Dorothea von Schlegel
Encyclopedia
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
novelist and translator.
Biography
Dorothea von Schlegel was born in 1764 in BerlinBerlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
. Oldest daughter
Mendelssohn family
The Mendelssohn family are the descendants of the German Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, and include his grandson, the composer Felix Mendelssohn....
of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn
Moses Mendelssohn
Moses Mendelssohn was a German Jewish philosopher to whose ideas the renaissance of European Jews, Haskalah is indebted...
, a leading figure in the German Enlightenment (Aufklärung). In 1783 she married the merchant and banker Simon Veit, brother of the physician David Veit
David Veit
-Life:His father Joseph Veit was a banker and his brother Simon Veit was the husband of Moses Mendelssohn's daughter Dorothea Schlegel, making David uncle to the painter Philipp Veit. During David Veit's time as a student he began a correspondence with Rahel Varnhagen von Ense, in which Veit also...
. Their son, Philipp Veit
Philipp Veit
Philipp Veit was a German Romantic painter. To Veit is due the credit of having been the first to revive the almost forgotten technique of fresco painting.- Biography :Veit was born in Berlin, Prussia...
, would later become part of a circle of German Christian painters called "the Nazarenes
Nazarene movement
The name Nazarene was adopted by a group of early 19th century German Romantic painters who aimed to revive honesty and spirituality in Christian art...
," who influenced the English painters in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. She met the poet and critic Friedrich von Schlegel in the salon of her friend Henriette Herz
Henriette Herz
Henriette Herz née De Lemos is best known for the "salonnieres" or literary salons that she started with a group of emancipated Jews in Prussia....
, after which she left her husband. They were divorced in 1799.
She obtained custody of her younger son, Philipp, and lived with him at the Ziegelstraße, which became a salon frequented by Tieck, Schelling, the Schlegel brothers, and Novalis.
Schlegel's novel "Lucinde" (1799) was seen as an account of their affair, causing a scandal in German literary circles. In 1801 her novel "Florentin" was published anonymously by Schlegel. They lived in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
from 1802 until 1804, and after her divorce they married as Protestants. In 1807 she translated "Corinne" by Madame de Staël
Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein , commonly known as Madame de Staël, was a French-speaking Swiss author living in Paris and abroad. She influenced literary tastes in Europe at the turn of the 19th century.- Childhood :...
from the French.
In 1808, Friedrich and Dorothea converted to Catholicism
Catholicism
Catholicism is a broad term for the body of the Catholic faith, its theologies and doctrines, its liturgical, ethical, spiritual, and behavioral characteristics, as well as a religious people as a whole....
. (She may have adopted the name "Dorothea" from a 17th century Dorothea von Schlegel who composed Catholic hymn
Hymn
A hymn is a type of song, usually religious, specifically written for the purpose of praise, adoration or prayer, and typically addressed to a deity or deities, or to a prominent figure or personification...
s). They continued to visit the salons of Rahel Levin and Henriette Herz, as well as the constellation which surrounded Madame de Staël
Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein , commonly known as Madame de Staël, was a French-speaking Swiss author living in Paris and abroad. She influenced literary tastes in Europe at the turn of the 19th century.- Childhood :...
. Friedrich died in 1829, after which she moved to Frankfurt am Main. There, she lived with her son Philipp (also a convert to a medieval style of Catholicism) until her death in 1839.
Her importance in cultural history
As the daughter of the greatest Jewish philosopher of the Enlightenment - Moses MendelssohnMoses Mendelssohn
Moses Mendelssohn was a German Jewish philosopher to whose ideas the renaissance of European Jews, Haskalah is indebted...
- (of equal stature with Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher from Königsberg , researching, lecturing and writing on philosophy and anthropology at the end of the 18th Century Enlightenment....
, and translator of John Locke
John Locke
John Locke FRS , widely known as the Father of Liberalism, was an English philosopher and physician regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers. Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Francis Bacon, he is equally important to social...
and Alexander Pope
Alexander Pope
Alexander Pope was an 18th-century English poet, best known for his satirical verse and for his translation of Homer. He is the third-most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, after Shakespeare and Tennyson...
, as well as Hebrew scriptures into German), Dorothea was surrounded throughout her life by the leading poets, critics, musicians, novelists, and philosophers of Europe. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was a German writer, philosopher, dramatist, publicist, and art critic, and one of the most outstanding representatives of the Enlightenment era. His plays and theoretical writings substantially influenced the development of German literature...
was her father's closest friend and colleague, and the Emancipation
Emancipation
Emancipation means the act of setting an individual or social group free or making equal to citizens in a political society.Emancipation may also refer to:* Emancipation , a champion Australian thoroughbred racehorse foaled in 1979...
and secularization
Secularization
Secularization is the transformation of a society from close identification with religious values and institutions toward non-religious values and secular institutions...
of the Jews and Jewish culture was a direct outcome of their work. (Mendelssohn was the model for Nathan der Weise in Lessing's play of the same name.) Dorothea's brother, Joseph
Joseph Mendelssohn
Joseph Mendelssohn was a German Jewish banker.He was the oldest son of the influential philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. In 1795, he founded his own banking house. In 1804, his younger brother Abraham Mendelssohn Bartholdy, the father of the composer Felix Mendelssohn, joined the company. The bank...
, was a friend and sponsor of Alexander von Humboldt
Alexander von Humboldt
Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander Freiherr von Humboldt was a German naturalist and explorer, and the younger brother of the Prussian minister, philosopher and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt...
