The German Romantics described poetry as a style and philosophy rather than as a form or technique. They understood it as a type of writing that “fuses poetry and prose, inspiration and criticism.” This explanation provides the perfect entry point to the work of Rahel Levin Varnhagen, a prominent Jewish intellectual and salonnière of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Berlin. Varnhagen is well known to academics but not to general readers. I Just Let Life Rain Down on Me offers a welcoming, user-friendly introduction to a remarkable author.
Varnhagen was best known during her time for her accomplished letters. But it is important to remember that the letters were highly performative and were almost certainly meant to be shared with the addressee’s close circle and intimates. In this sense, Varnhagen’s letters may be compared to blog or Substack posts: all of these are, technically speaking, “published” works.
The letters themselves are fascinating, freewheeling, lyrical communiqués to a broad range of friends and acquaintances. These include fan letters to the famous Wolfgang von Goethe, and to the young Victor Hugo after the publication of Notre Dame de Paris.
Varnhagen’s pieces should be understood not merely as correspondences, but as epistolary prose poems that blend the informal and the profound, the lyrical and the humorous in a way that other Romantic writers valued and appreciated:
Yes, I waltz.… Based on my experience I swear, I don’t know anything quite like it, extreme muscle pain notwithstanding — (I will leave out the “consequently”) there is nothing as unconducive to thinking or to feeling as this German swinging. Still, it’s a treat — namely, as never-ending occupation, because you have to keep moving not to miss a beat …
(To David Veit, Berlin, 17 December 1793)
Elsewhere, Varnhagen bewails her plight as an intellectual master housed in a Jewish woman’s body, comments supportively on a female friend’s conversion to Christianity, and notes — hilariously — the differences between Berlin and Vienna society.
But above all, in these pieces, the reader senses Varnhagen’s deep love for her closest friends. The letters to Pauline Wiesel, who was the mistress of Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia, stand out for their passion and solidarity:
I know what makes you tick better than you do; there is only one difference between us: you live everything, because you are courageous, and because you are favored by fortune: I think my way through life because I was not so favored in my physique, and because I lack courage; not the courage to wrest good fortune from fate, to wrestle pleasure out of destiny’s design; I only acquired the courage to carry myself as I am … And we were born to live truthfully … All lies amount to much the same; the eternal truth, real living and feeling that tap the deep human potential with which we were endowed is limitless!
(To Pauline Wiesel, Berlin, 12 March 1811)
Varnhagen’s support of a friend who has dared to live beyond the bounds of polite society, and her insistence on the power of emotional authenticity despite societal strictures, makes her writing soar and travel through time, and inspires us here in the twenty-first century.
Stephanie Barbé Hammer’s is a 7‑time Pushcart Prize nominee in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Her new novel Journey to Merveilleux City appears with Picture Show Press.
