Friedrich Schlegel and the New World

Extract

In the monographs and articles dealing with America and the New World in German literature Friedrich Schlegel is usually ignored. There are of course many gaps in our knowledge of America in German literature, as Harold Jantz pointed out in Deutsche Philologie im Aufriß (Berlin, 2nd ed. revised, 1960); the case of Friedrich Schlegel is a striking example. If he is mentioned, as in Paul Weber's America in Imaginative German Literature (1926), Hildegard Meyer's Nord-Amerika im Urteil des deutschen Schrifttums (1929), and in the recently published Amerika im Spiegel des deutschen politischen Denkens (1959) by Ernst Fraenkel, he is represented only by two quotations dating from the last few years of his life. The first treats of the familiar notion that the center of culture might move westward and that the United States would take over the role traditionally played by Europe. In 1792 Herder had asked “O Muse, nimmst du westwârt [sic] deinen Flug?” and in 1818 Platen wrote in his “Colombos Geist”: “Denn nach Westen früchtet die Geschichte, / Denn nach Westen wendet sich der Sieg.” Friedrich Schlegel suggested in 1820 that the shift was conceivable but that it would not take place in his time. Weber, Meyer, and Fraenkel stress SchlegePs underlining of the future, not his concession that the possibility existed. The second quotation is from the seventeenth lecture of the Philosophie der Geschichte (1829) in which he characterized North America as the breeding ground of destructive political principles which initiated an epidemic of revolutions.