The book is a documentary life: a four-part edition of Friedrich Schleiermacher’s correspondence, assembled by his survivors and published in Berlin in 1888, tracing his inner development from his Moravian childhood through his appointment at Halle in October 1804. The letters are framed by an editor’s preface explaining why the family finally released them, and they run from anguished exchanges with his father over his break with the community at Barby to intimate letters to Henriette Herz and Henriette von Willich. What emerges is less a biography than a self-portrait in fragments, written to friends rather than to the public.
“A public domain book is one that was never subject to copyright or whose legal copyright term has expired.”
The editor’s preface sets the terms. Schleiermacher, it explains, wrote few letters about scholarship and public life—the kind a wider audience would want—and those he did write are mostly not in his family’s hands. What survives in abundance is the other kind: letters in which, as he himself put it in February 1799, he stretched “all roots and leaves” toward love and had to touch it immediately or be “dry and worldless.” The edition is arranged in four divisions: to his father’s death and his appointment in Landsberg in 1794; to Halle in October 1804; to his marriage in May 1809; and a final gathering of fragments reaching his death on 12 February 1834. The editor concedes that a man who developed as continuously as Schleiermacher did could not have stood, at twenty-five, where he stood later—and that is precisely the interest of the early letters.
From Barby to the Berlin Salon
The 1888 Reimer Edition and Its Preface
The volume opens with Google’s digitization notice, in English and German, explaining that the book was scanned from a library copy whose copyright has expired and which now belongs to the public domain, though its status varies by country; marginalia from the original appear in the file, the watermark must not be removed, and use is restricted to non-commercial personal purposes. The German title page identifies the work as Aus Schleiermacher’s Leben. In Briefen, first volume, covering the years from his childhood to his appointment at Halle in October 1804, published in Berlin by Georg Reimer in 1888.
The editor’s preface explains why the family long withheld the letters. Schleiermacher wrote few letters devoted chiefly to scholarship or public affairs—the kind that interest a wide audience—and those he did write are mostly not in his survivors’ hands. In his earlier years, while still alone in the world, it was a decided need of his heart to pour himself out continuously to intimate friends, women more than men; he says as much in a letter of 15 February 1799, that he stretches all roots and leaves toward love and must touch it immediately or he is dry and worldless. To his sister, on 23 March 1799, he confessed that much in his heart is seldom understood by men. Public events and scholarship were never absent from his correspondence, but much of what he wrote came straight from the heart and touched the tenderest relations of his inner life, and so had to remain sacred to those closest to him. His peculiarity, too, played a part: as in scholarship he sought his own way on ground his conviction held firm, so in social life the merely conventional meant nothing to him, and he found his own manner in friendship and love, little concerned with the world’s eye—believing, as he told his sister, that his station obliged him to despise appearance whenever there were sufficient grounds for an action.
The decisive consideration, the editor continues, was that these intimate communications fall almost entirely in an earlier period and cease once Schleiermacher founded a household and found a sphere of activity that claimed all his powers; the need for such written intercourse ceased because he no longer had to seek afar what he found in his own family. Over a span of twenty-five years a man of such continuous inner development must have changed, and it seemed unsatisfactory to point readers only to his later writings and printed sermons. Others had already published much, though fragmentarily; fuller communications would fill the gaps and let his inner development be followed coherently for at least part of his life. The editor quotes Schleiermacher himself, engaged and writing to his sister on his birthday in 1808: he had taught so much of the beautiful and holy life of families, and now must show in deed and truth that it was more than beautiful empty words. The letters are arranged in four divisions: the first to the death of his father and his appointment at Landsberg in 1794; the second to Halle in October 1804; the third to his marriage in May 1809; a fourth adds fragments from his later life to his death on 12 February 1834. Further papers, especially letters addressed to him, might later occasion a supplement.
The Father’s Appeal Against Leaving Barby
The correspondence opens with the father’s anguished letter of 19 December 1787, written after his son announced his break with the Moravian community at Barby. The father accuses him of being blinded by his own ruin, of believing he can find in the world a way back to a community he has already left in his heart. The son’s objections, he says, are weak enough for a child to refute; what is strong is his self-conceit and pride. Jesus did say he was God’s Son, the true eternal God—the high priest condemned him for that confession as blasphemy. The father rejects the notion that man was created to strive after perfection but never attain it, calling it a God who created man in wrath for eternal misery. God’s glorification, not the son’s “perfection,” is the first and last purpose of all revelation; God is love, and whoever remains in the enjoyment of his love remains in God. Since God is one, he can have only one purpose: that his love and glorification become our present and future blessedness. If God first loved us and gave his only-begotten Son, then faith itself is a gift of the Deity, so the honor of our whole blessedness goes to God alone. If the son truly seeks this faith, he should beg it on his knees as a pure gift; if he seeks his own honor instead, he may choose—but the father and his house will serve the Lord who redeemed them.
