SOURCE: Weissberg, Liliane. “Turns of Emancipation: On Rahel Varnhagen's Letters.” Cultural Critique 21 (spring 1992): 219-38.

[In the following essay, Weissberg speculates that Varnhagen's letters offer a unique epistolary form that develops around ideas of emancipation and derives from Varnhagen's perspective as a Jewish female.]

I

Emancipation, the “deliverance from bondage or controlling influence,”¹ is a term that has its origin in the Roman family and describes not just the liberation of slaves but also the freeing of children from paternal power. It developed into a political term associated with contracts and laws and with the declaration of civil rights, and its use is highly charged ideologically. The eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, for example, does not list the term; the American Webster's dictionary, on the other hand, refers to its own country's history by listing Lincoln's proclamation. The German Brockhaus deflects attention away from German history and cites instead the end of American slavery as well as the French Revolution, and points to a general history that seems to defy all national boundaries: to the emancipation of women and of Jews.²

Perhaps, however, it is precisely this deflection that marks German historical writings, even more so than the account of the legal constructs by which “women” or “Jews” were established as emancipated objects within the national tradition. Moreover, the question arises as to how “women” or “Jews” have viewed the definitions of emancipation that have formed a discourse from which they have been excluded, even when their desire to participate in that discourse has been presupposed.³ The present essay tries to reflect on this desire by choosing a particular historical moment in which it is often said to have articulated itself. The place and time chosen is Berlin at the turn of the nineteenth century.

Obviously, one cannot assert the equality of women in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Berlin, or discuss the emancipation of Jews during a time when different Prussian laws took and gave various rights without establishing an equal status for the Jewish population. The democratic influence of the French Revolution had its limits, even in French-occupied Berlin. If I were to write about a Jewish woman author in Berlin during this period, I would have to shift the discussion of emancipation from a statement of paternal will to the question of daughterly wishes, private acts, and reflections, but perhaps not of an unpolitical kind. How could one be equal? Rahel Varnhagen seems to ask, and to whom should one be equal? Under which conditions, moreover, is this equality at all desired?

In his study of Jewish female authors in Berlin in the late eighteenth century, Gert Mattenklott identifies a relationship between the conditions of their literary production and the possibility of their own aesthetics.⁴ The double “marginality” of being a woman and a Jew, he writes, creates a secondhand way of living for them. For these Jewish women, there could not have been any life beyond their participation in another's—and there could not have been any “free” life at all. Art, it seems, however, is possible only after emancipation. The impossibility of leading a free life therefore makes the development of one's own aesthetics impossible:

Surely art could not flourish here. Art presupposes freedom. A Jewish, a female aesthetics, this is a contradiction in itself, and the women of this circle were much too clever not to discover this. Art by Jewish women would presuppose a sovereignty over their sex and birth, nature and history, and this, as it were, had to be illusory.

(“Aufbruch”)

The writings of these Jewish women were structured by their general lack of sovereignty; and they had to choose, as Mattenklott insists, a medium that lacked sovereignty as well. Examining the relationship between gender and genre, he focuses on the essay and the letter: “These are forms that flourish when something can be disposed with, independent of any direction, or in which the hindrance, the inability, or the resistance to conform to the representational forms of the old culture would find its expression” (“Aufbruch”). Texts by Jewish women appear here not only as writing that replaces action, but also as the replacement of proper literature,⁵ despite the fact that the letter and the essay are, paradoxically, precisely genres that mark, like no other, the official literary discourse in the eighteenth century.⁶

Mattenklott repeats the statements of many other literary critics and sketches further consequences of this thesis. The growth of these semipublic literary forms, made possible through resistance and the inability to choose other genres, itself indicates the deficiencies of the female and Jewish demimonde. There is only one response to these deficiencies. Because a “free life” is impossible for Jewish women, the letter and essay have to produce alternative lives and to reflect utopian autobiographies. But any critic who censures the essay and the letter as improper literary genres has to censure the sketch of an imaginary life as well.⁷ The hopeful alternative is therefore doomed to appear deficient. Here, as before, life meets art.

Perhaps, however, the issue may not be whether these Jewish women discover their sovereignty over their gender, but whether they find the sovereignty of their gender; perhaps we are dealing here with the paradox of a sovereignty that has to establish itself in the very moment of writing—even if they are writing as women and as Jews. The object/subject distinction of author and text, which has to be established in any kind of judgment, must be called into question. The sovereignty that can be discovered in these women's writing, and the sovereign nature of their writing, have to be different from that other, masterful discourse of literature.

