Emma Herwegh

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Emma Herwegh, painting in the Poet and City Museum Liestal

Emma Charlotte Herwegh , née Emma Siegmund (born May 10, 1817 in Magdeburg , according to other sources in Berlin , † March 24, 1904 in Paris ), was a German revolutionary during the surveys of 1848/49 in France and the German-speaking countries and a early champion of the women's rights movement . She became known through her marriage to the poet Georg Herwegh .

Life

Emma Charlotte Herwegh-Siegmund, daughter of the Berlin merchant and purveyor to the court Johann Gottfried Siegmund (1789–1865) and his wife Henriette Wilhelmine Siegmund, b. Cramer, widowed Schiff (1784-1860) grew up in a wealthy family in Berlin. She had a brother (Gustav August), an older one (Minna Caspari) and a younger sister (Fanny Piaget). She enjoyed an excellent education, mastered several foreign languages ​​(French, Polish, Italian) and was gifted with music; she composed, drew, translated, acted in theater and wrote poetry. But despite her liberal, open parental home, where prominent guests came and went, and despite a lively exchange with friends, the diaries of her youth show how boring and limited she found the conventional life of a bourgeois daughter:

"Nothing in the morning, nothing at noon and little in the evening." - "Saturday hour with Valentini [the Italian teacher], boring lecture of a Goldonian comedy." - Great tiredness. - Evening sailing trip. - Whist game. Malaise. Potato salad."

With her boyish demeanor, she often violated the conventions of her time: she rode like the devil, shot pistols, bathed in the sea at night, smoked and was interested in the gymnastics movement . Their political awareness was awakened by the French July Revolution of 1830, the Hambach Festival and the Polish freedom movement. Through her friend Emilie Sczaniecka, she was familiar with the situation in Poland after the partition and the November uprising; her sympathy lay with the oppressed people, while she was hostile to Prussia and Russia. Even before meeting Georg Herwegh, she was enthusiastic about the revolution:

"I read the history of the French revolution and was driven by a volcanic glow, now glowing, now half frozen. - But how if a time came when every person thought royally, when the overall education would be so omnipotent that man only in the other would see the brother where only merits would be recognized, where the spirit of the divine had revealed itself in every breast; would it then still need those kings? "

Meeting with Herwegh

Emma Herwegh (1817–1904) revolutionary, Georg Herwegh (1817–1875) revolutionary poet, translator, journalist, grave in the Liestal cemetery. Location: Feld LP, in 1863 he wrote the lyrics for the “Bundeslied”. According to his wishes, he was buried in Liestal in "republican soil".
Grave of Emma Herwegh and Georg Herwegh in Liestal

Although Emma Siegmund had many admirers as a good match, she was still unmarried at the age of twenty-five. The men around her seemed to her “official souls, human goods, vile society, villains, philistines, liberal pack, esthete, cream puffs, donkeys, demarked journeymen, courtiers, droolers”. Her crush on Jules Piaget, the husband of her younger sister Fanny, who encouraged Emma artistically, remained hopeless; the death of her "beloved brother" Piaget in 1840 hit her hard.

On October 28, 1841, Emma Siegmund first came across the "Poems of a Living Man", which the young Stuttgart poet Georg Herwegh had published in exile in Switzerland and which had become an overwhelming bestseller. Like many young people of her generation, she felt drawn to the fiery verses that conjured up the unity of all people and called for revolution. "That's the answer to my soul!" she is said to have exclaimed; the "noble poet" became the imagined reference person for her diary entries. Through her friend Charlotte Gutike (later wife of Maximilian Duncker ) she initiated an encounter with Herwegh during his celebrated trip to Germany in 1842. On November 6, 1842, Herwegh called on the Siegmund house for the first time - and on November 13 he was engaged to Emma.

