[In the following essay, Barnouw claims that Varnhagen and Salomon Maiman, as German-Jewish writers, were influenced by both Enlightenment and Romantic concepts of identity and in particular the concepts of transformation, self-knowledge, and experience.]

In the Western world Jews as a group have been perceived as particularly talented for modernity. Socialized into a mixed secular-religious culture that has valued symbolic activities, they have shown themselves to be skilled in abstraction, tolerant of change and, in certain situations, accepting of difference. They have been travelers who come and leave, strangers who negotiate the unfamiliar, connecting and exchanging across borders. If Ahasver, wandering through time without rest or change, is the old Urbild of Jewish existence, its modern counterpart is Lessing's Nathan, based on Moses Mendelssohn, the darling of German Enlightenment. Nathan comes and goes, carrying the fruits of exchange: objects, information and balanced opinion. Wise and shrewd, he is the seafaring, prosperous conflict mediator par excellence and agitator for inclusive, namely mutual, tolerance. Of course, in Nathan's enlightened world there is no distinct majority, and power yields easily to persuasion. This Enlightenment appreciation for the stranger's mobility has not fared well in the 19th- and 20th-century German intellectual tradition that has emphasized personal and cultural identity. But there are examples of its survival: exiled and at home in the US, the social philosopher and international banker Alfred Schutz was intrigued by the learning processes of the stranger whose strangeness diminishes in the acts of approaching the “in-group” (majority). In time, he will become familiar with this group, enter it as an actor rather than observer, and cease to be a stranger. However, moving toward what is strange to him, he undergoes transformation. The process, the motion of change is not linear since it involves a going-back-and-forth, acts of mediating, indeed translating between the cultural patterns of his home-group and the in-group he wishes to join. And, like any translator, he will for a time be uncertain about the adequacy and fittingness of his translation. But this uncertainty, too, though not easy, can produce useful insights. Importantly, it describes a social-psychological situation defined by historicity, that is, contingency and choice, not a fated condition of existential exile.¹

At first glance, Salomon Maimon and Rahel Varnhagen, separated by a generation, could not be more different. A social failure and a social success; a man who for the longest time remained outside high-cultural memory, a woman who, perhaps uniquely, arranged and insured her enduring presence in this memory; a cultural critic and philosophical skeptic who used language awkwardly, an aphoristic essayistic letter writer notorious for her exuberant verbal skill and inventiveness. The reader of the slim volume of Salomon Maimon's Lebensgeschichte, published in 1792 by one of his few remaining friends and quickly forgotten, comes away with the Gestalt of a strange and troubled man, a solitary wanderer between different worlds: the darkness of Polish-Jewish superstition and the light of German-Jewish rationalism. Rahel Varnhagen's extensive correspondence was edited by her husband under her guidance for the large circle of her friends, and published in several collections after her death in 1833. The reader of these many volumes of letters is left with the Gestalt of an accomplished Berlin hostess, celebrated for her incomparable sociability, her extraordinary charm, intellect and wit, thoroughly at home in her world and never alone.

Yet, operating quite differently within German high culture, they were both profoundly shaped by Enlightenment values, whether these concerned the responses to them from their environment, or the hopes and desires they brought to it. And both also needed something more or different than that environment could give them. The Enlightenment was many things, and some of them—and perhaps the most important ones—seemed inaccessible to both Salomon Maimon and Rahel Varnhagen. I am drawing here overly clear distinctions to make my point: the Enlightenment supported a temporary and fragmentary identity, a sort of working concept for experience; an identity that would establish itself again and again in ongoing processes of transformation; an identity as enlarged and changed by curiosity about what was different, approaching and partly assimilating it. The Romantic position supported an experience of transformation into identity, transformation as revelation of true identity, self-knowledge through rebirth into what seems other but turns out to be the true, original self. Where Enlightenment encourages the traveler to go on traveling and looking at the world out there, Romanticism lures the traveler back to the origins to find herself.

Maimon and Rahel alike were shaped by both Enlightenment encouragements and Romantic allurements, but the admixture of the ingredients was different. Precisely these differences seem to me instructive since they throw some more light on the promises and difficulties on what I would call a both successful and precarious German-Jewish cultural symbiosis rather than dialogue. A dialogue preserves the distinctness of the participants on equal terms. This was not true in the case of German-Jewish interaction because it concerned a large majority and small minority, and no kind or degree of toleration would change the reality of power as long as the socio-political role (value) of majority and minority could not be redefined. For Hannah Arendt, the most extraordinary aspect of the US as the novus ordo seclorum was the fact that she could be an American citizen and a Jew—in contrast to being a Jewish American. What she admired, then, was not the currently chic neo-Romantic “multiculturalist” accommodation of a hyphenated identity. It was, rather, the Enlightenment affirmation of identity as ongoing transformation, and here specifically the American experience of the unfamiliar becoming familiar in time and for a time. The opposite of this tolerance ideal of change through mutuality and mobility is the majority's control of toleration, namely the tendency—often with the best of intentions—to define the other's identity and then to accept it as such. Both Rahel and Arendt used to complain bitterly about this aspect of German-Jewish relations: that it is “always the others who do the legitimizing” (“Legitimieren tun immer nur die anderen”).² To some degree this may be inevitable where majority-minority relations are concerned. But German-Jewish interaction seems to have been particularly difficult in this respect. There was a host of entangled reasons for the explosive paradox of German-Jewish closeness and distance, identity and non-identity, similarity and otherness, familiarity and strangeness. Moreover, they differed with respect to period, place and temperament. But from the late 18th century on, larger European political developments have played an increasingly important role: If Jews have been the best prepared and therefore most skilled group in dealing with the challenges of modernity, Germans as a group have been the least prepared and least skilled. What I defined as the Enlightenment position was much more effective in England, the US, and in France; what I defined as the Romantic position was very much German, and it was connected with the German political experience in general and particularly that of the Napoleonic wars.

I

In the fall of 1794, David Veit, nephew by marriage of Dorothea Mendelsohn-Veit-Schlegel, visited Goethe on his way to the University of Jena, bringing him a letter from Salomon Maimon. His friend Rahel Levin adored Goethe to the point of making a cult of him and Veit immediately reported to Rahel her hero's interest in Maimon and positive reaction to his work. The letter he carried had been written on September 2, 1794 to tell Goethe about Maimon's enduring intellectual isolation and distressing social situation, particularly severe since the death of Karl Philip Moritz with whom he had collaborated on the Magazin für Erfahrungsseelenkunde. Since then, Maimon told Goethe, he had no friend to whom he could bare his heart. Thus it was “with pleasure” that he seized the opportunity to do so, and, as was his wont, in “the freest, most open manner.”³ The bulk of the letter, however, was a self-consciously composed account, a coherent fiction, of Maimon's role of outsider, a permanent stranger in German-Jewish intellectual culture. He attributed this situation to a contemporary philosophy both dignified and rendered unusable by Kantian epistemological systemicity. His complete rejection of dogmatic philosophy and desire for a thorough reform of philosophical discourse put him between all chairs, made him marginal. As he saw it, his originality of thought and intellectual independence had prevented him from operating successfully in the business of Enlightenment culture. But, appealing to Goethe to help him find support for his far-ranging literary-philosophical projects, he also made it clear that such support would be acceptable only in the terms of his intellectual self-perception.⁴ He did not write to a potential benefactor to explain his notoriously difficult circumstances but to affirm their cultural significance. Despite his interest in him, Goethe did not see fit to help him, and after the last of his Berlin benefactors stopped payments in December 1794, his final refuge was the remote Silesian country estate of Count Kalckreuth where he died in 1800.

