her heart's blood was contained in every envelope

Rahel Levin Varnhagen, by William Hensel, July 7, 1822 (185x149 cm).

"The most famous salon and probably the liveliest and most influencial, however, was lauched in 1791 by Rahel Levin, an unmarried twenty-year-old. (...)

The poet Jean Paul wrote that scholars, Jews, officers, Prussian bureaucrats, noblemen, and all others who elsewhere "were at one another's throats" contrived to be "friendly at [Rahel Levin's] tea table." Even Goethe paid a visit. (...)

Rahel - she was widely known by her given name alone - was an early feminist, a willfully independent woman who set out to build her life on her own terms. She had many lovers, some of whom, like Friedrich von gentz, remained enchanted with her into old age. (...)

More than just a renowned socialite, Rahel was also the most important German woman of letters of the nineteenth century; Gentz called her the very first Romantic. Entirely self-taught, she left no conventional oeuvre but was an astonishingly prolific letter writer. Intensely personal and introspective, her correspondence (more than six thousand letters survive of an estimated ten thousand) reveals her impatience with the superficialities and hypocrisies of the elegant world in which she lived. She had a rare ability to portray herself with utmost sincerity; it was said that her heart's blood was contained in every envelope she posted. Since her handwriting was difficult to read, her friends had her letters copied so they could pass them around. the letters touch on all aspects of literature and art; remarkably, politics and the extraordinary historical events of her lifetime (the French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars) are rarely ever mentioned. The cult of Innerlichkeit (intense introspection) so dear to the Romantics predominates.

A thoroughly assimilated Jew, Rahel was credited with having inaugurated the so-called symbiosis between Germans and Jews. (...) Rahel was not interested in Jewish reform; she yearned for integration into the German world. She was revolted - the word is not too strong - by her observant relatives.  Mendelssohn's version of judaism hardly appealed to her more; it was too dry and sterile in its rationality. She worshiped feeling, not reason. Her religiosity was of the heart and, like that of other romantics, couched in the mystical imagery of christianity; Christ's Passion and the Mother of God. (...)

Rahel's rejection went beyond religiosity. She hated her Jewish background and was convinced it had poisoned her life. For much of her adult life she was what would later be called self-hating. (...) And in 1814, after her mother's death, she converted. But her origins continued to haunt her even on her deathbed.

Rahel supreme desire was to live life as though it were "a work of art". Such a life demanded a "great love." And indeed, she gave herself to love unreservedly. (...)"

                                   Amos Elon, The Pity Of It All - A portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch 1743 -1933, Picador, 2002, pp. 77-80.