2 - “Ich sterbe”: The Construction of the Dying Self in the Advance Preparations for Death of Lutheran Women in Early Modern Germany

Summary

THE RHETORICAL QUESTION “Wer weiß, wie nahe mir mein Ende?” (Who knows how near my end may be?) functions as the first line of a seventeenth-century song preparing for death that is still included in today’s Lutheran hymnal. The text’s author was Aemilia Juliana, Countess of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, consort of the ruler of a small Thuringian principality. Since its first inclusion in a hymnal in 1687, innumerable women (and men) have incorporated this song into their sickbed and deathbed activities, and Johann Sebastian Bach loved this hymn so much that he made it the textual basis for several chorales. The sentiments expressed in the text provide evidence for the existence of a paradigm for the perfect way to die that underlies representations of death created in Germany in the early modern period and beyond. Since the song text was authored by a woman, it offers insight into female ideas and practices surrounding death and dying. And because the author also wrote a variety of other songs on the subject of death, some for specifically female experiences, a close examination of several of her texts can illuminate how a gendered representation of death developed during the foundational period of German Lutheran thought. On the other hand, a survey of the reception of her most famous song demonstrates that the representation of the good death as it was expressed by a woman found entry into the devotional practices of men as well.

Being ready for the unknowable hour of death is the primary theme in “Wer weiß, wie nahe mir mein Ende” and in many of Aemilia Juliana’s other songs, for the greatest danger to the soul, it was generally felt in early modern Lutheran Germany, was a sudden and unexpected death for which one was not spiritually prepared. She didn’t just reflect on the theme in an objective fashion but instead endeavored to give expression to the anxieties she and her contemporaries felt, employing highly charged emotional language and a first-person perspective. Aemilia Juliana faced death in advance by constructing a female persona who was in the midst of dying, an aesthetic self-fashioning that found its way into her songs for childbirth gone awry, serious illness, and deathbed use, as one might expect.