She is the subject of a celebrated biography, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess (1957), by Hannah Arendt.

Together with Herz and her cousin, Sara Grotthuis née Meyer, she hosted one of the famous Berlin salons of the 1800s.

Her home became the meeting place for artists, poets and intellectuals such as Schlegel, Schelling, Steffens, Schack, Schleiermacher, Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt, Motte Fouqué, Baron Brückmann, Ludwig Tieck, Jean Paul, and Friedrich Gentz.

In 1814, she married the biographer Karl August Varnhagen von Ense in Berlin, after having converted to Christianity — this also made her sister-in-law to the poet Rosa Maria Assing.

[5] According to the Jewish Encyclopedia (1906), "Rahel always showed the greatest interest in her former co-religionists, endeavouring by word and deed to better their position, especially during the anti-Semitic outburst in Germany in 1819.

Amos Elon wrote about Rahel Varnhagen in his 2002 book The Pity of It All: A History of the Jews in Germany, 1743-1933: She hated her Jewish background and was convinced it had poisoned her life.

Her overriding desire was to free herself from the shackles of her birth; since, as she thought, she had been "pushed out of the world" by her origins, she was determined to escape them.

"[6]This has alternatively been understood not as Varnhagen rejecting her Jewish roots, but as resenting the fact they were a barrier to entry into society.

Rahel's husband published an account of her deathbed scene, which Amos Elon described as "stylized and possibly overdramatised", including her alleged last words: What a history!