Adine Gemberg

Adine Gemberg, actually Alexandra ("Adja") Carlowna Gemberg, née von Becker, also de Baker, (April 28, 1858, Julian calendar April 16, Saint Petersburg — August 19, 1902, Wittenberg), was a German writer, novel and novella author, journalist and feminist social critic.

Life and work

Gemberg was the daughter of Carl Andreas von Becker (* May 5, 1821, in Einbeck; † March 4, 1894, in Wiesbaden), and his wife, the Georgian-Russian Princess Vera Ivanova (or Simeonovna) Gévachoff (also Vera Shewachow) (* September 21, 1836, in Saint Petersburg; † March 8, 1860, in Hyères) Her father was a German language teacher, court librarian, Imperial Russian real state councillor at the tsar's court and cabinet secretary to the Russian Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna and her daughter Maria Mikhailovna Romanova.

Due to the early death of her mother, she and her sister Sophie, who was one year younger, grew up separately from their father in Lüneburg with her paternal grandparents and her unmarried aunt, who took responsibility for her upbringing. She also spent a year alone with an aunt in Braunschweig. After completing a girls' boarding school in Hanover, she went to Karlsruhe with her father, who had left the Russian service in 1873, and her sister, Karlsruhe, where, after a quarrel with her father and a further stay in a boarding school in Celle, she trained as a free apprentice at the deaconess institution there and worked in the hospital run by the deaconesses, but without being consecrated as such and thus entering the community. On May 19, 1878, Adine von Becker married the widowed officer Gustav Gemberg (* January 23, 1841 in Meyenberg, † March 23, 1912 in Wittenberg), whose name she took and with whom she had six children, one daughter and five sons, one of whom died in infancy. The family, which also included a son from Gustav Gemberg's first marriage, first lived in Karlsruhe, then, due to the usual transfers of a young officer, in Engers near Koblenz, in Brandenburg an der Havel and finally in Wittenberg. Gustav Gemberg retired as a major as early as 1888, which also significantly reduced the social duties of his wife, whose fragile health he was very worried about according to his letters, and allowed her to become a writer based on her professional experience.