(1832) Karl Friedrich von Schlegel was born on 10 March 1772 at
Hanover, where his father,
Johann Adolf Schlegel, was the pastor at the Lutheran
Market Church. For two years he studied
law at
Göttingen and
Leipzig, and he met with
Friedrich Schiller. In 1793 he devoted himself entirely to literary work. In 1796 he moved to
Jena, where his brother August Wilhelm lived, and here he collaborated with
Novalis,
Ludwig Tieck,
Fichte, and
Caroline Schelling, who married August Wilhelm. In 1797 he quarreled with Schiller, who did not like his polemic work. Schlegel published
Die Griechen und Römer (The Greeks and Romans), which was followed by
Geschichte der Poesie der Griechen und Römer (History of the Poesy of the Greeks and Romans) (1798). Then he turned to
Dante,
Goethe, and
Shakespeare. In Jena he and his brother founded the journal
Athenaeum, contributing fragments,
aphorisms, and
essays in which the principles of the
Romantic school are most definitely stated. They are now generally recognized as the deepest and most significant expressions of the subjective idealism of the early Romanticists. After a controversy, Friedrich decided to move to Berlin. There he lived with
Friedrich Schleiermacher and met
Henriette Herz,
Rahel Varnhagen, and his future wife,
Dorothea Veit, a daughter of
Moses Mendelssohn.
Lucinde, which extolled the union of sensual and spiritual
love as an
allegory of the divine cosmic
Eros, contributed to the failure of his academic career in Jena where he completed his studies in 1801 and lectured as a
Privatdozent on
transcendental philosophy. In September 1800, he met four times with Goethe, who would later stage his tragedy
Alarcos (1802) in Weimar, albeit with a notable lack of success. In June 1802 he arrived in
Paris, where he lived in the house formerly owned by
Baron d'Holbach and joined a circle including
Heinrich Christoph Kolbe. He lectured on philosophy in private courses for
Sulpiz Boisserée, and under the tutelage of
Antoine-Léonard de Chézy and linguist
Alexander Hamilton he continued to study
Sanskrit and the
Persian language. He edited the journal
Europa (1803), where he published essays about
Gothic architecture and the
Old Masters. In April 1804 he married Dorothea Veit in the Swedish embassy in Paris, after she had undergone the requisite conversion from
Judaism to Protestantism. In 1806 he and his wife went to visit
Aubergenville, where his brother lived with
Madame de Staël. In 1808, he published
Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (On the Language and Wisdom of India). Here he advanced his ideas about religion and argued that
a people originating from India were the founders of the first European civilizations. Schlegel compared
Sanskrit with
Latin,
Greek,
Persian, and
German, noting many similarities in
vocabulary and
grammar. The assertion of the common features of these languages is now generally accepted, albeit with significant revisions. There is less agreement about the geographic region where these precursors settled, although the Out-of-India model has generally become discredited. In 1808, he and his wife joined the
Catholic Church in the
Cologne Cathedral. From this time on, he became more and more opposed to the principles of political and religious liberalism. He went to Vienna and in 1809 was appointed imperial court secretary at the military headquarters, editing the army newspaper and issuing fiery proclamations against Napoleon. He accompanied
archduke Charles, Duke of Teschen to war and was stationed in
Pest during the
War of the Fifth Coalition. Here he studied the
Hungarian language. Meanwhile, he had published his collected
Geschichte (Histories) (1809) and two series of lectures,
Über die neuere Geschichte (On Recent History) (1811) and
Geschichte der alten und neuen Literatur (On Old and New Literature) (1815). In 1814 he was knighted in the
Supreme Order of Christ. Following the
Congress of Vienna (1815), he was councilor of legation in the Austrian embassy at the
Frankfurt Diet, but in 1818 he returned to Vienna. In 1819 he and
Clemens Brentano made a trip to Rome, in the company of
Metternich and
Gentz. There he met with his wife and her sons. In 1820 he started a
conservative Catholic magazine,
Concordia (1820–1823), but was criticized by Metternich and by his brother August Wilhelm, then professor of Indology in Bonn and busy publishing the
Bhagavad Gita. Schlegel began the issue of his
Sämtliche Werke (Collected Works). He also delivered lectures, which were republished in his
Philosophie des Lebens (Philosophy of Life) (1828) and in his
Philosophie der Geschichte (Philosophy of History) (1829). He died on 12 January 1829 at
Dresden, while preparing a series of lectures. ==Dorothea Schlegel==