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Rahel Varnhagen

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9781681375892
Pages: 272
Publication Date: November 30, 2021

Rahel VarnhagenThe Life of a Jewish Woman

by Hannah Arendt, introduction by Barbara Hahn

Available as E-BookBiography & MemoirGerman Literature
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Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman was Hannah Arendt's first book, largely completed when she went into exile from Germany in 1933, though it would not be published until the 1950s. It is the biography of a remarkable, complicated, troubled, passionate woman, an important figure in German romanticism, the person who in a sense founded the Goethe cult that would become central to German cultural life in the nineteenth century, as well as someone who confronted and bore the burden of being both a woman in a man's world and an assimilated Jew in Germany with unusual determination.

Rahel Levin Varnhagen, was, Hannah Arendt writes, "neither beautiful nor attractive . . . and possessed no talents with which to employ her extraordinary intelligence and passionate originality." Arendt sets out to tell the story of Rahel's life as Rahel might have told it and, in doing so, to reveal the way in which intellectual and social assimilation works out in one person's destiny. On her deathbed Rahel is reported to have said, "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." Only because she had remained both a Jew and a pariah, Hannah Arendt observes, "did she find a place in the history of European humanity."

Praise

This book was written more than 40 years ago and the woman it deals with lived more than 170 years ago, but the story of Rahel Varnhagen survives the passage of time.
—Lore Dickstein, The New York Times

Arendt's insight into the psychology and the situation of pariah and parvenu is essential.
—Kirkus Reviews

If you know about Rahel Varnhagen, it's probably because of Hannah Arendt.
—Talya Zax, Forward

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