The love story of Emma Wegenast and Allama Iqbal is shrouded in mystery even after 70 years.
Emma Wegenast was a German lady and language teacher of Pakistani national poet Allama Iqbal.
Emma Wegenast and Iqbal
Iqbal loved her, Emma, very much and wrote to her 22 letters. Emma subsequently gave those letters to the government of Pakistan.
Iqbal met her during his brief stay at Heidelberg in the summer of 1907.
She was some kind of a language coach (and not a university teacher, as naively believed by Atiya Fyzee, who visited Heidelberg in that period).
She had little importance to the biographers of Iqbal until the late 1980s, when the poet’s letters to her emerged through a Pakistani research tourist who subsequently gathered information about her family too (Emma herself handed over the original letters to the Pak-German Forum sometime before her death in the early 1960s, but that set was never heard of again).
Emma’s replies to Iqbal may have been lost to us along with some other private papers destroyed by him near the end of his life.
From what we can gather now from the surviving one side of the correspondence, he did have some sort of emotional attachment to her.
An oral tradition runs in her family about her wanting to leave for India sometime around 1907 and being stopped by her brother.
“I’ve forgotten my German,” Iqbal wrote to her sometime after his return to India. “Excepting a single word: Emma!”
Some business in Paris, about which we don’t know anything, prevented him from making a return trip to Germany on his way back to India, and despite two more journeys to Europe in the 1930s, he was never able to revisit Germany or meet Emma after those few blissful days in Heidelberg.
She is quite likely to have been the muse for those movingly romantic poems from Iqbal’s stay in Europe that were once wrongly considered to be inspired by Atiya Fyzee.
However, the influence of German romantics of a century ago should not be overlooked as a significant source of inspiration too: Iqbal made acquaintance with their thought during his stay in Germany.
“Our soul discovers itself when we come into contact with a great mind,” Iqbal was to jot down three years later.
“It is not until I had realised the infinitude of Goethe’s imagination that I discovered the narrow breadth of my own.”
Allama Iqbal’s son, Javed Iqbal, also talked about their spiritual relationship in his book,
“Zinda Rood,” the official biography of Allama Iqbal.
