Sidonia Hedwig Zäunemann#
According to the baptism register at the Kauffmannskirche in Erfurt, Sidonia Hedwig Zäunemann was born in 1711 as the fourth of seven children of a lawyer.[1] Her father was the imperial notary and court-procurator Paul Nikolaus Zäunemann; her mother, Hedwig Dorothea Güldemund, is the daughter of an imperial master of the mint and caption of the city.[2] Sidonia Hedwig grew up together with her sisters Martha Paulina and Johanna Maria Benedictina. Her older siblings died before she was born and a further, younger sibling dies at the age of one. The family lived in the merchant quarter of Erfurt and the sisters likely attended the girls-school, which was run by a priest’s daughter, Martha Maria Werder.[3]
In 1734 Zäunemann publishes her first poems, ballads, scholarly texts, and letters in periodicals, primarily in the Hamburgischen Berichten von neuen gelehrten Sachen. 1737 she is the only woman to contribute an elegy to the epicedium for the professor Johann Albert Fabricius. At the same time in 1737 she writes an introduction in poetic form for the Curieusen und immerwährenden astronomisch-meterologisch-oeconomichen Frauenzimmer- Reise und Hand-Calender. At the turn of the year 1937/38 the University of Göttingen she appointed as the poeta laureata. It is from this time that the a copper-engraving shows her with the insignia of a doctorate: cloak and laurel wreath. In this she joins the italian professoressa at the University of Bologna, Laura Bassi, and the poeta laureata at the University of Wittenberg.
Following this she publishes her extensive volume of poetry “Poetische Rosen in Knospen”, containing both previously published and unpublished texts. Her final work, the satire “Die von denen Faunen gepeitschten Laster” is published in 1739. In December 1740, one month before her 30th birthday, she dies crossing a flooded river between Ilmenau and Erfurt. She was never married.
Zäunemann develops a number of motives and themes that are repeatedly picked up in her works. The central one is the question what a woman can and is allowed to do, if she wants to. She develops this both in literary form, when she writes male-dominated forms, such as her solider-songs, and in reality, when she entered the Ilmenauer mine and from that develops a didactic poem, that will find its way into Goethe’s library in Weimar.[4]
Prepared by Corinna Dziudzia