Introduction
Salons evoke high-flown associations; we picture elegant women and men gathering in glamorous settings for cultivated conversations about the arts and literature. The so-called salons hosted around 1800 in Berlin by bourgeois Jewish women are tied at once to promises of emancipation, gender equality and religious tolerance. That scholars have long debunked such promises as myths has not significantly altered the salon's reputation as a venue of the avantgarde; the story of the empowering functions of these convivial gatherings remains as strong as their deconstruction. Drawing on the latest research on conviviality in the social sciences, on Friedrich Schleiermacher's (1768–1834) theory of sociability, and on writings by and about Rahel Varnhagen (1771–1833), Henriette Herz (1764–1847) and Fanny Lewald (1811–89), this essay approaches the topic of the salon and its promises from a different angle.
Rather than asking and judging quickly in what ways convivial interaction promotes or inhibits large-scale visions of emancipation, gender equity or religious and ethnic plurality, I take a step back and examine what happens in these everyday exchanges over many topics, ranging from literature, languages and philosophy to marriage and the weather. This situation-focused, open-ended approach moves the dialogical as such and its effects centre stage. I investigate modes of interaction between dialogue partners and the objects of their conversations as we find them recorded in personal memories of convivial gatherings, in letters, autobiographical writings and novels.
These women's sociable endeavors, I suggest, were not tied to specific ends such as female emancipation or cross-religious and ethnic tolerance that we can either admiringly endorse or simply deconstruct from today's perspective. Their networking activities grew out of and are deeply embedded in their life stories and the social circles they moved in, and I argue that the notions of the female self, of writing, and the conceptions of literature and philosophy emerging from these convivial constellations are inherently dialogical and shifting. Conversations may sometimes break open social hierarchies and shake up gender divisions; but they may also foster no improvement and instead instigate tension and conflict. The value and lasting impact of these encounters, I suggest, lies in the effort made rather than a classifiable outcome; it lies in opening opportunities for women to see and experience things differently, to inhabit roles that deviate from their conventional ones, and to become perhaps something different, if only momentarily and on a modest scale. This perspective on conviviality and its volatile impact on women's self-understanding as intellectuals also begs the crucial yet still understudied question regarding the place of their dialogical writings and modes of engaging literary and philosophical traditions in the history and canon of the humanities.
Drawing on the latest critical research, the essay's first part discusses what we mean today when we speak of salon communication in Berlin, and how scholars have assessed the legacy of these convivial get-togethers. The second part puts Schleiermacher's theory of sociability in dialogue with a twenty-first century method of conviviality that promotes an analytic rather than normative practice of examination. In stripping sociability of overarching promises, both approaches, I demonstrate, treat convivial interaction as open-ended processes that foster mutual understanding and temporary shifts of power balance as much as conflict and tension. These theories, I argue, motivate a fresh perspective on Berliner salons that scholars have either praised as sites where cross-religious understanding and female emancipation became reality or, conversely, as social events whose progressive reputation is a myth. The final part concentrates on Herz, Varnhagen and Lewald, arguing that they each practise what I call a dialogical and socially involved concept of Geisteswissenschaft, of the humanities. Their writings and convivial gatherings create openings for women to become rather than be, and these activities have feedback effects on their self-understanding as much as on the humanist discourse of their time.
I. On the de- and reconstruction of Berliner salons
The term ‘salon’, with its associations of social privilege and prestige, calls for further clarification when we consider the historical situation of Berlin's Jewish community and of women especially. The circles within which they moved, and their spheres of influence were by no means comparable to those of, say, French aristocratic or upper-middle class English women (Lund Reference Lund, Lund, Schneider and Wels2017: 14). Also the hostesses never actually used the term themselves when referring to their activities. Reviewing letters, billets, private correspondence, and biographical memories, Lund finds around five different names that hostesses and guests used to refer to social events at the time, and ‘salon’ is not one of them (Lund Reference Lund, Lund, Schneider and Wels2017: 39–42). Similarly, Hahn and Naimark-Goldberg demonstrate that the term is misleading, given what we know about the venues and formats of these women's social activities. Guests came over to their houses for tea or lunch, and occasionally for dinner parties where modest meals would be served; while some families opened their homes to visitors on scheduled days, others received guests spontaneously. Besides private houses, similarly mixed groups also met at public places across town, such as theatre loges, or would congregate at bohemian baths and spas across Europe.Footnote 1
Despite raising false assumptions in need of explication, however, ‘salon’ has remained the umbrella term and a kind of ‘brand name’ for the many different female-led social activities around 1800.Footnote 2 When Fanny Lewald recalls in her autobiography, The Story of My Life [Meine Lebensgeschichte] (1861–62), her lunch visits from 76-year old Henriette Herz and 77-year old Sara Levy (née Itzig, 1761–1854), she introduces both women as nothing less than ‘Berlin landmarks’ and refers to their convivial circles explicitly as salons:
It seemed to me as if I found myself at King Arthur's Round Table when I looked at these old, weathered faces […]. Once they had all been at the forefront of the movement. These frail women had overcome the barriers of the caste spirit with their Bildung, and they had conquered the violence of prejudice in Berlin by means of their own powers (ML: III, 116–17, 123–24).Footnote 3
This excerpt from Lewald's accounts of her meetings with Herz and her circle of friends concisely prefigures what would become a dominant direction of argumentation in the critical literature on Berlin's Jewish salons. Full of admiration for the accomplishments and legacy of these aged women, the young Lewald feels like she has been admitted to King Arthur's Round Table. Through actively promoting dialogue, the women spearheaded what Lewald describes as a movement powerful enough to overcome social hierarchies and prejudice, and to place leadership by means of Bildung above the authority granted by aristocratic birth. What we witness here in 1840 in the making is what Hahn would call the myth of the salon well over 150 years later (Reference Hahn and McFarland2005b: 42–56).
