SOURCE: Hertz, Deborah. “Inside Assimilation: Rebecca Friedländer's Rahel Varnhagen.” In German Women in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: A Social and Literary History, edited by Ruth-Ellen B. Joeres and Mary Jo Maynes, pp. 271-88. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986.

[In the following essay, Hertz considers the collection of Varnhagen's letters to Rebecca Friedländer as reflective of Varnhagen's desire for personal emancipation and her attempts to assimilate.]

Almost two centuries ago in Germany, Rahel Varnhagen was a much-admired, much-discussed phenomenon. During the last decade of the eighteenth century and again during the third decade of the nineteenth century, she was at the center of Berlin's social and intellectual life.¹ Varnhagen was not the only Jewish woman in central Europe to entertain and befriend the era's most prominent male intellectuals. A tiny circle of rich Jewish women in Berlin achieved stunning successes as mediators of high culture and as pioneers in social assimilation. Their successes at the outset of the long process of Jewish emancipation were all the more remarkable because social triumphs on this scale largely eluded their counterparts in subsequent decades.² But Rahel Varnhagen earned her renown not just because her salon was popular or because her lovers were prestigious noblemen. Varnhagen attracted admirers for the quality of her mind as well as for her social skills. Although she was not well educated and she rarely published her writing, both her conversation and her letters earned her praise for her originality, her honesty, her expressive powers, and her aesthetic judgement.³ After her death in 1833, the posthumous publication of many of her letters kept her memory alive for two groups who claimed her as a pioneer in their respective struggles for emancipation. Successive generations of literary women found inspiration in these letters, and lauded Varnhagen for her “feminine” influence on Romantic high culture and for her progressive opinions on women's condition. For those German Jews who saw assimilation via mastery of high culture as the best path to emancipation, Rahel Varnhagen was an obvious model. Most who struggled to become assimilated were ambivalent about the personal costs of leaving Judaism and Jewry. She, too, had clearly been ambivalent about the calculated opportunism which was often required for successful social integration. In Heinrich Heine's words, Rahel Varnhagen had “fought for the truth, suffered, battled, and even lied for it.” Her oft-cited deathbed admission that she was in the end proud and not ashamed to be Jewish insured her place as one of the first complex, modern “non-Jewish” Jews.⁴

Yet neither the feminist nor the Jewish preoccupation with Rahel Varnhagen continued in the decades following the second world war. Not only did Nazi successes virtually obliterate Jewish life in Germany; in so doing, Nazism called into question the assimilationist strategy and thus Rahel Varnhagen's fitness as a model for twentieth-century Jews. The feminist constituency for an interest in her was also diminished. When literary feminists did appear, their initial focus was on published, “professional” female authors rather than on female “dilettantes” whose fame rested merely on their personal impact and letters. Then, too, the continuing obscurity of Rahel Varnhagen in the decades following the war was also due to the declining fascination of the romantic era for literary historians. The one book that did arouse some interest in Varnhagen was the biography of her written by Hannah Arendt before the war but first published in 1957. The book was well received critically, but its tone was abstract for a biography. Arendt's interpretation of Varnhagen as ultimately having been more of a rebellious “pariah” than an opportunist “parvenu” was exciting. But alone, and because of its anomalous style, her book did not bring Varnhagen to the attention of a very wide audience, either in the United States or in Germany.⁵

But all of this has changed now. As the immediate, paralyzing traumas of the Holocaust have receded, German interest in the Jewish past has revived. Having already rediscovered prominent published women authors, literary feminists are paying increasing attention to female intellectuals who had a less direct relationship to the reading public.⁶ And so the time has come for a postwar generation to repossess Rahel Varnhagen. The 1983 celebration of the sesquicentennial of her death was the occasion for rather grand pronouncements of her true importance. One critic complained that although “until now the title of honor ‘author’ has been denied her, this is unfair.” For, in the words of another, Varnhagen's letters and aphorisms are “perhaps the richest treasure of German literature.” Indeed, she is now hailed as “the greatest female author among the Germans.”⁷

Considering the new estimation of Rahel Varnhagen's significance, it is all the more disturbing that her letters have been so difficult to obtain. To begin with, many letters were omitted or tampered with when they were first published in the nineteenth century. It was not until the 1960's that a four-volume, annotated selection of her letters was published. And it is only now, in 1984, that a ten-volume reprint of all of her hitherto published letters will finally be available.⁸ Even more importantly, now that Rahel Varnhagen's papers have been discovered intact in Poland, the new interest in her can be matched with a new, complete set of Varnhagen's corpus. The necessity of going back to the original letters was urged by Arendt, whose work with the full set of Varnhagen's diaries and letters convinced Arendt that Rahel's husband, Karl August Varnhagen von Ense, had tampered with the texts when he edited her letters for publication after her death in 1833. Whole segments of her correspondence were never published, sentences and paragraphs were omitted from those letters which were published, and the identity of recipients of the letters was deliberately disguised.⁹ Yet Arendt's plans to supplement her biography with a selection from unpublished letters never came to fruition. A century after Varnhagen's death, in 1933, she left Germany, leaving the original letters behind. She would never see them again.

