Hermann Ludwig von Löwenstern (1748–1815) was a distinguished Baltic German politician. He served as district marshal starting from 1787, nobility marshal of the Governorate of Estland in the viceregency era from 1789 to 1792, and thereafter as Landrat in 1796 to 1814. He studied law at Leipzig University starting in 1767. After returning to his homeland, he married Baroness Hedwig Margarethe Stael von Holstein (1756–1799) in 1773 and they had ten children – six sons and four daughters. A century later, he was described as follows: ‘His contemporaries described him as a noble and amiable man who had been generally loved precisely because of his notable hospitality.’

The later Russian Major General Woldemar von Löwenstern (Владимир Иванович Левенштерн as written in Russian) was born in Raasiku on 8 December 1776. He received his schooling at home and later at Tallinn’s Ritterakademie (Knights’ Academy), as Tallinn’s Cathedral School was named at that time. He participated in a military campaign on the banks of the Rhine River and in Switzerland in 1799. He became General Barclay de Tolly’s adjutant in 1812 and later served as adjutant under Mikhail Kutuzov. Thus, he was at the centre of military and political life for a long time. He left three versions of his memoirs for posterity in German, Russian, and French.

Hermann Ludwig von Löwenstern, who was born on 13 December 1777 at Jäneda Manor as the fourth child of his parents and their third son, also received his education at Tallinn’s Cathedral School. In 1793, he entered service in the navy on the ship Parmen as a sergeant from the Guards. In the subsequent years, he served as a volunteer on various Russian ships and was promoted to the rank of midshipman in 1796. While serving in the Russian fleet, he spent the years 1795 to 1801 on the coast of England, in the North Sea, in the Mediterranean Sea, in Italy, and on the island of Corfu, from where he headed for Sevastopol together with the fleet. In Berlin, he met Adam Johann von Krusenstern, who proposed that Löwenstern participate in his voyage around the world. He was once again accepted in naval service in 1803 with the rank of midshipman (he was promoted to lieutenant in 1804). He was the fourth officer in terms of rank on board the ship Nadezhda and was one of the expedition’s cartographers. Hermann Ludwig kept a diary throughout his entire term of service. A clean copy of the diary with the original illustrations is preserved in the Krusenstern family collection at the Estonian National Archives. The part of the diary that describes the voyage around the world was published in parallel in Russian and English in 2003. The basis for the publication is two separate transcriptions (in St. Petersburg and at the University of Alaska).

Iwan Peter Eduard von Löwenstern, the youngest of the family’s children, was born on 28 March 1790 in Raasiku. After his mother’s death, he as well studied at Tallinn’s Cathedral School. According to oral family tradition, his father is said to have sent him to the Cadet Corps in St. Petersburg, from where he fled against the will of his father in 1806 in order to join the Sumy Hussar Regiment. Starting from that same year, he participated in many military campaigns, among others in later crushing the Southern Society of the Decembrists, for instance, and the Polish rebellion. In October of 1836, he became hetman of the Astrakhan Cossack Forces, and in December of that same year, he was promoted to the rank of major general. In the following year, he caught a severe cold in the course of the inspection tour of the crown prince (tsarevich, the future Alexander II) and died on 5 November 1837. He was buried in Astrakhan. A photograph of his tombstone is preserved in the Estonian National Archives. His memoirs were published in Berlin in 1910.

Amalie Christine von Löwenstern was born on 23 February 1785 in Raasiku. She was the family’s writer from among their daughters. She got married at a very young age in 1800 to Baron Karl Gustav von Tiesenhausen from Kose-Uuemõisa Manor. Regardless of her marriage in keeping with her social class and her children, she was obviously unhappy. That is one reason why a scene took place on a voyage in 1819, where one half of two married couples on board the ship fell in love with one another and decided to run away. She married Dr. Friedrich Jencken, one of the best translators of Shakespeare of their time, and thereafter the family lived in England, Germany, and Ireland. In 1868, Amalie Christine wrote her memoirs for her sons.Grandmother’s Tale (Großmutters Erzehlung. Blick in die Vergangenheit) is a text in which the already elderly author tells her life story in the third person starting from her childhood.

In short, it can be said that these four books are an exceptional phenomenon in 19th century Baltic German memoir literature. Such a quantity of surviving memoir texts from the children of one family is doubtlessly exceptional.