Rahel Levin Varnhagen Research Articles

Esther Gad und das gesellige Leben in Breslau um 1800

Abstract The article paints a vivid picture of late-eighteenth-century Breslau and places the Jewish writer Esther Gad, who was married to local tradesman Samuel Bernard in 1791, in the city’s sociable life. Mentioning Gad’s many contacts to writers and philosophers such as Christian Garve, Jean Paul, and Elisa von der Recke, the article singles out Esther Gad’s friendship with Rahel Levin Varnhagen, who visited Breslau in 1794 and described her impressions of the city in letters to her family. In 1798, Gad joined her friend in Berlin, seeking for opportunities in the Prussian capital she did not have in her Silesian hometown.

Loving in Queer Time: Rahel Varnhagen's Life and Letters

Abstract: In this essay I argue that the salonnière Rahel Levin Varnhagen's extended singlehood and Jewishness made her a queer figure in early nineteenth century Berlin. While her non-normativity was initially compelling to Berlin's social elite, the Napoleonic Wars engendered antisemitic, patriotic impulses among her friends that left Varnhagen isolated from her social circle. However, out of this alienation came the opportunity to forge intimate friendships with other women who were also rejected or stigmatized by Berlin's elite. Varnhagen's correspondence with Rebecca Friedländer and Pauline Wiesel reveals how loneliness opened a space for queer expression that destabilized contemporary notions of sexual normativity. In analyzing Rahel as a queer figure and exploring the tensions that arose from this status, I examine the intersectional boundaries of belonging that emerged within early-nineteenth-century Prussia's shifting sociopolitical landscape.

Contested Selves: Life Writing and German Culture ed. by Katja Herges and Elisabeth Krimmer

Reviewed by: Contested Selves: Life Writing and German Culture ed. by Katja Herges and Elisabeth Krimmer Karin Baumgartner Contested Selves: Life Writing and German Culture. Edited by Katja Herges and Elisabeth Krimmer. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2021. Pp. 280. Hardcover $110.00. ISBN 978-1640141056. Since 2000, the popularity of life writing has exploded. Prince Harry’s memoir Spare certainly confirms that memoir has become a central form of culture. It is just one very public example of trauma narratives mixed with historical recollections ostensibly presented by a non-professional writer (but in fact, ghostwritten). Spare exemplifies what editors Katja Herges and Elisabeth Krimmer argue in their introduction: today, the genre is so broad as to be almost meaningless, and yet, here we are. Life writing, the term settled on by the editors, includes memoirs and autobiography (the editors use these two terms interchangeably), letters, diaries (including calendars and date books), blogs and Twitter messages, and comics. These varied expressions of life writing are united by the twin focus on the subject and its truth claims, which are often contested, if not entirely fictionalized. Let us not forget that Buckingham Palace responded to Prince Harry’s memories with the terse comment, “recollections may vary.” In the end, the editors of this collection settle on a broad definition following Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (1996). The goal of the volume, the reader learns, is to “elucidate the theoretical contours and historical roots of the subgenres of life writing” (3). The introduction sketches the outlines of three categories—memoirs, diaries, and letters, and gives readers an overview of recent theory and the major contributors to the genre. In addition to Smith and Watson, the introduction touches on Nancy K. Miller, Phillippe Leujeune, and Liz Stanley and argues that the great success of the memoir is based on the low hurdle to entry (anybody with a good story might write a memoir), our era’s focus on authenticity, and the elasticity of the genre. The same might be said about letters and diaries, which are, however, not generally intended for publication. This genre allows minorities, women writers, and other non-professional writers to enter the literary sphere, as the first article in the volume—Laura Deiulio’s investigation of Rahel Levin Varnhagen—shows. [End Page 333] The remainder of the volume is not divided according to the editors’ initial criteria (memoir, letter, diaries); rather, the twelve essays focus on the genre as a way to a means; or in other words, the genre is used to convey agency and subjectivity (part 1), aesthetics (part 2), the processing of trauma (parts 3), and intergenerational and transnational history (part 4). The majority of the twelve essays focus on women writers, with only four essays dedicated to male writers. Many of the articles bring new voices onto the literary stage, reframe more known authors in light of their life writings, and investigate new media such as cartoons. The first part of the volume features the range of life writing. The volume begins with an essay on Rahel Varnhagen, perhaps the most famous letter writer in the German literary pantheon. Deiulio argues that Rahel’s letters, ostensibly written to an absent interlocutor, signify a form of autobiography. Letters fix a moment in time and space, and in conversation with the other, the self emerges over time. The second essay brings to light the work of Poet-Queen Carmen Sylva (Elisabeth, princess of Wied and queen of Romania), an underappreciated writer at the end of the nineteenth century, who used her memoir to create a collective female history centered on her person. The third article in this section addresses interview literature, one of the most collaborative genres. Shoults reveals how GDR authors Maxie Wander and Sarah Kirsch employed carefully crafted interviews to supplement the GDR’s official history with cultural memories that were perceived as authentic and individual. The next section examines two authors who wrote autofiction (autobiographical writing that includes fictional elements) avant la lettre. Müller looks at the friction between Döblin’s autobiographical practice and his theoretical misgivings about the genre. For Döblin, fictional and life writing were intricately related in that they...

