Mein Weg mit Robert Koch

Robert Koch's second wife opens up previously unimagined perspectives on the famous germ hunter in her newly published memoirs. The internationally esteemed Robert Koch shocked bourgeois Berlin in the 1890s: he divorced to marry the 29-year-younger Hedwig Freiberg. Many years after his death, Hedwig Koch describes not only the happy moments by the side of the Nobel laureate but also the unvarnished reality of being married to a difficult partner, whom she occasionally experiences as a "pedantically dry, eerily bureaucratic, diligent, aging model student." She accompanied her husband on extensive research expeditions and provides deep insights into the dubious colonial medicine exemplified by its perhaps most famous representative. Her observations reflect both the strengths and the abysses of the microbiological research conducted by Robert Koch. Above all, her memoirs read as a critique of society from a woman who oscillates between selfless devotion and rebellion against the humiliation and devaluation she has endured.