Rahel Varnhagen Research Articles

The Law as Fragment

When Hannah Arendt writes about the law, she does so as a political theorist, genocide survivor and critic of modernity. She also writes as a phenomenologist, which is to say, she is mindful not only that people create the law, but that law constitutes a people. In Origins, she calls attention to the importance of the rule of law in the emergence of totalitarianism. In On Revolution, she seeks a way of grounding political authority in something other than an Absolute. In the process, Arendt looks to another group of intellectuals who grappled with the nature of authority under conditions of modernity—the Early German Romantics. Romantic fragments are philosophical, poetic, even musical. For Arendt, the most highly valued fragments are historical because these fragments provide not only protection against totalitarianism but also a possible solution to the problem of authority. In this article, I explore Arendt’s interpretation of the Declaration of Independence as a historical fragment. She draws on a phenomenological approach to fragments, found primarily in the work of Rahel Varnhagen and Dorothea Veit-Schlegel, to create a resilient yet malleable basis for authority, thereby grounding political authority in concrete historical events, rather than in human nature.

A Rebel against the Volk

This paper discusses Hannah Arendt’s model of the Jewish pariah, developed in her study of Jewish assimilation. The argument is that Arendt’s model represents her early efforts to move beyond Martin Heidegger’s philosophy. The paper focuses on Arendt’s concept of a conscious pariah as a model for political resistance, independence, and agency. It shows how Arendt infused elements of Heidegger’s philosophy into her early vision of Jewish politics, while also transcending the limits of Heidegger’s ontological project with her political vision. The paper suggests that Arendt’s book on Rahel Varnhagen shares similarities with Heidegger’s work on Mitsein in Being and Time, while her 1944 model of the conscious pariah, especially the focus on the pariah as a rebel, illustrates her concerns with Heidegger’s work on the Volk.

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.

Worldly Shame: Ethos in Action by Manu Samnotra

Shameless behavior seems to be on the rise in political life—politicians lie, powerful companies cheat, and extremist groups flagrantly violate rules and norms without facing punishment. In Worldly Shame: Ethos in Action, Manu Samnotra offers a provocative solution to help transcend this shamelessness: shame itself. Samnotra develops a concept of “worldly shame,” where the feeling of shame generates “the awareness that we share and build upon a world with Others” (5). This worldliness is juxtaposed with worldlessness, the alluring belief that one's actions can determine outcomes with no input from others. By recognizing their dependence on others around them, worldly shame can compel people to act with and for others and cultivate political spaces that respect a plurality of voices. Samnotra develops this concept of shame by drawing on Hannah Arendt's writings, carefully parsing the complexities in Arendt's treatment of shame throughout her work. Chapter two elaborates on how shame contributes to worldliness through an analysis of Arendt's Rahel Varnhagen. Developing worldly shame, or “shame-proneness,” is not always so straightforward, as sometimes shame manifests as “shame-aversion,” which prevents worldliness by “sustaining a narcissistic illusion” (31). Samnotra identifies these two variants of shame in Rahel Varnhagen's life; the socialite felt shame from being Jewish and spent most of her life displaying shame-aversion as she tried to belong in exclusionary German social circles. Eventually, through self-reflection and participation in egalitarian salons, Rahel cultivated shame-proneness: she “awaken[ed] to the world” (35) and abandoned her attempts at assimilation. The thorough analysis of Rahel's journey demonstrates how these shames can coexist within individuals, although it is not clear how people cultivate shame-proneness from shame-aversion.

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...

The world in a Geranium pot: Female paranoia and love of detail in Schor, Beauvoir and Arendt

Might paranoia bear some promise, not only danger, for democratic theory and politics? To suggest that we should treat paranoia with anything but disdain today, in the age of Q anon and other white-supremacist lies, seems dangerous. But three decades ago, feminist theorist Naomi Schor took the risk and defended female paranoia, arguing that paranoia is an appropriate affect for feminist theory and critique. This essay follows Schor’s invitation to risk proximity to paranoia. I argue that the political importance of Schor’s essay lies in one particular attribute of female paranoia that she celebrates: its love of detail. To explore the promise and limitations of the paranoid love of detail I pair Schor with two 20th-century theorists – Hannah Arendt and Simone de Beauvoir. Each studies a paranoid woman who clings to details: Arendt’s Rahel Varnhagen counts the number of teacups that she serves in her German salon. Beauvoir’s housewife collects tufts of dust. With Schor, Arendt and Beauvoir, the article argues that love of detail is a critical component not only of paranoid indictments of the world, but also of any project that desires to repair the world in the wake of paranoia.

