Imagination is the free art of truth

– this is how Bettine von Arnim outlines her concept of poetry. The quote can be found in her first work, Goethe's Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde (Goethe's Correspondence with a Child) from 1835, a book that made the now 50-year-old famous far beyond the German-speaking world in a very short space of time.

Readers are led to believe that the sentence was written by the young, still unmarried Bettine. The special point, however, is that it was only formulated and written down by her around 25 years later. This is how the author proceeded in all her works: she pretended to publish letters, diary entries or conversations from her youth that she had written down from memory.

On closer inspection, however, it becomes apparent that the supposed documents were subsequently profoundly reshaped, and often even completely invented by her. Bettine von Arnim thus creates her own dream autobiography. She replaces the often banal facts with imaginative fictions. Her texts show us what might have been. In this way, the author uses literature as a space of possibility in which alternative concepts of reality are tested.