discussions of Apuleius’ style from Rode up to late into the twentieth century.19 Rode also explains that he leaves out several of his comments and explanations from the 1780 C&P translation, since he has already published them. His worries about self-plagiarism therefore make his complete translation appear at times less scholarly than his version of C&P. Rode’s sympathetic ‘Life of Apuleius’ (pp. I–XX) is well documented, summarizes autobiographical sections from the Apologia and Florida, and is free from the mistakes of previous translators who conflated the lives of Apuleius and his creation Lucius. Rode accuses Apuleius of bragging about his abilities (p. XVII) and sees the novel as a work of the wiser and more censorious Apuleius’ later life, as shown by his satiric stance against the sins of his time, such as loose morals or false beliefs, raising concerns many of his contemporaries shared about Apuleius’ suitability as reading material.

His employer, the enlightened prince Franz von Anhalt-Dessau, was highly appreciative of Cupid and Psyche. Rode worked on his translation of the tale while he was also in charge of the gardens of the Wörlitzer Schloss near Dessau.20 In the palace, designed by the prince’s friend Friedrich Wilhelm von Erdmannsdorff, the rooms belonging to the prince’s wife Princess Luise21 were painted and decorated with Cupid and Psyche motifs—for example, with a special focus on the story’s marriage theme, such as a copy of the Marlborough cameo, which features the marriage of Cupid and Psyche, over the door to the prince’s rooms.22 She also placed Angelika Kauffmann’s sublime and de-eroticized painting Cupid Comforts Psyche in her Luisium.23 Rode described these paintings later in his life,24 and Goethe visited in 1797 to see them.

Rode’s philological approach to the story, together with the interest shown by German enlightenment figures, is one of the reasons why C&P became popular in German Romanticism, especially among its figureheads who had links to classical scholars in Germany.

4. Cupid and Psyche as a Romantic Fairy Tale

The rise of Romanticism also saw a more scholarly approach to material such as fairy tales. French fairy tales were not translated into German during the first half of the eighteenth century, but were read by upper-class Germans in French.25 In the second half of the eighteenth century, however, they began to spread widely through German translations, and were seen as entertainment for young people (as in France, too, with the work of Perrault) and the lower classes.26 Importantly, these translations include Der Frau Maria le Prince de Beaumont Lehren der Tugend und Weisheit für die Jugend (ed. Friedrich Eberhard Rambach, Halle, 1758), and Friedrich Bierling’s 1761–6 translation of D’Aulnoy, Das Cabinet der Feen, and with those, of course, their versions of Beauty and the Beast with their links to Cupid and Psyche (for which see Chapter 2).27 The idea of C&P as essentially a fairy tale was influential in bourgeois Germany, an approach that sparked poetic and philological treatments of the story and widened the access of the allegedly lower-class future informants of the Brothers Grimm to this material.

Emblematic of a scholarly approach connected with the popular fairy-tale associations of Cupid and Psyche is Psyche, ein Feenmährchen des Appulejus, lateinisch, mit Anmerkungen (Göttingen 1789).28 This presents a Latin text with German annotations, and the advertisem*nts in contemporary journals do not on the whole give the editor’s name. The book appeared anonymously, but was the work of Johann Heinrich August Schulze (1755–1803),29 a German Protestant theologian and Classical scholar, who published Apuleius’ text in Latin but by his title associated it with fairy tales. This edition appeared in the wake of Rode’s success, with German philological annotations excerpted from Oudendorp’s recent (1786) commentary30 for his target audience of young adult males (1789: xix), and mentioned the Farnesina paintings briefly, too, which his book might help to understand (1789: xxix). He disregarded Apuleius’ book numbers and split the tale into thirty-two chapters31 to make it as accessible as possible to readers of modern novels. The cheerful chapter titles in German introduce the Latin text: ‘Nichts zu sehen, aber viel zu hören, Eine Mariage ohne Licht’ (‘Nothing to see but much to hear, a marriage without light’), for example, heads the chapter on Psyche’s marriage (Met. 5.2–4). The notes are basic and helpful mainly for translation; for example, the comments on Psyche’s wedding night deal entirely with the grammar. Like Rode, Schulze was interested in rehabilitating Apuleius for his readers, though not for a female readership,32 and thus in aiming for a quite different reception than that envisaged by the French female adapters of the fairy tale, or even the contemporary poets Gleim and Jacobi (see below).

Schulze starts his book with a somewhat pedantic justification for his spelling ‘Appulejus’ and the by now familiar reconstruction of Apuleius’ biography. Again he calls Apuleius’ style ‘Schwulst und Űberladung und Tändelei’ (‘bombast, grandiloquence, and frivolity’ (p. x)), which he blames on Apuleius’ Africitas.33 A scholarly overview of available Apuleius editions and commentaries follows. He explains his decision to publish C&P by itself, as this ‘allerliebstes Mährchen’ (‘most delightful fairy tale’ (p. xviii)) is not well known enough, since Apuleius as a whole is not read much. He justifies his title choice, as the story is full of ‘Feeerey’ (‘fairy things’ (p. xxii)), even though he admits the term itself is much more recent than antiquity. He hopes perhaps to find the support to edit the whole text of the Metamorphoses (p. xxi) in a similar form if there were any interest, but this does not seem to have materialised: Schulze’s attempt to appeal to scholars and general readers interested in fairy tales alike had only moderate success.34

Female readers, on the other hand, were given access to ‘gender-appropriate’ versions of Psyche as a fairy tale, often in suitably bowdlerized versions that suppress Psyche’s pregnancy. This was greatly helped by the disassociation of the story from Apuleius, because he was not seen as the original author, as we shall see. Instead, the story was attributed either to a fairy-tale source or to a lost Greek original, as contemporary philhellenic taste in the mid-eighteenth century universally preferred Greece over Rome and sought to associate this beloved story with the former, perhaps encouraged by Apuleius’ own claim to have written a fabulam Graecanicam, a ‘Grecian tale’ (Met. 1.1).35 This separation allowed writers and readers to distance themselves from the more explicitly erotic elements of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses and to suggest an idealized yet imaginary Greek origin for C&P.

A work exemplifying this disconnect was published first in 1786, with a second edition in 1789, the same year as Schulze’s Feenmährchen. This was a popular version in German prose by the poet and theologian Ludwig Gotthard (or Theobul) Kosegarten (1758–1818), Psyche. Ein Mährchen des Altertums, which marked the year of Kosegarten’s marriage to Katharina Linde in Greifswald.36 In the preface to the second edition he simplified, as he thought, the story into a small work that he could write in a short time, and dedicated it to a woman: ‘Henriette L in G’, who had first enjoyed his oral telling of it, he says. The story becomes intimate, a simple fairy tale, and a means to communicate with women about the right kind of love, which is non-sensual and heaven-inspired. In the end it is revealed that he is not only Henriette’s instructor in terms of love, but also her admirer.37 Since ‘Henriette’ is metrically identical to ‘Katharina’, an autobiographical reading of his text is evidently possible: his Psyche is sentimentalized, his own ideal woman who masters all her challenges by the ability to inspire admiring love in everyone she encounters. Kosegarten sets out for her in simplistic and romantic terms what he thinks is the life of Apuleius, mixed with that of Lucius (i.e. claiming that it was Apuleius who was initiated into the cult of Osiris in Rome (p. 8), with his marriage to Pudentilla afterwards (p. 9)). Psyche is the soul of man, cold and distant until love for God is awakened in her, where she is happy until human passions separate them (p. 14), when finally penitence unites her with her God. Kosegarten combines implicit Protestantism and a Platonic allegorical reading of the story (a reading of the novel that goes back to Beroaldo) in his introduction with the simple fairy-tale notion of his subtitle.38

His adaptation itself uses simple, often religious language—for example, Psyche’s suitors are ‘Wallfahrer’, pilgrims, while Psyche is ‘kirchenräuberisch’ (‘pilfering from churches’ (p. 28)) when she is worshipped instead of Venus. The focus is on the emotionally charged scenes: a lengthy passage describes Cupid’s rapture when Venus shows Psyche to him. Gods and humans reveal their feelings in lengthy monologues and are sensitive and emotional throughout, while Nature is in sympathy with Psyche. When Psyche cries in misery because she misses her family, Cupid in love promises her rashly whatever she desires, and repents immediately when she asks to see her family (pp. 5–8; on a similar motif in Wagner’s Lohengrin, see Section 13. When she breaks the taboo, it hits him hardest that she is mortal and he divine, and that he has broken his mother’s command (pp. 81–2). Unusually, neither her pregnancy nor her suicide attempts and her desire for revenge on her sisters are entirely suppressed, merely toned down; for example, the abstract goddess Nemesis drives Psyche’s revenge. It is, however, the personification Neugier, Curiosity, who finally drags Psyche before Venus (p. 111), and it is Venus’ handmaidens Angst and Herzeleid (Fear and Heartache) who torture her, as a clear adaptation of Apuleius’ personifications Sollicitudo and Tristities (Met. 6.9). Three of Psyche’s tasks are quite literally presented, but her descent into Hades instead becomes a gladdening of Hell. All Underworld creatures welcome the innocent girl and immediately help her with pleasure. As Persephone asks Sleep to carry her back to Earth, it is his presence, not the opening of the casket, which puts Psyche to sleep. After Cupid wakes her up, she confidently brings the casket to Venus and defiantly claims that she can do anything, since she is in love with Cupid, but is aware of her mortality. Venus’ anger melts away, and Jupiter makes Psyche immortal. Their child is born and called Wonne (‘delight’); the gender is, perhaps poignantly, not revealed, although the noun in German is feminine.39

Although the story stays fairly close to Apuleius, in his Nachwort (‘afterword’) Kosegarten claims that his text was inspired by Giambattista Marino’s L’Adone, which features an extensive inset tale based on C&P (p. 133; see Chapter 1 above), and that he had read Apuleius merely much later, and La Fontaine not at all. This may be a claim to Romantic originality, and the apology is significantly set in an afterword directed not immediately to his adored female addressee, but to his wider readership. The poem’s three parts follow closely Apuleius’ distribution of the story over three books.40 The sensuous narrative treats the story as a Kunstmärchen, an artistic fairy tale that can often be attributed to a specific author but written in a style to emulate oral fairy tales,41 whereas folk tales are seen as traditional and oral creations.42 This indicates the interest of scholars in the text and its alleged fairy-tale origins alongside courtly French and Italian literature, but with more scholarly ambition and envisaging a possible educated female readership such as was prominent in German Romantic circles. In 1796, Kosegarten returned to Psyche from a philosophical perspective with the small pamphlet (now lost) Eudämons Briefe an Psyche, oder Untersuchungen über das Urschöne, Urwahre und Urgute. (‘Eudämon’s letters to Psyche, or investigations of original beauty, truth and goodness’) (Leipzig 1796).43

A final example again combines Romanticism and fairy tale sensitivity with an interesting reading of the story. While a student in Göttingen, the young German poet and philologist Ernst Konrad Friedrich Schulze (1789–1817), influenced by Wieland (see below), whose Muses or rather Phantasy he evokes (1807: 160), wrote his Psyche: Ein griechisches Märchen in Sieben Büchern (‘A Greek Fairy Tale in Seven Books’) in 1807. It was published after his death in 1819.44 In an address to Wieland, Schulze acknowledges him as his inspiration, but calls the story itself a ‘Feenquelle der zauberischen Phantasie’ (‘a fairy fountain of magical phantasy’).

Schulze’s Psyche (often given the affectionately diminutive nickname ‘Psycharion’), like Wieland’s, grows up among shepherds, but Cupid magically abducts her and marries her, obsessed by her beauty. He forbids her to find out who he is, but in her lonely wanderings she encounters at his palace a statue of the goddess Jealousy, and in her crystal ball she sees herself next to a horrible ‘Drachen’ (‘dragon’) with a leonine head. Horrified, she intends to kill it, but wakes Cupid up via the Apuleian drop of oil. The plot continues closer to Apuleius’ text than Kosegarten’s, although it is occasionally Cupid himself who is made to help his desperate wife, a question still discussed in modern scholarship on Apuleius.45 When she opens Proserpina’s bottle (adapted from the original’s box, perhaps under the influence of Pandora’s jar), she sinks lifelessly to the ground, but then regains consciousness and throws herself into the sea, where she loses consciousness again. When she wakes up in Venus’ garden, she is greeted by the three Graces, including Aglaia, who reveals herself as her mother and Apollo as her father. This may be a learned echo of Martianus Capella and Boccaccio, who both make Psyche Apollo’s daughter.46 Venus welcomes and forgives her, and Cupid carries Psyche to Olympus to be his wife. What is called a fairy tale is again a contemplation of the immortality of the Soul and of how it is the object and creator of poetry.

