Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman
Hannah Arendt
Jan 2022 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Suzanne Toren
headphones
Audiobook
10 hr 28 min
Unabridged
family_home
Eligible
info
reportRatings and reviews aren’t verified Learn More
Want a 1 hr 3 min sample? Listen anytime, even offline.
Add
About this audiobook
Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman is the biography of a remarkable, complicated, troubled, passionate woman, an important figure in German romanticism, the person who in a sense founded the Goethe cult that would become central to German cultural life in the nineteenth century, as well as someone who confronted with unusual determination and bore the burden of being both a woman in a man's world and an assimilated Jew in Germany. Rahel Levin Varnhagen was, Arendt writes, "neither beautiful nor attractive . . . and possessed no talents with which to employ her extraordinary intelligence and passionate originality." Arendt sets out to tell the story of Rahel's life as Rahel might have told it and, in doing so, to reveal the way in which intellectual and social assimilation works out in one person's destiny. On her deathbed Rahel is reported to have said, "The thing which all my life seemed to me the greatest shame, which was the misery and misfortune of my life-having been born a Jewess-this I should on no account now wish to have missed." Only because she had remained both a Jew and a pariah, Arendt observes, "did she find a place in the history of European humanity."
About the author
Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) was an influential German political theorist and philosopher whose works include The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, and Eichmann in Jerusalem.
Suzanne Toren is an actor who has appeared on and off Broadway, in regional theaters, and occasionally on TV. Over a period of several decades, she has narrated close to 1000 audiobooks for most major publishers. She has received multiple Audie nominations and many industry awards, including Narrator of the Year.
Rate this audiobook
Tell us what you think.
Listening information
Smartphones and tablets
Install the Google Play Books app for Android and iPad/iPhone. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are.
Laptops and computers
You can read books purchased on Google Play using your computer's web browser.