Thinking and Writing Truth. Rahel Levin Varnhagen's ‘Diaries’ and Philosophical Notes

AbstractThis paper collects some of Rahel Levin Varnhagen's thinking about truth. It aims to contextualize Levin Varnhagen's non-conventional writing within German Romanticism. Her so-called ‘diaries’ vary between aphorisms, personal reflections, problem-oriented sketches and apodictic definitions concerning anthropology and society. Truth and honesty are shaped in opposition to lies but also build a base for the process of thinking itself. According to Levin Varnhagen, truth leads to the real quality of things and towards understanding—thinking truth is an epistemic process. The paper follows Levin Varnhagen's quest for and definition of truth by re-reading her diaries as philosophical practice. Thematizing the possibilities of critical female thought by a (Jewish) woman of the early nineteenth century (with a ‘twice incorrect name’, as Barbara Hahn has put it) and the restrictions in education and publishing, the paper addresses furthermore intersectional questions of gender and religion.

Rahel Levin Varnhagen during the Napoleonic Occupation of Prussia: Letters of a Jewish Intellectual

The article presents an attempt to carry out a study of psychology, which is aimed at the identification and analysis of individual motivations and reactions in conditions of war time. The letters by Rahel Levins serve as empirical base of the present pa-per. In the article, Levin’s emotional state dynamic is traced, from 1806 to 1815. The author also tries to describe motivation for Levin’s actions. The author of the article bases her conclusions on the theory of experience of grief by F. E. Vasilyuk.

"Sie hat den Gegenstand": Rahel Levin Varnhagen's Subliminal Dialogue with Goethe

"Sie hat den Gegenstand":Rahel Levin Varnhagen's Subliminal Dialogue with Goethe Renata Fuchs In her essay "Rahel und Goethe" (Rahel and Goethe), Käte Hamburger (1896–1992) observes that "Rahels Gespräche, damals weit über Berlin hinaus berichtet, sind verklungen. Aber sie klingen nach und wieder auf in einem Briefwechsel" (113; Rahel's conversations, at that time talked about all over Berlin and beyond, faded away. But they resound time and again in an exchange of letters). In her response to Rahel Levin Varnhagen (1771–1833), Hamburger not only reacts to her writings, emphasizing the letter form as a supplement and extension of salon conversations, but also highlights the continuation of the dialogue that Levin Varnhagen had begun. The dialogue continues through time and space, as more authors and literary critics engage with this topic, thus keeping it alive and conforming to Levin Varnhagen's aspiration: "Dann ist und bleibt eine Korrespondenz lebendig" (Then the correspondence is and remains alive).1 Levin Varnhagen's lifelong correspondence project celebrates the connectedness and bringing people together according to Romantic symphilosophy, the optimal condition for literary and artistic creation.2 This article, based primarily on my interpretation of selected materials from the Varnhagen Archive concerning Levin Varnhagen's reception history,3 examines her dialogues about and with Goethe while shedding more light on her cultural and literary legacy in the context of her identity as a woman and a Jew. With her epistolary writing, Levin Varnhagen contributed to philosophical and cultural engagement through the creation of a network of people corresponding with each other and generating knowledge dependent on dialogue. In this article, I examine two forms of dialogue as they pertain to Goethe's role in Levin Varnhagen's life: Levin Varnhagen's "dialogue within the dialogue"4 about Goethe, and what I call her "subliminal" dialogue with Goethe. Specifically, Levin Varnhagen's interaction with Goethe and his work warrants reexamination of her emerging identity as a literary critic and a creator of diverse forms of dialogue. To make this point, I first revisit the immediate reception of Levin Varnhagen as a public persona and her place in society as a woman, a Jew, and a writer and the struggle with the gender-role division as it pertains to the aspiration of being published. I continue with the Romantic idea of sociability and dialogue and then discuss Levin Varnhagen's innovative communicative network. In the second part of the article, I discuss Levin Varnhagen's and Goethe's intellectual connection [End Page 101] through the notions of die Wahrheit (the truth), their interest in the philosophy of humanity, and, most prominently, through Levin Varnhagen's unwavering support for Goethe's work. At the end, I focus on Levin Varnhagen as a "grosses weibliches Genie" (great female genius) and "schöne Seele" (beautiful soul). Epistolary Engagement From the reception immediately following her death, we know that Levin Varnhagen's engagement in social life (the salon, literary criticism, involvement in politics), her ideas disseminated through the salon, and her writing influenced not only those in direct contact with her but also had a profound bearing on general public opinion in Prussia, in other German states, and abroad. In particular, her foreign reception is well-documented in the Varnhagen archive.5 Accordingly, during her lifetime she was widely known as an active figure in intellectual life and also wielded enormous influence as an example for emancipated women as well as independent and assimilated Jewish women. In 1835, Karl Gutzkow compared Levin Varnhagen with Lessing, the critical authority on theater (Seibert 404). Shortly after her death, Theodor Mundt summed up her contributions to various fields in which she was active, and not only reaffirmed her popularity and prominence but also argued that her engagement with Goethe's works and recognition of the universal relevance of his oeuvre transformed her into a literary critic.6 Levin Varnhagen built what we might consider one of the most valuable collections of letters in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Germany and became known as the leading Berlin salonnière and a great thinker of her time.7 While her work was always lauded for its unique quality, it was...