Maimon had attracted the interest and support of a number of distinguished Berlin Enlightenment figures, Moses Mendelssohn, Ephraim Veitel, Samuel Levy, and David Friedländer among them; but by the time his Lebensgeschichte was published, he had managed to alienate all of them. Descriptions of his youth in Poland had appeared earlier in Magazin für Seelenerfahrungskunde and, picturing a world more strange and remote than could be found in the most exotic travelogues, they had aroused much interest among the journal's readers. In his foreword to the second part of his life story, which deals with his experiences of German-Jewish Enlightenment culture, Maimon explained his “pragmatisch” guidelines in writing his life story, namely to establish the continuity of his intellectual development. His intention had been to tell the truth, without consideration for himself, his family or friends. Since he had “left behind my people, my fatherland and my family to search for truth” nobody could expect him to write an account of this search that would fall short of the truth: “Complete openness is my main characteristic.”⁵ But, originating in his separation from his origins, this self-perception was a construct, a fiction. It is true, Maimon's experiences in Berlin had further developed his tendency to be suspicious and resentful. However, his fiction of truth had little to do with not being truthful about his alcoholism, his chaotic temperament and work habits, and, in some cases, his “heretical” arguments. All this he admitted quite openly since it was the stuff of a successful life story, if not a successful life. But there was no self-critical probing why his life had taken a particular shape, why he was as he had become. Nor why his company had proved intolerable to the rich, influential Jews, who were respected members of the group of Berlin Enlightenment intellectuals dominated by Kant, and politically correct in their position of principled tolerance. Maimon's self-fiction was based on his unquestioned belief that his complete devotion to the principle of truth was intrinsic to the shape of his life as that of significant outsider, that it could not accommodate the presence of others in terms other than his own.

In his Lebensgeschichte Maimon narrated with sharp realism an experienced lack of balance between nature and nurture, and in this he followed the Rousseau-influenced models of Heinrich Stillings Jugend, edited by Goethe (1777) and Moritz's Anton Reiser (1785-90). But in contrast to their emphasis on introspection, he emphasized his younger self's intensely frustrated desire for intellectual development, that is, for access to a larger, more varied, less restricted intellectual environment. And here the narrative strategies used by Moritz to construct Reiser's story as a model Krankengeschichte (precisely its appeal to readers in a cultural climate of increasing pietism) appear to have had little influence on Maimon—at any rate less than Markus Herz's notion of “Seelenzergliederung” as the enlightened physician's most important tool for healing.⁶ A highly respected Berlin physician and Enlightenment intellectual, Herz presented his “philosophical” concept of medicine most extensively in his main work Versuch über den Schwindel (1786/91).⁷ He was indebted to the argument in Ernst Platner's Anthropologiefür Ärzte und Weltweise (1772) (a text he had reviewed) for an integrative inquiry into the interdependent relations and forces of body and soul. Platner called this mode of inquiry “anthropology,” contrasting it with anatomy or physiology, but also with psychology.⁸ Importantly, this approach required practitioners who were broadly informed and experienced in both science and art. Sending Kant his Versuch über den Schwindel, Herz wrote that the “Grenzörter der beyden Länder, der Philosophie und der Medizin” needed to be visited by both philosophers and “praktische Gelehrte und Künstler.”⁹

Like his friend Christian Gotlieb Selle, another philosophical Berlin physician, Herz had problems with Kant's purging experience from philosophy, though he did not express his disagreement with the Kritik der reinen Vernunft as clearly as did Selle:

Ich war ausser mir von Ihnen zu hören, dass es eine von der Erfahrung unabhängige Philosophie gebe, Sie, der erste Philosoph Deutschlands, geben meiner Meinung nach, der Sache der Erfahrung, die ohnehin noch gar nicht im Besitz ihrer Rechte war, einen tödlichen Stoss, so wie mir das Geschwätz mit identischen Begriffen dadurch wieder neuen Spielraum zu gewinnen scheint.¹⁰

Herz, an old friend and admirer of Kant, was in close contact with him, writing frequently about the success of his private seminars on Kant's work for general educated readers, always asking him for copies of his most recent lectures. He also admitted his difficulties with the two Critiques the friend had sent him.¹¹ But for a pillar of Berlin German-Jewish Enlightenment like Herz, Kant was too much of a cultural icon to differ with openly. Instructively, he recommended to Kant Salomon Maimon's then still unpublished Versuch über die Transzendentalphilosophie, which raised similar questions, especially about the role of categories with respect to “die Denkbarkeit der Dinge,” the relation between thought and perception.¹²

As Maimon put it in his letter to Goethe, he had recklessly fallen in love with philosophy without considering the practical consequences. For reasons of temperament and experience, he had also become skeptical regarding certain important implications of Kantian philosophical dominance. His own philosophical curiosity was too intensely focused on the intelligible variety of cultural activities to deal so exclusively with epistemological problems. But his most important motivation was the need to make sense of the world in terms different from those available to him in the backward superstitious environment of his youth. Arguably, it was the urgency of this need that would set him apart, make him enduringly different—in his own and others' perception. In his contributions to Magazin für Seelenerfahrungskunde, Maimon was more conceptually organized and explanatory than Moritz.¹³ “Philosophical” explorations, they were meant to go beyond mere documentation of puzzling and disturbing mental states. Describing his youth among Polish Jews he wanted to show the victory, through (his) individual effort, of reason over un-reason, order over chaos, rational discourse over the irrational assertions of superstition and exaltation, Schwärmerey. Suggestively, his grid of contrasts here echoed Marcus Herz's contrasting evaluation of Hippocrates as a restorer of medicine, a worldly-wise man, virtuous and a good citizen, who knew the borderline between experience and speculative thought and had given medicine the status of an art; and of Paracelsus, dirty and uninformed, averse to all reason, tainting the divine art of medicine with superstition and mysticism, a Schwärmer.¹⁴

As enlightened observer of the intellectually suffocating world of the shtetl Maimon did not, however, destroy the spontaneity of his narrative, since he combined the perspectives of anthropologist and informant and drew the reader into his, the narrator's, experience of the troubling strangeness of the familiar. This potent double perspective derived from the fact that he was quite literally self-made, Frankenstein and his monster in one person. As a young man he had renamed himself after the 12th-century Spanish rabbi, philosopher, and physician Moses Ben Maimon, whose writings he credited with his own intellectual birth and whom he therefore considered to be his “greatest benefactor.” Reading the texts of Maimonides as products of a successful Arab-Jewish cultural symbiosis signified for Maimon the beginning of his search for German-Jewish Enlightenment, because he found in the admired writer rationality and love for truth, the rejection of superstition, intellectual daring and flexibility.¹⁵ Some critics have found “Jewish self-hatred” in Maimon's sensual and rational perspective on the shtetl, a world so alien to him that he desired nothing so much as to leave it behind. But it was his own intellectual energy and acuity which informed his criticism, not norms imposed from the outside by an ‘other.’ He struggled for the light of reason to illuminate the obscurities of origin so that he might escape their troubling strangeness. And he hated that strangeness precisely because he did not think it part of or fitting for himself. This does not mean that he succeeded, or that such rationally willed remaking of the self can ever be done successfully. But with increasing cultural (ethnic) interaction in modernity, the attempt to do so has been a common and still little understood phenomenon, and German-Jewish relations provide good examples.

