JULY 13, 1793. CHARLOTTE CORDAY. JEAN-PAUL MARAT. Invoking these two names in conjunction with the date conjures up the most famous representation of the assassinated Jacobin leader: Jacques Louis David’s painting of Marat in his bathtub, dead, naked, a letter in his hand, and blood dripping from his wound. This image has become part of European cultural memory of the years following the French Revolution. The assassin and the victim have both turned into mythical figures that have captured the imagination to the present day. This mythologization began not only with visual representations, but also with the poems, novels, and plays that appeared in several countries in the aftermath of the murder.

In late eighteenth-century France, tragedies about the fateful encounter between the hitherto unknown peasant girl and the famous politician were particularly popular. Early nineteenth-century French writers, however, avoided any allusions to Corday, as a result of Napoleon’s censorship and his general hostility to the Revolution and the events in its wake. The same restrictions did not apply to German authors publishing in areas not under Napoleonic rule; they could, therefore, explore a topic forbidden to their French neighbors. One such author was Christine Westphalen (1758–1840), née Axen, who wrote drama, poetry, songs, letters, and a travel diary. In 1804, at a time when her hometown of Hamburg was not yet directly affected by the Napoleonic wars, Westphalen anonymously published a play, Charlotte Corday: Tragödie in fünf Akten mit Chören (Charlotte Corday: A Tragedy in Five Acts with Choruses). It was one of the first historical tragedies by a German woman; up until then, as Susanne Kord observes, women had not been active in this genre, which had been dominated by Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. Therefore I read Charlotte Corday not only as a play about Marat’s murderess but also as an exemplification of the politics and controversy surrounding women’s entry into a realm dominated by men.

Goethe and Schiller, who described women writers as dilettantes, reacted particularly harshly to women’s reaching for what was considered the highest genre of Weimar Classicism, historical tragedy.