, the great naturalist and ethnologist. Felix Mendelssohn
Felix Mendelssohn
Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Barthóldy , use the form 'Mendelssohn' and not 'Mendelssohn Bartholdy'. The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians gives ' Felix Mendelssohn' as the entry, with 'Mendelssohn' used in the body text...
, the composer, and his sister Fanny Mendelssohn
Fanny Mendelssohn
Fanny Cäcilie Mendelssohn , later Fanny Hensel, was a German pianist and composer, the sister of the composer Felix Mendelssohn and granddaughter of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn...
, also a gifted musician, were her nephew and niece.
To fully appreciate the importance of this cultural scene, see the entries for Moses Mendelssohn, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was a German writer, philosopher, dramatist, publicist, and art critic, and one of the most outstanding representatives of the Enlightenment era. His plays and theoretical writings substantially influenced the development of German literature...
, Friedrich von Schlegel, Germaine de Staël, Felix Mendelssohn
Felix Mendelssohn
Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Barthóldy , use the form 'Mendelssohn' and not 'Mendelssohn Bartholdy'. The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians gives ' Felix Mendelssohn' as the entry, with 'Mendelssohn' used in the body text...
, Ludwig Tieck
Ludwig Tieck
Johann Ludwig Tieck was a German poet, translator, editor, novelist, writer of Novellen, and critic, who was one of the founding fathers of the Romantic movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.-Early life:...
, Novalis
Novalis
Novalis was the pseudonym of Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg , an author and philosopher of early German Romanticism.-Biography:...
, and others. Dorothea was the common link or nexus among them all.
Most of her work, letters, biographies, etc. seem to be available only in German. And there, with the legacy of the Holocaust, she would seem to have an ambiguous status. The emancipation of European Jewry, in which she and her family played a significant role, became the main target of the Third Reich and its Nuremberg Laws
Nuremberg Laws
The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 were antisemitic laws in Nazi Germany introduced at the annual Nuremberg Rally of the Nazi Party. After the takeover of power in 1933 by Hitler, Nazism became an official ideology incorporating scientific racism and antisemitism...
.
For some Jews, she may be a less than admirable figure as well, having left her Jewish husband, violated her divorce settlement, and converted first to Protestantism, and finally to Catholicism. Most of her later friends were Christians, assimilated or intermarried Jews (like Rahel Levin), or secular Deists and materialists. Her association with Germaine de Staël was obviously of the greatest importance, since Mme de Staël was also the patron and literary companion of Dorothea's second husband, Friedrich Schlegel. The daughter of Jacques Necker
Jacques Necker
Jacques Necker was a French statesman of Swiss birth and finance minister of Louis XVI, a post he held in the lead-up to the French Revolution in 1789.-Early life:...
, Louis XVI's finance minister, de Staël witnessed the collapse of the Bourbon
House of Bourbon
The House of Bourbon is a European royal house, a branch of the Capetian dynasty . Bourbon kings first ruled Navarre and France in the 16th century. By the 18th century, members of the Bourbon dynasty also held thrones in Spain, Naples, Sicily, and Parma...
s and the French Revolution
French Revolution
The French Revolution , sometimes distinguished as the 'Great French Revolution' , was a period of radical social and political upheaval in France and Europe. The absolute monarchy that had ruled France for centuries collapsed in three years...
. (See Christopher Herrold's "Mistress to an Age.") It was probably through de Staël's husband, a Swedish Count, that the Schlegel's were granted a title of nobility
Nobility
Nobility is a social class which possesses more acknowledged privileges or eminence than members of most other classes in a society, membership therein typically being hereditary. The privileges associated with nobility may constitute substantial advantages over or relative to non-nobles, or may be...
in the Swedish court.
Works
- Florentin, Lübeck und Leipzig 1801
- Gespräch über die neueren Romane der Französinnen, in: Europa (Zeitschrift, herausgegeben von Friedrich Schlegel)
- Geschichte des Zauberers Merlin, Leipzig 1804
Literature
- Heike Brandstädter, Katharina Jeorgakopulos: Dorothea Schlegel, Florentin. Lektüre eines vergessenen Textes. Argument, Hamburg 2001, ISBN 3-88619-284-9
- Michael Brenner, Stefi Jersch-Wenzel, Michael A.Meyer: Deutsch-jüdische Geschichte in der Neuzeit, Zweiter Band, 1780–1871, C.H.Beck'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, München 1996, S. 189f., ISBN 3406397034
- Gisela Horn: Romantische Frauen. Caroline Michaelis-Böhmer-Schlegel-Schelling, Dorothea Mendelssohn-Veit-Schlegel, Sophie Schubart-Mereau-Brentano. Hain, Rudolstadt 1996, ISBN 3-930215-18-7
- Franz Muncker: Schlegel, Dorothea Friederike, in: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Bd. 31, S. 372–376.
- Elke Steiner: Die anderen Mendelssohns. Dorothea Schlegel, Arnold Mendelssohn. Reprodukt, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-931377-96-2
- Carola Stern: „Ich möchte mir Flügel wünschen“. Das Leben der Dorothea Schlegel. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1991, ISBN 3-498-06250-6
- Margarete Susman: Frauen der Romantik. Insel, Frankfurt am Main und Leipzig 1996, ISBN 3-458-33529-3
- F. Corey Roberts: "The Perennial Search for Paradise: Garden Design and Political Critique in Dorothea Schlegel’s Florentin." The German Quarterly, 75.3 (2002): 247-64.
External links
- Literatur von und über Dorothea Schlegel im Katalog der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek
- Henriette Herz über Dorothea Schlegel
- http://www.panwitz.net/person/mendel/brendel.htm