For Maimon, the difficulties of Polish Jews were both clear and insurmountable: they had religious and all the other civil liberties, and yet encountered the most severe religious hatred. Both passive tolerance and active intolerance came from the same source, a pervasive political ignorance and inertia of the Poles which made the Jews, “with all their faults,” “almost the only useful people in this country” but, of course, not the most beloved.¹⁶ It also did not help them to overcome their profound provincialism. A rabbi and husband at age eleven, Maimon saw mainly the “faults” of his environment: the near total lack of interest in a larger world, or of teachers and books that taught anything, the never questioned authority of texts that were impenetrable to reason, the absence of thoughtful social—not to speak of political—organization and behavior. His introduction to cabalistic thought confronted him with the animosity of cabalists towards his attempts at making sense of that divine science. And the emotional exaltations of Jewish “sects” like the Chassidim suggested to him the link between the political dispersion of Jews and their overriding need for religious unity.¹⁷

The first part of his Lebensgeschichte showed the young Maimon as alienated from Eastern Jews, and his experience of religious Judaism as intensely hostile to his—and other young Jews'—intellectual potential. The second part of the narrative presented him as an outsider among the sophisticated Berlin Jews whose social cultural values of German-Jewish upper-middle-class propriety he could not share, though their participation in Enlightenment culture was so naturally attractive to him. Berlin was a paradise lost to him from the beginning and desired all the more desperately. In the preface to Part Two of Lebensgeschichte, Maimon wrote of the “intellectual rebirth,” geistiges Wiedergeburt, he owed to his “other benefactors”—parallel to the intellectual birth owed to Maimonides, his “greatest benefactor.” Though he did not name them individually, Kant, Reinhold and Mendelssohn were the three most important intellectual midwives. When he arrived in Berlin in 1777, seeking the light of reason, knowledge, and wisdom, he went into a butter shop one day and found

the dealer in the act of anatomizing a somewhat old book for use in his trade. I looked at it and found, to my no small astonishment, that it was Wolff's Metaphysics, or the Doctrine of God, of the World, and of Man's Soul. I could not understand how in a city so enlightened as Berlin such important works could be treated in this barbarous fashion. I turned to the dealer, and asked if he would not sell the book. He was ready to part with it for two groschen. Without thinking long about it I paid the price at once, and went home delighted with my treasure.

At the very first reading I was in raptures with the book. Not only this sublime science in itself, but also the order and mathematical method of the celebrated author—the precision of his explanations, the exactness of his reasoning, and the scientific arrangement of his exposition—all this gave my mind quite a new light.¹⁸

He had just obtained, after some difficulties with the Jewish police, the permission to remain in Berlin and therefore thought this coincidental find profoundly meaningful. But Wolff was just the beginning, and Maimon was to develop into an intellectual with a sharp intellect and remarkably broad interests and erudition. If he remained isolated in his passionate struggle to make sense of what seemed to him an ever growing, ever more fascinating world, the reason was not shallow rationalism. It was, rather, Maimon's enduring inability to make use of the Enlightenment promises of transformation by trying to understand how they had been used by others. His concept of reason became more accommodating and flexible as he learned more. But his early struggle to gain access to such learning had impressed on him the need for a rebirth that, given his temperament and the nature of German-Jewish Enlightenment culture, inexorably separated him from what he most desired: an unquestioned intellectual sociability that would include him as he was and thereby help his efforts to make the world more intelligible. He needed to be accepted as a stranger and yet be made to feel at home—let be, and yet be connected. But for the stranger, understanding develops in a narrative of his life that negotiates between his own fears and desires, and those of others; and that traces their becoming familiar to him in time.

In his overriding desire to be instantly and permanently delivered through enlightened rationality from the irrationality of his past, Maimon could not but compromise such understanding. When Mendelssohn, in agreement with other “benefactors,” complained of their “alienation” from him because he had not made up his “mind to any plan of life,” because he “was trying to spread dangerous opinions and systems,” and because he “was rumored to be leading a loose life, too much addicted to sensual pleasures,” Maimon agreed to go to Hamburg. He felt desperately isolated and lost there, “not even master of any language in which I could make myself perfectly intelligible,” and thought a second rebirth the only solution. He chose a Protestant minister at random and wrote to him in German, with Hebrew characters, of his desire to convert:

I am a native of Poland, belonging to the Jewish nation, destined by my education and studies to be a rabbi; but in the thickest darkness I have perceived some light. This induced me to search further after light and truth, and to free myself completely from the darkness of superstition and ignorance. To this end, which could not be attained in my native place, I came to Berlin, where by the support of some enlightened men of our nation I studied for some years, not indeed after any plan, but merely to satisfy my thirst for knowledge. But as our nation is unable to make use not only of such planless studies but even of those conducted on the most perfect plan, it cannot be blamed for becoming tired of them, and pronouncing their encouragement as useless. I have therefore resolved, in order to secure temporal as well as eternal happiness, which depends on the attainment of perfection, and in order to become useful to myself as well as others, to embrace the Christian religion.¹⁹

To the minister's not unexpected and under the circumstances sensible suggestion that he needed to first replace the light of reason with that of God's grace, Maimon, expectedly too, replied that he would always illuminate whatever he received, “with the light of reason. I shall never believe that I have fallen upon new truths if it is impossible to see their connection with the truths already known to me. I must therefore remain what I am, a stiff-necked [verstockter] Jew. My religion enjoins me to believe nothing, but to think the truth and to practise goodness. If I [now] find any hindrance in this from external circumstances, it is not my fault. I do all that lies in my power.”²⁰ And he continued to consider himself reborn by the grace of the light of German-Jewish reason, only more truly, more authentically so than German Jews and Gentiles.

II

Ever her faithful recorder for the posterity she so urgently desired, August Varnhagen wrote down what Rahel said to him a few days before her death, after a particularly frightening convulsion:

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 side 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. … Will the same thing happen to me with this bed of suffering, will I not rise once again in the same way and not to wish to miss it for anything? Dear August, what a consoling idea, what a significant comparison.²¹

For Leon Poliakov this is a testimony that “Judaism, consolation of their ancestors, was thus becoming the very symbol of sickness and torment for Rahel Levin's generation.”²² For Arendt it is an illusory reconciliation with her Jewishness that Rahel had struggled against all her life.²³ Both have their reasons for their readings. Poliakov's historical narrative presents, with the evidence of anti-Semitism, the self-evidence of its victimizing power. Arendt's political-psychological analysis of an individual life initiates a process of critical historical reflection on the meanings of anti-Semitism and of the victim status of Jews. In Rahel's case, Arendt's reading is more useful than Poliakov's, because it does more justice to the contradictions and conflicts of a person whose highly complex individuality has been articulated and documented so exhaustively and lavishly. Still, reading Rahel's life as she had written it, Arendt could not but read her own concerns into it. In her account, Rahel understood the Jewish question to be the crucial influence on the course and shape of her life. More, Arendt presented the shaping of this life by individual development and accident of birth as a historical model of the troubled social discourse of educated German Jews desiring assimilation. Here, too, her perception, her judgment was colored by her own situation—a coloring that both enlightened and obscured.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Rahel's Gestalt emerging from and on the basis of the texts published by Varnhagen and edited by herself, could be described as a priestess and female incarnation of Goethe, in which the woman and the Jewish question were somehow sublated. The significant individual living an examined life of diffuse secularized Christian religiosity, all-embracing, all-understanding, radiating and mediating a profound piety for the life-giving and life-enhancing moment, had achieved rebirth in renunciation and reconciliation, had overcome.²⁴ Clearly, this Gestalt was culturally significant because it provided relief from the more disturbing aspects of modernity: cultural secularity and diversity including the woman and minority questions, and the increasing importance of “quantifying” science and technology. And recent admiring biographies of “Rahel the Woman” look at her life with their own rigorously pre-established notions of cultural meaning and significance, which reflect their alliances. Arendt's probing reconstruction of Rahel as hovering, to the end, between a responsibly critical perspective on her minority group and unquestioning assimilation to the majority group, is still, with all its distortions and limitations, the most thought-provoking, precisely because she held Rahel so firmly—and impossibly—responsible for the text of her life. My account here is less certain in that respect, leaving intact that text's opacities and obscurities, tensions and lacunae.