Drewitz's Berliner Salons (Reference Drewitz1965) and early scholarship by Hertz (Reference Hertz1988) have played a crucial role in furthering such images of Berlin's salons as venues where women and men from different social strata and religious backgrounds lived an ideal of egalitarian sociability. The reading circle hosted by Dorothea Mendelssohn Veit Schlegel (1764–1839) every Thursday night or the regular convivial gatherings in Henriette Herz's living room and Rahel Varnhagen's attic facilitated nothing less than the beginning of a ‘new reality’ where women left ‘kitchen and childbed’ to become men's equal partners (Drewitz Reference Drewitz1965: 10). Between the years of 1780 and 1806, people whose artistic, intellectual and socio-political accomplishments would impact the decades to come congregated in these Jewish homes; the Humboldt brothers, Friedrich Schlegel, the Swedish diplomat Carl Gustav von Brinckmann, Friedrich Schleiermacher, the German writer and diplomat Friedrich von Gentz or Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia intermingled with friends and family of their Jewish hostesses, and together they vividly discussed Goethe's and Schiller's latest dramas, Klopstock's poetry, Wieland or Rousseau.Footnote 4
The hosting of such mixed gatherings with literature and the arts at the centre of discussions was by no means limited to the homes of these three women, yet with their prominent guest lists, wide-reaching social networks and activities, outstanding Bildung, and the published records by or about them, their names have emerged as the most prominent ones.Footnote 5 All three already played together as children at the Mendelssohns's home, a hub of Enlightenment thinking and debate at the time. Encouraged by the tenets of the Enlightenment, and its propagation of reason and religious tolerance, Mendelssohn and his fellow maskilim, as enlightened male Jews referred to each other, instigated with the Haskalah (from the Hebrew sekhel, ‘reason’ or ‘intellect’) or Jewish Enlightenment a new period in the history of Judaism.
They fundamentally questioned orthodox positions and the rabbinical elite's monopoly on the exegesis of the Torah. With his translation of the Pentateuch, Mendelssohn ‘brought the sacred language of the synagogue out into the open air of an enlightened public sphere’ and propagated the idea that being observant and committed to the Jewish faith may coexist with being a secular citizen of the state (Clark Reference Clark2006: 261). He and his generation used the contemporary language of reason, humanism, and tolerance to fight discrimination and the exclusion of Berlin's Jewish community from public life while reinterpreting the foundations of their faith through the lens of enlightened discourse. This broadminded and flexible attitude features in Mendelssohn's most influential and enduring work, Jerusalem, which shows a strong commitment to the Jewish faith but without compromising spiritual freedom and rationality.Footnote 6 Henriette Herz remembers in the Recollections of her Youth [Jugenderinnerungen] that Mendelssohn's project of bringing Jewish faith and Enlightenment religious critique together provoked scepticism and harsh attacks: people felt that ‘Lessing's close friend’ was ‘too enlightened and reasonable’ to seriously care for and follow the Mosaic laws; yet Mendelssohn, she recalls, was imperturbable, patiently endured such criticisms, and always looked for ways of engaging with them productively (Recollections: 178).
Given that Dorothea Mendelssohn, Rahel Varnhagen and Henriette Herz came of age in such an intellectual climate, it does not come as a surprise that Fanny Lewald and later generations would celebrate them enthusiastically as precursors of religious and female emancipation in the Enlightenment tradition. A number of critics, however, have demonstrated that such undifferentiated assessments of their accomplishments in matters of religious freedom, Jewish integration, and emancipation for women are a far cry from what we actually know today about their lives and social activities. As Lund points out, researchers of the salons are confronted with a paradoxical mismatch between lacking or unreliable sources and information about the activities of the salonnières on the one hand, and the many popular and scholarly publications honouring their legacy and wide-reaching impact on the other (Reference Lund2012: 2); or, as Hahn puts it, ‘salon is a word for what we do not know about social life around 1800’ (Reference Hahn, Gärtner and Purfürst1992: 106).Footnote 7
Salons are about oral communication and thus by definition fleeting events. All attempts to reconstruct the contents and social dynamic of these gatherings therefore involve a high degree of speculation. In the case of Henriette Herz and Rahel Varnhagen, however, scholars need to deal with an additional layer of complexity having to do with the transmission of their writings. We have letters and Herz's Recollections of her Youth, yet the manuscript breaks off in 1780–81 and does not cover the period commonly viewed as the high point of her social activities. Her self-proclaimed biographer Fürst provides insights into her life and multiple social engagements after this early phase but the reliability of his book from 1850 has always been contested in the critical literature.Footnote 8 Despite its ambivalent status, Fürst's autobiographical text is still the major source for subsequent editions such as Janetzki's edited collection Henriette Herz. Berliner Salon. Erinnerungen und Portraits (Reference Janetzki1984) and, most recently, the edition by Schmitz (2013). To date there is no critical edition of her work and correspondence providing researchers with a reliable textual foundation and corrective to Fürst's version.
In Rahel Varnhagen's case, the transmission of the circa 6000 letters she exchanged within a network of around 300 correspondents is even more complicated. Hahn rediscovered the manuscript of Rahel. Ein Buch des Andenkens für ihre Freunde in the Biblioteka Jagiellońska in Krakow in 1984. Karl August Varnhagen had begun preparing a first edition of this selection of letters by his wife already during her lifetime and continued expanding the collection after her death. In 2011 Hahn published a six-volume critical edition of the Buch des Andenkens, and the tremendous amount of archival research that had gone into the preparations for this edition shed light on Rahel Varnhagen's estate. Hahn addresses the difficulties and pitfalls that scholars examining the convivial activities of Rahel and her generation have to grapple with. Several small depositories and two large archival collections—the Varnhagen collection in Krakow, and the series of letters and billets collected by the Swedish diplomate Karl Gustav von Brinckmann—give insight into Berlin's social life from the 1790s onwards. As Hahn points out, however, the stories these sources tell differ from the ones told in the scholarship by Hertz or Drewitz: ‘An examination of contemporary unpublished sources soon shows that the idyllic image of an open society cannot stand up to scrutiny’ (Reference Hahn and McFarland2005b: 52). She brings into view evidence for defamation, exclusion, and for the pressure under which women stood to give up their Jewish heritage and convert.
In light of such findings, Hannah Arendt's understanding of Rahel Varnhagen's social activities seems much closer to reality than any of the idealized accounts of gatherings at Jewish houses. Arendt had begun writing her biography Rahel Varnhagen. The Life of a Jewess in the 1930s in Berlin and discusses the ‘attic room on Jägerstrasse’ where Rahel hosted her gatherings as a site that represents her social exclusion (Reference Arendt, Weissberg and Winston1997: 125). Located above and disconnected from her family's home, ‘Rahel's garret’, Hahn suggests, symbolizes Arendt's central view that ‘already from its earliest stages, the path of integration into a Christian-dominated society had been blocked’ (2005b: 46). Such examinations that uncover progressive conviviality as a myth constitute a dominant argumentative direction in the critical literature on Jewish salons. The focus lies thereby to a greater or lesser extent either on deconstructing salons as sites of cross-religious understanding and tolerance or of female emancipation and gender equity.Footnote 9
II. Conviviality as Wechselwirkung
Arendt's disillusioned perspective on Jewish integration and the idealized readings of earlier criticisms seem on opposite ends of the spectrum. What both assessments have in common, however, is that they do not consider convivial encounters on their own terms but always with an eye toward later developments in matters of religious tolerance or emancipation. As Schulte points out, most scholars consider instances where Jewish women broke with conventions against the backdrop of gradual processes of cultural assimilation, future baptisms or an always already malformed relationship between Germans and Jews. Many of these developments, however, could not have been foreseen by the hostesses and visitors of Berlin's convivial circles. Hence, his suggestion to shift the focus and investigate Jewish salons and the networks of correspondence they inspired ‘unteleologically’ (Schulte Reference Schulte, Lund, Schneider and Wels2017: 60).