On Dialogical Writing, Self-forming, and Salon Culture: Rahel Varnhagen, Henriette Herz, and Fanny Lewald

AbstractSalons evoke high-flown associations; we picture elegant people gathering in glamorous settings for cultivated conversations about the arts, literature, and politics. The so-called salons hosted around 1800 in Berlin by bourgeois Jewish women are tied to promises of emancipation and religious toleration. Scholars have either hailed the empowering functions of these convivial gatherings or debunked their enlightened promises as myths. Drawing on the latest research on conviviality in the social sciences, on Friedrich Schleiermacher's theory of sociability, and on writings by and about Rahel Varnhagen, Henriette Herz and Fanny Lewald, this essay approaches the topic of the salon from a different angle. I argue that these women's social endeavours were not tied to specific ends that we can either admiringly endorse or expose as failures from today's perspective. The notions of the female self, of writing, and the conceptions of literature and philosophy emerging from these convivial constellations are inherently dialogical and shifting. Conversations may sometimes break open hierarchies, but they may also foster conflict and no improvement. The value of these encounters, I suggest, lies in the effort made rather than a classifiable outcome.

Arendt’s Rahel Varnhagen: Challenging The Public - Private Dichotomy

Rahel Varnhagen, among the earliest works of Hannah Arendt, is often treated as an isolated piece in relation to her later political writings. However, this factual biography challenges one of the most inalienable elements in Arendt’s political theory: the public- private dichotomy. I argue that Rahel can be read as an exploration of the public or the private, that Varnhagen herself can be classified as either a parvenu or a pariah. A closer reading reveals that Rahel, as text and as individual, blurs this binary distinction. This blurring, in one exceptional text, helps to undermine the strict conceptual binary between public and private that is assumed to run through all of Arendt’s work. In Rahel, the political is not observed within the confines of a strict separation between the public and the private, but in an intermediate space: the social sphere of the eighteenth century salon. Identifying a conception of the social within Arendt’s political theory that is not detrimental to political actors and their actions would provide us a new reading of the social that is affirmative rather than negative. Such a reading would pave the way for a more inclusive reading of the social in Arendt, through which several “social” issues that are excluded from the political sphere may be recognized and re-conceptualized as political.

Arendt’s Rahel Varnhagen: Challenging The Public - Private Dichotomy

Rahel Varnhagen, among the earliest works of Hannah Arendt, is often treated as an isolated piece in relation to her later political writings. However, this factual biography challenges one of the most inalienable elements in Arendt’s political theory: the public- private dichotomy. I argue that Rahel can be read as an exploration of the public or the private, that Varnhagen herself can be classified as either a parvenu or a pariah. A closer reading reveals that Rahel, as text and as individual, blurs this binary distinction. This blurring, in one exceptional text, helps to undermine the strict conceptual binary between public and private that is assumed to run through all of Arendt’s work. In Rahel, the political is not observed within the confines of a strict separation between the public and the private, but in an intermediate space: the social sphere of the eighteenth century salon. Identifying a conception of the social within Arendt’s political theory that is not detrimental to political actors and their actions would provide us a new reading of the social that is affirmative rather than negative. Such a reading would pave the way for a more inclusive reading of the social in Arendt, through which several “social” issues that are excluded from the political sphere may be recognized and re-conceptualized as political.

Hannah Arendt Encounters Friedrich von Gentz: On Revolution, Preservation, and European Unity

This article contextualizes Hannah Arendt's complex and sometimes contradictory views on the Prussian statesman and balance-of-power theorist Friedrich von Gentz. A narration of Arendt's encounter with Gentz, to whom she devoted considerable space in her biography of Rahel Varnhagen and about whom she wrote two additional early essays, can illuminate the elusive contours of her international political thought as they developed from her early career to mature works likeThe Origins of Totalitarianism(1951) andOn Revolution(1963). I argue that a better grasp of Arendt's encounter with Gentz will shed light on the following: Arendt's complex relationship with conservatism, the early influences on her commitment to European unity and federation, and the early development of her conviction that the pathologies of the nation-state system require a revolutionary, cosmopolitan answer. Moreover, understanding this early encounter and its lasting traces will clarify why Gentz, who himself was active at the height of the “Age of Revolution,” once again became an important interlocutor for Arendt as she explored the possibility of a new age of revolutions inOn Revolution.

Hannah Arendt i sobowtóry. Próba myślenia

The essay discusses an issue that has not yet been studied separately: Hannah Arendt and her autobiographical crumbs scattered across other people’s biographies that she wrote and in her own biographies, both literary and cinematic. I called it an attempt at thinking, i.e. a synonym of a (biographical) essay. When Arendt writes about, e. g. Walter Benjamin or Rahel Varnhagen, she also – sometimes – writes about herself. When she smokes a cigarette in a specific way (rather than any other) or speaks German, she creates specific non-verbal doppelganger-like constructions.

