Rahel Varnhagen Read online

  HANNAH ARENDT (1906–1975) was born in Linden, Prussia (now Hanover, Germany). She studied philosophy at the University of Marburg under Martin Heidegger and at Heidelberg University under Karl Jaspers. Arrested for researching anti-Semitism at the Prussian State Library, she fled Germany in 1933 and lived for eight years in Paris, where she worked for Jewish refugee organizations and completed her biography of Rahel Varnhagen—though the book would not be published in full until 1957. Soon after the Nazi invasion of France in 1940, Arendt immigrated to the United States, taking part in the Commission on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction and teaching at Bard College, Berkeley, Princeton, the University of Chicago, and the New School for Social Research. She is perhaps best known for Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), and a major philosophical work, The Human Condition (1958).

  RICHARD WINSTON (1921–1983) and CLARA WINSTON (1917–1979) were both born in New York City, attended Brooklyn College, and lived most of their lives together on a farm in Vermont. They translated more than one hundred and fifty books from the German—including works by Kafka, Hesse, and Jung—and were awarded the PEN Translation Prize in 1972 for their edition of The Letters of Thomas Mann.

  BARBARA HAHN is a professor emerita of German studies at Vanderbilt University. She has written and edited a number of books, collecting and commenting on Hannah Arendt’s work and the correspondence of Rahel Levin Varnhagen.

  Rahel as a young girl. Pencil drawing by Wilhelm Hensel.

  RAHEL VARNHAGEN

  The Life of a Jewish Woman

  HANNAH ARENDT

  Translated from the German by

  RICHARD WINSTON and

  CLARA WINSTON

  Introduction by

  BARBARA HAHN

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 1957 by the Hannah Arendt Bluecher Literary Trust

  Translation copyright © by Richard Winston and Clara Winston

  Introduction copyright © 2022 by Barbara Hahn

  All rights reserved.

  First published as a New York Review Books Classic in 2022.

  Cover image: Portrait of Rahel Varnhagen von Ense, c. 1807; collection of Bibliothèque du Conseil d’Etat, Paris; Heritage Images/Fine Art Images/akg-images

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Arendt, Hannah, 1906–1975, author.

  Title: Rahel Varnhagen : the life of a Jewish woman / by Hannah Arendt.

  Description: New York : New York Review Books, 2021. | Series: New York Review Books classics

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020058368 (print) | LCCN 2020058369 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681375892 (paperback) | ISBN 9781681375908 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Varnhagen, Rahel, 1771–1833. | Jewish women—Germany—Berlin—Biography. | Jews—Germany—Berlin—Intellectual life. | Berlin (Germany)—Intellectual life.

  Classification: LCC PT2546.V22 A913 2021 (print) | LCC PT2546.V22 (ebook) | DDC 838/.609 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020058368

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020058369

  ISBN 978-1-68137-590-8

  v1.0

  For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Biographical Notes

  Frontispiece

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  Introduction: Fate and the Jewish Question

