W. L. Metternich's restoration policies after 1815. The son of a Protestant pastor, Schlegel converted to Catholicism in 1808 and publicized his new convictions in a wide range of philosophical, historical, and religious books, articles, and lectures. He became known throughout Germany and Europe for his reactionary views. Consequently, he was attacked by such liberals as Heinrich Heine, whose judgment of Schlegel in
Die romantische Schule (1836; translated as
The Romantic School, 1882) had an effect well into the twentieth century.
Thus there were two Schlegels, the young one and the older one, and the debate about the "true" Schlegel has never quite ended. In the twentieth century Schlegel's ideas have influenced modern writers as diverse as György Lukács, Thomas Mann, and Robert Musil, and it is a tribute to his powers as a literary theorist and as a philosopher that his views can provoke strong arguments pro and con even today. The history of Schlegel scholarship is characterized by these arguments, which reflect the various points of view, literary and political, that Schlegel's ideas inspired. Perhaps because he was one of the most controversial authors of the Age of Goethe, he is also one of the most fascinating.
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