SOURCE: Tewarson, Heidi Thomann. “1833 Rahel Varnhagen, Salonnière and Epistolary Writer, Publishes Rahel: Ein Buch des Andenkens für ihre Freunde, a Collection of Letters and Diary Entries.” In Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture, 1096-1996, edited by Sander L. Gilman and Jack Zipes, pp. 136-42. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997.

[In the following essay, Tewarson introduces the epistolary tradition in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Germany, tracing its private and public manifestations and noting its contended status as literature. Tewarson uses this background to examine the style of Rahel's writings and to note her influence on the genre.]

The unusual work, bearing only the author's first name in the title, was both a modest and daring endeavor. It left open the question of authorship while at the same time alluding to the biblical Rachel. Clearly intended to memorialize Rahel and edify a readership that had known and admired her, this volume and other posthumous publications of Rahel's writings soon began to assume overt political meanings. As the congeries of more or less retrograde German states evolved into the autocratic and hegemonic German Empire, Rahel's commitment to reason, tolerance, and human progress stood not only in stark contrast to a reactionary age but also as an example of the best that Enlightenment thought had produced. At the same time, the life and writings of this Jewish woman chronicle nearly half a century of aspirations for emancipation and assimilation. These efforts ended exactly one hundred years later with Hitler's ascent to power. In her biography, Rahel Varnhagen, the Life of a Jewess (1957), all but completed before her emigration in 1933, Hannah Arendt presented Jewish assimilation as a failed experiment.

Encouraged by the response of the initial publication, Varnhagen brought out, barely a year later, an expanded three-volume edition of Rahel: Ein Buch des Andenkens, again arranging Rahel's texts in chronological order. In time, the small but unusual Rahel oeuvre comprised many volumes: volumes 1-3 constituted the Buch des Andenkens (1834); volumes 4-6 contained Rahel's correspondence with Karl August Varnhagen (1874-75), and volume 7 that with her friend David Veit (1861); and volume 8 (in the present Collected Works) includes love letters to and from Rahel and diary entries (1877), as well as her commentaries on the writings of Angelus Silesius and Saint-Martin (1849). This work, in part conceived and shaped by Rahel herself, remains unique. Yet it evolved from the tradition of epistolary writing practiced by both men and women, notable and ordinary, since the beginning of the eighteenth century. To understand the distinct place of Rahel's letters within this context, it is important to briefly survey the modern epistolary tradition in Germany.

The eighteenth century might well be designated the epoch of the letter. As the middle classes assumed a greater role in the economic, social, and intellectual life of their countries, there emerged a distinctly bourgeois consciousness guided by Enlightenment thought. The private or intimate letter, because it was usually informed by a subjective viewpoint, served as an important medium in this process. Letter writing was also intimately connected both to the cult of friendship, underpinned by utopian notions of the uniqueness of the individual, and to the emerging belief in romantic love.

Furthermore, this form of writing permitted women to participate in the literary world for the first time. Christian Fürchtegott Gellert, in his treatise on the letter, presented women as exemplary letter writers. In his view, women most successfully fulfilled his demand for naturalness, liveliness, and literary agility, as well as for a pleasing style. But although women excelled at letters, epistolary writing did not at that time evolve into a genre unique to women. Rather, men embraced previously derogated feminine qualities and used the private letter to express and explore their inner lives and sensibilities. The importance of the letter in the bourgeois imagination is further demonstrated by the appearance toward the end of the century of a new literary genre—the epistolary novel. Richardson's Pamela, Rousseau's Julie ou La Nouvelle Héloïse, Choderlos de Laclos's Les liaisons dangereuses, Sophie von la Roche's Das Fräulein von Sternheim, and Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, to name but the most acclaimed, were no longer action novels. Instead, they drew their subject matter almost entirely from the protagonists' emotional states, feelings, and thoughts.

If the eighteenth century was important for the popularization and perfection of private letter writing, the nineteenth was notable for the publication of a great variety of correspondences and epistolary collections. In fact, printing private letters became so popular that by the second half of the century one can speak of a veritable explosion of such publications, among them the epistolary exchanges of kings and queens, princes and princesses, political figures, men of learning, artists, composers, women of note, and so forth. At the same time, serious reservations arose about the practice. In 1804, for example, a dispute erupted over Wilhelm Gleim's literary estate and the publication of correspondences contained therein. Similarly, Dorothea Mendelssohn Schlegel's decision to burn most of the letters in her possession with the intent of preventing their future publication further illustrates a critical attitude about the propriety of bringing private matters into print. (She encouraged others, including Henriette Herz, to do likewise.)