  Preface

  Preface to the Revised Edition

  1. Jewess and Shlemihl (1771–1795)

  2. Into the World: By Marriage Through Love (1795–1799)

  3. All Over: How Can One Go on Living? (1799–1800)

  4. Flight Abroad: The Beautiful World (1800–1801)

  5. Magic, Beauty, Folly (1802–1804)

  6. Answers: The Great Good Fortune (1805–1807)

  7. Assimilation (1807–1808)

  8. Day and Night

  9. The Beggar by the Wayside (1808–1809)

  10. Bankruptcy of a Friendship (1809–1811)

  11. Civil Betterment: Story of a Career (1811–1814)

  12. Between Pariah and Parvenu (1815–1819)

  13. One Does Not Escape Jewishness (1820–1833)

  Chronology

  Bibliography

  INTRODUCTION

  Fate and the Jewish Question

  IT WAS probably Hannah Arendt’s last encounter with her biography of Rahel Varnhagen. In August 1975, while vacationing in Switzerland, she received a letter from her friend Glenn Gray, who had just read the book: “It is a fascinating book, Hannah, and amazing for one who was a mere babe in arms to write. . . . I find it the most self-revealing of all your writings, self-revealing that is as you then were. Not many surely could have fathomed Rahel in all her idiosyncrasies as you do.” Arendt felt “quite touched about your lines on my old Rahel.” But, she insisted, “I did never identify myself with Rahel; I was interested in what she called a Schicksal. . . and the Jewish question.” Looking back at her book on Rahel Varnhagen, written many decades earlier, a word of her native language came to Arendt’s mind: Schicksal—fate. She was reminded of a key sentence the protagonist of her book had once written: “Everyone has a fate who knows what kind of fate he has.” Reflections on the Jewish question and on the fate of a Jewish woman who knew so much about her own fate—this is the quintessence of Arendt’s biography.

  Rahel Levin, the biography’s protagonist, could be introduced from different perspectives: Born in Berlin in May 1771, thrown into turbulent times—the French Revolution, Prussia’s defeat in 1806, the Napoleonic Wars, the Congress of Vienna in 1815—all these historical ruptures had a deep impact on her life. In 1830, she welcomed the July Revolution as a sign of a more democratic future to come. She died in Berlin in 1833.

  Or: Born the daughter of a Jewish merchant, she hoped for “civil betterment” of the Jews. In the 1790s, her salon drew young writers and intellectuals, actresses and opera singers, and even a Prussian prince to her house. They all enjoyed the art of conversation that their host practiced and promoted so masterfully. This tolerant society would soon vanish; some of her former friends converted to conservative or even openly anti-Jewish politics. In 1819, the first outbreak of modern anti-Semitism in Germany left her “endlessly sad.” At the end of her life, when in 1831 the cholera struck Berlin, she wrote to one of her brothers: “We here were told by the domestics that two Jews had poisoned the wells here.”

  Or: A young woman with no formal education, a brilliant writer of letters and aphorisms, who created a network of correspondences that—in the end—would involve more than three hundred people. unlike many of her addressees, she kept all the letters she received. In her papers, the Varnhagen Collection, housed today in the Jagiellonian Library in Kraków, Poland, more than six thousand letters have survived. Her first publication discussed Goethe’s work; she was one of the most important writers of her time to establish his towering reputation.

  Or: Goethe’s daughter-in-law, Ottilie von Goethe, once wrote: “Since Rahel, we women are allowed to have thoughts.” She had just read Rahel: Ein Buch des Andenkens für ihre Freunde (Rahel: A Book of Commemoration for Her Friends), published in 1834. This collection of Rahel Varnhagen’s letters, edited by her husband, Karl August Varnhagen, would become one of the nineteenth century’s most famous books by a woman. The three volumes, filled to the brim with the most unusual thoughts and reflections,
found enthusiastic readers not only in Germany but also in the English-speaking world: Thomas Carlyle reviewed them in his essay “Varnhagen von Ense’s Memoirs” (1838); with Rahel: Her Life and Letters (1876), Kate Vaughan-Jennings published the first English monograph on this exceptional woman and dedicated it to Carlyle.

  In the last years of the Weimar Republic, Arendt turned her attention to this fascinating figure and began writing a biography of Rahel Varnhagen. Soon, history would intervene. In the spring of 1933, Arendt was arrested by the Gestapo. After her fortuitous release from prison and before her flight from Germany, she managed to get the completed chapters of her book typed up by professional typists. In the greatest haste she added twenty more pages before she sent copies of the typescript to friends. Obviously, she had no time even to correct typos; some words contain numbers in the place of letters. One copy of this typescript survived the intervening disasters; it was published only in 2021. In Parisian exile Arendt managed to bring the book to a more satisfactory conclusion. Before she fled occupied France, she was able to mail a copy of this version to Palestine, where it survived the war. Another copy traveled across the Atlantic and landed in New York. Arendt’s ex-husband, Günther Stern, was supposed to take care of that one. Within days of her arrival in May 1941 in the United States, when Arendt tried to locate this copy—“I need the Rahel typescript. It’s urgent!” she wrote—it turned out this copy of the typescript had disappeared, and has never resurfaced.