In her letters, and by writing several letters a day, Rahel Varnhagen tries to establish herself, to describe herself as an individual. Rahel, the hostess of a well-known Berlin salon, receives numerous guests, many of whom become her correspondents. The concept of friendship and Geselligkeit [sociability] as established by the culture of the salons, and the oral discourse, influence the style of her letters and often their content as well. Paradoxically, Rahel writes about her self by reporting about others and by aiming her letters to her addressees, who become partners in a dialogue.

Moreover, her production of tens of thousands of letters reveals a strange fact. While letters are denied inclusion in established literary history, Rahel's letters do not even conform to the official rules of the letter. She does not follow epistolary guides, style manuals, or dictionaries. One is not always sure which qualifications of the “letter” they fulfill. Which description and definition can capture the abundance of her writings? And what “life” can we deduce as a result of Rahel's text?

In order to read and to find a descriptive term to characterize her letters, the critic must find similarities in, and make comparisons to, other texts. For Rahel, similarities are as crucial as differences. There are, for example, the similarities that Rahel recognizes between herself and the men of her circle of acquaintances: Christians, German bourgeois or bourgeois aristocrats, the authors of philosophical lectures or Bildungsroman. To remark on similarities implies, however, that one thing is comparable to another, and that they are established by the act of comparison; therefore, such a gesture is a means for discerning and articulating difference. The reader today, who would like to trace this gesture of comparison in Rahel's statement about her writing and in Rahel's writing itself, compares literary products. Are we able to understand these letters as a special, different literature; do we have indications of the possibility of another evaluation, another aesthetics? How can this gesture made by the female, Jewish author be compared to the gesture made by the reader herself today? How can the possibility of another kind of writing be compared with that of another kind of reading, without blurring the distinction between the conditions of writing and those of reading within this comparison?

II

In 1806, Napoleon's army moved into Berlin, beginning a period of French domination. During this time, between 1807 and 1809, the Prussian government devised a program of administrative and economic reforms, initiated by its secretary Freiherr von Stein. These reforms had no effect on lessening social differences, however. Prussia's precarious situation as a truncated state between France and Russia engendered a new feeling of patriotism. As a consequence, new tensions arose between Jews and gentiles. It was difficult to view the Jew, whose emancipation French revolutionary thought promoted, as a supporter of Prussian national ideas.

In May 1809, Karl August Varnhagen introduced his friend Alexander von der Marwitz to Rahel Levin. Rahel, who had begun to call herself Rahel Robert, or even Rahel Robert von Tornow, was living alone and was experiencing financial difficulties. Marwitz was the descendant of an old and established aristocratic family. He administered his family estate and was soon to join the Austrian army in its desperate revolt against the French. Rahel, at this time thirty-eight years of age, was very taken with Marwitz, sixteen years her junior, but their friendship was based primarily on an exchange of letters. Five years after their first meeting, Marwitz was killed in battle in France. At the time of his death, Rahel had already begun her relationship with Varnhagen; she converted to Christianity and married him in 1814. The handsome soldier Marwitz was, however, remembered by Rahel in many of her letters, and especially in her correspondence with Varnhagen. She wrote about him with fondness and with praise, and described Marwitz, who did not paint, or play any music, or write any poetry, as an “artist” (Briefwechsel I: 248).

Rahel's correspondence with Marwitz tells the story of their relationship. Her letters are filled with questions, reports, and descriptions of her own life and adventures. Marwitz in turn reads her letters many times, finding them agitating in a way that prevents his immediate reply.⁸ Rahel calls Marwitz's description both of his reaction and of her letters flattering, and she calls his letter a Schmeichelbrief [letter of flattery]. By rejecting his flattery, however, Rahel also comments on her own letters. A few years earlier (October 16, 1794), in a letter to her Jewish friend David Veit, Rahel describes them as the Confessions de J. J. Rahel (Briefwechsel zwischen Rahel und David Veit I: 240). Here, in her letters to Marwitz, she speaks again of her confessions:

You should know that this letter of flattery has flattered me indefinitely; do you know that it is quite true that I need to be calmed down about my quite terrible letters; that I could not suspect that you would deal with them [verführen] in this way? Do you also know that I wish quite different ones for you, to deal with them like that; but, on the other hand, that I do not think my own unworthy? And you should hear, first of all, what I have decided for myself: I will continue to write such letters to you; these are true confessions, I have thought about it and decided; and you should see my soul as only I can capture it.

