Johanna Schopenhauer
Also known as: née Trosiener
Biography
She arrived in Weimar in September 1806 and opened her house. For the next twenty years the best society in town came to her tea gatherings — Goethe among them — and when her money vanished in 1819 she became one of the first German women to make a living by writing.[1]
Who came to the tea, 1806–1826
The guest list reads like a roll call of classical Weimar: Goethe, Wieland, Heinrich Meyer, Bertuch, Fernow, Riemer, Wilhelm Grimm, Zacharias Werner. What is striking is whose room they came to — the classical circle is usually described as gathering at the court or around Anna Amalia, but by 1806 the room people wanted to be in belonged to a merchant's widow from Danzig who had arrived weeks earlier.
Writing to eat, 1819–1821
She began publishing after the death of her friend Carl Ludwig Fernow, and then, after major financial losses in 1819, she became one of the first German professional women writers.[1] That phrase deserves weight: not a woman who wrote, but a woman who lived on what she wrote, in a decade when that was barely a category. Her novel Gabriele appeared between 1819 and 1821.
The Rhine, and back to Thuringia, 1829–1838
From 1829 she lived along the Rhine — summers at Unkel, winters in Bonn — and in 1837 she moved to Jena, where she died the following year while writing her memoirs. It is a fittingly unsentimental end — she was working on the account of it when she stopped.
Questions visitors ask
- Who attended Johanna Schopenhauer's Weimar salon?
- Goethe, Wieland, Heinrich Meyer, Bertuch, Fernow, Riemer, Wilhelm Grimm and Zacharias Werner were among the guests at her tea gatherings, which she opened within weeks of arriving in September 1806.
- How did Johanna Schopenhauer become a professional writer?
- After major financial losses in 1819, she became one of the first German women to make a living by writing.[1] Her novel Gabriele appeared between 1819 and 1821.
- Where did Johanna Schopenhauer live after Weimar?
- From 1829 along the Rhine — summers at Unkel, winters in Bonn — and from 1837 in Jena, where she died in 1838 while writing her memoirs.
Sources
- Johanna Schopenhauer — Deutsche Biographie (NDB/ADB), retrieved 29 August 2026
Notable Works & Achievements
Gabriele (1819–1821)
Carl Ludwig Fernows Leben
Historical Context
By 1806 the circle's centre of gravity was a rented room belonging to a widow who had just arrived.
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
1766
1838
German