On September 27, 1814, at the age of 43, Rahel Levin married the Gentile Karl August Varnhagen von Ense and was baptized Antonie Friederike von Varnhagen. The stated purpose of this union was that during her life August, with her help, would assure her permanent access to society, and after her death be responsible for the text of her life as she was writing it in her letters.²⁵ She was born Rahel Levin on May 19, 1771 in Berlin, the eldest daughter of Levin Markus, a self-made, successful business man from a background not unlike Maimon's, now a Prussian Schutzjude and Münzjude.²⁶ In 1809 she adopted the surname ‘Robert’ from her favorite brother Louis who had taken it upon conversion in 1800 and from 1814 on she would sign most of her letters with ‘F. V.’ Through her marriage to a man who was 13 years her junior and, though gifted with a curiously flexible and perceptive contemporaneity,²⁷ has always been seen as less than an equal, this woman of great subtle social intelligence and psychological sophistication fully expected to be (literally) reborn, to be given a new self.

This rebirth was to occur in the public rather than the private sphere. Rahel's Christianity, a highly individualistic Jesus-centered secularist pan-piety, was developed long before her conversion. But during the weeks before the wedding and conversion ceremony she wrote several letters to her husband-to-be that harshly illuminate the depth of her emotional neediness and the urgency of her socially focused desire. All spring and early summer of 1814, she had been anxiously waiting for Varnhagen to come back to her from his assignments during that politically and militarily erratic end stage of the Napoleonic wars.²⁸ She described this waiting as an excruciatingly painful state of being, or, rather, of dying:

I am sitting here—ill and in much pain—waiting that you come for me. But I understand, God wants me to die the death of hesitation and waiting; and no other. But even where fate is most contrary, I cannot be without active self-involvement: and even if that were thwarted—the greatest misfortune—I simply must at least co-determine, if only that I will suffer it; and how I will suffer it. … Only come!!! To wait, to wait any longer, will kill me. Keep in mind how long I have been waiting; and that my whole life since I have known you has been oriented towards you. … And what was my life like before I knew you? A blooming heart: at which everyone stabbed, threw all the weapons, everything hard; a heart that did not know its beauty, purity, fullness, youth, and suffered it: and made no claims. I cannot go on. This heart is sick and it makes the whole human being sick: it has been too much. God knows it.²⁹

This composition of despair, panic, subtle recriminations, and solid manipulation is expressed in a language whose fluidity and inventiveness gives this complex of emotions the peculiar seductive immediacy characteristic for Rahel's ‘emotion management’ of her friends. Of course she was successful. Varnhagen answered at great length from Baden where he had been detained by illness, seven of her letters in front of him. Everything will be as she wishes; they will be married.

Why, being ‘the famous Rahel,’ admired by Alexander von Humboldt as well as Goethe, by Schleiermacher as well as the Mendelssohns, by Gentz as well as Mme. de Stael,³⁰ did she feel so needy, so excluded? It is important to keep in mind that this feeling was most intense after 1806—until she became Friederike von Varnhagen—when political nationalism rose in Germany in reaction to the disastrous battle of Jena. In combination with late Romantic cultural nationalism harking back to the medieval “Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation,” and increasing Pietism, it changed the previously much more fluid situation in which the salons of Jewish women like the notoriously beautiful, high-minded and well-married Henriette Herz, but also the plain-looking, original, subversive and temperamental unmarried Rahel Levin had flourished. 1806 to 1814 were the years when, like the Gentile male contemporaries who had frequented her Salon, Rahel was feeling, with the change of the times, the loss of youth and opportunities that made even such in many ways enlightened freethinkers as Friedrich and Dorothea Schlegel seek refuge in Catholicism³¹—not to speak of the more exuberantly and mystically chaotic Romantics like Clemens von Brentano.

Some of her most dramatic (and most frequently quoted) statements about the ‘misfortune’ of her Jewish birth were made early, especially in her letters to David Veit when he was a student in Göttingen and Jena and she felt stifled, as if arrested or shrinking, in her parents' house in Berlin.³² As she would lament so frequently, Rahel feared above all the sensation of being held back, the absence of movement, of friends coming and going: “It is not worthwhile to dress and undress. … I am stuck in the sludge.”³³ When she wrote to David Veit on March 22, 1795 that her Jewishness was at the root of all her suffering, making her whole life a bleeding to death, her despairing mood was triggered by the fact that her mother would not take her to the Leipzig fair.³⁴ Characteristically, she described her “suffering” in terms of her greatest frustration, her lack of social control. Nobody has shown any consideration for her, while she has had to give in to that hateful but almost instinctual living against her inclinations, “eternal dissembling,” “being reasonable,” “yielding which I myself no longer notice, against my own insights—I can no longer stand it; and nothing, no one, can help me.” The desire to leave for Leipzig has been consuming her; being held back in Berlin is making her literally mad: “As if an alien being had pushed these words into my heart with a dagger upon my entrance into this world: ‘Yes, have feeling, see the world as few see it, be great and noble, eternal thought has not been denied you, one thing, however, has been forgotten; be a Jewess.’”³⁵

Anticipating Veit's sensible admonition not to dwell so much on what makes her unhappy, she counters: “This is all good and well if I could live outside of society, occupying myself in a village.” And here, of course, is the crux of the matter. After completing his medical studies in Halle, Veit traveled to Paris with his cousin Abraham Mendelssohn, afterwards settling in Hamburg where, after some initial difficulties, he obtained a prestigious medical position with the city and, following the model of Markus Herz, gave private philosophical lectures on anthropology. Rahel, in contrast, was stuck in Berlin, forced to live with her “impossible” parents. Given her lively intellectual curiosity and spontaneity, protean moods and reflexes, her physical and emotional sensitivity, she understandably found very difficult the combination of a talented but emotionally unstable, tyrannical father and a fearful, weak mother.³⁶ But if Rahel's violent reactions to the limitations imposed on her seemed to center on her Jewishness, this was a metaphor for more than what she thought to be social slights and a difficult family. Veit's highly articulate, sensitive, and sensible letters said as much.³⁷ He was clearly aware of the one-directedness of her need for trust, her monological self-centeredness, her preoccupation with her “misfortune,” that is, her lack of luck as a shameful lack of wholeness, her panicked fear of exclusion.

