When Friedrich Schlegel invented romantic love
Experienced a second puberty: Friedrich von Schlegel
Quelle: picture-alliance / dpa
Friedrich Schlegel was one of the first Germans to live in a civil marriage. In Jena, he founded the famous romantic community with his brother. His novel “Lucinde” triggered a gender debate avant la lettre.
Friedrich Schlegel freed the daughter of the famous Berlin Enlightenment philosopher Moses Mendelssohn from an arranged marriage. Born in 1764, Brendel Mendelssohn, as she was baptized, initially married the Jewish merchant Simon Veit, in keeping with her status. The relationship produced two sons who wrote art history as painters of the Nazarene school: Philipp and Johannes Veit. Goethe’s cult book “Hermann und Dorothea” (1796), which was celebrated by everyone at the time, must have done something to Brendel, because after reading she called herself Dorothea. And: Before 1800, Dorothea belonged to the most distinguished of Berlin society. She met Friedrich Schlegel in the famous salon of her friend Henriette Hertz.
He was the younger of the two Schlegels. The Schlegel brothers, who come from a Protestant family in Hanover, are not as well known today as the Humboldts or the Grimms. And yet the Romantic period, the most influential German literary trend alongside the Classical period, is absolutely unimaginable without the Schlegels. August Wilhelm Schlegel, the four years older brother, was a famous Shakespeare translator and literature professor in Jena.
Friedrich Schlegel meets Dorothea
Friedrich followed his footsteps into philology, but never became a professor, instead immersing himself in all sorts of things. He is considered the founder of German Indology and modern literary criticism. He was passionate about Sanskrit and “Graekomania”, had non-stop ideas for studies and magazine projects. But because he lived “without office”, he fell into debt. In 1797 he was saved by a job at Johann Friedrich Reinhardt’s journal “Lyceum” in Berlin. Through Reinhardt he made contacts in the leading circles of the Prussian capital, which had 170,000 inhabitants at the time – more than Weimar, Jena and all Thuringian residence cities combined. When Fiedrich meets Dorothea Veit in Henriette Hertz’s salon, it’s love at first sight.
Dorothea Schlegel in a painting: The loose hair indicates her breaking out of marriage
Quelle: picture alliance / Heritage-Images
As hostess Hertz recalls, “She made such a powerful impression on him that even I noticed him; not for long, and the feeling was mutual, for Schlegel could indeed be called an amiable man, and had to please all the women he wished to please”. As someone who has sat over books since his youth, 25-year-old Friedrich Schlegel is experiencing “a kind of late puberty” (according to the brother’s biographer, Roger Paulin). The openly lived out relationship with the married Jewess caused gossip and resentment, even anti-Semitic tones, in Berlin, which was not yet completely tolerant at the time. Friedrich does not object to this, on the contrary – privately inspired – he develops real vigor and founds the magazine with his brother in Jena in 1798 “Athenaeum”in which the “fragments” famous to this day appear.
Dorothea divorces the father of her sons and lives with Friedrich in Jena in a civil marriage. Together with August Wilhelm and his wife Caroline, they form the core of the romantic flat share in which Novalis and Schelling also frequent. Friedrich’s relationship with Dorothea becomes a scandal because of his novel “Lucinde”. The book, published in Berlin in 1799, is read by contemporaries as a roman a clef. Julius alias Friedrich and Lucinde alias Dorothea provoke because they swap gender roles, propagate more independent femininity and gentle masculinity: gender avant-garde avant la lettre.
Later Friedrich and Dorothea lived more conservatively, they married in 1804, converted to Catholicism and moved to Metternich-Vienna, where Friedrich died as a reactionary in 1829. Dorothea survives him by ten years. Was love romantic until the end?
It is said that all writer’s life is paper. In this series, we present evidence to the contrary.