August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel
(1767–1845, 1772–1829)

August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, Athenaeum. Eine Zeitschrift (Athenaeum: A magazine), vols. 1–3, 1800–1798, Collection Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin—Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, installation view, Neue Galerie, Kassel, documenta 14, photo: Mathias Völzke

The journal Athenaeum was founded in 1798 in Berlin by the brothers August Wilhelm and Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel. It was discontinued in 1800, but its six issues stand as a defining statement of (early) German Romanticism and the Idealist philosophy that it inspired in the minds of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, and others. In 1803, Schelling—who, like Johann Joachim Winckelmann, never actually set foot on Greek soil or laid eyes on the Athens of their day—edited a follow-up publication titled Europa, which never equaled the heights achieved in the halcyon days of Athenaeum.

Posted in Public Exhibition