This was never to change, not even during the liveliest period of her Dachstuben (attic) salon, when the social intercourse between extraordinary Jews and Gentiles, willing, or, rather, self-styled Romantic outsiders, was much easier than in the period of Restoration after 1815 with its attendant xenophobic religio-political patriotism. It seems—and certainly seemed so to the participants—that everybody who was young and ‘coming’ in cultured Berlin society around 1800 gathered at Rahel's: diplomats, officers, scholars, writers, students, actors—among them the brothers Humboldt, Tieck, Schleiermacher, Fichte, Friedrich Gentz, the brothers Schlegel, Jean Paul. But the places where this cultural-intellectual vanguard came together so effortlessly were also outside established ‘society’—as Salons, Henriette Herz's elegant house and Rahel's modest attic room shared that location. In 1786 Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt were introduced by their tutor Kunth to Markus Herz in whose house they met Joseph and Abraham Mendelssohn, Dorothea Veit, Israel Stieglitz, David Veit, David Friedländer, and later also Rahel Levin. The teenager Alexander much preferred the Herz's house to his parents' estate Tegel, the “castle boredom.” But he also appreciated the fact that his parents, though approving of his admiration for the distinguished physician Herz, would not be thrilled by his liking so much his wife's unconventional guests.³⁸ The male Gentile friends of Henriette and Rahel had the unquestioned choice of being outsiders on a temporary basis, while they enjoyed the friendship of Jews in the social no-man's-land of their houses. They never had given up their citizenship in the majority. In 1806, when the spirit of the times (if not of the Humboldts) began to favor Nationalism and Pietism, Rahel wrote to Rebecca Friedländer to whom she was close during that time (though constantly complaining about her “limitations”³⁹): “How unpleasant it is to have to legitimate oneself over and over again! That's why it is so awful to be a Jewess.”⁴⁰ And in 1810, in the middle of moving into a new apartment that she did not like: “And in the end I am mesquin, not really, as I would like, at home in a place where I belong only because I have been there so long. I feel it eternally and deeply that I am not a citizen.”⁴¹

Like all her lamentations about her Jewish birth, this statement was made in reaction to a specific experience at a specific moment: she was upset or angry because she had been denied a favor, kindness, consideration, understanding, admiration. More, the perceived slights were always social in a narrow sense. But raising the issue of legitimation and of citizenship, she rightly pointed to the majority's power to define the social self-presentation of other groups. The situation was immeasurably complicated by the fact that this majority—its “customs, opinion, education, conviction”—was highly attractive to Jews of her and her parents' generation, as she pointed out to a friend who planned conversion.⁴² Gifted for sociability, doing well in Enlightenment culture, German-Jewish intellectuals, professionals, and businessmen had quickly risen to prominence. But they had acquired privileges, not rights, and privileges are notoriously unstable. Ironically, when the 1812 Emancipation Edict was passed as part of the Stein-Hardenberg reforms in Prussia (in which Wilhelm von Humboldt participated), the social climate had changed. Rahel shrewdly explained the change to Varnhagen: “The French have exhausted all social relations.”⁴³ Sociability, the easy sophisticated Geselligkeit between Gentiles and Jews, men and women, had been profoundly damaged by the disastrous French victories that undermined the self-confidence of German Gentile males and sent them on the search for “true” national and cultural identity.

The Christlich-Deutsche Tischgesellschaft founded by Achim von Arnim in the beginning of the Prussian-French war and counting among its members Brentano and Fouqué, but also philosophers like Fichte and Schleiermacher, the longtime intimate friend of Henriette Herz, and historians like Savigny, explicitly excluded women, Frenchmen, philistines and Jews. Ostensibly directed against France and certain tenets of the European Enlightenment (Western Culture), it was radically anti-bourgeois as well as against the early Romantics' androgynous fusions, their poetico-philosophical, apolitical transcendence of social conventions, in which Rahel's first salon had flourished. The intention was not so much to exclude from its fraternity women and Jews in general, as to keep a distance to specific bourgeois intellectual activities like the salons, in which Women and Jews, Jewish women, played an important role.

Many among the Tischgesellschaft patriots were, of course, old friends of Rahel's, and around 1810 her relationship to them, theirs to her, was ambiguous. In 1809 she wrote a long letter to Fouqué, explaining how much pain she had suffered from the undeserved “misfortune” of her “wrong birth.”⁴⁴ Here she set up her usual dichotomy between the complete happiness of others and her own total unhappiness. Since great happiness has eluded her, nobody has ever treated her as a happy person, namely one who can make demands and who is obeyed. Therefore she has failed—important here the German phrasing: “ist mir mißglückt”—in every human relationship, and chance has never helped her. Her perception of people is sharper and truer than anyone's and yet nothing and nobody has made her whole in the sense in which she needs and desires it. It is instructive that she insisted on being “ganz Natur”⁴⁵ to the Romantic poet Fouqué, who was to achieve some fame with his Romantic fairy tale of the eternally feminine mermaid, Undine (1811). In frequent contact with him during these years, she would lament about her isolation, flattering and manipulating him, and asking for understanding and adoration. She continued to be intrigued by Fouqué's and Brentano's religious and patriotic mysticism, if irritated by their willfully eccentric behavior and opinions about rational Jews and Gentiles, and her god Goethe.⁴⁶ Importantly, she was also certain that they were beneath her since she was in her own estimation “as unique as the greatest phenomenon on this earth,” and equal to the greatest artists, philosophers or poets.⁴⁷ Both unwilling and willing outsider, Rahel insisted on her uniqueness and her originality as her truth, which by definition could not be related to others, because as insiders they were all caught in the lies of social intercourse. Her exclusion, that is, her identity, is both fated and self-created, transcending her Jewish birth. For this reason her letters and diaries, which tell her “poetic original life story,” must be collected and reconstructed by her friends and lovers.⁴⁸ The origin of this Originalgeschichte is not her suffering, but its trans-personal cultural significance.

This significance is central to Varnhagen's role in the construction and dissemination of Rahel's self-fictions.⁴⁹ He is the only one on this earth who knows, understands and continuously shares her suffering, she writes in 1812. Never has there been a meaningful correspondence between her life and her nature; and he has been touched, his love for her has been shaped by precisely this rupture: “For your eye alone this terrifying spectacle.”⁵⁰ She has never had a friend like him, nobody has ever been so understanding, so exclusively centered on her, she tells him in an early letter that lists all the details of her misfortune: physical, emotional, financial, father, mother, brothers, sisters in law—all of them responsible for the fact that “my history goes back before the beginning of my life.”⁵¹ But if this last remark, summing up the record of miseries that constitute her complex unhappiness, does indeed refer to her Jewishness, it does not do so exclusively. Such Jewishness is highly composite and very much hers; it, too, is unique.