Editors' Preface

Editors' Preface Patricia Anne Simpson and Birgit Tautz With the publication of volume 27, we would like to take the opportunity to address some innovations. In this volume, we introduce an array of new formats through which we pursue research on Goethe, his age, and the long eighteenth century and seek to encourage new modes of collaboration, including, perhaps, communication across several volumes. A range of articles that contribute to the rich and growing archive of scholarship on German eighteenth-century studies opens this issue. Helmut J. Schneider's article, based on a keynote address at the 2017 Atkins Goethe Conference, "Re-Orientations around Goethe," highlights the eighteenth-century genesis of the bourgeois subject's unitary experience of the natural world. With select readings of Goethean texts, Schneider explores the disjuncture that opens between the gaze and the corporeal. Moreover, Schneider's reading captures the destructive consequences of the emancipatory escape into nature for anthropocentric moments of modernity. The remaining articles, while devoted to discreet subjects, authors, and texts, invite fascinating cross-readings. Oliver Simons turns our attention to the representation of Werther's narrative pulse. Herder and Lessing also figure in the framework for this interpretation of metanarrative reflections on suicide and acts of ending; the essay extends the narratological focus of a special section in last year's volume (What is an Event?). The two following articles—a fascinating, opportune pairing—redirect our attention to Karl Philipp Moritz, through texts that engage with but go beyond the Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde. Richard Apgar explores the fraught process of subject formation through an examination of Moritz's writing on the individual, "Erinnerungen aus den frühesten Jahren der Kindheit" (memories from the earliest years of childhood). This interrogation of impressions and mediated memories leads to fresh insights into the construction of the modern individual. Mattias Pirholt continues the focus on Moritz in his analysis of ethical and aesthetic principles encompassed by the concept of disinterested love in "Versuch einer Vereinigung aller schönen Künste und Wissenschaften unter dem Begriff des in sich selbst Vollendeten." The remaining contributions in this first section take up a challenge that our subfield has latently faced, namely to engage overtly or covertly with issues of relevancy; together the articles show how modern Goethe and his contemporaries are in our dialogues on belonging and identities, cultural legacies, and interdisciplinary inquiry. Renata Schellenberg turns our attention to the uncanny correspondence between [End Page xi] Goethe's portrayal of refugee reception in Hermann und Dorothea, foregrounding parallels to contemporary discussions and politics of statelessness, citizenship, and national belonging. Issues of intersectional identities also appear in Renata Fuchs's contribution on Rahel Levin Varnhagen's epistolary and dialogical engagement with Goethe. Despite her centrality as salon host and vibrant intellectual, Levin Varnhagen's reception was challenged by her outsider status as a woman and as a Jew. Stefan Höppner's article on Goethe's personal library invites a reconsideration of the shift from legal inheritance to cultural heritage. Michael Saman interprets three Goethean texts as keen observations of human ritual that offer prefatory ethnographic studies that impact structuralist anthropology. Karin Wurst approaches the intellectual hub of Weimar through the lens of contemporary creativity theory. These interventions demonstrate the continued, if underestimated, relevance of eighteenth-century studies for the study of humanities in the present, as well as sustained and innovative engagement with the literature of the Goethezeit. This volume launches our first Forum, a section comprised of invited contributions on an important topic of debate in the profession. For the debut, we asked colleagues engaged in Digital Humanities research to consider the canon in comparison to "the great unread" (Margaret Cohen): a vast expanse of noncanonical texts. The contributions evince approaches that go beyond the established binary of scholarly methods vs. data sciences; they also explore Digital Humanities as a way of navigating the gendered fault lines of canon formation to expand on the process, more generally, of canonization vs. marginalization in literary studies. We hope that readers of the Goethe Yearbook will be inspired to take up some of the questions, perspectives, and challenges introduced here, and that they will suggest further forum topics for...

