[1] The future Countess (Gräfin in German) von Lichetenau's father, Johann Elias Enke, was a chamber musician in service of King Frederick II of Prussia.

The couple had five children,[2] of whom only the youngest survived to adulthood:[3] Countess von Lichtenau's youngest child, Countess Marianne von der Marck, survived into adulthood: she married firstly, on 17 March 1797, Hereditary Count Frederick of Stolberg-Stolberg (1769–1805); they divorced in 1799.

After Frederick William died in 1797, Wilhelmine was exiled and her property confiscated, although she was finally granted a pension in 1800.

From 1802 to 1806, she had a second marriage to the dramatic Franz Ignaz von Holbein, known as "Fontano" and 26 years her junior, in Breslau (now in Poland and renamed Wrocław).

Following plans by Michael Philipp Boumann, an early classicist style townhouse called Lichtenau Palace was erected for her at the edge of Potsdam's Neuer Garten, at a site on today's Behlertstrasse.