Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess (Paperback)

by Hannah Arendt (Author), Liliane Weissberg (Editor), Richard Winston (Translator), Clare Winston (Translator) "IN 1982, Alfred Kazin published a review of Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's biography Hannah Arendt: For the Love of the World in the New York Review of..." (more)
Key Phrases: female philosopher, Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen, New York (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review
Reading this book is like looking at an early sketch made in preparation for the large composition yet to come. We are in the presence of a writer for whom thinking hard has been a first value since earliest youth, observing intently, with sympathy and dismay, the figure she herself might have cut had she been born a hundred years earlier. -- The Nation, Vivian Gornick --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"Thanks to the diligent researches of Liliane Weissberg, the editor of this new edition... we now finally have the first complete text [of Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess], including the annotations that Arendt herself had been unable to supply because of her abrupt departure from Germany in 1933. For the first time we can find our way through the book's thick forest of quotations and other literary and historical allusions..." -- Amos Elon, New York Review of Books

"Weissberg has provided a fascinating introduction in which Arendt's biography emerges also as an autobiography, a book that from its first draft in 1933 until years after its publication was part of Arendt's debate with her teacher Karl Jaspers about what it means to be German, what it means to be Jewish." -- Natalie Zemon Davis, Princeton University

"Reading Rahel Varnhagen today, I am startled to see that it is neither Jewishness nor womanness that holds my attention. What is striking now are the extraordinary similarities between Rahel's period and our own, and how much a creature of the time she seems to be... Seen against the disturbed and disturbing climate of a time, then as now, in which profound questions of self and world are being asked, Rahel's double portion of outsiderness cannot help but sound a deep note in the responsive reader." -- Vivian Gornick, The Nation

"So intense was Arendt's identification with Rahel that Rahel's letters became Arendt's way of experiencing herself as a woman within Jewry, a Jew within Germany, a voice uplifted against anti-Semitism, an unconventional woman within the male world of philosophy. Weissberg's introduction, a tour de force of post-structural analysis and psychological insight, maps the complexities of an identification so intense that it compressed time and transcended space. All those fascinated by the interweaving of biography and autobiography, of philosophy and politics -- and, most especially, by a woman's creation of herself in a hostile world -- must read this book." -- Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, University of Michigan

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Product Details

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press (March 2, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 080186335X
• ISBN-13: 978-0801863356
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: No customer reviews yet. Be the first.
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #160,430 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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