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. 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. 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. 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? 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"). 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". In the event, however,
Karl Marx's prognosis proved correct. Herwegh's
Legion of German democrats arrived in Strasbourg having failed to attract the French government backing that they had hoped for. While the force waited in Strasbourg Emma Herwegh, disguised as a stylishly attired teenage boy and armed with two daggers, fled across
the river into Switzerland, heading initially to
Geneva. By 1849 they appear to have been back in Paris. 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. 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. Some sources imply a romantic attachment between Orsini and Emma Herwegh, but the matter is one in respect of which it becomes impossible to disentangle the factual from the fanciful. In 1854, she organised a false passport in the name of "Tito Celsi" for him. Two years later, with Orsini in jail, she sent him a coat with buttons containing an intoxicant intended for use to put his jailers out of action. They stayed in Baden-Baden till 1875, when
Georg Herwegh died from
Pneumonia. It was important to the couple that his body should be buried "in republican earth" and it was accordingly returned to
the Canton of Basel for burial in the cemetery at
Liestal. Although she lived in relative poverty, she was able to move in "intellectual circles". ==References==