5. The Anacreontics

The idea of Psyche’s innocence and naivety that needed to be instructed by a more experienced male teacher, originated by Prasch and showcased by Kosegarten, was a key element of another subgroup in her reception. Psyche played a surprising part in the poetry of the eighteenth-century Anacreontic movement, where she became an incarnation of maidenly innocence set free from Apuleius’ plot and philosophy, rather than an active participant in a complete love story. The Anacreontics were inspired by the poems of Horace and his Greek predecessor Anacreon,47 and driven by the poetic engagement with Roman poetry and artwork that became popular in Germany at the time. Anacreontic poetry, associated with Protestant Prussia, provides an interesting link to Prasch’s ideology and also involves scholarly engagement with classical literature.48 Various girls inspired by Horace’s poems, e.g. Lalage (Hor. Odes 1.22; Gleim’s ‘An Lalage’n’), become the focus of Anacreontic delight in love, life, and wine, all set in playful Rococo landscapes populated by shepherds and shepherdesses full of Epicurean enjoyment of the present. Psyche is the idealized counterpart to the more sexually available Horatian girls in this type of poetry, and rarely the destined lover of Cupid in a form a reader of Apuleius would recognize.

Heavily inspired by classical scholars and philologists, Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim (1719–1803) was an influential poet of the German Enlightenment; he moved in high Prussian circles and served the Prussian crown.49 His Anacreontic Psyche is an innocent teasing young girl—for example, in the poem ‘Psyche’, where she herds her sheep and coquettishly steals Cupid’s weapons. His cycle of twenty-five poems Amor und Psyche (1796)50 lets the lovers grow up while interacting with each other and other members of the Greek Pantheon—Cupid is mischievous and intent on making his arrows, Psyche is full of love. Psyche’s character, accompanied by Graces and Muses, inspires the poet, but remains static. This Psyche is herself an artist who, among other things, embroiders and writes, which makes her attractive to Cupid. Psyche is both inspiration for and inspired by poets. As the plot is not dependent on Apuleius, Cupid’s warning to Psyche not to touch his arrows so as not to give herself a deadly wound51 is not ironic, although an allusion to Met. 5.23 is possible. The short poems include poetic manifestos for the ideas of Sensibility (Empfindsamkeit) and classicism.52

Though Gleim’s Anacreontic poems were not universally admired, they attracted contemporary composers, such as Beethoven, who set them to music;53he was also the mentor of, for example, Johann Heinrich Voss (1751–1826), a classicist and poet whose translations of Homer are still held in high regard today. Gleim and his fellow-Anacreontic Jacobi (below) enjoyed writing fictional poetic letters to each other, in which the two described their admiration for a fictitious young and innocent Psyche who serves as their Muse and inspiration.54 The Anacreontic Psyche is a highly literary product of poets’ creative engagement with the classical world, who lives alongside the Muses on Parnassus, whereas Apuleius is sidelined.

Gleim’s fellow Anacreontic Johann Georg Jacobi (1740–1814) was a poet and philosopher, and professor at the University of Freiburg in 1784;55 his younger brother Friedrich Heinrich was a friend of Goethe’s, who disliked J. G. Jacobi’s poetry and called it only of interest to women (not a compliment). J. G. Jacobi’s poetic cycle ‘Der Schmetterling nebst drey Liedern’ (‘The butterfly and three songs’ (1772)) moves into sentimentalism rather than Anacreontism, and furthermore displays some interest in Platonism; it arose out of conversations with Wieland and his influential ‘muse’ Maria Sophie von La Roche (née Gutermann von Gutershofen (1730–1807), herself a writer). She was initially engaged to Wieland but married von La Roche during one of the former’s absences; see below).56 The songs explain the immortality of the soul to a dying young girl; Psyche is associated with the beautiful death of a young maiden, and the symbol of the butterfly is explained as the explicit ancient token of immortality.57 Here as in Jacobi’s previous Anacreontic phase the inspiration may have come from art such as gemstones rather than from Apuleius’ text (see Chapter 4 for further gemstone inspired poems),58 but the philosophical subtext is of course already present in the Latin novel (see Chapter 1). The internal audience, the protagonist, and the intended audience of the poems, Sophie von La Roche, who served as recipient and inspiration of these rather morbid poems, and one of whose daughters Jacobi courted unsuccessfully,59 are all female. They are explicitly imagined as recipients of this poetry,60 which moves beyond any inspiration from fine art and becomes a free-standing literary text, which shares with Apuleius’ C&P its heroine, her katabasis, and the author’s Platonist ideal of the immortality of the soul, but little else.

6. Wieland’s Psyches

This version of a classical and Romantic Psyche finds its most memorable incarnation in the work of the dramatist and novelist Christoph Martin Wieland (1733–1813), who himself was influenced by the French fairy tales and adapted several fairy tales, including Giambattista Basile’s ‘Pervonto’ in 1778–9, into his own verse narratives.61 He was deeply interested in Greece and Rome throughout his life, especially in Lucian, and translated the Lucianic Onos into German in 1798, making the ass story available in German for the first time since Sieder’s and Rode’s translations of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses (see above).62 He argued that ‘Loukios of Patrae’ must have expanded on the Onos story, since Lucian (whom he believed to the author of the Onos) would be incapable of plagiarizing another author. This theory, no longer accepted now, was influential in his day.63

Wieland’s various Psyches are comparable to the playful use of Psyche in the Anacreontics but are also indebted to his interest in philosophy and reflect elements from the rest of Apuleian’s novel as well as from C&P. Wieland delighted in (Greek) antiquity, and all his work was steeped in its appreciation; Goethe admired his idealistic portraits of Greece. Throughout his writings, he combined Platonism with Hedonism, and also with a good dose of Socratic irony.64

Wieland’s ‘Bruckstücke von Psyche, einem unvollendet gebliebenen allegorischen Gedichte’ (‘Fragments of Psyche, an allegorical poem that remains incomplete’) was written over a number of years and finally published by him in 1767,65 after some parts of the original composition had been integrated into various other works—for example, his famous verse narrative ‘Musarion’.66 Wieland’s preface, where he explains the context of his fragments, explicitly refers to Apuleius’ Milesian Tale and the Golden Ass, and Apuleian influences are notable: his Psyche is an innocent girl who, as soon as she falls in love with a young man, is kidnapped by Zephyrus to the realm of Cupid; Cupid himself is split by Wieland into two half-brothers, one more sensual, the other Platonic, which may recall Apuleius’ own representation of two types of Venus in his novel and philosophy, themselves based on Plato’s Symposium.67 The Bruchstücke are set specifically into the context of the reception of the Latin text, which, so Wieland claimed in the preface, had captured his imagination since his early youth, and the image of Psyche is a dream of his own love, that, whenever he tried to grasp it in his arms, would fly away and escape, an allusion to his lost love La Roche as well as possibly to the ghost of Aeneas’ wife Creusa in Aeneid 2.792–6.68 He calls his incomplete fragment a ‘zart gesponnene[s] psychologische[s] Feenmährchen[s]’, a ‘tenderly spun psychological fairy tale’ (Wieland 1795a: 200).

Just as Apuleius features C&P as an inset tale, so does Wieland. The context is the love felt by the handsome Zoroastrian priest Alkahest, who tells the story to his admired Aspasia II, a priestess of Diana in Ekbatana, which sets the story in the fifth century bce (Fragment II).69 Fragment I associates the story with, among other authors, Plato and Hermes Trismegistos, who also claimed to write fairy tales. There are elements of Longus and reminiscences of Anacreontic idylls (see above), as Psyche, a foundling of unknown origins, grows up alongside a young shepherd. Later when the adolescent girl is in love with a lowly shepherd (Fragment III), she is whisked away by Zephyrus to a beautiful palace full of incorporeal voices. Now this allegory of the human soul is all curiosity. She meets a beautiful stranger by a fountain and falls in love with him immediately, but ‘like a sister’. When she hears music and strange voices, she does not see anyone, but she guesses that the creature near her is Cupid, the ‘most beautiful of all the gods’, the god of Love. Indeed, Cupid’s invisibility is not caused by his mother’s command, but (Platonically) by Psyche’s unpreparedness for full revelations. After the Graces prepare her for marriage, Cupid visits her in her sleep and admires her beauty at length, in an inversion of Apuleius’ narrative, where it is Psyche who admires the sleeping Cupid’s perfect body (Met. 5.21–2), a modification popular in this time and later, see Chapter 4 (Tighe) and Chapter 5 (Morris).70Wieland’s Cupid leaves her a virgin, since he is the Platonic god and feels no erotic attraction to her.

That is where the plot breaks off, but Wieland seems to suggest that there are two kinds of Cupid/Love, half-brothers and opposites in nature, one wisdom-loving and appreciative of the soul’s beauty, the other a connoisseur of physical love. As Wieland’s poem ends abruptly, we never learn how he would have solved the conundrum of the complicated family relationships and Psyche’s marriage to one of two gods that he originally seems to have had in mind. The plot is coloured by its Platonist and philosophical context, and very freely adapted from Apuleius, but shows some knowledge of the novel as a whole. For example, the goddess Isis, who plays a major role in the last book of Apuleius’ Golden Ass, is Psyche’s mother.71 Psyche (inspired by Wieland’s then fiancée La Roche) is both innocent and sensitive (empfindsam), as well as transcendental. The transition from fairy tale to high literature is fluid, and yet again it is the female influence on the author that leads to the focus on Psyche as their protagonist.

In the same year of 1767, Wieland also published the Bildungsroman (‘novel of development’) Geschichte des Agathon (‘The story of Agathon’), which especially in its happy ending shows some similarities with the Greek novels.72 It has two parts and, like the Metamorphoses, eleven books. In this novel Wieland combines elements of Anacreontism and sentimentalism, and describes his own intellectual development, but disguises this thinly by setting the novel in the historical context of the fifth and fourth centuries bce. It traces the life of Agathon, a young Platonic idealist,73 his philosophical education, and his idealized and innocent first love for Psyche (in his youth, a Platonic longing) and then for Danae, a courtesan trained by Aspasia74 (an enthusiastic and sentimental shared erotic relationship), whom Wieland describes as a ‘sittliche Venus’ (a ‘moral Venus’).

Agathon experiences several changes in his philosophical and religious directions. In 1.7.1, for example, he undergoes an initiation into Orphism under the direction of the Egyptian priest Theogiton, which echoes the initiations of Lucius in Met. 11, and experiences several epiphanies of the full Moon and Apollo. Wieland’s satirical streak comes to the fore then, as it is Theogiton, lusting after the beautiful Agathon and dressed up as Apollo, not the god himself, who speaks to Agathon. This leads to a crisis in faith for Agathon, and a turn towards Platonism. Greek novelistic love rivals appear, as the Pythia too falls in love with the 18-year-old Agathon.75

It is only when Agathon flees for Corinth (just as Lucius flees to Corinth’s harbour Cenchreae at the end of Met. 10) that he is recognized (again recalling ancient comedies or novels) by his father Stratonicus as an Athenian citizen, long lost to his family because of tragic circ*mstances (1.7.5). Like Chaereas in Chariton’s Kallirhoe, he becomes a universally admired young leader of armies until he has to leave Athens because of his rivals’ jealousy. His passionate affair with the beautiful Danae is destroyed in 2.8.1–4 by the sceptic Hippias, who had brought them together as a philosophical experiment,76 when Hippias reveals to Agathon that she is a hetaira, a lover of Alcibiades (c.450–404 bce) and Cyrus the Younger (who died 401 bce at the Battle of Cunaxa) as well as of Hippias himself, who had orchestrated their love. Agathon moves to Syracuse, where he hopes to find his idealized Psyche again. In Sicily, Agathon is more successful than Plato in turning the tyrant Dionysius towards philosophy (2.9.5).77 At this stage, Agathon looks like the Vatican Apollo, plays the cithara for Dionysius (see Apollonius King of Tyre 16) and gives displays of philosophical and rhetorical skill, until, two years later, he backs the wrong woman in Dionysius’ erotic adventures, loses his influence, and becomes a pragmatist (2.10.3). He moves to Tarentum, ruled by a friendly Pythagorean, Archytas, in whose female quarters Agathon spots his long-lost love Psyche, recently married to Archytas’ son.

Agathon now realizes that Psyche is in fact his own sister, like him separated from their parents at birth because of their tragic (or rather New Comedy) love story. Finally, a storm drives Agathon and his brother-in-law to a lonely farmhouse, where a single lady lives virtuously by herself. This turns out to be Danae, retired from her previous profession, whom Agathon recognizes as the mistress of the farmhouse as soon as he sees statues of her in the hall. Danae’s servant in turn recognizes Agathon. Danae and Psyche become friends, but we are left to guess the inescapable happy ending.

