Abstract

Friedrich Schlegel’s innovation in the history of hermeneutics is the historization of understanding on all levels. Schlegel’s philosophy of hermeneutics anticipates every discussion about philological methods and follows a developed criticism. A review of the structure of his detailed hermeneutical theory is crucial for an understanding of the early romantic fragment as a central expressional romanticist model. At this time, the fragment developed into a typical genre, since it was the most original and appropriate literary form for the romanticists, which could transmit new poetical, critical and philosophical contents. Fragmentary writing corresponds to the spiritual attitude of that time, because they experienced the world as “torn apart.” Fragments, as the will to fragment, are symptomatic of the romantic world view, because the unlimited romantic sense and the infinite romantic subject cannot be shown in a concrete, finite and ultimate form. There is also an analogy between Schlegel’s broad hermeneutical theory and fragments as typical of works of art in early romanticism.