Agnes von Gerlach geb. von Raumer

Chronicle

1. 1598 bis 1657 (ihr Urahn)

   Six generations before her stands a man who wrote his own life. Martin Milag, chancellor to the princes of Anhalt, set down in 1648 in a house and account book where he came from – for his wife and children, as it says there, and with a couplet above it: that everything here rests on God's rich blessing and not on our own diligence. Georg Raumer, court preacher at Dessau, took the text over into the funeral sermon nine years later. His son then married the chancellor's daughter; through that marriage Agnes descends from him.

2. 1761

   Born, eldest daughter of Leopold von Raumer. She had six siblings: the brothers Karl, Friedrich, Heinrich and Eugen and, youngest of all, the twin sisters Marie and Casimire.

3. 1786

   Marries Carl Friedrich Leopold von Gerlach (April). The wedding takes place in Dessau, where her father was chancellery director of the prince of Anhalt.

4. 1789–1801

   Birth of her four sons Wilhelm, Leopold, Ernst Ludwig and Otto.

5. 1798

   The two twin sisters lived with her for a long time. Casimire, very musical, fell ill with dysentery and died in the house of her brother-in-law – that is, under the Gerlachs’ roof. Marie remained attached to her sister and her sister’s children for the rest of her life.

6. 27. August 1806

   In Berlin the first and only daughter of her daughter Sophie was born. A fortnight earlier the uncle from Parsow had come to Rohrbeck and confirmed the news of war; whereupon the heavily pregnant Sophie decided to drive back to Berlin as early as 14 August, with the carrier’s horses that had brought the uncle. Leopold went with her. The parents did not leave until the 24th, with Ludwig and Otto, and arrived on the day of the birth; the fortnight between, her son writes, the mother had spent in deadly anxiety. The child is Luise, the "little Wieschen", the later Countess Stosch, in whose house the grandmother would die twenty-five years later.

7. 1807

   The death of her daughter Sophie, while her husband Grolman was fighting Napoleon in Spain, was the loss she never got over – not even the eleven-month-old child Sophie left behind could quiet her grief; her son Ernst Ludwig points for this to her letters to her sister. Of that child, the later Countess Stosch, he kept an image that was still before his eyes in 1864: the little Wieschen carried about as a one-year-old, with black ribbons through her white sleeves. Some days after the burial a letter from Grolman to his wife still arrived, while the family was at breakfast in the garden.

8. 1823–1824

   The Berlin directories list her as "v. Gerlach, A. née v. Raumer, widowed president's wife, Hinter der katholischen Kirche 1" – after her husband's office as president of the chamber, whom she had lost ten years before. Two of her sons appear at the same house: a Major von Gerlach and a judge of the Kammergericht. The widow kept together the house in which the brothers had grown up.

9. 1830

   Once more she saw a grandchild. Still in Berlin, shortly before moving to Lusatia, the half-year-old Jakob was shown to her at Potsdam – his aunt Levetzow brought him there on purpose. It was the first and the last time.

10. Ihre Handschrift

    Little of her own survives in the family archive – but something everyday does: seventeen recipes in her own hand, undated, catalogued under her name. It is the only surviving handwriting of the mother of the four brothers. The catalogue gives her dates as 1762 to 1831; family tradition says 1761.

11. 1813

    Death of her husband; she lives thereafter as a widow at Rohrbeck. In the same year she writes to her sister Marie about her sons gone to war: "Can I joyfully see my sons die for the fatherland …" Her letters and the brothers' diaries were published by Hans-Joachim Schoeps in 1963 ("Aus den Jahren preußischer Not und Erneuerung").

12. 1831

    Dies at Rohrbeck. Marie died in June of the same year and was buried at Mosigkau near Dessau, a foundation for noblewomen of the princes of Anhalt. The correspondence between the two sisters still existed around 1900.

13. Was sie las

    The introduction to her son’s memoirs sets her against her husband: he no friend of society, she "more inclined to society and literature". She often went to the theatre and read the German classics and Plato in Schleiermacher’s translation. Of the marriage, contracted in 1786, it says that it was the happiest of marriages.

14. Was in der Leichenpredigt steht

    The chancellor came of humble people, and the print of 1657 says so without circumlocution. His great-grandfather Johannes was a clothmaker at Fürstenwalde and lived to be a hundred and six. His father Jacob served as clerk to a landholder at Tristewitz, became schoolmaster at Zweta and died in 1637 on his way to his son, struck down between Aken and Köthen. His mother Anna was the daughter of Martin Quelmaltz, deacon at Colditz. That deacon held to the Reformed doctrine, and after the death of Elector Christian I of Saxony he was persecuted so far that after his death they would allow him neither bell nor singing nor at first the churchyard; only during a great plague did friends of the widow take up the body and bury it honourably. The grandson became a doctor of laws, a member of the Fruitbearing Society, and from 1645 negotiated for Anhalt at Osnabrück and Münster.

Sources and literature