Friedrich Schlegel
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich (after 1814: von) Schlegel (/ˈʃleɪɡəl/ SHLAY-gəl,[7] German: [ˈfʁiːdʁɪç ˈʃleːɡl̩];[7][8][9] 10 March 1772 – 12 January 1829) was a German poet, literary critic, philosopher, philologist, and Indologist. With his older brother, August Wilhelm Schlegel, he was one of the main figures of Jena Romanticism.
Friedrich Schlegel
10 March 1772
12 January 1829 (aged 56)
- Grounding epistemology on reciprocal proof (Wechselerweis), not original principle (Grundsatz)[6][2]
- Coining the term "historicism", (Historismus)[4]
- Out of India theory
Born into a fervently Protestant family, Schlegel rejected religion as a young man in favor of atheism and individualism. He entered university to study law but instead focused on classical literature. He began a career as a writer and lecturer, and founded journals such as Athenaeum. In 1808, Schlegel returned to Christianity as a married man with both him and his wife being baptized into the Catholic Church. This conversion ultimately led to his estrangement from family and old friends. He moved to Austria in 1809, where he became a diplomat and journalist in service of Klemens von Metternich, the Foreign Minister of the Austrian Empire. Schlegel died in 1829, at the age of 56.[10]
Schlegel was a promoter of the Romantic movement and inspired Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Adam Mickiewicz and Kazimierz Brodziński. The first to notice what became known as Grimm's law, Schlegel was a pioneer in Indo-European studies, comparative linguistics, and morphological typology, publishing in 1819 the first theory linking the Indo-Iranian and German languages under the Aryan group.[11][12] Some of his works were set to music by Schubert, Mendelssohn and Schumann.
Dorothea Schlegel[edit]
Friedrich Schlegel's wife, Dorothea von Schlegel, authored an unfinished romance, Florentin (1802), a Sammlung romantischer Dichtungen des Mittelalters (Collection of Romantic Poems of the Middle Ages) (2 vols., 1804), a version of Lother und Maller (1805), and a translation of Madame de Staël's Corinne (1807–1808) — all of which were issued under her husband's name. By her first marriage she had two sons, Johannes and Philipp Veit, who became eminent Catholic painters. She was the eldest daughter of Moses Mendelssohn which made the prodigious composers Felix and Fanny her niece and nephew.
