Olga Plümacher

Olga Marie Pauline Plümacher, who wrote under the name O. Plümacher, was a Russian-born Swiss-American philosopher. 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, was influential on Friedrich Nietzsche and Samuel Beckett.

Biography

Early life

Olga Marie Pauline Hünerwadel was born on 27 May 1839, in Tsaritsyn, Russian Empire. She was the daughter of Gottlieb Samuel Hünerwadel, a former officer in France under Napoleon, and his cousin Adelheid Hünerwadel. Her two older brothers died before she was born. The family moved to Switzerland, where her father managed a steel plant and later retired to Zürich, where Plümacher grew up. She received no formal university education. She received no formal university education.

Family and intellectual circle

Plümacher married the German Eugene Hermann Plümacher, who later served as U.S. Consul to Venezuela; the couple had two children. She emigrated with her family to the United States and lived in Beersheba Springs, Tennessee.
In 1877, Plümacher returned to Switzerland with her children for ten years so that they could receive a good education. During this period she renewed her friendship with Emilie Kammerer, a childhood acquaintance and the mother of the German playwright Frank Wedekind. Plümacher introduced Wedekind to the philosophies of Arthur Schopenhauer and Eduard von Hartmann, to whom she was devoted. She has been described as Wedekind's "philosophical aunt".

Philosophical work

Plümacher published three books in Germany that engaged with the philosophies of Schopenhauer and Von Hartmann: Der Kampf um's Unbewusste, Zwei Individualisten der Schopenhauer'schen Schule, and Der Pessimismus in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart.
These works made Plümacher a prominent participant in the pessimism controversy in Germany. Because she published under the name O. Plümacher, she was not recognised as a woman philosopher and was discussed as if she were a man. Der Pessimismus in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart influenced Friedrich Nietzsche, who annotated his personal copy throughout.
Plümacher also published several articles on psychology, philosophy and metaphysics in German journals. In addition, she wrote an article on von Hartmann in English for the Oxford journal Mind.

Death

Plümacher died in Beersheba Springs around 15 June 1895, aged 56, and was buried in the town’s Armfield Cemetery.

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.
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.
Plümacher has been compared to Agnes Taubert, another largely forgotten German female philosopher who also played large part in the pessimism controversy, as well as the German-American philosopher Amelie J. Hathaway.
Plümacher was included in the 2022 issue of the British Journal for the History of Philosophy, titled "Lost Voices: On Counteracting Exclusion of Women From Histories of Contemporary Philosophy", as well as the 2024 Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century Women Philosophers in the German Tradition.