Johanna Schopenhauer

Johanna Schopenhauer (née Trosiener; 9 July 1766 – 17 April 1838) was a German writer and salonnière. She was the mother of the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer and author Adele Schopenhauer.

Biography

Johanna Schopenhauer was born in Danzig (Gdańsk), in the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland, to a family of middle-class merchants. Her parents were Christian Heinrich Trosiener (1730–1797) and Elisabeth Trosiener, nee Lehmann (1745–1818). Her father was also a councillor in the city. She was the eldest child in the family, and had three younger sisters, Charlotte Elizabeth (1768–1828), who married Felix Ratzky, Anna (1769–1814) and Juliane Dorothea (1773–1849). She was a precocious girl, sensitive to art and with great talent for learning foreign languages. Before turning 10, she already knew Polish, French, and English apart from her native German. As a youth, she aspired to become a painter, a desire her parents however nipped right in the bud, considering it improper that a girl of her class exercised "a trade."

On May 16, 1785, at age 18, she married Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer (1747–1805), a much wealthier merchant twenty years her senior. He was to become the father of her two children, Arthur and Adele, 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 made clear that she "no more pretended ardent love to him than he demanded it". She denied, however, that she came under pressure from her parents to marry Heinrich Floris. On the contrary, she subtly admitted 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.