A Companion to the Works of Friedrich Schiller (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

A Companion to the Works of Friedrich Schiller Contributors: Steven D. Martinson,Walter Hinderer, David Pugh, Otto Dann...

Author: Steven D. Martinson

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A Companion to the Works of Friedrich Schiller

Contributors: Steven D. Martinson,Walter Hinderer, David Pugh, Otto Dann,Werner von Stransky-StrankaGreifenfels, J. M. van der Laan, Rolf-Peter Janz, Lesley Sharpe, Norbert Oellers, Dieter Borchmeyer, Karl S. Guthke, Wulf Koepke. Steven D. Martinson is Professor of German Studies and a member of the Associated Faculty in Religious Studies at the University of Arizona; Vice President and President-Elect of the Lessing Society (2006); and has written extensively on the literature of the Age of Goethe.

Friedrich Schiller is not merely one of Germany’s foremost poets. He is also one of the major German contributors to world literature. In Germany, Schiller celebrations and commemorations still play a role in the formation of public opinion, and the undying words he gave to characters such as Marquis Posa in Don Carlos and Wilhelm Tell in the eponymous drama continue to underscore the need for human freedom. Schiller cultivated hope in the actualization of moral knowledge through aesthetic education and critical reflection, leading to his ideal of a more humane humanity. At the same time, he was fully cognizant of the problems that attend various forms of idealism. Yet for Schiller, ultimately, love remains the gravitational center of the universe and of human existence, and beyond life and death joy prevails. This collection of cutting-edge essays by some of the world’s leading Schiller experts constitutes a milestone in scholarship that is particularly timely in view of the 200th anniversary of the poet’s death in 2005. Special attention is given to both the paradigm shifts in Schiller’s work in its development over time and the indelible imprint of the early writings on his later works. The contributors also remain sensitive to the multiple levels on which the poet was working. The volume includes in-depth discussions of Schiller’s major dramatic and poetic works, his essays on aesthetics, and his activities as historian, anthropologist, and physiologist, as well as of his relation to the ancients and of Schiller reception in the twentiethcentury.

Edited by Steven D. Martinson I SBN 1 -5 7113 -1 83 -3

Camden House

668 Mt. Hope Avenue Rochester, NY 14620-2731 and P.O. Box 9 Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK www.boydellandbrewer.com and www.camden-house.com

Jacket Design: Lisa Mauro

Edited by 9 781571 131836

Steven D. Martinson

Jacket image: Painting of Schiller by Anton Graff, completed 1791. Museum für Stadtgeschichte, Dresden. Used by permission of Ullsteinbild.


Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture Edited by James Hardin (South Carolina)

Camden House Companion Volumes The Camden House Companions provide well-informed and up-todate critical commentary on the most significant aspects of major works, periods, or literary figures. The Companions may be read profitably by the reader with a general interest in the subject. For the benefit of student and scholar, quotations are provided in the original language.

A Companion to the Works of

Friedrich Schiller

Edited by

Steven D. Martinson

CAMDEN HOUSE

Copyright © 2005 by the Editor and Contributors All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation, no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. First published 2005 by Camden House Camden House is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA www.camden-house.com and of Boydell & Brewer Limited PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK www.boydellandbrewer.com ISBN: 1–57113–183–3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A companion to the works of Friedrich Schiller / edited by Steven D. Martinson p. cm. – (Studies in German literature, linguistics, and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–57113–183–3 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Schiller, Friedrich, 1759–1805—Criticism and interpretation. I. Martinson, Steven D., 1949– II. Title. III. Series: Studies in German literature, linguistics, and culture (Unnumbered) PT2492.C66 2005 831⬘.6–dc22 2005003338 A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library. This publication is printed on acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America.

For Elisa

Contents Acknowledgments

ix

The Works of Friedrich Schiller

xi

Editions and Abbreviations

xv

Introduction: Schiller and the New Century Steven D. Martinson

1

Intellectual-Historical Settings Schiller’s Philosophical Aesthetics in Anthropological Perspective Walter Hinderer

27

Schiller and Classical Antiquity David Pugh

47

Schiller the Historian Otto Dann

67

Major Writings Die Räuber: Structure, Models, and an Emblem Werner von Stransky-Stranka-Greifenfels

89

Kabale und Liebe Reconsidered J. M. van der Laan

115

Great Emotions — Great Criminals?: Schiller’s Don Carlos Rolf-Peter Janz

137

Concerning Aesthetic Education Lesley Sharpe

147

“On the Shores of Philosophy”: Schiller’s Lyric Poetry, 1795 Norbert Oellers

169

viii

CONTENTS

Wallenstein Dieter Borchmeyer

189

Maria Stuart: Physiology and Politics Steven D. Martinson

213

Die Jungfrau von Orleans Karl S. Guthke

227

Wilhelm Tell Karl S. Guthke

247

Schiller’s Legacy The Reception of Schiller in the Twentieth Century Wulf Koepke

271

Works Cited

297

Notes on the Contributors

313

Index

317

Acknowledgments

T

this volume was facilitated greatly by the outstanding editorial skills of Jim Walker. His responses to numerous inquiries and questions were always speedy and incisive. Thanks also go to my colleague, Thomas A. Kovach, for having rendered a fine translation of Dieter Borchmeyer’s study on Wallenstein. I am grateful also to Claudia Galberg and Veronica Ostertag for their assistance in the early stages of the project, as well as to Janna Orlova-Schaeffer for her assistance in preparing the index. Finally, I wish to thank our colleagues in Germany, Sweden, England, Canada, and the United States whose expertise and patience helped bring this enterprise to fruition. This book is dedicated to my oldest daughter, Elisa, who attended the Schiller-Gymnasium in Marbach am Neckar. HE COMPLETION OF

S. D. M. Tucson, Arizona January 2005

The Works of Friedrich Schiller

L

ISTED BY YEAR OF FIRST APPEARANCE. When available in translation, English title and date of appearance are given. The occasional works of Schiller are not included in this list.

1780

1781 1781

1782 1783

1784

1786 1786 1787

Versuch über den Zusammenhang der thierischen Natur des Menschen mit seiner geistigen. Stuttgart: Cotta, 1780; translated by Kenneth Dewhurst and Nigel Reeves as “An Essay on the Connection between the Animal and Spiritual Nature of Man,” in their Friedrich Schiller: Medicine, Psychology and Literature, 253–85. Berkeley: U of California P, 1978. Elegie auf den frühzeitigen Tod Johann Christian Weckerlins; Von seinen Freunden, 4 pp., N.p., 1781. Die Räuber: Ein Schauspiel. Frankfurt am Main & Leipzig: Privately printed, 1781; translated by Alexander F. Tytler as The Robbers. London: Robinson, 1792; New York: Printed for S. Campbell, 1793. Anthologie auf das Jahr 1782. N.p., 1782. Trauerspiele / Zum erstenmal aufgeführt auf der Mannheimer National-Schaubühne. Die Räuber, Die Verschwörung des Fiesko zu Genua, Kabale und Liebe. Mannheim, 1783. Die Verschwörung des Fiesko zu Genua: Ein republikanisches Trauerspiel (Mannheim: Schwan, 1783); translated by George Henry Noehden and Sir John Stoddart as Fiesco; or The Genoese Conspiracy. London: Johnson, 1796. Kabale und Liebe: Ein bürgerliches Trauerspiel in fünf Aufzügen (Mannheim: Schwan, 1784); translated by Matthew Gregory Lewis as The Minister: A Tragedy in Five Acts. London: Bell, 1797; translation revised as The Harper’s Daughter; or Love and Ambition. Philadelphia: Carey, 1813. An die Freude: Ein Rundgesang für freye Männer. Mit Musik. N.p., 1786. Thalia. Vol. 1 titled: Rheinische Thalia. Edited by Schiller. Leizpig: Göschen, 1785–1787. Dom Karlos, Infant von Spanien. Leipzig: Göschen, 1787; translated by Hoehden and Stoddart as Don Carlos, Infant of Spain. London: Miller, 1798.

xii

1788

1788

1789 1791

1792 1792

1793 1795 1800 1800

1801

1802

1803

THE WORKS OF FRIEDRICH SCHILLER

Der Geisterseher: Eine interessante Geschichte aus den Papieren des Grafen von O*** herausgegeben aus Herrn Schillers Thalia. Berlin & Leipzig, 1788; republished as Der Geisterseher: Eine Geschichte aus den Memoiren des Grafen von O**. Leipzig, Göschen 1789; translated by Daniel Boileau as The Ghostseer; or, The Apparitionist. London: Vernor, 1795; New York: Printed for T. & J. Swords, 1796. Geschichte des Abfalls der vereinigten Niederlande von der Spanischen Regierung: Erster Theil enthaltend die Geschichte der Rebellionen bis zur Utrechtischen Verbindung. Leipzig: Crusius, 1788; translated by Edward Backhouse Eastwick as History of the Defection of the United Netherlands from the Spanish Empire. Frankfurt am Main: Krebs, 1844. Was heißt und zu welchem Ende studiert man Universalgeschichte? Jena: Akademische Buchhandlung, 1789. Historischer Calender für Damen für das Jahr 1791 (–1793): Geschichte des Dreißigjährigen Kriegs. 3 vols. Leipzig: Göschen, 1791–1793; translated by William Blaquiere as History of the Thirty Years’ War. 2 vols. London: Miller, 1799. Neue Thalia. Edited by Schiller. Leipzig: Göschen, 1792–95. Kleinere prosaische Schriften von Schiller: Aus mehreren Zeitschriften vom Verfasser selbst gesammelt und verbessert. 4 vols. Leipzig: Crusius, 1792–1802. Über Anmuth und Würde. Leipzig: Göschen, 1793. Die Horen: Eine Monatsschrift. Edited by Schiller. 3 years, each with 4 vols. 1795–97. Gedichte, 2 vols. Leipzig: Crusius, 1800–1803. Wallenstein: Ein dramatisches Gedicht, 2 vols. Tübingen: Cotta, 1800. Volume 1: Wallensteins Lager, translated by F. L. Gower as The Camp of Wallenstein. London: Murray, 1830; Die Piccolomini; or the First Part of Wallenstein, a Drama in Five Acts. London: Longman & Rees, 1800; volume 2: Wallensteins Tod, translated by Coleridge as The Death of Wallenstein. London: Longman & Rees, 1800. Maria Stuart: Ein Trauerspiel. Tübingen: Cotta, 1801; translated by Joseph C. Mellish as Mary Stuart: A Tragedy. London: Printed by G. Auld, 1801. Kalendar auf das Jahr 1802: Die Jungfrau von Orleans. Eine romantische Tragödie. N.p., 1802; translated by Henry Salvin as The Maid of Orleans in his Mary Stuart and The Maid of Orleans. London: Longmann, 1824. Die Braut von Messina oder Die feindlichen Brüder: Ein Trauerspiel mit Chören. Tübingen: Cotta, 1803; translated by G. Irvine as The Bride of Messina. London: Macrone, 1837.


1804

1805

1812

1839 1840

1862

1862 1867

1867 1890 1892 1902

1904 1943

xiii

Wilhelm Tell: Ein Schauspiel. Zum Neujahrsgeschenk auf 1805. Tübingen, Cotta, 1804; translated anonymously as William Tell. London: Bull, 1829. Die Huldigung der Künste: Ein lyrisches Spiel. Tübingen: Cotta, 1805; translated by A. I. du Pont Coleman as “Homage to the Arts.” In The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Vol. 3, edited by Kuno Francke and William G. Howard, 366–77. New York: German Publication Society, 1913. Theater, 5 vols. Tübingen: Cotta, 1805–1807. Friedrich v. Schillers sämmtliche Werke, 12 vols. Edited by Christian Gottfried Körner. Stuttgart & Tübingen: Cotta, 1812–1815; revised, 1835. Schiller’s erste bis jetzt unbekannte Jugendschrift: Die Tugend in ihren Folgen betrachtet. Amberg: Klöber, 1839. Nachlese zu Schillers Werken nebst Variantensammlung: Aus seinem Nachlaß. 4 vols. Edited by Karl Hoffmeister. Stuttgart & Tübingen: Cotta, 1840–1841. Avanturen des neuen Telemach oder Leben und Exsertionen Koerners des decenten, consequenten, piquanten u.s.f. von Hogarth in schönen illuminierten Kupfern abgefaßt und mit befriedigenden Erklärungen versehen von Winckelmann: Rom, 1786. Drawings by Schiller, texts by Ludwig Ferdinand Huber, edited by Carl Künzel. Leipzig: Payne, 1862. Ich habe mich rasieren lassen: Ein dramatischer Scherz. Edited by Carl Künzel Leipzig: Payne, 1862. Schillers dramatische Entwürfe zum erstenmal veröffentlicht durch Schillers Tochter. Edited by Emilie Freifrau von GleichenRusswurm. Stuttgart: Cotta, 1867. Schillers sämmtliche Schriften: Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, 16 vols. Edited by Karl Goedeke and others. Stuttgart: Cotta, 1867–1876. Aus dem Schiller-Archiv: Ungedrucktes und unbekanntes zu Schillers Leben und Schriften. Edited by J. Minor. Weimar: Böhlau, 1890. Briefe. Kritische Gesamtausgabe. Edited by Fritz Jonas. Stuttgart: 1892–1897. Deutsche Größe: Ein unvollendetes Gedicht Schillers. 1801. Nachbildung der Handschrift im Auftrage des Vorstandes der GoetheGesellschaft. Edited by Bernhard Suphan. Weimar: Goethe Gesellschaft, 1902. Sämtliche Werke: Säkular-Ausgabe in sechzehn Bänden. 16 vols. Edited by E. von der Hellen. Stuttgart: Cotta, 1904–1905. Werke: Nationalausgabe. Im Auftrage des Goethe- und SchillerArchivs, des Schiller-Nationalmuseums und der Deutschen Akademie. 35 vols. to date. Edited by Julius Petersen and Hermann Schneider. Weimar: Böhlau, 1943–. (⫽Nationalausgabe, NA)

xiv

1988

2004


Werke und Briefe in zwölf Bänden. Edited by Klaus Harro Hilzinger, et al. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1988–. (⫽Frankfurter Ausgabe, FA) Sämtliche Werke in 5 Bänden, ed. Albert Meier, et al. Munich: Carl Hanser, 2004.

Translations by Schiller Euripides. Iphigenie in Aulis. Acts 1–3, 6: Issue of Thalia, edited by Friedrich Schiller, March, 1789; acts 4–5, 7: Issue of Thalia, May 1789. Euripides. Phönizierinnen. 8. Issue of Thalia (October/November 1789). [first half of the drama only]. Gozzi. Turandot, Prinzessin von China: Ein tragicomisches Mährchen nach Gozzi. Tübingen: Cotta, 1802. Picard. Der Neffe als Onkel. Lustspiel in drey Aufzügen. Theater von Schiller. Vol. 5. Tübingen: J. C. Cotta, 1807. Picard. Der Parasit oder Die Kunst sein Glück zu machen. Ein Lustspiel. Theater von Schiller. Vol. 2. Tübingen: J. C. Cotta, 1806. Racine. Britannikus. Trauerspiel. Schillers dramatische Entwürfe zum erstenmal veröffentlicht durch Schillers Tochter Emilie Freifrau von Gleich-Russwurm. Stuttgart, 1867. [Fragments only] Racine. Phädrus. Trauerspiel von Racine. Tübingen: J. C. Cotta, 1805. [Fragments only; two manuscripts]. Virgil. Der Sturm auf dem Tyrrhener Meer (⫽Book 1 of the Aeneid). Schwäbisches Magazin, 11. Stück, edited by Balthasar Haug. Stuttgart, 1780. Virgil. Dido (⫽Book 4 of the Aeneid). Thalia. 2. and 3. Stück (1792). Virgil. Die Zerstörung von Troja (⫽Book 2 of the Aeneid). Thalia. 1. Stück (1792).

Editions and Abbreviations

T

HERE ARE TWO EDITIONS OF Schiller’s works that are currently widely used by scholars. The edition primarily relied upon in this volume is Werke und Briefe in zwölf Bänden, edited by Klaus Harro Hilzinger, et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1988–), which is known as the Frankfurter Ausgabe and abbreviated as FA. The other edition, which is used as the source of primary reference to Schiller’s works in the essay by Norbert Oellers and as a supplemental source in several of the other essays in this book, is Werke: Nationalausgabe. Im Auftrage des Goethe- und Schiller-Archivs, des Schiller-Nationalmuseums und der Deutschen Akademie, edited originally by Julius Petersen and Hermann Schneider, currently edited by Norbert Oellers (44 vols. to date; Weimar: Böhlau, 1943–), known as the Nationalausgabe, and abbreviated as NA.

Introduction: Schiller and the New Century Steven D. Martinson Lebe mit deinem Jahrhundert, aber sei nicht sein Geschöpf.

The Man and His Life

J

CHRISTOPH FRIEDRICH SCHILLER was born to Johann Kaspar Schiller and Elisabetha Dorothea Kodweiss in Marbach am Neckar on November 10, 1759. His father served in the Württemberg military as a lieutenant and medic. Following the Seven Years’ War, he was promoted to the rank of captain and became a recruiting officer. The duchy of Württemberg included among its largest cities Stuttgart, Tübingen, and Ludwigsburg. The small city of Marbach lies just northeast of Ludwigsburg on the Neckar River. The Landeskirche was Evangelical-Lutheran with which Swabian pietism soon conflicted. Not only that, but the duke, Karl Eugen, was Catholic, a vestige of which can be seen in the beautifully appointed chapel in the Ludwigsburg castle itself. The antagonistic confessional stands of the duke and his protestant subjects formed one of the bases of the political tension that reverberated throughout the province. The house in which Friedrich Schiller was born is a short walk uphill from the best Gasthaus (to this day) in Marbach, the Goldener Löwe. This is where Johann Kaspar Schiller met his wife-to-be, the innkeeper’s daughter Elisabetha. When their son was only five years old, the family moved to Lorch, where they spent the next three years. In the Remstal, young Schiller had access to the Klosterkirche and cemetery atop the Marienberg, a small castle, an outlying estate with its colossal walls, and, within an hour’s walk, the Hohen-Staufen.1 Johann Kaspar Schiller was a restless individual who desired the even greater education that his son, Friedrich, was to receive and for which he was grateful. Of Schiller’s mother, Elisabetha Dorothea Kodweiss, Bernhard Zeller records that she must have been a lively, imaginative, generous, and pious woman (9). While in Lorch, the family was influenced strongly by the local pastor, Philipp Ulrich Moser. Schiller would later OHANN

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STEVEN D. MARTINSON

leave a legacy, albeit a problematic one, to him in his first highly successful drama, Die Räuber (The Robbers, 1781). Under Moser’s instruction, young Schiller began to master Latin and became familiar with Greek, and it was through Moser that Schiller would be influenced by Swabian pietism. In this environment Schiller considered the possibility of becoming a pastor. The seeming ridicule that his attempts at declamation received, however, may well have dissuaded him from pursuing this path. Several subsequent experiences, in Stuttgart and Weimar, for example, confirm that Schiller was not destined to become an actor or a preacher. (His role as Clavigo in a performance of Goethe’s early work was not well received, as was evident from the lack of applause and guarded, but audible laughter.) In 1766, the Schiller family moved to the court city of Ludwigsburg. Shortly before their move, Duke Karl Eugen had taken up residence in this “Swabian Versailles.” Within a short time, the population of Ludwigsburg doubled in size from five thousand to ten thousand residents. The stage of the theater within the castle was one of the finest in Germany at the time. It was unique because it could be opened to the natural environment so that, among other things, horses could be brought onto the stage, thus increasing the effect of dramatic and operatic performances. Because of Friedrich’s exceptional academic success, the duke allowed the young Schiller to attend the theater with his father on a few occasions. The castle’s chapel and the many waiting and sitting rooms, together with the spacious gardens and likeness to the ruins of a medieval castle, contributed to the splendor of this location, in and around which Schiller spent many of his formative years. Despite his parents’ hesitation, the duke insisted that Schiller become a student at the newly established military Pflanzschule, appropriately called the “Solitude.” There, the students (called “Eleven”) were expected to consider the duke their new “father.” After a few years, the Herzogliche württembergische Militärakadmie (est. 1781, later the Herzogliche KarlsHohe-Schule), relocated near the castle in Stuttgart.2 Duke Karl Eugen reigned for nearly fifty years (1744–93). The students’ “mother” was the well-liked Duchess Franziska von Hohenheim, who, at times, counterbalanced the actions of her husband, Duke Karl Eugen. Although certainly a tyrant in an age of absolutism, the duke was capable of exercising what Goethe would characterize as a certain magnanimity (Zeller, 12). One of Schiller’s closest friends at the time was Friedrich von Hoven (1759–1838) with whom he spent a great deal of time. Together, they would write poetry and study both medicine and philosophy. Von Hoven noted that the duke had made some big mistakes as a regent, but even greater ones as a human being (Zeller, 13). Even before the time of the duke’s funeral, Schiller had come to realize that he had received an excellent education and training (as a future

INTRODUCTION: SCHILLER AND THE NEW CENTURY

3

military officer) at the Karlsschule. In fact, the medical faculty at the military academy was second in Germany only to the faculty at the university in Göttingen. In its final form, the duke approved the publication of Schiller’s dissertation, that is, Abschlußarbeit, on physiology, Über den Zusammenhang der tierischen Natur des Menschen mit seiner geistigen (Concerning the Connection between the Animal [Corporeal] and Intellectual Nature of the Human Being, 1780). The Johann Cotta Verlag, which would eventually become one of the most famous publishing houses in Germany, published Schiller’s dissertation in 1780. Schiller’s interest in medicine and his career in writing owed in part to his ill health. Since birth he had been lanky and sickly. Throughout his life he would battle a variety of debilitating illnesses. For Schiller, the act of writing became a therapeutic means of mediating between the demands of the mind and the needs of the body. His favorite professor at the Karlsschule was Jakob Friedrich Abel. Abel’s integration of poetry, by Shakespeare and others, into his lectures on philosophy had a profound impact on Schiller, as can be seen from his later study of the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant and the composition of his own philosophical essays in the 1790s.3 For the sake of brevity, we will mention only the geographical locations where Schiller spent the most time and then address briefly his relationships with the individuals with whom he was most familiar. The main stations in Schiller’s life following the early years in the Stuttgart area were Mannheim, Dresden, Jena, and Weimar. Intermediate stops included the small village of Bauerbach outside Meiningen in the Thuringian forest and, among other places, Leipzig. In 1785, in Mannheim, Schiller experienced both success (with Die Räuber) and failure (with Die Verschwörung des Fiesko zu Genua [The Conspiracy of Fiesco of Genoa, 1783]). Having received an unexpected and anonymous letter of appreciation for his work from a number of individuals in Leipzig, Schiller finally decided to leave his disappointments in Mannheim behind and travel to Saxony. He wrote: “O meine Seele dürstet nach neuer Nahrung — nach beßern Menschen — nach Freundschaft, Anhänglichkeit und Liebe” (quoted from Zeller, 44). It was at this moment that Schiller also decided to become a poet. The experience was nothing short of liberating. Just outside of Leipzig, in Gohlis, Schiller took up residence in the home of a farmer named Schneider. His fellow tenant was Georg Joachim Göschen, one of his future publishers. It was here also that Schiller became acquainted with Christian Gottfried Körner, who became a lifelong friend. In the late summer of that year, 1785, Schiller accepted Körner’s invitation to travel to Dresden with Körner’s new bride, Minna Stock, where he remained until mid-1787. Schiller records that he was never happier. His euphoria culminated in the writing of the famous poem, “An die Freude” (Ode to Joy, 1785).

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Seid umschlungen Millionen. Diesen Kuss der ganzen Welt! Brüder! Überm Sternenzelt Muss ein lieber Vater wohnen. (ll. 9–12) And: Ihr stürzt nieder, Millionen? Ahnest du den Schöpfer, Welt? Such’ ihn über’m Sternenzelt! Über Sternen muss er wohnen. (ll. 33–36) The experiences in Dresden provided Schiller with a sense of direction and a new view of the world. Hard work was mixed with moments of happiness, but before long he felt physically exhausted, as if nature were collapsing around him. In 1785, while in Dresden, Schiller composed the novella Der Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre (The Criminal Out of Lost Honor, 1786, originally titled Der Verbrecher aus Infamie) and the novel fragment, Der Geisterseher (The Ghostseer, 1788). The latter work quickly became one of the most popular of Schiller’s writings in Germany and also the most widely read of Schiller’s works in America. Both of these writings are indicative of a kind of existential crisis precipitated by haunting memories of his days at the Karlsschule, which began to torment the young writer. To Körner he wrote that he felt the bold tendency of his powers and the unsuccessful plan of nature, that is, his battle with illness. The one was caused by the insane method of his education and abortive fate, the latter of which had the greatest detrimental impact on him. Nonetheless, between 1785 and 1787 Schiller finished composing one of the world’s greatest pieces of literature, Don Carlos. The romantic content of the piece is encased by a new-found classical form, which, together, yielded a dramatic masterpiece. Here, too, the writer exhibits his concern with politics and the problem of humanity. The work appeared with Göschen in Leipzig in the summer of 1787. In the hope of meeting the famous writer, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Schiller left for Weimar in July of the same year. Here he met up with his Mannheim associate, Charlotte von Kalb, who instructed him in the ways of the court. Herself on the verge of divorce, von Kalb’s private interests included attracting Schiller and pursuing an amorous relationship. But he refused the lady’s advances and expressed his wish not to become involved with someone for whom he had no feelings. Privately, he considered her to be uncharitable (“nicht wohltätig”). Discovering that Goethe was in Italy, Schiller met the acquaintance of Goethe’s first mentor, the folklorist and theoretician Johann Gottfried Herder, as well as the famous writer and first (unsuccessful) tutor of Duke Carl August, Christoph Martin Wieland, who was well known for his novel, Geschichte des Agathon (The Story of


5

Agathon, 1766). In addition to Herder and Wieland, Schiller spent some time with Duchess Anna Amalia, the mother of Carl August, who had put Weimar on the cultural map. Although he opposed courtly life, to his surprise Schiller found the occasions at her home in Tiefurt, with its spacious grounds and the babbling of the Ilm river that winds its way around this beautiful and peaceful landscape, to be especially enjoyable. Schiller also became acquainted with the most influential lady of the Weimar court, Charlotte von Stein. On a side trip to Jena, Schiller first made the acquaintance of the philosopher, Karl Leonhard Reinhard, Wieland’s son-in-law, who first prompted the writer to undertake a close study of the work of Immanuel Kant. While in Weimar, Schiller, the man, began to come to a better understanding of himself. The following self-characterization reveals his propensity for self-critical reflection: “Um nun zu werden, was ich soll und kann, werde ich besser von mir denken lernen und aufhören, mich in meiner eignen Vorstellungsart zu erniedrigen” (quoted from Burschell, 230). It was the beginning of a new phase in Schiller’s life. In 1789, on Goethe’s recommendation, Schiller became a professor of history at the university in Jena, where Reinhard was actively professing the essential attributes and contemporary significance of Kant’s critical philosophy, albeit from a more independent standpoint. Schiller’s inaugural lecture, “Was heißt und zu welchem Ende studiert man Universalgeschichte?” (What Is and to What End Does One Study Universal History?, 1789), was well received by the four to five hundred attendees. On average, twenty to thirty students attended his lectures, even though only about half of them paid their tuition. By all accounts, Schiller was highly regarded by his students. One of them, Johann Gottfried Gruber, who would himself later become a professor of history, described Schiller’s physical condition and openness and support. His portrayal reads, in part: “Mit Freundlichkeit empfing er mich, sein ganzes Wesen erweckte Vertrauen. Da war nichts von Zurückhaltung, nichts von Stolz oder vornehmtuendem Air, er war so offen, so redlich in allen Äußerungen, so ganz nur ein schönes Herz entfaltend, das mir, ehe eine Viertelstunde verging, war, als hätten wir uns seit Jahren gekannt” (Lahnstein, 302). With a number of important exceptions, including the last several years of his life, Schiller would struggle financially. Although gifted at writing books on formidable European events in European history, for example, Geschichte des Dreißigjährigen Kriegs (History of the Thirty Years’ War, 1791–93), his initial interest in the subject was to earn the money he needed to sustain himself. Interestingly enough, the work appeared in installments in the Historischer Kalendar für Damen, the commercial success of which saved both the publisher, Göschen, and the author, who then received a sizeable reimbursement for his extremely hard work (Lahnstein, 265–66). Schiller was especially well paid for the essays he

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contributed to Wieland’s Teutscher Merkur. The stipends he received from Duke Friedrich Christian von Augustenburg and Count Ernst von Schimmelmann greatly furthered his career as a writer. With their support he wrote one of his foremost theoretical works, Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen (Concerning the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, 1793–95, referred to as the Ästhetische Briefe). Schiller was unable to live comfortably on the modest salary that Duke Carl August supplied in his position as a professor. It was not until he had moved to Weimar in 1799 that he began to lead a comfortable life, thanks to a significant increase in his allowance from the duke. Here, his life’s work reached fruition in the writing and co-production of masterpieces such as Wallenstein, Maria Stuart, and Wilhelm Tell. In the course of time, all of these writings, and more, would come to be regarded as classical works.4 They also number among the major works of Weltliteratur (world literature) — a term coined by his friend Goethe. While in Jena, it was not only his career that blossomed but love as well. On February 22, 1790, in a small church in Wenigenjena, Schiller married Louise Antoinette Charlotte von Lengefeld of Rudolstadt. Charlotte was the goddaughter of Charlotte von Stein. The “bürgerliche und häusliche Existenz” that Schiller had wanted for some time was achieved in his marriage. It was a happy moment for the man. “Mein Dasein ist in eine harmonische Gleichheit gerückt; nicht leidenschaftlich gespannt, aber ruhig und hell gingen mir diese Tage dahin. Ich habe meiner Geschäfte gewartet wie zuvor und mit mehr Zufriedenheit mit mir selbst” (Burschell, 276). Of Charlotte, Burschell notes that she was an insatiable reader and enjoyed sketching. Her naturalness was a basic feature of her character, and she felt at one with nature. Not surprising, she would be one of Goethe’s favorite acquaintances (243). Charlotte von Lengefeld-Schiller was a beloved confidant, and she was well respected for her integrity within Weimar social circles. Next to his wife, Schiller’s closest friend was Goethe (1749–1832), whose novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sufferings of Young Werther, 1774) had become a European bestseller and had at long last placed Germany on the map as a cultural force. While journeying home to Weimar in the company of Duke Carl August, Goethe first saw Schiller at the Karlsschule, on the same day young Schiller received a number of awards for his exceptional work in various fields of study. Documents reveal that, at first, Schiller was not impressed with Goethe and that Goethe met Schiller with indifference. Schiller’s first encounters with Goethe are characterized not only by admiration but also by jealousy. Accounts thereof describe the contempt that Schiller had for Goethe’s sense of self-importance, that is, for his inflated ego. Schiller expressed his initial love-hate for Goethe as follows: “. . . ich glaube in der Tat,


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er [Goethe] ist ein Egoist in ungewöhnlichem Grade . . . Er macht seine Existenz wohltätig kund, aber nur wie ein Gott, ohne sich selbst zu geben . . . Mir ist er dadurch verhaßt, ob ich gleich seinen Geist von ganzem Herzen liebe und groß von ihm denke . . . Eine ganz sonderbare Mischung von Haß und Liebe ist es, die er in mir erweckt hat . . . ich könnte seinen [Goethes] Geist umbringen und ihn wieder von Herzen lieben” (Burschell, 257–58; Zeller, 91). Schiller’s and Goethe’s professional relationship began in earnest when, in the spring of 1794, Schiller sought contributors for his periodical, Die Horen (The Horae, 1795–97) and invited Goethe to participate, which he did. Their conversation while returning from a lecture hosted by the Society for Natural Science in Jena and Schiller’s polite refutation of Goethe’s idea of a primal plant sparked Schiller’s letter of August 23, 1794, in which he contrasted, all-too sharply, his own critical-analytical (“sentimental”) approach to reality and Goethe’s more organic (“naïve”), or natural genius. Schiller’s striking characterization of their intellectual, philosophical, and psychological differences won Goethe’s respect, and the older man responded by accepting Schiller into his world. The portrayal was followed by another, just two days after Goethe’s birthday. Schiller’s most recent biographer, Peter-André Alt, cites the letter of August 30, 1794 when pointing to Schiller’s split existence between reflection and intuition (Anschauung) that contains within it the rupture of modern times and which cannot overcome it on its own. At first, Alt refers to the opposition between their intellectual tendencies and the terrain of opposites that mark the differences between Goethe and Schiller. Nevertheless, in the final analysis, and while drawing upon Goethe, Alt characterizes their relationship as forming a balance of productive friendship that includes insight into the complementary nature of their different temperaments (171). On the basis of these letters, scholarship has repeatedly created a picture of a dialectical relationship between Goethe and Schiller that is constructed, consciously or unconsciously, more with Hegel in mind and by way of an all-too-literal reading of Schiller’s letters. The problem is that such an orientation tends to either overlook or downplay the actual cultural, political, religious, and economic contexts in which these writers were working. Although their personalities and mentalities certainly differed, Schiller and Goethe shared many common interests. By collaborating so closely on a number of projects, their language became intertwined with the network of communication of their day and age. A paramount example of their close collaboration is the Xenien project, which is a compilation of very short verses that criticize contemporary developments in literature and poke fun at a number of authors of the time. Finally, their exchange of letters and conversations shows that each had a hand in the writing of the other’s works, one of the most important examples being the genesis of Faust and Wallenstein.

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In the alliance between Goethe and Schiller, there is an amalgamation of poetry and philosophy, physiology and natural science, psychology and spirituality that is indicative of what we would today call the interdisciplinary texture of their work. With reference to Schiller’s letter of July 21, 1797, Peter-André Alt has characterized the nature of their work relationship as one based on reciprocal perfectibility, a commercium of communications that translated into productive individual activities. In short, their perpetual discussions afforded both writers with incomparable artistic impulses (170).5 Whatever else it may be, the practical results of this alliance register the full potential of the German language, as manifested in literature and culture. Quite in spite of the erosion of the so-called canon that has resulted from the proliferation of postmodernist strategies in the last few decades, the vast writings of Goethe and Schiller remain an especially significant field of scholarly research and open up to the general reader a world that challenges our thinking and, in doing so, enlarges our view of history. With regard specifically to Schiller and his final days, Alt writes of the extraordinary social recognition that Schiller enjoyed in Weimar and his inexorable ethos of accomplishment. Despite the large volume of unfinished work, one is left with the impression that Schiller led a full and successful life. Schiller died in Weimar on May 12, 1805. The obituary in the Weimarische Wochenblatt three days later read as follows: Den 12ten May, des Nachts 1 Uhr, wurde der in seinem 46. Lebensjahr verstorbene Hochwohlgeb. Herr, Herr D. Carl Friedrich von Schiller, F. S. Meiningischer Hofrath, mit der ganzen Schule, erster Classe, in das Landschafts⫽Cassen Leichengewölbe beigesetzt und Nachmittags 3 Uhr des Vollendeten Todesfeyer mit einer Trauerrede von Sr. Hochwürd. Magnificenz, dem Herrn General⫽Superintendent Vogt, in der St. Jacobskirche begangen und von Fürstl. Capelle vor und nach der Rede eine Trauermusik von Mozarts Requiem aufgeführt.” (Alt II: 609)

*** The 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah, opened with the grand chorus of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. No doubt, few of the millions of people who watched the festivities on television or via the Internet, including those who attended the opening ceremonies in person, realized that the text of Beethoven’s symphony is by Friedrich Schiller. Both Schiller’s text and Beethoven’s musical composition trumpet the ideal of a humane humanity. Freedom and responsibility, sickness and healing, the individual and society — all of these and many more topics and themes that Schiller explores in his work still touch upon our own experiences of life, no matter how specific or unique that understanding may be. Through


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a comparative study of Schiller’s works and a critical, self-critical confrontation with the values that are encoded in his writings, the reader should gain even more insight into the nature of the realities that human beings experience and seek to understand. In her biography of Schiller (1830, the first to be written), Caroline von Wolzogen portrayed her brother-in-law neither as a servant of his time, nor as a self-proclaimed leader. Rather, he is said to have listened to the sound of nature within him. As the history of Schiller’s critical reception makes clear, Wolzogen was quite right to state that the voice of the nation would echo the sound of Schiller’s life’s work (17).6 The sound of the humane humanity that Schiller espoused was echoed not only in 1859 and 1959 in both Germany and America but, again, in 2002 at the opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics. This time, however, Schiller “spoke” not only to the nation of Germany and the European community but to the world. The Companion to the Works of Friedrich Schiller contributes further to an understanding of Schiller’s significance as a major writer of literature by reinvestigating (1) the various intellectual, philosophical, and historical contexts in which he was writing, (2) his major literary and theoretical writings, and (3) the reception of his work and legacy in history. The reader will find a number of suggestions for new directions in scholarship and further reading. While expanding our knowledge of Schiller, we remain cognizant of the wealth of information and previous insights that research has supplied for our consideration as enlightened readers. Without this, there would be no reliable guide by which to determine originality. With respect to history, Schiller’s work lies between the Enlightenment and German Romanticism and, as to style, between the Baroque and German, or Weimar Classicism. Finally, it is important to recognize that Schiller’s works operate simultaneously on a number of levels, for he was not only a writer of drama, poetry, and prose; he was also an army doctor, physiologist, philosopher, historian, professor, co-director of the Weimar court theater, gifted letter writer, and family man. His native talents, knowledge, and scope of writing were wide-ranging, as are the themes that he developed and the problems that he addresses throughout his multifarious writings. The present volume thus serves as both a signpost for scholarship at the crossroads of the past and the present and points to promising areas for future research on the life and works of Germany’s greatest dramatist.

Toward a Politics of Culture The jubilation over life that Schiller at times felt ceased when he was confronted with the news of the Reign of Terror in France (1793–94).

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As a subscriber to Le Moniteur, Schiller followed closely developments in post-revolutionary France. He was shocked by the assassinations of well over one hundred members of the old aristocracy (ancien regime) including men, women, and children. Sickened by the backlash of radical rationalism, he shared his sense of loss of hope in the future with his benefactor, Duke Friedrich Christian, that this occurrence would rob him of all hope for centuries to come as noted in his letter of July 13, 1793. With the exception of German Jacobins, such as Georg Forster and Schiller’s friend, Johann Erhard Benjamin, the vast majority of German intellectuals turned away from the massacre in dismay and horror. Hagen Schulze’s description of this chapter in modern history codifies the results of a great deal of scholarship. The turn to inner life and away from the horrors of the first mass murder in modern history, all done in the name of the Enlightenment, was also influential in the case of Schiller — but only to a point. Given his knowledge of the violent consequences of the extreme, Schiller could not and did not succumb either to pietistic inwardness or political despondency. Schiller’s vast knowledge of history meant that he was unable and, perhaps, unwilling to resign himself for long to the grim historical realities of the present. In fact, while considering the past and contemplating the future, he became even more resolute in his battle against the barbarism that now seemed to link the ancient past with modern times. In one of his major theoretical works, Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen, Schiller offered an alternative plan for the future. As he wrote in the pivotal Eighth Letter of his cultural broadsheet, the most pressing need of the time is to train, that is, refine and further develop the sensations (“die Ausbildung des Empfindungsvermögens”). The reasonableness of any given action was now to be determined by the education, that is, formation (Bildung) of the healthy relationship between reason and emotion as facilitated by aesthetic culture. He believed that this could be accomplished primarily, although not exclusively, through an understanding of art and literature, that is, through images and in words. As the writer makes clear, also in his book reviews, the imagination (Einbildungskraft) and the understanding (Verstand) are to work collaboratively together. The reciprocal limitation of the one by the other, and the avoidance of the extreme (the Aristotelian golden mean) that this presupposes, creates a fruitful tension that first gives birth to the classical work of art. As I have pointed out elsewhere, this central idea was anticipated in the writer’s medical dissertation, Über den Zusammenhang der tierischen Natur des Menschen mit seiner geistigen. While in the act of writing this seminal text Schiller worked out the first theory of the interactionist relationship between mind and body (Geist and Körper) in the Western tradition.


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But what were Schiller’s objectives? Walter Hinderer suggests here that “with his aesthetic anthropology or anthropological aesthetics, Schiller wishes to cultivate human freedom and create the psycho-political conditions of the state of freedom.” Over the following decade-and-a-half, namely from 1780 to his death in 1805, the writer explored the practical value of aesthetics as an instrument in the further education of both the individual and society, including political society, while building on and refining his original position in the early medical dissertations. In his response to the aftermath of the “Great” Revolution, Schiller held that it is not enough “daß alle Aufklärung des Verstandes nur insoferne Achtung verdient, als sie auf den Charakter zurückfließt; sie geht gewissermaßen von dem Charakter aus, weil der Weg zu dem Kopf durch das Herz muß geöffnet werden.”7 The way that one pursues the truth of humanity in cultural, religious, and social-political life now becomes the essential question. Politics was to be informed by ethics. The violent overpowering of the state that had led to the Reign of Terror exhibited man’s inhumanity to man. In the 1790s, Schiller’s goal, that is, the task of culture, was to counteract the propensity for retribution and violence in human beings through aesthetic education.8 To be sure, the French Revolution caused Schiller to reorientate his thinking and, as a result, his understanding of the political task of culture. Given his own bitter experience of the tyranny of Duke Karl Eugen, Schiller recognized the need for change in the political public sphere. The way in which this was to be achieved, however, was not by revolution but through the gradual re-formation of society: “. . . das lebendige Uhrwerk des Staats muß gebessert werden, indem es schlägt, und hier gilt es, das rollende Rad während seines Umschwunges auszutauschen” (8:563 [emphasis added]). Schiller was convinced that the Bildung of the individual through the sensuous knowledge (“sinnliche Erkenntnis,” as the father of aesthetics, Alexander Baumgarten, had first termed it) of aesthetic culture had an ennobling effect on one’s character. The ennoblement of character in the middle-class moral sphere would serve, politically, as an example to men and women of the nobility as well as the aristocracy. The question, then, was whether or not the nobility (and aristocracy) manifests true nobility of character. In sum, ethics and politics are inseparable in Schiller’s work. Owing to its increasing economical and educational ascendancy the middle class in Germany was quickly becoming the new model of social behavior, even if, or perhaps, despite the fact that the courts continued to emulate French culture. But as long as French was the language of choice in courtly culture, the task of the Bildung of German culture would entail an uphill battle, an assignment for the future. Schiller would agree with Johann Gottfried Herder’s statement in the Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Humanity, 1784–91): “Der Mensch ist einer langen Erziehung bedürftig” (315).

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Karl S. Guthke (1994) has underscored the fact that Schiller was a skilled psychologist, able to offer keen insights into human nature and the workings of the human psyche. Schiller contended that, with the aid of aesthetic culture, one is able to refine and redirect, that is, sublimate, one’s natural impulses. By activating and actualizing one’s fullest potential as a human being, one can alter the state of nature. Unlike the animal (or barbarian), the human being can aspire to something greater than what is simply given. The gateway to that higher state of being is art, “die Tochter der Freiheit” (8:559). The dignity that was and is lost to base humanity can be rescued in and through aesthetics. As Schiller writes, in the Ninth Letter of the Ästhetische Briefe: “die Wahrheit lebt in der Täuschung fort . . .” (8:584). In the classical art of the time one beholds the strength to endure what life presents in its most challenging and often overpowering manifestations. The nature of the type of character that Schiller believed would best serve as an example for his time forms the basis of a personal credo: “Strenge gegen sich selbst mit Weichheit gegen andre” (8:605; emphasis added). Among other things, the values of self-discipline and leniency towards others that Schiller cultivated in his writings were diametrically opposed to the Reign of Terror and any and all other forms of barbarism. The sustained coming to terms with the past and the present in light of the future provides informed evidence of Schiller’s engagement with the politics of his day.

Illness, Healing, and the Act of Writing Schiller was not quite forty-six years old when he died. Throughout his relatively short life Schiller battled a number of illnesses. Nonetheless, he strove actively to not allow his physical ailments to obstruct the expression, or hinder the cultivation, of his native abilities as a writer. To be sure, there were times when his physical limitations did prevent him from writing. His frailty at birth carried over into his adult life. In 1796 for example, a friend of Christian Körner, Rittmeister Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand von Funk, who was visiting Goethe, recorded how Schiller suffered from acute loss of breath and chest pains (Lahnstein, 342). Although von Funk (and even Schiller himself ) was probably not aware of it, these suffocations owed to the fact that one of Schiller’s lungs had collapsed, most likely in 1791 while attending a concert in Erfurt. Schiller’s earliest biographer, Caroline von Wolzogen, offered a fascinating and loving portrait of the man and the writer in her twovolume account, Schillers Leben (Schiller’s Life). Unlike Wilhelm von Humboldt’s one-dimensional picture of Schiller as an idealist in Über Schiller und den Gang seiner Geistesentwicklung (On Schiller and the Development of His Thought, 1830), which privileges the operations of the


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mind over the body, Von Wolzogen, although prone to romanticizing, comes squarely to terms with Schiller’s struggles with the body. For Schiller, reshaping and reinscribing the world via the act of writing was a means of rescue — that is, healing. It was not simply an act of personal overcoming. On November 9, 1794, Schiller wrote to his parents in an optimistic vein regarding this labor of love. “Es ist mir immer himmlisch wohl, wenn ich beschäftigt bin, und meine Arbeit nur gedeiht” (Lahnstein, 328). Nothing could match the energy he derived from writing. Von Wolzogen’s depiction offers important insight into a man who she knew well. She writes of the high seriousness and, yet, graceful, witty ease of an open and unspoiled mind that were always present in him. Even in pain, Schiller drew strength from a healthy self-love that respects others. Schiller’s perseverance had little if anything to do with Roman stoicism. Rather, it was grounded in self-knowledge and in his vocation as a writer.

Ethics and Aesthetics Despite claims to the contrary, and as we have suggested, in Schiller’s writings, aesthetics and morality are intimately related. For example, in the essay, Über den moralischen Nutzen ästhetischer Sitten (On the Moral Value of Aesthetics, 1793) the writer sees the true enemy of morality (“Feind der Moralität”; 8:814) to lie in that sense drive that seeks satisfaction alone, that is, self-satisfaction. It is “der stärkste Gegner, den der Mensch in seinem moralischen Handeln zu bekämpfen hat” (8:814). Here, too, the tension between the rational and sensuous natures of human beings, which Schiller had identified in his early anthropological writings, form one of the two major bases for his discussion of the practical value of aesthetics, the other being the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant. For the physiologist and aesthetician, Friedrich Schiller, the Mittelkraft (central force) that mediates between the sensuous and rational natures is later transformed into the Spieltrieb (play drive), which itself mediates between the Stofftrieb (material drive) and the Formtrieb (form drive) and thereby gives rise to art and literature. Filling the concept of taste of the early German Enlightenment with a new content, the theoretician proposes the following: “Der Geschmack befreit das Gemüt bloß insofern von dem Joch des Instinkts, als er es in seinen Fesseln führet . . .” (8:815). Schiller argues that all material inclinations and raw desires that have opposed the exercise of what is good are dispersed through taste. In their stead, art plants nobler and softer inclinations that encourage order, harmony, and perfection. Art promotes the “Legalität unsers Betragens” (8:819). Hence, it cannot be divorced from reality; on the contrary, it informs and reshapes it.

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It is not coincidental that justice and atonement are two of the golden threads that link Schiller’s writings, in drama (Die Räuber and Maria Stuart), prose narratives (Der Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre), and poetry (“Die Kraniche des Ibykus” [The Cranes of Ibycus]). After all, before having undertaken the study of medicine, Schiller had studied law, albeit for a short time. Although some minimal research is available in this area, the relationship between Schiller’s writings, jurisprudence, and various other concepts of law in the later eighteenth century is still an open field of scholarship. Müller Dietz, for example, has confirmed the fact that Schiller’s theater is directed to the education of the people and of legalpedagogical significance. We recall that following their heinous crimes, the characters Karl Moor (Die Räuber) and Christian Wolf (Der Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre), to say nothing of Maria Stuart, confess their crimes and guilt in the end. In effect, the moral law within recognizes the validity of the legal order outside of their individual selves, a sign of their responsibility to society. Not only Schiller’s drama and prose work but also his historical writings underscore the social accountability of the individual. For example, in both the Geschichte des Dreißigjährigen Kriegs and Wallensteins Tod (Wallenstein’s Death, 1799) General Wallenstein plots his own course and is eventually held accountable for his actions, or inaction, by the law of the land. What, then, is the relationship between law and freedom in Schiller’s works? For Schiller, the salvation of the human species lies neither in religion nor in science but, in art. Art alone is capable of effecting a balance between all of one’s individual faculties. Clearly, Schiller’s work marks a profound paradigm shift in German culture. He is the first to replace religion with art explicitly in theory. Somewhat later, at the turn of the new century, in Maria Stuart (Mary Stuart, 1801), the writer would present his audiences and readers with a dramatic representation of the power of art versus religion in the description of Mortimer’s visit to Rome, in act 1, scene 6. But are aesthetics, the visual arts and literature, “practical”? Schiller would argue that they are indeed, inasmuch as they are formative forces in a process of development, that is, education, which is devoted to reshaping human behavior. Beauty and its correlate, the sublime, serve as keys to the cultural re-formation of society. One of Schiller’s foremost contributions is the knowledge that practical reason operates in concert with aesthetics. The actualization of moral knowledge in the present that is gained in the process of aesthetic education means that the ideal of humane humanity serves as a regulative idea for the improvement of individuals and societies over time. Schiller’s ideas are not mere abstractions that await their realization in a distant and unforeseeable future. Rather, one strives to enact the moral knowledge that one has acquired affectively in and through aesthetic education.


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The Themes of Death and of Hope The eventuality of death already haunted the young and ailing Friedrich Schiller. While studying medicine at the Ducal Military Academy, or Karlsschule, the young student was deeply affected by the deaths of several associates, the experiences of which he set to meter. “Banges Stöhnen, wir vorm nahen Sturme, / Hallet her vom öden Trauerhaus, / Totentöne fallen von des Münsters Turme, / Einen Jüngling trägt man hier heraus: / Einen Jüngling — noch nicht reif zum Sarge, / In des Lebens Mai gepflückt, / Pochend mit der Jugend Nervenmarke, / Mit der Flamme, die im Auge zückt; . . .” (ll. 1–8). Schiller wrote these lines, taken from the poem “Elegie auf den Tod eines Jünglings,” on the death of Johann Christian Weckherlin (January 15, 1781), one of his fellow students at the academy. Although the elegy laments the loss of a friend and evokes a sense of mourning, it points to the possibility of overcoming sadness, grief, and despair. Although the world may be on the brink of destruction, for the writer of Theosophie des Julius (Julius’ Theosophy; see the Philosophischen Briefe [Philosophical Letters, 1787–89]), love is the gravitational center of the universe, the internal cultivation and external expression that restores hope in the future. Much later, in the poem “Hoffnung,” which appeared in the 1797 volume of Die Horen, Schiller would advance the following thoughts: Es reden und träumen die Menschen viel Von bessern künftigen Tagen, Nach einem glücklichen goldenen Ziel Sieht man sie rennen und jagen, Die Welt wird alt und wird wieder jung, Doch der Mensch hofft immer Verbesserung. In Wallenstein, Thekla would be driven to the gravesite of her lover, Max Piccolomini, by the power of love. In Schiller’s grand drama of history, the grave becomes an integration point of love where, contrary to expectations, nothing is to be feared: “Ich fürchte keines Menschen Zürnen mehr” (l. 3101). At the same time, however, the realization of a humane humanity would seem to lie outside history. Nevertheless, the expression of love and the unifying social bonds that extend from it foster hope in the future transformation of society. The prominent Schiller biographer Peter-André Alt characterizes the poem on Weckherlin’s tragic, premature death as a lament about the obscure ways of providence (I: 223). While blaspheming God, the fictional representation of the human being in this poem illustrates the “Protest gegen eine ungerechte Weltordnung” (I: 224). “Der Schöpfer ist kein genädiger Vater, sondern ein ‘Gott der Grüfte,’ den man ‘mit Grauen’

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verehrt” (ll. 137–38). But rather than take this passage too literally as an indictment of God, given the context in which it was written, the immediate reference is actually to the Duke of Württemberg, Karl Eugen, who insisted that he was the “father” of his students. What the young writer is protesting indirectly is the tyranny of his new “father,” the absolutistic ruler. Another biographer, Peter Lahnstein, has termed this contribution to Schiller’s collection of poetry, Anthologie auf das Jahr 1782 (Anthology for the Year 1782), not only an elegy (Trauergedicht) but also a lament (Leichengedicht) (89). Anticipating our discussion of new directions in future scholarship on Schiller, what, then, is the relationship between the body and the text in Schiller’s writings? Schiller introduces his first collection of poetry, the Anthologie auf das Jahr 1782, with the poem “Trauer-Ode auf den Tod des Hauptmanns Wiltmaister.” Captain Johann Anton Wiltmaister was a member of the Stuttgart military regiment, an outfit to which Schiller would be assigned and serve as a surgeon. Wiltmaister died at the end of December 1780, around the time that Schiller began his service. In this poem, the wing metaphor plays a key role, as it does throughout Schiller’s writings, and not only in the area of poetry. Maria Stuart, for example, dreams of escaping her prison with the aid of wings, which, in her case, is but a vain hope. Here, too, the writer explores the limitations, that is, fetters of the body. “Grimmig wirgt der Todt durch unsre Glieder!” (l. 1). Drawing upon the nomenclature and arguments introduced in his medical dissertation, Schiller advances the idea that when the strings of the body and the wings of the mind break death is certain and sudden. Yet, as always, there is hope. For one day, as the poet intuits, joy will prevail beyond the temporal divide between life and death. Finally, in mid-May 1782, young Schiller wrote a “Trauergedicht” on the death of the fort commander, Philipp Friedrich Rieger. Like Daniel Schubart, Rieger had spent time at the prison on the Hohenasperg under the worst of conditions (“in grausamster Haft”; Lahnstein, 92). Schiller’s own short-term imprisonment by Duke Eugen for deserting to attend the premiere performance of his first highly successful play, Die Räuber, in Mannheim, also put him in contact with Rieger. In fact, Schiller shared a review of his drama with Rieger while they were both imprisoned. Clearly, Schiller’s experiences as a young man, military doctor, and writer are intermeshed with the cultural and political terrain of the German eighteenth century. Schiller’s first, fascinating collection of poetry, Anthologie auf das Jahr 1782 as a whole still requires close examination. For one thing, it can be seen as a body of work that discloses the more intimate connections between the early and later works. For example, by charting the development of a particular theme, such as love, from the Laura-poems, for example, “Der Triumpf der Liebe,” through Wallenstein and beyond,


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it is possible to ascertain how the writer changed over time, in effect reconstructing a significant thread in the course of German cultural history. What aspects of German cultural and political history of the later eighteenth century does Schiller address and, possibly, critique in his poetry? In the light of interdisciplinary research today, a poem like “Der Abend” is especially interesting insofar as a number of motifs, themes, questions, and problems converge: the motif of flight as a representation of freedom and liberation from the chains of the earth and the body, the question of the extent to which Schiller was indebted to the Baroque and his analogies to modern science, and the theme of evening itself and the contrast between light and dark that is taken up again in poetry by other poets of the time, such as Matthias Claudius and representatives of the Sturm und Drang. In the light of its thematic complexities, it is especially interesting that “Der Abend” was Schiller’s first published poem (1776). To what extent should Schiller’s later works be re-read in full view of his earliest writings? In the poems “Hymne an den Unendlichen” and “Die Größe der Welt,” the recognition and problem of the infinite depths of the universe and, in the latter poem, the potential threat of a thunderstorm, that is, Nature, beg for comparison with the poetry of Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock and Albrecht von Haller, the latter of whom was the leading German-Swiss physiologist of the eighteenth century. Here it is interesting to observe that Schiller’s dissertation committee insisted that the young writer engage himself more with Haller’s work. To what extent does Schiller’s sidestepping of Haller in the early phases of his work on physiology constitute a critique of authority? It is a curious fact that Schiller’s committee members, Johann Friedrich Consbruch, Christian Konrad Klein, and Christian Gottlieb Reuss, criticized Schiller’s scientific writing style for its literary metaphors or “poetic turns of phrase that so often disturb the calm flow of the philosophical style” (Dewhurst/Reeves, 286). What is the relationship between science and literature in Schiller’s works? A number of subjects that could yield some unexpected and perhaps even unprecedented results when studying the Anthologie and its genesis and reception in Schiller’s works, as well as by other writers of the time include the following: the motif of flying (“Die Herrlichkeit der Schöpfung. Eine Phantasie”), space travel (“Die seligen Augenblicke”), and the fact of gravity, the animal world, and the “animal,” that is, corporeal, nature of the human being that Schiller investigates in his dissertation, Über den Zusammenhang der tierischen Natur des Menschen mit seiner geistigen, their relationship to the operations of the mind and to scientific accounts of various aspects of nature, such as Dr. Sulzers Abgekürzte Geschichte der INSECTEN Nach dem Linaeischen System (Dr. Sulzer’s Shortened History of Insects According to the Linaean System, 1776), and one of the most fundamental aspects of Schiller’s Gesamtwerk, that

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of music. Music, of course, calls up not only the question but also the problem of harmony, which is one of the most prolific themes of the German classical heritage from Johann Joachim Winckelmann to Thomas Mann. Although approaching death, Schiller continued to write. Given the debilitating condition of his internal organs — a collapsed lung, congested heart chambers, and a hardened liver — Schiller’s doctor was amazed that the man could have lived as long as he did. In the end, it was the pneumonia he had contracted in his one remaining lung that killed him. There is surprisingly little in the way of exclamations of suffering and pain in Schiller’s letters. Perhaps they were diverted to, and worked out in and through, his numerous writings. Schiller’s last words had nothing to do with wanting more light, as had Goethe. Instead, hope in the improvement of humankind and the cheerfulness that accompanies it: “Immer besser, immer heiterer . . .” Amid his sufferings, and in clear view of life in an imperfect world, Schiller kept joy and hope alive. Perhaps the following lines from the poem “Die Künstler” (The Artists), written in 1789 during the French Revolution, could well serve as Schiller’s epitaph. Der Menschheit Würde ist in eure Hand gegeben, Bewahret sie! Sie sinkt mit euch! Mit euch wird sie sich heben! Schiller believed that all social-political change must begin with the individual, no matter how criminal, as the actions of Karl Moor, Christian Wolf, Maria Stuart, and Wilhelm Tell suggest.

Selected Contributions to Schiller-Scholarship Numerous excellent sources for further reading and future scholarly research are currently available. Clearly, one should consult the main bibliographies on Schiller’s works, including installments in the Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft. A critical overview of the available editions of Schiller’s collected works is found in Wulf Koepke’s contribution to this volume, which serves as a helpful guide regarding the primary literature. Scholarship since the mid-1970s has energized Schiller studies and deepened our understanding of the times in which he was writing. In the 1970s, it drew attention especially to the problem of political idealism. Both Klaus Berghahn’s Friedrich Schiller: Zur Geschichtlichkeit seines Werkes (1975) and Walter Hinderer’s Schillers Dramen: Neue Interpretationen (1979) mark a turning point in scholarship, the effects of which are still felt


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and debated in contemporary research on Schiller. The collection of essays by Klaus Berghahn, Schiller: Ansichten eines Idealisten (1986) has compelled contemporary scholars to revisit and come to terms with the traditional view of Schiller as an idealist. Concerning this question, we must add that the writer Schiller monitored the limits of his own idealizing, which is evident from many of his statements. In the classical essays of the 1790s, for example, the writer frequently employs variations on the qualifier: “Aber das ist bloß eine Idee.” As a result, Schiller does not direct the ideal of a humane humanity toward the realization of a utopia at some point in future history. Rather, the ideal serves as a regulative idea, as a measure of the potentiality of the individual and humankind with an eye toward the future. The late 1980s and 1990s experienced a proliferation of collections of essays and monographs on Schiller that cannot be overlooked when conducting scholarly research on the writer and his works. Among the former there are the following: Friedrich von Schiller and the Drama of Human Existence (1988); Klassik im Vergleich: DFG Symposion 1990; Revolution und Autonomie: Deutsche Autonomieästhetik im Zeitalter der Französischen Revolution (1990); Schiller spielen: Stimmen der Theaterkritik: 1946–1985 (1990); Schiller und die höfische Welt (1990); Schiller: Aspekte neuerer Forschung: Ein Sonderheft zur “Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie” (1990), Schiller: Vorträge aus Anlaß seines 225. Geburtstages (1991); Schiller als Historiker (1995); and Schiller heute (1996). Karl S. Guthke’s book, Schillers Dramen: Idealismus und Skepsis (1994), has become a landmark study. With three monographs on Schiller to her credit (1982, 1991, 1995), Lesley Sharpe is the leading non-German scholar on the writer today. Clearly, her findings deserve careful attention. The collection of essays Friedrich Schiller: Zur Modernität eines Klassikers (1996) by Norbert Oellers, the editor of the Schiller Nationalausgabe, investigates the man’s physical ailments and the work of the classical writer (“Der kranke Klassiker Schiller”) who was fully cognizant of “die Gräßlichkeit der alles zermalmenden Geschichte” (22), which is characteristic of the crisis of modernity. My contribution, Harmonious Tensions: The Writings of Friedrich Schiller (1996), expands the traditional horizons of Schiller scholarship, the many contexts in which he was writing, and the writer’s reception in the twentieth century from the perspective of German studies. David Pugh casts new light on Schiller’s indebtedness to the neo-Platonic tradition in Dialectic of Love: Platonism in Schiller’s Aesthetics (1996). Helmut Koopmann’s Schiller-Handbuch (1998) is the leading handbook on Schiller in the German language, and Walter Hinderer’s collection of essays, Von der Idee des Menschen: Über Friedrich Schiller (1998), is an important reminder of Schiller’s commitment to a courageous and humane humanity in the face of man’s inhumanity to man.

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At the gateway to our own century, scholarship on Schiller in and around the Goethe-Year 1999 was especially vibrant. Peter-André Alt’s monumental two-volume work, Schiller: Leben — Werk — Zeit (2000), is unprecedented in its scope and numbers among the best contributions to scholarship on Schiller. Consistent with the renewed interest in politics, ethics, aesthetics, and history, Alt traces Schiller’s political interests as represented in his life’s work. Götz-Lothar Darsow’s account of the state of research in Friedrich Schiller (2000) is a helpful and reliable starting point for future scholarship in the twenty-first century. Three volumes published by Camden House confirm the interest by and impact of Anglo-Saxon scholarship on Germany’s distinguished writer, Friedrich Schiller. Lesley Sharpe’s Schiller’s Aesthetic Essays: Two Centuries of Criticism (1995), David Pugh’s Schiller’s Early Dramas: A Critical History (2000), and Kathy Saranpa’s Schiller’s “Wallenstein,” “Maria Stuart,” and “Die Jungfrau von Orleans”: The Critical Legacy (2002) serve as useful guides through the labyrinth of available scholarship on these central topics. Each one of these volumes contains suggestions for the future study of Schiller and his work. Concerning the most recent scholarship on Schiller, Jörg Aufenanger’s Friedrich Schiller: Biographie (2004) offers a new biography of the man and his professional activities along the lines of Peter Lahnstein’s biography, while Michael Hofmann explores Schiller’s writings in some detail in Schiller: Epoche-Werk-Wirkung (2003). Charlotte M. Werner provides the scholar and the general reader with very interesting insights into Schiller’s relationships to women and his love life in Friedrich Schiller und seine Leidenschaften (2004). Our knowledge of Schiller from his wife’s point of view is greatly expanded with the first major biography of Charlotte Schiller (von Lengefeld) by Eva Gesine Baur (“Mein Geschöpf musst du sein”: Das Leben der Charlotte Schiller, 2004). Finally, the Insel-Almanach auf das Jahr 2005. Friedrich Schiller. Zum 200. Todestag (2004) offers the reader historically-based accounts of Schiller’s life, times, and work by many well-known Schiller scholars in Germany, including two of our own contributors, Dieter Borchmeyer and Norbert Oellers. To be sure, the works by Schiller available in English translation in the Continuum German Library under the editorship of Walter Hinderer offer the reader and student an excellent point of departure for an understanding and appreciation of the writer and the problems that attend his work. These inexpensive and reliable volumes of Schiller’s works are a fine choice as texts for the classroom, especially in general education courses for the university and college communities in particular. The introductory essays are of value to all serious students of Schiller. One might ask to what extent Schiller’s theories and dramatic practice in particular reveal concerns of postmodernism? For example, Schiller was concerned about the fragmentation of society, which led him to the


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awareness that, in modern times, the human being can train, that is, educate oneself (ausbilden) only as a fragment of a larger and often overwhelming network of social and political connections. This feeling of being but a fragment can then result in the experience of profound alienation. Stephanie Hammer’s Schiller’s Wound (2001), as well as the chapter on “Trauma und Tragödie: Das Trauerspiel vom Los des Schönen auf der Erde,” in Benjamin Schmidt’s Denker ohne Gott und Vater treat interestingly Schiller and postmodernist issues. The task also remains to determine the web of relationships among the multi-dimensional aspects of Schiller’s collected works. No doubt such scholarship will help us appreciate the true complexity of the writer’s work even more profoundly than in the past. Finally, sustained investigations of Schiller’s unpublished fragments would help to identify the writer’s own intentions for his work and likewise expand our knowledge of its complexities, both within the Gesamtwerk itself as well as in the contexts in which his texts were written and the objectives and goals to which they point. In conclusion, we hope that the present volume will serve as a significant contribution to the study of Schiller and, at the same time, whet the appetite of the casual reader for the ideas and work of this major writer of world literature.

Notes 1 Our contributor, Werner von Stransky-Stranka-Greifenfels, charts the significance of landscapes such as these for a new and unique interpretation of Schiller’s Die Räuber. 2 The building was destroyed during World War II and, along with it, the library which contained books that Schiller himself used, access to which could have been especially helpful for research on the writer and his work. 3 This point serves as a corrective to Burschell’s reading. Burschell does not consider the medical writings to be of real significance for an understanding of Schiller’s main work. 4

For an excellent discussion of the use of the words “klassisch,” “Klassik,” and “Klassizität” in the language of the time, see Alt 2: 27–37.

5

See also the collection of essays, Unser Commercium (Barner, et al.). Furthermore, in Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne, Jürgen Habermas attributes to Schiller an acute understanding of “Mitteilung.” 6

The contribution to this volume by Wulf Koepke on Schiller’s reception confirms Wolzogen’s intuition.

7

References to Schiller’s works in this essay are to volume and page number in the Frankfurter Ausgabe, Werke und Briefe in zwölf Bänden, edited by Klaus Harro Hilzinger, et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1988–). Here: 8:582.

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8

Two of our contributors register acute sensitivity toward the turns in Schiller’s work in the last decade of the eighteenth century. Otto Dann sees that Schiller’s view of history and historiography changed significantly in 1790 as a result of his renewed engagement with history, while Norbert Oellers discloses the profound change in Schiller’s writing of poetry that followed just a few years later, in 1795.

Works Cited Alt, Peter-André. Schiller: Leben — Werk — Zeit. 2 vols. Munich: C. H. Beck, 2000. Aufenanger, Jörg. Friedrich Schiller: Biographie. Düsseldorf: Artemis & Winkler, 2004. Aurnhammer, Achim, Klaus Manger, and Friedrich Strack, eds. Schiller und die höfische Welt. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1990. Barner, Wilfried, Christine Lubkoll, Ernst Osterkamp, and Ulrich Ott, eds. Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft. Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner, 1957. Barner, Wilfried, Eberhard Lämmert, and Norbert Oellers, eds. Unser Commercium: Goethes und Schillers Literaturpolitik. Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1984. Baur, Eva Gesine. “Mein Geschöpf musst du sein”: Das Leben der Charlotte Schiller. Hamburg: Hofmann und Campe, 2004. Berghahn, Klaus. Schiller: Ansichten eines Idealisten. Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1986. ———, ed. Friedrich Schiller: Zur Geschichtlichkeit seines Werkes. Kronsberg /Ts.: Scriptor, 1975. Borchmeyer, Dieter. Die Weimarer Klassik: Eine Einführung. 2 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1980. Dann, Otto, Norbert Oellers, and Ernst Osterkamp, eds. Schiller als Historiker. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1995. Darsow, Götz-Lothar. Friedrich Schiller. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2000. Grathof, Dirk, and Erwin Liebfried, eds. Schiller: Vorträge aus Anlaß seines 225. Geburtstages. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1991. Guthke, Karl S. Schillers Dramen: Idealismus und Skepsis. Tübingen: A. Francke, 1994. Habermas, Jürgen. Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne: Zwölf Vorlesungen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985. Hammer, Stephanie. Schiller’s Wound: The Theater of Trauma from Crisis to Commodity. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2001. Herder, Johann Gottfried. Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit. Ed. Martin Bollacher. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1989. Hinderer, Walter, ed., Schillers Dramen: Neue Interpretationen. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1979.


