Samir Gandesha
Rahel Antione Frederike Varnhagen (née Levin), born May 19, 1771, in Berlin, the eldest child of successful merchant Markus Levin, was hostess of one of the most important Berlin literary-philosophical salons of the romantic period between 1790 and 1806.1 She went on to host, with her husband, Karl Auguste Varnhagen von Ense, a subsequent salon from 1821 to 1832, whose participants included such illustrious figures as Bettinia von Arnim, Henrich Heine, G. W. F. Hegel, Leopold von Ranke, and Eduard Gans. The household into which Rahel was born included four other younger siblings: brothers Markus (1772) and Ludwig (1778), and sisters Rose (1781) and Moritz (1785). The family remained orthodox and was relatively unversed in German culture but was also “equally uneducated in Jewish learning.”2 While she published no books of her own and a handful of essays in journals such as Das Schweizerische Museum and Das Morgenblatt, as well as Denkblätter der Berlinerin, Rahel Varnhagen distinguished herself as a gifted letter writer, having penned 10,000 letters over the course of her life, of which some 6,000 have survived. Her husband edited and published her correspondence in the two decades after her death.
Hannah Arendt deeply identified with Rahel and published this biography with the Leo Baeck Institute in 1957. She had begun working on the book in the late 1920s and managed to finish all but two chapters before she was forced to flee Germany in 1933. The biography also served as a kind of micrological history of the extraordinary case of German Jews, “an altogether unique phenomenon; nothing comparable to it is found even in other areas of Jewish assimilation.”3 In a letter written on September 7, 1952, in response to Karl Jaspers’s critical assessment of the book, Arendt explains its significance in the following way:
You are absolutely right when you say that this book “can make one feel that if a person is a Jew he cannot really live his life to the full.” And that is of course a central point. I still believe today that under conditions of social assimilation and political emancipation the Jew could not “live.” Rahel’s life seems to me a proof of that precisely because she tried out everything on herself without attempting to spare herself anything and without a trace of dishonesty. What always intrigued me about her was the phenomenon of life striking her like rain pouring down on someone without an umbrella.4
If the biography was a history of the German Jews, it was one that, in the words of Walter Benjamin, “flashed up in a moment of danger”5 insofar as, according to Arendt, it “was written with an awareness of the doom of German Judaism (although, naturally, without any premonition of how far the physical annihilation of the Jewish people in Europe would be carried).”6 What fascinates Arendt most is the oscillation of Varnhagen’s life between being a pariah or an outcast, which Rahel was clearly tortured by, describing her Jewish identity as a “slow bleeding to death,”7 and the seductions of assimilation and simply leaving this identity behind for the life of the parvenu or “upstart.”
In writing the biography, Arendt drew upon Rahel’s published letters as well as on a prodigious quantity of unpublished materials. What made Arendt’s labors particularly difficult and arduous were the numerous corrections, interpolations, and “mutilations”8 made by her husband, Varnhagen, himself, especially to the three-volume Buch des Andenkens, published in 1834. According to Arendt, which she reiterates in her letter to Jaspers, Varnhagen “made wholesale corrections, expunged essential portions and coded personal names in such a manner that the reader was deliberately led astray.”9 Especially significant is the fact that while Varnhagen’s actions had been exposed, one thing that remained unchallenged was
his deliberate falsifications of her life . . . that almost all of his omissions and misleading coding of names were intended to make Rahel’s associations and circle of friends appear less Jewish and more aristocratic, and to show Rahel herself in a more conventional light, one more in keeping with the taste of the time.10
As we shall see, the irony of her husband’s presentation of her life so ught to assimilate her as a parvenu despite her heroic deathbed embrace of pariahdom. If Rahel ultimately rejected assimilation, this did not prevent Varnhagen from seeking to reduce such a deviant embrace of her own difference to identity. To invoke Benjamin once again: “even the dead won’t be safe from the enemy if he wins.”11