Recent research into convivial constellations has developed a methodological approach that is analytic rather than normative with its concentration on the dynamics of interaction as such. This situation-focused practice is useful for isolating selected features and functions of the sociable activities and dialogical writings by Henriette Herz, Rahel Varnhagen and Fanny Lewald. More specifically, I draw on an approach spearheaded by Magdalena Nowicka in the social sciences that is productive not only for research in contemporary urban and migration studies but also for developing a more nuanced perspective on a unique historical moment when Jewish women opened their houses to people from radically diverse social, educational, and religious backgrounds.
In reviewing the critical literature on conviviality, Nowicka draws attention to the term's association with visions of ethnic pluralism, multiculturalism or diversity that all share ‘a normative and often idealistic aspiration for peaceful togetherness’ in common (Nowicka and Heil Reference Nowicka and Heil2015: 6). The shortcoming of such normatively oriented notions of conviviality is that critical investigations focus mostly on tensions between daily practices of sociability on the one hand and the question as to what extent these practices approximate or countermand overarching plans of cosmopolitanism, gender equity or religious tolerance on the other. Nowicka, by contrast, steps beyond dichotomous structures of what is and what ought to be by replacing normative connotations of conviviality with a ‘situated, participatory and open-ended methodology of research’ (Berg and Nowicka Reference Berg and Nowicka2019: 2). The underlying question is thereby always ‘how minimal sociality [is] possible’, how people find common ground despite tensions, racism and social inequalities that are not extraneous to but are often bound-up with conviviality (Nowicka and Heil Reference Nowicka and Heil2015: 7).
Such conceptualizing of analytic conviviality is a suitable tool for the purpose of this essay in several ways. The practice foregrounds temporary shifts of power balance, mutual understanding and the forming of ad hoc communities while acknowledging conflicts and failure. Rather than overarching normative objectives, the dialogical in its complexity and volatility is at the centre of attention, raising questions that concern the feedback effects of conversation on the female self and the objects under discussion. Analytic conviviality, I suggest, helps to foreground these women's dialogical understanding of the self and the humanist tradition they draw on and contribute to; the situation focused approach analyses letters, billets and autobiographical writings on their own terms and as expressions of enlightenment thinking in practice. Philosophy and literature emerge as inherently engaged, hands-on disciplines in that their relevance and role grow out of people's dialogical exchanges in society.
Moreover, I demonstrate that stripping sociability of overarching normative promises is a project that is not limited to contemporary research in the social sciences but also a key component of Schleiermacher's ‘Toward a Theory of Sociable Conduct’ (Versuch einer Theorie des geselligen Betragens) (1799). What this eighteenth-century theory by the theologian and preacher Schleiermacher and the social-scientific methodological approach of the twenty first century share is their interest in structures of interaction rather than results. The common denominator of these otherwise, of course, profoundly different approaches to the topic of sociability is their commitment to investigating communicative exchanges as such rather than against the backdrop of abstract overarching plans and principles. In daily conversations with Henriette Herz, Schleiermacher, I suggest, theorizes convivial dialogue as a process whose core characteristics resonate with the modes of sociability practised in their circles and written conversations.
Schleiermacher's fragment was published anonymously in the February issue of the Berlinisches Archiv der Zeit und ihres Geschmacks in 1799. The journal was co-edited by the ecclesiastic and freemason Ignatius Aurelius Fessler who hosted the ‘Wednesday Society’, a debating club that Schleiermacher attended regularly along with Berlin's leading intellectuals. His plan was to complete and publish the essay in a future volume of the journal, yet that never happened, and it was only at the beginning of the twentieth century that the philosopher Hermann Nohl identified the fragment as Schleiermacher's. It has since sparked the interest of scholars from various fields, ranging from education theory, sociology, and philosophy to urban planning and political science.Footnote 10
The essay's composition was inspired directly by the author's widespread social involvements, including learned societies as well as frequent visits to the open houses convened by bourgeois Jewish women. The salons hosted by Henriette Herz and her husband Marcus Herz (1747–1803) numbered among the most prominent social events in town at the time. Like her father Benjamin de Lemos (1711–89), her husband was a doctor and a maskil. He was Moses Mendelssohn's student and friend, and before coming to Berlin he had studied with Immanuel Kant in the East Prussian port town of Königsberg. By the time his significantly younger wife Henriette began hosting her own social circle, his house was already a reputable address for researchers and intellectuals who attended his lectures on physics and medicine. Friedrich Wilhelm University had not yet been founded, and meetings such as those at Herz's home were important venues of the proliferation and exchange of research proceedings.
On 30 December 1796, Schleiermacher, who was at the time employed as preacher and chaplain at the Berliner Charité hospital, received a ticket from Count Alexander Dohna, requesting that he join him for ‘tea and dinner at the home of Professor Herz’ (Nowak Reference Nowak1986: 106). Impressed by the distinguished and diverse circle of people gathering regularly at the house of the professor and his wife, Schleiermacher writes to his sister Clara: the couple receives ‘many foreigners and there is hardly a noteworthy person coming to Berlin who does not visit them’ (KGA: V/2, 370). He quickly became a regular at their house, and the convivial gatherings marked the beginning of an intimate and lasting friendship between him and Henriette Herz, recorded in their frequent letter exchanges and Herz's memoirs. She recalls daily get-togethers or mail correspondence if they could not meet in person and remarks on the crucial role of the relationship for both (HH: 80–85).
