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Rahel Varnhagen

The Life of a Jewish Woman

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Rahel Varnhagen

By: Hannah Arendt, Clara Winston - translator, Richard Winston - translator
Narrated by: Suzanne Toren
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About this listen

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 Jewess - this I should on no account now wish to have missed." Only because she had remained both a Jew and a pariah, Arendt observes, "did she find a place in the history of European humanity."

©1957 The Hannah Arendt Bluecher Literary Trust; Translation copyright 2022 by Richard Winston and Clara Winston (P)2022 Tantor Art & Literature Authors Women
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Despite being sold as a biography of Rahel Vernhagen, this dreary and self-regarding volume only uses Rahel as a fleetingly present peg on which Arendt hangs a series of musings on a variety of topics of varying relevance and diminishing interest, particularly her views on "parvenus" and "pariahs". Anyone curious about the actual life and thought of Rahel Vernhagen, about German Jewry in the 19th century, or about German Romanticism, is advised to look elsewhere. Those, on the other hand, who have wondered what it might be like to be trapped in a confined space with Hannah Arendt for 10 hours or so, can satisfy that morbid and unhealthy curiosity with this effrontery of a book. On the plus side, the reader of the audiobook makes a frankly heroic effort to breathe some life into this exhausting and moribund failure.

Not a biography.

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