Rahel Levin Varnhagen was the first intellectual Jewish woman in German history who established herself as an independent thinker. Her way of writing was dialogical; she wrote to and together with her addressees.

Margarete Susman published her first writings, a book of poetry, in 1901 and went on to have a prolific writing career that included plays, books, and journal articles. Susman combined literature and theory, often reflecting seminal texts of modern theory and addressing political issues and women’s rights. Her writings concentrate on the most problematic issues of the modern world: God and human beings, man and woman, Jew and Christian.

Journalist, essayist, novelist, and translator Clara Malraux spent her early life involved with antifascist activities and joined the French Resistance during World War II while in hiding with her daughter. Her work often describes her attempts to make a place for herself in a misogynistic and antisemitic society.

The Berlin salons that developed in the late eighteenth century owed both their existence and the form of their development to Jewish women. These salons have variously been criticized as a symptom of failing Jewish tradition or welcomed as a phenomenon of emancipation and acculturation. Regardless, their importance as highlights of the salon culture and for the process of women’s emancipation in Germany cannot be denied.