(17 Nov. 1811; Briefwechsel I: 129-30)

Rahel, the author and heroine of a text in Rousseau's tradition, offers her letters as a confession, as a form of purifying autobiography. The gesture of offering her letters is ambiguous. Only after some thought do her confessions reveal themselves to the reader as those of a soul that may not be beautiful but that wants to be true. The “truth” of these confessions will make Rahel's soul visible, on the other hand, and this becomes the justification for her letters.

Both an offering and a retraction are thematized here and are acted out through the exchange of these letters. Only true confessions and multiple avowals may prevent the replacement of Rahel's letters with those other, nameless ones, those that are not present here but that would be more deserving of a flattering reading and response. A foreign word, the French confessions, enters her letter seductively. It indicates a polite tone as well as a literary tradition, which is, despite the stress on “truth,” important here as well. After all, the reader's eye should not just capture the letters, but Rahel's soul—a soul that is in view only fleetingly, as if the reader would have to trace it in the act of reading and find a meaning that is in danger of escaping. The letter serves as a mirror, and it casts a double reflection. The reader captures the view of Rahel's soul, just as the author herself can view it—and only while it is passing by. Rahel's picture appears in this reflection, in the moment when her soul is offering itself: in its “truth” in Rahel's writing.

In Rahel's letters, this moment is always at stake; it is a moment that she has to produce by writing constantly, so as to be able to hope for its elusive appearance. The text should function as a mirror, but it cannot reflect her exact image from a smooth surface. This would presuppose a notion of an intact and stable image to which Rahel's “truth” cannot subscribe. Hannah Arendt describes Rahel's writing as a putting together of the disconnected and compares it with the technique of the joke (42). Connecting the disconnected, Rahel searches for her moment as one outside any linguistic order. If truth can be revealed in Rahel's dialogue with a reader, Rahel has, at the same time, to put into question what seems to be fundamental to every introspective narrative and every autobiography: a constant, defined self.

Autobiographical reflection presupposes a paradox; a stable “I” who narrates, and the transformation of the “I” in time. In this process the other—the reader or the addressee—is necessary. Jean Starobinski writes:

[Autobiography] only requires that certain possible conditions be realized, conditions which are mainly ideological (or cultural): that the personal experience be important, that it offer an opportunity for a sincere relation with someone else. These presuppositions establish the legitimacy of “I” and authorize the subject of the discourse to take his past existence as theme. Moreover, the “I” is confirmed in the function of permanent subject by the presence of its correlative “you,” giving clear motivation to the discourse. I am thinking here of the Confessions of St. Augustine: the author speaks to God but with the intention of edifying his readers.

(288)

Rahel sees the “truth” of her confessions as sufficient reason for their formulation. Her confessions are beyond any judgment, even the aesthetic one: “If truth is coarse or not, nobody can question it as such; it corresponds to its being, if it is true; and where it settles on, this is the place that transforms it into coarseness or courtesy” (21 Feb. 1809; Buch des Andenkens I: 405). One cannot criticize Rahel's “truth,” only the site in which it produces itself. “Truth” itself does not change because of the condition of its appearance. For Rahel, the Jewish woman who can choose neither an “acceptable” social place nor the “acceptable” form of literary expression, this may be a concept offering hope.

While truth does not orient itself according to the concretely placed subject, the legitimacy of that “I” and its authority are put into question by the structure of the representation itself. The separation between addressee, reader, and writer undermines in Rahel's letter the integrity of the self and the stability of the “place.” Her soul exists only while it passes quickly by. In her dialogue with the reader, truth does not become anything constructive or edifying, although it is the aim and object of her discourse. It becomes the third, fleeting, and never quite articulated side of a triangle that links writer and reader; one that separates them, as any message would, but also reflects this separation in itself. Rahel needs Marwitz not only to be a reader of her missive but to be a reader who makes the writing of truth possible and who makes the truth of her lines appear.