The novel features two Psyches; the first is a little pantomime dancer in 1.4.5, who enacts the story of Apollo and Daphne, and whom Agathon, enthusiastic and oversensitive (empfindsam) as he is, imagines to be similar in appearance and name to his lost love Psyche (1.4.6). The main Psyche of the story is more Anacreontic, however: a temple servant alongside Agathon in Apollo’s temple in Delphi, three or four years younger than the then 18-year-old Agathon (1.7.2–4), who believes her to resemble Diana (a Greek novel trope: Heliodorus’ heroine Charicleia, for example, dresses as Artemis in Delphi (Hld. 3.4), and in the novel’s first scene (Hld. 1.2)). Both their origins are uncertain, their love develops slowly in Delphi but remains chaste, echoing Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe, but they are separated when Agathon flees Delphi, and again after a very short accidental reunion on the road, thanks to robbers and shipwrecks. The flashback telling Psyche’s backstory in 2.11.3 features storms, pirates, and a shipwreck (further Greek novel tropes), where she was the only one saved, as Zephyrus blows Psyche on a plank on to land where a fisherman and his wife take her in (with possible echoes of La Fontaine, see Chapter 2). The wife turns out to be Psyche’s former nurse, and she recognizes her because of a token (necklace) and similarities with her dead mother Musarion. Psyche’s real name turns out to be Philoclea.

It is clear that this Psyche shares some similarities with the protagonist of the Bruchst ü cke in her naivety, beauty, and story, but she is not a goddess and child of Isis, but the offspring of an ill-starred love between two Athenians. In either text, however, she is desirable and to an extent sexually available, yet ultimately not the destined lover of the protagonist but a Platonic ideal: the Cupid in Bruchst ü cke leaves her and perhaps his half-brother might become her bridegroom, while Agathon’s love for her is Platonic in several ways. Whereas Agathon’s mind is allowed to grow and change, Psyche remains a stagnant yet beautiful ideal,78 both allegory and a focus for female identification. Despite this divergence from Apuleius’ story, there are, as shown above, several echoes from C&P (e.g. the clever use of Zephyrus), the Metamorphoses (Theogiton as priest), and other ancient novels, employed freely and mischievously to form a novel of development. This recognition of ancient plot elements is deliberate: both men and women are Wieland’s expected readers and well versed in antiquity, having already read Horace, Ovid, Martial, Petronius, Apuleius, and perhaps Aristophanes (2.8.5–7), and who could therefore enjoy Wieland’s playful non-love between Agathon and his Psyche.

For Wieland, Psyche continues to be the synonym for an unavailable, forbidden object of love. In 1774 he published the poem ‘Die erste Liebe. An Psyche’ (also titled ‘An Psyche. Die Quelle der Vergessenheit’ (‘The first love. To Psyche’ or ‘To Psyche. The fountain of forgetfulness’)). It passionately addresses Psyche as a friend and was published for a young friend’s engagement. Wieland again works through his failed engagement with La Roche but sublimates it and reminisces about the non-consummation of his love for her, while suggesting that the engaged couple will find love with each other.79

Like others (e.g. Kosegarten, Johann Gottfried Herder, Caroline Flachsland, and further members of their circle), Wieland uses the character of Psyche in an autobiographical manner to discuss his own love, clearly encouraged by the eighteenth century’s reluctance to associate C&P with its morally suspect creator Apuleius.80 His own idealized, Platonic, and unfulfilled love, especially with La Roche, is reflected in his innocent and unavailable Psyche(s) in novels and poems. The interest of learned writers in Platonism and sensitivity we have seen in Wieland lead to a specific interest in the femininity of Psyche beyond Anacreontic playfulness.

7. Herder and his Circle: Sturm und Drang and Classicism

At the same time, German classicism, itself intrinsically linked with scholarly exploration of antiquity, discovered the C&P story for itself. Wieland, as noted above, had profound knowledge of the classics. His friend Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) is of crucial importance in the reception of C&P in Germany, and, alongside his friend Sophie von La Roche (see above), in many ways its fulcrum.81 A Protestant theologian, philosopher, poet and literary critic, he was later part of the Weimar Circle (alongside Wieland, Goethe, and Schiller) and influenced Goethe’s interest in classical Greek and Latin texts and English novels, as well as his early writings.

Alongside the young Goethe and Schiller, Herder became a major proponent of Sturm und Drang in the 1770s, a German continuation of and response to the Enlightenment, which tried to break with constraining bourgeois literary rules for the sake of a more emotional approach driven by individuals who felt themselves at one with nature.82 Greece was preferred over Rome, and Homer, Pindar, and Shakespeare became the literary heroes of writers who admired Originalgenies (‘original geniuses’) above all for their natural talents. Together with Goethe and Schiller, Herder influenced the foundation of classicism in Weimar, when he turned towards a thorough study of the human soul as the driver of literature and imagination. His philosophy was a deeply felt humanism aiming to make the human soul strive towards its divine nature, in a cult of the genius (Geniekult).

Herder also had long friendships with Gleim and Jacobi, and met Angelika Kauffmann on travels in Italy in 1788–9. Kauffmann had spent fifteen years in London (1766–81) before moving back to Rome, where she found fame. Some of her Cupid and Psyche themed works show a focus on the feminine experience and gaze (see Fig. 3), while at the same time desexualizing it. Kauffmann herself was then identified by Herder as a schöne Seele, a ‘beautiful soul’, a description she shared with Herder’s wife.83 Again, both Psyche and female creators of her images become idealized, similarly to Wieland’s pure and idealized Psyche in Agathon.

Herder’s wife, Maria Karoline Herder née Flachsland,84 was another influential member of his circle; she supported him throughout his life and edited his works after his death. She was nicknamed ‘Psyche’, his sensitive (empfindsame) soul, during their courtship85 and became the object of Psyche poems by Goethe and Johann Heinrich Merck in addition to Herder, who, for example, directed his poem ‘An Psyche’ to her during their courtship. Herder himself had treated the subject from a scholarly perspective and referred to her as ‘Psyche’ from their earliest correspondence. Goethe’s 1772 poem ‘Fels-Weihegesang ǀ An Psyche’ (‘Rock-consecration song ǀ to Psyche’), addressed to Flachsland and less inspired by Apuleius and his location of Psyche on a rock for a marriage to death in Met. 4.35 than by Flachsland herself and her love for the specific landscape he places her in, describes Psyche’s longing for her absent lover. This was a clear allusion to the engagement between Flachsland and Herder; the latter reacted rather negatively.86 Even so, it is remarkable that the title ‘Psyche’ is given to women who were active participants in these literary circles, women who themselves wrote novels or poems, perhaps as an indication of their creative souls. One of the very few love stories from antiquity where the woman has a more active role to play than the man must have offered these women recognition and encouragement.87

It was mostly due to Herder, a classical scholar and Protestant priest, that allusions to Psyche were linked in his circle with Apuleius as well as with art. Remarkably, Herder disliked Apuleius’ version of the story, which he saw as a degenerate and late version of a lost and noble Greek narrative that Apuleius had merely cobbled together, fairy-tale style, an idea that had considerable influence on contemporary and future German scholarship on the novel.88 To him, Apuleius cannot be the original author of this gentle allegory on the experiences of the Soul after death, but merely a vandal who turned it into an indecent fairy tale. Involved as he was in contemporary literary circles, Herder’s influence on writers attempting to get to the bottom of the lost Greek myth of Love and the Soul, for which Apuleius was merely a late and degenerate source, was immense. Herder composed a few epigrams that reflect this Platonic concept of winged Love himself:

Critics of this approach were very few—for example, the philologist Johann Kaspar Friedrich Manso (1760–1826; a literary enemy of Schiller and Goethe) criticized Herder’s approach and its reliance on Fulgentius’ doubtful report of Aristophontes as the original writer of the story, as all witnesses to the story of Cupid and Psyche are later than Apuleius.90 Apuleius is then rehabilitated as author and philosopher, who himself composed this allegory of Plato’s portrait of the soul purified by suffering.

Herder’s focus lay elsewhere. The butterfly as an image of the departing soul (‘psyche’ in Greek means both) is a common metaphor in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and universal knowledge, as the influential Enlightenment poet and critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–81) claims in his 1769 study ‘Wie die Alten den Tod gebildet’ (‘How the ancients portrayed death’). His answer is that death is portrayed as a winged youth with an extinguished torch and crossed legs, in some ways resembling Cupid, often with images of a butterfly as the soul of the departed nearby. Herder responded to Lessing in 1774 (revised in 1786) with a pamphlet of the same title in seven ‘letters’ or chapters, in which he contextualizes and problematizes Lessing’s argument.91 Especially in the ‘Fifth Letter’, Herder focuses on Roman imagery portraying Psyche, butterflies, and Cupid with a raised torch in the context of death that may merge the iconography of Lessing’s Death and Cupid, and retells Apuleius’ story with focus on the elements in the story that resemble death imagery—for example, Psyche’s first marriage to death, or her katabasis. Herder therefore was familiar with the idea that Cupid and death are closely associated in their iconography, and saw in Apuleius’ story allegories of death, in his mind merging images of death and Amor with his torch. A sense of the Platonist immortality of the soul makes Herder’s interest compatible with his profession as pastor.

Many eighteenth-century poets enjoyed the C&P story because of its imagery of death of a maiden and resurrection, the marriage to death complex.92 Contemporary grave art for young girls and women displayed Psyche imagery, echoing its presence on Roman sarcophagi often used for children.93 Herder is no exception, as his poems on statues of C&P on a tombstone show. His poem ‘Amor und Psyche’ exists in three versions, all of which sensuously portray the two lovers embracing in death and turning into stone.94 The poem is clearly inspired by and about a pair of statues, perhaps similar to the Capitoline group (see Fig. 4)95—the subtitle of the version published in 1800 in Schiller’s Musen-Almanach is ‘Eine berühmte Gruppe’ (‘a famous group’).96 His ‘Amor und Psyche auf einem Grabmal’ (‘Cupid and Psyche on a tombstone’)97 makes it clear that the couple was given this metamorphosis as special favour by an angel and placed on a grave as its marker to allow them to be safely united forever.98

8. The Brothers Grimm and the German Fairy Tale

Herder studied ancient texts from an aesthetic perspective, and wrote influential treatises on, for example, Shakespeare, ‘Ossian’, and the German language, but also collected German Volksdichtung (‘folk poetry’), published in 1773 as Stimmen der Völker in ihren Liedern (‘Voices of peoples in their songs’).99 He was interested in the nature and characteristics of all peoples and nations, which he believed were all of equal value, though defined by their specific Volksseele (soul of the people). Herder’s beliefs in tolerance and cultural identities were influential on Romanticism, and found expression, among other things, in the works of folklorists and collectors of fairy tales, including the poet Clemens Brentano (1778–1842) and the Brothers Grimm.100 Like them, Herder was fascinated by fairy tales and their function in early education, a focus specifically of German fairy tales written during Romanticism.

The idea of the Volksseele as the origin of fairy tales is nowadays very much questioned by folklorists; Bottigheimer, for example, traces the development of fairy tales via printed books through Europe.101 The stories of the Brothers Grimm were no exception:

Many of the German Romantic writers, from Novalis to Brentano, in the last decade of the eighteenth century wrote fairy tales themselves. Albert Ludwig Grimm (1789–1872), no relation of the Brothers Grimm but a collaborator of Brentano, published in Frankfurt in 1824 ‘Das Märchen von der schönen Psyche’ in his first volume of his Mährchen der alten Griechen und Römer. Grimm103 attempts to bring out the fairy-tale elements of the story, and, for example, includes many more animal helpers. His frequent bird messengers include a dove and a yellow sparrow, and the helpers during Psyche’s tasks are animals grateful because Psyche had saved them, including a butterfly that was actually an Underworld demon (and thus an intertextually interesting animal to pick for Grimm’s Psyche to engage with rather than herself descending into the Underworld, as her Apuleian counterpart does in Met. 6.18–19) and whom she had rescued from an owl, and two bats, one of which is helpful, the other dangerous. The end is very much rewritten: after Cupid catches the dangerous bat and entraps it in Psyche’s box, he carries Psyche into their palace. He gives up his wings and becomes a human for her sake, while she is alive on earth. In a complete inversion of Apuleius’ happy ending, there is no child, and no apotheosis, so after Psyche’s death Cupid moves back to the world of the gods.

While these kinds of fairy tales were unashamedly artistic and literary (Kunstmärchen),104 the Grimm Brothers focused on another kind of fairy tale, simpler and based on what they believed to be traditional oral narratives told to them and their friends in person by various local women, written down in a simple and ‘popular’ style in several editions between 1812 and 1857. Nevertheless, French fairy tales (see Chapter 2) are the more likely sources for what the Grimms believed their young and old German storytellers had heard orally in their nurseries.105 The Grimms’ idea that folk tales had remained unchanged for centuries before they were written up by them is now seen as more and more problematic.106 While the fairy tales of the mostly female French authors were generally seen as primarily literary achievements (Kunstmärchen), the German tales gathered most prominently by the Grimms were, in line with the more Romantic approach taken by the brothers, seen as derived directly from the Volksseele (‘the people’s shared soul’) and Volksmärchen (‘the people’s fairy tales’), the supposed outpouring of ‘natural poetry’ (Naturpoesie, a term the Grimms had borrowed from Herder, whose own collection of German fairy tales was an important influence).107 These tales, they believed, had no origin in one creative author, but arose long before they were written down and were transmitted orally. Accordingly they did not note down any of their tales’ authorship.108 This included several tales resembling C&P.

