Friedrich Schlegel 1772 – 1829

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel was a German philosopher, literary critic, and one of the central figures of early Romanticism. With his brother August Wilhelm he founded the Athenaeum journal in Jena in 1798, which became the manifesto of the new movement and the home of his celebrated philosophical Fragments. His Lectures on the Philosophy of History and on the Philosophy of Language gave Romantic thought its first sustained historical and philosophical-linguistic shape, while his theory of irony and the fragment shaped modern literary self-reflection. After his conversion to Catholicism in 1808 he served the Austrian state and developed a religious philosophy of universal history.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel was born in 1772 at Hanover, the youngest son of a Lutheran pastor and literary critic. He studied at Gottingen and Leipzig, abandoned classical philology for literary and philosophical writing in the late 1790s, and with his elder brother August Wilhelm Schlegel became the intellectual organizer of the early German Romantic movement around the Jena journal Athenaeum (1798-1800), in which his Athenaeum Fragments and the dialogue Conversation on Poetry appeared.

His major works include the early classical studies On the Study of Greek Poetry (1797) and the History of the Poetry of the Greeks and Romans (1798); the novel Lucinde (1799); the philosophical lectures of his Jena, Cologne, and Vienna years on the philosophy of life, of language, and of history; and the great pioneering On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians (1808), the first European treatise on Sanskrit philology. He converted to Roman Catholicism with his wife Dorothea (the daughter of Moses Mendelssohn) in 1808 and from 1809 served as imperial court secretary at Vienna under Metternich.

Schlegel coined the formula of Romantic poetry as a 'progressive universal poetry', defended an ironic self-conscious art that contains its own theory, and laid the philological foundations of Indo-European linguistics. He died at Dresden in January 1829.