Rahel Varnhagen Read online

  The Winstons produced a very elegant translation. Even quotations from canonical authors such as Herder, Mendelssohn, Goethe, and Schleiermacher do not appear in their nineteenth-century translations but are rendered into twentieth-century American English. Rahel Varnhagen, who wrote a most idiosyncratic German and often peppered her texts with French words, now sounded almost like the biography’s author, Arendt herself.

  Older translations offered more literal versions of her letters. In Ellen Key’s Rahel Varnhagen: A Portrait (1913), a passage that is extremely important for Arendt’s book reads:

  “I imagine that just as I was being thrust into this world, a supernatural being plunged a dagger into my heart, with these words: ‘Now, have feeling, see the world as only a few see it, be great and noble; nor can I deprive you of restless, incessant thought. But with one reservation: be a Jewess!’ And now my whole life is one long bleeding. By keeping calm I can prolong it; every movement to staunch the bleeding is to die anew, and immobility is only possible to me in death itself.”

  This the Winstons rendered:

  “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. By keeping still I can delay it. Every movement is an attempt to staunch it—new death; and immobility is possible for me only in death itself. . . . I can, if you will, derive every evil, every misfortune, every vexation from that.”

  Even more striking is the difference between Kate Vaughan- Jennings’s Rahel: Her Life and Letters (1876) and the Winstons’ translation. Vaughan-Jennings found grandiose expressions for Rahel Varnhagen’s last words, spoken on her deathbed, the words with which Arendt opens her biography:

  “What a history is mine. I, a fugitive from Egypt and Palestine, find with you help, love, and tender care! It was God’s will, dear August, to send me to you, and you to me. With delighted exaltation I look back upon my origin, upon the link which my history forms between the oldest memories of the human race and the interest of to-day, between the broadest interval of time and space. That which was, during the early part of my life, the greatest ignominy, the cause of bitterest sorrow, to have been born a Jewess, I would not now have otherwise at any price.”

  The Winstons toned this down considerably:

  “What a history!—A fugitive from Egypt and Palestine, here I am and find help, love, fostering in you people. With real rapture I think of these origins of mine and this whole nexus of destiny, through which the oldest memories of the human race stand by side with the latest developments. The greatest distances in time and space are bridged. The thing which all my life seemed to me the greatest shame, which was the misery and misfortune of my life—having been born a Jewess—this I should on no account now wish to have missed.”

  As a prelude to her biography, Arendt chose the last two stanzas from Edwin Arlington Robinson’s poem “Eros Turannos.” The first four tell of a woman and man living together long after their love has disappeared. “She fears him, and will always ask / What fated her to choose him; / She meets in this engaging mask / All reason to refuse him,” the poem begins. It continues in tones of quiet desperation: “And home, where passion lived and died, /Becomes a place where she can hide.” None of this appears in Arendt’s quotation. No longer the voice of an omniscient narrator, it is rather a “we”: “We tell you, tapping on our brows, / The story as it should be.” “We”—as the opening of a biography that from the outset plays with multiple perspectives. A biography, written in different voices. A biography, waiting for readers who appreciate its fascinating and utterly unusual way of writing.

  —BARBARA HAHN

  PREFACE

  THE manuscript of this book, except for the last two chapters, was completed when I left Germany in 1933, and the last two chapters were also written more than twenty years ago. I intended originally to add a lengthy appendix and extensive notes presenting in part the unprinted letters and diaries contained in the Varnhagen Collection of the Manuscript Division of the Prussian State Library. The Varnhagen Collection, which in addition to Rahel’s papers contained a great wealth of material from the Romanticists’ circle,1 was stored during the war in one of the eastern provinces of Germany and was never brought to Berlin; what happened to it remains a mystery, so far as I know. I am therefore unable to carry out my original plan; I have had to rest content with quoting from my old excerpts, photostats and copies of those documents which, it seems to me, do not need to be checked once more against the originals. It is particularly regrettable that once again the complete text of Gentz’s letters to Rahel cannot be published. Passages of great interest, with all they show of the age’s freedom from prejudice, were sacrificed to Biedermeier morality. Unfortunately, my copies contain only such additional material as I needed for my portrait.

  The greatest loss to this book is the extensive correspondence between Rahel and Pauline Wiesel, Prince Louis Ferdinand’s mistress, the collection having included one hundred and seventy-six letters from Pauline to Rahel, and one hundred letters from Rahel to Pauline. These letters constituted the most important source material on Rahel’s life after her marriage, and upon them are primarily based the sometimes radical revisions I have made in the conventional literary portrait of Rahel. This correspondence has scarcely ever been used because Varnhagen, who copied most of Rahel’s letters in his extremely legible handwriting (these copies forming an important part of his Collection), prepared only sixteen of the letters to Pauline for the press in this way; later students and editors of the papers apparently made little use of this material because the handwritings and the spelling of both ladies made them hard to read. Some of this correspondence has been published by Carl Atzenbeck.