“[T]hat you would deal with them in this way?” Rahel asks. The subjunctive verführen [to seduce] derives from verfahren [to follow a procedure], to deal with, and hints at a procedure; but it is also the infinitive of the verb verführen, to seduce. Procedure and seduction, here ambiguously stated, are a necessary part of Rahel's writing. The letter that is her confessions, message and narrative of what can never be fully or permanently present, will finally also have to remove itself from that presence that insists on contemporary time. To be able to make herself understood by Marwitz in the future, at the time of his receipt of her letter, Rahel does not write what “is,” but about that which has made her what she is. She describes what makes her view of the world possible. Rahel comments on it elsewhere, in a letter to Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué:

I am, therefore, observing the world. Life, nature, are here for me. Calculate the lutte of my life, therefore; the big, the small and bitter moments. With the sharpest knowledge (Bewußtsein) about myself. With the opinion that I should be a queen (no reigning one, however), or a mother: I discover that there is just nothing that I am. No daughter, no sister, no lover, no spouse, not even a burgheress.

(26 July 1809; Buch des Andenkens I: 436)

Rahel observes the world. The happiness that she sees in others seems only to highlight what she lacks: properties, positions, places that she should have occupied. The subjunctive “should be” constructs an alternative position for her, however, that does not resemble a sketch of a dream world, but leads her to record her dreams. To record them, and to make the analysis of her writing possible, Rahel needs the other: “Please calculate,” she addresses her reader. The “sharpest consciousness” takes shape without a stable subject, between the author and the reader in the act of reading.

III

Rahel's first salon folded at the turn of the nineteenth century. The French occupation and the following war provided a political context in which Berlin's social life changed. Just after 1809, when Rahel was not able to keep even her position as hostess, she often writes down her dreams in her letters to Marwitz. These narratives, presented as gifts, function as signs of the greatest intimacy, and at the same time they provoke distance. As evidence of their friendship, Marwitz asks Rahel to show the narrative of her dreams to his friend Henriette Schleiermacher. With this presentation, he wants to seal his new friendship with his old one, and he encourages, moreover, the friendship between the women themselves and their exchange of dreams.⁹ Following this request, Rahel's letters to Marwitz become more cautious; she is not sure if she would really like to be part of this triangle and present her dreams. Later, however, she records the dreams for a second time, this time for Varnhagen, who will later marry her: Verfahren and Verführung, procedure and seduction, are here at play as well. With her help, Varnhagen prepares Rahel's letters for publication.¹⁰ He heads his copy of Rahel's dream narrative only with a date, “July 1812.” He selects dreams from those Rahel had copied into a notebook and introduces these excerpts into his printed edition of Rahel's correspondence with Marwitz. The dream that had been narrated as a letter is then returned as a narrative to the epistolary exchange.

Varnhagen's editorial procedure points to the special status of the narrated dream that would function as a letter. The reader—Marwitz or, later, Varnhagen—relates to this other world that Rahel would like to encounter, even if she could only do so voyeuristically. Strangely, though, the relationship between the reading of her text and her view of the other generates a double blindness: “Do you know,” she writes to Marwitz, “that your presence has become to me like the eye of the world? I see it, even if you are not there, but I cannot look into her [the world's] eyes: I also don't know if she [the world] is seeing me” (16 May, 1811; Briefwechsel I: 36). This blindness is marked by a sense of strangeness as well as by gender. It is a blind sight, which love demands, and is likened to that writing which directs itself blindly, and some distance away from the person who makes her search for truth possible. Without addressing Marwitz, the world outside cannot perceive her.

Several critics have pointed out that Rahel's writing calls for a psychoanalytic reading and that the writing itself bears out the structure of psychoanalytic discourse.¹¹ Fritz Ernst concludes his article “Rahels Traum” with a quotation from one of Rahel's dreams which he uses to try to trace her “wishes” and “longings.” At the center of her monograph on Rahel Varnhagen, Hannah Arendt places a chapter (“Night and Day”) in which two of Rahel's dreams are used as objects of biographical interpretation; Arendt cares not about the process of analytical reading itself but about a reading that attempts to stabilize the individual in the process of analysis. Not the act of reading is of importance, but the interpretation of symbols. Arendt can therefore proceed to make a thematic selection. Rahel's dreams become for her biographical keys to her relationships with the German Count Karl von Finckenstein or the Spanish diplomat Raphael d'Urquijo and become “silent and consuming complaints of the night,” “shadow images,” which repeat themselves, and “assault, as memories, the waking person” (Arendt 129). The night, however, which is calling for these ghosts, also repeats another dream that can be found in Rahel's letters, but that is neither quoted by Arendt nor copied by Varnhagen for reproduction, and that is therefore censored from the chain of repetitions, much in the same way dreams themselves exercise censorship and repression.

