Ethical Aesthetics and the Immutable Model in Friedrich Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man and Dorothea Schlegel’s Florentin

Sharon Worley

Friedrich Schiller and Dorothea Schlegel were both significant literary figures who reached maturity in the last decade of the 18^th century. Writing at a time when investigative enquiries into the nature of aesthetics merged the realms of psychology and metaphysics, they both produced pivotal works which bridged the period between the idealism of the Storm and Stress movement at the end of the Enlightenment and the genesis of the German Romantic movement in the first decade of the 19^th century. Schiller’s range of intellectual enquiry encompassed a broad range of genres and subject matter from his early career as a medical student to his later philosophical treatises on the relationship of physiology and psychology to aesthetics and ethics[i]. In addition he made artistic contributions as a novelist and playwright with outstanding well-known works such as “Don Carlos” and “The Robbers.” By the end of the 18^th century, however, metaphysical aesthetics were in ascendance in Germany, and scientific approaches based on Aristotelian empirical approaches coincided with interests in sociology and state government. Schiller’s work On the Aesthetic Education of Man while addressing the former, tacitly combined the latter in a blueprint for social order based on a unifying system of cultural aesthetics[ii]. Dorothea Schlegel, a minor figure in literature by comparison, is known primarily through her marriage to Friedrich Schlegel whose famous definition of romantic poetry in 1798 in his periodical Athenaeum Fragments is regarded as the starting point of the German Romantic movement[iii]. However, her first major literary effort Florentin published within the same year as the complete revised edition of Schiller’s Aesthetic Education mirrors many of the claims made by Schiller regarding aesthetics and ethics as the foundation of cultural unity. Through the creation of idealized archetypal characters, Dorothea creates a sociological utopia where social order and hierarchy is guarded by immutable aesthetic models.

Using the example of an ideal German noble family named the Schwarzenbergs, their images in art and the medieval castle and surrounding estate on which they live, Dorothea presents an organic model of ideal civic virtue through aesthetics. Ultimately, it is the power of art alone, which possesses the capacity to tame the advances of a disruptive drifter named Florentin. However, Florentin is much more that an anonymous vagabond. He embodies the all of the sensual impulses, which challenge the structure and order of society, and must be tamed by art. The novel easily fits the blueprint for social order provided by Schiller, and illustrates the basis for cultural unity through the medium of aesthetics. The opposing categories of sensual and rational man presented by Schiller clearly meet in tangible man-made aesthetic forms, neutralize one another in passive harmless play through portraits of female members of the Schwarzenberg family in the guise of Christian saints and Classical goddesses, and deflect the sensual animal aggressive impulses of would-be trespassers. The personal relationship between Dorothea and her husband Friedrich Schlegel, and its effect on their immediate cultural and political milieu become inextricably bound to the plot itself. As a Jew, and a woman whose own identity, appearance and social standing does not fit the prescription for social order she advocates in Florentin, Dorothea’s own perception of aesthetics and its relation to her self-image will merit additional consideration. In a similar vein, Friedrich Schlegel, also outside the realm of the ideal model of the propertied nobility, nonetheless advocated the feudal structure of society rooted in the Middle Ages and supported by art, and at the height of his diplomatic-academic career would resume using his great-grandfather’s lost noble title “von.”[iv]

Friedrich Schiller’s series of letters comprising On the Aesthetic Education of Man were written with the intent of presenting an anthropological and psychological model of aesthetics and its affect on the evolution of civilization. Written under the patronage of the Danish Duke of Augustenberg, the original letters were completed after the execution of Louis XVI in 1793 and during the Jacobin Reign of Terror which followed. Revised versions were first published in the periodical The Graces in 1795 followed by a single volume in 1801. Like many most of his illustrious contemporaries, Schiller was affected by the French Revolution and its challenge to not only the structure of society but the order and law on which it rested. His initial admiration of the Enlightenment ideals embodied in the movement’s Rights of Man was rewarded by honorary French citizenship[v]. But his reaction turned to horror as he witnessed atrocities which followed. He wrote to his patron that he felt “sickened by the these abominable butchers” who had just executed the king and “plunged“ Europe “back into barbarism and slavery.” To Goethe he confided that his Aesthetic Letters were intended to “make his profession of political faith” concerning both the “wretchedness of the actual political situation” and the ideal of freedom which it violated.[vi]

Schiller, however, also recognized the absolute, innate value of aesthetics as something which existed independently of social and political models or constraints. Art, he wrote:

Like Science, is absolved from all positive constraint and from all conventions introduced by man; both rejoice in absolute immunity from human arbitrariness. The political legislator may put their territory out of bounds; he cannot rule within it. He can proscribe the lover of truth; Truth itself will prevail. He can humiliate the artist; but Art he cannot falsify.[vii]

Art could at the same time be influenced by the fashions of the age in which case the “heavy shackles of rules” would force aesthetics to gratify the totalitarian demands of society. But acting independently, art was as pure an ethical ideal as truth, and the two were interchangeable. As such it could act as a guiding light and moral refuge for the construction of an ideal society[viii]. Aethetics, Schiller contends, “exists in every finely attuned soul…like the pure Church and the pure Republic.” It represents a natural manifestation of freedom which resists oppression of all kinds including social or political encroachment and sexual bestiality.[ix]

During the same year that Schiller’s letters were reissued in a single volume in 1801, Dorothea Schlegel’s novel Florentin was published in October. Without the author’s name and only that of the editor, her fiance Friedrich Schlegel, the work attracted the attention of leading literary figures including Schiller and Goethe.[x] The subject of the novel as well as the relationship between author and editor are interesting on many different levels and point to the complexity of the plot as it relates to the fabric of contemporary culture. Due to the close collaboration of Friedrich Schlegel as editor on this and additional works which Dorothea published, as well as the couple’s mutual religious and political ventures, it will be instructive to consider them jointly in relation to the plot of Florentin.[xi]

