Olga Plümacher

Olga Plümacher
Olga Plümacher
Born	Olga Marie Pauline Hünerwadel; 27 May 1839; Tsaritsyn, Russia
Died	c. 15 June 1895 (aged 56); Beersheba Springs, Tennessee, U.S.
Spouse	Eugene Hermann Plümacher
Children	2
Era	19th-century philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Post-Schopenhauerian pessimism

Olga Marie Pauline Plümacher (née Hünerwadel; 27 May 1839 – c. 15 June 1895) was a Russian-born Swiss-American philosopher and scholar. She engaged with the philosophies of the German philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Eduard von Hartmann, and published three books which contributed to the pessimism controversy in Germany. Her book on the history of philosophical pessimism, Der Pessimismus in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart ("Pessimism in the Past and Present") was influential on Friedrich Nietzsche and Samuel Beckett.

Biography

Olga Marie Pauline Hünerwadel was born on 27 May 1839,^[1] in Tsaritsyn, Russia.^[2] She was the daughter of Gottlieb Samuel Hünerwadel, a former officer in France under Napoleon, and Adelheid Hünerwadel (his cousin).^[1] The family moved to Switzerland where her father managed a steel plant and later retired to Zürich, Switzerland, where Plümacher grew up.^[1] She married a German, Eugene Hermann Plümacher, who later worked as U.S. Consul to Venezuela;^[3] they had two children.^[1] Plümacher had no formal university education.^[4]

Plümacher was friends with a former classmate,^[5] who was the mother of the German playwright Frank Wedekind and introduced him to the philosophies of Arthur Schopenhauer and Eduard von Hartmann, of whom Plümacher was a devotee; she has been described as Wedekind's "philosophical aunt".^[6]^[7]

Plümacher later emigrated with her family to the United States and lived in Beersheba Springs, Tennessee, where she published three books in Germany that engaged with the philosophies of Schopenhauer and Von Hartmann: Der Kampf um's Unbewusste ("The Battle for the Unconscious"), Zwei Individualisten der Schopenhauer'schen Schule ("Two Individualists of the Schopenhauer School"), and Der Pessimismus in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart ("Pessimism in the Past and Present"). These works made Plümacher a significant figure within the pessimism controversy in Germany.^[8] Der Pessimismus in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart was influential on Friedrich Nietzsche, whose personal copy he annotated throughout.^[9]

Plümacher also published several articles on psychology, philosophy and metaphysics in several German journals.^[1] Additionally, she published an article on Von Hartmann in English, in the Oxford journal Mind.^[10]^: 21

Plümacher died on an unspecified date around 15 June 1895, and was buried in the Armfield Cemetery in Beersheba Springs; she was 56 years old.^[10]^: 145

Legacy

Samuel Beckett first read Der Pessimismus in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart around 1938; his intense interest in the book led him to heavily annotate it throughout and add in blank pages for additional notes.^[11]

Plümacher has been compared to Agnes Taubert, another largely forgotten German female philosopher who also played large part in the pessimism controversy,^[12] as well as the German-American philosopher Amelie J. Hathaway.^[13]

Rolf Kieser, a professor of German at the State University of New York, published a biography of Plümacher in 1990, Olga Plümacher-Hünerwadel, eine gelehrte Frau des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts.^[6]

Plümacher was included in the 2022 issue of the British Journal for the History of Philosophy, titled "Lost Voices: Women in Philosophy 1870-1970".^[14]

Selected publications

Articles

Plumacher, O. (1879). "Pessimism". Mind. 4 (13): 68–89. doi:10.1093/mind/os-4.13.68. ISSN 0026-4423.

