SOURCE: Goodman, Kay. “Poesis and Praxis in Rahel Varnhagen's Letters.” New German Critique: An Interdisciplinary Journal of German Studies 27 (fall 1982): 123-39.

[In the following essay, Goodman focuses on Varnhagen's letters, as well as those of her contemporary and friend Bettina von Arnim.]

When German feminists trace their literary and cultural roots, they usually begin with the romantic women living around 1800. It was the time of the great Berlin salons and the new romantic liaisons, and both of these phenomena challenged a strictly domestic image of women.¹ The aura of sexual liberation in the lives of Caroline (Michaelis-Böhmer-Schlegel) Schelling and Dorothea (Mendelssohn-Veit) Schlegel draws the most colorful attention, but a more profound admiration generally accompanies the regard for Rahel Varnhagen and Bettina von Arnim.² When letters by these women first appeared in the 1830's, they excited, outraged, or simply puzzled readers; but even then their peculiar effect on women was apparent to anyone who cared to look. If women in mid-19th-century Germany did not all agree with the radical passions expressed in these letters, neither could many of them quite deny their attraction and sense of identification.³ Without raising the red flag of sexual freedom, von Arnim and Varnhagen expressed their impatience at all social prejudice and hypocrisy even as they voiced their own sense of personal frustration. They did not do this modestly. On the contrary, their irony, wit, and pride proved quite effective among women. By candidly rejecting any social restrictions they aided and abetted generations of German women in a contrary spirit, in integrity, and in the exercise of their intelligence and compassion. No doubt it is that compassionate rejection of any imposed order which attracts contemporary German women, East and West. If Rahel Varnhagen's “great refusal” allowed Hannah Arendt to prize her “pariah” attributes,⁴ that same stance is also the focus of Silvia Bovenschen's more recent admiration.⁵ The work of the East German author, Christa Wolf, demonstrates a profound sympathy for these authors.⁶ Acknowledged or unacknowledged, Rahel Varnhagen and Bettina von Arnim form a persistent link between women in (East/West) Germany.

In England Mary Wollstonecraft vindicated the rights of women. In France Olymp de Gouges rallied to the people's cause and Madame de Staël created ‘Corinne,’ and in Germany two women of strength and conviction resisted the imposition of abstract order. Placed beside these foreign contemporaries, Varnhagen and von Arnim seem unlikely heroines for German feminists of the 1970's, or for that matter even the 1870's. They penned no proclamations or treatises, delivered no inflammatory speeches, and portrayed no heroines surrounded by admiring crowds. Instead, they remained at home to write letters. Bettina von Arnim began reworking her correspondence as epistolary novels only in the 1830's. Rahel Varnhagen published a few fragments during her lifetime, but only after her death in 1833 did her husband publish three volumes of her letters. At first glance feminists desiring role models that publicly challenged the oppression of women might think of looking elsewhere. Not only is it difficult to characterize these women as activists struggling to advance such movements, they have actually been recouped for the domestic image of women and praised for their motherly, nurturing qualities. Rahel Varnhagen's salon has been described as a “womb,” and she has been praised, by way of contrast to her “unfeminine,” foreign counterparts, for not publishing.⁷ Thus there appears to be a contradiction between form and content, a contradiction between the radical rejection of all imposed order and the restriction of expression to a traditionally domestic and private form. The perception of such a contradiction, however, is both culture and time-bound. If the women's movements of today have different tones in English and in German-speaking countries, then, to a certain extent, that difference was struck as early as 1800. Certainly Katharine Anthony perceived it in her 1915 study of the women's movement in Germany at the turn of the century.⁸ There she highlights the controversial and influential Ellen Key, but does not mention Key's considerable admiration for Rahel Varnhagen. In her biography of Varnhagen, Key wrote of her influence that it “leads only to self-emancipation.”⁹

We would be too hasty if we simply looked elsewhere for more activist role models without at least pausing to ask why it is that von Arnim and Varnhagen have held this continuing fascination for German women. Moreover, we may actually need something they have to say. As American feminists we find ourselves increasingly confronted by a dilemma of both theoretical and practical dimensions. While we no longer see our ultimate goal in the achievement of equality within a system of domination, neither are orthodox Marxist-feminist models as successful as we might wish. Moreover, most of us cannot wholeheartedly embrace the abstract solutions of French feminism(s). As this complex movement has become known in this country—through the writings of Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, and Julia Kristeva—it proclaims the “future of difference,”¹⁰ identifying “male” and “phallic” with domination and edging dangerously close to the precipice of essentialism and even biological determinism. It seems either to confuse the metaphor with reality or to refuse any connection between the two. The gynomorphic labeling of abstract concepts as “feminine,” however, threatens to reimprison real women in definitions asserted by those concepts, to reimpose an abstract order.¹¹ Two 18th-century German women will not offer solutions to contemporary theoretical dilemmas, but looking at their experience and their letters may help us to pose some questions more clearly.

