Rahel Varnhagen died in March 1833. That same year, her husband privately printed a one-volume edition of her letters and notes for her friends. Rahel had been involved in the project during her lifetime. The response to this “memorial book” was so overwhelming that Karl August Varnhagen decided to publish an expanded three-volume edition. Containing Rahel Varnhagen’s correspondence with around 130 contemporaries, it met with lively interest among the general public and shaped her image as an emancipated woman and Jewish salonnière in Berlin.