Rahel Varnhagen - Life and Works

Life and Works

Rahel Levin was born in Berlin to a Jewish family. Her father, a wealthy jeweler, was a strong-willed man who ruled his family despotically. She became very intimate with Dorothea and Henriette, the daughters of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. Together with them she knew Henriette Herz, with whom she later became most intimately associated, moving in the same intellectual sphere. Her home became the meeting-place of men like Schlegel, Schelling, Steffens, Schack, Schleiermacher, Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt, Motte Fouqué, Baron Brückmann, Ludwig Tieck, Jean Paul, and Friedrich Gentz. During a visit to Carlsbad in 1795 she was introduced to Goethe, whom she again saw in 1815, at Frankfurt am Main.

After the death of her father in 1806 she lived in Paris, Frankfurt am Main, Hamburg, Prague, and Dresden. This period was one of misfortune for Germany; Prussia was reduced to a small kingdom and his king was in exile. Secret societies were formed in every part of the country with the object of throwing off the tyranny of Napoleon. Levin herself belonged to one of these societies.

In 1814 she married, in Berlin, the biographer Karl August Varnhagen von Ense, after converting to Christianity - this also made her sister-in-law to the poet Rosa Maria Assing. At the time of their marriage, her husband, who had fought in the Austrian army against the French, belonged to the Prussian diplomatic corps, and their house at Vienna became the meeting-place of the Prussian delegates to the Congress of Vienna. She accompanied her husband in 1815 to Vienna, and in 1816 to Karlsruhe, where he was Prussian representative. After 1819 she again lived in Berlin, where Varnhagen had taken up his residence after having been retired from his diplomatic position.

Though never the author of a major book, Rahel Varnhagen is remembered both for the intensity and variety of her correspondence. Six thousand letters have survived, out of an estimated ten thousand letters written by her in the course of her lifetime. A few of her essays were published in Das Morgenblatt, Das Schweizerische Museum, and Der Gesellschafter; in 1830, her Denkblätter einer Berlinerin was published in Berlin. Her husband, Karl August, edited and published her correspondence in the twenty years following her death. Her correspondence with David Veit and with Karl August was published in Leipzig, in 1861 and 1874–1875 respectively.

Rahel Varnhagen died in Berlin in 1833. Her grave is located on Trinity Cemetery (Dreifaltigkeitsfriedhof I) in Berlin-Kreuzberg. Her husband published two memorial volumes after her death containing selections from her work: Rahel, ein Buch des Andenkens für ihre Freunde (Rahel, a memorial book for her friends; 3 vols., 1834; new ed., 1903) and Galerie von Bildnissen aus Rahels Umgang (Gallery of portraits from Rahel's circle; 2 vols., 1836).