Varnhagen and von Arnim wrote their letters as Germany's capitalist system was just beginning to evolve. By 1800 the British parliamentary system had been long established, and the basic structure of the capitalist mode of production was also in place. In Germany, however, hundreds of principalities were still governed by whim of local aristocrats. The middle classes were only a vaguely oppositional force, accorded capricious favors by the court. Co-responsibility for governing was a dream, and only slowly were entrepreneurs granted economic concessions. Varnhagen and von Arnim chose the epistolary form in the context of an essentially precapitalist society, but at a moment when historical forces were formulating ideas and institutions which would shape Germany for some time. They witnessed and opposed the establishment of modes of domination we still experience.

Although women were not encourage to write anything else in 18th-century Germany, they were encouraged to write letters. Gradually, however, that “mere” letter writing would serve as a passport to more recognized forms through epistolary novels like Sophie von la Roche's The Story of Miss von Sternheim. And yet, the admiration generated by that novel of 1771 makes the later preference for letters by Varnhagen and von Arnim even more intriguing. For if women novelists as a breed were not uniformly admired, it was possible, at least for married women, to write fiction and still retain their social reputations. From the perspective of the evolution of women's writing the choice of letters as an art appears to lack boldness.

Even from the point of view of contemporary aesthetics, the choice appears peculiar. In the late 18th-century philosophers began to espouse the disinterestedness of art, and poets to assert the autonomy of literature. Thus, Kant's ‘pulchritudo vaga’ was a beauty independent of any particular or finite significance, the totally abstract beauty he discerned in nature or non-vocal music. Even the romantics tended to perpetuate this preference for an autonomous art, one defined by aesthetic criteria alone. Yet, these two women cultivated, as art, a form firmly rooted in everyday life. The letters they authored were to be neither disinterested nor autonomous. Without rejecting the fundamental validity of the poetic subject, which these poets proclaimed, von Arnim and Varnhagen retained their concern for immediate reality. They aimed simply, but startlingly, to make real human interactions both the basis for understanding objective reality and the vantage point for changing it. Thus, from a more general 18th-century perspective, their interest in letters actually manifested a continued belief in the enlightenment concept of friendship in which friends together sought to defy dogma and evade seduction by established power.¹²

Indeed, the 18th-century zeal for letters paralleled the importance of friendship as a theme in literature. So basic was the letter as a form to the creation of bourgeois culture in the 18th century that genres as different from each other as the novel and the essay regularly assumed an epistolary guise. None other than J. F. Gellert, that preceptor of bourgeois sentiment, authored the most influential Briefsteller (primer on letter-writing) of the century. In it correspondents were urged to strive for naturalness of feeling and expression: a sentiment integral to the ideology of friendship and domesticity. Just as that naturalness of style was intended to correct the stilted, manipulative style of court language, so too was the ideology of open and generous friendship seen to offer an alternative to the social rigidity, hierarchy, and artificiality of the aristocracy. Moreover, in that oppressive social situation the bonds of friendship sustained, with both emotional and practical support, burgeoning oppositional awareness.¹³ Friendship was both a means and an end, a more humane vision. Letters and friendships both aided in the creation of that discourse on public issues among private middle class citizens which Jürgen Habermas has termed the bourgeois public sphere.¹⁴

Nor is the word “public” totally out of place here, and we should not be surprised when we find Rahel Varnhagen expressing hopes for a larger, public impact of her letters. In the 18th century letters were not the private form they are considered today. Despite growing numbers of newspapers and journals the information network of the mid to late 18th century was still relatively undeveloped, and letters often complemented printed matter in providing news. Correspondents regularly furnished news of events in distant places, travel descriptions, or even philosophical exegeses. Such letters were frequently read by more than one person, perhaps in a small circle of friends where they would be discussed afterward. Goethe described just such a series of scenes in the home of Sophie von la Roche, and Varnhagen's letters are full of statements assuming that others will read her letters. In fact, she considered publishing her letters, as others regularly did. Indeed exceptional correspondents were not infrequently surprised to find their letters in print,¹⁵ and newspapers, after all, regularly printed letters from paid and unpaid “correspondents.” If they did not comprise a mass media, neither were letters totally or necessarily private.

As the middle class accumulated its economic wealth, its educated males could gradually hope for modest seats of power within the existing social structures—as advisors at court or professors in state universities. The letter of friendship was soon replaced by the business letter.¹⁶ But just at that moment of transition and just when aesthetics and daily life began their most profound separation, von Arnim and Varnhagen took letters more seriously than they had ever been taken before. Along with their romantic male contemporaries they explicitly rejected a notion of art which defined it as purposeful or containing a predetermined goal and yet, paradoxically almost, they retained what other romantics lost in the process, the intimate relation between art and concrete reality. Their efforts amounted to a fundamental indictment of the very bourgeois economic structures which letters had, in some ways, helped to establish.

Perhaps it is necessary to emphasize that not all letters by women posed this challenge. The importance of letters for women and for the development of women's literature has been duly recognized,¹⁷ but the tendency to view this form and women's cultivation of it as existing outside bourgeois aesthetic categories tends to mystify the issue.