This censored dream tries to confront art and life. It is not without obvious biographical references. Indeed, in many ways it resembles another dream that Varnhagen and Arendt record and which places Rahel in a castle, observing a gathering of people who are unable to see her. Here, in this second dream, Rahel finds herself in a big and festively lit hall on whose walls are hung “the portraits of all sculptors and painters who have ever lived or still live” (650).¹² Painters and sculptors are forming crowds to look at these portraits and to evaluate them in “a kind of last judgment of art” (651):

I saw men of every … age, from about 17 years on; … expression … of the face from all nations which art, imagination and reality had ever shown me … men with and without beards, with great ones and with moustaches, with moustaches without long beard; and again the other way around.

(651)

Rahel's attention is concentrated on the artists, not the paintings, and on the room itself. It is a ballroom that bears resemblance to a church:

But also the large room I had to look at a lot, and I could not understand the light, it was very friendly in its decoration, above, and with its pointed arches; and the many colors, of the many people and pictures, the colors of the room even above, the very light yellowish reddish light, all of this seemed to produce a crowd before the eyes, and gave the whole no cut up or petty look, but the impression remained large and joyful.

(651)

Rahel presses through the crowd of people, “carried dragged on between coats, dresses, backs and arms” (651), and ventures forward, to see the Ideal, who has arrived and who is greeted with awe by the gathered artists. The language of awe, that of the judging people who are present, is a silent hiss, like that of the seductive serpent itself:

[T]he Ideal, some said quietly, silently hissing; and an astonishment moves like a quiver through the room where we are: I, however, center my glance on him, a young man of about 20 years, in common clothes, without a hat … who tries to suppress his laughter: the others do not see it; I, however, call, but he is a human being, he lives, he cannot refrain from laughter. … I come closer and search directly for this person's eyes which he keeps covered, but he smiles more.

(652)

Rahel is the only one who recognizes the joke and unheard laughter. And while she begins to waltz uninhibitedly with “this human being” (652), the artists step back.

Blindness and sight, important for Rahel's description of her confessions, are thematic here. Now it is the Ideal who covers his eyes and needs Rahel in order to be seen properly. She is the only one who realizes that he is a young man and human being. While the audience looks on, Rahel can join with him in dance. The reader, however, knows that Rahel is the only one who would have been able to dance with him. Despite the fact that some sculptors have freed their arms “like women” (651), Rahel is the only woman present. By virtue of being a woman, she alone is able to report that the Ideal lives and laughs, and that she alone may dance with him. The Ideal is not only seductive, but can be seduced to dance as well; in view of this, the other artists, who know nothing about life, have to withdraw. Here ends Rahel's dream. She reports it to Marwitz, who has chosen to read her letters and whom she thinks of as an artist whose flattery she likes both to accept and to reject.

Rahel often mentions waltzing in her early correspondence with David Veit, for whom she describes her dancing master and her lessons, as well as the education that is necessary for acculturation and Bildung—for example, the French language of the confessions.¹³ In all of these letters, waltzing becomes the metaphor of that seductive and dizzying common movement that she designs as an image for her writing, the movement of giving and withdrawing—a linguistic dance. To dance happily with the Ideal could indeed be a proper alternative to the established judgment of art, whose criteria Rahel can fulfill neither through her letter writing nor with her own life.

IV

While she records this dream, however, Rahel is also engaged in a matter of aesthetic judgment herself. She exchanges letters with Varnhagen about Goethe's works. Varnhagen substitutes letters for the names of authors and addressees, and therefore transforms their exchange into an anonymous discussion. In this form he shows his and Rahel's letters to the master, Goethe, himself. Rahel, who idealizes Goethe, is curious about his judgment, and Goethe answers positively. In conferring his opinion, Goethe reads the letter of the alphabet that identifies Rahel's letters, G., as an initial substituting for the name of a male author; and Rahel's letter does indeed correspond to the one beginning his own name. Did Rahel want to be anything else but Goethe's well-meaning mirror? For her, Goethe's reaction is flattering, but it has disturbing consequences for her calculation:

Much as this event pleases me and flatters my self and my heart, I am so terribly sorry that Goethe has to see now which person of really no importance this G. is, in the world as well as in literature; and although he has probably never thought about it, he will not experience it as new that I love him, and in counting those who wish him well there will be one less now.