The father then trembles with foreboding that his warnings will bear no fruit, since the god of this world has blinded his son, and prays God to open the blind eyes.
The Potsdam Letters to Henriette Herz
Writing from Potsdam in mid-February 1799, Schleiermacher tells Henriette Herz how completely their minds run together on every relation of human life—a harmony he noticed even on a sad occasion, when their shared feeling had to include dissatisfaction with friends and still left them wholly agreed. He wonders aloud what a marriage between them would have been like, suspects it might have been a capital match, unless too harmonious, and takes a melancholy pleasure in pairing off his acquaintances: three or four couples might do well enough if only they could swap partners. People chase the fate they believe is theirs but never take a step toward the people who would suit them, and could not hold fast to them if they did. He asks pardon for remarks sprung from the past few days. He has read a dialogue of Plato, studied Religion a little, written letters—tried everything but good manners, which are useless without society. He begs her to write diligently, since his life cannot thrive in solitude; he calls himself the most dependent being on earth, doubting whether he is an individual at all, stretching every root and leaf toward love. In Landsberg he was farther from her, yet less forsaken. Her farewell words gave him so intimate a feeling of friendship that departing seemed beautiful—wicked and religious at once—if only one did not have to stay away. He asks her to admonish him about Religion in every letter, and will send no manuscript until the second speech is finished, having learned that Religion suffers when he copies out too-small portions.
Censorship Fears and the Question of Schlegel
A week later he is grieved by a morning without post, then consoled by an afternoon letter—so easily is one spoiled. Sack now has Religion for censorship. The first speech may please him, but the end of the second he fears will be struck out: Sack, though opposed to confiscating atheistic books in principle, would likely refuse the imprimatur if the book came before him, and this will seem to him as good as atheistic. Schleiermacher will not confess his authorship, for what discussions that would provoke. On his relation to Schlegel she has judged clearly, and he concedes something like it: he never claimed one mind with Schlegel, only that Schlegel had none. But kindred substances, as she put it, always separate them—and she is properly his nearest kindred substance, from whom none can separate him. The bond is not so loose as she thinks; knowledge, wit, and philosophy are no mere tinsel, and what is bound by them is not bound by force. On Sunday he makes a pretty calembour at whist: teased that he might soon become a Hochwürden, he answers that it could only happen at the loss of his honor.
Sacrifices of Our Time
In early March he urges her not to look at what will or can happen, but to keep themselves as high as possible so that everything else looks small. We are all sacrifices of our time, as every man is in some sense; if only we live and are and love, that one thing is the main matter. He wishes she had raised herself into melancholy, where he can achieve something, so the rest would vanish. She must give no room to thoughts of separation and solitude, and remember that the will is also something in the world.
Letters to Charlotte: Family and Friendship
Writing to his sister Charlotte at the end of 1799, he can picture their father only vaguely, but shares her vivid memory of Dann, and thinks of the man constantly, pleased when he can imagine him satisfied. He hopes Carl’s move to Breslau will let him make the journey too, though his own summer trip depends on circumstances beyond his power. He is glad she saw her “A—,” and recalls Professor Bartholdi of Stettin, a man he loves heartily, in whom he finds all that Schlegel lacks and who suits him exactly where he differs from Schlegel—the pity being that Bartholdi is a lazy letter-writer. He plans to return from Silesia through the Lausitz to revisit dear places. In a letter begun the same day in Berlin, he is moved by the return of Alexander Dohna from his long journey, who brought greetings from Wedeke. Year’s end brings the paying of money and letter debts—an epistle to Brinkmann in Paris, one to his mother—and the strain of learning a new Küster. Charlotte seems more withdrawn; he observes that their temperaments move in a circle, sometimes outward, sometimes less, which is salutary but must come of itself, and that it is the body’s duty to suffer with the spirit.
A Confirmation and a New Friend
After the holidays, he speaks at length with Alexander about his sister, and concludes that nothing can be done now but trust God.
Judgment of a Young Author and the Limits of Authority
The segment opens mid-argument, with Schleiermacher weighing a young man named Müller who had once written against Fichte’s Handelsstaat. The essay left no good impression: it reeked of arrogance, offered nothing useful, and displayed such empty cleverness against a thinker of Fichte’s stature that it repelled him in one so young. Authority, he concedes, need not be feared in itself—but it ought to make a reader suspicious of the grounds behind an argument, at least when the tone betrays that the speaker himself senses much might still be said against him. He cannot fathom how anyone could side with Novalis and himself while opposing Schlegel, since whatever Novalis shares with him, both share with Friedrich Schlegel. Time will show what the young man makes of himself.
