Auguste Bussmann

Magdalena Margaretha Auguste Bußmann (born January 1, 1791 ; † April 17, 1832 in Frankfurt am Main ) was briefly married to Clemens Brentano .

Life

Auguste Bußmann's mother Maria Elisabeth comes from the Frankfurt banking family Bethmann . Her father, the banker Johann Jakob Bußmann, died the same year she was born. Her uncle Simon Moritz von Bethmann took over the guardianship. Augustes mother married Alexandre Victor François de Flavigny for the second time. From this marriage, the writer Marie d'Agoult emerged, in turn mother of Cosima Wagner .

At the end of July 1807 the 16-year-old Auguste Bußmann escaped in wild passion with the recently widowed poet Clemens Brentano . The couple found shelter at a brother-in-law of Brentano in Kassel and were married on August 21, 1807 in Fritzlar Cathedral. Shortly after the wedding, there were arguments and heated arguments between the unequal couple. The couple could not live together, so they soon separated. Short-term attempts to live as a married couple quickly failed each time. A quick separation was desired from both of them. However, divorce was difficult to obtain. It was not until 1814 that the formal divorce decree was signed. Subsequently, Auguste Bußmann was given the choice by her family of going to the monastery or of getting married again. On March 30, 1817, she married Johann August Ehrmann. Auguste Bußmann had four children who, by his own testimony, were not all of her husband's. On April 17, 1832, Auguste Bussmann drowned himself in the Main .

Literary processing

Hans Magnus Enzensberger edited the correspondence between Auguste Bußmann and Clemens Brentano under the title Requiem for a Romantic Woman ; it was filmed in 1998 by Dagmar Knöpfel .

The main part of the documentary part of Enzensberger's Requiem for a Romantic Woman contains a few letters from the couple, but mostly excerpts from the letters and draft letters of the Brentano district as well as court documents, memories of Augustes half-sister and biographical representations from the 1870s, as well as selected poetry by Clemens Brentano and two prose texts from the pen of Achim von Arnim .

In 2004 , the Frankfurt chanson duo, Duo Liederlich, processed the tragic story of Auguste Bußmann as a chanson evening under the title Du cheeky lüderliches Weib .

literature

• Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Requiem for a Romantic Woman. The story of Auguste Bußmann and Clemens Brentano , Berlin 1988, ISBN 3-458-33973-6

filming

• Dagmar Knöpfel, Requiem for a Romantic Woman , 1999