Start gifting
Libro.fm for Business
Start a membership, get two free audiobooks
Almost ready!
In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.
Log in Create account
Limited-time offer
Get two free audiobooks when you make the switch!
Now’s a great time to shop indie. When you start a new membership supporting local bookstores with promo code SWITCH, we’ll give you two bonus audiobook credits at sign-up.
Make the switch
Gift audiobook credit bundles
You pick the number of credits, your recipient picks the audiobooks, and your local bookstore is supported by your purchase.
Start giftingRahel Varnhagen
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn moreRahel 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."
Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) was an influential German political theorist and philosopher who came to the United States as a refugee from the Nazis in 1940. She held a number of academic positions at American universities including the University of California, Berkeley; Northwestern University; the University of Chicago; and Princeton University, where she was the first woman appointed to a full professorship. Her works, which deal with issues of power, authority, revolution, thought, and judgment, include The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Between Past and Future, and the incomplete and posthumously published The Life of the Mind.
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 and Best Voices of the Year. Making beautifully crafted writing come alive is her passion; she is honored and thrilled to have been able to earn a living doing it.