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Dorothea Veits Florentin and The Early R
Dorothea Veits Florentin and The Early R
LAURIE JOHNSON
University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign
The Early German Romantics,i avid students of critical philosophy who met in Jena between
1796 and 1801, wrote fiction that seems to advocate a radical form of Idealism.ii While Novalis and
Friedrich Schlegel in particular critique Fichte's notion of the allencompassing, selfpositing ego in
philosophical writings such as the FichteStudien or the Athenäumsfragmente, literary texts by these
same authors, such as Die Lehrlinge zu Sais, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, and Lucinde, often are read as
contributions to the development of a conceptual world of selfenclosed subjects. The subsequent
privileging of aestheticism found in Romantic fiction would seem to draw readers even further into a
world of purely abstract phenomena, a world in which real others are inaccessible. The conclusion, then,
that there is no functioning model of alterity in Early Romantic literature is understandable, particularly
in light of statements, uttered by that literature's protagonists, such as: "Mich führt alles in mich selbst
zurück."iii
Romantic philosophy, despite its wrangling with the problems posed by Fichte's absolute ego,
also would seem to remind us frequently that we indeed live in a world of selfconstructed images.iv
While the realm of imagination perhaps can promise some intuitive, nonrational contact with real others
in the world outside,v the best that the thinking mind can do is to form an imageworld and then live
within it in a state of endless oscillation between reciprocal concepts. Consciousness exists, for Novalis,
as a "selbstinduzierte Hin und Herbewegung einer unvordenklichen Einheit, die…weder als 'gedachtes'
noch als 'gefühltes' Ich aber vollständig ist und deshalb immer wieder ins Andere übergeht."vi Despite
the Early Romantics' contention that this oscillation is "progressive," it remains a fundamentally
repetitive movement, and this means in turn that our relations with the world may be forever repetitive;
we may never get anywhere with anyone other than ourselves. Schlegel describes the progression of
selfconsciousness in the world as an eternal backandforth movement between conceptimages, "wie in
einer endlosen Reihe von Spiegeln."vii It is not surprising that the philosophical project of Romanticism
is often deemed an exemplification of solipsism and loneliness, a dilemma acknowledged by the
Romantics themselves.viii Although Early Romanticism has been described as a "culture of couples"ix
whose writings contain multiple and lengthy reflections on the nature of love, friendship, and spousal
relations, such a description cannot always defeat the conviction that, fundamentally, even these
apparently intersubjective relationships exist only in the mind of the poetphilosopher who constructs
them as "Begriffe der Welt" (KA XII: 351).
But at least briefly, in Jena, among the group of students and scholars who met regularly for
Fichte's lectures on the selfpositing ego, an alternative does develop to the selfcentered universe of
selfgenerated images so often considered Idealism's signature. To be sure, protagonists such as
Schlegel's Julius and Novalis's Heinrich can be read as literary envisionings of Fichte's "Ich," who "sieht
alles in sich; sieht es etwas als auser sich[,] so muß der Grund dazu doch in ihm liegen."x But Schlegel,
who says of Fichte shortly after their first meeting in August 1796: "Üeberhaupt ist er wohl in jeder
Wissenschaft schwach und fremd, die ein Objekt hat,"xi starts looking almost immediately after that
meeting for a way to ground philosophy in a system of relationships rather than in selfconsciousness
alone. This system will and must include the corporeal world outside the self. As Manfred Frank argues,
the philosopherauthors of Jena are not searching for metaphysical truths so much as they are concerned
with establishing a notion of existence as the "Einheitsgrund der physischen und der geistigen
Wirklichkeit."xii In fact, unity, but also a recognition of duality, is already built into the philosophical
foundations of the Romantic movement in the late 1790's. This duality can be acknowledged in the
realm of rationality and consciousness as well as in that of feeling and imagination; the two realms must
be deployed together.xiii
It is in this early phase of the Romantic era that Friedrich Schlegel, the group's most prominent
philosopher, develops a critique of Fichte's philosophy of consciousness in the form of a proposition he
calls the "Wechselerweis," or "Wechselgrundsatz"—the reciprocity axiom or principle. This principle
attributes life, activity, and interactivity to nature as well as to the self, and thus shifts the search for a
foundation of philosophy from the self alone to an interaction between self and world (KA XII: 152,
190). It is Schlegel's direct response to Fichte's notion of a "Wechselbestimmung," an idea Fichte
already himself uses to address the objection that the ego cannot completely posit itself; that is, that the
"Ich" cannot be the absolute ground of thought, excluding all else. Fichte defends his concept of the ego
by paraphrasing his own idea of reciprocity as follows:
Das Ich sezt sich zum Theil nicht heißt[:] es sezt sich beschränkt, oder das Intelligente muß sich etwas
reales entgegensezen, weil das ideale beschränkt sein soll, aber der Grund kann nicht im idealen liegen[,]
er muß daher auf das reale bezogen werden; so kommen wir dazu[,] dem Ich etwas [in] dem Ich
entgegenzusetzen.xiv
Whereas Fichte's answer is to locate the real within the "Ich" and thus to preserve the absolute status of
the ego, Schlegel turns to the idea of a dynamic, reciprocal movement not only within the self, but
between self and world. "Wie wenn nun aber ein von außen unbedingter, gegenseitig aber bedingter und
sich bedingender Wechselerweis der Grund der Philosophie wäre?" (KA II: 72)xv he asks, and then later
affirms: "In meinem System ist der letzte Grund wirklich ein Wechselerweis. In Fichte's ein Postulat und
ein unbedingter Satz" (KA XVIII: 521, no. 22).xvi
Guido Naschert, in two essays on Romantic irony and the reciprocity principle, argues that in
these and other brief statements embedded in the philosophical fragments, Schlegel develops a very new
type of transcendental philosophy modeled on the very old Socratic dialogue.xvii In Schlegel's case, the
primary dialogue does remain within the self, and takes place specifically between feeling and memory
(which is a form of cognition, or of reason). It is the reciprocal interaction of these two faculties that
permits us to recognize others. Feeling manifests as the "unmittelbare Wahrnehmung eines andern Ichs
in der gegenwärtigen Welt," and memory responds "als ein Wiedererwachen und Wiederfinden des
vollständigen Ichs in dem gegenwärtigen, zerteilten, abgeleiteten" (KA XII: 355). In other philosophical
fragments, Schlegel extends this basic dialogue, contained within one consciousness, into any number of
parallel dialogues: between self and world, self and other, and between the self and the images the self
constructs.xviii
Philosophers as well as scholars of German literature have tended to ignore Schlegel's reciprocity
principle and its significance for Romantic thought,xix partly because its depiction is dispersed
throughout Schlegel's writings,xx partly because his writings are often so fragmentary as to defy
comprehension, and partly because there is a tendency, particularly among Germanists, to read all Early
Romantic philosophy as a direct response to Kant and Fichte alone.xxi The influence of contemporary
philosophers such as Johann Georg Jacobi, whose early work on nihilism is fundamental for the Jena
groupit is in a review of Jacobi’s work that Schlegel first presents his ideas about the reciprocity
principleor Novalis's mentor Carl Leonhard Reinhold is usually ignored, as is the significance of past
thinkers such as Jakob Boehmexxii or Plotinus, whose thinking about the relationship between microcosm
and macrocosm helped inspire the Jena group's interest in the world beyond the self. And, as we will see
in the following section, Schlegel is as indebted to the realism of Spinoza, whose "ultimate
preoccupation was the relation of human beings to nature,"xxiii as he is to the idealism of Fichte.
This essay cannot reconstruct the complete philosophical context of Jena, work that has been
undertaken and to date largely accomplished by Manfred Frank and Dieter Henrich, among others.xxiv
But I will present a reading of the reciprocity principle that I hope not only will illuminate more about
the foundations of the earliest German Romanticism, but will lead to a productive rereading of a novel
that portrays the truly progressive aspects of Early Romantic philosophy in a way that the fiction of
Schlegel and Novalis never did: Dorothea Veit's Florentin of 1801. The struggle between solipsism and
alterity, never worked out satisfactorily in the literature written by the philosophers who engaged in that
struggle, does find expression and development in Veit's text. Specifically, I argue that Dorothea Veit's
novel represents a particular and progressive understanding of the "Wechselerweis" so important to
Friedrich Schlegel's critique of Fichte's subject philosophy—a gesture crucial to understanding the
progressive nature of the earliest Romanticism.
Scholarship to date has not investigated the relationship between Florentin's theoretical
sophistication and the philosophical projects of Early Romanticism. Martha Helfer's important essay
from 1996 lays the groundwork for such an approach by locating the novel within the larger Jena
movement; she terms the text "an expression of feminist Romantic theory" and in fact argues "that
Florentin instantiates a feminist theory of writing."xxv However, Helfer's focus is on Florentin's
relationship to Jena aesthetic theory—specifically to that theory as developed in Friedrich Schlegel's
Lucinde—as well as on the significant issue of the paradoxical representation of Veit herself as
simultaneously independent and submissive, and on the repercussions of such paradoxes for our reading
of the text.xxvi And despite the publication of Helfer’s and several other fairly recent pieces on Florentin,
Dorothea is still probably best known as Friedrich's wife. Even feminist readings have considered the
novel interesting on some levels, but not very good fiction on the whole.xxvii Although I am not
emphasizing here the potentially autobiographical aspects of Florentin,xxviii the novel’s content certainly
seems to mirror Veit’s life and interests at least to a certain extent, and a comparison between the text
and the author's position within Jena Romanticism is worthwhile. I wish to argue, however, that
Dorothea’s work reflects and responds not only to Friedrich's aesthetic theory as worked out in Lucinde
or to the aesthetic theory of Jena Romanticism in general, but to Friedrich’s philosophy as well.xxix But I
do not intend to read Florentin as simply a literary reflection of Jena Romantic theories, although we do
know that the period in which Friedrich was working out the reciprocity principle and working on his
most progressive philosophy encompasses the time in which Dorothea wrote her novel.
My aim also is not to rehabilitate the Schlegels' reputations, marred by their eventual
pledge to an aestheticized politics of the Catholic church and by a subsequent retreat into
esotericism (although Friedrich Schlegel's oftenstrange late writings are of considerable
interest); nor do I wish to recast the Early Romantics as direct predecessors of twentiethcentury
phenomenologists, who have worked out the philosophical relations between selfconsciousness
and world in considerably different detail and with different epistemological emphases.xxx Rather,
I hope to demonstrate that the view of intersubjective relations that Florentin provides, when
read together with Friedrich Schlegel's reciprocity principle, can yield a more complete
understanding of the novel as well as of the earliest Romantic philosophy—a philosophy that
contributed to the development of later subject philosophies and of depth psychology.