Madness and the Social Link

ABSTRACT In this paper, I contend the necessity of a feminine agency in order to survive deshumanization. Examples are taken from Hannah Arendt’s Rahel Varnhagen, anthropologist and psychoanalyst William Rivers in Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy, who was called a male mother by traumatized officers returning from the front, Diotima for Socrates in the Symposium, Dulcinea for Don Quixote, and my experience in a psychiatric hospital situated on the battle fields of the previous war in the north of France.

‘But I am a rebel after all!’ The Politics of Marginality in Hannah Arendt’s Life of Rahel

In this essay, I offer an interpretation of Arendt’s biography of the Jewish-German salonnière, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess (1957). Treating the book as a work of political theory, I develop two arguments: First, I contend that Arendt’s study lays the grounds for a political epistemology of marginality and exclusion, making her a standpoint theorist avant la lettre. Second, I argue that Arendt’s book gives us an account of the process of ‘becoming political.’ This helps complement, and to a degree counter, her insistence in more widely read books that political freedom is an exclusively plural experience in the public realm. This insistence sidelines the role played by individual political consciousness in the decision to engage in action, as well as the necessary interaction between the private and the public spheres in becoming a political subject. Arendt’s biography suggests that becoming political can be facilitated by a solidary, and private encounter with the excluded other.

World-Craving: Rahel Varnhagen, Daniel Paul Schreber, and the Strange Promise of Paranoia

This essay reads Hannah Arendt’s Rahel Varnhagen (1957) alongside Sigmund Freud’s case history of paranoia, The Schreber Case (1911), two texts about 18th- and 19th-century personalities caught up in the gender and ethnic politics of their times. Noting affinities between the fantasies documented in Varnhagen’s and Schreber’s memoirs, I compare Seyla Benhabib’s and Eric Santner’s readings of these two texts as political, not psychological, documents. I propose a reading of paranoia positioned between Benhabib’s too optimistic dismissal of paranoia and Santner’s too tragic approach. The result is a new reading of Varnhagen’s story and an approach to paranoia as a potentially promising political affect. Might paranoia stand not just for world-withdrawal but also for world-building? If so, this would be in keeping with Arendt’s own treatment of her subject’s persecution fantasies not only as a “verdict against the world” but also as a desire for a world.

Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger: History of a Love by Antonia Grunenberg

Reviewed by: Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger: History of a Love by Antonia Grunenberg Evanthia Speliotis GRUNENBERG, Antonia. Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger: History of a Love. Translated by Peg Birmingham, Kristina Lebedeva, and Elizabeth von Witzke. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017. xvi + 309 pp. Cloth, $80.00; paper, $30.00 Antonia Grunenberg offers a fresh look at the decades-long relationship, both personal and intellectual, between Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger. The personal relationship—"History of a Love"—discloses the character of each; the intellectual relationship illuminates their respective understandings of philosophy: the nature and purpose of philosophical thinking, and whether and how this philosophical thinking can (must?) engage with action, politics, and world. Weaving these two narratives together, Grunenberg suggests that life—world, circumstances, fate—on the one hand, and character, on the other, play a significant role in how one sees and engages with the world, how one responds to it, and, ultimately, how one understands world, being, and the philosophical life. The setting for Grunenberg's account is the sweeping revolt occurring at the turn of the twentieth century in philosophy, culture, art, and science, and the call for "a new beginning." Beginning with the birth of German existentialism, in particular, Heidegger's replacing the traditional separation between thinking and being with Dasein, for which thinking authentically is being (chapter 1), Grunenberg then describes Heidegger's rise to power (chapter 2), and his subsequent belief that the historical moment was at hand to instantiate the philosophical ideal in the world (chapter 3). Into this account she weaves the story of Hannah Arendt, a student and lover who was inspired and influenced deeply by the new way of thinking and philosophizing that Heidegger presented (chapter 2). The rise of National Socialism and antisemitism, and Heidegger's apparent embrace of both, however, forced her to question this way of thinking, as she grappled with an ugly reality that threatened her very existence (chapters 2–3). Whereas Heidegger understood philosophy as a purely theoretical activity, Arendt became increasingly convinced that human being is, essentially, a political being, and that the thinking life must ever be in and contend with what exists in the world and with the political (chapters 4–6). Natural talent and circumstances combined to put Heidegger in a position of power: his studies with Husserl and his reappropriation of the ancient Greeks helped him conceive of a new way of thinking; the publication of Being and Time secured him public recognition for his discovery. Being also proud, thirsty for power, and certain of his own wisdom, seduced by the rhetoric of National Socialism, he believed the [End Page 382] opportunity was at hand to instantiate his ideal in the world: to reform the German university into Plato's Academy where he as "overseer" and "guardian" would educate a new generation of philosophically enlightened individuals to go forth and transform German society. As for his antisemitism, to which Grunenberg devotes significant attention, so certain was he that the "Jewish intelligentsia" epitomized the Enlightenment tradition against which he had revolted that he acquiesced in—even supported—the antisemitic agenda of National Socialism, albeit for his own theoretical reasons (chapter 3). As brilliant as he was, Heidegger apparently never questioned himself—his assumptions, perceptions, conclusions—nor did he ever acknowledge responsibility for his actions (chapter 5). Where Heidegger spent most of his life in solipsistic engagement with texts and with being (apart from his one failed attempt to actualize Plato's Academy), Arendt, by contrast, was driven both by life and personality to confront and examine herself—as human being, intellectual, Jew—and the world she lived in (see especially chapters 3–4 on Rahel Varnhagen, Origins of Totalitarianism). Inspired by Heidegger's teachings regarding grappling with being and reading texts—"against the grain"—for her, "being" included world and the "action of the many," which Heidegger dismissed (chapters 5–6). Thirsty to learn, conscious that there was much she did not understand, she pulled from all the resources available in her quest for understanding. A key resource in this quest was dialogue and the communities that make it possible. In her theoretical writing, this meant the political community...

