Katharina von Zimmermann

Katharina von Zimmermann (1756 – 10 September 1781) was a medical doctor's daughter, originally from central Switzerland, who died young. She is known to posterity chiefly on account of her friendship with Goethe, who wrote about her.

Life Katharina Zimmermann was born in Brugg, a small but politically significant town in the Aare Valley, then enjoying the status of a Municipality ("Munizipalstadt"), governed directly under the control of Bern in Switzerland. She was the second recorded child of Johann Georg von Zimmermann, a physician and writer. Her mother and grandmother both died of Tuberculosis in March 1771, while Katharina was still a young teenager. She was relocated to Hanover where she lived with a friend of her father's called Mrs von Döring. Shortly after this she was moved again, to live with friends of her father in Minden. In May 1773 her father, who in the interim had closed down his own household, sent her on to Lausanne, accompanied by a request to father's friend and colleague, Samuel-Auguste Tissot, that he do everything necessary to provide her with a complete upbringing (einer "vollkommenen Education"), even if the cost should exceed the budgeted annual amount of 400 Thalers. Moving to Lausanne instantly provided Katharina with four new sisters. Along with the Tissot sisters, the household already included a girl from Poland.

In March 1775 Zimmermann removed his daughter to Bern where she moved in with the Haller family. There is speculation that she had acquired a boyfriend in Lausanne of whom he disapproved. Two months later, in May 1775, he decided to reclaim his daughter. Together they traveled to Hanover, arriving on 5 October 1771. Along the way, between 22 and 27 September, Zimmermann and his daughter stayed as guest of the Goethe family in Frankfurt. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was 26 at this time: his engagement to Lili Schönemann was about to be broken off by Lili Schönemann's mother, ostensibly due to the differing religious backgrounds of the parties. He wrote to his friend Johann Caspar Lavater on 28 September 1775 that, "his daughter is not closed off, but only holding back, and she has left the door slightly ajar..." ("Seine Tochter ist so in sich, nicht verriegelt nur zurückgetreten ist sie, und hat die Thüre leis angelehnt"). Goedeke contends that the marriage idea from Frau Goethe was a non-starter because Katharina was still in love with a man she had met when living in Lausanne, and that her thwarted lover committed suicide the next year.

The original Mignon? Writing in 1900, Alfons Matthes believed that he had discovered in Katharine von Zimmermann the inspiration for Mignon, a character in Goethe's second novel, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. Not everyone was convinced.