In the following, I read first the "Wechselgrundsatz" and then Florentin in order to construct a
new interpretation of Veit's novel—to show that Veit illuminates the fascinating intersubjective
possibilities yielded by the intersection of literary and philosophical discourses in Early Romanticism.
Rather than copying Friedrich's ideas, Dorothea's literature works out this key aspect of his philosophy
in a challenging and truly intersubjective way.
Friedrich Schlegel's Theory of Reciprocity
It is well known that reciprocity is crucial to the Early Romantic program of “infinite
progression” toward an ideal but never reachable future. Selfconsciousness works progressively
between and through series of various oppositional concepts (such as knowlege/belief,
remembering/intuiting, philosophy/poetry, men/women) in order to “increasingly potentiate” itself and
to thus approximate an idea of absolute truth as closely as possible. But what is not generally
acknowledged in German literary criticism is that the Romantic idea of reciprocal progression is part of
a much older debate about subjectobject relations. Rather than embracing solipsism—that is, rather than
viewing the progression between reciprocal concepts in consciousness as a phenomenon contained
exclusively within the self—the Jena philosophers reopen the discussion on the relationship between
macrocosm and microcosm (and: the general and the individual) in which Plotinus was the most
influential participant.
This discussion in turn relies on the older debate between Platonic and Aristotelian worldviews
with respect to the relationship between matter and form, substance and appearance.xxxi The Early
Romantics struggle with the question of whether we are essentially simulations of God or nature, or
whether we (or at least the male geniuspoet, who emerges perhaps most fully in literature and
philosophy just prior to Romanticismxxxii) are actually repositories of meaning complete within
ourselves. Georg Braungart has argued that, at least from the Enlightenment onward, a compelling third
way is found out of this debate, and I contend that the Romantics, at least in Jena, follow this path. We
are indeed miniature reflections of a macrocosmic reality, but it does not follow that we are mere
shadows or puppets—rather, it is in our appearance and in the appearances we construct that meaning is
contained. Braungart describes this point of view as one that espouses “corporeal sense,” or the “Idee
des erscheinenden – und nicht ins Unendliche aufgeschobenen – Sinnes.”xxxiii For this view to hold, not
only must we be animated by real meaning, but nature—that is, the realm outside the ego—also must be
considered animated and alive. Schlegel phrases this conviction negatively when he says that if Fichte is
right and the ego alone “ist tätigreges Leben: Ichheit; Geist, Leben, Tätigkeit, Bewegung, Veränderung
sind alle eins,” then nature “besteht in steter Ruhe, Stillstand, Unbeweglichkeit, Abwesenheit von aller
Veränderung, Bewegung und Leben, d.h. im Tod" (KA XII: 152).xxxiv This is precisely what Schlegel
cannot accept; for him, materialism is too compelling of a doctrine and Spinoza, primarily, too
convincing a thinker to ignore. Novalis thinks similarly in Die Lehrlinge zu Sais, saying: "Man steht mit
der Natur gerade in so unbegreiflich verschiedenen Verhältnissen, wie mit den Menschen; und wie sie
sich dem Kinde kindisch zeigt, und sich gefällig seinem kindlichen Herzen anschmiegt, so zeigt sie sich
dem Gotte göttlich, und stimmt zu dessen hohem Geiste."xxxv
Beginning in 1796, Schlegel develops preliminary formulations, which never coalesced fully into
a coherent philosophical program, of a response to both Spinoza and Fichte at once.xxxvi In his work on
the reciprocity principle, a principle that, he wishes to argue, underlies all of the various oppositional
concepts that figure so prominently in Romantic thought, Schlegel shifts emphasis from the content of
these concepts themselves to the idea of dynamic movement between them. This movement takes place
within individual consciousness, but also between a self and a world that each contain meaning in their
appearance: the self is a meaningful representation of a larger reality, and nature or the nonego, though
we know it only through images we construct, is nevertheless also active and living. Schlegel’s first
concern in establishing a philosophy of dynamic reciprocal movement is to revise Fichte’s notion of the
basic movement in consciousness, the “Tathandlung” of the ego positing itself. Again, instead of
agreeing that the ego alone contains all life and meaning, Schlegel argues for a backandforth
movement between the subject and object worlds. “Von Vorstellung und Gegenstand muß Eins das Ct
[Zentrum], das andre der Hz[Horizont] seyn, oder beide sich gegenseitig und wechselweise möglich
nothwendig und wirklich machen" (KA XVIII: 66, no. 460). Movement between the similar forces of
self and world, a concept and its object, is what permits a relationship between the two to emerge; this
relationship is not between images of the thing and the thing itself, but between one set of meaning
imbued images and another. This interaction of phenomena is, essentially, the best we can do, but since
meaning and activity permeate phenomena, a relationship obtains that can justifiably be called real.
One of the more intriguing implications of Schlegel’s reciprocity principle is that, in the
movement between images that exists both within consciousness and between one consciousness and
another, a difference asserts itself that consciousness cannot control. The reciprocal movement Schlegel
describes not only takes place within the self, between self and nature, or between one person and
another; it also can be understood temporally, as an interaction between past and present.xxxvii In the gap
between the two timeframes or entities, something can escape that does not fit neatly into the model of
seamless progression between reciprocal concepts. This slippage is possible because Schlegel conceives
of his reciprocal entities, whatever they may be, as similar rather than as the same or as completely
different. Sameness between self and world essentially would imply once more that the self exists as the
creator of all meaning, while absolute difference would be incomprehensible and thus not translatable by
the self into images at all. Instead, Schlegel contends that understanding takes place when subject and
object, self and world recognize one another and share “eine eigentliche innerliche Verbindung
geschiedener, aber ähnlicher Geister" (KA XII: 350351). This “Verbindung” manifests as a constant
backandforth movement between two entities sympathetic yet different, and Schlegel describes this
movement, this connection, as “love.” And love, in turn, is only possible when “inner sense” and
activity are present in both subject and object:
Ist alles außer uns kein bloßes NichtIch, sondern ein lebendiges, gegenwirkendes Du, so
kann jeder Gegenstand nur die Hülle eines Geistes sein. Jeder muß einen inneren Sinn
haben, dieser muß überall wahrgenommen werden, wenn wir den Gegenstand nur recht
verstehen. Der Sinn leuchtet unmittelbar ein, das Du spricht in dem Augenblicke, wo das
Wesen in seinem Ganzen vom Ich verstanden wird, spricht es an und offenbart ihm das
Wesen seines Daseins. […] Und sofern wir dies Wahrnehmen und Ergreifen des Ichs des
Gegenstandes, diese Vermählung des wahrnehmenden Ichs und des wahrgenommenen
Geistes sehr gut Liebe nennen, können wir den Satz aufstellen, ohne Liebe kein Sinn, der
Sinn, das Verstehen beruht auf der Liebe (KA XII: 350351).
As Liliane Weissberg explains, Schlegel’s concept of “love” is also a critique of the
contemporary conviction that “die körperliche Liebe einer platonischen, wahren Liebe zur
verständnisvollen Freundin widersprach. Sinnlichkeit stand bei Schlegel nicht einer geistigen
Liebe gegenüber, sondern bildete eine Einheit mit ihr.”xxxviii
But unity does not imply sameness. By acknowledging a state of similarity and
sympathy, or correspondence, between self and world rather than a collapse between the two,
Schlegel makes room for the inevitability of difference, a difference felt in the sense of
fundamental loss that every conscious mind experiences:
Das WeltIch hatte seinen Ursprung vergessen: es findet ihn wieder. Dieses Wiederfinden ist die
Erinnerung: diese Erinnerung aber muß mit Schmerz und Reue verbunden sein, über den wo
nicht gänzlichen, doch teilweisen Verlust der ursprünglichen Einheit, über den innern Zwiespalt
und Kampf, der das Wesen des WeltIchs ganz zu zerrüttten droht (KA XII: 435).
The self can never return to its own origins, nor can it rejoin the state of original unity with all
other selves that Schlegel postulates, as he echoes Plato’s notion of a collective prebirth soul.
Manfred Frank paraphrases this dilemma for selfconsciousness and for its forevertruncated
relationship with the world: "Wenn wir zum Bewußtsein der Welt und unserer selbst kommen,
haben wir ihn immer schon verloren."xxxix The challenge is to deal with this loss of unity and with
the emergence of difference in a productive manner;xl Schlegel’s reciprocity principle, with the
dynamic movement between sympathetic entities that it implies, provides a model. Although
subject and object (as well as present and past self) will still appear to one another as part of an
eternal oscillation between mutually constructed images, this “endless row of mirrors”xli is
nevertheless a manifestation not of solipsism but of loving interaction.
This abstract aspect of Schlegel’s philosophy can be envisioned more concretely if a
parallel is drawn to twentiethcentury psychology and theories of object relations. Although it
emerges from a very different intellectual discourse, R.D. Laing’s psychological concept of
“relatedness” is a useful parallel to Schlegel’s notion of similarity. Loss and subsequent anxiety
are inevitable components of relatedness. Laing explains:
The analytic theory of objectrelations is based on the finding that the recognition of our own
separate existence, and the separate existence of the other person, is gained only slowly and often
painfully.…Anxiety remains an ultimate risk even in mature objectrelations, since there is no
escape from the tragic paradox that whereas our relatedness to others is part of us, the real other
person is not.xlii
For Schlegel, our similarity and sympathy with the other is real, as is the love that ensues. But we can
never subsume the real other into ourselves. The realization that we are always dealing in images can
indeed lead to feelings approximating Laing’s anxiety, such as the “pain” and “regret” mentioned in the
above quote from Schlegel on memory and loss. But if we embrace the reciprocity principle and the
relationship between two different, but meaningful and active entities that it implies, such pain can be
part of a productive mourning rather than a repetitive melancholy. When subject and object are separate
(and separated by the fact that they can only relate to one another via mutual imageconstruction rather
than directly), but similar, they can recognize one another in a process of reciprocal movement.