In letters written during longer stays in Landsberg and Potsdam, Schleiermacher does not hold back with telling her how dependent he feels on her companionship and how eagerly he awaits her feedback on his work.Footnote 11 Similar to his interlocutors, Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich Schiller, Schleiermacher felt that the quality of such friendships, the circles he moved in, and the open houses he visited were unique and called for deeper theoretical and philosophical examination.Footnote 12 He recognizes and admires the progressive potential of these gatherings at Jewish homes where ‘young scholars and the fashionable elite’ interact with people from different cities and countries:
Whoever wants to see good society in a free and easy manner, allows oneself to be introduced into such houses. Here every person of talent—be it only a talent for socializing—is welcome and will certainly amuse himself, for the Jewish women […] are very cultivated; they know how to converse about any subject, and usually they master one or another of the fine arts to a high degree. (KGA: V/2, 370)
‘Toward a Theory of Sociable Conduct’ examines the conditions under which such synergy effects of freedom and ease that he was experiencing at get-togethers like those at the Herz's house may develop. In doing so, Schleiermacher pursues two interrelated objectives that must not be confused: The text articulates a vision of what free sociable interaction ought to look like under ideal circumstances, where questions of origin, religious confession, social standing, education, or gender are deemed irrelevant. In a second step, he brings this utopian ideal in dialogue with the volatile dynamics of human interaction in real life convivial settings.
The essay's concluding paragraph anticipates that readers might fall into the trap of mistaking the theory of sociable conduct for a description of what an actual social gathering could look like under perfect circumstances. Hence Schleiermacher reminds anyone who otherwise might have forgotten or missed the point that a theory, per definition, formulates an ideal:
Moreover, it is part of the essence of a theory and, therefore, does not actually need to be expressly stated, that the ideas put forward in a theory are ideals that practice is only to approximate. This is also the case, then, with the concept developed here, namely, that each society should be a unity, a whole. Not only will each society inevitably have moments when it is divided into several parts but it also will be a particularly good fortune for even the most excellent, if they can maintain themselves even for a short while as an actual whole. (TSC: 39; KGA: I/2, 184)
Misunderstanding, conflict, and division are integral components of sociability, and even ‘the most excellent’ society may consider itself fortunate to experience moments or brief periods where cohesion, togetherness and communal understanding are strong enough to push aside tensions and disagreements.
Now that we are turning to the essay's beginning, it is important to bear this distinction between utopian ideal and conviviality in practice in mind because the salon scholarship tends to step right into the trap Schleiermacher tells us to avoid. Reminiscent of Schiller's analysis of the modern human condition in the Aesthetic Letters (Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen) (1795), Schleiermacher opens the essay with observations on how society's increasing professionalization has reduced people's realms of social interaction and advanced intellectual compartmentalization. Regardless of how distinguished and relevant professional activities may be, they ‘banish […] the activity of the mind to a narrow sphere’, confining our outlook on the world to ‘a single point of view’. This assessment of contemporary social life leads him to imagine an ideal convivial scenario that places high demands on all participants. Sociability can only be free, he suggests, if all involved divest themselves of their professional identity and let go of any sense of social rank and of national, religious, or ethnic belonging. Such a state of conscious detachment from all ties and status criteria is the prerequisite for the individual's restricted sphere of activity to be ‘intersected by the sphere of others as diversely as possible’ (TSC: 20; KGA: I/2, 165).
This process of intersection is centred on a complex concept of ‘reciprocal action’ (Wechselwirkung) that lies at the heart of Schleiermacher's theory: ‘The action of each individual should be aimed at the activity of others, and the activity of individuals should be their influence on the others’ (TSC: 24–25; KGA: I/2, 168–69). One participant's activity (Thätigkeit) ought to have a direct feedback effect on that of another and vice versa. The model of reciprocal action and formation imagined here shares its basic structure of communication with the one in Schleiermacher's fourth speech in On Religion. Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (1799) (Über Religion. Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern) where he examines the social element in religion. He was writing his major work On Religion while composing the theory of sociability, and the communalities of his explorations of sociality in secular and sacred settings are obvious. The lack of social hierarchy and equilibrium he imagines between those speaking and those listening in a conversation resonates with key sections of the fourth speech. He envisions a congregation that dispenses with pre-assigned positions of leadership and makes the role of the preacher potentially available to all (KGA: I/12, 181–249).Footnote 13
The better people follow this principle of reciprocity, this mutually effective back and forth in conversation in any social setting, the more ‘good quality of life’ (gute Lebensart), he remarks in his notebook (KGA: I/2, 34, number 147). A letter to Herz from 1798 demonstrates how serious he was about modelling his own preaching and conversing on reciprocal action: ‘Yesterday, I preached to the great joy of my cousin; whether the other people enjoyed it too, I don't know, because rather than practicing a good way of life I gave them a lecture […]’ (HH: 256). The statement is interesting because he juxtaposes two different styles of addressing his audience: the lecture format, based on a top-down model of instruction, and the horizontal format centred on exchange that he associates with ‘quality of life’. Herz is clearly familiar with her friend's usage of the term and knows to associate it with reciprocal action. Hence Schleiermacher concludes without further explication that he decided to go against his own principle that day and give his listeners a lecture that he ‘knew they could need’ (HH: 256).
The essay on sociable conduct goes into depth on this matter. A horizontal, interactive style increases the quality of our lives because it allows us a
view into a different and alien world. In this manner, one can come to know all the appearances of humanity little by little, and even the most alien persons and relations can grow familiar and become, as it were, neighbors. (TSC: 20–21; KGA: I/2, 165)
In reading such promises and prospects of successful sociality, readers might expect formulations of an overarching humanist vision to follow next. As for that matter, Schiller's conception of the play drive (Spieltrieb) and reciprocal action in the Aesthetic Letters lead up to an ideal state of beauty, giving us the ‘gift of humanity itself’ (AL: 147–48). Schleiermacher, by contrast, does not talk about reaching an aesthetic condition nor does he envision a state where members of diverse cultural and societal backgrounds view themselves as equal members of a global community. Instead of formulating a pluralistic ideal of sociality or proposing the arts as a solution to the ills of human division and misunderstanding, his focus remains on the dynamics of reciprocal action as such:
If we now look at the purpose that is to be attained under this form of thoroughgoing reciprocity, we notice that the predicate of freedom implies that there should be no mention of a single and determinate purpose in free sociality since this conditions and limits the activity in conformity to material and objective rules. There should be no particular action executed communally, no product brought about jointly, nor any judgment methodically acquired. The purpose of society is not at all to be conceived as lying outside it. (TSC: 24; KGA: I/2, 169)
Further determination of the purpose of convivial interaction would mean corseting social activities into a set of rules steered toward prescribed outcomes. As Schmidt succinctly sums up the issue, Schleiermacher conceives of the sociable discourse as a kind of laboratory without a research agenda (Reference Schmidt and Frischmann2014: 102). The sociable domain is a transitory space that is not supposed to yield specified results, and if it does it has fallen short of its purpose: ‘The reciprocal action accordingly is self-contained and complete. The form as well as the purpose of sociable activity is contained in the concept of reciprocal action […]’ (TSC: 25; KGA: I/2, 170, emphasis added). The members of a convivial circle must be on guard so that activities such as solving scientific problems, communal agreements on ethical standards or the formulation of cultural agendas do not capture and thereby disrupt the fragile principle of reciprocity.