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Hinderer, Walter. Von der Idee des Menschen: Über Friedrich Schiller. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1998. Hofmann, Michael. Schiller: Epoche — Werk — Wirkung. Munich: C. H. Beck, 2003. Humboldt, Wilhelm von. “Über Schiller und den Gang seiner Geistesentwicklung,” In Schillers Leben und Werk in Daten und Bildern, ed. Bernhard Zeller. Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1966. Knoblauch, Hans-Jürg, and Helmut Koopmann, eds. Schiller heute. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1996. Koopmann, Helmut, ed. Schiller-Handbuch. Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner, 1998. Kühn, Rudolf A., ed. Schillers Tod: Kommentierter Reprint der Studie “Schillers Krankheit” von Wolfgang H. Veil aus dem Jahre 1936. Jena: Universitätsverlag Jena, 1992. Lahnstein, Peter. Schillers Leben: Biographie. Munich: List, 1982. Marbacher Schillerbuch: Zur hundertsten Wiederkehr von Schillers Todestag. Ed. Schwäbischer Schillerverein. Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1905. Martinson, Steven D. “Authority and the Author: Schiller and the Public Sphere.” In The European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms 3 (1998): 87–96. ———. “Filling in the Gaps: ‘The Problem of World Order’ in Friedrich Schiller’s Essay on Universal History.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 22 (1988): 24–46. ———. Harmonious Tensions: The Writings of Friedrich Schiller. Newark: U of Delaware P; London: Associated University Presses, 1996. ———. “Reason, Revolution and Religion: Johann Benjamin Erhard’s Concept of Enlightened Revolution.” History of European Ideas 12 (1990): 221–26. ———. “Shaping the Imagination: Friedrich Schiller’s Book Reviews.” In The Eighteenth-Century Book Review. Eds. Karl Fink and Herbert Rowland, 137–50. Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1995. Müller-Dietz, Heinz. Grenzüberschreitungen: Beiträge zur Beziehung zwischen Literatur und Recht. Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1990. Oellers, Norbert. Friedrich Schiller: Zur Modernität eines Klassikers. Ed. Michael Hofmann. Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1996. Piedmont, Ferdinand, ed. Schiller spielen: Stimmen der Theaterkritik, 1946–1985. Eine Dokumentation. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1990. Pieper, Heike. Schillers Projekt eines “menschlichen Menschen”: Eine Interpretation der “Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen” von Friedrich Schiller. Lage: Jacobs, 1997. Pilling, Claudia, Diana Schilling, and Mirjam Springer. Friedrich Schiller. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2002. Pugh, David. Dialectic of Love: Platonism in Schiller’s Aesthetics. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1996.

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Pugh, David. Schiller’s Early Dramas: A Critical History. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2000. Reed, T[erence] J. “Coming of Age in Prussia and Swabia: Kant, Schiller, and the Duke.” Modern Language Review 86 (1991): 613–26. Rippere, Vicky. Schiller and “Alienation”: A Problem in the Transmission of His Thought. Bern: Peter Lang, 1981. Saranpa, Kathy. Schiller’s “Wallenstein,” “Maria Stuart,” and “Die Jungfrau von Orleans”: The Critical Legacy. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2002. Schiller: Aspekte neuerer Forschung. Special edition of “Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie.” 1990. Schiller, Johann Kaspar. Betrachtungen über landwirtschaftliche Dinge in dem Herzogthum Württemberg, ausgesetzt von einem Herzoglichen Offizier. Stuttgart: Cotta, 1767–69. ———. Von der Baumzucht im Großen. Neustrelitz: Michaelis, 1793. Schmidt, Benjamin Marius. Denker ohne Gott und Vater: Schiller, Schlegel und der Entwurf der Modernität in den 1790ern. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2001. Schulze, Hagen. Kleine Deutsche Geschichte. Munich: Beck, 1996. Sharpe, Lesley. Friedrich Schiller and the Historical Character: Presentation and Intepretation in the Historiographical Works and in the Historical Dramas. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1982. ———. Friedrich Schiller: Drama, Thought and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. ———. Schiller’s Aesthetic Essays: Two Centuries of Criticism. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1995. Simm, Hans-Joachim, ed. Insel-Almanach auf das Jahr 2005. Friedrich Schiller Zum 200. Todestag. Frankfurt am Main/Leipzig: Insel, 2004. Sokel, Walter. “Die politische Funktion botschaftsloser Kunst. Zum Verhältnis von Politik und Ästhetik in Schillers Briefen Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen.” In Revolution und Autonomie: Deutsche Autonomieästhetik im Zeitalter der Französischen Revolution. Ein Symposium, ed. Wolfgang Wittkowski, 264–72. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1990. Sulzer, Johann Heinrich. Dr. Sulzers Abgekürzte Geschichte der INSEKTEN: Nach dem Linaeischen System. 2 parts. Winterthur: H. Steiner u. Comp., 1776. Ugrinsky, Alexej, ed. Friedrich von Schiller and the Drama of Human Existence. New York: Greenwood Press, 1988. Werner, Charlotte M. Friedrich Schiller und seine Leidenschaften. Düsseldorf: Droste, 2004. Wolzogen, Caroline von. Schillers Leben, verfaßt aus Erinnerungen der Familie, seinen eigenen Briefen und den Nachrichten seines Freundes Körner. 2 parts in 1 vol. Stuttgart/Tübingen: J. C. Cotta, 1830. Zeller, Bernhard. Schiller: Eine Bildbiographie. Munich: Kindler, 1958.

Intellectual-Historical Settings

Schiller’s Philosophical Aesthetics in Anthropological Perspective Walter Hinderer

F

RIEDRICH SCHILLER, KNOWN FROM TIME TO TIME, both positively and negatively, as the German Shakespeare, was not only one of the greatest German playwrights but also one of the first modern European intellectuals. It is no accident that we find in his Über naive und sentimentale Dichtung (On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, 1795–96) a kind of aesthetics of modernity, one that left visible traces in the theoretical writings of the Early Romantics. Long before Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht, Schiller argued that the poet’s work must reflect the philosophical and scientific achievements of his age. Precisely in the face of the increasing fragmentation of our faculties, which, according to Schiller, necessitates an “erweiterte[n] Kreis des Wissens und die Absonderung der Berufsgeschäfte,” poetry acquires a special function: it alone is able to reunify the divided powers of the soul, “welche Kopf und Herz, Scharfsinn und Witz, Vernunft und Einbildungskraft in harmonischem Bunde beschäftigt, welche gleichsam den ganzen Menschen in uns wieder herstellt.”1 It is certain that for Schiller the precondition for achieving totality lies in the aesthetic state, which he once characterized as the noblest of all gifts. Here, the individual experiences the parallelogram of forces of his basic drives, both physical and mental, and is motivated to become a second creator. It is also true that traces of this basic program of the classical ideal of humanity can be found a generation earlier in the writings of Herder and Wieland. In the Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität (Letters Toward the Advancement of Humanity, 1793–97), for example, Herder states the case as follows: “Humanität ist der Charakter unseres Geschlechts; er ist uns aber nur in den Anlagen angeboren und muß uns eigentlich angebildet werden. Wir bringen ihn nicht fertig auf die Welt mit, auf der Welt soll er das Ziel unsres Strebens, die Summe unserer Übungen, unser Wert sein” (Werke, 5:103). In the anthropologies and intellectual histories produced during the German Enlightenment, maturity (“Mündigkeit”) and the discovery of self-consciousness are often only different names for the same idea. From this perspective, it is clear that the Biblical narration of the fall of man evolved into a paradigm of intellectual emancipation. In Mutmaßlicher

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Anfang der Menschheitsgeschichte (Conjectural Beginning of Human History, 1786), Kant defines the way out of the garden of Eden — in spite of all the obvious drawbacks — as a decisive anthropological event: with this act mankind frees itself from the narrow bonds of instinct (“Gängelwagen des Instinkts”) and from the guardianship of nature and passes into a state of freedom, beginning to serve Reason and becoming, in Kant’s sense, mature (“mündig,” Werke, 9:92). In his essay Etwas über die erste Menschengesellschaft nach dem Leitfaden der mosaischen Urkunde (On the First Society of Men according to the Guidelines of the Mosaic Document, 1790), Schiller characterizes, even more forcefully than Kant, the fall of man from the sway of instinct (“Abfall des Menschen vom Instinkt”) as the most fortunate, indeed the greatest event in the history of humankind (“glücklichste und größte Begebenheit in der Menchengeschichte,” 6:434). Although moral corruption (“moralisches Übel”) enters the world with self-responsibility and maturity, it was, according to Schiller, only by means of this event that such a thing as moral goodness (“das moralisch Gute”) could become possible. Schiller’s reflections belong to the philosophies of what was called by the historian Reinhart Koselleck, literally, “the saddling-period” (“Sattelzeit”) of the eighteenth century. This is a time of new beginning — which, according to Odo Marquard — can be characterized as the “Avancement von Geschichtsphilosophie, philosophische Anthropologie, philosophische Ästhetik” (1981, 47). In this connection, one need only quote the letter that Schiller wrote to Charlotte von Schimmelmann on November 4, 1795, in which he asserts: “Die höchste Filosofie endigt mit einer poetischen Idee, so die höchste Moralität, die höchste Politik. Der dichterische Geist ist es, der allen Dreien das Ideal vorzeichnet, welchem sich anzunähern ihre höchste Vollkommenheit ist.” This development can be read as a process of compensation which, in the mid-eighteenth century, leads to a new understanding of man (Marquard, 1981, 42). Reasons for this can be found, first, in the experience of a diminution of life (“Lebensverlust”) — the increasing distance between claims made on life and their fulfillment — that Schiller had already noted in his Philosophische Briefe (Philosophical Letters, 1786; 8:214); and, second, in a disenchantment of the world through a process of increasing reification during the period of the Enlightenment. Aesthetics holds an exceptional place, following Marquard, among the simultaneous innovations that occurred in the various compensatory disciplines because it liberates the individual through a new enchantment from a reification imposed by alien powers. These various attempts at compensation can be read as reactions to the collapse of Leibniz’s theodicy within the cultural system of the sciences and the arts. Not least of all, the earthquake in Lisbon on November 1, 1755 so shattered the Enlightenment’s belief in reason and optimism that, by means of a dialectical turnabout, as portrayed by Schiller through the fate of the

SCHILLER’S PHILOSOPHICAL AESTHETICS

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fictive materialist Franz von Moor, the negative side of this worldview came forcefully to light. The question of responsibility within the discourse of theodicy in the period 1755–1789, which has been described as a double shift of phase from optimism to pessimism and then again from pessimism to optimism (Weinrich, 66–67), becomes further and further displaced into transcendental philosophy, which, not without reason, came to be known as a secularized “theodicy without God” (“Theodizee ohne Gott”) (Marquard, 1987, 81). The consequences were, as Marquard points out: “Die Rechtfertigung der Welt hängt fortan an der Rechtfertigung des Ich und diese an seiner Kapazität der Antonomienauflösung” (83). Although Schiller’s theoretical writings and dramas intervene at the forefront of discussions of the Sattelzeit, his specifically anthropological tracts evidence arguments drawn from the contemporary physiology and medicine he encountered as a student of medicine at the Karlsschule. In fact, it was the so-called philosophy of the physicians that, from the late Enlightenment on, focused on the whole human being and constituted, with its psycho-physical concepts, the presuppositions of an anthropology that not only left visible traces in Schiller’s early theoretical writings but also shaped in detail his three major essays influenced by Kant, Über Anmut und Würde (On Grace and Dignity, 1793), Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen (On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, 1795), and Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung [On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, 1795). One can certainly maintain that the basic concepts of Schiller’s philosophical-anthropological aesthetics had already been developed while he was a student at the Karlsschule. Above all, it was Jakob Friedrich Abel (1751–1829) who introduced the young Schiller to the important medical discourses of the time. In opposition to the views of his Tübinger master, the Wolffian Gottfried Ploucqet, Abel taught his students Georg Ernst Stahl’s (1659–1734) animistic theories, Albrecht von Haller’s (1708–1777) and Ernst Platner’s (1744–1818) anthropology, and the mechanistic theories of Hermann Boerhaave (1668–1738), as well as those of the French scientist Julien Offray de La Mettrie2 (1709–1751).3 The eclectic Abel appears to have promoted an open and critical discussion of both schools of thought. But, like his two students Friedrich Wilhelm von Hoven and Schiller (Riedel, 1993, 211–20), he advanced the psycho-physiological perspective. In his introductory note to Anthropologie für Ärzte und Weltweise (1772), Platner provided a definition that guided contemporary discussions of the matter. It reads: Die Erkenntnis des Menschen wäre . . . in drey Wissenschaften abzutheilen. Man kann erstlich die Theile und Geschäffte der Maschine allein betrachten, ohne dabey auf die Einschränkungen zu sehen, welche diese Bewegungen von der Seele empfangen . . . das ist die Anatomie und

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Physiologie. Zweytens kann man auf eben diese Art die Kräfte und Eigenschaften der Seele untersuchen, ohne allezeit die Mitwirkung des Körpers . . . in Betracht zu ziehen; das wäre Psychologie, oder welches einerley ist, Logik, Aesthetik und ein großer Theil der Moralphilosophie. . . . Endlich kann man Körper und Seele in ihren gegenseitigen Verhältnissen, Einschränkungen und Beziehungen zusammen betrachten, und das ist es, was ich Anthropologie nenne. (xv–xvi)

Platner points to the one-sidedness of materialistic and animistic perspectives and propagates a psychosomatic point of view that does justice to the whole human being and in no way contributes to a further fragmentation of medical-philosophical positions. For this reason, the young Schiller speaks in his second dissertation of a “wunderbare und merkwürdige Sympathie, die die heterogenen Principien des Menschen gleichsam zu Einem Wesen macht” and states, almost apodictically, “der Mensch ist nicht Seele und Körper, der Mensch ist die innigste Vermischung dieser beiden Substanzen” (8:149). As a student, Schiller tried to overcome the separation of substances that Descartes instituted in De homine (1632), first with the idea of the mediating power (“Mittelkraft”; Philosophie der Physiologie), next with the aesthetic sense (“ästhetischer Sinn”; Was kann eine gute stehende Schaubühne eigentlich wirken? [What Effect Can a Good Repertory Theater Have?, 1784]), a median state (“mittlerer Zustand”) and, finally, following some disagreement with Kant, with the aesthetic state (“ästhetischer Zustand”) or median mood (“mittlere Stimmung”; Über die ästhetische Erziehung). It is evident that Schiller is applying terms and issues from anthropologicalmedical contexts to contemporary problems of cultural philosophy, society, and aesthetics. For all the intellectuality of his arguments, he did not intend in the 1790s to develop a closed system, a fact that distinguishes him from Kant and Fichte, but aims instead to propose for discussion elements of an anthropologically-based aesthetics. In his first dissertation, the Philosophie der Physiologie (1779), which, was rejected by its evaluators,4 the future poet presents his readers in the very first paragraph with a daring interpretation of the definition of the human being (“Bestimmung des Menschen”): it is nothing less than his equality with God (“Gottgleichheit”). Schiller refers this claim to the creator’s exquisite plan that also grants the human being divine powers. To approach the ideal is to expand the self (“Ich-Erweiterung”); the opposite movement leads to self-diminution (“Ich-Verkleinerung”). Young Schiller describes the goal as an idea of totality, in which all forces cooperate “gleich Saiten eines Instruments tausendstimmig zusammenlautend in eine Melodie” (8:37). Already here, as in the Theosophie des Julius (Philosophische Briefe), love is introduced as a vital magnetic force: it is “der schönste, edelste Trieb in der Menschlichen Seele, die grosse Kette der empfindenden Natur” (8:38). As he explains in the Theosophie, love is based on


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a momentary exchange of personalities, a substitution of beings: “auf einem augenblicklichen Tausch der Persönlichkeit, einer Verwechslung der Wesen” (8:222). Even God, as Schiller writes in a letter of April 14, 1783, to Reinwald, sees his being strewn about everywhere, “erblickt sich, sein großes, unendliches Selbst, in der unendlichen Natur umhergestreut” and loves himself in the distinct outline, the signified in the sign: “Er liebt sich in dem Abriß, das Bezeichnete in dem Zeichen.” Since the human ideal of totality can be only partially achieved, love has the function of collecting the dispersed characteristics of beauty into one complete body, “die zerstreuten Züge der Schönheit, die Glieder der Vollkommenheit in einen ganzen Leib aufzusammeln.” In the Theosophie, Schiller visualizes love as a ladder, “worauf wir emporklimmen zu Gottähnlichkeit” (8:227). The mutual attraction of spirits multiplied and continued into infinity (“Anziehung der Geister ins Unendliche vervielfältigt und fortgesetzt”) must, in the end, lead to the cancellation of that division, or produce God (“Endlich zu Aufhebung jener Trennung führen, oder . . . Gott hervorbringen”). It follows that love is the precondition of the possibility of equality with God. It should be noted in this context that in what remains to us of his first dissertation Schiller seems not to continue his discourse on love, which makes use of formulations very similar to the ones in Theosophie des Julius and in the letter to Reinwald that has been quoted. Because only the first chapter of the dissertation is extant, one can only speculate whether, in the third or fourth chapter, Schiller again took up the topic of the great chain of sentient nature (“große Kette der empfindenden Natur,” 8:38). In the paragraphs that have been preserved, he introduces as a force between matter and mind, “zwischen Welt und Geist” (8:40–41, 43–44), the above-mentioned mediating power (“Mittelkraft”) that feeds ideas to the soul. Wholly in accord with his time, Schiller derives the system of sensory perceptions from the specific organs of the senses. In the wake of Albrecht von Haller, though in a much more speculative way, he locates the Mittelkraft in the nerves; indeed, in the sixth paragraph, he practically associates the Mittelkraft with the nerve spirit (Nervengeist). Not without wit, Schiller sought to forge a path through the contradictory and complex jungle of medical theories (see Dewhurst/Reeves, 104). As he phrases it, surely with a trace of provocativeness, he realizes that he is “in einem Feld, wo schon mancher medizinische und metaphysische Donquixotte sich gewaltig herumgetummelt hat, und itzo herumtummelt” (8:43–44). His less than benevolent instructors interpreted his tendency to draw his own conclusions as a sign of arrogance. The anatomist Klein was especially critical of Schiller’s “dangerous tendency to know all things better” and delivered the following judgment: “The author is exceedingly bold and very frequently harsh and immodest in his judgment of the worthiest men.” Klein denounces Schiller’s criticism of “the immortal von Haller”

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and “the diligent Cotugno.” It is reasonable to suppose that Schiller’s eclectic and opinionated teacher Jacob Friedrich Abel, who motivated young Schiller in so many ways, encouraged his students to think courageously on their own (see Riedel, 1985, 19–18). Moreover, Schiller certainly must have known Abel’s Dissertation de origine characteris animi (1776), a work influenced by the philosophers Adam Ferguson, Helvetius, and Garve, as well as by the philosophical physicians Ernst Platner and Johann Georg Zimmermann. In the first paragraph of the second chapter of his dissertation, Abel, Schiller’s favorite teacher, detaches himself from metaphysical prejudices and underscores the corporeality of the soul. Almost programmatically, he reformulates the following freely from Platner’s Anthropologie: “Der Grund für den Einfluß des Körpers auf die Seele liegt darin, daß die Entstehung und Reproduktion sämtlicher Ideen an Einzelvorstellungen gebunden sind: daß diese durch den Körper bestimmt werden, kann im übrigen jeder darin ersehen, daß ohne Sprachzeichen und also auch ohne Nerven keine Vorstellungen in ausreichender Weise reproduziert werden kann” (Abel, 534, §12). Schiller, Abel’s student, also indicates the path via the sense organs through which material nature finds access to mental life. Here the external changes of material nature become inner ones. They become perceptions that, according to Garve, are based on changes of the nerve spirit in sensation (“einer Veränderung des Nervengeistes bei der Sensation”). In order to illustrate this psychosomatic exchange, Schiller introduces an organ of thought, the instrument of understanding. Here the question arises what constitutes the material ideas of this organ of thought or of imagination. The result achieved by the author through a critique of various theories (see Alt, 1:161–66) lies in the material association upon which thinking is based. It is plain that in this text Schiller practically equates thinking and imagination. On the other hand, he singles out Abel’s concept of awareness, Aufmerksamkeit, with which the soul can actively influence the organ of thought. For young Schiller, this concept represents the precondition of freedom to the extent that man, thanks to freedom, possesses a free will, whereas he is otherwise a slave of reason (8:56). For Schiller, therefore, the morality of the human being is located in awareness, that is, the active influence of the soul on the material ideas in the organ of thought. Thus it is through awareness that we can let our imagination wander, reflect, differentiate, and write poetry (8:57). However, the organ of thought can become untuned through illness: “Verwirrung der Geister in der Krankheit” (8:57). At the end of this first, fragmentary dissertation, Schiller emphasizes again that the soul is not only a thinking but also a sentient being. The schemes of self-expansion and self-diminution that Schiller would later develop in his Philosophische Briefe are touched upon here, and their psychic consequences are described.


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The rejected dissertation already demonstrates the anthropological direction of Schiller’s philosophical interests. He is concerned with the whole human being, whereby, with his portrayal of the human being in at least the last two paragraphs, the personal experiences linked to his poetic imagination become evident. In his third dissertation,5 Schiller again takes up the topic of the first one, where, contrary to his first attempt, he emphasizes the empirical side of the psychosomatic connections in the human being. Although he still attempts to find a middle way between the prevailing materialistic and idealistic theses, he is interested foremost in heightening the value of the contributions that the body makes to the actions of the soul (8:123) to prove the impact of the “thierischen Empfindungssystems auf das Geistige.” The model of influxus corporis taught to him by Abel (see Riedel, 1985, 26–33 and Alt 1,176–88), which is based on concepts of Ernst Platner, Tissot, and Zimmermann, illustrates the psychosomatic connection in which the human being and his cultural development stand. Logically, then, Schiller puts his explanations into two main chapters; the first supplies the physical, while the second addresses the philosophical context of the problem. It is striking that here young Schiller also targets the idea of totality that is found at the beginning of his first dissertation before touching the question of how the activity of the human soul relates to the activity of matter. The fact that the law of mechanics exercises its power in the domain of animal sensation reminds the human being again and again of his existential limitations and teaches him that, in a phrase of Albrecht von Haller’s, he is “an unholy hybrid of beast and angel” (“das unseelige Mittelding von Vieh und Engel”) — an anthropological definition that Schiller also could have found in Wieland’s works. Just as moral and intellectual sentiments promote the well-being of the sentiments of the mind (Geist), animal, that is, physical sensations foster the well-being of one’s animal, or corporeal, nature (“tierische Natur,” 8:131). Clearly, Schiller’s concern is with harmonizing both existential principles — this foundational thought, along with the idea of defining the individual through his progress toward equality with God, is encountered again in the later aesthetic writings.6 In this context it is remarkable that Schiller assumes the underlying anthropological conditions as a constant and on this basis explains all innovations and refinements from a developmentaltheoretical and cultural-philosophical point of view. Schiller even formulates this as a kind of law: “Aber geschaffen wird nichts mehr, und was nun neues wird, wird es nur durch Entwicklung. Die Entwicklung des Menschen mußte durch Menschen geschehen, wenn sie mit der Konsumtion in Verhältniß stehen, wenn der Mensch zum Menschen gebildet werden sollte” (8:125). With this formulation Schiller not only brings the main ideas of the contemporary philosophy of the physicians closer to the concept of the ideal of humanity — ideas that had become programmatic for Wieland and Herder

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(see Hinderer, 1995; 25–127); he is providing a crucial indication of his later program of aesthetic education. As early as his first theoretical writings, this purported exponent of philosophical idealism had already begun to propagate the materialistic-realistic basis of his anthropology. Even the highest virtue (“höchste Tugend”), the most profound philosophy (“tiefste Philosophie”), and divine religion (“göttliche Religion”), he says here pointedly, cannot defend against the law of necessity (“Gesetz der Notwendigkeit”; 8:130).7 But for Schiller, the advantages of the dual definition of the human being can be demonstrated in a characteristic way in the developmental history (“Entwicklungsgeschichte”) of the individual, as well as of the universal. Although Schiller’s explanations indicate the presence of various ideas of Albrecht von Haller, Garve, Ferguson, Ludwig Schlözer, Abel, and Zimmermann, they also reveal the basic concept of his anthropological aesthetics. If, in the child, the sensual drives are still predominant, then in the boy selfreflection has already begun, and this will become the highest objective for the adolescent and the man. Just as ontogenesis leads to the enrichment of ideas (“Ideenbereicherung”) and intellectual pleasure (“geistigem Vergnügen”), humankind progresses cultural-historically from primitive forms of tribal existence to civilized cities and nations ruled by morality, the arts, and the sciences. Despite individual historical and universal historical progress, Schiller emphasizes that sensuality is the first ladder on the way to perfection: “erster Leiter zur Vollkommenheit” (8:141). At the heart of his last dissertation, Versuch über den Zusammenhang der tierischen Natur des Menschen mit seiner Geistigen (Concerning the Connection Between the Corporeal and Intellectual Natures of the Human Being, 1780) are the two fundamental laws discussed in sections 12 and 18. The first fundamental law of mixed natures states: “Die Tätigkeiten des Körpers entsprechen den Tätigkeiten des Geistes; d.h. Jede Überspannung von Geistestätigkeit hat jederzeit eine Überspannung gewisser körperlicher Aktionen zur Folge, so wie das Gleichgewicht der ersten, oder die harmonische Thätigkeit der Geisteskräfte mit der vollkommensten Uebereinstimmung der letzern vergesellschaftet ist” (8:141–42). The second fundamental psychosomatic law concerns the coherence of perception and rational thought. In Schiller’s short version, it reads as follows: “die allgemeine Empfindung tierischer Harmonie [soll] die Quelle geistiger Lust, und die tierische Unlust die Quelle geistiger Unlust sein” (8:149). The many references to literary works that Schiller used to illustrate his scientific explanations show how greatly the medical theory of emotions or physiognomy of the sensations shaped the dramas of his youth. It is not accidental that a passage in the Räuber serves to demonstrate how negative feelings can harm the entire system. For Schiller, every emotion has its own particular expression, in a way, its own unique dialect, that is also reflected in the physiognomy. Schiller’s insight into the dualistic structure of human nature belongs no less to his psychosomatic principles than does the conclusion that the individual must


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do everything in his power to achieve a harmony of forces. Every extreme emotion, whether pain or desire, aims at its resolution (8:158). Shifted to the psyche, there is an essential difference whether the sensation of love leads to self-expansion or whether the emotion of hatred leads to selfdiminution. The young Schiller had already intimated this idea in his second speech at the Karlsschule before explaining it in greater detail in his Philosophische Briefe. His last dissertation is also concerned with psychological diatectics. Since the highest state of emotional pleasure also signifies the highest state of physical well-being (8:160), it is in the interest of the individual to do everything he or she can to support this self-expansion. At this point another crucial thought emerges — one that will determine central aspects of Schiller’s later aesthetic writings. It is the idea of the relaxation of all overexcited emotions, activities, sensations, and ideas (§26). The insight that even positive emotions and sensations can be either minute or exaggerated leads to the requirement of finding the right balance by a harmonization or a dialectical synthesis of the basic drives (see Martinson, 170–71). Just as in the early history of the individual, Schiller distinguishes three stages through which the human being passes in his development from childhood to manhood; in the perspective of universal history he speaks first of the development from the tribal existence of the natural human being to the civilized nation (8:136–41) and then tells the story of how the natural state advances to the moral and, eventually, to the aesthetic state (8:673–74; see Alt, 2:141–48). In Schiller’s impressive work Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen, as well as in the other aesthetic writings that he composed during the last decade of the eighteenth century, he continues to restate the same fundamental law of mixed nature (“Fundamentalgesetz der gemischten Natur”; §12, 8:141–42) that he formulated while still a student at the Karlsschule. Every individual and social advancement, therefore, is based on the need for a balance between the fundamental sensual-rational (“sinnliche-vernünftigen”) structure of individual human beings (8:595), the externalization of everything internal and the formal elaboration of everything external. As Schiller states at the end of the pivotal Eleventh Letter, both tasks lead back to the concept of divinity, “in ihrer höchsten Erfüllung gedacht, . . . zu dem Begriff der Gottheit zurück, von dem [er] ausgegangen [war]” (8:595). This shows that Schiller’s first dissertation, Philosophie der Physiologie, already contains in nuce the ideas of his later writings. In Über Anmut und Würde, as well as in Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, the writer poses over and above his binary central concepts an idealistically-conceived unity that illustrates precisely the idea of totality. In the first text, he refers to the anthropological presupposition of two drives, one sensual and the other rational, that plainly parallel the material (“Stofftrieb”) and the form drive (“Formtrieb”) of Über die ästhetische Erziehung. If the first impulse

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suppresses the demands of reason, the second suppresses the demands of nature. The point of unity, the synthesis, is created by a kind of aesthetic condition. In a clear anticipation of Über die ästhetische Erziehung, Schiller, characterizes the condition in which the beauty of play arises as that disposition in which “Zustand des Gemütes, wo Vernunft und Sinnlichkeit — Pflicht und Neigung — zusammenstimmen” (8:365). In this and other writings, we can see that anthropological presuppositions are powerful not only in aesthetics; they are also valid to the same degree for the fields of cultural history, politics, and society. In Schiller’s first major work, freedom is situated, from a political point of view, between legal pressure and anarchy (“zwischen dem gesetzlichen Druck und der Anarchie,” 8:364–65). It is astonishing to see that in his political model of liberal and despotic rule this honorary citizen of the French revolutionary government pleads not only for a monarchy with a liberal ruler but openly argues for a political constellation in which the citizen (“der Bürger”) asserts his own inclination against the will of the ruler (8:361). In a formulation at the end of the Second Letter of Über die ästhetische Erziehung, Schiller explains to the recipient how closely connected are the domains of aesthetics and politics: “daß man, um jenes politische Problem in der Erfahrung zu lösen, durch das ästhetische den Weg nehmen muß, weil es die Schönheit ist, durch welche man zu der Freiheit wandert” (8:560). In the Kallias letters, he immediately defines beauty as freedom in appearance (“Freiheit in der Erscheinung”). “Freiheit in der Erscheinung,” on the other hand, is for Schiller nothing other than “die Selbstbestimmung an einem Dinge, insofern sie sich in der Anschauung offenbart” (8:288–89). It must be noted here that in the discussion of freedom, emphasis falls on the notion of self-determination, the most important concept of philosophical anthropology at the time of the Enlightenment. “Frei sein und durch sich selbst bestimmt sein, von innen heraus bestimmt sein, ist eins” (8:298), as Schiller postulates in his Kallias letters. This selfdetermination is evidence not only of human maturity in Kant’s sense, but also an anthropological imperative and the specifica differentia between animals and plants (8:354). Where nature lends to animals and plants their determination and executes it all by itself, human beings are distinguished by the fact that they must themselves realize the determination prescribed to them by nature. These are the acts of a free person who is responsible for his own deeds. The justification of the world no longer occurs, as in Leibniz, by means of a theodicy, but, as Odo Marquard has put the matter generally, is dependent on the “Rechtfertigung des Ich und diese an seiner Kapazität der Antonomienauflösung” (1987, 83). In the German Enlightenment view of the anthropology and history of the formation of an individual, maturity and the discovery of selfconsciousness are often the names of a single idea. When, in Anmut und Würde, Schiller describes the control of the drives through the moral


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power of higher human capacities, such as freedom of mind (“Geistesfreiheit”) and its expression in appearance as dignity (“Würde”), he is describing a fundamental experience of the philosophy of idealism: the autonomy of the individual. It forms the centerpiece of Schiller’s anthropology and probably receives its most persuasive formulation in the Eleventh Letter of Über die ästhetische Erziehung. Here he differentiates in the human being between an absolute being that is grounded in itself, that is, the person, and a dependent condition, being, or becoming. In a formulation that almost suggests Existenz-philosophie, Being and Time, and Self (“Ich”) and Time are juxtaposed as the conditions of the possibility of human existence. Schiller expresses this fundamental process as follows: “Nur indem er [der Mensch] sich verändert, existiert er; nur indem er unveränderlich bleibt, existiert er” (8:594). The ideal, or complete, individual would be “die beharrliche Einheit, die in den Fluten der Veränderung ewig dieselbe bleibt” (8:594), which is something, however, that he could become in reality only in an ideal sense. For even if the individual carries within himself the talent for divinity (“Anlage zu der Gottheit”), it can only be an unattainable goal (8:594–95). Nevertheless, from this limited anthropological constellation, Schiller derives the two fundamental principles of sensual-rational nature that, conceived at the point of their highest fulfillment, should lead to the concept of divinity. If the first of the laws insists on absolute reality, the second one emphasizes absolute form. This internalization and formal elaboration of the external, which is thematized in the poems “Das Ideal und das Leben” (The Ideal and Life, 1795), “Worte des Glaubens” (Words of Belief, 1798), and “Worte des Wahns” (Words of Delusion, 1800), is supposed to lead to a unity and reciprocal control of the two basic binary elements of human existence. Against Kant’s categorical imperative Schiller argues as early as in Anmut und Würde that it is the task of culture to lend each of the three drives equal validity. In a procedure typical for him, and one that is evident in the writings of his youth, Schiller posits a play drive (Spieltrieb) alongside the material and form drives, in which the two basic drives are united. This drive accomplishes the impossible, namely, “die Zeit in der Zeit aufzuheben, Werden mit absolutem Sein, Veränderung mit Identität zu vereinbaren” (8:607). Thus, the play drive would be in a position to place the individual in a state of physical and moral freedom (8:608) and to reproduce the totality (8:614–15) that has been lost to our culture. In the aesthetic condition the individual experiences himself in the fullness of his possibilities. In this way, beauty becomes an aesthetic-anthropological phenomenon that Schiller interprets as the consummation of humanity (“Konsummation der Menschheit,” 8:611). However, this is only one part of the function of aesthetics in Schiller’s exposition; at the same time, he understands aesthetics — and here he transcends the medical and philosophical discourse — as an existential-philosophical model. One could directly

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attribute to the aesthetic, to the play drive — in the terminology of Martin Heidegger — the quality of an “entwerfend-sein zu einem Seinkönnen,” “die existenziale Seinsverfassung des faktischen Seinkönnens” (143, 145). As Schiller puts it, by means of aesthetic culture the human being fully retrieves “die Freiheit, zu sein, was er sein soll,” the ability bestowed upon him by nature, “aus sich selbst zu machen, was er will” (8:636). At the same time, Schiller expands to the limit notions elaborated by other eighteenth-century authors, raising beauty to the heights of “the highest of all gifts,” as the “Schenkung der Menschheit” (8:636). If Wieland, for instance, had already made the human being a second creator (Werke, 3, 231), Schiller proclaims beauty to be our second creator (“unsere zweite Schöpferin”), one that acquaints us with our full potential. Now it becomes clear how the concept of beauty as a medium and mediator, anthropologically conceived, becomes the compensatory model of modernity, which is characterized by defects like fragmentation and a loss of reality. In the Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh letters, which can be seen as the nuclei of the essay Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, Schiller provides an overview of the regressive tendencies of his time (8:567–80). He deals with the conditions in the lower as well as in the civilized classes, and notes even more negative syndromes in the higher classes than in the lower ones. This leads him to the surprising, fundamental criticism of the enlightenment of reason (“Aufklärung des Verstandes”), which has so little ennobling influence upon people’s convictions that it ends up promoting corruption through maxims (“die Verderbnis durch Maximen,” 8:568–69). Schiller criticizes the prevailing system of egoism, returning to thoughts from his Philosophische Briefe concerning the politically and socially relevant antitheses of egoism and altruism, tyranny and love (8:225–26), and he analyzes the symptoms of the zeitgeist “zwischen Verkehrtheit und Rohigkeit, zwischen Unnatur und bloßer Natur, zwischen Superstition und moralischem Unglauben” (8:569). Whereas at the time of Greek antiquity nature united all things, today understanding (Verstand) leads to the segregation of the different realms of life. In modern times, the original unity is torn asunder: church and state, laws and morals, pleasure and work, means and end, effort and reward are detached from each other. The individual human being “develops into nothing but a fragment; everlastingly in his ear the monotonous sound of the wheel that he turns, he never develops the harmony of his being” (8:572–73). Here Schiller formulates a powerful metaphor for the mechanization of human life and disenchantment through rational culture, which left a lasting impact on his contemporaries.8 The Romantics would point repeatedly to this syndrome of the Enlightenment, namely, alienation, lack of imagination and feelings, and general fragmentation. Today, according to Schiller, the individual “instead of putting the stamp of humanity upon


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his own nature, he becomes nothing more than the mere imprint of his occupation or of his specialized knowledge” (8:573). In this way the image of the species (“Bild der Gattung”) has been dismembered, and one has to go the rounds from one individual to another in order to read the totality of the species as a whole (“von Individuum zu Individuum herumfragen . . ., um die Totalität der Gattung zusammen zu lesen,” 8:571). Whereas in his Philosophische Briefe young Schiller speculated about the overcoming of every separation (“Aufhebung jener Trennung”) through love as a reproduction of God (8:227), the task here is to restore via a higher art the totality of our nature that art has destroyed (“Totalität in unserer Natur, welche die Kunst zerstört hat, durch eine höhere Kunst wiederherzustellen,” 8:578). This demand makes apparent the political component of Schiller’s aesthetics; a state marked by constraint (“Staat der Not”) can be replaced with a free state (“Staat der Freiheit”) only by a people who display a totality of character. Only beauty can connect theoretical with practical culture (8:582–83) and bring about the nobility of character that is the condition of any improvement in the political sphere. That is the point where aesthetics becomes a political and social preparatory school. In this text, the aesthetic state, which is also capable of establishing an aesthetic culture, is, for Schiller, the precondition of freedom (8:636–37). In other words, the aesthetic mood (“ästhetische Stimmung”) eliminates the one-sided coercion of either of the basic drives and restores to the human being his capacity for freedom. Schiller differentiates between three different moments or stages in human development, in both the individual and the species. In his physical condition the individual endures the forces of nature; in the aesthetic condition he rids himself of these forces; and in the moral condition he governs nature (8:648). This psychic triad correlates with the political one: in the dynamic state of rights, one man encounters the other as a force, which restrains his abilities; and in the ethical state of obligations he is opposed by the majesty of the law, which enchains his will. Only in the aesthetic state is he allowed to confront the other as an object of free play (“als Objeckt des freien Spiels,” 8:673). Whereas in the dynamic state nature is tamed by nature and in the ethical state the individual will is subjugated to the general will, only in the aesthetic state is the will of the whole accomplished through the nature of the individual. Conceived in this way, only beauty is capable of generating a social character (“geselligen Charakter”). The basic anthropological conditions or forces of human existence characterize — again triadically — political institutions and societies, depending on which of the basic conditions or forces is dominant. What Schiller describes at the end of Über die ästhetische Erziehung as dynamic and ethical, he had described, in his Third Letter, as the natural state and the moral state, with a change from natural laws to the laws of reason. But he also points out the difficulties of such

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a change (8:562–63; see Alt 2:144–46). At this point in the text, Schiller indicates, interestingly, the necessity of an intermediary force that is successful in changing the rolling wheel of state at the moment of its reversal. In other words, if, for Schiller, it was at first the aesthetic state that appeared to catalyze a smooth shift of paradigms from the natural state to the moral state, then at the end of his text, he posited a triadic development, the highest point of which is occupied by the aesthetic state, since here the instrument that serves is the free citizen: “das dienende Werkzeug [ist] ein freier Bürger” (8:676). It is doubtless also Schiller’s answer to what he considered to be the unsuccessful French Revolution. That was most certainly on his mind when, on July 13, 1793, he wrote the following to Duke Friedrich Christian von Augustenburg: Der Moment war der günstigste, aber er fand eine verderbte Generation, die ihn nicht wert war, und weder zu würdigen noch zu benutzen wußte. Der Gebrauch, den sie von diesem großen Geschenk des Zufalls macht und gemacht hat, beweist unwidersprechlich, . . . daß das liberale Regiment der Vernunft da noch zu frühe kommt, wo man kaum damit fertig wird, sich der brutalen Gewalt der Tierheit zu erwehren, und daß derjenige noch nicht reif ist zur bürgerlichen Freiheit, dem noch so vieles zur menschlichen fehlt. (8:501)

With his aesthetic anthropology or anthropological aesthetics, Schiller wishes to cultivate human freedom and create the psycho-political conditions of the state of freedom. Nevertheless, he does not conceal the skepticism that is clear in his view that the projected state of beautiful appearance (“Staat des schönen Scheins”) can be discovered in only a very few select circles (“einigen wenigen auserlesenen Zirkeln,” 8:676). It is certainly not accidental that Schiller’s text ends with the main concepts of grace and dignity with which he first attempted to explain the phenomenon of beauty. Furthermore, in Anmut und Würde, he associated the anthropological conditions in a triadic manner with political and social conditions and defined beauty (8:362–66) as a kind of play drive or mediating power, as a condition of mind or disposition where reason and sensuality — duty and inclination — harmonize. In his last, most important text, the question changes but not the basic anthropological conception. In Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, Schiller constructs a founding document of literary modernity9 jointly with a triadic history of genres (satire, elegy, idyll) as well as an anthropological typology (realist, idealist). Not by chance is the idyll understood as a synthesizing concept, in which the opposition of reality and ideal, satire and elegy, appears to be suspended (8:775). The idyll is, as Schiller explains, “der Begriff eines völlig aufgelösten Kampfes sowohl in dem einzelnen Menschen, als in der Gesellschaft . . ., kurz, er ist kein andrer als das Ideal der Schönheit auf das wirkliche Leben angewendet” (8:775). Just as the


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naïve and sentimental genres correspond to specific kinds of perception and possibilities of human experience, they also have a particular culturalhistorical status and exist in different social arrangements. Naïve and sentimental poets form a similar opposition, as the two basic human types of the realist and idealist do in the second part of the essay. If Schiller relates the naïve and sentimental poet to a specific context as well — the definition of which depends decisively on an existing or lacking totality in social reality — here Schiller presents the antagonism of realist and idealist as quasitimeless constellations. Nevertheless, in both parts of the argument, the triadic cognitive model that will become characteristic of the dialectics of idealistic philosophy is still directly and indirectly perceptible. Not only is the distinction between the naïve and the sentimental poet blurred from time to time (see Szondi, 80–89) — the idyll clearly signals the synthesis of antitheses — but the massive criticism of both basic human types also makes a third constellation at least desirable. Characteristically, in a footnote, Schiller introduces a three-stage model (Dreischritt) in the context of poetic genres and types of sensation, in which the ideal is raised up as the sought-after concept of synthesis. The first category is nature and its corresponding naïve mood, the second is art “als Aufhebung der Natur durch den frei wirkenden Verstand,” and the third and final one is the ideal, “in welchem die vollendete Kunst zur Natur zurückkehrt” (8:777). If one wants to relate this triple gradation to the various types of poets, one would have to add to the naïve and sentimental a third type of poet, the idealistic poet, who leads fulfilled modernity on a higher level back to the achievements of the ancients. In his marginal notations to Wilhelm von Humboldt’s March 1793 essay Über das Studium des Altertums, und des Griechischen insbesondere (On the Study of Antiquity, Especially That of the Greeks), Schiller again illustrates the progress of human culture by way of a triad. He distinguishes three moments epistemologically and classifies them cultural-historically as follows: “In der ersten Periode waren die Griechen. In der zweiten stehen wir. Die dritte ist also noch zu hoffen, und dann wird man die Griechen auch nicht mehr zurückwünschen” (8:1075). In his letter to Humboldt of December 25, 1795, Schiller explains, moreover, in conjunction with Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, that naïve poetry relates to sentimental poetry as naïve humankind to sentimental humankind (Schiller-Humboldt, 1:270). However, sentimental poetry can be elevated above naïve poetry only when it has achieved perfection and is free of culturally conditioned deficiencies. Certainly, in this case, the art of poetry and humankind are, as Schiller emphasizes, “nicht mehr sentimentalisch, sondern idealisch” (1:270). In his three major philosophical texts, Schiller works with opposing concepts that are ultimately united into a synthesis. This tendency, and the tying together of anthropological, social, cultural and political topics,

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can even be found in the writings of his youth. Although Schiller’s theoretical ideas were stimulated by “the philosophy of the physicians” (see Hinderer, 1990; 502–20), popular philosophy (see Riedel, 1998, 155–66), and the writings of Garve, Kant, Reinhold, Herder, and Fichte, he developed a basic view of the human being quite early that later changes only in its questions, its methodology, and above all in the differentiation of its terminology. What makes his writings especially interesting documents of the time is that they never attempt to cover up their ruptures or resolve their contradictions. At the end of each of his three major texts, Schiller emphasizes not only the experimental character of his reflections but also draws attention to the discrepancies between theory and practice, idea and reality. From this point of view, it comes as no surprise that with each new writing he should, to some extent, start anew methodologically and thematically. This does not mean, however, that he altered his anthropological concept of the human being, which runs as a red thread throughout all his theoretical statements. If we visualize in overview the smaller as well as the more comprehensive contributions to the philosophical discourse of the time, it is strikingly clear that from the pamphlets of his youth to the well-known essays of the last decade of the eighteenth century, Schiller formulates a set of fundamental principles concerning the psychosomatic conditions of human existence. The earliest is found in the dissertation Versuch über den Zusammenhang der tierischen Natur des Menschen mit seiner geistigen (§12). In writings like Vom Erhabenen (Of the Sublime, 1793) and Über das Pathetische (On the Pathetic, 1793), Schiller applies these laws to aesthetics, above all to the pathetic representation of tragedy. He calls this principle, in the plural form, “die beiden Fundamental-Gesetze aller tragischen Kunst” (8:422, 426), and comments as follows: “Diese sind erstlich: Darstellung der leidenden Natur; zweitens: Darstellung der moralischen Selbstständigkeit im Leiden.” For Schiller, independence, or Selbständigkeit, a concept, introduced in Vom Erhabenen that is already contained in that of the pathetically sublime, is directed toward the autonomy of the person, the god in us (“Gott in uns”) described in Über Anmut und Würde, and toward the supersensory in the human being described in Über das Pathetische. Art, in this case theater, turns out to be the aesthetic demonstration of the divine atomic nucleus in the human being, a view that can, moreover, be found in Wieland as well as in Herder, and whose intellectual origins are in Christian stoicism10 and the tradition of baroque drama.11 In this demonstration not only are all powers of the soul, the mind, and the heart at work (Was kann eine gute stehende Schaubühne eigentlich wirken), but the essence of the individual is freed, that is, his heavenly origin (“himmlischer Urspung,” 8:187, 200), the essence of his very existence. Pathetic representation illustrates the real purpose of art: “die moralische


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Independenz von Naturgesetzen im Zustande des Affekts” (8:423). In other words, “Die Intelligenz im Menschen,” the autonomy of the person, manifests itself as a power that is independent of nature, precisely as the suprasensual (“Übersinnliche”), is the higher principle that enables the human being to rise above his sensuous nature — idealistically. From this perspective it seems only logical that, in Über die ästhetische Erziehung, Schiller defines the fundamental anthropological law existentially. In this context he again speaks of two fundamental laws — not of tragic art as before, but now, in a decisively anthropological manner, of sensuousrational nature (“die sinnliche-vernünftige Natur,” 8:595). Here Schiller captures the dichotomies of his dissertation more precisely as person and condition, being and time, which human beings experience in different ways. Since the condition has its basis in time, that is, the condition of all dependent beings (“der Bedingung alles abhängigen Seins,” 8:593), the person has it within himself. As being that is grounded in itself (“[ein] in sich selbst gegründetes Sein”), it is also the preliminary condition of freedom and the concept underlying Schiller’s political philosophy. Just as in Theosophie des Julius, he brings the antitheses of egoism and love into functional relation with the corresponding political institutions, with despotism and the free state (8:226), he later praises the legislator Solon for having had respect for human nature, “daß er Achtung hatte für die menschliche Natur und nie dem Menschen dem Staat, nie den Zweck dem Mittel aufopferte, sondern den Staat dem Menschen dienen ließ” (6:506). For Schiller the achievements of a state are dependent on the extent to which it succeeds in cultivating all of the human being’s abilities (6:486). The schema of self-diminution and self-expansion that the essay Theosophie des Julius connects with the positive and negative characteristics of egoism and love supplies the framework for the comparison of the statecraft of Lycurgus and Solon. In Schiller’s opinion, only Solon fulfills the standards of healthy and genuine statecraft, which is a fundamental principle upon which, in his view, all states are based. Schiller expresses this principle as follows: “sich selbst die Gesetze zu geben, denen man gehorchen soll, und die Pflichten des Bürgers aus Einsicht und aus Liebe zum Vaterland, nicht aus sklavischer Furcht vor Strafe, nicht aus blindern und schlaffer Ergebung in dem Willen eines Obern zu erfüllen” (6:505–6). In the same way in which Schiller continues this exposition in his letters to the Duke Augustenburg, he perceives the value or unworthiness of laws and forms of government as the most faithful imprint (“treuesten Abdruck”) of the character of a people (6:506). His unquestionably high opinion of the human being — in no way a rare view among eighteenthcentury intellectuals — must also be reflected in political institutions and society. In Schiller’s theoretical essays, not only anthropology and aesthetics are related to one another, but anthropology is also related to both politics and history. This is what he addresses in Über das Erhabene, which was not

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published until 1801 although surely composed in the 1790s: “Die Welt, als historischer Gegenstand, ist im Grunde nichts anders als der Konflikt der Naturkräfte unter einander selbst und mit der Freiheit des Menschen und den Erfolg dieses Kampfes berichtet uns die Geschichte” (8:835). In this way, the historian would indeed become an author of pathetic representation, whose business it would be to report the triumphs of the person over the surrounding circumstances. It is not accidental that this essay should contain Schiller’s central confession regarding his anthropological aesthetics: “Die Kultur soll den Menschen in Freiheit setzen und ihm dazu behüflich sein, seinen ganzen Begriff zu erfüllen. Sie soll ihn also fähig machen, seinen Willen zu behaupten, denn der Mensch ist das Wesen, welches will” (8:823).12

Notes 1

References to Schiller’s works in this essay are by volume and page number in the Frankfurter Ausgabe, Werke und Briefe in zwölf Bänden, edited by Klaus Harro Hilzinger, et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1988–). Here: 8:972.

2

Concerning La Mettrie, see Martinson, 39.

3

See, for example, Riedel, 6–10; Riedel, Abel, 390–401; and, generally, also Dewhurst/Reeves, 242–49. 4

Riedel, 1985, 100–106; also, Dewhurst/Reeves, 165–68.

5

In 1780 Schiller submitted a tractatus (De Discrimine Febrium Inflammatoriarum et Putridarum) on the difference between an inflamed (“entzündungsartig”) and an idle (“faulig”) fever one week before his Versuch über den Zusammenhang der tierischen Natur des Menschen mit seiner Geistigen. Whereas the first thesis (in Latin) was rejected again, the second was accepted. Both were written in 1780; the last one was also published in the same year. 6 Martinson has referred to the influence of Moses Mendelssohn’s Briefe über die Empfindungen (1755) in which the concept of “harmonische Spannung” was coined, and which was not without influence on Schiller (21–22). 7

See the last stanza of the poem, “An einen Moralisten,” in Schiller’s Anthologie auf das Jahr 1782. 8

For example, Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder’s Märchen “Von einem nackten Heiligen,” Werke und Briefe, 304–8. 9 Bolten takes up an idea from Jeffrey Barnouw and, already in this context, speaks of a “romantischen Wendepunkt” in Schiller’s Gesamtwerk (226) while referring to a key passage in the Ästhetische Briefe. To be more correct, one could speak here of transcendental aesthetic concepts that early romanticism took over and continued. 10 See Justus Lipsius, De Constantia, 1584. Reprint of the second edition of 1601, edited by Leonard Forster.


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11 See Leonard Forster’s “Nachwort” to Lipsius’s De Constantia (19–31). FriedrichWilhelm Wentzlaff-Eggebert’s study, “Die deutsche Barocktragödie” is still of fundamental importance. 12 Concerning the topic of “des ganzen Menschen,” see the rich source of essays in the publication of the DFG-Symposium: Schings, Der ganze Mensch: Anthropologie und Literatur im 18. Jahrhundert.

Works Cited Abel, Jacob Friedrich. Eine Quellenedition zum Philosophieunterricht: An der Stuttgarter Karlsschule (1773–1782). Ed. Wolfgang Riedel. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1995. Alt, Peter-André. Friedrich Schiller: Leben — Werk — Zeit. 2 vols. Munich: C. H. Beck, 2000. Bolten, Jürgen. Friedrich Schiller: Poesie, Reflexion und gesellschaftliche Selbstdeutung. Munich: Fink, 1985. Dewhurst, Kenneth, and Nigel Reeves. Friedrich Schiller: Medicine, Psychology and Literature. Oxford: Sanford, 1978. Forster, Leonard, ed. Justus Lipsius: Von der Bestendigkeit (De Constantia). Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1965. Heidegger, Martin. Sein und Zeit, 11th ed. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1967. Herder, Johann Gottfried. Herders Werke in fünf Bänden. Ed. Wilhelm Dobbek. Berlin: Aufbau, 1964. Hinderer, Walter. “Die Depotenzierung der Vernunft: Kompensationsmuster im präromantischen und romantischen Diskurs.” In Romantisches Erzählen, ed. Gerhard Neumann, 25–64. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1995. ———. “Die Philosophie der Ärzte und die Rhetorik der Dichter: Zu Schillers und Büchners ideologisch-ästhetischen Positionen.” Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 109 (1990): 502–20. Hinderer, Walter, and Daniel O. Dahlstrom, eds. Friedrich Schiller: Essays. New York: Continuum, 1993. Kant, Immanuel. Immanuel Kant: Werke in zehn Bänden. Ed. Wilhelm Weischedel. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1968. Koopmann, Helmut, ed. Schiller-Handbuch. Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner, 1998. Marquard, Odo. Abschied vom Prinzipiellen. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1981. ———. Transzendentaler Idealismus: Romantische Naturphilosophie: Psychoanalyse. Cologne: Verlag für Philosophie Jürgen Dinzer, 1987. Martinson, Steven D. Harmonious Tensions: The Writings of Friedrich Schiller. Newark: U of Delaware P; London: Associated UP, 1996. Platner, Ernst. Anthropologie für Ärzte und Weltweise. Leipzig: Dyckische Buchhandlung, 1772.

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Riedel, Wolfgang. Die Anthropologie des jungen Schiller. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1985. ———. “Die Aufklärung und das Unbewußte.” Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft 37 (1993): 198–220. ———. “Schiller und die popularphilosophische Tradition.” In SchillerHandbuch, ed. Koopmann, 155–66. Schiller, Friedrich. Der Briefwechsel zwischen Friedrich Schiller und Wilhelm von Humboldt. Ed. Siegfried Seidel. Berlin: Aufbau, 1962. ———. Schillers Briefe. Kritische Gesamtausgabe. Ed. Fritz Jonas. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1892–97. Schings, Hans-Jürgen, ed. Der ganze Mensch: Anthropologie und Literatur im 18. Jahrhundert. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1994. Szondi, Peter. “Das Naïve und das Sentimentalische.” In Szondi, Lektüren und Lektionen, 60–99. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973. Wackenroder, Wilhelm Heinrich. Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder: Werke und Briefe. Ed. Gerda Heinrich. Munich/Vienna: Carl Hanser, 1984. Weinrich, Harald. “Literaturgeschichte eines Weltereignisses: Das Erdbeben von Lissabon.” In Literatur für Leser, ed. H. Weinrich. Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1971. Wentzlaff-Eggebert, Friedrich-Wilhelm. “Die deutsche Barocktragödie.” In Formkräfte der deutschen Dichtung vom Barock bis zur Gegenwart, 2nd ed., ed. Hans Steffen. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1967. Wieland, Christoph Martin. Werke. 5 vols. Ed. Fritz Martini and Hans Werner Seiffert. Munich: Carl Hanser, 1967.

Schiller and Classical Antiquity David Pugh

Introduction

T

HE HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF CLASSICISM in Schiller’s Germany is not easy to grasp. Since various forms of classicism had been prevalent in European letters for around three centuries, at first sight we might view German classicism as a mere footnote. The most forceful statement of the previous phase of classicism had come in France in 1674 with Nicolas Boileau’s Horatian L’art poétique, and, in England, Alexander Pope had called in his Essay on Criticism of 1711 for an aesthetic based on Aristotle’s rules of poetry, which, as he claims, represents “Nature methodised.” Pope proceeds as follows:

Hear how learn’d Greece her useful rules indites, When to repress, and when indulge our flights: High on Parnassus’ top her sons she show’d, And pointed out those arduous paths they trod; Held from afar, aloft, the immortal prize, And urged the rest by equal steps to rise. . . . Learn hence for ancient rules a just esteem; To copy Nature is to copy them. (ll. 92–97, 239–40) Pope’s classicism was meant as an antidote to the excess and tastelessness that he saw running riot among his contemporaries. The adoption of the ancient authors as literary models would mean a restoration of simplicity, moderation, and good sense.1 There is a more than superficial resemblance between this and Schiller’s position in the ninth of his letters, Über die ästhetische Erziehung der Menschen (On the Aesthetic Education of Man, 1795), where he directs the writer to take his inspiration from antiquity. And yet there are salient differences that prevent us from seeing Schiller’s classicism as a restatement of the older position, and a brief survey of these will serve as an introduction to our subject. First, Schiller’s references to political corruption and a “barbaric constitution” introduce a note of political critique that is alien to Boileau and Pope and that, in the age of the French Revolution,

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inevitably raises the emotional pitch of his treatise. Second, Schiller’s praise of antiquity does not lead him to espouse the old Aristotelian or Horatian poetics, and in fact he expressly condemns a rule-based art: “Wo der Charakter straff wird und sich verhärtet, da sehen wir . . . die Kunst in den schweren Fesseln der Regel gehen” (FA 8:583).2 Instead, he justifies the turn to antiquity by saying that it will enable the artist to learn the secret of form in general: “Den Stoff zwar wird er von der Gegenwart nehmen, aber die Form von einer edleren Zeit . . . entlehnen” (8:584). Third, as shown by the words omitted from the last sentence — “. . . ja jenseits aller Zeit, von der absoluten unwandelbaren Einheit seines Wesens . . .” — form is not, or not only, a matter of taste or poetic technique, but is charged with metaphysical significance. Schiller presents the artist’s struggle to find the right form for his work as a process that mirrors the struggle between spirit and matter in the universe. Finally, and to return to the first point, this metaphysical framework means that Schiller’s political references are not as straightforward as they seem. Rather, the corruption that surrounds him is merely a symbol for the work of temporality in general, and the pure form displayed by Greek art is to be seen less as the product of a free society than as an achieved conquest of time. By successfully imposing form on matter, modern artists will free themselves and their public from the shackles of time and materiality, the “Verderbnis der Geschlechter und Zeiten” (8:584) that arouses Schiller’s disgust. Whereas Schiller might seem to be outbidding Pope merely in adding a new strand of political polemic to the traditional advocacy of a classical aesthetic, he is in fact heightening the neoclassical argument by rephrasing it as a metaphysical one, for he is attributing to a classically inspired art a power not just of liberation but of redemption.3 In order to understand this extraordinary reformulation of the classical creed, it is necessary first of all to consider the career of Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–68). For, with his pamphlet Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst (Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture, 1759) followed in 1764 by his Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (History of Ancient Art), Winckelmann inaugurated a new attitude to ancient Greece and exerted a spell on all the writers of the next generation, including Herder and Friedrich Schlegel, of whom we do not think primarily as classicists. It is not possible to point to one overpowering new idea that Winckelmann contributed to the discussion. As Hatfield argues, his thought is an eclectic synthesis. In the sentence following on from the famous slogan of “edle Einfalt und stille Größe” (20), Winckelmann espouses a Stoical ethic of resistance to emotion, for he argues that the calm expression on the face of a Greek statue arises from a mastery of the passions that rage beneath.4 Contrasting with his Stoicism stands an Epicurean worship of the senses

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that leads Winckelmann to praise Greek nakedness and, at least implicitly, sexual freedom, but this contrasts in turn with a Platonic aspiration to an ideal beyond nature. Perhaps Winckelmann’s impact is due as much to his new tone and style as to this strange cocktail of ideas, for he offered his readers a welcome escape both from the pedantries of German academic prose and from the supernatural transports of Pietism. Altogether, his work denotes a multiple shift in the approach to antiquity: from a Roman to a Greek paradigm, from a dependence on French mediation to a new German autonomy, from an emphasis on politics and the state to one on the arts and, within the arts, from a focus on literature to one on sculpture. Last but not least, we can observe the shift from the idea of antiquity as the source of rational norms to one of Greece as a lost paradise and the object of insatiable yearning.5 A great deal of the responsibility for the idea of Germany as a Kulturnation belongs to Winckelmann, and Schiller is only one of numerous writers of this period whose work would be unthinkable without him. In contrast to the usual practice of treating this subject in a chronological fashion, the following will be an attempt at an analytical presentation of Schiller’s relation to antiquity under the following headings: humanity, nature, art, and politics. First, however, it may be helpful to offer a biographical outline of Schiller’s concern with and use of antiquity in the various phases of his career.

Schiller’s Career For our purposes Schiller’s career falls roughly into four phases, in which his concern with antiquity alternated between being mainly speculative and mainly practical in nature. The first phase saw the composition of the Brief eines reisenden Dänen (Letter of a Danish Traveler, 1785), an ecstatic piece after the manner of Winckelmann, in which he describes the casts of the most famous Greek sculptures on exhibit in Mannheim. This period culminated in the elegy “Die Götter Griechenlandes” (The Gods of Greece) of 1788, which was written with “Horazische Correctität” (letter to Körner, March 17, 1788) for Wieland’s journal the Teutscher Merkur. It is one of Schiller’s finest poems, but in part it reformulates ideas he had expressed previously in his poem “Der Triumph der Liebe” (The Triumph of Love). The latter appeared in 1781, inspired by Gottfried August Bürger’s German version of the Pervigilium Veneris, a late Latin poem. Both poems have to be understood in the context of Schiller’s early philosophy of love, the main expression of which can be found, stripped of all Greek references, in his Philosophische Briefe (Philosophical Letters, 1786).6 Antiquity appears with a different, more political function in some other texts of this period, notably in Die Räuber (The Robbers, 1781), where Karl Moor

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draws inspiration from Plutarch’s Lives for his ideal of a German republic that would make Athens and Sparta look like nunneries (2:32). In Die Verschwörung des Fiesco zu Genua (Fiesco’s Conspiracy in Genoa, 1783) the conspirators try to fan Fiesko’s republican zeal by showing him a painting of a heroic scene from early Rome (2:372–75). And in his speech, “Was kann eine gute stehende Schaubühne eigentlich wirken?” (What Can a Good Repertory Theater Really Achieve, 1784), Schiller refers to Periclean Athens as an example of the theater working as a force for national unity in a divided country.7 Following his completion of Don Carlos, Schiller turned to Greek literature with the intention of improving his technique as a writer. The protracted composition of this tragedy had left Schiller dissatisfied with his achievements to date and with his working method, and the study of the ancients was intended to enhance his skills. This second phase saw the composition of his versions of Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis and part of the same author’s The Phoenician Women (both 1788). It is notable that Schiller had to use the available translations of Euripides into Latin, French, and German, for unlike Goethe and Wilhelm von Humboldt, he never had the opportunity to study the Greek language thoroughly. Schiller’s letters to Körner during this period are particularly revealing, especially that of August 20, 1788, in which he declares that to purify his taste, he intends to read no modern authors for two years, only ancient ones: “Du wirst finden, daß mir ein vertrauter Umgang mit den Alten äußerst wohlthun — vielleicht Classizität geben wird.”8 The original impulse for these studies seems to have been Schiller’s experience of attending a reading of Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris, on which he reports in a letter of October 14, 1787, but he also drew inspiration from the hexameter translation of the Odyssey by Johann Heinrich Voss.9 In various texts of this second phase, we notice a tendency that becomes more important later on, namely a desire to find fault with the works of the Greeks coupled with an ambition to outdo them. This “agonistic” component in Schiller’s relation to antiquity has rightly led to comparisons to the seventeenth-century controversy over the relative merits of ancient and modern culture, known in France as “la querelle des anciens et des modernes” and in England as “the Battle of the Books.” We notice this argument in Schiller’s review of Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris (1788), where he awards the palm to the modern author for having united “die feinste edelste Blüte moralischer Verfeinerung mit der schönsten Blüte der Dichtkunst” (8:964). The second reference to a “blossoming” refers to the excellence of Greek poetry, which can be equaled by an exceptional modern author, but the first refers to the superior level of morality attained by the moderns. Thanks to the progress of moral culture and the comparatively milder spirit (Geist) of the times, the modern author enjoys an inherent advantage over the ancients.


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The argument here foreshadows the position that Schiller developed later in Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung (On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, 1795). We find a comparable case of the disparagement of antiquity in his essay of 1792, Über die tragische Kunst (On Tragic Art), where Greek tragedy is said to rely on the concepts of fate and necessity and hence to leave a modern audience, with its developed rational faculty, dissatisfied. A modern tragedy, by contrast, will arouse in the audience “die erquickende Vorstellung der vollkommensten Zweckmäßigkeit im großen Ganzen der Natur” (8:261). With the third phase, we see Schiller returning to a more speculative preoccupation with antiquity. This is the period of the composition of his famous treatises on philosophical aesthetics, Über das Pathetische (On the Pathetic, 1793), Über Anmut und Würde (On Grace and Dignity, 1793), Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (On the Aesthetic Education of Man, 1794), and Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung (On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, 1795). Schiller wrote these works under the dual impact of his study of Kant and of the tumultuous events taking place in France, and yet they both take up themes from the first phase of Schiller’s career. In the early part of each treatise, an eloquent passage praising Greek culture for its harmony with nature is encountered, while the possibility is also held out that, with our higher level of rationality and morality, the moderns can actually surpass the Greeks. Schiller’s return to poetic composition followed the writing of these treatises, and the poems of the next years are full of Greek allusions that, despite differences of emphasis, are fundamentally consistent with the view of Greece advanced in the treatises. A few examples are “Das Ideal und das Leben” (The Ideal and Life), “Der Spaziergang” (The Walk), “Das Glück” (Happiness), and “Die Sänger der Vorwelt” (The Singers of Yore). The last of the four phases is the time of Schiller’s second period of dramatic composition as well as of his partnership with Goethe. Again he turned to the study of the Greek dramatists, particularly Sophocles, and his correspondence with Goethe contains much on poetological matters, including a discussion of Aristotle’s Poetics (see especially Schiller’s letter of May 5, 1797). Schiller had earlier planned a drama, Die Malteser, that was intended to conform to the pattern of ancient tragedy. Though he resumed work on it in these years, it was left unfinished at his death. The most classical of the completed plays of this period is Die Braut von Messina (The Bride of Messina, 1803), in which Schiller attempted a synthesis of ancient and modern techniques and motifs, including a chorus, the use of which he justified in his Foreword by philosophical arguments. But Wallenstein also contains in Gordon a figure whose role is based on that of the ancient chorus, and even the romantic tragedy Die Jungfrau von Orleans (The Maid of Orleans, 1802) has a scene (act 2, scenes 6–7) derived from an episode from the Iliad and written in iambic trimeters, the Greek tragic meter.

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But, even if Schiller’s concern with the Greeks at this stage seems to be predominantly pragmatic. A letter of July 26, 1800, shows that he had not abandoned the conclusions of the foregoing speculative phase. Johann Wilhelm Süvern was a classical scholar who had published a book comparing Die Jungfrau von Orleans and the Wallenstein trilogy to Greek tragedy. In a polite but firm response, Schiller argues against imposing alien models on modern art, for art must always arise “dynamisch und lebendig” from its own time. Describing Sophoclean tragedy as “das lebendige Produkt einer individuellen, bestimmten Gegenwart,” he applies the nouns “Ohnmacht,” “Schlaffheit,” and “Charakterlosigkeit” to modernity. The contradiction between such disparagement of modernity and Schiller’s belief in its ultimate superiority is only apparent. His conclusion to the letter, “Die Schönheit ist für ein glückliches Geschlecht, aber ein unglückliches muß man erhaben zu rühren suchen,” introduces the sublime, the aesthetic experience that is the threshold to the supersensible realm and that will allow the moderns to prevail in the new querelle. Schiller’s attitude to antiquity is now entrenched in his philosophy of history and in his elaborate dialectic of the beautiful and the sublime.