Schlegel's novel Lucinde as well as his other early philosophical writings, including his thinking
on gender,xliii do grapple with the dilemmas posed above and do invoke his potentially radical theory of
reciprocal relations to at least a certain extent. At first it would seem that Lucinde is a tribute to
solipsism: the protagonist Julius essentially works his way through women as representations of stages
in his own life. Lucinde represents the culmination of Julius’s development; not only does she not
disrupt his life expectations in any way, thus functioning as a really different person from him, but her
appearance seamlessly completes his life circle by returning him to his innocent past, to a time before he
contributed to his girlfriend Lisette’s suicide. Lucinde’s image, viewed by Julius “mit dem Auge meines
Geistes […] in vielen Gestalten, bald als kindliches Mädchen, bald als Frau in der vollen Blüte und
Energie der Liebe und der Weiblichkeit, und dann als würdige Mutter," facilitates Julius’s redemption:
“Julius fand in Lucindes Armen seine Jugend wieder.”xliv She, or rather her image, permits him the
return to his preproblematic past that Schlegel’s own philosophy would never allow. But when Lucinde
speaks during the dialogues in the novel’s final section, she points out that Julius loves a projection of
himself rather than a person separate from himself: “Nicht ich, mein Julius, bin die die Du so heilig
malst […]. Du bists, es ist die Wunderblume Deiner Fantasie, die Du in mir, die ewig Dein ist, dann
erblickst, wenn das Gewühl verhüllt ist und nichts gemeines Deinen hohen Geist zerstreut.”xlv Here
Lucinde hints that she actually is a different person from Julius, but this hint disappears by the
dialogue’s end. Rather than asserting her own meaningfulness or returning Julius’s love as a different,
yet similar equal, Lucinde accepts that he will subsume her into his own redeemed self (although, again,
his redemption is only possible via her existence): “So fühlt sich, wenn ich sein darf wie ich bin, das
weibliche Gemüt in liebeswarmer Brust. Es sehnt sich nur nach Deinem Sehnen, ist ruhig wo Du Ruhe
findest.”xlvi For Lucinde, to be “permitted to be as she is” is to be permitted to be a female extension of
Julius’s ego. The fact that this is the last line she speaks in the novel effectively affirms her status,
uncritically, as the instrument of Julius’s redemption fantasy rather than as a loving reminder of
inevitable loss.
Lucinde is often read as autobiographical, but one aspect of Schlegel’s own life that is usually
not acknowledged in interpretations of the novel is a tendency to perform the same type of
aestheticization of another as does Julius, rather than to establish a relationship between truly different,
if similar, spirits. Not long after meeting Dorothea in 1797, Friedrich ascribed central status to her in his
life, but Caroline Schlegel asserted that a glorified image rather than a real person was now helping to
guide Friedrich's intellectual work and personal development. “’Die Vergötterung seiner erhabenen
Freundin wurde für seinen Geist ein fester Mittelpunkt und Boden einer neuen Welt.’”xlvii The tendency
to idealize others is not necessarily a criminal offense, but Caroline’s judgment does suggest that, at
least in the early stages of his relationship with Dorothea, Friedrich acted more like Julius than like the
author of the reciprocity principle. While it is Friedrich who develops a subject philosophy and theory of
representation, it is Dorothea’s Florentin rather than Friedrich’s Lucinde that exemplifies and develops
these theories as a playingout of various possible scenarios between subjects and objects, scenarios that
represent the shape and implications of the “Wechselgrundsatz” and thus provide the outline of a
Romantic model of alterity.
Florentin depicts oscillation between any number of different, yet similar “spirits:” between the
protagonist’s past and present selves as well as between the protagonist and real others. At the same
time, however, the novel demonstrates the dangers inherent in alienation from others that Schlegel’s
philosophy acknowledgesxlviii but that Lucinde, and other Early Romantic fictional works, do not. While
Julius assembles past girlfriends in the service of his own illusion of a seamless life history, and
Heinrich von Ofterdingen neatly assembles aesthetic representations of various life stages into a
comprehensive story of his own (as yet unlived) life, Florentin cannot sustain an aestheticized narrative
of his past, cannot continue to live in his own fantasy. The dangers of solipsism as well as the
progressive potential of Schlegel’s philosophy of reciprocal relations, in which images serve as
indispensable mediators to real others, are explored and assessed in Veit’s fiction.
In the next section, I reinterpret Florentin relative to the reciprocity principle by
emphasizing three sequences in the novel: 1) Florentin's retelling of his past and his
simultaneous aestheticization of that past; 2) Florentin's relationship to his friends Juliane and
Eduard, specifically as manifested during an excursion they take away from the estate of
Juliane's famiily, as well as during Florentin's encounter with the couple's future marriage bed—
an encounter with overtly sexualized and thus threateningly real others; 3) Florentin's responses,
first to a painting and then to the actual appearance, of Juliane's aunt Clementine, who may be
Florentin's mother, the most important representative of his real psychic past. It is when he meets
Clementine that Florentin’s virtual, aestheticized, selfcontained universe begins to implode.
Each of these narrative sequences illustrates interactions between phenomena or images, but
each also presents intersubjectivity as constituting itself in the dynamic movement between
consciousness and the images that consciousness creates. In the space of that movement, what
"escapes"—but is, in the moment of escape, acknowledged—is something real, and something
really different.
Alterity and Intersubjective Tension in Florentin
Florentin is positioned at the vexed juncture of Enlightenment and Romanticism; it is a text that
embraces that juncture and, in my view, embodies a particularly Romantic form of reason. This
Romantic rationality is integral to the interdependent relationship between self and other in Schlegel’s
reciprocity principle, and this type of intersubjective relationship is in turn important to a depiction of
individual development and of social justice in Veit’s novel. Florentin advocates neither a solipsistic nor
a strictly instrumental form of rationality, but rather depicts possibilities for the just deployment of
reason in the private mind and in the public sphere, a deployment that does not deny the Jena focus on
selfconsciousness nor the fact that the self is primarily interacting with images it constructs of others. In
the imagegenerating space of the "Wechselgrundsatz," others can still represent and assert real
difference; Florentin's demonstration of the reciprocity principle in action shows how consciousness,
housed in real bodies, interacts with a material world not always transparent to the mind that encounters
it.
In this unfinished Bildungsroman, a Romantic yearning for a return to a glorified past, a
return that actually will move the hero forward into a harmonious future, is juxtaposed with self
reflexive reason about real present situations. Veit contrasts her sentimental protagonist with an
eminently reasonable family, that of the count and countess Schwarzenberg on their comfortable
estate. At the same time, the novel is characterized by more complex relationships than a
relatively simple conflict between rebellious irrationality and entrenched, oldworld
reasonableness would imply. Veit's construction of social interactions, interactions largely
determined by the characters' rerepresentations of their recollections, allows her to critique
significant tenets of Jena Romanticism while also using that movement's insights and showing
ways in which these insights can and should be integrated into an enlightened community.
In the following analysis of several narrative sequences from Florentin, we will see both
productive and unproductive variations on the reciprocity principle in a literary rather than a
philosophical discourse; interestingly enough, it is the literary text that reveals the reasonable,
nonsentimental, and potentially tangible aspects inherent in the philosophical presentation of
progressive reciprocation as “love.” This revelation sometimes happens via negative example:
when Florentin nostalgically prettifies his past by rerepresenting his recollections of it in song
and poetry, for instance, he enacts the basic selfself dialogue primary to Friedrich Schlegel’s
reciprocity principle, but also demonstrates how this dialogue can go wrong. Too often, Florentin
sees in others only images of himself, thus displaying the kind of inability to conceptualize the
world that Friedrich Schlegel says can lead only to unproductive repetition: to “einer
unendlichen Reihe von Spiegelbildern […], die immer nur dasselbe und nichts Neues enthalten”
(KA XII: 351).xlix When this happens, Florentin indeed functions as a critique of Lucinde’s
Julius, as Martha Helfer has claimed in another context.l
As much as he wishes to be alone, however, Florentin cannot avoid encountering real
other people and their very different lives, and these uncomfortably challenge his preconceptions
—although such encounters are constantly framed as meetings between mutually constructed
images. Veit’s use of portraits, artworks, and other aesthetic representations of reality makes this
aspect of mutual imagecreation very concrete. When his uneasy relationships with other
characters culminate in his viewing of the future marriage bed of his friends Juliane and Eduard,
Florentin’s preconceptions collide most strongly with his new reality, and his departure becomes
inevitable.
Finally, in a scene that initially seems less threatening to his psychic health, Florentin
meets Juliane’s aunt (and substitutemother), Clementine, in the form of a portrait. But his
encounter with this apparently serene image contributes substantially to Florentin’s later
psychological turmoil and to his disappearance. Ultimately, Florentin must run from real
reciprocity. His psyche cannot sustain the tension of the backandforth movement of images that
an intersubjective relationship demands.li However, the novel Florentin does sustain this tension;
it achieves the “appearing sense,” or meaning in appearance, that Friedrich Schlegel’s reciprocity
principle posits.
1. Florentin's Relationship to His Past: An Example of Unproductive Reciprocity
In the first lines he speaks, Florentin acknowledges a parallel between himself and the
world outside. Lost in the woods, he says: “In diesen Wald kam ich ungefähr auf eben die Weise
wie ins Leben" (Florentin 12). However, this opening scene does not transmit a sense of a
reciprocal relationship between Florentin and an animated nature so much as it establishes a
pattern, repeated throughout the novel, of a backandforth movement between reminiscence and
projection within Florentin’s own mind. This temporally expressed reciprocal movement
effectively and consistently removes Florentin from the real present rather than producing a
relationship of alterity with anything in the world outside. Continuing through the forest, he
shifts his focus from allusions about his past to vague intuitions about the future, saying:
Sei meine Reise wie mein Leben, und wie die ganze Natur, unaufhaltsam vorwärts!…Was mir
nur begegnen wird auf dieser Lebensreise, oder diesem Reiseleben?…Närrisch genug wäre es,
wenn mich dieser Weg auch endlich an den rechten Ort führte, wie alles Leben zum
unvermeidlichen Ziel (Florentin 11).
This pattern of recollecting and intuiting continues after Florentin meets the Schwarzenberg
family and recreates himself by narrating his life in a highly aestheticized formlii that does not
require interaction with the family members who act as his audience.
Florentin uses song and poetry to frame his recollections; in this respect he is similar to
the artist protagonists of Lucinde or of Heinrich von Ofterdingen, who are continually following
paths inward, seeking selfexpression and selfunderstanding by looking to art, rather than in
relationships with real others. Like Julius, Florentin fantasizes about a future in which his past
will make sense, in which he will have access to a solid tradition based on a supposedly real
home (“Vaterland”) and family. However, this real future remains indefinitely postponed, and
Florentin is suspended in a state of repetitive longing. In a tone that is both passionately earnest
(“ernsthaft”) and playful (“scherzhaft”), he declares: “Wo ist mein Vaterland?…Soweit mich
mein Gedächtnis zurückträgt, war ich eine Waise und ein Fremdling auf Erden, und so denke ich
das Land mein Vaterland zu benennen, wo ich zuerst mich werde Vater nennen hören"
(Florentin 17).