Wilhelm Grimm, according to Fehling, who has done seminal work on this issue,109 saw de Villeneuve’s version of ‘La Belle et la Bête’ (see Chapter 2, Section 4) as the most basic form of the story, but not its origin. The Grimm Brothers started collecting fairy tales in 1807, and Fehling, among others in his wake, has shown that their versions of fairy tales that resemble Beauty and the Beast derive from the written versions of fairy tales, most of them from the eighteenth century.110 C&P leaves several traces. In one of the earliest fairy tales they collected, ‘Prinz Schwan’, the prince is transformed into a swan, and the girl who loves him fails in the task he has set her to hold on to the end of a ball of wool; when she lets go, he flies away and marries another woman. In the end, it takes the girl three nights with him to gain him back.

First published in 1815, the beast in Dorothea Wild’s Das singende, klingende L ö weneckerchen (‘The singing, springing lark’)111 is a lion, and the story follows ‘La Belle et La Bête’ fairly closely. A father of three daughters is asked by his youngest to bring her a ‘singing, springing lark’ from a trip, and when he tries to catch one on his way back, a lion jumps out and threatens him. The lion lets him go under the promise that he would be sent the first thing that the man meets on his way back. That is his youngest daughter (echoes of the biblical Jephthah’s daughter, Book of Judges 11), who dutifully moves to the lion’s castle. The lion becomes a man every night, and they are happily married, until the youngest girl attends the weddings of her two sisters with the lion, and, despite his warning against letting any candlelight touch him (a variation on Psyche’s lamp) and the girl trying to prevent it, a tiny beam of light transforms her lion husband into a dove for seven years. The girl has to follow it and undergo several difficult magical tasks until, in the end, she is reunited with her husband after three nights of testing.

‘Das singende, klingende Bäumchen’ (‘The little singing ringing tree’) from 1801, from the anonymous book Braunschweiger Feenmärchen, is the first popular and widely spread adaptation of C&P, and the Grimms’ ‘Löweneckerchen’ story connects the 1801 tale through their scholarly annotations back to Apuleius, accusing de Villeneuve of adapting the ancient source ‘badly’.112 The Grimms’ and other German approaches to the fairy tale focus less on the love story (as the French writers had) and more on the magical aspects. Warner113 stresses the importance of the female gender of the storyteller in the Apuleian original, the old crone, whose point of view can be seen through Psyche and Charite and gives the story a feminine voice and focus, which in turn matched the French female writers’ own voice.114 This cannot be said for the nineteenth-century versions collected by the Grimm Brothers, which therefore are not the focus of Warner’s magisterial book. Many German fairy tales can, however, be traced back to French versions: Allerleirauh, published in 1812 and based on Dorothea Wild’s story,115 is the Grimms’ version of Peau d’Âne, and the taboo of incest in it may well be inspired by another ancient novel, the Historia Apollonii Regis Tyri.116 Consequently, many of these tales can be shown to derive from literary ancestors rather than the Volksseele. Altogether, thirteen German early fairy tales seem to be based on C&P.117

Grimms’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen (‘Household tales’ (1812)) become successively didactic in nature with their re-editions and were used more and more in the education of German children.118 Dorothea Viehmann is the woman to whom the Brothers Grimm attributed many of their tales, claiming her to be the voice of the people. But she was not a peasant but the wife of a tailor, and her stories show influence from French literary texts.119 Alongside the insistence of earlier German authors on calling their adaptations of C&P fairy tales (Schulze, Kosegarten), finding elements of French versions of C&P in her stories as presented by the Grimms is therefore not unsurprising.

There is furthermore evidence of another literary influence on the Brothers Grimm. They included summaries and adaptations of Giambattista Basile’s Lo c*nto de li c*nti (‘The Tale of Tales’ (1634–36)), deceptively simple fairy tales written in Neapolitan dialect by a learned poet and well-connected courtier, in the second edition (1822) of their work,120 and that collection also included stories derived from Cupid and Psyche (see Chapter 1 Section 4: (‘Il catenaccio’ (‘The Padlock’) and ‘Tronco d’oro’ (‘The Golden Trunk’)); C&P motifs appear in further tales.121 Basile’s stories also formed the basis of some of Perrault’s French fairy tales.122 The Grimm Brothers’ versions of Basile’s tales were more romantic and magical, with much of Basile’s sexual colour and sordidness suppressed. Jacob Grimm, in his Vorrede (Preface) to their Basile translation, saw the link to C&P quite clearly.123 Via Basile, C&P made its way into the fairy tales of much of Europe.124 Basile’s adaptations of Psyche125 are deliberately earthy; the protagonists are human, and their love is not the eternal search of the Soul for the Divine, but mere lust. They stress the lovers’ invisibility and the girl’s quests. The Grimms’ adaptations give Basile’s story a more fairy-tale-like colour by omitting the names of some characters, toning down any sexual references, and changing the dramatis personae to more recognizably fairy-tale professions, such as ogresses to witches. Here we will summarize and discuss the Grimms’ versions of two of Basile’s tales and highlight the differences.

‘The Padlock’, adapted by the Grimms as ‘The Little Magic Box’ (‘Das Zauberkästchen’), a more poetic title, is the ninth tale of the second day in Basile’s Boccaccio-type structure.126 It turns Cupid into the son of a queen, and Psyche, pointedly named Luciella by Basile but nameless in the Grimms’ version, into the youngest daughter of a poor woman who follows a servant to an underground palace and encounters a lover at night in the darkness. The sisters’ deceit is changed from telling the youngest girl to murder her unknown husband in Apuleius to opening a magic box or padlock after hearing the truth from a witch (an ogress in Basile), but the opening still leads to the couple’s separation as the girl cries out at the wondrous small ladies that emerge from the box, which wakes up her lover; the girl wanders the world until she is reunited with her lover in a royal palace that turns out to belong to his mother (echoes of Venus) after giving birth to their baby son. Her lover is freed from the curse, which has no clear origins in the Grimms’ version, but is that of an ogress in Basile, put on him when all the roosters in the country are killed on order of the queen, and the queen embraces him as her long-lost son. The story is devoid of real love between the couple and focuses instead on love between mother and son (queen and prince), and father and son (prince and his and the girl’s baby). The girl is passive and in despair during most of her story, which is driven to its happy ending by the actions of others.

‘The Golden Trunk’, the fourth tale of the fifth day and summarised as ‘Der Goldene Baumstamm’ by the Grimms,127 tells the story of Parmetella (named in both versions), who chops down a tree with golden leaves and finds a passage to an underground palace underneath, where a young man (Basile specifies he is a slave; the Grimms’ version is more romantic) offers her a bed. In the dark of night, unbeknown to her, he turns into a handsome young man and sleeps with her. On their second night Parmetella lights a candle to see his beauty and discovers his identity, and he abandons her angrily since he will now be cursed for seven more years. Parmetella undertakes many magical labours reminiscent of Venus’ tasks and of Psyche’s journey to the Underworld, on the advice of an enchantress (a fairy in Basile; the Grimms made their version more mysterious and powerful). Her lover, now named as Thunder-and-Lightning, helps her. During her last task, driven by her curiosity, she opens the box given to her by an ogress, and again Thunder-and-Lightning (identified as an ogre too in Basile, but a mere handsome man in the Grimms’ version) needs to come to her aid after telling her off for her curiosity. His mother has arranged a wedding for him with an unsuitable bride, and during the feast he kills his bride in exasperation at her loose morals, and sleeps with Parmetella instead. His horrible mother cannot prevent their love and kills herself. The violence is considerably toned down in the Grimms’ version.

Praet offers a close comparison between Apuleius’ and Basile’s two tales.128 Not only are the plot lines similar, but both authors also employ framing narratives, where the stories are told as oral tales to their primary female listeners: Princess Zoza in Basile (and the Grimms’ adaptation), Charite in Apuleius. Both storytellers weave elements of the frame narrative into their tales: Zoza’s prince is cursed to fall asleep, and the girls in both Apuleius’ and Basile’s stories break taboos involving their sleeping lovers. Zoza and the three girls in the tales, like Psyche, need to undergo several tests and tribulations to regain their male beloveds.

It seems clear that Basile adapted Apuleius’ tale and that his adaptations were in turn adapted by the Brothers Grimm. Basile’s versions are earlier and earthier than the French tales and clearly marked out as traditional fairy tales; this might explain the Grimms’ reluctance to see the more literary French tales as valid origins of their own stories. The Grimms’ adaptations and the availability of literary sources indicate clearly that they were aware of the tale’s Latin ancestry, though their adaptation of Basile’s Neapolitan fairy tales might lend a folk veneer to their endeavour. This might also explain their insistence on the folk origins of C&P stories, despite their better knowledge, as they had French and Italian sources reworking the same plot at their disposal. Their fairy tales are literary creations based on French Beauty and the Beast tales, Basile, and his predecessor Giovanni Francesco Straparola (c.1485–1558, thus out of the timeframe of our analysis), all of which ultimately go back to Cupid and Psyche.129

Basile’s influence on the German Romantics stretched beyond the Brothers Grimm; as noted above, his ‘Pervonto’ was translated by Wieland in 1778–9, and, aware of the literary origins of at least some fairy tales, the brothers popularized the form of the Kunstmärchen. ‘Brentano [see above on links with Herder] contends that Basile composed an essentially literary interpretation of oral folk tales, whereas the Grimms emphasize the oral nature of Basile’s book.’130 Brentano saw Basile’s tales as manifestations of Kunstmärchen, and adapted Basile: he used some of his tales in his Italienische Märchen (‘Italian fairy tales’) (written 1805–11, published 1846–7), not including the two obviously Apuleian tales but adapting ‘La mortella’ (‘The myrtle’), which has some motifs taken from Cupid and Psyche.131 It becomes clear that the Brothers Grimms’ fairy tales and those of their contemporaries were ultimately based on written rather than oral sources, some of which ultimately go back to Apuleius’ story.132 Via Basile and the French tales, C&P was fundamental to German fairy tales and literary responses to them.

9. The Soul as Myth: Antiquarianism and Philology

A redefinition of ancient mythology with a focus on cultural identity became an intellectual pursuit in the second half of the eighteenth century—for example, with Herder, who as we have seen was also a major influence on the Grimms’ antiquarianism. Herder’s circle thought that reception of mythology should not be merely passively allusive and transposed into a more modern costume, but that the material should be re-energised, used as an inspiration to create ‘new’ myths themselves, based on German idealism and Romanticism. This innovation of a new mythology for a new time could make excellent use of C&P, because the story itself was so obviously late and a composite of earlier literary stories and philosophies, and, as they thought, of Greek rather than Roman origin.

This Romantic approach to Greek origins and antiquarianism was combined with serious classical research. The philosopher and poet Julius Graf von Soden (1754–1831),133 in his Psyche. Ein Mährchen in vier Büchern: ein Versuch zu Erklärung der Mythen des Alterthums (‘Psyche. A fairy tale in four books. An attempt to explain the myths of antiquity’ (1801)) combines fairy tale, mystery cults and myth in his explanation of Cupid and Psyche. His treatise contains a complete translation of the text and engages with Apuleius, La Fontaine, and Kosegarten in detail. He focuses on the femininity of Psyche’s character and its suitability as a metaphor for the soul, claiming for the story an underlying philosophical and mystery cult subtext that underpins much of mythology.

Several eminent classicists drove the reception of C&P in Germany throughout the whole of the nineteenth century and themselves influenced many artistic responses, since scholars and poets moved in the same circles. Apart from Herder, they include, among many others,134 the Heidelberg professor of Classical Philology Georg Friedrich Creuzer,135 the influential essayist Karl Philipp Moritz,136 the Königsberg philologist Ludwig Friedländer,137 and the philologist and friend of Goethe, Carl August Böttiger.138 All of them studied Psyche broadly as an ancient image of the human soul, founded on early Greek mysteries and later merely adapted by Apuleius and simplified into a fairy-tale narrative. The idea that the story of Psyche is ultimately based on ancient mystery cults remained a noticeable strand in German scholarship on Apuleius’ text and found its most prominent proponent in Reinhold Merkelbach’s influential Roman und Mysterium in der Antike (1962), where he argues that most ancient novels are initiation texts and fairy tales bowdlerized versions of these.139

Moritz, a close friend of Goethe’s after 1786, was influenced by Gleim, Wieland and especially August von Rode, who edited some of Moritz’s works. His important study Götterlehre (1791; 2018) climaxes in a summary of Apuleius’ Cupid and Psyche, noting their wedding, but ignoring Psyche’s pregnancy and the birth of Voluptas. His explanation of Psyche’s character echoes contemporary sensibilities: Psyche with her butterfly wings is a ‘zartes geistiges Wesen’, a ‘tender spiritual creature’ that emerges out of a rough chrysalis and, too beautiful for this world, is refined for a higher existence and wedded to Cupid. The name, Moritz explains, means butterfly and soul, and ‘notions of life and death are inherent in this kind of poetry’.140 The correspondences between poetry and philology are apparent.

