Dorothea Schlegel

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Anton Graff : Portrait of Brendel Veit, born Mendelssohn (around 1790; Alte Nationalgalerie , Berlin)

Dorothea Friederike Schlegel , born as Brendel Mendelssohn (* October 24, 1764 in Berlin ; † August 3, 1839 in Frankfurt am Main ), also von Schlegel since 1814 , was a literary critic and writer of the Romantic period , partner and later wife of Friedrich Schlegel . The daughter of the Jewish enlightener Moses Mendelssohn was one of the most prominent Jewish women who converted to Christianity around 1800.

Life

Brendel Mendelssohn was born on October 24, 1764, the second daughter of Moses and Fromet Mendelssohn . At the age of fourteen she was engaged to the merchant Simon Veit , ten years her senior, in 1778 , whom she married on April 30, 1783 at the age of eighteen. Between 1787 and 1793 she had four sons, two of whom survived: Johannes Veit and Philipp Veit , who later became co-founders of the Nazarene school of painting. In July 1797, in her friend Henriette Herz's salon , she met the young Friedrich Schlegel , who became her lover that same year. Friedrich Schlegel's novel Lucinde (1799), which was scandalous for the time, is a programmatic representation of their permissive relationship.

On January 11, 1799, the Veit couple divorced through a rabbinical court . Brendel Veit received custody of her younger son Philipp Veit on the condition not to remarry, not to be baptized and not to persuade her children to convert to Christianity. Due to the divorce, she also lost the right to live in Berlin. Since the divorce, she called herself Dorothea by dropping her Jewish first name. She now lived freely and publicly with Friedrich Schlegel. She moved with him, his brother August Wilhelm Schlegel and his wife Caroline to Jena , where a center of literary romanticism was established with Novalis , Ludwig Tieck and Schelling , to form a living and working community. Dorothea was inspired by the Jena community to write the first volume of the novel Florentin (1801), which appeared anonymously under the editorship of Friedrich Schlegel and in which she emulated Goethe's Wilhelm Meister and Tieck's Franz Sternbald's wanderings .

In 1802 the couple moved to Paris , where Dorothea converted to Protestantism in 1804 and married Friedrich Schlegel. In the same year the couple moved to Cologne . In the following years she translated various works from French, including memoirs such as those of Margaret of Valois , stories of knights and Germaine de Staël's novel Corinna or Italy (four volumes, 1807), which in turn appeared as editor and translator under the name of her husband. Schlegel was even supposed to include many of his wife's works in his work edition. Dorothea also saw herself as her husband's assistant and wished "Friedrich to be his journeyman". In the magazines published by Schlegel, his wife's literary criticism also appeared.

In 1808, while still in Cologne, Dorothea changed religion again, this time together with Friedrich Schlegel, in that both converted to Catholicism - for which Schlegel's Protestant family, who disapproved of this change of religion, made them responsible. The daughter of the prominent Jewish representative of the Enlightenment and Tolerance was now convinced, together with her second husband, that there was no salvation outside of the Catholic Church, and tried to woo proselytes among her friends and in her family , which both of them decided to do Baptizing sons Catholic. In 1808 the couple also moved to Vienna , where Dorothea Schlegel had occasional contact with Rahel Varnhagen von Ense  - an old friend from Berlin days -, Wilhelm von Humboldt and Joseph von Eichendorff . After a temporary stay in Frankfurt am Main (1816-18), where her husband was an Austrian diplomat at the Bundestag of the German Confederation , the couple moved to Rome in 1818, where Dorothea's Nazarene-minded sons worked as painters. When her husband died in 1829, she moved to Frankfurt to live with her son Philipp, who was the director of the Städel Art Institute there.

Her grave is in Frankfurt's main cemetery , in Gewann B, grave number 180.

Honors

According to her who is Dorothea-Schlegel-Platz in Berlin and Dorothea Veit Street in Jena-Lobeda named.

Works

literature

Web links

Commons : Dorothea Schlegel  - Album with pictures, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Dorothea Schlegel  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ John F. Oppenheimer (Red.) And a .: Lexicon of Judaism. 2nd Edition. Bertelsmann Lexikon Verlag, Gütersloh u. a. 1971, ISBN 3-570-05964-2 , col. 704.
  2. ↑ Not in 1763, as stated in older writings and on her tombstone.
  3. ↑ So the newer literature; In addition, the life dates of her older sister Sara, May 23, 1763 - April 15, 1764, are documented in Moses Mendelssohn's correspondence on the Phaedon .
  4. ^ "Dorothea Schlegel. Inventor of the Romantic Marriage ” , calendar sheet from October 24, 2014, Deutschlandradio Kultur , accessed on November 9, 2014.
  5. ↑ Net biography of Hannah Lotte Lund and portrayal of life by Carola Stern.
  6. ↑ Deborah Hertz: Dorothea Mendelssohn Schlegel. In: Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia. March 1, 2009, accessed August 4, 2018 .
personal data
SURNAME Schlegel, Dorothea
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Schlegel, Dorothea Friederike; Veit, Dorothea; Mendelssohn, Dorothea
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German literary critic, writer
DATE OF BIRTH October 24, 1764
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH August 3, 1839
Place of death Frankfurt am Main