Rahel Varnhagen

The Life of a Jewish Woman

De: Hannah Arendt, Clara Winston - translator, Richard Winston - translator

Narrado por: Suzanne Toren

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

Interesante!

El libro permite tener una idea del genuino sentir de los judíos en Europa en el S. XIX y es revelador para entender el S.XX y hoy mismo. Su historia sigue explicando los conflictos morales, económicos y sociales de Europa.

Anything by Arendt but…

Love Toren reading intellectual stuff. Doesn’t quite feel novelistic though. Which is fine since it’s Arendt. Anything to experience the breadth of her speculations. But as fiction… Speculations re the forces on a historical character. The author feels ever present, less the character. Except to the extent she is also the author.