INTRODUCTION

Just a few weeks before Sophie Mereau's death, Johanna Schopenhauer moved to Weimar. Having already enjoyed a certain amount of success as the hostess of social gatherings in Hamburg, the recently widowed Schopenhauer hoped to establish herself in Germany's cultural center. As luck would have it, her arrival came just two weeks before Napoleon's armies defeated the ill-prepared Prussians at Jena and Auerstadt on October 14, 1806. By the next day soldiers were burning and plundering the site of Weimar Classicism. The woman who had come looking for culture suddenly found herself in the midst of a war.

The Germans had watched events unfold in neighboring France since 1789, but until 1806 the actual righting had taken place only on the western perimeter of their territory. For the next several years the Germans would experience first hand the changes wrought by the Revolution. By the time Napoleon was finally defeated at Waterloo, twenty-six years had passed since Louis XVI had summoned the assembly of the Estates General, and little remained the same. The Napoleonic Wars had engulfed Europe from Gibraltar to Moscow and from London to Cairo. Mass conscription and prolonged righting had brought the war home to a far greater percentage of the population than was typical for earlier wars. The French had seen their king and queen executed and their nobility sent into exile. For a time Robespierre had led a revolutionary dictatorship that oversaw executions in the name of virtue and terror. The Holy Roman Empire came to an end; churches were turned into temples of reason; even calendars were changed to abolish religious holidays in a new secular society.