  Only as the war was ending did Arendt again hear of her book: “I am so proud to have saved your manuscript on Rahel Varnhagen. Where is the book’s final resting place? At a publisher’s? On your desk?” Gershom Scholem wrote from Jerusalem in the spring of 1945. This was the version Arendt had finished in Paris and had hoped to get from Stern, but even having recovered it, many more years would have to pass before she could get the book to the desk of a publisher who was willing to print it. Time and again, Arendt contacted publishing houses, first in Switzerland, later in Germany. All this while she earned a living in a new world, began to write in English, and composed a major book, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). Only in 1955 did Arendt return to her biography of Varnhagen. The occasion was that the recently established Leo Baeck Institute in New York wanted to publish the book. Arendt assumed they would bring it out in German; the institute, though, insisted on an English translation. In the end, the book appeared in England, not in the united States, which turned out to be a considerable disadvantage.

  Despite the fact that Arendt already enjoyed a reputation as an internationally known author, her biography of Rahel Varnhagen did not find many reviewers and readers. “Rahel Varnhagen is an unusual biography. We are warned in the preface,” Sybille Bedford began her review for the Reconstructionist. She read “a relentlessly abstract book—slow, cluttered, static, curiously oppressive; reading it feels like sitting in a hothouse with no watch.” Many years later, in January 1965, Jacob Neusner reviewed the book. For him, Arendt’s biography had gained new importance after the publication and controversy concerning Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963):

  [Arendt] has been much maligned, and perhaps she has erred in some of her historical judgments. I for one will always read her writings with respect and admiration, respect for integrity and admiration for her rich insights. I have every certainty that she will be regarded, in time to come, as one of our generation’s great lights, for she has given us—and this book is yet another part of her intellectual legacy—a heritage of understanding and painful honesty about our situation as Jews. Only she could have written at once so usefully and so sensitively of Rahel Varnhagen; of both mass movements and isolated individuals; and told us, in all, so much about ourselves, even when we do not want to listen.

  Arendt’s American friends did want to listen, and some of them tried to help find a publisher in the United States. We know of at least three attempts; all failed. It was only in 1974, a year before Arendt died, that Harcourt Brace Jovanovich finally brought out the book. This prompted a review in The New York Times, a rather critical one: “To present this book to the American public more or less as it was written 40 years ago is a disservice. The book alludes to the political events and historical figures of Rahel’s time as if they were familiar, accessible landmarks; they may be in Germany, but they are not well known to the general American audience,” Lore Dickstein remarked. The translation “adheres too closely to the author’s original German formulations.” This might not reduce “the impact and fascination of Rahel Varnhagen’s story,” but it prevents “the book from being a major work. The material is all there; it needs only to be fleshed out.”

  By this time, all the reviewers treated the book as the work of a highly respected author. But critical remarks predominate. Some reviewers felt that Arendt overlooked the fact that her protagonist had been a woman: “What was not, perhaps, so easy for the distinguished historian to ‘see’ (that is, to consciously attend to) was the fact that Rahel’s destiny was so unalterably that of an outsider every bit as much because she was a woman as because she was a Jew,” Vivian Gornick wrote, while Lilly Rivlin concluded her review by stating that “one wishes at times for some kind of sympathy for Rahel’s life as a woman.”

  It was only after Arendt’s death that the biography found more empathic readers. Sometimes a book is so ahead of its time that it takes decades to build its audience.

