Hannah Arendt wrote this biography between 1929 and 1956 in Frankfurt, Berlin, Paris, and New York – fully aware of “the doom of German Judaism”. Before 1933, she had consulted Rahel’s papers in Berlin. Arendt’s preface criticizes the “deliberate falsifications of [Rahel’s] life” by her husband, who made her friends out to be “less Jewish and more aristocratic”. Arendt wanted to show that Rahel in fact remained “a Jewish woman and a pariah”.