Rahel had a second Salon in Berlin from 1819 to her death in 1833; she was again a success and continued to be grateful to Varnhagen, because in his total acceptance of her uniqueness he had built a permanent bridge between her and the world into which she wanted to be accepted once and for all, without further questions. Her distinguished guests tended to be Gentiles rather than Jews, philosophers and historians—Schleiermacher, Hegel, Ranke—rather than poets, men rather than women. It was the time of Restoration, and around Rahel one ridiculed and was apprehensive of the ever growing nationalist Pietism and attendant parochialism. When Varnhagen visited Berlin in the fall of 1817—he was at the time a Prussian diplomat in Karlsruhe—, he complained bitterly to Rahel about his former friend Ludwig Theremin, Hof- and Domprediger since 1814, who had turned orthodox and was now hoping, as Varnhagen put it “that all Jews would be murdered promptly; I know what his Christianity is all about.” Varnhagen's heated response may have been influenced by the appearance in 1816 of several anti-Semitic treatises reflecting the reactionary spirit of the Vienna Congress.⁵² Rahel, more calmly, pointed out that Theremin was a special case: always a follower, always looking for something, someone to adore and venerate. Shrewdly, she linked such desire with a particular weakness that could produce cruelty. Yet she also saw a more general reemergence of spiritual illnesses that had been temporarily cured by the Enlightenment intellectuals' ridicule of bad reasoning and superstition. Troubled by the contemporary intellectual demonization and rejection of everything having to do with world trade, of its effect on the voyages of exploration, and of their cultural consequences, Rahel lamented

Ah! poor Novalis, poor Friedrich Schlegel. … You did not think your shallow disciples [the younger Romantics] would be like that. Great, dear, blindly read Goethe, fiery honest Lessing, and all you great and serene ones, you could not have thought of that. A nice mess! [Eine schöne Säuerei!] But, then, we, too, looking at that situation, are not without prejudice, because we are annoyed by it: what small bends in the eternal stream of being; that is, of becoming!⁵³

This, in nuce, is Jewish-Christian Rahel Friederike: a highly individual symbiosis of Enlightenment and Romantic sensibilities,⁵⁴ trying to be a contemporary to and a critic of the age of Restoration.⁵⁵ Instructively, in that same letter she urged Varnhagen to push one of her pet literary ideas while in Berlin: to make accessible Moses Mendelssohn's translation of the Old Testament to all Germans, Jews and Gentiles alike, by printing it in German (not Latin!) rather than Hebrew letters. If not explicitly then certainly by implication, Rahel drew here the connection between world-opening trade and Moses Mendelssohn. But unlike Mendelssohn, Rahel, the most sociable of beings, also sought transcendence, impossibly desiring an immediacy of meaning in a culture that was, as she very well knew, irreversibly modern, that is, historical. Thus she found also irreversible her Uremigrantentum, as she wrote an old friend in 1825.⁵⁶ It is true, she was now entirely established in society. But if she no longer felt exiled from it, it had changed on her, whereas she had remained the same; her exile from fortune, from wholeness, had proved to be permanent.

Not long after she had married Varnhagen, Rahel wrote him a letter to be opened upon her death. It shows both her great talent for drawing the other person into her experience, here of mortality and memory, and her enduring massive self-deception about her relation to the man who was of crucial importance to her because he assured the wholeness of the text of her life:

As much as it was possible, possible for your temperament to understand one like mine, you did understand it; through a magnificent spirited acceptance: with an insight which I cannot grasp as it does not come from any similarity of temperament. There simply is no more impersonal, more grandiose, more understanding way for one human being to take in and treat another than yours has been in relation to me.⁵⁷

But Varnhagen had understood her because she had interpreted herself to him so forcefully and exhaustively, and because he had been fascinated by the contemporaneity of this interpretation: its emphasis on complete personal authenticity and sociability. Prepared to admire her ‘as she was,’ he presented her as she had made herself, fated to be immortal in her uniqueness by evading historical time and transformation.

Notes

1. Alfred Schutz, “The Stranger,” The American Journal of Sociology 49, no. 6 (1944): 499-507, now in Alfred Schutz Collected Papers, ed. Arvid Brodersen (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), 2:91-105.

2. Arendt to Heinrich Blücher, August 12, 1936 (unpublished letter). For Rahel see below note 41.

3. Quoted Salomon Maimon's Lebensgeschichte Von ihm selbst erzählt und herausgegeben von Karl Philipp Moritz, ed. Zwi Batscha (Frankfurt/M.: Insel, 1984), 368.

4. Lebensgeschichte, 368-70.

5. Lebensgeschichte, 144, 146, 148.

6. Lothar Müller, Die kranke Seele und das Licht der Erkenntnis Karl Philipp Moritz' Anton Reiser (Frankfurt/M.: Athenäum, 1987), 255-59.

7. Marcus Herz, Versuch über den Schwindel (Berlin, “Zweyte umgeänderte und vermehrte Auflage,” 1791), 28: “dass man es vielleicht gar lächerlich finden würde, wenn ich in einer wohl eingestellten medizinischen Schule, neben dem Lehrer der Körperzerschneidung, einen Lehrer der Seelenzergliederung forderte” (quoted in Müller, Die kranke Seele, 63).

8. Ernst Platner, Anthropologie für Ärzte und Weltweise (1972), Vorrede, xvff: “Man kann erstlich die Theile und Geschäfte der Maschine allein betrachten, ohne dabey auf die Einschränkungen zu achten, welche diese Bewegungen von der Seele empfangen, oder welche die Seele wiederum von der Maschine leidet; das ist Anatomie oder Physiologie. Zweytens kann man auf eben diese Art die Kräfte und Eigenschaften der Seele untersuchen, ohne allezeit die Mitwirkungen des Körpers oder die daraus in der Maschine erfolgenden Veränderungen in Betracht zu ziehen: das wäre Psychologie, oder welches einerley ist, Logik, Ästhetik und ein grosser Theil der Moralphilosophie. Endlich kann man Körper und Seele in ihren gegenseitigen Verhältnissen, Einschränkungen und Beziehungen zusammen betrachten, und das ist es, was ich Anthropologie nenne” (quoted in Müller, Die kranke Seele, 62ff).

9. Herz to Kant February 27, 1986, in Immanuel Kant, Gesammelte Schriften 10 (Briefe) (Berlin, Leipzig, 1922), 431.

10. Selle to Kant December 29, 1787, in Kant, Gesammelte Schriften 10:516ff.

11. Herz to Kant April 7, 1789, in Kant, Gesammelte Schriften 11:14. See Müller, Die kranke Seele, 51ff.

12. Salomon Maimon, Versuch über die Transzendentalphilosophie ([Berlin: Voss, 1790] reprinted in Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1963), especially 189-99.

13. See here Mark Boulby, Karl Philipp Moritz: At the Fringe of Genius (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), 135f.

14. “Der Mann [Hippocrates], der einmüthig vom ganzen Althertume seinem Äskulap zur Seite gesetzt ward, und nicht nur als Erfinder oder Wiederhersteller der Medizin, sondern auch als Weltweiser, tugendhafter Mann und guter Bürger geschätzt, und nächst dem Plato der göttliche Alte genannt wurde. … Seine Verdienste in Ansehung der Medizin sind unendlich gross. Er ist es, der die Gränze zwischen Erfahrung und Raisonnement genau kannte und bezeichnete; er, der sie zum Stande einer Kunst erhob.” Paracelsus, in contrast, is “Ein schmutziger aufgeblasener unwissender Mensch voller Schwärmerey. Er hasste alles Vernunft-mässige, und legte es darauf an, die göttliche Kunst mit Aberglauben, Vorurtheilen und mystischen Begriffen zu besudeln. Doch war sein Anhang nicht geringfügig: natürlich, er war ein Schwärmer.” Marcus Herz, Grundriss aller medizinischen Wissenschaften (Berlin, 1782), 7ff. Quoted in Müller, Die kranke Seele, 53.