  Aside from the known publications of Rahel’s letters, which are listed in the bibliography, my account is based on a large amount of unpublished material. To the extent I have been able, I have indicated these sources in footnotes. There are numerous corrections and additions to the letters and diary entries which Varnhagen published in his three-volume Buch des Andenkens, 1834.2 Varnhagen’s arbitrariness in the publication or preparation of Rahel’s papers has been commented on frequently.3 In some cases he did not stop at interpolations and mutilations are frequent.4 He made wholesale corrections, expunged essential portions and coded personal names in such a manner that the reader was deliberately led astray. But for all that these practices have been exposed, Varnhagen’s conception of Rahel, his stereotyping and embellishing of her portrait, and his deliberate falsifications of her life, became established and have remained almost uncontested. The significant fact is that almost all his omissions and misleading codings of names were intended to make Rahel’s associations and circle of friends appear less Jewish and more aristocratic, and to show Rahel herself in a more conventional light, one more in keeping with the taste of the times. Typical of the former effort is the fact that Henriette Herz always appears as Frau von B. or Frau von Bl. even where there was no need to disguise the name on grounds of the remarks being unfavorable; that Rebecca Friedländer, who as a writer used the pen name of Regina Frohberg, is always denoted by Frau von F. Typical of the latter is that the few letters and extracts from letters to Pauline Wiesel are dressed up as diary notes, or appear as addressed to a Frau von V., so that the part this friendship played in Rahel’s life has been completely eradicated from the documents.

  There is always a certain awkwardness in an author’s speaking of his book, even one written half a lifetime ago. But since this book was conceived and written from an angle unusual in biographical literature, I shall nevertheless venture a few explanatory remarks. It was never my intention to write a book about Rahel; about her personality, which might lend itself to various interpretations according to the psychological st
andards and categories that the author introduces from outside; nor about her position in Romanticism and the effect of the Goethe cult in Berlin, of which she was actually the originator; nor about the significance of her salon for the social history of the period; nor about her ideas and her “Weltanschauung,” in so far as these can be reconstructed from her letters. What interested me solely was to narrate the story of Rahel’s life as she herself might have told it. She considered herself extraordinary, but her view of the source of that quality differed from that of others. She attempted to explain this feeling in innumerable phrases and images which retain a curious similarity throughout her life as they strive to formulate the meaning of what she called Destiny. Her whole effort was to expose herself to life so that it could strike her “like a storm without an umbrella.” (“What am I doing? Nothing. I am letting life rain upon me.”)5 She preferred not to use characteristics or opinions on persons she encountered, on the circumstances and conditions of the world, on life itself, for purposes of shelter. Following this principle, she could neither choose nor act, because choice and action in themselves would anticipate life and falsify the purity of life’s happenstance. All that remained for her to do was to become a “mouthpiece” for experience, to verbalize whatever happened. This could be accomplished by introspection, by relating one’s own story again and again to oneself and to others; thereby one’s story became one’s Destiny: “Everyone has a Destiny who knows what kind of destiny he has.” To this end, the particular traits one had to have or to marshal within oneself were an unflagging alertness and capacity for pain; one had to remain susceptible and conscious.

  Rahel herself once very clearly characterized the romantic element in such an undertaking when she compared herself to the “greatest artists” and commented: “But to me life itself was the assignment.” To live life as if it were a work of art, to believe that by “cultivation” one can make a work of art of one’s own life, was the great error that Rahel shared with her contemporaries; or rather, it was the misconception of self which was inevitable so long as she wished to understand and express within the categories of her time her sense of life: the resolve to consider life and the history it imposes upon the individual as more important and more serious than her own person.

  My portrait therefore follows as closely as possible the course of Rahel’s own reflections upon herself, although it is naturally couched in different language and does not consist solely of variations upon quotations. It does not venture beyond this frame even when Rahel is apparently being examined critically. The criticism corresponds to Rahel’s self-criticism, and since she—unburdened by modem inferiority feelings—could rightly say of herself that she did not “vainly seek applause I would not record myself’ she also had no need? to pay flattering visits to myself.” It is, of course, only of my intentions that I speak; I may not always carry them out successfully and at such times may appear to be passing judgment upon Rahel from some higher vantage point. If so, I have simply failed in what I set out to do.

  The same is true for the various persons discussed and the literature of the period. These are seen entirely from her point of view; scarcely a writer is mentioned whom Rahel did not certainly or most probably know and whose writings were not of importance for her own introspections. The same principle has been applied, though here with more difficulty, to the Jewish question, which in Rahel’s own opinion exerted a crucial influence upon her destiny. For in this case her conduct and her reactions became determinants for the conduct and attitudes of a part of cultivated German Jewry, thereby acquiring a limited historical importance of which, however, this book does not treat.