Rahel Varnhagen's letters were a small part of the enormous Varnhagen Collection, which originally belonged to the Rare Manuscript Division of the Prussian State Library in Berlin.¹⁰ In 1942, most of the Division's holdings, which included original Beethoven and Mozart scores, were moved to a variety of depots in eastern Germany, which was then believed to be the safe front of the war. After 1945, the location of the lost Manuscript Division remained unknown, and none of its precious holdings was ever returned to East or West Berlin. When Arendt published her biography of Varnhagen in 1957, she believed that the Varnhagen Collection, along with the rest of the Manuscript Division, had been lost. By the time her biography was reissued in 1974, Arendt had reason to believe that the Varnhagen Collection might have survived, but she had been unable to gain access to it. Since then, a long search by many Western scholars has finally succeeded in locating the collection and tracing the history of its odyssey. It was housed during the war in a monastery in the small hamlet of Grussau in Silesia. The collection was eventually moved to Krakow, and has been there, at the Jagiellonian Library, since 1946. The German Democratic Republic has publicly demanded that all the material now in Krakow be returned to East Germany, but Polish officials have thus far been unwilling to do so. The eventual fate of the Varnhagen Collection and the other precious material from the Berlin State Library remains unclear.

One major set of letters which Varnhagen von Ense kept almost completely from publication were those which his wife wrote to the novelist Rebecca Friedländer between 1805 and 1810.¹¹ Only one side of the correspondence survived; Friedländer's replies to Varnhagen were burned at some point. Partly because few of these letters were ever published, Friedländer's name (later changed to Regina Frohberg) and her work have fallen into complete obscurity. The letters Rahel Varnhagen wrote her in these years are of great interest, however, not so much because of Friedländer's intrinsic importance as an individual, but rather because of her sociological similarity to Rahel Varnhagen at the time that they were written. Both women were born into wealthy and acculturated Jewish families, but neither settled into conventional Jewish marriages. Both women suffered the pain of voluntarily moving to the edge of acculturated Jewish society in Berlin without achieving any immediate success in entering the highest levels of gentile society. Intermarriage with gentiles was often the mechanism for female assimilation in this era, and a Jewish woman's failure to succeed at intermarriage meant triple pain—as a Jew who had chosen exile from the Jewish world, who was also excluded from gentile society, and as a woman deprived of love and marriage. Varnhagen was ultimately successful in the struggle to assimilate; because she was intelligent and sensitive, her own version of the female-specific assimilation process is an important one. Assimilation by intermarriage was thus a nuanced, difficult process, one which involved distancing oneself from kin while carefully cultivating a new social network. It is crucial to reconstruct in which ways Varnhagen interpreted the changes in her own life as legitimate personal emancipation and in which ways she interpreted her assimilation as a betrayal of the Jewish world.

In this essay, the newly available letters Varnhagen wrote to Friedländer in her life's loneliest years are examined to take us “inside” the assimilation process, to reconstruct how one articulate Jewish woman at the time viewed her own troubles achieving emancipation. The range of themes covered in the letters is broad, and only two of these themes can be touched on in what follows. A major theme of the letters is how Varnhagen felt about her intense friendship with Rebecca Friedländer. Thus I concentrate here on how their common fate of being stranded between two worlds drew the two women together for camaraderie and support. But the writing of letters, the very same medium that was so crucial in forging the private bond between the two women, was also a quasi-public activity which could contribute to winning fame and a professional career. So the second theme I examine below is what Varnhagen herself has to say in the letters to Friedländer about publishing her writing.

But before turning to interpret the very subjective letters, it is imperative to briefly survey the objective social universe in which the two women lived. That the two women could even come close enough to gentile society to feel the pain of periodic rejections by its representatives was itself an unusual accomplishment due largely to the altogether unique position of Berlin Jewry in this era. Whereas in most European Jewish communities only a few families were wealthy, in Berlin somewhere close to half of the 3200 members of the community were wealthy, including the city's very richest men. The astonishing wealth of the tiny community was a consequence of King Frederick the Great's maxim of obtaining the greatest economic service from the fewest number of Jews. Such services were needed in a Prussia where an overly strict mercantilism, the crown's unwillingness to let commoners grow wealthy enough to challenge the nobility, unlucky geography, and the absence of German national unity all hindered the development of a vigorous gentile bourgeoisie.¹² The daughters born into such families enjoyed the sumptuous homes, silk dresses, French tutors, hairdressers, and trips to nearby spas made possible by their fathers' money. What was unprecedented was that the daughters' wealth and their acculturation should have become adorned with a prize no amount of money could buy: a degree of social acceptance by the cream of Berlin society. Between 1780, when Henriette and Markus Herz first opened their salon, until 1806, when French troops occupied Berlin, ninety-eight individuals—including princes, diplomats, and the avant-garde intelligentsia—attended sixteen salons, nine of them hosted by Jewish women. Varnhagen was the most famous of these Jewish salonières, Friedländer the most obscure.

One might well expect Varnhagen's letters to Friedländer to be exceptionally forthright, not only because of the general similarity in the two women's backgrounds, but also because in the years when the letters were written the two women's social and emotional situations became even more directly parallel. When the correspondence began in 1805, Varnhagen (then still Rahel Levin) was thirty-five, single, and living in the attic apartment of the family home in the center of Berlin, on the Jägerstrasse. Some very happy times as a family member, as a lover, and as a salonière were behind her. It was not that her relationships in any of these three regions of her emotional landscape had ever been altogether unproblematic. Yet when viewed from the sharp, painful loneliness which began in 1805, her previous life looked rich and satisfying indeed. She was born in Berlin in 1771. Her early years as a child and an adolescent in the Levin household were, to be sure, difficult ones. Her father, a prominent jewelry merchant who enjoyed entertaining amusing nobles and actors, was a moody autocrat. His daughter Rahel was a frail child who nonetheless tried to stand up to her father. Over the years of her life at the Jägerstrasse household, she had difficulties with her mother and with two of her brothers who managed her inheritance. Still, there was a strong family bond, and Varnhagen would later show loyal devotion to her mother when she became ill in 1809.

