BIBLIOGRAPHY

Weissberg, Liliane. “Changing Weather: A Review Essay.” The Germanic Review 67, no. 2 (spring 1992): 77-86.

Reviews four books on Varnhagen. Weissberg also provides a brief biography and summarizes a conference devoted to the work of Varnhagen.

BIOGRAPHY

Arendt, Hannah. Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess. First Complete Edition. Translated by Richard and Clara Winston. London: East and West Library, 1957. Reprint, with an introduction by Liliane Weissberg, Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.

Offers a descriptive, rather than factual, biography of Varnhagen that focuses on Varnhagen's Jewish-German identity, using then unpublished letters and diaries to reconstruct Varnhagen’s life.

CRITICISM

Benhabib, Seyla. “The Pariah and Her Shadow: Hannah Arendt's Biography of Rahel Varnhagen.” In Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, edited by Bonnie Honig, pp. 83-104. University Park, Pa.: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995.

Claims Hannah Arendt's biography of Varnhagen was written to also address the conditions of modernity and totalitarianism, particularly with regard to questions of Jewish-German identity and anti-Semitism.

Bird, Alan. “Rahel Varnhagen von Ense and Some English Assessments of Her Character.” German Life and Letters 26, no. 3 (April 1973): 183-92.

Briefly examines the reception of Varnhagen by nineteenth-century English critics Anna Jameson and Elizabeth Rigby, and notes Varnhagen's continued relevance to contemporary issues.

Corkhill, Alan. “Female Language Theory in the Age of Goethe: Three Case Studies.” Modern Language Review 94, no. 4 (October 1999): 1041-53.

Considers the confessional writings of Varnhagen, Sophie Mereau-Brentano, and Bettina Brentano-von Arnim as evidence of women's writing about philosophy and poetics during the German Romantic period.

Goodman, Kay. “The Impact of Rahel Varnhagen on Women in the Nineteenth Century.” Amsterdamer Beitrage zur Neuren Germanstik 10 (1980): 125-53.

Analyzes the influence of Rahel on the 1830's women's emancipation efforts and its leaders. Goodman distinguishes between the letters and Varnhagen by noting the positive response to the letters.

Joeres, Ruth-Ellen B. “‘We Are Adjacent to Human Society’: German Women Writers, the Homosocial Experience, and a Challenge to the Public Domestic Dichotomy.” Women in German Yearbook: Feminist Studies in German Literature and Culture 10 (1995): 39-57.

Asserts that homosocial epistolary writing by German women, with examples from Varnhagen and Bettina von Arnim, demonstrate social spheres marked by fluid identities and the expression of desire.

Tewarson, Heidi Thomann. “Caroline Schlegel and Rahel Varnhagen: The Response of Two German Women to the French Revolution and Its Aftermath.” Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 29, no. 2 (May 1993): 106-24.

Analyzes Varnhagen's and Caroline Schlegel's interest in politics demonstrated in letters and diaries. Notes that these private writings reflect these women's limited abilities to influence substantial public change.

Weissberg, Liliane. “Writing on the Wall: Letters of Rahel Varnhagen.” New German Critique: An Interdisciplinary Journal of German Studies 36 (fall 1985): 157-73.

Looks at the construction of Varnhagen's identity as a model of the inwardly focused individual through, first, Varnhagen's use of language and, second, her husband's edited collection of her letters.

Additional coverage of Rahel Varnhagen's life and career is contained in the following sources by the Gale Group: Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 90 and Literature Resource Center.