Although a Platonist approach to the story’s interpretation was predominant, there were variant Hellenophile interpretations of the story.141 The classical scholar and archaeologist Otto Jahn (1813–69) was an outlier, as in 1847 and 1851 he particularly influenced scholarship by refuting the double thesis that there must have been a lost Greek original for the story, and that it was likely to derive from mysteries of Eros in Thespiae, as there was no written evidence for either of these claims.142 Aloys Hirt (1759–1837), a Berlin classicist, who in his 1816 treatise Die Fabel des Amor und Psyche nach Denkmälern discussed the allegorical use of Psyche as the immortal soul separated from its body, and as an image of the Christian soul, also worked with Queen Luise of Prussia (1776–1810) at the Berlin court on courtly spectacles; Luise in 1804 enacted the role of the bride of Alexander the Great, with young girls wearing butterfly wings surrounding her.143 In 1818 Hirt staged the wedding ballet Die Weihe des Eros Uranios based on C&P and with allusions to Plato’s Symposium for her court.144

This learned classicism and yearning for Greek origins for the story ensured that much contemporary poetry based on C&P involved both poets and their readerships dipping their toe into popular Platonism, which became linked with Apuleius’ reception throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Germany. The erudite and enlightened Luise also employed the poet Friedrich Matthisson (1761–1831, a friend of Rode, Schiller, and Hölderlin; Beethoven set some of his poems to music) as a reader and travel companion for herself. In his poem ‘Elysium’ (1788) he describes, in the wake of Platonist concepts, how Psyche, a personification of the Soul, enters Elysium by herself and frees herself from mortal memories by kneeling in a flowery meadow next to the Underworld river Lethe to drink from it.145

Similarly important is contemporary interest in the nature of the soul,146 and especially so among the idealists, who discussed the participation of the individual soul in an absolute soul shared by all, the Allseele, an earlier stage of the development of the soul that was believed to be closer to nature; mythology was believed to be the earlier Allseele’s expression. C&P, though written comparatively ‘late’ in antiquity but believed to be based on a lost earlier Greek text, allowed a flexible reading of the text, with Platonist and Christian interpretations seen as possible. Apuleius presented an intermediate step between the ancient and the more contemporary concept of the soul.

10. Epics of the Soul

A favourite way to treat Christianity, Platonism, and a focus on the immortality of the soul in both systems of thought resulted in various treatments of C&P in epic format. The amount of epic adaptations of C&P written in such a brief period is extraordinary, driven by the authors’ desires to reconstruct the ‘true’ version of the story based on philological research and inclination, and to move away from the concept of a simple and lowly fairy tale. These epics, made possible by the para-epic colouring of Apuleius’ story,147 engage with the whole story, not merely its protagonist in idealized form, and the story is brought back to its original mythological form, for which, often enough, epic was considered the true genre. Interestingly, the focus on the female protagonist found in fairy-tale receptions remains, and the intended audience is conceived as feminine in these texts. As a result, Apuleius as the author was often sidelined in this refocusing on the imagining of a primal Greek original.

In 1804, Johann Jacob Freyherr von Lincker adapted C&P into German hexameters (Die epische Fabel der Psyche nach dem Apulejus metrisch übersetzt), possibly in the wake of the romantic idylls in hexameters by the Homer translator Johann Heinrich Voss (Luise (1782–84)) and Goethe (Hermann und Dorothea (1796–7)). He toned down only slightly the angry exclamations of Venus and renamed Voluptas ‘Wonne’ or ‘Delight’—that is, taking away some sexual connotations and employing the same noun Kosegarten had already used; his Venus is much more gentle than Apuleius’, despite an otherwise rather close adaptation of Apuleius’ text.148 He dedicated his work to the Grand duch*ess of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach and Grand duch*ess of Russia Maria Pavlovna (1786–1859) on the event of her marriage. She was an active benefactor of the arts and sciences at her court and admired for her learned nature by Schiller and Goethe.

Quite romanticized in these terms is the epic (in genre and in length) version by the philosopher Christian Heinrich August Clodius (1772–1836)149 in Eros und Psyche: Ein Gedicht in zwölf Gesängen in ottava rima, posthumously published in 1838. Clodius saw the story as narrative about the end of the pagan world and its replacement by the Christian one; its plot is fairy-tale-like, while also incorporating a Christianized allegorical strand: Psyche’s mother, here called Isis, eats forbidden fruit (echoing both the story of Eve in Genesis and the fairy tale of Rapunzel) in order to fall pregnant, and gives birth to three daughters.150 While her horrible sisters become the mothers of all kinds of monsters, Psyche, who is always accompanied by a butterfly, is pursued by an angry Venus in an image that echoes Adam and Eve’s loss of paradise. Psyche is aided by the invisible Eros, who communicates with her in written form. After breaking the taboo (on her sisters’ instigation) and looking at her husband, Psyche is tortured by Venus in ways that echo the sufferings of Christ: for example, she is flogged and crowned with a crown of thorns. In the end, the marriage between Eros and Psyche results not in happiness and the birth of a child, but the end of all pagan gods, as Kronos, the god of Time, destroys Olympus and turns its deities to stone. Psyche’s soul escapes and sees her petrified body embracing Eros in an eternal kiss, in an echo of the famous Capitoline statue group (see Fig 4). Eros, the god of Love, is older than all other pagan gods and his voice remains at the end of the epic to soothe Psyche and reassure her that divine love will always be with her, even if she herself doubts it.151

Similarly in hexameters is the 1808 translation Psyche: Ein episches Gedicht, published anonymously in 1811, in ten cantos by Ludwig Gottlieb Carl Nauwerck (1772–1855),152 who dedicates it to his sister (with her initials alone). He had connections with Weimar, and illustrated Goethe’s Faust. Again, the poem is seen as an adaptation of a Greek source. He poses as an inspired poet in the wake of Homer and Vergil, asking the muse to tell him about Psyche’s beauty as seen in the Roman statues based on lost Hellenistic origins of Cupid and Psyche kissing.153 His Psyche is the daughter of the king and queen of Larissa in Thessaly, her sisters are called Astarte and Lampata, and the poem is full of epic set scenes in the imitation of Homer (e.g. Apollo is addressed as Smintheus in 2.46 echoing Iliad 1.39; there are gods in disguise, epic similes, loci amoeni, and so on) but no mention of Apuleius as its model, not even as an adapter of a lost Greek source. The story is cleaned up, and problematic elements in Psyche’s character are suppressed. Her pregnancy is mentioned, though the legality of her marriage to Cupid is never in doubt. Reminiscing about his own love for his sister at the beginning of canto 5, the poet explicitly condemns the actions of the two sisters. The focus is on the emotions and relationships between the characters, and the all-encompassing power of Love. At the beginning of canto 7, for instance, the poet asks Cupid directly if he had any part in saving Psyche from drowning, raising again the important question of how much he is involved in her tasks. It is Eros who creates false dream images of Psyche, which he sends to her sisters to lure them to death (perhaps a nod to the false dream duping Agamemnon in Iliad 2); thus Nauwerck’s real Psyche is innocent of this particular double sororicide. The child is born in wedlock and yet again named ‘Wonne’ and of indeterminate sex.

In 1836, Ado Schütt published Psyche, an epic poem in three cantos, again an attempt to turn what he saw as the transmitted ‘fairy tale’ into a worthy epic, though with the focus on the transfer of Graeco-Roman myth into German Romanticism, inspired by the landscapes of the Rhineland.154 Yet again the audience is female; the preface appeals to German maidens and asks them to follow the singer to Crete (the location is perhaps a nod to Prasch, see above) in order to find Psyche; It is then Venus’ priestess in Paphos who takes over the song and tells the story of Psyche, full of epic similes and allusions. Again gods appear among mortals in disguise, as Venus attends as an unrecognized guest at the wedding of Psyche’s older sister. Cupid and Psyche’s wedding night is downplayed by the female narrator, and Psyche’s tasks set by Venus heroize the girl and align her to Hercules by suppressing the Apuleian tasks of sorting seeds and collecting wool, which by then had lowly fairy-tale associations.155 This heroization of Psyche is especially intended to reduce the fairy-tale elements of the story: for example, she has to wrestle Greek women in Corinth, and heroically bring Persephone’s ‘talisman of grace’ (Anmut) up from Hades. Heroic as she is, Psyche does not succumb to curiosity or desire to be beautiful in the end, and her final apotheosis crowns her as a worthy mediator between the immortal human spirit and the gods.

Christian Martin Winterling (1800–84) taught modern languages at the University of Erlangen and translated, among other things, Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield into German. In his ‘Amor und Psyche’, the first in his Antik-Moderne Dichtungen (1836, in iambic octaves), which also included a poetic version of Longus in iambics, Psyche is a girl who likes to read.156 Again, the sex of the child Wonne is indeterminate. Winterling, too, is interested in reconstructing a lost Greek myth that Apuleius had used, which he combines with an allegorical Platonist approach in seeing a veiled discussion of the Soul’s immortality.

An interesting scholarly approach is offered by the teacher and philologist Johann Christian Elster (1792–1854),157 whose posthumously published Die Fabel von Amor und Psyche nach Appuleius lateinisch und deutsch metrisch bearbeitet (1854) presented the text in both Latin and German hexameters in order to restore the story to its (in his view) original Greek epic form. Consequently, he omitted anything comic or fairy-tale-like in his versions, and added further mythological material—for example, his Pan tells Psyche the story of Endymion, a Romantic favourite, and Elster also introduced the role of Mercury as psychopompos (escorter of souls) when Psyche descends into the Underworld158 instead of Apuleius’ frivolous talking tower. His version, too, attempts to free the story from later embellishments and reconstruct its ‘original version’. His main focus is on Psyche’s descent into the Underworld (366 out of his 1,721 hexameters).

These long works engage with the story as a whole but nevertheless remain indebted to Romantic ideas of the nature of the soul, the role of the feminine, and surround the ‘schöne Seele’ with an ennobled Grecian plot. While some embrace and integrate fairy-tale elements, most epic authors suppress them in an attempt to return to a mythical and epic Greek Ur-Cupid-and-Psyche.

11. Goethe’s ‘Beautiful Souls’: Schöne Seelen

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1748–1832) was an avid reader of Greek and Roman poetry.159 Although his work prioritizes the Greek classics160, his Roman Elegies (1788–1790) inspired by the elegies of Propertius and Ovid are rightly famous. His very early poems were written under Anacreontic influence (for a 1772 poem ‘An Psyche’ see above), but he soon found his own voice and a preference for Homer, the Greek tragedians, and Vergil. An avid reader of the Greek novels, Goethe owned prints of Raphael’s frescoes of the Loggia di Psyche at the Villa Farnesina in Rome (see Chapter 1, Section 4 and, for an image, Fig. 2) and he had known of the myth of C&P since at least 1780, as he was also one of the first to encounter Rode’s influential translation when it was read out at the court of Anna Amalia, the duch*ess of Sachsen-Weimar.161 Goethe was so taken by the story that he planned to have his Weimar residence decorated with images from the story (by Johann Heinrich Meyer). He owned the 1594 Apuleius edition by Causaubon, and borrowed Rode’s translation in 1826. He read the novel on 15 August 1831 for certain.162

Furthermore, like many of his contemporaries, Goethe was engaged in the contemplation of the nature of the soul. As we have seen, Psyche allows the combination of Platonic–pagan and Christian thought—Psyche could represent humanity as well as the soul in search of the divine. In a letter to his admired Charlotte von Stein in July 1776, Goethe toys with Platonism, the immortality of the soul (a favourite topic throughout most of his life), and metempsychosis, claiming that in a previous life she was either his sister or his wife. He also procured a gemstone of a winged Psyche as a present for her, as he tells us in his letter to his ‘beloved Soul’ (an allusion to the translation of Psyche) from 1 October 1781. He also shares the contemporary interest in plastic representations of Cupid and Psyche in stone as both allegories and symbols that move our most precious emotions: ‘Die bekannte Gruppe von Amor und Psyche ist Allegorie und Symbol zugleich. Schwerlich ist jemals in eines Menschen Geist etwas Lieblicheres und Zarteres aufgestiegen’ (‘the well-known group of Cupid and Psyche [i.e. the Capitoline statue; see Fig. 4] is at once allegory and symbol. Hardly ever has there arisen within mankind’s spirit anything more lovely and tender’).163

There is evidence of Goethe’s engagement with Apuleius in his novels, too. His early work (written before Rode’s translation) Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1779), an epistolary novel about the doomed love of the Homer-and-‘Ossian’-loving Werther for Lotte who is engaged to someone else and which ends in Werther’s suicide, features a scene where Werther reads a fairy tale to Lotte’s younger siblings (1st part, 15 August). The fairy tale of ‘a princess waited upon by hands’ (‘Prinzessin, die von Händen bedient wird’) may be a reflection of Beaumont’s fairy tale with its invisible servants, or perhaps even of Apuleius’ story itself. Werther also believes that Lotte and he are related souls (Seelenverwandte), whose spirits will find one another in a next life (10 September), tapping into contemporary ideas of the transmigration of the soul.

