Thekla von Gumpert

[1] Six years followed, until her activity ended when Prince Adam Konstanty Czartoryski remarried with Countess Elzbieta Działyńska from Poznań.

Through the Weimar Legation Counselor and poet Franz von Schober, her later husband, whom she married at the age of 46 and from whom she separated again in 1860, she found the courage to combine her educational and literary skills and to follow the path of a young adult writer.

She kept in touch with the "father" of the kindergarten idea, Friedrich Fröbel, and propagated his method in her book Für Deutsche Frauen.

However, when Froebel fell out of favor with the Prussian government – allegedly the kindergartens spread socialist, liberal and atheistic sentiments – they distanced themselves from him, refused to collaborate in his magazine and only described herself as his admirer and not a student.

Her best-known work is certainly her Daughter Album, which appeared annually as a periodical from 1855 with the subtitle: Conversations in domestic circles for the education of the mind and spirit of growing female youth.

Thekla von Gumpert describes her motives in a letter to Heinrich Schwerdt : The purpose of my writing has always remained the same, valuing young people's literature only when it is used not for idle entertainment but as an educational tool, in such a way as to educate mind and heart and stimulate willpower and to seeks to guide.