  THE JEWISH QUESTION

  Arendt first encountered Rahel Varnhagen as a teenager. Sometime around 1920, Anne Weil, “the friend of my youth,” gave her a copy of Rahel: Ein Buch des Andenkens für ihre Freunde. Arendt read the letters immediately “and reflected on them but left all that alone when I went to study philosophy.” Having finished her dissertation, “it occurred to me that I should go back to this unfinished Rahel-business,” as she wrote to a friend. Initially, she called her project “On the Problem of German-Jewish Assimilation, Exemplified with Rahel Varnhagen’s Life.” She later shifted the focus, and “Rahel Varnhagen” moved into the center of her attention. “The Life of a Jewess,” as the subtitle of the first English edition reads, which became “The Life of a Jewish Woman” in the United States, tells the story of a “bankruptcy,” as Arendt called it—in the sense not of a personal failure but rather of a historically necessary one. Assimilation in Germany around 1800 came at a high price: it meant being forced to assimilate with a people who only accepted Jewish individuals who had left their roots behind. Jews were supposed to forget who they were, and yet in return the Gentiles never forgot that they were Jews. Rahel Varnhagen always tried to be honest and not accept these lies that held contemporary societies together; she was among the very first fully to understand this dilemma. As Arendt shows, she decided against becoming a “parvenue,” choosing rather to remain “a Jew and a pariah.” Endowed with a “rebellious heart,” she accepted her fate.

  FATE

  When it was published, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman was—as we have seen—difficult to read. This is at least in part due to the fact that the book breaks with almost all of the genre conventions of biography. Arendt wrote hers in the mode of “as if.” As if Rahel Varnhagen herself had written her autobiography. But this was an enterprise the historical Rahel Varnhagen—as we know—had never embarked upon. Her genre of writing was the letter, or more precisely, correspondence. Autobiographies are written after the fact, when we look back on our lives. Rahel Varnhagen, though, wrote to friends and family; she even corresponded with her cook. The first letters that came down to us date back to the 1790s; the last one she penned a couple of days before she passed away. Her writing was constant and, as Arendt phrased it, “not reflective or retrospective” but, rather, in “a mode of ‘experiencing,’ of learning.” In the midst of experiencing, exposed to life and committed to always telling the truth—this was Rahel Varnhagen’s Schicksal, her fate. Because she had no “umbrella” to shelter her from “letting life rain upon” her, she knew what it meant to have a Schicksal. B
eing a Jew, a Jewish woman, cut off from Jewish tradition, cast her into a singular and lonely existence.

  But who could write the biography of a woman who represents nothing but her own fate? A woman who never had the privilege of belonging?

  Arendt decided to write as if she could “re-whistle with variations. . .the melody of an offended heart,” as she once explained in a letter. She composed a book together with the voice of her protagonist and not on her; “interpretation” of Rahel Varnhagen’s thinking, so Arendt remarked, had “to take the path of repetition.” For Arendt, repetition meant literally to repeat and not just to quote Rahel Varnhagen’s letters. In her biography, hundreds of words, sentences, and passages taken from these letters are to be found, sometimes with quotation marks, sometimes without. In some places, these words or phrases meander through a couple of paragraphs; in others, we come upon a longer passage. And Arendt almost never gives her readers any information on the addressee or where and when the letters were written. By incorporating all these quotes, she creates a conversation, a dialogue with her protagonist. Accompanied by many, many citations from letters, poems, novels, books, and pamphlets written by Rahel Varnhagen’s contemporaries, a choir of very different ways of writing the German of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century can be heard. In the translation, this dimension of Arendt’s book vanishes.

  A BOOK IN ENGLISH

  Arendt herself decided to work with translators who had experience rendering contemporary German literature, rather than nonfiction, into English. She approached Clara and Richard Winston, whose translations she knew and liked. After having received the typescript, Richard Winston wrote back to Arendt:

  Now I have read it, and I am overwhelmed with admiration and scared stiff about the translation. It is the most extraordinary kind of biography, so complete in its psychological and philosophical identification that it comes close to Rahel’s autobiography. Extraordinary, too, your basic view of what is the human person. So supple and undoctrinaire. This is something I sense fiction is just beginning to give us, but you have done it already. And the prophetic quality is there throughout; amazing, for example, that you should have written in the thirties that discussion of the subjectivity of history.