Politics and Love

On Mathilde - The Power and The Mask

By : Gabriele Haefs

A popular biographical novel on a royal eternal triangle in the 18th century.

Johann Friedrich Struensee, born in Halle in 1737, had a sensational career: A doctor to the poor in Altona – then Danish territory – who rose to become first the personal physician to the Danish King, Christian Vll, then his most important adviser, and finally the lover of Queen Caroline Mathilde. Such are the historical facts, and Struensee’s rise and fall has since then never left authors in peace. The best known German attempt at a Struensee novel is Robert Neumann’s Struensee (1935, since reprinted numerous times.) However, while all eyes have been turned towards this adventurer, the queen who granted him her favours has been easily overlooked. This deficiency has been made up for by Maria Helleberg in the novel Mathilde, magt og maske (Mathilde – The Power and The Mask) that was published in Danish in 1991.

Fulfilling the duty.
Helleberg draws the picture of the English princess who at the age of fifteen was married to the Danish king .

Caroline Mathilde enters into this marriage without any great illusions, knowing only too well that only rarely are marriages to monarchs happy ones. Her mother’s advice to her is that she should produce an heir to the throne as quickly as possible, after which she can do as she likes. But, however few illusions his wife labours under, Christian is a bitter disappointment: his lack of intelligence borders on feeble-mindedness, and instead of bothering with his wife, he prefers to masturbate in his circle of boy courtiers. He does certainly manage to make Mathilde pregnant, but after she has given birth to the heir to the throne, all that is left for her is – boredom.

The intelligent lover
And then the new personal physician turns up. Struensee is fascinated by the manifest intelligence of the young queen; for her part, she first finds in him an intelligent partner in conversation and then an imaginative lover. Struensee is able to fill her enthusiasm for his political ideals. He, a diciple of Rousseau, is inspired with the ideas of the Enlightenment and sets about making a modern European country of a Denmark that still has the hallmarks of a medieval feudal state. “That is indeed a revolution,” says Queen Mathilde to her lover at one juncture in the book. The French Revolution had still not taken place, and with these words the English princess is thinking of England’s “florious revolution” that put William of Orange on the throne and probably thereby avoided a civil war.

The disaster
This positive picture of a revolution is not to be hers for long. Struensee has felt too secure and has set about things too quickly. The Danish aristocracy is not disposed to accept the abolition of serfdom or torture, or the introduction of press freedom – at least not if at the same time it has to forfeit its own long-established privileges. And so the aristocracy organises its own revolution, one adopting a far bloodier course than Stuensee’s. He dies on the scaffold in 1772. The Queen is send into exile, dying in 1775 in Celle, in what was then the English Kingdom of Hannover.

A sensitive, impressionistic pen.
Maria Helleberg does not provide us with an exhaustive account; she does not slip into the role of the omniscient author. For instance, Mathilde is never sure just how much Struensee really loves her, and how much he is in love with the power which she is to help him to attain. Nor does Maria Helleberg know this. With a sensitive, impressionistic pen she produces a picture of a woman on the borderline between two epochs: Perhaps that is how it was.

Translated by W. Glyn Jones