The subsequent parts of the fragment introduce a set of laws that specify what free conversation structured around reciprocal action looks like under real life circumstances. The text, entertaining and often unintentionally amusing, reads like a meticulously detailed guide to appropriate social conduct. It turns out that the reciprocity principle asks more of people than to temporarily discard what usually defines their role in society outside of convivial gatherings. After all, we learn that reciprocal action and getting to know one another in convivial settings is not actually about leaving life stories and conversations over the different hats people normally wear at the doorstep, so to speak. Rather, it is about contributing the right contents and comments in the right tone of voice, manner, and style at the right time. Schleiermacher subsumes such rules of conduct under what he terms the ‘quantitative law’; this law details the art of finding the right balance between being ‘self-restrained’ and advancing conversations by bringing in one's unique personality (TSC: 25; KGA: I/2, 170).
There is no need to detail further how Schleiermacher negotiates the dialectical relation between the ideal of free sociability and its necessary confinements, between the individual and the group in actual convivial settings.Footnote 14 What is relevant for the discussion here is that he untethers the concept of sociability from normative constraints and makes reciprocal action as such its purpose. This focus on sociability as a kind of laboratory from which moments of mutual understanding or ruptures of accustomed social hierarchies and gender barriers might or might not develop makes for contact points to current theorizations of conviviality such as Nowicka's. With their open-ended and situation-centred theorizations of dialogue and reciprocal action these approaches provide a productive lens for examining the effects of sociability on women's self-understanding, their writing, and their modes of engaging literary and philosophical traditions.
III. Geisteswissenschaft as dialogue
It was incredibly tough for a woman with intellectual ambitions to find her place in a society that did not envision any place other than the domestic one for her. In Fanny Lewald's eyes, there is nobody whose writings articulate this experience of confinement and discrimination better and in more relatable way than those by Rahel Varnhagen:
[She] once said in one of her letters: “Ugly women and Jews are always in a bad position. They have to always first prove that they are likeable”. By and large, all women with intellectual gifts are in the same position. One denies that they are qualified for this or that branch of knowledge without taking into consideration that up to now they have been denied almost every opportunity to train themselves in the sciences. (Letters: 61)
In discussing social activities and writings of Varnhagen and her generation, Lewald thematizes throughout her political, biographical, and fictional works the paradoxical situation of women, seeking to claim their voice and inhabit a position in the scientific, philosophical, and literary discourse of their time. Their lack of formal education, yearlong preparation and training is held against them as evidence for their incapability to seriously participate in contemporary intellectual discourse to begin with: ‘We were supposed to swim but hadn't learned it’ (Letters: 61).Footnote 15
In different yet comparable ways, Lewald and her female role models Varnhagen and Herz practised conviviality and dialogue as means to compensate for their lack of formal training and gain recognition as thinkers in their own right. Looking back at her educational career at the age of forty-one, Varnhagen recalls: ‘Nobody taught me anything; I grew up as if surrounded by a forest of humans’ (I: 584). And in a letter to her friend Pauline Wiesel, she remarks: ‘We are next to human society. No office, no vain title there!’ (Wiesel Reference Wiesel1982: 12). As Tewarson's biography Rahel Varnhagen demonstrates, she brought up the topic of her ignorance and deficient training throughout her life, and compared to the excellent private instruction that her friends, the Humboldt brothers, received in preparation for their university studies, such self-depreciating assessments seem unsurprising (Tewarson Reference Tewarson1988: 19). Like Varnhagen, Herz is fully aware of the curial role that her contacts and sociable activities played for her education. She concludes the Recollections of her Youth by thanking all the ‘extraordinary people’ she came to know through Berlin's convivial circles, and who ‘made her’ (Recollections: 183).
The importance of networks and dialogue for these women's development, self-conception and writing has received more critical attention recently. Taking Hahn's characterization of Varnhagen as a ‘great writer […] without an ouvre’ as her point of departure (Hahn Reference Hahn1990: 11), Krauss (Reference Krauss2015: 149) asks about the place of her type of dialogical writing that does not fit into traditional categories of authorship and autonomy. Pollok argues that the ‘prolonged, suspicious absence of female philosophers from a philosophical “canon” up to this day’ has to do with the fact that the functions of the ‘dialogical mode’ for their self-understanding as intellectuals has not been sufficiently explored (Pollok Reference Pollok and Dyck2021: 196–97). To assess the role of dialogue more fully, she suggests widening the scope of research and examining its interrelated functions in salon communication, the public sphere, letters, women's readings, biographical writings and novels.
In drawing on and contributing to this direction of scholarship, I investigate how dialogue structures Herz's, Varnhagen's and Lewald's writing and engagement with language, literatures and philosophy. Conversations over these topics in salons, letters or novels, I argue, are never self-enclosed but deeply embedded in and connected to what currently moves these women and makes up their daily experiences. Their humanist activities and inquiries cannot be disconnected from their life stories and those of their conversation partners or, in Lewald's case, from those of the characters in her novels. Philosophy and literary studies are treated as engaged and hands-on disciplines whose relevance and value grows out of their various functions in real life settings. The so called Doppelsalon of the Herz couple is a good starting point for this discussion because it demonstrates paradigmatically the characteristics of what I would call a dialogical and socially involved concept of Geisteswissenschaft, of the humanities. Notwithstanding the lack of a critical edition of her work, the sources we have in sum provide a solid starting point to study the topic at issue here.
