Ibsen and Dilthey: evidence of a forgotten acquaintance

Henrik Ibsen came to Gossensass in southern Tyrol for the first time in 1876. He returned on his way to Italy in 1878, and then again in 1882, 1883, 1884 and 1889. The last stay is probably the best known, mainly because of Ibsen’s encounter with the young Austrian Emilie Bardach. Some sort of romance developed between them. She began to think that she had a future as his collaborator, and that she would travel the world with him and partake in his triumphs. The following winter they corresponded until February 1890, when Ibsen asked her to stop writing to him. Directly after Ibsen’s death in 1906 Georg Brandes published Ibsen’s letters to Miss Bardach. It seems that she had been pushing him to do so, threatening to do it herself if he did not, and the publication was greatly resented by the Ibsen family. Since then the relationship between Ibsen and Emilie Bardach has been a favourite theme for Ibsen biographers and even the topic of two plays and a novel. But Ibsen also made other acquaintances that summer which have passed practically unnoticed. Emilie left Gossensass on 28 September 1889. In a letter to her dated 7 October, written after his return to Munich, Ibsen tells her about the last week in Gossensass. He says that it had been sad without her, and that the hotel had been almost empty: “Auch im grossen Saal habe ich es öde und trostlos gefunden. Die Gäste, Familie Pereira und der Professor mit Gattin, erschienen nur bei den Mahlzeiten.” The professor and wife were Wilhelm and Katharina Dilthey. The philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) was at that time professor in Berlin, since 1882 occupying the chair in theoretical philosophy formerly held by Fichte and Hegel and before Dilthey