  The German-speaking Jews and their history are an altogether unique phenomenon; nothing comparable to it is to be found even in the other areas of Jewish assimilation. To investigate this phenomenon, which among other things found expression in a literally astonishing wealth of talent and of scientific and intellectual productivity, constitutes a historical task of the first rank, and one which, of course, can be attacked only now, after the history of the German Jews has come to an end. The present biography was written with an awareness of the doom of German Judaism (although, naturally, without any premonition of how far the physical annihilation of the Jewish people in Europe would be carried); but at that time, shortly before Hitler’s coming to power, I did not have the perspective from which to view the phenomenon as a whole. If this book is considered as a contribution to the history of the German Jews, it must be remembered that in it only one aspect of the complex problems of assimilation is treated: namely, the manner in which assimilation to the intellectual and social life of the environment works out concretely in the history of an individual’s life, thus shaping a personal destiny. On the other hand, it must not be forgotten that the subject matter is altogether historical, and that nowadays not only the history of the German Jews, but also their specific complex of problems, are a matter of the past.

  It is inherent in the nature of the method I have selected that certain psychological observations which appear to thrust themselves forward are scarcely mentioned and not commented on at all. The modern reader will scarcely fail to observe at once that Rahel was neither beautiful nor attractive; that all the men with whom she had any kind of love relationship were younger than she herself; that she possessed no talents with which to employ her extraordinary intelligence and passionate originality; and finally, that she was a typically “romantic” personality, and that the Woman Problem, that is the discrepancy between what men expected of women “in general” and what women could give or wanted in their turn, was already established by the conditions of the era and represented a gap that virtually could not be closed. I could touch upon such matters only in so far as they were absolutely essential to the facts of Rahel’s biography and could not consider them in any general way, since the point was not to assume to know more than Rahel herself knew, not to impose upon her a fictional destiny derived from observations presumed to be superior to those she consciously had. That is to say, I have deliberately avoided that modem form of indiscretion in which the writer attempts to penetrate his subject’s tricks and aspires to know more than the subject knew about himself or was willing to reveal; what I would call the pseudoscientific apparatuses of depth-psychology, psychoanalysis, graphology, etc., fall into this category of curiosity-seeking.

  •

  The bibliography at the end of this book lists only the printed source material I have used, in so far as I have been able to collate it again from my old notes and to recheck it. Secondary works on Rahel, which for the most part consist of magazine articles and essays in more comprehensive works, I have been unable to re-examine after so long a time and outside of Germany. All quotations whose authorship is not expressly noted or obvious from the context are taken from Rahel Varnhagen’s letters and diaries.

  •

  I am grateful to the Leo Baeck Institute for the sponsorship of this book, for the opportunity to go over the manuscript once more in preparing it for the press and for generous aid in securing the translation, as well as secretarial and scholarly assistance. I wish also to thank Dr. Lotte Köhler for her help in final preparation of the manuscript, the bibliography and the chronological table.

  HANNAH ARENDT

  NEW YORK

  Summer 1956

  1. In this collection were a portion of the papers of Clemens Brentano which his sister, Bettina von Arnim, had given to Varnhagen for preservation. It also included the originals of Friedrich Gentz’s letters, extracts of which were published by G. Schlesier (Briefe und vertraute Blätter von Friedrich von Gentz, 1838) and by Wittichen (Briefe von und an Gentz, 1909). There were also letters of Hegel, Wilhelm and Caroline von Humboldt, Henriette Herz, the Mendelssohn-Bartholdys, Adam Müller, Leopold von Ranke, Prince Louis Ferdinand, Friedrich and Dorothea Schlegel, Ludwig Tieck—to mention only the most famous names. See Ludwig Stem, Die Varnhagen von Ensesche Sammlung in der Königlichen Bibliothek zu Berlin, 1
911.

  2. My personal copy of this book, corrected by comparison with the manuscripts, as well as all other copies and excerpts, are now in the Archives of the Leo Baeck Institute.

  3. See the introduction by Heinrich Meisner to his edition of the correspondence with Alexander von der Marwitz, 1925, and Augusta Weldler-Steinberg’s Afterword in Rahel Varnhagen, Ein Frauenlehen in Briefen, 1917.

  4. The best known of these interpolations consists of a few sentences in a letter of Rahel to Varnhagen which is designed to pretend a close acquaintance with Beethoven. The intention is obvious: Varnhagen wanted to show one more “famous man” as part of Rahel’s circle of friends. (The most recent “discovery” in this field, naming Rahel as Beethoven’s ferne Geliehte, scarcely needs to be mentioned, since the author himself makes no claim to having documentary evidence for this thesis. Not only in the published correspondences, but in all the unpublished material as well, there is not a single line which might support this conjecture. In Rahel’s day it was not customary to make a secret of such matters; to suspect her, of all persons, of harboring such a secret, indicates an extraordinary ignorance of her personality.) On the mutilation of the letters, and the motives, see the episodes with Clemens Brentano, pp. 187–88, and Pauline Wiesel, pp. 206–07.