Emma Charlotte Herwegh (née Siegmund; 10 May 1817 – 24 March 1904) was a German salonnière and woman of letters who participated in the 1848 uprisings, undertaking at least one secret quasi-diplomatic mission on behalf of the German Democratic Legion. She is known to posterity in particular, partly because she married the poet and activist Georg Herwegh, and partly because she was an exceptionally prolific letter writer.
Life
Provenance and early years Emma Charlotte Siegmund was born in Berlin or, more probably, Magdeburg. Sources differ. Johann Gottfried Siegmund (1792–1865), her father, was a prominent and successful Berlin silk merchant. He came from an old Jewish family, but had himself committed to Protestantism. Emma grew up in a prosperous home: Lucas Schönlein, their family doctor, was also the family doctor of the king, whose palatial city residence was close by.
She was the middle sister of three. There was also a brother, Gustav August Siegmund (1815-1902) who would grow up to become a Berlin physician and minor politician. She enjoyed a first-class education, through which she mastered three foreign languages (French, Polish and Italian). Musically gifted, she composed, painted, translated, enjoyed theater and wrote poetry.Michail Krausnick: Nicht Magd mit den Knechten (Marbacher Magazin 83/1998). Marbach 1998, , p. 3 and beyond. Despite the liberal open atmosphere of the parental home, where various prominent Berliners were regular visitors, and despite plenty of animated conversations with friends, the diaries she kept as an adolescent indicate that she felt acutely constrained by the dull and conventional "bourgeois" life which she led:
Mornings nothing, afternoons nothing and evenings not a lot ... Saturday some hours with Valentini [her Italian teacher], dull lesson about a [long since forgotten] play ... Exhausted - evening boat trip - whist party. Ennui. Potato salad.Emma Siegmund: Tagebuch, 22. Februar 1839; 12. Mai 1839; 13. September 1841. as quoted in: Barbara Rettenmund und Jeannette Voirol: Emma Herwegh. Die grösste und beste Heldin der Liebe. Limmat Verlag, Zürich 2000, , p. 21.
As a young woman she evinced a certain tomboyishness. A phrase reproduced in several sources indicates that she "often violated the conventions of her time: she rode like the devil, shot with pistol, on holiday in 1841 swam in the sea off Helgoland, smoked, and took an interest in gymnastics". When she was thirteen her political consciousness was engaged by the 1830 French Revolution, and slightly closer to home, two years later, the "Hambach Festival". She also drew inspiration from the Polish liberation movement. Because of her friendship with Emilia Sczaniecka, twelve years her senior, it is evident from their correspondence that she was unusually well informed about the Polish situation in the aftermath of successive partitions of Polish territory between Russia and Prussia. Her sympathies lay with the oppressed population, which meant uncompromising rejection of the Prussian and Russian positions. Even before she met Georg Herwegh she was enthusiastic about another revolution:
I read about French revolutionary history and was seized by a volcanic passion, at once burning, at once half frozen. - But how might it be if the time came when every man thought like a king, when everyone was taught such a level of empowerment that people saw one another only as brothers, where only merit mattered, where divine spirit was revealed in every human heart, to the point where kings were no longer needed?Emma Siegmund: Tagebuch, 24./25. Oktober 1841. as quoted in: Michail Krausnick: Nicht Magd mit den Knechten. (= Marbacher Magazin Nr. 83/1998.). Marbach 1998, , p. 8.
The death of the king in June 1840 brought the prospect of a new generation of monarch, and many of those who back in 1832 had celebrated visions of liberalism and democracy at Hambach dared to think their moment had arrived. Emma Siegmund did not share their optimism. The new king was crowned on 18 October 1840. She did not need to walk far from the family home to witness the festivities. Her diary comment comprised three words: "Everywhere boring" ("Langeweile über alles"). By this time she was frequently escaping from the middle-class stuffiness of the family home in Berlin by visiting her friend Emilia Sczaniecka whose family estate at Pakosław near Posen became like a second home to her. The two were in several ways - notably politically - kindred spirits, and spent long hours together discussing independence and freedom (for Poland). Around this time Sczaniecka gave Siegmund a ring inscribed, "Poland is still not lost" ("Noch ist Polen nicht verloren"). Emma would wear that ring for the rest of her long life.
Georg Herwegh By the time she was 25, both Emma's sisters were or had been married. She was not. That she came from a cultured, socially well connected, and unusually wealthy family was widely recognised in the city. Her diaries, gleefully quoted by a biographer, indicate that the men in her social circle were "time servers, liberal activists and groupies, low life, philistines, pretty boys, weathercocks, donkeys, dropouts, no-hopers and sycophants" ("Beamtenseelen, Menschenware, niederträchtige Gesellschaft, Schufte, Philister, liberales Pack, Schöngeister, Windbeutel, Esel, entmarkte Gesellen, Höflinge, Speichellecker."). She had a powerful crush on the young diplomat, Jean-Jacques Jules Piaget, who married her younger sister, Fanny, and she was devastated when he died suddenly in 1840.