Dorothea Schlegel had been born Brendel Mendelssohn, the daughter of Moses Mendelssohn, a philosopher and major figure of Jewish emancipation in Berlin. Mendelssohn had emerged from the lower strata of German society in the Jewish ghetto of Dessau. After moving to Berlin, he managed a silk factory and at the same time established himself as a prominent scholar in both Jewish and German circles becoming an esteemed colleague of his contemporaries Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Immanuel Kant.[xii] Even more impressive was the position he held in the eyes of Frederick the Great who in 1778 requested that he prepare and present the German authorities with a compilation of the Ritual Laws of the Jews.[xiii] The model of integration and participation in German society which Mendelssohn proposed in a later work Jerusalem, or on Religious Power and Judaism (1783) was followed by his daughter Brendel Veit to the extreme of assimilation. After meeting the leading figure of the fledgling German Romantic movement, Friedrich Schlegel in 1798, she dissolved her 15 year marriage to banker Simon Veit and moved with Schlegel to Jena the following year where she wrote Florentin in a hasty nine months. The romantic alliance eventually led to her conversion to Christianity, first to Protestantism in 1804 in Paris where she and Schlegel married, and later their mutual conversion to Catholicism in Cologne in 1808 and reaffirmation of their marriage vows.[xiv]

On the surface, the plot of Florentin, is similar to Goethe‘s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and Ludwig Tieck‘s Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen, as well as other examples of the Romantic Bildungsroman in terms of journeys of artistic development and self discovery. The plot is also placed far from the ghetto of Moses Mendelssohn’s origins as well as the Schlegel’s academic literary circles of intellectuals which produced the forerunners of the 19^th and 20^th century bohemian cultural milieus. In contrast, the plot focuses on a description of the ideal noble estate owned by the Count and Countess Schwarzenberg as a model of German society. As such, the model withstands the seduction of the peripatetic bohemian artist Florentin and in the end subverts his destructive advances by commanding his respect and admiration through the innate reforming force of pure aesthetics. The Schwarzenbergs have four children, two young boys and two girls, the oldest of which, Juliane, is nearly 16 and engaged to a young man Eduard von Usingen. After saving the life of the count from an attack by a wild boar, Florentin is invited to stay with the Schwarzenbergs where he immediately falls in love with the beautiful Juliane. The drama unfolds as Florentin befriends Juliane and Eduard, reveals the mercurial details of his sordid past, and comes to terms with his unrequited feelings for Juliane prior to her marriage.

There are many reasons why Dorothea may have presented this model as forming a mutually beneficial bridge between social strata. Dorothea may have wished to present a model of integration and assimilation between her own class and that of the nobility she admired, thereby improving her social standing and facilitating the social mobility of Jews into the upper echelons of society and government. She may also have wished to transfer her own conservative conceptions about prearranged marriages originating in her Jewish heritage onto the medieval hierarchy symbolized by the Schwarzenberg’s noble estate. By doing so she could at least in fictitious terms legitimize her own unorthodox relationship with Schlegel by shunning the sensuous advances of the peripatetic artist Florentin through an inverse archetypal relationship. Placing herself in the pre-established role of the Schwarzenberg women absolved the need to marry someone like Schlegel outside of her religion and class in order to attain cultural legitimacy and upward mobility in the German social hierarchy. It also, ironically, gave her the upper literary hand of artistic license in applying an outmoded moral code to the sexual licentiousness which marked the literature as well as the relationships of participants in Romantic culture, including her own suspect relationship with Schlegel. Like many of her Jewish women contemporaries in the same social circle, Dorothea faced considerable ambiguity over the issue of conversion. While Christian friends and lovers, notably the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, urged educated Jewish women like Levin and Herz who participated in the salon circles to convert, some stalled, postponed conversion, wavered, or repeatedly refused. Dorothea intentionally postponed her marriage to Schlegel and conversion to Christianity until after her mother’s death. Her first husband Simon Veit had been both unattractive and culturally backward preferring his closed Jewish social circle to Dorothea’s ventures into contemporary academic literary circles.[xv] However, he represented the orthodox legitimacy of prearranged Jewish marriages, while Schlegel represented the epitome of the contemporary Romantic artist driven exclusively by his passions.

Marriages between wealthy Jews and nobles were also entertained at this time as a means of making capital available to support both estates and military operations, especially in light of encroaching Napoleonic campaigns. While this may have been outside of Dorothea’s immediate purview, it was a paramount concern to her future husband Friedrich Schlegel. Much of Schlegel’s writings at this time on German culture were aimed at shoring up the support of the nobility and capital for military operations. Dorothea’s involvement, on the other hand, causes immediate speculation concerning Jewish aspirations toward assimilation. Especially in the world of the salon at the turn of the 19^th century in Berlin, Jewish women were presented with the dilemma of choosing between oftentimes pre-arranged marriages to Jewish men, and the more glamorous option of rapid upward mobility presented by the numerous nobles who frequented the social gatherings of the intelligentsia.[xvi] Dorothea’s two closest childhood friends, Henrietta Herz and Rahel Levin, both hosted salons in Berlin which attracted leading literary figures and philosophers as well as members of the aristocracy including the crown prince Friedrich Wilhelm and the king’s brothers.[xvii]