Arendt considered her approach to writing about Rahel Varnhagen’s life to be an “unusual”12 one insofar as she did not intend the book to be simply about her subject’s life, which is presumably what a biography traditionally is. It was not about Rahel’s “psychology,” as this would have entailed the introduction into her life of categories and norms from “the outside.” Neither was it necessarily intended as a work about the extraordinary role Rahel played in the history of German romanticism, nor was it about the Berlin “Goethe cult” of which she was the originator. Arendt was also not particularly interested in the social history of the period, nor about her ideas or world view. Her interest consisted in narrating “the story of Rahel’s life as she herself might have told it.”13 In describing the biography thus, Arendt betrayed a profound and enduring identification with her subject. So deeply did she identify with Rahel that Seyla Benhabib is compelled to suggest that her biography can be read as narrating Arendt’s own development: “The one narrated about becomes the mirror in which the narrator also portrays herself.”14
The biography sets out the contours of Rahel Varnhagen’s life, and it details her amorous entanglements with Count Karl von Finckenstein, Friederich von Gentz and, most importantly, of course, Karl Auguste Varnhagen himself. It also provides an account of Rahel’s Jägerstrasse salon in Berlin, which was frequented by a veritable who’s who of prominent literary and philosophical figures. The book culminates in Rahel’s courageous, deathbed embrace of her long-repudiated Jewishness. What characterized her life as a whole with the exception of this late embrace, in Arendt’s view, was her refusal to act but rather to accept life as a kind of destiny, a fate over which she had little control. She regarded her erotic relationships with men, for example, as “chance” encounters. This was especially the case with Karl Auguste Varnhagen, whom she met in 1808 in the wake of a hardening of German attitudes toward Jews and, indeed, a resurfacing of anti-Semitism, with the entry of Napoleon’s army into Germany in 1806, after a period in which it had briefly fallen into abeyance. It was arguably this external pressure that led Rahel, already deeply conflicted about her own Jewish identity, to embrace a full-blown assimilationism, to become, in other words, a parvenu. She first sought to change her name to Robert, following the lead of her two brothers, who were also baptized. Upon making the acquaintance of and marrying Varnhagen, she took his name and sought to assimilate into gentile society. This entailed a kind of self-sacrifice and, indeed, outright violence to her own identity.
What role does Rahel Varnhagen play in Arendt’s oeuvre as a whole and what is its contemporary importance? According to Arendt herself, it doesn’t play much of a role in her thought after 1933.15 Nonetheless, it is possible to identify three main themes that we find reflected in her subsequent writings, particularly in the decade or so to follow: the relation between pariah and parvenu, and the idea of what Bernard Lazare calls the “conscious pariah” that can be regarded as constituting the essence of Arendt’s idea of political subjectivity; the centrality of reflective judgment in the encounter with the “new”; and the fraught relation between the distinct spheres of the “social” and the “political.” Let us takes these up in turn before addressing the question of the actuality of the biography.
The word “pariah,” according to the OED, derives from South Indian language Tamil. When capitalized, it refers to “a member of a scheduled tribe of South India concentrated in southern Kerala and Tamil Nadu, originally functioning notably as sorcerers and ceremonial drummers and also as laborers and servants, but later increasingly as ‘untouchables’ in unsanitary occupations.”16 It has come to mean lower caste, outcast, and, more recently, “a member of a despised class of any kind; someone or something shunned or avoided; a social outcaste.” Parvenu, in contrast, designates newly acquired wealth and/or social status; it refers to the assimilated social climber or what Arendt calls the “upstart.”17 In Arendt’s account, this characterized “court Jews” as well as Jewish millionaires. In order to become a parvenu, the pariah was compelled to deny or, indeed, excise those pariah qualities so despised by society at large. The position of the pariah, then, as alluded to earlier, is one of self-sacrifice insofar as the cost of belonging to the dominant order requires the sacrifice of one’s own difference.