Sometimes, family strife was caused by Rahel's new gentile friends. The 1790's had been a decade of great social success for Varnhagen. In these years, while still living at home with her mother and brothers, she slowly began to make herself into a person of intellectual competence. She hired tutors to work on French, English, and mathematics; she improved her German (Western Yiddish was her native tongue) through correspondence with a young Jewish medical student at Göttingen. And so, having mastered the requisite languages, in the summers at spas she made the acquaintance of free-thinking noblemen and noblewomen who became her champions, and, in the winter in the city, brought their friends by to meet her. These social successes, to be sure, were not crowned by success at intermarriage; Varnhagen had two unhappy love affairs with nobles between 1795 and 1804, and in both cases the men declined to marry her.¹³

Of all the losses from which she suffered in the first years of the new century, none was simultaneously more acute and less personal than the gradual disappearance of her salon circle. To begin with, salons were fragile, evanescent institutions. They tended to appear in preindustrial European cities where there was peace, prosperity, a tiny intelligentsia, an absence of meritocratic intellectual institutions, an intellectually motivated and urbanized nobility, and where wealthy women's intellects were valued by themselves and others. Salons hosted by Jewish women and frequented by gentile guests required even more prerequisites. For Jewish salons to appear and endure there had to be wealthy Jews whose wives and daughters were acculturated as well as gentiles who had financial, erotic or ideological reasons to visit them. The very existence of Rahel Varnhagen's salon between 1790 and 1806 was thus due not solely to her impressive personal qualities, but also to the convergence of the various factors which caused all sixteen of the city's salons to appear in Berlin in these years. To be sure, the heady success she achieved as the city's most well-known salonière was also due to her widely-praised intellectual and social talents. She established a devoted following among a circle of young men who would later constitute Germany's intellectual leadership, including Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt, Johann Fichte, Ludwig Tieck, Friedrich Schlegel, and Friedrich Schleiermacher. Progressive nobles who were not publishing intellectuals, like Gustav von Brinkmann and Wilhelm von Burgsdorff, brought their prestigious noble friends along when they visited the Jewish salons. But the utopian heterogeneity of the salon circles did not endure. Just as the sheer magnetism of Rahel Varnhagen's personality did not create her salon to begin with, her charm alone could not hold her salon together when the times changed radically in Berlin. As political efforts in France turned from internal reform to foreign conquest and as Prussia finally joined the coalition resisting such conquests, imitation of French culture, including salon attendance, became less popular among Berlin's intelligentsia. And so, by the time the correspondence with Rebecca Friedländer began, Varnhagen was bereft and alone. Neither privately nor publicly had the dream of assimilation been fulfilled.

On the surface, Rebecca Friedländer's life had been less traumatic than her friend Rahel's had been. She was born Rebecca Salomon in 1783. Her father, Jacob Salomon, was a jewel merchant serving the Prussian court in Berlin. The Salomons, some of whom changed their name to Saaling, tended to marry into prominent Jewish families. Rebecca's uncle Salomon Bartholdy was married to Bella Itzig, a daughter of the premier Jewish family in Berlin. Their daughter Lea Bartholdy married Moses Mendelssohn's son Abraham, and was the mother of Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, the composer.¹⁴ Friedländer herself married Moses Friedländer in 1801, when she was eighteen. Moses Friedländer was the son of David Friedländer, a banker and colleague of Mendelssohn's who was the author of a controversial 1799 pamphlet proposing that the Jewish community convert en masse to a rationalized version of Christianity. Yet the marriage quickly soured, and by 1804, Friedländer was divorced and living alone in an apartment in the home of another prominent Jewish family, that of Amalie and Jacob Herz Beer. Luckily, divorcing a banker's son had not left her in poverty. For although her father had not possessed an “oversize” fortune, it was divided evenly among all of the six siblings, and each inherited enough to “live without cares.”¹⁵ Her cares may not have been financial, but she did have cares nevertheless. She was often unhappy. Her woes fell into the two central areas of life, love and work. When the correspondence began, Friedländer was in love with Count von Egloffstein. This relationship went badly, as did the one with von Egloffstein's successor, Count Frederic d'Houdetot, a French field officer stationed in Berlin. Her literary efforts also caused her considerable frustration. Her first novel, published in 1808, was poorly reviewed, and her second, a roman à clef only thinly depicting her friend Varnhagen's salon, caused considerable trouble in the friendship. Later, she would convert and adopt her pen name, Regina Frohberg, but she never did remarry.

