Page "Johanna Schopenhauer" Paragraph 5

At first, Arthur Schopenhauer didn't move to Weimar along with his family ; he instead remained in Hamburg.

Due to a promise he had made to his father, which Arthur refused to break even after Henrich Floris's death, he felt obliged to go on with his merchant apprenticeship.

Johanna had a difficult relationship with her famous son.

Upon moving to Weimar in 1809, Arthur didn't settle in his mother's home, but to that of his young instructor, Franz Passow.

The reason was that Johanna didn't want to live with him, due to deep personality differences.

Many of the extant letters she wrote him attest to her exasperation towards Arthur's pessimistic outlook on life, his haughtiness, and his assertive manners.

( As his mother destroyed all the letters he wrote her, Arthur's side of the story is unknown ).

Though in 1813 she at last permitted him to live with her, the arrangement soon failed: a year later Johanna asked her son to leave the house following a heated argument between the two of them over Johanna's friendship with her lodger, a younger man named Georg von Gerstenbergk.