Rahel Varnhagen

 ( 1771 Births ) 

Rahel was revered for her witty conversation and wise judgments, and was passionate about literature as well as the new sciences. Since she was not allowed to study as a woman, she educated herself by reading the most important classical and contemporary literature, often in the original language.

It was the time of the romantic cult of friendship. Rahel lived intensely, knew the highs of enthusiasm and the lows of despair. She went out of her way for her friends, giving advice and helping when it came to secret love affairs or illegitimate children. An ardent lover herself, she experienced two passionate love affairs: the first with Count Karl von Finckenstein, the second with the Spanish diplomat Don Rafael Eugenio de Urquijo. Both relationships were broken off after lengthy engagements.

As an independent woman her view of marriage was highly critical, nevertheless she hoped to escape the “disgrace” and “misfortune” of her Jewish birth through marriage.

After 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 its 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, at the age of 43, she married the biographer Karl August Varnhagen von Ense, 14 years of her junior, in Berlin, after having converted to Christianity — this also made her sister-in-law to the poet Rosa Maria Assing. After her conversion to Protestantism, when she took the name Antonie Friederike.

At the time of their marriage, her husband, who had fought in the army against the France, belonged to the Prussian diplomatic corps, and their house in Vienna became a meeting place for Prussian delegates to the Congress of Vienna. In 1815, she accompanied her husband to Vienna and then to Karlsruhe in 1816, where he became a Prussian representative. Early years were difficult in Vienna, Frankfurt and in Karlsruhe, where Karl Varnhagen was a Prussian diplomat at the court of Baden and she, as a baptized Jew, was not invited to court events. She returned to Berlin in 1819, when her husband retired from his diplomatic position. Her husband learned to give her the freedom she needed. Together they ran a salon but since these were the times of restoration after the Congress of Vienna and Rahel was now a married woman, it was rather more conventional than her first salon. Many of the Romantics had turned away from Rahel after embracing conservatism and Germanism. Hegel, Ranke and Börne and other progressive political thinkers socialized with them. Rahel herself was enthusiastic about Saint Simon's early socialist writings and found an intellectual heir in the young Heinrich Heine, whose genius she recognized. Bettina von Arnim also became an important friend at that time.

Though she never wrote a major book, Rahel Varnhagen is remembered for the intensity and variety of her correspondence. Six thousand letters have survived, out of an estimated ten thousand she wrote in her lifetime.