The central questions were whether private letters qualified as publishable literature and whether communications that were intended for the eyes of an intimate friend or at most a small circle of acquaintances ought to be released to the wider public. Modern notions of authorship (that is, who is entitled to “authorize” a work) thus conflicted with the public's appetite for such reading material. During the eighteenth century no sharp distinction existed as yet between the private and the literary spheres of writing. The absence of such a division is precisely what encouraged the flowering of epistolary writing. To the considerable extent that friendship became an essential factor in the lives of the literate classes and letter writing was turned into an art, the demand for published letters grew.

Around the same time, Goethe narrowed the definition of literature to three main genres—poetry, drama, and epic prose. He thus excluded or, more precisely, marginalized epistolary writing, until then an integral part of belles lettres (both in France and the German states). Goethe nevertheless attributed great value to this kind of writing: “Letters are among the most important memorials the individual can leave behind.” Like many of his contemporaries, he carried on wide-ranging correspondences with prominent men. But, as the quotation indicates, he appreciated letters primarily for their historical and documentary value. They served as a key to a person's life and work and, in his case, as material for his literary efforts.

Letters, like memoirs and diaries, differ from other literary genres in several respects. They are much more vulnerable than texts expressly written for publication. Not only subject to being lost or burned, they are also very much dependent on the intermediary role of a collector-editor. Furthermore, the very openness of this form of writing allows for a great many possibilities of presentation: as correspondences between two or more persons, as collections of letters by one writer or as selections by several, with entries arranged chronologically or around a theme, excerpted or presented in their entirety, and so forth. From the great number and variety of nineteenth-century epistolary publications, three stand out as formative, influential, and illustrative of the aesthetic and didactic potential of such publications. The first is by Goethe, the luminary who for half a century dominated the literary and cultural stage; the second, a seminal first work, is by the romantic writer Bettina von Arnim. The third is the epistolary work of Rahel Levin Varnhagen, which is also the focus of this essay.

The Briefwechsel zwischen Schiller und Goethe (Correspondence between Schiller and Goethe; 1828-29) exemplifies Goethe's views and the position he assigned to letters within his oeuvre. Prepared and published by the author himself toward the end of his life, it quickly became, like so many of Goethe's endeavors, the standard for subsequent epistolary publications. The letters Goethe had exchanged with Schiller between 1794 and 1804 clearly were of great importance to him. Theirs was an epistolary conversation prompted not by a meeting of kindred souls but by common literary and aesthetic concerns. Besides documenting a most interesting discourse regarding their current literary projects, the correspondence testifies to the two authors' lofty efforts to set up criteria for a German national literature and theater modeled on but also differentiated from Greek classicism. It traces the evolution of their ideas on questions of form and shows how these inquiries went far beyond their narrow confines to address the much more encompassing task of finding the literary means to adequately represent the modern world. Thus, it can be claimed that these letters were from the beginning intended for publication, as an elucidation of Schiller and Goethe's other formal aesthetic writings.

In 1835, less than ten years later and three years after Goethe's death, another work appeared: Goethes Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde: Seinem Denkmal (Goethe's correspondence with a child). It was written by Bettina von Arnim, who used the letters she had exchanged with Goethe and his mother, Frau Rath Goethe, mostly between 1807 and 1811 and intermittently until 1832. The actual letters, however, form but a small part of a work of over five hundred pages, which may be more accurately termed an epistolary novel. Like Goethe, Bettina von Arnim published her book for a specific reason: to memorialize the poet she revered throughout her life and to honor their unusual relationship, in which she portrayed herself as his muse and inspiration. Additionally, she intended it as a memorial to a time that enabled someone like Goethe to conceive and depict a more daring idea of man and human relations. As such, the book represents an implicit criticism of the repressive Period of Reaction (1815-48). Although a young woman rather than a child at the time of the actual letter exchange and a mature woman at the time of composing the novel, the author's posing as a child created an effective literary device. It permitted her to disregard convention; to speak freely, even bluntly; and to juxtapose the retrograde real with the free and often fantastic world of her imagination. A combination of Enlightenment thought and romantic exaltation of nature, art, and love informs the book.

