Johanna Schopenhauer
Encyclopedia
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
author
Author
An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...
. She is today known primarily for being the mother
Mother
A mother, mum, mom, momma, or mama is a woman who has raised a child, given birth to a child, and/or supplied the ovum that grew into a child. Because of the complexity and differences of a mother's social, cultural, and religious definitions and roles, it is challenging to specify a universally...
of Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher known for his pessimism and philosophical clarity. At age 25, he published his doctoral dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which examined the four separate manifestations of reason in the phenomenal...
.
Biography
Johanna Schopenhauer was born in Danzig to a family of wealthy merchants of DutchDutch people
The Dutch people are an ethnic group native to the Netherlands. They share a common culture and speak the Dutch language. Dutch people and their descendants are found in migrant communities worldwide, notably in Suriname, Chile, Brazil, Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, and the United...
extraction. Her father, Christian Heinrich Trosiener, was also a senator in the city. At 18 years of age she married Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer, a rich merchant twenty years her senior whom she barely knew. He was to become the future father of her two children, Arthur and Adele Schopenhauer.
In 1806, shortly after her husband's death, Johanna and Adele moved to Weimar. The reason she chose that city, then the centre of German literary life, as her new residence — a city where she had no relatives or close acquaintances — is rumoured to have been the desire of meeting Goethe. Unbeknownst to Johanna, however, was that Weimar was in danger of war: French military troops commanded by Napoleon were heading to the city, and combat broke out shortly after Johanna and Adele's arrival. Johanna stayed in Weimer as no transportation out of the city was available for her, her daughter and the servants. During war time Johanna was very active at the local scene: she harboured German officials arrived in the city, and they dined at her house; volunteered to nurse wounded soldiers; and gave shelter to many of the less fortunate Weimar citizens whose homes had been invaded taken over by after French soldiers. As a result, she quickly became very popular in Weimar.
Past the war, she earned a good reputation as salonnière
Salon (gathering)
A salon is a gathering of people under the roof of an inspiring host, held partly to amuse one another and partly to refine taste and increase their knowledge of the participants through conversation. These gatherings often consciously followed Horace's definition of the aims of poetry, "either to...
. For years to come literary celebrities — e.g. Goethe, Wieland
Christoph Martin Wieland
Christoph Martin Wieland was a German poet and writer.- Biography :He was born at Oberholzheim , which then belonged to the Free Imperial City of Biberach an der Riss in the south-east of the modern-day state of Baden-Württemberg...
, the Schlegel brothers August and Friedrich, and Tieck — twice a week gather in her house. Meanwhile, Arthur Schopenhauer studied in Hamburg; much to his distaste, he had to attend Commerce school due to a promise made to his father which he insisted in fulfulling in spite of the elder's death.
Johanna had a difficult relationship with her famous son. Upon moving to Weimar in 1809, Arthur had to settle in the house of his young instructor, Franz Passow
Franz Passow
Franz Ludwig Carl Friedrich Passow was a German classical scholar and lexicographer.He was born at Ludwigslust in Mecklenburg-Schwerin...
, not that of his mother. The reason was that Johanna didn't want to live with him. (He was allowed, however, to visit during the salon reunions.) Many of the extant letters she wrote him attest to their character differences: Arthur's pessimism, gloominess, haughtiness and nagging ways were not to her taste (Arthur's side of the story is unknown since his mother destroyed all the letters he wrote her). Though in 1813 she at last permitted him to live with her, the arrangement soon failed as a year later Johanna asked her son to leave the house following a heated argument between the two of them over Johanna's friendship with her lodger, a younger man named Georg von Gerstenbergk.
From 1814 onwards, mother and son no longer met. Thenceforth all communication between the two happened by means of correspondence—but even this changed after she read a letter Arthur sent to his sister. The letter was about their father's suicide and, in it, Arthur pointed to Johanna as being responsible for the tragedy, rumoured to be a suicide, saying that, whilst their father suffered ill in bed, abandoned to the care of an employee, Johanna amused herself in social reunions and gave her husband none of her time. Still, in 1819 Arthur made a move to re-establish his family bonds. In that year, the Schopenhauer ladies had lost the greater part of their fortune due a bank crisis. Arthur expressed willingness to part with them his share of his inheritance—an offer Johanna dismissed.
Only in 1831 their correspondence resumed; it continued in sporadic fashion until Johanna's death in 1838. Apparently the philosopher's many difficulties—the ill-fate of his books, the failure of his brief career as a teacher at Berlin University, and also some physical ailments—led him to again seek contact with his family. But Johanna and Arthur Schopenhauer would never again meet in person. As a matter of fact, even after her death Schopenhauer continued to express complaints about her, about how bad a mother she had been. In her will, Johanna Schopenhauer made Adele her sole heir. That, she probably did not do out of spite to her son: for, whilst Arthur lived economically well-off, having not only preserved but even doubled his share of his father's wealth, Adele, as Johanna foresaw, would pass financial difficulties after her mother's death—something in which the spendthrift Johanna played no small role.
In Weimar Johanna Schopenhauer made a name as an authoress. She was the first German woman writer to publish books without making use of a pseudonym
Pseudonym
A pseudonym is a name that a person assumes for a particular purpose and that differs from his or her original orthonym...
. During a little more than a decade, from the late 1810s to the early 1830s, her literary production turned her into the most famous woman author in Germany. In 1831 her writings received a second edition at Brockhaus' publishing house: the collected oevres filled no less than 24 volumes. Nothing, however, could compensate for those financial setbacks; under the guise of health issues, Johanna and Adele Schopenhauer, being no longer able to maintain their lifestyle in Weimar, moved to Bonn
Bonn
Bonn is the 19th largest city in Germany. Located in the Cologne/Bonn Region, about 25 kilometres south of Cologne on the river Rhine in the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, it was the capital of West Germany from 1949 to 1990 and the official seat of government of united Germany from 1990 to 1999....
. In the middle 1830s their situation would deteriorate further as Johanna's fame decayed. Almost without resources, Johanna wrote to the Duke of Weimar a letter in which she narrated her current plight. The Duke, in acknowledgment to the once so fêted writer, conceded her, in 1837, a small pension and invited her, and also Adele, to live in Jena
Jena
Jena is a university city in central Germany on the river Saale. It has a population of approx. 103,000 and is the second largest city in the federal state of Thuringia, after Erfurt.-History:Jena was first mentioned in an 1182 document...
. In there Johanna died the following year. She left incomplete the manuscript of a last work, her autobiography, whose contents narrate her early life until Arthur's birth.
Works
It was not long after her arrival in Weimar that Johanna began to publish her writings, some articles on paintings with an emphasis on those by Jan Van EyckJan van Eyck
Jan van Eyck was a Flemish painter active in Bruges and considered one of the best Northern European painters of the 15th century....
. In 1810, she published her first book: a biography of her friend Fernow, who had died two years before. She wrote it with the intention to pay his heirs' debts with his editor. As the book met with critical success, Johanna felt estimulated to pursue a career as an authoress—a career on which her livelihood would depend, after the aforementioned financial difficulties. First came the publication of her travelogue
Travelogue
Travelogue is the second full-length studio album released by the British synthpop band The Human League, released in May 1980 before the band achieved any degree of commercial success....
s, which were also acclaimed, and then of her fiction work, which, for a little more than a decade, made her the most famous woman author in Germany. The following are her best known novels: Gabriele (1819), Die Tante (1823) and Sidonia (1827).
Further reading
- Frost, Laura: Johanna Schopenhauer; ein Frauenleben aus der klassischen Zeit, Berlin 1905.