(Letter to Marwitz, 26 Dec. 1822; Briefwechsel I: 146)

Letters of flattery circulate now as well, and Rahel is again afraid of an exchange of judgment and affection. Her reaction to Goethe's reading parallels her reaction to Marwitz's response, and this is not accidental. Goethe is not only an object of Rahel's admiration and love, but also a constant theme in her correspondence with Marwitz. It is precisely in this movement of giving and withdrawing, exemplified by the exchange of letters itself, that the master of all Bildung and poetry can reveal himself. Rahel writes to Varnhagen about the instigation for her own words and correspondence:

In one thing I have followed my innermost depth, I held myself in distance from Goethe shyly. God, how right this has been! How chaste, how safe from profanation, as if it would have been safeguarded throughout a whole and unblessed life, I could now be able to show him the adoration in my heart. It passes through everything that I have ever expressed, every written word nearly does contain it. And he, too, will be the one to take count of this for me, understanding how difficult it is to keep such loving admiration silently throughout one's whole life hidden in oneself. How embarrassedly I had to fall silent two years ago, when Bettina told me once of the object of her greatest passion, fiery and beautiful, in a Monbijou that turned shiny and silent in the autumn sun! I pretended that I did not even know him. This happened to me quite often; and, at another time, I am willing to talk. You know this. Now, Marwitz has to suffer it. All of our conversations begin with him, and end with him.

(25 Dec. 1811; Briefwechsel I: 183)

While her aristocratic friend Bettina von Arnim talks freely about her love of Goethe, Rahel hides her admiration of him. Rahel resists any competition which would also presuppose that their positions are the same. Rahel denies her own confession the aesthetic scenery, moreover; no autumnal sun keeps shining on her words. Her confessions appear only sometimes, and they cannot always be expected. Goethe, and the confession of her admiration of him, form, however, the beginning and the end of every talk with that other partner, Marwitz. Her confessions about Goethe are a necessary part of her letters to Marwitz, of those special conversations that communicate her dreams as well. But as her letters to Marwitz deal with Goethe and—as confessions—with her own truth as well, Goethe's words themselves will have to speak an ambiguous language, one that not only tells a story but that can tell Rahel's life. The special relationship between Rahel and Goethe thus becomes understandable. It is a relationship that produces Rahel's admiration of the master:

You [Marwitz] were smiling the other day in such a way, when I told you that all of Goethe's words appear to me so totally different, when he is saying them, than when other people have said the same: such as hope, faith, fear, etc. You smiled, judged my observation as correct, and proceeded to explain my words. But now, listen to the unheard of. It seems to be the same for me in regard to my own life. I always think, in the first sense, which is taken from the bloodiest and liveliest heart, that the other people do nothing. I have been thinking this way, if not quite so clearly, for a long time now. And in this way I am telling you this, too. Therefore, I am able to recognize Goethe's words, and every truth of men.

(5 Jan. 1812; Briefwechsel I: 153)

Rahel's letters are confessions that deal with herself and speak about Goethe; they are aimed at Marwitz, herself, and Goethe. Goethe, on the other hand, pursues a writing that offers for his reader Rahel the special significance of her own life. Goethe writes a language that becomes immediate metaphor; he writes with the same letter but differently. The metaphor articulates Rahel's view. Goethe is able to write like this because there is a “truth” in his writing, and this truth is offered by him in words that cannot be his own. Goethe, with his Bildungsroman, the masterful Wilhelm Meister, writes the “unheard of” because he can hear. Rahel, the reader, comments:

Yes, I would be a real part of this book (as you [Veit] say: “as if this is a great loss!”). Although he may have invented everything, even Aurelie, the speeches that she gives he must once have heard, this I know, this I believe. Namely, the princess of Tasso says the same; only in a different tone. How great is this! But he must have heard it. The women nobody can argue with me about. Either one thinks this as woman, or one hears it from a woman. One cannot invent this. Every other humanly possible thing I grant him. But this I know as I.