Performing German Women’s Professional Identity: The Correspondence of Rahel Levin Varnhagen and Auguste Brede

The correspondence of the actress Auguste Brede (1784–1859) with the well-known intellectual Rahel Levin Varnhagen (1771–1833) allows a unique glimpse into a professional woman’s life during the Romantic period. Because the private letters were not originally written for publication, they permit a fresh perspective on the experience of actresses of the day. This study explores how Brede understood her professional and personal roles in the context of evolving discourses of professionalization, the theater, and the bourgeoisie.

“Soll ein Weib wohl Bücher schreiben; Oder soll sie’s lassen bleiben?”: The Immediate Reception of Rahel Levin Varnhagen as a Public Figure

This article, based primarily on materials from the Varnhagen Archive at the Jageiellonian Library in Krakow, Poland, examines the immediate reception of Rahel Levin Varnhagen’s work and persona—weighing both contemporaneous and subsequent claims concerning her public image. In discussing Varnhagen as a public figure, scholarship has emphasized that she did not publish under her own name, but rather anonymously or under a pseudonym. This article claims that not only her persona, but also her writings were very much known and discussed. This is essentially the reason why the first publication of her letters gained immediate popularity. Levin Varnhagen’s engagement in social life—be it her salon, the literary scene including her literary criticism, or politics—and her ideas influenced not only those in direct contact with her but had a profound bearing on the general public opinion in Prussia, other German states, and abroad. In particular, Levin Varnhagen’s foreign reception is well-documented in the Varnhagen archives. Rahel Levin Varnhagen’s public influence as a cult figure was widely known even before her death. She enjoyed a status similar to that of a contemporary superstar or celebrity. The timeless unfading relevance of her free thinking approach renders her to be also an active model for emancipated women as well as independent and assimilated Jewish women—a status which caused endless polemical exchange, and thus extended the ongoing discussion about her private or public role in the society.

The Other Jewish Question: Identifying the Jew and Making Sense of Modernity, Jay Geller (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), xiv + 510 pp., hardcover $110.00, paperback $40.00

Jay Geller's The Other Jewish Question challenges any conventional way of reviewing a book. His densely written analysis of both iconic and arcane (mostly German-language) texts across a roughly two-hundred-year period is not for the intellectually faint-hearted. But it is a feast for the connoisseur who follows the evolution and morphing of ideas and uncovering how these ideas become markers for defining, defending, or regulating social relationships. Countless cross-references, ideational interpolations, phonemic allusions, psychoanalytic evocations, intertextual linkages, and morphemic conjectures—characteristic of both Geller's style and method—make up the bulk of the present work's 300-plus pages, followed by more than 200 pages of endnotes and references. Such an accomplished intellectual amalgamation dazzles in its virtuosity, at times revealing with stunning lucidity the textual genesis and decline of ideas, if at other times weaving a nearly impenetrable web of opaque connections. What then is this book about? It is about the European discourse (and counter-discourses) on the “Jew” in the period from Rahel Levin Varnhagen's birth in 1771 to Walter Benjamin's death in 1940. The book stops, so to speak, just at the moment that European antisemitic ideology begins to reach its pinnacle, having moved from curious and spurious textual ideas about “Jews” to the material reality of physical annihilation. And thus The Other Jewish Question traces the possible outcome of an insidious discourse on what is perceived as “the Other”: cultural assumptions spread widely and enduringly across discrete disciplines of knowledge, artistic expression, and social agencies.

The Other Jewish Question: Identifying the Jew and Making Sense of Modernity (review)

