When we meet Rahel Levin Varnhagen today, we encounter her as a witty salonnière and passionate reader of Goethe. But there is more to say about this romantic. Rahel Levin Varnhagen was a great writer, but she did not create a body of work in the conventional sense. Her work consists of very different notes and, above all, letters. These letters not only reflect Varnhagen's large communicative network, but are also characterized by a high literary and intellectual quality.

The author was well aware of the importance of her correspondence. In the 1790s, she exchanged letters with David Veit, a medical student of the same age, which the two of them drafted as a joint book. They exchanged views on art, literature and politics and were interested in Jewish emancipation and the relationship between men and women. It is precisely their differences in lifestyle and opinions that are important for their correspondence - as Rahel Levin Varnhagen emphasizes in a letter from the summer of 1795:

You are different from me. What then? Is it not enough that we think alike in so many things, and can always correct them quickly, should they still proceed alike in us? that is not possible: for it seems to me that things proceed quite differently in us, very differently. Therefore it seems to me that our friendship is a true triumph - the only enjoyable one for me - the product of two united rational beings, who, they may give way and wander, meet again undoubtedly at the truth, to which they always return, which they always seek in earnest.

Varnhagen creates a modern idea of friendship here. For according to the author, friendship, if it is based on reason and the search for truth, is an equal and cross-gender relationship.