(Letter to David Veit, 1 June 1795; Buch des Andenkens I: 264)

By listening to a woman, and by writing Rahel's life specifically, Goethe finds words for a life that Rahel cannot describe except by comparison, in a paradox that is her truth. This truth appears unexpectedly, and it is unexpected because it always appears in another place. As a “thoroughly witty” similarity and likeness, it can even appear in Goethe's letters themselves (Letter to Varnhagen, 19 Feb. 1809; Buch des Andenkens, I: 264). Just “like this,” Goethe describes her life. While Rahel is unique in comparison to him, she produces with her life a balance to his work. This balance is needed, not only for any comparison, but for any counting and calculation as well. She herself cannot appear differently except in the “image”:

I am as unique as the greatest appearance on earth. The artist, philosopher, poet does not stand above me. We are of the same element. We are of the same level [Rang], and we belong together. And he who wants to exclude one, is only excluding himself. I am, however, appointed to the life; and I remained as a germ, until my century, and I am totally buried from outside, therefore I say it myself. Because one image should end the existence.

(Letter to David Veit, I June 1795; Buch des Andenkens I: 264)

With the statement of this comparison, the irony as well as the “truth” of another dream becomes apparent, which Rahel, in her dialogue about hearing and true silence, adds to her dream about art and the Ideal. This other, shorter dream is older, but it is one that she “loves still” (652). It is presented as an appendix to the earlier one and recounts an aesthetic judgment. In this dream, Rahel is again among men. Men visit her father and refer, among other topics, to the Duke of Weimar. Rahel provokes a smile, although not suppressed laughter, because she herself knows the “unheard of” this time:

The talk about war ended, and the men dispersed, at that point, I asked somebody who came together with an officer, if Goethe is with the Duke, and how he is doing. “Goethe?” said the man, “who is that?” What? You don't know Goethe? I answered; our foremost poet. Goethe is your foremost poet, this may not quite be the case; the man smiled; this I have never heard. After a pause, in which I could not confront the man, and could not find any answer, nor any evidence, I said: listen! He is the greatest poet; because if God would come down from heaven and tell me that this is not the case; well I say, then I no longer understand His world.

(652)

V

Bettina von Arnim published her memoirs of the ennobled Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as a collection of letters that, while not without erotic impact, are entitled Goethe's Correspondence with a Child.¹⁴ For Rahel, Goethe is a paternal figure who has to be worshiped but who undergoes a peculiar secularization. Goethe's writings represent all that a German Bildung should strive for, the desired social position and style that Rahel is unable to attain. In her dream, the uniform of military men gives entrée to the House of Weimar, and it is an entry that neither Rahel's person nor any of her letters are ever able to obtain. Venturing from a native Yiddish, and trying herself with the established pen, her writing mirrors the military order as anarchy. She writes to the poet Fouqué:

Something else! And something quite different! Quite! When I am writing myself into the Fouquéan writing house, it is quite honest and naive of me! I know very well that I am writing things that are worthwhile reading; but my words and yours! Like exercising soldiers in beautiful uniforms everything of yours is standing there; and mine, they look like run together rebels with sticks!

(Letter to Fouqué, 31 Dec. 1811; Buch des Andenkens I: 585)

Neither Rahel nor her writing wear the proper “uniform,” but this may not necessarily imply any deficiency on her part. In contrast to a man's world, it may simply be “something else.” Rahel's descriptions designate failure as well as success: to lack particular properties but to be of the same level, and to produce a balance by the absence of the proper place. Unlike Bettina von Arnim, Rahel is neither child nor daughter in her relationship to her male correspondents. While her writing lacks the “uniform,” and therefore the authority, of Marwitz or Fouqué or, above all, Goethe, her Jewish mother tongue is an origin of more than an alternative discourse. Rahel can only write differently under Goethe's image. But Goethe's writings themselves are “true” only inasmuch as they offer a metaphor for Rahel's existence.

This dialogue offers a peculiar paradox. By its ability to liberate, to open one's powerful hand to let go, emancipation presupposes an established ownership. Goethe's paternal hand, however, can only offer emancipation by writing what is already not his own, the truth of Rahel's life and conversation. Far from being barred any access to literature and aesthetics by her lack of social freedom, Rahel undermines in turn the structure of emancipation itself—with her writing. Neither the positions of master and dependent student seem stable, nor does any delineation of gender that would conform to and confirm this configuration of power—Rahel can turn, indeed, into the author G. Her letters, linking the dependency of life with art, give birth to a mastery that transgresses the relationships of mother and son, and of father and daughter. Here, the search for any Jewish and feminist aesthetics has to begin.