More clearly dependent on Apuleius’ Metamorphoses and C&P are however Goethe’s masterly Bildungsroman Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795/96, ‘Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship’), and its sequel Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (conceived in the 1790s, published in 1821 and heavily revised in 1829, ‘Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years’).164 The Lehrjahre appears to be inspired by Apuleius’ Metamorphoses in both its plot outline and the conception of its main characters. A rather naïve yet highly educated young protagonist travels and hears several inset tales which echo and reflect upon his own life while growing in character and learning his place in society.165 Both novels end with an initiation, that of Lucius into the mysteries of Isis and Osiris, and that of Wilhelm into the Turmgesellschaft/’Society of the Tower’ (7.9, through darkness into the light), which itself shares some elements of Egyptian mysteries. Magic and curiosity play important roles in both plots, and both novels feature theatricality as a leitmotif.166 An inset tale about a ‘beautiful soul’ is placed roughly at the centre of both: Goethe’s book 6 (out of nine altogether) is ‘Bekenntnisse einer schönen Seele’/‘Confessions of a beautiful soul’. This inset tale is the story of the aunt of Natalie, the girl who will become Wilhelm’s soulmate. The aunt is physically frail and focuses throughout her life on her spiritual nature, from hearing fairy tales when bedridden at eight years old, to having lively conversations with God, whom she frequently calls her ‘invisible friend’. The schöne Seele is the oldest(!) of three sisters, and courted by several young men over the times, all of whom she rebuffs in favour of her invisible friend (God as Cupid). She turns to the beliefs of the Moravian Church and Pietism.

The story functions as a mise en abyme of Wilhelm’s own progression, as a feminine mirror development of and a passive and contemplative counterimage to Wilhelm’s active maturation. Mirroring literary references in main and inset tales in the novel is one of Goethe’s creative principles at the time, and one of the concepts he would have found and admired in Apuleius’ use of Cupid and Psyche, too.167 Natalie in 8.10 becomes a schöne Seele herself, so that the inset tale and the frame narrative in their respective developments become as intertwined as in Apuleius, where Psyche reflects and echoes the choices and development of Lucius.168

Furthermore, the mysterious young girl Mignon, Wilhelm’s protégée and, among other symbolisms, a representation of the contemporary German longing for Italy,169 reflects events of the ‘Bekenntnisse’: in 8.2 she is dressed up in Natalie’s play in a white dress and golden angel wings, and her song deals with the immortality of the soul.170 In ‘Bekenntnisse’, the aunt dreams of adventures with a little angel, who looked after her clothed in a white dress and with golden wings.171 The crucial moment in Mignon’s story is a knowing inversion of Cupid and Psyche. She decides to visit Wilhelm in his bed at night in the dark, like Apuleius’ Cupid, only to find another rival has beaten her and got there first (5.12). Wilhelm does not recognise the woman he sleeps with, and she is only very much later revealed to him and the readers as the actress Philine. The scene does not lead to eternal love: Wilhelm rather develops a loathing for Philine’s flippant nature, while Mignon after her death receives a moving funeral staged as a ‘marriage to death’, mourned by everyone.

The Wanderjahre is a loosely connected sequel with prominent inset tales, the longest of which is Ein Herr von funfzig Jahren (‘A Fifty-Year Old Gentleman’). It features the young Hilarie who first falls in love with her uncle and then with his son Flavio, her cousin. The uncle, similarly enamoured with Hilarie, is characterised by his love and imitation of Horace and Ovid (2.4). It is only after Flavio in a crazed state ‘like Orestes’ (2.5) comes to her and her mother’s house one night and is placed to rest in a bed, that Hilarie begins to fall in love with her future husband, as she holds a candle over the sleeping Flavio and observes the beauty of his body in a description echoing that of Apuleius’ sleeping Cupid. Finally, she carries the candle close to him ‘wie Psyche in Gefahr, die heilsamste Ruhe zu stören’ (‘like Psyche, in danger of disturbing the most salutary rest’), i.e. of burning the sleeping man, her mother and the doctor move her outside. Goethe makes clear that father and son resemble each other closely, thus offering another version of the doubling motif of the image of Love that is so often associated with different aspects of love in this period, as seen in the discussion of Wieland’s ‘Bruckstücke’ above, and which itself may echo Psyche’s conjectural claims to her sisters about her husband’s identity as first a young and then a middle-aged man (Met. 5.8 and 5.15).172 Furthermore, Hilarie’s gazing at her lover intratextually echoes and corrects Mignon’s attempt to visit Wilhelm at night, a use across two novels of the same key scene from C&P.173 Finally, it is up to the kind woman Makarie, taking the role of Jupiter in Apuleius, to solve the amorous entanglements successfully at the story’s close.

It is clear that Goethe not only used the image of the beautiful soul for his characters, but was also inspired by Apuleius’ novel and its inset tale for the structure and plot lines of his own novels. This also anticipates the early nineteenth century turn away in Germany from epic retellings of C&P to novelistic versions that became increasingly popular.

12. Coming Full Circle: Psyche Novels

Long verse epics soon fell out of fashion, and more and more the novel, already discussed in connection with Goethe, became the literary mass medium of choice, making the Roman novelist Apuleius a natural model for his nineteenth-century counterparts.174 The important Romantic poet and friend of Goethe and the Brothers Grimm Achim von Arnim (1781–1831) worked together with his future brother-in-law Clemens Brentano on their celebrated anthology of poems, Des Knaben Wunderhorn (‘The Boy’s Magic Horn’ (1805–8)) in Heidelberg, where they met other prominent German Romantics and the Classicist J. H. Voss first as friends and then as enemies.175 In 1823, von Arnim published Raphael und seine Nachbarinnen (‘Raphael and his Female Neighbours’), a novella based on the life of Raphael, the painter of the Farnesina frescoes (see above), which uses C&P as the novel’s structural framework for characters as well as a metaphor for the artist’s soul, inspiration, and creativity, while adding another interesting example of doubling.176 Raphael’s long-term aide recalls the two young neighbours who become Raphael’s contrasting yet interchanging Muses. Psyche’s lamp burning Cupid is the recurring leitmotif in the story. Chapter 1, ‘On Raphael’s Psyche’, recalls Raphael’s youth in Urbino, when he is in love with Benedetta, who lives next door and decorates her father’s ceramics. For three nights, secretly Raphael paints her plates for her. The first time he does this, he mistakes a marble statue, possibly of Psyche, waiting to be burnt for lime in the shared court, for Benedetta, whom he then paints on the plates as Psyche. Benedetta, ignorant of who is helping her, assumes it might be an angel. The experienced and worldly-wise next-door neighbour Ghita, a baker’s daughter whom Raphael associates with Psyche’s ‘unreinen Schwestern’ (‘impure sisters’), persuades Benedetta one night to surprise the ‘angel’ alongside her, carrying a lamp and a sword, in order to satiate their (rather Apuleian) curiosity (‘zur Befriedigung ihrer Neugierde’). Raphael is recognized but barely escapes. Just as Venus sends Cupid away (‘nun schickte ihn Venus in die Fremde’), his parents decide it is time for Raphael to move to Perugia. Raphael now feels as if his heart were burning in pain like the place where Psyche’s sputtering lamp had hurt Cupid. Benedetta’s father rewards him for his work with sweets from Ghita’s father’s store for his now revealed work on the ceramics, and Raphael begins to associate Ghita’s earthy sexuality with reward for his art.

In Chapter 2, ‘On Raphael’s Madonnas’, Raphael wishes to give Benedetta a ring before leaving, but the ring accidentally ends up on the statue’s finger instead. As the statue is also draped with Benedetta’s cloak in Marian colours (blue and red), this is a mystic union of Raphael and his Psyche/Muse, and Benedetta takes the ring off its finger. The narrator notes that Raphael’s later depictions of the Virgin are based on his memory of the Psyche statue and Benedetta. Raphael also finds himself attracted to Ghita, the sensual part of his inspiration and art, and starts an affair with her years later. She has an ape-like creature (who later turns out to be human, a German painter from Nuremberg) living with her and becomes the model for his voluptuous pagan goddesses. Raphael claims her beast to be the painter of what seems to be the Wedding of Cupid and Psyche in the Farnesina.177 It is clear that the beast is the other part of Raphael’s artistic identity. Over the years, Ghita bears two children to Raphael but keeps them secret from him.

The third chapter, ‘On Raphael’s Transfiguration’—that is, his last painting—brings both spheres of Raphael’s life together. Just as the painting consists of two contrasting levels but needs both of these to work, so Raphael’s character, the beast and the innocent youth, and his two contrasting muses need to have elements of both in order to create sublime art. The Psyche/Muse statue is painted as the mysterious figure at the centre of the lower level of the picture, holding it together, portrayed with her outstretched finger that had caught Raphael’s ring. Taken into the Church of the Sisters of Mercy, he sees a marble statue clad in blue, which reminds him of the Psyche/Muse statue of his youth; the religious pictures in Raphael’s style on the church walls turn out to be by Benedetta. The art inspires him finally to start on his masterworks, the Transfiguration and the Sistine Madonna based on his memories of Benedetta and the Psyche statue. He declares he needs both heaven and earth, Benedetta and Ghita, as an artist. The so-called ape reveals himself as the German painter of some of Raphael’s paintings and Ghita’s German husband, whose deformation was caused when his mother put him into the oven for warmth and burnt him. Raphael’s artistic identity consists of all these facets,178 and the symbolism of burning fire, like Psyche’s lamp, holds them together. Later, Raphael meets his hitherto unknown two sons and paints them as the angels of the Sistine Madonna—Benedetta had raised them for Ghita. When she and Raphael finally meet again, she is recognized by his ring on her finger and explains that the statue in the church is indeed his Psyche/Muse, the paintings her own in his style. Before he can marry Benedetta, he breaks down with burning-hot fever-dreams of Christ’s passion, his hair turns white, and he dies while trying to finish the Transfiguration.

Raphael is here characterized as Cupid burnt at the beginning and end of his artistic development by the lamp carried by Psyche and (unApuleianly) her sister, Benedetta and Ghita. The statue of Psyche/Muse escapes death in the flames. The doubling of Cupid’s character seen in some previous German receptions—for example, Wieland—may have helped von Arnim to create this unusual concept of doubling both Psyche (and her sister) as his soul and inspiration, and Raphael (the divinely inspired artist and the beast). Raphael, who paints both pure saints and earthly voluptuous bodies, needs both women.

Another important member of this circle is Bettina von Arnim (1785–1859), Brentano’s sister and Achim’s wife, granddaughter of Sophie von La Roche (above) and well connected with writers in the period, including Jacobi, Herder, and Goethe. Bettina was fascinated with mythology, perhaps triggered by reading K. P. Moritz’s Götterlehre at an early age.179 In the same year her husband’s Raphael-novel was published, she designed a memorial for Goethe.180 He is seated majestically like Zeus, with a childlike Psyche at his knees who bears Bettina’s own features, grasping for Goethe’s lyre.181 Among some reliefs on Goethe’s throne, there is an image of Mignon. In her reading of his novel, Bettina also identifies herself with Mignon, and Goethe with Wilhelm Meister.182

In 1835, she also published the fictionalized exchange of letters between herself and her idol Goethe (and initially his mother), mostly adapted from correspondence between 1807 and early 1811 and her fictionalized diary, in Goethes Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde. Seinem Denkmal (‘Goethe’s Correspondence with a Child: On Behalf of his Memorial’), to great and public success and critical controversy.183 Its sale was intended to raise money to erect the Goethe memorial she had designed, and reflects her adoration of and passion for Goethe, especially in the last of its three parts, the diary-style Buch der Liebe, which covers her emotional experiences from her mid-teens to the years after Goethe’s death, at times set against the Napoleonic wars with their often direct impact on her family.184 It reflects how, alongside her enthusiastic love for Goethe, she grows into a deeply passionate and sensitive writer because of it.