Reviewed by: The Other Jewish Question: Identifying the Jew and Making Sense of Modernity Kerry Wallach The Other Jewish Question: Identifying the Jew and Making Sense of Modernity. By Jay Geller. New York: Fordham University Press, 2011. Pp. 510. Paper $35.00. ISBN 978-0823233625. The “Jewish question” (Judenfrage) has referred to pressing concerns about the political status and fate of European Jewry since roughly the 1770s. In German and Austrian lands, Jewish emancipation, acculturation, and secularization gave rise to a slippery understanding of Jewishness (Judentum) among both Jews and non-Jews. Who should be considered a Jew was determined according to increasingly antisemitic and so-called racial (rather than religious) specifications; many came to regard Jewishness as indelible. The “other” Jewish question of Jay Geller’s significant contribution to cultural studies addresses the roles physiognomic and bodily constructs have played in processes of Jewish identification and self-identification. Geller explores how a number of prominent “text-producing self- and other-identified Jews” (4) from Baruch Spinoza to Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Walter Benjamin “mediated” Jewish identification; that is to say, how they approached the ascription (or denial) of Jewish identity. Masterfully, Geller grapples with issues of racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual difference—but also with physiology, pathology, nationalism, and antisemitism—as they pertain to Jewishness. Though this book nominally spans Germanophone texts produced from 1771 to 1940 (the birth of Rahel Levin Varnhagen to the death of Walter Benjamin), it also deals intensively with seventeenth-century Spinozan claims and their reception, thereby locating 1632 (Spinoza’s birth) at the dawn of German-Jewish modernity. Geller’s central methodological move is the shift from the study of Jewish “identity” to the study of “identification.” Drawing on the work of sociologist Rogers Brubaker (Ethnicity Without Groups, 2004), which is increasingly present in Jewish cultural [End Page 393] studies today, Geller updates our understanding of processes of identifying the Jewish body. In departing from fixed notions of “identity,” Geller opens up a broader range of texts, including many that are not easily read with respect to Jewishness. Indeed, some can be downright problematic: after all, it is difficult for scholars of (German-) Jewish studies to draw on works such as Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf or Artur Dinter’s Die Sünde wider das Blut without digressing into a study of antisemitism. Yet in its supremely careful and erudite readings of texts produced by Jewish writers, as well as texts and discourses that emerged from concurrent antisemitic climates, The Other Jewish Question provides fascinating interpretations of cultural motifs and their effects on identification within cultural and historical contexts. An impressive number of texts receive close attention in Geller’s quest to trace a genealogy of ascriptions (and inscriptions) of Jewishness. Whereas his analysis concentrates on representations of the circumcised Jewish body, Geller goes beyond Beschneidung to include “other such corporeally coded ‘quasi-objects’ that supplemented, that helped make visible, the circumcised: noses, smells, voice, hair, mimicry, animality, rags, diet, disease and diseased reproduction” (19). In an introduction and nine chapters that proceed more or less chronologically (plus over 100 pages rich with interesting notes), he analyzes: (1) the persistence of circumcision (Spinoza, Moses Hess, Berthold Auerbach), (2) interrelationships of Chinese and Jewish hair (Heine; German Romantics such as E. T. A. Hoffmann, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Achim von Arnim), (3) figurations of diseases including syphilis and leprosy (primarily in texts by antisemitic writers, including Mein Kampf), (4) gender difference (Varnhagen), (5) food, particularly onions and garlic (Ludwig Feuerbach), (6) Marx’s use of the terms Lump- and Verkehr-, including topics such as the rag trade and prostitution, (7) Max Nordau’s conspicuous pre-Zionist omissions, (8) paranoiac Daniel Paul Schreber’s vision of a non-Jewish Wandering Jew (Schreber, Freud), and (9) Walter Benjamin’s understanding of the “Jewish aroma” (Benjamin, Franz Kafka, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno). Despite his emphasis in these chapters on well-known works and authors, Geller never ceases to cull additional arcane cultural tidbits that few before him have unpacked. This book also advances the field of Jewish gender studies in several ways. Building on the work of scholars such as Sander Gilman, Daniel Boyarin...

How Jews became Germans: the history of conversion and assimilation in Berlin

When the Nazis came to power and created a racial state in the 1930s, an urgent priority was to identify Jews who had converted to Christianity over the preceding centuries. With the help of church officials, a vast system of conversion and intermarriage records was created in Berlin, the country's premier Jewish city. Deborah Hertz's discovery of these records, the Judenkartei, was the first step on a long research journey that has led to this compelling book. Hertz begins the book in 1645, when the records begin, and traces generations of German Jewish families for the next two centuries. The book analyzes the statistics and explores letters, diaries, and other materials to understand in a far more nuanced way than ever before why Jews did or did not convert to Protestantism. Focusing on the stories of individual Jews in Berlin, particularly the charismatic salon woman Rahel Levin Varnhagen and her husband, Karl, a writer and diplomat, Hertz humanizes the stories, sets them in the context of Berlin's evolving society, and connects them to the broad sweep of European history.

Transgressive Mobility, Gender and Jewish Patronage: The Case of Ludwig Robert's Die Tochter Jephthas

Ludwig Robert is best known today as the brother of salonnière Rahel Levin Varnhagen. Through Baroness Sophie von Grotthuß he came to have his first play performed in Goethe's Weimar. The play was called Die Tochter Jephtbas [Jephthah's Daughter]. Set in biblical times, the play actually dramatises the transgressive nature of nineteenth-century Jewish women's mobility. In this essay I analyse the correspondence surrounding Robert's play and read the play in relation to Bible stories, Goethe's literary creations and German adaptations of Shakespeare. The circumstances surrounding the play's production, the flouting of some representational conventions, and the heritage of the playwright and his patroness combine to provide insight into the complexity of German—Jewish and gendered relations in the early 1800s.

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.

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.