Since Herwegh was on a tour of Germany, they exchanged intense letters. After Herwegh was expelled from Germany, Emma Siegmund traveled to Zurich with her father and sister in February 1843 and married him on March 8, 1843 in Baden . In attendance were Adolf Ludwig Follen , Friedrich Wilhelm Schulz , Jacob Henle , Karl von Pfeufer and Mikhail Bakunin . The honeymoon took them both to Italy, from September 1843 they lived in Paris, where their first child Horace was born. Your neighbors there in Paris were Karl and Jenny Marx .

When the revolution broke out in Germany in March 1848, the wife also took part in Herwegh's Paris German Legion . As a scout and envoy, she traveled several times from Alsace to Baden to negotiate with Friedrich Hecker about the Legion's deployment. Herwegh wanted to support the Baden Revolution militarily in Baden . After the unfortunate outcome of the uprising, Georg and Emma Herwegh only barely saved their lives and fled to Switzerland, where they settled in Zurich from 1851 to 1866 . The marriage was not without crises; at times the couple lived separately.

In 1855 she helped the revolutionary Felice Orsini to escape from the Castello San Giorgio prison in the Palazzo Ducale in Mantua by sending him books with thin files hidden in them. The amnesty granted to all politically exiled people after the war in 1866 prompted the Herweghs to move to Baden-Baden in 1866 , where Georg Herwegh died in 1875.

Emma and Georg Herwegh had three sons: Horace (1843-1901), Camille (1847-1848) and Marcel (1858 to around 1937) and a daughter: Ada (1849-1921), who married Antônio Francisco de Paula Souza in 1871 . Emma Herwegh spent her twilight years in Paris, where she maintained close relationships with Frank Wedekind just a few years before her death . She died in 1904 and was buried at the side of her husband in Liestal, Switzerland .

In memory of Emma Herwegh, a square in Liestal and streets in Berlin-Moabit and Freiburg-Betzenhausen were named after her. A memorial plaque commemorates them in Baden-Baden.

Berlin street sign of Emma-Herwegh-Straße with dedication

Works

  • On the history of the German democratic legion from Paris. From a high traitor. Levy, Grünberg 1849.

Letters

  • Georg Herwegh's correspondence with his bride. Edited by Marcel Herwegh. Lutz, Stuttgart 1906.

literature

Literary processing

Web links

Commons : Emma Herwegh  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Michail Krausnick: Not a maid with the servants (=  Marbacher Magazin 83/1998 ). Marbach 1998, ISBN 3-929146-74-6 , pp. 3 .
  2. ↑ Emma Herwegh: Diary, February 22, 1839; May 12, 1839; September 13, 1841. Quoted from: Barbara Rettenmund and Jeannette Voirol: Emma Herwegh. The greatest and best heroine of love. Limmat Verlag, Zurich 2000, ISBN 3-293-00277-3 , p. 21 .
  3. ↑ Michail Krausnick: Not a maid with the servants (=  Marbacher Magazin No. 83/1998 ). Marbach 1998, ISBN 3-929146-74-6 .
  4. ↑ Emma Siegmund: Diary, 24./25. October 1841. Quoted from: Michail Krausnick: Not a maid with the servants. (=  Marbacher Magazin No. 83/1998. ). Marbach 1998, ISBN 3-929146-74-6 , pp. 8 .
  5. ↑ Michail Krausnick: Not a maid with the servants (=  Marbacher Magazin No. 83/1998 ). Marbach 1998, ISBN 3-929146-74-6 , pp. 6 .
  6. ↑ Michail Krausnick: The iron lark. Georg Herwegh, poet and rebel. Signal-Verlag, Baden-Baden 1970, ISBN 3-7971-0288-7 , p. 40 .
  7. ↑ Rettenmund, Voirol: Emma Herwegh.
  8. ↑ Grave of Emma Herwegh at knerger.de
personal data
SURNAME Herwegh, Emma
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Herwegh, Emma Charlotte (full name); Siegmund, Emma (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German revolutionary and champion of the women's rights movement
DATE OF BIRTH May 10, 1817
PLACE OF BIRTH Magdeburg or Berlin
DATE OF DEATH March 24, 1904
Place of death Paris