Humanity In a famous letter, Schiller gives an unfavorable comparison of his own personality to Goethe’s. Whereas the latter’s creative mind is intuitive and is integrated around a synthesizing imagination, Schiller describes his own mind as a hybrid and as hovering uncertainly between three pairs of opposites, namely concept and intuition, rule and feeling, technique and genius: “Noch jetzt begegnet es mir häufig genug, daß die Einbildungskraft meine Abstraktionen und der kalte Verstand meine Dichtung stört” (letter to Goethe, August 31, 1794). But Schiller’s praise of the Greeks in his major aesthetic writings of the same decade dwells precisely on their successful unification of such opposites. In Über Anmut und Würde (On Grace and Dignity, 1793), for example, we read: “Nie darf sich ihm [dem Griechen] die Sinnlichkeit ohne Seele zeigen, und seinem humanen Gefühl ist es gleich unmöglich, die rohe Tierheit und die Intelligenz zu vereinzeln” (8:334; Schiller’s italics), and in the Ästhetische Briefe the following: “Damals . . . hatten die Sinne und der Geist noch kein strenge geschiedenes Eigentum; denn noch hatte kein Zwiespalt sie gereizt, mit einander feindselig abzuteilen und ihre Markung zu bestimmen” (8:570). The structural similarity of these arguments shows that Schiller’s concern with Greek culture is related to how he views his own character and poetic talent, hence the strange ruminations in a letter to Wilhelm von Humboldt (October 26, 1795) as to whether or not he has an affinity, not with a particular Greek author, but with the Greeks as such. We should thus understand Schiller’s


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attitude to the latter not just as the glorification of an era conventionally regarded as classical but also, more intimately, as a strategy for dealing with his insecurity regarding his poetic gifts. The drive towards unification, of which humanity is the goal, goes beyond the immediate human sphere. A frequent and somewhat surprising topos in Schiller’s argument is that an achieved humanity, conceived as the reconciliation of spirit and sensibility, will also erase the difference between the human and the divine, and the Greek gods are taken as a prefiguration and a promise of a possible future state. This is not an easy idea to grasp, but it is one of Schiller’s most persistent themes. We encounter it in the Brief eines reisenden Dänen, where he writes that the Greeks portrayed their gods as nobler human beings, and hence brought the latter closer to the former. Perhaps we can infer, he suggests, something about our future: “Wenn der Mensch nur Mensch bleiben sollte — bleiben könnte, wie hätte es jemals Götter und Schöpfer dieser Götter gegeben?” (8:206; Schiller’s italics). Schiller seems to be hovering between a Christian affirmation of the immortality of the soul and a more mysterious suggestion as to a future deification of humankind. The idea appears first in a Christian guise in Schiller’s first medical dissertation, where he writes, “Gottgleichheit ist die Bestimmung des Menschen” (8:37). Schiller is intensifying the conventional concept of perfection, Vollkommenheit, to the point where the difference between humanity and God is suspended. In using the phrase “die Bestimmung des Menschen,” Schiller is adopting the title of a popular religious work from 1748 by Johann Joachim Spalding, and he suggests that man’s “destiny” is a strenuous self-elevation: “der Mensch ist da, daß er nachringe der Größe seines Schöpfers, mit eben dem Blick umfasse die Welt, wie der Schöpfer sie umfaßt” (8:37). But if we look beyond the Christian trappings, we can see here the origin of Schiller’s later preoccupation with the myth of Hercules’ ascent to Olympus, expressed so memorably in the conclusion of “Das Ideal und das Leben.”10 A less strenuous tone is struck in his long early poem “Der Triumph der Liebe,” where the deification motif is affirmed repeatedly in the refrain: Selig durch die Liebe Götter — durch die Liebe Menschen Göttern gleich. Liebe macht den Himmel Himmlischer — die Erde Zu dem Himmelreich. The theme of the poem is the birth of Venus, which brings about a softening and rejuvenation in the natural world, and which for humankind signals the arrival of civilization after a somewhat Hobbesian prehistory.11

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The same rapprochement of gods and men is at the heart of “Die Götter Griechenlandes,” where it is forcefully stated just before the end: “Da die Götter menschlicher noch waren, / Waren Menschen göttlicher” (ll. 191–92; 1788 version). Venus is again the presiding deity here, for it is her worship at the shrine at Amathus that forms the focus of this magnificent poem, and instead of the heroic exploits of Hercules, Schiller celebrates a form of interaction between gods and mortals that is more appropriate to this goddess: “Pyrrha’s schöne Tochter zu besiegen, / Nahm Hyperion den Hirtenstab” (ll. 35–36; 1788 version). The function of love in these poems as the bond linking the natural with the divine world entitles us to see it as derived from Plato’s theory of love, which he originally expounded in the Symposium and which was developed in the Renaissance by Marsilio Ficino in his influential dialogue De amore. Although explicit references to the concept of love are less frequent in Schiller’s writings of the 1790s, there is nonetheless a strong continuity between them and these earlier texts, and so it is no distortion to view Schiller’s concept of humanity as derived from the Platonic eros. But we should not underestimate the distinctiveness of Schiller’s theory. In its full complexity, it states that in antiquity human beings were more human than they are now, in the sense of being more natural and less corrupted by culture. In particular the Greeks did not try to approach divinity as Christians do, that is, by misguidedly suppressing their humanity through an ascetic morality, and they also did not suffer from the division of labor that distorts and fragments the modern personality. However, and only here do we see the full paradox, the Greeks came closer than we do to divinity precisely by disclaiming any desire to be more than human. Schiller’s concept of Menschlichkeit, which seems in some places to represent a simple call for a balanced physical-spiritual existence and an integration of the faculties, in fact carries with it an inherent nisus towards a divine, or at least a more than human, mode of existence. The association of this idea with the Greeks is expressed nowhere more clearly than in the fifteenth Ästhetischer Brief, where Schiller refers to the Juno Ludovisi, a massive portrait of the goddess, as both “der weibliche Gott” and “das gottgleiche Weib.”12

Nature In “Die Götter Griechenlandes,” Schiller calls for a return of the Greek golden age, describing it as “Holdes Blütenalter der Natur” (l. 146). But the nature that is enshrined in Greek culture is not the nature of Alexander Pope. Pope understands nature as a codification of the rules of good sense, whereas Schiller (to compress the impressions left by the poem into a single phrase) presents it as a perpetual springtime of youth, dance, and free love. No one, and certainly not Schiller, would claim that this picture of Greece


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has much to do with history. It is most likely based on the myth of the Golden Age, as Schiller could have found it in the first book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (ll. 89–112); the reference to the banishment of Saturn (l. 180) makes this source quite likely, and Schiller’s “Holdes Blütenalter der Natur” may have been prompted by Ovid’s “ver erat aeternum” (l. 107; it is less likely that Schiller was familiar with Hesiod’s account in the Works and Days, ll. 109–20). As in his later treatises on aesthetics, the portrayal of Greece in “Die Götter Griechenlandes” is not an end in itself, but functions as a Wunschbild against which Schiller can present and attack the shortcomings of modernity. The common thread running through the Greek panorama, with its numerous mythological vignettes, is the unity of nature and spirit or of human and divine. This is of course the same concept that we found at the heart of Schiller’s idea of humanity in the previous section, and, in line with our opening comparison of Schiller’s classicism with Pope’s, we can see it as a metaphysical expansion of the dramatic unities on which neoclassical critics had insisted.13 The opposite of Schiller’s unity is the estrangement of nature and spirit in culture. With remarkable dialectical skill, Schiller portrays modernity in this poem as groaning under both an ascetic Christianity and an abstract, mechanistic science, each of which is presented as a result of the same original estrangement. He adheres to the same intellectual model in his essays of the next decade. In the sixth Ästhetischer Brief, he writes of “die alles vereinende Natur” and opposes it to “der alles trennende Verstand” (8:571). The course of history is characterized here as a fall from a state of nature into one of culture, with the latter being understood as the fragmentation wrought by the destructive faculty of the understanding. But Schiller’s philosophy of history goes beyond this binary antithesis. Its full scope is revealed in two further statements that illuminate each other. In the letter cited above, Schiller writes that “alle [Völker] ohne Unterschied durch Vernünftelei von der Natur abfallen müssen, ehe sie durch Vernunft zu ihr zurückkehren können,” and in Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung we read, “Die Natur macht ihn [den Menschen] mit sich Eins, die Kunst trennt und entzweiet ihn, durch das Ideal kehrt er zur Einheit zurück” (8:735). As the juxtaposition of the two statements shows, nature stands as both the first and the last term in a triadic scheme, for the future ideal is itself associated with the concept of nature. And yet the ideal nature is not identical to the original nature, but is posited as existing at a higher level of consciousness and morality. This logical model explains the paradoxical role of the Greeks in Schiller’s thought. On the one hand, they represent a paradigm of unity and harmony to an age that has lost these qualities, and hence they are an object of aspiration and longing. On the other hand, and thanks to the intellectual and moral advances achieved in the modern age, any reconstituted unity and harmony must inevitably

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surpass all former achievements. Therefore the Greeks must also represent a stage that humanity has outgrown and must outgrow further. In a handwritten comment on an essay by his friend Wilhelm von Humboldt, Schiller sketched an analogy for this dialectic of unity and division in the cognitive process: first we grasp the whole object, but only indistinctly; next we take in the parts and lose sight of the whole; finally we return to viewing the whole, but now with a distinct knowledge of the parts. In the second phase, we still long for the first, but in the third, we have no need to do so. Similarly, in the third phase of history, we will no longer wish for the return of the Greeks (8:1075).14 In an article on the historical thought of Johann Gottfried Herder, Wilfried Malsch has drawn a parallel between this kind of complicated relationship of antiquity to modernity, consisting both of sameness and difference, and the logical model of prefiguration in Christian thought.15 His findings can also be extended to Schiller, for, as Adam prefigures Christ and Jerusalem the kingdom of heaven, Schiller regards ancient Greece as prefiguring the state of ideal nature at the end of history. It is of course ironic to find the Greeks at the heart of such a quintessentially un-Greek argument, though it is also possible to relate it to the Neo-Platonic dialectic of fall and return that M. H. Abrams has applied so effectively to the Romantic era. But if, as I have argued, Schiller’s agonistic attitude to the Greeks was in part the consequence of personal insecurity, we can see here that, no matter whether the Christian or the Neo-Platonic background is the decisive one, he contrived to convert that private insecurity into an elaborate philosophical theory of historical change. In the context of the eighteenth-century argument, nature and culture are antithetical terms. How, we wonder, can it then make sense to describe Greek culture as natural? What features of Greek culture fit it for the role assigned to it in Schiller’s system? Winckelmann had also used the concept of nature to establish the superiority of Greek sculpture, but his argument is largely restricted to matters pertaining to anatomy, such as the athletic training of Greek youths. Schiller expands the argument far beyond this narrow base. First, as we have seen, he defines nature as unification, and he uses this term to illuminate not only the Greek religion, which projects humanity into nature and the divine world, but also the quality of Greek society, with its less advanced division of labor, and even Greek individuality, in which the human faculties are not fragmented. But Schiller is clearly aware of the problem that the Greeks also had a flourishing culture, and so he describes them as having achieved the maximum degree of culture that is still reconcilable with nature: “Bei diesen [den Griechen] artete die Kultur nicht so weit aus, daß die Natur darüber verlassen wurde” (8:726). The further advance of culture in modern times necessarily brought a rupture with nature, and the breach can only be healed by the reconstitution of nature at an ideal level, however that is to be understood.


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To conclude this section, we should note that Schiller applies the concept of nature to the Greeks not only as a speculative philosopher but also as a literary critic. In his antithesis of poetic modes in Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, the Greeks are said to have practiced simple mimesis. In their poetry we do not come across the idea of nature, for nature was their immediate life and not an object of reflection or longing. This is why modern readers, who are accustomed to emotional and intellectual commentary on the object, may initially be repelled by naïve poets, who portray the object severely (“streng und spröde,” 8:728) and without ceremony. In a famous passage from the same essay, Schiller contrasts excerpts from Homer and Ariosto to highlight the former’s unadorned narrative style. In another, the idyll appears as the genre closest to nature, not only in that it portrays a natural form of life, but also in that the typology of naïve and sentimental idyll mirrors the role of nature as the first but also the third term in humanity’s dialectical progress. The stress on simplicity as a feature of Greek poetry may be consistent with the old neoclassical doctrine, but this concept is now embedded in a speculative system of which Boileau and Pope had no inkling.

Art We have seen that, within Schiller’s dialectical theory of history, the concept of nature has two meanings, and the same is true of art — Kunst and Kultur. On one hand, it stands for the dominion of the intellect that, with its compartmentalization and mechanization, has disrupted an original, natural unity. On the other hand, it means the process by which the rupture can be healed and the unity restored at a higher level. This double use of the term is most evident in the eighth Ästhetischer Brief, where Schiller writes that, in view of the loss of human totality in modern times, “so muß es bei uns stehen, diese Totalität in unsrer Natur, welche die Kunst zerstört hat, durch eine höhere Kunst wieder herzustellen” (8:578). How did Schiller envisage this higher art? It may seem to be making matters still more complicated when in the Ninth Letter he tells us that Greek art preserved the achievements of Greek nature, but this provides us with our answer. Modern art, if it is to be progressive in Schiller’s sense, must paradoxically orient itself in some way on ancient Greek art. In accordance with the logic of Schiller’s historical system, we should not be surprised to find that it must be both similar to and different from Greek art. A simple formulation comes in the ninth Brief, where, desiring to preserve the young artist from the harmful influences of modernity, Schiller sends him to school in Greece. When the artist returns to his own age, matured and strengthened like the young Orestes — a somewhat disturbing comparison, he will apply the lessons he has learned by subjecting

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modern matter to a strict form. If we turn to Schiller’s own poetic production, this formula seems to be best borne out by his series of exceptional poems in the elegiac meter. Here he is able to cause the predominantly dactylic rhythm to express a poised and wistful lyricism: “Sagt, wo sind die Vortrefflichen hin, wo find’ ich die Sänger, / Die mit dem lebenden Wort horchende Völker entzückt?” (“Die Sänger der Vorwelt”; 1:99). Schiller’s advocacy of strict form, however, is not confined to specifically classical forms. One should recall, for example, that his most comprehensive and successful statement of his philosophical views in poetry, “Das Ideal und das Leben” (first version 1795, titled “Das Reich der Schatten” [The Realm of Shadows]), is written in a strict but wholly un-Greek stanza. For Schiller, the Greeks may represent the best instantiation to date of the fusion of form and life, for which he calls in the Fifteenth Letter, but the principle of form is itself timeless, a metaphysical force that enables us to master the world of flux in which we live. At the same time, we should note that Schiller’s references to antiquity are not always in this spirit of austere formalism, but can also serve to produce a more Rococo spirit of decoration and diversion. This mood is prevalent in the long poem “Die Künstler” (The Artists) of 1789 where, apostrophizing all artists of the past, Schiller writes, “Wie eure Urnen die Gebeine, / Deckt ihr mit holdem Zauberscheine / Der Sorgen schauervollen Chor” (1:217). The Greek references in such passages are chiefly to the Muses and the Graces, allegorical deities whom we are most likely to associate with Schiller’s fellow Swabian writer Christoph Martin Wieland, and their activity seems to be more about concealing unpleasantness than with bringing structure to reality. But these deities also figure prominently in Schiller’s announcement of his journal Die Horen (the Horae) in 1795, in which he deplores the way in which war and political conflict have banished the Muses and Graces from social intercourse. The title of the journal alludes to the Greek goddesses of the seasons, and Schiller’s commentary shows that, as in the early poem “Der Triumph der Liebe,” he is still preoccupied with the birth of Venus as the mythical symbol for the coming of civilization, for, as the sixth Homeric Hymn tells us, it was the Horae who first clothed the goddess and led her to Olympus: “eine reizende Dichtung, durch welche angedeutet wird, daß das Schöne schon in seiner Geburt sich unter Regeln fügen muß und nur durch Gesetzmäßigkeit würdig werden kann, einen Platz im Olymp, Unsterblichkeit und einen moralischen Wert zu erhalten.” On one hand, this is a conventional allegorical expression of a no less conventional aesthetic of decorum. We are not all that far from the world of Gottsched and German neoclassicism here. On the other hand, the names of the Horae, Eunomia (Order), Dike (Justice), and Irene (Peace), are indicative of Schiller’s deeper purposes. The first name alludes to the principle of form, and the last two point to the association between form and the moral and social aspirations that are implicit in Schiller’s classical aesthetic from the outset. And it is of


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course no coincidence that he turns to Greek mythology to express these aspirations, for as we have seen, it is in ancient Greece that Schiller believes that his metaphysical principles came closest to realization. It was inevitable that Greek tragic drama would exercise a huge fascination over a playwright holding these views, and Schiller’s correspondence with Goethe contains interesting observations as to what he can learn, especially from Sophocles, to benefit his own plays (see the letter of April 4, 1797). Die Braut von Messina (1803) was Schiller’s most serious attempt to transplant the techniques of Greek tragedy, and in particular the chorus, to the modern stage. Although it enjoyed considerable success at the time, the play is now reckoned not to have “come off,” owing chiefly to some poor plot management, but Schiller’s explanation of his procedure in his Foreword is still of exceptional interest.16 Again we see the dialectical logic of Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung. The original chorus, he writes, grew from the natural and mimetic art of ancient Greece. Thanks to the quality of ancient society, which was open, public, collective, and concrete, the Greek chorus was a “natural organ.” Nothing in modern life, which is abstract, compartmentalized, and internal, corresponds to this chorus. However, since modern art is not mimetic, the chorus can be retained, albeit with a different justification. In modern drama the chorus is thus not a natural but an “artificial organ.” Whereas previously it formed part of a naturalistic aesthetic, its function is now “dem Naturalism in der Kunst offen und ehrlich den Krieg zu erklären” (5:285). Far from reflecting reality, the task of modern art is to transform reality according to a model that is at once natural and ideal. Although Schiller speaks of the future state as different from Greece, it is still based on Greece as its prefiguration. Hence he calls for the revival of Greek motifs in drama, not merely the chorus but also the creation of a more external and public form of life: “Der Dichter muß die Paläste wieder auftun, er muß die Gerichte unter freien Himmel herausführen, er muß die Götter wieder aufstellen. . . .” (5:286–87). Although Schiller used the chorus only once, one can recognize in this wider explanation some more general features of his later dramatic style. Thus the unhistorical meeting of the two queens in act 3 of Maria Stuart reflects a preference, which is both artistic and ethical, for robust personal confrontation over dissimulation and intrigue, and Mortimer’s confusion of the earthly and the heavenly Maria in the same play should be seen in connection with Schiller’s call for a return of the Greek gods.17

Politics When Schiller writes in the last quotation of “reopening the palaces,” he is thinking of the archaic world portrayed in Greek tragedy in which the city

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states are still ruled by kings. This brings us to the question of whether Schiller responded in any way to the political legacy of ancient Greece. The answer here must be mainly negative. As we have seen, the concept of unity is central to Schiller’s conceptions of nature and humanity, and, projected back into Greece, this leads primarily to an affirmation of the human unity of the individual Greek. The problem of disunity in Greek history, that is, the actual fragmentation of the country into warring statelets and the frequency of civil strife within them, is barely touched upon. There is an indirect reference to this problem in the Schaubühne speech, where Schiller, with an eye on his homeland, asks: “Was kettete Griechenland so fest aneinander?” and answers, “Nichts anders als der vaterländische Inhalt der Stücke, der griechische Geist, das große überwältigende Interesse des Staats, der besseren Menschheit, das in denselbigen atmete” (8:199). Schiller is thinking here of a national theater as a means of overcoming German Vielstaaterei. And yet, as he would have had to acknowledge, the theater failed to have any such effect in Greece, and the similar hopes placed in the German theater would turn out to be no less chimerical. What is left is the fallback position of the theater, or of art in general, serving as a refuge for ideals for which there is no room in real life, that is, as a substitute and a consolation and not as a means of making them a reality. This implication is not yet seen in the Schaubühne speech, but it is confronted in the ending of the Ästhetische Briefe, where Schiller sketches an aesthetic state (Staat, not Zustand) that will enshrine the qualities of liberty and equality that are too risky to be implemented in reality. Given this basic structure, it is not surprising that Greece usually functions in his thought more as a fairy tale or as the “Blütenalter der Natur” when the gods walked on earth, and less as a historical civilization with concrete social and political features. Two qualifications should be made to this depoliticized picture. In 1792 Schiller delivered a lecture at the University of Jena on “Die Gesetzgebung von Lykurgus und Solon” (The Legislation of Lycurgus and Solon). The factual information is largely derived from Plutarch, but Schiller includes reflections of his own on the task of the statesman that parallel his views in the fourth Ästhetischer Brief. Castigating the Spartan legislator, Schiller writes: “Der Staat selbst ist niemals Zweck, er ist nur wichtig als eine Bedingung, unter welcher der Zweck der Menschheit erfüllt werden kann, und dieser Zweck der Menschheit ist kein anderer als Ausbildung aller Kräfte des Menschen, Fortschreitung” (6:486). All this is still abstract, but further on in the lecture Schiller writes that Solon understood these relations correctly, and hence built a state in which, in contrast to the Spartan tyranny, men governed themselves and were thus capable of the highest cultural attainments. By concluding the lecture with the statement “Alles eilte dem herrlichen Zeitalter des Perikles entgegen,” Schiller indicates that the Periclean age was the civilization that most closely


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approximates his ideal of a state in which political goals are subordinate to the needs of human development and culture.18 But it is no coincidence that he never attempted to flesh out this picture of fifth-century Athens in a historical account, for its value for him is that of a paradigm of humanity existing apart from the sordid processes of history. For this reason, the references to the historical Athens and the poetic image of the Greek Golden Age do not really represent distinct interpretations of Greece but are rather the two faces of a single complex idea. Our second qualification concerns Schiller’s great elegy “Der Spaziergang” (first version 1795, titled “Elegie”) in which he outlines the history of humanity as mirrored in the south German landscape. Greece figures here as the locus of two succeeding eras, both of which are states of nature, although the second is also one of culture. First, with a reference to Ovid’s Bronze Age, Schiller briefly depicts a pastoral society that is entirely at one with nature: “Nachbarlich wohnet der Mensch noch mit dem Acker zusammen, / Seine Felder umruhn friedlich sein ländliches Dach” (ll. 51–52). Next, in a passage of astonishing concreteness, he describes the arrival of civilization and its advance in Greece up to the limits set by nature. He is adhering here to his judgment in the sixth Ästhetischer Brief discussed above.19 In a keen dialectic, he shows how the emergence of cities and of social inequality — “Stände seh ich gebildet . . .” (l. 63) — leads to an upsurge of energy and creativity. Greek religion, art, technology, commerce, and exploration all receive their due. Even the inevitable social disunity can lead to new forms of cooperation: “Sieh, da entbrennen in feurigem Kampf die eifernden Kräfte, / Großes wirket ihr Streit, größeres wirket ihr Bund” (ll. 73–74). Significantly, it is not the selfgovernment of the Greek republics but their patriotism that Schiller celebrates, and also, by his skillful translation of the Thermopylae epitaph (ll. 97–98), their unity in the face of the Persian threat. The term “Streit” is the sole allusion to internal strife and civil war. Significantly, however, and despite the specific historical references in this passage, Schiller also brings in his favorite theme of the traffic of gods and men — “Nieder vom Himmel steigen die seligen Götter . . .” (l. 79) — which belongs to the Golden Age myth. Again, therefore, we see Schiller’s characteristic combination of historical and non-historical moments in his approach to antiquity.

Conclusion In this discussion a recurrent duality in Schiller’s thought is evident, one that affects not only his presentation of Greece but his concepts of nature and art as well. This duality results from Schiller’s commitment to a Platonic metaphysic that divides existence into material and ideal worlds, but it is made more complex by Schiller’s imposition of this metaphysic

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onto the traditional aesthetics of nature. The stresses caused by the attempted integration of real and ideal nature into a single concept are then accommodated by Schiller’s triadic philosophy of history, by which all tensions are to be resolved, though it is left radically unclear whether the future resolution of tensions is to be accomplished in fact or only in the work of art (or the “aesthetic state”) as a surrogate. In any case, Schiller’s presentation of ancient Greece can be adequately understood only within this philosophical context. This is not to suggest that individual texts are inaccessible to a straightforward reading. In closing it is important to note two poems, the ballad “Die Kraniche des Ibykus” (The Cranes of Ibycus, 1797) and the elegy “Die Sänger der Vorwelt” (1795), in which Schiller uses Greece as the backdrop for a portrayal of ideas that are important to him. The ballad, based on a story from late antiquity, tells of the unmasking of two murderers at a performance of the Eumenides of Aeschylus, during which the chorus of the Furies provokes such terror in the criminals that they spontaneously confess their crime. The elegy begins with an evocation of the close relationship in antiquity between poets and their audience, and goes on to celebrate the wider harmony existing at that time between idea and reality; not only were the gods visible, the poet also did not have to struggle for an inner vision but took his inspiration from the reality that surrounded him. In both poems, Greece serves as the ideal locus for a paradigm of humanity and society. They portray a world in which aesthetic, religious, and ethical experience all work together, in which inner and outer experience mirror each other, and in which the poet is the mouthpiece for communal beliefs. It is a powerful vision, and we do not disparage Schiller by saying that he based it on the deficiencies and absences that he felt in himself and in the world in which he lived. Like all traditions, classicism must constantly transform itself to answer the needs of each succeeding period, and Schiller’s version of classicism is a product of its time. But with its combination of personal engagement and intellectual sophistication, of formal clarity and moving lyricism, it deserves to be counted among the finest and most interesting versions of classicism to have appeared in European letters.

Notes 1

The same attitude to antiquity can be found in Shaftesbury’s Characteristics the impact of which on German aesthetic thought has long been recognized. See for example Shaftesbury’s rebuke to modern writers for flattering their readers rather than attempting to educate them: “Had the early poets of Greece thus complimented their nation by complying with its first relish and appetite, they had not done their countrymen such service nor themselves such honour as we find they


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did by conforming to truth and nature” (118). On the reasons for Shaftesbury’s widespread influence, see Kondylis 393–98, and for his relation to Schiller, see especially Cassirer. As Riedel points out (“Popularphilosophie,” 164), it cannot be shown that Schiller read Shaftesbury himself. It is more likely that his ideas were transmitted to him by Wieland. 2

Schiller’s dramas and prose works are cited by volume and page number from Werke und Briefe in 12 vols., ed. Klaus Harro Hilzinger et al. (Known as the Frankfurter Ausgabe; Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1988-). Poems are quoted from vol. 1 of this edition and are cited by line number only. Schiller’s letters are cited from vols. 11 and 12 of the same edition and are identified by recipient and date.

3 See the conclusion to Düsing’s recent article on Schiller’s classical elegies: “Das Ziel klassischer Kunst . . . ist nicht mehr die Umgestaltung der Wirklichkeit. Es geht um Befreiung, um Erlösung durch die Aufhebung der Zeit in der Epiphanie des Schönen” (114). 4

The Rousseauian praise of the noble savage, evident in the passage starting “Sehet den schnellen Indianer an, der einem Hirsche zu Fuße nachsetzet” (6), can also be seen as a modern version of the Stoical life according to nature.

5

For Winckelmann’s transference of emotions originally associated with Pietism to a secular and pagan context, see the interesting comments by Nicholas Boyle (28–29).

6

This text was published in 1786, though its central part, the Theosophie des Julius, goes back to his years at the Karlsschule. The best short account of Schiller’s philosophy of love is contained in the two cited articles by Wolfgang Riedel.

7

“Eben so wenig darf die Kunst es entgelten, daß sie . . . im achtzehnten Jahrhundert nicht ist, was unter Aspasia und Perikles” (8:188). 8

The faults of “Spitzfindigkeit, Künstlichkeit und Witzelei” to which Schiller admits in this letter echo the critique of modern literature in Shaftesbury’s “Soliloquy,” or “Advice to an Author” (Characteristics, 93): “I must confess there is hardly anywhere to be found a more insipid race of mortals than those whom we moderns are contented to call poets for having attained the chiming faculty of a language with an injudicious random use of wit and fancy.”

9 Schiller did not entirely neglect Roman literature. In 1790–91, as part of his pursuit of “Classizität,” he translated parts of books 4 and 6 of the Aeneid, transposing the material from the hexameters of the original into the ottava rima of Italian Renaissance epic. His hexameter translation of part of book 1 is a school exercise and is of less interest. Emil Staiger has some thought-provoking remarks as to the Virgilian source of Schiller’s vision of the underworld in the opening of “Das Ideal und das Leben” (29) and also concerning the greater affinity of Schiller’s use of language to Latin than to Greek (181–84). It may also not be fanciful to detect a general influence of Virgil’s Georgics in “Der Spaziergang” and “Das Lied von der Glocke,” particularly in their portrayal of the antithesis of peaceful industriousness and civil disorder. For a general discussion of Schiller’s translations, see Koopmann, “Übersetzungen, Bühnenbearbeitungen.” 10

See Habel, “Schiller und die Tradition des Herakles-Mythos” for Schiller’s reliance on Winckelmann for his interpretation of the Hercules myth.

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11 Schiller returns to the motif of the birth of Venus in 1795 in the announcement of Die Horen, the journal that he dedicated to the cause of Humanität. 12

In its fusion of mortal and immortal, the sculpture serves as a synthesis of Schiller’s two basic types of deification, the ascent of Hercules and the descent of Venus. In accordance with the dualism of Schiller’s thought, these can be said to represent respectively the beautiful and the sublime options, or in Christian parlance the equivalents of incarnation and resurrection. The name Ludovisi refers to the Roman villa where the original could be inspected. As Rolf-Peter Janz informs us in his commentary (8:1399), the cast of the sculpture on display in Goethe’s house in Weimar, which we now know to have been a portrait bust, was only acquired after Schiller’s death in 1823. Schiller must thus have known it only from hearsay.

13

This metaphysical expansion of the idea of nature is an epochal phenomenon. See the discussion by Kondylis, “Die Struktur des normativistischen Naturbegriffs,” 342–56. The lateness of Schiller’s position in the history of this concept is shown by his awareness of the gulf between nature as reality (“die wirkliche Natur”) and as ideal (“die wahre Natur”; see Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, 8:780). This crisis in his concept of nature gives rise to the rupture in his aesthetics between the concepts of the beautiful and the sublime.

14

Schiller gives a further explanation for this point in a footnote to Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, referring here to the Kantian categories of unity, multiplicity and totality (8:777). 15

For a classic account of the prefiguration model, see Auerbach 16, 48–49, and passim. On page 73, Auerbach quotes his own definition of figura from a previous article: “Figural interpretation ‘established a connection between two events or persons in such a way that the first signifies not only itself but also the second, while the second involves or fulfils the first.’ ” 16 There has been an extensive critical discussion of the relation of ancient and modern traditions in this play, in particular on Schiller’s use of the concept of fate. For a recent discussion, see Ritzer. For a full bibliography, see Guthke’s article on the play (Koopmann, ed. 466–85). 17

For further comments on the classical qualities of this drama, see Pütz 295–302.

18

Schiller follows Winckelmann in this idealization of Periclean Athens: “Die glücklichsten Zeiten für die Kunst in Griechenland, und sonderlich in Athen, waren die vierzig Jahre, in welchen Perikles, so zu reden, die Republik regierte . . .” (Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums, 308). It is unlikely that Schiller knew Pericles’ great funeral speech from Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. 19

The rupture of nature and culture is evoked in the poem as liberty gives way to libertinism: “Freiheit ruft die Vernunft, Freiheit die wilde Begierde, / Von der heil’gen Natur ringen sie lüstern sich los” (ll. 141–42). The subsequent period of decadence and depravity is described in rather general terms although, with its references to treachery and sycophancy, it is reminiscent of Tacitus’s account of Rome under Tiberius, confirming again the Winckelmannian shift of paradigm from Roman to Greek antiquity.


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Works Cited Abrams, M. H. Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature. New York: Norton, 1971. Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1968. Boyle, Nicholas. The Poetry of Desire. Vol. 1 of Goethe: The Poet and the Age. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991. Cassirer, Ernst. “Schiller und Shaftesbury.” Publications of the English Goethe Society n.s. 11 (1935): 37–59. Düsing, Wolfgang. “Aspekte des Kunstbegriffs in Schillers klassichen Elegien.” In Traditionen der Lyrik: Festschrift für Hans-Henrik Krummacher, ed. Wolfgang Düsing, 103–14. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1997. Guthke, Karl S. “Die Braut von Messina.” In Schiller-Handbuch, ed. Helmut Koopmann, 466–85. Habel, Reinhardt. “Schiller und die Tradition des Herakles-Mythos.” In Terror und Spiel, ed. Manfred Fuhrmann, 265–94. Poetik und Hermaneutik 4. Munich: Fink, 1971. Hatfield, Henry. Aesthetic Paganism in German Literature: From Winckelmann to the Death of Goethe. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1964. Kondylis, Panajotis. Die Aufklärung im Rahmen des neuzeitlichen Rationalismus. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1986. Koopmann, Helmut, ed. Schiller-Handbuch. Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner, 1998. ———. “Übersetzungen, Bühnenarbeitungen.” In Schiller-Handbuch, 729– 42. Malsch, Wilfried. “Hinfällig geoffenbartes Urbild: Griechenland in Herders typologischer Geschichtsphilosophie.” Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft 30 (1986): 161–95. Ovid. Metamorphoses. 2 vols. Trans. Frank Justus Miller. Loeb Classical Library, London: Heinemann, 1966. Pütz, Peter. “Nähe und Ferne zur Antike: Iphigenie und Maria Stuart.” In Unser Commercium: Goethes und Schillers Literaturpolitik, ed. Wilfried Barner, Eberhard Lämmert, and Norbert Oellers, 289–302. Stuttgart: Cotta, 1984. Riedel, Wolfgang. “Schiller und die Popularphilosophie.” In Schiller-Handbuch, ed. Helmut Koopmann, 155–66. ———. “Schriften der Karlsschulzeit.” In Schiller-Handbuch, ed. Helmut Koopmann, 547–59. Ritzer, Monika. “Not und Schuld. Zur Funktion des ‘antiken’ Schicksalbegriffs in Schillers Braut von Messina.” In Schiller heute, ed. Helmut Koopmann and Hans-Jörg Knobloch, 131–50. Stauffenberg Colloquium 40. Tübingen: Stauffenberg, 1996.

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Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of. Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy. Ed. Lawrence Klein. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. Staiger, Emil. Friedrich Schiller. Zurich: Atlantis, 1967. Winckelmann, Johann Joachim. Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1969. ———. Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums. Vienna, 1934. Reprint, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1993.

Schiller the Historian Otto Dann

F

SCHILLER WAS TWENTY-EIGHT years old when, after having enjoyed sensational success as a dramatist, he decided to set aside his creative poetic work to devote himself entirely to the writing of history. Resigning his post as a military doctor in Stuttgart in September 1782 left Schiller without a steady income and heavily in debt. As a historian he gained new intellectual perspectives, social connections, and sources of income. In 1785 Schiller moved from southwest to central Germany and soon became a noted partner in the flourishing book and newspaper industry. Already well known as a dramatist, as a writer he encountered personal engagement and intellectual interest within socially open-minded literary and artistic circles in Leipzig, Dresden, Jena, and Weimar. Supported by the young Leipzig-based publisher Georg Joachim Göschen, he was able to continue the journal Thalia, which he had begun in Weimar. In the second issue of the magazine, in February 1786, the second act of Don Carlos appeared. It was the last drama of Schiller’s early phase, as well as his first historical prose text. Schiller’s decision to write history ripened while working on the project Geschichte der merkwürdigsten Rebellionen und Verschwörungen (History of the Most Remarkable Rebellions and Conspiracies, 1788) concerning the Dutch rebellion against Spain in the sixteenth century, which he had been carrying out with a close friend of his, Ludwig Ferdinand Huber, since 1786. The encouragement of the prominent Weimar writer Christoph Martin Wieland in the fall of 1787 was critical. Wieland suggested to Schiller that he expand his piece on the Dutch “rebellion” into a scientifically-based description. One year later the first volume of Schiller’s history became available and secured for him a reputation as an excellent historian: Geschichte des Abfalls der Vereinigten Niederlande von der spanischen Regierung (History of the Revolt of the Spanish Netherlands, 1788/1801). The young historical narrator became courageous. He threw himself immediately into a new project that was now also supported by his friend in Dresden, Gottfried Körner: the publication of an Allgemeine Sammlung historischer Memoirs vom zwölften Jahrhundert bis auf die neuesten Zeiten (General Collection of Historical Memoirs from the Twelfth Century to RIEDRICH

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Today, 1791–1806). In this subsequent work, at least four volumes of personal memoirs from European history since the Middle Ages were to appear annually. Schiller accepted the task of writing an introductory historical overview for every volume. But that was not enough: in December 1788, Schiller was fooled by his own ambition and by the Weimar government under Goethe’s administration (see Schiller’s letter of December 15, 1788) into assuming a lectureship in history at the university in Jena during the summer semester of 1789. His involvement in the German university system, with which he was not yet familiar, was a personal challenge. Was heißt und zu welchem Ende studiert man Universalgeschichte? (What is, and to What End Does One Study Universal History?, 1789) is the frequently-quoted title of his inaugural lecture of May 16, 1789, which was published in the same year. Schiller also recorded other of his earliest lectures and published them soon thereafter. The end of 1789 saw the continuation of his Geschichte des Abfalls der Vereinigten Niederlande. But Schiller was tempted to accept his publisher’s offer to write a new work of his own historical narration: Geschichte des Dreißigjährigen Kriegs (History of the Thirty Years’ War, 1791/93). It was published in Göschen’s Historischer Calender für Damen and became a great success. In 1789 and 1790, the thirty-year-old Schiller was not only emboldened by the revolutionary events in Paris, but was convinced that he could increase his productivity still further, which included writing a “deutscher Plutarch” (see the letter of December 16, 1790, to Körner). He overestimated his energy, and became a victim of the book until, in January 1791, his appalling physical condition caused him to take a break, at which point he either dropped his previous commitments or handed them over to someone else. Beginning early in 1792, a stipend from Denmark stemmed Schiller’s financial worries and enabled him to undertake an intensive study of Kantian philosophy, which opened up new perspectives. He devoted his time first to aesthetic and anthropological questions, publishing them in extensive pamphlets. In 1796, poetry and drama moved back to the center of his attention, partly due to the influence of his friendship with Goethe. This provides a sketch of the most important dates that mark Schiller’s work as a historian. They enable us to discern a historical phase in Schiller’s career lasting five years, from late summer 1787 until fall 1792. Supported also by Schiller’s statements in letters of October 26, 1787, to Huber, and September 21, 1792, to Körner, the idea of such a phase in Schiller’s career has generally been adopted by scholarship. The intensive investigations into Schiller’s activity as a historian around the anniversaries of 1859 and 1905 continued to have their effect, for example, those by Ottokar Lorenz, Johannes Janssen, Rudolf Boxberger, Theodor Kükelhaus, and Richard Fester. At that time — in the age of historicism — it was shown

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that because of the manner of his work and the forms of representation that he chose, and in view of the contemporary standards of scholarship, Schiller could not be considered a historian. However, to marginalize Schiller’s histories is dubious. For it is based on a problematic approach that is retrospective in nature, and in many respects often the anti-historical resentment of those who are committed to literature in the narrower sense. In a letter to Körner in 1792, Schiller describes his historiographical obligations as a burden and says that he wants to finish them as soon as possible. One has to keep in mind that Schiller the historian was still an artist. For him and his contemporaries, art and science were the two great cultural realms, and were related in their investigation and mediation of truth. Only in our time has the task arisen of incorporating Schiller’s productive engagement with history more adequately and comprehensively into our understanding of his lifelong work and the times in which he lived, and re-evaluating its significance. First, it must be said that Schiller’s interest in history (Geschichte) and stories (Geschichten) was not at all limited to those five years. Beginning in Stuttgart, stories based on authentic life experiences fascinated Schiller. As an author he had a need to tell true stories. In 1782 there is some early evidence of this, for example, the short story “Eine großmütige Handlung aus der neuesten Geschichte,” based on an event from 1547 to which Schiller had devoted serious historical study. In the story he reports on the destiny of two brothers in the environs of Stuttgart. He places the story into the context of the most recent history and its educated society, telling it in the form of a drama. Schiller’s next and weightier historical narration stems from 1785: the historical novella Der Verbrecher aus Infamie (Criminal Out of Infamy, 1784) which bears the notable subtitle: “Eine wahre Geschichte.” This true story appeared in the second issue of Schiller’s journal Thalia, and provided him with the opportunity to present himself to the reading audience in a new form. Here the original relationship between his literature and his historical project becomes graphically clear, as Schiller narrates once again a nexus of occurrences that extend from the framework of the everyday and were of special interest to him. As an author, he considered it his task to bring them back to life with the aid of narrative representation. But, before writing the final version of Verbrecher aus Infamie, Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre (Criminal Out of Dishonor, 1785), which was based on the life of an actual criminal, Schiller reflected thoroughly on the functions of historical narration and its specific methods. The first printing of the second act of Don Carlos, the most important historical drama of the young Schiller, is the focus of attention of the aforementioned second issue of Thalia. His preparations for writing the play included considerably more study of historical literature than for his earlier pieces. For the first time he dared to use a significant theme from

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European history. In the process of studying the literature, Schiller recognized that an appealing, modern literary-historical narration ran parallel to traditional historiography. He had read William Robertson’s three-volume History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V (1769) in German translation, Robert Watson’s The History of the Reign of Philip the Second, King of Spain (1777) in French translation, and Guillaume-Hyacinthe Bougeant’s depiction of the Thirty Years’ War and the Peace of Westphalia, Historie des guerres et des négoticiations qui précédènerent le Traité de Westphalie (History of the War and Negotiations Leading to the Treaty of Westphalia, 1727). Upon having studied the latter, he shared with Körner the wish that he had begun the writing of history earlier (letter of April 15, 1786). For some time, Schiller had known Sebastien Mercier, the French dramatic poet who at that time was capturing the stage with his Tableaux historiques. In the second issue of Thalia, Schiller published a translation of a characterization of King Philip II of Spain by Mercier that was associated thematically with Don Carlos, thereby presenting another piece of historical prose. Although this text, Philipp der Zweite, König von Spanien: Von Mercier, does not classify as a historical work in the narrower sense, it has been assigned a place among Schiller’s historical writings in editions of his work. Finally, one can find in the aforementioned second issue of Thalia the impressive poem “Resignation” with the memorable line: “Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht” (l. 95). Even though he borrowed the topos, the verse makes it clear that, next to narrative stories, Schiller also had an overarching concept of universal history. At that time the term “Weltgeschichte” was used as a collective singular that signaled a new kind of philosophical-historical thinking (Koselleck, 653–68). The same issue of Thalia, in which Schiller also granted his friends Körner, Huber, and the young author Sophie Albrecht a voice, testifies to Schiller’s progressive and reflective engagement with history in its various forms within the learned society of education (Bildungsgesellschaft) of the time. As has been mentioned, in the course of the year 1786 Schiller took on a new literary project that included the term history in its title: Geschichte der merkwürdigsten Rebellionen und Verschwörungen. It was not one but several accounts of previous “rebellions and conspiracies,” written by a number of authors, which were to appear with the Leipzig-based publisher Crusius. Though grounded on historical literature, the pieces did not claim a scientific basis but, according to Schiller, focused on “das Interesse des Details und der Charaktere.” In their pragmatic manner of representation they were different from another novel that Schiller began to write in 1786: Der Geisterseher. Eine Geschichte aus den Memoiren des Grafen von O** (The Ghostseer: A Story from the Memoirs of the Count von O**). However, this work, despite the historical-sounding title and a beginning that purports to be the report of an eyewitness and pure, strict truth


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(“reine, strenge Wahrheit”), was an invention of Schiller’s imagination. Der Geisterseher, which remained a fragment, was Schiller’s only novel and, up until that time, his greatest public success. In addition to the many forms of historical narration and reflections on history that Schiller undertook during this period, we point once again to the two historical dramas that originated in these years. They were based on an intensive study of historical literature, and indicate Schiller’s intention to re-enliven, through the use of the historical imagination, human, social, and political problems that prevailed in the societies of the sixteenth century. After delving into all of these forms of historical representation that he had been using since 1782, in the fall of 1787 Schiller shifted to history. With the Geschichte des Abfalls der vereinigten Niederlande von der spanischen Regierung Schiller hoped to succeed in this new discipline of history, “zu dem ich mich angefangen habe zu bestimmen, beim Publikum gut an[zu] kündigen” (letter of November 5, 1787, to Crusius). The forms of historical thinking and representation that he had developed previously affected his new practice of critical, referenced, and pragmatic historical portrayals. It is only at this point that Schiller depicts himself as a historian and is recognized as such by his readership. “Alles macht mir hier seine Glückwünsche, dass ich mich in die Geschichte geworfen,” he writes to Körner on December 19, 1787, from Weimar. The transition to scientific historical narration was indeed a leap for Schiller in an existential sense. His correspondence in the winter of 1787–88, especially with Körner, is not only a protocol, but also an interpretation of this transformation. In his letters of January of that year, Schiller underscores the following points: 1. He fears that he is burned out and “written out” (ausgeschrieben) as a poet and dramatist who generates ideas from inside. Instead, in historical narration, he borrows themes taken from external sources and is able to process them freely. 2. He hopes for a different audience. Schiller does not only want to write for friends of belles-lettres, who are mostly women. He also wishes to reach the politically and economically interested businessman. He wants to act in public life and to seek recognition, that is, “Anerkennung in der sogenannten Gelehrten- und in der bürgerlichen Welt” (letter of January 7, 1788). 3. He needs a higher income. Schiller wanted to unburden himself of his debts in order to provide for a family (letter to Körner on April 16, 1788). After his previous bad experiences, he now places his bets on historical literature and on collaboration in magazines. In sum, for Schiller, the transition to professional historical writing was tied to a new outline for his life that goes beyond a change of subjects. He wanted, for the first time in his life, to have his fate in his own

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power, and he wanted to achieve this within a year (letter of January 7, 1788). He wanted to be better anchored socially and, with the means at his disposal, to be active in public life. Here the social and political dimension of his life comes into view, without which the conditions and intentions of Schiller’s historical writing must remain incomprehensible. In the various states of the Holy Roman Empire, the 1780s were high points for the reform movement and its initiatives, especially in education. In this third decade of his life, Schiller’s sensibility for the spiritual and political tendencies of the time were articulated in an abundance of productive messages. His interest in alternative social behavior was visible early on. This was confirmed, for example, with the success of Die Räuber (The Robbers, 1781). With his second drama project, Fiesco (1783), he referred back to a national uprising in the city of Genoa. In Kabale und Liebe (Intrigue and Love, written 1782–83, published 1784), he staged the social conflicts of his own epoch, and, in Don Carlos (1787), the stage became the world theater of European history. It was only after these historical dramas that Schiller completed the transition to the writing of history, thematizing the Dutch revolution of the sixteenth century in his Geschichte des Abfalls der vereinigten Niederlande von der spanischen Regierung. As he writes in his introduction, he wished to erect a monument to the strength of the middle class: “dieses schöne Denkmal bürgerlicher Stärke vor der Welt aufzustellen, in der Brust meines Lesers ein fröhliches Gefühl seiner selbst zu erwecken und ein unverwerfliches Beispiel zu geben, was Menschen wagen und ausrichten mögen durch Vereinigung.” In the same context he expressed his conviction, “dass gegen die trotzigen Anmaßungen der Fürstengewalt endlich noch eine Hilfe vorhanden ist, dass ihre berechnetsten Pläne an der menschlichen Freiheit zuschanden werden.”1 In the Geschichte des Abfalls der vereinigten Niederlande von der spanischen Regierung Schiller brought to the fore the current issues of educated German society in the 1780s: social criticism, the middle-class problem of freedom, and a political revolution that, even though it was not an imminent reality, was often discussed. Explosive content lies behind the ponderous title of Schiller’s first great historical work. In reading the introduction (6:41–56), one can relate even today to the revolutionary expectations that were alive in the educated society of central Europe in the 1780s, that is, long before the revolutionary events of 1789 in Paris. Schiller first became aware of the history of the Dutch revolution of the late sixteenth century in conjunction with the writing of his drama Don Carlos. Through the dramatic character of Marquis Posa of the fragment in the Thalia, the Dutch people stand in the background of events as a suppressed, yet heroic people (“ein unterdrücktes Heldenvolk”). Subsequently, Schiller intended to write an article on “Die Rebellion der vereinigten


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Niederlande” for his project Geschichte der merkwürdigsten Rebellionen und Verschwörungen. He began writing in August 1787, after settling in Weimar. At the beginning of October he informed his publisher that he had completed the text. This text was the object of a lecture that took place on October 24, 1787, in the Weimar residence of Schiller’s friend Charlotte von Kalb. One could almost say that, on that evening, the historian Friedrich Schiller was born. Wieland, the influential editor of the journal Teutscher Merkur, was present, and, as Schiller was to report to Huber in his letter of October 26, 1787, proclaimed that Schiller was born to write histories. Wieland agreed to publish the text in his journal. It appeared in that publication at the beginning of 1788. In an accompanying note, Wieland declared the dramatist and poet to be a historian. With that, the die had been cast for Schiller’s immediate future. His audience, the German educated class, now expected a historical work from him. Motivated by Wieland, as well as by the prospect of a professorship at the University of Jena, Schiller knitted together the next phase in his life by turning decidedly in this direction. He now concentrated completely on historical work and on source materials with which he had not been familiar, but which provided him with a new self-awareness. Before completing his account of the Union of Utrecht (1579) in July of 1789, Schiller had begun to envision continuing this thread of history in a multi-volume project on the topic of the fall of the Netherlands. In his “Vorrede,” Schiller declared this first volume to be but an introduction to the real revolution (6:37). He also provided a comprehensive summary of his historical research for the volume. He named the sources from which he had profited most (6:38–39) They included, for example, Robert Watson’s characterization of the reign of Philipp II (1777), Hugo Grotius’s depictions of modern Dutch history (1658), and Adam Anderson and Friedrich Christoph Jonathan Fischer’s co-authored economic-historical studies of the times (1775 and 1785). Schiller mentioned first the authors of the historiographic tradition from whose work he had extrapolated retold history, which since the ancients had been part of rhetoric; however, he treats the authors’ views in a more detailed and critical way. Second, Schiller cited more recent authors, specifically from the fields of statistics and economic history, with whose help he could add a cultural-historical dimension to his manner of representation. This distinct and reflected use of historical matter shows that Schiller’s historical writing was on its way to becoming a methodologically-based science. The introduction provides a profile of the Netherlands’ liberating battle against the despotism of Philip II, sets it into a European framework, and interprets it from a historical-theoretical perspective. Influenced by the then-increasing interest in psychology, Schiller dedicated considerable space to character analyses of his leading dramatic figures. These characterizations

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of the dramatis personae are high points in the art of representation, and through them we come to recognize Schiller’s cultural-historical achievements. Beginning with Don Carlos Schiller succeeded in helping to bring about a breakthrough in the direction of historical writing in Germany. This reform can only be understood from today’s vantage point if one is familiar with the situation of historical writing in the eighteenth century: on the one hand, scholarly histories, which describe the Haupt- und Staatsaktionen in a ponderous style and with numerous footnotes; on the other hand, authors of historical novels who tell stories in the gallant style of the time but give no thought to the question of truth. Schiller wanted to tie these traditions together. He wanted to go back to the sources themselves in a critical and pragmatic manner. At the same time, he wanted to write in a polished style. With such historical narration Schiller aimed at practicing a philosophical way of thinking about history that places stories into a modern context of development. Schiller’s academic appointment as a professor at the University of Jena took place at the end of May 1789, precisely the week in which the revolutionary estates began to assemble in Versailles to constitute a national assembly of the French people. His interest in revolutions and people’s revolts led the young dramatist to an engagement in history. One may conclude that Schiller followed the events in France with particular attention, sympathy, and expectation. Schiller’s inaugural lecture in Jena, which was published as Was heißt und zu welchem Ende studiert man Universalgeschichte?, contains the programmatic draft of the universal-historical project that occupied Schiller in that year of revolution, 1789/90. He saw it necessary to create a new discourse concerning the idea and goal of universal history. Furthermore, new orientations opened up for the methodology and self-understanding of the writing of history. Schiller calls the historian a researcher of history (“Geschichtsforscher,” 6:428), thereby indicating that historical writing was on the way to becoming an empirically analytical science. In his inaugural lecture, Schiller juxtaposes two different and fundamental approaches: the recognition of the past by means of facts and events, and the achievement of an overview of the epochs of history that will allow comprehension of their interrelationships (6:412–16). The latter is the philosophical study of history. However, historical writing since Aristotle had been focused only on actual occurrences; it was the responsibility of philosophy to inquire into the universal and the true. Schiller opposes this traditional limitation of history. He was convinced that universal history could achieve something that had been considered impossible in the Western tradition, namely, the arrival at universally valid truth-claims from a close study of the past. Presumably, such a universal history would throw light on not only the past but also the most recent developments of the


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time. The individual human being would be liberated from the limitations of his private existence and placed into a larger social context. Universal historical interest would open up a perspective of social development that aims to bring about, in Schiller’s words, “our century of humanity” (“unser menschliches Jahrhundert herbeizuführen,” 6:430). This programmatic introductory address was followed by a number of lectures that illuminated specific connections between occurrences in human history. Three of these lectures have been preserved. They give us an impression of how Schiller completed his project of universal history. In the essay “Etwas über die erste Menschengesellschaft,” Schiller explains that history is never accessible to us directly, but only via narrative traditions. He refers to a biblical tradition, and presents an example that shows the courage and innovative power of his enlightened spirit to interpret the Bible in a new way. The fall of man is now the beginning of man’s freedom (6:434). In a separate section of the essay, Schiller addresses the origins of social inequality. He ends with an analysis of the origin of legends concerning monarchical sovereignty in light of the idea of the sovereignty of the people. In the essay “Die Sendung Moses” the biblical tradition is Schiller’s most important source. Yet he also refers back to a report about ancient Egyptian mysteries. Here he highlights the problem of the self-liberation of an oppressed people. Schiller singles out the constitutive role of Moses as the leader of his people, that is, the figure of a ruler. In addition, Schiller deals with the question of what significance religion can play in such a liberating process; on the one hand, for the common people, and, on the other hand, for the educated. In the epoch of the late Enlightenment (Spätaufklärung), the European intelligentsia was increasingly concerned with this question. In the essay “Die Gesetzgebung des Lykurgus und Solon” (The Legislation of Lycurgos and Solon, 1790), Schiller presents a historicalconstitutional comparison between the most famous city-republics of Greek antiquity. At the same time, a third reality is involved: Schiller’s own time. Its central themes stand in the foreground and form the criteria for the comparison: the relationship of the political constitution and culture, of civil and human rights, and of the political constitution and social structure. Eventually, in the discussion about constitutional patriotism in a republic of citizens, he pleads for representative democracy. With that, his writing attains a political relevance achieved by no other universal-historical text. Schiller composed all of these universal-historical texts during the first year of the French Revolution. Especially remarkable is how affirmatively Schiller argues for the principle of the sovereignty of the people and how he defends the constitutional form of representative democracy in “Die Gesetzgebung des Lykurgus und Solon.” We know that Schiller composed this text in the days in which the French National Assembly was adopting the Declaration of Human and Citizens’ Rights. During the summer

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months of 1789, Schiller lived in synchronous rhythm with the French Revolution. With his unswerving republicanism he was even ahead of developments, constitutionally. His vision, which was directed at those nations that were undergoing a process of emancipation, was broadened to a universal one. In these weeks, he considered the ideal of a self-liberating humanity to be the only sensible mode of philosophically-oriented historical thinking. In light of the democratic revolution, which was now crossing national borders, history had indeed become a history of humanity. Schiller’s ideas of the tasks and methods of historiography were shaped significantly by his experience with history. He had already publicly posed these questions early in his career. In the introduction to his story Verbrecher aus Infamie, he raises the question “warum das Studium [der Geschichte] für das bürgerliche Leben noch immer so fruchtlos geblieben [sei]” (7:563). That he asked the question in this way reveals that he had in mind different basic conceptions of the general significance of history and its future role in a middle-class society. Schiller points out that contemporary historiography still considered itself to be part of rhetoric, whose task it is to offer a moral explanation of past histories which, as he put it, warm the heart. For his part, however, Schiller argues in favor of separating historical writing from rhetoric, to which it had been attached since ancient times. It could now concentrate on its own specific duties and have its own legitimate methods: not dramatization or biased description, but the explanation and understanding of human behavior in view of one’s unchangeable nature and changeable conditions (“veränderlichen Bedingungen,” 7:564). Young Schiller makes his point on the basis of a psychology of the soul (Erfahrungsseelenkunde) that was then considered to be modern. It is remarkable how clearly he pleads for the emancipation of the writing of history from rhetoric while separating drama from history, even though both merge in his person. The historian has to uncover the motives of human behavior with cold reasoning and has to explain its structural relationships, but not take a moral stand. If he does this, he offends the republican freedom of the reading public, whose task it is to serve as the jury (7:564). Schiller’s first text on issues of history assumes a position that is modern even today: the pledge for a consistently delineated historiography that is structurally and socially historical in nature. He points out the historiographical significance of police, medical, and prison files (7:562), for the discovery of which Michael Foucault was celebrated in the twentieth century. This call for a clear separation of historical writing and poetry by the young Schiller, which has hardly been recognized, makes his transition two years later from the one discipline, drama, to the other, history, more understandable. It is also recognizable in the methodological conception of his first historical work, even if he does not maintain in any consistent


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manner the “Grenzengerechtigkeit” (6:564) that he proposed in 1786. As the preface to the Geschichte des Abfalls der vereinigten Niederlande exhibits, Schiller underscores the separation of historical writing from the novel. However, this raises the question of what form historical representation should take. It remains Schiller’s aspiration to link science and art, as did the great historical writers of the eighteenth century whom he admired: Montesquieu and Voltaire in France, Robertson in England, and Johannes Müller in Germany. The historian remains true to his credo: “dass eine Geschichte historisch treu geschrieben sein kann, ohne darum eine Geduldsprobe für den Leser zu sein . . ., dass die Geschichte von einer verwandten Kunst etwas borgen kann, ohne deswegen notwendig zum Roman zu werden” (6:40). Schiller’s intent to provide an “Einführung in die Universalgeschichte” in his Jena inaugural lecture of 1789 prompted him to further clarify and deepen his position. For him, contemporary historiography was on its way to becoming an empirically analytical science. The reference back to the sources and their critical analysis is of central importance here. Schiller devoted special attention to the question of sources, and the gaps in historians’ accounts of history lead to further problems concerning the nature of historical knowledge. Schiller’s real historical interest, however, was not tied to questions of reconstructive historical science. By his own admission he did not want to become a professional scholar of history. His primary concern was with problems of historical interpretation, as well as with the transmission and presentation of historical connections. Schiller’s idea was linked with developments in Europe that, in the last three decades of the eighteenth century, were marked by significant innovations. Since the time of his more intensive study of history in Dresden, Schiller was influenced more and more by the historiography of the English-Scottish Enlightenment (William Robertson, Robert Watson, Edward Gibbon). In Scotland, a circle around David Hume, Adam Ferguson, and Adam Smith had introduced a new way of conceptualizing universal history. They saw it as a new science of humanity, a genus of nature that runs through different stages of progressive development to become, and further cultivate, middle-class society. In Germany, a group of historians at the new university in Göttingen began to establish universal history as a separate discipline with its own methodology. In 1767, Johann Christoph Gatterer released his first Handbuch der Universalgeschichte (Handbook of Universal History). August Ludwig Schlözer followed, in 1772, with his Vorstellung einer Universalgeschichte (Idea of a Universal History). Schiller had become familiar with these works as a student at the Karlsschule. In 1784, in Weimar, Johann Gottfried Herder released his major work on universal history, Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (Ideas Concerning

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a Philosophy of the History of Mankind, 1774). Schiller was impressed with this work, and even more so with Kant. Schiller’s study of Kant began in 1787 with a lecture on Kant’s Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht (Idea Concerning a General History for World Citizens, 1784). For Schiller, Kant’s substantial work accrued more than one meaning. He certainly did not overlook the fact that, in his foreword, Kant expressed the hope that the writing of history would have its own Newton. What Kant had in mind was a historian who not only supplied intellectual descriptions of events, but remained focused on the possible goal of a history of enlightenment, namely a world comprised of nation-states in which there was middle-class freedom for all and an internationally secure rule of law. Schiller himself had in mind a universal history that was to be enacted methodologically and critically. This was the level of Schiller’s expectations in 1789 when he began to teach at the university in Jena and undertook an extensive editing project of historical memoirs, or Quellen-Editionsprojekt, the Allgemeine Sammlung historischer Memoirs. In 1790, Schiller’s recent encounters with history changed the nature of his writing of history. But he held on to history as the central realm of experience that challenged not only the philosophical thinker but also the poet and dramatist. Schiller was no doubt the last historian to adopt the perspective of the Enlightenment before it was shattered by the experience of revolution. But even this he understood to be a challenge to his own thinking about universal history that further motivated him to rethink its own traits and their historical interconnections in the hope of achieving an authoritative standpoint in the present. As he was being carried along by the events in Paris in the fall of 1789, Schiller still advanced his idea of enlightened optimism in the inaugural lecture, Was heißt und zu welchem Ende studiert man Universalgeschichte? In his first “Universalhistorische Übersicht” (Overview of Universal History), which he composed immediately thereafter, he took a step forward and risked offering a new interpretation of the medieval Crusades with the aid of dialectical argumentation. He considered this text to be an especially successful form of philosophical history writing, and published it separately under the title “Über Völkerwanderung, Kreuzzüge und Mittelalter” (Concerning the Migration of Peoples, the Crusades and the Middle Ages, in the Sammlung historischer Memoires, 1792; 6:518–40). The winter semester of 1789 to 1790 was the first one during which Schiller devoted his full energies to his work at the university. He delivered lectures on universal history titled “Vom Zeitalter Karls des Großen bis zum Zeitalter Friedrichs II: König von Preußen” (From the Age of Carl the Great to the Age of Frederick II, King of Prussia) and “Römische Geschichte.” In the spring of 1790 he composed a second “Universalhistorische Übersicht” (6:545–72), which led to the publication of his two-volume Allgemeinen Sammlung historischer Memoirs the same year. But before this, in the


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summer semester of that year, Schiller presented a lecture on a different subject, “Theorie der tragischen Kunst” (Theory of Tragic Art). Two additional essays on this new topic have been preserved, “Über den Grund des Vergnügens an tragischen Gegenständen” (On the Cause of Pleasure in Tragedy) and “Über die tragische Kunst” (On Tragic Art) (8:234–75). They signal a new orientation in Schiller’s activities. Here he addresses the connection between the writing of history and the drama of history, the relationship between historical and political truth, and offers opinions about sublime events in history. This meant, above all, his critical assessment of the French Revolution. New problems and perspectives emerged from this experience of history. Since September 1789 Schiller’s life had stood under the sign of multiple transitions. After having moved to Jena, Schiller met a number of women of the court, among whom was Charlotte von Lengefeld, to whom he proposed. When the wedding was announced in December 1789, the ruling duke, Carl August of Saxony-Weimar, took a personal interest in the marriage. Schiller was named Hofrat and thereby became worthy of appearing at court and entitled to all attending rights and privileges. At first, he received a modest stipend. His wife could not live without a maidservant, nor Schiller without a servant, and the latter immediately became his scribe. Schiller adopted a new orientation to life. In a letter of September 30, 1790, he wrote of “einer gewaltigen Revolution, nicht geringer in meinem Ideenleben als diejenige, welche in meinem häuslichen vorgegangen ist.” In the background lay the experience of the revolution in France. In addition to newspaper reports, the personal accounts of those who had traveled to Paris gained in importance by the end of the year, especially his first conversations with Wilhelm von Humboldt, the skeptical liberal. To Schiller, Humboldt radiated an enlightened disposition that was realistic and reserved in the face of any idealization of political revolutions, and they became close friends. Immediately upon completing the essay on the Crusades, Schiller accepted the offer of Göschen, his publisher, to write a contribution on the Thirty Years’ War for the Historischen Calender für Damen (Historical Calendar for Women, 1791). It was not until May 1790 that Schiller was able to turn his attention to the development of this project for the Calender. He began this undertaking in the manner of his previous optimistic view of history, but texts being written at that time were characterized by a different view of political relationships and developments. Schiller presents a broad historical canvas of religious and political conflicts in his approach to the Thirty Years’ War, and then moves to a portrayal of individual campaigns, wherein princes and commanders take center stage. They are the subjects of history. People are arranged mainly according to their activities. Even the central concept of freedom is associated with the princes and their “Libertät,” and no longer, as before, with peoples and nations.

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A new chapter in Schiller’s writing of history begins with the Geschichte des dreißigjährigen Kriegs. The Calender für das Jahr 1791 had been carefully prepared and advertised by the publisher, Göschen, in a number of announcements and beautifully appointed with illustrations. Since the time of its appearance at the fall book fair of 1790, it was a huge success and enjoyed the most positive reviews. Within a year of the appearance of the first part of the work, Wieland would write in his Neuen Teutschen Merkur: Selten ist in Deutschland eine Schrift mit lebhafterem und allgemeinerem Beifall gelesen worden [. . .] und wiewohl diese Geschichte vorzüglich und namentlich für Leserinnen bestimmt war, glaube ich doch ohne Übertreibung sagen zu können, dass sie so viele Leser gehabt habe, als es in dem ganzen Umfang unserer Sprache Personen gibt, die auf einigen Grad von Kultur und des Geistes Anspruch zu machen haben.