Additionally, Goethes Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde, although it contributed to the Goethe cult then on the rise, is an early female bildungsroman, or artist's novel. Bettina von Arnim, who also exhibited considerable talents as a composer, sculptor, and artist, explores in this and subsequent epistolary novels her own development as a creative individual from the vantage point of the mature woman and writer. A distinguishing feature of her writing is the dialogic form that characterizes all of her works: in the epistolary novels, she speaks with poets—Goethe, Caroline von Günderode, and her brother, Clemens Brentano—whereas her political books are addressed to King Frederick William IV, who reigned in Prussia at that time.

If Goethe took great care in preserving the documentary value of his correspondence with Schiller, and Bettina von Arnim freely fictionalized them, Rahel embodies a third approach that was never repeated. Although she published little and only anonymously during her lifetime, it is now quite well known that she carefully prepared parts of her wide-ranging correspondence for posthumous publication. Almost from the beginning she collected and preserved her own letters and those written to her, whether they came from notables, friends, members of her family, or her servants. At the same time, Karl August Varnhagen's role in this project cannot be overestimated. With acuity and vision, he created a collection of autographs that remained unparalleled in his century and even now ranks among the best with regard to variety and comprehensiveness. The repository of some six thousand letters written by and to Rahel represents a most valuable component of the Varnhagen collection. Recent research has shown the often maligned Varnhagen as an unusually conscientious and careful editor whose changes and omissions were, for the most part, intended to protect the privacy of the living or dictated by the repressive spirit of the times. Nonetheless, his editorial principles had far-reaching consequences for almost all subsequent editions and anthologies of Rahel's writings until World War II. Even today, the historical critical editions now in progress will draw from Varnhagen's copious notes on many now forgotten persons with whom Rahel corresponded. Equally influential was Varnhagen's focus on Rahel as an outstanding personality rather than on her achievements as a writer and salonnière. Moreover, because they preferred not to do battle with Rahel's notoriously cryptic handwriting, most scholars and authors relied on the neat copies her husband made of a large number of her letters in preparation for future publication. These, however, also bear his mark because he standardized her idiosyncratic grammar and orthography and frequently replaced her spirited or even coarse expressions with more neutral and diplomatic ones. All this indicates that Rahel's literary oeuvre cannot be separated from the history of the way it was edited and published. In fact, it is doubtful that it would exist in anything approaching its present form without Varnhagen's loving devotion and dedicated efforts. In important respects, therefore, Rahel's literary legacy represents the result of a collaborative undertaking by a husband and wife team as well as a fortuitous understanding between gentile and Jew. Their editorial manipulations notwithstanding, Rahel's letters hold their own as literary texts of great originality and authenticity.

As an author Rahel distinguished herself from all others in making the letter, this recently marginalized genre, her almost exclusive literary means. It was indeed an appropriate vehicle, for she was marginal: a woman and a Jew, unmarried until age forty-three. We may justifiably ask what qualifies these letters as literature of a distinct genre. For one, there is the sheer volume, indicating that here was an author who dedicated a good part of her life to writing and for whom writing constituted an existential necessity. The Gesammelte Werke (Collected works) of ten volumes (eight of them facsimile reprints) are being supplemented at present by a critical edition of six more of mostly unpublished material (three featuring Rahel's correspondences with women, two presenting family letters, and one containing her diaries and other writings). Like any artistic oeuvre, Rahel's epistolary work evolved in terms of both style and content.

Second, although Rahel never aspired to become a novelist or poet and maintained that she could write only letters, she incorporated many other genres within the letter: aphorisms, epigrams, anecdotes, poetic passages, travel reports, diary entries, literary criticism, philosophical “treatises,” literary and music reviews, dream recordings, and essays on a great variety of general topics, such as education, women, political developments, society and sociability, and progress. Although Rahel, an intellectual woman, had at best an eclectic education and was subject to frequent interruptions, she employed these minor forms effectively to convey a wealth of ideas, and they served her well.

