Furst, Lilian R. “The Salons of Germain de Staël and Rahel Varnhagen.” In Cultural Interactions in the Romantic Age: Critical Essays in Comparative Literature, edited by Gregory Maertz, pp. 95-103. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1998.

[In the following essay, Furst discusses the literary salons of Varnhagen in Berlin and of Germain de Staël in Coppet to consider the salons' effects on cultural interaction in the Romantic Age.]

In any consideration of cultural interaction in the Romantic Age, one major social institution immediately springs to mind: the salon. The salon was instrumental in bringing together men and women from different backgrounds, classes, and countries. The conversational exchange of views, which was the main occupation of the salons, was a salient medium for the discussion and transmission of innovative ideas. The growing internationalization of the salon at this period was of primary importance in furthering wider and freer cultural interaction than had hitherto prevailed. Given the limitations of space I have opted to focus on two outstanding salons: that of Germaine de Staël at Coppet, and that of Rahel Varnhagen in Berlin. These are the preeminent exemplars of the species at the time, and though neither is typical of the genre, an analysis of their functioning will give us an insight into the role of the salon in cultural interaction.

Both these salons flourished in the heyday of the Romantic Age: Rahel Varnhagen, or to be more accurate, Rahel Levin, as she was before her marriage to Karl August Varnhagen von Ense in 1814, presided over her salon from the mid-1790's to 1806, when the French occupation radically changed the atmosphere in Berlin, causing the cessation of the salons. As for Germaine de Staël, she was involved in a whole series of salons throughout her life, beginning with attendance at her mother's salon at age four! However, the one I want to examine is that held at Coppet in the years 1804-1810 because it was patently the most multicultural and the most literary of all her salons.

These two women could, at first glance, hardly seem more unlike. Germaine, as the only child of Louis XVI's powerful finance minister, Jacques Necker, was born in 1766 into privilege and wealth. In her mother's salon, which reigned supreme in Paris from 1770 onward, she came to be on familiar terms with such eminent men as Denis Diderot, Jean d'Alembert, Georges-Louis Buffon, and Edward Gibbon, a former suitor of her mother's. During her teens, there was talk of marriage to William Pitt, the Younger, the British Prime Minister, but Germaine objected to the prospect of living in England. In January 1786, she married Eric Magnus, Baron Staël von Holstein, the Swedish ambassador to France, thereby securing for herself a diplomatic rank and position that were to be at least somewhat protective in the turbulent revolutionary years.

While Germaine was born into “the navel of the universe,”¹ Rahel Levin was destined from birth onwards to its periphery by her Jewishness. Her father, Markus Levin, was a prosperous jewelry merchant, who also arranged loans for actors and young noble spendthrifts, whom he would entertain in his home, which became a center of sociability for enlightened Jews and gentiles. But although her family was already quite far removed from traditional Judaism, Levin did not have the benefit of the select, indeed hyper-intellectual education that the French “female prodigy”² was given. Rahel's mother-tongue was Western Yiddish, of which even some of her later letters show traces.³ Only in her early twenties, when she had met a number of intellectuals and nobles at the Bohemian spas, which she patronized in summers, did she engage tutors to make up for the deficiencies she then perceived in her knowledge of German, foreign languages, and mathematics. In the problems surrounding her marriage, Rahel offers another sharp contrast to Germaine. By refusing the Jewish businessmen proposed to her by her family, she both aggravated her tenuous relationship to her own community and risked isolation through rejection by the German upper classes. The precariousness of her social standing is confirmed by the two broken engagements she suffered, jilted in 1800 by Karl von Finkelstein after a protracted four-year courtship, and again in 1804 by Don Raphael d'Urquijo, secretary to the Spanish delegation in Berlin, to whom she was betrothed for two years. Eventually, in September 1814 she was baptized and married to Varnhagen von Ense, who was fourteen years her junior.

