Alles, was ich in der Welt verlange

by Carola Stern

Stern, Carola. Alles, was ich in der Welt verlange. Das Leben der Johanna Schopenhauer. Erste Auflage. Köln, Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2003. 14 x 22 cm. 318 Seiten. Hardcover/ Gebunden. Im originalen Schutzumschlag. Sehr guter Zustand mit minimalen Gebrauchsspuren. Johanna Henriette Schopenhauer (* 9. Juli 1766 in Danzig; 16. April 1838 in Jena[1]) war eine deutsche Schriftstellerin und Salonnière. Sie war die Mutter des Philosophen Arthur Schopenhauer und der Schriftstellerin Adele Schopenhauer. (Wikipedia)

Hardcover

First published February 29, 2000

About the author

Carola Stern wurde als Erika Assmus 1925 auf der Insel Usedom geboren. Nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg arbeitete sie als Lehrerin in der DDR, bis sie in den fünfziger Jahren nach West-Berlin flüchtete. In den sechziger Jahren leitete sie das Politische Lektorat eines Kölner Verlages, und ab 1970 arbeitete sie im WDR. Sie ist Autorin zahlreicher Bücher. Sie starb im Januar 2006 in Berlin.

Reviews

[Ariadne Oliver · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh. I picked this up because I liked Stern's book about Rahel Varnhagen and I'm always up for biographies about interesting women.

Johanna Schopenhauer certainly was one. She married a man who was twenty years older than her, whom she didn't love and who was difficult to live with. After his death she decided that she'd had enough of trying to accommodate someone else's wishes all the time and tried to carve out a life that suited her. She traveled widely, first with her husband who was a merchant, later with her daughter Adele. She established a literary salon in Weimar which was highly regarded and visited by important artists, writers, scholars etc. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a regular guest.

Due to financial hardships she started a career as a professional writer (she was one of the first women to do so and - also uncommon - published under her own name). She wrote novels as well as travel diaries and works about art history. Despite being successful she always lived above her means and struggled with debt for the rest of her life.

She walked a line between conforming, trying to adhere to the female ideal of her time and wanting to stand out from other women - while simultaneously asserting that she was not at all different from them. She craved knowledge, but was afraid to be seen as "ein gelehrtes Weib" (really roughly: scholarly broad, deprecatory because it was seen as unwomanly).


Stern's prose is easily readable and while her sympathy for Johanna is clear she doesn't shy away from showing her flaws.

I wish she had incorporated more sources and included supplementary quotes. It's frequently hard to tell what her conclusions are based on, what is fact or at least pretty reliable and what is speculation on her part.

I also think she largely mischaracterized Adele Schopenhauer, Johanna's daughter, which makes me hesitant to rely on her depiction of people I don't know much about.
She portrays Adele as a "Werther of her times" focusing almost entirely on her exuberance of feelings, while disregarding traits like her pragmatism, her loyalty and her supreme talents.
Stern also completely fails to recognize Adele's love attachments to women, including her relationship with Sibylle Mertens-Schaaffhausen which lasted two decades (with some breaks).
If you are interested in Adele's life and can read german, I highly recommend "Geschichte einer Liebe: Adele Schopenhauer und Sibylle Mertens" by Angela Steidele.

I'm also not keen on the author self inserting herself to tell me how to view Johanna Schopenhauer. I'll decide that myself, thank you.



Conclusion: Stern has chosen a highly interesting subject for this biography, but fails in the execution. Skip this one, her books about Rahel Varnhagen and Fritzi Massary are far better.