The reasons for the melancholy behind this proclamation become clear later, when
Florentin tells the story of his past and this search for his identity to his friends Juliane (Count
Schwarzenberg’s daughter) and her fiancé Eduard von Usingen while the three are on an
excursion in the countryside. Florentin’s recollections are dominated by the dynamic of
reciprocal remembering and intuiting described above. In a highly stylized manner, prefacing his
recollections with a song, Florentin relates the story of a childhood spent first on a lonely island,
and then in an equally lonely home with his supposed mother and sister. Told that his biological
father has died, Florentin must endure four years under the claustrophobic supervision of a
negative father figure, a Benedictine monk who prepares Florentin for a life in the order. Feeling
utterly trapped, Florentin begins his pattern of vague wishful thinking about the future: "es war
mir immer, als spräche etwas in meinem Innern zu mir: es gibt noch viel schöne Dinge, aber weit
von hier!" (Florentin 56). A friend, Manfredi, helps Florentin escape, but the two fail to prevent
Florentin's sister from entering a convent. After discovering that neither of the women he knew
as mother and sister are his biological relatives, and being told that his real parents are dead,
Florentin flees to Italy and becomes an artist. He is ecstatic when his lover, an artist’s model,
becomes pregnant. After she aborts the pregnancy, Florentin almost kills her, then nearly dies
himself from a hemorrhage he incurs while violently upset. After a cardinal takes the woman
under his protection, Florentin wreaks revenge by writing angry verses about him, verses that
soon circulate and make the story widely known.
Florentin's attempts to know the past through art, and his aestheticization of anger about
past events in verse—a past in which he was denied the chance to know his own father and to be
a father himself—are countered by his fantasies about a future in which he will have a loving
family. However, Florentin does not imagine an actual future family life so much as he dreams
of repairing his own damaged childhood and the traumatic experience with his lover. The act of
taking nostalgic refuge in vague dreams of becoming a father essentially permits Florentin to
reparent himself and simultaneously to reparent his dead child, to become the good father he
never had and never was. But this reparenting only happens through an aestheticized re
representation of his own memories. Veit thus permits her hero to construct the same sort of
return to innocence that Julius experiences in Lucinde, but the redemption here is temporary and
takes place solely within Florentin’s consciousness. Unlike Julius, who fulfills and forgives
himself via Lucinde, Florentin is stuck—he has not moved beyond his traumatic childhood. By
making it clear that Florentin’s way of seeking redemption is limited to his own solipsistic tale
telling, Veit indirectly critiques the lack of real reciprocity in Julius’s life as well.
The removal from the present that Florentin’s aestheticization of his past effects means
that for him, others are not animated and active—they are always either remembered or intuited.
He seeks “einen Gegenstand der Liebe […], die bis jetzt mir nur unbelohnt, aber tief im Herzen
lebt, wo würde ich den wohl finden? Er existiert irgendwo, das weiß ich, von dieser frohen
Ahndung werde ich im Leben festgehalten: aber wo er existert? Wo ich ihn finde?" (Florentin
46). This constant movement between recollection of a sad past and imagination of an idealized
future produces a fossilized virtual reality; Florentin gets nowhere in the real present. The
repetitive and thus unproductive reciprocal relationship that Florentin maintains with his own
past has tangible consequences—the abortion of his child, the end of his love relationship. It is
clear that Florentin's obsession with creating a perfect future contributes to his lover's decision to
end her pregnancy ("ich…vermehrte durch meine Ängstlichkeit ihre Ungeduld, so daß ich
unaufhörlich von ihren Launen litt" [Florentin 92]).
However, the revelation that Romantic reciprocity can be repetitive and even dangerous
for the psyche and for intersubjective relations does not imply that memory or representation per
se are always problematic. All of the intersubjective relationships in Florentin are determined at
least in part by rerepresentations of recollections of past events and by representations of hopes
for the future. This pattern is more complex than Schlegel’s reciprocity principle would imply,
but it is a logical consequence of that principle's application. The problem occurs when memory
and imagination are used to flee life, and life with others, in the present. Florentin’s monologue
about his past thus reminds us of the danger of “bad mirroring” inherent in Romantic reciprocity.
When he rerepresents himself, and only himself, with no acknowledgment, for instance, of the
reasons his commonlaw wife may have had for acting as she did, Florentin cannot express
sympathy for or acknowledge difference between his own psychic life and the psychic life of
others.
Despite the aestheticization of his selfnarration, it is clear that Florentin’s childhood was
genuinely sad, and his monologue contains some critical potential. In the tale he tells Eduard and
Juliane, he acknowledges abusive tendencies in subjectobject relations:
Ja oft rächen [Leute] sich für das ausgestandene Übel wiederum an ihren Kindern, so wie
diejenigen gegen ihre Untergebenen am härtesten verfahren, die selbst aus dem Stand der
Dienstbarkeit sind. Kinder werden von einer Generation auf die andre als angebornes Eigentum
angesehen, das man zu seinem eigenen Vorteil, oder nach Laune, bearbeitet und benutzt
(Florentin 55).
With this kind of insight into abusive power dynamics, it is perhaps surprising that Florentin is
not more successful at engaging in satisfying relationships of his own. But while he is certainly
not a total caricature of Romantic solipsism, Florentin ultimately fails to construct a real
reciprocal relationship between his present and past self—a relationship that acknowledges
similarity and difference between past and present, rather than striving either for seamless unity
or for absolute difference—and this in turn prevents him from engaging with others in the
present moment. This is not entirely Florentin’s fault. Juliane and Eduard, together with the
entire Schwarzenberg family, are also to a certain extent stuck between an aristocratic past and
an uneasy present in which the old ways are becoming obsolete. A skeptical engagement with the
past could lead to social and personal renewal for the couple, although at the novel's end the
chances for that do not look good. In Florentin's case, the loss of his parents, and in particular of
his mother, losses that inevitably impact the rest of his life, result in incessant repetition via
aestheticization and, more concretely, in his inability to create a real new family.
Although his attitude towards himself and his past is described occasionally as
“scherzhaft,” Florentin’s lengthy monologue often seems to lack the irony that characterizes
Lucinde, which after all is subtitled “Bekenntnisse eines Ungeschickten.” However, in Florentin
irony functions on a different level. Like Friedrich, Dorothea does not deny that we live in a
world of fictions. But she does not limit this insight to her presentation of Florentin’s character,
nor does she narrate only the fictions that he creates. Instead, she grants voice to, or animates,
multiple characters in the novel, and thereby demonstrates just how far removed from life in the
present and from meaningful intersubjectivity Florentin is. She depicts him as stuck in a fictional
universe sheerly of his own making rather than as always actively participating in relationships
characterized by mutually constructed and interactive images. Florentin therefore reveals the
dangers posed by the inadequate development of a model of alterity in Early Romanticism (and,
specifically, in Schlegel's philosophy). The abortion and the violent interaction between
Florentin and his lover depict the possible realworld consequences of the idealization of a lost
parent or of a past that never was.
2. Florentin’s Relationships in the Present: Clashes Between Repetitive and Progressive
Reciprocity
Although at the novel’s beginning Florentin presents himself as a lone wanderer in the
woods, after he accidentally encounters Count Schwarzenberg’s hunting party and saves the
count from a charging sow, he can no longer avoid the company of others. He returns with the
count to the Schwarzenberg estate and meets the countess, Eleonore, along with Juliane and
Eduard. An erotic current begins to run almost immediately between Florentin and Juliane, but
also between Florentin and Eduard,liii and the configuration of a sexuallycharged threesome
disrupts the uncritical, repetitive aspects of selfself reciprocity outlined in the argument above.
It is in his relationship with the young couple that Florentin finally focuses on the present and
also acknowledges and expresses a concrete, nonnostalgic sense of loss and longing. During
their adventure in the country, when Juliane dresses as a boy in order to accompany the two men,
the three young people “genossen sich selbst in reiner Unbefangenheit; Vergangenheit und
Zukunft war ihren Gedanken fern, der Wille des Augenblicks war ihnen Gesetz” (Florentin 44).
Soon Florentin is again lost in reminiscence, telling his friends the story of his past to date. But
when a storm forces the trio to spend the night at a miller’s home, Florentin and Eduard focus
again on the present. Florentin admits his desire for Juliane, but simultaneously denies that he
would ever act on his feelingsnot out of consideration for Eduard, but due to differences of
character and class. Fundamentally, he tells Eduard, he is too much of a loner to assimilate into
the world of the aristocratic clan. Eduard asks Florentin in disbelief, "'warum dünkst du dich
noch immer allein? in unsrer Mitte allein?'" (Florentin 117) And indeed, Florentin is far from
alone, but is rather completely imbricated in the Schwarzenberg family, and he has the power to
permanently alter the family's history. In this same passage, Eduard essentially proclaims his
love for Florentin, demanding to accompany him on his future travels: "'Höre, ich gehe mit dir;
ich teile deine Unternehmungen, ich will die Stelle deines Manfredi ersetzen'" (Florentin 116).
Florentin denies Eduard's request, but it is clear that his feelings for Eduard are at least as strong
as those he has for Juliane, who remains fascinating primarily for her "'Schönheit (…) mit immer
neuen, immer lieblichen Bildern erfüllt ihre holde Gestalt die Phantasie'" (Florentin 117).
While Florentin retreats from a confrontation with Eduard over Juliane, and also from a
confrontation with Juliane over Eduard, his presence in their lives nonetheless disrupts the status
quo, making the couple question their commitment to marriage and thus to preserving the
aristocratic order. The tensions evident in the exchange between Eduard and Florentin at the
miller's homebetween the desire to flee and the desire to stay, between the rustic countryside
setting and aristocratic conventions, between love and friendshipthese tensions are in
themselves productive in that they produce momentary glimpses of possible alternatives to the
characters' ultimate choice to remain in their (largely) selfprescribed social roles (Eduard and
Juliane marry, Florentin continues to insist on being an outsider). During the overnight stay at
the miller's home, and notably during a storm in which nature appears as nothing if not highly
animated and alive, the novel's intersubjective relationships are most decidedly in flux and come
closer than ever to real change. The conversations the three young people have during their
excursion, and the very excursion itself, demonstrate a desire to resist old social conventions
without denying the demands those conventions continue to make on the present.
Juliane contributes to the tensions and disruptions in the novel's inter and intrasubjective
relationships when she tells a "ghost story" prompted by her fear of the storm. This story turns
out to be, quite possibly, the story of Florentin's actual past, as Juliane relates an episode from
her aunt Clementine's life that foreshadows and ultimately may describe Florentin's birth
(Florentin 119126).liv To a certain extent the story follows the pattern of many folk and fairy
tales, with an infertile woman (Clementine's "friend") finally granted her wish for a child. In this
case, however, the child is born only after the woman has seen a ghost child. While Eduard's
response to this story is an aesthetic critique ("'Eine sehr niedliche Geschichte!…man versteht sie
vollkommen, ohne durch eine besondere prosaische Auflösung gestört zu werden'" [Florentin
126]), Florentin's reaction is visceral and caused by an uncanny conviction that he remembers the
tale's events: "'Mir war, als wären mir sowohl die Begebenheiten, als die Menschen darin nicht
fremd…Und was ich sonst nicht leicht fühle, mich hat ein leises Grauen dabei überfahren.'"