Rahel Levin Varnhagen: The Life and Work of a German Jewish Intellectual (review)

174 SHOFAR Winter 2001 Vol. 19, No.2 Rahel Levin Varnhagen: The Life and Work of a German Jewish Intellectual, by Heidi Thomann Tewarson. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. 262 pp. $45.00 (c); $20.00 (p). Tewarson's life ofRahel Varnhagen is too broadly admiring ofher protagonist and too narrowly informed on the issue ofantisemitism. She distances herselfimmediately from Hannah Arendt's Rahel Varnhagen: Lebensgeschichte einer deutschen Jadin aus der Romantik (1959; RY: The Life ofa Jewish Woman, 1974), which appears to her much too harsh on Rahel. But her own portrait does not consider the historical complexities of majority-minority relations in Prussia around 1800, especially in the case of a minority that was both intensely drawn to the majority (high) culture and desiring to maintain a significant distinctness-the root cause of Rahel's notorious "suffering." Tewarson writes from the position of late twentieth-century identification with the victim status, relying on studies like Katz's streamlining history ofantisemitism, From Prejudice to Destruction, and a recent wave offeminist celebrations ofRahel the great (under-appreciated) woman writer. Rahel, whose fame as spiritual guide had actually been remarkably enduring for more than a century after her death in 1833, has reemerged as a cult figure, with her own very active "Rahel Varnhagen Society," and a voluminous edition of her complete letters. Arguably, the anachronistic simplifications inherent in this perspective have prevented Tewarson from asking why and how Arendt was more critical ofRahel. It is true, Rahel's husband was treated unfairly by Arendt, who disregarded his later considerable contributions because she wanted to highlight the difference in intellectual status at the time ofthe marriage between the much older woman and the still immature young man. Guided at first by Rahel's shrewdness in social matters-she insisted that he obtain the title ofnobility during the Napoleonic wars when this could be arranged more easily-, including her extraordinary networking skills, Varnhagen would eventually come into his own as an important political essayist and, as expected, he would take excellent care ofRahel's posthumous fame. From the very beginning, their relationship was a working marriage devoted to the enduring remembrance ofRahel's "greatness"-a term habitually used by both of them in reference to her-through the publication ofher letters. She trained Varnhagen to send back to her the most brilliant passages culled from her letters together with admiring reactions offriends with whom he had shared them. Always admonishing him not to overlook any gems, she would also praise him for his loyal assembling and making public the text ofher life. She "shared Varnhagen's opinion in wishing to preserve what exists of me. It has been thrown up by explosions, there are jewels among it. Long live suffering" (to la Motte Fouque, Jan. 30,1810). Rahel came to Varnhagen after several very painful love affairs with young aristocrats, and through him she finally secured her place in cultivated society and immortality for her "greatness." The young, impressionable Varnhagen was prepared for such heavy responsibility by virtue ofhis literary talents and interests. He was also Book Reviews 175 aided by the arch-literary form of Romantic sociability that expressed itself in communal explorations ofemotional and intellectual experiences through conversation and the sharing ofletters and diaries. The intensity of Rahel's preoccupation with the great text ofwhat she thought her uniquely original life was unusual; but her intimately connecting mode ofexpression was very much ofthe time. Referring to herselfas "the human magnet towards which flies every human particle!" (To Varnhagen, Sept. 2, 1827), she was profoundly attracted to the attraction ofher "genius" to others. Her cult ofGoethe was an extraordinary mixture ofsocial shrewdness, childlike reverence, and imitatio, since she saw his greatness significantly linked to hers. Goethe was the divine model for the text of her life, and she explicitly and repeatedly renounced authorship during her lifetime, because she wished to keep her story open for its significant ending that had to include the entirety of her intellectual and emotional responses to the ongoing work of Goethe. Goethe as the monumental Urbild of all human cultural greatness for the German nineteenth century, Jewish and Gentile, was Rahel's publicly private religion...

Women of Letters. A Study of Self and Genre in the Personal Writing of Caroline Schlegel-Schelling, Rahel Levin Varnhagen, and Bettina von Arnim