A decade's more experience with doomed love affairs with noblemen, meddlesome brothers, and the literary scene had made Varnhagen rich in relevant experience. She confided in, consoled, and advised her younger friend. Although for almost all of these five years the two women were living in the same city only three miles apart, for some periods Varnhagen wrote almost daily, when the weather was poor, when she had a migraine, or when lack of a carriage made a visit impossible. Frequently, the topic of her letters turned to the details of how things stood between the two friends. Hannah Arendt, who judged the letters to have been so important because of what they revealed about Varnhagen's Jewishness, gave no hint that one of the major topics of the letters was her extensive analysis of the state of the friendship with Friedländer. Varnhagen was often affectionate, sometimes angry; previous visits and letters were pored over in enormous detail. Discovering this theme is a surprise, for Arendt's comments on Friedländer suggest that she was not a very important friend to Varnhagen, that her chief significance lay merely in her sociological similarity to Rahel in these lonely years. In Arendt's words, the two women's “real solidarity” lasted only until Friedländer's “stupidity became too apparent to her [Varnhagen].” In Arendt's view, the cause of the breakup of their friendship was not just that Friedländer was “insufferable, unnatural, pauvre by nature in her pretensions,” but in the novel that she published in 1810, under the name of Regina Frohberg. According to Arendt's account, the book, intended as “a picture of a German salon … compromised both herself and her entire circle of acquaintances, since no one at the time had any difficulty dubbing in the real names.” Quoting Varnhagen to the effect that “she [Friedländer] is a greater fool than I thought,” Arendt summed it all up by concluding that Varnhagen then proceeded to “cut off relations with her.”¹⁶

Arendt's negative view of Friedländer was, to be sure, shared by others who had the advantage of knowing her personally. Rahel Varnhagen's brother Ludwig Robert wrote a most unflattering poem about her, found among the letters in Krakow. He portrays her as a person utterly lacking in authenticity. He described Friedländer as “honorable, when you deceive, deceptive when you believe.” He concluded by condemning her intellectually as well: “silly when you read books, sillier still when you write them.”¹⁷ Nor did Friedländer's nephew, the writer Paul Heyse, have much positive to say about his aunt. He attributed her success as a salonière merely to her pretty face and her “worldliness.” Heyse wrote of his shock when, as a fourteen-year-old, he happened upon his aunt while she was staying on the bottom floor of the Heyse home in Berlin. In the darkened room she sat “for the entire day all dressed up with white kid gloves,” and “let her fat, pockmarked maid make her tea.”¹⁸

Others may have found Friedländer comical and unworthy of Varnhagen. Yet these letters do not show that Varnhagen herself felt this way, and they definitely contradict Arendt's claim that Varnhagen did not relate “anything particularly secret” to Friedländer. Varnhagen concluded a May 1807 letter: “do understand the friendliness of this letter. It is that. Such a rush of truth, a reverence. No one ever spoke to me in this way.”¹⁹ She frequently wrote about the balance between her affections for Friedländer and Friedländer's affections for her. Earlier in 1807 she wrote that “today, especially, I would have liked to see you and shown my love.”²⁰ By 1809, to be sure, the mutuality of their affections was in doubt. She admonished her friend: “you are not so necessary to me, as I may be to you, so it goes in friendship: but you are not in love with me!”²¹ Quite frequently, her tone was physically intimate. She concluded an 1806 letter: “I embrace you for a quarter hour.”²²

Interpreting the meaning of these passages is a tricky business. This was an era in which language was often flowery and overblown. Even without seeing these letters, Kay Goodman suggested in 1980 that the nature of the relationship between the two women should indeed be characterized as a lesbian one, although not necessarily in the physical sense.²³ Surely these and other passages in the letters could provide additional evidence for Goodman's provocative claim. But there are good reasons for refraining from use of such controversial labeling altogether. Lillian Faderman's term “romantic friendship” would seem a better label than lesbian for this relationship.²⁴ There is rarely evidence to show that romantic friendships were actually sexually consummated, however lavish the language and however much time was spent together in intimate settings. Others have supported Goodman in arguing that by denying the women the label “lesbian” one is depriving the contemporary homosexual movement of its heroes in the German past.²⁵ Yet without some explicit evidence in the letters of erotic experience, use of this label would seem unwarranted and imprecise. Even Varnhagen's most ardently passionate claims do not provide evidence for going beyond the double assertion that this was a deeply affectionate friendship and that previous biographers minimized its importance in Rahel Varnhagen von Ense's life. The question of whether Karl August Varnhagen found the openly declared romance of the friendship embarrassing in the terms of his own day, and therefore censored the letters for that reason, must remain a mystery for now.

Similarly, more research is necessary before making a final decision on whether the 1810 publication of Schmerz der Liebe, Friedländer's second novel, really caused the end of the friendship. The novel, whose characters were all aristocrats with high titles, was a story of competition for love, worry about misalliance, rebellion against arranged marriage, and enjoyment of luxury. The narrative unfolds by the reader's overhearing the conversations at one Gräfin von Aarberg's salon and reading the letters exchanged by the characters. The novel, like Friedländer's other novels, received a pretty devastating reception. Her publisher, to be sure, advertised that her “touching situations” and “striking character sketches are totally the work of the feminine feeling for delicacy,” and that her new book would count on receiving the “approval of the elegant reading world.”²⁶ But her nephew Heyse portrayed her as lacking any talent at all, and considered it a riddle how her “wretched products could have found a publisher at all.”²⁷ Karl August Varnhagen von Ense published an utterly damning review of three of Friedländer's books in 1811 under a pseudonym, August Becker. He began by blaming the rush of mediocre women's writing on their participation in intellectual interchanges, which led some of the women to believe that they themselves were intellectuals. In his opinion, their tales of private life and of love should not have been allowed to emerge from “the secrets of hidden hours.”²⁸ He had nothing, absolutely nothing good to say about Friendländer's books. In his view, the characters were thin, the plots simple minded, the dialogue stilted. He concluded by wishing that the author would enjoy “in other circles all of the happy success which is denied her in this one.”

