The Literary Salons Of Berlin

Petra Wilhelmy-Dollinger traces the history of Berlin’s salon culture from the 18th-20th century…

The Berlin salons which developed in the late eighteenth century owed both their existence and the form of their development to Jewish women. These early salons were the result of a unique interrelation between the German enlightenment and Haskalah on the one hand and, on the other, young, educated Jewish women from well-to-do families, who were searching for a new role in life outside the patriarchal structures of their families.

These salons have variously been criticized as a symptom of failing Jewish tradition or welcomed as a phenomenon of emancipation and acculturation. Whatever one’s attitude, their importance as highlights of the salon culture and for the process of women’s emancipation in Germany cannot be denied.

The formal structure of the Berlin salons was built on principles of French salon tradition (both the aristocratic salon and, even more, its modified version: the modest bourgeois salon or tea-table). In the later nineteenth-century salon culture, salons held by Jewish women remained an important part of the Berlin salon life (until the end of the salons circa 1914).

Varnhagen-Rahel
Rahel Levin Varnhagen, by William Hensel, July 7, 1822 (185×149 cm). Photographer: Jörg P. Anders; Institution: bpk / Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

While in Paris by the mid-eighteenth century salons had become a traditional social institution and even bourgeois ladies had advanced to besalonnières, Berlin society, in comparison, was very old-fashioned. The social classes remained strictly separated (with a very exclusive, but largely poor aristocracy at the top); Jews were discriminated against by Prussian law and socially stigmatized. It took a long time for a Bildungsbürgertum (an educated middle class) to develop, especially as there was no university in Berlin until 1810.

Middle-class women were not supposed to engage in cultural activities, but only in their religious and household duties. The rich but small Jewish upper class in Berlin had a protected status in exchange for their financial and economic services to the crown. Their lifestyle after the end of the Seven Years’ War (1763) became aristocratic. Daughters from these families, born around 1760, became the first Jewish salon women. Most important were the

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