"Luise – The Queen and Her Siblings"

Young, beautiful, revered: Queen Luise of Prussia was admired during her lifetime like hardly any other woman of her time. Poets, diplomats and students raved about her grace, her virtue and her charisma. Her early death at the age of just 34 cemented her status as a legend – the ‘Queen of Hearts’.

But who was Luise really?

In her book *Luise – The Queen and Her Siblings*, historian Carolin Philipps offers a fresh, surprisingly personal insight into the famous queen. Her research is based on thousands of letters to her five siblings – some of which have never been published before. These letters reveal a Luise beyond the myth: vulnerable, lonely, desperate, but also full of joie de vivre, warm-hearted and longing for closeness.

She confided her fears, hopes and premonitions of death only to her siblings. Only with them could she shed the role of the ever-smiling queen – and be completely herself.

The result is a moving portrait of a woman about whom we think we know everything, yet who can still be rediscovered: as a queen, a sister, a wife, a mother – and as a human being.

Against the historic backdrop of the Ballhaus Wedding, Carolin Philipps takes her audience on a journey back to the period around 1800: an era full of upheavals, revolutions and wars, in which old certainties crumbled and new ideas of freedom and equality changed the world.