Given the self-imposed restrictions against marrying outside of one’s class and religion practiced by both Jews and the nobility, the number of intermarriages that took place within the social circles of the salons is all the more remarkable. Intermarriage prior to the Emancipation Edict of 1812 granting Jews the rights of citizenship including military service may have anticipated an unrealized goal of redistributing Jewish capital.[xviii] The benefits of highly publicized liaisons between prominent members of German Jewish and Christian literary circles such as that between Dorothea and Friedrich Schlegel at the very least served as role models for social and intellectual integration. Disappointments and broken engagements were probably more common as in the case of Rahel Levin who while in her mid-twenties had an extended unhappy alliance with Karl von Finckenstein. Among the most desirable and eligible bachelors of contemporary Berlin society, he was an attractive blonde member, and a member of one of the wealthiest Prussian noble families.[xix] High profiles affairs such as theirs only served to reinforce the social glamour of the nobility, and attract women to the marriage market. Given the structure of the military where aristocratic title was frequently equated with officers rank, a woman searching for a noble title could find easily find one in an officer of lower rank whose wealth was limited to the salary of a clerical administrator.[xx]

Titles alone were not an assurance of wealth especially for younger siblings who did not inherit land and the majority of nobles who only owned small estates. For cases such as these special ordinances had been passed early in the 18^th century permitting nobles to marry outside their class for the purpose of increasing their wealth and landholdings.[xxi] Many nobles also did not necessarily trace their roots as far back as the romantic image of the Middle Ages portrayed in Dorothea‘s Florentin. Friedrich Wilhelm III began the practice of elevating civil servants to titles in return for bureaucratic service. Those who had inherited titles but no land to speak of also found employment in government administration. Thus, the many nobles who frequented the Berlin salons were for the most part administrative attaches rather than wielders of vast estates.[xxii]

However, at the dawn of the Napoleonic era, the entire stability and structure of Prussian society rested on the image and model of the landed gentry. The officer corps was drawn exclusively from the ranks of the nobility, and modern monarchs beginning with Frederick the Great actively promoted their role as the “foundations and pillars of the state.” Their leadership role as officers was especially important given that the infantry they commanded was composed of serfs and later freed peasants who were required to provide compulsory service. The patriarchal role of the aristocracy was reinforced by the publication of a genre of writing known as “Hausväterliteratur.” These handbooks provided information on both estate management and their social structures. Hausväter literature clearly established the role of the patriarchal noble as the father of his self-contained estate. The estates represented a social microcosm which included craftsmen and cottage industries providing support for its primary agricultural produce for both domestic and foreign markets. As models of rural self-sufficiency managed by a benevolent autocrat, nobles were placed at the center of their own small self-contained kingdoms which in turn served as role models for the aggregate of German society.[xxiii]

The cross-cultural relationship between Dorothea and Friedrich Schlegel raises a number of questions concerning authorship and intent. Because Dorothea’s name did not appear on her novel Florentin, or other works which she translated and edited, the degree of Schlegel’s influence is still in question. It seems plausible that the general plot or at least the setting of the novel Florentin was suggested by Schlegel as a means of reinforcing his own agenda with regard to the medieval origins of German social structures. Medieval overtones which reinforced Romantic figureheads and feudal social structures were an important means of identifying and maintaining loyalty to existing class structures in Prussia and Germany. Dorothea, while she would never reach the range of audience that Friedrich Schlegel would, supported his literary interests in medieval culture on both intellectual and philosophical levels. Both authors demonstrated considerable interest in the medieval period. Other medieval sources which Dorothea edited and for which Schlegel took credit for included The Maid of Orleans from Old French Sources, The History of Margaretha of Valois Wife of Henry the Fourth and Lother and Maller, A Tale of Chivalry from an Unpublished Manuscript. Clearly in this vein, both Dorothea and Schlegel showed a strong affinity with Schiller whose historical settings for his dramas William Tell, Don Carlos, Mary Stuart and The Maid of Orleans mirrored contemporary conflicts with the French while providing clearly defined role models in art and cues for ethical actions.

The title of Dorothea’s novel Florentin was itself not fixed, and the titles Arthur and Lorenzo were alternately considered. The name Arthur suggests allusions to the legendary Celtic hero King Arthur who discovers his destiny and legitimizes his claim to the throne by drawing the sword from the stone. The name Lorenzo, on the other hand, suggests the Italian Renaissance “prince” Lorenzo de’Medici who symbolized not only a cultural and aesthetic high point of European civilization but the trade and banking on which it was based. The title which was ultimately decided upon, Florentin, also alludes to both the Renaissance city of Florence and its widely circulated coinage known as florins. At the time the novel was written and published, the imminent threat of social change in the wake of the French Revolution followed by Napoleon’s meteoric rise to power as First Consul in 1799 and his subsequent Italian campaign, loomed large on the horizon of Prussia’s political future. The primary challenge to the decaying outmoded structure of German feudal states, which had a natural tendency towards fragmentation, was unity and financing. Loyalty was dependent upon real estate titles which the French offered in turn for military support. In addition the flow of capital outside of the loose federation of German states to finance French campaigns and alliances was a central concern.

