Friedrich Wilhelm von Schlegel
born March 10, 1772, Hannover,
Hanover
died Jan. 12, 1829, Dresden, Saxony
German writer and critic, originator of
many of the philosophical ideas that
inspired the early German Romantic
movement. Open to every new idea, he
reveals a rich store of projects and
theories in his provocative Aperçus and
Fragmente (contributed to the Athenäum
and other journals); his conception of a
universal, historical, and comparative
literary scholarship has had profound
influence.
Schlegel was a nephew of the author
Johann Elias Schlegel. After studying at
Göttingen and Leipzig, he became closely
associated with his elder brother August
Wilhelm Schlegel at Jena in the
quarterly Athenäum. He believed that
Greek philosophy and culture were
essential to complete education.
Influenced also by J.G. Fichte’s
transcendental philosophy, he developed
his conception of the Romantic—that
poetry should be at once philosophical
and mythological, ironic and religious.
But his imaginative work, a
semi-autobiographical novel fragment
Lucinde (1799; Eng. trans., 1913–15),
and a tragedy Alarcos (1802) were less
successful.
In 1801 Schlegel was briefly lecturer
at Jena University, but in 1802 he went
to Paris with Dorothea Veit, the eldest
daughter of Moses Mendelssohn and the
divorced wife of Simon Veit. He married
her in 1804. In Paris he studied
Sanskrit, publishing Über die Sprache
und Weisheit der Indier (1808), the
first attempt at comparative
Indo-Germanic linguistics and the
starting point of the study of Indian
languages and comparative philology. In
1808 he and his wife became Roman
Catholics, and he united his concept of
Romanticism with ideas of medieval
Christendom. He became the ideological
spokesman of the anti-Napoleonic
movement for German liberation, serving
in the Vienna chancellery (1809) and
helping to write the appeal to the
German people issued by the archduke
Charles. He had already edited two
periodicals on the arts, Europa and
Deutsches Museum; in 1820 he became
editor of the right-wing Catholic paper
Concordia, and his attack in it on the
beliefs that he had earlier cherished
led to a breach with his brother.
Two series of lectures Schlegel gave
in Vienna between 1810 and 1812 (Über
die neuere Geschichte, 1811; A Course of
Lectures on Modern History, 1849 and
Geschichte der alten und neueren
Literatur, 1815; Lectures on the History
of Literature, 1818) developed his
concept of a “new Middle Ages.” His
collected works were first issued in 10
volumes in 1822–25, augmented to 15
volumes in 1846. His correspondence with
his brother was published in 1890 and
that with Dorothea was edited (1926) by
J. Körner, who wrote major studies of
the brothers.