UN ESPEJO DE AGUA CLARA: RAHEL VARNHAGEN COMO REFLEJO Y PROYECCIÓN DE HANNAH ARENDT (I)

<div class="page" title="Page 1"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><div class="page" title="Page 1"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><div class="page" title="Page 1"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p> Este artículo tiene como objetivo identificar en el libro de la temprana Hannah Arendt sobre la vida de Rahel Varnhagen —Rahel Varnhagen: The life of a Jewess— los primeros esbozos de los conceptos políticos que desarrollaría a lo largo de su vida dedicada a la teoría política, haciendo un seguimiento de su posterior aparición en diferentes obras. Se enfatiza el análisis aplicado de los conceptos de asimilación, paria y advenedizo. Se compara además las personas de Hannah Arendt y Rahel Varnhagen en cuanto a su origen judío y su condición de mujeres, tanto en la vida pública como en la privada y en la profundidad de su respectiva intimidad.</p></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>

Berlin for Jews: A Twenty-First-Century Companion by Leonard Barkan

Reviewed by: Berlin for Jews: A Twenty-First-Century Companion by Leonard Barkan Kerry Wallach (bio) Berlin for Jews: A Twenty-First-Century Companion By Leonard Barkan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. 191 pp. Berlin for Jews: A Twenty-First-Century Companion seems to be directed at an insider community of Jews who care about Jewish history, especially those considering a trip to Germany. The book's meandering look at Berlin is broader and more nuanced than a travel guide, with close attention to how Jews of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries understood their own relationships to Jewishness. Still, it remains unclear who beyond a small subset of travelers will be interested in Leonard Barkan's writing on Berlin. That the author is not an expert in either German or Jewish Studies has both merits and drawbacks. As a professor of comparative literature, art and archaeology, classics, and English, Barkan has written a type of memoir for a general audience that scholars in German or Jewish Studies might not venture or desire to write. The first two chapters use a cemetery in Prenzlauer Berg and a neighborhood in Schöneberg as windows into specific eras of history. Chapters 3 through 5 present Barkan's own "special Jewish pantheon" of Berlin Jews: salon hostess Rahel Varnhagen, art collector James Simon, and writer Walter Benjamin, whose legacies are intertwined with the history, people, and places of Berlin. Barkan concludes with a brief discussion of Holocaust memorialization and tourism, with a few poignant pages on Jewish daily life in Nazi Germany. One highlight throughout is the book's emphasis on architecture and works of art. Some of the most interesting questions raised by Berlin for Jews deal with the absence and presence, hiddenness and visibility, of Jews and Jewishness. As Barkan explains in the prologue, like many German Jews, he once had a relationship to Jewishness that was complicated by deep ambivalence and a quest for upward mobility. Indeed, this book constitutes a self-proclaimed "therapeutic" quest to parse both [End Page 92] personal and broader cultural ambivalence by means of strolls through Berlin, historical anecdotes, and self-critical humor. This takes different forms, for example: examining combinations of German and Hebrew on various gravestones; combing texts for the term Jew and its synonyms and euphemisms; and marveling over the Jewish address books published in Berlin in 1929/30 and 1931 and positing their relevance for understanding minority positions more broadly. Taken together, the book's uneven methods of analysis do not offer a balanced or convincing narrative. The discussion of places in the first two chapters is surprisingly illuminating and enjoyable. Even someone who is very familiar with Berlin and its Jewish sites will discover new details about individuals and families in the first chapter on the Schönhauser Allee cemetery. Barkan notes, however, that he does not provide a "convenient itinerary" for viewing the various graves discussed; those in search of specific gravesites may want to purchase the cemetery's extensive guide for six euros. (For a more straightforward and comprehensive itinerary of Jewish sites in Berlin, try Bill Rebiger's Jewish Berlin, which also covers the Schönhauser Allee cemetery.) Chapter 2 concentrates on the former residents, both Jewish and non-Jewish, of the Bayerisches Viertel (Bavarian Quarter) to postulate a "School of Schöneberg" in the vein of Raphael's Renaissance fresco The School of Athens. This chapter in particular calls attention to the fascinating architecture of this neighborhood while drawing on the author's knowledge of classical architecture. In contrast to the first two geographically oriented chapters, chapters 3 through 5 proceed more or less chronologically. The eloquent chapters on Rahel Varnhagen and Walter Benjamin could serve as engaging introductions to their biographies and writings for anyone with little knowledge of these relatively well-known figures. The fourth chapter on philanthropic art collector James Simon is the most original and insightful, thanks in part to the author's art historical expertise and perhaps also because little English-language scholarship exists on Simon. Vivid close readings of portraits and objects from Simon's collection, including the famous Nefertiti bust, make this chapter especially instructive. Here readers have...

