Ida Friederike Remy
(26 September 1847 – 23 April 1879)
Ida Friederike Remy was the young woman who became Heinrich Ernst Göring’s first love. In writing my book, I want to bring forward the people who inhabit the story — not merely as names in a family tree, but as living figures with hopes, fears, dreams, and destinies. Ida is one of them: a woman rarely mentioned in history books, yet one who left a deep mark on Heinrich’s life. She was his first love, perhaps also his purest.
Ida was born into a wealthy and culturally refined family in Bonn. The Remy family was known for its solid position within the city’s bourgeois society, and she grew up in a home shaped by education, music, languages, and expectations. Although sources are scarce, they paint a picture of an intelligent and curious young woman — one who learned quickly, read widely, and showed an independence not always common among young women of the 1850s. In the universe of the novel, and in the faint historical traces that remain, it is precisely this blend of warmth, wisdom, and quiet strength that makes her so memorable.
Heinrich Ernst Göring met Ida in Bonn, at a time when he himself was young, ambitious, and full of faith in the future. He studied law, moved in the city’s academic circles, and became acquainted with the Remy family through social and cultural gatherings. Their relationship is not documented in public archives, yet there are enough traces — and enough silence — to sense the outline of something significant: a young man who saw in her something he found nowhere else, a young woman who faced a future she could not quite grasp, a love that never had the chance to grow. She became the mother of his children: Wilhelm, Frieda, and Ernst Albert. For Heinrich, Ida represents what might have been — the bright, hopeful part of his life, before Africa, before the defeats, before the decline.
Eventually, Ida vanishes from the historical sources. I will not reveal why — that I leave to the unfolding of the novel. But in Heinrich’s life, and in the world of the story, she remains the first love, the unattainable dream, the one who showed him who he could have been. When we look at Heinrich’s later life, marked by political failure, colonial chaos, and personal tragedy, it is easy to understand why the memory of Ida must have been an anchor in a time when everything else slipped away.
Although Ida Friederike Remy left few historical footprints, her significance is nonetheless real. She represents the lost innocence in Heinrich’s life, the young love that never had the chance to bloom, the human contrast to his later life in Africa and Europe, the quiet voice that follows him through memory. In an era when women rarely found a place in history books, it is important to give Ida the place she deserves — not as a footnote, but as a person who shaped another person’s life.
Ida Friederike Remy was not a political figure, not a colonial administrator, not a historical personality in the traditional sense. But she was something else — perhaps something even more important. She was the first to see Heinrich as he wished to be seen. She was the first he loved. And she was the first he lost. In my novel, she is not merely a name, but a heartbeat — a quiet, persistent rhythm that follows Heinrich throughout his life, even when he himself can no longer hear it.