Caroline Pichler (Vienna 1796 – Vienna 1843), writer and salonnière, is mostly remembered for hosting and bringing together celebrities such as Beethoven, Schubert, Brentano, Grillparzer, Tieck, Madame de Staël, August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel. Pichler’s salon, the highlight of Viennese social life, was also frequented by Metternich, which profoundly affected his cultural policies.

Pichler was home-schooled, her main tutor being Leopold Haschka, who would later become famous for writing the words to the Austrian national anthem Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser. When she started publishing herself, she focused on plays; these were overtly nationalistic and express the Schiller-inspired idea that theatre should help to create a national idea. Her close friend Joseph von Hormayr (1781–1841), Tyrolean patriot and instigator of the Tyrolean insurrection of 1809, shared these notions.

Over time, Pichler’s national commitment and sense of Austrian identity changed drastically. Her early plays, like Germanicus (1812) and Das befreite Deutschland (1813), were written in a time when she saw Austria as a part of the tribally- and medievally-rooted Germany of the erstwhile Holy Roman Empire. In her most famous play, Heinrich von Hohenstaufen, König der Deutschen (1813), she echoed Arndt’s ethnolinguistic nationalism: “Wo deutsche Sprache klingt, da sey, das deutsche Volk auch ewig frey!”; and the narrative juxtaposed the medieval ruler whose political legitimacy was under threat with the current crisis of the Habsburg Monarchy following the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire. The play premiered at Vienna’s Hofburgtheater in October 1813 in dedication to the recent German victory over Napoleon at Leipzig. Pichler also expressed her German-integrationist thought by actively promoting old-German dress, expressing the hope that women in both Berlin and Vienna would wear it.

These ideas changed fundamentally around 1815, when she abandoned her integrationist-German outlook and instead opted for a Habsburg-focused Austrian Reichspatriotismus, e.g. in her Ferdinand II, which centred on the Reformation. Closely following the example of Walter Scott, with whose works she became familiar in 1820, Pichler started to devote herself to strengthening Austrian national consciousness through historical novels, such as Die Belagerung Wiens (1824), Die Schweden in Prag (1827), Die Wiedereroberung von Ofen (1829) and Elisabeth: Eine Familiengeschichte aus der Zeit des Österreichischen Erbfolgekrieges (1835). Die Schweden in Prag was translated twice into English, once into French, and was adapted as a Romantic opera by Georg Valentin Röder (1842).

Pichler committed suicide in 1843, by which time her writings had largely been forgotten. Her historically valuable autobiography, Denkwürdigkeiten aus meinem Leben, was published posthumously in 1844.