Briefsteller (primers on letter writing), often containing model letters, were widely taught; and no less a patriarchal figure than Gellert himself was most forceful proponent of the idea that women wrote better letters than men. Schooling (correct spelling, diction, syntax) was less important to him than heartfelt expression, at which he found women more skilled. That bourgeois sentiment of openness, friendliness, and mutual support which helped in resisting aristocratic domination became identified with women. It became in fact the ideology which was to define and confine the role of women and keep them from positions of authority. That is, letters, as expression of that friendliness, were also a perfect genre for the expression of domestic tranquility; and many letters of virtuous bourgeois sentiment issued from pens of women like Louise Voss, letters which lost the sense of support in opposition and accepted the new order. Even if Varnhagen and von Arnim proclaimed their originality in letters, their opposition to all abstract order, and their thirst for more experience, they did not exceed the guidelines of the Briefsteller. For following general aesthetic trends, Briefsteller in the latter half of the century stressed the inapplicability of any rules and the desirability of originality and genius in letter-writing, as in the other arts.¹⁸ Since women were generally held to be better letter writers, it should have been assumed some of them would begin announcing their genius and originality. Still the boldness of Varnhagen and von Arnim affronted not a few, for they continued to reject bourgeois restrictions with their letters, just as the middle classes had rejected aristocratic ones. In their hands and minds the letter became a form to undermine even bourgeois dreams.

Both Rahel Varnhagen and Bettina von Arnim developed their own epistolary style, replete with their own metaphors and themes. Both eschewed those forms of social and literary discourse which pursued predetermined goals, and so neither wrote treatises on the aesthetics of letters. Any understanding of their positions on this theme must be culled from the letters themselves. Here I want to focus primarily on the life and letters of Rahel Varnhagen¹⁹ as a case in point.

Rahel Varnhagen was born Rahel Levin, she was also known as Rahel Robert and briefly as Antonie Friederike Robert, her full married name was Antonie Friederike Varnhagen von Ense, but at the end of her life she preferred simply Rahel Varnhagen. She was a woman wrestling with an identity. She was Jewish, poor, unschooled, and unattractive (in her own and others' opinion). With few interruptions she lived in Berlin from 1771 to 1833. She was the center of an impressive intellectual salon and wrote volumes of letters. These were of great importance to her in that time/place of legalized prejudice, and growing nationalism and anti-Semitism. They were an integral part of her entire philosophy and life.

THE ECONOMICS OF BEING GOOD

Even in her earliest letters Varnhagen wrote about the “economy of the soul” in terms that disregarded principles basic to bourgeois economics. In the tradition of enlightened secular examinations of the soul, piety meant working on yourself, improving yourself according to an external standard. For Varnhagen perfecting yourself, being pious or good, meant exploding rational constructs, saying what confused and what pained you. Only then could one's inner gardens flourish. The nerves, fibers, and desires of the soul were sacred and should be not only accepted, but revered “even if it led to the greatest bankruptcy” (II, p. 33).²⁰ Of necessity this would undermine the ration(alize)ed order of the soul, “the inner economy,” that constituted for her “a dead order.” Only when that well-managed, well-ordered economy was challenged could we do justice to the nature alive within us, eliminate the prejudices against our/selves. Energies invested in this undertaking will never have a particular goal in mind and will consequently not always be productive. When David Veit wonders if he should become a doctor, Rahel Varnhagen responds that she can't imagine him becoming anything specific. A class or profession is just as restricting as marriage (I, p. 20). Of women she wrote, not without irony, that they should be encouraged to write for even if it had been proven for all time that they were incapable of expressing their thoughts, still it remained an obligation to make the attempt over and over again (III, p. 10).²¹ One should care for inner desires. This requires unbudgeted time and leisure. Being good was a commitment not to common sense, but to the senses. It was a fundamentally inefficient use of human resources, but it was humane and hopeful and strove to resist external authority.

RELATIONSHIPS

Constraints on the soul's economy, however, can only be lifted in dialogue—with one's self and with others. Truth for Varnhagen lay in connections, in relationships. She refused to define, to delimit. She wanted to hold possibilities open. Conversations and letters were important communication because friends corresponded to and awakened various sides of herself. She wrote Gustave Brinkmann that, were she to lose him, she would lose a large part of herself. Only he recognized that part, and it needed to be recognized or it would die (I, p. 198). Hers was not the classical notion of a self-identical, harmonious subject, it was a multifaceted, de-centered self with unimagined potential.

Parsimony would not build the open exchanges necessary for the realization of that potential and hoarding would not nourish inner gardens. One could not be niggardly with oneself. The only talent she valued in herself was precisely her talent for openness and friendship: “What a friend you have chosen, discovered and uncovered! … I can loan my soul as though doubly organized and have the remarkable power to double myself without confusing myself” (I, p. 265). Capitalist economies don't duplicate themselves without establishing hierarchies. Moreover, since friendship held the soul sacred, it became a secular religion. Mutual confessions undermined external hierarchies, papacies, and subverted established orders. A protestant revolution of the psyche. The self, truth blossoms in the warmth of friendship, and, once in flower, continues to disseminate truth. If dead orders were abolished, “the heavy, dark and patient earth would yield its fullness for all peoples; they wouldn't need to war, to lie, and make proclamations for legitimation!” (II, p. 305). Holding the desires of the soul sacred, through friendship, would unleash a truth powerful enough to resist, even crumble repressive orders.

