Performance by the KantTheater Berlin: “Rahel Varnhagen: The Wittiest Woman in the Universe”

For “I reveal myself through speech and can remain silent for a very long time, and I love all that is human… what, in the end, is a human being other than a question? He is here only to ask, to ask.”

In her attic apartment on Gendarmenmarkt, all class distinctions were set aside over tea and buttered bread: She was a conversation partner to a wide variety of men and women—nobles and commoners, military officers, artists, and philosophers—including the Humboldt brothers, Bettina von Arnim, Fichte, Hegel, Schlegel, Pauline Wiesel, and Prince Louis Ferdinand. And yet, throughout her entire life, Rahel Varnhagen felt a double marginalization: as a woman and as a Jew.

In this play, Anette Daugardt portrays Rahel Varnhagen—Uwe Neumann embodies her conversation partners, such as the “figurehead” of the salons, Wilhelm von Humboldt, who in a letter to his wife refers to his old friend Rahel Varnhagen as a “Jewish maid” and writes lines such as: “I actually only love Jews en masse; en détail, I go out of my way to avoid them,” or Heinrich Heine, for whom she was the “most witty woman in the universe.”