Granted then, her work may not have been very good. But was Arendt correct that it caused the end of the friendship? The letters suggest that this was not the case. In May of 1810 Friedländer was apparently considering withdrawing the novel from the publisher, although the printing had begun. Varnhagen herself urged Friedländer not to withdraw it, and stressed that its author should look on her novel as a stranger would. “That is what I would do also … it [the novel] can hurt me as much as someone in China; because it pains you so much, we will forget this altercation even faster than I would normally.”²⁹ In August, she recounted how her other friends had been asking her for her reaction to the book; she told them that she did not want to withdraw the novel from the publisher, as it could not hurt her. The friends claimed that Friedländer should have withdrawn it behind Varnhagen's back, but she reported to Friedländer that her response had been that “a play of fantasy should be permitted.” She did admit that “the incident is annoying,” but counseled her friend: “don't make anything out of it. Every author is bound to be attacked.”³⁰

Varnhagen's sympathy for her friend's plight did not originate in her own experience with publication. Her very reluctance to publish has in fact been hailed by some literary historians. These scholars' enthusiasm for her position on the fringe of the literary establishment follows from their own relativism about the division between craft and high art.³¹ Were Rahel Varnhagen's letters a work of literature? Did she see them as such? Friedländer's literary situation at the time makes the letters to her a fitting source to answer both of these questions. Comments about publishing penned by one brilliant “dilettante” to one mediocre “professional author” are useful in questioning whether traditional categories of literary work ought to be abolished. This period is precisely the right one, moreover, for investigating the relationship between women's letters and women's literature. The last two decades of the eighteenth century were a glorious epoch for a letter-writing culture. This was a time when the content and style of letters was less bound to formula than ever before. Simultaneously, letters played a more important role in the lives of intellectuals than they would in the subsequent century. Newspapers were infrequent and censored in Germany, a country also lacking a capital city. New intellectual disciplines and new kinds of literature were born in these years from letters. Travelers' letters grew into anthropological observations and books of travel reportage; the epistolary novel grew into the psychological novel; scholars' correspondences came to be published in fledgling scholarly journals.³² But at the very same time that the stuff of private communications found new outlets as public, published commodities which could be sold for a profit, the culture of letterwriting itself became more public. It was Rolf Engelsing who aptly called writing letters in the eighteenth century a “half-public” activity.³³ Letters were often read aloud; they were sometimes sent on to a third person; their style and contents could become known to important strangers; they could also be published. This was a setting in which the distinction between private and public was not as fixed or as comprehensive as it would subsequently become. Letters offered a chance to express oneself and to become famous, all without leaving home.

In their “half-public” quality, letters were very much like salons. Both institutions offered intellectual women a stage which they lacked in later decades, when intellectual life became more formal. Letters and salons both allowed women, who remained excluded from educational and employment opportunities, to participate in the literary culture. The importance of letters in the literary culture was due partly to the fact that in the eighteenth century literature was a young and decentralized enterprise for which formal training was not required. But letters and salons could also play a central role then because wealthy homes in these years were still public places. Letter writing and salon participation were two ways that talented women could become famous without leaving home or publishing their words. If the women's role in public life was even more restricted because they were Jewish, letters were an especially important medium. In this way Rahel Varnhagen's success at letters and at salons was a testimony to her own talents as much as a testimony to the structure of literary possibilities at the time.

The question of which letters were public and which were private seems to have depended greatly on the letter. Sometimes it apparently was understood that sharing the letter was expected, even wished. On Christmas Eve of 1806, Varnhagen announced that she was writing especially clearly so that Friedländer could read the letter aloud to her guests.³⁴ Sometimes she wrote her friend of her plans to share Friedländer's letters with a third person, or instructed her to convey her impressions of a third person's letter to that person.³⁵ Yet other letters were clearly for Friedländer's eyes alone. She was exhorted to “honor this letter with deep silence,” and not share its contents “even indirectly;” another letter's contents were especially to be kept from Friedländer's sister Marianne Saaling.³⁶

Many passages show that the two women understood letter writing to be a serious intellectual endeavor. Some letters contain long evaluations of books read, or short essays on topics of interest. Varnhagen occasionally stressed emotional issues connected with writing: “even if speaking and writing do not help at all, by no means should one stop speaking and writing.” On another occasion she insisted, “you should write, and get it out! That does the mind, body, soul, and heart good.”³⁷ She herself knew full well how little she could accomplish when she suffered from migraine, breast ache, or extreme nervous exhaustion. So as well as exhorting her friend to write, she sometimes admonished her not to read or write until she had rested. These comments suggest that the women understood reading, speaking, and writing letters to be intellectual work. Literary historians who have argued that letters as well as her conversation in salons should be classified as literature should be glad to see these lines. These scholars have focused on Varnhagen's oft-cited boast that “I am as unique as the greatest figure on this earth. The greatest artist, philosopher, or poet is not above me.”³⁸ Varnhagen did explicitly link salon-style conversations, letters, novels, and memoirs as having aesthetically similar structures.³⁹ Her own statements expressing a kind of literary relativism, equating unpublished words with published words, has matched these scholars' own rejection of traditional definitions of high art. Silvia Bovenschen's “pre-aesthetic” category, which seems to include virtually all varieties of unpublished writing, has been presented as a way to include more women in the literary canon.⁴⁰