The Unhappiest Year, and the Duty to Fight
Writing to Henriette Herz from Stolpe on 21 November 1803, he thanks her for a note that greeted his birthday at dawn—his first event of the day, alongside a small one from W. He answers only as a last evening greeting, having had to tear himself away from the feeling of his sad condition. He has closed the unhappiest year of his life; all years to come can only be continuations, bearable through the merciful dulling that time works on everything—especially if he followed her advice merely to endure rather than to fight. He turns the advice back on her: it came not from her knowledge of him but from her wishes for him. For him there is no enduring but fighting; anything else would be gloomy despair. He cannot endure without hoping, and mere waiting is the hope of fools. He must fight to hope as he must hope to endure.
Friendship, Plato, and the Moral Critique
To E. von Willich, the next day, he apologizes for delay—he sits deep in work, wanting to send Reimer a piece of Platonic manuscript that very day. Willich’s detailed letter made the stay with his family so vivid that he would gladly skip the intervening time, were it not so full of labor. He warns against expecting too much of him: money will scarcely stretch to travel via Greifswald, so the road will be long. If they arrange things well, it will be real enjoyment, for sharing daily life belongs essentially to a living, complete picture of a person. He hopes not to fall ill—with him illness is always immediately serious—and would like above all to see Willich in his office and in the pulpit. Of the Kritik der Moral he has heard little, save that people say he treated Kant and Fichte badly and some fear a scandal. He thought he had done Fichte every possible honor; not wanting to set out his own system, he had to point firmly at what Fichte lacks. If some find Fichte made ridiculous, he cannot understand how he produced that effect so entirely without intention. Willich’s wish that he finish Plato soon cannot be spoken of for five or six years, if all goes well.
Suffering, Death, and the Education of Children
To Charlotte von Kathen, on 26 November, he grieves to hear of her poor health, the more since the season suits a suffering body badly. He too has suffered much since autumn began, and anyone considering his lonely situation, stripped of friendly help, might feel pity enough. Yet he can bear much pain and has often wished to take it from his friends; he managed not to take to his bed and not to let his official duties be disturbed. Where courage can help, courage itself becomes a medicine. It seems fair that people like him bear more than a proportionate share of bodily suffering, for nothing suffers on their account, and the image of death in the background may even be welcome. But a housewife and mother cannot look on death so; she must be healthy. He recalls a painfully sweet reunion that spring with the sister of a close friend, unseen for ten years—known to him only as a girl, now a mother who had lost a beloved daughter months before, expecting another child, yet full of longing for death. The impression left something repugnant in its melancholy. Health and blessing to all who have children: they need not look longingly toward another immortality than the one they enjoy. No woman, he tells Charlotte, has expressed his thoughts on education so purely as she; one can only watch children’s inner life and keep away what disturbs it, letting them see the image of love and the rule of reason in the life around them.
A Devotional Book and the Native Mountains
To Henriette Herz he commends a book whose spirit—childlike simplicity joined to deep vision—she must love; what seems strange in his own speech belongs only to dominant opinions happily foreign to her. His sister Lotte has read it too, and the pious feeling in it spoke so purely to her piety that her expressions moved him deeply.
The Truth Grasped in the Lecture Hall
The letters open with Schleiermacher writing to Henriette von Willich—Jette—in the flush of a new certainty. He tells her that “we have grasped the truth,” and that lecturing grows easier by the day. Something individual often surprises him mid-lecture, rising of itself without plan, so that he leaves each hour almost instructed by his own words. He delights in making Christianity and the State clear to the young men, giving them what they need to make the future better than the past. He pictures returning from the lectern into her arms after she has watched him go with furrowed brow and grim, speculative face, and asks her not to be misled by his bad beginnings but to trust that better follows. Love and religion, he reflects, are one; both came to him at once, though he cannot fix the exact point, and afterward it often alternated, with whole periods of falling back into dullness.
Jette’s Answer from Stralsund
Henriette replies on 7 December, wishing she had his portrait and regretting she never spoke the wish. She is glad their feeling agrees that people may find them cold; she wants to close herself secretly and bridally on his breast, and dislikes that those who cannot understand the truest thing believe their union merely rational, sealed by reflection alone. At night, when the house sleeps, it is sweet to come to him and her father and lay open her heart. Tomorrow she must see Stralsund again for the first time, where the memory of the dear man and the whole past will come alive; she wishes she could walk the streets at his hand, but business demands her full attention. She is moved by his letter to L. P., sent on to her, describing how E. appeared and how his being spoke joy and love; she asks why he did not tell her, and says she had thought of E. on his birthday. Her whole being, she writes, is an echo of his, and she must be kindled by him to feel.
