Emma Guerrieri Gonzaga

Emma Julia Hohenemser

Emma Therese Julie Clara Guerrieri Gonzaga , née Emma Julia Hohenemser (born December 11, 1835 in Mannheim , † December 29, 1900 in Rome ) was a German educator and promoter of educational institutions, Froebel pedagogy and women's education. She was an employee and friend of Froebel's great-niece Henriette Schrader-Breymann .

biography

Emma Julia Hohenemser got involved early on as a sponsor of educational institutions, Froebel pedagogy and women's education. After her marriage to the Italian patriot Marchese Carlo Guerrieri Gonzaga in 1866, she continued her work as a teacher in Italy.

In Germany

Emma Julia Hohenemser came from a wealthy and influential Jewish banking family who were based in Mannheim and had family ties with the financial elite in Germany and Europe. Emma showed a keen interest in European politics at an early age, although she was certainly influenced by the encounters and discussions that took place in her mother's salon, Sophie Löwengard Hohenemser.

Sophie Löwengard Hohenemser, Emma Julia's mother

Sophie belonged to the country's intellectual elite and was associated with the revolutionary movement and its representatives in the Frankfurt National Assembly . Since Sophie was involved in the Baden Revolution in 1848 , she and her youngest children had to flee to Switzerland , where she lived in exile in Geneva .

There Emma met another refugee and, like herself, an ardent admirer of Giuseppe Garibaldi : her future husband Carlo Guerrieri Gonzaga (1827–1913). He and his brother Anselmo had taken part in the Italian struggles for freedom and were survivors of the " Five Days of Milan ".

Before her marriage and later relocation to Italy, Emma returned to Germany to work as a teacher with the pedagogue Henriette Schrader-Breymann at her school in Watzum-Wolfenbüttel. H. Schrader-Breymann was Friedrich Froebel's great niece and founder of the Pestalozzi Froebel House in Berlin. This cooperation, in which the mother Sofia was involved, arose from the close friendship that the two not only with H. Schrader Breymann, but also with other intellectual German women, for example, Bertha von Marenholtz-Bülow and Malwida of Meysenbug , combined .

It was these women of strong character and intellect who had an important part in the liberal revolutionary movement of 1848, both theoretically and practically. In their idealistic program, early childhood education played a major role: it was about the development of kindergartens and children's homes as well as reforms to improve the welfare and medical care of children from poorer sections of the population, with the aim of creating a '' " To achieve reconciliation of the classes ””.

In Italy

The married couple Emma and Carlo Guerrieri Gonzaga first settled in Florence , the then provisional capital of the Kingdom of Italy . The three children Luigi, Maria and Sofia were born here. The family first moved to Rome in 1875, but returned to Florence five years later. In December 1883 Carlo was appointed Senator of the Kingdom of Italy, which required a renewed and permanent move of the family to Rome. The Guerrieri Gonzaga family only spent their holidays in their country estate near Mantua . The progress of the agricultural reforms, which Carlo had begun to implement there as a supporter of Cavour's ideas, had to be monitored and thus required his presence.

Wherever Emma and Carlo settled, they immediately found access to cultural circles and were thus connected to the most important intellectuals in Italy, but also to many German-Italians who had settled in Florence and Rome. Acquaintances developed into intensive friendships, for example with Karl Hillebrand , with the widow of the composer Robert Schumann , Clara , and her daughter Elise, with the poet Mathilde Blind , the painters Sabine and Reinhold Lepsius . The connection with the Hildebrand families, with the Brewsters and the Wagners, with their children and grandchildren was never to be broken.

The Italian circle of friends was at least as large. The Florentine Emilia Peruzzi Toscanelli deserves special mention, who welcomed the peninsula's elite in her famous “Red Salon”. Emma continued her educational commitment even after moving to Italy. From Florence in 1873 she was able to use her contacts to important personalities. She campaigned for the realization of kindergartens and founded an action committee with committed members and herself as chairman. The initiative was successful. The first kindergarten was founded in Italy, to which children from poor families also had access. With wise foresight and to help the “Kindergarten Company” get off to a successful start, she also involved her best political friends: For example, the future Prime Minister of the kingdom, Baron Costantino Sidney Sonnino , who later became Minister of Education Pasquale Villari , and Ubaldino Peruzzi, a former Minister, Mayor of Florence in her day.

The maturing process that Emma Julia had gone through, among other things through her experiences in the educational field, can also be traced in her correspondence with Friedrich Nietzsche . Maria Guerrieri Gonzaga worked as a loyal and tireless colleague of her friend, the pedagogue Maria Montessori , for the development of early childhood education. Maria Montessori was a regular guest of the Guerrieri Gonzaga family. She visited them after her travels both at the country estate in Palidano and in Rome. Emma's daughter Maria promoted the hospital reform and founded the first training center for nurses in Italy, the management of which she entrusted to a student of Florence Nightingale . Emma's niece Ida Hohenemser , daughter of her brother Wilhelm, who had taken part in the Heckerzug during the Baden Revolution in 1848 , was also Maria Montessori's employee. Ida Hohenemser lived with the Guerrieri Gonzaga family for about 15 years, was temporarily assistant to Maria Montessori and translated her educational writings into German, which were published in Stuttgart in 1926. Ida returned to Germany around 1913/14 and founded a Montessori kindergarten in her house in Meiningen / Thuringia.

literature

• Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari: Friedrich Nietzsche, Correspondence: Critical Complete Edition , Berlin, de Gruyter, 1975.
• Paolo Cont: Mosaico biografico, Emma Hohenemser Guerrieri Gonzaga , Rovereto (Trento), Tipolitografia Festini, 2013.
• Paolo Cont: Mosaico biografico, Luigi Guerrieri Gonzaga , Rovereto (Trento), 2009.
• Carlo Guerrieri Gonzaga: Memorie e lettere di Carlo Guerrieri Gonzaga . Con prefazione di Alessandro Luzio, Città di Castello, S. Lapi, 1915.
• Mary J. Lyschinska: Henriette Schrader-Breymann: Your life from letters and diaries . Vol. I, Berlin-Leipzig, Association of Scientific Publishers, 1922. P. 277

Web links

• Mosaico biografico, Emma Hohenemser Guerrieri Gonzaga . Rovereto (Trento), Tipolitografia Festini, 2013.
• Mosaico biografico, Luigi Guerrieri Gonzaga . Rovereto (Trento), 2009.

Remarks

1. ↑ Nietzsche's correspondence was published in “F. Nietzsche, Correspondence: Critical Complete Edition, G. Colli and M. Molinari, Berlin, de Gruyter, 1975 ”published.