Genealogy of an Existential Model: the Schlemihl Figure Ii Rahel Varnhagen, Hannah Arendt and Lea Ritter Santini

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.54103/2282-0035/23082

Keywords:

Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen, Schlemihl, German Literature, Women’s writing, Lea Ritter Santini

Abstract

The purpose of this contribution is to shed light on the Jewish figure of the Schlemihl, in terms of how it has come to assume, in the discourses of Rahel Varnhagen, Hannah Arendt and Lea Ritter Santini, the extra-literary function of a recognition device and existential schema. It is in the triangulation of the speeches and lives of these three intellectuals, each in her own way belonging to German culture, that the figure of Schlemihl has exemplarily unfolded its genetic force, as a metaphor for a destiny in which, from the moment of its literary appearance in the society of early 19th-century Berlin salons thanks to Adelbert von Chamisso, those who had to carve out their lives on the basis of uprooting and a primal exclusion recognised themselves. In what could be understood as a genealogy, the reference to the Schlemihl of Rahel Varnhagen, Hannah Arendt and Lea Ritter Santini conveys the shared sense of a multifaceted undergoing and acting on uprooting, within the framework of a prismatic discourse - in the form of letters, essays and poems - that in feeding on life and thought has been able to recount marginality in its different and contiguous forms.

Author Biography

Chiara Maciocci, Sapienza University of Rome

Chiara Maciocci graduated with honours in 2021 with a double Master’s degree in German Idealism and European Modern Philosophy at “Sapienza Università di Roma” and “Friedrich Schiller Universität” in Jena, with a dissertation on the concept of time in Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit.” She also obtained a Master's degree in Modern Philology in January 2024, with a dissertation in German literature on the poetic production of the academic Lea Ritter Santini. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Germanic and Slavic Studies in the framework of a double degree joint doctoral study programme at “Sapienza Università di Roma” and Univerzita Karlova in Prague, with a project aimed at analysing under a double lens – ecocritical and genderspecific – a corpus of German women poets from the early nineteenth century to contemporary times.

References

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Published

2024-05-03

Issue

Section

Saggi