Friendship was not only a religion, it was an art: “I am as unique as the greatest phenomenon on earth. The greatest artist, philosopher, or poet is not above me. We are of the same cloth, in the same rank, and belong together … but life was assigned to me” (I, p. 266). As a Lebenskünstler (artist of life) life itself became her artistic metier, and her mission was none other than to affect and perfect her immediate reality and through that, the world.

THE POETICS OF EPISTLES

Friendships become audible in conversation (as in the salon) and legible in letters: “And I will write you letters where the soul can take a stroll, and not a goal-directed, purposeful trip on well-trodden, dusty highways. We want to walk on fresh, small, abstract paths that even we don't know: and follow the play of the clouds as we go, and enjoy the magic of the light and even, if we chose, follow the darkness!” (II, pp. 414-15) As mutual and leisurely exploration of inner landscapes and desires, letters would be truth in praxis, both the means and end to the vision of a future which permits friendship and openness.

As art, Varnhagen's letters were intended to capture the essence of moments and feelings normally ration(aliz)ed in more perfect forms: “I want a letter to be the portrait of the moment in which it was written: it shall be primarily a likeness, as high as any demands of art on ideal ennoblement. … Happy are the lovely images in a laughing moment of nature which, far from all human imagination, could serve the most artistic as a model!” (II, pp. 55-6) Rooted in daily experience, letters can become a momentary release from daily economy, a spontaneous image of unbounded inner nature. Glimpses of that nature exceed the potential of other art forms.

Varnhagen's letters communicated in “form, color, and content” (II, p. 516). Her style, so admired by progressive writers of the 1830s, is rich in metaphor, neologism and unusual syntactics. It fairly erupts with misplaced relative pronouns; postplaced modifiers; awkward, unbalanced phrasing; asyndeton; faulty punctuation, spelling, diction; frequent intrusions of French. Varnhagen often complained of never having learned German properly and of not writing beautifully balanced sentences, but one suspects that such comments are more an excuse than an explanation, because her eccentricities lend her style the immediacy and spontaneity of a conversation, precisely the effect she strove to achieve. One suspects, in fact, that this disruption of rational discourse was a further intentional refusal to learn a “dead order,” but it certainly seems a causal extension of Gellert's preference for heartfelt expression at the expense of a disciplined, schooled style.

Any conscious stylistic innovation was surely motivated by a deep respect for language as well as a belief in the inadequacy of all language. No language could express the essence of anything; nothing could be understood unless the listener/reader already understood what the speaker/writer meant: “How can one describe the indescribable: at best! at best narrate it? No, absolutely not, positively not” (I, p. 92). So she fashioned her own language: “Language is not at my command, not German, not my own; our language is our lived life; I have invented mine myself. I could make less use than many others of the tired phrases, that's why mine are often clumsy and full of all kinds of errors, but always genuine. …” And although she describes it as turpitude, it is probably not without some pride that she reports Friedrich Gentz's appraisal of her letters: “I write letters in which blossoms and fruit lie together with the roots, and the earth on them from being pulled out of the ground. And worms” (I, p. 524). She and Pauline Wiesel even had their own language, a “green” language (of nature).

Although unschooled, Varnhagen was a well-read woman, and she clearly shared much of her thought with her romantic contemporaries: aesthetics with Friedrich Schlegel; ideas on dialogue and free sociality (Geselligkeit) with Friedrich Schleiermacher; an understanding of the importance of integrity and tolerance and the potential of truth with Johann Gottlieb Fichte. In fact, if the romantics looked to fragmentary forms as a more just expression of that inner nature which corresponded to the godhead and nature in general, then Varnhagen's letters can also be considered fragmentary art forms. They move quickly in sketch-like fashion from daily experience, to literary and philosophical reflections, to self-explorations, to personal news, to cultural and political phenomena, to dreams. Unlike fragmentary forms written for publication, however, the personal nature of letters, even if for a few good friends, allows one a certain freedom. Moreover, the correspondent also carries the responsibility to reflect, respond, and elicit more. A correspondence continues.

Male romantics then also valued the letter highly, even as an art form. But with a difference. Friedrich Schlegel wrote: “A dialogue is a chain, or a wreath of fragments. A correspondence is a dialogue in greater measure and memorabilia are a system of fragments. There is not yet anything which is fragmentary in form and content, both totally subjective and individual and totally objective and like a necessary part in a system of all sciences.” (Athenäum, Fragment 77) Although he admired the epistolary form Schlegel was not content with it. Rather he sought more abstract, objective forms as well. Neither Rahel Varnhagen nor Bettina von Arnim sought more objectivity or abstraction. Letters were the ideal form for them, the most immediate, the most real, the one capable of allowing the greatest personal and public growth. Bettina von Arnim's brother, the poet Clemens Brentano, treasured her letters for their art, found her style to possess poetic potential, and therefore urged her to write other forms: like autobiography or fiction. He even locked her in a room until she had produced a poem. For von Arnim, however, the abstraction involved in giving external order to reality only distorted it. Like Varnhagen she refused to do that. If Varnhagen's theory of language and her intentional disruption of rational discourse therefore remind us vaguely of French post-structural thought—and, to my knowledge, Lacan's direct or indirect debt to Fichte and other German romantics remains to be studied²²—we might also remember that, unlike both her male contemporaries and the post-structuralists, her linguistic concerns are restricted to a language as close to spoken language as possible, and a form intended for everyday use, to continue dialogues, to alter immediate reality.²³