The elixir which Friedrich Schlegel went to considerable trouble to concoct and disseminate to the German nobility was a heightened awareness of the faith, culture and unity symbolized by German medieval heritage. The Romantics’ resurgent interest and appreciation of the Middle Ages was quickly adopted by numerous literary figures and adapted to different ends. Not only Schlegel and his brother Wilhelm, but Goethe and the brothers Sulpiz and Mechior Boisserée were among the early advocates of a medieval revival and movement for the conservation of art and architecture which emerged at the turn of the century. When Dorothea and Schlegel visited Cologne in 1804, the Boisserée brothers were among the first to hear Schlegel’s lectures on medieval literature. He also assisted the two in preserving numerous examples of medieval German art. The primary attraction in the city, however, was the Cathedral of Cologne to which they devoted considerable scholarly attention. It soon became a symbol of national unity in the face of French oppression, and the restoration and completion of the original Gothic design received vigorous support, ironically, from the Protestant Prussian monarchy under Friedrich Wilhelm III and his successor Friedrich Wilhelm IV.[xxiv] Dorothea and Friedrich Schlegel’s romance with German medieval heritage was literally consummated with their conversion and reaffirmation of their marriage vows at Cologne Cathedral in 1808. It culminated in the lectures Schlegel gave soon thereafter to the Austrian nobility in 1810 and again in 1812 where he stated his assertion that German civilization was at its pinnacle in between the 10^th and 12^th centuries. According to Schlegel: “Nobility…and freedom were the foundation of the earliest German Constitution” where “the pope was the spokesman and umpire” of the European nations.[xxv]

Popular academic literature such as Friedrich Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man advanced a similar type of model which defined the role of beauty in creating the ideal state. In one sense it can be regarded as reactionary to the events surrounding the French Revolution. It does not pose a radical reordering of society, rather a description of the psychological process which naturally create morals and govern civilization. “Sensual man” according to Schiller is the being who threatens society if his needs are not met. “Rational man” alternatively represents the highly evolved intellect which formulates abstract laws of morality and resides in a perfect unchanging realm. Art, the mediator between the states of sensual and rational only has one purpose according to Schiller: to manipulate the lower functions of sensual man to conform with the laws created by rational man. Society, Schiller assumes, can naturally make distinctions between good and evil because morals are abstract ideas which exist independently of human experience. The highest form of aesthetics are comparable to moral qualities, and work in close conjunction with ideals of truth and justice. Art can literally act as the sensual embodiment of intellectually abstract ideals such as truth and justice. As such, it serves to educate society in morality through the medium of beauty or sensual aesthetic pleasure. Thus, the image of the ideal ordered society is never questioned, rather Schiller attempts to publicize the role of aesthetics in attaining that ideal image.[xxvi]

The key is art. Both Schiller and Dorothea use art as the means of maintaining an ideal ordered society, and of pacifying the wild beast which lurks in human nature and would otherwise create havoc in design and order. Art is able to appeal to the sensual bestial nature of man and at the same time convey abstract ideal moral values in the literal tactile form of art via analogy, allegory and narrative. Schiller’s Aesthetic Education and Dorthea’s Florentin compared together provide an example of how Schiller’s model could be put into practice by a contemporary author. In some respects Dorothea’s novel can be reduced to an analysis of how unbridled human passions are held in check through art. The bestial nature which threatens the ideal ordered world of the Schwarzenbergs is clearly alluded to in the opening scene of Dorothea’s novel. The story opens with the hero Florentin traveling through the countryside on horseback. A peripatetic lonely figure, he represents “sensual” man without means or social structure to guide his search for a higher intellectual “rational” state of existence. The only meaning he finds in his existence is the sensual aesthetic appreciation of nature in the landscape which surrounds him. Dorothea clearly lays out this analogy in the opening setting of the novel and the reflections of the hero Florentin:

Absorbed in the enjoyment of the splendor surrounding him and in fantasies that tugged him now forwards, now backwards, he had missed the right path…”Have I gotten to this point for naught? I came to this forest in about the same way I came into life…I boast of being a free man. This sunshine, this warm embrace, the young buds, the anticipation of things which surround me is to blame for my anticipation also…and of what?…It would be foolish enough if this path ultimately led me to the right place just as life leads to the inevitable goal.” [xxvii]

The importance of bridling sensual nature to positive societal goals is explicitly symbolized again in the opening scenes in the contrast between animals where the utility and nobility of Florentin’s horse is juxtaposed with that of a wild boar. The horse is white and Florentin, while allowing the horse to rest a moment from their journey, showers it with accolades calling him a “regal animal” fit for kings, “a model of loyalty and submissiveness” which should be “eternalized in history.” The soliloquy by Florentin which follows rivals Shakespeare’s famous “to be or not to be” lines given to Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark, as Florentin considers whether he should yield to his temptation to leave the aesthetic sensuality of the forest and return to the “senseless institutions” of civilization. Florentin’s journey itself symbolizes a search for freedom, and the question he poses to himself is whether it is contained in the confines of civilization or in the beauty of nature. Florentin is disturbed from these reflections by a cry for help, and he immediately comes to the rescue of an elderly man Count Schwarzenberg who is in danger of being attacked by a wild boar. While the white horse is masculine, the boar is a sow who being undomesticated has no rational faculty and is about to engage in a life and death struggle with the Count who was hunting her. With a calm presence of mind, Florentin quickly distracts the sow, encourages it to charge him instead, and then “warded it off” with his hunting knife. As the novel proceeds and the reader discover the importance of Schwarzenberg and his ideal estate, it becomes clear that Florentin’s act has much more significance than simply that of a good Samaritan. The boar comes to symbolize those unbridled, undomesticated bestial inclinations of animals and by extension human nature which pose a threat to the ordered existence of the landed German gentry. In contrast, Florentin’s noble steed represents the best animal nature trained to serve and act as a harmonious mediator between nature and society.

