31 Facts About Emma Herwegh

Emma Herwegh 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.

Emma Herwegh came from an old Jewish family, but had himself committed to Protestantism.

Emma Herwegh grew up in a prosperous home: Lucas Schonlein, their family doctor, was the family doctor of the king, whose palatial city residence was close by.

Emma Herwegh enjoyed a first-class education, through which she mastered three foreign languages.

Emma Herwegh's sympathies lay with the oppressed population, which meant uncompromising rejection of the Prussian and Russian positions.

Emma Herwegh did not need to walk far from the family home to witness the festivities.

Emma Herwegh would wear that ring for the rest of her long life.

Emma Herwegh 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", a poetry collection by the young Stuttgart poet Georg Herwegh, who was living in political exile in Switzerland.

Siegmund discovered that during the late summer of 1842 Emma Herwegh had planned a celebrity tour of Germany, which would include Berlin.

Emma Herwegh was looking for people to work on a new project to be centred round a newspaper, "Deutschen Boten aus ser Schweiz", intended, it has been suggested, to get around the press censorship in Prussia.

Nevertheless, helped by her friend Charlotte Guticke, Siegmund managed, at an art exhibition, to get close enough to Emma Herwegh to speak with him.

Georg Herwegh and Emma Siegmund became engaged on or before 13 November 1842.

In December 1842, the king became aware that Emma 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.

Emma 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 Mikhail Bakunin who was staying in the city.

Emma Herwegh had not wished to be separated from her fiance, and the two of them traveled to Leipzig together.

At the start of February 1843, Emma was informed by a mutual friend, Ludwig Follen, that Herwegh, now back in Zurich, was ill.

Emma Herwegh became aware that her letters to him, and his to her, were taking a remarkably long time to arrive.

Emma Herwegh reacted to Follen's information on her fiance by immediately setting off for Zurich, where she arrived by stage coach, accompanied by her 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, an hour or so down the valley from Zurich.

In Paris, for a time, Emma Herwegh found Marie d'Agoult becoming a serious rival for her husbands' affections, and there would later be times when the couple lived apart, but the partnership nevertheless endured.

Emma Herwegh was accompanied by his wife, reportedly the only woman in an armed band of 650, whose passion for the enterprise was no less intense than his.

Georg Herwegh, whose extremism had been exaggerated in government propaganda, and who never captured the support of the moderate majority among the reformers in the region, found himself widely ridiculed while Emma was disinherited by her father whose business interests in Berlin had, since 1842, been badly affected by his daughter's very public displays of revolutionary passion.

However, Emma Herwegh had not taken the precaution of telling his friend that half a year earlier he had embarked on an intense love affair with Natalia, Herzen's wife.

The affair with Natalia Herzen - much publicised by the enraged Herzen in the radical political circles in which the Herweghs moved - appears to have led to a two-year separation, during which Emma relocated to Genoa.

Emma Herwegh did, in any event, became a steadfast and at times a usefully practical supporter of the patriotic adventurer.

In May 1853, Georg and Emma Herwegh resumed their cohabitation, settling together in Zurich, where Emma again became a "salonniere", and hostess to some of Europe's most high-profile radical intellectuals.

Emma Herwegh's family resumed financial support, and she earned money by undertaking translations of works by French, Polish or Italian authors into German.

Around the same time the couple's financial situation took a turn for the worse: Emma Herwegh's inheritance seems finally to have been exhausted, and one reason given for leaving Zurich was the need to get away from people to whom they owed money.

Emma Herwegh now returned to Paris where she supported herself as a languages tutor and translator.

Emma Herwegh's body was buried at Liestal "in free republican earth", beside that of her husband.