Una finestra sul mondo. Salotti ebraici nella Berlino del "tournant du siècle"

Abstract

This essay first provides an overview of the main phases in the history of the salon as a feminocentric space and as a generation of communicative actions. The author then turns to the term “salon” itself, with its semantic connotations of a location of alternative culture. After having established this context, the essay focuses on two specific meeting places in Berlin, the Jewish gatherings of Henriette Herz and Rahel Levin Varnhagen von Ense as examples of the salon as a heterotopia of great socio-cultural impact and as an «anthropologic space» where the culture of the Hebrew Haskalah and that of the Christian Enlightenment enter into communication with another, encouraging both the emancipation of cultured and intellectually engaged women and that of intellectuals of the period bound by a new holistic anthropologic perception.