ABSTRACT
On September 2, 2004, the name of Anna Amalia, Duchess of Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach, made contemporary headlines when her famed library and the contents within it were consumed by fire. This chapter provides a sense of her person and the forces that shaped her character. It draws a sense of Anna Amalia's personality from primary sources such as her letters and journals and those of her son Carl August, her lady-in-waiting Louise von Göchhausen, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johann Georg Wille, Johann Heinrich Merck, Angelica Kauffman, Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein, and Johann Gottfried Herder. The duchess's youthful experience in Braunschweig, however, neatly fits Norbert Elias's theories on the rationalizing tendencies of eighteenth-century court society as exemplified by the French court. After examining the regime of Louis XIV, Norbert Elias concluded in The Court Society that the king was not free from the system of court society he created but depended on the court and its courtiers.
