Malwida von Meysenbug (October 28, 1816 – April 23, 1903) was a German writer, memoirist, and prominent proponent of women's education and emancipation.Queer Places:
Campo Cestio
Rome, Città Metropolitana di Roma Capitale, Lazio, Italy
Malwida von Meysenbug (October 28, 1816 – April 23, 1903) was a German writer, memoirist, and prominent proponent of women's education and emancipation.
Born in Kassel, Germany, into an aristocratic and bureaucratic family—her father was a minister under the rulers of Hesse-Kassel—von Meysenbug rejected her conservative, religious upbringing in favor of democratic and philosophical ideals. During the European revolutions of 1848, she aligned herself with radical democratic thinkers, religious reformers (joining the Free Congregations), and political exiles.
Because of her political activities and support for revolutionaries, she broke permanently with her family, was disinherited, and faced police surveillance in Berlin before fleeing Germany in 1852. She relocated to London, where she survived by teaching German and translating. During her time in England and later in France and Italy, she interacted with major figures of the 19th-century European democratic and intellectual underground, including Giuseppe Mazzini, Alexander Herzen, and Richard Wagner.
Von Meysenbug spent much of her later life in Italy, primarily in Rome, where she hosted a renowned intellectual salon. She never married, choosing instead an independent path focused on intellectual companionship and social reform.
She formed a close, lifelong friendship with the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, whom she met in the 1870s and who affectionately referred to her as a "second mother". In 1876, she organized an intellectual retreat in Sorrento, Italy, bringing together Nietzsche and author Paul Rée.
She published her landmark autobiographical work, Memoiren einer Idealistin (Memoirs of an Idealist), anonymously in 1869 (with later volumes following), which chronicled her spiritual and political evolution, her life in exile, and her battles against 19th-century gender limitations.
In 1901, she achieved historical distinction as the first woman ever to be nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, proposed by the French historian Gabriel Monod.
Meta von Salis-Marschlins was a Swiss historian, pioneering feminist, writer, and activist for women's suffrage.
Meta von Salis was part of the broader intellectual and feminist circle that gathered around Malwida von Meysenbug and Friedrich Nietzsche in the late 19th century. Through her association with Meysenbug, von Salis integrated into a network of progressive thinkers who challenged contemporary orthodoxies regarding women's intellectual capabilities.
Von Salis went on to become the first woman to earn a PhD in philosophy from a Swiss university (at the University of Zurich in 1887), a milestone achieved with encouragement from Nietzsche and the wider reform-minded circle fostered by figures like Meysenbug.
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