The remainder of the novel is devoted to a contrast between Florentin’s rootless past and search for meaning and freedom in his future, and the stability and cultural idealism represented by the Schwarzenberg family. The Schwarzenbergs exist in a bell jar which represents the building block of German society, law and order. Beauty takes the form both of natural surroundings and art in the form of religious paintings and family portraiture. Ironically and symbolically, the faces of family members as we shall see are superimposed on religious paintings. In terms of Schiller’s model, Florentin can be said to symbolize the potential of man. Literally set adrift in nature guided solely by human passions and impulses without the necessity to conform to a social structure, he is a completely malleable substance who plays with the concept of freedom in the intermediary realm between sensuality and rationality through the vehicle of beauty in nature. When his appreciation of beauty is transferred from animals and nature to the human form reinforced by positive and ideal role models represented by members of the Schwarzenberg family and their images in portraiture and religious art, his conversion to their societal structure is sealed. But the process is a slow painstaking one which begins with his comical perception of their way of life. After rescuing the Count and his son and agreeing to accompany them back to their estate, Florentin imagines their portraits as parodies on icons:

If I had to paint their portraits for an ancestral gallery, I would paint the first one in great devotion presenting a heart pierced with arrows, and the other one absorbed in solemn and moving meditations over a bunch of forget-me-nots. It is the most ridiculous thing in the world, except for me, who lets himself be induced to follow them in procession…[xxviii]

Both Schiller and Dorothea attach a metaphysical dimension to art and aesthetics which transcends human existence and at the same time imbues it with tangible meaning. The revival of medievalism and study of religious art in this context went far beyond a mere historical interest in classification. For both Schiller and Dorothea as well as Friedrich Schlegel, art was a powerful tool which could model the aspirations and thus ethics of humanity. For this reason, the study of religious medieval and Renaissance art became increasingly important in the contemporary political climate. Art is venerated as if it actually possessed the mystical powers attributed to it at the time of its creation centuries earlier, and could induce the loyalty of the masses through ideal models of aesthetic and by association ethical behavior. However, philosophers such as Schiller and the novelists they influenced, such as Dorothea, applied models based on reasoning which were clearly influenced by the Enlightenment standards of empirical Aristotelian inquiry. The reverential power traditionally accorded to art had been evaluated by leading German philosophers who laid the epistemological basis for modern psychology and the study of human behavior.[xxix] As such, art was an abstract reflection of the moral goals of society which could be modeled according to highest ideals of its age.

Dorothea’s study of Italian art would later be aided by spending two years in Rome with her two sons by her first marriage, Johannes and Philipp Veit. Johannes became a painter whose commissions would include a portrait of Princess Wilhelmina of Prussia following the Napoleonic Wars and the restructuring of Germany during Congress of Vienna. According to a friend Frau von Humboldt, Johannes had demonstrated the ability to accurately copy an image of the archangel Michael by the Renaissance painter Pietro Perugino including its soul and spirit. The larger implication being that Johannes could transfer these same transcendent qualities to his subjects in portraits of contemporaries.[xxx] Certainly Dorothea’s later conversion to Catholicism together with Friedrich Schlegel in 1808 would serve to reinforce her convictions regarding the power of religious art. But the political agenda they supported with the Church was never out of sight. Her determination to see her sons follow her example in converting to Catholicism was linked with her belief that Germany’s salvation resided in the dynasty of Austria and a revival of the Holy Roman Empire as the sole means of repelling Napoleonic invasions. To this end, following their conversion at the Cathedral of Cologne, Dorothea and Friedrich Schlegel, together with her two sons Johannes and Philipp Veit, would move to Vienna where Friedrich Schlegel would rally the support of the nobility and the feudal social structure they governed under the banner of medieval Christendom, art and literature.[xxxi] At the same time Dorothea and Friedrich represented the “natural aristocracy” of the intellectuals of academia who also drew its inspiration and support from an association with the community of medieval craftsmen.

Dorothea’s use of female standards of beauty in maintaining German social structure in the context of Florentin and the Schwarzenberg estate, naturally calls into question Dorothea’s own semitic features. Did her contemporaries view her exotic dark features and those of her prominent Jewish friends Henrietta Herz and Rahel Levin as close relatives of Mediterranean Italian and classical artists and models they admired? One portrait of Henrietta Herz (1778) by Anna Dorothea Therbusch (fig.1) portrays the budding salon hostess in her prime with all the grace and allure of a Classical muse and the mystery of a Dionysian bacchante. As sympathetic a rendering as the portrait appears, Therbusch was much more than an admiring friend. She was the daughter of the Prussian court portraitist G. Lisiewski, and the painting was completed towards the end of her life when she had already established a formidable reputation. During the course of her long career, she served as the court painter to the Duke of Wurttemberg, Charles Eugene, and the Mannheim Elector of the Palatinate, Charles Theodore, as well as painting portraits of the Prussian royal family including that of Frederick William II as Prince of Prussia in 1773.[xxxii]

Despite social connections to the Prussian nobility, the personal appearance of the three Jewish women (fig. 2) caught the attention of contemporaries who generally ascribed to the wit and social esprit as compensation for a lack their of physical beauty. According to one contemporary:

There was nothing about Dorothea to entice one to sensuality. Nothing about her was beautiful except her eyes, through which, it is true, there shone the light and loveable soul and her sparkling mind, but with the exception of that there was nothing, neither face nor figure, not even the hands or feet, which are often beautifully formed in otherwise unattractive women.[xxxiii]