Third, Rahel displayed a high degree of sensitivity in regard to formal, stylistic, and linguistic aspects of writing. She was familiar with the current literary debates as well as the tradition of epistolary writing. She particularly admired the letters of Madame de Sévigné, Ninon de Lenclos, Voltaire, Mirabeau, and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. But early on she began to formulate an epistolary theory of her own—one dictated by the needs of her specific situation as an extraordinarily intelligent woman, a Jew, and a salonnière of renown. In devising her writing strategies, she pursued a path that differed from the classicist principles established by Goethe and Schiller. This may be surprising, given the fact that the significance of Goethe was for Rahel at least as momentous as for Bettina von Arnim. Indeed, the effect of his work (rather than his personality) was such that her being and thought cannot be understood without considering her apperception and appreciation of Goethe (Hamburger 1983). His mature works in particular became her lifelong avocation and subject of study, from which she drew consolation, strength, and inspiration, as well as confirmation for her own thoughts and feelings. Today, she is acknowledged as one of the first of many Jewish interpreters of Goethe. That she did not emulate him in her writing points to her own self-possession and to her awareness that his kind of artistic perfection could be attained only by a man of genius, secure in his personal, social, and artistic identity and able to draw and build on established traditions. In contrast to the many women novelists attempting to conform to the norms of classicist literature, Rahel chose the letter, an infinitely flexible genre, and adapted it to her needs as an author without a tradition or accepted identity.

The overriding characteristic of Rahel's written communication is her insistence on dialogue. “I do not like to write monologues, but rather want to write conversations such as they animatedly occur within the individual.” Speeches or monologues, she claimed, tended to be presented “like a herbarium, according to an ever lifeless order” (Varnhagen 1979, 3:183). Her writing was thus never self-contained but reached out in its continual struggle toward genuine communication. The letter is of course inherently dialogic, but Rahel pursued the dialogic form with a purposefulness that far surpassed most other epistolary writing, including Bettina von Arnim's. Not only did she respond to letters in great detail and point by point, adjusting the tone and level of argument to the sensibilities and capabilities of the recipient, she demanded the same from her partners. Admonitions such as, “Answer me!” or “I want answers,” can be found throughout her letters. The writer Jean Paul (1763-1825) early on appreciated the “artist” in Rahel, but he also perceptively added that she could write only if she wrote to someone.

Rahel thus intentionally practiced a style of writing that approximated spoken conversation by aiming for spontaneity, naturalness, and the illusion of immediacy and physical presence. In later years, she liked to situate a letter not only with the date and place but also with a detailed weather report, explaining that this served to excuse her unmethodical way of writing. The weather constituted at least in part “the situation of the day” for her, and she intended the recipient to be aware of the frame of mind in which she wrote the epistle. She wanted a letter to “be a portrait of the moment in which it is written.” This attempted spontaneity largely precluded the kind of aesthetic refinement and idealization demanded of literature at the time.

Implicitly referring to Goethe, Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, Friedrich Gentz, and others whom she admired for their elegant ways with language, Rahel carefully distinguished between herself, a “storm-tossed soul” and “rebel,” and those fortunate individuals endowed with methodical and measured minds who “have no mood, no weather! or rather: their moods are the music of a beautiful state of mind; and their weather is sunshine in the purest, mildest air.” Endowed with such innate harmony, they were able to fulfill the demands of idealization in the very act of creation, whereas Rahel had to contend with the task of exactly rendering “the moment,” regardless of any unresolved dissonances and contradictions (Varnhagen 1979, 3:55). In her case, then, truth took precedence over aesthetic perfection and idealization. In her letters, she frequently referred to her love of truth and truthfulness. Just the same, Rahel placed both her conversations and her writing within the realm of art, as each was guided by what she considered to be defining artistic criteria—arrangement and self-knowledge.

The commitment to truth and authenticity is also evident in Rahel's astonishing appraisal of her idiosyncratic use of language: “Language is not at my service, not even my own, German; our language is our lived life; I have invented my own [life]; I could therefore make less use than many others of the existing phrases, that's why mine are often rough and in many ways faulty, but always genuine” (Varnhagen 1979, 1:337). Rahel's many reflections on writing, scattered throughout her letters, almost invariably relate language, style, and form to personal and social provenance. As both an outsider and a pioneer, she knew that for her, writing entailed a different set of demands. And although she was familiar with the rules of aesthetics, she refused to let her writing be dictated by them. Instead, she turned her new and unprecedented situation into the wellspring of her written expression. The famous passage to David Veit, a fellow Jew, on the effects of anti-Jewish slander, may serve as an example: “I have a strange fancy: it is as if some supramundane being, just as I was thrust into this world, plunged these words with a dagger into my heart: ‘Yes, have sensibility, see the world as few see it, be great and noble, nor can I take from you the faculty of eternally thinking. But I add one thing more: be a Jewess!’ And now my life is a slow bleeding to death. By keeping still I can delay it. Every movement is an attempt to staunch it—new death: and immobility is possible for me only in death itself. … I can if you will, derive every evil, every misfortune, every vexation from that. … This opinion is my essence” (7:79). Although leading Jews had always protested the conditions under which they and especially their poorer coreligionists suffered, they tended not to dwell on the psychological hurt. Rahel's written explorations of the effects of social discrimination on the self were thus new and startling. Moreover, in her case, it concerned a self that was extraordinarily sensitive and socially aware. In the process, she fashioned a language for expressing the psychological and emotional conflicts that the newly emancipated Jews confronted in their struggle to find a place in the larger society.

