# Olga Plümacher

Olga Marie Pauline Plümacher (née Hünerwadel; 27 May 1839 – c. 15 June 1895), who wrote under the name O. Plümacher, 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
### 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 Adelheid Hünerwadel (his cousin). She had two older brothers, who died before she was born. The family moved to Switzerland where her father managed a steel plant and later retired to Zürich, Switzerland, where Plümacher grew up. She received no formal university education.

### Personal life

Plümacher married a German, Eugene Hermann Plümacher, who later worked as U.S. Consul to Venezuela; they had two children together. She emigrated with her family to the United States and lived in Beersheba Springs, Tennessee.
In 1877, Plümacher returned to Switzerland for 10 years with her children to ensure they received a good education. While there, she reconnected with Emilie Kammerer, a childhood friend, who was the mother of the German playwright Frank Wedekind. Plümacher 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".

### Career

Plümacher 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. Since she published under the name O. Plümacher, she was not recognized as a woman philosopher and was thus engaged with as though she were a man. Der Pessimismus in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart was influential on Friedrich Nietzsche, whose personal copy he annotated throughout.
Plümacher also published several articles on psychology, philosophy and metaphysics in a number of German journals. Additionally, she published an article on Von Hartmann in English, in the Oxford journal Mind.$^{:21}$

### Death

Plümacher died around 15 June 1895 in Beersheba Springs and was buried in the Armfield Cemetery in Beersheba Springs; she was 56 years old.$^{:145}$

## 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.
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: Women in Philosophy 1870-1970", as well as the 2024 Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century Women Philosophers in the German Tradition.

## 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)