Olga Plümacher


Olga Marie Pauline Plumächer was a Swiss-American philosopher and scholar.

Biography

Plumächer was born in St. Petersburg, Russia on 27 May 1839. She was the daughter of Gottlieb Samuel and Adelheid Hünderwadel. The family moved to Switzerland where her father managed a steel plant and later retired to Zürich, where Plumächer grew up. She married a German sea captain, Eugene Hermann Plumächer who was U.S. Consul to Venezuela; they had two children. Plumächer had no formal university education.
Plumächer was friends with a former classmate who was the mother of the German playwright Frank Wedekind and introduced him to the philosophy of Eduard von Hartmann and Arthur Schopenhauer, of which Plumächer was a devotee; she has been described as his "philosophical aunt".
Plumächer 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 philosophical schools of von Hartmann and Schopenhauer. These works made Plumächer a significant figure within the pessimism controversy in Germany: Der Kampf um's Unbewusste, Zwei Individualisten der Schopenhauer'schen Schule, and Der Pessimismus in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart. Plumächer has been compared to Agnes Taubert, another largely forgotten German female philosopher who played large part in the pessimism controversy. Plumächer also published several articles on psychology, philosophy and metaphysics in several German journals. Additionally, she published an article on von Hartmann in English, in the Oxford journal Mind.
Plumächer died in Tennessee, in 1895.

Legacy

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