The “blemish” of Jewishness, for this was how she viewed her origins, stayed with her throughout her life, in spite of her efforts at assimilation, including marriage to a gentile and the required baptism preceding it. The gentile world, even some of its most enlightened leaders such as Wilhelm von Humboldt, continued to react with hostility to her aspirations. The many passages of despair and outrage scattered throughout the letters bear testimony to the lifelong discrimination Rahel encountered. Nevertheless, she refused to accept society's judgment of her. This refusal further defined her writing. It was motivated, on the one hand, by an attitude of defiance and, on the other, by a compulsive need to explain and define herself to others. She never tired of wishing to disclose herself to others “as one opens a cupboard and, with one movement, shows the things, ordered, on the shelves. People would surely be satisfied; and, as soon as they saw it, also understand” (Varnhagen 1979, 1:135). Her self-portrayals ranged from grandiose to self-deprecatory or pathetic, but a close reading reveals them also as surprisingly objective. Thus, depending on the situation, she could define herself as “the first critic” or “as unique as the greatest phenomenon of this earth. The greatest artist, philosopher, or poet is not above me” (260). At other times, she acknowledged the reality of her precarious position in society. In one of her most startling self-appraisals, she acknowledged the untimeliness of her person and aspirations in a retrograde society by defining herself as a “paradox.” By this she meant a truth that had as yet no established place in the world, which nevertheless pressed “forward forcefully, albeit with a contortion” (400).

By means of her vast epistolary network and her salon, Rahel established and maintained contact with many notables of the time. These included the more progressive-minded members of the royal family and aristocracy, leading state officials and public servants, the philosophers and theologians responsible for German Enlightenment and Idealist thought, representatives of the classical and romantic literary movements, and even some who were associated with the politically oriented Young Germany. Additionally, many of the revered composers, musicians, singers, actresses, and actors of the day attended her salon and corresponded with her. Her letters, therefore, even if they are not explicitly political, trace a most eventful period in European history, from the French Revolution through the Napoleonic Era to the Congress of Vienna and the ensuing Period of Reaction. They offer both an astonishing array of cultural history and an outstanding record of sustained reflections and original insights. The letters, moreover, disclose the degree to which Rahel assimilated the achievements of one of Europe's most fertile periods in the history of ideas and the arts and the competence with which she responded to many of the pressing issues of the day. At the same time, her comments differ in important ways from those of other observers, because they came from someone not in a position to make or even influence the events of the day. Hers was a marginal voice using a marginal genre to judge the actors on both the cultural and the political stages. Firmly committed to the idea of progress and human perfection, she had much to say about her fatherland and about human issues that revealed an unusually astute, almost clairvoyant sense of history.

In one important respect Rahel's published epistolary work has remained deficient, although it constitutes almost a third of the repository of the six thousand letters at the Varnhagen Archive: her correspondence with women. Although a good number of Rahel's letters are contained in the Buch des Andenkens, those written by her friends have for the most part not been published. Many of these women were Jewish. Several corresponded, like Rahel, with prominent men and women, especially the authors they revered, including Goethe, Jean Paul, and Friedrich Schlegel. Some also wrote in other literary genres, such as novels, novellas, essays, and travelogues. Once these correspondences are published in the volumes edited by Barbara Hahn and Ursula Isselstein, they will reveal much about women's lives and writing efforts. Rahel may remain the most prominent and prolific of nineteenth-century epistolary writers, but she may not stand so alone.

Rahel's legacy was not passed on in the form of epistolary writing, the genre that suited her so well and that she made so uniquely her own. Instead, the generations of writers that followed paid homage to her in novels, poems, pamphlets, essays, biographies, anthologies, and personal testimony. Moreover, these authors concentrated on her personality and thought rather than on her writing strategies. For the Young Germans, she became a model for their notion of the emancipated woman. To many women both outside and inside the women's movement, she served as an inspiration in their various struggles for independence and self-realization. Rahel herself appointed the poet Heinrich Heine, fellow Jew and fellow rebel, to carry on her struggle for truth and social justice through writing.

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