15. Lebensgeschichte, 147.

16. Lebensgeschichte, 14.

17. Lebensgeschichte, 105. See however also Maimon's “Kurze Darstellung der jüdischen Religion von ihrem Ursprung bis auf die neuesten Zeiten,” Lebensgeschichte, 215-30. He gave here historical explanations for certain questionable rabbinical practices, defended Talmudisten against generalizing attacks, and pointed out positive aspects of Polish-Jewish culture, such as strong sense of social responsibility and family. He also noted in this context that Polish Jews had access to the full range of occupations (as did Spanish Jews when Maimonides was a young man). Not limited to lending money, they were seldom accused of dishonesty and thus tended to stay in the country of their birth.

18. Salomon Maimon, An Autobiography, ed. Moses Hadas (New York: Schocken, 1967), 74; Lebensgeschichte, 151f.

19. Autobiography, 81ff and 88ff; Lebensgeschichte, 172ff, and 182ff.

20. Autobiography, 91; Lebensgeschichte, 185.

21. Varnhagen quotes his wife in the introduction to Rahel. Ein Buch des Andenkens für ihre Freunde, ed. Karl August Varnhagen von Ense, 3 vols. ([Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1834], reprinted in Bern: Lang, 1972) 1:43ff. The text was reprinted again in Rahel Varnhagen Gesammelte Werke, 10 vols., ed. Konrad Feilchenfeldt, Uwe Schweikert, Rahel E. Steiner (Munich: Mathes & Seitz, 1983), vols. 1-3. References are to any of the three editions since they share pagination. Unless stated otherwise, all translations from the German are mine and the emphasis is Rahel's, who liked to underline.

22. Quoted in Leon Poliakov, The History of Anti-Semitism (New York: The Vanguard Press, 1975 [in French 1968]), 3:200ff.

23. Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 13; all references to this edition.

24. This is true for the many different letter and diary selections based on Varnhagen's published and unpublished collections, as well as the different spiritual (rather than intellectual) biographies of Rahel, among them notably Ellen Key's Rahel Varnhagen A Portrait translated from the Swedish by Arthur G. Chater, introduced by Havelock Ellis (New York and London: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1913).

25. Rahel's general control over this text was assumed by her contemporaries and by the many editors of her letters and diaries based on Varnhagen's collections throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, though Varnhagen's interference in details was known. Arendt thought that Varnhagen had interfered systematically to overemphasize Rahel's relations to German aristocrats, editing out her Jewish associates, but Rahel's own active editing has been reaffirmed by the recent discovery in Krakow of the Varnhagen papers presumed lost from the Berlin Staatsbibliothek at the end of the war. See Deborah Hertz, “The Varnhagen Collection is in Krakow,” The American Archivist 44, no. 3 (Summer 1981); Jutta Juliane Laschke, Wir sind eigentlich, wie wir sein möchten, und nicht wie wir sind (Frankfurt, Bern: Lang, 1988), 63-67; Ursula Isselstein, “Rahels Schriften I. Karl August Varnhagens editorische Tätigkeit nach Dokumenten seines Archivs,” Rahel Levin Varnhagen Die Wiederentdeckung einer Schriftstellerin, ed. Barbara Hahn und Ursula Isselstein (Göttingen: Vandenhöck & Ruprecht, 1987), 16-36.

26. Belonging to the group of Jewish businessmen who were responsible for the quality of coins in the Prussian state and involved in the silver trade.

27. One of the best accounts of Varnhagen's career as diplomat and social intellectual historian of his time is still Carl Misch, Varnhagen von Ense in Beruf und Politik (Stuttgart: Friedrich Andreas Perthes, 1925).

28. During those months Varnhagen was close to military action and her letters clearly reflect her nervousness, especially as news was sparse: Briefwechsel zwischen Varnhagen und Rahel, 6 vols. ([Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1874] reprinted in Bern: Herbert Lang, 1973), and in Rahel Varnhagen Gesammelte Werke, vol. 3, Briefwechsel, 306-77. On Varnhagen's maneuvering himself into appointments in the fluid situation of the Napoleonic wars see Misch, 17-30.

29. Rahel to Varnhagen, June 3, 1814, Briefwechsel 4:1ff and 4ff; abridged in Rahel Varnhagen, Briefwechsel, 4 vols., ed. Friedhelm Kemp (Munich: Kösel, 1967) (Kemp) 2:284ff.

30. Rahel had met Mme. de Staël in 1800/01 at the Humboldts' in Paris and was reintroduced to her by their mutual friend Karl Gustav von Brinckmann, the Germanophile Swedish diplomat, who praised Rahel's “genius” to Mme. de Staël in 1804. Brinckmann wrote an account of their meeting shortly afterwards, and of Mme. de Stael's fascination towards Rahel, that was preserved in Varnhagen's memoirs (quoted in Kemp 3:428ff). Rahel met Goethe in the summer of 1795 in Karlsbad, and David Veit reported on Goethe's being very impressed by the peculiar intensity of her feelings and her intellect (letter to Rahel of August 14, 1795, in Kemp 3:64). The combination of remarkable individual talent and cultural ‘groupiness’ in German intellectual life at the time is noteworthy and, willing or not, Goethe in Weimar was at the center of it. When Varnhagen made a trip to Southern Germany in the early fall of 1827, the pull of the “magic place” Weimar could not be resisted; meeting Goethe again and receiving the gift of his praise for Rahel was the high point of the journey. See Varnhagen's long letter to Rahel of September 19, 1827, in Briefwechsel 6:183-88, especially 187.

31. Dorothea Mendelssohn Veit Schlegel had first converted to Protestantism in Paris on the day of her marriage to Friedrich Schlegel, April 6, 1804, and then in Cologne, together with her husband, to Catholicism, on April 16, 1808. The authors of the tediously rambling but potentially subversive, gender-‘deconstructing’ Lucinde (1799), both had become increasingly pious, anti-French, and mystically nationalist. See here Dorothea's letters to Rahel during 1815-17, complaining about Wilhelm von Humboldt's “paganism” that made him ban religious ritual from political celebrations (November 6, 1816), and about Henriette Herz's “stubborn” resistance to baptism (January 11, 1817)—she was to give in and convert in 1817. Dorothea felt close to Rahel despite their different religious temperaments, since Rahel seemed to share her own appreciation of Christianity as “the most precious gift of the eternal father in heaven” (April 16, 1817, Caroline und Dorothea Schlegel in Briefen, ed. Ernst Wieneke [Weimar: Kiepenheuer, 1914], 482ff, 488, and 492). Before her conversion in Paris where both she and Friedrich were quite unhappy, she wrote to her old friend Schleiermacher on November 21, 1802 that she was reading the Bible in Luther's translation as an “antidote” to Parisian frivolities. Reading both testaments, she found Protestantism purer and preferable to Catholicism, which “bears too much resemblance to the old Judaism which I loathe.” Protestantism seemed to her “entirely the religion of Jesus and the religion of culture (Bildung); in my heart I am, as much as I can understand from the bible, Protestant.” Public profession of one's creed seemed to her unnecessary, indeed “Catholic ostentation, desire for domination and vanity” (ibid., 357ff). This describes important aspects of Rahel's enduring position. Dorothea, of course, was to change her mind dramatically.

