World-Craving: Rahel Varnhagen, Daniel Paul Schreber, and the Strange Promise of Paranoia

DOI10.1177/0090591719868954
Published date01 April 2020
Date01 April 2020
Subject MatterArticles
https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591719868954
Political Theory
2020, Vol. 48(2) 192 –217
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0090591719868954
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Article
World-Craving: Rahel
Varnhagen, Daniel
Paul Schreber, and
the Strange Promise
of Paranoia
Noga Rotem1
Abstract
This essay reads Hannah Arendt’s Rahel Varnhagen (1957) alongside Sigmund
Freud’s case history of paranoia, The Schreber Case (1911), two texts about
18th- and 19th-century personalities caught up in the gender and ethnic
politics of their times. Noting affinities between the fantasies documented
in Varnhagen’s and Schreber’s memoirs, I compare Seyla Benhabib’s and
Eric Santner’s readings of these two texts as political, not psychological,
documents. I propose a reading of paranoia positioned between Benhabib’s
too optimistic dismissal of paranoia and Santner’s too tragic approach. The
result is a new reading of Varnhagen’s story and an approach to paranoia as a
potentially promising political affect. Might paranoia stand not just for world-
withdrawal but also for world-building? If so, this would be in keeping with
Arendt’s own treatment of her subject’s persecution fantasies not only as a
“verdict against the world” but also as a desire for a world.
Keywords
Paranoia, Hannah Arendt, Sigmund Freud, world-building, Rahel Varnhagen,
Daniel Paul Schreber, Eric Santner, Seyla Benhabib, affect
1Department of Political Science, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA
Corresponding Author:
Noga Rotem, Department of Political Science, Brown University, Box 1844, 111 Thayer
Street, Providence, RI 02912, USA.
Email: noga_rotem@brown.edu
868954PTXXXX10.1177/0090591719868954Political TheoryRotem
research-article2019
Rotem 193
“It is not only the paranoiac who dreams of a new world. Who doesn’t?”
—Devorah Baum, Feeling Jewish
In the wake of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, readers flocked to
Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism seeking insights about the seem-
ing “return of the paranoid style in American politics.”1 In Origins, Arendt
described how people, deprived of a shared world, are thrown into paranoid
worlds of fantasy. Atomized and stripped of social status, the masses in totali-
tarian movements shut themselves off from the world—no longer “believ[ing]
in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience; they do not trust
their eyes and ears but only their imaginations.”2
This essay proposes that another work by Arendt is also relevant now:
her still relatively unknown 1957 biography of Rahel Varnhagen. Like the
masses in Origins, Rahel Varnhagen was worldless and sought solace in
fantasy. But whereas Arendt in Origins sees the masses’ “longing for fic-
tion” as a symptom of their utter withdrawal from a world that has spun out
of control, she sees something else in Varnhagen’s own fantasies—a desire
for a world.3 To bring out this contrast between Origins and Varnhagen, I
read Arendt’s biography alongside Sigmund Freud’s famous case history of
paranoia, The Schreber Case, which has elements of both—world with-
drawal and world-craving.4
Reading Varnhagen and Schreber together may seem forced. Varnhagen
was an assimilated Jewish intellectual in 1771-to-1833 Berlin and a self-pro-
claimed sufferer of lifelong humiliation and “true and bottomless melan-
choly.”5 She was a Jewish woman in a patriarchal and increasingly
anti-Semitic Germany. Schreber was a respectable 19th-century German
judge and a diagnosed paranoiac who spent nine years confined in mental
institutions. In what follows I argue that both Arendt and Freud see in their
subjects’ fantasies hopeful attempts to recreate the world of which they were
deprived. Such generous interpretations may offer inspiration or instruction
in our own political moment of paranoia and conspiracy thinking.
Others have turned to each of these texts—not reading them together—
for other reasons. Eric Santner reads Schreber’s paranoia as a “private
Germany,” a personification of a political crisis. Can we read Varnhagen in
a similar way? In my view, Seyla Benhabib does precisely that. She, like
Santner, is compelled by the political exemplarity of her subject. Benhabib
reads Varnhagen—who was a salon hostess of some renown at the turn of
the 18th century—as personifying a new form of public life in the
Enlightenment. For Benhabib, Varnhagen’s 18th-century salon prefigures
the associational model of the modern public sphere. Santner’s reading of

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