The unusually high honorarium he would receive for writing the work was not the least of the reasons why Schiller accepted. As he was working on it, from May 1790 on, it became clear to him that the project would not be restricted to one essay. Schiller found himself obligated to articulate, in a first “Buch,” the fundamental historical, religious, and political conditions for the political and military conflict of the Thirty Years’ War, which at this time was no longer understood simply as a religious war. His depiction of the war of states begins in Book 2, following a masterfully written overview of political and religious issues in the Holy Roman Empire — according to an outline of political relations in the European states — with an account of the so-called Westphalian War (1620–23). Schiller interpreted the Bohemian Revolt (1618–20) as an intra-Habsburgian occurrence during which the young emperor Ferdinand II had to prove himself. Ferdinand II is the first of a series of great personages of action who appear in Schiller’s Geschichte des Dreißigjährigen Kriegs. In connection with the portrayal of the war, these personages are now brought into the foreground. In the course of Book 2, the two main characters, Wallenstein and Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, are introduced. In Book 3 Schiller turns their confrontation of 1632 into the true high point of the work, which ends with a description of the battle of Lützen and an evaluation of the fall of Gustavus Adolphus. Wallenstein’s transformation into a “todeswürdigen” rebel and his memorable end in February 1634 occupies the center of Book 4. Schiller still feels compelled to narrate the story (“Geschichte”) of the Thirty Years’ War to its end. In the conclusion to his work, the author reports that his original intention was to include a history of the Peace of Münster and Osnabrück, as “ein großes und eigenes Ganzes” that would follow his account of the war. The problem of the creation of a European community, with which Schiller had opened his portrayal, remains unsolved. Schiller’s contemporaries shared this uncertainty


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when, in 1792, the war with revolutionary France had broken out and held the attention of Europe until well after Schiller’s death. Today’s readers recognize more clearly than Schiller’s contemporaries the disproportions and breaks in the work’s composition. They also have his earlier historical writing more firmly in mind, above all the Geschichte des Abfalls der vereinigten Niederlande. In comparison with Schiller’s earlier historical writings, the later work lacks an introduction and begins immediately with the larger nexus of the problems of the time. With this work Schiller departed from the academic style of historical writing. He no longer included references to his sources and did not carry out a timeconsuming study of source materials before beginning to write. Schiller the historical writer of 1790 no longer considered the battle for freedom and political independence from a despotic ruler legitimate, either during the Bohemian revolt or that of the Netherlands. Princes and military commanders determined the events. Peoples and nations, however, which had previously stood at the center of Schiller’s historical writing, are depicted almost without exception as dependent subjects. The personalization of history that is part of Schiller’s historiography should not be overlooked. With the Geschichte des Dreißigjährigen Kriegs Schiller discontinues his practice of providing character sketches of leading personae on their first appearance, which he had favored as early as in Geschichte des Abfalls der vereinigten Niederlande. Character sketches instead occur upon the death or departure of historical personages. The writer thus heightens the significance of the leading figures as representatives of their time. In the first part of the work, Gustavus Adolphus is the most prominent hero. In part two, which was written two years later, Schiller gives greater attention to the politics of his ascendancy. How is the great success of the Geschichte des Dreißigjährigen Kriegs to be explained? With this work Schiller reached a different readership, that of the Calender für Damen. But the work also matched Schiller’s own convictions. With the historiographical work that he had begun in 1787 and then continued during his professorial appointment in Jena, he had an academic audience in mind. Following his experiences with the time-consuming work of the historian and his quarrels with colleagues at the university, he was disillusioned by the academic world and sought a way to leave the university at the end of 1789. In his historical writing it became increasingly more difficult for him to bridge the gap between the academic form and the interests of his readers. In this circumstance, Göschen’s Calender project offered him the opportunity to turn to a new audience. In spite of the pointed topic of a war history, his work resonated broadly. By the end of the eighteenth century, the German reading public included large portions of middle-class society. Schiller possessed a critical consciousness and a high regard for the reading public. The announcement for his next Thalia-project, the Rheinische Thalia (8:897–903),

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serves as an example. He knew his readership was divided. A new mass public stood in contrast to the traditional, academic one. With the advent of this public, Schiller developed a need for greater knowledge of historical development. The new interest in history among the German intellectual classes and in the schools — which contemporary reviews clearly show — was tied directly to the increasing interest in and consciousness of the development of a German nation. This interest in history could not be satisfied by academic historiography: new forms of representation were required. Schiller had known for some time now that the theater offered that opportunity. Therefore, it is not surprising that immediately following the success of his historical work, Schiller would have been contemplating a drama about Wallenstein, although he did not realize this plan until 1796. Wallenstein became a drama of a new kind. Having taken up a broad study of history, Schiller wanted to create a true drama of history (Geschichtsdrama). He was concerned with the representation and interpretation of a historical reality and, unlike before, with the idealization of historical personages. During the writing of the Geschichte des Dreißigjährigen Kriegs, Schiller experienced a remarkable shift of interest from the regal hero Gustavus Adolphus to the secretive Wallenstein, who appeared as a militarypolitical rebel. The drama Wallenstein was characterized correctly as a continuation of the Geschichte des Dreißigjährigen Kriegs with aesthetic means. In the meantime, it was acclaimed as the most modern, realistic drama of the nineteenth century (Hinderer, 213, 268). The tremendous success of Wallenstein among the public, including the premiere performances of 1799 and the first book editions of 1800, had a positive effect on the sales of Geschichte des Dreißigjährigen Kriegs. By 1802, the Geschichte had gone through several editions. Even today, most of the interest in the historical work is sparked by the drama, including that of scholars of literature in particular. Schiller’s epochal significance grew from the time of the Geschichte des Dreißigjährigen Kriegs to Wallenstein. It was to be found less in the realm of method and much more in Schiller’s conception of history and forms of representation. What is yet to be evaluated is a depiction of history that is no longer driven by a teleological viewpoint, but is immanent and oriented toward the concrete — a Geschichtsschreibung in transition. The Geschichte des Dreißigjährigen Kriegs has remained an important work because of the themes it takes up. Three interrelated dimensions should be emphasized: 1. First, its connection to its time. As the Holy Roman Empire reached more and more of a crisis through the challenge posed by the French, a depiction of its earlier time of great crisis must have been especially interesting. Schiller’s work provides historical evidence of the political


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crisis of the German nation of princes (“Fürsten-Nation”) as the Holy Roman Empire neared its end. The conclusions that Schiller himself drew from this are to be found most clearly in his fragment of 1801, Deutsche Größe (German Greatness): “Deutsches Reich und deutsche Nation sind zweierlei Dinge. Die Majestät des Deutschen ruhte nie auf dem Haupt seiner Fürsten . . .” (1:735). The depiction of the birth of the modern European state system could also demand interest at a time in which that system was being questioned because of the division of Poland and the challenge that revolutionary France presented. 2. Next, the person of Wallenstein. From the start, Schiller perceived Wallenstein as a rebel against the emperor and the empire. He then pursued this relationship in his drama and explored the problem of a possible revolution within the empire. Schiller raised two aspects of this problem for discussion: first, the question of the federal empire’s founding and the legitimation of its political heritage, and second, the new possibilities of the military usurpation of power in the light of the revolutionization of the military. 3. Finally, we recall the importance of the Thirty Years’ War as the greatest catastrophe in German history. In this regard it was not overshadowed until the Second World War. It also marked the beginning of the end of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, upon which the relevance of Schiller’s depiction of the history of the Thirty Years’ War depended. Schiller was considered by the educated public of the time to be the most modern writer of history (Geschichtsschreiber) in Germany. He saw himself as being drawn to great historical events. At the university he offered three lectures on history during the winter semester 1790/91: “Europäische Staatengeschichte” (History of European States), “Geschichte der Kreuzzüge” (History of the Crusades), and “Fortsetzung der Universalgeschichte” (Continuation of Universal History). This enormous productivity was suddenly interrupted at the beginning of 1791 by a physical collapse that became more aggravated in May of that year. Schiller was compelled to radically reduce his activities as a historian, which had reached a new high point. His lectures on history at the university were cancelled immediately and never taken up again. He was able to place the Allgemeine Sammlung historischer Memoirs into the hands of his Jena colleague and friend Paulus. However, he felt compelled to stay in touch with Körner regarding a “Universalhistorische Übersicht” to Sully’s memoirs. It appeared in installments under the title Geschichte der französischen Unruhen, welche der Regierung Heinrichs IV. vorangingen (History of French Uprisings which Preceded the Reign of Henry IV, Sammlung historischer Memoires, 1806) — Schiller’s third extensive historical work (6:573–675). There remained the Geschichte des Dreißigjährigen Kriegs, of which only the first

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part had appeared in the Historischen Calender für das Jahr 1791. His friends’ assistance provided a quick solution for the remaining work on the Calender. Wieland had written a preface for this volume and, at the end, developed a unique perspective: Schiller could have a much greater, even a national, effect through the writing of historical dramas; he could become a German Shakespeare. With that, Wallenstein was introduced to the public: Schiller had been working on the drama since the beginning of 1791. Schiller informed only Körner and the co-adjutant von Dalberg concerning his plans for the writing of a drama treating Wallenstein’s end. After all, this political-military adventure of the Thirty Years’ War fascinated Schiller the most, and his historical study had left some questions unanswered. In December 1791 the Danish nobility offered Schiller a three-year annual stipend, which put him solidly in a position to start a new plan of work. Schiller could then turn more intensively to the clarification of aesthetic-philosophical questions that had become increasingly pressing for him since 1790. A progressively more thorough study of Kant’s philosophy had shown him the possibilities of an independent illumination of the foundations of his work. Even his work with the literature of ancient Greece continued in dialogue with Humboldt. In the summer of 1792, with rare calmness, concentration, and productivity, Schiller worked out the third, fourth, and fifth books of the Geschichte des Dreißigjährigen Kriegs. Alongside this, in the spring, he had written two insightful introductory texts to writings that he agreed to edit for a publisher in Jena: the preface to a translation of Pitaval’s crime stories and the preface to a translation of the work of Vertot on the Maltese Order, the depiction of which had stood time and again on the dramatist’s agenda (see 7:449–59). The date of the conclusion of the manuscript of Geschichte des Dreißigjährigen Kriegs in September 1792 is viewed in scholarship as the end of the historical phase in Schiller’s life. However, we should not be misled into thinking that this was the end of his interest in history and its representation. To a great extent, the Wallenstein project alone shows how important history was for him. It would be more adequate to speak of a transfer (“Verlagerung”) of the forms of his representation of historical materials. The universal- and historical-developmental orientation in Schiller’s historiography is hardly recognizable after 1790. His treatment of the Peace of Westphalia was original and served as a crowning touch to his work. Schiller had built up other overarching structural connections in his portrayal of the Thirty Years’ War: the careers of the great commanders of this war, above all Gustavus Adolphus and Wallenstein. Were military geniuses now the great movers of history? Schiller dedicated his last great historiographical text to such a “comet.” In a contribution


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to his journal Die Horen, in 1795, he wrote his portrayal, Merkwürdige Belagerung der Stadt Antwerpen in den Jahren 1584 to 1585 (Remarkable Occupation of the City of Antwerp from 1584 to 1585; 7:460–512), drawing from his pool of sources for the Geschichte des Abfalls der vereinigten Niederlande. Here, the genius of the young commander Alexander von Parma is celebrated. With the Wallenstein drama, which he worked on beginning in 1796, the confrontation with this political-historical topic was renewed and deepened. Could a genial commander and organizer like Wallenstein be a model for a national-political revolution in Germany? In Schiller’s late historical dramas, other political geniuses are emphasized: the country girl Johanna and the mountain huntsman Tell, a hero from the people. They remain tied to their heritages and have not their own political power but the liberation of their peoples and the forming of a nation as their goal (“Zielvorstellung”). Schiller had lost his earlier perspectives on the development of a universal history as he had drafted them in his inaugural lecture at Jena, due to his disappointments over the course of the French Revolution and its consequences in Europe. From mid-July 1789 on, Schiller no longer believed that political revolutions were meaningful, and even considered them a fundamental danger, in a similar way as had Kant. In his historical studies he gave up completely the political concept of revolution that formed the basis of his Geschichte des Abfalls der vereinigten Niederlande. Because he wanted to avoid being counted among the enemies of the Enlightenment and human rights, Schiller hardly gave written expression to this new critical position vis-à-vis revolution. So-called Jacobins like the Nürnberg doctor Johann Benjamin Erhard numbered among his friends. In a letter on May 5, 1795, Schiller wrote to Erhard: “Glühend für die Idee der Menschheit, gütig und menschlich gegen den einzelnen Menschen, und gleichgültig gegen das ganze Geschlecht, wie es wirklich vorhanden ist — das ist mein Wahlspruch.” It was characteristic of his mediating position that he allowed the addition of “Bürger von Frankreich” to his new title of nobility, which had been entered into the Weimar court records. History could no longer be regarded as a source of general truths and knowledge. In his last theoretical essay, Über das Erhabene, Schiller articulated his basic position: Die Welt, als historischer Gegenstand, ist im Grunde nichts anderes als der Konflikt der Naturkräfte untereinander selbst und mit der Freiheit des Menschen und den Erfolg dieses Kampfes berichtet uns die Geschichte. . . . Nähert man sich nun der Geschichte mit großen Erwartungen von Licht und Erkenntnis, wie sehr findet man sich das getäuscht! . . . Wie ganz anders, wenn man darauf resigniert, sie zu erklären, und diese ihre Unbegreiflichkeit selbst zum Standpunkt der Beurteilung macht. (8:835)

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A philosophical consideration of history according to which reason was to develop teleologically over its course had lost its footing. Schiller now wanted to show how intellectual and moral sovereignty can assert itself even against the backdrop of a fundamentally incomprehensible course of history. In conclusion, one of the most important insights that Schiller gained as a historian was the practical experience that the tremendous effort of a coherent Geschichtsschreibung supported by reliable sources goes unrewarded. He thus came to understand the impact of attitudes that inform and are shaped by history. The possibility of greater composure and dignity from the perspective of the sublime, for example, was to be of major consequence for the subsequent writing of history (7:513–15). Translated by Steven D. Martinson

Notes 1


Works Cited Hinderer, Walter. “Wallenstein.” In Schillers Dramen, ed. Walter Hinderer, 202–79. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1992. Koselleck, Reinhart. “Geschichte, Historie.” In Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, vol. 2, 653–68. Stuttgart: Klett, 1975.

Major Writings

Die Räuber: Structure, Models, and an Emblem Werner von Stransky-Stranka-Greifenfels

Introduction

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HE PLAY DIE RÄUBER (The Robbers, 1781) is a product of the times in which Schiller lived. As such, it can be understood only from within the panorama of contemporary history. At the same time, the drama also has a religious historical background, the structures of which are significantly more complex than previously acknowledged. Of the four versions of Die Räuber, two stand out over and against each other, namely the first edition of the Schauspiel of 1781 and the Trauerspiel of 1782. The Trauerspiel has become the standard text for theater directors. Since the Mannheim premiere performance, in 1782, the version in the Soufflierbuch (stage text) has been staged. It forms the basis of the original performance and later variations. The Trauerspiel is most consistent with that text. In short, the Trauerspiel has been performed, while the Schauspiel has been read and interpreted. Although a series of interpretations have been published on the Zwote, verbesserte Ausgabe (Second Improved Edition, 1782) from a number of different perspectives, hardly any of these interpretations undertakes an in-depth analysis of the text. Scholarship has been even less concerned with the surface of the text. Such analysis reveals important differences not only between these two versions but, above all, among previous interpretations of the Schauspiel. Furthermore, Schiller’s intentions for Die Räuber have been misunderstood, as they were even at the time of the premiere performance. While composing Die Räuber, the author addressed his manner of writing. In the suppressed preface to the drama, he writes: “Der Zuschauer vom gewaltigen Licht der Sinnlichkeit geblendet, übersieht oft sowohl die feinsten Schönheiten, als die untergeflossenen Flecken, die sich nur dem Auge des bedachtsamen Lesers entblößen.”1 In the preface, Schiller makes the point that the work is to be comprehended not as a “theatralisches Drama” but, rather, as a “dramatischer Roman.” The poet has thus built finer elements (“die feinsten Schönheiten”) into the text that only the attentive reader can appreciate,

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elements that are lost in dramatic performance, or are overlooked by the spectator whose attention is diverted by the enigmatic qualities of the dramatic action. The formulation “feinste Schönheiten” refers to the ideal of everything that is beautiful in late eighteenth-century art. The finer component parts are combined according to the principles of symmetry and harmony. This observation must then call into question the classification of Die Räuber as a drama of the Sturm und Drang. The quotation above also refers to “Flecken” (blemishes). One may assume that Schiller is addressing several mistakes in the drama’s composition, such as flaws in the dramatic action and specific passages in the dialogues. To be sure, Schufterle’s report on the atrocious acts that were perpetrated during Roller’s rescue from the gallows is inconsistent with the emphasis on the “schönsten Feinheiten” that the dramatist built into the drama. To acquaint ourselves with how Schiller goes about his work and in this way to understand the drama more fully, it is essential that we read the text carefully on the surface, in part to ascertain the poetic, artistic, sociological, political, philosophical, and, not least, the religious-historical panorama of the time. This means, then, that in the work of a poet who was extremely economical in a linguistic sense, every expression is to be taken seriously — in Die Räuber every word is meaningful. It is reported that following the initial performance, the Mannheim public was ecstatic. They cheered, cried, and went wild. With the help of key words (“Schlüsselwörter”) Schiller criticizes two of the most unfortunate historical occurrences of the time: first, the enlistment of sailors and soldiers and their later treatment by the United East-Indian Company, and, second, the selling of a number of troops by German princes to England for service in the American Revolutionary War, after they had already been sold as soldiers to Prussia. In short, they were recruited through notoriously underhanded means. For Schiller’s contemporaries, these developments were a terrible reality and a sign of arbitrary, aristocratic rule that impacted them on a daily basis. Schiller must have been especially attentive to these conditions, since his father was a recruitment officer for Württemberg during his childhood. Consequently, we can postulate that, on the one hand, the work contains numerous keywords, all of which have various specific functions and, on the other hand, that Schiller falls back on a number of highly diverse models in his great early work that he then weaves together in an artistic manner. In part, this lends his Schauspiel a different content than has been expressed in published interpretations and analyses since the time of the original performance of the drama. This contribution will show that Schiller thoroughly researched the models he used. One of the most revealing findings is that the places to which individual scenes in Die Räuber refer at which aspects of Die Räuber can be traced to actual historical locations.

DIE RÄUBER: STRUCTURE, MODELS, AND AN EMBLEM

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In the summer of 1780, in his essay, Ueber den Zusammenhang der thierischen Natur des Menschen mit seiner geistigen (On the Relationship Between the Animal [read: Corporeal] and Intellectual/Spiritual Nature of the Human Being, 1780), Schiller examined his modus operandi. His fellow student Karl Philipp Conz submitted an informed report: “Wenn kein Zögling ‘ohne gel. Erlaubnis, bei sonst zu befahren habender scharfer Ahndung’ etwas drucken lassen sollte, versprach Schiller seinen Freunden im Scherz, gewiß eine Stelle aus seinen Räubern in seine Dissertation einzuschalten, und hielt . . . Wort.” The joke was that he had written a thirteen-line passage from the dialogue between Franz Moor and his servant, Daniel into his dissertation with only slight changes. He used this text in his drama as a quotation from a fictitious “Tragedy by Krake,” where, in practically the same breath, he mentions the figure of Richard III and Franz Moor. This procedure discloses both the way in which Schiller works and some unique features of his personality. The dialogue is not only fully integrated into the new context that surrounds it, but it also takes on new significance. In addition, Schiller shows a certain impudence bordering on insolence, since this work had to be defended publicly, that is, in front of an assembly of fellow students and instructors with the strict Duke Karl Eugen at its head. Because the duke had already lengthened Schiller’s studies by one year, there would have been serious consequences if the joke had been discovered. His “Übungsobjekt” — Die Räuber — shows a significant number of such “experiments.” An analysis of Schiller’s works demonstrates that he relied upon many different models. In the Räubern, we recognize numerous models of more or less importance. The story of the robbers is based on the historical example of the Hussite Wars. The main action, however, is supported in part by a literary model, namely Schubart’s short-story, Zur Geschichte des menschlichen Herzens (Story of the Human Heart, 1775), as well as by the historical model of the case of Buttlar (Akte Buttlar), which was also Schubart’s model. By the end of act 3, these models are largely exhausted. Beginning with the fourth act, Schiller employed the structure of the Aladdin-Erzählung, the story of Aladdin of Scheherazade. These four models are themselves subordinated to a fifth, namely the structure of Richard II. Schiller’s ideal of Shakespeare is prevalent throughout Die Räuber. The models noted here form the basis of both the structure and the framework of the story. This framework makes its mark mainly by the Trauerspiel version of the play. But it pales in comparison with the message of the drama, a message that Schiller the pietist expresses in Franz’s dialogue in act 5 and which is attributable to his own religious convictions, namely Origen’s doctrine of Christ’s Resurrection, which was taken up by Swabian Pietism in the eighteenth century. Owing to his appropriation of Origen, Schiller placed himself uncompromisingly against the heaven-hell

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dualism of Saint Augustine, which was represented by both the Protestant and Catholic churches. Presumably, when he entered the Hohe Karlsschule in 1773, Schiller was working on this structural complex in his first drama, “Die Christen,” a writing that was lost during his student days. The heart of the Schauspiel, which had to do with Schiller himself, is based on an aphorism by Hippocrates that Schiller made the motto of his play. For the sake of brevity, this discussion will outline briefly the structure of the work, the characterization of the figures, as well as the examples that enliven them, and the division of the acts. This study will first determine the actual locations on which the settings of the play were based, then examine the historical model of the Hussite Wars and, finally, address Schiller’s interests. In his first great work, the author transmitted the message of the play by way of an emblem.

Structure The external dramatic action is arranged into two parallel tracks, or plots. Although the action at the castle supports the main plot, it is the story of the robbers itself that explains Karl’s behavior. Beginning with act 4, scene 1, the two plots are continually interwoven until the inevitable denouement. Schiller directs the characters and types of dramatic action in a kind of Figurenballet, whereby always one character and one type form an axis (“Achse”). The clearest example of this is Franz Moor and his alter ego Moritz Spiegelberg. The simultaneity that is achieved through the verbal entanglements (“Verstrickungen”) that characterize their dialogue and the scenes in which they appear helps us understand the “Zeitblöcke,” Schiller’s division of the acts (see table 1). The transformation of the Taborites in the robber bands begins in act 3, scene 2, “Gegend an der Donau.” After the story of the robbers as well as the main plot are widely exhausted, Kosinsky’s story introduces a new structural phase, which, after act 4, scene 1, comes to full fruition. Schiller took the structure of this phase from the Aladdin story, and from that point on, the locations at which the dramatic action takes place in Die Räuber agree largely with those of Aladdin. The same is true for the models of movement of Kosinsky, Karl, Amalia, and Franz, which are analogous to those of Aladdin, the princess Baldrouboudour, and the African magician.

The Scenes The recognition that the locations of the scenes of Die Räuber actually exist comes as a surprise. Schiller refers to them in the text by their names.


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Table 1.

No doubt because he does this so openly, scholarship has taken them for granted. The Castle in Franconia The first reference to the castle is suggested by the count’s unique family name, Moor. The stage direction for the first scene of the first act reads: Franken. Saal im Moorschen Schloß. Schiller has Karl confirm the location as Franconia once again when he exclaims: “Auf ! Hurtig! Alle!

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Nach Franken.” The drama refers to specific locations within the castle, or in its proximity, such as the garden, the landscape surrounding the castle, and the fallen tower in the adjoining forest. One of the models for the main action, as we know, was Schubart’s Zur Geschichte des menschlichen Herzens (Concerning the History of the Human Heart, 1775). The case of Buttlar (Akte Buttlar), one of the greatest social and legal scandals in Franconia in the early eighteenth century, also served as a model. Major Wilhelm von Buttlar married Eleonora von Lentersheim at Obersteinbach castle. She was a daughter of the House of Freiherr von Lentersheim. Her father, Erhard von Lentersheim, was an epileptic and was so victimized by alcohol that he had to be placed under the care of a guardian. His son-in-law Wilhelm von Buttlar therefore had the right of disposal of von Lentersheim’s goods transferred to himself. Additionally, Buttlar’s mother-inlaw, Louisa von Lentersheim, also possessed her own personal property. To seize her fortune, Buttlar had her strangled. He was of course indicted for the crime, but the trial lasted for years and did not end in a conviction. Schubart used this deed as an opportunity to write his story, Zur Geschichte des menschlichen Herzens. Schiller adopted it at the recommendation of his friend and classmate, Friedrich von Hoven, among others, and changed it significantly. The details of the Räuber text permit the conclusion that, next to the literary model, Schiller drew also on both the material of Buttlar’s deeds and the genealogy of Lentersheim. Given the interrelationships within the Lentersheim family and the location of its ancestral seat at the castles of Altenmuhr and Neuenmuhr one can establish a link between the occurrences at Obersteinbach castle and the name Moor. Upon Erhard’s death, the Oberstein branch of the family died out and the Obersteinbach castle was later sold. Although there may be nothing new about the influence of these two models on Schiller’s play, the determination of their locations topographically, is indeed original. Until now, it was not known to which castle the play referred, or where father Moor’s dungeon is located (the fallen tower in the adjacent forest), or if Karl’s description of the terrain in front of the castle in act 4, scene 1 has to do with any existing landscape. The Herren von Mur, to whom the name Moor refers, were the first in the knightly family to reside in Mu(h)r. Through marriage and the eventual purchase of the Mur estate, the Herren of Lentersheim became the successors to the Murs. The first authenticated mention of the Herren von Mur is found in 1169 in the figure of Hartwig von Mur (also Hertwic de Moere), that is, at the time of Emperor Friedrich I, the German king Barbarossa (1152–1190). The Lentersheims were also first documented at about this time. And this is precisely Schiller’s point of departure in Karl’s dialogue with Amalia in the gallery scene: “MOOR. O ganz gewis. Sein Bild war immer lebendig in mir. An den Gemälden herumgehend. Dieser ists nicht. AMALIA. Errathen! — Er war der Stammvater des gräflichen Hauses, und


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erhielt den Adel vom Barbarossa, dem er wider die Seeräuber diente” (1:108). Therefore, the progenitor received nobility status, that is, lehensfähige Reichsritterschaft, from Barbarossa. Here, Schiller pinpoints the time exactly. Incidentally, Schiller could rely on several of his friends at school who, in part, were closely related to the Lentersheims and the Buttlars or were familiar with the region and the historical background, among them Schubart’s son. Furthermore, at that time the study of genealogy was a favorite hobby, especially among the nobility. The Herren von Mur, that is, the Freiherren von Lentersheim owned no fewer than five castles in the area around what is today the municipality of Muhr am (Altmühl-) See, not far from Gunzenhausen in Middle Franconia. 1. Castle Mittelmuhr burned down in 1570, together with a part of the village, and was never rebuilt. Presumably it is this catastrophe that Schiller carried over to the count’s castle. 2. Castle Neuenmuhr. This, one of the largest of the many castles in the area, was affected detrimentally by the Thirty Years War. At the time when Schiller’s Räuber originated, it was considered to be quite dilapidated and was uninhabited. The castle was torn down in 1832. The reference to the fallen tower in Schiller’s drama resembles the decay at Castle Neuenmuhr. However, for various reasons, the dramatic action itself does not suggest this location. 3. Castle Altenmuhr is still maintained and inhabited today. Only the corner towers, the Zwinger, as well as the wall that encircled it were torn down in the nineteenth century. The castle grounds are found again in Schiller’s text. In the Räubern there are two scenes that take place at the castle in which the entry of the characters are strung together after the pattern of a so-called “Schwingtürdramaturgie,” namely act 4, scene 2, “Galerie im Schloß,” and act 5, scene 1 with its unique description, “Aussicht von vielen Zimmern” (1:139). However, in terms of dramaturgy, it is obvious that neither of the scenes can be played out in a hall or suite of rooms. For Schiller, the dramaturgical approximation to French comedy would have been unbearable. Karl’s description of the “ländliche Gegend um das Moorische Schloß” (1:106) in act 4, scene 1 agrees in detail with the layout of Altenmuhr at that time. Next to the Gartenthürchen that Karl mentions in the text, there was a dill garden surrounded by posts. In the seventeenth century, another area of land was developed in which one hunted small game and employed a catcher (Fanger). When Karl stands in front of the garden door, he describes the courtyard of the manor house, which he must traverse to reach the door of the inner courtyard of the castle, which lies straight ahead. To his left, there is a building that was added to the wall and, to his right, the fence to the dill garden, “wo man den Fanger belauschen

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und necken kann.” Passing the estate, the path leads over a bridge that spans a moat and enters a gate to the castle. According to the stage directions, the following is seen from the small door of the garden: “Er geht schnell auf das Schloß zu. [. . .] Er steht an der Pforte. [. . .] Er geht hinein” (1:107), at which point the text offers no more information. We are unsure whether the gate leads to the castle’s inner courtyard or, perhaps, to the castle itself. One thing is certain: a medieval castle grounds where a visitor can reach the castle portal directly from a garden door would be highly unusual. 4. The Turmhügelburg. Along the way to the garden door in Altenmuhr, with the Wiesental below, Karl has, already seen the old mill which is but a stone’s throw away next to the grassy knoll. This overgrown hill — incidentally, the only one of its kind in the Wiesental, which at that time was swampland — is nothing other than the Mur’s first castle. A small stone house is all that is left of the towered fortress that was perched on the hill. Since the time of its collapse, it has the look of a grassy hill, which is in part still recognizable today. 5. The Kellerhaus. On a once-forested hill lies the so-called Witwenschlößchen, which was built in the sixteenth century. In Schiller’s time, the estate was known only by the name Kellerhaus. This owes to its two exceptionally large vaults in which, earlier, the Murs preserved their supplies and locked them up tightly. When a visitor climbs up to the small castle, the steep entrance to this conspicuous cellar is the first thing one sees. Even today, one cannot avoid being impressed by it. It is easy to assume that, given Schiller’s sources, the depiction of this location must have been of special importance to the writer. The shape of the portal and the dimensionalizing of the hand-forged hinges could easily have been a barred gate, of which Karl speaks in act 4, scene 5. Consequently, in the poet’s world of ideas, as well as according to oral tradition, the cellar could have depicted an excellent dungeon. The numerous legends and horror stories that grew out of the events that impacted the house are reflected in Karl’s exclamation: “Geist des alten Moors! Was hat dich beunruhigt in deinem Grab?” (1:133), as well as in one part of the dialogue of old father Moor that follows soon thereafter: “[. . .] denn die allgemeine Sage geht, daß die Gespenster meiner Väter in diesen Ruinen rasselnde Ketten schleifen, und in mitternächtlichen Stunden ihr Todenlied raunen” (1:135). The distance from the Kellerhaus to the village and castles is approximately one to one and one-half kilometers. This means that Schweizer’s Angels of Vengeance, a band of fiery riders galloping down a rocky mountain path, could have reached the castle within several minutes, while the cart carrying the corpse of father Moor would take a half hour. This is precisely the amount of time that old Moor indicates after Karl rescues him.


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In sum, the models for the setting of the scene “Schloß in Franken” are the castle Altenmuhr and its landscape. The cellar house is still occupied. It is known today as Julienberg. The Bohemian Woods What was Schiller’s reason for placing the action of the story of the robbers, in act 2, scene 3, in Den böhmischen Wäldern? Was this Schiller’s model? The scene ends after Karl’s dialogue with the priest, with battles between the band of robbers and those seventeen hundred men who, according to the priest, are to guard every hair on his head. The battle actually takes place outside of this location. Nonetheless, as one of the central points of the story of the robbers, it is an integral part of the dramatic action. Thanks to Karl’s masterful tactics, the robbers had inflicted serious losses on the priest’s army, while the band of robbers had lost only one comrade, namely Roller. There must be a historical model for this battle, and indeed, history records one that is similar in description, namely the Schlacht bei Taus (Battle at Taus), in 1431. The pope and emperor had deployed an army against the Taborites, the radical wing of the Hussites, who controlled most of the Bohemian woods at the time.The battle ended with the embarassing defeat of the imperial troops. Schiller pinpointed the location of the city of Taus in Bohemia, very near the German border, on the Homann map, which is in the Württembergische Landesbibliothek in Stuttgart (see map). The Donau Region Schiller provides two references to this location. In the drama it becomes clear that the camp is located near water. Furthermore, a passage from Razmann’s dialogue is likewise indicative of the location, for he states, “[. . .] daß ein reicher Graf von Regensburg durchkommen würde” (1:75). The explicit naming of Regensburg must be understood as a key word. Seen from Count Regensburg’s location, who is on his way, there is only one road, namely the one over Furth im Wald, that is, Waldmünchen, which lies past Taus. The reference establishes the location of the action of “Gegend an der Donau” as the environment around Regensburg, which is a further argument for establishing the location of the scene in the Bohemian Woods. Both scenes are therefore tied together. One look at the Homann map should convince the skeptical reader that the path to Böhmen can lead only to this location on the Danube. Tavern at the Borders of Saxony On even closer examination, the second scene, “Schenke an den Gränzen von Sachsen,” can be located in three ways: (1) from the title of the scene itself, (2) with the aid of a statement by Kosinsky in act 3, scene 2, according

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The Homann map from the Württembergische Landesbibliothek, with overlay.


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to which he says, “nach Hof,” and (3) with the help of act 1, scene 3 of Shakespeare’s Richard II, “The lists at Coventry,” where “the lists” can be interpreted not only as a sports field but also as barriers. One look at the Homann map makes it clear that there was (and still is) an area in southwestern Saxony that is fenced in by three different borders, namely those of Thuringia, Bohemia, and the Mark Bayreuth (today Bavaria/ Upper Franconia).The Saxon border runs between Plauen and Hof. Assuming that Karl is on his way from Leipzig to Franconia, the location of this scene must be near the city of Hof, to be precise, on Karl’s path over Plauen to Hof. Here, a border crossing near, or in, Wi(e)dersberg or Roseck that lies more than one mile northeast of the castle comes into play. From this study it is apparent that Schiller was always clearly aware of what he was writing. This is also the case here. Hof is the term that Schiller uses throughout his work as a hidden reference. Only secondarily does it have to do with the text into which it is interwoven. Bringing the phrase “an den Gränzen von” into conjunction with “Hof,” the reference must indicate a place at the Saxon border near the city of Hof.

The Circumscription of the Scenes as a Divine Symbol The scene of Muhr builds geographically and topographically on the first literary model, Schubart’s story, as well as the first historical model, the Akte Buttlar and its genealogical background. The scene “Böhmen,” by contrast, is shaped by a second historical model, which has yet to be explained. The two scenes of Franz’s, or, respectively, Karl’s, dramatic action, are determined by these models and are fixed, whereas the two other scenes are variable. Had he wished to do so, Schiller could have placed them at different geographical locations. It is of course tempting to determine in what geometrical relation the two other scenes stand to the axis Muhr/Taus. A simple empirical investigation yields another surprise. When all four scenes are linked together, they form an isosceles trapezium. But that is not all. The distance of the stretch between Muhr and Regensburg, that is, Muhr and the court, “Hof,” corresponds to the distance between Muhr and Marbach, the poet’s birthplace. Moreover, with one deviation of approximately two percent, the coordinates connecting Taus to Regensburg and to Marbach form almost a straight line. The isosceles trapezium with its suburb of Marbach commands attention. The isosceles trapezium was, and is, a symbol of symmetry and harmony. Beyond that, it is constructed according to the golden section (compare Keppler: sectio divina and Luca Pacioli: Divina Proportione).

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It becomes a divine symbol that hovers over the dramatic action and represents the inner connections of the content of the play, thereby demonstrating an important part of Schiller’s message. In the course of the comments on the text, this study endeavors to clarify the writer’s message for the reader.

The Hussite Wars as a Historical Model In almost all of his dramas Schiller treats historical models in his own unique way. Why should his first great work be an exception, since its historical and, above all, its religious-historical interest was of a special kind? Why, then, shouldn’t Schiller’s Die Räuber be a historical drama? He himself refers to Bohemia, to the fate of the reformer Jan [Johannes] Huss, and the wars that continued well beyond his own time and were embedded in the consciousness of the people. We know that in Prague two devastating wars were triggered; first, beginning in 1419, the Hussite Wars, and second, beginning in 1618, the Thirty Years’ War and the Defenestration of Prague. Schiller points to one of the reasons why the Hussite Wars had not been recognized as a model. In a letter of December 10, 1788, to Karoline von Beulwitz, he writes: Ich werde immer eine schlechte Quelle für einen künftigen Geschichtsforscher seyn, der das Unglück hat, sich an mich zu wenden. Aber ich werde vielleicht auf Unkosten der historischen Wahrheit Leser und Hörer finden und hie und da mit jenen ersten philosophischen zusammentreffen. Die Geschichte ist überhaupt nur ein Magazin für meine Phantasie, und die Gegenstände müssen sich gefallen lassen, was sie unter meinen Händen werden.

What the Hussite model became in the hands of the poet and in what way he developed this material intertextually can be summarized here only with broad strokes and the aid of a few examples. It is important to realize that the writing of the history of the Hussite Wars is hardly comprehensible and even contradictory depending on how it is reported. Aside from the current view of the play, there are sources of interest that young Schiller had at his disposal in the Ducal Library at the Hohe Karlsschule and that, presumably, influenced his view of the Hussites. The model and its traces in the Räubern are described as follows. The Bohemian reformer Jan Huss, who had a master’s degree from the university in Prague, was enticed to the Council in Constance in 1415 by Pope Martin V with a letter of manumission and was burned at the stake by the Inquisition as a heretic. Among other things, the reason for his execution owed to Huss’s demand that believers commune not only by


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eating the bread, but also by drinking from the chalice, which had been reserved for the priest. Stemming from the time of Huss’s death at the stake, a religious and socially justified protest movement was formed: the Hussites. The Hussites were opposed to a Roman Church that had become a feudal power at a wide distance from the original church. The Hussites were not the only ones to blame the council for the treatment that Huss experienced. There also arose an intense conflict between the Czechs and the Holy Roman Empire. The strife between King Wenzel and his brother Sigismund, king of Hungary, is also part of this history. In 1400, Wenzel was removed as the German king, but he remained king of Bohemia. Sigismund was elected and crowned emperor. In the bloody revolt in Prague on July 30, 1419, the more radical faction of the Hussites assembled a procession under the leadership of Father Johann von Selau, starting at the Stephanskirche in the Neustadt. There, participants had broken open the tabernacle and stolen the communion chalice. The procession, which became ever more violent, led to the Prague city hall. The tumult resulted in the first Defenestration of Prague, at which the Catholic councilors who had refused to talk were thrown out of the windows. Jan Ziska (1370–1424), the most important military leader of the Hussites, is said to have played a leading role in this event.

The Consecrated Vessels of the Lord’s Supper One of the passages from a dialogue in Die Räuber between the priest (Pater) and Karl reads: “Hast du nicht das Heiligtum des Herrn mit diebischen Händen durchbrochen, und mit einem Schelmengriff die geweithen Gefässe des Nachtmahls entwandt?” (1:86) This passage, which has gone unexplained until now, is more understandable when it is brought into conjunction with the model of the Hussites. As we know, the “geweihten Gefässe des Nachtmahls” originate from the paten that had always been available to believers, as well as from the chalice, that paramount symbol of the Taborites for which Jan Huss was burned at the stake and which Ziska attached to his banner as a coat of arms shortly after the defenestration. Schiller wants readers who are familiar with history to take note. As we know, the consecrated vessels were stolen out of the Stephanskirche. The connection between this occurrence and Schiller’s Räuber becomes clear when we consider the fact that, in the middle of a tumult dominated by the murdering of old men, women, children, and even babies, plunderings, the demolition of a magazine of arms, and the like, an anonymous robber declares that he sneaked into the church and separated “Borden vom Altartuch.”

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The Taborites and Their Misdeeds in the Context of Schiller’s Story of the Robbers In September 1419, the radical contingent of the Hussites assembled on Tabor Mountain in southern Bohemia. There they named themselves Taborites and chose Jan Ziska, the military head of the Hussites, as their captain. Ziska, who had served Wenzel at the court through the time of the defenestration, quickly made a name for himself as a ruthless warrior and leader. During the next three years until his death in 1422, he became legendary as a masterful tactician and strategist. From this point on to the end of the Hussite Wars of 1434, the Taborites ravaged Bohemia, then proceeded into neighboring regions and instigated a series of raids in the south, to Hungary, and in the north, to the Baltic Sea. Their main attention was directed toward everything German. Whole cities were destroyed, their inhabitants were tortured and killed, churches and monasteries were plundered and burned down. Priests, monks, and nuns — as long as they had not joined the Taborites — were violated and murdered in the cruelest ways. The Taborites’ indescribable atrocities are verified by eyewitness accounts. They are also portrayed in Die Räuber, in the internal plot (Binnengeschichte) of act 2, scene 3, namely in the story of the burning of the city upon Roller’s release from the gallows and especially in Shufterles’s report on the misdeeds that he had committed in the meantime, which can hardly be depicted more repulsively. These events certainly did not spring from Schiller’s imagination. In this internal plot Schiller summarized two things: the procession that began at the Stephanskirche in parallel with the procession that leads to Roller’s gallows and the burning of cities, including Hof [!] and Cham. One of the most bloodthirsty, cruelest, and most cunning Taborite leaders under Ziska was the priest Johann von Selau, whom Ziska detested. In Karl’s band of robbers we find him again in the figure of Spiegelberg, as well as in the report on the “Spaß im Cecilienkloster” at the beginning of act 2, scene 3. Ziska himself had certainly burned down cities and churches. Only in a few exceptional cases, however, did he involve himself in the atrocities. The parallel to Karl is clear also in the dialogue between Spiegelberg and Razmann in the first third of act 2, scene 3, as well as in Karl’s dialogue with the priest.

The Path to the Taborites via Biblical Allegories The following passages from Karl’s dialogues show clearly that with Schiller the path to the Taborites leads over Biblical allegories, for example, when the priest exclaims, “O Pharao! Pharao!” and Karl answers him directly with


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“Rotte Korah.” The technique that Schiller develops here is especially difficult to understand and can only be touched upon in this context. Like the zealots, the Taborites revolted against Roman Catholic rule. The Jewish shading of Spiegelberg forms the connecting link among libertines, Taborites, and their Biblical allegories. This shading is evident at several places in the text. Of the Taborites it is known that they had turned to the Old Testament and rejected the theological framework of the Christian church and, consequently, the church as an institution. For the Taborites, everything that occurred after the Old Testament, including all that was written about the Last Supper, was no longer relevant. Therefore, they did not recognize the New Testament but only the Old Testament. In the light of this background, Spiegelberg’s demand of Karl, “Lies den Josephus, ich bitte dich drum” is more easily understood. Several striking statements by Karl in act 2, scene 3, “In den böhmischen Wäldern,” also reveal this understanding. It is the confession of a religious fanatic who finally sees that neither the world nor the human being can be changed by means of violence, and that the path he travels must lead to the abyss. Here a religious aspect is present that is hardly compatible with the view of life of the leader of a band of robbers. A model that goes beyond the life of a robber is to be found in the political-religious realm, that is, the history of religion and, to be sure, in the history of the Hussite Wars. This scene in Schiller’s work, in which the story of the robbers comes to fruition, forms a triptych that comprises three stories and a dialogue: Spiegelberg’s misdeeds in the Cecilien monastery, the report of Roller’s release and, finally, the preparations for combat and Karl’s dialogue with the priest. Although the stories depict the cruelty and other repulsive characteristics of the Taborites, the robbers’ captain Karl Moor assumes the role of the Taborite captain, Jan Ziska. Thus Schweizer calls Karl’s tactical directions “meisterlich, vortrefflich,” thereby recalling Ziska’s legendary abilities. Ziska used his tactical skills to annihilate powerful armies. He was able to escape on account of his reputation of invincibility. This occurred also in the aforementioned battle of Taus. The reader experiences the ending of these battle plots in the dialogues of Die Räuber in the Danube scene: enemies suffering devastating defeat, on the one hand, and the priest’s seventeen hundred soldiers, on the other hand, that is, the army that set out to confront Ziska.

The Priest and the Inquisition Since, in this scene, Ziska serves as the model for Karl, we should consider whether or not Schiller also had a model for the priest in mind. In a bull, in 1420, Pope Martin V excommunicated Jan Ziska. The bull can be compared

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to the Bannbrief that Franz sends to Karl in the name of old Moor. Imperial troops were unable to take Ziska and, after his death, Prokop the Great (ca. 1380–1434), leader of the Taborites, into custody. In the meantime, the robberies that the Taborites committed had degenerated into brawling bands of robbers that took on ever more terrible forms. At this time it was agreed to raise a crusading army in order to either capture or kill the Taborites. Their captain, Prokop, was wanted dead or alive. In 1431 Cardinal Giuliano Cesarini, who was only twenty-eight-years-old, was named Cardinal Legate and leader of the ensuing crusade against the Hussites. In 1232, the work of the Inquisition was transferred to the Dominicans. Characterized generally as domini cane, God’s watchdog, they were often portrayed in society as dogs. They appear as such in two of Schweizer’s lines of dialogue when the priest enters the stage: “Hast du gehört Hauptmann? Soll ich hingehn, und diesem abgerichteten Schäferhund die Gurgel zusammen schüren. . . .” (1:86). Further evidence of the same is provided by the words he directs to the priest: “Hund! Hör auf zu schimpfen” (1:85). Right after that, Karl mentions the Inquisition in connection with a clergyman, specifically, Johann von Ragusa. This “Pfaffen Ihres Gelichters” can be seen as a Dominican abbot or even a bishop since he is wearing an agate ring reserved for abbots and bishops. Karl now brags about having torched the Dominican church. These are no longer the words of the captain of a band of robbers who must hide in the woods. This is the statement of a Taborite captain to two of the most powerful men of the church, who were personally responsible for the death of Jan Huss. Schiller thus brought two models, Cesarini and Johann von Ragusa, together. The priest’s last statement at the end of the dialogue reads: “Ich werde unsinning, ich laufe davon . . .” (1:90). This was precisely what the Cardinal Legate Cesarini did with his retinue in the battle at Taus after the largest part of his crusading army had already run away. While the robbers let the priest get away scot-free, the Taborites picked up the insignias, golden crucifix, and the papal bull from Cesarini.

The Freibrief The Hussite model emerges perhaps most clearly in another passage from a dialogue between Karl and the priest. It refers back to Huss’s death. Karl answers the letter of manumission in which the robbers are promised safe conduct when they give the captain over to the besiegers. “MOOR: Seht doch, seht doch! Was könnte ihr mehr verlangen? — Unterschrieben mit eigener Hand — es ist Gnade über alle Grenzen — oder fürchtet ihr wohl, sie werden ihr Wort brechen, weil ihr einmal gehört habt, daß man Verrätern nicht Wort hält? — O seid außer Furcht! Schon die Politik könnte sie zwingen, Wort zu halten, wenn sie es auch


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dem Satan gegeben hätten. Wer würde ihnen in Zukunft noch Glauben beimessen? Wie würden sie je einen zweiten Gebrauch davon machen können? — Ich wollte drauf schwören, sie meinens aufrichtig. Sie wissen, daß ich es bin, der euch empört und erbittert hat, euch halten sie für unschuldig. Eure Verbrechen legen sie für Jugendfehler, für Übereilungen aus. Mich allein wollen Sie haben, ich allein verdiene zu büßen. Ist es nicht so, Herr Pater?” (1:89–90)

Hardly a word of this quotation, except the ones italicized, connects with an ordinary band of robbers of “neun- und siebenzig.” “Gnade über alle Grenzen” can only be conferred in Rome, where this general pardon had to be signed “in one’s own hand.” Certainly, the robbers have already heard, “daß man Verrätern nicht Wort gehalten hat, wenn sie es auch dem Satan gegeben hätten.” At the time this dialogue begins, namely in 1431, seventeen years have already passed since the heretic Johann Huss was enticed to the council with a false letter of manumission and then burned at the stake as an instrument of Satan.

Ziska’s Drums Schiller’s treatment of an extremely macabre — perhaps the most macabre — occurrence in connection with Jan Ziska, and one that Schiller could not ignore, gives an idea of the poet’s subtle manner of creative production in the metamorphosis of his models. The linguistic finesse that he employs may elude not only the English-speaking reader. It has also escaped the attention of the scholarship on Schiller. The transformation of the libertines in Die Räuber into Hussites/Taborites, begins in act 1, scene 2. Here, Spiegelberg suggests that his companions form a robber band and adds: “. . . Wollt ihr an der Leute Fenster mit einem Bänkelsänger Lied ein mageres Almosen erpressen? oder wollt ihr zum Kalbfell schwören . . . ? oder bei klingendem Spiel nach dem Takt der Trommel spazieren gehn . . . ? Seht das habt ihr zu wählen” (1:40). The expression, “zum Kalbfell schwören,” means to enlist in service to war. As a rule, a soldier accompanied the recruiting officer with a drum that was covered with a calf’s skin, upon which recruits were sworn in. But at this place in the dialogue there are two different drums that serve as alternates to one another. According to Spiegelberg, libertines can choose between one or the other drum. Schiller repeats himself and cloaks his repetition in a metonymy. Schiller’s deviation from his otherwise strict economy of language admits only one conclusion: the term, Trommel, stands for the well-known “drums of Ziska,” which were still well known in Schiller’s time. Ziska died in 1424 from a plague that ran rampant in the Taborite camp. On his deathbed, he ordered that upon his death his skin be stripped off and stretched over a drum, so that as soon as the enemies heard its sound they

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would be forced to flee. Ziska’s last order was followed with the help of three members of the Medici family, who were named in the sources. The drum was used by Ziska’s successor, Prokop.

The Kampflied Another example of the connection between Die Räuber and the model of the Hussites is a line spoken by Schweizer at the storming of the castle wall (Ringmauer) in act 5, scene 1. Against the command of the captain, he orders, “Stürmt! Schlagt tod! Brecht ein! Ich sehe Licht! dort muß er sein” (1:150). Built up metrically and in the light of the end rhyme, this passage produces a rousing march rhythm. Consistent with the content of the play, the passage corresponds to the battle song of the Taborites, which began with the words: “Schlagt, erschlagt, schonet niemand!”

The Play’s Message What was Schiller’s primary concern? Die Räuber was certainly not written for the desk drawer, or for posterity, but rather, for a contemporary audience. The message of the piece is certainly not to be found in Aladdin or the Franconian castle, or even in the Hussite Wars, although these elements do guarantee a place for the play among Schiller’s historical dramas. It is also difficult to conceive that in his Räubern Schiller wanted to glorify brutality and violence with the help of the model of the Taborites. The father-son problematic can hardly be of primary concern, any more than the much-noted love of freedom is, although the latter is a step closer to the truth. If Schiller’s intentions for the play are to be appreciated, it is absolutely necessary to know the biographical background. As we know, young Schiller was raised in a strict, pietistic home and, to be sure, in the spirit of Swabian pietism, which itself varies in a number of respects from pietism in general. As already mentioned, Swabian pietists had again made the teachings of Origen their own. In his youth, Schiller had wanted to be a minister, an aspiration that was denied him by the duke because of his forced enlistment at the Karlschule. If this wish was not “Schwärmerei,” but was rooted in a deep conviction, then the brutal intervention of the duke in Schiller’s life and plans must have left some deep wounds. The available scholarship alludes only very indirectly and unintentionally to the healing of these wounds during his school days at the military academy (for example, by references to Schiller’s mediocre grades, poor hygiene, “Enuresis,” and so on). In this case, there are grounds to


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suspect that the theme had caught young Schiller’s attention, and that in 1773, that is, in his first year at the academy, which was also the year of the abolition of the Jesuit order by Pope Clemens XIV, he may have been working with the same theme in Die Christen, his first but no longer extant drama. One should not rule out the possibility that this piece by an engaged and perhaps already partially disillusioned young observer treated not merely sweet romantic stories of pilgrimages, but, rather, Calixtrinern, crusades, reformations, religious wars, Dominicans, Gallikanern, Jansenists, the papacy, orthodoxy, and Gottfried Arnold: in short, intra-Christian Auseinandersetzungen, and, with that, all those anxieties that could be called up by these battles for power and the injustices of believers that are connected with them. We may then conclude that the increasing complex of problems during his school years preoccupied the writer until he found its release in the Räubern. There, the poet could write the entire problematic from his soul — mixed with other areas of problems and models — in an orderly and well-thought-out fashion. From this perspective, it is not surprising that the young poet would have taken a stand — a stand against orthodoxy, inquisitions, and clerical striving for power — and, at the same time, a position in favor of the opposite pole, represented by the Jesuits. This is precisely the content of Die Räuber. Here, Schiller expresses the compulsion for freedom, that is, freedom from the authority of institutions of churches that behave in an absolutistic manner. Four clerics appear in the Räubern: two Dominicans, namely the priest and a “Pfaffe seines Gelichters,” Pastor Moser, and the father confessor. Until now their relationship to Franz has not been clarified. After Franz has literally thrown out his protestant household cleric, Pastor Moser, he assigns his servant Daniel the task of calling the Catholic father confessor, “damit er mir seine Sünden hinwegsegne” (1:149). This contradictory and senseless behavior can be explained when one takes into consideration the nature and fate of the Jesuits of the eighteenth century. This insight is based on two facts. First, in 1773, the Jesuits had been banned by their own head of the church, Pope Clemens XIV. To be sure, John Huss had been the victim of clerical intrigues and Roman Catholic exercise of power. Second, the Jesuits of that time stood in excellent stead with the people. For example, in opposition to other clergymen, the Jesuits were always willing day or night and despite weather conditions and other factors, to stand by those who were dying — even Protestants — and, whenever possible, to convert these people on their death beds. Remarkably, this characterizes the situation in which Franz finds himself. He receives the death sentence and the castle is burning. In this seemingly hopeless situation he calls for the only person who will stand by him, a Jesuit. Schiller here intimates on the basis of history the possibility of Franz’s conversion.

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Schiller makes it clear that he is not for Protestantism by the hardly flattering manner in which he portrays Pastor Moser. And he is not against Catholicism as such, for Karl is damned not by the priest, that is, the Catholic, but rather with a “christlichen Ach.” What Schiller keeps tabs on here is less the dualism of both Christian confessions but rather disputes within the Catholic church where, not surprisingly, he places himself on the side of the oppressed. With the exception of the father confessor, a heirarchy of values is identified in the extremely disparaging clerical dramatis personae. The two figures that demonstrate this the most and who represent the emerging power, as well as the persecution and torture of heretics, are the priest and the parson. Pastor Moser is valued somewhat more highly, since he argues significantly more intelligently than the priest. Nonetheless, he preaches death and damnation; even he is a representative of power and at once one of the followers of those reformers who, adhering to the Old Testament, supported the torturing of heretics. All three characters, the priest, the pastor, and Karl, are swayed by the Jesuits, who hover over them and who are themselves the victims of that higher authority, “die über Leben und Tod spricht.” Just like Mozart, who was the same age, young Schiller was searching for a perfect form that, following the example of the ancients, was harmonious, symmetrical, and beautiful. In the music of classicism, this form of creation found its high point in the form of the sonata. Traditionally, harmony and symmetry are divine symbols. They appear explicitly in Schiller’s text, and this creates an opportunity to determine at what place in the work those “feinsten Schönheiten” apply better than the passages in act 5, scene 1. In this scene Franz hurls the following words at Pastor Moser: “. . . Wenn ich meine sieben Schlösser schleifen lasse, wenn ich diese Venus zerschlage, so ists Symmetrie und Schönheit gewesen. Siehe da! das ist eure unsterbliche Seele!” (1:145). Schiller divides the two most important lines of the poem having to do with symmetry and beauty and the immortal soul according to the golden section (goldnener Schnitt). With this, the golden section S falls behind the strongest stressed syllable, “das (ist eure unsterbliche Seele).” By way of the demonstrative pronoun, symmetry and beauty become synonymous concepts for the immortal soul. A close analysis of the text can thus determine what is being said: 1. The seven castles embody God in heaven. He determines the immortal soul. 2. The immortal soul is therefore divine and beautiful. 3. However, if the locks to the seven castles are filed open, the heavens are torn apart and Venus, that is, beauty, destroyed; the immortal soul can no longer exist. Who would then really be able to render the words that are placed in Franz’s mouth in the first person? In the Old and New Testament tradition


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there is only one who can tear the heavens asunder and could undo his own creation — the immortal soul. Therefore, Schiller’s words are formulated here not as a threat but as counterfactual. Since Franz cannot tear apart the heavens, but can destroy beauty, he also possesses an immortal soul, even when this is deformed (verunstaltet) by his misdeeds, an inner condition that is expressed through his unsightly appearance. This interpretation can account not only for Schiller’s words in his published foreword, “Jedem, auch dem Lasterhaftesten ist gewissermaßen der Stempel des göttlichen Ebenbilds aufgedrückt . . .” (1:17); it also agrees with Origen’s doctrine of the Resurrection. Herein lies Schiller’s message to the public; and, yet, even this is only one part of a whole — part of an emblem.

The Emblem In the Baroque world, whose child Schiller was in every respect, a motto was a part of an emblem. Such an emblem contains a brief heading — a motto in the form of a Latin inscriptio that ancient authors and Bible verses not infrequently employ. The emblem extends from a pictura that depicts historical or Biblical figures or scenes, as well as an inscriptio that explains and interprets what the image portrays and the meaning of the image from which a general truth of life or rule of behavior can be drawn. Emblematics is a form of an allegory that Schiller cultivates in the Räubern. Emblem books were uncommonly popular at the time, and the public was widely familiar with any number of emblems. Authors of baroque dramas (against which Schiller has Karl crusade: “Mir ekelt vor diesem Tintenkleksenden Sekulum . . .”), above all Daniel Casper von Lohenstein, played on such emblems in their texts, and often in the footnotes (!) or notations. But emblematics was in no way a sophisticated game reserved for the dramatist. It belonged to the public. The emblem, or the reference to one, turned the reader or spectator into a kind of Mitspieler and evoked a reaction that, to employ a modern expression, one might describe as a form of intellectual interaction. Schiller also attached a motto to his play that is difficult to comprehend: Hippocrates Quae medicamenta non sanant, ferrum sanat, quae ferrum non sanat, ignis sanat. Furthermore, he marks three passages with the golden section: the sectio divina, namely the frame of the scene in which the goldener Schnitt serves

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as a structural aid, the trapezium that was constructed following the section, and the “Gedicht” in the dialogue of act 5, scene 1. This is grounds to suspect that Schiller is characterizing the four parts of an emblem here. In the comment section of the Trauerspiel Epicharis of 1665 (reprint 1724) by Daniel Caspar von Lohenstein, there is the hidden reference: “Besiehe hiervon des Saavedra LII. Symbolum.” This symbol, the SkorpionEmblem, which for reasons of space we are not able to consider here, forms — per the knowledge that was gained in the analysis — the model for Schiller’s Räuberemblem. The difficulty with this arises when interpreting the Hippocrates aphorism. First, we see that Schiller only uses the first part of the aphorism as his motto. Translated into German, it reads as follows: was Arzneien nicht heilen, heilt das eisen (das Operationsmesser) was das Eisen nicht heilt, heilt das Feuer (das Ausbrennen). He omitted the second part: Quae vero ignis non sanat, ea insanabilia existimare oportet Was aber das Feuer nicht heilt, muß als unheilbar angesehen werden. Following the previous results of our analysis, medicine, scalpel, and fire are to be understood as key words. Thus, we should also be able to find correlates to these words in the text of the Räuber. On closer examination, Schiller supplies the reader with the key to understanding the motto. The only correlate to scalpel, the “Operationsmesser,” surfaces in Franz’s monologue at the beginning of act 2, scene 1 as “des Zergliederers Messer,” that is, the opposite, or reverse of the concept of “healing.” Likewise, in this monologue Franz states, “Ich möcht ihn nicht getödtet, aber abgelebt. Ich möcht es machen wie der gescheide Arzt (nur umgekehrt)” (1:53). The lexeme umgekehrt is, however, the key to the aphorism. Schiller placed this concept in parentheses in the middle of a dialogue in his play, knowing full well that a parenthesis — just like a footnote — cannot be spoken but only read. The play refers to an entire series of correlates. Three of them stand out: Gift (poison) is — hardly surprisingly — to be found with Franz and, to be sure, at a clearly marked place, namely in the footnote to his dialogue in which Schiller refers subliminally to the connection between poison and medicine. Feuer (fire) accompanies Karl through the entire dramatic action that relates to him; for example, the burning of the city and the Dominikanerkirche. In the last scene of the drama, he “schlägt mit dem Dolch gegen einen Stein daß es Funken gibt” (1:151). It is therefore not


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surprising that he should enter the castle under the pseudonym of Graf von Brand and that this castle should be consumed by flames. Schiller expresses his intentions clearly here as he has done before in his use of Gift. These are only a few examples of the occurrences of Gift and Feuer in the text. The analysis leads to the insight that poison stands as a metaphor for Franz Moor’s destructive qualities, and fire for those of his brother Karl. It is not so easy to recognize the correlate for Eisen. The text contains numerous references to iron. But none of them appears sufficiently clear-cut. Even the most attentive reader can easily overlook the only passage of dialogue that would seem to form a connecting link. The poet’s strong marking of this passage first becomes apparent when we take the function of the chorus verbatim and consider its relevance for an understanding of the play. The anonymous band of robbers may be seen as a chorus. Given the example of the ancients, this is hardly surprising. However, the function of the chorus throughout Die Räuber is restricted to the often ballet-like choreography of the collective of robbers. Like a higher being, the chorus stands above the actual plot — commenting, observing, admonishing. Even more incisive are the words that the poet places into the mouth of the Nameless One. What kind of horror could cause Karl Moor’s teeth to chatter, and what then is the word that Karl wishes to convey to the anonymous robber? Is it, perhaps, that word of eternal damnation that is taken from the Augustinian dualism? This can only be the horror of a higher power that is embodied in the chorus, a power that works from the inside out. The horror of dark forces at play in the human being, the horror of Lucifer as a component of that side of human nature that Schiller characterizes as “die thierische” in Versuch über den Zusammenhang der thierischen Natur des Menschen mit seiner geistigen (Concerning the Connection Between the Animal and Intellectual/Spiritual Natures of the Human Being, 1780). But the animal is only one side of human nature. The seven castles in Franz’s poem treat the other side. The doctrine of Origen and the robber emblem, and the subsequent dialogue between Karl and Amalia stand in close relation to one another. As Amalia falls on his neck, Karl exclaims: “Sie vergibt mir, sie liebt mich! Rein bin ich wie der Aether des Himmels, sie liebt mich. — Weinenden Dank dir, Erbarmer im Himmel! Er fällt auf die Knie und weinet heftig. Der Friede meiner Seele ist wiedergekommen, die Qual hat ausgetobt, die Hölle ist nicht mehr —” (Facsimile, 213, 2–3). But for what reason should the captain of the robbers, who, following Amalia, is all at once a Mörder, Teufel, and Engel, suddenly become pure as the ether of heaven? As we know, Schiller’s religious orientation in his early years was pietistic. Less well known is that the Apokatastasis panton, the doctrine of the church father Origen regarding the Resurrection,

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could find a footing in the eighteenth century. As previously mentioned, it left its imprint on Swabian pietism. It is precisely because of this that Karl’s statement is so interesting. Accordingly, hell is in no way described in terms of dubious, underworldly, and fiery realms, but rather as a component of human nature itself. According to the logic of this teaching, there can be no eternal damnation. The immortal soul of the fallen sinner leads back to its creator as a part of the divine creation — like the once fallen Lucifer himself. The passage of dialogue that is quoted here is then nothing other than the Schillerian representation of Origen’s teaching: the immortal soul is loving, the “Erbarmer des Himmels wiedergekommen,” and hell is left behind. The first sentence of the passage of the dialogue describes consistently the condition of the soul as pure, as the fifth and indestructible Aristotelian element, “rein wie der Aether des Himmels.” With that, the inscriptio of the robber emblem emerges more clearly. It reads as follows: Was das Gift nicht zerstört, zerstört das Feuer, was das Feuer nicht zerstört, zerstört das Eisen Similarly as with the scorpion emblem, the subscriptio first becomes comprehensible when the attentive reader ties together the subtleties of the various connections, above all that part of the Hippocrates aphorism that Schiller left out of his motto: was aber das Eisen nicht zerstört, muß als unsterblich angesehen werden. In his poem Franz expresses what is seen as immortal. The poem thus discloses itself as a subscriptio. “Wenn ich meine sieben Schlösser schleifen lasse, / wenn ich diese Venus zerschlage, / so ists Symmetrie und Schönheit gewesen. / Siehe da! das ist eure unsterbliche Seele!” It is expanded with Karl’s exclamation: “Weinenden Dank dir, Erbarmer im Himmel! Er fällt auf die Knie und weinet heftig. Der Friede meiner Seele ist wiedergekommen, die Qual hat ausgetobt, die Hölle ist nicht mehr — . . .” (1:156). The pictura of the robber emblem is just as double-sided as its model. In the scorpion emblem the isosceles trapezium that is constructed with the aid of Göttliche Proportion also hovers over the divided framework of the scenes in accordance with the golden section. In summary, the three parts of the emblem resemble the characteristic qualities of the baroque emblem, with which we have compared it above: 1. The baroque pictura depicts Biblical and historical figures or scenes. In the Räuber Schiller proceeds from two historical models: the Akte


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Buttlar as the model for the dramatic action having to do with Franz and, in the case of Karl, the model of the Hussites. Above the framework of the scenes there hovers the divine symbol in the form of the isosceles trapezium. This trapezium also forms the inner connection of the emblem and applies to both the scriptura and Schiller himself. 2. The brief heading, or motto, the Latin inscriptio, is quoted frequently by ancient authors, and is present in various Bible verses. The motto of Die Räuber stems from an ancient author, Hippocrates. 3. The subscriptio explains and interprets what is represented in the image. It frequently extracts from the image a general truth about life or a rule of behavior. The subscriptio of Schiller’s emblem fulfills the given criteria since it explains and interprets literally what is represented in the image, namely the trapezium. It is especially interesting to observe that that symbol of divinity, the immortal soul, is connected with the birthplace and person of Friedrich Schiller. As we know, Schiller edited the first version of his work anonymously. Instead of his name there stands that of Hippocrates, featured prominently in italics. The first part of the aphorism follows. The common denominator of both Hippocrates and the aphorism is the field of medicine, which Schiller explored at Duke Karl Eugen’s military academy.

Concluding Remarks Up until now, Schiller’s Die Räuber has been cataloged as a Storm and Stress drama. That this conclusion is incorrect is evident in the investigations that inform this essay. According to these findings, although he was at home in the Baroque, with his first great work, the young poet was already on the path to classicism. In the Räuber Schiller created his own form, one that has proven to be classical. To do so, he used models and elements of the most diverse kind, taking them from wherever he could find them and reshaping them according to his needs. Still anchored in the Baroque, he also made use of the elements of form with which he had, so to speak, grown up. Seen in its own way, the use of the baroque emblem provides an insight into the meaning of the play which Schiller himself could hardly have foreseen. In sharp contrast to that parody, or literal deconstruction, that the work experienced in his Trauerspiel version, Schiller’s Schauspiel Die Räuber proves to be a key work in the transition between the epochs of the Baroque and German Classicism. Translated by Steven D. Martinson

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Notes 1

Unless otherwise stated, parenthetical references to Schiller’s works in this essay are to volume and page number in the Frankfurter Ausgabe, Werke und Briefe in zwölf Bänden, edited by Klaus Harro Hilzinger, et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1988–). Here: 1:164.

Works Cited Hörner, Petra, ed. Hus Hussiten: Dokumentation literarischer Facetten im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Frankfurt am Main: P. Lang, 2002. Schiller, Friedrich. Die Räuber: Ein Schauspiel. Frankfurt/Leipzig, 1781. [Facsimile] ———. Die Räuber: Ein Schauspiel. 2nd ed. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1990. Stransky-Stranka-Greifenfels, Werner von. “. . . so ists Symmetrie und Schönheit gewesen . . .” Zu Vorlagen und Struktur von Friedrich Schillers Schauspiel “Die Räuber.” Stockholm: Almqvist & Weksell International, 1998. ———. Schiller, Räuber, Embleme . . . Friedrich Schillers “Räuber” — ein barockes Emblem? Stockholm: Germanistisches Institut, Universität Stockholm, 2001. ———. Schiller, Räuber, Jesuiten . . . Zur religionsgeschichtlichen Perspektive der Räuber. Stockholm: Germanistisches Institut, Universität Stockholm, 1999. Stubenrauch, Herbert, and Günter Schulz, eds. Schillers Räuber: Urtext des Mannheimer Soufflierbuches. Mannheim: Bibliographisches Institut, 1959.