Admittedly Dorothea and her friends Herz and Levin by the time they were approaching middle age did not conform to contemporary ideals of Northern beauty. However youthful depictions of dark haired beauties in classical settings seem to have been just as popular in contemporary art as fair-haired maidens. Franz Krüger’s portrait of Prince Augustus of Prussia (fig. 3) with François Gérard’s 1805 portrait in the background of the famous French beauty and salon hostess Madame Récamier who long stood as the object of the prince’s affections, is probably representative of the ideal Dorothea and her friends sought and admired. While cruel caricatures of Jewish social pretensions, some overtly racially motivated (fig. 4), existed, Dorothea appears to have been unaffected. Her close friend Rahel Levin, while ostensibly a great success as a salon hostess, was painfully aware, on the other hand, of racial discrimination and the effect which it had on her social interactions. In 1805, Levin would confide to Dorothea’s ex-husband Simon Veit:

Be a Jewess! And now my whole life is a wound…how repulsively degrading, offensive, mad and common is my environment which I cannot escape, a single contamination, a mere contact sullies me, and disturbs my nobility.[xxxiv]

It seems likely then, that Dorothea sought assimilation and integration, together with her sons, with the very society which might otherwise ostracize them for cultural interloping.

Given that the Schwarzenberg estate appears to have been set in Southern Germany in the region of Austria close to the Italian border, and the very area Schlegel and Dorothea would target with their message of medieval unity when they moved to Vienna following their conversion to Catholicism, the question of integration and assimilation appears to be broached on the level of German and Italian cultural diversity rather than Jewish and Christian ethnicity.

A similar question regarding the ideal of rooted ancestry in the German medieval feudal social structure also applies. Residing exclusively in cities, neither Friedrich Schlegel nor Dorothea and her Jewish friends could lay claim to the ideal fantasy of the castle surrounded by a vast estate she presented in Florentin. Yet the romance of the landscape retained spiritual significance as well as allusions to social and political stability. Landscape painting depicting the German countryside and noble estates was a common feature of Romantic culture. As such, paintings by friends and colleagues of Dorothea’s artist son Philipp Veit, like Johann Heinrich Ferdinand Olivier‘s Landscape near Berchtesgarden (fig. 5) or Ernst Ferdinand Oehme’s Stolphen Castle (fig. 6) painted for Prince Friedrich August of Saxony, served to reinforce the dual notion of metaphysical and material well being residing in ideal representations of the German landscape in art. In other words the Schwarzenberg ideal of beauty and social structure went hand in hand to support the united interests of the loose federation of German states. In contrast, well-educated Jews such as Dorothea and the Mendelssohn, Veit, Levin and Herz families represented interlopers attempting to integrate themselves with German noble society through the play medium of intellectual cultural pursuits like art, philosophy and literature.[xxxv] Dorothea’s own background in terms of beauty and social structure differs so dramatically from the ideal aesthetic model she creates with the Schwarzenbergs, ultimately one is left with the impression that Dorothea had used Schilleresque methods of modern psychology to set her own aesthetic literary trap for cultural interlopers. Dazzled by the perfect beauty and harmony of the estate and its female occupants, Dorothea presents outsiders like herself with a model for support and cooperation based on aesthetic admiration.

While the Schwarzenbergs lived in contemporary turn-of-the-century Germany, they represented the audience Friedrich Schlegel hoped to target. Wealthy descendents of an ancient medieval hierarchy, Count Schwarzenberg remained loyal in the service of the Kaiser. His administration of his lands is presented not only as ideal but a model which his neighbors want to emulate and seek out his advice for.[xxxvi] By contrast, at the time Florentin meets the Count his journey has take him from a monastery in Italy where he was educated across Germany on his way to board a ship for America. Florentin’s aimless wanderings perplex the Count. “Your fatherland doesn’t hold you?” he asks Florentin. America was a popular destination in the Romantic imagination which could symbolize the heroism of George Washington and the Revolutionary War as well as the Enlightenment ideals which initially drew intellectuals to support the French Revolution. In this context, however, it represents a seductive alternative which competes with German nationalist goals for the loyalty of citizens, and suggests the militarist attraction of Napoleon who claimed to spread the Revolution as he advanced over the Alps crossing Italian borders. “Where is my fatherland?” Florentin responds in dejectedly, “as far back as I can remember, I was an orphan and a stranger on earth, and thus I intend to call the land where I will first be called father my fatherland.”[xxxvii]

Issues of identity and nationality were flexible for both Friedrich Schlegel and Dorothea as a result of their interfaith marriage and subsequent conversion to Catholicism. Their mutual search for national identity at a time of approaching international crisis is clearly alluded to in the figure of Florentin. Being members of the intelligentsia they were among the educated and modern enlightened salon class, which included noblemen and diplomats as well as philosophers, writers and artists. This mixed social milieu was naturally drawn to the exploration of questions of national identity which challenged traditional role models and entertained notions of ethnic, religious and class diversity and equality. Comments by many of their friends suggest that they were more surprised by the couple’s conversion to Catholicism than they were by Dorothea’s Jewish heritage or the fact that she changed her entire name from Brendel Mendelssohn Veit to Dorothea Schlegel. Clearly inspired by the Romantic medieval revival, Schlegel’s conversion, nonetheless, aroused some consternation among family and friends stemming in part from long standing prejudices as well as his family’s venerable history as Prussian Protestant pastors. The move towards Catholicism began with the couple’s interest in medieval art and literature and grew with their concern for national solidarity in the midst of the Napoleonic invasions. In 1806 Schlegel wrote to a Protestant acquaintance regarding his preference for Catholics:

If you think we are partial towards Catholicism, I must confess that this is partly due to personal friendship. My former so-called friends, be they Calvinists, Lutherans or Moravians, theists, atheists or idealists, have with the sole exception of my own brother, who is, however, a very bad Calvinist -- behaved towards me like a veritable pack of gypsies.[xxxviii]