Compared to other female contemporaries writing in forms like the novel, von Arnim and Varnhagen boldly announced their genius, i.e., the divinity residing in the soul of every human being, and their right to the fulfillment of that divine promise. The epistolary form was not only a means of moving toward that divine personal promise and the refusal to accept external orders, it was also the refusal to impose any, either in person or in writing. The maintenance of this critical attitude toward dominance, the advocacy of tolerance, and the acceptance of difference was not defined by these women with recourse to sexual difference. The male romantics were the ones who divided men and women into separate categories (nature vs. reason, heart vs. head, love vs. domination).²⁴ They did it in their essays and in their fiction, with figures like Diotima or Undine. These are not characters; they are representations of abstractions, imposed order on the lives of women. Female romantics resisted this anthropomorphizing of philosophical concepts. None of Varnhagen's metaphors (or Bettina von Arnim's) gynomorphize her philosophical position, and she certainly did not consider the women she knew as representing her position. On the contrary, she found women in particular slavishly bound to rules and external authority and could abide very few of them.

A modern French writer like Hélène Cixous who freely cites E.T.A. Hoffmann or Heinrich von Kleist clearly owes a great deal to German romanticism. Her essay “The Laugh of the Medusa,” however, suggests the gynomorphic conceptualizations of male romantics, rather than the more consistently radical positions of Varnhagen and von Arnim.²⁵ This probable connection/difference bears investigation, but even without a closer analysis, it remains curious that many of her metaphors resemble those of Rahel Varnhagen, although she never mentions her name.

If we want to avoid gynomorphizing Varnhagen's philosophical position, that in no way means it was an accident that women upheld the most radical rejection of dominance. Living in the 20th century, we all know that Rahel Varnhagen's enormous hopes for friendship and integrity did not materialize. With a cynicism to which we may have grown too accustomed, it is easy to assume that the aspirations she harbored for letters could not possibly be realized. It does not hurt, however, to examine the possible reason for that failure, for it is undoubtedly connected to her femaleness—and her Jewishness.

As a woman and a Jew, her position as outsider in Berlin at the end of the 18th century was assured. Naturally she wanted a more just society in which she would be accepted and valued. Just as naturally the position of pariah was difficult to maintain consciously and voluntarily. The temptation to yield to the prevailing power structures was strong, particularly in her case. Patriarchal commands had pervaded Varnhagen's childhood. Her strict, brutal, capricious father had broken her ability to take action, just as the monarchy must have hindered it. However, he could not break her character which she claimed was eternally inverted, like a plant growing into the earth; the noblest qualities, like kindness and gratitude, had become the most despicable ones (II, p. 186). And she acknowledged: “The decree from above: I should be rational and reasonable, I know it too well. And just because my innermost nature drives me to follow this commandment, I feel miserable, or rather it is my entire misery” (II, p. 567).

Varnhagen had formulated her philosophy of friendship and her aesthetic principles during the period before the Napoleonic wars and in concert with many of the prominent middle-class intellectuals who frequented her salon, including Friedrich Schleiermacher and Friedrich Schlegel. In those youthful and more open days the society of intellectual Jewish women like Henriette Herz, Dorothea Mendelssohn, Marianne Meyer, Sarah Meyer was sought out in general; but in particular Varnhagen's salon became the gathering place for a potentially volatile mixture of people on the periphery of power: those who were rich, famous (or with pretensions to fame), but powerless: bourgeois intellectuals, Jews, actors, even some politically disillusioned aristocrats. There they formulated a liberal ideology alien to aristocratic courtly life in a social institution, the salon, which blatantly fostered interracial and interclass friendships.

After the Wars of Liberation (1812/13) the Metternich Restoration soon cooled the fresh hopes of political liberals, Varnhagen included. And Varnhagen, who had formerly considered marriage too constricting, submitted willingly to its yoke, albeit to a gentile who she believed understood her. Her hopes for a marriage in which she would remain free of patriarchal commands, however, were disappointed as her husband, Karl August, began to assert his authority. Simultaneously the rise of nationalism which accompanied the political events also brought a wave of anti-Semitism. And as various male friends entered the rungs of university, i.e., civil service, and became publicly recognized personalities they deserted her. Friedrich and Dorothea Schlegel (now Catholics) and Wilhelm and Caroline von Humboldt, for instance, distanced themselves from her. Such betrayals inevitably produced doubts about the viability of a religion of friendship, and her faith was shaken. As in Lessing's “Parable of the Rings,” to prove it the true religion, the prophets of friendship would need to demonstrate its truth. However, friendship (and the expansion of a multifaceted soul) cannot be sustained alone. The gulf between Varnhagen's hopes and the reality of her social situation widened as those middle-class men betrayed the religion of friendship for positions in a structure of domination, joined those institutions which tried to prevent full development of multifaceted personalities.

