Schlegel (née Brendel Mendelssohn, Divorced Veit), Dorothea von

Dorothea Mendelssohn Veit Schlegel (1764–1839) was a novelist, essayist, translator, and literary critic whose life embodied the ideals and values of the early German Romantics, but with a twist. Born into the most illustrious Jewish family in Berlin, her father, Moses Mendelsohn, a philosopher, critic, and humanist, modeled for her what a life of letters could be. The literary culture of the Berlin salons provided a context for her to develop her own ideas, shaped by the German Enlightenment, Biblical Higher Criticism, and Weimar Classicism. She became the center of a constellation of luminaries who inspired her to live her life on her own terms. She liberated herself from an unhappy marriage; after passing infatuations, she fell passionately in love with a brilliant younger man. Friedrich von Schlegel’s Lucinde famously tells the story of their scandalous affair, with Dorothea the obvious heroine of the novel. Dorothea, uniquely among the Early German Romantics, in her novel, Florentin, maintained the Enlightenment critique of Christianity while advocating for the liberal religious ideal of Humanism. Her marriage to Friedrich Schlegel and their shared literary ventures epitomized symphilosophie—the collaborative ideal of early German Romanticism. Her spiritual quest to overcome the inner turmoil created by her double standing as a Jew and as a German led her ultimately to the Catholic Church. As a mother, lover, wife, thinker, and writer, Dorothea lived according to her ideal of the feminine; her status as a religious thinker has yet to be appreciated.