Memoiren einer Idealistin

Like her close contemporary, Queen Victoria, Malwida von Meysenbug had her roots in a small, protestant German princely court and developed a great fondness for the Isle of Wight. But beyond that, her career was very different from the home life of our own dear queen. Despite her family having been on the receiving end of a small popular uprising when she was a little girl (their house was surrounded by an angry mob for some hours, and her father was obliged to go into exile together with the ruling prince whose chief minister he was), she grew to become a radical democrat and an atheist (or at times agnostic), determined not to accept the role that society and her family of minor statesmen and diplomats had defined for her as a woman. show more She was an excited spectator of the events of 1848 in Frankfurt and Berlin, was actively involved in a project to set up a women's higher education college in Hamburg, and had to leave Germany in a hurry when the Prussian police started to take an interest in her contacts with radicals and revolutionaries.

A period of exile in London gave her the opportunity to break with her family and build up an independent career for herself as a translator and journalist, as well as bringing her into close contact with the dazzling array of subversive foreign geniuses that were living in London at the time. In particular, she became very close to Johanna and Gottfried Kinkel, Alexander Herzen, and Giuseppe Mazzini. Presumably because of her friendship with the Kinkels, the most famous London revolutionary of them all, Karl Marx, is only mentioned once, rather dismissively. Whilst she firmly resisted any suggestion that she should take up the demeaning role of governess, she did look after the widowed Herzen's two young daughters "as a friend" for a time. She broke off this arrangement for a while when he installed his Russian mistress and her husband in the house, but went back to him later, adopting Olga Herzen as her "elective daughter".

She was a devoted Wagnerite, becoming a fan of his books before she had ever heard any of the music. She met him a couple of times in London, and later became a firm friend of the Wagners during a stay in Paris. She and Olga were excited participants in the celebrated controversy over the Paris premiere of Tannhäuser in 1861, which she describes in the final chapters of this memoir.

Memoiren einer Idealistin was originally published anonymously, in French, in 1869, and later translated and revised by the author a number of times. Even in the later editions, the book shows signs of its original anonymous form, and is sometimes frustratingly evasive about names and places. It's not a work of outstanding genius, but she generally comes across as a remarkably open and honest narrator. However, there are moments where she does seem to be deliberately muddying things. I was struck by the way she managed to imply that she was still a naive young thing - practically a teenager - during the events of 1848, when she was already over thirty. And the whole business of her relationship with Herzen is rather odd. Very possibly it was all as purely platonic as she says, but she certainly behaved towards him in the way you would expect a jealous lover to do...

For modern readers, the most obvious reason to tackle these three substantial volumes (plus the single-volume postscript Der Lebensabend einer Idealistin of 1896) is probably the glorious feast of nineteenth-century name-dropping (even die-hard eurosceptics will have the pleasure of bumping into Lord Palmerston (MvM was not a fan), Mrs Gaskell and Richard Cobden!). That was my starting point, really, but I found myself drawn in to a surprising amount by MvM's account of her own intellectual development. The "question everything" attitude she taught herself to adopt from an early age reminded me very much of growing up in the 1960s and 70s - it was really fascinating to see it coming out in someone born a couple of years after Waterloo, growing up in exactly the period when fat-headed reaction and social conservatism were becoming the dominant forces in upper-middle-class life throughout Europe. The book seems to have been quite an inspiration to the subsequent generation of feminists, and MvM was something of a minor cult figure for a while, although she now seems to be retreating into obscurity again.

Probably not for everyone, but good fun if you're a fan of 19th century Europe. show less