[1] 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.

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").

("Schlank und wohlgewachsen, trat sie auf ohne Zierlichkeit, ihr regelmäßiges Gesicht wäre angenehm gewesen, wenn sich ein Zug von Teilnahme darin aufgetan hätte")[2] For Goethe 1775 was important for another reason.

A marriage with a noble purpose was a not uncommon thing among the Frankfurt bourgeois families, but Goethe lashed out: "If we were discussing an orphan ... it would be worth considering and pursuing, but God preserve me from a father-in-law like that!

[4] 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.

Johann Georg Zimmermann also attended his daughter's autopsy, and by sufficiently observing the marks on her lungs, satisfied himself as to the cause of her death.

[5] 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.