Rahel Vaenhagen and the Culture of Her Time

Abstract

This essay examines the personality of Rahel Varnhagen, one of the brightest repre- sentatives of the German cultural milieu, owner of a literary salon that brought together prominent authors, artists, philosophers, nobles, and the crème of burgher society in the period between the end of the 18 th Century and the 1830s. Rahel stood out among other female owners of literary salons, due to her deep knowledge of contemporary aesthetic trends, their specificity and perspectives, and in this respect, she was a perfect equal to male intellectuals of the time. Her contacts spread beyond the salon as she correspond- ed with a great number of people both within and outside the country. Rahel’s letters, collected by Varnhagen von Ense, and her diaries reveal outstanding literary gifts. On the example of Rahel’s world and her environment, this article examines the transient decades of European life that signaled the shift in the cultural sensibility as well as the debunking of the Enlightenment social, philosophic, and aesthetic concepts by the gen- erations of Romantics. The diversity of personalities that evoked Rahel’s interest shows the ambiguity of public opinions and tastes reflected in literature. The atmosphere of her salon helps us better understand individual literary figures that either represented certain aesthetic trends or combined the traits of different trends in their work.

Keywords

• salon
• woman
• culture
• classics
• Goethe
• Jena Romanticism
• epoch
• letter