In other respects, too, these women were widely divergent. Germaine was of robust constitution, although she died at age fifty-one, whereas the always delicate Rahel survived to sixty-two. The latter never bore any children, and seems to have been remarkably chaste and cerebral in her friendships. By contrast, Germaine's love-life is notorious: of her three (possibly four) children, one at most may have been by her husband. Her roster of lovers included Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, Mathieu de Montmorency, and Benjamin Constant. She was equally productive intellectually: her first novel, Delphine, appeared in 1802, and her second, Corinne, ou l'Italie, in 1807, was an immense success. She also published several treatises, of which two, De la Littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales (1798) and De l'Allemagne (1810) achieved lasting fame. Rahel, on the other hand, left no formal writings, only a voluminous correspondence, edited shortly after her death by her husband as a memorial to her.⁴

I have begun with the differences between my two subjects largely because I want to elaborate on the similarities beneath the disparity. Neither of these women was blessed with physical beauty: the portraits of Germaine show her as inclined to corpulence, with short, plump arms and a soulful face; Rahel, on the other hand, was slight with a long nose and upper lip. Yet both wielded extraordinary power through force of personality, mind, and word, were famous during their lifetime, and have remained so ever since.⁵ Their tremendous prestige is all the more curious insofar as both endured a painful marginalization. Rahel was doubly marginal by being Jewish and by defiantly discarding her heritage. Germaine, while born an insider, became an outsider through the enmity of Napoleon, who banished her from Paris and later from France altogether. Her incessant mobility and far-ranging travels are as much a product of this expulsion as of her innate restlessness. Each of these women in her own way was, therefore, under peculiar handicaps as a salonière, and each triumphed over adverse circumstances through sheer personal charisma.

Having introduced my two figures, let me now turn to their salons. Germaine de Staël and Rahel Levin operated in discrepant contexts. The salon, under female leadership, was a well-established tradition in France, flourishing particularly in the seventeenth century, as shown by Carolyn Lougee's study, Le Paradis des femmes. Women, Salons, and Social Stratification in 17th Century France (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976). What is more, Germaine had the immediate example of her mother's salon, which she headed after the latter's death in 1794. Rahel, on the other hand, had only a single precedent in the salon run jointly by Henriette and Markus Hertz until his death in 1803; theirs was an exceptional, double salon, in which Henriette discussed poetry and novels with the young Romantics in one room while Markus lectured on reason, science, and the Enlightenment next door. However, the salon as a cultural practice was not a common form in Germany, and certainly not in the mode it assumed in Berlin in the final decade of the eighteenth and the opening years of the nineteenth century. Such salons as had existed—in Potsdam, Weimar, Jena, Leipzig, Heidelberg, and Darmstadt—were associated with princes' courts. The numerous salons hosted by middle-class Jewish women in Berlin in the 1790's and up to 1806 are an anomalous episode in German history, as has been documented by Deborah Hertz in her illuminating book, Jewish High Society in Old Regime Berlin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988). The sorry state of Berlin's intellectual institutions, devoid at that point of a university, a parliament, generous noble patronage, or even a vital publishing industry, created, paradoxically, a window of opportunity for a bevy of Jewish salonières, such as Amalie Beer, Sara Levy, Rebecca Solomon, and Philippine Cohen, besides Henriette Herz and Rahel Levin.

But even within their respective environments, Germaine de Staël and Rahel Levin departed from the norms more than they conformed to them. They went along with salon usage in upholding the custom of female sovereignty. Germaine admittedly made capital out of her husband's social position, but otherwise he played no significant role in her life; in November 1800 they were legally separated, and in May 1802 he died. Her wealth and her estate at Coppet were inherited from her father. As for Rahel, her salon reached its zenith long before her marriage. She began receiving in the mid-1790's while living as a rebellious spinster in an attic apartment of her family's grand house in the center of Berlin. Though not as affluent as the other hostesses of the period, she lived in easy circumstances, despite the limitations on her allowance from her brothers in the wake of family disputes. So both these women were financially as well as intellectually independent, each possessing a room of her own, to resort to Virginia Woolf's terms.

