Heidi Thomann Tewarson. Rahel Levin Varnhagen: The Life and Work of a German Jewish Intellectual. Texts and Contexts. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. 262 pp.

Abstract

Fields such as Jewish cultural history and women's studies, where interest in nineteenth-century Berlin Jewish literary salon society continues to grow, converge at the emblematic example of Rahel Levin Varnhagen. Heidi Thomann Tewarson's new biography, Rahel Levin Varnhagen: The Life and Work of a German Jewish Intellectual, is the first to address the English reader since Hannah Arendt's recently reissued Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess, originally published in 1957. As such, Tewarson has incorporated the most up-to-date research on this figure and period, otherwise available almost solely in German. Arendt's work has traditionally been read as part biography and part autobiography—as much about identification and coming to terms with Jewish identity as a German Jewish woman intellectual in 1930s Berlin as it is about the salon period. Tewarson has taken a different tack. Rather than focusing on the life of a Jewess per se, Tewarson is interested in the work of an intellectual. What constitutes the legitimate, creative work of an intellectual? And can the term itself be gender-free? These questions, though necessarily tied to Rahel's place outside the literary and cultural mainstream, serve as the main thrust of the book.