Daley, Marymargaret. Women of Letters: A Study of Self and Genre in the Personal Writing of Caroline Schlegel-Schelling, Rahel Levin Varnhagen, and Betting von Arnim. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1998. 135 pp. $55.00 hardcover. As the subtitle of this small volume indicates, the focus is a study of self and genre in three of the most prominent women writers of the nineteenth century, Caroline Schlegel-- Schelling, Rahel Varnhagen and Bettina von Arnim. In particular, the author Marymargaret Daley explicates the personal writings of these women by analyzing how they "expand the boundaries" (ix) of epistolary writing, with self-discovery as the goal. Daley maintains that Schlegel-Schelling defines herself "as a woman intellectual against the radical backdrop of the French Revolution," that Varnhagen describes "her yearning for sublime transcendence," and that von Arnim "produce[s] an idealized expression of Romantic love" (x), all as "quest[s] for self-vision" (xii). The thesis of the study is that epistolary writing is "uniquely suited for an exploration of the self in progress" (1). The reason given for this "uniqueness" is that "pressures from gendered social definitions of the self and the contradictions of identity and audience" give voice to the discovery of an identity that emanates from "epistolary intercourse made public" (2). An important characteristic of epistolary writing that Daley emphasizes near the beginning of her analysis is its oral semblance and its potential for creative literary production. It is then not surprising that all three women, either independently or together with their spouses, hosted various types of salons. Daley mentions this but does not unmask any deeper correlation between the oral salon tradition and the epistolary writings of these three women, which would strengthen this study's argument. For example, Daley maintains that Bettina von Arnim "seemed to enjoy turning her meetings into autobiographical monologues" (52). This would be an important point to develop further in supporting the thesis of Daley's book. However, neither is this assertion documented, nor is it used in the broader line of argument. In Daley's review of the publication of Schlegel-Schelling's epistolary writings, it becomes clear how fragile these personal writings are. The way in which editors compromise and sometimes destroy the authenticity of personal writing is often overlooked. Daley, through the example of Schlegel-Schelling, illustrates the significance of this fact in her study of the role of gender and genre in women's writing during an era of male predominance. Schlegel-Schelling, with her biography of social and political connectedness, "can be read most productively as a series of reflections on the changing role of a woman's private life in a time of political and cultural tumult" (45). In contrast to Schlegel-Schelling, who created a "signed" private voice and made a conscious choice not to publish her writings, Varnhagen created a public voice but chose to remain anonymous in her publications. Daley argues that Varnhagen "arrive[s] at a sublime level of contemplation" (56) in her writings of self-discovery. While this is by no means inaccurate, it does appear to be a bit presumptuous to claim that "It]he vast majority of readers have not yet learned how to read Varnhagen" in this regard (56). Daley references some of the recent literary critics who have helped us to read Varnhagen-Katherine Goodman and Elke Frederiksen, to name just two. Moreover, Daley seems to contradict herself on this point when in the same chapter she states, "Her [Varnhagen's] proclivity for self-reflection pinpoints a moment of conflict that is intriguing to critical and casual readers alike [. …

Women of Letters. A Study of Self and Genre in the Personal Writing of Caroline Schlegel-Schelling, Rahel Levin Varnhagen, and Bettina von Arnim (review)

Women of Letters. A Study of Self and Genre in the Personal Writing of Caroline Schlegel-Schelling, Rahel Levin Varnhagen, and Bettina von Arnim (review)

Women of Letters: A Study of Self and Genre in the Personal Writing of Caroline Schlegel-Schelling, Rahel Levin Varnhagen, and Bettina von Arnim

Daley, Marymargaret. Women of Letters: A Study of Self and Genre in the Personal Writing of Caroline Schlegel-Schelling, Rahel Levin Varnhagen, and Betting von Arnim. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1998. 135 pp. $55.00 hardcover. As the subtitle of this small volume indicates, the focus is a study of self and genre in three of the most prominent women writers of the nineteenth century, Caroline Schlegel-- Schelling, Rahel and Bettina von Arnim. In particular, the author Marymargaret Daley explicates the personal writings of these women by analyzing how they expand the boundaries (ix) of writing, with self-discovery the goal. Daley maintains that Schlegel-Schelling defines herself as a woman intellectual against the radical backdrop of the French Revolution, that describes yearning for sublime transcendence, and that von Arnim produce[s] an idealized expression of Romantic love (x), all quest[s] for self-vision (xii). The thesis of the study is that writing is uniquely suited for an exploration of the self in progress (1). The reason given for this uniqueness is that pressures from gendered social definitions of the self and the contradictions of identity and audience give voice to the discovery of an identity that emanates from epistolary intercourse made (2). An important characteristic of writing that Daley emphasizes near the beginning of her analysis is its oral semblance and its potential for creative literary production. It is then not surprising that all three women, either independently or together with their spouses, hosted various types of salons. Daley mentions this but does not unmask any deeper correlation between the oral salon tradition and the writings of these three women, which would strengthen this study's argument. For example, Daley maintains that Bettina von Arnim seemed to enjoy turning her meetings into autobiographical monologues (52). This would be an important point to develop further in supporting the thesis of Daley's book. However, neither is this assertion documented, nor is it used in the broader line of argument. In Daley's review of the publication of Schlegel-Schelling's writings, it becomes clear how fragile these personal writings are. The way in which editors compromise and sometimes destroy the authenticity of personal writing is often overlooked. Daley, through the example of Schlegel-Schelling, illustrates the significance of this fact in her study of the role of gender and genre in women's writing during an era of male predominance. Schlegel-Schelling, with her biography of social and political connectedness, can be read most productively a series of reflections on the changing role of a woman's private life in a time of political and cultural tumult (45). In contrast to Schlegel-Schelling, who created a signed private voice and made a conscious choice not to publish her writings, created a public voice but chose to remain anonymous in her publications. Daley argues that arrive[s] at a sublime level of contemplation (56) in her writings of self-discovery. While this is by no means inaccurate, it does appear to be a bit presumptuous to claim that It]he vast majority of readers have not yet learned how to read Varnhagen in this regard (56). Daley references some of the recent literary critics who have helped us to read Varnhagen-Katherine Goodman and Elke Frederiksen, to name just two. Moreover, Daley seems to contradict herself on this point when in the same chapter she states, Her [Varnhagen's] proclivity for self-reflection pinpoints a moment of conflict that is intriguing to critical and casual readers alike [. …

