Asko Nivala. The Romantic Idea of the Golden Age in Friedrich Schlegel's Philosophy of History. New York: Routledge, 2017. viii + 273 pp.

Summary

Friedrich Schlegel is commonly identified as a writer, philosopher, and literary theorist. Though much of his work focused on Greek and Latin classics, Schlegel thought of himself as a historian, engaged in what he characterized as Kulturgeschichte (though admittedly not in the modern sense of the term). Inspired by Hesiod and the book of Genesis, many eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury models of history followed a triadic pattern, positing a problematic present as a fallen or undesirable age, between an idyllic primitive Golden Age in the past, and the possibility of a utopian Golden Age in the future. Asko Nivala challenges the commonly held reading that Schlegel and the Romantics believed that a Golden Age had any basis in history. He further proposes to complicate the view that Romanticism be understood in terms of a nostalgic yearning for such a lost Golden Age. Rather it is a fluid trope that allowed Schlegel to critique the cultural present. Schlegel's “Romanticism” here refers to the historical period in German cultural history at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, intertwined with the final stages of the Enlightenment. Its early proponents include the Schlegel brothers, Novalis, Tieck, Schleiermacher, Dorothea Veit and Caroline Schlegel.

This book focuses on Schlegel's early writings, literary fragments, and letters until his conservative turn and conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1808. Nivala, a cultural historian and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Turku, Finland, teases out and drills down into Schlegel's complex and shifting treatment of the conception of a Golden Age, proposing to reconstruct his philosophy of history. For Schlegel, the Golden Age is often deployed ironically. He rejected claims that it represented an age of greater authenticity, a position Nivala compares to Adorno's critique of fetishizing the genuine. Noting the complexity of Schlegel's conception of the Golden Age, Nivala suggests that he is ripe for various contemporary readings, including the postmodernist, the transhumanist, and the ecocriticial.

Deploying a broadly chronological and biographical organization, Nivala first examines Schlegel's writings on classical poetry, arguing that he distinguishes between the myth of the Golden Age and primitivist myth, too often conflated in the critical literature.