On 28 October 1841, Emma Siegmund got her hands on a copy of "Gedichte eines Lebendigen" (loosely "Poems of one who is alive"), a poetry collection by the young Stuttgart poet Georg Herwegh, who was living in political exile in Switzerland. The little volume had been promptly banned by the authorities, despite which (or possibly because of which) it had become a bestseller. Like many of her generation, she found herself fired up by the verses that evoked unity among all people and called for revolution. "That is the answer my soul was missing" ("Das ist die Antwort auf meine Seele!"), she is said to have cried out.Michail Krausnick: Die eiserne Lerche. Georg Herwegh, Dichter und Rebell. Signal-Verlag, Baden-Baden 1970, , S. 40. Her image of this noble poet became a focus in her diary entries and she set about engineering a meeting with her new "favourite bard". She was in love – albeit platonically at this stage – with a man she had never met.
Siegmund discovered that during the late summer of 1842 Herwegh had planned a celebrity tour of Germany, which would include Berlin. He was looking for people to work on a new project to be centred round a newspaper, "Deutschen Boten aus ser Schweiz" ("German messages from Switzerland"), intended, it has been suggested, to get around the press censorship in Prussia. As he toured the cities he was widely feted. Getting near him was no simple matter. Nevertheless, helped by her friend Charlotte Guticke (who herself later married Max Duncker), Siegmund managed, at an art exhibition, to get close enough to Herwegh to speak with him. That turned into a meal together followed by a succession of increasingly excited daily diary entries. Georg Herwegh and Emma Siegmund became engaged on or before 13 November 1842. During his visit, Herwegh was also given an audience with King Frederick William IV whose curiosity had been aroused. The encounter was more an exchange of views than a meeting of minds. At the end of it the king murmured, "I know we are enemies, but I must be true to my profession, we want to be honest enemies" (""Ich weiß, wir sind Feinde, aber ich muss nun mal bei meinem Handwerk bleiben, wir wollen ehrliche Feinde sein." ") and signaled the end of their meeting. Directly following the audience, he ordered a ban on "Deutschen Boten aus ser Schweiz". The lovers spent Christmas at the Siegmund family home in Berlin. In December 1842, the king became aware that Herwegh had published an open letter complaining about the political situation in Germany, and ordered that the literary trouble maker be expelled from the kingdom. On 26 December 1842, Hervegh was marched to a police station and given 24 hours to leave the country. It was partly as a result of pressure from the government in Vienna but partly, also, as a result of King Frederick William's appreciation of the dangers represented by the popularity of Georg Herwegh, that there was now a more general tightening up of censorship in Prussia and elsewhere in the German confederation.
Herwegh had used his German trip to meet at some length with Heinrich Heine, and as he hastened back to Switzerland he found time to stop off in Leipzig to meet with his friend (and political ally) Mikhail Bakunin who was staying in the city. Emma had not wished to be separated from her fiancé, and the two of them traveled to Leipzig together. At the station, their fellow revolutionary, Bakunin awaited them. However, they were also awaited by a Saxon police officer who served Herwegh with an expulsion order without even permitting him to leave the main railway station. The entire experience appears to have crystallised in Emma a dislike of Prussia which would never leave her. Now the lovers really were parted, and for the next two months their relationship was intensively pursued (and thereby documented) by correspondence.
At the start of February 1843, Emma was informed by a mutual friend, Ludwig Follen, that Herwegh, now back in Zürich, was ill. Friends were convinced that only Emma's presence could save him from further decline. She also became aware that her letters to him, and his to her, were taking a remarkably long time to arrive. Later, she established the reason: the letters were being intercepted and read by government censors not just in Berlin, but also by other governments along the way. She reacted to Follen's information on her fiancé by immediately setting off for Zürich, where she arrived by stage coach, accompanied by her (already a widow for more than five years) elder sister, Minna Caspari, and by her father, on 23 February 1843. Georg Herwegh and Emma Siegmund were married on 8 March 1843 at Baden (Aargau), an hour or so down the valley from Zürich. An official exclusion order from the Canton of Zürich had come into effect sooner than expected, but in the adjacent Canton of Aargau the cantonal president was happy for the marriage to be contracted, noting that he was "delighted, through this authorisation, to be able to demonstrate that there ..[were].. still cantons in Switzerland that had not fallen prey to the spies". Guests attending numbered various German born (and other) political exiles as well as several originally German successful medical men: they included Adolf Ludwig Follen, Friedrich and Caroline Schulz, Jakob Henle, Karl von Pfeufer and, as the couple's groomsman Michail Bakunin.
In April, they took their honey moon in southern France and Italy. There is also mention of a political meeting in Geneva with two "artisan communists" called Weitling and Becker, and of a bathing holiday in Ostend. The couple evidently intended to remain in Switzerland, paying several hundred Swiss francs to the municipality of Augst and several hundred more francs to the cantonal authorities of Basel-Land for the authorisations needed to do so. By the time they died, the investment would probably have appeared worthwhile, but in September 1843 the couple moved to Paris, the city identified in sources as "the waiting room for the [next] revolution", where their first child, Horace, was born three days short of 1844, and where, between 1843 and 1848, Emma became, among other things, a "salonnière" - the hostess of a politically engaged "salon". Regular visitors included Heinrich Heine, George Sand, Victor Hugo, Franz Liszt, the Countess d'Agoult, Ivan Turgenev, Alphonse de Lamartine and Pierre-Jean de Béranger.