19 Facts About Johanna Schopenhauer

Johanna Schopenhauer was the mother of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.

Johanna Schopenhauer was born in Danzig, in the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland, to a family of middle-class merchants.

Johanna Schopenhauer's parents were Christian Heinrich Trosiener and Elisabeth Trosiener, nee Lehmann.

Johanna Schopenhauer was the eldest child in the family, and had three younger sisters, Charlotte Elizabeth, who married Felix Ratzky, Anna and Juliane Dorothea.

Johanna Schopenhauer was a precocious girl, sensitive to art and with great talent for learning foreign languages.

Johanna Schopenhauer was to become the father of her two children, Arthur and Adele, who were born in 1788 and 1797, respectively.

Johanna Schopenhauer denied that she came under pressure from her parents to marry Heinrich Floris.

The marriage was stable, but from the beginning Johanna Schopenhauer felt that her happiness and that of her husband depended on her resignation to his will.

Johanna Schopenhauer encouraged her son to leave these studies behind and follow his desire to become a scholar.

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.

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 Johanna Schopenhauer made an attempt to approach his family.

That year, the Johanna 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.

In Weimar, Johanna Schopenhauer made a name as an author.

Johanna Schopenhauer 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 woman author in Germany.

Johanna Schopenhauer left incomplete the manuscript of her last work, her autobiography, which narrates her early life until shortly after Arthur's birth.

Johanna Schopenhauer wrote the book with the generous intention to pay Fernow's heirs' debts with his editor.

The work met with critical success, which encouraged Johanna Schopenhauer to pursue a career as an author, on which her livelihood and that of Adele would depend after the aforementioned financial crisis.