Hannah Arendt
Rahel Varnhagen
The Life of a Jewess
Johns Hopkins University Press,
416 pp., $ 29.95
Hannah Arendt was clearly one of the most original thinkers among the large group of German-Jewish intellectuals who came to America after fleeing Nazi Germany. She first won recognition in 1951 with Origins of Totalitarianism, an ambitious attempt to map out the dark "subterranean stream" that surfaced in the regimes of Hitler and Stalin. Over the next quarter-century, she wrote another ten books, including The Human Condition, On Revolution, and the controversial Eichmann in Jerusalem, a book whose focus on the Nazi bureaucrat's "banality" and "inability to think" was misrepresented by critics as an attempt to excuse his behavior.
By the time Arendt died in 1975, her writings had already attracted considerable attention, and since then there has been a deluge of books and articles on Arendt's life and on the important works she began writing in the 1940s. Indeed, the treatment of Arendt's mature writings has been so exhaustive that some scholars have now crossed into a less visited area: her immature writings.
One such work is Arendt's Ph.D. dissertation, originally published when she was twenty-three in Germany and partially revised thirty-five years later while she lived in America. Published in 1996 by Joanna Scott and Judith Stark as Love and Saint Augustine, the result is a nearly unreadable pastiche of 1929 Heidelberg and 1960s New York.
Now comes another Arendt work from the same early period, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess, completed (except for the last two chapters) in 1933. This is the third time around for this English translation by Richard and Clara Winston. It first came out in 1957, and a second edition was published in 1974. This one calls itself the "first complete edition," which is somewhat misleading since the earlier editions were also complete in substance. What the latest editor, Liliane Weissberg, has done is to add a useful new introduction and some endnotes citing Arendt's German sources.
The story behind Rahel Varnhagen is more interesting than the book itself. Early in the 1920s, one of Arendt's friends discovered some volumes of Varnhagen's published letters and diary entries, edited by her husband in the form of an Andenken, or souvenir book, and Arendt was so intrigued that her friend handed it all over to her.
At the time Arendt was trying to get over an affair she had been having with her professor, Martin Heidegger. Now here was Rahel Varnhagen, like Arendt a German-Jewish woman, whose garret salon in Berlin at the turn of the nineteenth century became a meeting place for Romantic poets, utopian reformers, and visiting tourists from the nobility. Like Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen fell madly in love with a German gentile, who, like Heidegger, broke it off to return to respectable society.
The parallels, however, go only so far. Although both eventually married gentiles, Arendt never rejected her Jewish identity, where Rahel spent her life desperately trying to assimilate. With Napoleon's invasion of Berlin in 1806 and the subsequent French occupation, Rahel's cosmopolitan circle was broken up. And the rise of the German bourgeoisie only meant a proliferation of gentile salons where she would be most unwelcome. So she changed her name twice, settling on a convenient marriage to a much younger Karl August Varnhagen. Still, it should not be surprising that Arendt, then a sensitive nineteen-year-old living in a garret and writing lovesick verses ("I think of him and of the love as though it were a distant land"), should be attracted to the lamentations of another ill-used boheme.
Arendt may or may not have gotten over Heidegger, but by the end of the 1930s she had clearly gotten over Rahel Varnhagen. She completed her manuscript "rather grumpily" in 1938, and only because her husband and the literary critic Waiter Benjamin kept "pestering" her to do it. That is what she later wrote Karl Jaspers (her dissertation mentor, who had become something of a father-figure to her), adding that "this whole project has not been very important to me for a long time, actually not since 1933." These and other slighting remarks came in response to Jaspers's own rather harsh comments on the manuscript, which she had sent to him through a friend. In his long letter to Arendt, Jaspers began with ritual dustjacket praise (" powerful and significant . . . contains pages of extraordinary profundity"), but soon launched into a sharp critique: "Rahel seems to have awakened neither your interest nor your love . . . . You let Rahel dissipate herself in disjointed experiences."