When Marcus Herz married Henriette de Lemos in 1779, his house was already a well-known centre of enlightenment thinking. Fully aware of her wit and beauty, Henriette Herz saw her opportunity to gather her own circle, and soon both partners would host meetings for different circles of people in adjacent rooms of the house:
[almost] every known intellectual foreigner […] visited [our house]—Herz attracted people because of his intellect and fame as a doctor, and I because of my beauty and my sense for all intellectual endeavors; there was hardly an intellectual field of inquiry that I did not feel pretty much at home in, and some I pursued seriously—such as physics and later several languages. (Recollections: 183)
Seventeen years younger than her husband and fluent in at least seven languages, she attracted a younger and socially more diverse group. Women and men, Jews and protestants, writers, aristocrats and visitors to Berlin looking for occasions to socialize and read together gathered at her place. The events hosted by her husband were targeted at men interested in scientific research and philosophy such as the young Humboldt brothers. It did not take long, however, until Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt became more interested in his wife and her circle than scientific lectures (Recollections: 182). These convivial events where intellectual debates went hand in hand with flirtation and amorous friendships like the one between Henriette and Wilhelm sparked unconventional modes of communication and opened fresh perspectives on Bildung for the members of the circle that have been researched.Footnote 16
Significant for this essay's focus is that Herz cultivated a style of interaction with her guests that is closely modelled on the principle of reciprocal action and ‘good quality of life’ thematized in her exchanges with Schleiermacher. So not just the topics but also, crucially, the discursive practice distinguishes her salon from her husband's:
My husband, who was older than I and friends with Lessing […], rejected everything even in classical literature that had not been written with the clarity and transparency he knew from Lessing's writings […]. With the beginnings of the Romantic school my aesthetic suffering increased. Everything here was false and incomprehensible for Herz. (Berliner Salon: 39–40)
While Marcus, surrounded by enlightened men, would stick to the top-down lecture format, the group in the adjacent room would engage in open discussions of literary texts, art, and theatre, promoting an aesthetics of feeling. To be sure, social hierarchies and experiences of exclusion did not just disappear but perhaps it is not too optimistic to assume that these barriers felt less rigid and more permeable.Footnote 17 Moreover, options for participation in and shaping the directions of the reception of literary works opened up:
People sought to comprehensively familiarize themselves with German literature, and by good fortune its first flourishing began right back then. The master works of German literature matured with us. It is something special to witness the emergence of a great literary epoch; you develop an interest and an understanding of the works, and you contribute to forming first judgements about them in ways different from someone who encounters these same works of literature as completed ones, finalized judgements about them included. (Berliner Salon: 47)
The passage gestures at the role Herz's social group had in forming the literary and cultural historical discourse of their time. Contemporaries knew that their judgments had an impact; Wilhelm von Humboldt, for instance, was curious to find out what the reading public thought of the latest works his friend Friedrich Schiller had written. Herz describes the mode of literary criticism practiced in her and other female-led circles as cutting-edge and a ‘Profanation [of the male] sanctuary of science’:
the seeds [of literature] had fallen on pristine, virgin soil. There was no transmission through a tradition here […] but also no prejudice that would have had arisen from such a path of Bildung and tradition […]. The highest blossoming of this spirit was later revealed in Rachel Levin. (Berliner Salon: 48–49)
Unlike most of their educated male conversation partners, women read and discussed literature with a comparatively untutored eye, which Herz presents as an advantage. In her opinion, their lack of training, familiarity with discursive conventions, and historiographical knowledge makes their perspectives original and less prone to biases. Her correspondence with Schleiermacher reveals that she was actively cultivating such a subject-centred and engaged practice of reading, viewing, and writing in dialogue with him. In letters from July 1803, he gives her hands-on advice and encourages her to keep a regular journal: ‘What you write must be as subjective as possible; always a representation of your views and feelings’ (HH: 355). Another letter announces that he will read her journal while she is in Dresden, and he tells her to record her ‘views, thoughts, and feelings’ during her visits to the Gemäldegalerie and compare them to the art discussions by August Wilhelm Schlegel and his wife Caroline, published in the Athenäum in 1799 (HH: 355).Footnote 18
Sadly, we do not have Herz's journals to see what her writing on art and literature actually looks like. What we do have, however, is a wealth of correspondence by the woman she considers the ‘first flourishing’ of this new spirit in literary criticism. The edited collection Begegnungen mit Rahel Levin Varnhagen provides illuminating insights regarding Varnhagen's use of dialogue, its effects on her self-understanding, and on how she engages with literary and philosophical works (Hahn Reference Hahn2015). The correspondence between Varnhagen and her long-term friend David Veit reads like a book co-written in and about dialogue, Frömming argues. Their conversations are not about presenting ‘results’ as in a ‘philosophical dialogue’ but about the formative capacities of the ‘dialogical method’ as such. In close readings of their epistolary exchanges, Frömming demonstrates how Veit and Varnhagen engage in topics of political and moral philosophy to rethink the experience of friendship and of basic questions of human existence and self-creation. In doing so, they are not interested in developing new speculative philosophical systems but rather in ‘a new culture of conversation’ that contributes to making the world more inhabitable (Frömming Reference Frömming and Hahn2015: 17–21, 43).
Concerning her dialogues about and with literature and literary characters, the Buch des Andenkens für ihre Freunde provides a wealth of resources with its literary reviews and montage techniques. Dannenberg describes the letter-based book as a ‘work of art with aphoristic, essayist, and text-exegetical forms of writing’ that centres on developing continuously changing versions of the self. She resorts repeatedly to works such as Hamlet, Jeanne d'Arc and Torquato Tasso, and puts the literary figures created by Shakespeare, Goethe, and Schiller into conversation with everyday experiences and seemingly unrelated topics. The objective of her practice, Dannenberg claims, is to create a kind of Kunstfigur of herself whose identity shifts constantly and calls for rewriting (Dannenberg Reference Dannenberg and Hahn2015: 173–74, 186).
From what we know, the associative technique and unsystematic style of her letters was also the trademark of her salon communication. Count Salem describes how the lively conversations at her gatherings would swiftly move between topics and involve everyone: ‘all were active in a natural way, and yet no one intrusive; people seemed to like to listen as much as they liked to talk’; yet no one mastered the art of conversing like the hostess herself, leaving a deep impression on the Count: ‘I felt as if I had been swirled around, and I could no longer distinguish what was wit, profundity, genius or oddity in her wonderful, unexpected pronouncements’. Her style was ‘without coercion or intention’, and as disorienting as it was inspiring. Her unexpected utterances, and characteristic mode of moving between matters of ordinary life and deep reflection in conversations felt like sudden flashes of lightening, touching his ‘inmost heart’ (Tewarson Reference Tewarson1988: 33). In a letter from 1803, Friedrich von Gentz also remarks on her dedication to the dynamics of common existence and the immediacy of human interaction: ‘Her letters are not even written, they are living people’ (KIII: 121). David Veit holds her idiosyncratic use of words and syntax responsible for such effects of immediacy, surprise and inspiration: ‘In her letters […] every word always looks as if she had invented it for herself’ (VII/2: 130).