In both instances, too, their salons represented what might be called “neutral ground”—and this is their distinctive feature and their main departure from the norm. Instead of functioning as an extension of the social life of their time and place, the salons of Germaine de Staël and Rahel Levin were a kind of metonymic replacement. In Germaine de Staël's, this is to be taken literally for Coppet is just over the Franco-Swiss border in a spot safe from Napoleonic censorship. Rahel Levin's salon was metaphorically neutral territory as a Jewish home where nobility, intelligentsia, and artists could mingle as nowhere else. For this reason both these salons were conducive to extreme, quite unprecedented social heterogeneity, and became the seedbeds of cultural interaction. They were international and cosmopolitan, welcoming a wide spectrum of foreign visitors. As a result, they proved particularly consequential in implementing cultural interchange, notably between France and Germany.

In their overall figuration, these two salons run parallel: both were voluntary and unrestricted, yet relatively small and élite. Both had an artistic as well as an intellectual and social dimension: Germaine instigated theatrical performances, at which she often took the leading part, while Rahel arranged musical recitals in the course of the evening. Both salons depended on the extraordinary interlocutory powers of their hostesses, for whom conversation was nothing short of an art form. Of Staël J. Christopher Herold comments: “For Germaine, conversation was, next to love, the principal raison d'être.” He adds: “Her emotional intensity and intellectual grasp, the improvisatory yet sure-footed rush of her eloquence, the electrifying enthusiasm she communicated for her ideals produced an effect on her audience that can be compared only to a rare musical experience.”⁶ No wonder that she took to the stage like the proverbial fish to water. Rahel, according to contemporary testimony, was far more low-key and restrained in manner. While Germaine domineered by her mere presence, Rahel would circulate quietly from one group to another, making introductions, animating discussions, and occasionally lingering to make signal remarks herself. Although her style was one of understatement, compared to Germaine's boisterousness, she was at least as adept at orchestrating her salon. Perhaps as a born outsider she never possessed the degree of self-assurance that is the insider's birthright, or perhaps it was more a matter of temperament. Be that as it may, the conversational brilliance of each of these women was absolutely decisive for the success of their salons.

In their practical organization and structure, the two salons were, however, utterly different. Both had internal complexities and tensions, but they, too, stemmed from predicaments peculiar to each one.

Germaine de Staël held court at Coppet, an estate on the lake shore about ten miles from Geneva in the Swiss canton that is now Vaud and then belonged to Berne. Her father had acquired the castle and barony in 1784, and during the chaos of the post-revolutionary years it became a safe haven from Napoleonic persecution. Coppet was, therefore, quite exceptional in the salon tradition insofar as it was in the country with no connection to either court or city. Because of its relatively remote location it was, perforce, mainly a residential salon. Its members fell into three major categories: first, local callers, who might come for merely a few hours as dinner guests or as spectators at the theatrical performances. The second group comprised transient visitors from all parts of Europe and even America; their stay might range from several days to several weeks. These included the Danish dramatist Adam Gottlob Oehlenschläger, the Danish poet Frederika Brun, who wrote in German, Prince August of Prussia, Friedrich Schlegel and his new wife, Dorothea, daughter of Moses Mendelssohn, a Russian nobleman, Prince Tuffiakin, François René Chateaubriand, François Guizot, Mathieu de Montmorency, Madame de Krüdener, Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, who painted Germaine's portrait as Corinne, the German philanthropist Baron von Voght, the historian Johann von Müller, the Duchess of Courland, Prince Belmonte, Prince Sapieha, and an American art student, Mr. Middleton. This list of guests gives some idea of the motley array of birds of passage. The more or less permanent residents, who formed the core of the Coppet ménage were Germaine's cousin, Madame Necker de Saussure, her friend, the beautiful Julie Récamier, the novelist Benjamin Constant, August Wilhelm Schlegel, tutor to her children, Simonde de Sismondi, who was to write the monumental History of the Italian Republics, and a near neighbor, Charles-Victor de Bonstetten, who composed a travel book about Italy using the Aeneid as a kind of Baedeker. Between mid-morning breakfast and late afternoon dinner, the Coppet guests were left to their own devices, to write, to read aloud and discuss their own or others' works, or simply to engage in conversation, which often continued into the early morning hours since Germaine, an insomniac, liked to postpone the misery of bedtime.