The psychology of social organization is a primary concern for both Schiller and the Schlegels. Society itself represents nothing more than the organization of social groups, and art is the powerful tool which ultimately possesses the potential to wield human destinies. According to Schiller men naturally impose limitations upon one another through their interactions. He refers to this state as the “dynamic state” which is the most fundamental level at which society is formed. The “ethical state” represents a higher level organizational complexity in which morals are necessitated by the need to subject the will of the individual to society as large. Here the natural instinctual impulses of humanity are held in check and governed by laws. The question Schiller poses at this point is what induces people to give up their freedom and conform to social structures defined by laws. His answer is that men retain their freedom through the play function of beauty and aesthetics which at the same time provides the glue which holds society together:

Though it may be his needs which drive man into society, and reason which implants within him the principles of social behavior, beauty alone can confer upon him a social character. Taste alone brings harmony to society, because it fosters harmony in the individual. All other forms of perception divide man, because they are founded exclusively either upon the sensuous or upon the spiritual part of his being…only the aesthetic mode of communication unites society, because it relates to that which is common to all.[xxxix]

For Schiller society is induced to obey laws because the culture which binds it also satisfies the natural urge for freedom through the play mode of aesthetics. Aesthetics is the only medium for Schiller which can be experienced both on an individual and aggregate level. As such it is the unifying basis for culture, having a function which anticipates a parallel with Karl Marx’s statement to the effect that religion is the opiate of the masses. For Schiller: “Beauty alone makes the whole world happy, and each and every being forgets its limitations while under its spell.”[xl]

Upon reaching Count Schwarzenberg’s estate Florentin is overwhelmed with scenes of beauty and order, among the first of which include the Count’s daughter Juliane:

Juliane’s face did not belong to the regular beauties at which one stared but whose lack of vitality left one cold. The fine play of the expressive features, which so visibly reflected what transpired in her soul, was irresistibly attractive and pleasant. Although not very tall, she was built in the most perfect proportions. A veritable wealth of light brown hair flowed in many locks and braids around the small beautifully formed head and the white nape of the neck. The slender throat which was often bent to the side in sweet cunning and then again raised freely and proudly, joined the youthful breasts in smooth contours…big dark blue eyes that now sparkled full of soul and a happy life, now lowered tearfully like bedewed violets under the long, silky eyelashes…All these were so many enchantments from whose unified power Florentin could not remain unaffected.

The term beautiful is used so frequently within the next several paragraphs in which Florentin encounters the estate and its inhabitants, there is no doubt that beauty is accorded primary importance in the novel. Not only is a long paragraph devoted solely to describing Juliane’s appearance, the term beautiful is applied in rapid succession to her mother Eleanore, Eleanore’s eyes, the two women taken together, several horses and the village, as well as “large farm buildings and several interior installations.” Formerly, Florentin had reacted to such domesticated scenes of social order with revulsion, considering them “oppressive and stifling to the spirit.” Through the example of the Schwarzenberg family and estate, Florentin finds that only through the aesthetic faculty can he too be domesticated and reconciled with society. While realizing that Juliane is unattainable due to her engagement, her beauty symbolizes that the irresistible allure of aristocratic society he has encountered. His strong reaction is due to undoubtedly to paucity of his own material possessions and experience which pale in comparison. It serves to expose his own emptiness and lack of self worth. At the same time, it transforms his entire outlook on life and provides him with future moral direction where previously he had none.[xli]

Images of women which had the power to arrest and instruct society through aesthetics had their basis in portraiture of royal family members at the top of the Prussian social pyramid. Dorothea, for example, would have been influenced by such idealistic and politically significant representations as Friedrich Georg Weitsch’s Portrait of the Princesses Louise and Frederica Crowning the Bust of Friedrich Wilhelm II (fig. 7). Painted in 1795 to celebrate the Peace of Basel in which Prussia gave diplomatic status to the French Republic as it existed with boundaries west of the Rhine, the painting reflects the English Grand Manner in portraiture. The highly symbolic pyramidal form would also characterize the work of German Romantic painters such as Philipp Otto Runge and Caspar David Friedrich. In this painting the Prussian princesses decorate the bust of their father-in-law King Friedrich Wilhelm II with garlands. The bust itself is a copy of one made by Johann Gottfried Schadow in 1792, who had previously accepted a commission to do a portrait bust of Henrietta Herz in 1785.[xlii] While a portrait such as this presented the external image of the role model in which social order was effected, its symbolic representation of the metaphysical potential it held in terms of the relation of aesthetics to the order not only of Germany but life itself would be closer to work such as Runge’s Morning (1808) (fig.8).

Ultimately, however, Dorothea’s combination of portraiture with religious archetypes in art anticipates later corollary developments by the German Nazarene painters and their followers who strove to infuse contemporary painting with Medieval and Renaissance idealism. For example Wilhelm von Schadow’s Mignon (1828) (fig. 9) which represents a incarnation of poetry from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Lehrjahre illustrates contemporary conceptions of abstract literary allegorical archetypes based on Classical and Renaissance prototypes. When Florentin discovers a portrait of two Schwarzenberg family members, Juliane and her aunt Countess Clementina, represented as St. Anne instructing the Virgin Mary, his conversion to domesticity through aesthetics is sealed. Not only is beauty the term which the portrait immediately calls to mind but also “sublimity…gentle seriousness…virtue…peace and dignity.” Florentin jokingly confides to his host and rival for Juliane’s affections, Eduard von Usingen, that he is in danger of falling in love with the image of Countess Clementina and would have pursued the model of Saint Anne in “knightly custom.” Not only he is restrained by the knowledge that she is now a matron once entrusted as Julianne’s governess, but also by the civilizing influence of beauty upon which the structure of Germany’s nobility itself rests.[xliii] In the realm of the Schwarzenberg estate as in Schiller’s “kingdom of taste even the mightiest genius must divest itself of its majesty, and stoop in all humility to the mind of a little child. Strength must allow itself to be bound by the Graces, and the lion have its defiance curbed by the bridle of a Cupid.”[xliv]