Kabale und Liebe Reconsidered J. M. van der Laan

B

SCHILLER IN 1782 and first performed in Frankfurt on April 15, 1784, then two days later in Mannheim, Kabale und Liebe (Intrigue and Love) has ever since remained in the repertory and been a staple offering of German theater. Through three centuries, it has been Schiller’s most performed play (Fischer, 34). Even today, and as a glance in publications like Der Spiegel, Schaubühne, and Theater heute will confirm, it continues to be one of the playwright’s most popular dramas.1 Though many have loved it, not all audiences have been so taken with Kabale und Liebe. Even contemporary critics found fault with the play, and point to serious shortcomings in their reviews.2 Initial critical responses raise objections to inane dialogue and melodramatic exaggeration. Such criticisms cannot be denied. Luise’s urgent plea to her beloved Ferdinand von Walter, for instance — “Sieh mich an, lieber Walter. Nicht so sehr in die Zähne geknirscht”3 — sounds more silly than serious, as was actually intended. Latter-day scholars likewise acknowledge major artistic flaws. Most notably, Erich Auerbach in his now-classic study of the Western literary tradition describes and dismisses Kabale und Liebe as “a tempestuous, an inspired and inspiring, a very effective, and yet — when we look at it a little more closely — a fairly bad play. It is a melodramatic hit written by a man of genius” (441). As Benno von Wiese observes, “Wohl wird dem Zuschauer etwas zuviel zugemutet, wenn der sterbende Ferdinand am Ende doch noch ‘dem zerschmetterten’ Vater vergibt” (217). More recently, Bernd Fischer calls attention to the weak ending, where Schiller waffles between total tragedy and a restoration of order and intimation of harmony (97). As Fischer also points out, the heroine occasionally falls out of character, for instance in her pivotal meeting with Lady Milford (130). In a deft summary of the play’s problems, Walter Pape argues that it presents exaggerated and psychologically untrue characters and that the work ends with an unnecessary catastrophe (199). Even so, Kabale und Liebe remains exceedingly popular, a perennial favorite, and still draws an audience. What explains its appeal, both to theatergoers and to literary critics? What makes it worth seeing or writing another word about? Despite his negative assessment, Auerbach chose this early Schiller play out of all the EGUN BY

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other German plays in the late eighteenth century for his sweeping survey of Western culture and literature because he considered it “the only one of its kind” (443). In his opinion, no further attempts were made in the age of Goethe “toward the tragic treatment of an average contemporary bourgeois milieu on the basis of its actual social situation” (443). Over the years, the play’s melodrama and sentimentality has doubtless met certain needs and fed the tastes of a public eager for such entertainment. But beyond this emotional appeal, Kabale und Liebe is an intellectually intriguing play. In his book, Friedrich Schiller, Benno von Wiese considers it the boldest play Schiller ever wrote, with a far greater influence than that of Fiesko (192). The work is exceedingly complex and complicated, a text whose themes entwine with each other and defy disentanglement. Schiller’s play is still important and interesting to us not least because of its special place in literary history and in the tradition of a particular genre: das bürgerliche Trauerspiel, the middle-class tragedy. The genre effectively begins in England with George Lillo’s The London Merchant of 1731, but had its German inception in 1755 with Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Miß Sara Sampson. According to Karl S. Guthke, Kabale und Liebe ranks along with three other plays as the most significant examples of the genre, the others being Lessing’s Miß Sara Sampson, his Emilia Galotti (1772), and Hebbel’s Maria Magdelena (1843). Schiller himself intended such a generic identification, as the subtitle he gave his play — Ein bürgerliches Trauerspiel — indicates. While Kabale und Liebe is also thus situated within the tradition of the domestic tragedy, it also has features of eighteenth-century sentimentality, as found in the works of Bodmer, Breitinger, and J. E. Schlegel, and roots in the Sturm und Drang drama (Koopmann, 1979, 153–54). As Auerbach notes, the bourgeois tragedy combined and contained many features from those traditions. It “was a genre wedded to the personal, the domestic, the touching, and the sentimental” (441). The genre typically makes use of a set of stock characters, as Benno von Wiese notes. There is characteristically “ein bestimmter, typischer Umkreis von Personen: der gewissenlose Fürst, die vornehme Mätresse als Nebenbuhlerin des bürgerlichen Mädchens, der schurkische Confident und Handlanger, der aufrechte bürgerliche Vater, die beschränkte Mutter, der Liebhaber als Verführer oder umgekehrt als empfindsam Liebender usw” (191). Although Schiller’s play presents its own variations on the theme, it clearly follows that basic pattern. Other traits typify the genre and likewise inform Kabale und Liebe. As Lesley Sharpe observes, “the unfortunate consequences of social divisions, the centrality of the suffering heroine, the key role played by the father, were constantly recurring elements during the previous decade [the 1770s] and testify to the immense influence of Lessing’s Emilia Galotti (1771)” (46). As might be expected,

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such a constellation of established characters also largely determines the direction of the plot and the content of the play. Even though the domestic tragedy focuses on bourgeois figures, it includes aristocratic characters. The emergence of the bourgeois tragedy around 1755 mirrors the rise of the bourgeoisie as a new social and cultural force. The emergence of the genre parallels the transition, albeit gradual, of power and prestige from the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie in the eighteenth century. With its “Lebensgefühl” and “das Menschenbild der moralisch-empfindsamen Privatheit,” the genre offered something decisively new (Guthke, 20). For all these reasons, Kabale und Liebe represents an important milestone in the history of German literature and culture.4 Kabale und Liebe is not the title Schiller first gave his play. He had originally called it Luise Millerin, but the actor and playwright A. W. Iffland suggested Kabale und Liebe. Schiller readily accepted the change, one that shifted the focus and attention we give to the characters and the content. Of course, Kabale und Liebe is the sad love story of Luise Miller and Ferdinand von Walter. And of course, Luise must be the tragic heroine. Schiller asserts as much by placing such words, maybe a little too heavy-handedly, in her mouth: she declares herself “die Heldin dieses Augenblicks,” “die Verbrecherin,” and the “Opfer” (623), a thrilling assertion and fascinating juxtaposition. But a secondary character, Lady Milford, in effect supplies the more trenchant title and in doing so places herself at the center of events as well. “Die Verbindung mit dem Major,” she reveals to her maidservant, “ — du und die Welt stehen im Wahn, sie sei eine Hofkabale — Sophie — erröte nicht — schäme dich meiner nicht — sie ist das Werk meiner Liebe” (590). Here we learn that she is a significant force, if not the motive force in the drama. Not President von Walter, but Lady Milford has set the cabal, the intrigue — that the major, the president’s son Ferdinand, should marry her rather than Luise — in motion. Her own love for Ferdinand is the source of the intrigue that triggers the release of so much evil and ultimately causes the tragedy for all involved. Intrigues and loves abound in this complex story. A bourgeois girl, Luise, and an aristocratic man, Ferdinand, have fallen in love. The exiled noblewoman, Lady Milford, loves the same man, however, and a secretary to the president, appropriately named Wurm, wants Luise for himself. The noblewoman is attached to the prince of the land as his mistress, and Luise is wrongly implicated in an affair with another aptly named character, the court dandy von Kalb. There are two other love relations of a much different but equally problematic nature, that of Miller the musician for his daughter and that of President von Walter for his son. The intrigues are numerous and intertwined. As noted, Lady Milford has launched an intrigue to obtain Ferdinand and his love. Acting as the catalyst, her plot affects Ferdinand’s father, the president, who devises his own intrigue to prevent the union between his son and the common girl,

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and to tie him in marriage to the Lady Milford. The president’s scheme to unite his son with the prince’s mistress, Lady Milford, is a calculated move to ensure his place of power and prestige at the court. It was moreover intrigue — “falsche Briefe und Quittungen” (617) — that had first brought the president to power. Wurm hatches yet another plot in the service of his master, the president, to sabotage the love between Ferdinand and Luise, another cabal that serves his own interest in the girl. At the end of the play, Ferdinand believes Luise to be guilty of a final intrigue — a dictated letter she copied under duress — whereas it is actually he who ends the drama with a deception of his own, for he surreptitiously poisons her before committing suicide. The love between Ferdinand and Luise cannot be realized for several reasons, all of which matter and figure in their tragedy. Their love constitutes a mésalliance, as they are from markedly different social classes.5 Moreover, there are people actively plotting and acting against them, including Lady Milford, the president, Wurm, Luise’s father, and von Kalb. Both Luise’s father and her lover want to possess her. In addition, Ferdinand and Luise are divided by their religious “convictions.” While Luise adheres to a conventional Christian ethic, Ferdinand follows a religion of love. To accept any one of these different points of view does not mean one must reject the others. Rather, they are all different parts of the whole. Kabale und Liebe may be a play about love thwarted and doomed by intrigue, but the tragedy of love serves as a vehicle for Schiller to raise disturbing questions about the social order, the political system, religious attitudes, individual or personal autonomy, and the moral universe within which it all occurs. The combination of so many different realms results in an intricate and complex text. As David Pugh writes, “the interplay of social and private themes is exceptionally hard to unravel, and the visionary and religious language in which both the lovers experience and express their love adds to the difficulties of assessment” (166). In Guthke’s opinion, the attempts to understand the play tend to fall mainly into two categories. On the one hand, scholars identify a drama of unconditional love; on the other, they see a tragedy of class conflict, a political drama of the time (Guthke, 101). It is not really so simple and straightforward, however. There are as many different approaches to the play as there are themes in it, and any one perspective cannot do it justice. In the Schiller-Handbuch, Helmut Koopmann comes to a similar conclusion, writing that the drama cannot be exhausted by a single theme (376).6 It is precisely a polyvalency of meanings that Schiller’s play offers and that make a single, unified interpretation so hard to establish and accept. There have been many fine studies of the drama to date. Some have dealt with the political dimension of the play, among others, Korff, J. Müller, and Strich. Some have interpreted the play in terms of class


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conflict, including Heitner and Müller. For others like Martini and Kittler, the psychology of the characters takes precedence. Various scholars have examined the dynamics of the social and familial order (Müller, Koopmann, Graham, Janz, Michelsen, and Kaiser). Analyses of the religious component have been undertaken as well (by Weitbrecht, Malsch, and most notably Guthke). In addition, several studies have investigated the role of language and the loss of linguistic facility (Müller-Seidel, Hiebel, Kieffer, Duncan, and Pilling). With Kabale und Liebe, Schiller confronts his audience with various problems, all substantive and compelling. He examines the contemporary political reality; the prevailing social order with its insurmountable barriers between the estates or classes, between bourgeois and aristocrat; the growing tension between orthodox religion and the process of secularization with its attendant theology of love; the deterioration of the family, both bourgeois and aristocratic; aristocratic corruption and bourgeois insufficiency. The play is directed at the human inability to solve the problems Luise and Ferdinand face: class distinctions, religious injunctions, familial obligations and demands. Lesley Sharpe sums it up well when she writes that Schiller’s “intensely moral turn of mind expresses itself in the [early] dramas not in moral preaching but in an exploration of the difficulties of judgment and the agony of choice” (5). The following pages review the many and varied problems addressed in the play and conclude with a look at an otherwise almost altogether ignored, but pivotal and essential character, Lady Milford. Miller’s opening remark immediately charges the drama and establishes not only a conflict, but also the terms of that conflict: “Meine Tochter kommt mit dem Baron ins Geschrei” (565). The stage is set. Reference to the baron establishes the opposition between the bourgeois and the nobility, while Miller’s name emphasizes his humble origins in the trades. Time and again, the contrast between the classes, between “Gesind” and “Herrschaft” (566), as Miller says, confronts the audience, and as he sees it, never the twain should meet. For him, it is simple: his daughter has a relationship with a baron, a man above her station and a man of aristocratic tastes and habits. She should marry someone of her own rank, “einen wackern ehrbaren Schwiegersohn,” Miller states, “der sich so warm in meine Kundschaft hineingesetzt hätte” (567). Miller also understands what the liasson of a bourgeois girl with a nobleman typically implies: “Ich werde sprechen zu Seiner Exzellenz: . . . meine Tochter ist zu schlecht zu Dero Herrn Sohnes Frau, aber zu Dero Herrn Sohnes Hure is meine Tochter zu kostbar” (568). Miller knows how the aristocracy, particularly Ferdinand’s father, President von Walter, views his daughter. Indeed, the president has no respect for Luise and refers to her disdainfully as the “Bürgerkanaille” (577). She is only a plaything, an erotic dalliance, a sexual object for his son to enjoy for a time and then discard. To conclude

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the first scene, Luise’s father reasserts his identity: “Ich heiße Miller” (568) — a declaration that reflects the self-confidence of the bourgeoisie and its implicit challenge to the aristocracy. Luise similarly draws attention to the problems her relationship with Ferdinand creates, problems that are clearly related to class distinctions. For that same reason, she is prepared to forsake him, to surrender any claim to him in this life: “Ich entsag ihm für dieses Leben. Dann, Mutter — dann, wenn die Schranken des Untershieds einstürzen — wenn von uns abspringen all die verhaßte Hülsen des Standes — Menschen nur Menschen sind —” (574). Luise sees everything in terms of class and status. She imagines Ferdinand among “die vornehmen Fräulein,” while she is merely “ein schlechtes vergessenes Mädchen” (573). In Schiller’s day, those terms Fräulein and Mädchen clearly expressed the gulf between the estates. It is the only way Luise can conceive of herself and construe her relationship with Ferdinand. Even as Ferdinand tries to reassure Luise that class distinctions do not matter and can be overcome, he nonetheless reinforces them. “Ich bin ein Edelmann” he boasts, “Laß doch sehen, ob mein Adelbrief älter ist, als der Riß zum unendlichen Weltall? oder mein Wappen gültiger als die Handschrift des Himmels in Louisens Augen” (575). Ferdinand sets so much store by his rank that he even dares contend with heaven and the Creator himself. In a sense, his “Ich bin ein Edelmann” answers to Miller’s “Ich heiße Miller,” both strong assertions of class identification, signals an audience cannot fail to register. Every aspect of the play is informed by the preoccupation with class. In his confrontation with Lady Milford, for instance, Ferdinand does not say simply that he loves another woman. Rather, he must characterize her in the terms of class — “Ich liebe, Milady,” he says, “ — liebe ein bürgerliches Mädchen — Louisen Millerin.” As if it were still not clear, he adds “— eines Musikus Tochter” (599). Although Luise grasps how much Ferdinand is bound and determined by his class consciousness — “dein Herz gehört deinem Stande” (622), she tells him — she is unaware that her own heart belongs and is restricted just as much or even more to her position in society. Ferdinand has declared himself ready to abandon his station, but he is perhaps no more able than Luise to understand the world without the categories of class. Luise is bound by her concepts of social order and class distinctions. She cannot conceive of a world without them. For her, an alliance with Ferdinand would violate the foundations of society, a divinely established social order. An alliance between the bourgeoisie and the nobility would be unholy. Therefore she believes she must give up a relationship, “das die Fugen der Bürgerwelt auseinander treiben, und die allgemeine ewige Ordnung zu Grund stürzen würde” (623). In her view, their marriage would cause the complete breakdown of society as she knows and understands it.


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Imprisoned in her own conceptions of an unalterable social structure, a general and eternal order, she cannot begin to contemplate alternatives. In the impossible relationship between Luise and Ferdinand, Schiller’s play shows how entrenched and insurmountable the class divisions and barriers were at that time. Although the play attacks the prevailing social order of the day, it does not necessarily assert the values of the bourgeoisie over those of the aristocracy. “Neid, Furcht, Verwünschung” (583), as Ferdinand declares, may well characterize the aristocracy, but Miller’s values are not much better, for he thinks in terms of “Handel” (565), “Commerz” (565), and “Kundschaft” (567). At the close of the play, he shows his true colors when he takes a bag of money from Ferdinand in payment for “den dreimonatlangen glücklichen Traum von seiner Tochter” (665). It is a moment fraught with tension and fear, yet Miller is able to discuss business (past music lessons for Ferdinand) without much thought about all that has happened and what might still be to come. His words betray a bourgeois veneration of wealth. For him, the sack of gold is an “allmächtige Börse” (665), “das bare gelbe leibhafte Gottesgold” (665). For a moment, he worries that it is not Gottesgold after all, but gold from Satan. Reassured by Ferdinand, however, that he can accept it with a clear conscience, Miller jumps in the air like “ein Halbnarr,” thrilled by his good fortune. As exemplified by Miller, the bourgeoisie cannot serve as an alternative to the values of a bankrupt aristocracy. The real focus of Schiller’s social criticism is the institution of the family — both bourgeois and aristocratic. After all, the play is a domestic tragedy. The familial dimensions of the play, in particular the father-daughter and father-son relationships, but also the family in general, come under scrutiny. In fact, the word family proves problematic as it applies to the groups in question, since the constellations of characters who are related to each other hardly constitute a family. Whether the relations are husbandwife, father-daughter, father-son, prince-mistress, or sovereign and subjects, none are sound or healthy. In both the aristocratic and bourgeois worlds, the family is crumbling. The family, this epitome of a most simple society, reflects severe crisis. Although Luise’s family is intact with father, mother, and daughter, it is nonetheless troubled and dysfunctional. Her mother is foolish and has no bearing on the family structure or life. As such, she is unimportant and has no real presence in the drama, let alone the family. The father in contrast has an ardent concern, but an obsessive, unhealthy, and even artificial love for his daughter. In his own words, his relation is “zu abgöttisch” (652). He tells her: “Du warst mein Abgott. . . . Du warst mein Alles” (655). He is unable to let his daughter go, to free her to live her own life, and forces her to choose her father over her lover and husband-to-be: “Wenn die Küsse deines Majors heißer brennen als die Tränen deines

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Vaters — stirb!” (657). Under such duress, she obliges, suggestively offering him her hand (as if in marriage?). — “Vater! Hier ist meine Hand!” (657). “Das ist meine Tochter!” Miller replies, “Um einen Liebhaber bist du leichter, dafür hast du einen glücklichen Vater gemacht” (657). “Meine Luise,” he cries out, “mein Himmelreich!” (657). His possessiveness borders on the perverse and his paternal love on the quasi-incestuous.7 When Ferdinand offers him gold, near the end of the play, Miller’s love for his daughter reveals itself instead to be self-interest and a true lack of concern for Luise. As Gerhard Kluge says, “besessen vom Glanz des Reichtums, schmückt er seinen Abgott, Luise, in Gedanken auf vermessene Weise zur Madame aus, verblendet mit Größenwahnsinn geschlagen” (1415). In a flash, Miller changes his tune and is prepared to surrender and compromise his daughter and her honor. It is all the more tragic that Luise is willing to sacrifice herself and her happiness for her father’s safety and freedom, when her father’s much touted devotion to his daughter turns out to be not only shallow, but hollow. With his eyes on the gold, Miller blurts out to Ferdinand: “Wären Sie ein schlechter geringer Bürgersmann — rasch und mein Mädel liebte Sie nicht? Erstechen wollt ich’s, das Mädel” (666). Bewitched by such riches, Miller blatantly persists with the unnecessary charade that Ferdinand would still need to be an ordinary burgher to marry Luise, but were that the case, and she did not love Ferdinand, Miller would be ready to kill his otherwise precious daughter. Luise is unable to find refuge in the family, for the structure of her family is infirm. The same is true of Ferdinand’s family. We know nothing of his mother, who is never mentioned and utterly absent. There are only the son and the father, who are completely at odds. The president may claim to have his son’s best interest in mind, but in truth seeks only his own advantage. Like Luise’s father, President von Walter is heavily invested in his child, but in selfish ways and for selfish reasons. The president’s relation to his son is not, as Kluge writes, simply “von der Sorge bestimmt, diesem mit den Mitteln intrigierender Karrierepolitik eine erstklassige Stellung am Hof zu verschaffen und den Weg zum Thron zu ebnen” (1419). Rather, the father is driven by self-interest and by the desire to aggrandize himself first, his son only as a means to that end. That is abundantly clear in the exchange between father and son in the first act. While the father tries to claim that he has done everything to promote his son — “Wem zu lieb hab ich die gefährliche Bahn zum Herzen des Fürsten betreten? . . . Sage mir Ferdinand: Wem tat ich dies alles?” — Ferdinand rightly answers: “Doch mir nicht mein Vater?” (582). Let there be no mistake: President von Walter acted on selfish motives. As Paul Böckmann realizes, the president wants his son to marry Lady Milford “damit der Präsident seinen Einfluß behaupten kann” (259). The president’s relation to his son is empty, as he wants to use his son to secure his own position at court through the marriage of his son to the prince’s mistress, itself a degradation.


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A new and better model for the family order is unable to assert and establish itself. The never-to-be-achieved union of Luise and Ferdinand denies such a possibility. As Koopmann notes, “Das Trauerspiel entwickelt sich freilich nicht daraus, daß die familiären Werte eingehalten werden, sondern vielmehr aus der Unmöglichkeit ihrer Verwirklichung” (1998, 369). Ferdinand and Luise offer no hope for the foundation of a family any better than the corrupted ones they both already know and belong to. Schiller provides no remedy, no possible opportunity for a renewed or different kind of family. His play is indeed a domestic tragedy, for it is a tragedy of the family, an enactment of its demise. Everywhere and in every regard, the family is under attack in Schiller’s play. The prince, for example, destroys the family by tearing men away from their homes to conscript them for foreign military service across an ocean on another continent. In the world of Luise and Ferdinand, the family no longer exists to protect and preserve. It no longer functions as a haven from external assaults. Instead of an island of safety, a refuge from the chaos of the world, the family is shattered and undone. As Koopmann notes, “die Familie als Urordnung . . . ist fragwürdig geworden” (1979, 148). “Bei aller Vergebung und bei allem Selbstgericht endet die Tragödie mit einem bitteren Nachgeschmack,” he writes. “Der Vertrauensbruch ist nicht wiedergutgemacht, zwei zerstörte Familien bleiben zurück, und auch die Weltordnung hat einen Riß bekommen, der nicht mehr geheilt werden konnte” (1998, 366). As such, the tragedy of the family may well be graver than the tragedy of Miller’s daughter or of the young lovers. In the end, both Ferdinand’s and Luise’s families are destroyed. As the curtain falls, both fathers stand alone. The values defining the ideal family — “Liebe, Treue, Zuverlässigkeit, auch Gleichberechtigung und Toleranz” (Koopmann, 1979, 368) — are missing from both families. According to Koopmann, “die Liebe als höchster Wert der bürgerlichen Gemeinschaftsstruktur” exerts its own destructive power, allows the individual to go under, and annihilates the bourgeois world altogether. But that assertion drastically oversimplifies and ignores the dishonesty, suspicion, jealousy, and misunderstanding that wreak such havoc. In Schiller’s drama, we see how the bourgeois and the aristocratic families both have foundered. Steven D. Martinson offers a valuable insight into the collapse depicted in Kabale und Liebe. In his discussion of Schiller’s Theosophie des Julius (Julius’s Theosophy, in the Philosophische Briefe, 1787–89), he explains that the absence of love causes a crisis. “For disintegration and loss of connectedness would be the end result of a world driven merely by egoism and self-preservation” (65). Precisely such conditions prevail in Kabale und Liebe. Egoism and self-preservation, not love, hold sway and define Ferdinand’s father, Wurm, the court chamberlain, the prince, even Miller. Lady Milford, Ferdinand, and Luise each lose love. All the virtue in the

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world — and Luise is its embodiment — cannot overcome the absence of love. Martinson believes that the central message of Kabale und Liebe is this: “where love is absent, worlds collide and the social order soon collapses” (95). In addition to questions of family and society, much scholarship has been devoted to the religious dimension of Schiller’s play. Michelsen, for instance, argues that the play presents a picture of the abuses of religion. Certainly, Miller’s faith has more to do with gold than God. As early as 1897, Carl Weitbrecht remarks that Luise gives voice to sentimental religiosity, not to any deep religious convictions. Given the melodramatic tone of the drama, the biblical allusions, the numerous invocations of God and Jesus, and the references to Luise’s saintliness, all smack too much of religious platitude used as veneer, especially at the end of the play: “Jesus! Was ist das?” (673), “O mein Herrgott!” (673), “O Gott vergiß es ihm — Gott der Gnade, nimm die Sünde von ihm” (673), “Sterbend vergab mein Erlöser” (674), “Engel des Himmels” (674), “Das Mädchen ist eine Heilige” (675), “Ich wasche die Hände” (676). None of this rings true. More than anyone else, Karl S. Guthke has sought to illumine the religious component of Kabale und Liebe. He reads the play as a reflection of the growing sacralization of the profane in eighteenth-century German culture (1994, 95). According to him, the drama depicts the tension and conflict between the realms of the secular and sacred, between a traditional and orthodox Christianity embodied by Luise and her father and a secular religion of love personified in Ferdinand. That is, Ferdinand tempts Luise with the “Säkularisation des Religiösen am Paradigma der Liebe” (99). Ferdinand, for instance, appropriates conventional religious language in an attempt to convert Luise to his religion of love. “Wo wir sein mögen,” he tells Luise, “geht eine Sonne auf. . . . Werden wir Gott in keinem Tempel mehr dienen, so ziehet die Nacht mit begeisternden Schauern auf, der wechselnde Mond predigt uns Buße, und eine andächtige Kirche von Sternen betet mit uns” (621–22). When Luise asks him “Und hättest du sonst keine Pflicht mehr, als deine Liebe?” Ferdinand answers “Deine Ruhe ist meine heiligste” (622). As Guthke indicates, Ferdinand exemplifies the secularization of religion and asserts love as the new sacred. The very words he uses — temple, preach, repentance, reverence, church, pray, and holiest — redefine love as their religion. According to Guthke, with Ferdinand’s encouragement, the two lovers initially serve the god of love and lovers. They also attempt to identify that god with the judge of the world, the God of Christian tradition, but are unable to do so. Their tragedy, he argues, is “die des Fehlschlags dieses Versuchs” (106). In the end, Ferdinand’s new secular religion fails to replace Luise’s traditional religious framework. As much as she would have liked to believe with Ferdinand in a gospel of profane love, she remains uncertain, unconvinced, and unconverted. Hence, Kabale und


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Liebe is “die Tragödie der Säkularisation oder genauer der Sakralisierung der Liebe” (106). For Guthke, the secularization of eighteenth-century culture and the simultaneous sacralization of love are the backbone of the play (103). If we focus too narrowly on that aspect of the drama, however, we lose sight of other significant and vital concerns of Schiller’s play. Although Guthke makes a strong case for the primacy of its religious themes, Kabale und Liebe cannot be reduced so neatly to one common denominator. With his famous and oft-quoted remark, Hermann August Korff reinforced (if not established) the reputation of the play as a political statement. In his opinion, Kabale und Liebe plunges the knife “in das Herz des Absolutismus” (206). To be sure, the play delivers a political message and strikes a blow against absolutistic power, represented by the president and the duke he serves, and the exploitation of the people by the ruling tyrant. Were it not for Lady Milford, the political content of the play would have been all but lost. Luise and Ferdinand, for instance, are utterly unconcerned with and untouched by any considerations about the larger political context. Of all the characters, only Lady Milford cares about and raises objections to the political system and the absolutistic abuses of power. She alone judges and condemns the world of the prince, the president, and the marshall as one of “abscheuliche Herrlichkeit” (590), emphasizing the political domination of others. The audience first learns about the tyrannical policies of the ruling prince from a manservant’s report to Lady Milford: “Gestern sind siebentausend Landskinder nach Amerika fort” (590). They have been sold like chattel by the prince. “Es traten wohl so etliche vorlaute Bursch’ vor die Front heraus, und fragten den Obersten, wie teuer der Fürst das Joch Menschen verkaufe? — aber unser gnädiger Landesherr ließ alle Regimenter auf dem Paradeplatz aufmarschieren, und die Maulaffen niederschießen. Wir hörten die Büchsen knallen, sahen ihr Gehirn auf das Pflaster sprützen, und die ganze Armee schrie: Juchhe nach Amerika! —” (591). Schiller could hardly have made a clearer political statement against the outrages and abominations of tyrannical absolutism. Lady Milford’s chambermaid Sophie extends our knowledge of princely cruelty and brutality. She informs her mistress of a destructive fire and its aftermath in a city on the border of the realm: “die mehresten dieser Unglücklichen dienen jetzt ihren Gläubigern als Sklaven, oder verderben in den Schachten der fürstlichen Silberbergwerke” (592). Only through the presence of Lady Milford’s character does the political dimension of the play come to the fore. Thanks to her, the spotlight falls on political oppression. At the same time, we receive a glimpse of Lady Milford’s integrity, as she not only displays empathy with the unfortunate and exploited, but also takes overt action to help them.

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In the same passage, Lady Milford recalls the horrific abuses she found when she first arrived in the prince’s land: “auf einmal [stand] die schauderndste Szene vor meinen Augen. . . . Die Wollust der Großen dieser Welt ist die nimmer satte Hyäne, die sich mit Heißhunger Opfer sucht. — Fürchterlich hatte sie schon in diesem Lande gewütet — hatte Braut und Bräutigam zertrennt — hatte selbst der Ehen göttliches Band zerrissen — hier das stille Glück der Familie geschleift — dort ein junges unerfahrnes Herz der verheerenden Pest aufgeschlossen, und sterbende Schülerinnen schäumten den Namen ihres Lehrers unter Flüchen und Zuckungen aus — ”. (597)

Not only does Lady Milford’s commentary lay bare the savagery unleashed by the “great ones of the world,” it also highlights the deterioration of the family as one of its consequences. Lady Milford dared to alleviate and undo the tyranny of the ruling prince despite her precarious situation as his concubine. Even so, she courageously placed herself “zwischen das Lamm und den Tyger; nahm einen fürstlichen Eid von ihm [dem Fürsten] in einer Stunde der Leidenschaft, und diese abscheuliche Opferung mußte aufhören” (597–98). To Ferdinand, she reveals the full extent of the despot’s cruelty: “Walter, ich habe Kerker gesprengt — habe Todesurteile zerrissen, und manche entsetzliche Ewigkeit auf Galeeren verkürzt. In unheilbare Wunden hab ich doch wenigstens stillenden Balsam gegossen — mächtige Frevler in Staub gelegt, und die verlorne Sache der Unschuld oft noch mit einer buhlerischen Träne gerettet” (598). Although the play provides a searing critique of the abuse of power, it does not present some other form of rule as an alternative. And while Lady Milford exposes the tyranny of absolute authority, she also describes a world where freedom is absent and nowhere in sight, except beyond the horizon, and then only for her. Kabale und Liebe wrestles with the possibility or impossibility of freedom and autonomy more than with any other question it raises. The two lead characters, Ferdinand and Luise, seek emancipation from the constraints of class, from bourgeois and aristocratic conventions and expectations, but they cannot achieve that goal. While Ferdinand dared to take the risk and dared Luise to do so also, she refused, justifiably fearing reprisals against her father, which then restrained Ferdinand as well. The characters are unable to become autonomous. Luise does not assert herself, does not leave her father for a husband, nor does she establish her own domain, chiefly because of her father’s demands. Ferdinand likewise makes equally unfair demands of her that would deny her of any freedom and independence just as much as it would her father. According to Kluge, “beide [Miller und Ferdinand] versündigen sich an Luise, indem sie ihre Liebe mit falschen Besitzansprüchen


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verbinden und Luise — modern gesprochen — verdinglichen” (1414). They treat her as an object, as something to possess.8 The language Ferdinand uses in his conversations with Luise betrays his possessiveness. “Du bist meine Luise,” he declares, “Wer sagt dir, daß du noch etwas sein solltest” (575). The authoritative tenor of his voice warns her against any attempt to assert herself as an individual. He in effect commands her to define herself solely in relation to himself. “Ich selbst —” he audaciously declares, “ich will über dir wachen wie der Zauberdrach über unterirdischem Golde — Mir vertraue dich” (576). In other words, Luise is to be utterly dependent upon him. Like Ferdinand, Luise’s father speaks the same language of possessiveness. And like Ferdinand, his words give him away. In the last act, for example, Miller constantly uses the possessive pronoun “my” when he thinks about or speaks to his daughter. She exists for him as “meine Tochter,” “mein Kind,” “meine Einzige,” “mein Abgott,” “mein Alles” (655), “Meine Louise” (657), and “mein Himmelreich” (657). For him, she has no independent identity. He transforms her into something that he owns. Almost everyone in the drama desires to possess someone or something, and in doing so, they deny others any autonomy. The prince, for instance, denies his subjects their freedom, Miller his daughter, the president his son, Wurm Luise, Ferdinand Luise. Even Luise is culpable since she denies herself and Ferdinand any chance of freedom. Only Lady Milford manages to escape from that world and emancipate herself, albeit at great cost. Admittedly, the president has great power, making horrible, real threats against Luise and her family: “Vater ins Zuchthaus — an den Pranger, Mutter und Metze von Tochter!” he commands (608). As Luise and her parents know, the president has the position and power to enforce his violent intentions. “Ich will meinen Haß an eurem Untergang sättigen,” he exclaims, “die ganze Brut, Vater, Mutter und Tochter, will ich meiner brennenden Rache opfern” (608). Ferdinand has the means to counter his father’s authority, however, and responds to his father’s menacing words with a threat of his own. “Unterdessen,” he says in the ear of the president, “erzähl’ ich der Residenz eine Geschichte, wie man Präsident wird” (610). Alarmed and aware of the danger his son represents to him, the president immediately desists and commands the release of Luise, her mother, and her father: “Laßt sie ledig” (610). Ferdinand’s threat to expose his father and the vile means he used to become president would have guaranteed their safety, at least for a time, had Luise desired as much. As Ferdinand informs Luise, “der Sohn wird den Vater in die Hände des Henkers liefern” (621). The president realizes the gravity of his situation and acknowledges his peril to Wurm: “wenn ich den Major zwinge, [ist] mein Hals [in Gefahr]” (613). Ferdinand

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moreover has hatched a plan to escape his father’s powerful reach and to flee the land. The plan includes both Luise and her parents. “Schlag ein Uhr um Mitternacht wird ein Wagen hier anfahren. Ihr werft euch hinein. Wir fliehen” (622). Even though Ferdinand holds his father in check and, at least momentarily, has kept Luise and her parents out of prison and the torture chamber, Luise continues to fear the curse of his father (622). She fails to understand and accept what the president himself knows and fears: Ferdinand endangers his very existence, and he dare not harm them. Luise rejects his plan all the same. Without doubt, flight and freedom mean exile and anguish. In the choice he presents to Ferdinand — “Wählt Lady Milford oder Fluch und Enterbung” (625) — Wurm defines the cost of freedom for the two lovers. It is the price Ferdinand, but not Luise, is willing to pay. It is too frightening for her, such “Entsetzliche Freiheit” (625), that she cannot even begin to think it possible. Since that choice is for her incomprehensible, it is unacceptable, and she refuses to flee with Ferdinand. Instead, she contemplates suicide as the only alternative and the only freedom possible for her. She is prepared to join Ferdinand in a “third place” (654) — but the grave is not a genuine choice. It equates with desperation rather than emancipation. Convinced of her helpless situation, she surrenders to hopelessness and death, even though Ferdinand offered both help and hope in the concrete form of a real escape to a life together. Because she cannot conceive of freedom, it becomes something that cannot be realized. At her father’s urging, Luise rejects suicide and in a surprising reversal considers flight an option after all. Unaware of any contradiction, she now proposes an escape that she had previously rejected. “Doch hinweg aus dieser Gegend mein Vater — Weg von der Stadt . . . Weg, weg, weit weg von dem Ort . . . Weg, wenn es möglich ist —” (657). All her objections to flight with Ferdinand lose their force as the inconsistency of her reasoning becomes apparent. Drawing Ferdinand along with her, Luise cannot act as and fails to become an autonomous human being. Koopmann calls it “Scheitern aus Mangel an Selbstbestimmung” for both Luise and Ferdinand (1986, 300) and explains that self-determination is all but impossible in Kabale und Liebe (303).9 Neither Luise nor Ferdinand gains any personal autonomy. Because they cannot change, their world also is unalterable. No new order or possibility of existence presents itself; it has been rejected by Luise. The old order thus remains, but it is destructive rather than restorative, for it is disharmonious and unhealthy. Only Lady Milford escapes from the prison house of their world. The tragic end of the play does not leave much room for hope or encouragement. Ferdinand has murdered his beloved Luise and committed suicide. The bourgeois world represented by Miller is as bankrupt as


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that of the court. While the aristocratic order of things presents itself as utterly corrupt, the bourgeois system of values likewise offers no hope for a better future and fails to save Luise. There is no emancipation, neither by the power of reason or love. Reason is altogether absent, thus it cannot provide an answer or lead to freedom. Deceit, emotion, and intrigue prevail instead. Even love succumbs and is conquered by the harsh realities of the world of intrigue. Luise cannot envision something better, a better world, an alternative. The eternal order does not triumph either. Rather, there is disorder, punishment, and suffering for all, except the always overlooked and forgotten Lady Milford. No one is free at the end of the play — no one except Lady Milford. Everyone except Lady Milford is bound and held captive by class, social convention, religion, family obligation, and the like. Luise and Ferdinand, Miller and the president, find no release from their confinement. Only Lady Milford achieves and embodies any semblance of real freedom. Ferdinand gives this indication early in the second act when he meets and confronts her about his father’s plans for their marriage. Without fully realizing the import of his remark, he calls her “die freigeborene Tochter des freiesten Volks unter dem Himmel” (595). As the prince’s mistress, she may momentarily not be free, but she will emerge as the one character who sets herself free. The only one who ultimately takes control of her life, who acts, who determines her own fate and life is Lady Milford. She alone develops and models human freedom. While “Fluch und Enterbung” frightens and repels Luise, it is precisely that which Lady Milford chooses. Her decision to give up her life at the court, a life of luxury and privilege as the ruler’s mistress, resulted in real freedom, but in exchange for exile, for curse and disinheritance as it were. It is a decision in favor of freedom, an act of self-determination, which she presents as the viable alternative to Luise’s choices. Lady Milford acts heroically and virtuously, gives up everything, and leaves the court and its corruption. In doing so, she emancipates herself and exemplifies true autonomy. Lady Milford’s escape indicates that, contrary to Ferdinand’s and Luise’s conclusions, there was indeed a way out, that there were other options and alternatives to dependence, subservience, and captivity. Whereas the critical literature tends either to ignore her or mention her only in passing, Lady Milford is of extraordinary importance for Schiller’s drama. Although a secondary character, Lady Milford is generally more interesting, complex, and compelling than Luise. She deserves concentrated attention and consideration. One of the few scholars to recognize her significance is Fischer, who nevertheless mentions her only briefly. In his opinion, she is “eine der interessantesten Figuren des Stücks” (114). As Fischer reports, even Schiller himself acknowledged in his letters that Lady Milford’s character captured his interest more and more (114).

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Could that explain why Lady Milford overshadows Luise Miller as a more convincing and engaging character? As noted above, and as Fischer also realizes, Lady Milford is the only character to undergo any dramatic development (117). She stands apart from the rest of the characters and, it could even be said, above Luise, the main character, who is otherwise the focus of the action and attention. Lady Milford has many functions. She is the motive force behind the initial intrigue against the union of Ferdinand and Luise. She shows the contrast between the bourgeoisie and the court aristocracy. She provides the political criticism, exposing the injustice and crimes of the existing regime. What is more, Lady Milford offers the only instance of escape from the imprisonment of class, economics, woman’s subjugation to man (Luise remains subject to her father, and in all likelihood would have been to Ferdinand as well, had she married him), and the tyranny of absolutism. It is only natural that audiences and critics concentrate on Luise as the tragic heroine since she is the focal point of the love story. She is pitiful, but not especially interesting or sympathetic, at least not compared with Lady Milford. And Schiller invites comparison between the two characters. The initials of their names call attention to their connection: Luise Miller and Lady Milford. Certainly, the tradition and genre of the domestic tragedy would have us compare and contrast them. Typically, the vices of the aristocratic lady illumine and underscore the virtues of the bourgeois girl. Unfortunately, the tables are turned this time, for Lady Milford outshines Luise Miller. Although stage directions call for Luise to be “gelassen und edel ”(643), and Lady Milford calls Luise the “edle, große, göttliche Seele” (646), it is Lady Milford who actually fits that description and rises to that level. Luise and Ferdinand confirm Wurm’s assessment of their world that greatness of spirit and personal nobility are make-believe: “Was sollten auch die phantastischen Träumereien von Seelengröße und persönlichem Adel an einem Hof,” he asks (611). Lady Milford proves him wrong, however, for she demonstrates the possibility of “Seelengröße” and of “persönlichem Adel” in her own person. Instead of Luise, Lady Milford emerges as the virtuous heroine. Here she displays her true greatness. “Großmut allein sei jetzt meine Führerin!” she declares, “In deine Arme werfe ich mich, Tugend!” (647). She renounces her high position, leaves the duke, and embraces exile and poverty. There is something heroic in her decision and action, but the same cannot be said about Luise. She is tragic, not to mention pathetic, but hardly heroic. Of her own accord, she is helpless and immobilized, unable and unwilling to act. Auerbach puts his finger on the problem with Luise: “in general Luise is represented as so touchingly innocent, so filled with noble sentiments, that her essential narrowness and pusillanimity are not spontaneously recognizable” (443).


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In a response to Koopmann’s essay, “Kabale und Liebe als Drama der Aufklärung,” Wolfgang Wittkowski points out that the tragic hero of eighteenth-century drama made a decision against personal interest. “Darin besteht die sittliche Leistung,” he observes (1986, 305). But Luise’s decision against self-interest, that is, not to marry and flee with Ferdinand, does not accomplish anything — there is no moral benefit to be reaped through her sacrifice. To be sure, she wrote down the letter dictated to her by Wurm and so protected her father. But Ferdinand’s threat to expose his father exerted more power, and certainly would have protected them all from any further machinations by the president. Lady Milford, Martinson writes, “achieves moral dignity through enlightened self-determination” (97). Once again, she is the character who much more than Luise qualifies as a tragic hero in the eighteenth-century sense, for she makes a remarkable decision against personal interest that also results in a moral achievement. She rises from the depths, overcomes her own passions and desires, criticizes and rejects the prevailing political system and order, and renounces pleasure and privilege. Only Lady Milford overcomes her dependence and lack of freedom to exercise free will and become truly autonomous. She alone shows a way out of the captivity in which the other characters languish. In light of the hardships she knowingly embraces and will endure in order to redeem and emancipate herself, her decision requires the courage only a heroic character could muster. In effect, she steps into the void, loses a world, but saves her soul. Indeed, she gains everything she had forfeited as the prince’s kept woman: integrity, dignity, true nobility, autonomy, in a word: freedom. As Martinson points out, Schiller was typically concerned with the development of the individual into a balanced or harmonious whole. Throughout his life, he called for the union of mind and heart, of “reason and sense, the sublime and the beautiful, dignity and grace” (Martinson, 270).10 In Kabale und Liebe, however, there is no such harmony, there is only tension, to use Martinson’s juxtaposition. Here Robert Heitner’s insights prove useful. He considers Luise a divided character much like Karl Moor and Don Carlos. To extrapolate and apply Martinson’s concepts, she consequently lacks inner harmony. It is a highly suggestive paradigm, for it describes so many of Schiller’s dramatic characters. In a sense, they have been divided into two characters and are incomplete without their counterpart. Accordingly, Karl Moor and his brother Franz, Don Carlos and Marquis Posa, Elisabeth and Maria Stuart, Luise and Lady Milford complement each other. In need of harmony, their characters exist in tension with one another. Pugh attributes to Fischer the insight that Lady Milford shows us the future development of Schillerian tragedy (Pugh, 177). Indeed, she contributed to Schiller’s subsequent dramatic production in any number

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of ways. The intensity and drama in the confrontation between Luise and Lady Milford, for example, points toward the great clash of Maria and Elisabeth in Maria Stuart, one of the most profound and bestexecuted dramatic moments in all of Schiller’s work as a playwright. In particular, Lady Milford anticipates the great female character to come. Coincidentally, Schiller himself established a subtle link between Lady Milford and her dramatic descendent, Maria Stuart, in Kabale und Liebe. When she recounts her personal history to Ferdinand, Lady Milford mentions her father, “der für die schottische Maria ein Opfer war” (596). In Maria Stuart, the culmination of Schiller’s dramatic art, we recognize the same moral struggle and victory, inherent nobility, renunciation of self-interest, and personal autonomy that Schiller first revealed in Lady Milford.

Notes 1

Cf. Martinson’s note to this effect, p. 147 n. 23.

2

See especially Kluge whose edition of the play includes many of those reviews, pp. 1371–86.

3

References to Schiller’s works in this essay are to volume and page number in the Frankfurter Ausgabe, Werke und Briefe in zwölf Bänden, edited by Klaus Harro Hilzinger, et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1988–). Here: 2:622–23.

4

For further and more detailed discussions of the genre, see Guthke’s Das deutsche bürgerliche Trauerspiel (first published in 1972, latest revision 1994); Peter Szondi’s Die Theorie des bürgerlichen Trauerspiels im 18. Jahrhundert (1973); RolfPeter Janz’s “Schillers Kabale und Liebe als Bürgerliches Trauerspiel” (1976); and Cornelia Mönch’s Abschrecken oder Mitleiden: Das bürgerliche Trauerspiel im 18. Jahrhundert (1993). 5

I use the term “class” here for the German “Stand,” even though it is a concept that came into use after Schiller’s time.

6

Here Koopmann appears to have modified his stance somewhat since his 1986 essay in Verlorene Klassik where he declared: “das Drama liefert mit der Fabel einen Problemfall, nicht viele” (287).

7

Both Kaiser and Stephan have documented a hint of the erotic in the relationship between Miller and his daughter.

8

In this regard, cf. especially Ilse Graham’s “Passions and Possessions in Schiller’s ‘Kabale und Liebe’ ” in German Life and Letters, 6 (1952/53): 12–20.

9

According to Koopmann, it is a problem in Die Räuber and Don Carlos as well, but one that finds a solution in Maria Stuart, Jungfrau von Orleans, and Wallenstein.

10 On this subject, see also Schiller’s inaugural lecture, Was heißt und zu welchem Ende studiert man Universalgeschichte? of 1789.


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Works Cited1 Alt, Peter André. Schiller: Leben — Werk — Zeit. 2 vols. Munich: C. H. Beck, 2000. Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. 10th ed. Trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991. Böckmann, Paul. Formensprache: Studien zur Literaturästhetik und Dichtungsinterpretation. Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1966. Duncan, Bruce. “ ‘An Worte läßt sich trefflich glauben’: Die Sprache der Luise Millerin.” In Friedrich Schiller: Kunst: Humanität und Politik in der späten Aufkärung, ed. Wolfgang Wittkowski, 26–31. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1982. Fischer, Bernd. Kabale und Liebe: Skepsis und Melodrama in Schillers bürgerlichem Trauerspiel. Frankfurt am Main/Bern/New York/Paris: Peter Lang, 1987. Graham, Ilse Appelbaum. “Passions and Possessions in Schiller’s ‘Kabale und Liebe.’ ” German Life and Letters 6 (1952/3): 12–20. Guthke, Karl S. Das deutsche bürgerliche Trauerspiel. 5th ed. Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 1994. ———. “Kabale und Liebe. Evangelium der Liebe?” In Guthke, Schillers Dramen: Idealismus und Skepsis. Tübingen/Basel: Francke, 1994. Heitner, Robert R. “A Neglected Model for Kabale und Liebe.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 57 (1958): 73–85. Hiebel, Hans Helmut. “Missverstehen und Sprachlosigkeit im ‘bürgerlichen Trauerspiel.’ ” Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft 27 (1983): 124–53.

1

Although this study refers to and engages past and present scholarship of Kabale und Liebe and concludes with an extensive list of works cited, an annotated review of the critical literature far exceeds the scope of this essay. There is moreover no reason for me to repeat or duplicate the good work done by so many others. I refer readers to the following studies for a thorough review of pertinent research: Benno von Wiese’s chapter on the play in question in his study Friedrich Schiller from 1959; Helmut Koopman’s essay and useful bibliography in the 1998 SchillerHandbuch; Karl S. Guthke’s essay from 1979, updated for his 1994 book Schillers Dramen (esp. 102–7); Bernd Fischer’s monograph on Kabale und Liebe (esp. 36–74); Gerhard Kluge’s materials in the commentary section for the 1988 Deutscher Klassiker Verlag edition of the play; Steven D. Martinson’s (1996) and Lesley Sharpe’s (1991) chapters devoted to the play in their respective monographs on Schiller; and David Pugh’s indispensable contribution to Schiller studies (2000). While the scholars mentioned here have in their time each given a good overview and offered commentary and assessment of the past scholarship, Pugh is by far the best source for the most extensive, competent survey and account of the vast critical literature about Kabale und Liebe.

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Höbel, Wolfgang. “Natural Born Schiller.” Der Spiegel 17 (1996): 225–26. Janz, Rolf-Peter. “Schiller’s ‘Kabale und Liebe’ als bürgerliches Trauerspiel.” Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft 20 (1976): 208–28. Kaiser, Gerhard. “Krise der Familie: Eine Perspektive auf Lessings Emilia Galotti und Schillers Kabale und Liebe.” Recherches Germaniques 14 (1984): 7–22. Kieffer, Bruce. “Tragedy in the Logocentric World: Schiller’s Kabale und Liebe.” German Studies Review 5 (1982): 205–20. Kittler, Friedrich A. “Schiller: Archäologie der Psychologie des bürgerlichen Dramas.” Dichter, Mutter, Kind, 47–98. Munich: Fink, 1991. Kluge, Gerhard. “Kabale und Liebe.” In Friedrich Schiller Dramen I, vol. 2 of Friedrich Schiller: Werke und Briefe, 1329–1502. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1988. Koopmann, Helmut. “Kabale und Liebe als Drama der Aufklärung.” In Verlorene Klassik? Ein Symposium, ed. Wolfgang Wittkowski, 286–308. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1986. ———. “Kabale und Liebe.” In Schiller-Handbuch, ed. Helmut Koopmann, 365–78. Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner, 1998. ———. Drama der Aufklärung: Kommentar zu einer Epoche. Munich: Winkler, 1979. Korff, Hermann August. Geist der Goethezeit. Vol. 1. 8th ed. Leipzig: Koehler and Amelang, 1966. Malsch, Wilfried. “Der betrogene Deus iratus in Schillers Louise Millerin.” In Colloquium Philosophicum: Studien Joachim Ritter zum 60. Geburtstag, 157–208. Basel/Stuttgart: Schwabe, 1965. Martini, Fritz. “Schillers ‘Kabale und Liebe’: Bemerkungen zur Interpretation des Bürgerlichen Trauerspiels.” Der Deutschunterricht 4/5 (1952): 18–39. Martinson, Steven D. Harmonious Tensions: The Writings of Friedrich Schiller. Newark: U of Delaware P, 1996; London: Associated UP, 1996. Michelsen, Peter. “Ordnung und Eigensinn: Über Schillers ‘Kabale und Liebe.’ ” Jahrbuch des Freien Deutschen Hochstifts (1984): 198–222. Mönch, Cornelia. “ ‘Kabale und Liebe’ — Friedrich Schiller zwischen Konvention und Innovation — mit einem Exkurs zu ‘Die Räuber.’ ” In Mönch, Abschrecken oder Mitleiden: Das deutsche bürgerliche Trauerspiel im 18. Jahrhundert: Versuch einer Typologie, 331–40. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993. Müller, Joachim. “Schillers Kabale und Liebe als Höhepunkt seines Jugendwerkes.” In Müller, Wirklichkeit und Klassik: Beiträge zur deutschen Literaturgeschichte von Lessing bis Heine, 116–48. Berlin: Verlag der Nationen, 1955. Müller-Seidel, Walter. “Das stumme Drama der Luise Millerin.” Goethe 17 (1955): 91–103. Pape, Walter. “ ‘Ein merkwürdiges Beispiel produktiver Kritik’: Schillers Kabale und Liebe und das zeitgenössische Publikum.” Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 107 (1988): 190–211.


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Pilling, Claudia. “Linguistische Poetik und literaturwissenschaftliche Linguistik? Anmerkungen zu Schillers ‘Kabale und Liebe.’ ” In Sprachspiel und Bedeutung, ed. Susanne Beckmann, Peter-Paul König, and Georg Wolf, 439–49. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2000. Pugh, David. Schiller’s Early Dramas: A Critical History. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2000. Sharpe, Lesley. Friedrich Schiller: Drama, Thought, and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. Stephan, Inge. “ ‘So ist die Tugend ein Gespenst’: Frauenbild und Tugendbegriff bei Lessing und Schiller.” In Lessing und die Toleranz, ed. Peter Freimark, Franklin Kopitsch, and Helga Slessarev, 357–72. Munich: text und kritik, 1986. Strich, Fritz. Schiller: Sein Leben und sein Werk. Leipzig: Tempel-Klassiker, 1912. Szondi, Peter. Die Theorie des bürgerlichen Trauerspiels im 18. Jahrhundert. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973. Weitbrecht, Carl. Schiller in seinen Dramen. Stuttgart: Fromann, 1897. Wiese, Benno von. Friedrich Schiller. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1963. Wittkowski, Wolfgang, ed. Verlorene Klassik? Ein Symposium. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1986.

Great Emotions — Great Criminals?: Schiller’s Don Carlos Rolf-Peter Janz

I

N HIS LETTER OF JUNE 7, 1784 to the Mannheim stage director Baron Wolfgang Heribert von Dalberg, and upon having already written Die Räuber, Fiesco, and Kabale und Liebe, Schiller promised a new work, not a political work (“ein politisches Stük”) but, instead, a family portrait, “ein Familiengemählde in einem fürstlichen Hauße.”1 That sounds harmless, and it was supposed to be. Not only does Schiller explicitly deny the politically explosive material of his Carlos drama for tactical reasons; even the innocent designation “Familiengemälde” does not indicate what will happen later on within the royal family. The sixty-year-old Philip of Spain, a political haggler (“politische[r] Schacher”; Müller, 225), and the most powerful man in the old and new world, marries the young French princess Elisabeth of Valois. Because she loves Philip’s son and is even promised to him, it costs Philip his son’s love. That means he must fear Carlos in two ways: first, as a rival in winning Elisabeth’s love and, second, as his successor, who, he believes, could overthrow him at anytime, as he himself had done to his own father. The morally austere Philip, who spies jealously (“mit hundert Augen”) on his faithful wife’s relationship with Carlos, has an affair with the countess Eboli. Eboli desires Carlos and confesses her love for him, but is rejected and therefore does everything she can to take revenge on Carlos and Elisabeth. All of this lies hidden under the term “Familiengemälde.” Private conflicts, the fabric from which the domestic tragedies have been woven since Lessing’s Miss Sara Sampson and Emilia Galotti, suddenly achieve tremendous significance since they do not take place in a tiny principality but at the Spanish court. Schiller’s ingenious exposition, which stages the private family history and affairs of the state (the preservation of Spanish authority over Flanders, the prosecution of high treason, the Inquisition, etc.) does not create a drama of prohibited love followed by a political drama. Instead, he is much more successful in tying the two themes together, for he writes the genre of domestic tragedy into the fabric of the tragédie classique. The bürgerliches Trauerspiel shows sovereigns in the act of persecuting innocent daughters of middle-class households and selling young men to serve as

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soldiers in foreign countries. On the other hand, the characters in Schiller’s Carlos drama do what they do to each other not because they are immoral or possess other character flaws, but because they are, at one and the same time, representatives and victims of a political system that deforms them and of a state terrorism that does not allow for humanity. Philip’s father confessor, the “Großinquisitor,” complains to his ally Alba: “Schwer zu unterscheiden, / Noch schwerer zu ergründen sind die Menschen” (ll. 1966–67).2 The religious and military arm of this supervising state fears loss of influence at the court. They want to know what the people think and feel privately in order to control them better, ostensibly in order to consolidate the power of the king. What also motivates the playwright Friedrich Schiller is to fully fathom the human being. It is precisely the play’s historical material that provides him with plenty of opportunity to set his unbridled anthropological curiosity into motion. What happens to people when they are exposed to extreme situations? What does someone like Carlos think or feel, someone who, when he finally sees his father for the first time at the age of seven, sees him signing four death sentences, someone who is flogged in public (“auf Sklavenart”; l. 252) on his father’s orders, someone who is permitted to talk to Elisabeth only under the observation of her jailer (l. 653) since she is his surrogate mother? In his early dramas Schiller was interested above all in the cryptic, sinister sides of his characters. Psychopathological deviations fascinate him more than conventional behavior. As a result, his figures are granted hardly any rest. That is the reason why Carlos, Posa, and Countess Eboli are in a state of constant rage, out of anger, pain and hatred, such that their nerves are on the verge of tearing apart (“reißen”; l. 752). Their jealousy turns into vindictiveness. Although they assure each other that great souls shall suffer “quietly” (l. 613), they hardly miss an opportunity for the exaltation of love, and at times fall on their knees and burst into tears. Schiller’s Don Carlos provides for a theater of great emotions. His figures fall quickly from one state of emergency into the other. Although called for, selfdiscipline is rarely accomplished. If already at the beginning Don Carlos confesses to Marquis Posa his scandalous love for Elisabeth, he knows already that madness or the scaffold (“Wahnsinn oder Blutgerüst”) lies ahead of him — and, yet, he still loves her. When he stands face to face with Elisabeth for the first time, he confesses: “Man reiße mich von hier aufs Blutgerüste! Ein Augenblick, gelebt im Paradiese, Wird nicht zu teuer mit dem Tod gebüßt.” (ll. 638–40) Where strong passions are acted out or affirmed in an excessive way, great expressions, or performances of self-control are necessary. “O Karl! Wie

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groß wird unsre Tugend, / Wenn unser Herz bei ihrer Übung bricht!” (ll. 766–67). With such suggestive questions as these, Elisabeth wants to dissuade Don Carlos from his love for her. Up to act 5 it is clear that Carlos does not want to hear about such exercises in the regulation of affects. In situations where the power of language is insufficient to persuade the audience of the extraordinary emotions of his figures, Schiller employs the play of silence, as he had already done in Die Räuber and Kabale und Liebe. The stage directions require of the characters incessant mini-dramas enacted by bodily gestures and expressions. We observe Carlos gripped by sudden paralysis (“von einer plötzlichen Erstarrung ergriffen”; act 2, scene 4), or see him fling himself down before Philip and express great emotional turmoil (“im Ausdruck der höchsten Empfindung”; act 2, scene 2). Eboli, when she confesses her misdemeanor to the queen, acts like a maniac (“drückt [sie] ihr glühendes Gesicht auf den Boden” and “fährt wie eine Rasende in die Höhe”; act 4, scene 19). The pathos of speeches, exaggerated gestures, and body language — all of these reveal very clearly how closely Schiller’s modern tragedy approached the opera, as he had already done with his Räuber drama. Even there he did not envision tempered stages of emotion. Precisely the high pitch of the tragedy explains that from time to time the sentences begin to roar, as happens elsewhere in Schiller’s works, for instance at the end of Die Braut von Messina: “Das Leben ist der Gütern höchstes nicht, / Der Übel größtes aber ist die Schuld” (ll. 2838–39; 5: 384). There is no doubt that in this piece one can hear the organ-like pathos that Schiller’s critics take for his most characteristic imprint, that cadence that makes his works prone to parody (see Janz 189–201). Tears have an uncanny function in Schiller’s works. Whoever is crying in Don Carlos — and many tears are shed in this piece — usually admits to it. At the time of Empfindsamkeit, which runs parallel to the Enlightenment, tears serve as hallmarks of true and honest humanity. Whoever cries only claims one’s own natural right to feel, even — and especially — in public. It is a right that Storm-and-Stress heroes employ extensively. In order to show that even the despot possesses human traits — and that includes being deserving of compassion — Schiller cannot apply a more effective stage device than to let him cry: “Der König hat geweint” (act 4, scene 13). That is the sensation at Philip’s court — an entirely unexpected stirring of emotion that touched a later reader of Don Carlos, Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kröger, enormously. Murderers, cunning intriguers, betrayers, and conspirators are selfevident in Storm-and-Stress drama.3 Whether Franz Moor, Spiegelberg, or Fiesco — Schiller appreciated and served generously the desire to behold criminal acts. In his theoretical essays of the 1790s concerning the sublime and tragedy, he was engaged intensively with the great criminals of literature, and expressed his admiration for Shakespeare’s Richard III,

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whose malevolence is unsurpassed in dramatic literature. What distinguishes Shakespeare’s character in particular is the colossal strength of will that leads him to commit his terrible deeds unimpeded and consistently. None of the characters in Don Carlos can compare to Richard III. When considering the offenders who step onto the stage, the first places go to Alba, Domingo, and the princess Eboli and, finally, to Philip, the great inquisitor, and Posa. Carlos must here withdraw, for even if he was willing to support the rebellion of the Netherlands against the imperial power of the king, he has too much in common with a Hamlet, as Schiller himself noted, to consider him capable of activities against his father’s regime. He remains caught in his unhappy love for Elisabeth and acts as a tool for the revolt in Flanders as planned by Marquis Posa. Even though Philip is under the impression that his son could become dangerous to him politically, he has good reasons to trust Carlos’s assurances of faithfulness: “Ich bin nicht schlimm, mein Vater — heißes Blut ist meine Bosheit, mein Verbrechen Jugend. Schlimm bin ich nicht, schlimm wahrlich nicht — wenn auch Oft wilde Wallungen mein Herz verklagen, Mein Herz ist gut —” (ll. 1052–56) Alba and Domingo are presented as ambitious courtiers who are brought into the center of power and do everything they can, ostensibly for the sake of the monarchy, but in reality to preserve their own influence, albeit in vain. They are creatures of the court, who serve the king as long as he needs them. In short, they are agents of the Inquisition and the army upon which Philip’s despotic regime is based. Their conspiracy against the queen, and against Carlos and Posa, is fearsome and their clever intrigues, even though they seem overly entangled, demand respect even from an audience with less criminal sagacity. The historian Schiller was well aware that security services established by the army and the Church for the purpose of the Inquisition could become entities unto themselves, thus threatening to become a state within the state. Schiller brings this insight to bear in his drama. When Philip wants to see evidence of Alba’s accusation that Carlos and the queen are planning a conspiracy, a decision is inevitable. Should the queen and Carlos be innocent, the king threatens to sentence the accuser to death. At the risk of his own life, Alba stands ready to defend his accusation to the death. But the king rejects the sacrifice. “[. . .] Und was ist Euch das Leben? — Königliches Blut Geb ich dem Rasenden nicht preis, der nichts


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Zu hoffen hat, als ein geringes Dasein Erhaben aufzugeben — Euer Opfer Verwerf ich. Geht — geht, und im Audienzsaal Erwartet meine weiteren Befehle.” (ll. 2802–8) The king knows what people are like. The cynic of power on the throne sees that Alba’s sacrifice is not worth its price. Here is the queen’s life, there the subordinate’s life for the monarchy, or so Alba would have us believe. According to the sovereign, Alba would not sacrifice his person for the salvation of the monarchy, but instead in order to himself be the object of glorification. In this game of courtly intrigue, Schiller assigns a special role to princess Eboli. She is led to participate in Alba’s and Domingo’s conspiracy, steals letters that belong to the queen, and reveals to her conspirators what Carlos had told her in a fit of credulity. Because her love has been refused, she takes revenge on Carlos and Elisabeth. When she confesses her love to Carlos, it becomes clear that she too is a victim of courtly behavior. The culture of courtly etiquette creates an atmosphere of ambiguity for everyone, which is manipulated by the king’s surveillance network in order to safeguard his power. Of course, Carlos cannot admit his feelings for Elisabeth in public. For her part, she can take personally “die versteckten Liebesäußerungen des Infanten, die der Königin gelten, . . .”4 Given the courteously encrypted invitation, and blinded by passion, Carlos presumes a rendezvous with the queen. Eboli also becomes his deadly enemy because the rules of conduct at the court do not allow for clarification of miscommunication. She is at the same time the perpetrator and victim of the machinery of power. With the figure of Philip Schiller invents a despot that the Storm and Stress could have have imagined any more splendidly. It seems that he oversees and rules not only the court, his subordinates, and the conquered countries, but also his family members. His regime elevates terror to an art of the state (l. 1178) and as a means of control over his family. However, Schiller has mastered the work of the drama too well not to know that in this case a mixed character (“gemischter Charakter”) needs to take the stage. He draws human traits and human weaknesses into the terrifying image of the monarch. Philip is lonely, but he is also jealous, and miserably so. By having him cry, Schiller has the king suffer weakness. In this way, the dramatist again contributes to the program of educating princes through the transmission of middle-class values. According to this program, princes too can be enlightened; they should not be immune to the stirrings of the heart. If the monarch has been impressed with Marquis Posa for some time already, it is because Posa, an outsider with unheard-of ideas, in contrast to Alba and Domingo, does not expect to gain any benefit from his acquaintance with Philip.

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Philip proves himself to be more than the absolute power of a sovereign when he allows Posa to explain to him his ideals of human dignity and freedom. Nevertheless, when Philip learns about Posa’s plan to liberate the Netherlands, his mercy reaches its limits. Even though he feels offended by Posa’s seeming disdain and his moral superiority over the dictator, the sovereign holds that Posa’s death is justified in spite of the love he feels for him. As remarkable as this is, and at precisely the point at which the political opponent is eliminated and Carlos falls to his knees beside Posa’s corpse, the drama shows the monarch losing consciousness (act 5, scene 5). The ruler is no longer in control of his senses. Where words prove to be insufficient to express the crisis that has befallen the despot, Schiller uses once again his proven theatrical talent to stage a spectacular physical breakdown. Eventually it becomes clear that the sovereign, who regulates all the means of enforcement, is himself subject to constraints that his nature cannot overcome. His body is out of control. This development foreshadows the penultimate scene. The great inquisitor talks to Philip like a disobedient student, instructing him that the power of the state is held by the Church. Remorsefully, Philip accepts the blame and leaves his son in the hands of the Inquisition. Thus, the terrifying image of the despot is overshadowed by that of the inquisitor. In the further course of the drama, Schiller shifts the focus of attention to Marquis Posa, who now becomes the main hero. This is all the more appealing insofar as Posa was designed from the start to be a more complex and hence dramatically more interesting figure. From the time of the play’s première up to the present, scholars have not been able to agree about Posa. Even Schiller considered him to be dubious as he continued to think about him in his Briefe über Don Carlos (published in 1788 in Wieland’s Teutsche Merkur). For a long time it was assumed that Schiller had identified with Posa and dealt with him later on in his Carlos letters. Today, Schiller scholars view the matter differently. They are right to stress Posa’s problematic personality traits, which are certainly hard to ignore in the drama. But no one seems to disagree about one thing: the figure of Posa takes the stage as an idealistic schemer, an idealist who takes freedom and human dignity seriously. He is a visionary who promotes a better state and supports the Netherlands against Spanish hegemony. In the king’s view, it is a clear case of high treason. Posa’s strength of will and his willingness to take risks in order to carry out this audacious undertaking lend this hero greatness. In this respect at least he resembles Count Fiesco or even the scoundrel Wurm of Kabale und Liebe, of whom Luise Millerin astutely says: “Eine vollkommene Büberei ist auch eine Vollkommenheit” (2: 625). Secondly, what predestines him to be a sublime hero is his willingness to sacrifice his life for Don Carlos after his political plans have failed. Or is he not such a hero? Whatever the


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case, Schiller chooses as unsuspicious a person as the queen to outmaneuver Posa. “Sie stürzten sich in diese Tat, die Sie Erhaben nennen. Leugnen Sie nur nicht. Ich kenne Sie, Sie haben längst darnach Gedürstet — Mögen tausend Herzen brechen, Was kümmert Sies, wenn sich Ihr Stolz nur weidet. O, jetzt — jetzt lern ich Sie verstehn! Sie haben Nur um Bewunderung gebuhlt.” (ll. 4380–86) The man who wishes to convince Philip that he loves humanity (“die Menschheit liebt”) has to hear from Elisabeth that he cares only about his own glorification. It is not coincidental that he should later call himself a “hazadeur” who played for all or nothing. The means of power that he thought to master is out of his control. Only when his enthusiasm fades does he admit that he has failed morally. In fact, he had deceived his friend Carlos by not informing him about his temporary alliance with the king. The well-intended education of Carlos turns out in practice to be a form of manipulation. Posa wants Carlos in his hands in order to protect him against rash deeds, with the accompanying fatal consequences. But why is it necessary for this idealist to be a villain? Posa’s career provides a didactic example of how to deal with abstract principles of virtue and happiness, which, because they are expected to be valid for everyone, can lead to manipulating individuals just as much as any self-serving despot. According to Schiller’s devastating assessment in the Briefe über Don Carlos, Posa’s enthusiasm for freedom leads him to do violence to the freedom of others and to a spirit of secrecy and tyranny (“Gewalttätigkeit gegen fremde Freiheit”; “Geiste der Heimlichkeit und der Herrschsucht”; 3:465). His excitement for the greater good, human love on a grand scale, neglects the single individual. Love of an ideal (“Liebe zu einem Ideal”) is something different than love for a real object (“Liebe zu einem wirklichen Gegenstande”), that is, for a person (3:463). Love for an ideal imperils the individual human being. Here, Posa endangers Don Carlos, above all when he tries to realize his ideal conceptions in a fanatical and absolute manner. This is precisely Posa’s cardinal mistake. In the drama, as well as in the Briefe, it is called Schwärmerei, enthusiasm or adulation. But Posa’s Schwärmerei is as hazardous for him as for Carlos, a fact that Schiller addresses critically in the Briefe. Both Posa’s and Carlos’s destruction is attributable to the fact that Posa is overly concerned with his ideal of virtue and too little concerned about his friend (3:463–64). If one gets carried away by one’s visions, as is the case with Posa, one elevates oneself to the realm of general abstractions and thereby rejects, unpardonably, “natural, practical feeling” (“natürliches praktisches Gefühl”; 3:465).

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To turn freedom into the ultimate goal to be achieved by emotion leads to a loss of reality. Posa strays into despotism (3:466). With that, he resembles the despot Philip, the very person whom he is trying to fight. Nonetheless, Schiller has Philip attain a respectable resolution of the conflict; first, by having Philip hand his political legacy over to Carlos and the queen, for it is in safe hands with them; and, second, by having Posa’s antagonist triumph, namely, the great inquisitor, who stands behind the scenes, as a fossilized, old blind man and a terrifying image of cold fanaticism for whom decomposition is preferable to freedom (l. 5277). Schiller could not have accessed the historical insight that evil can also be trivial. The officially commissioned terrorist walks over dead bodies. Moreover, he is proud of his perfect bookkeeping. On the other hand, Posa, the committed and credible advocate of human rights, certainly has the audience’s sympathy. Still, his most resolute and most effective rehabilitation consists in his sacrifice for Carlos. The way he gives his life bestows the highest value to the person to whom he is giving it, as well as to the goals he stands for. This is what the logic of sacrifice stipulates. The queen knows about it and advises Carlos as follows: “er hat sich geopfert Für Sie! Mit seinem teuern Leben Hat er das Ihrige erkauft. — Und dieses Blut Wär einem Hirngespinst geflossen?” (ll. 5287–90) If Posa sacrifices his life, then Carlos’s life must be more than just a fabrication. Posa’s self-sacrifice restores his friendship with Carlos, whom he once betrayed, and the dignity of his political goals. However, in sacrificing his life for Carlos, does not Posa prove his own greatness as well? I cannot rule out this possibility. Posa is one of Schiller’s most enigmatic characters. With all his contradictions, he is constructed in such a way that he cannot be reduced to one pattern of behavior or one motive. Even the readily employed opposition of passion and reason that is characteristic of the dramatic heroes of Schiller’s later works Die Jungfrau von Orleans, Maria Stuart, and Wallenstein cannot account completely for the figure of Marquis Posa. Schiller’s anthropological experiment of the theater ranges from domestic dramas of love to opera-like tragedies that led to the creation of another mixed character (Marquis Posa) who is everything at once: intellectual and enlightener, advocator of human rights, a bundle of emotions and an enthusiast, a courtier that knows all the tricks of courtly behavior. He is yet another individual who acts on his own, a Selbsthelfer from the archive of Storm and Stress drama. But this must mean that we are far from exhausting the significance of the marquis — and Schiller’s work. Translated by Steven D. Martinson


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Notes 1

References to Schiller’s works in this essay are to the Frankfurter Ausgabe, Werke und Briefe in zwölf Bänden, edited by Klaus Harro Hilzinger, et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1988–). References are parenthetical within the text by volume and page number. Here: 3:1075.

2

Whether an “Aufhebung” of the domestic tragedy takes place in this high tragedy, as Müller assumes (219–20), is open for debate. 3 Concerning Schiller’s lifelong interest in betrayal, the right of resistance, and Tyrannenmord, see Müller-Seidel, 422–46. 4

Schiller’s letter to Reinwald of April 14, 1783.