However bizarre this setup was, and despite the rivalries between lovers competing for the favors not only of Germaine de Staël but also of Madame Récamier, and notwithstanding the incessant undercurrent of political anxiety, there can be no doubt that Coppet was the central fulcrum for cultural interaction and for the transmission of German ideas to the French avant-garde at a time when the German romantic movement was in full flower while its French counterpart, held back by the Revolution and censorship as well as by a conservative attachment to the native neoclassical tradition, was still in a state of gestation. In that gestation, the Coppet salon played an absolutely crucial mediating, almost midwiferly role.

In comparison to Coppet, Rahel Levin's salon was in some respects far more conventional, in others, however, more of an infraction of social codes. It was more conventional than Coppet in its city center location, in its 5:00 p.m. meeting hour for tea and conversation, and in its openness to all comers without formal written invitation, simply by introduction through other habitués. Often introductions were effected by Gustav von Brinkmann, an amateur poet, who was secretary to the Swedish delegation in Berlin. Rahel had met him in the 1790's at Teplitz, and he was an invaluable intermediary between her and the gentile world at large. If the problems at Coppet were primarily of an amatory and political nature, in Rahel Levin's salon they centered on matters of etiquette and religion. It was unusual, to say the very least, for a young unmarried Jewish woman to be receiving the leading thinkers, artists, and nobles in her attic apartment. Among the regular guests were three sets of brothers: August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt, and Ludwig and Christian Tieck, also Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Johann von Müller, Friedrich von Gentz, Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, Henrich von Kleist and Jean Paul Richter on occasion, members of the Prussian royal family such as Prince Louis Ferdinand and his sister, Princess Radziwil, aristocrats such as Count Alexander Tilly, a former page to Marie-Antoinette, the diplomat Peter von Gaultieri, Counts Dohna and Bernstorff, Wilhelm Burgsdorff, a Prussian state official, and the Prince de Ligne, a well-known wit, “master of the tone of the ancien régime,”⁷ and finally such performing artists as the famous actors, Johann Friedrich Fleck and Friederika Unzelmann, and the great singer, Madame Marchetti. Noticeably underrepresented in Rahel's salon on the whole were women, except for a few close personal friends such as Pauline Wiesel. For a time Karoline von Humboldt, Wilhelm's wife, was on intimate terms with Rahel, but later she demonstratively distanced herself as a concomitant of her explicit anti-Semitism. Growing anti-Semitism after 1806 was one of the leading factors in the waning of Rahel's first and most brilliant salon. The two phenomena are closely connected, for anti-Semitism is an indication of a narrow, xenophobic mentality, inimical to the open-mindedness quintessential to the salon as an institution.

It is hard, indeed virtually impossible, to assess with any precision the impact of these salons. If only the tape recorded had been invented then so that we could have immediate access to some of those sparkling conversations! Lacking firsthand evidence, we have to depend on the testimony of witnesses and some not always reliable data. The fact that both these salons attracted such an illustrious assemblage of guests over so many years is the most telling proof of their magnetism and prominence. Gustav von Brinkmann, in an unpublished letter of May 5, 1801 to Julie Voss,⁸ claimed that there was more wit on Rahel Levin's “Judensopha” (Jewish sofa) than in all the rest of Berlin. Backhanded though the compliment is, it nonetheless aptly summarizes the dominant position of Rahel's salon in the intellectual life of the time. Even Goethe enjoyed conversing with her in Karlsbad in 1795, and called on her in 1815 when she was in Frankfurt. As for Germaine's influence, perhaps the ambiguous title of Herold's biography Mistress of an Age does truly encapsulate her situation.

