Rahel Levin Varnhagen

The influence of Rahel Varnhagen on German culture owed much to the salon society of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Hostess of a noted salon in Berlin, she was greatly interested in philosophical exchanges, though she also had an impressive command of imaginative literature and knew important writers, including Goethe. What we know of her intellectual and emotional life derives primarily from the thousands of letters she wrote to her many correspondents. She converted to Christianity in 1810, but championed the cause of Jews during the outbreak of German antisemitism in 1819. The German Jewish political philosopher Hannah Arendt identified strongly with Varnhagen and wrote a biography of her.