While the urge to reevaluate accepted definitions of artistic creation may be a well-founded and timely one, removing the boundary between unpublished and published words altogether in the end causes more confusion than illumination. As one of the relativist literary historians has himself noted, labeling Rahel Varnhagen's letters as literature requires making endless demarcations between some letters which are literature and others which are not.⁴¹ The letters to Friedländer provide a more specific reason for not equating unpublished with published words. And that reason is Varnhagen's own discussion of why she did not join in writing for publication. In a letter of 1807, she announced that she could do a better translation of a book than the one she had just read. She concluded: “I have talent. Should I use it? and earn something? Oh God! I know myself already! Some abilities; how I will use them—impossible! Nature did a lot for me inside; the other gods all stayed away from my cradle.”⁴² Her own revelation that her failure to publish was due more to her own lack of ability and temperament than to a self-conscious rejection of the medium is consistent with an older interpretation of her relationship to the printed word. It was Otto Berdrow who attributed her inability to write for publication to her lack of discipline and to her need to express herself to a specific, known individual rather than to an abstract, unknown reader.⁴³ All this suggests that while we work to insure that gifted women's words are not forgotten simply because they were not published in a traditional literary form, we should also pay attention to the role that individual temperament played in individual decisions not to publish.

In the past scholars have often selected the “most important” dimension of Rahel Varnhagen mainly on the basis of their own ideological passions. Traditional literary historians have seen her as the muse of the era, feminists have claimed her as a women writer, and pro- or anti-assimilationist Jews have blamed or praised her according to how they saw her own relationship to her Jewishness. But the meaning of Rahel Varnhagen's life cannot be grasped if it is separated into compartments. All research into the world of the Berlin salons shows that Jewish women then and there possessed both opportunities for assimilation and concomitant sadnesses not shared by the Jewish men of the era. Although Varnhagen rarely referred to Jews directly in these letters, the love advice she pressed on Friedländer and her complaints about her lack of access to good society can only make sense when interpreted in light of the fact that they were written to another Jewish woman. The intimacy of her friendship with Friedländer was surely also linked to the women's common ethnic and social fate. The rediscovery and reconstruction of the richly detailed world described in the letters to Friedländer should be the occasion for finally seeing the woman in a whole and integrated way. Namely, not as a Jew in general or as a woman in general, but as a Jewish woman whose social environment combined with her individual personality to allow for glamorous opportunities and also to cause great suffering.

Notes

1. It was difficult to decide what to call the persons discussed in this essay. Women and men are both referred to by their last name. Since Rahel Varnhagen is known to posterity by a name acquired after that period discussed here, she is referred to by Varnhagen rather than Levin. But preserving historically authentic names is also an important principle. Since Rebecca Friedländer's subsequent name, Regina Frohberg, is scarcely better known than the name she had at the time, she is referred to here in the same way she was referred to in the original letters.

2. For discussion of the situation of Jewish women in the ensuing centuries, all of which points to diminished success at social assimilation, see the concluding chapter of Ingeborg Drewitz, Berliner Salons: Gesellschaft und Literatur zwischen Aufklärung und Industriezeitalter (Berlin, 1965) and Marion Kaplan, “Tradition and Transition: The Acculturation, Assimilation and Integration of Jews in Imperial Germany, A Gender Analysis,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 28 (1983). For general background on the late nineteenth-century situation of Jews in Berlin, see Fritz Stern, Gold and Iron: Bismarck, Bleichröder, and the Building of the German Empire (New York, 1979).

3. An accessible collection of Varnhagen's letters was edited by Friedhelm Kemp in four volumes: Rahel Varnhagen: Briefwechsel mit Alexander von der Marwitz (München, 1966); Rahel Varnhagen: Briefwechsel mit Karl August Varnhagen (München, 1967); Rahel Varnhagen im Umgang mit ihren Freunden (München, 1967); Rahel Varnhagen und ihre Zeit (München, 1968). (Henceforth referred to as Kemp I, II, III, and IV.) An expanded, corrected edition of the Kemp edition was published in Munich in 1979, but this edition was not available to me.

4. On the feminist concern with Rahel Varnhagen in the early twentieth century, see Kay Goodman, “The Impact of Rahel Varnhagen on Women in the Nineteenth Century,” in Gestaltet und Gestaltend: Frauen in der deutschen Literatur, vol. 10 of Amsterdamer Beiträge zur neueren Germanistik, ed. Marianne Burkhard (Amsterdam, 1980), pp. 125-53. See also Anna Plothow, Die Begründerinnen der deutschen Frauenbewegung (Leipzig, 1907), chapter 1; Lily Braun, Die Frauenfrage: Ihre geschichtliche Entwicklung und ihre wirtschaftliche Seite (Leipzig, 1901), pp. 90-101, and Helene Lange and Gertrud Bäumer, Handbuch der Frauenbewegung; Erster Teil, Die Geschichte der Frauenbewegung in den Kulturländern (Berlin, 1901), p. 21.