In a sense, however, those institutions had always exercised more power over Rahel Varnhagen than she wished. The gulf between her demands on herself and her real actions had been a constant source of self-accusation. A different story about the economics of being good and about Varnhagen's seduction by authority emerges from the correspondence with one friend, Pauline Wiesel. Wiesel, the wife of Friedrich Ferdinand Wiesel, was the mistress of Prince Louis Ferdinand. When the Prince died in battle against the French in 1806, Wiesel elected not to return to a chaste domestic life, but to continue her existence outside bourgeois society, living alternately with men or with women, and dying in poverty. The correspondence between Rahel Varnhagen and Pauline Wiesel is perhaps the most consistent of any of Varnhagen's lasting at least 25 years. This friend did not fail her; this friend animated at least one side of her/self not seen in other letters.

THE REAL ECONOMICS OF BEING GOOD

In 1810 Rahel Levin wrote Pauline Wiesel: “I see you every day, and nature, and myself, more. Away from you I do nothing but repeat every word, every small deed of yours, every expression … there is only one difference between us, you live everything, because you have courage and had luck: I think most things; because I had no luck and received no courage … by different paths we arrived at one point. We exist beside human society. There is no place, no office, no title there! All lies have one: the eternal truth … has none! and so we are shut out of society, you because you insult it … I, because I can't sin with it and lie … One would like to go to war, me too, to gain sustenance for the expectations with which nature sent us into life. By almighty and righteous God on the high seat of judgement, one goes to battle for less than that!” (pp. 141-42)²⁶

In 1811 Rahel Levin wrote Pauline Wiesel: “You know, Pölle, I consider myself without courage … That I haven't long left my hometown and family, like you, however is not because I had less courage than you … I remain outwardly—and partly probably also inwardly—close to my family. Our inheritance is mixed and can't and couldn't easily be divided and disentangled … and a thousand tasks, errands, illness and lack of money kept me here, also semi-commitments to which I would first have to say yes or no. I am not brouilliert with society, I still live in it. I am dissatisfied with it because I don't have a position or name and can't find a heart which would make up for it, but society still seeks me and I it. It is an inner observation and an interrogation of my inner most being when I hear the answer: you must get out. With you, Pölle, I would gladly live in it … We have … a cheerful, childlike nature. And a bridge, a tree, a trip, a smell, a smile, in short the entire surface of the world engages our ten healthy senses and our precious inners. And so we'll try, a community will, must build up around such clever, cheerful, innocent creatures. And if we had sufficient money, I would build us a fresh, lively existence” (pp. 151-53).

In 1812 Rahel Levin wrote Pauline Wiesel: “There is only one virtue, one quality; that is courage. If I had the courage to go with you; the courage not to be frightened … we would both have had, I my some modique, and you what you have. But our character lies in our shape and I don't look like you, can't have your courage and not your fate. What good is all heart! all friendship! If ever you can rescue me, do it. When I have the opportunity, the money to get away, I will go with what they now give me annually as charity. I won't even mention my inheritance; that doesn't bring one cent. But I am suffocating here. The poverty, the misery mounts on all sides! My situation is totally unbearable, I shall go insane. Write me at once; if possible without cost.” (pp. 159-60).

In March, 1818 (four years after her marriage) Rahel Varnhagen wrote Pauline Wiesel: “As soon as you have read this letter, sit down and figure out what you would give a driver to drive you here; and whatever else the trip costs; I'll dispatch it to you on the spot” (p. 181).

One month later she wrote: “But how melancholy I am! I can't show it; but you'll believe it. For I don't change … only the means to live, only the preparations for it and I will never be permitted to live; never. Oh! and if once one dared, as you sometimes did, then the miserable world, the entire world is against you. Dear Pauline! If we had known each other before Wiesel … what a life! Wholly nature, according to our innermost demands, and near; an ancient, proper and contemporary life … Nature should have made us one. Someone like you ought to have my ability to reflect, my foresight, my reasonableness. Someone like me your courage to live, your beauty. Together we have everything which could endow one talented human being with happiness. Sense, senses, reason, sentiment, sensitive hearts, sense for art and nature—in our language we say ‘we love everything green.’—Oh! Pauline and we have to waste away like this. I can't force the world without a great fortune, that is I don't want to force it … but it hinders us, restrains us if we can't force it to leave us alone … But don't ever doubt me: and my endless activity for our life together!!! It is my entire urging, and Varnhagen also wants it for me: because he knows my innermost nature … and knows that only the truest companionship can make me happy: and that is with you” (pp. 182-83).