There is a third option for Arendt that she adopts from Bernard Lazare, and this is the idea of a “conscious pariah,” one who is aware of and embraces her position as a “social outcast,” not simply as kind of fate as an act of political commitment.18 The conscious pariahs constituted in her view a unique tradition within Judaism and included, in addition to Rahel Varnhagen, figures such as Henrich Heine, Sholom Aleichem, Lazare himself, Charlie Chaplin, and Franz Kafka.19 In contrast to the Jew-as-parvenu who embodied all “Jewish shortcomings—tactlessness, political stupidity, inferiority complexes, and money-grubbing,” in Arendt’s view, “all vaunted Jewish qualities—the ‘Jewish heart,’ humanity, humor, disinterested intelligence—are pariah qualities.”20
These pariah qualities are exemplified by the poet Henrich Heine, whom she calls the “lord of the dream,” whose status as outcast placed him in solidarity with the “common people” but as the “people’s poet.”21 Indeed, here Arendt’s assessment of Heine is strikingly similar to that of her rival, Theodor W. Adorno, who suggests: “His idea of sensuous fulfillment encompasses fulfillment in external things, a society without coercion and deprivation.”22 Moreover, for Adorno, Heine the homeless outcast showed the way in which homelessness was to become a universal condition in late capitalism. In Arendt’s view, the quintessential pariahs were the refugees who, themselves, “represent the vanguard of their peoples.”23 It was these refugees, exiles, and outcasts who would search for and find a home in the space of the political. For the political was quintessentially the space in which differences could appear without be being reduced to an overarching identity insofar as it was premised on the idea that “men” not “Man” inhabited the earth. Arendt’s early, perhaps unreasonable, idealization of secular Zionism was founded on the idea of a unique sense nationhood rooted in a shared experience of a “pariah people.”24
For Arendt, thinking through the fraught and shifting relations between these two categories, again as applied to Jews, enabled her to clarify the relation that is central to her mature political theory as set forth in her 1958 magnum opus, The Human Condition. This is the relation between the “social” and the “political.” As she puts it in The Origins of Totalitarianism, “During the 150 years when Jews truly lived amidst, and not just in the neighborhood of, Western European peoples, they always had to pay with political misery for social glory and with social insult for political success.”25 Significantly, in the Human Condition, published only one year after Rahel Varnhagen, Arendt traces the rise of the social, and Rousseau’s criticism of it for effacing the uniqueness of the individual, in the demands of the salons of “high society.” Although, for Arendt, Rahel’s Jägerstrasse salon was a unique space in which individual differences could be glimpsed between the existing hierarchies of ancient regime, on the one hand, and the equalizing tendencies of Enlightenment reason, on the other. I shall return to the significance of the distinctive nature of the space of the salon below.
It was precisely because she was a “conscious pariah,” someone situated betwixt and between German culture, on the one hand, and Jewish traditions, on the other, that she was actually forced to think; and to think, as Arendt makes clear, in her late Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, is to engage in the activity of judging. Given her pariah status, “the world was unknown and hostile to her; she had no education, tradition or convention with which to make order out of it; and hence orientation was impossible for her.”26 Rahel was therefore placed in a position in which she was compelled to think through particulars rather than with universals. Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman must be regarded as a vital contribution to understanding the role and contribution of this extraordinary woman, the tensions of her historical moment between the spheres of “the social” and “the political,” and the ways in which such tensions forced upon her an oscillation between the contradictory positions of pariah and parvenu. Furthermore, this biography suggests the vital importance during a time of historical transformations of the capacity to think or the exercise of judgment. As Ron H. Feldman, the editor of Arendt’s Jewish Writings attests, “Her awareness that she was a conscious pariah is probably the crucial factor that allowed her to see the political dimension in Kant’s understanding of aesthetic reflective judgment.”27 The latter is to be differentiated from what Kant called determinative judgment insofar as in this form of judgment we apply preexisting universals to new particulars, while in reflective judgment we must, through an act of the imagination by which we put our self in the place of the other, invent new universals out of unprecedented particulars for which no existing concepts are applicable or adequate. The political role of reflective judgment became especially evident for Arendt in the rise of totalitarianism in the middle of the mid-twentieth century.
The salon itself was for Arendt an ambivalent space as alluded to earlier. On the one hand, it existed firmly within the sphere of the social insofar as it constituted a dimension of “high society” with its characteristic hierarchies and exclusions. But it is also bore features of what she comes to call the political or the public realm: it is a space in which its participants confront one another as equals—so galling to Rahel’s amours such as Count von Finckenstein, because they proved no match for Rahel’s formidable intellectual presence—and in terms of appearance. One could say that the salon could be regarded as a kind of model of the political for Arendt in the same way that the nineteenth-century coffee houses play a key role in Habermas’s account of the bourgeois public sphere.28