(Florentin 126127). Within the tale, an image that seems real (the infertile woman sees the
ghost child "in der Tat vor sich; da sie es aber anfangs hätte umarmen wollen, wäre es
zurückgewichen'" [Florentin 123]) precedes the arrival of a real child, though of course this is a
child who supposedly also exists only as image, only as a figure in a tale. The progression from
ghost child to "real" child within the tale then extends outward to Florentin, who seems to
remember as real things that are after all only aesthetic representations. The images in Juliane's
tale may indeed be images from, or images resembling those in, Florentin's actual past, and her
narrative introduces an element of difference and the unknown into Florentin’s previously sad
but seamless selfrepresentation. Although Juliane may here be providing Florentin with key
information about his historyinformation he himself claims to seekthe effect is disruptive
rather than comforting. After all, he cannot really remember these events, but rather their
similarity to something to which his memory has no direct access, "'so wie man, wenn man ein
Schauspiel liest, sich die Schauspieler denken muß, von denen man es einst hat spielen sehen'"
(Florentin 126). This passage makes it clearer than most in the novel that interactions between
mutually constructed images of reality influence the characters' feelings and development.
Juliane's perceptions of nature, and specifically of the storm, lead her to remember and tell a
story based on an older representative form (the folktale), and this story contains images that
evoke additional images in Florentin's mind, images he conveys to the others and that
subsequently influence their perceptions of him. Juliane is surprised by his strong reaction and
diverts attention by demanding breakfast and a song.
Thus the critical potential of the FlorentinJulianeEduard triangle is only partially
realized. Florentin's sense of remembering the events in Juliane's tale does not lead to any
revelations of certainty about his own past, and his nostalgic musings have the same effect on
Juliane and Eduard as they do on him—they effectively help prevent the engaged couple from
taking the action necessary to resolve the substantial tensions and difficulties that arise in the
weeks before their wedding. His reminiscences and projections entertain and distract them as
they prepare to be married. Specifically, the patriarchal and dynastic system that Florentin
clearly abhors is actually buttressed by his constant retreat into aesthetic recreations of his past.
The repetitive rather than progressive reciprocal relationship between Florentin and his past
keeps not just himself, but his friends from acting skeptically and critically in the present, and
precisely at a time when they need to be doing just that. At the same time, Florentin acts as a
disturbance in the relationship between Eduard and Juliane, just as they occasionally disturb his
virtual universe. But in the end, although he is clearly unhappy with the upcoming marriage,
Florentin leaves the estate rather than speaking up and providing reasons why the couple should
cancel or at least delay the nuptials.
Although Florentin in general insists relentlessly on emphasizing Juliane's beauty over
the "soul" that Eduard claims to love,lv the socialcritical potential embedded in his relationship
to the couple resurfaces when, on the day of the wedding, Florentin enters Juliane's new
bedroom. Above the fireplace is a basrelief of Psyche, "welche die Lampe in der Hand, den
schlummernden Gott der Liebe mit staunenem Entzücken beschaute." Florentin views this piece
appreciatively, but then he sees
das große Prachtbette (…). Am Oberteil des Lagers sowohl, als zwischen den stolzen
Federbüschen, die auf den reich mit goldnen Quasten verzierten schweren seidnen Vorhängen
prangten, breiteten sich mit großer Würde die Wappen, gleichsam der schwebenden, beinahe
entkörperten Psyche erdrückend entgegen. Wir wagen es nicht zu bestimmen, was dem
Florentin für Bemerkungen eingefallen sein mögen, aber er lachte laut auf (Florentin 145146).
Like the figure of Psyche, the bed is an artwork, an evocation of marriage and property relations.
Its appearance confirms Florentin's prejudices about the aristocracyhe sees what he wants to
seebut it is also really there, and seems to confirm the reservations about the wedding that other
characters have expressed as well. This passage suggests both the regressive and progressive
possiblities of the reciprocity principle: Florentin's laughing reaction to the bed prompts a
similar, critical reaction in the reader, but the action simultaneously remains confined to an
interaction between Florentin and an image; the weddingand the old social orderproceed. On
the one hand, the bedroom scene, as well as other encounters with art in the novel (such as
Florentin's viewing of paintings of Clementine, described in the following section) encourage
engagement with the world and with others; in other words, aesthetic encounters encourage
individual and perhaps also social change. On the other hand, the contrasts between the
supposedly natural and nonhierarchical lifestyle Florentin claims to prefer and the stilted,
repressive world he says he wishes to escape remain circumscribed in aesthetic terms and
confined to individual psyches. Florentin's responses to the marriage bed and to Juliane's ghost
story are very different from those of Juliane and Eduard, for instance. The novel's expression of
this paradoxical aspect of reciprocity is in itself a reciprocal reflection of a key contradiction in
Friedrich Schlegel's own thinking about selfother relationships, which is fundamentally a
conflict between idealism and realism. Sharin N. Elkholy paraphrases this contradiction when
she explains that "while he may ultimately believe in a reality independent of the 'I,'…Schlegel
reduces becoming to a successive process of reflection that occurs within the self."lvi Veit's
accomplishment in these passages is to explore and reveal the possible consequences of
simultaneously believing in real others and in acknowledging our dependence on images. This
simultaneity, or the existence of the paradox itself, is possible only through sustained movement
between reciprocal entities. In the case of Florentin, this movement happens in discrete passages
that describe interactions between present and past self, between self and other people (or
nature), and between self and aesthetic form.
While the triangle of Florentin, Juliane, and Eduard presents perhaps the most intriguing
set of relationships in the novel, several other couple dynamics characterize the narrative as well.
Jeffrey S. Librett identifies Juliane and Eduard as the novel’s “real” couple, accepted by and
integrated into the community’s social web. In contrast, Juliane and Florentin are a “virtual”
couple, and Betty and Walter, whom Florentin meets at Clementine’s estate, are a sort of parody
of the other pairs: their relationship is “much more unambiguously exploitative than the
(relationships) it mirrors in exaggerated form.”lvii There are, then, multiple reciprocal
relationships occurring on different levels in the novel; these reciprocities also function between
as well as within couples—e.g., Betty and Walter serve as a critical “mirror” for Juliane and
Florentin, and so forth. The seemingly simple opposition of sentimental and selfconscious
Florentin and the reasonable, and nonmelancholic Schwarzenberg family is also actually rather
complicated due to Veit’s narrative techniques. For instance, the information the reader receives
about the family is mediated by Florentin; what we read, in his internal monologues, are his re
representations of his images of the family. We learn of Clementine's existence not only through
Juliane's tale and through letters, but from Florentin. Juliane's letters to Clementine detailing her
ambivalence about the wedding and her feelings for Florentin are arguably as important to the
novel's construction as are Florentin's reminiscences and projections.
Veit also resists the tendency to construct simplistic dichotomous reciprocities between
emotion and reason, love and friendship, and so on, and she at least occasionally refuses to
assign consistent gender roles to such concepts. In fact, stereotypical gender roles are reversed
inasmuch as Eleonore and Clementine serve to counter Florentin's sentimental excesses and his
relentless aestheticizing of himself and others. Eleonore’s landimprovement projects on the
Schwarzenberg estate, together with Clementine’s social welfare program, aim to create a more
equitable, reasonable material reality, although they do so in relatively closely circumscribed
spheres of action. The count describes intersubjective relationships as well as the economic
conditions on and around the estate, where the nearby villagers live happily and in good health,
as determined by the female inhabitants: "'Eigentlich leben wir wie unser deutschen Väter: den
Mann beschäftigt der Krieg, und in Friedenszeiten die Jagd, der Frau gehört das Haus und die
innere Ökonomie'" (Florentin 22). Eleonore replies: "'Glauben Sie nur…der Mann, der jetzt eben
so kriegerisch und wild spricht, muß manche häusliche Sorge übernehmen'" (Florentin 22). The
count is more than happy to take on such duties, since Eleonore has accompanied him to various
battlefields, and has even left her child in Clementine’s care for fourteen years in order to do so.
The count explains: "'Es geziemt dem Manne allerdings […] der Gehülfe einer Frau zu sein, die
im Felde die Gefährtin ihres Mannes zu sein wagt'" (Florentin 22).lviii
Such comments could be read as merely part of a game played with images that men and
women typically construct of one another, but in this case the reversed gender roles are deployed
productively in the service of the estate, and the labels that Eleonore and her husband give each
other are translated into action in the estate’s daily life. In relationships with Eleonore and
Clementine, relationships affected by these women's choices about how to spend economic and
social resources, the inhabitants in and around their estates develop a just community where
reasoned and consensual decisions determine actions. On these two properties, the reciprocal
dynamics between men and women, sensory experience and reflection, recollection and hope,
and various forms of communication (prosaic writing in the form of letters, aestheticized
recollection in the form of songs) all affect social realities. Whether unconventional or
traditional, the relationships between men and women in the novel as well as the individual
characters themselves are not unambiguouslix—characters are seldom wholly good or bad, and
all, including Florentin, participate in an aging aristocratic society characterized by patriarchal
property law and archaic marriage customs. By presenting the reader with a ceaseless flow of
reciprocal movement between interrelated couples and settings, Veit highlights the conflicts her
characters experience when caught between the demand to repeat past customs and the desire for
social and personal progress.
3. The Challenge of Real Reciprocity
In keeping with his habit of introducing recollections of his past with a song, as well as of
transforming songs into memoir, Florentin constructs his relationships with others in the present,
and specifically with women, on the basis of aesthetic portrayals rather than on interaction with
others themselves. He is enthralled, for instance, by a portrait of Clementine—although the
portrait is of a much younger woman and depicts Clementine not as herself but as Saint Anne.
When Florentin comments ironically that he is in danger of falling in love with the painting,
Eduard replies: "'man wird es Ihnen nie verzeihen, sich von einem Gemälde haben hinreißen zu
lassen, da Sie die Gegenwart der schönen Frauen selbst so ruhig läßt'" (Florentin 33).lx But while
Florentin acknowledges critically, in this same scene, his tendency to remove himself from the
real present by taking refuge in glorified representations,lxi he later implies that meaning and
appearance, substance and form, are one and the same. In his farewell note to Eduard he adds a
message for Juliane: "'wer Sie sieht, wird Sie kennen; wer Sie kennt, muß Sie lieben; wer Sie
liebt, kann nie aufhören'" (Florentin 156). It is not Juliane's core self but her appearance that
inspires lovebut, again, that appearance is all Florentin can know, and, for him, it is in her
appearance that a core self is revealed.
