Volume 46, Number 3 · February 18, 1999
'A Fugitive from Egypt and Palestine'
By Amos Elon
Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess
by Hannah Arendt, First complete edition, edited by Liliane Weissberg, translated by Richard Winston, by Clara Winston
Johns Hopkins University Press, 388 pp., $29.95
By the end of the nineteenth century Rahel Varnhagen, the daughter of Markus Levin, seemed in retrospect the first completely assimilated Jew in modern German history. A century before, in the 'garret' of her parents' house on the Jaegerstrasse in Berlin, she ran the best-known German literary salon of the nineteenth century. She was only about twenty years old when she started inviting people to come to see her around 1791, and her salon was almost immediately frequented by leading Romantic poets, foreign diplomats, and fashionable young Prussian aristocrats. She was widely seen as having inaugurated the Goethe cult in Germany. Though she herself felt highly uncomfortable as a Jew, she helped launch what later came to be called the German-Jewish 'dialogue' or 'symbiosis'—a highly charged and contentious subject of debate.
Review, 4495 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |