SOURCE: Hofe, Harold von. “August Wilhelm Schlegel and the New World.” Germanic Review 35, no. 4 (December 1960): 279-87.

[In the following essay, Hofe considers Schlegel's diverse and thoughtful treatment of America and American themes in his writing.]

In the monographs and articles on America in German literature and thought August Wilhelm Schlegel is either misrepresented or not mentioned;¹ in the critical and biographical studies of Schlegel, America is ignored. A revaluation of the part which the New World played in his life and works is needed, for abundant pertinent material is contained in his verse, critiques, essays, and letters.

Schlegel actually thought of emigrating to the United States with Caroline in 1795² and, from 1809 to 1811, of finding refuge in the United States with Madame de Staël.³ Clemens Brentano wrote to Joseph Görres in 1811 that Schlegel's departure was imminent: “Adieu Shakespeare und Calderon, bald werden wir amerikanische Sonette lesen und machen müssen.”⁴

The most important American theme in Schlegel's writings is reflection on the influence of the New World on the literary and intellectual life of the Western World and the role of the Americas in historical development. Furthermore, he treats American topics—slavery, German mercenaries and the Revolutionary War, Benjamin Franklin—treatments which deserve brief mention before we examine the main theme.

After witnessing the baptism of a negro with Chamisso and French acquaintances at the Chateau of M. Le Ray, a friend of Madame de Staël who had spent a large portion of his life in the United States, Schlegel wrote a Petrarcan sonnet, “Auf die Taufe eines Negers” (1810).⁵ He handled the theme differently from most poets. From the Schlesische Robinson (1723) to the beginning of the nineteenth century, negro slaves were generally portrayed as suffering creatures whose lot exemplified the contrast between Christian theory and practice. The Göttingen Musenalmanache, to which Schlegel contributed when he was a student at Göttingen, published several such poems which came to his attention.⁶ In Schlegel's sonnet the first stanza contains conventional images of European greed and of the wretchedness of slaves. In the second strophe, however, the slave receives his freedom, and in the final stanza he is baptized in an exotic and solemn setting. (The Countess de Pange recounts that the “literary-cosmopolitan ceremony” was accompanied by the music of a guitar and a tambourine.) “Ein Lichtstrahl fällt auf seine dunkle Stirne” and he experiences “das göttliche Geheimnis ew'ger Gnade.”

The American War of Independence left few traces in Schlegel's works, since the war broke out when he was only eight years old. The question of German mercenaries was acute, however, as he approached maturity in the eighties. For Schlegel it was a personal as well as a public question, for he, like Caroline,⁷ had an older brother, Carl August, who was impressed into British service as a member of a Hanoverian regiment. Since the Revolutionary War ended before Carl August was to be shipped overseas, however, he was sent to India. In Madras he died at the age of twenty-eight. Several years after his brother's death, Stengel wrote a commemorative poem containing reflections about German hirelings (Werke, II, 13 f.):

Deutschland, unzärtliche Mutter
Immer dem Ausland hold, immer nicht achtend was dein!
.....Bald wohl nahet die Zeit, da wirst du der Männer bedürfen,
Die du um Sold, fühllos, sendest die wackern hinweg.

Schlegel referred to the War of Independence itself in a warm biographical sketch of Jacques Necker, father of Madame de Staël and former French Minister of Finance. Schlegel recounts Necker's political maneuvers and explains his policies with a tone of good will to the United States, stressing the difference between Necker's sympathies and the policy that Necker thought wise for France to follow: “Frankreich ergriff die Partei der amerikanischen Kolonien gegen England, wiewohl es Necker abgerathen hatte. Er nahm zwar lebhaft Anteil an der Sache der Unabhängigkeit Nordamerikas, aber er widersetzte sich einem Bruch, den er entweder als nicht hinreichend veranlaßt, oder nach den Verhältnissen der französischen Monarchie als unpolitisch betrachtete” (Werke, VIII, 180).

Schlegel regarded America's pre-eminent citizen, Benjamin Franklin, as an epochmaking scientist but a stodgy philosopher. He referred to Franklin's philosophical thinking in his “Merkwürdiger Scheintod,” (Archiv der Zeit und ihres Geschmacks [1799]). This article dealt with the seeming demise, and revival, of the Berlinische Monatsschrift. In order to exemplify the insipidness of its editorial policy, Schlegel wrote: “Franklins moralischen Küchenzettel, nach welchem er wöchentlich eine Tugend zur Hauptschüssel machte, die übrigen aber nur in Assietten servierte, erklärte sie für den Gipfel menschlicher Weisheit” (Werke, VIII, 14). Schlegel's characterization of Franklin's thinking as vapid contrasts with that of most contemporary Germans, whose views ranged from Georg Forster's praise of the American's homely, practical wisdom to Hippel's conclusion that classical antiquity produced no one who was his equal. Only Wilhelm Heinse felt, with Schlegel, that Franklin's philosophizing was banal; Heinse wrote that, according to Franklin's code, no one could excel in any virtue, since his moderation precluded eminence.

Schlegel rejected Franklin's moralizing, but regarded the American's scientific achievements as supreme contributions. Since reference to Franklin's inventiveness occurs in his essays on intellectual history, Schlegel's appraisal appears in an appropriate light only if we analyze his conception of the Americas in relation to literary and intellectual development.

The most salient reference to the New World is found in Schlegel's “Abriß von den europäischen Verhältnissen der deutschen Literatur” (1825). The allusion is remarkable for its freshness. Appraising German literature in historical perspective, Schlegel wrote: The gains of German literature from the middle of the eighteenth to the beginning of the nineteenth century were comparable to those achieved by Italy in the fifteenth, by England and Spain in the sixteenth, and by France in the seventeenth century. German literature had a new dimension, however, for the Germans had become the most cosmopolitan people of Europe; their receptiveness to foreign ideas, their intellectual curiosity and catholicity of literary taste had brought into being a universality of outlook which other nations did not possess. Schlegel's conception of the Germans was not new in 1825. It had been expressed by Novalis, the young Friedrich Schlegel, and, most notably, by Schiller in his poetic fragment of 1797 on “Deutsche Größe.” In Schlegel's essay we find a fresh note, however, when he analyzes the origins of the European spirit which, in its best sense, the Germans presumably represented so well. Lending broad historical perspective to Kant's concept of “Mündigkeit,” Schlegel explained that Europe had come of age through four evolutionary circumstances (Werke, VIII, 212-213): (1) Assimilation of the Greco-Roman heritage; (2) free exchange of opinion as a result of the Reformation, (3) progressive penetration into the secrets of nature through the development of the natural sciences, (4) development of a global outlook through the discoveries initiated by Columbus and Vasco da Gama.

What part did the Germans have in this process? While the Germans played a major role in furthering assimilation of the Greco-Roman heritage, in the Reformation, and in scientific research, Schlegel observed, their geographic location was unfavorable for launching circumnavigations of the globe and making global discoveries. Even in this field they made significant contributions, however, for the unequaled achievements of Alexander von Humboldt counterbalanced the collective accomplishment of others.

Such a characterization of the New World as a formative element in the Weltanschauung of Europeans and in German literature was original and novel. Its innovational character stands out if we compare the author's analysis of the European spirit with that of the equally universalist Herder, expressed three decades earlier in the seventeenth letter of the Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität. Herder cited only the first three elements, classical antiquity, the Reformation, and scientific developments, as influences giving direction to the European spirit. The fourth, the influence which the Age of Discoveries brought in its wake, was Schlegel's own addition. His views also contrast with those of his contemporary, Georg Hegel. The latter was giving his Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte in Berlin while Schlegel was writing his “Abriß von den europäischen Verhältnissen der deutschen Literatur” in Bonn. The Americas found no place in Hegel's historical thinking. While the insignificance and inferiority of the aborigines were self-evident, he wrote, the new United States was but an appendage of the Old World; it owed its origin to the abundance of Europe, as Altona owed its origin to the abundance of Hamburg, Offenbach to Frankfurt, and Fürth to Nürnberg.⁸

Writers of the eighteenth century had been mindful of the New World, and the United States, in numerous ways, but none considered the effect of the Western Hemisphere on European literature and thought. The range of specific conceptions of the New World was wide, extending between the two poles which Wieland and Herder might be said to represent. Wieland, whom Goethe characterized as a “representative of his age,” exemplified the self-satisfied culture of the eighteenth century and regarded the world from a suprahistorical point of view. Europe was to him the beginning and end of civilization. Herder's conception, on the other hand, was conditioned by historical consciousness and had greater breadth. His Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, which contain numerous references to America, were of universal scope.

August Wilhelm Schlegel exemplified the historical thinking which had become widespread at the beginning of the nineteenth century. When Karl von Savigny wrote in 1814 that a sense of history had awakened everywhere, he stood at the culminating point of a development that reached back, beyond Herder, to Vico and Montesquieu. The “Universalhistoriker” Gibbon, Herder, and Johannes von Müller had given momentum to the trend, but Schlegel wanted more substance in the world history which he visualized. He wrote in his “Abriß”:

Vormals, da unser Horizont kaum über die Säulen des Herkules und über die Küsten des mittelländischen Meeres hinausreichte, genoß die alte Weltgeschichte das traurige Vorrecht, beschränkt und mager sein zu dürfen: mit dem Anwachs unserer Länder- und Völkerkunde sind die Anforderungen an sie in demselben Maße gesteigert. Denn die Aufgabe ist keine geringere, als die gegenwärtigen Zustände des Menschengeschlechts in allen Weltteilen aus der Vergangenheit, und zwar so viel möglich aus der entferntesten Vergangenheit zu erklären. Viele von den kümmerlich vollgeschriebenen, gehaltleeren, sogenannten Universal-Geschichten müßten überdies noch als apokryphisch durchgestrichen werden.

(Werke, VIII, 214)

The concept of a pithy universal history shaped his thought about the significance of the Western Hemisphere. A number of instances in his writings, moreover, point to inception of the idea that Western Civilization embraced the Americas, both the United States and indigenous cultures. A cogent example is his “Considérations sur la culture en géneral” in which he uncovered correlative developments in the culture of classical antiquity and in that of recent centuries. He cited as one illustration the lyre of Mercury in ancient culture and the musical glasses of Franklin in the modern period, writing of the American not as the first prominent member of an incipient civilization but as a representative of modern occidental culture.⁹ Schlegel gave a second instance in his “Aperçus historiques, paraboles, doutes et problèmes,” which contain a treatise on the violence which the Christian faith had evoked in the course of history. His examples are the forceful conversion of the Saxons by Charlemagne, the crusade against the Albigenses, that of the Teutonic Order against the Lithuanians, the deeds of the Inquisition, and the atrocities committed by Spain in the Americas (Œuvres, I, 145-146).

In equating Charlemagne and the Saxons in the eighth century with Pizarro and the Incas of the sixteenth, in comparing Mercury and Franklin, and in showing that awareness of the Americas helped to shape man's conception of the world, Schlegel displayed breadth of perspective. His sense of identity with Europe and his concern for the continent's present and future have been obscured by those who, like Weber, have stressed his German patriotism. Schlegel's “Sur le système continental” (1813) was inspired, for example, by the concern of the good European about the future of the continent that had been the center of “enlightenment and intellectual perfectibility.” At the same time Schlegel's view reflects the notion of the westward movement of culture and the possibility that the United States of America may become the focal point of Western civilization. Unless the mechanical uniformity of a despotically ruled Europe was soon shattered, he observed, the portion of North America which had become emancipated and formed a sovereign nation might soon put the mother continent to shame; “transatlantic Europe,” the United States of America, was developing with astonishing rapidity.¹⁰

Schlegel's broad fresh views are traceable to the confluence of two currents. One is the development of the historical sense, the other the increased acquaintance with the New World which travel descriptions, scientific treatises, historical studies, and works of imaginative literature had brought about. Of Schlegel's numerous sources, his friend and correspondent Alexander von Humboldt, whose many volumes on the Americas contained the observations of a universal mind, was the chief fountain of authentic information about indigenous cultures. Humboldt combined his data into an integrated picture of old cultures in the New World and showed them to be, at least in part, kindred to those of Europe.

In 1817 Schlegel wrote a detailed review of Humboldt's Vues des cordillères et monuments des peuples indigènes de l'Amérique (Paris, 1816), a condensation of the Atlas pittoresque of 1810 (Werke, XII, 515-528). Schlegel emphasized that portions of Humboldt's text paralleled his own speculations about the course of history: the possible genealogical unity of mankind, climate and racial differences, the origin of language, and the establishment of analogical cultural patterns.

Schlegel's comments on interrelations between the continents reflect knowledge and critical judgment; the assurance with which he wrote of Humboldt's observations suggests that he had read much about the New World. Since his chief interest lay in the area of interconnections, he was especially interested in Humboldt's account of Mexican and Peruvian legends according to which “bearded men of lighter color” had come many centuries ago to found a religion and establish a code of law. Did they come from Asia or from Europe? Schlegel speculated. The only Europeans who visited the Western Hemisphere before Columbus were the rude Norsemen. Yet, their visits may account for a legend that a race in Guatemala is descended from Wotan. In pondering the plausibility of the Guatemalan Wotan legend, Schlegel weighs the sparse evidence judiciously; he is captivated by the possibility of an additional link between the two worlds. Schlegel had no cause to find the theory grotesque. Notions as fanciful as that mentioned by Humboldt and Schlegel were circulating at the time. Lessing quoted, in his “Zur Gelehrten-Geschichte und Literatur,” Möbius' and de Pauw's assertion that the Apostles as well as the Romans were acquainted with American Indians, Kant claimed, in “Von den verschiedenen Rassen der Menschheit,” that the aborigines were descendants of the Huns, and Schopenhauer suggested, in the essay on “Amerika, in physischer Hinsicht,” that they were offspring of the Chinese.

Schlegel's reflections about Indian cultures differed from the prevalent view of the eighteenth century in which Haller, Herder, Jung-Stilling, Seume, and Schiller portrayed majestic natives, while Wieland scoffed at them, and Gleim and Georg Jacobi described them as savage and crude. Schlegel neither glorified nor depreciated. The lines in his portrait derive from a sense of history and from knowledge of the New World greater than that which most writers of the eighteenth century possessed.

Schlegel had sources of information other than those provided by Alexander von Humboldt. With Wilhelm von Humboldt he discussed American-Indian languages.¹¹ As a critic he reviewed plays dealing with New World themes. German works of literature with American motifs had become so numerous that all of them have not yet been studied. One of these works was Saffar, König in Kambaja, which Schlegel reviewed in 1796 (Werke, X, 267-268). Although it was published anonymously in 1795, its author was Christian A. Vulpius, brother of Christiane, and it was identical with Vulpius' Leidenschaft und Liebe (1790). The theme of the play was a familiar one: confrontation of conquering Spaniards with noble Indians. As early as the sixteenth century, Montaigne had spoken of Indian “natural virtues”; and somewhat later Edmund Spenser wrote, in the sixth book of the Faerie Queen, that it was most strange and wonderful to find such “mild humanity and gentle mind” in the “desert forests”; in the eighteenth, Christian Wernicke wrote of their “original innocence.” With the spread of Steele's Ingle and Yarico motif and the worship of the gentle Incas, to which the widely imitated narrative of Marmontel's Les Incas (1777) gave impetus, the so-called primitivistic tradition was deeply rooted by 1795. In a preface to Saffar, König in Kambaja, Christian A. Vulpius had written: Since his play was to mirror the customs of the age in which the action took place, it would necessarily differ in tone from dramas in which the characters were contemporary persons. The historically-minded Schlegel pointed out correctly that the author had done precisely the opposite, for the Indian king Saffar was not a historical character but a representative of eighteenth-century sensibility and virtue.

In 1796 Schlegel reviewed Kotzebue's Die Spanier in Peru oder Rollas Tod (Werke, a IX, 223-226). The play is the second portion of a loose trilogy on the Inca theme. The first was the very successful Cora drama Die Sonnenjungfrau and the third was Ataliba. Schlegel's critique of the play resembles that of the work by Vulpius. The Indian Rolla displayed the same sensibility as the Indian Saffar. In other words, neither Vulpius nor Kotzebue had a sense of history.

In 1797 Richard Sheridan, author of The School for Scandal, adapted Rollas Tod in his anti-Napoleonic Pizarro; in 1800 the original Kotzebue play was performed in America, and in 1802 Schlegel saw it performed in Germany. He wrote a second critique in which he rejected not only the specific characterization of Rolla but also the primitivistic picture of the New World (Werke, X, 310). Schlegel disapproved of the equating of Christendom and heathendom and of the caricature of sixteenth-century Spaniards who represented the “heroic spirit of chivalry.” His discussion again reveals extensive familiarity with writings on America. He mentions Bishop Las Casas, whose ambiguous role in the introduction of slavery has attracted historians, novelists, dramatists, and translators again and again; Schlegel speaks of Marmontel, whose Les Incas had called forth fifteen German translations between 1777 and 1802;¹² he refers to William Robertson, the most widely read historian of America at that time.

Between the two critiques of Rollas Tod Schlegel wrote his satire of Kotzebue, Ehrenpforte und Triumphbogen für den Theater-präsidenten von Kotzebue bei seiner gehofften Rückkehr ins Vaterland (1800) as an answer to Kotzebue's “Der hyperboreische Esel.” The seventy pages of Schlegel's text are significant for two reasons. Firstly, his comments on New World themes, Indian cultures, slavery, and European-American relations are the comments of a knowledgeable person; secondly, his parodies of unspoiled Indians dealt a hard blow to the primitivistic tradition which was still evident in the works of German poets other than Kotzebue. Schiller's “Nadowessiers Totenlied” (1797) and Seume's “Der Wilde,” with its famous lines on “Ein Kanadier, der noch Europens übertünchte Höflichkeit nicht kannte,” (1799) appeared at this time. Schlegel wrote with a flair which caused Schleiermacher to call the Ehrenpforte “divine parodies” and Schelling to say that they were “exemplary satires.” In lampooning Kotzebue, Schlegel attacked primitivism and the shallow phases of the Enlightenment simultaneously. The Inca temple of the sun, Schlegel wrote, had become an educational institution animated by enlightened principles: children were no longer disciplined, since one had learned from Las Casas' relationship with Indians that any conceivable result can be achieved through kindness and reasonableness; the virgins of the sun had become fertile mothers, and Cora had assumed philanthropic responsibility as head of a foundling home. Schlegel's caricatures written in the course of his famous feud with Kotzebue were the sharpest satires that the primitivistic picture of the New World had called forth.¹³

The total picture of the New World in Schlegel's life and works contains lights and shadows, colors, and much detail. The two periods of preoccupation with possible emigration reflected, and furthered, interest in the New World. Tangible evidence of its importance in Schlegel's works is abundant. Themes such as slavery, aborigines, travel, the War of Independence, mercenaries, Benjamin Franklin, and the future of the United States appear in his works. Most significantly, Schlegel's conception of world civilization, in which the eighteenth-century ideal of world citizenship and the development of historical consciousness intermingle, encompass the New World; he stresses time and again the significance of interconnections between the New World and the Old. The historical perspective with which Europeans increasingly regarded the Americas is traceable to August Wilhelm Schlegel as well as to Herder, Georg Forster, and Alexander von Humboldt. The prominence of America and American themes in his writings provides evidence that the picture of Schlegel's indifference to the New World requires not modification, but reversal.

Notes

1. Gerhard Desczyk, Amerika in der Phantasie deutscher Dichter (Chicago, 1925), points out only that Schlegel confessed his inability to picture American Indians vividly. Paul C. Weber, America in Imaginative German Literature in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1926), states that Schlegel's patriotism precluded interest in America.

2. Friedrich Schlegels Briefe an seinen Bruder August Wilhelm, ed. Oskar Walzel (Berlin, 1890), p. 221. Caroline und ihre Freunde, ed. Georg Waitz (Leipzig, 1882), p. 30.

3. Briefe von und an August Wilhelm Schlegel, ed. Josef Körner (Leipzig, 1930), I, 254, 261. Pauline Gräfin de Pange, August Wilhelm Schlegel und Frau von Staël. Nach unveröffentlichten Briefen (Hamburg, 1940), pp. 208, 229, 245, 254. Madame de Staël, Dix années d'exil, ed. Paul Gautier (Paris, 1904), p. 164.

4. Joseph von Görres, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Marie Görres (München, 1874), VIII, 84.

5. August Wilhelm Schlegel, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Eduard Böcking (Leipzig, 1846-47), I, 374. Hereafter cited as Werke.

6. Musen-Almanach, Poetische Blumenlese auf das Jahr 1784 (Göttingen), pp. 88 ff. and Musen-Almanach, Poetische Blumenlese auf das Jahr 1788 (Göttingen), pp. 124 ff.

7. Caroline. Briefe aus der Frühromantik, ed. Erich Schmidt (Leipzig, 1913). See letters 4, 10, 16, 22, 23, 51, 54, 60, 64, 72, and 76 for references to her brother in the service of the British during the War of Independence.

8. Georg Wilhelm Hegel, Werke, 2nd ed., ed. Eduard Gans (Berlin, 1840), IX, 100-102.

9. August Wilhelm Schlegel, Œuvres écrites en français, ed. Eduard Böcking (Leipzig, 1846), I, 291.

10. August Wilhelm Schlegel, Essais littéraires et historiques (Bonn, 1842), p. 61.

11. See numerous references in Briefwechsel zwischen Wilhelm von Humboldt und August Wilhelm Schlegel, ed. Albert Leitzmann (Halle, 1908).

12. Lawrence Marsden Price, The Vogue of Marmontel on the German Stage (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1944).

13. A concise account of the relationship between the New World and German literature is given by Harold Jantz, “Amerika im deutschen Dichten und Denken,” in the Deutsche Philologie im Aufriß.