Notes

1. See Webster's New Universal Unabridged Dictionary.

2. See Der Grosse Brockhaus.

3. This is taken for granted in all the studies dealing with Jewish emancipation; see, for example, Reinhard Rürup, “Judenemanzipation und bürgerliche Gesellschaft in Deutschland,” or Arno Herzig, “Das Problem der jüdischen Identität in der deutschen bürgerlichen Gesellschaft.” Jewish resistance towards the adoption of the German language, for example, is generally seen as a mark of the pre-emancipatory era, and the pre-Mendelssohn time; see, for example, Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study.

4. See Gert Mattenklott, “Aufbruch in neue Lebensräume oder Der ungestillte Hunger.” The following quotations are taken from this article. All translations from the German, here and elsewhere, are mine.

5. The thesis that literature serves as a replacement for actions continues a traditional opposition of art and life. It can often be found in the secondary literature on Rahel Varnhagen, and seems to answer her own complaints about her limitations to act. See, for example, even the discussion of Varnhagen in a feminist study like that of Silvia Bovenschen, Die imaginierte Weiblichkeit.

6. See Kay Goodman, “Poesis and Praxis in Rahel Varnhagen's Letters.” She refers to Jürgen Habermas's Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit.

7. Indirectly, Mattenklott himself criticizes his representation of Jewish women writers as women without properties later in his essay, by correcting Wilhelm von Humboldt's similar assertion. In another essay, Mattenklott also touches on the fact that the letter may not be such a “marginal” genre. It is an essay on the letters and epistolary novels of a non-Jewish woman writer, Bettina von Arnim: “Romantische Frauenkultur.”

8. Compare Alexander von der Marwitz's letter to Rahel Varnhagen, 12 Nov. 811; Briefwechsel I: 125.

9. See letter to Alexander von der Marwitz, 8 Dec. 1812 (Briefwechsel I: 217-221), and the following letters.

10. For this reference, I am grateful to Ursula Isselstein, who was able to consult Rahel's corrections on the original letters. The copy of the dream narratives has not been censored any further by Rahel or Karl August Varnhagen, however. See “‘daß ich kein Träumender allein hier bin!’” esp. 650. See Isselstein for a history of the publication of Rahel's dream narratives. Friedrich Kemp gives these narratives the heading “Aus Rahels Tagebuch” [From Rahel's diary] (Briefwechsel I: 202).

11. See, for example, Goodman 133; Isselstein, 653n12; and Liliane Weissberg, “Writing on the Wall.”

12. Rahel Varnhagen's dreams are quoted from their first publication by Isselstein; the page references follow the quotations in the text.

13. See, for example, the letters to David Veit, 13 and 17 Dec. 1793, and David Veit's letter to Rahel, 24 Dec. 1793; Briefwechsel zwischen Rahel und David Veit I: 78 and I: 85-86.

14. In German, Goethes Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde. Seinem Denkmal.

This paper was first presented at Cornell University, November 1988. It is part of a longer work on Rahel Varnhagen and Dorothea Schlegel that will appear in German in a special volume of the Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift, Perspektivenwechsel.

Works Cited

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Arnim, Bettina von. Goethes Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde. Seinem Denkmal. Berlin, 1835.

Bovenschen, Silvia. Die imaginierte Weiblichkeit: exemplarische Untersuchungen zu kulturgeschichtlichen und literarischen Präsentationsformen des Weiblichen. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979.

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———. “Romantische Frauenkultur: Bettina von Arnim zum Beispiel.” In Literatur—Frauen—Geschichte: Schreibende Frauen vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart. Ed. Hitrud Gnüg und Renate Möhrmann. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1985. 123-43.

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———. Briefwechsel zwischen Rahel und David Veit. 2 vols. Ed. from the papers of Karl August Varnhagen. Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1861. Rpt. in Rahel-Bibliothek. 10 vols. Ed. Konrad Feilchenfeldt, Uwe Schweikert, and Rahel E. Steiner. Munich: Matthes und Seitz, 1983.

———. Buch des Andenkens. 2 vols. Ed. Karl August von Varnhagen. Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1834. [Rahel-Bibliothek I.]

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