SOURCE: Hertz, Deborah. “Inside Assimilation: Rebecca Friedländer's Rahel Varnhagen.” In German Women in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: A Social and Literary History, edited by Ruth-Ellen B. Joeres and Mary Jo Maynes, pp. 271-88. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986.

In the following essay, Hertz considers the collection of Varnhagen's letters to Rebecca Friedländer as reflective of Varnhagen's desire for personal emancipation and her attempts to assimilate.

Almost two centuries ago in Germany, Rahel Varnhagen was a much-admired, much-discussed phenomenon. During the last decade of the eighteenth century and again during the third decade of the nineteenth century, she was at the center of Berlin's social and intellectual life.¹ Varnhagen was not the only Jewish woman in central Europe to entertain and befriend the era's most prominent male intellectuals. A tiny circle of rich Jewish women in Berlin achieved stunning successes as mediators of high culture and as...