Books

Der Kampf um's Unbewusste (The Struggle for the Subconscious; 1881)
Zwei Individualisten der Schopenhauer'schen Schule (Two Individualists from the Schopenhauer School; 1881)
Der Pessimismus in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart (Pessimism in the Past and Present; 1883)

References

^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e Hunerwadel, Otto K (June 2008). Hunerwadel Family (PDF). pp. 1–2. Retrieved 2020-07-09.
^ Clopper, Almon (2010). "Dan and the Plumachers". Beersheba Springs, A History (PDF). Vol. 1. p. 141. In 1839, Gottlieb [Hünerwadel] had gone to St. Petersburg to establish a linen factory. The enterprise was unsuccessful and soon after her birth, the family returned to Lenzburg in Switzerland, where her father was in charge of the cadet corps. Olga was born, not in St. Petersburg, but in Tsaritsyn, later Stalingrad and now Volgograd.
^ "Plumacher, Eugene Hermann, Papers, 1877-1947" (PDF). Tennessee Secretary of State. 1970. Retrieved 2020-07-09.
^ Beiser, Frederick C. (2016). After Hegel: German Philosophy, 1840–1900. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. p. 218. ISBN 978-0-691-17371-9.
^ Neuenschwander, Heidi (1994). "Geschichte der Stadt Lenzburg. Band III, 19. und 20. Jahrhundert". Argovia: Jahresschrift der Historischen Gesellschaft des Kantons Aargau (in German). 106: 322. doi:10.5169/seals-11820. Retrieved 2022-08-22. Olga Plümacher kehrte 1877 für zehn Jahre mit ihren Kindern in die Schweiz zurück, um ihnen hier eine gute Schulbildung zu ermöglichen. In dieser Zeit nahm sie wieder Kontakt auf mit ihrer Zürcher Jugendfreundin Emilie Kammerer. Diese hatte in Amerika den Arzt und Grundstückspekulanten Dr. Friedrich Wilhelm Wedekind geheiratet und wohnte seit 1872 mit ihrer Familie auf Schloß Lenzburg. So lernte Olga Plümacher auch den jungen Frank Wedekind kennen, auf dessen geistige Entwicklung sie einen großen Einfluß nehmen sollte.
^ ^a ^b Jackson, Frances Helen (2010). The Swiss Colony at Gruetli (PDF) (2010 ed.). Gruetli-Laager, Tennessee: Grundy County Swiss Historical Society. p. 20.
^ Hulle, Dirk Van; Nixon, Mark (2013). Samuel Beckett's Library. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 151. ISBN 978-1-107-00126-8.
^ Beiser, Frederick C. (2016). Weltschmerz: Pessimism in German Philosophy, 1860-1900. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 168. ISBN 978-0-19-876871-5.
^ Janaway, Christopher (2022-03-04). "Worse than the best possible pessimism? Olga Plümacher's critique of Schopenhauer". British Journal for the History of Philosophy. 30 (2): 211–230. doi:10.1080/09608788.2021.1881441. ISSN 0960-8788.
^ ^a ^b Beersheba Springs, A History (PDF). Vol. 1 (2017 ed.). Beersheba Springs, Tennessee: Beersheba Springs Historical Society. 2017. Retrieved 2020-07-09.
^ Wimbush, Andy (2020). Still: Samuel Beckett's Quietism. BoD – Books on Demand. p. 76. ISBN 978-3-8382-1369-9.
^ Roehr, Sabine (2015-10-27). "After Hegel: German Philosophy 1840–1900 by Frederick C. Beiser (review)". Journal of the History of Philosophy. 53 (4): 790–791. doi:10.1353/hph.2015.0073. ISSN 1538-4586. S2CID 170193435.
^ Bensick, Carol (2018-04-12). "An Unknown American Contribution to the German Pessimism Controversy: Amalie J. Hathaway's 'Schopenhauer'". Blog of the APA. Retrieved 2021-02-06.
^ Connell, Sophia M.; Janssen-Lauret, Frederique (2022-03-04). "Lost voices: on counteracting exclusion of women from histories of contemporary philosophy". British Journal for the History of Philosophy. 30 (2): 199–210. doi:10.1080/09608788.2021.1984201. ISSN 0960-8788.