A similar pattern occurs when Florentin visits the temple on Clementine's grounds and
sees a painting there of Cäcilia, the patron saint of music. This painting, which served as the
basis for the Saint Anne portrait, has an even stronger effect on Florentin. "Im Anschauen
verloren, vergaß er es völlig, daß es Clementinens Porträt sei, von dem er schon so viel gehört
hatte. Nichts was an Menschen und Menschenwerk erinnert, war seiner Seele dabei gegenwärtig,
nie hatte er die Göttlichkeit der Musik so verstanden, als vor diesem Angesicht" (Florentin 181).
It would seem, in other words, that the truest appreciation of art comes at furthest remove from
real others (from what reminds of "Menschen und Menschenwerk"); it is then that meaning and
appearance most fully coincide. And indeed, when the real Clementine appears, Florentin is
deeply confused; the confluence between substance and form as well as the discrepancy between
past and present bothers him for the first time. Feeling numb, he wonders, "warum ist diese
Clementine und alles was sie umgibt, grade mir wie eine Erscheinung (…) warum wird jene
ferne Erinnerung wach in mir? was tut sich die Vergangenheit, dies längst verdeckte Grab, gegen
mich auf? warum kann ich nicht mit den andern des gegenwärtigen Augenblicks froh werden?
Er suchte endlich dem Eindrucke der Musik die Unruhe zuzuschreiben, die immer noch in
seiner Seele widerhallte" (Florentin 185). Clementine, emerging "wie eine Erscheinung," evokes
memories Florentin does not welcome; the past she represents, whose trace she embodies in the
present, is not the idealized story of origin he has been seeking throughout the novel. Florentin
responds to Clementine's ghostly appearance much as he did to Juliane's "ghost story," with
anxiety.
Here Veit continues to present portrayals of reciprocal relationships in layers, as
Florentin's interactions with Clementine's portraits, portraits that supposedly reveal her true
nature, are supplanted by his confrontation with the real woman. Unlike his relationship with
Juliane, in which her beautiful form is superseded ultimately by an inert object d'artthe
marriage bedFlorentin's relationship with Clementine progresses from object to woman, albeit
to a woman also completely defined by her appearance. Swathed in black, sickly, gaunt, and
pale, Clementine seems to represent not Florentin's mother so much as the very absence of a
mother or of motherliness in his life.lxii And this is crucial, since Florentin's ultimate objective is
neither to win Juliane, and thus to upset the aristocratic social structure, nor even to reparent
himself through becoming a good father, but to find his real mother. She is the key to his real
origins, origins obscured by the standin mother he knew as a child. But the images of
Clementine with which Florentin is confrontedfirst in the two paintings, then in the appearance
of the ill elderly woman herselfrequire him to acknowledge his mother's absence, and therefore
also to acknowledge that he will and can never know his true origins, that the search for a real
origin is fruitless. Reciprocal interactions between the subject and the world of images thus have
the power to bring the subject closer to reality, and toward a realistic perspective on the past. The
paintings of Anne and Cäcilia are really rerenderings of Clementine, who in turn represents
Florentin's ultimate lost love object, his mother. After encountering Clementinesince they do
not speak, he more or less "views" her as he would a paintingFlorentin's anxiety reveals a
possibility for the beginning of mourning; his description of the past as a longcovered grave
avows its pastness, the fact that it is forever over. But rather than staying on Clementine's
property and lingering in her temple, rather than remaining suspended in aesthetic appreciation,
and rather than trying to build a relationship with a woman more absent than present, Florentin
leaves entirely. His departure can be read as prompted by his fight with the boorish Walter, and
thus reflective of his continuing failure to live in the present, but it is, on another level, a sign
that Florentin's days of seeking his past through art are over.
While Florentin's representation of his biography to his friends presupposes a fairly
straightforward dichotomous relationship between present and past, Juliane's tale and
Clementine's portraits demonstrate that any real knowledge he has of his origins, sketchy and
unreliable though it must remain, comes from tales or artworks that in turn rely on other tales or
artworks for their content. Juliane has heard her story from Clementine, and the portrait of
Clementine as Anne is based on the portrait of Clementine as Cäcilia. Florentin's knowledge of
himself can only be grounded in a series of representations of representations, and this series
recalls Guido Naschert's description of Schlegel's reciprocity principle, in which "alles eine
Rechtfertigung verlangt und daher die Grundmomente des Selbstverhältnisses nur im Kreis
erweisen kann."lxiii It is the desire for origin, and the desire to justify the present by finding and
defining the past, that produces the realization of the circularand simultaneously also possibly
progressivenature of selfknowledge. This circularandprogressive pattern is replicated in the
novel on the level of selfother relationships as well. Florentin's feelings for Juliane are in part
repetitions, yet also developments, of feelings he had for the sister he could not save. In his
relationship with Juliane, as in his brief confrontation with Clementine, Florentin experiences the
sense of loss described by Schlegel and by the psychologist R.D. Laing, the awareness that while
we carry feelings of relatedness and sympathy for others within us, we are ultimately separate
from those others. By depicting this sense of loss and concomitant anxiety, Florentin emphasizes
and confronts headon the inescapability of the fictions within which we live. The novel ends
with Florentin's questions about his past unanswered and the main characters in a state of
profound unrelatedness: as Clementine dispenses her profoundly ambiguous blessing to the
newlyweds ("'Gott segne meine lieben Kinder! mögt ihr nie die Leiden der Liebe erfahren!'"
(Florentin 191), Juliane looks up while Eduard looks down, and Betty looks nowhere, covering
her eyes entirely. What looks, though, like a complete breakdown of reciprocal relationships is
simultaneously an assertion of principles of differencethe old system has broken down, and the
individuals who once lived within it will have to construct a new world.
Conclusion
Florentin ultimately cannot continue to narrate himself without recognizing real others.
But rather than engaging in the "real" world of the "good mirror" that his author holds up, he
flees and the novel is left unfinished, the characters' futures unresolved. This is, however, not
necessarily an expression of hopelessness about the possibilities of real alterity (or: nonabusive
intersubjective relationships) and the tension it entails. Rather, Florentin can be read as an
unfinished critique—not only of the contemporary Early Romantic philosophical situation, but of
crucial problematic aspects of the oftenreciprocal relationship between Enlightenment and
Romanticism. Florentin is far more than a parody of other male Romantic heroes, although he
indeed can be considered that as well. His heroic battle with a sow at the novel's beginning is
melodramatic but also demonstrates Florentin's capacity for selflessness, as he endangers himself
to save the count's life. His flight at the novel's endperhaps to the New World, where he wants
to join the colonies' battle for independencecould be read as resulting from a sentimental
immaturity, but also as a sign of his unwillingness to accept the injustices of "old" Europe.
It is difficult not to see at least some of these tensions between old and new, irony and
earnestness, as autobiographical. Despite the fact that Veit was a wife whose selfstated primary
goal in life was to support her husband, she was also the child of Moses Mendelssohn, an
assimilated Jew and a major theorist of the Enlightenment. However, her engagement with the
tensions between Enlightened thinking and reactions against ittensions that themselves help
constitute a reciprocal relationship between old and newvirtually disappears by 1804, when she
proclaims: "Ich hasse diese Aufklärung unserer Zeit recht von Herzen; es ist noch nichts Gutes,
Nein Nichts, von ihr hergekommen! Schon weil er so uralt ist zieh ich den Katholizismus vor;
alles Neue taugt nicht."lxiv It is perhaps, then, not surprising that Florentin remained unfinished,
but this is not necessarily disappointing. Veit ultimately chose not to live in an ongoing state of
tension between allegiances to past and future, but at least her protagonist’s future remains
forever open.
Jeffrey Librett reads repercussions of Dorothea’s submission to Friedrich in her
intellectual production, and sees a rather complex reworking of submission as liberation in her
work. In her relationship with Friedrich,
Dorothea emphasizes the dimension of selfeffacement. She reads herself—at least, she tries to
read herself—in terms of the other, and not the other in terms of herself. She thus endows her
own language with the status of figurality, of derivativeness and anticipatoriness, while endowing
the language of the privileged other, in this case Schlegel, with the status of literalness.…
Schlegel is the literal ‘fulfillment’ or ‘realization’ of the ‘prefiguration’ she represents. lxv
In Florentin, Librett contends, Veit “resists this prefigurationfulfillment model by conceiving
prefiguration as fulfillment, fulfillment as prefiguration.”lxvi This is another way of describing a
state of ongoing intersubjective tension, but the reciprocity principle helps us understand Veit's
resistance to the traditional trajectory of prefiguration and fulfillment as more than a way of
reconciling submission and liberation. Instead, Romantic reciprocity acknowledges a
psychological element missing from Librett’s rhetorical analysis. Veit criticizes the solipsism of
living in an endless row of mirrors that, as Schlegel says, “immer nur dasselbe und nichts Neues
enthalten” (KA XII: 351), and shows that intersubjective relationships are the realization of
productive mirroring, of the productive and progressive interplay of images delineated in the
reciprocity principle. Such relationships acknowledge and in fact intimately involve loss.
Florentin's loss of his parents, Clementine's loss of her son, and Florentin's loss of Juliane are all
anxietyprovoking situations that are productive for the narrative's development, if not always for
the characters themselves.
By countering Florentin's aestheticized presentations of a past whose veracity cannot be
ascertained with Juliane's narration of a version of what may be Clementine's past, and by virtue
of being unfinished, Florentin displays a lack of what Richard Terdiman calls "mnemonic
confidence," a lack characteristic of philosophy and literature in postEnlightenment Europe.lxvii
The realization that information about the past is unreliable, and the inability to integrate that
unreliable, fragmentary knowledge into a coherent view of the present is, Terdiman argues, a
"memory crisis" that is a fundamental productive force for thinkers around 1800. While the lack
of mnemonic confidence parallels a lack of confidence in interactions with real others, it
simultaneously encourages skepticism about one's own cherished world view. The crisis of
memory echoes the crisis of hermeneutical understanding, and this dilemma also harbors a
productive potential. In rejecting understanding of the self or of others based on intuition alone,
and privileging an understanding based on dialogue and reflection, Veit opens herself up to the
criticism that deconstruction levels at hermeneutics: that what claims to be an aim for consensus
is really an aim to dominate others. But, as Jean Grondin explains,
the meaning of communicative reason is not to level out individuality; quite the contrary, it is to
bring the individual's communicative possibilities to the point where they can unfold themselves
freely and articulate their justifiable claims to validity. It is only in the context of a dialogical
community that the pluralism and difference of lifeforms favored by deconstruction are
possible.lxviii
The earliest Romanticism favored exactly that perspective on dialogical understanding; the
contradiction in Schegel's thought on reciprocity reflect the tensions between the need for
individual validity and the demands of community. The paradoxes of Veit's text emphasize
similar tensions. In Florentin, aestheticized memory is depicted as dangerous (Florentin is
trapped more often than not in an aestheticized version of a virtual past), but interactions with
artistic renderings of memories of the past are necessary components of intersubjective
relationships and of a selfknowledge that recognizes its own contingency. As itself an aesthetic
staging at and of the juncture of late Enlightenment and early Romantic thought, Florentin
contributes to the body of selfconsciously subjective and anamnestic narration of this period.