Bettina sees herself as a childlike Psyche who looks up to Goethe’s divine nature for inspiration and affirmation as artist through love, both in the monument and in the Briefwechsel, as she explains herself after Goethe’s death. She compares herself to a blooming red rose who merely reflects the light and beauty of Eros, whose light shines through her,185 and returns to the image of Psyche burning her beloved with her lamp, especially after Goethe’s death, to come to terms with her alienation from Goethe after 1811,186 which she describes in echoes of Psyche hanging on to Cupid’s feet when he flees.187

Her lifelong identification with Psyche is explained by herself as derived from a semi-mystic eroticized initiation when she was a teenager at her grandmother’s house. There the visiting Herder called her Psyche and kissed her, first without and then with permission, as he singled her out among her sisters. He grabs the blue bow on her white dress (images of innocence) like a butterfly wing, Bettina narrates, and releases her back into freedom only in return for a kiss. At first, she claims, she does not know what ‘Psyche’ means, which, given her knowledge of mythology, does not entirely ring true; but in time she realizes that this was her initiation into love and art.188 Consequently, for Bettina von Arnim, the recurring Psyche motifs in her book are linked to the idea of mystic or spiritual union between lovers that echoes her own fascination over the years with Goethe, who both forms and is formed by the ‘child’s’ artistic presence.189 Bettina herself was 22 in 1807 when the correspondence starts and when she met Goethe for the very first time, hardly a child. Yet, her self-stylization as Kind or ‘child’ puts her on the level of her childlike Psyche, in the wake of portraits of Psyche as a child on the Marlborough gem or Roman sarcophagi. At the same time, she follows this through in the design of her monument for Goethe, where Goethe becomes the unreachable Cupid who supports her, yet is hardly ever visible to her (they are travelling in different parts of Germany during their exchange of letters and only met briefly), but always beloved. References to Psyche are therefore found throughout the correspondence that conform with contemporary Romantic imagery—for example, both correspondents imagining the soul of the deceased as a (reborn) butterfly able to meet the other despite their physical distance;190when Bettina meets the now elderly and frail Anacreontic Jacobi (see Section 5 above), she calls him a ‘tender Psyche’ who was woken too early and on whom she herself bestows the crown of immortality, no doubt playing therefore with Jacobi’s own poems about Psyche, death, and immortality.191

Ernst von Brunnow (1796–1845), brother of the more famous Russian diplomat Phillipp Graf von Brunnow, of Kurland nobility and based in Dresden, wrote several poems and novels, among them in 1837 Die neue Psyche (‘The New Psyche’), an artist’s novel.192 Unfortunately it is little known today, but represents many of the German approaches to C&P laid out in this chapter. It is explicitly based on academic research, which leads Brunnow to believe that the origins of the story are Greek, archaic, and based on mystery cults, and Apuleius’ version is an inadequate and late adaptation into a fairy tale by a writer of dubious style and origins. The ideology of the schöne Seele looms large, and the metaphor of the butterfly in its double nature as the Soul’s immortality, and an image of death, relevant in Germany since the Anacreontics and Herder, is unambiguously thematized, here leading to a doubling of the pair of lovers and of the inset tale itself.193 Both art and, more especially, poetry are needed to adapt the story adequately into a German context.194 The story of C&P is prominently inserted into the novel itself and shown to reflect its protagonists’ own experiences. Longing for Italy motivates one of them, who is deeply moved by Raphael’s Farnesina Psyche. Initially planned as a verse epic (see below), it then became a prose novel, following the literary developments of its time. It suppresses or problematizes the killing of the sisters and Psyche’s pregnancy but discusses its reasons openly.

In his preface, Brunnow locates the origins of the story in Greece, cites especially Herder and Creuzer as his scholarly inspiration, and places himself within its literary reception. At first, Brunnow intended to write a verse epic like Ernst Schulze (note that Schütt’s was published in the same year), but, like Wieland, gave up. Instead, he decided to integrate the G ö ttersage (‘myth’ (p. iv)) into a modern novel in twenty Schilderungen (‘descriptions’, each beginning with a poem), with not one, but two couples that contrast with and reflect each other, with his focus always on the portrait of their souls. The preface steers the reader towards Brunnow’s desired interpretation of his work, and classifies the novel as a work of art itself reflecting on other works of art and the very nature of art.

The novel is set against the background of the Napoleonic wars. Arthur, a sensitive poet, and the passionate painter Oskar, closest of friends, spot on a springtime walk a mourning-cloak butterfly (nymphalis antiopa), which for Oskar is a sign of death and loss, and for Arthur a sign of the immortality of the soul. This kind of doubling of contemporary Psyche associations makes Oskar recall his Italian journey and lost love for Giulietta, a Psyche-figure with two sisters, whom he left after catching her in flagrante delicto, he thinks, stealing his wallet. A flashback (the first inset tale) fills in their backstory. Arthur was in unrequited love with the gentle Angelika, who has lost her fiancé in the Battle of Brienne (1814), and who is Psyche-like in her angelic and ethereal nature. Oskar, full of Italiensehnsucht, travelled to Italy, where he was greatly enthused by Raphael’s Farnesina paintings of Psyche and had a vision of her coming down to join him (5th Schilderung). While painting in Tivoli under a pseudonym, he met Giulietta, a duplicate of Raphael’s Psyche (echoes of von Arnim, see above); the two were attracted by each other’s beauty, and she posed for him (6th Schilderung) and introduced him to her family. They fell in love, and her Psyche-like curiosity was her only negative trait. Oskar explicitly kept his identity secret, inspired by Cupid’s self-concealment from Psyche. Her sisters were jealous and agitated against Oskar, who observed the uncanny similarities of this to the plot of C&P. During a family dinner, Oskar fell asleep, possibly drugged, and woke up in pain, with Giulietta kneeling before him, having taken his wallet and hurt him with his own dagger(!). He fled and, on returning to retrieve the contents of his wallet, was trapped by robbers and fainted. When he woke up, he found himself in police custody and was put on trial, similarly to Lucius in the Risus episode, for being a traitor (8th Schilderung). Days later, he was released and fled back to Germany.

Meanwhile, Arthur has become a poet and scientist in Germany, longing for the mourning Angelika. When Oskar returns, both young men are invited to join Angelika and her father at his residence to paint and write, the situation of the novel’s beginning. Angelika’s father has a collection of art, including a statue group of Cupid and Psyche (11th Schilderung).195 Angelika persuades Arthur, who had been thinking about turning the story into an epic, to translate Apuleius’ text for her, while Oskar will teach her painting. Arthur begins to see Angelika as his own Psyche and inspiration (12th Schilderung). They are Seelenverwandte, ‘related souls’, entirely in tune with each other (see above on Goethe’s use of the phrase), and they are unsure whether it is fraternal or erotic love, especially as Angelika grows close to Oskar, who resembles her deceased fiancé. Angelica is also friends with an Italian-speaking friend, Clara/Clärchen, who is, of course, Giulietta come north to look for her lost painter. Fearing losing Angelika to Oskar, Arthur displays some Lucius-like characteristics, too, when he admonishes himself not to worship the false image of Isis but to assess his situation correctly (16th Schilderung; the novel also features a cheerful pastor called Lucius). Arthur precedes his performance of his own prose translation of the C&P story with a lecture in front of the C&P statue and all the protagonists (17th Schilderung); his lecture on Greek religion (just like his move from verse epic to prose) reflects Brunnow’s own beliefs in early Greek mystery cult origins for the story (1837: 184), thus turning his own version into a mise en abyme (the second inset tale).

In the lecture Arthur calls Apuleius’ version a ‘ziemlich buntfarbenes Mährchen’ (‘a rather colourful fairy tale’ (1837: 184)) that does not quite hide the truth of the ancient story about the Soul and its Immortality; the butterfly image is found, he teaches, on tombs (echoes of Moritz and Herder), Psyche images reflect both the Soul and Immortality. Cupid, or rather Eros, is the love for all that exists, and their story that of the love of the Soul for the Divine, a love that is complete only if the Soul does not indulge its curiosity about the nature of the Divine but follows its instructions without questions. Psyche’s sufferings and quest are the purifying search for divine love in desire for union, until the god takes pity and bestows immortality on her. The story’s meaning and its presentation as fairy tale, he concludes, are like the intertwined image of the body and the soul, and a poet enjoys both of its aspects.

Consequently, Arthur’s fairly close translation (17th Schilderung) is embellished to reflect both his (and Brunnow’s own, another doubling) views and the presence of ladies among the internal audience: he names the older sisters Soma and Hedone, ‘Body’ and ‘Pleasure’ in Greek: Body and Soul may echo the contrast between them set out in Plato’s Phaedo, the dialogue on the immortality of the soul, which discusses the separation of the soul from the body (and hence from pleasure and pain—e.g. 81b–82c), an allegorical reading of the sisters already encountered in Fulgentius, who identifies them with Flesh and Free Will, and Boccaccio, who identifies them with the tripartite soul, respectively.196 Cupid does not visit Psyche in her bedchamber, but the next morning chastely kisses her as her invisible fiancé. Consequently, there is no pregnancy, and the taboo is changed accordingly: not to enter a cave near the lake surrounded by cypresses. This turns out to be Cupid’s lonely bedroom, where Psyche, urged on by her sisters, surprises him and burns him with her lamp. He threatens to take revenge on her sisters and leaves her. Psyche deals with her sisters as she does in Apuleius, but crucially ‘under Cupid’s inspiration’ (1837: 210). Psyche is less passive and enquires from Apollo’s oracle where she might find Venus, and sails to Paphos to surrender herself to her.

In a lengthy discussion that follows about the ‘meaning of the myth’, Arthur’s adaptations are criticized by Angelika’s knowledgeable father, but Arthur explains them by having to tone down Apuleius’ sensuous ‘African nature’ and late Roman lack of taste,197 and having to accommodate Angelika’s sensitivities. His version is declared the better for it, but Oskar is inflamed by Psyche’s curiosity, which makes him recall his own experiences again (18th Schilderung), which he narrates to Angelika, who recognizes him as her friend Clärchen/Giulietta’s lover and rushes to reunite them and solve all misunderstandings: it was Giulietta’s jealous sisters(!) who had denounced Oskar as a political traitor to her and urged her to look at his dagger’s inscription for proof, but when her curiosity made her look at it while he was asleep, its inscription reads ‘Giulietta sempre mia’ (‘Giulietta, forever mine’) instead of a political slogan. She dropped the dagger and inadvertently wounded Oskar, who woke up, and, thinking she had intended to kill him, banishes her from his life. Her father then betrayed him to the Italian police, who arrested him. So Giulietta made the arduous journey to Germany to find her fugitive lover, where now Angelika dramatically reunites her with Oskar, but not before Giulietta faints on seeing him, echoing Psyche’s deathlike sleep (Met. 6.21), and Oskar kisses her awake again. The German painter’s Italian soul is declared ‘die neue Psyche’, and Angelika as an angel of heaven replaces angry Venus in their story. In the end, both couples are united in marriage.

Finally, Apuleius’ story could even become a source of social analysis and criticism. The Baltic–German Biedermeier novelist Alexander von Ungern-Sternberg (1806–69), better known for his fairy tales (Braune Märchen (1850)), conceived his Psyche as a Zeitroman—that is, a novel focusing on analysing his own contemporary times. Published in two volumes in 1838,198 it deals with adultery and the contemporary change in gender roles and is based around an image of a statue of a childlike Psyche holding the lamp over the sleeping Cupid, with which it begins and ends, commissioned to celebrate the daughter of the house, who was found in this position when 4 years old. At the time the novel is set, she is 19 and married, when the finished statue finally arrives. A priest, asked to unveil the statue in the presence of a group of guests, stresses how it symbolizes marital fidelity and female submission. ‘Psyche’, married to someone else now, meets again her old friend with whom she was portrayed in child form in the statue. The climax of the story is a night-time visit to her by her beloved old friend instead of her husband, but she prevents adultery from taking place because she carries a lamp and recognizes him. When the statue is once again displayed, ‘Psyche’ collapses, deathlike, in front of it. After regaining consciousness and strength, she initiates a divorce from her husband.199

These texts establish the novel as a model of choice for the reception of Apuleius in a period when the novel becomes the predominant literary genre.200 Apuleius’ story is adaptable, as it can be plot-driven or character-focused, leaving enough space for further development. Academic research into the story’s supposed Greek origins often underpins (and at times even features in) the novel plots. But, besides the scholarship and research that add force to these epics and novels, a substratum of popular entertainment based on Cupid and Psyche was available for wider public: drama.

13. Drama and Opera

Dramatic adaptations of C&P are less popular in the Germany of this time than in seventeenth-century France (see Chapter 2). Still, the period sees several comic and serious dramatizations of the story, covering the whole spectrum of theatrical genres.201 Some French adaptations were performed in German theatres first—for example, the ballet d’action Psyché et l’Amour (1762, with music by Jean-Joseph Rodolphe), by Jean-Georges Noverre (1727–1810), had its first performance in Stuttgart’s Hoftheater (under the reign of Charles Eugene, duke of Württemberg).202 Psyche: Singspiel in zwei Aufzügen (Berlin, 1789), by Karl Friedrich Müchler (1763–1857), with music by Carl Bernhard Wessely (1768–1826),203 features as its frontispiece the portrait of the singer Friederike Auguste Conradine von Unzelmann née Flittner (1760–1815), who was then active at the Berliner Hoftheater and will have taken the main role in this somewhat farcical drama. The plot is allusive, and it may have helped the audience to have known the Apuleian plot, possibly via reading Rode’s translation. It features, apart from Psyche, her father King Nicetas and her sisters Klymene and Kalippe, plus their hard-drinking, happy-go-lucky servant Simmias. Just as in the French dramatizations, Apuleius’ anonymous minor characters are given names, a necessity of staging the plot and of characterization; the nobler characters, for example, have Greek aristocratic names. While Psyche is brave throughout, Cupid is mischievous and frivolous and happily lies to his mother; his flirtatious duet with her on whether he should kiss her or not ends the third scene. Then the sisters appear full of jealousy after some time has passed, and find out from their servus currens Simmias (his name and role both echo Plautine comedy—namely, the famous Pseudolus) what he has heard from court gossip and from eavesdropping on Psyche complaining about her husband’s invisibility.

