Johanna Schopenhauer
Johanna Schopenhauer was the first German woman to publish books without a pseudonym, an influential literary salon host, and in the 1820s the most famous female author in Germany. She is the mother of the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, with whom she had a disagreeable relationship.
Biography
Johanna Schopenhauer was born in Gdańsk, the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland, to a family of middle-class merchants of Dutch extraction. Her father, Christian Heinrich Trosiener, was also a councilor in the city. She was a precocious girl, sensitive to art and with great talent to learn foreign languages. Before turning 10, she already knew Polish, French, and English apart from her native German.The young Johanna had aspirations to become a painter, a desire her parents nipped right at the bud, considering it improper that a girl of her class exercised "a trade."
At 18 years of age she married Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer, a much wealthier merchant twenty years her senior. He was to become the father of her two children, Arthur and Adele Schopenhauer, who were born in 1788 and 1797, respectively. In her autobiography, in which Johanna promised to tell the facts of her life "without poetry", Johanna makes clear that she "no more pretended ardent love to him than he demanded it". She denies, however, that she came under pressure from her parents to marry Heinrich Floris. On the contrary, she subtly admits that what attracted her to a union with him was his social rank and the possibilities that his wealth could open to her. The marriage was stable, but from the beginning Johanna felt that her happiness and that of her husband depended on her resignation to his will.
One year after her husband's death in 1805, Johanna and her daughter moved to Weimar, a town where Johanna had neither relatives nor close friends and which was, moreover, about to be the stage of war between Prussia and the invading troops of Napoleon. Despite the fact that Johanna did not know of the imminent risk of war, she refused to leave the city when the situation became clear, as transportation was only available to her and her daughter, and her servants would have to be left to their own fate.
During the war, Johanna was quite active in providing services to those who were in need, nursing German soldiers and giving asylum to less fortunate citizens, whose houses had been taken over by French soldiers. With that, she quickly became a popular figure in Weimar.
After the war, she gained a high reputation as a salonnière, and for years to come there attended her semiweekly parties several literary celebrities: Wieland, the Schlegel brothers August and Friedrich, Tieck, and, above all, Goethe, whose connaissance was probably what attracted Johanna to Weimar in the first place. Goethe's endorsement was a big factor behind Johanna's social success, and it greatly contributed to their friendship the fact that Johanna was the first upper-class woman in Weimar to open the doors of her house to Christiane Vulpius, Goethe's mistress, who had hitherto been excluded from the shining social scene of the city owing not only to her lowly background, but also to the fact that Goethe and Vulpius were no more than lovers, despite living together.
At first, Arthur Schopenhauer chose to stay in Hamburg. At that moment he had every intention to fulfill a promise made to his father, that of concluding his merchant apprenticeship, however much that pained him and however much he would have preferred to study Philosophy. Johanna encouraged her son to leave these studies behind and follow his desire to become a scholar.
Mother and son, however, did not get along. In letters written to Schopenhauer, Johanna makes it very clear how distressed she was at her son's pessimism, his arrogance, and his imperious ways. When, in 1809, Schopenhauer finally moved to Weimar, he established himself, not in his mother's house, but in that of his young instructor, Franz Passow, as it was the mother's impression that living under the same roof as her son was a bad idea. In 1813, she finally allowed him to move into her house, renting him a room, but the arrangement was soon broken after frequent arguments; the pivot was Johanna's friendship with another lodger, a younger man called Georg von Gerstenbergk.
After 1814, mother and son never met again. All the communication between the two was from then on through letters, but even this was interrupted after Johanna read a correspondence from Schopenhauer to his sister Adele, where he blamed their mother for the death of their father, understood to have been by suicide, accusing her of going to amuse herself at parties while Heinrich Floris was bedridden, sick and abandoned to the care of a loyal employee. In 1819, however, Schopenhauer made an attempt to approach his family. That year, the Schopenhauer ladies lost most of their fortune in a banking crisis. Schopenhauer volunteered to share with them the inheritance he received from his father, but Johanna refused the offer.
It was only in 1831 that the correspondence between mother and son resumed. It was Schopenhauer who took the first step, motivated, apparently, by his many difficulties: from the failure to sell his books to his bodily ailments. The correspondence continued sporadically until Johanna's death in 1838. Despite the cordial tone of the last communications between Johanna and Arthur, the latter continued to speak ill of her even after her death, making little of Johanna's mother skills and painting her as a thoroughly self-centered woman. For her part, in her will Johanna made Adele her sole heir. But this was probably motivated, not so much to slight the son, but in recognition that the daughter would be in greater difficulties in future years, since Schopenhauer not only managed to conserve his part of the fatherly inheritance but even doubled it, whereas Adele would have few resources at her disposal, something in which the spendthrift Johanna had no small role.
In Weimar Johanna Schopenhauer made a name as an author. She was the first German woman to publish books without a pseudonym, and from the late 1810s to the early 1830s, her works turned her into the most famous female author in Germany. In 1831, her books received a second edition, and the collection filled no less than 24 volumes. Despite all this production, her critical acclaim and commercial success, Johanna was never able to make up for the financial losses of the 1810s. Unable to maintain their lifestyle in Weimar, and also for health reasons, Johanna and Adele moved to Bonn. In the mid-1830s, Johanna's fame declined and their financial situation worsened. Almost without resources, Johanna wrote to the Duke of Weimar detailing her plight. In 1837 the Duke, in recognition of Johanna's fame and contributions to the city's culture, offered her a small pension and invited her to move to Jena. There, Johanna died the following year. She left incomplete the manuscript of a last work, her autobiography, which narrates her early life until shortly after Arthur's birth.