Die gebrochenen Ketten: Erzählungen, Reportagen und Reden (1861-1873) (Stuttgarter Nachdrucke zur Literatur des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts) (German Edition)
Giesler-Anneke Mathilde Franziska was an author, reformer, educator. She wrote a range of books in German, translated works of other authors.
Background
Mathilde Franziska Anneke was born on April 3, 1817, in Westphalia at Lerchenhausen on the Ruhr. She was the daughter of Karl and Elisabeth (Hülswitt) Giesler.
Her girlhood was spent on the estate and in the neighboring castle of Blankenstein, of which her father was Domänendirektor.
Education
Anneke enjoyed passionately the outdoor life and romantic scenery of the region was carefully educated under Catholic auspices.
Career
Mathilde Franziska and her second husband removed to Köln and joined the revolutionary movement. While Fritz Anneke was spending eleven months in prison awaiting trial for treason, Frau Anneke started two papers, the Neue Kölnische Zeitung and the Frauenzeitung, which were quickly suppressed by the police.
At liberty again, Fritz Anneke joined the revolutionary forces in Baden and the Palatinate, his wife accompanying him as a mounted orderly.
They were in the battle of Ubstadt June 23, 1849, were forced back on Rastatt, and amid general confusion were compelled to flee. They reached Zürich in safety and thence emigrated to the United States, settling in Milwaukee, where Mrs. Anneke soon made her appearance as a lecturer.
From 1852 to 1858, they lived in Newark, New Jersey, where Anneke edited the Newarker Zeitung and Mrs. Anneke the Frauenzeitung.
From 1860 to 1865, she was in Switzerland as a newspaper correspondent, while her husband served as an artillery staff officer under Gen. John A. McClernand and for three months as colonel of the 34th Wisconsin Infantry.
Later, he was war correspondent for the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung and after the war secretary of the Deutsche Gesellschaft of Chicago. At Jena, in 1863, Mrs. Anneke published a novel, Das Geisterhaus in New-York.
In 1865, she founded a girls’ school, the Milwaukee Töchter Institut, and conducted it for the rest of her life. It enjoyed a high reputation and a wide influence among liberal Germans in the Middle West.
Until late in life she continued to write much prose and verse.
During the development from a writer of pious books to a pioneer of German feminism, Anneke abandoned dogmatic religion and became a freethinker.
Personality
To the end, in spite of bereavements and severe illness, Mathilde Franziska retained her youthful idealism and her enthusiasm for various humanitarian causes.
Quotes from others about the person
Carl Schurz, who was Anneke’s aide-de-camp, describes her as “a young woman of noble character, beauty, vivacity, and fiery patriotism”.
Connections
Mathilde Franziska Anneke was married at the age of nineteen to the Gerichtsrat Alfred von Tabouillot. The marriage proved a mistake and was soon dissolved, but a long struggle ensued in the courts before she secured the custody of her infant daughter.
On June 3, 1847, she married Fritz Anneke, whose liberalism had cost him his lieutenancy in the Prussian artillery.
While Anneke was spending eleven months in prison awaiting trial for treason, their first child was born. Five children were born to them in America.