Storms, Memory, and the Priest of God
Terrible storms make travel impossible, postponing the journey until Monday. Picturing their future life, she sees how things once were, especially in outward arrangements, and many small traits move her deeply and fill her with melancholy—seeing how deficient things were and that the deficiency came from her alone. She cannot call it repentance, for on the whole she was what she was and could be, but despite earnestness she was not ripe for the great vocation, especially in outward things, whose effects spread far beyond the inner. Deep melancholy and inexpressible happiness mix in her; all dull and troubled things will fall away when she is with him, whose tears already have this power. She calls him her father, her tenderly loved one, her old angel who will carry her up to all that is beautiful. On 11 December she marvels that such happiness could be hers—to call him “mine” with truth. She proposes naming a day to commune together, receiving the holy thing from his hands; she agrees their custom expresses the married relation more, but prefers that way for their relation and especially for him—to announce God’s grace to her and bless her in His name, since his whole existence is blessing and grace to her. She calls him pious, pure, priest of God.
The Weight of Public Affairs
Writing from Berlin on 15 December 1808, Schleiermacher cannot hear often enough how she clings to and trusts him. He longs for her now as never before, to pour out his cares. Much weighs on him—not in his nearest relations but in general affairs. Their king has been surprised by a wretched party into a step that pulls things back from the secure course in which they were being led. Excellent men still stand at the head, but who knows how long they can hold against the bad men who have newly ensnared the king; thus the fatherland may be led a second time to the brink of ruin. These thoughts take nearly all his time; even alone in bed with her he does little but complain to her. His work is disturbed, so he appears outwardly idle though he accomplishes nothing; the pulpit and lectern are the only places where he properly does what is fitting. Yet he does not think the time lost, hoping a sure view and perhaps firm, definite activity will develop from this pondering. He asks her not to think it too bad, and hopes she will never see him brought down and crushed.
The Boundaries of a Friendship
Turning to his relation with Alexander, Schleiermacher finds it hard to describe. In essentials they are very close: each knows all the other’s important matters, they have unbounded trust, and each states his opinion openly. Personally they like being together and find nothing definitely objectionable in the other, so in essence they are true friends—yet it does not appear so outwardly as between Schleiermacher and others.
A Mother’s Counsel and a Father’s Warnings
The segment opens with the mother’s letter brimming with affection and hope. She recounts the Pentecost festival—Father preaching beautifully on the first day, an evening at the Reimers’ where she had Herr Frommann describe the old Goethe, and on the second holiday Goßner’s fiery sermon in the Brüderhaus, which moved her deeply; she would regret his likely departure from Berlin. Count Recke remains, and she grows fonder of him. She urges her son to walk more, praising solitary walks, and looks forward to living together, pressing him to devote himself wholly to politics, where she expects much of him.
Father, writing from Potsdam, reports that W. returned with an unfavorable impression of the son’s health. He advises consulting the house doctor, notes that sensible physicians avoid pestering young men with medicines but offer dietary counsel, approves of bathing and swimming while worrying over athletic feats beyond the “holy Christopher,” and recommends the holidays for restorative rest—ideally a walking tour with a congenial companion. He is cool toward a Rhine trip requiring the express coach, asks the son to weigh his plans, and, while satisfied with his studies, wants more precision about his professional course and orientation among the main scholarly works. He advises against joining the Borussia or similar associations, whose bonds restrict freedom, especially given the son’s tendency to withdraw. Church and university affairs are in crisis, he warns; the son may not retain his position until the ordinary juridical path is secured. Arndt’s affair awaits the King’s decision, another reason to avoid Bonn. If the Harz is too little, he suggests Eisenach, Gotha, the Inselberg and Schneekopf, Schmalkalden, Meiningen, and back along the Werra.
Deaths, Exhortations, and a Student’s Loan
The mother’s letters from Berlin in July 1826 report Countess Schwerin’s death in childbirth, her old mother dying the day after the funeral, and Mar severely wounded in Heidelberg—the family quiet and composed, caring for the child entrusted to the sisters. Later letters exhort the son to cultivate love, joy, and gratitude, to walk in nature, and describe a visit to the institution for criminals’ children outside the Hallisches Tor, praising its director and a fifteen-year-old former pupil who won the children’s trust. She mentions a baptism at the Klenzes’, Bernhard Jacobi, and old Hennefug’s visions concerning the son. September brings Father’s hope that the Göttingen journey may come about, and the marriage of Jacobi and Cornelia on 31 August, which Father solemnized. October recalls the farewell at the foot of the Stubenberg; Father mentions news of the son’s loan, which he will repay, teasing him about “pumping” money as a student initiation. In November the mother chides him for complaining she does not write.