Works Cited Janz, Rolf-Peter. “Schiller-Parodien.” In Schiller heute, ed. Helmut Koopmann, 189–201. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1996. Müller, Klaus-Detlef. “Die Aufhebung des bürgerlichen Trauerspiels in Schillers Don Carlos.” In Friedrich Schiller: Angebot und Diskurs: Zugänge/ Dichtung/ Zeitgenossenschaft, ed. Helmut Brandt, 218–34. Berlin/Weimar: Aufbau, 1987. Müller-Seidel, Walter. “Verschwörungen und Rebellionen in Schillers Dramen.” In Schiller und die höfische Welt, ed. Achim Aurnhammer, Klaus Manger, and Friedrich Strack, 422–46. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1990. Schings, Hans-Jürgen. Die Brüder des Marquis Posa: Schiller und der Geheimbund der Illuminaten. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1996.

Concerning Aesthetic Education Lesley Sharpe

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ÄSTHETISCHE ERZIEHUNG des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen (known as the Ästhetische Briefe [On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, or the Aesthetic Letters, 1795]) may be the work by which Friedrich Schiller is best known outside Germany. Its influence has been enormous, and not just in the field of aesthetics but also in political and psychological theory. It expresses a grand vision of human potentialities that has inspired and provoked its readers, while its dazzling moments of insight into the problems of cultural development, into the nature of aesthetic experience, and into the qualities of art objects have given impetus to further reflection and sparked off fruitful debates. The analysis of the effects of the division of labor, the elaboration of the notion of art as play, the notion of Schein or aesthetic semblance, the concept of the aesthetic state — all of these ideas have had an eventful afterlife, though often detached from the matrix of Schiller’s argument.1 Yet despite their enormous impact and continuing resonance in cultural debates, the Ästhetische Briefe remain difficult to interpret, and many bones of critical contention remain. Does Schiller succeed in bringing his treatise to a satisfactory conclusion in the concept of the aesthetic state and how does such a state relate to the problem of political renewal identified in the early letters? Why does Schiller promise his readers a treatment of “energetic” as well as “melting” beauty but fail to deliver it? Is aesthetic education the means or the end of progress? Does the work represent the quintessence of Schiller’s thought on aesthetics, or is it, as I shall argue, only one position in his continuing intellectual odyssey? The Ästhetische Briefe are the culmination of Schiller’s engagement with the nature of the beautiful and with the role of art and aesthetic experience in human development and society. These issues had long been in his mind. As early as 1784 he gave a lecture to the Kurpfälzische Deutsche Gesellschaft which was published under the title Was kann eine gute stehende Schaubühne eigentlich wirken? (What Effect Can a Good Repertory Theater Have?, 1784).2 Much of the answer Schiller offers reiterates familiar defenses of the theater. At the end of the essay, however, he claims that the theater affords us experience that restores our inner equilibrium and, in so doing, our harmony with our fellow human beings. This effect of BER DIE

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psychological healing through aesthetic experience is particularly beneficial, Schiller claims, to people in the modern world whose lives are dominated by intense but restricted use of one part of themselves. This is ultimately a moral effect of theater, but an indirect one. After completing his fourth play, Don Carlos, in 1787, Schiller temporarily gave up writing plays (though he toyed with a number of plans), profoundly disturbed by the compositional difficulties Don Carlos had given him and unsure of his ability to complete a play that would satisfy him. It was not until 1797 that he began concentrated work on the great three-part drama Wallenstein, completed in 1799. In the intervening period he pondered long and hard on the nature of drama as a genre and attempted systematically to use and adapt aspects of Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy as a basis on which to argue for the profound link between morality and aesthetics and thus for the fundamental importance of art to what it is to be human. That he had the opportunity to spend some years on these matters was the result of a great personal misfortune: the loss of his health. His illness was a bitter blow at a time when, after so many years of overwork and financial uncertainty, he was beginning to occupy a more secure and respectable place in the world. In 1789 he was appointed to a Chair of History at the University of Jena on the strength of his historical writings, chiefly his Geschichte des Abfalls der vereinigten Niederlande von der spanischen Regierung (History of the Revolt of the Spanish Netherlands, 1788),3 and in 1790 he married Charlotte von Lengefeld, a member of the nobility but by no means wealthy. The severe bronchial illness of 1791 that nearly cost him his life left him a permanent invalid and burdened with financial worries. Help came, however, from an unexpected quarter. In the summer of 1791 the German-Danish poet Jens Baggesen (1764–1826) first heard an erroneous report that Schiller was dead, on the strength of which he organized a ceremony in his memory. Learning of his mistake but also of the poet’s straitened financial circumstances, he appealed to two Danish noblemen, Prince Friedrich Christian von Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg and Count Ernst Heinrich von Schimmelmann, who responded by granting Schiller a threeyear pension that allowed him to recover and put aside some of the journalistic activities with which he had planned to relieve the financial pressure. Instead, he was able to engage in a serious study of Kant and of the aesthetic problems that he felt stood in the way of his fulfilling his calling as a poet. The Ästhetische Briefe grew out of the letters (known as the Augustenburg letters) he wrote to the Prince of Augustenburg as a tribute to his generosity.4

Beauty and Freedom From his earliest days as a creative writer Schiller had been preoccupied with the limits and exercise of human freedom. His experience of being

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sent against his own and his parents’ wishes to the Ducal Military Academy in Stuttgart and Duke Karl Eugen’s own intervention to put a stop to his literary ambitions lent intensity to that preoccupation. Personal circumstances were compounded by his observation at close quarters of the workings of princely absolutism and by his interest in theories of the state. As a tragedian, he was fascinated by the ways in which individuals reach and justify their moral decisions. The central question asked by the Ästhetische Briefe is: How can art contribute to the realization of true human freedom? Under the umbrella of that large question are the further questions: How does the aesthetic realm relate to the moral? What is the significance of art as a human activity? Engagement with Kant’s philosophy gave Schiller a framework and certain key ideas he could adapt to attempt to answer these questions. Furthermore, as an artist himself, he felt particularly well placed to offer insights that would satisfy poets as well as philosophers. That Schiller should study and be forced to take account of Kant was inevitable. His own tendency of mind, evident long before the 1790s, was to think in dualisms. Kant’s system discriminates between the phenomenal and noumenal worlds. As natural beings we belong to the former, of which we have knowledge through our organs of perception and the faculty of our understanding. The noumenal world is the ideal realm, the realm of the Absolute, which cannot be known through the senses or understanding and of which we can have no direct experience. It can be accessed only through the exercise of pure reason. As moral beings, we participate in the noumenal realm by virtue of our ability to act upon the moral law within us. Freedom for Kant is to obey the moral law. The Kantian dualism is adopted by Schiller in all his major aesthetic writings, but he tends to interpret it experientially as the conflict between the pull of earthly, material existence and the claims of the ideal realm, which includes the moral law. What is for Kant a set of necessary distinctions to make the investigation of knowledge possible becomes for Schiller a dualism symptomatic of the problem of the human condition. At the same time, Schiller always felt a strong pull from theories of human wholeness, where human beings are not caught in a battle between two realms but can rediscover harmony of thought and feeling. The challenge facing him in his major aesthetic writings was that of adapting Kant’s system to accommodate the possibility of harmony between the material and intelligible worlds, though arguably he was setting himself an impossible task. Schiller’s starting point in his study of Kant was the third and last of his three great critiques, the Critique of Judgment (1790). Kant separated the aesthetic response from the good and the agreeable and thus guaranteed it its own autonomous realm. While recognizing that judgments of taste are subjective, Kant asked whether our judgments on the beautiful and the sublime have more than empirical and subjective validity. He came to the conclusion that it is in the nature of these judgments to claim

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universal assent. He described our response to the beautiful as “interesseloses Wohlgefallen” (disinterested pleasure), thus pointing to the independence of aesthetic pleasure from moral judgment, which for Kant cannot be disinterested. Schiller was not concerned with a transcendental theory of the possibility of knowledge but with the place of art as an expression of full humanity. He took up Kant’s suggestion that art is a symbol of the moral (Critique of Judgment, §59) by trying to find in art an expression of autonomy, an analogy between the autonomy of art and the autonomy of the moral individual, so that in this way the qualities of beauty and morality could be linked. For if beauty is in some way a symbol of the nature and possibility of moral self-determination, then the fundamental importance of beauty and art to humanity is established, yet in such a way that it is not made subordinate to the moral. Schiller held firmly to the view that art has no direct moral purpose. As he says in the twenty-first Letter, “die Schönheit gibt schlechterdings kein einzelnes Resultat weder für den Verstand noch für den Willen.”5 But art, if it is to be a vital human activity, must be capable of touching our moral lives through its restorative and integrating effect. Kant was by no means the only philosophical influence on the Ästhetische Briefe, but he was surely the single most important one. Indeed, Schiller’s usual eclecticism is conspicuous in the work: among other prominent influences one should name Rousseau, Fichte, Shaftesbury, Karl Philipp Moritz, Goethe, Herder, and Karl Leonhard Reinhold, a Jena philosopher and colleague of Schiller’s whose extensions of Kantian thought modified Schiller’s reception of Kant.

The Analysis of the Age While Schiller’s inner deliberations on aesthetics were leading up to the composition of the Ästhetische Briefe, external circumstances played their part in the birth of the work. German intellectuals were profoundly disturbed by the course taken by the French Revolution. The American Revolution had been a source of inspiration and hope to Germans who looked for reform in their own states. It provided an example of how men could establish a new form of government based on principles of reason and a belief in inalienable rights. The beginnings of revolution in France were greeted by many with cautious optimism, but the Jacobin seizure of power in 1792 and the ensuing Reign of Terror, in particular the execution of the king in 1793, caused widespread repugnance in the German states. This background gave Schiller’s ideas on the role of art in society and politics particular relevance and urgency. What was being played out in France, he believed, was the failure of Enlightenment. As he wrote in the letters to his patron: “Der Moment war der günstigste, aber er fand eine verderbte


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Generation, die ihn nicht wert war und und weder zu würdigen noch zu benutzen wußte” (Letter of July 13, 1793; 8:501). Where the Enlightenment had failed was not in the education of the mind and in the increase of knowledge but in the cultivation of the heart, of sensibility. The way to the head must be opened through the heart, Schiller argued. Only then can a people be in a position to choose aright and create and carry through a state based on reason and moral action. By comparison with his first attempt at his subject in the Augustenburg letters, Schiller’s allusions to contemporary events in the Ästhetische Briefe are guarded. This may be because he did not want his ideal of art to seem passé as soon as events in France were no longer of consuming interest. It may also be that he did not want to contradict his own stated policy as editor of Die Horen (The Horae, 1795–97), the journal in which the work originally appeared in three installments, namely that of banning from the journal material bearing directly on contemporary political developments. In establishing the Horen project, Schiller aimed, with characteristic idealism, to bring readers and contributors together in an enterprise that would rise above sectional interests. Part of the fascination of the Ästhetische Briefe lies in the fact that Schiller gives a non-political answer to a burning political question — how is reform of the state possible? — and does so on the strength of acute political analysis. Indeed the answer he gives to the question carries weight only because it rests on such a perceptive account of contemporary political culture. But it is clear that if the French Revolution had not crystallized the problem of political culture and the possibility of change, Schiller’s analysis of the age would have been just as valid and impressive. The speculative historical scheme (used, for example, by Rousseau and Kant) of postulating a primal state of unity followed by a state of dividedness — the inevitable result of the increased specialization and sophistication of society — that will in turn be overcome in a third and final stage is adopted and adapted by Schiller: “Die Kultur selbst war es, welche der neueren Menschheit diese Wunde schlug” (8:572).6 But in contrast to Rousseau, Schiller does not speculate on humanity’s presocial condition. Rather, he presents a view of early human society that is reminiscent of Hobbes’s, in which human beings struggle for existence amid coercion. The state provides some kind of framework in which society can exist, a society in which through increased specialization human beings play an increasingly limited and fragmented role and in which the balance of their development is lost. The contrast Schiller draws is not that between man in a state of nature and civilized man but that of contemporary human beings and the ancient Athenians. For Schiller the ancient world at its height still allowed the development of the balanced individual. Although the advance of civilization has inflicted wounds on society and on the individual, the role of art is to help heal those wounds and make possible a renewal of the social and

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political order. Unlike Kant he does not see the way forward in the practice of reason alone. For what he sees around him is not unreason, not an inability on the part of sophisticated human beings to see the right but an inability or unwillingness to act in accordance with it. The quotation from Rousseau’s novel Julie ou La nouvelle Heloïse (Julie or The New Heloise) that served as a motto for the first publication of the treatise is thus apt: Si c’est la raison qui fait l’homme, c’est le sentiment qui le conduit. Schiller then analyzes the problem as how to open up a way to the heart among those whose reason has been overdeveloped but in limited directions. Thus, the proper cultivation of feeling is the pressing task of the age. It is only by showing an intense consciousness of the problems of the age that Schiller feels he can gain credence for his fascinating and provocative claim in Letter 2 that it is only through beauty that man makes his way to freedom. Though the claims of beauty may be far from modern people’s interests and priorities, they are not far from their actual needs, namely the cultivation of the heart. The problem facing modern societies is how to progress from the Naturstaat, the state based on coercion and subjugation, to the Vernunftstaat, the state governed by the exercise of reason. Human beings find themselves in a state in which they have surrendered their individual liberty and have to accept the dominance of force. How can human beings transform this kind of state, with which they are bound to be dissatisfied, into a state based on reason and reason’s laws, a state that can lay claim to the assent of its citizens? For human beings must continue to exist in any period of change. The state cannot just be dispensed with, rather it must be transformed while safeguarding something of the life of its citizens: “das lebendige Uhrwerk des Staats muss gebessert werden, indem es schlägt” (8:563). What is needed is a support to man’s moral character to help change be possible, to smooth the transition and serve as a “sinnlicher Pfand der unsichtbaren Sittlichkeit” (8:563/14). No change can rest on the state doing violence to the individual. What is called for is a refinement, an ennoblement of the human being. If human beings can act with their sense of morality in harmony with their desires and instincts, then there will be a basis on which change in the political sphere can be possible and sustained. Schiller sees beauty as the cure for both fatal tendencies of the age: savagery and lethargy. The former is the hallmark of the masses (so frighteningly manifest to observers of the French Revolution), the latter of the privileged classes, who have enjoyed enlightenment of the mind, only to reject its moral claims and slide into egotism. This analysis of the ills of modern humanity applies, Schiller admits, not only to the present age but to any people caught in the process of civilization. His account of the division of labor and the negative effects of specialization has become the locus classicus in the history of the idea of alienation, even though his thoughts are not original but a skillful rhetorical compilation of the commonplaces of the time.7 This portrait of


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the age’s overspecialization is set in contrast to the ideal of the Greek polis, where the individual citizen was identified with the state, in which he (and Schiller means he and not she) could still function with all his faculties. He makes use here of the idealized image of Greece propounded by the art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–68) and sustained, for example, by Goethe and Wilhelm von Humboldt. In fact, Schiller felt much less affinity with ancient Greece than did those three, but the idealizing of Greece as a contrast to the present age fulfills an important rhetorical function in his argument as a cultural touchstone.

Portrait of the Artist While he was completing the Ästhetische Briefe, Schiller began his friendship and correspondence with Goethe. They first met in 1788 at the home of Schiller’s future wife, Charlotte von Lengefeld, shortly after Goethe’s return from Italy. Still full of his recollections of that momentous experience, Goethe associated Schiller with the Sturm und Drang he had decisively left behind. Although no spontaneous sympathy arose from the meeting, Goethe recommended Schiller for the vacant professorship at the University of Jena, an important development for the younger man for it gave him some position in the rigidly stratified and hierarchical world of Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach. By 1794 the two men seemed to have settled into a distant and formal relationship with no prospect of rapprochement when Schiller invited Goethe to contribute to his new journal, Die Horen. It was to offer contributions of a high literary and intellectual standard and thus raise the level of journalism and of public debate. Shortly after, the two men coincided at a scientific meeting in Jena and on leaving fell into conversation. Goethe’s account of their conversation, “Glückliches Ereignis,” written over twenty years later, stresses the potential conflict between his more intuitive and Schiller’s more speculative way of seeing the world.8 Despite the polarity of attitudes, they nevertheless — aware of much common ground — agreed to differ. Schiller’s brief allusion to the momentous evening, contained in a letter (September 1, 1794) to his friend Christian Gottfried Körner, reports that they spoke about “art and art theory.” Clearly, it was a wide-ranging conversation, which dealt with a topic preoccupying both men in the 1790s, namely the relationship between nature, in the sense of external reality, and art. And although Goethe presents himself in his own account as bridling against Schiller’s Kantian conception of reality, he was at the time considerably influenced by aspects of Kant’s thought and even appended to one of his early letters to Schiller an essay formulating some of his ideas on beauty and animal morphology in terms that bring them closer to Schiller’s manner of approaching aesthetics.9 Schiller followed up their first discussion with his famous birthday letter.

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In that letter of August 23, 1794, Schiller analyzed Goethe’s position as a poet living in an age and environment that ran counter to his poetic consciousness, which had a far greater affinity to the classical world. When the first nine Ästhetische Briefe were published, Schiller told Goethe he would find his portrait in them. In Letter 9 he sets out how the poet must stand apart from his age, giving it not what it wants but what it needs: Schiller’s vision of the ideal artist is of a piece with his notion of aesthetic education. The artist must seek to ennoble his audience not by moral preaching but by adherence to the highest aesthetic standards. The implication of the poet’s being nurtured “under a distant Greek sky” is that those standards will derive from those of the ancients, which Goethe and Schiller considered immutable, for they rest on Nature itself. A longer and more complex reckoning with Goethe’s particular genius and with ancient and modern kinds of poetic consciousness is found in Schiller’s last great theoretical work Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung (On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, 1794). The portrait of the artist in the ninth Letter complements the various polemics, most notably in their satirical distichs found in the collection of Xenien, that Schiller and Goethe engaged in against what they considered to be banal and second-rate in the literature of their day. Yet it is surely a little disingenuous of Schiller to elevate the notion of the independent artist in this way. He himself, while composing the Ästhetische Briefe, was the recipient of patronage.10 Duke Carl August of Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach, conscious of the luster he added to Weimar, also gave him a pension. He found sympathy and support in his publisher Cotta, a fellow Swabian he met on his visit in 1793/94 to his homeland, who realized the long-term business advantage of Schiller’s name, unlike most other publishers. Even at the height of his fame and success, as financial security was established, Schiller was conscious of the need to keep a public for his work. His practical involvement with the Weimar Court Theater under Goethe’s direction shows him on many occasions aware of the importance of keeping the enterprise going with a judicious choice of plays, while his own, though demanding and long, also have an immediacy on stage that was appealing to audiences and still is. Thus, Schiller’s rhetoric here has to be taken with a small pinch of salt.

The Deduction of Beauty Letters 10 to 16 of the Ästhetische Briefe were published together in Die Horen as the second of three installments, and in them Schiller expounds his definition of beauty as living form. Basing his argument on the dualism of condition and person drawn from Kant and Fichte, he postulates two fundamental drives that determine our selves, the sense drive (Stofftrieb) and the form drive (Formtrieb), the former relating to our lives as creatures


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of sense in a changing environment, the latter to our rational impulse to impose order and permanence on our existence and relate it to the presumably unchanging realm of the absolute. Between them, these two drives exhaust the whole of our existence. To mediate between them he then postulates a “play drive” (Spieltrieb), the object of which is the beautiful and which brings the two basic drives into a reciprocal relation and balance. Beauty defined as lebende Gestalt thus represents the harmonization of these two contradictory impulses, being both material and ordered and thus an ideal fusion of sense and spirit. Though it was a term used widely in contemporary aesthetics, Schiller probably took from Kant the term Spiel to apply to the aesthetic realm. But he gives it much greater prominence and provocative force than Kant: “der Mensch soll mit der Schönheit nur spielen, und er soll nur mit der Schönheit spielen [. . .] Denn [. . .] der Mensch spielt nur, wo er in voller Bedeutung des Worts Mensch ist, und er ist nur da ganz Mensch, wo er spielt” (8:614). The notion of play implies an activity in which formal discipline is voluntarily accepted, an activity that has no practical or moral purpose in itself but by its harmonization of content and form mediates the ideal to us intuitively.11 Thus, it is both completely unimportant and supremely important at the same time. At this point (Letter 15), Schiller produces his one example of ideal beauty, the Juno Ludovisi. His concern is always for the beautiful in relation to human beings and for him the human form is always the highest expression of beauty. Taking the sculpture to be of Greek origin and a representation of the goddess, Schiller emphasizes how the Greeks always turned to the gods for images of human perfection, banishing from their faces all traces of earthly struggle and investing them with serenity: Es ist weder Anmut, noch ist es Würde, was aus dem herrlichen Antlitz einer Juno Ludovisi zu uns spricht; es ist keines von beiden, weil es beides zugleich ist. Indem der weibliche Gott unsere Anbetung heischt, entzündet das gottgleiche Weib unsre Liebe; aber indem wir uns der himmlischen Holdseligkeit aufgelöst hingeben, schreckt die himmlische Selbstgenügsamkeit uns zurück. In sich selbst ruhet und wohnt die ganze Gestalt, eine völlig geschlossene Schöpfung, und als wenn sie jenseits des Raumes wäre, ohne Nachgeben, ohne Widerstand. (8:615)

This is what Schiller termed das Idealschöne, a concept of beauty that embraces transcendence as well as materiality, the sublime and the beautiful.12

The Beautiful and the Sublime We have arrived at a significant moment in Schiller’s battle with aesthetics in a Kantian framework. It is in his attempt to construct a theory of beauty that encompasses the beautiful and the sublime that his problematic

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relationship with Kant is most evident.13 Here we need to look back briefly over the earlier stages of this journey. Beginning with Schiller’s earlier approach to a definition of beauty, he tries to adapt Kant and transcend him at the same time. In the Kallias letters, his first attempt to find an objective standard of beauty, he postulates that beauty is “Freiheit in der Erscheinung,” meaning that the beautiful is the sensuous manifestation of autonomy in the beautiful object, or, in Kant’s terms, beauty is some kind of manifestation of practical reason. He was unable, however, to take this argument to a satisfactory conclusion and the work Kallias was never written. The next stage in Schiller’s struggle for a definition of the beautiful and perhaps more revealing for the Ästhetische Briefe is his famous treatise Über Anmut und Würde (On Grace and Dignity, 1793). There Schiller, still inspired by Kant’s suggestion that the beautiful is a symbol of the moral, again wants to find a relationship between moral and aesthetic autonomy. Grace is defined as the sensuous representation of the perfect fusion of nature and reason, which manifests itself in moral and aesthetic harmony. In postulating this possibility, Schiller is identifying and attempting to overcome a problem in Kant, namely the fact that Kant excludes from the scope of the moral any action inspired by nature or inclination. Schiller would like to allow for the possibility that nature and morality may act in concert, which, he suggests, must surely be the human ideal. The culmination of grace is the “beautiful soul,” in whom moral conduct has become second nature. Dignity, by contrast, is the product of a moral conflict, where the moral will has to be exerted and autonomy shown by conformity to the moral law. The aesthetic counterpart to dignity is the sublime, the imaginative transcendence of nature by reason. To capture the possibility of moral habituation and moral transcendence in a single person, Schiller postulates that a fusion of grace and dignity is necessary if full humanity is to be expressed both morally and aesthetically. This proposition, however, is a logical impossibility within the categories Schiller has employed, for each model of behavior — grace and dignity — excludes the other. Thus, from a logical point of view, the treatise falls apart.14 Why does Schiller jeopardize his argument in this way? The answer bears directly on the Ästhetische Briefe. The fact that Schiller tried to combine two mutually exclusive models of behavior is indicative of a tension in his thinking that is widely evident throughout his career: the desire to postulate the possibility of harmony, of some kind of marriage of sense and spirit, and the urge to assert the supremacy of the intellect, the will, and the moral over the natural in human beings.15 The former urge issues in his theories of beauty, which are based on the faith that some kind of interpenetration of the two sides of humanity’s nature is possible and that life can be lived with some kind of wholeness of being. This longing for wholeness, so characteristic of Europe on the brink of Romanticism, is expressed with great


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poignancy in Schiller’s work in “Die Götter Griechenlands” and in Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung. Yet Schiller the tragedian lays hold of a darker vision of human struggle in the world, where harmony is impossible and the individual must act and suffer. For his theoretical essays on tragedy, Schiller built on the Kantian notion of moral freedom as expounded in the Critique of Practical Reason, the ability of human beings to demonstrate their belonging to the noumenal realm by following the demands of the moral law. Extending his own line of argument in the Critique of Judgment, Kant had accounted for the sublime as an aesthetic experience in terms of our imaginative awareness when, from a position of safety, we are faced with overwhelming physical danger. The sublime is mediated through the experience of remembering that we are also by virtue of the exercise of moral freedom partakers in the realm of the Absolute and thus can transcend nature’s force. The sublime for Kant is therefore the assertion of the superiority of the intelligible. Although Schiller was drawn to theories of wholeness in aesthetics, his instincts as a dramatist were with the Kantian model of moral struggle and transcendence, and through them he was able in his essays on tragedy to find a new way of interpreting Aristotle’s notion of catharsis and thus secure a place for tragedy — essentially an archaic art form — in a modern moral environment. Schiller implied on a number of occasions that the sublime was the aesthetic of the future. He associates it in the Ästhetische Briefe with the effect of bracing, the effect beneficial to those (the majority in the modern world) who have sunk into a lethargy, their feeling deadened. Replying to Wilhelm Süvern, a young classical scholar who had written a comparison of his Wallenstein with Greek tragedy,16 he said: “Die Schönheit ist für ein glückliches Geschlecht, aber ein unglückliches muß man erhaben zu rühren suchen” (Letter of July 26, 1800). By “happy” and “unhappy” he was referring to ancient and modern. In Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, written immediately after the Ästhetische Briefe, Schiller set out his vision of modern literature, which is characterized by a tension between real and ideal, a vision that implies the containment of conflicting elements of which the sublime is an example. In the Augustenburg letters, he constantly refers to the sublime as well as the beautiful as the key to the refining of the passions. What happens to the sublime in the Ästhetische Briefe? After his transcendental deduction of beauty and establishment of “das Idealschöne” Schiller suggests that there are two kinds of beauty, one “melting beauty,” which harmonizes, the other “energizing beauty,” which braces. Whereas in ideal beauty the two are held in equipoise, in actual works of art one or the other will tend to predominate. The treatment of energetic beauty (generally taken to be the sublime), though promised, never materializes. Regarding the failure to treat energetic beauty, Wilkinson and

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Willoughby say: Of the conflicts involved in such transcendence of nature by Freedom, of the resultant Dignity and Sublimity, Schiller treated elsewhere in his theoretical works [. . .] For his whole aim in this treatise is to teach, not the transcendence of one of our natures by the other, but precisely the reconciliation of the two. (311)

It is unsatisfactory, however, to be told that Schiller was interested in the sublime but not in this particular work. Not only does that suggest that one cannot gain a coherent overview of Schiller’s thought in the Ästhetische Briefe except by suppressing consciousness of the rest of his work, it also contradicts the clear indications in the treatise (see, again, the account of the Juno Ludovisi) that his ultimate aim was to bring the sublime and the beautiful together in one system. One conclusion, perhaps the most convincing conclusion that can be drawn, is that Schiller was only too aware of the aporia of Über Anmut und Würde and simply had to suppress extensive discussion of the sublime in the Ästhetische Briefe in order not to run into the logical quicksand that had engulfed him before (Zelle 179–84; for a contrary view see Barnouw, 1980). The implications for the rest of the argument of the treatise will be considered below.

The Aesthetic Condition The key for Schiller to the transforming power of the aesthetic and to its ability to restore harmony in the individual is in its creation of an aesthetic condition (Zustand) in which individuals are released from the two kinds of coercion exerted by their mixed nature, the coercion of the senses and the coercion of the mind. There can, Schiller argues, be no immediate transition from feeling to analytical thought or vice versa. The aesthetic provides an intermediate stage. It compels us to take one step backwards, to be momentarily free of all determination whatsoever and pass through a state of pure determinability. The freedom thus gained is the restoration of our humanity (Letter 21): Es ist also nicht bloß poetisch erlaubt, sondern auch philosophisch richtig, wenn man die Schönheit unsre zweite Schöpferin nennt. Denn ob sie uns gleich die Menschheit bloß möglich macht und es im übrigen unserm freien Willen anheimstellt, inwieweit wir sie wirklich machen wollen, so hat sie dieses ja mit unsrer ursprünglichen Schöpferin, der Natur, gemein, die uns gleichfalls nichts weiter als das Vermögen zur Menschheit erteilte, den Gebrauch desselben aber auf unsere eigene Willensbestimmung ankommen läßt. (8:637)

Now, restored to ourselves, we have the potential to act as we should and also to refine our sensibilities so that the war between our moral and our


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natural selves is diminished. With characteristic metaphorical verve, Schiller adds that man must “den Krieg gegen die Materie in ihre eigene Grenze spielen, damit er es überhoben sei, auf dem heiligen Boden der Freiheit gegen diesen furchtbaren Feind zu fechten; er muß lernen edler begehren, damit er nicht nötig habe, erhaben zu wollen” (7:648). The use of the word play is a playful reference back to the play drive. Schiller again takes up the notion of Veredelung (ennoblement) — the need for human beings not just to choose the right more frequently but to develop greater moral refinement. The realm of sense thus finds a foothold in the realm of the moral. As in the case of Über Anmut und Würde, this claim takes Schiller into contradiction of Kant’s ethics, in which the two realms of nature and freedom are strictly separate. He also evades the logical problems of his synthesis of grace and dignity by presenting them here as psychic dispositions detached from any transcendental argument. Schiller’s use of the word freedom in the phrase “auf dem heiligen Boden der Freiheit” in the last quotation above is freedom in Kant’s sense. In Kant’s ethics, freedom is virtually identical with practical reason. Humanity exercises freedom only in accord with practical reason. There is no freedom in choosing not to follow the dictates of reason, for that is to follow the dictates of nature. In writing about the aesthetic condition, Schiller reveals that his own concept of freedom has shifted in the treatise in ways that take him away from Kant’s definitions.17 Such terminological shifts are notorious in Schiller’s philosophizing. In many instances Schiller associates freedom with doing the good and the right, in other words with practical reason (see, for example, 4 §7, 13 §2, 23 §4). In Letter 19, however, freedom is the state we find ourselves in when our two fundamental drives are in equilibrium. As Schiller, spotting the problem himself, puts it, the freedom flows from our “mixed nature.” When we are in this state of equilibrium, we are free from the pressures of both of our natures and in a state of potential. We must then choose to do the right if moral action is to ensue. This concept of a free will is something Schiller may have taken over from his colleague Reinhold at the University of Jena.18 Reinhold popularized Kant’s critical philosophy through his Briefe über die Kantische Philosophie (Letters on Kautian Philosophy, 1789). In doing so he addressed the problem in Kant’s moral philosophy that would also trouble Schiller, namely of how to account for the apparent free choice shown in immoral or amoral actions. To do so, he developed a theory of drives, the selfish drive and the unselfish drive, which correspond roughly to nature and practical reason in Kant. In the middle is the force that determines whether an impulse from one of these drives will be turned into a willed action. Thus Reinhold had opened up the possibility of a free will, one that can choose whether to turn the prompting of these drives into action. Here in the Ästhetische Briefe Schiller wants to postulate the possibility of harmony of nature and reason, an option that does not exist in Kant. Thus Reinhold’s

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arguments were useful to him, allowing him to postulate an equilibrium out of which the freedom of choice could flow.19

The Aesthetic State The ambiguity in Schiller’s treatment of freedom links with the ambiguity of his treatment of the sublime and is responsible for the ambiguity surrounding the aesthetic state, the construct with which Schiller finishes his treatise. The aesthetic state is one in which all members cultivate the equilibrium of aesthetic freedom by regarding everything and everybody with an aesthetic attitude, that is, they regard them under the aspect of Schein or aesthetic semblance and thus maintain an equanimity and disinterestedness characteristic of aesthetic contemplation. The aesthetic state is contrasted with the dynamic state of rights and the ethical state of duties. These last two states put human beings in a condition of compulsion and are the metaphorical equivalents of the Stofftrieb and the Formtrieb. The aesthetic state is the realm of freedom where people appear to one another as form, as objects of free play: “In dem ästhetischen Staate ist alles — auch das dienende Werkzeug ein freier Bürger, der mit dem edelsten gleiche Rechte hat, und der Verstand, der die duldende Masse unter seine Zwecke gewalttätig beugt, muß sie hier um ihre Beistimmung fragen” (8:676). How does the aesthetic state serve to round off Schiller’s argument? In one sense it is the logical culmination. Just as the aesthetic condition releases the individual from the constraints of humanity’s mixed nature, so the aesthetic state shows that this possibility of freedom is not just an individual experience but can be exercised in society among human beings and thus demonstrate art’s power to ennoble and refine. Schiller concedes that such a state can be found only in a few chosen circles. He recognizes, in other words, that it is a utopian vision but perhaps one that can slowly transform reality as the few chosen circles gradually make an impact on their wider environment (Wilkinson and Willoughby, l-li). Indeed, one might argue that Schiller is too realistic to suggest that the promise of the aesthetic to transform and lead us to true freedom can be manifest in more than a few chosen circles. Thus the aesthetic state does not replace the state of reason anticipated in the early letters but is a sign of hope that it will be brought about. Other commentators, however, feel that the aesthetic state provides an inconclusive ending to the treatise, indeed it has become a commonplace of criticism to cite Hans-Georg Gadamer’s comment that education through art, the goal of the early part of the treatise, has been replaced by education toward art (Gadamer, 78). Art was the means but has now become the end. The need to transform the political sphere, which was the starting point of Schiller’s inquiry, has disappeared from view and the aesthetic has usurped the moral and rational as the desired


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endpoint of development. Moreover, the aesthetic state is based on an elite culture that excludes most of the people who need the refinement that the aesthetic is attributed with bringing and has more in common with the courtly world of the old ruling houses than with the expanding world of business, commerce, and industry that gave rise to Schiller’s memorable analysis of the effects of the division of labor.20 Such a view is in direct opposition with those who claim that the aesthetic state is a vision of the realization of democracy and popular sovereignty.21 In my view, both interpretations are too literal in looking for analogies with real social and political structures, but they reflect, through the fact that the text seems to give them some justification, perhaps a genuine uncertainty on Schiller’s part about the context in which any aesthetic education stretching beyond the individual might take place. The ambiguity demonstrated in Schiller’s treatment of freedom and in his treatment of the beautiful and the sublime is relevant here because this ambiguity derives from Schiller’s ambiguity about the question of the precedence of the moral over the aesthetic. The Ästhetische Briefe show him to the last trying to have his cake and eat it. The aesthetic state is the end and the means.

Semblance One of the major paradoxes of a treatise full of intentional paradoxes is that although the aesthetic is a means of education, the work of art has no purpose whatever. Indeed, it is its essence to be without purpose and only if this cardinal rule is adhered to can the educative effects in Schiller’s sense flow from the aesthetic experience attached to it. For aesthetic contemplation, the one step backwards essential to the liberating potential of aesthetic experience, depends on the paradoxical nature of art as a kind of honest deception or illusion, a phenomenon summed up in Schiller’s use of the word Schein. It is an illusion in that the artist has created something that appears to be real and to have its own autonomy, to be its own world, yet at the same time as we enter imaginatively into this world we are aware of the fact that it has no substance. The notion of Schein is linked to the importance Schiller attaches to what he calls form: In einem wahrhaft schönen Kunstwerk soll der Inhalt nichts, die Form aber alles tun; denn durch die Form allein wird auf das Ganze des Menschen, durch den Inhalt hingegen nur auf einzelne Kräfte gewirkt [. . .] Darin also besteht das eigentliche Kunstgeheimnis des Meisters, daß er den Stoff durch die Form vertilgt (8:641)

By form Schiller means the artistic shaping of the material such that it is the vehicle for a response to the world, a sense of how the world is

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experienced, in a way that allows the observer the opportunity to perceive and contemplate that response. The subject matter is consumed (or abolished, to translate more literally) but the art object has sensuous reality and through its form conveys to us a particular sense of life. In her influential study Feeling and Form, Suzanne Langer skillfully illuminates the relation between aesthetic semblance and form in Schiller’s sense. It is the liberation of the art object from the usual connotations of its material that allows form to function as a symbol of how we experience the world: Schiller was the first thinker who saw what really makes “Schein,” or semblance, important for art: the fact that it liberates perception — and with it, the power of conception — from all practical purposes, and lets the mind dwell on the sheer appearance of things. The function of artistic illusion is not “make-believe,” as many philosophers and psychologists assume, but the very opposite, disengagement from belief — the contemplation of sensory qualities without their usual meanings [. . .] The knowledge that what is before us has no practical significance in the world is what enables us to give attention to its appearance as such. (49)

As Mary Wilkinson commented in an essay inspired by Langer’s book, Schiller’s theory of Schein shows that he realized that in spite of the prevalent Wirkungsästhetik of the eighteenth century — the association of aesthetic effects with the arousal of certain emotional responses — works of art do not arouse emotions. Rather they present to us various types of feelings as objects of contemplation and thus allow us to interpret our emotional lives.

Gender and Genius The title Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen is hard to translate into English because of the problems surrounding the word Mensch (human being). By opting for Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Humanity, we circumvent the problem of translating “des Menschen” with “of Man.” Yet a brief look at Schiller’s own views on gender and at the gender politics of the later eighteenth century indicates that the term Man tended to mean men and not men and women. In other works, he espouses the gender ideology of the time, according to which women, though theoretically idealized, were excluded from certain realms of artistic activity. The prevalent late eighteenth-century model of the complementarity of the sexes was based on the notion that men and women were equipped with different mental as well as physical attributes. In his poem “Würde der Frauen” (1795) men are imagined as striving restlessly for the infinite while women remain in a more circumscribed sphere. Women are associated with nature, with a condition in which they are


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untroubled by the speculations that reason puts into the minds of men. On the other hand, women are presented as the touchstone for humanity. Their grace and naturalness are a necessary corrective to men’s aggression and self-destructive restlessness. Poems such as “Würde der Frauen” may seem innocent enough relics of past attitudes until we link them to Schiller’s theoretical writings, in which there is a strong tendency to combine aesthetic and gender categories. In Über Anmut und Würde, for example, the notion of grace, in particular its supreme expression, the Beautiful Soul, is essentially feminine. The expression of dignity, which is cognate with the sublime, is linked to the masculine. In Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, Schiller associates women with a more natural state of being, now lost, and thus with the “naïve” in its broader sense.22 This kind of speculative historical framework raises the question of how women can develop. If they are trapped in a perpetual childhood and innocence, how can they participate in the arduous journey towards the goal of humanity, namely to regain something of nature’s lost harmony while combining it with the benefits of reason and civilization (Bovenschen 164–81)? And if they cannot make that journey, how can they participate in a higher humanity that, according to Schiller, is the goal of all humanity’s striving? These treatments of women elsewhere in Schiller’s work alert us to the fact that we cannot take for granted the inclusion of women in his scheme of aesthetic education. When one looks at the portrait of the artist in Letter 9 one finds an exclusively male portrait. The artist is “terrible like Agamemnon’s son.” He has to be independent of his age and environment. It is clear that no woman writer would easily fit into such a pattern, women’s lot being to live in a state of dependence and the woman writer’s lot being to exercise her talent in circumscribed ways and in a narrow range of genres. It is hardly imaginable that she could be the prophet figure captured in this passage. Yet when one reads the essay more closely, more promising vistas open. Schiller, as observed above, adopts a Hobbesian view of humanity’s past history. The natural state, which precedes the state of reason, is presented as a struggle for existence and Schiller projects his longing for an idealized state of natural harmony onto Ancient Greece. So women in this treatise are not explicitly associated with Rousseauian nature and thus their ability to participate in aesthetic education is not predetermined by the gender assumptions of the Rousseauian model, as it is in Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung. The most prominent female figure in the treatise is the Juno Ludovisi. For his one and only illustration of ideal beauty, Schiller chooses the female goddess who combines grace and dignity, the beautiful and the sublime, and one might add by implication the feminine and the masculine. By attributing to the image the aesthetic qualities associated with the masculine

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and the feminine, one might argue that Schiller’s vision of ideal beauty transcends gender itself. In anticipating a reconciliation of opposites, it points the way to liberation from the confines of gender divisions. Schiller is much more reticent about gendering aesthetic categories in this treatise than in, for example, Über Anmut und Würde, and this may be because he fears that any consistent gendering will simply give him too many elements to integrate into his argument. The result is that his vision of ideal beauty, probably contrary to any conscious intention on his part, looks beyond gender and gives an intimation even of the fluidity of gender itself.23

The Ästhetische Briefe in Schiller’s oeuvre The discussion above demonstrates that the Ästhetische Briefe represent the culmination of Schiller’s attempts to find a definition of beauty and to relate the aesthetic realm to all other areas of human activity. The work is one of the great humanist statements of its age, indeed of any age. Yet it remains something of an uneasy compromise. The project of reconciling the beautiful and the sublime in one theory goes by default, and the ambiguities concerning the precedence of the moral over the aesthetic or vice versa remain. The uneasiness Schiller seems to have ultimately felt with theories of harmony is emphasized by the fact that he was a tragedian first and foremost and thus drawn more to the sublime, a response that, in his theory at least, rests on an assertion of the superiority of the intelligible over the material world. It is difficult, therefore, to read the Ästhetische Briefe as the ultimate statement of Schiller’s position on aesthetics. It is more convincing to see it as a stage, albeit a hugely impressive and significant one, in his restless intellectual battle with questions of beauty, the stage where he found his own most sophisticated formulation of the possibility of human harmony.

Notes 1 For a full account of the work’s impact in a wider context, see Wilkinson and Willoughby, cxxxiii–cxcvi. For a full survey of critical reception up to the mid1990s, see my Schiller’s Aesthetic Essays. For the purpose of this contribution I restricted my references to critical pieces I found particularly relevant to my argument, characteristic of different scholarly views, and illuminating for those approaching the work for the first time. 2 Later published in slightly revised form under the title Die Schaubühne als eine moralische Anstalt betrachtet in the fourth part of Schiller’s Kleinere prosaische Schriften (Leipzig: Crusius, 1802). 3

Schiller wrote the first part of this work in 1787–88, and it was published in 1788. The complete work was published in 1801.


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4

The original letters were destroyed by fire at the Christiansborg Palace, Copenhagen, in 1794. Copies of some survived. These are Schiller’s letters to his patron dated February 9, July 13, November 11 and 21, and December 3 of 1793, and an undated letter of December 1793. In the letters Schiller discusses the political and philosophical context of his theme and introduces several concepts central to the final work such as Verwilderung, Erschlaffung, Veredelung, and ästhetische Kultur.

5


6

For a Foucauldian critique of Schiller’s use of this paradigm, see Behler.

7

These commonplaces are ably analyzed by Victoria Rippere, who challenges the uncritical assumption that Schiller was the father of the concept of alienation. 8

“Glückliches Ereighnis” was first published in 1817 in the first number of Goethe’s journal Zur Morphologie, and it is in this context that it is to be found in Goethes Schriften zur Naturwissenschaft (Leopoldina), vol. 9/I, 79–83, rather than in the context of autobiographical writings, as in other Goethe editions. 9

See the appendix to Goethe’s letter to Schiller of August 30, 1794, “In wiefern die Idee: Schönheit sei Vollkommenheit mit Freiheit, auf organische Naturen angewendet werden könne.”

10

The contradiction between theory and practice here has been explored recently by Woodmansee.

11

For a fascinating discussion of play as an intimation in human activity of the divine, see Berger. 12

Wilhelm von Humboldt in his Horen essay Über männliche und weibliche Form also discusses the Juno Ludovisi in terms that indicate the close discussions the two men conducted during Humboldt’s stay in Weimar in 1794. But Humboldt’s use of many examples and concern with male and female characteristics leads to an attenuation of his argument and a reinforcement of gender stereotypes.

13 See in particular Schaper, Heinrich, and Janke. Both of Schaper’s essays are more critical of Schiller’s use of Kantian terminology than Heinrich or Janke. From a different perspective, Eagleton explores Schiller’s adaptation of Kant as a way of responding to the emergent bourgeoisie’s ideological needs. 14

This aporia is well analyzed by Hamburger.

15

For an important discussion of this tension in relation to tensions in the Platonic tradition of beauty, see Pugh.

16

Über Schillers Wallenstein in Hinsicht auf griechische Tragödie (Berlin: Unger, 1800).

17

Calder expounds this particular with particular reference to Schiller’s theory of tragedy.

18

I am greatly indebted to Sabine Röhr for sharing her ideas with me on the influence of Reinhold and for her generosity in sending me the manuscript of two unpublished articles, “Zum Einfluß K. L. Reinholds auf Schillers Kant-Rezeption”

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and “A Systematic Account of Freedom and Autonomy in Schiller.” The second of these is now published as “Freedom and Autonomy in Schiller” in Journal of the History of Ideas 64 (2003): 119–34. On Reinhold’s influence, see also Alt 2:133–35. 19

This possibility of free choice was also important to his theory of tragedy. In Über das Pathetische he insists that in tragedy we are not concerned as spectators to satisfy the demands of our reason that the characters do what is right but, rather, the demands of our imagination that the characters could choose the right if they wanted to, in other words, with their freedom of choice, however that is exercised. Here, too, Schiller wishes to argue for the potential released by the aesthetic condition and this demands a view of human freedom and of the will that grants choice in a way that Kant’s system did not.

20

This was a common view in criticism in the German Democratic Republic; see, for example, Träger. See Burger for a discussion of the courtly ideal in the aesthetic state. Ueding recognizes this aspect but sees it as combined with a progressive vision.

21

Barnouw (1982) and Chytry are examples of this view, the latter reading Schiller’s text from a rather one-sidedly liberal perspective. 22 Schiller also gives the term his own specialized poetological meaning: the naïve poet enjoys singleness of vision, which contrasts with the sentimental poet’s divided consciousness. 23

For a contrasting view, see Behler, 123–34.

Works Cited Alt, Peter-André. Schiller: Leben — Werk — Zeit. 2 vols. Munich: Beck, 2000. Barnouw, Jeffrey. “ ‘Freiheit zu geben durch Freiheit’: Ästhetischer Zustand — Ästhetischer Staat.” In Friedrich Schiller: Kunst, Humanität und Politik in der späten Aufklärung: Ein Symposium, ed. Wolfgang Wittkowski, 138–63. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1982. ———. “The Morality of the Sublime: Kant and Schiller.” Studies in Romanticism 19 (1980): 497–514. Behler, Constantin. Nostalgic Teleology: Friedrich Schiller and the Schemata of Aesthetic Humanism. Bern: Lang, 1995. Berger, Peter L. A Rumour of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural. London: Allan Lane, 1970. Bovenschen, Silvia. Die imaginierte Weiblichkeit: Exemplarische Präsentationsformen des Weiblichen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979. Burger, Heinz Otto. “Europäisches Adelsideal und Deutsche Klassik.” In Burger, Dasein heißt auch eine Rolle spielen: Studien zur deutschen Literaturgeschichte, 211–32. Munich: Hanser, 1963. Calder, William M. “Schiller on the Will and on the Heroic Villain.” Oxford German Studies 2 (1967): 41–54. Chytry, Josef. The Aesthetic State: A Quest in Modern German Thought. Berkeley: U of California P, 1989.


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Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Wahrheit und Methode: Grundsätze einer philosophischen Hermeneutik. Tübingen: Mohr, 1962. Hamburger, Käthe. “Schillers Fragment ‘Der Menschenfeind’ und die Idee der Kalokagathie.” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift 30 (1956): 367–400. Henrich, Dieter. “Der Begriff der Schönheit in Schillers Ästhetik.” Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 11 (1957): 527–47. Translated as “Beauty and Freedom. Schiller’s Struggle with Kant’s Aesthetics.” In Essays on Kant’s Aesthetics, ed. Ted Cohen and Paul Guyer. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1982. Janke, Wolfgang. Historische Dialektik: Destruktion dialektischer Grundformen von Kant bis Marx. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1977. Langer, Suzanne K. Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art Developed from Philosophy in a New Key. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953. Pugh, David V. Dialectic of Love: Platonism in Schiller’s Aesthetics. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1996. Rippere, Victoria. Schiller and “Alienation”: A Problem in the Transmission of His Thought. Bern: Lang, 1981. Schaper, Eva. “Friedrich Schiller: Adventures of a Kantian.” British Journal of Aesthetics 4 (1964): 438–62. ———. “Schiller’s Kant: A Chapter in the History of a Creative Misunderstanding.” In Studies in Kant’s Aesthetics, 99–115. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1979. Sharpe, Lesley. Schiller’s Aesthetic Essays: Two Centuries of Criticism. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1995. Träger, Claus. “Schiller als Theoretiker des Übergangs vom Ideal zur Wirklichkeit.” Sinn und Form 11 (1959): 546–76. Ueding, Gerd. Schillers Rhetorik: Idealistische Wirkungsästhetik und rhetorischen Tradition. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1971. Wilkinson, E. M. “Schiller’s Concept of Schein in the Light of Recent Aesthetics.” German Quarterly 28 (1955): 219–27. Wilkinson, E. M., and L. A. Willoughby, eds. Friedrich Schiller: On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1967. Woodmansee, Martha. The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. Zelle, Carsten. Die doppelte Ästhetik der Moderne: Revisionen des Schönen von Boileau bis Nietzsche. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1995.

“On the Shores of Philosophy”: Schiller’s Lyric Poetry, 1795 Norbert Oellers

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was already strong during his study of medicine at the Karlsschule in Stuttgart. Plutarch’s influential work Vitae Parallelae (Parallel Lives) was especially interesting to him — as if he could one day be a part of these lives. Most of his dramas deal with the great figures of world history and their momentous achievements — as if they were prime examples of a (mostly fatal) greatness that could be elevated poetically. Schiller’s historical interest stemmed, to a large degree, from his own strong desire to become great. While working on his dramas Fiesko and Don Karlos, Schiller studied the historical sources carefully. They served as a collection of facts that he could use however he pleased. On December 10, 1788, he wrote the following to Caroline von Beulwitz: “Die Geschichte ist überhaupt nur ein Magazin für meine Phantasie, und die Gegenstände müssen sich gefallen laßen, was sie unter meinen Händen werden.”1 In that year he had already published his first great historical work, Geschichte des Abfalls der Vereinigten Niederlande von der Spanischen Regierung (History of the Revolt of the Spanish Netherlands, 1788). At that time, and in order to relax, Schiller shook off the “school dust” of history and leaped “into the realm of poetry” (see his letter to Christian Körner of March 17, 1788). In the poem “Die Götter Griechenlandes” (The Gods of Greece, 1788), he glorified the history of the ancients. In “Die Künstler” (The Artists, 1789), he tied human progress to the historical development of the arts.2 Moreover, on December 9, 1788, Goethe recommended to the Weimar Secret Council that Schiller be appointed to the University of Jena precisely because of his abilities as a writer of history. Schiller was named professor in the summer semester of 1789. On May 26, 1789, in his introductory lecture, “Was heißt und zu welchem Ende studiert man Universalgeschichte?” (What is, and to What End Does One Study Universal History?), he tried to convey to his audience that a collector and presenter of historical facts is not a historian but at most a “bread-scholar” (“Brotgelehrter”). Only as a philosophical thinker (“philosophischer Kopf”), who is capable of closing the gaps that tradition creates by means of his imagination and reasoning, will the historian accomplish a true — and teleological — understanding of history.

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For the next two years, Schiller strove to gain the requisite historical knowledge to meet his own expectations of a universal historian. His historical papers from this time up to the writing of Geschichte des Dreißigjährigen Krieges (History of the Thirty Years’ War, 1791–93) are only partially philosophical and speculative in nature. The choice and composition of the source material — although carried out independently — does not carry him much beyond the work of a traditional historian. Schiller, the philosophically ambitious historian, neglected poetry for a while, but he never lost sight of it. By 1790 he most likely realized what he would acknowledge eight years later while working on Wallenstein: “Ich werde es mir gesagt seyn laßen, keine andre als historische Stoffe zu wählen, frey erfundene würden meine Klippe sein” (letter to Goethe, January 5, 1798). But coming from the solid ground of historical facts, it was still a long journey to the realm of poetry. Between these two areas of activity lay philosophy. The end of the epoch of Schiller the historian came in 1791 and 1792, and as a philosopher he was not quite successful in influencing the writing of history. Conquering the terrain of philosophy was a higher priority for him. His intensive study of Kant’s ideas pushed him to the edge of experience. Speculations about the conditions that allow the very possibility of knowledge led him to inquire unpretentiously into the essence of the beautiful, that is, into a theoretically determinable legitimacy that would collide neither with the claim of autonomy in art nor with his intentions for its reception. In rapid succession, Schiller published a wide range of aesthetic papers, including, Über Anmut und Würde (On Grace and Dignity, 1793), Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen (On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, 1795), and Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung (On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, 1795). Providing a philosophical foundation for the beautiful on the basis of historical experience and knowledge, these writings were to bring the poet back to himself. Again, Schiller dared to enter the field of poetry. The fact that history remained important to Schiller is evident from the many dramas of his classical period. Additionally, a number of his poems from this period stem from historical sources. Tradition served only as a “storeroom” that stimulated his imagination. Occasionally he considered it necessary to draw attention to the surplus of poetical truth over historical truth. For example, he expressed this idea in his essay “Über das Pathetische” (On the Pathetic, 1793). It was an idea that Aristotle had taken up in his Poetics, namely, that the aesthetic effect is produced not by historical, but by poetic truth. The precedence of the poetic over the historic becomes even more apparent in the essay “Über die tragische Kunst” (On Tragic Art, 1792): “[Es] läßt sich begreifen, wie bey strenger Beobachtung der historischen Wahrheit nicht selten die poetische leiden, und umgekehrt bey grober Verletzung der historischen

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die poetische nur um so mehr gewinnen kann” (20:167). As for poetry, it stands “ihrer historischen Freyheit unbeschadet, unter dem strengen Gesetz der Naturwahrheit . . .” (167). Only in this way is poetry able to overpower any and all criticism. Kant had conceived of the matter in a similar way. At the end of his nine-month journey through Swabia, at the beginning of May 1794, Schiller and the publisher Cotta from Tübingen agreed to edit a political newspaper and a monthly literary magazine. Back in Jena, Schiller signed the contracts for both projects. He soon dismissed the plan for a political newspaper, however, and published the literary periodical Die Horen (The Horae) from 1795 until 1797. In the invitation to potential contributors he stated that there would be no lack of poetical portrayals in this work. Having himself experienced a considerable period of poetical abstinence, the editor Schiller knew well that this announcement obligated him to contribute his own poetry in order to make the periodical a successful venture. His clear intention to follow through with his obligation may help to explain his contract with the publisher Michaelis in August 1794 in which he promised to publish a Musenalmanach annually from 1795 on. Thus two periodicals awaited the editor’s poetic contributions. Clearly, Schiller had a hard time meeting his own commitment: The Musenalmanach for the year 1796 needed to be compiled by the summer of 1795, and the first few issues of Die Horen featured only a few poems by other authors such as Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Johann Heinrich Voss, and Gottlieb Konrad Pfeffel; Schiller provided some philosophical material, for example, the Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen and historical texts like his Merkwürdige Belagerung von Antwerpen in den Jahren 1584 und 1585 (Foreign Occupation of Antwerp in the Years 1584 and 1585, 1795/1801). Only in the September issue of the magazine did he return as a poet with “Das Reich der Schatten” (The Realm of Shadows). Schiller composed the poem in July and August 1795. Since June he had been preparing a few works for the Musenalmanach. By then, he had finished “Der Tanz” (The Dance) and perhaps also “Die Macht des Gesanges” (The Power of Song), “Spruch des Confucius” (Saying of Confucius), “Pegasus in der Dienstbarkeit” (Pegasus in Servitude), and “Die Ideale” (The Ideals). Once he started, Schiller produced poem after poem in rapid succession until September, of which the majority (“Der Abend” [The Evening], “Würde der Frauen” [Dignity of Women], and “Stanzen an den Leser” [To the Reader]) were designated for the Almanach, while the others (“Natur und Schule” [Nature and Education], “Das verschleierte Bild zu Sais” [The Veiled Image of Sais], and “Elegie” [Elegy]) were produced for Die Horen. Only “Poesie des Lebens” (Poetry of Life), the first poem that he conceived after his long break, in June 1795, was not published right away. It did not appear until 1798 in the Musenalmanach für das Jahr 1799.

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When he wrote his letter to August Wilhelm Schlegel on October 29, 1795, Schiller was probably thinking of most of the poems that he had composed between June and September 1795. “Das Reich der Schatten” and “Natur und Schule” “. . . zeichnen neben einigen andern meinen Uebergang von der Speculation zur Poesie. Ich hoffe aber, wenn ich nur Zeit und Stimmung finde, nicht immer so ängstlich mehr am Ufer der Philosophie hinsteuren zu müssen, sondern etwas weiter ins freye Meer der Erfindung zu segeln” (28:88). From the solid ground of history to the shores of philosophy — it would now require a brave leap into the sea of poesy to approximate the goal of touching eternity. The artist, as Schiller had decreed in the ninth letter of Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen, “präge es [das Ideal] in die Spiele seiner Einbildungskraft, und in den Ernst seiner Thaten, präge es aus allen sinnlichen und geistigen Formen und werfe es schweigend in die unendliche Zeit” (20:334). In the section “Analytik der Grundsätze,” of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason, 1787), Kant had characterized the land of pure understanding as an island, “umgeben von einem weiten und stürmischen Ozeane, dem eigentlichen Sitze des Scheins, wo manche Nebelbank, und manches bald wegschmelzende Eis neue Länder lügt.” One could only risk entering this ocean if the “land” were thoroughly calibrated (Kant 267–68). And later in Die transzendentale Dialektik (Transcendental Dialectic), Kant insisted that knowledge was possible only by determining the limits of reason through sure principles, “welche ihr nihil ulterius mit größester Zuverlässigkeit an die herkulische Säulen heftet, die die Natur selbst aufgestellet hat, um die Fahrt unserer Vernunft nur so weit, als die stetig fortlaufende Küsten der Erfahrung reichen, fortzusetzen, die wir nicht verlassen können, ohne uns auf einen uferlosen Ozean zu wagen” (Kant, 4:393).3 Schiller aimed at going beyond the pillars of Hercules. Nevertheless, he remained within his boundaries, that is, within his philosophy of what the human being is capable of achieving in the fields of the true, the good, and the beautiful. The poems that Schiller composed on the shore of philosophy refer back more distinctly to the limitations of the mainland than they point ahead to destinations on the wide ocean. Schiller was still considerably short of his goal of becoming a captain on the high seas. Kant had defined the beautiful as follows: “Schön ist, was ohne Begriff allgemein gefällt” (8:298). It follows that, if they are empirical and not pure, aesthetic judgments apply only partially to the truly beautiful. They are judgments of sense, not true judgments of taste. Regarding the judgment of taste, Schiller had learned the following from his master teacher: “Ein Geschmacksurteil ist . . . nur sofern rein, als kein bloß empirisches Wohlgefallen dem Bestimmungsgrunde desselben beigemischt wird” (Kant, 8:303). Schiller had said this before and not much differently on occasion, for example, in the


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essay Zerstreute Betrachtungen über verschiedene ästhetische Gegenstände (Scattered Remarks on Different Aesthetic Objects, 1793): “. . . ob es gleich nur durch seine Beziehung auf sinnlich-vernünftige Wesen Existenz erhält, so ist es [das Schöne] doch von allen empirischen Bestimmungen der Sinnlichkeit unabhängig, und es bleibt dasselbe, auch wenn sich die Privatbeschaffenheit der Subjecte verändert” (20:223–24). In what follows, the most important poems by Schiller that originated in the period from June until September 1795 will be sketched with an eye toward their philosophical qualities and in view of their rootedness in the historical materials and to their historical greatness, including that of the author. Here “the historical” refers not only to the use of transmitted historical sources but also to the interpretation of history, as is consistent with Schiller’s perception of a universal history properly understood. Mythology is also seen as part of the basis of historical narration. When Schiller, inspired by metaphysics, chose the topic and material of the dance for his first significant poem following his break from writing poetry, “Der Tanz,” he did not shy away from saying what he felt to be important about this form of art, which he now brought into close conjunction with music; the how, that is, the structure and metrical format, was no longer a problem for him. At the same time that the poem was being written, the last of his letters Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen appeared in Die Horen. There he wrote that it is inopportune to want to “think reasonably” immediately following the enjoyment of the “lively sensations” of delightful music. For “. . . auch die geistreichste Musik [steht] durch ihre Materie noch immer in einer größern Affinität zu den Sinnen . . ., als die wahre ästhetische Freyheit dultet . . .” (20:381). The first version of “Der Tanz” reads as follows: Sieh, wie sie durcheinander in kühnen Schlangen sich winden, Wie mit geflügeltem Schritt schweben auf schlüpfrigem Plan. Seh’ ich flüchtige Schatten von ihren Leibern geschieden? Ist es Elysiums Hain, der den Erstaunten umf ängt? Wie, vom Zephyr gewiegt, der leichte Rauch durch die Luft schwimmt, Wie sich leise der Kahn schaukelt auf silberner Flut, Hüpft der gelehrige Fuß auf des Takts melodischen Wellen, Säuselndes Saitengetön hebt den ätherischen Leib. Keinen drängend, von keinem gedrängt, mit besonnener Eile, Schlüpft ein liebliches Paar dort durch des Tanzes Gewühl. Vor ihm her entsteht seine Bahn, die hinter ihm schwindet, Leis wie durch magische Hand öfnet und schließt sich der Weg. Sieh! jetzt verliert es der suchende Blick. Verwirrt durcheinander Stürzt der zierliche Bau dieser beweglichen Welt. Nein, dort schwebt es frohlockend herauf. Der Knoten entwirrt sich, Nur mit verändertem Reiz stellt sich die Ordnung mir dar.

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Ewig zerstört und ewig erzeugt sich die drehende Schöpfung, Und ein stilles Gesetz lenkt der Verwandlungen Spiel. Sprich, wie geschieht’s, daß rastlos bewegt die Bildungen schwanken, Und die Regel doch bleibt, wenn die Gestalten auch fliehn? Daß mit Herrscherkühnheit einher der einzelne wandelt, Keiner ihm sklavisch weicht, keiner entgegen ihm stürmt? Willst du es wissen? Es ist des Wohllauts mächtige Gottheit, Die zum geselligen Tanz ordnet den tobenden Sprung, Die, der Nemesis gleich, an des Rhythmus goldenem Zügel Lenkt die brausende Lust, und die gesetzlose zähmt. Und der Wohllaut der großen Natur umrauscht dich vergebens? Dich ergreift nicht der Strom dieser harmonischen Welt? Nicht der begeisternde Takt, den alle Wesen dir schlagen? Nicht der wirbelnde Tanz, der durch den ewigen Raum Leuchtende Sonnen wälzt in künstlich schlägenden Bahnen? Handelnd fliehst du das Maaß, das du im Spiele doch ehrst? (1:228) The poem was to depict the transition from a feeling dominated by sense impressions to the freedom of thought. At the same time, Schiller appeals to the letters on aesthetics: “Die Musik in ihrer höchsten Veredlung muß Gestalt werden, und mit der ruhigen Macht der Antike auf uns wirken . . .” (20:381). In this case the dance is music that has taken form, winding its way along and hovering and gradually unwinding from the earthly realm to “Elysiums Hain” (l. 4). The music is a path that is opening, which involves confusion and order, death and genesis. In the first part of the poem the rhythm of the notes is transformed into the rhythm of “bodies” (l. 3). In spite of the turbulence, the chosen words awaken a sense of all-embracing harmony that is reproduced in the dance of a single couple. For this poem, Schiller chose the distich, thus securing knowledge of that “tranquil power of the ancients.” Given its measuredness and order, the classical distich also makes possible the combination of epic breadth and dramatic succinctness through the tension and resolution that is enabled by the verses it employs (hexameter, pentameter), its conciseness, and its polarization. The distich, which Schiller mastered better than almost any other German poet, is the poetic means by which he wanted to mark a transition from philosophy to poetry. But this was in vain since the pillars of Hercules will not allow reason to transcend them. Schiller was not willing to dispense with reason when writing his poems. Based on the particularity of a dance that could not be comprehended as something universal, it was still possible to draw some general conclusions, or at least the poet himself thought so. Schiller depicts a (not the) dance in eight distichs. This itself is a historic event that requires interpretation. As such, the poem becomes an


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allegory, although the myth of the blessed shadows of Elysium is brought into play. This is explained in the following eight distichs, beginning with line 17: “Ewig zerstört und ewig erzeugt sich die drehende Schöpfung.” It should not be overlooked that the poem had been conceived from an idea that had already found expression in a philosophical letter from Schiller to Körner on February 23, 1793: “Ich weiß für das Ideal des schönen Umgangs kein paßenderes Bild als einen gut getanzten . . . englischen Tanz. . . . Es [das Miteinander der Tanzenden] ist das treffendste Sinnbild der behaupteten eigenen Freiheit und der geschonten Freiheit des andern.” Of course, freedom can only be maintained through “ein stilles Gesetz” (l. 18) that guides the dancers. It is a law that does not seem to be of this world, but, in art, has the effect of the powerful divinity of melodious sound (“des Wohllauts mächtige Gottheit,” l. 23). By transforming music into motion and attaining the highest level of art, the human being proves to be educated aesthetically. Henceforth, he can be called a social creature who is equal to the ideal of a citizen in a future state grounded in freedom. Schiller activates many other elements to make sure that his realm of art is not constructed from dance and music alone. The individual classes of the arts are only examples that consist in pleasant consonance with the divine laws of nature. The speculation about utopia in the poem is interrupted in the last verse: The human being, addressed as “you,” may have an understanding of the harmony that he gained in the aesthetic play of the poem,4 but his actions do not correspond with this understanding. The concluding question is meant only rhetorically. “Handelnd fliehst du das Maaß, das du im Spiel doch ehrst?” (l. 32). The completion of “Der Tanz” is followed by the writing of “Die Macht des Gesanges” which was most likely composed in July 1795. In this poem, Schiller’s inclination toward philosophy is emphasized more strongly than in “Der Tanz”; he even refers back to “Die Künstler,” for he uses those verses that he had composed as introductory lines for that poem but had then left behind. “Ein Regenstrom aus Felsenrissen, / Er kommt mit Donners Ungestüm” (ll. 1–2), etc. The poem consists of five stanzas with ten verses, the first eight of which are in alternate rhyme. The last two verses comprise a rhyming couplet; the cadence of four-footed iambic verse in alternate rhyme oscillates delicately between feminine and masculine endings. In the writer’s aim for technical accuracy, the whole project appears to be crafted philosophy. The poetry, “des Gesanges Wellen” (l. 9), rushes powerfully “from undiscovered sources” (l. 10), as an ally of the Parcae, who spin life’s thread (“des Lebens Faden drehn”; l. 12). At different points the poet leads “das bewegte Herz” “in das Reich der Todten” and, also, “himmelwärts” (ll. 16–18). “Ein ungeheures Schicksal” (l. 24) announced by a stranger from another world (“Fremdling aus der andern Welt”; l. 26) discards the world of senses and bestows “Geisterwürde”

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(l. 33) on deserving humankind. “Den hohen Göttern ist er eigen” (l. 35) signifies that the stranger has arrived “in secure arms of nature” (l. 49). Clearly, in its ideal creation poetry can be especially powerful. “Die Macht des Gesanges” corresponds with ideas expressed in Über das Erhabene (On the Sublime, ca. 1793).5 The poem depicts two geniuses who guide the human being gently through life. One leads the individual to the knowledge of truth and the exercise of duty, while the other carries him over staggering depths and sets him free: “. . . wir fühlen uns frey beym Erhabenen, weil die sinnlichen Triebe auf die Gesetzgebung der Vernunft keinen Einfluß haben, weil der Geist hier handelt, als ob er unter keinen andern als seinen eigenen Gesetzen stünde” (Über das Erhabene, 21:42). Meanwhile, the return of the individual to nature implies that art has succeeded at attaining ideal beauty, into which the sublime must also be absorbed.6 Among the works that Schiller produced for his Musenalmanach is the poem “Die Ideale,” which probably originated in the first half of August 1795. The poem is of some interest here. It consists of thirteen stanzas with eight verses each, in four-foot iambic and alternate rhyme with alternating feminine and masculine cadences. Hence, in its form, and therefore in its immediate effect, it is similar to “Die Macht der Poesie.” The poet philosophizes less here than in preceding and subsequent poems. The lyrical “I” recognizes the loss of everything that once belonged to that golden time (“goldne Zeit,” l. 6) of his life and the path of youth (“Jugend Pfad,” l. 10) and is now eager to recall the past. Peering into the future, the lyrical “I” sums up life up to that point and discovers that it is not without its delightful perspectives. Life remains the quiet, tender hand of friendship (“Der Freundschaft leise zarte Hand,” l. 94). It is an activity that is inexhaustible (“Beschäftigung, die nie ermattet,” l. 99). Goethe was especially fond of the poem, as Schiller informed Humboldt in a letter of September 7, 1795. In the same letter, the poet describes it as “eine Stimme des Schmerzens, der kunstlos und vergleichsweise auch formlos ist. . . .” The poem reads: So willst du treulos von mir scheiden, Mit deinen holden Phantasien, Mit deinen Schmerzen, deinen Freuden, Mit allen unerbittlich fliehn? Kann nichts dich, Fliehende! Ferweilen, O! meines Lebens goldne Zeit? Vergebens, deine Wellen eilen Hinab ins Meer der Ewigkeit. Erloschen sind die heitern Sonnen, Die meiner Jugend Pfad erhellt,


Die Ideale sind zerronnen, Die einst das trunkne Herz geschwellt, Die schöne Frucht, die kaum zu keimen Begann, da liegt sie schon erstarrt! Mich weckt aus meinen frohen Träumen Mit rauhem Arm die Gegenwart. Die Wirklichkeit mit ihren Schranken Umlagert den gebundnen Geist, Sie stürzt, die Schöpfung der Gedanken, Der Dichtung schöner Flor zerreißt. Er ist dahin, der süße Glaube An Wesen, die mein Traum gebahr, Der feindlichen Vernunft zum Raube, Was einst so schön, so göttlich war. Wie einst mit flehendem Verlangen Den Stein Pygmalion umschloß, Bis in des Marmors kalte Wangen Empfindung glühend sich ergoß, So schlangen meiner Liebe Knoten Sich um die Säule der Natur, Bis durch das starre Herz der Todten Der Strahl des Lebens zuckend fuhr. Bis warm von sympathetschem Triebe, Sie freundlich mit dem Freund empfand, Mir wiedergab den Kuß der Liebe, Und meines Herzens Klang verstand; Da lebte mir der Baum, die Rose, Mir sang der Quellen Silberfall, Es fühlte selbst das Seelenlose Von meines Lebens Wiederhall. Es dehnte mit allmächtgem Streben Die enge Brust ein kreisend All, Heraus zu treten in das Leben In That und Wort, in Bild und Schall. Wie groß war diese Welt gestaltet, So lang die Knospe sie noch barg, Wie wenig, ach! hat sich entfaltet, Dieß wenige, wie klein und karg. Wie aus des Berges stillen Quellen Ein Strom die Urne langsam füllt, Und jetzt mit königlichen Wellen

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Die hohen Ufer überschwillt, Es werfen Steine, Felsenlasten Und Wälder sich in seine Bahn, Er aber stürzt mit stolzen Masten Sich rauschend in den Ozean. So sprang, von kühnem Muth beflügelt, Ein reißend bergab rollend Rad, Von keiner Sorge noch gezügelt, Der Jüngling in des Lebens Pfad. Bis an des Äthers bleichste Sterne Erhub ihn der Entwürfe Flug, Nichts war so hoch, und nichts so ferne, Wohin ihr Flügel ihn nicht trug. Wie leicht ward er dahin getragen, Was war dem Glücklichen zu schwer! Wie tanzte vor des Lebens Wagen Die luftige Begleitung her! Die Liebe mit dem süßen Lohne, Das Glück mit seinem goldnen Kranz, Der Ruhm mit seiner Sternenkrone, Die Wahrheit in der Sonne Glanz! Doch ach! schon auf des Weges Mitte Verloren die Begleiter sich, Sie wandten treulos ihre Schritte, Und einer nach dem andern wich. Leichtfüßig war das Glück entflogen, Des Wissens Durst blieb ungestillt, Des Zweifels finstre Wetter zogen Sich um der Wahrheit Sonnenbild. Des Ruhmes Dunstgestalt berührte Die Weisheit, da verschwand der Trug. Der Liebe süßen Traum entführte Ach! allzuschnell der Hore Flug. Und immer stiller wards, und immer Verlaßner auf dem rauhen Steg, Kaum warf noch einen bleichen Schimmer Die Hofnung auf den finstern Weg. Von all dem rauschenden Geleite, Wer harrte liebend bei mir aus? Wer steht mir tröstend noch zur Seite, Und folgt mir bis zum finstern Haus?


