Emmy Arnold (1884-1980) was born in Riga, Latvia, to a prominent family of academics. As an adult she turned her back on the middle-class milieu of her upbringing and married Eberhard Arnold, a revolutionary public speaker. In 1920 the couple left their Berlin home and founded a rural commune in the village of Sannerz that still exists in the form of the Bruderhof, a communal movement in the northeastern U.S.