Adele Schopenhauer
Biography
She was nine when her father died and her mother took her to Weimar, and she grew up inside the room where Weimar's whole literary circle gathered every week. The ADB describes the peculiarity of the maternal house, in which all the celebrities of Weimar gathered every week — that was her childhood home.
Goethe, whom she called Father
The friendship lasted his whole remaining life, and the word she used for him was Vater. She was also close to Ottilie von Pogwisch, who married Goethe's son August, and the two of them founded a women's literary circle together. It is worth holding those two facts side by side: the household everyone describes from outside had, inside it, two young women organising their own literary life.
What she wrote, and when
She published late — Haus-, Wald- und Feldmärchen in 1844, Anna in 1845, Eine dänische Geschichte in 1848, the last of them a year before her death. Her novels criticised the social subordination of women and demanded better education for them. Growing up in the most literary house in Germany appears to have taught her precisely what it was like to be a woman in it.
Bonn, and the end
After financial losses she moved to Bonn in 1829, became a friend of Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, and spent her last years travelling between Italy and the Rhine. She died in Bonn in 1849, cared for by Sibylle Mertens-Schaaffhausen. Weimar is where she was formed and not where she stayed — the same shape as her mother's life, one generation on.
Notable Works & Achievements
Haus-, Wald- und Feldmärchen (1844)
Anna (1845)
Eine dänische Geschichte (1848)
Historical Context
The period seen by someone who grew up inside its most famous drawing room and wrote about what it cost women.
For roughly sixty years a duchy of a few thousand people held the centre of German literature, because its ruler kept inviting writers to live there and then gave them jobs. That is the whole mechanism, and it ran from Goethe's arrival in 1775 to his death in 1832.
Read more about this period →Quick Facts
1797
1849
German
On stage
On stage
Walter Hesse
One of the two plotters — the house casts her as a woman of the literary circle with a score to settle.