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Du, die du alle Wunden heilest, Der Freundschaft leise zarte Hand, Des Lebens Bürden liebend theilest, Du, die ich frühe sucht’ und fand, Und du, die gern sich mit ihr gattet, Wie sie, der Seele Sturm beschwört, Beschäftigung, die nie ermattet, Die langsam schaft, doch nie zerstört, Die zu dem Bau der Ewigkeiten Zwar Sandkorn nur für Sandkorn reicht, Doch von der großen Schuld der Zeiten Minuten, Tage, Jahre streicht. (1:234–37) It is important to note that the ideals that are cultivated in the poem do not represent idyllic conditions of pre- or post-historical times; nor do they represent victory in the battle against the world of sensory perceptions that threaten to overwhelm everyday life. Rather, they are “Was einst so schön, so göttlich war” (l. 24): the faith “An Wesen, die mein Traum gebahr” (l. 22), a faith of all-invigorating love that unites the young man most intimately with nature. He storms away as a stream rushes loudly into the ocean (“rauschend in den Ozean,” l. 56);7 still unrestrained by Care (“Sorge”) and “Bis an des Äthers bleichste Sterne” (ll. 59–61), he leaped into the path of life. The tenth stanza sums up the situation (somewhat unsystematically). Love, fortune, glory, and truth were the youth’s ideals; he had lost them just as he reached the middle of the way (“des Weges Mitte,” l. 73). At the end of the poem, the engagement that determines the quality of life is the inexhaustible act of reasoning, researching, and composing (ll. 101–4), which the historian Schiller had once stated and the aesthetician Schiller had tried to convey in images while he was composing the poem. But he is still far away from the open sea of poetry. In the essay Über die notwendigen Grenzen beim Gebrauch schöner Formen (On the Necessary Limits in the Use of Beautiful Forms), published in September 1795 in Die Horen, Schiller captures the main ideas of the poem in prose and interprets them critically. He talks about the young man who is prone to exaltation since he is seduced by the “temptation of the great and the beautiful”: In seinem Kopf arbeiten dunkle Ideen, wie eine werdende Welt, die ihn glauben machen, daß er begeistert sey. Er nimmt das Dunkle für das Tiefe, das Wilde für das Kräftige, das Unbestimmte für das Unendliche, das Sinnlose für das Übersinnliche — und wie gef ällt er sich nicht in seiner Geburt! . . . Schlummert nun ächte Geniuskraft in dem fragenden Jüngling, so wird zwar anfangs seine Bescheidenheit stutzen, aber der Muth des wahren Talents wird ihn bald zu Versuchen ermuntern. . . . Er behorcht,

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wenn er zum Dichter geboren ist, die Menschheit in seiner eigenen Brust . . . und läßt den nüchternen Verstand die Ufer ausmessen, zwischen welchen der Strom der Begeisterung brausen soll. Ihm ist es wohlbekannt, daß nur aus dem unscheinbar Kleinen das Große erwächst, und Sandkorn für Sandkorn trägt er das Wundergebäude zusammen, das uns in einem einzigen Eindruck jetzt schwindelnd faßt. (21:20–21)

It was less with poems for the Musenalmanach than with those for Die Horen that Schiller contributed to that “miraculous building” that was determined to exist for all eternity. The first of these poems was “Das Reich der Schatten.” It originated in July and August 1795 and was published the following month. Since the title led to misunderstandings among its readers, the poet changed it to “Das Reich der Formen” in 1800 on the occasion of the publication of the modified version of the poem. Eventually, in 1804, he changed the title to “Das Ideal und das Leben.” It thus became clear that the poem described the contrast between historical reality and — the insufficient title “Reich der Schatten” certainly foreshadows the problem — the anticipated ideal of the perfect harmony of all living creatures — human beings, god, nature — at the end of history. This was celebrated in the idyll, that highest form of art. “Das Reich der Schatten” deals poetically with a resolution of this contrast, which is the subject of Schiller’s later essay, Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung. At first, Schiller was satisfied with the poem. “Ich gönne es dem Almanach nicht,” he wrote to Cotta on August 9, 1795 and the same day to Wilhelm von Humboldt: “Hätte ich nicht den sauren Weg durch meine Aesthetik geendigt, so würde dieses Gedicht nimmermehr zu der Klarheit und Leichtigkeit in einer so difficilen Materie gelangt seyn, die es wirklich hat.” When developing his aesthetics, specifically in Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, Schiller was convinced that it was this poem that had first established a platform for something even greater to come.8 The poem begins with the evocation of the life of the Olympian gods that flows “Ewig klar und spiegelrein und eben” (l. 1). In juxtaposition to this, Schiller portrayed the destiny of the mortal individual as follows: “Zwischen Sinnenglück und Seelenfrieden / Bleibt dem Menschen nur die bange Wahl” (ll. 7–8). The seventeen stanzas that follow deal mainly with the question of if (and how) it was possible that out of the limitations of the senses paths emerge that lead upward to the infinite (“aus der Sinne Schranken führen / Pfade aufwärts zur Unendlichkeit,” ll. 17–18). Over and above that, Schiller contemplates a related and seemingly more realistic question: an imaginable happiness already in this world (“in des Todes Reichen,” l. 21). For that, courage is required to free oneself from the anxiety of the earthly domain (“Angst des Irrdischen,” l. 38) and to succumb entirely to beauty (l. 40). Only in this realm will the appearance of eternal bliss free the human being from all duties (“von allen Pf lichten,” l. 54) and enable him to recognize the godlike image of humanity (“der Menschheit Götterbild,” l. 63).


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The antitheses that are negotiated in this poem — the ideal and life, this world and the beyond, beauty that triumphs and a deed that fails — are continued in eight more stanzas (9–16). They begin by alternating “wenn” and “aber” and are framed into poetic images with ever-intensifying gravity. The human being may fight, but the quiet shadow lands of beauty (“der Schönheit stille Schattenlande,” l. 94) are not achievable through struggling; the human being may strive to discover the truth through philosophy, but he will still be removed from the sphere of beauty (“der Schönheit Sphäre,” l. 111); the human being may follow the principles of morality, but he will not gain freedom of thought (“die Freyheit der Gedanken,” l. 132). “Nehmt die Gottheit auf in euren Willen, / Und sie steigt von ihrem Weltenthron,” ll. 134–359). Finally, the human being may rebel against pain, but he will only find redemption from agony “in den heitern Regionen / Wo die Schatten selig wohnen” (ll. 151–52). Schiller’s philosophy of beauty that leads to bliss is summed up in the last two stanzas. The writer recalls the heroic deeds of the mortal, and to be sure, also divine, Hercules and his crossing to Olympus, where Hebe, the goddess with the rose cheeks, praises the “transfigured” (Verklärten) with a goblet (ll. 178–80). The construction seems to be somewhat daring, for Hercules, son of Jupiter and Alcmene, is not just any human being but a demigod who is capable of exceptional deeds. Moreover, because of his ancestry, he is predestined for the joys “in Kronions Saal” (l. 178). The poem revolves several times around the following question: How can the human being partake of the divine already in this world? The answers that the poet gives (the inability to take from death what belongs to it [compare ll. 21–23] and, following that, the flight into beauty that helps to overcome everything mortal) are postulates of practical reason that employ Hercules’s fate as an allegory that indicates the path and goal of the one who is searching for the only conceivable happiness in the shadow realm of beauty, that is, pure forms. Schiller describes the sea of poesy from the solid ground of philosophy as if only good will were needed to make the sea a home. Self-evidently, the attainment of this goal means that Pilate’s question, “What is truth?” has been resolved. In his poem “Das verschleierte Bild zu Sais,” composed in mid-August 1795 for Die Horen, Schiller shifted his view from Olympus to earth. It sets to verse that which had been told over and over again in the myth of the temple of Isis. The sanctum of the temple contained a holy chest that mortals were not allowed to open. Schiller had already retold this myth in 1789 in his lecture “Die Sendung Moses” (Moses’ Calling). There, he mentioned the fate of an unfortunate individual who had disregarded the law and gone mad. In the poem and following the encounter of Moses with God, in which God disguises himself in a cloud, the goddess Isis presents herself to an inquisitive young man as a veiled image of huge

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proportions (“ein verschleiert Bild von Riesengröße,” l. 20). She is the truth that may not be unveiled because, as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in “Eine Duplik” had first made clear, the human being is not predestined to acquire it. The young man suffers for hours. Finally, he transgresses the command and is punished. “Auf ewig / War seines Lebens Heiterkeit dahin. / Ihn riß ein tiefer Gram zum frühen Grabe” (ll. 79–81). It is hard to overlook the message in Schiller’s poem, which is that the human being shall not tempt the gods and that it is not possible to attain the truth. And, yet, especially when considering “Das Reich der Schatten,” something else could be meant: the young man’s death is revoked in poetry, the beauty of the words is granted permanence, the mythos is nothing other than the material that is eradicated by the form.10 Of course, as before, the content of the poem is very much of this world. The epistemological question is so pressing that the beauty of the verses is obstructed as if they were standing alone on the wide sea, revealing another truth as the common one, namely the truth that emerges from beauty and transcends all philosophizing. The poem “Natur und Schule” which originated presumably at the end of August 1795,11 is related in its content to the poem “Das verschleierte Bild zu Sais” and, formally, to the poem “Elegie.” It was composed in classical distichs, which were Schiller’s metric domain. In answer to the questions of an inquisitive young man, the poet discusses how, in spite of all obstacles, humankind could come to “truth and justice” (l. 14). After the lost unity of humankind, nature, and the gods, it is important to lead the human being back to nature through culture, science, and art “auf dem Wege der Vernunft und der Freyheit,” as stated in the essay Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, which originated at this time (20:414). The poem “Natur und Schule” follows: “Ist es denn wahr, sprichst du, was der Weisheit Meister mich lehren, Was der Lehrlinge Schaar sicher und fertig beschwört; Kann die Wissenschaft nur zum wahren Frieden mich führen, Nur des Systemes Gebälk stützen das Glück und das Recht? Muß ich dem Trieb mistraun, der leise mich warnt, dem Gesetze, Das du selber, Natur mir in den Busen geprägt, Biß auf die ewige Schrift die Schul’ ihr Siegel gedrücket, Und der Formel Gefäß bindet den flüchtigen Geist? Sage du mirs, du bist in diese Tiefen gestiegen, Aus dem modrigten Grab kamst du erhalten zurück, Dir ist bekannt was die Gruft der dunkeln Wörter bewahret, Ob der Lebenden Trost dort bey den Mumien wohnt? Muß ich ihn wandeln den nächtlichen Weg? Mir graut, ich bekenn’ es, Wandeln will ich ihn doch, führt er zu Wahrheit und Recht.” Freund, du kennst doch die goldene Zeit, (Es haben die Dichter Manche Sage von ihr rührend und einfach erzählt.)


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Jene Zeit da das Heilige noch in der Menschheit gewandelt, Da jungfräulich und keusch noch der Instinkt sich bewahrt, Da noch das große Gesetz, das oben im Sonnenlauf waltet, Und verborgen im Ey reget den hüpfenden Punkt, Der Nothwendigkeit stilles Gesetz, das stätige, gleiche, Auch der menschlichen Brust freyere Wellen bewegt, Da ein sichres Gefühl noch treu, wie am Uhrwerk der Zeiger, Auf das Wahrhaftige nur, nur auf das Ewige wies? Da war kein Profaner, kein Eingeweihter zu sehen, Was man lebendig empfand, ward nicht bey Todten gesucht. Gleich verständlich für jegliches Herz war die ewige Regel, Gleich verborgen der Quell, dem sie belebend entfloß. Aber die glückliche Zeit ist nicht mehr. Vermessene Willkühr Hat der getreuen Natur göttlichen Einklang entweiht. Wolkigt fließt der himmlische Strom in schuldigen Herzen, Lauter wird er und rein nur an dem Quell noch geschöpft. Dieser Quell, tief unten im Schacht des reinen Verstandes, Fern von der Leidenschaft Spur, rieselt er silbern und kühl. Aus der Sinne wildem Geräusch verschwand das Orakel, Nur in dem stilleren Selbst hört es der horchende Geist. Aber die Wissenschaft nur vermag den Zugang zu öfnen, Und den heiligen Sinn hütet das mystische Wort. Hier beschwört es der Forscher, der reines Herzens hinabsteigt, Und die verlorne Natur giebt ihm die Weißheit zurück. Hast du, Glücklicher, nie den schützenden Engel verloren, Nie des frommen Instinkts liebende Warnung verwirkt, Mahlt in dem keuschen Auge noch treu und rein sich die Wahrheit, Tönt ihre Stimme dir noch hell in der kindlichen Brust, Schweigt noch in dem zufriednen Gemüth des Zweifels Empörung, Wird sie, weißt du’s gewiß, schweigen auf ewig wie heut, Wird der Empfindungen Streit nie eines Richters bedürfen, Nie den hellen Verstand trüben das tückische Herz, Nie der verschlagene Witz des Gewißens Einfalt bestricken, Niemals, weißt du’s gewiß, wanken das ewige Steur? O dann gehe du hin in deiner köstlichen Unschuld, Dich kann die Wissenschaft nichts lehren. Sie lerne von dir! Jenes Gesetz, das mit eisernem Stab den Sträubenden lenket, Dir gilt es nicht. Was du thust, was dir gefällt, ist Gesetz. Herrschen wird durch die ewige Zeit, wie Polyklets Regel, Was du mit heiliger Hand bildest, mit heiligem Mund Redest, wird die Herzen der Menschen allmächtig bewegen, Du nur merkst nicht den Gott, der dir im Busen gebeut, Nicht des Siegels Gewalt, das alle Geister dir beuget, Einfach gehst du und still durch die eroberte Welt;

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Aber blind erringst du, was wir im Lichte verfehlen, Und dem spielenden Kind glückt, was dem Weisen mislingt. (1:252–53) Although unaware of it himself, the inquisitive young man is in possession of the truth that he seeks because he stems from the ancient world, a world that is not in need of science, of the walk “in diese Tiefen” (l. 9) where answers are sought about the nature of Being in modern times. The schoolmaster begins by reminding another person that he actually is familiar with the Golden Age. “Freund, du kennst doch die goldene Zeit” (l. 15). “Jene Zeit da das Heilige noch in der Menschheit gewandelt” (l. 17). Subsequently, he describes the genius as the one who preserves his instinct (“der Instinkt sich bewahrt,” l. 18), to whom “ein sichres Gefühl noch treu, wie am Uhrwerk der Zeiger,” and attributes “das Wahrhaftige” to himself (ll. 23–24). Having fallen into a time of uncertainty, in his “künstlicher Unschuld” (l. 51) the genius knows without reflecting, and makes laws through the God who reigns in his bosom (l. 58): “Einfach gehst du und still durch die eroberte Welt” (l. 60). Schiller philosophizes in verse, recalling what he had written earlier and which he now formulates in prose. In Über Anmut und Würde, the “beautiful soul” is presented as a vision of the future in which sensuousness and morality, duty and inclination are tied together harmoniously. It is closely related to the idea of the naïve genius who is placed back into the past. In Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, the beautiful soul of the future has become the naïve genius of the past, who now proves to be the stranger in the present. “Natur und Schule” addresses just such a genius: “Aber die glückliche Zeit ist nicht mehr” (l. 29). Only in the last distich does the poet mention that a genius is also a genius of art and science, of unintentionally created natural products of the beautiful and the true: “Aber blind erringst du, was wir im Lichte verfehlen, / Und dem spielenden Kind glückt, was dem Weisen mißlingt” (ll. 61–62). In Schiller’s view, Goethe was a “Naturerzeugnis.” He belonged to the “Günstlingen der Natur,” with or without “ ‘Unarten’ wodurch sie nicht selten ein Gegenstand verdienter Verachtung sind,” having left behind the “üppige Naturkraft über die Freyheit des Verstandes” (20:276). In a way, “Natur und Schule” is the philosophical prelude to the most poetical of all Schiller’s productions of 1795, “Elegie,”12 which was composed in August and September and for which Schiller himself reserved high praise. As he wrote to Wilhelm von Humboldt on November 29, 1795: “Mein eigenes Dichtertalent hat sich, wie Sie gewiß gefunden haben werden, in diesem Gedichte erweitert: noch in keinem ist der Gedanke selbst so poetisch gewesen und geblieben, in keinem hat das Gemüt so sehr als Eine Kraft gewirkt.”


185

It would be tedious to go through the poem in detail with its 108 distichs and 216 verses; it has been studied in depth by numerous scholars.13 Here we note Schiller’s successful effort to move both on the shore and beyond it, that is, to move on the solid ground of his philosophy of history as well as on the seemingly uncertain surface of the sea of beauty, as ascertained philosophically. The beautiful is nature, that “Berg mit dem röttlich strahlenden Gipfel” (l. 1), the forest, the mountains, the meadow; bees, butterflies, and larks. Despite all historical change, nature remains in a state of ever-changing beauty (l. 209). As always, for humankind, beauty is imperishable. “Unter demselben Blau, über dem nehmlichen Grün / Wandeln die nahen und wandeln vereint die fernen Geschlechter, / Und die Sonne Homers, siehe! Sie lächelt auch uns” (ll. 214–16). Thus, nature becomes an allegory of art and is one with it and general (“allgemein”). It is symbolically enlarged as the infinite whose secret the poet is able to disclose. However, the naïve view of nature, whether it is experienced or invented, does not only shed light on what is harmoniously delightful but also on the extremes, on the opposites between the eternal heights and infinite depths (“zwischen der ewigen Höh und der ewigen Tiefe”) that face each other (l. 37). This is, so to speak, the sublime, which is not terrifying, since the wanderer peers, as Schiller wrote in his essay “Vom Erhabenen,” “von einem hohen und wohlbefestigten Geländer in eine große Tiefe, oder von einer Anhöhe auf die stürmende See hinab sieht” (20:179–80). Yet, it awakens the memory of what is violent in history, from which “die Liebe verschwand” (l. 44), in which “entbrennen in feurigem Kampf die eifernden Kräfte” (l. 77) and where, for humankind, “der Natur züchtiger Gürtel zu eng wird” (l. 146), that is, in which the world was brutalized. Schiller’s lament over the course of history appears all the more moving as he paints pre-historic times with the brightest colors. Even wars belong to the order of things, here in alliance with beautiful nature. The poet plants his ideas into the gaps in historical tradition to make history a system out of the spirit of poesy. In doing so, the poet proves to be the only true historian, who not only sees how it was, but who also knows what finally has to be done for the well-being of humanity. Aesthetic education is necessary, “Drum soll der Sänger mit dem König gehn,” as Karl VII sees in Schiller’s Die Jungfrau von Orleans (The Maid of Orleans, 1801; l. 484). By poeticizing the philosophical and the compellingly naïve depiction of nature in which at least the semblance of being shines forth, Schiller’s “Elegie” is certainly persuasive. Of course, Schiller was denied the fulfillment of his desire to surpass the “Elegie” with a “pure” poem (an idyll) in which the marriage of Hercules with Hebe was to be immersed into nothing other than light.14 The sentimental poet is never the ruler of the sea of poesy. This knowledge pained Schiller, for he wanted to be as great as his own creations.

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Schiller himself did not approve of the separation between the shore of philosophy and the sea of poesy, or, also, of literature — which he may have taken over from Kant. In his poetry of 1795, and even more so in subsequent poems, he attempted to soften the separation by way of a flowing transition. He believed that philosophy would develop sufficiently so that eventually it could be pulled out to sea. This idea was not at all off course. Schelling, for example, endorsed it in his System des transcendentalen Idealismus (System of Transcendental Idealism, 1800), at the end of which he states that for the philosopher, art was the highest field of activity, “weil sie ihm das Allerheiligste gleichsam öffnet, wo in ewiger und ursprünglicher Vereinigung gleichsam in Einer Flamme brennt, was in der Natur und Geschichte gesondert ist, und was im Leben und Handeln, ebenso wie im Denken, ewig sich fliehen muß” (2:628). Time and again, and as it always has, beauty rises “aus dem unendlichen Meer,” as Schiller writes in “Das Glück” (l. 68). It remains at a distance from solid ground, and even the shoreline, in order not to be perceived as being ordinary. Translated by Steven D. Martinson

Notes 1

All references to Schiller’s works in this essay are to the following edition: Werke: Nationalausgabe. Im Auftrage des Goethe- und Schiller-Archivs, des SchillerNationalmuseums und der Deutschen Akademie, edited originally by Julius Petersen and Hermann Schneider, currently edited by Norbert Oellers (44 vols. to date; Weimar: Böhlau, 1943–), known as the Nationalausgabe. References will appear in parentheses with volume and page number. Here: 25:154. 2 Schiller had been working on this poem since October 1788. It was finished only after Wieland’s active participation in February 1789 and appeared in his Teutscher Merkur in March 1789. 3 With the reworking of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft in preparation for the second edition of the work (1787), Kant thoroughly revised the chapter “Von den Paralogismen der reinen Vernunft,” which is the first “Hauptstück” of the second book of the Transzendentale Dialektik. The poet’s warning about the “uferlosen Ozean” was left out in the revised version. 4

Schiller’s definition of play appears in the Fifteenth Letter of Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen: “um es endlich auf einemal herauszusagen, der Mensch spielt nur, wo er in voller Bedeutung des Worts Mensch ist, und er ist nur da ganz Mensch, wo er spielt” (20:359).

5

To be sure, the essay did not appear until 1801, but based on its content, it is most likely that it was written before 1795.

6

Compare also the epigram “Schön und erhaben,” which probably originated in October 1795 and was included in the twelfth “Stück” of Die Horen for 1795.


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7

In the second version of the poem, Schiller left out the stanza that contains this image.

8

See Schiller’s letter to Humboldt of November 29/30, 1795.

9

See Goethe’s drama Iphigenie auf Tauris, in which Iphigenie ascertains that the gods speak to us only through our hearts (“nur durch unser Herz zu uns sprechen,” l. 494) and whose character determines the projection of humanity. “Der mißversteht die Himmlischen, der sie / Blutgierig wähnt; er dichtet ihnen nur / Die eigenen grausamen Begierden an” (ll. 523–25); and then begs, “Rettet mich / Und rettet euer Bild in meiner Seele!” (ll. 1716–17). 10

See the Twenty-second Letter of Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen, where Schiller writes, “Darinn also besteht das eigentliche Kunstgeheimniß des Meisters, daß er den Stoff durch die Kunst vertilgt . . .” (20:382).

11

The poem was later titled “Der Genius.”

12

Later titled “Der Spaziergang.”

13

See, for example, Riedel, Jeziorkowski, and Alt 2:283–93.

14

See Schiller’s letter to Humboldt of November 29/30, 1795.

Works Cited Alt, Peter-André. Schiller: Leben — Werk — Wirkung. 2 vols. Munich: C. H. Beck, 2000. Golz, Jochen. “Nemesis oder die Gewalt der Musik.” In Gedichte von Friedrich Schiller: Interpretationen, ed. Norbert Oellers, 114–22. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1998. Hinderer, Walter. “Konzepte einer Sentimentalischen Operation.” In Gedichte von Friedrich Schiller: Interpretationen, ed. Norbert Oellers, 128–48. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1998. Jeziorkowski, Klaus. “Der Textweg.” In Gedichte von Friedrich Schiller: Interpretationen, ed. Norbert Oellers, 157–78. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1998. Kant, Immanuel. Werke in 10 Bänden. Ed. Wilhelm Weischedel. 4th facsimile reprinting. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1975. Oellers, Norbert, ed. Gedichte von Friedrich Schiller: Interpretationen. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1998. Riedel, Wolfgang. Der Spaziergang: Ästhetik der Landschaft und Geschichtsphilosophie der Natur bei Schiller. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1989. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph. Schellings Werke, ed. Manfred Schröter. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1927. Facsimile reprinting, 1965.

Wallenstein Dieter Borchmeyer Unter Saturnus geboren und Jupiter kokettierend, welcher ihm nicht Stich hält. — Richard Wagner, referring to Schiller’s Wallenstein, from an interview with Cosima on May 24, 1870.

An Aesthetic Public Space

I

Wallensteins Lager (Wallenstein’s Camp, 1800), the play whose premiere opened the Weimar Theater on October 12, 1798, after its remodeling by Thouret, Schiller speaks of the “new era” that is to begin, after what was even for him a long break from the theater, with the reopening of the Weimar stage. This new era is to encourage the poet, “die alte Bahn verlassend,” to elevate the spectator “aus des Bürgerlebens engem Kreis / Auf einen höhern Schauplatz [. . .], / Nicht unwert des erhabenen Moments / Der Zeit, in dem wir strebend uns bewegen” (ll. 52–56). There is no doubt that when Schiller speaks of “this moment,” in which “um der Menschheit große Gegenstände, / Um Herrschaft und um Freiheit wird gerungen” (ll. 65–66), he is referring to the French Revolution. The stage must prove equal to this large historic kairos by committing itself to the “großen Gegenstand” (l. 57): the world-encompassing content of historical-political tragedy. In this sense a new era was beginning for Schiller as well, as can be seen if one compares Wallenstein with Don Carlos, the last drama he wrote before the long hiatus in his dramatic production. The latter work, despite its efforts to reach beyond the “Schranken des bürgerlichen Kothurns,” remains a “Familiengemälde aus einem königlichen Hause” that transposes the purely humanistic, domestic-familial situations and relations of the bourgeois tragedy to the courtly level, and places them in a contrapuntal relationship to the obligations of etiquette or of a politics perceived as pure machination (Borchmeyer 1973, 78–90). The political element in this play is presented positively only in the form of ideas (Posa’s state utopia!), in a private alliance based on friendship that is interpreted as an archetype for a future republican community. This positive political element, though, N HIS PROLOGUE TO

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does not appear in events having far-reaching implications. The decisive elements of the plot in Don Carlos have practically no consequences that extend beyond the immediate vicinity of the royal household; state affairs, in contrast to all later historical dramas, take place in Don Carlos behind the scene of world politics. The antinomy of the private and the political spheres, so characteristic of the works written during Schiller’s youth, is superseded after Wallenstein by the interpenetration of both spheres. The embodiment of the political in human form, as well as the return to dramas that center around the figure of a ruler and affairs of the state, to the tragedy of public life in which the downfall of the hero pulls “eine Welt im Sturze” (Piccolomini, l. 2640) down into the depths, and in which the fate of the tragic individual is at the same time the fate of the community — all this is connected with Schiller’s theory of “ästhetische Erziehung” (Borchmeyer 1973, 96–151). This education is aimed at the unity of the individually and the generally human as represented by the state, in contrast to the bureaucratic-abstract state of modern times. This modern state has become “seinen Bürgern fremd, weil ihn das Gefühl nirgends findet”;1 humanity in the concrete sense thus remains restricted to the private sphere. If Lessing in his Hamburgische Dramaturgie had disparaged dramas that focus on rulers and affairs of state in favor of the bourgeois tragedy, because the concept of the state is far too abstract to appeal to our senses,2 in Schiller’s aesthetic, which opposes the privatization of tragedy as justified by Lessing, drama tends toward an aesthetic utopia that restores the unity of the human and the political, as archetypally realized in the Greek Polis, and overcomes the alienation between the state and the individual. The stage thus evokes an aesthetic public space, as Schiller had envisioned it theoretically in his Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen (Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, 1795). The prologue to Die Braut von Messina (The Bride of Messina, 1803), “Über den Gebrauch des Chors in der Tragödie,” forms a bridge between these letters and the classical drama. It is here that Schiller, from the dramatist’s standpoint, addresses again the theme of the abstractness of the state, the privatization of modern life, and the false artistic consequences resulting from these phenomena (bourgeois tragedy). Der Palast der Könige ist jetzt geschlossen, die Gerichte haben sich von den Toren der Städte in das Innere der Häuser zurückgezogen, die Schrift hat das lebendige Wort verdrängt, das Volk selbst, die sinnlich lebendige Masse, ist, wo sie nicht als rohe Gewalt wirkt (Revolution!), zum Staat, folglich zu einem abgezogenen Begriff geworden, die Götter sind in die Brust des Menschen zurückgekehrt. (5:286)

In short, life in general has lost its meaningful, aesthetic public space and has become abstract and prosaic.

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Schiller does not draw the same conclusion from this fact as does Lessing, namely that the dramatic poet ought to transpose his plot into the interior of houses as the only space in which concrete humanity can still be found. Instead, he develops a dramatic conception out of a spirit of aesthetic contradiction in opposition to the condition of the modern world. Der Dichter muß die Paläste wieder auftun, er muß die Gerichte unter freiem Himmel herausführen, er muß die Götter wieder aufstellen, er muß alles Unmittelbare, das durch die künstliche Einrichtung des wirklichen Lebens aufgehoben ist, wieder herstellen [. . .]. (5:286–87)

It is the chorus that Schiller uses in Die Braut von Messina as the poetic instrument for the “opening up” of life in this sense. In ancient Greek tragedy, the chorus was the “natural” accompaniment of tragic actions, because “die Handlungen und Schicksale der Helden und Könige” that comprised such actions are “schon an sich selbst öffentlich.” But the chorus can no longer be a natural organ in this way for the events of modern life. It becomes instead an “artificial organ” that places the stage in opposition to these events, and thus a “lebendige Mauer [. . .], die die Tragödie um sich herumzieht, um sich vor der wirklichen Welt rein abzuschließen” (5:285). The introduction of the chorus, to be sure, remains an experimental exception. This is conceivable only in the synthetic art world of Die Braut von Messina, but not in the modern historical drama, within which another means of “opening up” dramatic actions must be found. In the prologue to Die Braut von Messina, Schiller bases his judgment as to a tragedy’s appropriateness to the public space of the theatrical performance on the tragedy’s content and its protagonists’ manner of expression — by means of the public space represented by the chorus, the dramatic figures stand “auf einem natürlichen Theater [. . .] und werden ebendeswegen desto tauglicher, von dem Kunsttheater zu einem Publikum zu reden” (5:290). Likewise, he demonstrates in his dramaturgical treatises, for example, in Über die tragische Kunst (On Tragic Art, 1792), that the appropriateness of a drama to the public that witnesses its performance is based on the form of tragic art, which is fundamentally rich in affect and related to the public on an elemental level. It is no coincidence that Schiller, together with Goethe, studied and interpreted Aristotle’s Poetics during this time of renewed dramatic productivity (1797). These readings confirmed him in his dramaturgical conviction that it is the purpose of tragedy, in contrast to the largely apathetic structure of the epic, to arouse the spectator’s emotions, or else to modulate and balance them through the utilization of specifically “epic” means. In a letter to Goethe dated December 26, 1797, Schiller described the “affektvolle, unruhige Erwartung, mithin das Gesetz des intensiven und rastlosen Fortschreitens” as the essential characteristic of all tragic art.

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Epic Theater and Tragedy While Schiller was working on his magnum opus, Goethe also turned again to the work that was to accompany him throughout his life, Faust. Oddly enough, both writers — the born narrative writer and the tragedian who increasingly felt the calling to be a narrative writer during the years in which he had distanced himself from the stage — were initially thinking of treating their dramatic subject within an epic framework. On June 27, 1797, Goethe replied to Schiller’s question as to the “poetischen Reif ” (poetic maturity) of the rapidly expanding material of Faust, which in Schiller’s view would require a “zu große Umständlichkeit und Breite” for the drama (June 26, 1797), that he would like to make use of the “Theorie des epischen Gedichts” that they had formulated jointly that year. Regarding Wallenstein, which was becoming more and more expansive, Schiller wrote on December 1, 1797: “Es kommt mir vor, als ob mich ein gewisser epischer Geist angewandelt habe.” He traces this back to the influence of Goethe’s spirit. If Goethe in a sense integrated an epic element into the dramatic form of the entire Faust drama through the temporal breadth and discontinuity of its action, and also the multiplicity of its scenes and subplots, Schiller confined the epic element mainly to the prologue. Wallensteins Lager is a piece of epic theater by virtue of its stringing together of picturesque scenes in an attempt to capture the totality of Wallenstein’s epoch as mirrored in the life of an army, and finally in its lack of dramatic progression. “Darum verzeiht dem Dichter,” it is said in the prologue, “wenn er euch / Nicht raschen Schritts mit Einem Mal ans Ziel / Der Handlung reißt, den großen Gegenstand / In einer Reihe von Gemälden nur / Vor euren Augenabzurolen wagt” (ll. 119–23). The epic overture clears the space for a drama based on the formal laws of classic tragedy: the division of the action by acts replaces the mere sequence of scenes in the Lager, blank verse replaces Knittelvers, the plebeian setting of the soldiery makes way for dramatic figures belonging to the upper classes. Still, the first act of Die Piccolomini exhibits epic structure inasmuch as it “mehr statistisch oder statisch ist, den Zustand, welcher ist, darstellt, aber ihn noch nicht eigentlich verändert,” as Schiller wrote to Goethe on December 1, 1797. He goes on to claim that this act thus serves to evoke “die Welt und das Allgemeine, worauf sich die Handlung bezieht” — again, a task belonging more properly to the epic. To justify the greatly augmented breadth of the work in terms of the laws of drama, Schiller gives it the form of a trilogy. This is nothing but a hollow mold that conceals the extensive epic material because what we are dealing with after all is not three independent dramas, but rather a work that was composed without interruption. On the other hand, one cannot overlook the fact that Schiller consistently seeks to accommodate the historical material to the art form of

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tragedy. After all, in his treatise Über die tragische Kunst, he had emphasized that tragedy has to accommodate historic truth to its own laws and psychagogic needs; that is, the tragedian must stylize the historic material in terms of plot schemata suited to compel the spectator’s emotions. In this sense, the Wallenstein material, which, according to Schiller’s letter to Körner dated November 28, 1796, is generally unsuited to the tragic mode, is “poetisch organisiert und [. . .] in eine reine tragische Fabel verwandelt.” This is done, for instance, by bringing “die Handlung gleich vom Anfang an in eine solche Präzipitation und Neigung, daß sie in stetiger und beschleunigter Bewegung zu ihrem Ende eilt” (letter to Goethe, October 2, 1797) — in accordance with the final principle of dramatic art as he developed it together with Goethe earlier that year. One can cite the following examples for this tragic “schematization” of the material: the virtuosic preparation and shaping of a peripeteia (Wallensteins Tod, act 3, scene 5), which intensifies and heightens the turn of fortunes in Wallenstein’s destiny into a cataract of messages of doom, or the clear affinity of the pathetic scenes at the end of the trilogy with the fall of the house of Atreus as portrayed by Aeschylus and Euripides. That this tragically conceived and stylized material represents a poetic “as if ” order, and not the historical “per se,” corresponds to the prologue’s maxim according to which the work “die Täuschung, die sie schafft / Aufrichtig selbst zerstört und ihren Schein / Der Wahrheit nicht betrüglich unterschiebt” (ll. 135 ff). It was not until later, when in the process of the reception of Schiller’s historic drama “Schein” and “Wahrheit” became confused, that the tragic nemesis hypostasized into an objective law of history. But Schiller was convinced that human reason projects laws of this kind onto history. As early as in his inaugural lecture, Schiller had emphasized that history is only an “Aggregat von Bruchstücken” elevated by the historian “zu einem vernunftmäßig zusammenhängendem Ganzen” (6:427). The historian acts in a manner analogous to the poet: after all, according to Schiller’s poem “Die Künstler” (ll. 235 ff.), it is only by way of the tragic stage that providence entered into the course of history — a thought vividly elucidated at the end of the ballad “Die Kraniche des Ibykus,” in which nemesis or vengeance indeed spills over from the stage onto life. In Wallenstein too, this mythic, symbolic construction of nemesis is derived from the art form of tragedy and acts effectively as a characteristic of tragedy, especially by arousing fear in anticipation of the hero’s impending catastrophe. Nemesis belongs in the realm of symbolic devices upon which tragedy depends. Schiller was convinced that the modern world, which had left the gods behind, was infertile ground for tragedy; he therefore sought poetic surrogates for the gods and the numinous signs of ancient tragedy. In the prologue to Die Braut von Messina it is said that “Die Götter sind in die Brust des Menschen zurückgekehrt”; therefore, the tragic poet must

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restore them to life (5:286). Of course Schiller did not believe in visions, miracles, or prophetic dreams, yet they are legitimized poetically in works such as Die Jungfrau von Orleans or Die Braut von Messina. (One might also think of Countess Terzky’s prophetic dream before Wallenstein’s death.) Schiller was no Voltaire, for whom literary form, including that of tragedy, served to destroy mythos and legend; rather, he sought to reconstitute the miraculous as aesthetic illusion in Die Jungfrau von Orleans. And as is well known, he did so in explicit opposition to Voltaire’s Pucelle d’Orléans. The astrological motifs in Wallenstein, with which Schiller struggled for a long time, are of the greatest significance in this connection. Astrology was a “Fratze” to him (to Goethe, December 4, 1798; to Iffland December 24, 1798; et al.), with which he dealt reluctantly, even when he needed it urgently for the sake of historical ambiance — to get closer to the spirit of the age, as he wrote to Goethe in the letter of December 4. (In his letter dated December 5, 1798, Goethe described the “Astrologische” element in Schiller’s sense as a “Teil des historisch, politisch, barbarisch Temporären” and in this connection as a counterpoint to the tragic.) But this superstitious caricature is to gain poetic dignity through dramatic treatment, as Schiller writes to Goethe on April 7, 1797. On October 2 of the same year, Schiller writes to Goethe that this dignity is derived from its analogy to the numinous apparatus of the classic tragedy, especially to the form-determining role of the oracle. He admits that it is difficult to find a replacement “aus weniger fabelhaften Zeiten” for the latter: “Das Orakel hat einen Anteil an der Tragödie, der schlechterdings durch nichts andres zu ersetzen ist.” As had already been acknowledged by Schiller’s sharp-witted contemporary Johann Wilhelm Süvern in his book Über Schillers Wallenstein in Hinsicht auf griechische Tragödie (Concerning Schiller’s Wallenstein in View of Greek Tragedy, 1800), the same year in which the book edition of the Wallenstein trilogy was published, Schiller had found a substitute for this supernatural element in the astrological motif of Wallenstein. In the original version of the astrological scene at the beginning of the third part of the trilogy, Wallenstein speaks of the “Orakeln” in the “Buch der Sterne.” And in fact, the function of the latter in the symbolic cosmos of Wallenstein closely resembles the intricate role of the oracle in Sophocles’ Oedipus the King and in classical mythology generally. Again and again, there is a dark counter-sense that lies behind the oracle’s surface sense, the true tragic meaning behind the apparently happy meaning. The ambiguity of the oracle is portrayed by Schiller in the “two faces” (Doppelgesichtigkeit) of the planetary alignment, like the apparently contradictory dream “Orakeln” (they are explicitly referred to by this term) later in Die Braut von Messina, which in fact has the same content. More than anything else, it is this verification of the oracle, the dream, or the planetary

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alignment that connects Oedipus the King, Wallenstein, and Die Braut von Messina. The heroes of these dramas are struck by the “Schicksalsfluch” even as they think they have escaped it; the happy condition they think they have achieved is revealed to be the catastrophe they thought they had averted. This is the tragic irony that pervades the Wallenstein trilogy down to the details of the action. It consists precisely in the fact that Wallenstein believes, on the basis of his horoscope, that he is one of the “hellgebornen, heitern Joviskindern” (Piccolomini, l. 985), and that his destiny stands under the sign of victorious Jupiter — whereas in reality it is the defeated Saturn, and Mars, the other star of misfortune, that represent his destiny. Astonishingly, Richard Wagner recognized this (thus anticipating the most recent Schiller research)3 in a conversation with Cosima Wagner on March 24, 1870, in which he reduced the figure of Wallenstein to the following formula: “Unter Saturnus geboren und Jupiter kokettierend, welcher ihm nicht Stich hält.” With these words, Wagner refers to the astrological scene at the beginning of the book version of Wallensteins Tod. In this scene, Wallenstein and his astrologer Seni are observing and interpreting “der Planeten Aspekt,” which finally appears to Wallenstein as he hoped it would: Glückseliger Aspekt! So stellt sich endlich Die große Drei verhängnisvoll zusammen Und beide Segenssterne, Jupiter Und Venus, nehmen den verderblichen, Den tück’schen Mars in ihre Mitte, zwingen Den alten Schadenstifter, mir zu dienen. [. . .] Jetzt haben sie den alten Feind besiegt, Und bringen ihn am Himmel mir gefangen. Seni completes the thought: “Und beide große Lumina [Jupiter und Venus] von keinem / Malefico beleidigt! Der Saturn / Unschädlich, machtlos, in cadente domo” (Wallensteins Tod, ll. 22–24). Wallenstein’s assessment of the various planets corresponds exactly to the astrological norm: Jupiter and Venus are the beneficae stellae, Saturn and Mars the maleficae. Of course this assessment is connected to the actual role of the gods of classical mythology, who now have been transposed to the starry sky above. In the constellation sketched out by Seni, the maleficae stellae are in a weak position. Wallenstein’s strategic vocabulary — Jupiter and Venus take Mars “in ihre Mitte,” they “[haben] den alten Feind besiegt” and now bring him “gefangen” — brings the scene’s tragic irony to the fore with exceptional clarity, because the seemingly fortunate aspect, the planetary constellation as read by Wallenstein,

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is diametrically opposed to the real, political and military “constellation.” Wallenstein believes that his blessed stars are bringing Mars to him as a captive. But who is it who has just been “captured”? It is Wallenstein’s agent Sesin — and with this, the peripeteia has already begun! Immediately following on Wallenstein’s decision to act, based on the favorable constellation which has finally appeared (or so he thinks) “geschehen Schläge an die Tür” (following l. 35 of Wallensteins Tod). It is destiny knocking at the door — and thus the planetary aspect seems not at all in accord with the actual course of events. Are the stars thus will-o’-the-wisps? Only if one believes that Jupiter is in fact Wallenstein’s star. But if one reads this aspect against the grain of Wallenstein’s own interpretation, if one thus recognizes that it is not Jupiter, but Saturn and Mars to which in fact he is subject symbolically, then the planetary alignment actually does correspond to the facts. Just as Saturn’s dominion is “aus” (Wallensteins Tod, l. 25), so too is that of Wallenstein; he too will henceforth be “unschädlich, machtlos, in cadente domo.” The metaphor of his “fall” pervades the whole trilogy; even the phrase “fallenden Hauses” is applied by Countess Terzky at the end of the tragedy to Wallenstein: “Ich überlebte meines Hauses Fall” (Wallensteins Tod, l. 3857). While Wallenstein believes his destiny to stand under the sign of victorious Jupiter, in reality it resembles that of defeated Saturn, both astrologically and mythically. Even when he says “Mars regiert die Stunde” (Wallensteins Tod, l. 2) at the very beginning of the play (not immediately in an astrological, but here rather in a metaphorical sense), this is much truer than he suspects. It is not Venus who belongs to him, but Mars, the god of war. Whatever Wallenstein is, he has become through war. The notion that he might be a bringer of peace is a fateful self-delusion (and the delusion of Max Piccolomini as well). This is clear even at the start of the trilogy in Wallensteins Lager. The soldiers’ idea of freedom makes absolute the exceptional situation of wartime, and it is only the rules of war — to use the terminology of Hegel’s Ästhetik, the rules of a “heroischen Weltzustandes” amidst an institutionally solid and “polizierten” order — that give Wallenstein even the chance of achieving peace by his own means. But a peace of this kind, dependent as it is on an exceptional existence conditioned by war, is a paradox. No one can seriously believe that Wallenstein could be transformed from a war hero into a colonializing hero of peace who builds, sows, regulates streams, and creates routes for commerce, as Max Piccolomini dreams in the fourth scene of act 3 (l. 1670). Max opens his vision of the future with a symbolic reinterpretation of the astronomical constellation expected by Wallenstein, which Max employs in a deliberately anti-mythological sense: the “düstere[s] Reich” of Mars will soon be over (l. 1654). But what will Wallenstein do when the desired constellation appears? Not a project of colonization and peace,

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but an act of civil war. He, like his planet Mars, is the dispenser of misfortune, who, within the constellation that he has seen rightly but interpreted wrongly, has entered into a fateful dilemma from which there is no escape.

Astrology and Melancholy Thus, Saturn and Mars are Wallenstein’s real stars. He more or less acknowledges his Saturnian, that is, saturnine traits when he comments in the astrological scene: Saturns Reich ist aus, der die geheime Geburt der Dinge in dem Erdenschoß Und in den Tiefen des Gemüts beherrscht, Und über allem, was das Licht scheut, waltet. Nicht Zeit ist’s mehr zu brüllen und zu sinnen, Denn Jupiter, der glänzende, regiert Und zieht das dunkel zubereitete Werk Gewaltig in das Reich des Lichts — Jetzt muß Gehandelt werden [. . .]. (Wallensteins Tod, ll. 25–33) The brooding and musing, the “Temporisieren” (Piccolomini, l. 922) of Wallenstein that confuses his followers, thus stand under the sign of Saturn — the god whom Jupiter banished to the underworld, and who now acts out of the depths, the birthing womb of the earth and of the human spirit. Wallenstein wants to dwell in the Olympian realm of light, the realm of deeds that are not “sicklied over with the pale cast of thought.” He refuses to see that the roots of his spirit reach down far into the depths of earth. Fundamentally, he is afraid of acting, hence his shudder at the discovery that the deed he has only conceived is now “entlassen aus dem sichern Winkel / Des Herzens, ihrem mütterlichen Boden[!]” and “Hinausgegeben in des Lebens Fremde” (Wallensteins Tod, ll. 187 and 189). Schiller has Wallenstein express ideas that are derived from the ancient European theory of the humors or temperaments,4 which is inextricably connected with astrology and suffused in mythology. To be sure, this theory had largely disappeared from collective cultural memory during the age of Enlightenment.5 But in the course of his study of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century “kabbalistischen und astrologischen Werken,” which (according to his letter to Goethe of April 7, 1797) he had borrowed from the Jena university library, he had acquainted himself with the fundamentals of astrology and the theory of humors. (Körner too, in his detailed letter of March 14, 1797, had supplied Schiller with a list of astrological

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writings, the content of which he summarizes.) In all probability, Schiller also studied the work that was the most widely circulated of all the important occult writings of the sixteenth century: Agrippa von Nettesheim’s De occulta philosophia (1531). Körner had recommended it, and it was in Goethe’s private collection — in fact, the figure of Agrippa von Nettesheim (1486–1535) is one of the Urbilder for Faust, on which Goethe was working once more while Schiller was writing his Wallenstein. It was Goethe too who, thanks to his familiarity with the literature of the occult (especially in the period of his Urfaust), was able to give Schiller a number of important suggestions. This can also be seen in the letter of December 8, 1798, in which Goethe views the “astrologischen Aberglauben,” which he prefers not to call a superstition at all, as anchored in the “dunkeln Gefühl eines ungeheuren Weltganzen,” a formulation with which he aptly characterizes the analogic thinking of the occult sciences. The work from which Schiller obtained the most pertinent information was the Dialoghi d’amore (Dialogues of Love, published posthumously in 1535) by the Portuguese-Jewish physician and philosopher Leone Ebreo, one of the most important Renaissance treatises on love.6 In his search for astrological source material, Schiller came upon the work in a Latin translation of 1587. He reports this to both Goethe and Körner in separate letters on April 7, 1797. To Goethe, he confides, “Die Vermischung der chemischen, mythologischen und astronomischen Dinge ist hier recht ins Große getrieben und liegt wirklich zum poetischen Gebrauche da.” In spite of all the bewilderment, even amusement, he felt in reading the work, he was fascinated by the broadly-conceived speculative connection between mythology and astrology, as well as the analogic thinking, which brings the individual human being into manifold connections with the cosmos. At the center of the mythological-astrological portion of Ebreo’s Dialoghi is the cosmological drama between Saturn and Jupiter, with its implicit analogies in the human sphere. Saturn, the author explains, is the son of heaven and earth, Uranos and Gaia, and thus partakes of the essences of both. According to Ebreo, Saturn is master of all earthly things because of his origin in the earth; he can make the people governed by his sign melancholy, sad, serious, and lethargic, but his gifts also include great genius and profound thought. This in turn points to the paternal-heavenly inheritance of Saturn, from which he endows the soul ruled by him with divinatory powers that raise this soul above all earthly reality. Leone Ebreo’s Dialoghi d’amore is anchored entirely in the tradition of “humors,” according to which human nature is divided into four types of temperament, which are distinguished from one another by the predominance of one of the four “Grundsäfte” or “Humores” in each individual person. Each of these four types is assigned a particular planet. Thus warm and moist blood, the temperament of the sanguine individual, belongs to the planet Jupiter; warm and dry yellow bile, which determines

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the temperament of the choleric individual, corresponds to Mars; cold and moist phlegm, which is dominant in the phlegmatic, corresponds to the moon; and the star that rules over the melancholic, who is conditioned by cold and dry black bile, is the slowest and most distant from the sun of all the stars: Saturn. This assignment of the four temperaments to their own planets is of course derived from the mythological stories of the divinities that gave these planets their names. Just as melancholy is the most paradoxical of the temperaments, Saturn is the most paradoxical of the planetary gods. On the one hand, in classical mythology he is the dethroned and dishonored god who lives alone in dark Tartarus, and thus he is particularly suited to have the slowest, most distant, and darkest planet named after him. But on the other hand, he is the ruler over the Golden Age. Moreover, the Orphics honored him as possessing the highest prophetic intelligence. These contradictory qualities give their imprint also to the temperament of melancholy — as we shall see in the example of Schiller’s Wallenstein, who is portrayed entirely as a Saturnian in the ancient European sense, as a homo melancholicus of the type of Hamlet, Tasso, and Faust.7 As a rule, one associates the idea of Olympian clarity, luminescence, and cheerfulness with the term Classicism. Melancholy or black gall, if only because of its dark “Gemütsfarbe,” is thus the threatening antipode to Enlightenment (which also sees itself under the sign of light), and thus to Classicism as well (Schings 265). Nevertheless, the two central works of Weimar Classicism are centered around figures marked by Saturn, the god opposed to the established order of Olympus and banished to the underworld: Faust and Wallenstein, homines melancholici, whose intellectual roots reach deep into a pre-Enlightenment conceptual universe, one that was alien to the eighteenth century, which in fact had practically disappeared by the time of these works. Even the historical figure of Wallenstein was a typical melancholic. This has been demonstrated repeatedly by the chroniclers and historians of the Thirty Years’ War up to Schiller’s own Geschichte des Dreißigjährigen Krieges. In his Versuch über Schiller (1955), the first work in which Wallenstein’s melancholy disposition is clearly grasped in its full significance, Thomas Mann pointed out the astonishing parallelism between the character in Schiller’s drama and Kepler’s horoscope of the imperial generalissimus from the year 1608, which was not published until long after Schiller’s death. Thomas Mann reported that Kepler saw Wallenstein’s destiny in der Verbindung von Saturn und Jupiter im ersten astrologischen Hause, dem Hause des Lebens [. . .]. Es ist diese Verbindung saturnischer und jovialischer Elemente, aus denen Schiller instinktive und mit dem Ergebnis völliger realistischer Überzeugungskraft sein Wallenstein-Bild geformt hat.8

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In Kepler’s horoscope we find the following passage: Saturnus im Aufgang machet tiefsinnige, melancholische, allzeit wachende Gedanken, bringt Neigung zu Alchymiam, Magiam [. . .], Verachtung und Nichtachtung menschlicher Gebote und Sitten, auch aller Religionen. (Cited in Borchmeyer 1988, 23)

Thomas Mann writes, altering this summation with regard to Schiller’s character: Saturn: das ist brütende Melancholie, es sind die abseitigen und im Verbogenen gärenden Gedanken, das selbstherrliche Sich-Erheben über menschliche Gebote, die skeptische Indifferenz in religiösen Dingen, [. . .] dunkle Verträumtheit, Ehr- und Machtbegierde, Phantastik und nachtwandlerische Verwegenheit. [. . .] Das Außermenschliche seines Wesens schreckt; aber was Jupiter der saturnischen Unheimlichkeit zufügt, ist ein Königlich-Gebietendes, ein unverkennbar Herrscherliches, welches nicht nur Furcht, sondern auch Ehrfurcht, Glauben, Hingabe erzeugt. (9:905)

Thomas Mann’s image of Wallenstein is shaped entirely by this “stellarischen Doppelnatur des Helden.” True, he is inclined to interpret this double nature as leading to a kind of harmony, in the sense of the two complementary souls within Wallenstein. The latter’s self-characterization as “heiteres Joviskind” is never really called into doubt by Mann, even if he corrects it with the reference to the saturnine features in his being. Wallenstein himself acknowledges none of this saturnine disposition. As the Germanist Otto Ludwig wrote in 1857/58, “In allem ist er das Gegenteil von dem, für was er sich hält” (Cited in Heuer/Keller, 48). The clearest evidence for this is his dialogue with Illo in act 2, scene 6 of Die Piccolomini. It is not he himself, but rather Illo, whom he characterizes as a child of Saturn: Dir stieg der Jupiter Hinab, bei der Geburt, der helle Gott; Du kannst in die Geheimnisse nicht schauen. Nur in der Erde magst du f inster wühlen, Blind, wie der Unterirdische, der mit dem bleichen Bleifarb’nen Schein ins Leben dir geleuchtet. Das Irdische, Gemeine magst du sehn. [. . .] Doch, was geheimnisvollbedeutend webt Und bildet in den Tiefen der Natur, Die Geisterleiter, die aus dieser Welt des Staubes Bis in die Sternenwelt, mit tausend Sprossen, Hinauf sich baut, an der die himmlischen

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Gealten wirkend auf und nieder wandeln, [. . .] Die sieht das Aug’ nur, das entsiegelte, Der hellgebornen, heitern Joviskinder. (Piccolomini, ll. 967–85) Jupiter, who is portrayed here in a manner consistent with astrological tradition as a bright planetary god who spreads good cheer, is seen to have descended at Illo’s birth, that is, he stood in the “descendent” in his horoscope. The regent at Illo’s birth is Saturn, the “subterranean,” as he is called with a reference to mythological tradition. Since the figure of Saturn is assigned to the element of earth (his mother, according to Leone Ebreo), his children are dark and inclined to all that is earthly. As to the “bleifarbn’nen Schein” of Saturn, even Leone Ebreo sees in this leaden color that he draws from inside of Mother Earth (“nel color’ piombale, che tira al terriccio”) one of the commonalties between Saturn and Earth. To be sure, when Wallenstein, referring back to the ancient hermetic symbol of the “spirit ladder” — the “Jacob’s ladder” referred to in the Bible (Genesis 28:12) — disputes the ability of the dark child of Saturn to see the mysterious connections between heaven and earth, and reserves this power for the “heiteren Joviskind,” he stands a basic principle of the traditional theory of the temperaments on its head. According to this theory, it is precisely Saturn, “der Hachette unter den Plantain” — in the paradoxical nature characteristic of this planet, which Leone Ebreo traces to its origin from heaven and earth simultaneously — who draws the soul upward “von den irdischen Dingen zu dem Höchsten” (Agrippa von Nettesheim). The divinatory power that Wallenstein ascribes to himself as a son of Jupiter is in truth the characteristic gift of the child of Saturn! It was the first scene in Faust’s study from the first part of Goethe’s Faust that provided the immediate impetus for the image of the spirit ladder, which symbolizes the analogies between the stellar and sublunar worlds, the “dunkle[s] Gefühl eines ungeheuren Weltganzen” of which Goethe speaks in his letter of December 8, 1798. Faust, Wallenstein’s brother in melancholy, reflects about the “Zeichen des Makrokosmos,” one of the tables often encountered in the pansophical writings, in which all the realms of the world are united by analogy: Wie alles sich zum Ganzen webt, Eins in dem andern würkt und lebt! Wie Himmelskräfte auf und nieder steigen Und sich die goldnen Eimer reichen! Vom Himmel durch die Erde dringen, Harmonisch all das All durchklingen! (ll. 447–53)

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If Wallenstein has revealed himself in the dialogue with Illo quoted earlier as a “Saturnian against his will,” he shows himself to be even more so in the astrological scene at the beginning of the third play in the trilogy. Here Saturn appears as the god “[des] Brütens und Sinnens” (ll. 25–35), while Jupiter is seen to embody the world of joyous action. But it is precisely this kind of decisive action of which the Hamlet-like, melancholic Wallenstein is no longer capable. Against the grain of his own interpretation of the planetary alignment, he is hopelessly bound to that dark god of earthly and spiritual abysses. But he himself becomes conscious of this after his betrayal of the emperor, as is shown in the great scene with Max Piccolomini at the beginning of the second act of Wallensteins Tod. He has now lost faith in Jupiter as his star — this is why he no longer engages in astrology — and he openly embraces his Saturnian nature. Mich schuf aus gröberm Stoffe die Natur, Und zu der Erde zieht mich die Begierde. Dem bösen Geist gehört die Erde, nicht Dem guten. Was die Göttlichen uns senden Von oben, sind nur allgemeine Güter, Ihr Licht erfreut, doch macht es keinen reich, In ihrem Staat erringt sich kein Besitz. Den Edelstein, das allgeschätze Gold Muß man den falschen Mächten abgewinnen, Die unterm Tage schlimmgeartet hausen. Nicht ohne Opfer macht man sie geneigt, Und keiner lebet, der aus ihrem Dienst Die Seele hätte rein zurückgezogen. (Wallensteins Tod, ll. 797–809) Wallenstein has in fact entered into a kind of devil’s pact, one of the numerous parallels between the trilogy and Goethe’s Faust. He has devoted himself to the “bösen Geist” (Satan) to which the earth (the element of the Saturnian) and its demonic treasures belong. The thematics of melancholy in Wallenstein can be presented only in broad outline here, but one must at least consider the conclusion of the trilogy from this point of view. Wallenstein, struck down by Nemesis, emanates a new and distinctive radiance during the last two acts. For the people, he has become the vessel of chiliastic hopes. And he himself develops apocalyptic visions in his conversation with the mayor of Eger: “Die Erfüllung / Der Zeiten ist gekommen, Bürgermeister. / Die Hohen werden fallen und die Niedrigen / Erheben sich” (Wallensteins Tod, ll. 2604–7). Wallenstein’s prophetic glance reaches beyond his own age into the revolutionary present of the dramatic poem of which he is the protagonist. Once again, the divinatory gift of the son of Saturn reveals itself. Saturn appears now to show his other face: that

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of the ruler of the Golden Age. Buttler reports that a “Schwindelgeist” has seized hold of the entire city: “Sie sehn im Herzog einen Friedensfürsten / Und einen Stifter neuer goldnen Zeit” (Wallensteins Tod, ll. 3216–18). It is equally clear that this results from the obligation to conform to the system of the Saturnian image that the people have made from Wallenstein, and that this image is delusional. It must not be forgotten that Schiller included, among the “Worten des Wahns” in his 1799 poem of that title, the belief in a “Goldene Zeit, / Wo das Rechte, das Gute wird siegen,” an unmistakable echo of the Wallenstein trilogy. Line 16 of the poem, “Nicht dem Guten gehört die Erde,” is almost a direct quotation of Wallenstein’s maxim “Dem bösen Geist gehört die Erde, nicht dem guten.” In the political realm — the most purely Saturnian sphere — the good will never triumph! This is Schiller’s own pessimistic belief, to which he gave devastating dramatic expression within the Wallenstein trilogy in the self-willed death of the idealist Max Piccolomini, who believed that politics too can and should follow the laws of pure morality. In the words of the poem “Worten des Wahns,” the good man remains a stranger in this world: “er wandert aus / Und suchet ein unvergänglich Haus” — thus he represents a counter-world of pure morality and pure aesthetic illusion that remains separate from the vicious circle of history and politics. Wallenstein’s susceptibility to the astrology that he finally abandons is based on his desire to subject everything to his calculations and not leave anything to the blind uncertainty of “Zufall” (Wallensteins Tod, ll. 136–37). But wherever his calculation seems most clearly to be vindicated, it is thwarted. It is precisely Octavio, to whom he believes himself bound by “Sternenfreundschaft,” through their common birth date (“Wir sind geboren unter gleichen Sternen,” Piccolomini, l. 889), who brings about his destruction. But here too, the stars do not lie. Wallenstein and Octavio are really born under the same stars in that both are betrayers: Octavio betrays Wallenstein, just as Wallenstein betrays the emperor. Even the historical Wallenstein’s contemporaries, as well as subsequent historians, interpreted their common time of birth in this sense. Thus Schiller could read the following passage in one of his sources, Johann Christian Herchenhan’s Geschichte Albrechts von Wallenstein (1790): “In der Nativität des Piccolomini, sagte Friedland, habe ich Übereinstimmung unserer Schutzengel gefunden, seine Konstellation ist genau die meinige, aus dieser Ursache kann mich der Graf nicht hintergehen.” Wallenstein konnte leicht in den Aspekten viele Ähnlichkeiten finden, beide, er und Piccolomini waren, nur auf sehr verschiedene Weise, Verräter. (Cited in Borchmeyer 1988, 116)

But it is precisely this lack of fidelity that is ascribed to Saturn — the “Saturn impius” (Horace) who devours his children — and to those humans under

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the sign of Saturn by mythological and astrological tradition, as well as the destiny of having been orphaned, which is shared by both Octavio and Wallenstein. The great “Rechenkünstler,” as he is called by Buttler (Wallensteins Tod, l. 2853), who believes that by way of astrology he can calculate people, circumstances, and even destiny thus errs — this is the primal tragic motif of mistaking one’s situation, which, according to Aristotle, reverses itself and becomes recognition (anagnorisis), thus constituting one of the strongest elements of pathos in tragedy — precisely when he is most confident of his calculation. This is the case too vis-à-vis Buttler and in the moment of immediate mortal danger, when he believes himself to be protected from catastrophe through the calculation that the dead Max Piccolomini was the sacrifice he owed to destiny. Wallenstein’s belief in astrology is on the one hand influenced by power-seeking calculation, and thus far removed from Goethean piety regarding the symbolic connection of the worlds of the stars and of humanity; on the other hand, this belief is not without a goal, a visionary element, which is symbolically connected with his love for Max Piccolomini. Into this belief he projects his better self, the self to which he aspires, and sees in it, as in a mirror, his own being. Jupiter, the “helle[r] Gott” (Piccolomini, l. 968), and Venus, the “Gestirn der Freude” (l. 1613), are not only supposedly “his” stars; for him the brightly illumined form of Max Piccolomini is combined with these deities to the point of symbolic identity: “Stets warst du mir / Der Bringer irgendeiner schönen Freude, / Und, wie das glückliche Gestirn des Morgens [Venus!], / Führst du die Lebenssonne mir herauf ” (Piccolomini, ll. 755–57). This identification of Max with these blessed stars becomes even clearer in the shattering third scene of act 5 of Wallensteins Tod, when Wallenstein confuses Countess Terzky by using the words “Stern, der meinem Leben strahlt” to refer both to Jupiter, who is covered behind storm clouds, and the dead Max. Incidentally, it is quite remarkable that prior to his own death Wallenstein disregards the warning of Seni, which is based on an inauspicious sign behind Jupiter’s rays. Wallenstein’s own star — Max — will not return to him. Thus the celestial apparition that threatens the planet Jupiter, and which may point back to Max’s death, no longer frightens him.