The quotations reveal that her visitors and correspondence partners tried to find adequate circumscriptions for what could perhaps be summed up as the ‘Rahel effect’. To be sure, she was aware of her talent for conviviality—‘I love society infinitely, and I have always been fully convinced that I was born [for society], and determined and equipped for it by nature’ (IX: 321)—and dedicated her life to cultivating it. Yet she also kept emphasizing that her skills grew out of a deep anxiety of being misunderstood for which she held her lack of education responsible, at least partially: ‘If I could only open up to humans in the way that you open up a closet; and, with one movement, show things organized in shelves’ (VII/2: 135). Our language is our ‘lived life; I invented mine for myself’ (KI: 337). Yet what distinguishes her invention from those of others, she writes, is a lack of method and familiarity with systematic conventions that are matched by her deficient grammar, syntax and spelling. While foregrounding her disadvantageous background, however, she also sees it as an opportunity to stake out her own position and introduce alternative perspectives on the aesthetic and discursive norms of her time: ‘The way I write is not random because I want to create a portrait of the moment in which I am writing’ (III: 102). Rather than ‘a speech’, she composes ‘conversations as they would happen in a lively way in people’ (III: 456).
Varnhagen, who often begins her letters with elaborate notes on the weather, her current mood and well-being, does not see much value in corseting her prose into stylistic conventions that might interfere with her objective of creating a portrait of the very moment of writing. As Tewarson demonstrates, she was deeply familiar with contemporary artistic and aesthetic standards, and in confronting them with her own approach she did more than make a virtue out of necessity—she made a conscious effort to set off her own unsystematic, lifelike practice against abstract principles (Tewarson Reference Tewarson1988: 118). In a rather bold move, she critiques Schiller's normative aesthetics and poetics (Dichtkunst) as too restrictive and advocates for accepting a wider range of practices of narration: ‘But even just narrating is sometimes poetic, and copying the most poetic element of a work’ (Tewarson Reference Tewarson1988: 59). A casual style of writing and even copying the right text at the right time, she suggests, can be as artistically valuable as infusing a landscape with one's spirit.
Her commentary on selected parts from Schleiermacher's On Religion follows a similar logic of argumentation. She finds his definition of conviviality in the fourth speech too narrow and hierarchical: ‘[…] a truly good speech should not be an ornament of something; a speech is a sequence of thoughts; a representation of ourself in a certain moment; and if we are free at that moment, the speech will be beautiful and true’ (Commemoration: IV 408). There is no space here for a detailed analysis of her response to Schleiermacher's linking of religion and sociability, but the quotation suffices to see that she pursues the same agenda as in her criticism of Schiller's aesthetics. Be it in a written correspondence or in face-to-face conversation, she is fully dedicated to moments of speech as such. Speech does not gain authenticity by fitting into thematic, aesthetic or rhetorical frameworks but by being a true articulation of the self at a specific moment in a person's life in history.Footnote 19
Varnhagen and Herz both cultivate a culture of conversation that provides stages for women to stake out positions different from those that have traditionally been assigned to them. In doing so, they put the philosophical and literary discourses of their time into the service of fostering open-ended, participatory dialogues through which different versions of the ‘I’ may emerge rather than specific objectives in matters of religious tolerance or emancipation. The purpose of their laboratories of conviviality is to create openings for women to become rather than be. Lewald, I argue, views her own activities as a continuation of precisely that legacy. In following in the footsteps of her foremothers and role models Herz and Varnhagen, she engages contemporary intellectual positions as vehicles for plural forms of Selbstaufklärung, a lasting process of self-education in the Enlightenment tradition.Footnote 20
As Stamm points out, the best-selling authoress is an exception among nineteenth-century female writers because reason constitutes the leading category of her self-understanding and activities as a writer (Stamm Reference Stamm2012: 130). Her immense, under-researched oeuvre includes twenty-seven novels and over thirty novellas and stories, as well as travelogues, autobiographical texts, shorter memoirs, personal letters, journalistic writings and journal articles.Footnote 21 She was a public figure in Berlin, married to the classical scholar Adolf Stahr (1805–76), and hosted the city's most prominent intellectuals and artists at her house on the popular ‘Monday evenings’ in the late 1850s and 1860s.Footnote 22
Today we do not know much more about these gatherings than that they took place, and that Lewald viewed them as her own continuation of the Jewish salon tradition. The best resources for gaining insight to how she stages dialogues over philosophical topics are therefore her writings. Jenny (1843), a bestseller at the time, is among Lewald's most widely read novels and a good starting point. This story of a young Jewish woman, Jenny Meier, who falls in love with her tutor Gustav Reinhard, brings together the two subjects that preoccupied Lewald throughout her career: gender inequality and religious prejudice. Discrimination against women and Jews advance the plot development at every stage and lead up to dramatic clashes between different characters. Reinhard trains to become a Protestant minister and is a stern proponent of Christian dogma, and Jenny, brought up in the tradition of Enlightenment thinking, comes from a wealthy, highly educated bourgeois Jewish family.
The novel engages central themes and arguments from contemporary debates in religious philosophy. We find ideas of the period's most prominent philosophical voices such as Lessing, Mendelssohn and Spinoza refracted in the story. In this philosophical context, it is important to note that she considers a systematic approach to topics in philosophy intimidating and of not much use to her:
Neither in my youth nor any later point have I been able to absorb grandiose, perfected systems or use philosophical textbooks to my advantage. That is because I always had to fully appropriate what was foreign to me before it could become meaningful or useful for me. I also think that the independent development of a single proposition is more useful for people—especially for people without particular talent and unaccustomed to studying foreign theories—than familiarizing themselves with large quantities of thoughts that others have come up with. Systematic textbooks and theories have always frightened and confused me because I often felt that they were too powerful. The single, active word, however, or witnessing a specific action was useful and encouraged me. (ML: I, 350–51)
This passage from her autobiography sums up succinctly where her philosophical interests lay. Terms and fragments of complex argumentative constructs are a source of inspiration for her. Like Varnhagen, she is interested in how single words or sentences animate her thinking and acting.
