Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess was largely written in the early 1930s, before Arendt fled Germany, but was not published until 1957 (in English by the East and West Library in London; the German edition appeared in 1959). It is a biographical study of Rahel Levin Varnhagen (1771–1833), a Jewish woman in Berlin who hosted one of the most celebrated salons of the Romantic era and spent her life trying to overcome the “shame” of being born Jewish.
Rahel’s salon attracted Goethe, the Humboldt brothers, Friedrich Schlegel, and much of literary Berlin — but her social success was always precarious, dependent on her ability to transcend her Jewish origins through wit, cultivation, and personal charm. She eventually converted to Christianity and married a Prussian diplomat, Karl August Varnhagen von Ense, achieving the social acceptance she had spent decades pursuing. But on her deathbed she reportedly said: “The thing which all my life seemed to me the greatest shame… I should on no account now wish to have missed.”
Arendt’s treatment of Rahel is both sympathetic and critical. She understands the desire to escape a stigmatized identity — she grew up in a similar milieu of assimilated German Jews — but she judges it as a form of self-deception. Rahel’s tragedy, in Arendt’s reading, is that she spent her life trying to become something she was not, and succeeded only in losing herself without gaining acceptance. The book reads in retrospect as a diagnosis of the illusion of assimilation that the Holocaust would destroy completely.
Collecting Rahel Varnhagen
First edition (East and West Library, London, 1957): Cloth binding.
Market values:
- First English edition in dust jacket: $100–$300
- Without jacket: $25–$60
- German edition (1959): $40–$100