The two women met while Staël was in Berlin in 1804. The accounts are somewhat at variance: according to one source,⁹ the indefatigable Brinkmann brought Staël to dinner at Dorothea von Courland's and arranged a long tête-à-tête between her and Rahel. According to an earlier source, the meeting took place at a soirée hosted by Brinkmann, who had invited the most distinguished and interesting people in Berlin to meet the French visitor. But once she was introduced to Rahel, Germaine ignored everyone else, retired into a corner with her, and engaged in a one and a half hour conversation with her alone. Germaine was deeply impressed by Rahel, and is reported to have said: “She is astonishing. I can only repeat what I have said a thousand times on this journey, that Germany is a mine of genius, whose riches and depth remain unknown as yet.”¹⁰ Rahel's reactions to her French interlocutor were more muted and mixed. Her correspondence contains almost fifty references to Staël: she praises her Considérations sur les principaux événements de la révolution française (1789), but is mostly critical of De l'Allemagne, and thinks that she has misread Rousseau.¹¹ Though discombobulated by Staël's whirlwind manner and want of repose, she nevertheless repeatedly expresses keen regret at her early death.

A “social phenomenon:” that is the phrase used by Thomas Carlyle to describe Rahel.¹² He defines that “phenomenon” in these terms: “That without beauty, without wealth, foreign celebrity, or any artificial nimbus whatsoever, she had grown in her silently progressive way to be the most distinguished woman in Berlin; admired, partly worshipped by all manner of high persons, from Prince Louis of Prussia downwards; making her mother's, and then her husband's house the centre of an altogether brilliant circle there.” He designates her furthermore as “a woman of genius, true depth and worth” (33), who at the time of his writing in 1838 “seems to be still memorable and notable, or to have become more than ever so” (1). Mutatis mutandis, Carlyle's phrase is apposite to Germaine too. She, also, was a “social phenomenon,” who gathered about her the leading minds of her day. The contributions made by these two women to cultural interactions in the Romantic Age are at once unique and parallel.

Notes

1. J. Christopher Herold, Mistress to an Age: A Life of Madame de Staël (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs Merrill, 1958), p. 28.

2. Renée Wintergarten, Madame de Staël (Leamington Spa: Berg, 1985), p. 19. Chapter 2 (18-25), “Education of a Female Prodigy,” gives an account of her upbringing. She was introduced first to the Bible at age two, then to the masterpieces of seventeenth-century French literature along with more recent works of poetry and ideas. She was also taught Latin and English, which she spoke fluently by the time she was twelve. She read John Milton, Thomas Gray, Henry Fielding, and especially Samuel Richardson.

3. See Deborah Hertz, ed., Briefe an eine Freundin. Rahel Varnhagen an Rebecca Friedländer. (Köln: Kiepenhauer and Witsch, 1988).

4. Rahel, Ein Buch des Andenkens für ihre Freunde, 3 vols. (Berlin: Duncker und Humbolt, 1834; Reprint, Munich: Matthew and Seitz, 1983).

5. Proverbially, the three major forces in Europe at the turn of the century were said to be Napoleon, the Duke of Wellington, and Germaine de Staël! Similarly, that phrase in German cultural history has come to be known as “die Rahelzeit.” The enormous amount of scholarly writing on Staël and, particularly more recently, on Rahel Varnhagen, too, testifies to their continuing interest for our age. Both are often seen as pioneers of women's emancipation.

6. Herold, Mistress to an Age, pp. 257, 72.

7. Ellen Key, Rahel Varnhagen, translated by Arthur G. Charter (New York and London: Putnam, 1913; Reprint, Westport, Conn.: Hyperion Press, 1976), p. 215.

8. Cited by Hertz, Briefe an eine Freundin, p. 257.

9. Ibid., p. 157.

10. Alfred Götze, Ein Fremder Gast: Frau von Staël in Deutschland, 1803-4. Jena: Verlag der Fromannscher Buchhandlung, 1928, p. 121; no source given. “Sie ist erstaunlich. Ich kann nur wiederholen, was ich schon tausendmal während meiner Reise gesagt habe, daß Deutschland eine Fundgrube an Genie ist, deren Reichtum und Tiefe man nirgends kennt.”

11. Rahel, Buch des Andenkens, II: 540, and 218; III: 8 respectively.

12. Thomas Carlyle, “Varnhagen von Ense's Memoirs.” London and Westminster Review 62 (1838): 24. I am grateful to Gregory Maertz for having so kindly sent me a copy of this review.