1. Rahel Varnhagen is the subject of a celebrated biography, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess, by Hannah Arendt.
10 Facts About Rahel Varnhagen
1. 2.
Rahel Varnhagen Antonie Friederike Levin was born to a Jewish family in Berlin.
3.
Rahel Varnhagen's father, a wealthy jeweller, was a strong-willed man who ruled his family despotically.
4.
Rahel Varnhagen became close friends with Dorothea and Henriette, daughters of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn.
5.
Rahel Varnhagen's home became the meeting place for artists, poets and intellectuals such as Schlegel, Schelling, Steffens, Schack, Schleiermacher, Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt, Motte Fouque, Baron Bruckmann, Ludwig Tieck, Jean Paul, and Friedrich Gentz.
6.
Rahel Varnhagen returned to Berlin in 1819, when her husband retired from his diplomatic position.
7.
Rahel Varnhagen hated her Jewish background and was convinced it had poisoned her life.
8.
Rahel Varnhagen's overriding desire was to free herself from the shackles of her birth; since, as she thought, she had been "pushed out of the world" by her origins, she was determined to escape them.
9.
Rahel Varnhagen considered her origins "a curse, a slow bleeding to death".
10.
Rahel Varnhagen's husband published an account of her deathbed scene, which Amos Elon described as "stylized and possibly overdramatised", including her alleged last words:.