The Perennial Search for Paradise: Garden Design and Political Critique in Dorothea Schlegel's Florentin

Abstract

Fange define Herzenskultur nicht mit dem Anbau der edlen Triebe, sondern mit dem Ausschneiden der Schlechten an. Ist einmal das Unkraut verwelkt oder ausgezogen, dann richtet sich der edlere Blumenflor von selbst kraftiger in die Hohe. -From Dorothea Schlegel's Tagebucher (In Berlin and Jena, 1798-1802)1 How to interpret Dorothea Schlegel's novel Florentin has been an ongoing problem for literary critics and scholars since the work's first publication in 1801. Should the text be understood as a product of the Jena Romantic circle, an embodiment of the ideals of the Aufklarung, or simply as Dorothea Schlegel's artistic Handwerk to financially support her husband?' Is it a more straightforward development of the same Romantic aesthetic put forth in Friedrich Schlegel's Lucinde or a critical response to Romanticism from the perspective of a marginalized Jewish woman? Are the characters and stylistic elements of Florentin best understood according to Dorothea Schlegel's literary influences, her personal biography, or something else?3 Critics have addressed these issues over the past two hundred years and, while there has been no real consensus on how Florentin should be read, scholarship has demonstrated that one of the major difficulties in interpreting this novel is precisely the question of how to deal with its enigmatic author. What makes Florentin so difficult to interpret is Dorothea Schlegel's unique position as simultaneously an insider and an outsider in late-18th-century German society and culture. While Dorothea Schlegel never had any illusions about her place as a Jewish woman within German intellectual and social spheres, she was in many ways an insider.4 Throughout her youth and into the new century, she was continually in the company of some of the most important and influential figures of 18t-century Romanticism, indeed of modern European thought. Any study of Dorothea Schlegel's literary production, however, must also seriously consider the real restrictions placed upon her as an author since, as a Jewish woman, her participation in 18th-century German social and cultural spheres was at best limited and usually out of the question. Active engagement in political negotiations was even less an option because it was restricted to men from the most elite families. Despite these strict limitations on political activity, near the end of the 18th-century models of socio-political reform began emerging from the tradition of Enlightenment thought. Based on the assumption of basic human equality and a faith in the transformative power of Bildung, thinkers proposed notions of civil society in which intellectual and religious freedom could be balanced with the authority of the monarchical state.5 Following the French Revolution in 1789, discussions of the ideal form of government took on new urgency among German intellectuals. How were the ideals of the Enlightenment to be achieved if not by gradual popular Aufklarung within the monarchical order? It was in this context that Early Romanticism and the first forms of political Liberalism emerged as socio-political discourses about the nature of the ideal, post-- absolutist state. Romantics like Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis formulated an organic, communitarian model of the state that sought to balance individual freedom with what Isaiah Berlin refers to as a positive notion of liberty.6 According to the Romantic model of the state, real freedom is only possible within the context of a community. Society, as a whole, offers individuals the means to a self-fulfillment that they would be unable to achieve on their own. The Romantic notion of liberty is therefore a freedom within and enabled by the state. Liberal thinkers like Kant, Schiller, Forster, and Wilhelm von Humboldt, on the other hand, actively promoted a negative concept of liberty (Berlin 132). In contrast to Romanticism, Liberalism asserts that the state's only function should be to protect the individual rights of its citizens. …