Women of Letters: A Study of Self and Genre in the Personal Writing of Caroline Schlegel-Schelling, Rahel Levin Varnhagen, and Bettina von Arnim

Women of Letters: A Study of Self and Genre in the Personal Writing of Caroline Schlegel-Schelling, Rahel Levin Varnhagen, and Bettina von Arnim

Rahel Levin Varnhagen: Briefwechsel mit Pauline Wiesel (review)

Book Reviews 153 employ the term "contract" for a thinker whose point is to replace the theory ofcontract with the alternative ofa fusion theory to describe the constitution of civil society (pp. 131ff.) proves equally problematic. If the conceptual framework ofliberalism allows Smith to view Spinoza in terms of a modem liberal who speaks to the current predicament of contemporary liberal Judaism, such a framework, paradoxically, seems to obfuscate an approach that would do more justice to the challenge of Spinoza's own thought. Willi Goetschel Department of German Columbia University Rahel Levin Varnhagen: Briefwechsel mit Pauline Wiesel, edited by Barbara Hahn and Birgit Borsold. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1997. 767 pp. Rahel Levin Varnhagen: Briefwechsel mit Pauline Wiesel is part of Barbara Hahn and Ursula Isselstein's Edition Rahel Levin Varnhagen, the ambitious project to publish Rahel Levin Varnhagen's correspondences and other writings after her estate became accessible. The enterprise datesback morethan ten years ago. Levin Varnhagen's letters and diaries reveal not only the emotions -of a woman intellectual at a time of major social change, they constitute a major contribution to the development of the postEnlightenment German-Jewish discourse. They reveal the mindset of an exceptional Jewish woman, a pioneer in the history ofemancipation and assimilation, and a witness ofa decisive period in Central European history: the Napoleonic occupation, the Wars of Liberation, the Restoration, and the early phases of "modem" antisemitism. The editor notes that prior to 1984 it had not been obvious to the scholars undertaking the new edition that the Levin Varnhagen holdings of the Cracow Jagiellonian library by far exceeded what had been published prior to that date. Moreover, Hahn writes, earlier publications of Levin Varnhagen's work consisted of selected texts that mirrored the expectations ofa given period and hence were of little scholarly value. For example, the most influential publication of Levin Varnhagen's writings, Rahel: Ein Buch des Andenkens fir ihre Freunde (1833/4), contained only Rahel Levin Varnhagen's letters to certain individuals in chronological order. The responses and stimuli motivating her writing remained concealed. The same is true for later publications. Thus a comprehensive picture of the relationships and activities of this woman intellectual who like few others studied and commented on the world around her could not emerge. In her correspondence with Pauline Wiesel, whom she termed her most important and best friend, Rahel Levin Varnhagen reveals her private self and her wishes and desires with greater immediacy than in her representational letters to her aristocratic friends or "great" men. How strongly she felt about her correspondence with Pauline 154 SHOFAR Summer 2000 Vol. 18, No.4 Wiesel as well as the person is revealed by the fact that she mentions no other correspondence in her will of 1816: Levin Varnhagen asks her husband, Karl August Varnhagen von Ense, to return Wiesel's letters to the writer along with a personal note. Wiesel's letters were not returned; rather, in an attempt to compile as complete a record of his wife's writings, Varnhagen asked Wiesel to forward Levin Varnhagen's letters to him. Yet, Hahn maintains, he was highly selective when publishing this portion of Rahel Levin Varnhagen's correspondence. In the afterword Hahn discusses problems she encountered in her work with the Wiesel/Levin Varnhagen correspondence in an attempt to reconstruct what happened to Wiesel's manuscripts and the letters she received. Hahn speculates whether along with Wiesel's letters to Rahel these documents are apt to bring about a revision of Wiesel's image as the "mistress of great men." To establish a more accurate picture, Hahn traces Wiesel's biography, contrasting facts with myths surrounding Wiesel, who is traditionally configured as a paragon ofbeauty and sensuality. The biographical sketch hints at reasons for the affinity between Levin Varnhagen, a Jewish-born woman and socialite who eventually took baptism to marry a Christian considerably younger than herself, and Wiesel, the precocious child of a CatholicProtestant marriage who led an eccentric life that left her vulnerable and socially marginalized despite her marriages. Different in family background, religion, and childhood experiences, both women experienced a life in extremis. Their letters reveal how uncharted the territories...