The next scene, after another leap in time, shows Psyche planning to discover her husband’s identity. Her ensuing conversation with Cupid, who is disguised as a ‘genius’, a Schutzgeist or ‘guardian spirit’, and carries a torch (a metaphor for erotic love in Roman art), allows their married life to be presented on stage, ending in a mutual declaration of love (without Psyche realizing that her genius is her husband), which is overheard by her sisters, but Cupid has left before they enter. The sisters and Simmias persuade Psyche to murder her husband. The second act sees Psyche making up her mind but realizing that her husband is Cupid, and as she kisses him he wakes up (no burning in this play) and leaves her unwillingly, as she has broken her oath and Necessity (Nothwendigkeit) has forced them to separate. Alone, she flees with her sisters and the bibulous Simmias before Cupid’s palace collapses around them, just as it had in some of the French versions—for example, in Thomas Corneille’s 1678 tragédie lyrique (see Chapter 2). Meanwhile, Cupid fruitlessly tries to charm his irate mother into letting Psyche live, and Psyche’s begging of Venus for forgiveness also falls on deaf ears. Psyche’s suicide attempts are prevented by the priest of Neptune, who sends her into the Underworld (with close echoes in a prose passage (1789: 710) of the Tower’s advice to Psyche (Met. 6.17–19)). On her way back from there, Psyche visits her family, and the sisters quarrel about which of them should open Proserpina’s box. But Cupid appears in time, reveals that Psyche is forgiven and will become his wife, and admonishes the sisters fiercely. The Singspiel ends in a wedding feast where everyone is involved.204

A more famous Singspiel with Apuleian (as well as masonic) references is Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute (1791)) of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–91). Emanuel Schikaneder’s libretto is heavily influenced by Apuleius, and many adaptations of Apuleius.205 Most allusions are to the novel’s Isiac ending, as the widowed Queen of the Night with her star-flaming gown and throne (‘sternflammende Königin’ (‘star flaming queen’)) resembles both the Moon Goddess Lucius invokes in Met. 11.2 and Isis who answers him, although her search for her lost daughter might rather recall that of Demeter (whom Isis herself claims to be, among other goddesses (Met. 11.5)) for Persephone. The hero and heroine Tamino and Pamina are initiated into the mysteries of Isis at the end of the Singspiel with the help of Egyptian priests (‘Oh Isis und Osiris, welche Wonne’ ‘Oh Isis and Osiris, what delight’) in a descent to the Underworld sequence (‘Der welcher wandert’ (‘He who wanders’)), which recalls both Lucius’ mystery initiations (Met. 11.23) and Psyche’s katabasis (Met. 6.18–19), which anticipates them.206 The arias of the Queen of the Night are reminiscent of Venus’ rants: Met. 4.30 on her cosmogonic majesty just before she points out Psyche to Cupid anticipates the setting of Mozart’s first aria, sung by the Queen seated on a throne of stars: ‘Oh zittre nicht, mein lieber Sohn’ (‘O do not tremble, my beloved son’), just after she had arranged for a picture of the beautiful Pamina to be shown to Tamino. Met. 5.30 about her child’s ingratitude corresponds with ‘Der Hōlle Rache’ (‘The vengeance of Hell’), where the Queen excoriates her daughter for her lack of obedience. C&P can also be found in the Singspiel’s comic side. For example, Papageno’s introductory song as bird catcher may be based on a Pompeian image of an old woman selling winged erotes to women, seen by Goethe in Italy in 1787. Images of Psyche held by her wings on ancient gems were popular in the period, and Goethe’s 1796 poem ‘Die Liebesgötter auf dem Markte’ describes a scene of encaged Loves for sale.207

Much more earthy than these magical Singspiele is the caricature operetta ‘Amor und Psyche. Eine mythologische Karrikatur in Knittelreimen mit Gesang in zwey Acten’ (‘A Mythological Caricature in Two Acts in Knittelvers with Songs’) by Carl Meisl (1775–1853), with music by Ferdinand Kauer.208 This Viennese author places lofty divine events in a rather low-life environment; in the first scene Jupiter plays bowls in a tavern, for example, and all the gods are driven by rather base emotions. Psyche is a vain girl who dances in front of her mirror and takes the initiative in forming the relationship with Cupid. After extended comic Underworld scenes, the play ends in a ‘modern marriage’, where divorce is likely (Meisl 1820: 56), as Jupiter prophesies.

At the other end of the spectrum209 is the Austrian tragedian Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872). Inspired by Goethe, the young man drafted between 1808 and 1815 several extremely short dramatic fragments, including some for a Friedensoper (‘Peace Opera’) planned between 1809 and 1812, which he renamed frequently. The planned names include ‘Psyche’ and ‘Szylla’.210 What remains of ‘Psyche’ is the first scene of the first act, a monologue by Psyche who lives still at her father’s house and for whom nature seems to flourish magically. She describes the fate of Leda with her swan (an anticipation of her own love with a god in disguise?) and longs for new emotions and experiences.211

Similarly serious is the lyric drama Amor und Psyche. Ein lyrisches Drama in vier Akten. Den schönen Vereinen edler, deutscher Frauen und Jungfrauen huldigend geweihet (Rudolstadt, 1816) (‘dedicated in homage to the fair unions of noble German women and maidens’) by Carl Friedrich Werlich (1772–1833). The much more serious genre pares down the dramatis personae and focuses on the protagonist’s noble inner feelings and motivations. Its treatment of the story is sugar-sweet and concentrates on female characters without any real peril.212 It replaces Apollo with Themis and the little bird who informs Venus of Cupid’s affair with a personified Fama, and the sisters are genuinely concerned for Psyche’s well-being; Pan’s scene is expanded considerably, as he gently persuades the distraught girl that Amor will return to her in the end, as his whole nature is love. Venus, greatly upset with Cupid for dallying with a mortal girl, sets the same tasks for Psyche as in Apuleius, but their dangerousness is deliberately toned down; Zephyr, Sleep, and the gods of love assist Psyche through the Underworld, and a lengthy scene with Proserpina shows female sisterhood in action. Psyche opens the box, not out of curiosity, but of selfless desire to be always alive and beautiful for Cupid’s sake by removing the obstacle of her own mortality. After Cupid reanimates her, she is welcomed to divine immortality on Olympus by a chorus of all the gods, though Venus remains conspicuously absent. The lavish script requires several choruses of maidens, love gods, lovers, and the damned, as well as of shepherds and shepherdesses.

Even though dramatic and musical adaptations are not the German genre of choice, some motifs from C&P even made their way into the Romantic operas of Richard Wagner (1813–83): Die Feen (1833–4), Der fliegende Holländer (1843), and Lohengrin (started in 1843, first performed 1850) all feature the love between a mortal and a supernatural being. In two of them the immortal creature gives the mortal the impossible injunction not to enquire about his or her real identity. In The Fairies the gender roles are inverted, as the immortal is the female half-fairy Ada whose beloved is forbidden to find out her name, but the happy ending is similar in the sense that her husband and the father of her children is made immortal.

Closest in both fairy-tale motifs and the naming taboo is Lohengrin (1850), which Wagner primarily based on the mediaeval epic Parzifal by Wolfram von Eschenbach (c.1160–1220): the innocent Christian noble lady Elsa of Brabant has been accused of murder to gain the Duchy, and an ordeal by combat is decreed to clear her name. No one stands up for her, until after Elsa’s prayer a mysterious knight in a boat drawn by swans appears as her champion, promising to protect her people and marry her, as long as she never asks for his name and where he is from (‘Nie sollst du mich befragen’). In two attempts, a pair of pagan enemies (husband and wife, not sisters), however, sow doubt in the somewhat trusting and naive Elsa’s mind about her husband’s nature and urge her to ask for his name, which Elsa refuses twice, like Psyche, but seeing his face is replaced with knowing his name (a change that makes the scene easier to stage in the opera).213 In their wedding chamber, Elsa finally asks the knight three fateful questions about his identity, even though he tries to prevent her. He then publicly reveals his identity to her, the king, and the chorus as Lohengrin, the son of Parzival, a knight of the Holy Grail; the rule of this knightly order is to remain anonymous for all the time of their aid to others. He now reluctantly has to leave his beloved Elsa forever. His swan boat arrives, and he leaves his wife, just like Cupid slipping away, while Elsa collapses dead on shore (cf. Met. 5.24–5, where Cupid leaves Psyche lying on the ground after she had broken his taboo).

Wagner scholars point to his inspiration from Greek tragedies and especially the myth of Zeus and Semele (via Friedrich Schiller’s lyric operetta Semele (1782)), and Wagner himself was aware that the name taboo was a classical motif.214 Borchmeyer, however, points out, too, that the French poet Charles Baudelaire noted the uncanny similarity between Lohengrin’s wedding chamber scene and Cupid and Psyche, as both women are driven by curiosity to find out their unknown husband’s identity.215 Again, key motifs of C&P are so interwoven into German culture that they find echoes not only in the literature but also in the music that is still influential today.

14. Conclusions

This overview has ignored the fine arts almost entirely,216 and many more works of literature by well- or lesser-known authors could have been added. Apart from the works discussed here, the motif of Cupid and Psyche appears in others in a more fleeting but still poignant manner—for example, in Friedrich Schlegel’s (1772–1829) erotic romantic novel Lucinde (1799), as an image of love overcoming death in the central chapter ‘Metamorphoses’.217 The linguist and English teacher Christian Friedrich Falkmann (1782–1844) in 1816 published in Göttingen his Poetische Versuche, including the poem ‘Schlüsselblumen’, where a boy reads ‘Feenmährchen’ and, as an innocent young man, admires a statue of Psyche that looks like his sister. Much more work can be done here beyond this mere basic outline of German reception in this crucial century.

C&P lent itself to Christian and philosophical reception, and, because of its ending in marriage, became a useful ancient myth for women (especially) to explore their interest in the classical world though contained in contemporary morals. Time and again the happy ending allowed it to be revisited as a pagan myth suitable for wedding ceremonies, since it suggested to the brides a positive identification with a beautiful and sympathetic female character from antiquity, and her final wedded bliss and motherhood were a cornerstone in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reception (Wieland, Kosegarten, Hirt, von Lincker, and others). The frequent use of ‘Psyche’ as a pseudonym for admired female members in poets’ circles (La Roche, Flachsland) is no doubt similarly based on this kind of socially permitted enactment of mythological projection on desirable women. Psyche’s wedding was evoked by artists and writers of both sexes and adapted to their personal lives and search for their own marital happiness.

Contradictory explorations of the soul could already be traced to Apuleius and his medieval reception, and even more so to a hopefully and tendentiously reconstructed Greek (and therefore better than the frivolous African’s) original tale; interest in Greece and in the nature of the soul was a contemporary concern. Lyric poetry explored the nature of Psyche as the soul and poetic inspiration, an idealized lover and a muse, while also associating her with the themes of death and immortality. The desire for Greek authenticity in the most archaic of myths led to the overall acceptance of the story as Greek, and of Apuleius as a lesser author who gave the ancient myth a fairy-tale-like sheen. The close interpersonal links between the writers in this period, who often knew each other and communicated their views on the soul and poetry, frequently including trained classical scholars alongside poets, is another important aspect of German reception in this time. Clearly, interaction with C&P in Germany is driven by classicists, even in the lighter genres, who often focused on the reconstruction of an imaginary Greek text or original, and it can be expressed in engagement with both Platonism and fairy tales. This itself fascinated some authors, and the levity associated with fairy tales allowed them to experiment with the plot and the characters quite freely, since the refashioning of C&P as a fairy tale, especially in the early part of the century, was common. Sometimes authors employed both deep Platonist symbolism and a fairy-tale veneer in their works at the same time, in attempt to echo what they believed Apuleius himself had done.

Romanticism in Germany in the early 1800s was in many ways a reaction to its predecessors, classicism and Hellenism.218 ‘Modern’—that is, ‘Romantic’—literature was more sensitive, less perfect than Greek literature, according to Friedrich Schlegel, and the term was intrinsically linked with the new genre of choice, the novel. As one of the first novels ever written, Apuleius’ novel naturally lent itself to this new form, and, from Goethe to Brunnow, its novella-like inserted tale of C&P offered inspiration for the developing genre’s form, structure, and content. Especially in the novels discussed here, Psyche’s flexibility as a symbol and plot element led to a doubling of characters that covers all aspects—death and immortality, poetic inspiration and maiden-like innocence, scholarly learnedness and female-oriented writing and readership, in such diverse writers as Wieland, Goethe, and the two von Arnims.