32. On April 2, 1793, twenty-one years old, she writes that she shall never be able to conceive of the fact that she is “a Shlemihl and a Jewess.” “Since after all these years and having given so much thought to it, it has eluded me, I will never really know it. That is why ‘the clang of the murderous axe does not nibble at my root’; that is why I am still living. I haven't yet said all these things to you, that's why I am writing them so that you'll be amused” (Kemp 3:20). See this passage in English in Arendt, XIVf, making Rahel sound more unambiguously in despair. There is also a suggestion in Arendt's text—rendering “es wird mir nie einkommen” with “be convinced”—that Rahel was repressing that knowledge deliberately. The quote is from Goethe's Egmont: his monologue in the dungeon (Act 5). Significantly, Arendt does not quote the last sentence where Rahel refers to Veit's being amused by her lamentations.

33. To David Veit December 12, 1794, in Kemp 3:48. See here also Henriette Mendelssohn's letter to Rahel of April 8, 1800, complaining of stagnation in Galerie von Bildnissen aus Rahel's Umgang und Briefwechsel, ed. K. A. Varnhagen von Ense (Leipzig, Gebrüder Reichenbach, 1836), 67.

34. Kemp 3:54.

35. Kemp 3:52-54.

36. See Rahel's description of her development in her long letter to Varnhagen of March 28, 1814; she analyses her weaknesses and strengths, describing the, in her view, unique combination: nature has given her “one of the finest and most strongly organized hearts on earth” and this sensibility was “broken”—she emphasizes this word and repeats it several times—by her “rough, strict, violent, moody, genialisch, almost crazy father” who thereby “broke,” without being able to weaken her character, any “talent for action” she might have had, making it impossible for her to “have luck” (Briefwechsel 3, 310-314, and 11, abridged Kemp 2:258). See also her letter of March 12, 1810 to her friend Pauline Wiesel, in Kemp 3:228-31.

37. See especially his long letter to Rahel of December 24, 1793, encouraging Rahel to demand more, be more assertive and not be so accommodating, such a “noble being.” Here he also makes some very perceptive remarks on Lessing's Nathan der Weise and on Mendelssohn's oriental self-stylization: “He wanted to show that a Jew formed by the spirit of his fathers and by the model of the orient can reach the highest degree of freedom. He wanted to show what can be achieved by the Jew as Christian and Jew; he has always tried to swim between both parties; and sometimes even the most experienced, most skilled swimmer is deserted by the strength of his arms and breaks out into a sweat of anxiety.” Galerie, 16-28, especially 20; this important passage is not included in the portions of Veit's letter quoted in Kemp 3:30ff.

38. See Hanno Beck, Alexander von Humboldt, 2 vols. (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1959) 1:12-14.

39. Habitually in letters to Varnhagen, referring to Rebecca Friedländer as “G.” meaning “die Gute,” i.e., endlessly trying and not succeeding. See here the letter to Varnhagen of November 12, 1810, where she also criticizes Henriette Herz for her bourgeois superficiality, declares her great love for the unconventional authentic Bettina Brentano-Arnim, and complains about “Madam Frohberg-Friedländer” resting on the laurels provided by Goethe and the philologist Wolf, namely their praise for her “abysmally bad writing, called novel. … We are not mad at each other. I don't fight with her anymore. She is not open to rational argumentation [überzeugungsunfähig]” (Kemp 2:157). See also Rahel to Pauline Wiesel, March 12, 1810: “I am not going to see Friedländer anymore—she has taken the name Frohberg—she is too intolerable, unnaturally pauvre in character, and pretentious” (Kemp 3:231).

40. Rahel to Rebecca Friedländer, summer 1806, Kemp 3:273.

41. To Rebecca Friedländer, September 6, 1810, Kemp 3:287.

42. Rahel also advised the change of name: “It will make you a different person externally; and this is really necessary.” The external, visible attachment to the “great class” that will enable Ernestine to be the support of the “unhappy remnants” of a great, talented, highly religious nation “in a human, that is Christian way” (letter to Ernestine Goldstücker May 16, 1818, Buch des Andenkens 2:536ff).

43. February 1, 1812, Briefwechsel 2, 236ff.

44. July 26, 1809, Kemp 3:295.

45. Kemp 3:296.

46. Letter to Varnhagen January 30, 1812, Briefwechsel 2:233.

47. To David Veit February 16, 1805, in Kemp 3:83: “I am as unique as the greatest phenomenon on this earth. The greatest artist, philosopher or poet is not above me. We are of the same element. Of the same rank, and belong together. … But my assignation has been life.” See here also her diary entry of 1801: “The human being as such is a work of art and its essence is an alternation of consciousness and non-consciousness. That's why I love Goethe so!” (Buch des Andenkens 1:226).

48. Letter to Frau von Boye July, 1800, Kemp 1:304.

49. See her letter to Varnhagen June 20, 1815, Briefwechsel 5:143, abridged Kemp 2:306, thanking him for his love as “elucidation” of her acceptance of her “pure misfortune.”

50. Rahel to Varnhagen February 27, 1812, Briefwechsel 2:258. See here also Varnhagen's long letter to Rahel of October 24, 1811, Briefwechsel 2:167-74 on the greatness of her suffering, promising to revenge her on all those who do not understand her, and Rahel's irritated answer of November 12, 1811 (ibid., 175-80), pointing out that her suffering is increased by his lack of judgment as to who are her friends and her enemies.

51. Letter to Varnhagen of February 26, 1809, Briefwechsel 1:307-312. See also her letters to him March 4 and 7, 1809, and his consoling answers to her lamentations, reassuring her of his unwavering love March 27, April 2 and 4, 1809, Briefwechsel 1:317-24.

52. Jacob Friedrich Fries, Über die Gefährdung des Wohlstandes und Charakters der Deutschen durch die Juden (Leipzig, 1816); Friedrich Rühs, Über die Ansprüche der Juden an das deutsche Bürgerrecht (Berlin, 1816) and Die Rechte des Christentums und des deutschen Volkes, verteidigt gegen die Ansprüche der Juden und ihrer Verfechter (Berlin, 1816).

53. Varnhagen to Rahel October 21, 1817, Rahel to Varnhagen October 28, 1817, Briefwechsel 5:246 and 264-67. See also Moses Mendelssohn's “Vorrede” (1782) to Manasseh Ben Israel's Rettung der Juden, translated from the English by Marcus Herz, arguing for the cultural importance of trade furthering openness, connection, flexibility, mobility, imagination. His friend Christian Wilhelm Dohm had suggested in his influential Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden (Berlin, 1781) (a work on which Mendelssohn had collaborated) a broader occupational distribution of Jews, especially into the more obviously ‘productive’ areas of agriculture and handicraft.

54. She does not say so, but she might have had in mind an essay written by the young critic Friedrich Schlegel that is still (almost two centuries later) one of the most intelligent appreciations of the circumnavigator, explorer and revolutionary Georg Forster: Friedrich Schlegel, “Fragment einer Charakteristik der deutschen Klassiker,” Kritische Schriften, ed. Wolfdietrich Rasch (Munich: Hanser, 1964, 2nd ed.). “Klassiker” means for Schlegel the writer as exemplary interpreter of (Enlightenment) modernity.

55. In reaction to physical attacks on Jews in 1819, Rahel complains to her brother Louis on August 29, 1819 about the (younger) Romantics' “hypocritical new-love for Christian religion,” their fascination by medieval art and horrors, with which they incite uneducated people (Kemp 4:504ff).

56. Letter to Wilhelm von Willisen November 11, 1825, Kemp 4:284ff.

57. April 24, 1816, Briefwechsel 5:116; abridged Kemp 2:393.