A literary scandal

Abstract

In 1799 a small book called Lucinde was published in Berlin. Written by the brilliant young literary critic Friedrich Schlegel, it celebrated his (adulterous) affair with Dorothea Veit, daughter of the eminent Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. Though not widely read and still less widely understood the book provoked a considerable, and largely hostile, reaction among the reading public. It became to its generation what Lady Chatterley's Lover was to a more recent age: the quintessential embodiment of an obscene book. The author's mother gave utterance to the popular consensus when she wrote that ‘through his novel Fritz has shown himself to me as one who has no religion and no good principles’. This literary scandal was, perhaps strangely, to become an important topic in the relationship between Romantic literature and religion because of the response it provoked from two of the leading religious thinkers of the nineteenth century, Friedrich Schleiermacher and Soren Kierkegaard, and, once again, Kierkegaard's interest in this shows something of the extraordinary internal heterogeneity of his work, its simultaneous projection along a spectrum of cultural concerns, and his engagement with the debate as to the shape and texture of contemporary cultural life. Few commentators have sought to commend Lucinde simply as a work of literature.