Life
Homage and exposure: Two titanic German-Jewish women of letters
Daniel Ben-Ami reviews a new edition of a book by Hannah Arendt
March 18, 2022 24:00
Daniel Ben-Ami reviews a new edition of a book by Hannah Arendt
March 18, 2022 24:00Life of a Jewish Woman
By Hannah Arendt
New York Review Books, £15.99
Rahel Varnhagen (born Rahel Levin) was an extraordinary woman born in 1771 into a tumultuous Europe. Although she lacked a formal education, in her youth she ran a salon for artists, intellectuals and poets from her tiny garret in her native Berlin. Then she found herself caught in the maelstrom of European wars, including that between Prussia and Napoleonic France and then later between Russia and France.
She was also part of the first generation of Jews to begin to assimilate into German society. Before that, a tiny elite enjoyed the privileged status of wealthy “court Jews”, providing finance to the rulers of the patchwork of German statelets that existed at the time. Even until the early 19th century, Jews were mostly dirt poor and generally excluded from mainstream society.
Rahel (as she is generally known) became the leading German woman of letters of the 19th century, thanks to her voluminous correspondence with many of Germany’s leading cultural figures. She also had several lovers, until in 1814, at the age of 43, she married August Varnhagen von Ense, a soldier, diplomat and man of letters 14 years her junior. Shortly before her marriage, she converted to Christianity.
This would all provide ample material for a conventional biography, but Hannah Arendt’s Rahel Varnhagen is anything but. Arendt, also from a German Jewish background, was one of the most remarkable figures of the 20th century, now largely remembered for the single, powerful phrase, “the banality of evil”, coined in her report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel in 1961. She had her own particular take on Rahel.
When Arendt fled Germany in 1933, the book’s manuscript was completed except for the last two chapters. It was written as a “habilitation” (second doctorate to enable her to get a university teaching post) but it reads nothing like an academic treatise. This edition is published by the New York Review of Books.
There are many facets to Arendt’s book, but in a 1952 letter to Karl Jaspers, her former doctoral supervisor, she describes it as “written from the perspective of a Zionist critique of assimilation”. It is not hard to see why. After the Napoleonic invasion of Berlin in 1806, the Jews were for the first time granted full civil rights. But shortly afterwards there was an antisemitic backlash from both the nobility and the rising business class.
The echoes from Arendt’s time are easily discernible. German Jews seemed to be assimilating remarkably well until the rise of the Nazi party in the 1920s.
While neither woman was against assimilation in principle, it seemed to have failed in its promise to solve the problem of antisemitism.
Daniel Ben-Ami runs a website on untangling antisemitism, www.radicalismoffools.com