Rahel Varnhagen

03-29-2019

Talya Zax celebrates Women’s History Month in The Forward by suggesting that we re-read Rahel Varnhagen.

If you know about Rahel Varnhagen, it’s probably because of Hannah Arendt. Arendt called Varnhagen, born Rahel Levin in 1771, “my closest friend, though she has been dead for some hundred years.” The two shared a background; both were well-off German-born Jews. They shared an intellectual daring and determination; while Arendt, born in 1906, would become one of the most influential philosophers and writers of the 20th century, Varnhagen established an elevated status in German intellectual society that was unprecedented for a Jewish woman. But most importantly, the duo shared an outlook on the problem posed by their Jewish identity in the German Christian world in which they lived.

“If we should start telling the truth that we are nothing but Jews, it would mean that we expose ourselves to the fate of human beings who, unprotected by any specific law or political convention, are nothing but human beings,” she wrote in the 1943 essay “We Refugees.”

“I can hardly imagine an attitude more dangerous, since we actually live in a world in which human beings as such have ceased to exist for quite a while; since society has discovered discrimination as the great social weapon by which one may kill men without any bloodshed; since passports or birth certificates, and sometimes even income tax receipts, are no longer formal papers but matters of social distinction.”

Just over 150 years before, in a letter from 1975, Varnhagen expressed a similarly morbid understanding:

“I have a strange fancy: it is as if some supramundane being, just as I was thrust into this world, plunged these words with a dagger into my heart: “Yes, have sensibility, see the world as few see it, be great and noble, nor can I take from you the faculty of eternally thinking. But I add one thing more: be a Jewess!” And now my life is a slow bleeding to death.”

To both women, the greatest impediment to being seen as an equal in society — let alone being able to gain the respect they wished for as writers and thinkers — was not being a woman, but being a Jew. And while both would eventually be publicly understood to have overcome both obstacles, in their private lives, each would be intellectually tormented by the complicated influence of their religious and ethnic identities until their deaths. Varnhagen, despite living in a very different Germany than that into which Arendt was born, paved an essential road for her successor.

 
The Hannah Arendt Center’s Virtual Reading Group is currently reading and discussing Arendt’s book Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess. You can watch a sample recording of our reading group here.
 
You are welcome to join us in reading Arendt’s great biography of Rahel Varnhagen. Find out more and sign up to join the Virtual Reading Group here. Or email us for more information.