„Wenn ich ein Mann wäre und schreiben könnte!”

The board of the Friedrich Schlegel Society aims to bring more attention to and honor the diverse work and influence of Dorothea Schlegel. Therefore, the Friedrich Schlegel Society invites you to the event “If I Were a Man and Could Write!” on February 7, 2024, at 7:00 PM. Yvonne Al-Taie (Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel) will discuss Romantic women writers, the literary canon, Dorothea Schlegel's works, and their accessibility with Cosima Jungk (Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz) and Martina Wernli (University of Zurich/CH).

The event will launch the Friedrich Schlegel Society's new online format, the Dorothea Schlegel Talks, which will be organised annually on Dorothea Schlegel's birthday. In this way, we would like to make the often forgotten authors of the Romantic period visible and give Dorothea Schlegel a permanent place in the Friedrich Schlegel Society as an author, translator and patron of the arts.

As with many female authors around 1800, Dorothea Schlegel's literary contributions, with a few exceptions, have so far been insufficiently catalogued and difficult to access. Although Dorothea Schlegel was an important figure in early Romanticism, her reception in literary research has remained marginal. The RMU initiative ‘Making Visible: Deutschsprachige Romantikerinnen um 1800’ (Frankfurt a. M./Mainz) aims to provide an accessible overview of the works of female authors around 1800 and is collecting data from archives, bibliographies and encyclopaedias for this purpose. The event on 7 February will present initial results and discuss opportunities and challenges. Using the works of Dorothea Schlegel as an example, it will become clear how this work opens up new perspectives on the diverse oeuvre of female authors and thus on Romanticism and can provide important impulses for further research.