Effi Briest - Background

Background

Elisabeth von Ardenne (1853-1952) is said to be the inspiration for Effi Briest.

Elisabeth von Ardenne was born Elisabeth von Plotho on 26 October 1853, the youngest of five children. Her place of birth, Zerben, is nowadays known as Elbe-Parey. After her father’s untimely demise in 1864, she led a blissful and tranquil childhood until she made the acquaintance of her future husband, Armand Léon von Ardenne (1848-1919). The adolescent Elisabeth, who had by then received the sobriquet “Else”, is said to have displayed little interest in the young man who was five years her senior, and therefore declined his first proposal of marriage. Nonetheless she had a change of heart during the Franco-Prussian War, in which Ardenne had been injured. Elisabeth von Plotho and Léon von Ardenne announced their two-year engagement on 7 February 1871. The couple eventually wed on 1 January 1873.

They relocated to Düsseldorf in the summer of 1881 owing to Ardenne’s ascent within the country’s political hierarchy. In Düsseldorf they struck up a relationship with the judge Emil Hartwich (1843-1886). Hartwich, who also had an outstanding reputation as a painter, was suffering on account of his unhappy marriage. He and young Elisabeth von Ardenne, who was ten years his junior, turned out to have many things in common, such as their love for the theatre. The correspondence between them did not even cease when Ardenne returned to Berlin on 1 October 1884, with Elisabeth and the couple’s two young children following him.

Hartwich continued to pay sporadic visits to Elisabeth and her husband even after the couple’s departure. While he was sojourning in Berlin during the summer of 1886, he and Elisabeth both resolved to divorce their respective spouses and to marry each other. Ardenne, however, had been secretly harbouring suspicions which were confirmed when he found the letters which his wife and Hartwich had been exchanging over the course of several years. Thereupon he filed for divorce and challenged his rival to a duel, an event which attracted massive media coverage before it took place on 27 November 1886. Hartwich sustained severe injuries and died four days after the duel on 1 December 1886. Although Armand von Ardenne was initially sentenced to two years’ imprisonment, his prison term was reduced to merely eighteen days not long afterwards.

The von Ardennes’ divorce was finalised on 15 March 1887, with Armand von Ardenne being given full custody of their two children. Over the years following her separation from her husband, Elisabeth von Ardenne consecrated herself to the care of deprived or disabled people. Her name was, albeit temporarily, deleted from her family’s chronicles.

In 1904, Elisabeth’s daughter Margot was the first one to make an endeavour to track down her disowned mother. Her son Egmont encountered her only five years later. Thus Elisabeth von Ardenne reunited with her children after two decades of separation. Her former husband died in 1919 at the age of 71.

Elisabeth von Ardenne died on 4 February 1952 in Lindau at the age of 98, and was interred in an Ehrengrab in Berlin. Her grandson was the scientist Manfred von Ardenne.