Probably no other Romantic author identified intimacy so unconditionally with the ideal of perfect understanding as Bettina von Arnim, née Brentano. In her view, intimacy was the prerequisite for successful communication, in which it was fulfilled. She described the experience of perfect understanding as “love”. Her medium was the letter, and it was through written correspondence that she nurtured and maintained almost all of her intimate relationships. These relationships were ultimately immortalised in the semi-fictional epistolary works Goethe’s Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde, Die Günderode, Clemens Brentano’s Frühlingskranz and Ilius Pamphilius und die Ambrosia. But intimacy is threatened by the communicative excesses it produces. The frequency with which understanding is addressed in her letters stands in contrast to the rarity with which it actually occurred.