Friedrich Schlegel went from scandalous Romantic rebel to Metternich's Catholic propagandist
In 1799 Friedrich Schlegel scandalised German letters with Lucinde, a novel widely read as the story of his affair with Moses Mendelssohn's married daughter. A decade later the former atheist was a Catholic convert writing fiery anti-Napoleon proclamations for the Austrian army and working for Metternich. Along the way he helped found comparative linguistics.
Schlegel was born in Hanover on 10 March 1772, son of a Lutheran pastor. He studied law at Göttingen and Leipzig before turning wholly to literature in 1793. In Jena he joined his older brother August Wilhelm, Novalis, Ludwig Tieck and Fichte, and the brothers founded the journal Athenaeum, whose fragments and aphorisms set out the principles of early Romanticism. His polemics soon soured relations with Schiller.
In Berlin he shared lodgings with Friedrich Schleiermacher and met Dorothea Veit. Lucinde, never continued past its first part, tried to apply the Romantic demand for total personal freedom to ethics and celebrated the fusion of sensual and spiritual love. The scandal helped sink his academic career in Jena. Goethe later staged his tragedy Alarcos in Weimar, to little success. He married Dorothea in Paris in 1804; she wrote a novel and translations that appeared under his name, and her sons became noted Catholic painters.
Paris also gave him Sanskrit and Persian. His 1808 book On the Language and Wisdom of India compared Sanskrit with Latin, Greek, Persian and German and found deep similarities in words and grammar, an insight broadly accepted today in revised form. He was the first to notice the sound pattern later called Grimm's law, and in 1819 proposed a theory linking Indo-Iranian and German languages. His claim that Europe's first civilisations came from India, however, has not held up.
The same year as the India book, he and Dorothea were received into the Catholic Church at Cologne Cathedral, a move that estranged family and friends. He grew hostile to liberalism, served the Austrian court from 1809, helped promote a romanticised vision of Austria leading a Catholic Germany, and was knighted in 1814. He died in Dresden on 12 January 1829 while preparing lectures. Schubert, Mendelssohn and Schumann set some of his writing to music.
Source: Friedrich Schlegel