   The Heine quote is cited in Siegfried Prower, Heine's Jewish Comedy (Oxford, 1983), p. 213. The deathbed quote is: “Was so lange Zeit meines Lebens nur die grösste Schmach, das herbste Leid und Unglück war, eine Jüdin geboren zu sein, um keinen Preis möcht' ich das jetzt missen.” It is cited on page 3 of Hannah Arendt's Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman (London, 1957). One reviewer of the Arendt biography noted that Varnhagen's full deathbed citation shows a more positive attitude toward Christianity than implied by this one sentence: see Heinrich Schnee's review of the book in Historisches Jahrbuch 81 (1960), p. 458. (I am grateful to my colleague David Biale for reminding me of the importance of this reviewer's critique.) For a sensitive discussion of many Jewish historians' ambivalence about Rahel Varnhagen and the Jewish salonières, see Maximilian Stein, “Paul Heyse und die Berliner Salons,” in Stein's Vorträge und Ansprachen (Frankfurt/M., 1932). For a contemporary nineteenth-century critique of Rahel Varnhagen's relationship to Judaism by Gabriel Riesser, see Konrad Feilchenfeldt, “Die Anfänge des Kults um Rahel Varnhagen und seine Kritiker,” in W. Grab und J. H. Schoeps, eds., Juden im Vormärz und in der Revolution von 1848 (Sachsenheim, 1982).

5. See Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen. Also of interest are Arendt's collected essays on the theme, edited by Ron H. Feldman, The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age (New York, 1978); Elizabeth Young-Breuhl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven and London 1982), and Sharon Muller, “The Pariah Syndrome,” Response 39 (Summer, 1980), pp. 52-57.

6. For instance, see Silvia Bovenschen, Die imaginierte Weiblichkeit: Exemplarische Untersuchungen zu kulturgeschichtlichen und literarischen Präsentationsformen des Weiblichen (Frankfurt/M., 1979).

7. These quotations are reprinted in the Fall 1983 brochure of Matthes und Seitz (Munich), publishers of the new collected works of Rahel Varnhagen. See Uwe Schweikert, “Ich lasse das Leben auf mich regnen: Rahel Varnhagen—Ein Porträt aus ihren Briefen,” Frankfurter Rundschau (March 5, 1983). See also Konrad Feilchenfeldt, “Rahel Varnhagen in neuer Sicht,” Neue Züricher Zeitung (March 5, 1983).

8. The four-volume edition is that edited by Kemp; see note 3. The editors of the new ten-volume edition (see note 7) are Konrad Feilchenfeldt, Uwe Schweikert, and Rahel E. Steiner.

9. See Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen, p. x. On Karl August's Varnhagen's disguise of Friedländer, see also Kemp III, pp. 413-14.

10. For a survey of the collection's contents, see Ludwig Stern, Die Varnhagen von Ensesche Sammlung in der königlichen Bibliothek zu Berlin (Berlin, 1911). For a summary of the search for the lost material, see Nigel Lewis, Paper Chase: Mozart Beethoven, Bach … The Search for Their Lost Music (London, 1981). My own shorter report is “The Varnhagen Collection is in Krakow,” American Archivist, 44 (1981), pp. 223-28.

11. In Kemp, III, pp. 267-92, 18 of Varnhagen's 346 letters to Friedländer were republished. All of them originally appeared in Rahel, Ein Buch des Andenkens für ihre Freunde (Berlin, 1834).

12. For background on the economic activities of Berlin Jewry, see Eugen Wolbe, Geschichte der Juden in Berlin und der Mark Brandenburg (Berlin, 1937), Selma Stern, Der Preussische Staat und die Juden, 3 volumes (Tübingen, 1971). See also Henri Brunschwig's essay, “The Struggle for the Emancipation of the Jews in Prussia,” which is included as an appendix to his Enlightenment and Romanticism in Eighteenth-Century Prussia (Chicago, 1974). For a general background on the salons in Berlin, see the Drewitz volume cited in note 2 above; Karl Hillebrand, “Die Berliner Gesellschaft in den Jahren 1789-1815,” in Uhde Bernays, ed., Unbekannte Essays (Bern 1955); Bertha Meyer, Salon Sketches (New York, 1938); Mary Hargrave, Some German Women and Their Salons (London, n.d.). Two books written during the Nazi era, useful in spite of their ideological perspective, include Hans Karl Krüger, Berliner Romantik und Berliner Judentum (Bonn, 1939), and Kurt Fervers, Berliner Salons: Die Geschichte einer grossen Verschwörung (Munich, 1940).

13. This summary of Varnhagen's life story until 1805 is based mainly on material found in Otto Berdrow, Rahel Varnhagen: Ein Lebens- und Zeitbild (Stuttgart, 1902).

14. It is unclear when each of the Salomons changed their name to Saaling, and when each converted. Jacob Jacobson, in his Jüdische Trauungen in Berlin, 1723-1859 (Berlin 1968) (henceforth, Trauungen), p. 440, claims that Frohberg was born “Saaling.” But a poem dedicated to Friedländer to be sung at her birthday in 1786, found among Julie Heyse's papers in the Paul Heyse Collection (at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich, Rep. VIII, 17), refers to her as “Madame Salomon.” She herself could not have converted before 1801, since she married Moses Friedländer in a conventional Jewish ceremony that year, which would not have been possible if she had converted. For additional biographical information on Friedländer, see Ludwig Geiger, “Marie oder die Folgen des ersten Fehltritts, ein unbekannter Roman,” Zeitschrift für Bücherfreunde N.F. 9 (1917), pp. 58-62.

    The reason that Bella Itzig's and Friedländer's uncle, whose original name was Levin Jacob Salomon, had children named Bartholdy was that Bella Itzig had previously been married to a Bartholdy, and her second husband, Friedländer's uncle, changed his name to Bartholdy after they married in 1775. See Trauungen, p. 226. On the Mendelssohn-Bartholdy family, see Heinrich Eduard Jacob, Felix Mendelssohn und seine Zeit (Frankfurt/M., 1959), pp. 33-35.