In Seyla Benhabib’s view, a reading of Arendt’s Varnhagen biography presents us with an “alternative genealogy of modernity” in which the later sharp differentiation in The Human Condition between the social and the political is drawn in somewhat more finely grained terms.29 If the abiding Jewish experience for Arendt was the paradoxical and shifting relation between “political misery” and “social glory,” “social insult,” and “political success,” for Benhabib, the salon was a unique space in which the opposition between these distinct spheres could be reconciled. Benhabib notes the way in which the space of the salon complements and complicates the normative model of the Athenian polis that she comes to idealize in her mature work. Such a complication throws new light on Arendt’s approach to the “woman question.” Benhabib writes:
If we proceed to decenter Arendt’s political thought, if we read her work from the margins towards the center, then we can displace her fascination with the polis to make room for her modernist and women-friendly reflections on the salons. The “salons” must be viewed as transitory but also fascinating precursors of a certain transgression of the boundaries between the public and the private. Arendt developed her political philosophy to ward off such transgression, but as a radical democrat she could not but welcome such transgression if they resulted in authentic political action, in a community of “speech and action.”30
Rahel Varnhagen has a remarkably contemporary resonance. Arguably, this has to do with its overarching concern, of course, with the problem of identity. Over the past few decades, indeed likely dating back to the liberation struggles of the New Left, one of the key problems in political thought has been that of identity.31 Feminists, critical race theorists, and postcolonial theorists have all contributed in important, though at times troubling, ways to thinking about the role of identity in politics. One of the dominant ways of doing so is by linking identity to lived experiences and by conceiving such “intersecting” lived experiences to the subjectivity of specific groups, such as women, blacks, Latino, Asians, and so on and so forth, with one possible implication being a kind of separatism of these different communities from the dominant white society. Such a view would, in Arendt’s view, conflate ethnos and ethos, and familial affiliation with a shared orientation to a certain form of life or bios. Contemporary identity politics assumes that individuals can be grouped under more general categories rather than opening up in-between spaces in which differences within groups are permitted to appear. Therefore, it falls into the trap constituted out of the opposition between pariah and parvenu, between self-segregation and self-abnegating assimilationism. But such an opposition for Arendt would be unacceptable insofar as each option, in its own way, foreshortens the spaces between those individuals and reduces them to an overarching identity. It also forecloses the possibility of there being anything in common between members of these various groups. It is here that the model of Rahel Varnhagen can be especially instructive: at the end of her life she resisted both poles of the opposition—pure pariahdom and assimilationism. She revealed herself at the end of her life to be a “conscious pariah.” Ultimately, the conscious pariah is capable of being together (mit-Sein) with those who are, themselves, different rather than embodying an identical sameness.
Notes
1 Manfred Frank, The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism, trans. Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2004), 25, alludes to the vital role played by the Berlin salons in shaping the thought of early romantic writers and challenges the accepted viewed that they were, by and large, reactionary, anti-Enlightenment thinkers: “In the authors of early German Romanticism, the Nazis saw—and rightly so—ground breakers of the literary avant-garde whose irony was biting and whose sincerity was doubted, enemies of the bourgeoisie, friends and spouses of Jews, welcomed guests and discussions partners at the Jewish Berlin salons, aggressive proponents of the ‘emancipation of the Jewry,’ and finally ‘subversive intellectuals’ (a slogan which the Nazis used indifferently to refer to members of the political left, to Jews as a group, and to intellectuals).”
2 Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 229.
3 Ibid., xvii.
4 Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, Correspondence 1926–1969 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), 198.
5 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt Brace Johanovich, 1968), 255.
6 Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen, xvii.
7 Ibid., 7.
8 Ibid., xiv.
9 Ibid., xiv–xv.
10 Ibid.
11 Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 255.
12 Ibid., xv.
13 Ibid.
14 Seyla Benhabib, “The Pariah and Her Shadow: Hannah Arendt’s Biography of Rahel Varnhagen,” Political Theory 23, no. 1 (February 1995): 11.
15 Arendt and Jaspers, Correspondence 1926–1969, 197.
16 “pariah, n. and adj.” OED Online. July 2018. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/view/Entry/137889?redirectedFrom=Pariah& (accessed November 29, 2018).
17 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 62.
18 Hannah Arendt, “The Jewish State,” in The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 283–86.
19 Hannah Arendt, “The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition,” in The Jewish Writings (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 276–77.
20 Hannah Arendt, “We Refugees,” in The Jewish Writings (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 274.
21 Arendt, “The Jew as Pariah,” 277.
22 T. W. Adorno, “Heine the Wound,” in Notes to Literature Volume I, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 81. For an extended consideration of Arendt and Adorno, see Rensmann and Gandesha, Arendt and Adorno: Political and Philosophical Investigations (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012).
23 Arendt, “We Refugees,” 274.
24 See for example, Leon Botstein, “The Jew as Pariah: Hannah Arendt’s Political Philosophy,” Dialectical Anthropology 8, nos. 1/2 (1983): 47–73.
25 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1973), 56.
26 Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen, 17.
27 Arendt, The Jewish Writings, xxviii.
28 Jürgen Habermas, The Stuctural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Berger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991).
29 Benhabib, “The Pariah and Her Shadow,” 5–24.
30 Ibid., 19–20.
31 See, for example, Haider, Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in an Era of Trump (London: Verso, 2018).