Major Minor Form: Marginalia on Rahel Levin Varnhagen's Rahel. Ein Buch des Andenkens für ihre Freunde

In this article, I outline theoretical approaches to an exuberant work: Rahel Levin Varnhagen's posthumously published writing project, Rahel. Ein Buch des Andenkens für ihre Freunde . A disparate constellation of Rahel's letters, excerpts from her diaries, aphoristic reflections, dreams, and multiple‐page essays on various topics, this project challenges the discursive format of the book and calls for further reflections on its principles of formation. In this essay, I undertake these reflections with regard to paratextual fringe zones, strategies of beginning and ending, questions of wholeness and fragmentariness, genre‐theoretical paradigms, and the concept of a work. I argue that the Buch des Andenkens should not be situated first and foremost with in the context of autobiography and the author function, but rather should be seen as a historically new and different form of the novel, along the lines of Goethe's Wanderjahre . This form is one that revises its principle of formation (dis)continuously in its process of becoming and thusmaywell transcend any norm of a work.