Guido Naschert points out that in Early Romanticism, the fragmentary nature of texts
expresses and mirrors the necessarily fragmented relationship of the self to itself;lxix the dynamic
movement of the reciprocity principle can help that self reach beyond its own fragmentation and
establish connections to real others, although those connections will always necessarily be
mediated by imagery filtered through each subject. Florentin, a fragmentary novel written before
Dorothea and Friedrich fled into the aestheticized space of a glorified image of the Catholic
church, an unfinished work that employs circular representations of selfother relationships,
comes closer than any other work of Early Romantic literature to realizing the initially
progressive, critical character of the early years of German Romanticism, a time in which the
Jena authors explored "Romantic reason" in a way soon thereafter lost. As a representative of
this progressive Romantic moment, Florentin is "ein wahrlich symphilosophischer Text."lxx
Acknowledgment
i
I am indebted to Professor Leon Chai of the Department of English at the University of Illinois for sharing his extensive knowledge
of Friedrich Schlegel's work with me, for directing me to the "Wechselgrundsatz" in the first place, and for pointing out the
importance of dynamic movement therein.
Notes
“Early Romantic” or “Jena Romantic” group members included Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel, Dorothea Veit (later
Schlegel, after her marriage to Friedrich in 1804), Novalis, Ludwig Tieck, Friedrich Schelling, Caroline SchlegelSchelling, and
Friedrich Schleiermacher. Friedrich Hölderlin was not in Jena from 17961801 and therefore is often not included in the group, but,
as Manfred Frank and others have shown, his philosophical work clearly belongs to the same movement.
ii
Manfred Frank defines Idealism as the conviction that “die Grundgegebenheiten unserer Wirklichkeit geistige (eben
ideelle) Entitäten sind oder auf solche zurückgeführt werden können,” and then argues that Early Romantic philosophy
actually does not fit that definition. I develop this contention in the context of my own argument shortly. Frank is quoted in
"Unendliche Annäherung". Die Anfänge der philosophischen Frühromantik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997) 27.
iii
Novalis, Gedichte. Die Lehrlinge zu Sais, ed. Johannes Mahr (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1984) 64. It should be noted
that this statement comes in the context of the apprentice's selfcritique (“Auch ich bin ungeschickter als die andern, und
minder gern scheinen sich die Schätze der Natur von mir finden zu lassen…So wie dem Lehrer ist mir nie gewesen,” 64).
Die Lehrlinge zu Sais also does present a version of a debate about the relationship between man and nature, and thus a
continuation of Novalis's philosophical critique of Fichte. But the truths that the apprentice discovers via
“Naturentschleierung” ultimately are revealed as projections of his own consciousness, and they fit seamlessly into his
process of selfdiscovery; no elements surface in nature or in others that are incommensurate with the apprentice's
developing selfconcept.
iv
As Elizabeth Mittman and Mary R. Strand phrase it, for Novalis, "the other, the nonbeing, is also merely an image
formed by the self. (…) The I creates a world of images." "Representing Self and Other in Early German Romanticism,"
Theory as Practice: A Critical Anthology of Early German Romantic Writings, ed. and trans. Jochen SchulteSasse, et al.
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997) 54.
v
Mittman and Strand explain that it is the realm of feeling and imagination "out of which the subject unfolds into
differential systems and thus begins to relate to the outside world. The wall of isolation, which can enclose the I as it
experiences consciousness, is then broken down as the I encounters others outside of itself." "Representing Self and Other
in Early German Romanticism" 55.
vi
Novalis, Werke, ed. Gerhard Schulz (Munich: Beck, 1969) 294f.
vii
Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Ausgabe, ed. Ernst Behler (Munich: Schöningh, 1958), II: 182183, no. 116. Abbreviated
henceforth parenthetically in the text as KA, followed by volume, page number, and fragment number where applicable.
viii
Friedrich Schlegel formulates the problem of the ego that does not have an appropriate conceptualization of anything
beyond itself as follows: "Wo der Gedanke des Ichs nicht eins ist mit dem Begriffe der Welt, kann man sagen, daß dies
reine Denken des Gedankens des Ichs nur zu einem ewigen Sichselbstabspiegeln, zu einer unendlichen Reihe von
Spiegelbildern führt, die immer nur dasselbe und nichts Neues enthalten." KA XII: 351. Schlegel distinguishes between the
productive, progressive oscillation between concepts of self and world that characterizes the "endless row of mirrors"
referred to above from the endless selfmirroring that comes from having images only of oneself and not of the world
outside.
ix
The phrase "culture of couples" here comes from Lothar Pikulik, who ascribes much Early Romantic thinking about conceptual
reciprocities such as "past/future" and "remembering/anticipating" as structured by one Romantic thinker's notion of him or herself
at any given moment as a participant in "symphilosophical" exchange with another member of the group. In this way of thinking,
the couples included, at different times, Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel, Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel
and Friedrich Schleiermacher, Friedrich Schlegel and Dorothea Veit, August Wilhelm Schlegel and Caroline Schlegel (who later
became Caroline SchlegelSchelling and was then paired with Friedrich Schelling), Ludwig Tieck and Novalis (Pikulik, 67). In his
afterword to the Reclam edition of Florentin, Wolfgang Nehring presents a more concrete, less flattering view of this couple
culture, and of Dorothea in particular. He contends that the group's work was marred by a "kleinlicher Konkurrenzgeist, ein
wechselseitiges Sichbeobachten und Aneinandermessen, die Polemik nach außen setzt sich als Verlästerung im innern Zirkel fort,
und hier scheint es, daß Dorothea Schlegels Beitrag an Subversion einer der größten ist—nicht weil sie mehr tut als die anderen,
sondern weil sie rigoroser und böser urteilt. Da ist zunächst ihr Bedürfnis, Friedrich als den Bedeutendsten der Gruppe
herauszustellen, wohl nicht unbeeinflußt davon, daß er äußerlich karrieremäßig am wenigsten erfolgreich ist." Dorothea Schlegel,
Florentin (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1993) 293. Cited henceforth parenthetically in the text as Florentin.
x
Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Wissenschaftslehre novo methodo, ed. Erich Fuchs (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1982) 73.
xi
Schlegel in a letter to Christian Gottfried Körner, KA XXIII: 333. Quoted here in Guido Naschert, "Friedrich Schlegel
über Wechselerweis und Ironie (Teil 1)," Athenäum. Jahrbuch für Romantik (1996) 47.
xii
Frank, "Unendliche Annäherung" 27.
xiii
Mittman and Strand, "Representing Self and Other in Early German Romanticism" 55.
xiv
Fichte, Wissenschaftslehre novo methodo 7273.
xv
Quoted here in Guido Naschert, "Friedrich Schlegel über Wechselerweis und Ironie (Teil I)" 48.
xvi
Quoted here in Naschert, "Friedrich Schlegel über Wechselerweis und Ironie (Teil I)" 48.
xvii
Naschert, "Friedrich Schlegel über Wechselerweis und Ironie (Teil I)" 49. Although I cannot treat Novalis's extensive
critique of Fichte in depth, it is worth mentioning here that that critique includes reconceiving the Fichtean "NichtIch" as a
"Du": "Statt Nichtich Du." See Novalis, Schriften. Die Werke Friedrich von Hardenbergs, ed. Paul Kluckhohn and
Richard Samuel [Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 19601988]) III: 430.
xviii
Expressions of the reciprocity principle are found primarily in Jakobis Woldemar (1796; in KA II), in the Entwicklung
der Philosophie in zwölf Büchern (18041805; in KA XII), and in "Aus der ersten Epoche. Zur Logik und Philosophie," an
addition to the Philosophische Lehrjahre (1796; in KA XVIII).
xix
Naschert points out that only Manfred Frank has to date fully and correctly acknowledged the significance of the
reciprocity principle for Schlegel's philosophical system, and then actually worked with the principle in a consistent way in
his research. Others tend to (perhaps unknowingly) follow Hegel's judgment (in the Ästhetik, Berlin: Aufbau, 1985, I: 72)
that Schlegel's work is to be understood primarily under the rubric of aesthetics, and that Schlegel uses aesthetics in part to
flee the dilemmas of Fichte's philosophy. Naschert elaborates: "Die Einseitigkeit der Hegelschen Darstellung ist freilich
längst zurückgewiesen, die ästhetizistische Deutungstendenz hat trotzdem in manchen Forschungsbeiträgen eine
fragwürdige Selbstverständlichkeit erhalten. Angesichts der im wörtlichen Sinne grundlegende Bedeutung des
WechselerweisKonzepts ist es zudem erstaumlich, daß sich die Schlegelforschung diesem Problem nur sporadisch
angenommen hat. In mehreren Arbeiten wird zwar der Grundgedanken Schlegels als solcher beiläufig erwähnt, hinegen
nur in wenigen gedeutet und argumentativ rekonstruiert…Eine erste begründungstheoretische Einordnung des
Wechselerweises lieferte Manfred Frank [in Das Problem 'Zeit' in der deutschen Romantik. Zeitbewußtsein und
Bewußtsein von Zeitlichkeit in der frühromantischen Philosophie und in Tiecks Dichtung (1972; Paderborn: Schöningh,
1990, 27f)]. Seit 1972 wies er immer wieder auf seine fundierende Funktion hin…," "Friedrich Schlegel Über
Wechselerweis und Ironie (Teil I)" 4950. Naschert summarizes the results of other investigations of the reciprocity
principle (including work by Ernst Behler, Thomas Schmidt, and Andreas Arndt) on p. 51 of the same essay.
xx
Naschert also explains that five of Schlegel’s notebooks from the years 17961797 have been lost; these in all
probability contained some work on Fichte, Schelling, and quite possibly on the reciprocity principle as well. “Friedrich
Schlegel über Wechselerweis und Ironie (Teil I)” 52.
xxi
Frank, "Unendliche Annäherung" 20, 27.
xxii
A major exception here is Paola Mayer’s Jena Romanticism and Its Appropriation of Jakob Böhme: Theosophy –
Hagiography – Literature (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueens University Press, 1999), in addition to her article
“Reinventing the Sacred: The Romantic Myth of Jakob Böhme,” The German Quarterly 69.3 (1996) 247259.
xxiii
Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (Orlando: Harcourt, 2003) 15.
xxiv
See for example Dieter Henrich, Konstellationen. Probleme und Debatten am Ursprung der idealistischen Philosophie
(17891795) (Stuttgart: KlettCotta, 1991; Manfred Frank, "Unendliche Annäherung", among others.
