Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess

Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess is, ostensibly, a biography of a nineteenth-century Jewish socialite, written by the political philosopher Hannah Arendt. It began as her habilitation thesis (Habilitationsschrift), largely written in the 1930s, which she could not complete in Germany after fleeing the Nazi regime. She carried the manuscript into exile in Paris, where she finished it in 1938. Forced to flee again, this time without the manuscript, she reached America in 1941; earlier she had given a copy to Gershom Scholem. The book was finally published in 1957, translated from German, in London.

The work marks an important step in Arendt's analysis of Jewish history, of assimilation and emancipation, and of the Jewish diaspora understood through the figures of the pariah and the parvenu. It also represents an early version of her concept of history. Varnhagen's life is set against the destruction of German-Jewish culture and the illusion of any true German-Jewish "symbiosis". For this reason the book has been described as "biography as autobiography".