Jenny provides a wealth of entry points for examinations of how Lewald reworks philosophical ideas and terms in a narrative context. Regarding her stance on the emancipation of women, her retelling of Lessing's ‘Parable of the Palace’, a key document in his philosophy of religion, is an insightful example.Footnote 23 In a longer speech, Reinhard's widowed mother, the Pfarrerin (wife of a Lutheran pastor), warns her son against marrying Jenny. As Tebben shows, the monologue is as much a warning to Reinhard as it is a programmatic declaration, addressed to the novel's female readership (Tebben Reference Tebben1997: 16):
“That is what I fear!” said the clergywoman. “Jenny's intellect is relentlessly clear; she is not deceived by her heart, and that worries me. These intellectual girls from Jewish families who were raised like Jenny almost always lack proper female conduct: […] Each other's company and the care for daily housekeeping duties no longer gives them pleasure; they prefer male company […]. Their intellect and enlightenment progresses rapidly in these male circles; they quickly tear down old prejudices and discard narrow views. The house with its peaceful old walls where the young girl felt at home and where she appears most loveable is destroyed and replaced by a new shining palace. Bright sunlight shines through the building's large windows and reflects from its smooth marble walls. Everything is light! There is no half-darkness, no gloomy shadow, and no quiet room to build an altar for the creator, no intimate place for shy love”. (Jenny: 90)
The girl's metaphorical destruction of her familiar dwelling feels like an imminent threat to Reinhard's mother. She imagines a story of emancipation in which young women leave their narrowly defined and tightly controlled domestic space behind and replace it with a new palace that is all light, shiny and reflective. Lessing published the parable about the palace a year before Nathan the Wise, calling it a barely encoded poetic statement about the history of Christianity (Works: IX, 828–29); the narrative was part of a series of highly controversial exchanges with Johann Melchior Goeze, chief pastor of Hamburg and major spokesman of Lutheran orthodoxy.Footnote 24
The parable envisions a boundless, light-filled palace whose countless doors and windows make it impossible for anyone entering to maintain a sense of orientation. All human efforts to identify the building's original Grundriss (floor plan) and to arrive at an undisputed understanding of its measurements have been in vain and led Lessing to employ the image of the futile search as a compelling visualization of what definies the spirit of religion and its limitless articulations. The ongoing controversies over Scriptural exegesis or original ‘floor layouts’, as the story puts it, pose the greatest threat to the spirit of religion and human well-being. Different religious groups have interpreted the Bible's ‘words’ and ‘signs’ to fit their views and needs, and thereby ignored that answers to their questions are not to be found in fundamentalist explications of so-called historical evidence and origin. The parable concludes with a scenario in which the palace is about to burn down because instead of saving the building in its entirety, everyone is concerned with rescuing what they regard as the true floor layout. With its powerful image of a palace lacking a single matching Grundriss, Lessing's parable is part of a sequence of highly controversial works that argue against conflations of Biblical exegesis and historical origin narratives with questions of religious truth in the field of apologetics.Footnote 25
Lewald's version of the parable replaces the topic of religion with the vexed question of female emancipation. Reinhard and his family are only interested in safeguarding their ‘layout of the house’ and the notion of womanhood associated with it. In destroying their home and building a palace, however, the girls who pose such danger in the eyes of Reinhard's mother do something much more radical than exchange a traditional understanding of how women ought to be and act with a more progressive one: They seek to rewrite the history of women altogether as an anti-foundationalist one. The image of the reflecting palace representing womankind does not map on to a specific floor plan; there is no historical ground, in other words, no foundation for a narrowly defined understanding of womanhood such as the one articulated by Reinhard and his family. The palace with its immeasurable dimensions signifies plural forms of femininity, growing out of different ways of life, education, social interactions and everyday practices.
This ideal of marriage fails because of society's lack of tolerance, culminating in the death of both lovers at the end of the novel. But despite this tragic conclusion, Jenny illustrates Lewald's varied approaches to using popular images, philosophical ideas, and narratives to develop new debates over women's roles in the family and in society at large. Here and across her varied writings she concentrates on the dynamics of specific situations and practical reform projects rather than on a more comprehensive and abstract emancipatory agenda.
Concluding remarks
Drawing on Schleiermacher and recent social-scientific research into the dynamics of convivial interaction, this essay has isolated selected features and functions of the sociable activities and writings by Henriette Herz, Rahel Varnhagen and Fanny Lewald. What Schleiermacher's concept of reciprocal action and Nowicka's analytic approach to conviviality share is their focus on structures of interaction rather than results and questions of long-term, overarching purposes. Instead of asking what is and what ought to be, they concentrate on the dynamics, conflicts, and potentials of the back and forth in verbal and written conversations. Such understanding of conviviality as a kind of laboratory without underlying agenda provides a productive lens, I suggest, for examining writings by and about key figures of Berlin's salon culture. More specifically, I asked how sociability and dialogue affect their self-understanding and technique of engaging literary and philosophical traditions. I demonstrated that the humanities emerge as dialogical and socially involved fields whose relevance and value are contingent upon the daily experiences and life worlds of these women and their networks. Varnhagen's associative technique and unsystematic style of writing and conversing, Herz's correspondence with Schleiermacher and reflection on her salon, and Lewald's rewriting of the history of women in conversation with Lessing in Jenny share a common objective. They each seek to foster open-ended, participatory dialogues through which women may stake out positions and inhabit roles going beyond those traditionally assigned to them.
The dialogical and biographical engagement of the humanist tradition begs the question of these women's understudied place in its history. What role do their contributions play in today's burgeoning scholarly discourse over philology, its history, and its wide-ranging scope and methodological breadth? The editors of the collected volume on World Philology contrast today's narrow conception of the field as ‘text criticism, bibliography, historical grammar, [and] corpus linguistics’ (Pollock Reference Pollock, Pollock, Elman and Kevin2015: 9) with its notable historical past when ‘philology was the queen of the sciences’ (Pollock Reference Pollock, Pollock, Elman and Kevin2015: 2). Figureheads such as Friedrich August Wolf, Friedrich Schlegel and the Humboldt brothers formulated their grand vision of the field, focused on ‘empirical depth and conceptual breadth, the particular and the universal, and scientificity and creativity’ (Pollock Reference Pollock, Pollock, Elman and Kevin2015: 21). Given how closely Herz and Varnhagen interacted with some of these future architects of the modern university and this conception of philology, it seems worthwhile to ask about their role in the making of this comprehensive nineteenth-century ‘discipline of making sense of texts’ (Pollock Reference Pollock, Pollock, Elman and Kevin2015: 22). Varnhagen, Herz and also Lewald intervened boldly in the discursive formats, contents and style over topics in literature and philosophy. They brought conversations down to biographical and personal matters, and forged discussions over women's roles in society. Questions concerning the personal and biographical or speculative and creative engagements with textual traditions are integral to the history of the humanitiesand a central concern in contemporary research.Footnote 26 The function and place of women who interacted and worked directly with nineteenth-century men in writing that history, however, is still in the dark.