xxv
Martha Helfer, "Dorothea Veit's Florentin: Constructing a Feminist Romantic Aesthetic," The German Quarterly 69.2
(1996) 148, 146.
xxvi
This paradox is not unique to Veit. RuthEllen Boetcher Joeres identifies the same basic conflict between public
assertiveness, even artistic radicality, and the appearance of submissiveness and/or frivolity in several female authors of
roughly the same period, including Bettine von Arnim and Louise Aston. See Respectability and Deviance: Nineteenth
Century German Women Writers and the Ambiguity of Representation (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago
Press, 1998).
xxvii
Helfer summarizes much of the available scholarship on Florentin in “Dorothea Veit’s Florentin” 144148.
xxviii
There are, for instance, interpretations that focus on the character of Eduard as representing a nobleman named
Eduard d'Alton, with whom Veit was in love. See Helfer, “Dorothea Veit's Florentin" 146. Inge Stephan also has
demonstrated that there are reasons to read Florentin as an autobiographical work; she argues that Veit projects her own
character onto that of Florentin by "creating a male character who functions in a 'female' fashion by remaining alone, an
outsider, and lacking fulfillment in a society that does not accord him the possibility of selfdefinition" (Stephan in Helfer,
147). Helfer contends that Veit's own contradictory character (with its poles of independence and subservience) is reflected
in the contradictory character of her novel (which is a mix of complex theoretical insight and ineffective fiction),
“Dorothea Veit’s Florentin” 148.
xxix
In 1799, when Dorothea leaves her husband Simon Veit and joins Friedrich in Jena, the same year in which Lucinde
appears, Friedrich pens Über die Philosophie. An Dorothea. This essayletter primarily concerns the reciprocal,
interdependent relationship of man to woman and of philosophy to poetry, among other dualities. Here Friedrich states:
“Übrigens aber halte ich strenge auf meinem Satz: Religion sei die wahre Tugend und Glückseligkeit der Frauen, und
Philosophie die vorzüglichste Quelle ewiger Jugend für sie, wie Poesie für die Männer. […] Die Philosophie ist den Frauen
unentbehrlich […].” Dorothea begins work on Florentin in the fall of the same year. She was, however, acquainted with
philosophy well before meeting Friedrich; in Berlin, while married to her first husband Simon Veit, she attended Friday
evening discussions at the home of Kant specialist Markus Herz; and her education in general, provided by her father
Moses Mendelssohn, was, in Hans Eichner's words, "ungewöhnlich vielseitig" for a girl of her time. See KA V: xxi.
Liliane Weissberg provides a more differentiated overview of Veit’s upbringing, saying that the child Brendel
Mendelssohn “las Werke der Aufklärung, aber heimlich auch die vom Vater verurteilten Romane. Ihr eigenes Leben
jedoch sollte sich nicht nur nach dem ‘Verstand’ richten, sondern auch nach Erwägungen, in denen dieser mit der
orthodoxen Religion und einem konservativen Frauenbild einen Kompromiß bilden sollte.” Florentin: Roman –
Fragmente – Varianten, ed. Liliane Weissberg (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1986) 212.
xxx
Manfred Frank establishes a trajectory of philosophies of consciousness from the eighteenth through the twentieth
centuries in the collection entitled Selbstbewusstseinstheorien von Fichte bis Sartre (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1991).
xxxi
Much more on this debate, as it frames a different thematic context, in Victoria Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002).
xxxii
See Jochen Schmidt, Die Geschichte des GenieGedankens 17501945. Von der Aufklärung bis zum Idealismus, vol. 1
(Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1985) 1, 6168.
xxxiii
Georg Braungart, “’Intransitive Zeichen’: ‘Die Signatur des Schönen’ im menschlichen Körper bei Karl Philipp
Moritz,” Rhetorik 13 (1994) 3. See also Braungart’s booklength study involving this topic, Leibhafter Sinn. Der andere
Diskurs der Moderne (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1995).
xxxiv
Also cited in Ernst Behler, German Romantic Literary Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) 191.
xxxv
Novalis, Gedichte. Die Lehrlinge zu Sais 68.
xxxvi
Ernst Behler explains that Schlegel is, in this phase of his work, interested philosophically in establishing that
“idealism and realism, subject and object, Fichte and Spinoza, were not only complementary components, but also two
poles that must ‘interactively make themselves possible, necessary and real.’” German Romantic Literary Theory 190191.
Schlegel is cited in KA XVIII: 66.
xxxvii
In Schlegel’s view, the present is fundamentally empty and must be invested with meaning via philosophical
aesthetic forms, such as the fragment, that rerepresent the past. Manfred Frank elaborates on the Romantic notion of the
“Substanzlosigkeit [der] Gegenwart” and on the importance of temporality to Romantic theories of representation in Das
Problem “Zeit” in der deutschen Romantik 20, et al.
xxxviii
Weissberg, Florentin 229.
xxxix
Frank, "Unendliche Annäherung" 28.
xl
For Schlegel, a productive attitude toward loss must be an ironic one. But this does not imply an ultimate hopeless
negativity. Like Guido Naschert, Ginette Verstraete defends Schlegel against Hegel’s charge that Romantic irony in the
face of the unknowability of the other is “merely abstract Sophisterei on the part of a selfindulgent subject” when she
says: “…confronted with the chaos of the outside world, Schlegel develops a philosophy that finds its roots not in the
reflective powers of an allencompassing mind, but in the creative powers of an incomplete and infinitely divided
subject…Whereas Hegel unites subject and object in a third term—objective spirit—and reduces the particularities of life
to the manifestation of this allembracing (plural) totality, Schlegel relativizes the existence of the mediator as unreal and,
instead, affirms the creative powers of a subject that never simply ‘is’ precisely because its condition for existence—the
unification with the object—is contradictory.” Fragments of the Feminine Sublime in Friedrich Schlegel and James Joyce
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998) 9.
xli
Translated from KA II: 182183, no. 116. See also Note 8 above.
xlii
R.D. Laing, "An Examination of Tillich's Theory of Anxiety and Neurosis," British Journal of Medical Psychology 30
(1957) 8891.
xliii
Schlegel’s writings on gender from various texts have been compiled by Winfried Menninghaus into the volume
Theorie der Weiblichkeit (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1982).
xliv
Friedrich Schlegel, Lucinde (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1993) 7, 73.
xlv
Schlegel, Lucinde 104105.
xlvi
Schlegel, Lucinde 107.
xlvii
Caroline Schlegel quoted in Weissberg, Florentin 216.
xlviii
See for instance KA XII: 351; see also Note 8 above.
xlix
See also Note 8 above.
l
Helfer, 152153.
li
I adopt the notion of “tension” from feminist psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin, who argues that healthy intersubjective
relationships require sustained “tension between asserting the self and recognizing the other.” Only a maintenance of such
tension can break the cycle of domination and submission perpetrated by supposedly selfcontained subjects. In order for
this type of relationship to be successful, however, the participants must understand themselves and others as living, active
subjects; they must avail themselves of “a new possibility of colliding with the outside and becoming alive in the presence
of an equal other.” This position is not dissimilar to Schlegel’s in his elaborations of the reciprocity principle. See Jessica
Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Feminism, Psychoanalysis and the Problem of Domination (New York: Pantheon Books,
1988) 32, 221 et al.
lii
In this he performs “the poetic construction of the selfpositing subject” that Helfer contends is the “goal” of Jena
Romantic discourse; “Dorothea Veit’s Florentin” 149.
liii
Martha Helfer points out that the novel "delicately suggests a possible explanation" for the fact that Florentin has not
found "his dream woman" but, in Eduard, may have found his dream man. "Not only has Florentin never loved a
womanalthough he quickly befriends men, has experienced embarassing sexual failure in a heterosexual tryst, and
probably fears falling in love with Juliane for this reasonat the end of the narrative he is actually accused of despising
women," "Dorothea Veit's Florentin" 154.
liv
Florentin's family relationships are often unclear in what was intended only as the first part of the entire novel. In his
afterword to Florentin, Wolfgang Nehring states that Veit intended to clarify Florentin’s family history in the never
completed second part. See Florentin 323.
lv
See for instance Florentin 117.
lvi
Sharin Elkholy, "What's Gender Got to Do With It?: A Phenomenology of Romantic Love," Athenäum. Jahrbuch für
Romantik (1999) 130.
lvii
Jeffrey S. Librett, The Rhetoric of Cultural Dialogue: Jews and Germans From Moses Mendelssohn to Richard
Wagner and Beyond (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000) 178.
lviii
See also Christine Brantner’s discussion of gender roles in Florentin, part of her argument that Veit develops “ein
Frauenbild, das weit über das idealisierte ihrer männlichen Romantikerkollegen hinausging,” in “Frühromantische
Frauengestalten in Dorothea Veits Roman Florentin,” Michigan Germanic Studies 17.1 (1991) 52, et al.
lix
This ambiguity is part of what Helfer calls the “polysemous” nature of Jena Romantic works and of Florentin in
particular; “Dorothea Veit’s Florentin” 149.
lx
Martha Helfer argues persuasively that Florentin’s “emotional attachments to men are much more profound and
enduring” than his relationships with women. However, as Helfer also says, he “flees those interpersonal relationships that
threaten to undermine his selfcentered existence,” including relationships with men (“Dorothea Veit’s Florentin” 158n23).
Although his male friendships are not mediated through the same aesthetic forms as are his attractions to women, I would
contend that Florentin ultimately seeks to “potentiate” himself through these friendships by seeing himself mirrored in his
male acquaintances, rather than to construct qualitatively better relationships with men than with women. Again, it is when
the men in his life threaten to become too different from his preconceived images of them and of himself that Florentin’s
psychic world cracks.
lxi
See for instance Florentin 33.
lxii
Helfer describes Clementine as "defined by absence," absent from the wedding and absent from her own representations
in the two paintings, in "Dorothea Veit's Florentin" 155 et al.
lxiii
Naschert, "Friedrich Schlegel über Wechselerweis und Ironie (Teil I)" 62.
lxiv
Briefe von Dorothea und Friedrich Schlegel an die Familie Paulus, ed. Rudolf Unger (Berlin: B. Behr, 1913) 8485.
Cited here in Wolfgang Nehring's afterword to Florentin, 297298.
lxv
Librett, The Rhetoric of Cultural Dialogue 180.
lxvi
Librett, The Rhetoric of Cultural Dialogue 181.
lxvii
Richard Terdiman, Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993) 21.
lxviii
Jean Grondin, Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994) 135.
lxix
Naschert, "Friedrich Schlegel über Wechselerweis und Ironie (Teil I)" 90.
lxx
Naschert, “Friedrich Schlegel über Wechselerweis und Ironie (Teil I)” 90.