Reading the Lives of Others: Biography as Political Thought in Hannah Arendt and Simone de Beauvoir

In this essay, I focus on two biographical works by Hannah Arendt and Simone de Beauvoir that I read as political texts:Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess(Arendt 1957) and “Must We Burn Sade?” (Beauvoir 2012). Reading Arendt'sVarnhagenand Beauvoir's “Sade” side by side illuminates their shared preoccupation with lived experience and their common political premises: the antagonism between freedom and sovereignty, and the centrality of action and constructive relations with others. My argument is that these texts constitute an original style of political thinking, which I call politico‐biographical hermeneutics, or reading the life of others as exercises in political theory. Politico‐biographical hermeneutics, as I take it, is not a systematic methodology, but an approach to interpreting sociopolitical forces as they come to bear and are embodied and inscribed in the lived experiences, struggles, and works of representative or exemplary individuals. This approach identifies the political lessons of lived experience and supports one of the central claims of feminist philosophy, namely, that the personal and the political are not antithetical, but relational.

The Self and History: Hannah Arendt and the Perplexities of Jewish Identity

Her biography of the Berlin salonnière Rahel Varnhagen, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess, was Hannah Arendt's most systematic analysis of Jewish identity. Written in the 1930s, it interpreted its protagonist's Jewish identity as a function of her understanding of history. But Arendt's construal of Jewish selfhood in this way could be seen as exhibiting critical conundrums, revealed through considering her work as a whole — as an oeuvre. This holistic perspective shows that Arendt's philosophy of the human mind, which she formulated late in her life, conflicted with her earlier historical interpretation of Jewish identity in Rahel Varnhagen. This conflict confounded Arendt's analysis of Jewish selfhood in the biography. And, in general, it created a discord in her oeuvre — a crucial fracture between her philosophical thought and her historiography.

THINKING BEYOND PHILOSOPHY:HANNAH ARENDT AND THE WEIMAR HERMENEUTIC CONNECTIONS

While there is increasing interest among Hannah Arendt's readers in the ways in which her political ideas can be traced back thematically to Weimar influences, there are only fleeting reflections on the junctions between her famously unorthodox approach to political philosophy and the hermeneutic revolts of her youth. The present paper will explore some of these connections, arguing that the theoretical-methodological background of Arendt's youth shaped her approach to what she later formulated as the basic predica- ments of political modernity. In this context, I read Arendt's early work in genealogical conjunction with the writings of Friedrich Gundolf, her literature teacher. It was particularly Gundolf's critique of Romanticism that became relevant for Arendt's work on Rahel Varnhagen, a Jewish hostess of a Berlin salon in the age of Romanticism. This link is not merely interesting, especially in the light of Arendt's life-long passion for literature and weaving elements of it into her political theory. More importantly, it constitutes a crucial episode in the conceptual evolvement of her critique of political modernity, and as such, in the genesis of her theory of politics.