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JOSEFINE SOLIMAN’S SECOND LETTER TO FRANCIS I, EMPEROR OF AUSTRIA

Since I have not received any response to my letter, I will ask to be allowed to write to Your Majesty once more, this time in terms much bolder, though I would not wish them to be taken as excessive familiarity: Dear Brother. Because has not God, whomever He may be, made us to be brothers and sisters? Has he not divided diligently among us our obligations so that we would carry them all out always with dignity and devotion, tending to His works. He entrusted to us the lands and the seas, and to some He gave industry, and to some He gave governance. Some He made highborn, healthy, and attractive, while others He made of lower birth and of lesser physical blessings. With our human limitations, we cannot explain why. All that remains us is to trust that there is His wisdom within it, and that in this way we all form a part of His complex architecture, parts whose purpose we are incapable of divining, but – we must believe this – without which this world’s great mechanism would simply stop working.

Just a few weeks ago, I gave birth to a baby boy, whom my husband and I named Edward. My great maternal joy is marred, however, by the fact that my little son’s grandfather has not yet attained his final resting place. That his unburied body has been exhibited by Your Majesty to curious onlookers at the Prince’s Wunderkammer.

We have been so fortunate as to have been born in an age of reason, in an exceptional era that has been able to clearly express to what extent the mind is the most perfect of God’s gifts. The power of the mind is such that it may cleanse the world now of superstitions and injustices and make all the world’s inhabitants rejoice. My father was fully dedicated to that idea. It was his deeply held belief that human reason is the greatest power we as people can achieve and wield. And I, brought up in all my father’s love, believe that, too: reason is the very best thing God could have given us.

In my father’s papers, which I put in order after his death, there is a letter from His Majesty the Emperor Joseph, Your Majesty’s predecessor and uncle, a letter written in His Majesty’s own hand and containing the following passage, which I shall permit myself to repeat here: ‘All people are equal at birth. From our parents we inherit only animal life, and in this – we know well – there is not the slightest difference between king, prince, merchant, or peasant. There is no law in existence, divine or natural, that could counter that equality.’

How am I to believe this passage now?

I am no longer asking but imploring Your Majesty for the return to my family of my father’s body, which has been stripped of all honour and all dignity, chemically treated and stuffed, and exhibited to human curiosity in the proximity of dead wild animals. I write to you, too, on behalf of the other stuffed human beings contained within that Cabinet of Natural Curiosities of His Royal Highness, since, as far as I know, they have no one of their own to stand up for them, not even family – here I refer to that anonymous little girl, and to one Joseph Hammer and to Pietro Michaele Angiola. I don’t even know who these people are, and I would not be able to tell even the most abbreviated version of the stories of their unhappy lives, but nonetheless I feel it is my duty to them as the daughter of Angel Soliman to perform this Christian deed of asking. It is my duty, too, as of now, as the mother of a human being.

Josefine Soliman von Feuchtersleben