An even greater challenge to Florentin’s sensual nature by another work of art is located in Juliane’s bedroom. A bas-relief with life size figures of Psyche “with the lamp in her hand, gazed at the slumbering god of love [Cupid] with astonishing rapture.” The image of Psyche “hovering” and nearly “disembodied” casts an aesthetic aura over the entire room. Juliane’s persona permeates the ensemble of objects and merges with the ideal represented by Psyche. Triumphal symbols of social caste and objects of sexual desire intersect above her bed where her coat of arms rises and spreads like tendrils to embrace heavy silk bed curtains pulled back by gold tassels on either side.[xlv] At this point, just prior to Juliane‘s wedding reception which follows in the next scene, Florentin’s urges are refined by art. He finds so much pleasure in the sheer appreciation of beauty, that it effectively models his own behavior in line with the Schwarzenberg’s ideal and harmonious estate.

Sensuality and aesthetics continually collide in art yet the Schwarzenberg ideal is never threatened by them. It does appear as though the outsider and drifter Florentin would otherwise possess the power to completely subvert the social structure of the estate were he to press his sensual claims on Juliane. In fact Florentin appears to have drifted into the world of the Schwarzenbergs merely to pose a sexual and thus structural threat, be lulled into submissive docility by art, and retreat in admiration. His destructive potential is revealed by his own disruptive vagrant history which included effectively being cut off from his mother and raised as an orphan in monastery, a botched “godless” attempt to prevent his sister from taking orders as a nun, and an unstable relationship with a woman in Italy which ends with an abortion when she believes he has abandoned her.

Florentin’s pattern of life has been one of dissipation and uninterrupted demonstrations of the play drive. His ability to respond to art is enhanced by the fact that he is an artist, and had worked as a portrait painter. Given that Florentin has limited resources which have run out from time to time, his freedom must occasionally be sacrificed to his need to support himself. In these situations he has the ability to sublimate his urge to freedom in the play drive of art. When Florentin encounters art at the Schwarzenberg estate which embodies his sensual desire for Juliane, he feels both veneration and love for the immutable model whether it is a Christian saint or classical goddess. Like Schiller’s description of Juno Ludovisi:

It is not Grace, nor is it yet Dignity, which speaks to us from the superb countenance . . . it is neither the one nor the other because it is both at once. While the woman-god demands our veneration, the god-like woman kindles our love; but even as we abandon ourselves in ecstasy to her heavenly grace, her celestial self-sufficiency make us recoil in terror…we find ourselves at one and the same time in a state of utter repose and supreme agitation, and there results that wondrous stirring of the heart for which mind has no concept nor speech any name.[xlvi]

The conflict between the two opposing active drives is diffused in a passive state of equilibrium which is known as the pleasurable aesthetic response. Here the drive for action and consummation is satisfied psychologically. The female model, whether it be the symbol of divine motherhood in Saint Anne or the prenuptial adoration of a lover symbolized by Psyche, serves to inspire and arrest unlawful action in one breath. Art in this context can almost be viewed as neutralizing sensual drives which are then re-channeled according to the higher moral ideals the immutable models represent. Florentin admires two final aesthetic objects in the family chapel before he disappears from the Schwarzenberg estate forever without a trace following the marriage of Juliane and Eduard: a bas-relief of a guardian angel resting on a sarcophagus and above, another portrait of Aunt Clementina portrayed as St. Cecilia, the patroness of music. In this case, form itself has come full circle in Florentin‘s mind from sensual attraction and apprehension to the intangible realm of ideal metaphysics. Like the image itself he perceives, Florentin dissolves into the thin air of memory and ideas, leaving the Schwarzenbergs to their perfect world protected by aesthetic guardians:

The setting sun cast yet a brilliant ray through the high windows; the white candles shimmered through palely; all objects were illuminated in a strange way and moved like ghosts. The ray fell directly on the face of St. Cecilia. Colors and features had disappeared; it was only a brilliant radiance. Florentin could have fallen to his knees before this splendor.[xlvii]

In preparing notes for a second edition, Dorothea compared her novel Florentin to Paul Veronese’s Marriage at Cana. The jubilant image from the Italian Renaissance depicting a wedding sanctified with wine, and the bacchanal pleasures of society mystically multiplied for the guests, is an accurate description of her own aspirations with respect to upwardly mobile assimilation. It is an image of inclusiveness rather than alienation, and wine itself symbolizes the sanctity of aesthetic pleasures which could bind society under a unified cultural agenda. Dorothea effectively used Schiller’s play medium in art to create the image of an ideal social order in Germany which would induce others upon admiring its perfection to model their own behavior in accordance with her aesthetic goals. Yet, like Schiller, she also believed that art should strive to achieve an independent value which in its highest form could affect everyone who perceived its aesthetic power. In this respect, she sought Schiller’s aesthetic dictum in the purity of experience:

This lofty equanimity and freedom of the spirit, combined with power and vigor, is the mood in which a genuine work of art should release us, and there is no more certain touchstone of true aesthetic excellence.[xlviii]

Ethical Aesthetics and the Immutable Model in Friedrich Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man and Dorothea Schlegel’s Florentin

Sharon Worley

Notes

Illustrations

Bibliography