Whatever the reality of the relationship between these two women, Rahel Varnhagen associated nature itself, her nature with Pauline Wiesel, who represented that verdant garden which undermined any dead order. But Varnhagen's divergent excuses for not freeing her own self of that order make it very clear that for such a flowering of her nature there would have to be a more favorable climate. The very concrete economy of the patriarchal status quo forced her to be good in very conventional ways, broke her. What good, she was forced to ask, are heart and friendship anyway?

It is not really surprising that she succumbed to social and economic demands of her day, that she felt forced to kill parts of herself as she would write in a letter to Custine (II, p. 568). It was, of course, particularly difficult for women who broke the rules of convention. But Varnhagen's letters reveal that she never allowed herself to feel comfortable in her compromise and that she continued searching for a humane reality. Even at the end of her life she was fascinated by that other secular religion—Saint-Simonism. She struggled not to ration(alize) the facets of her desires in her letters and her openness became, finally, a gaping wound. Without that more generous climate it was not possible to flourish. Then, as now, it was not possible to escape the real daily consequences of the dominant economic order.

RELATIONSHIPS

Ultimately it is Varnhagen's passion, candor, and integrity that surprise and give hope. And move. For we still want to think in terms of connections and to consider letters as a genre. Varnhagen read history in letters, but not the history historians usually wrote. Reading the letters of Lavater, Racine, and Michelangelo between the lines and against the texts, she had learned about the struggle with history and about the necessity for compromise, but she also learned about their dreams. That gave her courage. Varnhagen considered publishing her own letters as an autobiography and in place of an autobiography. Although she never thought others could or should emulate her life, she did think she was someone who had wrestled honestly with the prejudices and difficulties presented by the historical period into which she had been born (I, p. 466). Others might find their leisure and freedom in sensibilities and observations enlivened by a biography.

If fragments of desire cling to sentences in a body of correspondence, then the reader is allowed to view the ragged process of that life taking shape, to see interactions occurring, and the struggle itself. The narrator does not stand in the distance, as an autobiographer typically does, surveying the actions, explaining and legitimating them, often omitting the ones that didn't lead anywhere or are too painful to remember. Selective memory, a specific intent, or even a single aesthetic principle can less easily ignore thoughts which refuse to be rationalized. The parts resist a system and the desires remain exposed.

Varnhagen's passion, conveyed in part through her disruptive style, as well as her candor and integrity—her concept of the epistolary form—surely had everything to do with the response her letters evoked in younger women when they were published posthumously in 1835. She unwittingly befriended other women who needed recognition for desires denied them by their families and their culture. As a young woman Malwida von Meysenbug had read Varnhagen's letters and instantly identified with her. She even wanted to found a corresponding society for women isolated in and by their families. Later she left her parent's home, alone, to join a progressive school for girls in Hamburg. In 1851 she would be forced into exile because of her connections with German radicals. Fanny Lewald found solace and courage in the letters of Rahel Varnhagen in the 1830s, and her early novels protested social injustice and prejudice. Lily Braun, Ellen Key, Hedwig Dohm and other women active in the proletarian and bourgeois women's movements at the turn-of-the-century knew and admired the letters of Rahel Varnhagen. If her letters did not immediately fulfill her hopes for them, they did find an active response later, in an uncourted population. As influential as the novels, autobiographies, and treatises of these later women have been, however, none has so continuously moved the hearts and minds of women as Rahel Varnhagen's letters.

Notes

1. For information on the Berlin salons see Ingeborg Drewitz Berliner Salons (Berlin: Haude and Spener, 1965); Deborah Hertz, “Salonieres and Literary Women in Late Eighteen-Century Berlin,” New German Critique, 14 (1978), 97-108; Deborah Hertz The Literary Salon in Berlin, 1780-1806: The Social History of an Intellectual Institution, Diss. University of Minnesota, 1979.

2. This image of Caroline Schelling is born out in Gisela F. Ritchie's study of the fictional portraits of her in 19th-century novels: Gisela F. Ritchie, Caroline Schlegel-Schelling in Wahrheit und Dichtung (Bonn: Bouvier, 1968). A new biography, however, interprets her life as an attempt at an alternative, more collective life style, see Gisela Dischner, Caroline und der Jenaer Kreis. Ein Leben zwischen bürgerlicher Vereinzelung und romantischer Geselligkeit (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1979). Bettina von Arnim heavily influenced the American, Margaret Fuller; but lack of familiarity with von Arnim's works led Ann Douglas to a misinterpretation of her efforts: Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1977), pp. 259-288.

3. See Kay Goodman, “The Impact of Rahel Varnhagen on Women in the Nineteenth Century,” in Gestaltet und Gestaltend. Frauen in der deutschen Literatur, ed. Marianne Burkhard, Amsterdamer Beiträge 10, (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1980), 125-153.

4. Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen. Lebensgeschichte einer deutschen Jüdin aus der Romantik (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1975). English translation: Rahel Varnhagen. Life of a Jewish Woman (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1974).

5. Silvia Bovenschen, Die imaginierte Weiblichkeit. Exemplarische Untersuchungen zu kulturgeschichtlichen und literarischen Präsentalionsformen des Weiblichen, (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978) pp. 260-65.

