”Doch hat auch Teutschland dich zur Bürgerin erkohren”

Sophia Elisabet Brenner, en tillfällesdiktare med kontakter fjärran och nära

Abstract

”Doch hat auch Teutschland dich zur Bürgerin erkohren” (“Still, Germany has made you a citizen”): Sophia Elisabet Brenner, Occasional Poet with Contacts Far and Near

On her father’s side, Sophia Elisabet Brenner was a member of Stockholm’s important German-speaking minority and was bilingual as a writer. In this article, I suggest that the German congregation in Stockholm provided important opportunities for contacts and was a culturally stimulating cultural environment; both aspects are on view in her poetry. As a poet and learned woman, Brenner was well-known outside Sweden; the fact of her being commissioned to write a memorial poem on Peter the Great, the czar who had been Sweden’s sworn enemy and who had died in 1725, bears eloquent witness to her international fame. A portion of the poem deals with the excellent communications of the times with letters and learned reviews as important means of contact, often composed in international languages such as Latin and German. At the same time, interesting glimpses are given of the working-habits of an occasional poet.