15. Little is known about Moses Friedländer. See Trauungen, p. 440, and, on his attempt to be exempted from the Jewish marriage tax because his mother belonged to the Itzig family, see Karoline Cauer, Oberhofbankier und Hofbaurat (Frankfurt/M., 1965), p. 36. The fact that Friedländer was living in the Beer home is known because several of Rahel Varnhagen's letters of 1807 were addressed to her there. On the Beer family, see the Beer family papers in the Archive of the Leo Baeck Institute in New York City. On the division of the inheritance of the Salomon family, see Paul Heyse (her nephew), Jugenderinnerungen und Bekenntnisse (Berlin, 1901), p. 6.

16. Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen, p. 107.

17. The poem is untitled and unsigned. In Karl August's Varnhagen von Ense's handwriting above the poem is written “Rebecka Friedländer (Frohberg)” and below the poem “Ludwig Robert.” (The poem is reprinted in Geiger, “Marie,” p. 58.)

18. Heyse, Jugenderinnerungen, p. 9.

19. Letter of 15 May, 1807. All of the letters cited here will appear in my forthcoming book: Briefe an eine Freundin: Rahel Varnhagen an Rebecca Friedländer (Cologne, Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 1985). All quotes are in Varnhagen's original German, which sometimes is incorrect in grammar and spelling.

20. Letter of 18 January, 1807.

21. Letter of 16 February, 1809.

22. Letter of January, 1806.

23. Goodman, “The Impact of Rahel Varnhagen.”

24. See Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York, 1981). Although at the outset Faderman's term avoids the problems of the term lesbianism, one reviewer has noted that Faderman actually equates the two terms and the two experiences. See Isabel V. Hull's review of Faderman's book in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 8 (Summer 1983), pp. 708-9.

25. This objection was raised when an earlier version of this essay was presented at “Condition and Consciousness: German Women in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: An International Conference,” held at the University of Minnesota in April, 1983.

26. This phrase was part of the ad for Friedländer's novel, Die Brautleute oder Schuld im Edelmuth (Wien, 1814), and was printed at the conclusion of her novel Bestimmung (Wien, 1814). The rest of her published novels include: Louise (Berlin, 1808); Schmerz der Liebe (Berlin, 1810); Das Opfer (Amsterdam und Leipzig, 1812); Verrath und Treue (Berlin, 1812); Marie (Dresden, 1812); Darstellungen aus dem menschlichen Leben (Vienna, 1814); Das Gelübde (Vienna, 1816); Erzählungen (Vienna, 1817); Herbst-Blumen (Vienna, 1817); Gustav Staning (Vienna, 1817); Die Rückkehr (Frankfurt/M., 1825); Der Liebe Kämpfe (1827); Eigene und Fremde Schuld (Leipzig, 1837); and Vergangenheit und Zukunft (Gera, 1840).

27. Heyse, Jugenderinnerungen, p. 9.

28. Karl August Varnhagen von Ense's review was published under the pseudonym “August Becker.” He reviewed Louise, Schmerz der Liebe, and Erzählungen, in Die Musen (Berlin, 1811). The copy of the review found among the letters to Friedländer in Krakow has the name “Varnhagen” written under the name “Becker” in Karl August Varnhagen von Ense's handwriting.

29. Letter of May, 1810.

30. Letter of 9 August, 1810.

31. See the unpublished M.A. thesis by Klaus Haase, “Rahel Varnhagens Brief-theorie: Eine Untersuchung zum literarischen Charakter des Privatbriefs in der Romantik” (Munich, Ludwig Maximilian University, 1977).

32. Two good introductions to the literary profession in eighteenth-century Germany are H. Kiesel and P. Münch, Gesellschaft und Literatur in 18. Jh.: Voraussetzungen und Entstehung des literarischen Markts in Deutschland (Munich, 1977), and George Steinhausen, Geschichte des deutschen Briefs (Berlin, 1889).

33. Rolf Engelsing, Der Bürger als Leser: Lesergeschichte in Deutschland 1500-1800 (Stuttgart, 1974), p. 296. See also Reinhard M. G. Nickisch, “Die Frau als Briefschreiberin im Zeitalter der deutschen Aufklärung,” Wolfenbüttler Studien zur Aufklärung 3 (Wolfenbüttel, 1976), pp. 29-66.

34. Letter of December, 1806.

35. Letter of 28 March, 1810.

36. Letter of 14 September, 1806.

37. Letter of 14 December, 1807.

38. See Kemp, III, p. 262.

39. See Hase, “Rahel Varnhagens Brieftheorie,” passim.

40. In addition to the book cited in note 6 above, see Silvia Bovenschen, “Über die Frage: Gibt es eine weibliche Aesthetik?” Aesthetik und Kommunikation 15 (1976), pp. 60-75. For a critique of Bovenschen, see Elke Frederikson, “Die Frau als Autorin zur Zeit der Romantik,” Amsterdamer Beiträge zur neueren Germanistik 10 (Amsterdam, 1980), pp. 83-108.

41. Karl Haase, “Rahel Varnhagens Brieftheorie,” p. 14 and p. 33.

42. Letter of 13 January, 1807.

43. Berdrow, Rahel Varnhagen, pp. 217-20.