6. For instance Rahel Varnhagen is referred to directly in “Unter den Linden,” Gesammelte Erzählungen (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1974) pp. 65-117. Both here and elsewhere, however, her influence is indirectly felt. Christa Wolf has not only written an article on Bettina von Arnim—“Nun ja! Das nächste Leben geht aber heute an. Ein Brief über die Bettine” in Lesen und Schreiben. Neue Sammlung (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1980), pp. 284-318—she has also edited her correspondence with Caroline von Günderode.

7. Eduard Schmit-Weissenfels, Rahel und ihre Zeit (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1857) pp. 10, 15ff.; 31f., 40.

8. Katharine Anthony, Feminism in Germany and Scandinavia (New York: Henry Holt, 1915). See also Richard Evans, The Feminist Movement in Germany, 1894-1933 (London: Sage, 1976) and Richard Evans, The Feminists: Women's Emancipation Movements in Europe, America, and Australia 1840-1920 (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1977).

9. Ellen Key, Rahel, Eine biographische Skizze (Halle: Edgar Thamm, 1920), p. 8 (my own translation). For an English translation of the entire biography see Ellen Key, Rahel Varnhagen: a Portrait (New York: Putnam, 1913).

10. See for instance Hester Eisenstein and Alice Jardine ed., The Future of Difference (New York: Barnard College Women's Center, 1980).

11. For a critique of “difference” from a French feminist, see Christine Faure “Absent from History” and “The Twilight of the Goddess, or the Intellectual Crisis of French Feminism” in Signs, 7/1 (1981), 71-86.

12. See Agnes Heller “Enlightenment Against Fundamentalism,” New German Critique, 23 (1981), 13-26.

13. See Wolfdietrich Rasche, Freundschaftskult und Freundschaftsdichtung im deutschen Schriftum des 18. Jahrhunderts (Halle: Niemeyer, 1936), esp. pp. 81-111 and 222-263.

14. See Jürgen Habermas Strukturwandel der Offentlichkeit (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1965); or Peter Hohendahl, “An Introduction to Habermas' The Public Sphere,” and Jürgen Habermas, “The Public Sphere,” New German Critique, 3 (1974), 45-55.

15. See George Steinhausen, Geschichte des deutschen Briefes. Zur Kulturgeschichte des deutschen Volkes (Berlin: Gaertner, 1889) II.

16. See Helmut Hartwig “Zwischen Briefsteller und Briefpostkarte. Briefverkehr und Strukturwandel bürgerlicher Öffentlichkeit” in Ludwig Fischer, Knut Hickethier, Karl Riha, eds. Gebrauchsliteratur. Methodische Überlegungen und Beispielanalysen (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1976), pp. 114-126.

17. For the discussion of women and letters see Christa Wolf “Nun ja! Das nächste Leben geht aber heute an. Ein Brief über die Bettine” op. cit., Elke Frederiksen “Die Frau als Autorin zur Zeit der Romantik: Anfänge einer weiblichen Tradition” in Gestaltet und Gestaltend, op. cit., and Silvia Bovenschen “Is there a Feminine Aesthetic?” in New German Critique, 10 (1977), 111-137.

18. See Reinhard Nickisch Die Stilprinzipien in den deutschen Briefstellern des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck Ruprecht. 1969).

19. For a longer discussion of Bettina von Arnim's epistolary novels see Christa Wolf, “Nun ja!”, op. cit. and Edith Waldstein, Bettina von Arnim and the Literary Salon: Women's Participation in the Cultural Life of Early Nineteenth-Century Germany, Diss. Washington University, 1982.

20. Except for correspondence to Pauline Wiesel, all quotations from Rahel Varnhagen's letters are taken from Karl August Varnhagen von Ense, ed., Rahel. Ein Buch des Andenkens für ihre Freunde [3 vols.] (1834; reprint, Bern: Herbert Lang, 1972).

21. For a discussion of Varnhagen's views on women see Doris Starr Guilloton, “Rahel Varnhagen und die Frauenfrage in der deutschen Romantik: Eine Untersuchung ihrer Briefe und Tagebuchnotizen,” Monatshefte, 69 (1977).

22. Recent discoveries of unexpected parallels also suggest this direction. See for instance Lilian Hoverland “Heinrich von Kleist and Luce Irigaray: Visions of the Feminine” in Gestaltet und Gestaltend, op. cit., 57-82; Friedrich A. Kittler, “Das Phantom unseres Ichs und die Literaturpsychologie. E.T.A. Hoffmann—Freud—Lacan” in Romantikforschung seit 1945, ed. Klaus Peter, (Königstein: Anton Hain, 1980) pp. 335-356.

23. For a critical perspective on French theory of “poetic language,” see Mary Louise Pratt, Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), pp. 3-37, and on “Natural Narrative,” pp. 38-78.

24. See Silvia Bovenschen, op. cit.

25. Hélène Cixous “The Laugh of the Medusa” in Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, eds., New French Feminisms (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), pp. 245-64.

26. Quotations from letters to Wiesel are taken from Carl Atzenbeck, Pauline Wiesel. Die Geliebte des Prinzen Louis Ferdinand von Preussen (Leipzig: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1926).