Self-Absorption and a Great Interest
Letters of early 1827 describe a sick-house at home and little Nathanael’s fall en route to the puppet theater. Father counsels at length that the son is too preoccupied with himself—one is not yet noble and excellent at his age but must become so—and that he needs a great interest, politics, to act meaningfully; the mother agrees. June brings Father’s plan to travel to Upper Silesia to fetch their foster daughter, and farewells to Recke and Goßner. An editorial note explains that in July and August 1827 Schleiermacher’s wife was in Karlsbad with her friend F. and the latter’s daughter, later meeting him to fetch the foster child from Biala in Galicia. His letters to her express longing, instruct her to address letters to “B.” to avoid routing through Prague or Vienna, describe the household without her, mention Hildchen and a performance of the Iphigenia with the Schechner, and the burial of old Jänicke with a poorly received sermon.
Hegewald’s Death and the Church’s Decline
By July 1832 the mother thanks God that E. is well and commends his travel plans, urging him to enjoy the romantic nature around him and to seek union at the Savior’s feet. She reports that Hegewald has left “this dark planet”: his farewell was transfigured in love, and he said, weeping, that his heart could not bear all the love and thanks. His burial was so beautiful no eye stayed dry; the father spoke deeply moved, young academy men sang, the path was strewn with flowers, the crypt a grotto of flowers. Such impressions, she reflects, leave the truth that only One thing is needful. She reports visitors—the Hochwächters, now the Kathens; Lotte weak; young people in abundance; Herr v. Harthausen spirited, though religious difference is a wall for the father, not for her.
The Heart Laid Open
The letters turn on a single temperament, and Schleiermacher names it himself: he is “the most dependent and unself-standing being on earth,” doubting even whether he is an individual. Love is not an ornament of his life but its condition—without it he withers. This is why the correspondence with women carries so much of the book. He tells his sister Charlotte in March 1799 that much in his heart is seldom understood by men; in Henriette Herz he finds what he calls his “nearest kindred substance,” a bond no separation can loosen. The editor’s preface makes the same point from outside: in his friendships he was more connected with women than with men, and the intimate letters cluster in the years before he founded a household, after which the need for them simply ceased.
Against this warmth stands a stubborn independence of mind. The break with the Moravian community at Barby is the book’s first drama, and it is fought over doctrine: the son cannot accept proofs he has not examined, resents opinions presented without their grounds, and feels a natural pull toward “the evidently suppressed.” His father’s reply is a masterpiece of wounded love—the appeal to the tears shed three years earlier, the plea “Return! ah, my son, return!”—and the son answers with respect but no surrender. The same pattern recurs in the preface’s account of his character: in scholarship as in society he sought to free himself from the merely traditional and the merely conventional, believing his station obliged him to despise “the appearance” when there were sufficient grounds for an action.
A Life Measured in Friendships
Read as a whole, the collection makes an argument about how a life is best told. The editor worries that Schleiermacher will be misunderstood by many readers, as he was misunderstood in his lifetime, and offers the letters as a corrective to the later published works and printed sermons. The result is a portrait built from the outside in—his grief for Friedrike, his joy in the morning baths with his brother Carl in the cold Panke, his pleasure in the “Silesian stars” of the B— family, his grief-stricken counsel to the widowed Henriette von Willich, whom he urges to picture her dead husband freely and to trust that love “will eternally possess all it wishes.” Even his public eminence, which he describes to Charlotte with some satisfaction—the respect of those called philosophers, religious souls attaching themselves to him—is weighed and found lighter than the prospect of a quiet domestic life. “All in the world is vain and delusion except domestic life.”
The book’s afterlife belongs to its readers rather than to any public event. It preserves the raw material from which Schleiermacher’s thought grew—the Plato studies, the critique of morals he was sketching section by section, the sermons he refused to write out and defended against a critic who thought that a preacher’s holiest duty. But its deeper value is the record of a man who could not thrive in solitude and said so without embarrassment, and whose survivors, after long hesitation, decided that what served his memory should be given gladly. The preface ends by quoting him on his birthday in 1808, hoping that “these leaves from the life of a man who was so rich in love” would find a friendly reception. They did.