Stung by his criticism, Arendt flatly declared, "I won't publish the book." Five years later the first edition came out. What had happened in the meantime was the opening of a New York branch of the Leo Baeck Institute, devoted to preserving archival records of German Jewry. Arendt had submitted her edited version of Rahel's diary entries and letters, the Andenken, to the directors, and they in turn invited Arendt to send her own manuscript. An English translation of Rahel Varnhagen soon appeared, published for the Institute by the East and West Library in London. Perhaps because it was poorly marketed, sales were so bad that the book never made back the five hundred dollars advanced to Arendt. In the meantime, though, she had started negotiating with a Munich publisher for a German edition. For this her motives were more complicated.
She was seeking restitution from West Germany for the loss of an academic career there during the Nazi period, but in Germany the precondition for a university post is not just a Ph.D. but the publication of a second thesis, an Habilitation. The German edition of Rahel Varnhagen was to be Arendt's Habilitation. After reading the introduction the publisher sounded enthusiastic, but after finishing the manuscript he sent a rejection letter full of extravagant praise: a wonderful, remarkable book, he said, but it provoked "a certain feeling of monotony."
A year later, though, as Arendt was shopping it around to other German publishing houses, her mature writings were bringing her considerable renown in Germany. Perhaps wishing to get on the bandwagon, the publisher wrote back asking if she were still interested. She was, and so in 1959 the first German edition appeared. The point of it all came when Arendt got Jaspers to sign a letter saying that her book was substantially complete in 1933 and would have been approved as an Habilitation had Arendt not been forced to flee Germany. In 1972, Arendt finally received the financial award she had been seeking since the 1950s.
What can be said about the book? Arendt's German publisher said it all: Rahel Varnhagen provokes "a certain feeling of monotony." It is almost unrelievedly monotonous, and the reason is directly connected to Arendt's method. Instead of writing a conventional biography, Arendt pieced together Rahel's reflections on herself, in letters and diary entries, over the course of several years. "It was never my intention," she writes in the preface, "to write about Rahel . . .. What interested me solely was to narrate the story of Rahel's life as she herself might have told it."
What Arendt did, in effect, was to write biography as if it were the subject's autobiography, a dubious way to cover anyone's life but one particularly inappropriate for Rahel Varnhagen, a woman so absorbed in herself and her private dolors that we get only the foggiest understanding of what was actually going on. "Everything was over," Arendt writes, paraphrasing Rahel, "only life, stupid, insensitive life." A few pages later Rahel declares, "I must die, but I don't intend to become dead," and Arendt asks: "How, then, could one go on living when everything was over?" Further on, Rahel sighs again: "It's all over with me in the world; I know it and cannot feel it; I wear a red heart like others, and have a dark, inconsolable, ugly destiny." And the reader must plod on through another 125 pages of lachrymations and kvetchings: "What fault have I committed that one man should toss me into the hands of another until the goddess herself calms me by turning me to stone?" And so on.
Not until the last two chapters, the ones written in 1938, does the book start to come to life, and that is because Arendt departs from her professed aim of telling Rahel's story "as she herself might have told it." Arendt sees, as Rahel did not, that the growth of German nationalism in the nineteenth century made those who tried to escape Jewishness all the more vulnerable to their enemies, "who rejoiced in having for once caught a wholly isolated Jew, a Jew as such, as it were, an abstract Jew without social or historical relationships." The snubs and insults Rahel Varnhagen endured finally forced her to accept her fate, but she could have dismissed them as incidents for which she was not to blame "if she had not centered her whole life around her 'disgrace,' her 'infamous birth.'"
At the end of her life, Rahel finally seemed to grasp that her former determination that "the Jew must be extirpated from us" was unrealizable. She now "unconcernedly wrote whole paragraphs to her brother in Hebrew characters, just as she had done in her girlhood." Yet she converted to Christianity shortly before she died (Arendt cut this from her edition of the Andenken) and referred to the Jews as a "deservedly despised nation."
Not surprisingly, by 1938 Arendt had no more desire to see everything from Rahel's perspective. "Grumpily" completing the last two chapters of this book was not the dreamy student who began it but an active Zionist, living in France and trying to resettle Jews in Palestine before the Nazis invaded. By then she had had quite enough of Rahel -- of her anti-Semitism, her self- absorption, her adolescent mooning over failed romances, her strange passivity. By 1952 Arendt was calling her "insufferable." And so Varnhagen remains, even in this "first complete edition" of Arendt's early work: insufferable.
George McKenna is professor of political sicence at City College of New York.