Martin Klöker Together with Caspar and Catharina in the Latest Issue of Sirp: Love Between Sources

On April 17, 2026, an interview with the Research Professor of the Literary Institute, Martin Klöker, was published in Sirp about his long-term research and his new two-volume source publication, „Caspar und Catharina. Eine Revaler Liebe in Dokumenten des 17. Jahrhunderts”. Martin Klöker was interviewed by the Head of the Department at the Literary Institute, Kaarel Vanamölder and Madli Vanamölder.

Kaarel Vanamölder, Madli Vanamölder

Love Between Sources

Germanist Martin Klöker: „It is astonishing how well we understand, despite the linguistic distance, what people of the 17th century were trying to express, and that we feel deep sympathy for them.”

Martin Klöker is a German literary historian and Germanist, a long-standing and renowned researcher of early German-language literature in Estonia and Livonia, and a senior researcher at the Under and Tuglas Literature Centre of the Estonian Academy of Sciences. In 2020, Klöker published an archival source collection of just over one hundred love letters. These were written between 1636 and 1652 by the scholar and secretary of the Estonian Knighthood, the married Caspar Meyer (ca. 1605–1654), and Catharina von der Hoyen (born ca. 1621), an unmarried merchant’s daughter from Tallinn, whose relationship became known in the city and provoked mixed reactions. Now Klöker has compiled over six hundred additional documents or fragments of them from various archives, covering the period 1627–1663, totaling nine hundred pages, and has presented a new two-volume source publication, „Caspar and Catharina 2.”

Read the full interview here.