Between 1801 and 1804, August Wilhelm Schlegel gave a series of lectures on art and literature in Berlin. He regarded the Middle Ages as the cradle of Romantic literature, which he characterized as “peculiarly modern, not based on ancient patterns”, yet also “universal and everlasting”. In the audience of his Berlin lectures were the writer Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué and Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen, who later translated the Nibelungenlied. The lecture was printed in Friedrich Schlegel’s journal Deutsches Museum (1812) on the basis of the manuscript displayed here.