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Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess

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Rahel Varnhagen
1997 edition
AuthorHannah Arendt
SubjectBiography
Published1957
PublisherEast and West Library
Publication placeUnited Kingdom
Pages222
OCLC70379360
LC ClassPT2546 V22 A9413 1957
Portrait of Rahel Varnhagen in 1800
Rahel Varnhagen ca. 1800

Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess[1] is a book-length biography of Rahel Varnhagen written by political philosopher Hannah Arendt. Originally her Habilitationsschrift she completed it in exile as a refugee, but was not published till 1957, in English, in the UK (London) by East and West Library.

History

Rahel Varnhagen was Arendt’s Habilitationsschrift, largely written in the 1930s, but which she was unable to complete, having to flee Nazi Germany. She took the manuscript with her into exile in Paris, where she was able to complete it in 1938. Forced to flee once again, this time without her manuscript, she arrived in America in 1941. However, she had given a copy to Gershom Scholem[2], and it was finally published in 1957[3] having been translated from German. [4] The book was later translated into French in 1986,[5] and Spanish in 2000.[6] A revised edition in 1974 used the subtitle The Life of a Jewish Woman.[3] A later biography of the subject by Heidi Thomann Tewarson (2001) distanced itself from Arendt's work, which its author considered too critical of Varnhagen.[3] Arendt dedicated the book to her life-long friend Anne Mendelssohn, who had first drawn her attention to Varnhagen's writing.[7][8][9]

Content

Rahel Varnhagen is ostensibly a biography of this nineteenth century Jewish socialite, and formed an important step in Arendt's analysis of Jewish history and the subjects of assimilation and emancipation, and introduced her treatment of the Jewish diaspora as either pariah or parvenu. In addition it represents an early version of her concept of history.[10][11] Arendt's relation to Varnhagen permeates her subsequent work. Her examination of Varnhagen's life is set against the background of the catastrophic destruction of German-Jewish culture and its demonstrations of the illusion of any true German-Jewish "symbiosis" and the threatened existence of her subject. In this sense the book partially reflects Arendt's own view of herself as a German Jewish woman driven out of her own culture into a stateless existence.[10] In this sense the work has been referred to as "biography as autobiography".[11][12][13]

References

  1. ^ Arendt 1997.
  2. ^ Aschheim 2011.
  3. ^ a b c Barnouw 2001.
  4. ^ Zohn 1960.
  5. ^ Azria 1987.
  6. ^ El Ciervo 2000.
  7. ^ Grunenberg 2017, p. 107.
  8. ^ Zebadúa Yáñez 2017.
  9. ^ Benhabib 1995.
  10. ^ a b Grunenberg 2003, p. 34.
  11. ^ a b Young-Bruehl 2004, pp .85–92.
  12. ^ Goldstein 2009.
  13. ^ Cutting-Gray 1991.

Bibliography

  • Arendt, Hannah (1997) [1958]. Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess. Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 978-0-8018-5587-0. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
  • Aschheim, Steven E. (Winter 2011). "Between New York and Jerusalem". Jewish Review of Books (Review). {{cite magazine}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)* Azria, Régine (1987). "Review of Rahel Varnhagen. La vie d'une juive allemande à l'époque du romantisme". Archives de sciences sociales des religions. 32 (64.2): 233. ISSN 0335-5985. JSTOR 30129073. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
  • Barnouw, Dagmar (Winter 2001). "Rahel Levin Varnhagen: The Life and Work of a German Jewish Intellectual (review)". Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies. 19 (2): 174–176. ISSN 1534-5165 – via Project MUSE. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
  • Benhabib, Seyla (1995). "The Pariah and Her Shadow: Hannah Arendt's Biography of Rahel Varnhagen". Political Theory. 23 (1): 5–24. JSTOR 192171. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
  • Christophersen, Claudia (2002). Es ist mit dem Leben etwas gemeint: Hannah Arendt über Rahel Varnhagen (in German). Königstein/Taunus: U. Helmer. ISBN 978-3-89741-112-8. OCLC 51022474.
  • Gerhardt, Christina (2001). "Review of Rahel Varnhagen. The Life of a Jewess". Monatshefte. 93 (3): 389–391. ISSN 0026-9271. JSTOR 30166386.
  • Klein, Dennis (1980). Gay, Peter; Arendt, Hannah; Scholem, Gershom; Dannhauser, Werner J. (eds.). "Assimilation and Dissimilation: Peter Gay's Freud, Jews and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture". New German Critique (19): 151–165. doi:10.2307/487977. ISSN 0094-033X. JSTOR 487977.

Bibliographic notes

  1. ^ 1st ed. Preface ix–xxv; 2nd ed. Preface to Second Edition ix–xxxvi, Preface xxxvii-l
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