Rahel Varnhagen

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Rahel Varnhagen

Rahel Varnhagen née Levin (born June 19, 1771 in Berlin; died March 7, 1833 in Berlin) was a German writer of Jewish descent who hosted one of the most prominent salons in Europe during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. She is the subject of a celebrated biography, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess (1958) written by Hannah Arendt. Arendt cherished Varnhagen as her "closest friend, though she ha[d] been dead for some hundred years." The asteroid 100029 Varnhagen is named in her honour.

[edit] Life and works

Rahel's family life was very uncongenial during her childhood. Her father, a wealthy jeweler, was a strong-willed man who ruled his family despotically. She became very intimate with Dorothea and Henriette, the daughters of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. Together with them she knew Henriette Herz, with whom she later became most intimately associated, moving in the same intellectual sphere. Rahel's home became the meeting-place of men like Schlegel, Schelling, Steffens, Schack, Schleiermacher, Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt, Motte Fouqué, Baron Brückmann, Ludwig Tieck, Jean Paul, and Friedrich Gentz. During a visit to Carlsbad in 1795 she was introduced to Goethe, whom she again saw in 1815, at Frankfurt am Main.

After the death of her father in 1806 she lived successively in Paris, Frankfurt am Main, Hamburg, Prague, and Dresden. This period was one of misfortune for Germany; Prussia was reduced to a small kingdom and her king was in exile. Secret societies were formed in every part of the country with the object of throwing off the tyranny of Napoleon. Rahel herself belonged to one of these societies.

In 1814 she married, in Berlin, the biographer Karl August Varnhagen von Ense, after converting to Christianity. At the time of their marriage, her husband, who had fought in the Austrian army against the French, belonged to the Prussian diplomatic corps, and their house at Vienna became the meeting-place of the Prussian delegates to the Congress of Vienna. She accompanied her husband in 1815 to Vienna, and in 1816 to Karlsruhe, where he was Prussian representative. After 1819 she again lived in Berlin, where Varnhagen had taken up his residence after having been retired from his diplomatic position.

Though not a productive writer herself, Rahel was the center of a circle of eminent writers, scholars, and artists in the Prussian capital. A few of her essays appeared in print in Das Morgenblatt, Das Schweizerische Museum, and Der Gesellschafter, and in 1830 her Denkblätter einer Berlinerin was published in Berlin. Her correspondence with David Veit and with Varnhagen von Ense was published in Leipzig, in 1861 and 1874-75 respectively.

Rahel always showed the greatest interest in her former coreligionists, endeavoring by word and deed to better their position, especially during the anti-Semitic outburst in Germany in 1819. On the day of her funeral Varnhagen sent a considerable sum of money to the Jewish poor of Berlin.

The poet Ludwig Robert was a brother of Rahel, and with him she corresponded extensively; her sister Rosa was married to Karl Asser.