Rahel Varnhagen

Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman is the biography of a remarkable, complicated, troubled, passionate woman, an important figure in German romanticism, the person who in a sense founded the Goethe cult that would become central to German cultural life in the 19th century, as well as someone who confronted with unusual determination and bore the burden of being both a woman in a man's world and an assimilated Jew in Germany. Rahel Levin Varnhagen was, Arendt writes, "neither beautiful nor attractive...and possessed no talents with which to employ her extraordinary intelligence and passionate originality." Arendt sets out to tell the story of Rahel's life as Rahel might have told it and, in doing so, to reveal the way in which intellectual and social assimilation works out in one person's destiny. On her deathbed, Rahel is reported to have said, "The thing which all my life seemed to me the greatest shame, which was the misery and misfortune of my life - having been born a Jewe