Power and the Ideal In spite of Wallenstein’s sentimental longing for an ideal world beyond the goal-oriented political reality of the present, a world embodied in Max Piccolomini, there is no doubt that his action as portrayed in Schiller’s trilogy is determined not by an ideal but by power politics — however

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much we may want to excuse the duke on the basis of chain of unfortunate circumstances, from the traumatic experience of being offended by the emperor at the Regensburg Imperial Diet to the arrest of Sesin and Octavio’s betrayal. The motivic complex of the blessed stars and the paradisal world of light and peace designates an ideal sphere within Wallenstein that remains separate from the reality-based motives of his actions, and which in case of conflict is sacrificed to political interests — an example of Schiller’s insight into the psychology of the seeker of power. For Max and Thekla as well, Jupiter and Venus symbolize a paradiselike, idyllic world of light and peace as it appeared to them during the “goldenen Zeit der Reise” (Piccolomini, ll. 1476–77), as a utopian object of desire, opposed to the “düsteren Reich” of Saturn (l. 1654). And just as Max embodies for Wallenstein the desired idyllic world of light, Max on the other hand sees in Wallenstein the pure bringer of peace — a delusion that places a fateful blindfold before his eyes, which he tears off only at the last moment before a moral plunge into the abyss: “Er wird den Ölzweig in den Lorbeer flechten, / Und der erfreuten Welt den Frieden schenken” (ll. 1656–57). In this utopian sense — which points back unmistakably to the idea of the idyll in Schiller’s essay Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung — Max and Thekla appropriate Wallenstein’s astrological beliefs for themselves — not in a superstitiously literal sense, but as reinterpreted by Max (ll. 1619–43) in an explicitly de-mythologized, aesthetic and symbolic fashion. It is of this that Thekla speaks when she says: “Wenn das die Sternenkunst ist, will ich froh / Zu diesem heitern Glauben mich bekennen” (ll. 1644–45). Max’s words “Die alten Fabelwesen sind nicht mehr, / Das reizende Geschlecht ist ausgewandert” (Piccolomini, ll. 1635–36) remind us of the artist’s lament on the departure of the gods from the world in Schiller’s poem “Die Götter Griechenlands” — in the words of Heinrich Heine, the gods in the starry heaven live “im Exil.” The process by which the ancient gods become stars, and symbolically endow these stars with their ancient mythological names, which then enliven them and allow them to give a reply to the loving human heart: all this makes us think of the Pygmalion motif in Schiller’s poem “Die Ideale.” Just as Pygmalion gives life to stone through his feelings, the poet endows the nature that has been abandoned by the gods, the soulless one, with a new language. Thus myth experiences a symbolic resurrection. Max’s lines about the poetic return of the “alten Fabelwesen” were understood, especially by the British Romantic poets, as a kind of beacon. Coleridge expanded considerably on this passage in his translation of Wallenstein, Walter Scott placed it as a motto at the beginning of the third chapter of his novel Guy Mannering, and Keats made use of it in lines 231–33 of his “Lamia.” Underlying all these texts is a nostalgia for a mythic world. Goethe is the author of the following

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characterization of Wallenstein, which in its precision has not been surpassed up to the present day: Der Dichter hatte also zwei Gegenstände darzustellen, die miteinander im Streit erscheinen: den phantastischen Geist, der von der einen Seite an das Große und Idealische, von der andern an den Wahnsinn [cf. Wallensteins Tod, ll. 2559ff.] und an das Verbrechen grenzt, und das gemeine wirkliche Leben, welches von der einen Seite sich an das Sittliche und Verständige anschließt, von der andern dem Kleinen, dem Niedrigen und Verächtlichen sich nähert. (Cited in Heuer/Keller, 8–9)

All the facets of both Wallenstein’s character and that of his counterparts are presented here in an impartial manner. All the same, there is no doubt that the idealistic aspect of Wallenstein’s character is veiled in tragic irony. We have already spoken of the lack of credibility that characterizes his idea of peace. At most, his goal is a peace created by him within a world that he — “Ich einzelner” — has given birth to from within himself as a godlike creator. Octavio’s bitter irony is thus not without its justification: “Nichts will er, als dem Reich den Frieden schenken; / Und weil der Kaiser diesen Frieden haßt, / So will er ihn — er will ihn dazu zwingen!” (Piccolomini, ll. 2333–35). Thus in his historical dramas Wallenstein, Maria Stuart, and Demetrius, Schiller, the supposed idealist, has presented every form of idealism, to the extent that it seeks to realize itself in political form, as either doomed to defeat or based on self-interest. This is true as well for Wallenstein’s counterpart, namely, legitimate authority. In the great monologue of act 1, scene 4, in which he arrives at his decision, the principle of legitimacy is placed in an extremely timely and apt light, given its negation by revolutionary ideology. Wallenstein weighs the pros and cons of political legitimacy with dialectical acuity. “Du willst die Macht, / Die ruhig, sicher thronende erschüttern, / Die in verjährt geheiligtem Besitz, / In der Gewohnheit festgegründet ruht” (ll. 193–96). The principle of Verjährung, in the older, positive sense of the term — the integrity of a political order based on its historical duration — was for Edmund Burke and Justus Möser, for conservatives of all stripes, the counter-principle to the French Revolution and its interpretive model, namely the negation of an existing order in the name of pure, super-historical principles of reason (Borchmeyer 1988, 158). Wallenstein’s reflection, quoted earlier, corresponds to Schiller’s own prose from the fourth book of the Geschichte des Dreißigjährigen Krieges: Nichts geringes war es, eine rechtmäßige, durch lange Verjährung befestigte, durch Religion und Gesetz geheiligte Gewalt in ihren Wurzeln zu erschüttern; [. . .] alle jene unvertilgbaren Gefühle der Pflicht, die in der Brust des Untertans für den geborenen Beherrscher so laut und so mächtig sprechen, mit gewaltsamer Hand zu vertilgen. (7:364)

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This is one side of the matter. But the other side of legitimacy is: [. . .] das ewig Gestrige, Was immer war und immer wiederkehrt, Und morgen gilt, weil’s heute hat gegolten! Denn aus Gemeinem ist der Mensch gemacht, Und die Gewohnheit nennt er seine Amme. Weh’ dem, der an den würdig alten Hausrat Ihm rührt, das teure Erbstück seiner Ahnen! Das Jahr übt eine heiligende Kraft, Was grau für Alter ist, das ist ihm göttlich. Sei im Besitze, und du wohnst im Recht, Und heilig wird’s die Menge dir bewahren. (Wallensteins Tod, ll. 208–18) Shortly thereafter, Wallenstein will experience in his own person the justification for this ironic pessimism. In the moment that he takes off the cloak of legitimacy, the magic of his personality is broken; in Max Weber’s terminology, “charismatic leadership” loses out to traditional leadership. In his Geschichte des Dreißigjährigen Krieges, Schiller writes of Wallenstein: “Größe für sich allein kann sowohl Bewunderung und Schrecken, aber nur die legale Größe Ehrfurcht und Unterwerfung erzwingen. Und dieses enscheidenden Vorteils beraubte er sich selbst in dem Augenblicke, da er sich als einen Verbrecher entlarvte” (7:365). Without a doubt, there is just as much of Schiller’s personal convictions in Wallenstein’s lines just quoted as there is in the contradictory reflections quoted earlier. To be sure, Wallenstein has no moral right to his criticism of the traditional order, since he is concerned basically with the right of the more powerful, not the right of reason. As his Ästhetische Briefe show, Schiller’s political theory is determined by liberal principles of natural law to such an extent that there is no room in it for a traditional historical legitimization of political power. But, in the interim, the experience of revolution taught Schiller that the attempt to destroy an existing state according to principles of pure reason drives society into a state of anarchy, and that the temporary suspension of an existing political order conjures up a chaos of passions. The “Uhrwerk des Staates,” according to the third letter, can thus be improved only “indem es schlägt” (8:563); the state based on reason must in a sense develop under the skin of the pre-existing order. Wallenstein’s balancing between conservative affirmation and liberal negation, based on abstractions of pure reason, of traditional power that is legitimized only historically corresponds to Schiller’s own ambivalent posture vis-à-vis the ancien régime, and explicates the dialectic of existing power structures, their “Anschliessen” to what is moral as well as to what is

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contemptible. This dialectic manifests itself most clearly in the actions of Octavio. Even traditional, legitimate power cannot manage without unethical, base, even criminal means. It becomes entrapped in the vicious circle of history, of the evil that constantly re-engenders itself (cf. Octavio’s speech in Piccolomini, ll. 2447 ff.). Only in an ahistorical space, in the aesthetic “Reich der Schatten”9 can the unsullied ideal be found. And thus the idealists Max and Thekla are driven out of history and finally out of life itself! Only once did Schiller develop a positive historical alternative to an existing political system, one that is realized without being corrupted in the process: in Wilhelm Tell. But this alternative is imaginable only on the margin between myth and history. The Swiss struggle for freedom is the ideal construction of a republican form of community, one that is based on theories of natural law and social contract, but one that replaces traditional authority only gradually — thus an order that is really borne by the entire people, not the “Weltschöpfung” of a single individual, and thus one that does not lead ad absurdum on account of its lust for power. Wallenstein and Demetrius, on the other hand, do not represent a progressive historical conception that breaks the vicious circle of history — here, power is still an end in itself.

The Tragedy of the Lost Father One looks in vain in Schiller’s historical dramas for a “world-historical individual” in Hegel’s sense, one who as an individual represents the spirit of the world. Wallenstein belongs in the political and spiritual vicinity of Napoleon, who probably served as the model for the title figure of Demetrius. Napoleon — the offspring of the revolution who carried its ideas through Europe at the point of a bayonet, the upstart who brought down the traditional order of an entire part of the world, the “subjective prince,” as Goethe called him in a diary entry of August 8, 180610 — this Napoleon is in fact the confirmation, both questionable and brilliant, of the tragic irony present in Schiller’s historical drama. In spite of all the statements of Schiller that are thought to express, or actually do express, a desire to flee the world, it is abundantly clear that his writing is inextricably connected with the political developments of his day. The historical effect of Wallenstein is far stronger in its connection with the situation in Schiller’s day than it is through its depiction of material from the history of the Thirty Years’ War. In the person of the “subjective prince” Wallenstein, Schiller demonstrates the crisis of legitimacy of the traditional state, the collision between charismatic and traditional authority, as well as the dialectic of enlightenment and revolution.

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The “Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit,” Kant’s definition of enlightenment, here becomes tragic — the tragedy of the lost father, a theme that can be traced throughout Schiller’s works, from Die Räuber to Demetrius. “Du machst mich heute mündig / Denn bis auf diesen Tag war mir’s erspart, / Den Weg mir selbst zu finden und die Richtung,” Max confesses to his spiritual father Wallenstein, after the latter tells him in palliative language of his own high treason. Wallenstein has enlightened Max, that is, he has helped him to escape his own state of dependency and taught him (quoting Kant once more from his “Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung” [Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?, 1784]) “[sich] seines Verstandes ohne Leitung eines anderen zu bedienen” (Cited in Hinske, 452). “Zum ersten Male heut’ verweisest du / Mich an mich selbst” (Wallenstein Tod, ll. 711–17). For the first time, Max learns that Wallenstein’s guidance, on which he previously believed he could depend unconditionally, does not accord with his “Herzen” — a leitmotif throughout the trilogy, understood here as the autonomous power of moral judgment. Max’s now enlightened consciousness is an unhappy one, it entangles him in a tragic conflict: O! welchen Riß erregst du mir im Herzen! Der alten Ehrfurcht eingewachsnen Trieb Und des Gehorsams heilige Gewohnheit Soll ich versagen lernen deinem Namen? [. . .] Die Sinne sind in deinen Banden noch, Hat gleich die Seele blutend sich befreit! (Wallensteins Tod, ll. 736–44) The “blutend befreite Seele” — in this image, and in these two last lines, Schiller gave devastating expression to the price exacted by enlightenment. And Max’s tragedy is based on this dialectic. The autonomy of the subject, which decades earlier still believed it could break through the compulsion of “Schicksal” (recall Goethe’s Iphigenie), now sees itself at the mercy of a new kind of fate in the world of politics, a fate it cannot master. This corresponds to Napoleon’s famous statement in his conversation with Goethe to the effect that today politics has taken the place of destiny. At the end of the century of the Enlightenment, the tragic destiny that had been despised and thought obsolete by that same Enlightenment experiences an astonishing return. The wars following the French Revolution awakened Europe from the Enlightenment delusion of a world that is comprehensible and morally governable. The apparently well-ordered web of the world has become confused and impenetrable, and humanity sees itself at the mercy of anonymous and abstract relationships within an ever

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more complex and complicated socio-political reality; it tends therefore all too easily to mystify this reality as destiny. Freedom, moral self-determination, seems to exist only as an “Auszug aus der Geschichte,”(Janz, 338) no longer as something within history, as the “verteufelt humane” conclusion of Goethe’s “gräzierendem Schauspiel” Iphigenie still allowed one to believe.11 Viewed in this way, Schiller’s Wallenstein is in a sense a retraction of Iphigenie auf Tauris. Translated by Thomas Kovach

Notes 1

References to Schiller’s works in this essay are to the Frankfurter Ausgabe, Werke und Briefe in zwölf Bänden, edited by Klaus Harro Hilzinger, et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1988–). References are to volume and page number, except references to the Wallenstein trilogy, which are by line number. Here the reference is to the sixth of Schiller’s Ästhetische Briefe: 8:574.

2

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Werke und Briefe in zwölf Bänden, ed. Wilfried Barner et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985–2003). Here the reference is to the fourteenth part of the Hamburgische Dramaturgie, 6:251. 3

This is the central thesis of my book, Macht und Melancholie: Schillers Wallenstein.

4

Compare the main work of the available research by Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsy, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn und Melancholie, which deals with the German version of Raymond Klibansky’s Saturn and Melancholy. 5

Compare the standard work of German scholarship on melancholy by Hans-Jürgen Schings, Melancholie und Auf klärung.

6

See Borchmeyer, 1988, 53–62.

7

Cf. Borchmeyer, 1988, 72.

8

Thomas Mann, Gesammelte Werke, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1974), 9:905.

9

Das Reich der Schatten was the original title of Schiller’s philosophical poem Das Ideal und das Leben.

10

See Jochen Schmidt, 1985; vol. 1: 440.

11

Goethe concerning Iphigenie auf Tauris in a letter to Schiller of January 29, 1802.

Works Cited Borchmeyer, Dieter. “ ‘Altes Recht’ und Revolution. Schillers Wilhelm Tell.” In Friedrich Schiller: Kunst, Humanität und Politik in der späten Auf klärung, ed. Wolfgang Wittkowski, 69–111. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1982. ———. “Die Kontrapunktik von Familiegemälde und Staatsaktion in Don Carlos.” In Borchmeyer, Tragödie und Öffentlichkeit: Schillers Dramaturgie

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im Zusammenhang seiner ästhetisch-politischen Theorie und die rhetorische Tradition, 78–90. Munich: W. Fink, 1973. ———. Die Weimarer Klassik. Portrait einer Epoche. 2nd ed. Weinheim: Beltz Athenäum, 1998. ———. Macht und Melancholie: Schillers Wallenstein. Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1988. Heuer, Fritz, and Werner Keller, eds. Schillers Wallenstein. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1977. Hinderer, Walter. Der Mensch in der Geschichte: Ein Versuch über Schillers “Wallenstein.” Königshausen im Taunus: Athenäum, 1980. Hinske, Norbert, ed. Was ist Aufklärung? Beiträge aus der Berlinischen Monatsschrift. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchhandlung, 1973. Janz, Rolf-Peter. “Antike und Moderne in Schillers Braut von Messina.” In Unser Commercium: Goethes und Schillers Literaturpolitik, ed. Wilfried Barner, Eberhard Lämmert, and Norbert Oellers, 329–49. Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1984. Kant, Immanuel. “Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?” In Was ist Aufklärung? Beiträge aus der Berlinischen Monatsschrift, ed. Norbert Hinske. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1973. Klibansky, Raymond, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl. Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Art. New York: Basic Books, 1964. ———. Saturn und Melancholie: Studien zur Naturphilosophie und Medizin, der Religion und der Kunst. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Werke und Briefe in zwölf Bänden. Eds. Wilfried Barner, et al. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985–2003. Mann, Thomas. Gesammelte Werke. 2nd ed. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1974. Schings, Hans Jürgen. Melancholie und Aufklärung: Melancholiker und ihre Kritiker in Erfahrungsseelenkunde und Literatur des 18. Jahrhunderts. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1977. Schmidt, Jochen. Die Geschichte des Genie-Gedankens in der deutschen Literatur, Philosophie und Politik, 1750–1945. Vol 1: Von der Aufklärung bis zum Idealismus, 452–60. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1985.

Maria Stuart: Physiology and Politics Steven D. Martinson

I

HIS FIRST MEDICAL DISSERTATION Philosophie der Physiologie (Philosophy of Physiology, 1779), Johann Friedrich Schiller asserted that philosophy and religion can overpower the “animal,” that is, corporeal sensations, and tear (reißen) the soul away from mere agreement, that is, identification with matter.1 Even though it has not been enlisted to do so in the past, Schiller’s early medical writing would seem to support the traditional reading of Maria Stuart. Queen Mary absolves herself of the sins of the past, attains a state of sublimity, and marches triumphantly to her death. Through this chain of events, she achieves the final victory over death, to say nothing of her opponent, Queen Elizabeth. Or, so it would seem. In fact, the sustained and, at times, profound impact of Schiller’s early medical dissertations on his later works suggests a quite different interpretation, one that is also at variance with the most recent scholarship. The present undertaking expands my reading of Schiller’s Maria Stuart in my book Harmonious Tensions: The Writings of Friedrich Schiller (1996). It is my purpose here to explore the relationship between physiology and politics in Maria Stuart. I will also cast further light on the drama by showing how it interrelates with a number of other works by Schiller. A close analysis of gender roles and the relationship between Elizabeth and Mary rounds out the discussion. N

The Interaction Between Mind and Body At the beginning of his career as a writer, Friedrich Schiller appreciated the vital roles that moments of crisis and rupture can play in the restoration and maintenance of health, not only in the body and the mind but also in the multifarious relationships between individuals and society. In the second of his medical dissertations (Abschlußarbeiten), for example, the young student of medicine observed that in the case of fevers, nature combats nature. In moments of crisis, the individual finds himself at the crossroads of illness and health, or life and death. If this state of being is prolonged, however, any further disruption, that is, rupture (Riß ) will lead to the complete collapse and destruction of the body. Nonetheless, when

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explaining the nature of fevers, Schiller sees that the crisis of our physical being in moments of illness can also lead to a restoration of health. To my knowledge, Schiller’s third and final medical dissertation, Über den Zusammenhang der tierischen Natur des Menschen mit seiner geistigen (On the Connection between the Animal and Spiritual Nature of Man, 1780), is the first work in the Western tradition to introduce an interactionist theory of the relationship between body and mind. Having disapproved of Schiller’s first two attempts to write a dissertation, his committee, as well as the duke, Karl Eugen, accepted this third writing. It was published in 1780 at the Cotta publishing house in Stuttgart. In this work, Schiller advances the idea that although the mind regulates the activities of the body, the body holds the mind within its bounds. The dynamic interplay that this particular relationship creates, however, is not one of harmony in the traditional sense, that is, of balance and equilibrium wherein opposites are completely reconciled. Rather, human physiology is a tensionfilled process of reciprocal delimitation and interdependence. In arriving at this conclusion, Schiller drew upon the work of the Jewish-German writer Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786). In his Briefe über die Empfindungen (Letters on Sensory Perceptions, 1755), Mendelssohn underscores the integrated nature of body and mind. The nervous system is comprised of a labyrinthine network of passages, such that everything in the body, including the mind, is tied to everything else. The degrees of tension in the body are distributed harmoniously from nerve to nerve. A change in the one leads to a change in the whole. A healthy state of being depends on the perpetual cultivation of what Mendelssohn here terms harmonious tension (harmonische Spannung). Having surveyed the debate over materialism and idealism in his own time, Schiller submitted that the more common error was to overemphasize the power of the human spirit (Geist) and downplay, or even neglect, the influence of the body when claiming the independence of the mind (8:123). The writer’s candid recognition of a more complex interrelationship between mind and body is supported by the tension between anthropology and metaphysics that reverberates throughout his work as a whole. But there is more. Schiller’s writings display the dynamic integration of literature, physiology, philosophy, history, and music as referenced by the innumerable metaphors and other linguistic devices that lend his writings their interdisciplinary texture. The most prominent among the central symbols and metaphors in all of Schiller’s writings is the stringed musical instrument. In one of his first speeches, “Rede über die Frage: Gehört allzuviel Güte, Leutseeligkeit und grosse Freygebigkeit im engsten Verstande zur Tugend?” the nineteen-year-old medical student associated the metaphor of the stringed musical instrument with the source of all Creation (Martinson, 23). In his first dissertation concerning the philosophy of physiology, young

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Schiller submitted that the nerve spirit (“Nervengeist”) is an entity whose strings (“Saiten”) vibrate constantly (“zittern”). This transmutative force (“Mittelkraft”) resides in the nerves and reverberates throughout the body, including the brain, and the brain is portrayed as the instrument of the understanding (“das Instrument des Verstandes”; 8:48). Another revealing fact is that all of the writer’s completed dramas, save one, contain references to one or more stringed instruments, whether that instrument be a piano, lute, guitar, violin, or lyre. The relative absence of this central metaphor in Maria Stuart is purposeful and a key to the interpretation of the play. In fact, it is the only major drama from Die Räuber through Wilhelm Tell to not employ the symbol. In fact, at the beginning of the play, we learn that Mary’s lute has been confiscated. Since the beautiful, melodic, and entrancing sounds of her musical instrument will not be able to reach beyond the walls of the prison, Mary will now be unable to evoke sympathy for her cause. From early on, music played an essential, indeed vital, role in Schiller’s development as a writer. In the third dissertation, the relationship between body and mind is described as two finely-tuned stringed instruments that are placed next to each other (8:149). When a string is plucked on the one instrument, the same string on the other sounds of its own accord and reproduces the same note. However, for a stringed musical instrument to produce beautiful music, each of the strings must be tightened to just the right degree. The point is that all of the strings must be taut, that is, tense. By extension, melodic, that is, beautiful music is first achieved in and through harmonious tension. In Harmonious Tensions, I suggested that the symbol of the stringed instrument serves both as a general model of nature and as a sign for the harmonious tensions operative in Schiller’s writings. Furthermore, this harmonious tension emits a particular or distinct kind of tone whereby it can also be identified. For example, in the poem “Die Herrlichkeit der Schöpfung,” the motif of flying is associated with nature’s “lute,” which “Tönt auf der Laute der Natur” (Martinson, 58). In the course of writing the three medical dissertations, Schiller developed a basic law of mixed natures. The activities of the body and the mind are interrelated. An overexertion of the one results in an overexertion of the other. This “Überspannung” runs the risk of short-circuiting the proper give-and-take between strain (“Anspannung”) and relaxation (“Entspannung”). Hence, Schiller’s writings attest neither to rest nor the cancellation (“Aufhebung”) of opposites but to the perpetual tug of war between mutually dependent, yet oppositional forces of nature, without which harmonious tension and, therefore, life itself, would not be possible. In retrospect, the young writer had appropriated the ancient Greek symbol of the lyre and Pythagoras’s interpretation thereof as representative of the harmony of the spheres. At the same time, he drew upon the work

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of his contemporary, Moses Mendelssohn, and somewhat later the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant. In modern times, the production of beauty was still possible, but the danger now existed that the very strings that produce it may either be strung too tightly or break altogether. The same is true of the nerves, which Moses Mendelssohn describes as requiring harmonious tension, perpetual quivering (“zittern”), to ensure a healthy mind and body. As I will seek to demonstrate in this essay, historical fact is not the only reason why, in Maria Stuart, the conflictual relationship between Queen Elizabeth and Queen Mary ends in tragedy. The rupture between the queens, and within the queens, is unbridgeable and irreparable. The full tragic effect of the drama may well lie in the final rupture between body and mind. In the end, the tragic, pathetic shattering of the ideal of harmonious tension also constitutes a political statement.

Textual Analyses and Intertextual Associations I In addition to the relative compactness of dramatic structure and the skillful and refined use of language in Maria Stuart, the writer remains focused on the workings of nature, one component of which is human physiology. This is especially evident in the conflict between Mary and Elizabeth, as well as between many of the other dramatis personae. Early in the play, namely in act 1, scene 7, Schiller has Mary utter the following insightful observation regarding their relationship: “. . . die Natur / Warf diese beiden feurigen Völkerschaften / Auf dieses Brett im Ozean, ungleich / Verteilte sies, und hieß sie darum kämpfen” (ll. 811–14; 5:36). It is made vividly clear that differences in the two characters’ physical and spiritual-intellectual natures underlie the cultural and political differences between them. It is likewise apparent that nature has distributed its gifts unevenly. This insight into nature had its origins already in Schiller’s medical dissertation Philosophie der Physiologie, the drama Die Räuber (The Robbers, 1781) and the prose work Der Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre (Criminal out of Dishonor, 1785), that is, in a wide variety of forms of writing beginning at the earliest stage in his development as a writer. The problem and potential of rupture is first articulated in the dissertation. Here, too, we find the first instance in Schiller’s writings of an analogy between human anatomy and strings. In Maria Stuart, Queen Elizabeth has been cheated physically by nature, whereas Mary exhibits all the traits of natural beauty. In the light of his early writings, it is evident that it is not only because of his interest in history that the writer turned to the political feud between England and Scotland and the clash between Queen Elizabeth and Queen Mary in this later work. It is also, if not more so, Schiller’s study of nature, specifically his knowledge of human physiology, that shaped the body of his text.


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In Harmonious Tensions, I helped to shift the general tide of scholarship on Maria Stuart from its preoccupation with Mary as a positive heroine to the struggles within Queen Elizabeth in order to flesh out her character and thereby set her on an equal footing with her antagonist, Queen Mary. As it turns out, the text lends itself very well to this exercise, not only with respect to physiology but also in terms of the tension between politics and morality. Foremost, Schiller underscores the common heritage of the two queens. However, rather than reduplicate the fact that, in history, they were cousins, the writer creates a more intimate relationship between them by referring to them as sisters. The technique is purposeful and the ramifications for an interpretation are significant. It draws attention to the possible complementariness of the central heroines.

Changing Views of Schiller Given that Schiller was aware of the arbitrariness (“Willkür”) and tyranny of absolutism in his own time, the collapse of the relationship between Mary Stuart and Elizabeth may be interpreted as an indirect but devastating criticism of this form of government. Peter André Alt underscores the political awareness of the writer while downplaying the longstanding view of Schiller as an idealist. “Gegen das zum Mythos geronnene Bild vom weltfernen Idealisten setzt die vorliegende Biographie des Portraits eines politisch denkenden Künstlers, der die revolutionären Umbrüche der vornapoleonischen Epoche mit gespannter Aufmerksamkeit zu erfassen wußte” (Alt 1:14). However, this view of Schiller is not supported by references to any overt or even proactive political initiatives on his part. As a result, readers who are looking for such evidence and are unable to find it will refer to the writer as either non-political or, at best, apolitical. However, it is crucial to bear in mind the writer’s attentiveness to the workings of nature, especially human nature, for in the case of Maria Stuart, it is physiology that drives politics.

Gender, Gender Roles, and Human Physiology An interpretation of Maria Stuart today should include a discussion of gender and gender roles. In doing so, we are able to appreciate even more the impact of the medical dissertations and other discussions of human physiology on Schiller’s composition of this, his most outstanding classical drama. The public pressure on Queen Elizabeth to live up to the traditional role of a woman, namely to be married and to bear a child, is enormous. Not coincidentally, Schiller employed metaphors of enchainment when

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depicting not only Mary’s but also Elizabeth’s predicament. At first, Schiller’s Queen Elizabeth registers some resistance to what others consider to be her place within public society. In act 3, scene 3, for example, Shrewsbury quips in her presence that “woman” is a weak and fragile thing (“ein gebrechliches Wesen”; l. 1373). Although Shrewsbury may intend the statement to be a rhetorical strategy that could generate greater sympathy for Mary, Queen Elizabeth takes the comment as an affront to womanhood. She quickly and emphatically recoils against this traditional male conception of the comparative weakness of women: “Das Weib ist nicht schwach. Es gibt starke Seelen / In dem Geschlecht — Ich will in meinem Beisein / Nichts von der Schwäche des Geschlechtes hören” (ll. 1374–76). Keeping in mind that this play enjoyed numerous performances, and in view of the social context of the time, the public chastisement of an elder, male statesman constitutes an act of enlightenment. Elizabeth’s statement, as well as the strength and dignity that her counterpart, Queen Mary, exhibits, projects an image of woman that would seem to be uncommon for the time in which it was written. From a more contemporary perspective, one might argue that the strength and dignity exhibited by Elizabeth and Mary has everything to do with their privileged social standing and that the writer simply attributed characteristics to them that one would find in the political history of the time. However, a comparative study of the drama and Schiller’s other writings proves to be most helpful as a corrective to ideological readings of the text. Already in Schiller’s earliest dramatic writings, female characters like Luise Millerin, a member of the lower middle class, exhibit nearly identical virtues of strength and dignity that are competitive with those of their male counterparts. For example, in Kabale und Liebe (Intrigue and Love, 1784), the battle of words between Luise and Lady Milford, the latter of whom enjoys a much higher social standing, anticipates the later rhetorical duel between the two queens. In both Kabale und Liebe and Maria Stuart, the politically disenfranchised or disempowered counterpart wins the battle of words. With respect to character, the politically weaker is actually the stronger of the dramatis personae. Schiller’s portrayals of the strengths and the weaknesses of women in the social-political contexts of his own century reflect the tenets of the German Enlightenment, namely that one exercise one’s own understanding (Kant), strive for truth (Lessing), and become what one is as a unique individual (for example, Leibniz, Goethe, and Sophie von La Roche). In Schiller’s case, however, the relationships between the body and the mind that characterize individuals and their relationships to each other lie at the forefront of the dramatic writings and serve to illuminate the complex contours that are representative of the act of writing. To be sure, Schiller’s portrayals constitute an at times critical dialogue with the political power structures and other social realities of his day.


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At the same time, Schiller’s criticism is presented indirectly by way of artistic expression. To be sure, at a time of entrenched absolutism and the reality of censorship, criticisms of the political system had to be indirect. Literature, that is, “fiction,” offered a means by which such criticism could be transmitted and understood by those whose lives were impacted by the dominant political structures of the time. In retrospect, within the historical context of his time and in the light of history up through the eighteenth century, Schiller’s portrayal of female characters is actually more progressive than feminist readings, and not only feminist readings, of Schiller’s plays have allowed.2 The portrayal of female characters in Schiller’s dramatic texts forces the spectator or reader to consider critically and self-critically his or her assumptions and biases regarding the sexes. Although the portrayal of women in selected poems like “Würde der Frauen” (Dignity of Women) is negative as viewed from the vantage point of modernity, one first needs to take into account all of Schiller’s representations of and statements on women, as well as the observations of those whom he knew personally, such as Caroline von Wolzogen, before one can generalize about Schiller’s view of women. Schiller’s literarydramatic representations of women were certainly conditioned or even determined by the times in which he was living. In most cases, they are forward-looking. Whatever else they may be, Schiller’s female characters should be appreciated for their combination of sharpness of mind and quickness of wit, emotional passion (and poise) and compassion, that is, more for their strengths than for their weakness of mind and voluptuousness of body. The fact that this is true regardless of their social standing would seem to disclose the construction of a general type. However, as the unique personalities of Amalia, Luise, Eboli, Mary, and Johanne clearly indicate, it is not an undifferentiated type.

Elizabeth and Mary The rivalry between Elizabeth and Mary in Maria Stuart is animated by the writer’s early philosophy of physiology. As the play unfolds, Elizabeth’s behavior is impacted more and more by her senses, whereas Mary moves away from the senses to the spiritual/intellectual plane. Although strong and remarkable in its separateness and exclusivity, Mary’s state of sublimity actually creates an unbridgeable gap between herself and Elizabeth. For her part, and quite in spite of her powerful political position, Elizabeth has become the prisoner of both her body, specifically her purely corporeal responses, and the body politic from which, in the end, she is indistinguishable. Somewhat unexpectedly, perhaps, Elizabeth wrestles with the demands of political expediency and the call to moral freedom. In my reading, it is

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the imprisonment of whatever free will Elizabeth may still possess that causes the queen the most distress. Externally, that is, as a queen, she is not allowed to be herself, as suggested by her depiction of the powerful office she holds, namely as a form of slavery, suggests that she is not allowed to exercise personal freedom. For her political office dictates that she must be responsive to the will of the people, as Lord Burleigh makes abundantly clear. In short, whatever the nature of her inclinations, she is duty-bound. But this does not come easily since she is shown to struggle with her own moral knowledge. As queens of different religious persuasions, political orientations, and cultural environments, and yet “sisters,” they are, at the outset, two parts of a greater whole; oppositional, yet interdependent. They are not, in the first instance, complete opposites. However, as the combat between them increases, their interdependence is progressively compromised. Eventually, their relationship is completely severed. Elizabeth, in the end, is relegated to the exclusively corporeal-material concerns of mere politics. Only in the end do Elizabeth and Mary finally become complete opposites. Politically and physically enchained, Mary is still free morally. Although politically strong and in command, Elizabeth is a prisoner, that is, slave to her office. As the battle of words in act 3, scene 4 makes abundantly clear, the fierce rivalry between these two female monarchs is informed not only by politics or religion but by the rupture that is brought about by the crises within their own natures as well as by the natural split between them, which by definition is anthropological in nature (see Hinderer’s essay in this volume). Certainly, Mary’s grand yet momentary victory in the battle of words comes not only at the cost of political defeat. It also means that the harmonious tension between the rational and sensuous natures has been short-circuited and that the crisis in her relationship with Elizabeth will have tragic consequences. For her part, Elizabeth is incapable of exercising her free, moral will. Her self-imposed imprisonment within the confines of both her sensuous being and her political office underscores her ultimate moral ineptitude. In the end, she becomes the complete embodiment of the will of the people, and this leaves her isolated and alone on a throne that seems to restrict her very movement. As the curtains are drawn, she is paralyzed within the body politic. The spiritual/intellectual as represented by Mary has now departed her. The relationship between mind and body has been completely ruptured. In retrospect, Mary goes to her death at peace with her own history, while Elizabeth sits in isolation upon a throne that entraps her. As Mary is given to say, “Jetzt habe ich nichts mehr auf der Erden!” (l. 3838). Clearly, she is freed from the confines of the corporeal world which is now represented by Elizabeth. The harmonious interaction between mind and body is no longer possible.


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Although the main tide of scholarship on Maria Stuart still places Mary over Elizabeth as the true heroine, it is significant that the play should end with Elizabeth and not with Mary. As is graphically clear from the stage directions at the end of act 4, scene 10, Elizabeth reacts only to the dictates of her sensuous nature when signing the death warrant (5:118). There is no sign of rational deliberation or reflection on the necessities of Realpolitik. By following only her sensuous nature, the queen abandons the rational-moral sphere of action. In the light of physiology and politics in Maria Stuart, Elizabeth’s life is ignoble because she has become a prisoner of her own sensuousness and the plaything of the body politic. Like Mary, the dynamics of Elizabeth’s character reside in her own nature, that is, between the rational and sensuous components of her being. The true tragedy is found in the complete rupture between body (Elizabeth) and mind (Mary), that is, in the complete disruption of harmonious tension. In sum, Schiller’s clear emphasis on the relationship between mind and body, both within and between the main protagonists, makes the sequence of events in Maria Stuart more understandable intellectually and even more stirring emotionally. This way of visualizing the drama opens up the text and creates a tie between the time in which it was written and contemporary understandings of the body as text. Perhaps such a reading can be of interest to future productions of the play.

Associations: Maria Stuart within the Corpus of Schiller’s Writings Although at first glance unlikely, there are significant thematic parallels between Maria Stuart and Schiller’s earliest works, as well as in other dramatic and non-dramatic texts. Having drawn an essential parallel between Kabale und Liebe and Maria Stuart, it is worth briefly comparing this work with some of Schiller’s other writings. Two decades before the writing of Maria Stuart, we observe that Karl Moor (Die Räuber [The Robbers, 1781]) and Christian Wolf (Der Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre [Criminal out of Dishonor, 1785]) come to terms with their own histories and experiences. Both of them accept fearlessly the full ramifications of the crimes they have committed and for which they decide to atone. It is not resignation but the acknowledgment and acceptance of the error of their ways that characterize their behavior and define their true character. All three main characters have transgressed a law for which they must now atone, and each one does so not only with full recognition, but without excuse. Additionally, they assume responsibility for something that, in part, lies outside of their control. Their newfound nobility of character commends

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itself to the audience and readers. In short, Schiller’s dramatic heroes disclose fundamental problems of their times that compel readers and spectators to come to terms with their own situations, the problems that attend their own societies, and, to be sure, their lives. In addition to the ethical-spiritual consciousness that they share, Karl, Christian, and Mary, among others, represent an extreme in the mindbody paradigm. According to his essay Theosophie des Julius (Julius’s Theosophy, 1782) Schiller emphasized the ordaining of the human being to the divine (“Bestimmung des Menschen zur Göttlichkeit”), which was a widespread and widely accepted idea in later eighteenth-century German literature. However, as argued here, the ultimate challenge for the human being is not so much perfection as it is the cultivation of harmonious tension between mind and body, body and mind, which guarantees health and healing. In this way one realizes the honorable or noble human being within oneself that is to serve as an example to others and the community at large. Nevertheless, the most difficult task of culture remains to extend the knowledge that is gained through critical self-reflection outwardly through the active promotion of harmonious tension and humaneness for the improvement of society. As early as in his characterizations of Karl Moor and Christian Wolf, Schiller underscored the importance of a personal moral turn, an act of moral will that proves to be necessary when one finds oneself entangled in and overcome by the enormity and complexities of life. Self-overcoming (“Überwindung”) is the positive result of an act of moral resolve that consists not in the one or the other individual dominating others but in the following: reason keeps the senses within their bounds while sensuousness informs reason. In political terms, whereas the senses keep reason from becoming dictatorial, reason restrains the anarchical extremes of passion. When the healthy tension between the individual and the society of which one is invariably and inescapably a part is compromised, society runs the risk of disruption, dissolution, and revolution. As is made explicit in Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen (On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, 1795), Schiller advocated reform, not revolution. Although Schiller’s call for reform is indebted to the Lutheran tradition, Kant’s philosophy, and Moses Mendelssohn’s analysis of sensuality, we have seen that it is likewise informed by his early interactionist theory of physiology. To recap, with respect to the medical dissertations and the later classical dramas, for Schiller, the interaction between mind and body is a process of reciprocal delimitation and interdependence. While the body holds the mind within its bounds, the mind regulates the impulses and drives of the body, safeguarding it against possible destruction. In Maria Stuart, this vital interrelationship collapses, sealing the tragic end of the drama.


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In Die Räuber and Der Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre, it is out of the depths of experience that Karl and Christian are first able to embrace the moral principle. What occurs here is hardly idealistic but, rather, wholly realistic. The same is also true of Mary, who, given her personal history and the encounter with her other, Elizabeth, exercises moral resolve. In fact, all three characters — Karl Moor, Christian Wolf, and Mary Stuart — attain sublimity of character. To a point, the same is true of Wilhelm Tell, who faces and overcomes adversity. In Mary’s case, however, this comes at the expense of her own body and Elizabeth. With respect to the theme of love, unlike Die Räuber, Kabale und Liebe, or Wallenstein, Maria Stuart contains no genuine love relationship. Mortimer, like Leicester (and, to some extent, even Shaftesbury), desires Mary and all that she represents, while Mary’s apparent love for Leicester is but a form of manipulation. There is only intrigue and the tragic cessation of the reciprocity between mind/spirit and body. As Schiller’s early theoretical writings, such as Theosophie des Julius, illustrate, it is the gravitational pull of love that holds the universe together. Without it, the world collapses. In Die Räuber, Franz Moor represents the material world of necessitation, whereas Karl takes on the characteristics of mind or spirit. As we know from the Philosophie der Physiologie, the absence of a transmutative force (“Mittelkraft” of mediation) explains the “Riß zwischen Welt und Geist ” (author’s emphasis), whereas the presence of the Mittelkraft animates and enlivens everything around it. The character constellation of Die Räuber creates a bridge to the later classical drama. In fact, the verbal disagreements between Franz and Karl Moor, as well as between Luise and Lady Milford in Kabale und Liebe and Don Carlos and the Marquis Posa in Don Carlos set the stage for the later battle of words between Mary and Elizabeth. And, in both Don Carlos and Maria Stuart, the driving forces that inform the dramatic action are not only political but physiological in nature. As do Karl Moor in Die Räuber, Christian Wolf in Der Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre, and the title character in Maria Stuart, the criminal calls for his own arrest and accepts the consequences of his actions. It is an act of moral will that is in fact liberating. This moral act is sublime precisely because it breaks through the limits with which the average individual remains content. It is a call to self-action above and beyond the confines one imposes upon oneself when one follows only the force of passion, for example, Elizabeth. When coming to terms with the past, as with Mary Stuart, Schiller’s main characters are no longer enslaved by history. Instead, they forge a new chapter in history, one that points in the direction of the improvement of self and society, that is, to the actualization of true humanity in the present, as well as in the future. In his later writings, Schiller concentrated more and more on the powerful forces of nature that animate life in the universe. In “Der Kampf

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mit dem Drachen” (Battle with the Dragon), for example, the battle with the dragon is as much a battle with oneself as it is with an external enemy. But, happily, the threat of destruction is averted here through the cultivation of harmonious tension. As we read in the poem, “Das weibliche Ideal. An Amanda,” in the Musenalmanach für das Jahr 1797, “Auch dein zärtester Laut ist dein harmonisches Selbst.” In “Das Ideal und das Leben” (The Ideal and Life) life is always greater and more powerful than any one individual: “Mächtig, selbst wenn eure Sehnen ruhten, / Reißt das Leben euch in seine Fluten, / Euch die Zeit in ihren Wirbeltanz” (ll. 44–46). And: “Thatenvoll der Genius entbrennt, / Da, da spanne sich des Fleisses Nerve, / Und beharrlich ringend unterwerfe das Element” (ll. 71–76). In the end, tension-filled harmony, which registers the power of perpetual renewal and healing, also contains within itself the possibility of extinction and collapse. Health can only be maintained when the individual, as an embodiment of nature, actively seeks to cultivate the necessary reciprocity between the spiritual-intellectual and physical-corporeal spheres of existence. One of the main tasks of political culture for Schiller is the maintenance or recovery of a healthy relationship between oneself, society, and nature in the ever-vacillating, forever challenging course of history.

Conclusion Maria Stuart is not a Läuterungsdrama, as Schiller maintained. Nor is it a martyr play. The physiological-anthropological dimension of the dramatic text intensifies its tragic elements. As suggested, Elizabeth’s signing of the death warrant is motivated by an exclusively sensuous act of retribution for her defeat in the battle of the words in act 3, scene 4. In act 4, scene 10, Elizabeth is given the following words: Mit welchem Hohn sie auf mich nieder sah, Als sollte mich der Blick zu Boden blitzen! Ohnmächtige! Ich führe beßre Waffen, Sie treffen tödlich und du bist nicht mehr! Mit raschem Schritt nach dem Tische gehend und die Feder ergreifend. Ein Bastard bin ich dir? — Unglückliche! Ich bin es nur, so lang du lebst und atmest. Der Zweifel meiner fürstlichen Geburt Er ist getilgt, sobald ich dich vertilge. Sobald dem Briten keine Wahl mehr bleibt, Bin ich im echten Ehebett’ geboren!


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Sie unterschreibt mit einem raschen, festen Federzug, läßt dann die Feder fallen, und tritt mit einem Ausdruck des Schreckens zurück. Nach einer Pause klingelt sie. (ll. 3239–48; 5:118)

The real source of her political decision, namely the senses carries tragic consequences, not only Mary’s demise but also Elizabeth’s sensuous enslavement and imprisonment in the body politic. Her merely sensuous reaction precludes any responsible political action3 while satisfying another sensuous need: the people’s desire to have Mary executed. In the end, the central tragedy of Maria Stuart consists in the disclosure of the political world as a sickly body in need of spiritual renewal, that is, healing. This is underscored by Elizabeth’s lack of development (Bildung). But this does not necessarily turn Mary into a heroine since the crisis in her relationship with Elizabeth results not in harmonious tension but in rupture, which is the source of the play’s full tragic effect. In Maria Stuart, the mind-body problem and politics are intimately related. The ultimate goal of Schiller’s Ästhetischen Briefe is not the realization of a future utopia but the actualization of the knowledge of humanity through the cultivation of harmonious tension between the rational and sensuous natures of the human being and between the individual and society in the present. This ideal is realizable at any point in history by virtue of the individual’s moral will to actualize him or her self, especially in times of adversity. In the essays on the sublime, for example, Über das Erhabene (On the Sublime) the accent lies on transgressing the limits of the world of beauty. To be sure, this act of sublime self-determination is a primary means in the actualization of the rational-aesthetic state in the present. At the same time, however, it is the beauty of harmonious tension between mind and body in individual human beings that first creates the hope for a better future.

Notes 1


2 Wittkowski argues that Schiller’s portrayal is more progressive than feminist readings of the drama have allowed (389, 400). 3

Alt maintains that Elizabeth does not hesitate to order the execution “aus Furcht vor der öffentlichen Meinung” (2: 503). Furthermore, “Gerade weil Elisabeth die Sklaven der öffentlichen Stimmung ist, bleibt ihre Rolle prekär” (503). Clearly, my interpretation varies significantly from Alt’s. According to Alt, the play constitutes a political tragedy. “Nicht die subjektiven Spiele der Leidenschaften, sondern deren objektive Folgen für den Staat bilden das Zentrum der Tragödie” (499).

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Works Cited Alt, Peter André. Schiller. Leben — Werk — Zeit. 2 vols. Munich: C. H. Beck, 2004. Martinson, Steven D. Harmonious Tensions: The Writings of Friedrich Schiller. Newark: U of Delaware P; London: Associated UP, 1996. Wittkowski, Wolfgang. “Können Frauen regieren? Schillers Maria Stuart. Poesie, Geschichte, und der Feminismus.” Orbis litterarum 52 (1997): 387–409.

Die Jungfrau von Orleans Karl S. Guthke

1.

I

N HIS LAST TWO COMPLETED PLAYS, not counting the “fate tragedy” Die Braut von Messina (The Bride of Messina, 1803), Schiller, the German Shakespeare as he was known in the 1780s, seems to have taken a leaf from the master’s book: in Die Jungfrau von Orleans (The Maid of Orleans, 1802) and Wilhelm Tell (1804), tragedy yields to a more conciliatory, indeed redemptive mood, culminating in the triumph and glorification of “Romantic nationalism” (Reed, 97) or related noble sentiments. Not surprisingly, both plays rank highest among Schiller’s plays in popularity. All-time favorites of open-air theaters and amateur productions, their “Romantic” pageantry, miraculous events, grandiose scenic effects, and musical intermezzi have the broad appeal of opera. Arguably, there is even a touch of kitsch in them, and they are to this day an inexhaustible reservoir of familiar quotations without which no newspaper or cocktail party would be quite the same. Yet both are also serious, philosophically charged historical dramas. In Tell, Romantic nationalism glorifies the triumphant political liberation movement of the Swiss cantons; in Jungfrau, it leads up to the apotheosis of the patriotic heroine at the moment when she has turned the tide of the war in favor of her country and a victorious outcome of the struggle for national autonomy is in sight. In each play, the course of history confirms or validates the high-minded aspirations of the protagonist, even suggesting a near-utopian future. This is strange if we remember that in the mid1790s, Schiller had rejected his idealistic, teleological, and therefore optimistic conception of history, and its lofty promise of ultimate justice (“die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht”) in favor of a thoroughly skeptical, indeed disillusioned concept of history — history as a jumble of random events without ulterior meaning and certainly without the seeds of progress of any kind (Hofmann in Oellers, 371–79). But this apparent contradiction between the historical plays and their author’s view of history becomes irrelevant once we realize that in all of his historical plays, Schiller focuses not so much on the course of history and its ulterior meaning as on the prominent man or woman caught up in it.

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He did so in Fiesko and Don Carlos, before his supposed disillusion with history, and again in Wallenstein and Maria Stuart after it. Being a born dramatist, and one who did not need to be told that the proper study of mankind is man, Schiller was especially fascinated by individuals whose inner conflicts are activated by their conflicts with the world or the “history” around them that plunge them into guilt and error, and ultimately tragedy. But, then, aren’t Jungfrau and Tell about saints of sorts? Richard Wagner spoke of Schiller’s “dichterische Heiligsprechung” (poetic canonization) of Joan,1 and isn’t Tell a patriotic hero about whom it was rightly written at the time of the French Revolution, if in parte infidelium, “Dein Name werde geheiligt,”2 — the bringer of freedom who is celebrated as the “savior” of the country? Saints and saviors are not usually psychologically interesting, at least on stage. Yet in Jungfrau and Tell, Schiller is not deserted by his genius for problematizing character portrayal — even as the greater-than-life national hero and heroine are showered with welldeserved jubilation by a chorus of lesser figures. Schiller’s keen eye for tragedy perceives them as very human for all that: as suffering and erring, struggling to come to terms with their failings and their guilt. As such, they are no less tragic than Schiller’s other dramatic heroes and heroines. Joan of Orleans and Wilhelm Tell join ranks with them by presenting the dramatist’s original insights into what he would have called “die Geschichte des menschlichen Herzens.”

2. Yet there is something strange not only about the tragic quality but also about the present-day popularity of Die Jungfrau von Orleans, which theater programs tend to bill as a “noble-minded wondrous play.” (These are the words of none other than Thomas Mann, whose “Versuch über Schiller” was a landmark not only in the author’s own career but also in the history of the appreciation of Schiller.) The strangeness of the play derives from the fact that its featured character problems and conflicts are associated with “saintliness” or “holiness.” How meaningful are such concepts — not to mention “pure maiden,” “divine command,” “holy mission,” and “redemption” — to the modern theatergoer? Not only are these terms sprinkled all over the text, they have also been indispensible to interpreters of the “Romantic Tragedy,” as it was subtitled, ever since Schiller’s lifetime, as though there was nothing baffling or disturbing about them. What is the interest in a drama that has virtually nothing in common with the significant historical figure it foregrounds — nor with “any mortal woman that ever walked this earth,” as G. B. Shaw noted, no doubt speaking from experience, in the preface to his own Saint Joan? Why should late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century audiences care for a play about

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a rabidly militant amazon with a savior complex, a protagonist who is given the lines: “Was ist unschuldig, heilig, menschlich gut / Wenn es der Kampf nicht ist um’s Vaterland?” (ll. 1782–83). What accounts for the enduring fascination of a play that has such built-in obstacles to appreciation? Finding Shaw’s diagnosis of nonsense unacceptable, scholars have given the reader all manner of first aid; but for their part, many of the more recent critics cannot deny that the work remains, here and there at least, confusing and inaccessible. They are at a loss (“ratlos”) about the “contradictions” and “enigmas” in the text (Sauder, 336–49; Luserke, 659). Some critics, encouraged by such findings, jump to the conclusion, made partly plausible by the operatic elements of the text, that the distinguishing feature of Schiller’s plays, or at least this one, is that instead of ideological constructs they are essentially nothing but arrangements of highly poetical motifs (Storz; Graham). There is certainly something to this. For no doubt it is such an arrangement of poetical highlights that creates the richly modulated fairy-tale world of Die Jungfrau von Orleans, with its profusion of colorful figures and events of great sensual presence. And why not remember in this context the widespread conviction that Schiller, much more so than Goethe, was first and foremost a man of the theater, obsessed with creating stirring scenes, sensuous moments, and theatrical effects rather than with the demonstration of a cogent intellectual thesis through coherent dramatic action or through philosophically charged character portrayal, or psychological plausibility, for that matter (Staiger). If one looks at the play from such a purely aesthetic or theatrical vantage point, the transformation of the gentle shepherdess Johanna into the man-killing amazon is simply the transition from one poetical or stagey motif to another, requiring no further reflection or analysis. Indeed, the transformation could just as well have been the other way around if the play were really nothing more than a kaleidoscope of vivid scenes and effects. In this kaleidoscope, the poetical or fairy-tale motifs may organize themselves into a coherent whole that is aesthetically pleasing, but not into one that incorporates some “meaning.” But is such an aesthetic arrangement of motifs really all that makes Die Jungfrau von Orleans a remarkable play? This is the question on the mind of all those other critics who expect a certain intellectual content or substance — and stumble over intellectual contradictions. It is not hard to imagine, of course, that after finishing the intellectually and formally demanding Maria Stuart, Schiller let himself go a bit in the play he took up immediately afterwards. His letters written at the time confirm this: they reveal nothing about his philosophical struggle with the historical subject matter (such as had exercised him while he was working on Maria Stuart). Instead of philosophical and historical concerns, it is the interest in “poetical motifs” and “stoffartige Wirkung” that dominate the letters written during the genesis of Jungfrau. By “stoffartig” Schiller meant “pertaining to the senses,” having in mind the multisensual appeal

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of opera or of a composition of words and scenes designed for maximum stage effect.3 However, Schiller’s well-documented fascination with “poetical motifs” doesn’t need to imply that the resulting work, to appropriate Goethe’s remark on his Märchen, is “bedeutend, aber deutungslos” (meaningful but uninterpretable), that is to say: a pattern of motifs whose wealth of optically and acoustically pleasing impressions is entirely self-referential. But that is exactly how critics of the aesthetic persuasion (Storz, Graham, and others) read the play. They believe any ideological interpretation, that is, any interpretation pointing to some graspable meaning in the sense of a position concerning a philosophical or anthropological problem or issue implied in their literary articulation, will lead the reader astray. If one looks at the play with such limited expectations, one cannot help isolating a single, prominent aspect at the expense of others at least equally significant. For example, what about the play as a text for the theater as “moral institution” that Schiller was also very much concerned with — and that, properly understood, is not an institution of moral instruction but a school purveying knowledge of or insight into the complexities of human nature? All the same, something can be said for the l’art pour l’art-style of reading Die Jungfrau von Orleans. Such a reading can be appreciated as a reaction against an enduringly influential school of Schiller interpretation that we might call “ideological.” This attempts (often with beguiling rhetoric, sometimes with sophistication bordering on clairvoyance) to view the play as a consistent literary transformation, or even application, of what we would now call Schiller’s “theory.” More often than not, to be sure, this is not done admittedly but implicitly. One way or the other, familiarity with Schiller’s theoretical positions blinds the critic to those features of the drama which, from that point of view, are less striking. More specifically, we need to distinguish two such ideologically interpretive approaches. They rely on two different points of Schiller’s thought about human nature and history; one is fundamentally Christian, the other ultimately humanist. The first takes its cue from Schiller’s treatise Über das Erhabene (On the Sublime, 1801) and its articulation of the mind-body problem. The roots of this line of interpretation in Christian thinking are undeniable. For it takes Johanna’s proclamations about her mission (her carrying out of a divine command, “Sendung,” “göttlicher Auftrag”) at face value — as a theologically authentic statement, or at least as an allegorical reference to the world of ideas beyond the physical world as man’s true home. As a result, Johanna’s “divine mission” becomes the key to her “fate” — which is that of a Christian martyr. Ordained by “divine command” to be a saint, or an idealist heroine, Johanna wages her war against the English invaders and occupiers not out of patriotism, let alone out of a personal will to power, but as God’s chosen tool, for the sake of divine order to be established


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on earth — clearly beyond reproach. Triumphing over all trials and tribulations, she completes her mission as the paradigm of the Christian God’s witness and indeed as his representative on earth or, to choose a less Christian, more idealistic formulation, as the presence of “the eternal in the realm of history,” in fact, as “Gefäß des Göttlichen” (Erläuterungen, NA 9:435). Accordingly, the ending of the play — the death of a saint, rather than a witch — places a seal of approval on an exemplary life. “Der irdische, heroische strebende Mensch geht nach Leid, Schuld, Buße und Reinigung in das Reich des Ewigen ein” (Erläuterungen, NA 9:436). Johanna, in this view, is “the stranger sent from a transmundane realm, a ‘blind’ instrument of God accomplishing its mission in the world of history”; the play accordingly becomes “a parabolic, legend-like drama about the alien nature of the transcendental in the midst of a vain, impure and debasing world,” as an influential critic put it, speaking for a host of others.4 Amounting to a religious perspective, this line of interpretation is hard to take at a time when all belief systems come under suspicion. But one should first look at the second, the more humanistic, rather than Christian or idealist-crypto-Christian, ideological interpretation. Its vantage point is not Über das Erhabene but Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung (On Naive and Sentimental Poetry, 1795). Seen from it, Die Jungfrau von Orleans appears to exemplify a particular concept of the development of mankind and of the individual. This development proceeds from the initial stage of a putative naïve union of the self with nature and with itself, via the conflict between self and the world and the conflict within the self (the stage of “culture”) all the way to the utopian ultimate condition in which all faculties of the senses and the mind are re-united in an ideal harmony: from Arcadia to Elysium. Applied to the play, this speculation, shared by others at the time, implies an understanding of Johanna’s final moments as the realization of the highest perfection possible, in spite of the imperfections of the world and the vulnerability of the individual. In effect, the first-mentioned ideological interpretation could readily agree with this line of thought, except that it would see this perfection as one of human nature participating in the realm of the transcendent; in other words, this perfection would be that of man bearing witness for God by living up to his “mission” on earth — until, at the end of his time, he fully “enters into the divine” as Schiller envisaged the conclusion of his uncompleted Heracles idyll (12:102). The humanistic interpretation, on the other hand, views that ultimate perfection of human nature in this-worldly terms: as that ideal secular humanity that can be realized through human determination and responsibility alone (Ide; Kaiser). The final scene of the play is the touchstone of either way of understanding the heroine: Johanna’s death on the battlefield (invented by Schiller with supreme disregard for history: St. Joan was burned as a witch) is seen either as self-abandonment to the will of a transcendent God, that is, entry into the “real” world of the ideal in the more secularized idealistic view or, in the

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humanistic interpretation, as the regeneration of the autonomous self reaching its ultimate authenticity. This very contradiction of the two ideological lines of interpretation, which have nothing in common except their unrelenting abstractness, makes one wonder what image of human nature, exemplified by Johanna, would come into view if one were to look at the play without casting glances sideways at Schiller’s “theory.” One wonders all the more as the analyses proceeding from philosophical concepts tend to marginalize the specific character traits of a given dramatis persona as at best incidental to the overall conceptual scheme they try to uncover, no matter whether this is articulated in quasi-religious or in humanistic terms. Both, then, ignore a lot — but what, precisely? Aspects of Johanna that fit neither the concept of the saint sent to earth by God nor the vision of Weimar-style human perfection include, first of all, the fanatic brutality, indeed the power-hungry, self-serving vitality of a bloodthirsty St. Joan of the battlefields and, second, the narrow-minded chauvinism of a savior who advocates humane behavior only in the company of the French, not in encounters with what we now call the “other.” These two unsettling aspects of Johanna are marginalized as harmless or irrelevant in the conventional ideological interpretations of the play, whereas the l’art pour l’art approach does not catch sight of character portrayal at all. But doesn’t the unbridled savagery of a “saint” or “pure maiden” who cheerfully goes about her business of “making widows” (l. 1666), sword in hand, give us pause? Don’t critics all too routinely reel off those awe-inspiring key terms, taking them either literally (documenting Christian values or verities) or metaphorically (as referring to idealist or humanist values or verities)? And don’t they explain Johanna’s bloodthirsty conquistador mentality away too easily when they say: such bloodthirst is sufficiently excused by Johanna’s high mission5 and by the “eternal order” that is to be preserved? Does Johanna really remain a “schöne und zugleich erhabene Seele” for all her savagery (Erläuterungen, NA 9:393–94), “terrifying [. . .] but never impure” (v. Wiese, 738)? Her “Tötungsrausch,” we read as late as 1996, is no “Problem des Stückes” (Oellers, 259): as Johanna acts under the coercion of her divine “mission,” she is not responsible for her gratuitous atrocities in the battlefield. Really? Oddly enough, Johanna herself is a better critic. Confronted with the enemy, Montgomery first and Lionel later, she by no means ignores this question, nor does she minimize it. And just as Johanna finds no pat answer to her moral dilemma, neither does the thoughtful critic (or should one say, the critic cursed with common sense who fails to see the empress’s new clothes?). For such a critic wonders how Johanna’s killing spree and her refusal to love (both, she tells us, ordained by God and both, we know, invented by Schiller, in contradiction to the historical facts known to him) are compatible with the statement that Johanna’s calling is one “zur Idealität des Menschen” (Kaiser, 1978, 136). Or such a critic wonders how


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the cold-blooded murder of Montgomery can be seen as “die höchste Steigerung Johannas zum reinen Geistwesen” and as a sublime triumph of idealism (Erläuterungen, NA 9:430–31; Miller, 39–41). Isn’t she rather, throughout much of the play, the power-hungry, sword-wielding chauvinist fury, convinced of her divinely ordained mission of which there is not a shred of independent “proof” in the play?6 An answer may be given by a close look, unencumbered by Schiller’s own theorizing, at character portrayal in this play: how is the undeniable ensemble of missionary zeal, brutal will to power, and bloodthirsty chauvinism integrated into the image of the “saint” — or is it integrated? Isn’t Johanna’s sense of mission, which glorifies herself as it glorifies God, a notso-distant relative of megalomania and of the delusion of the “chosen” — which, ever since Die Räuber, Schiller had critically diagnosed in his protagonists who seemed to be so blamelessly idealistic? And doesn’t Johanna herself point to this failing when she indicts herself as vain (“eitel,” l. 2938)? Schiller’s deviation from known historical fact points in the same direction: in her trial, Jeanne d’Arc insisted, and the prosecution did not deny, that she had not spilled blood in battle. Also, is it not strange that the so-called redemption play, in which there is indeed much talk of divine calling with specifically Christian connotations, should be published, in accordance with the author’s express wish, with an engraved title vignette featuring Minerva, the pagan goddess of war? (628, 630) Strange — or telling? How are such contradictory traits accommodated in Johanna’s ample soul? Clearly, a psychologically close reading seems to be indicated. Why not take a cue from Schiller’s — Dr. Schiller’s — own diagnostic method, practiced ever since his heavily psychological medical dissertation and his earliest critical writings? Why not trace how the dramatist goes about his project, announced in Wallenstein, of letting us see the human quality of his dramatis personae, the project of “menschlich näherbringen.” Appropriating Schiller’s own realistic and slightly skeptical knowledge of human nature, one might do worse than try to gain insight into how the contradictory traits accommodate themselves in the personality of so saintly a human being. They might constitute an ensemble that, in Schiller’s view, would amount to the signet of the condition humaine — not a particularly edifying condition, but an interesting one nonetheless, and certainly not a contemptible one. In Die Jungfrau von Orleans, Schiller indeed goes out of his way to throw into relief the protagonist’s conflicted plurality of motivations, which includes, along with the religious ones, rather inhumane ones as well. As a result, the much-acclaimed idealism or saintliness of the protagonist becomes ambiguous, to say the least. The self-proclaimed envoy from heaven (which is commonly taken to be supra-national and well-disposed toward humans) becomes questionable through her nationalism that acknowledges only the French as human (ll. 2085–90), not to

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mention her frenzied mass slaughter: “Ein Schlachten war’s, nicht eine Schlacht zu nennen” (l. 981). Slaughter authorized by the Virgin Mary (featured in Johanna’s banner) or by Minerva (on the title page) — or by both? Such plurality of motivation need not be a shortcoming of the play. On the contrary, it may reveal consistency of thought and of artistic shaping. What obviously fascinates Schiller is “das weite Land” of the soul (as Schnitzler would have called it) with all its conflicts and contradictions. A closer look at the development of the protagonist should leave no doubt about that.

3. The play opens with a “Prologue.” Its function is the “künstlerische Herausarbeitung der ‘Sendung’ ” (Erläuterungen, NA 9:422). All the same, it fails to answer the question whether this mission or “divine command” is a matter of “objective truth,” as some critics see it (Miller, 41; v. Wiese), that is to say, whether it is a fact of the dramatic world that is to be taken at face value (as the interference of transcendence in the life of an otherwise solidly this-worldly human being) — or a fact of subjective consciousness (so that one could at best speak of Johanna’s sense of a mission, not “Sendung” but “Sendungsbewußtsein”). Indeed, this is not the only respect in which the prologue is ambiguous about the self-proclaimed mission of the uneducated shepherdess. The very place where she claims to have had the vision that commanded her to wield the sword of God and liberate France from the English invites ambiguity: “Vorn zur Rechten ein Heiligenbild in einer Kapelle; zur Linken eine hohe Eiche.” Why an oak, rather than the beech of Schiller’s source (Erläuterungen, NA 9:423)? The oak was the sacred tree of the Celts, appropriately called “Druidenbaum” in the play. As a consequence, the vision occurring between an oak and a chapel is a priori questionable: is it a Christian calling to the service of God or a call from the depth of the heathen past of a warlike people (Harrison; Pfaff, 414)? Our uncertainty is confirmed on almost every page of the text as Johanna, who features the Virgin Mary on her banner but acts like a heathen goddess of war on the battlefield, is seen by the dramatis personae surrounding her either as an envoy of Jesus Christ or of Satan (who held the fallen world of the heathens in thrall with evil spirits such as those worshipped in the “Druidenbaum”). Interestingly, as Johanna herself, after a long silence, begins to speak, she defines herself neither as the “Fromme” that Raimund sees in her nor as the devotee of an infernal spirit of “Heidenzeit” that her father thinks she is; she does not define herself in religious terms at all. Instead, she grabs Bertrand’s helmet: “Mein ist der Helm und mir gehört er zu” (l. 193). In other words: the “lion-hearted” young woman who, we hear, thought nothing of strangling a “Tigerwolf”


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with her bare hands (ll. 196–97), breaks out into “Begeisterung” for the national cause of France: Mit ihrer Sichel wird die Jungfrau kommen Und [des Feindes] Saaten niedermähn. (ll. 306–7) What is not said here is just as important: not a word about her calling from on high. Instead, “Es ist / der Helm der sie so kriegerisch beseelt” (ll. 328–29). This is not a commentary that, like others in the play, can be brushed aside as a matter of the limited perspective of the speaker. For in this case the audience has just witnessed its veracity: it has seen how emphatically Johanna grabbed the “kriegerischen Schmuck” (l. 195). This is the spontaneous expression of her patriotic urge — which is less fittingly symbolized by the image of the mother of God than by the heathen oak that Johanna is associated with so consistently. True, the France she loves and sees threatened is the land of Christians, the land of the crusades against the heathens. But how does Johanna herself refer to the realm of Christian transcendence? The Old Testament God, “der Schlachten Gott,” will choose her, she says (ll. 324–25). It is not a case of man pressed into service by the Divine; the Divine is pressed into service by man: it serves as a confirmation or guarantee of Johanna’s own wishes, of her patriotic commitment to the “Land des Ruhms” (ll. 332–33); against this country’s enemies she will wield the scythe, following her own drive, as the helmetgrabbing scene made clear. On balance, then, it is God who is “called,” not Johanna. We do not hear about Johanna’s calling until the following scene, the fourth of the prologue: shouldn’t that be a hint from the playwright, so well-versed in the tricks of his trade, that what matters most in Johanna’s psychological makeup is the patriotic urge or drive? It is not until the fourth scene of the prologue, a monologue, that Johanna interprets her chauvinistic enthusiasm for an immediate departure for bloody battlefields as a calling. The role of the metaphysical, subjectively embraced with fervor, remains secondary in a precise sense demonstrated on stage by the course of events. Moreover, the identity of the metaphysical power that calls Johanna still remains unclear in scene four: does the calling come from the evil “spirit” (a “Geist,” as in “Begeisterung”) worshipped in the druids’ tree, or from Jahwe? Both are mentioned in this scene — the Virgin Mary is not. Of her, Johanna does not speak until in act 1, when she appears before King Charles, who is about to give up the fight against the English invaders. But even then the patriotic urge remains paramount. Not for nothing, after all, is Johanna (who has just worked “a strange miracle” in the battle of Vermanton, leaving two thousand enemy warriors dead) introduced to the king in a typically syncretist manner: as the (obviously

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heathen) “Kriegsgöttin” (goddess of war) whose banner boasts the Virgin Mary as her sponsor (ll. 953–66). The Minerva of the title page vignette comes to mind. And indeed, the military predicament of the country is what Johanna speaks of first in the presence of the king. Only later, and again secondarily, as in the prologue, does she bring up her calling, her mission, and here too this is a self-conceived, self-created “Sendung,” rather than one that “calls” her, overwhelming her contre coeur: Da rief ich flehend Gottes Mutter an, Von uns zu wenden fremder Ketten Schmach, Uns den einheimschen König zu bewahren. (ll. 1059–61) It is only after this plea that, as she reports to the king, the mother of God appeared to her under the druids’ oak and commanded her “[ihres] Volkes Feinde [zu] vertilgen.” But now, as she reports this, that command is surprisingly represented not as the will of Mary, but of the Lord (“Herr”) — who, in context, is clearly Jesus, not, as earlier, Jahwe or the spirit in the druids’ tree (ll. 1062–1105). The mission therefore becomes even murkier than it was to begin with, and even more so almost immediately afterwards, when Johanna says that it was the “Geist” that gave her the command to fight for her country. In other words, the religious mission (“Sendung”) and its nature become more ambiguous and less convincing as Johanna’s patriotic spontaneity gains conviction. What is Schiller driving at here? No doubt he wants to show that Johanna invests her primary patriotic and amazonian drive, vaguely enough, with some supernatural, religious authority, thereby validating it in a way that is plausible in the historical setting. She believes in France; she also believes in her “mission” (which, it should be remembered, but usually is not, does not in any way function as a thematic given of the play, as distinguished from Johanna’s subjective fantasy world). To Johanna, liberating the land of the king “der nie stirbt” (who never dies, l. 346) is liberating the land of the earthly, or rather French, representative of a God who ordained its national boundary when he created the watery barrier between the English and the French (ll. 1208–21; 1647–51). In the military conflict, it is therefore Heaven that favors France: “Der Himmel ist für Frankreich” (l. 1767). It is as simple as that: patriotism comes first, the sense of a mission (which is not the same as a mission objectively validated in terms of the play) follows, and the audience is a witness to this development in Johanna’s self-understanding. Up to this point in the play, Johanna’s conflicted personality has been presented in the manner of program notes. In the subsequent acts, the audience sees her in action, in military conflict, and here the ambiguity of the impression conveyed so far is demonstrated ad oculos. Three scenes in particular map out the stages of the protagonist’s progress, and each of


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them consistently confronts us with the question: saint and “Gottgesandte” or self-appointed “Kriegsgöttin” endowed with rabid chauvinism and brutal violence? These stages are Johanna’s encounters with Montgomery, with the Black Knight, and with Lionel. The military situation is favorable as Johanna confronts Montgomery on the battlefield. The English have been defeated, Orleans has been retaken by the virgin with the Virgin’s banner. But as Johanna appears in person, she seems to be not so much an envoy of the Queen of Heaven as a terrifyingly warlike Fury. She herself speaks of her “Schreckensnähe” (l. 1500), continuing: Jetzt Fackeln her! Werft Feuer in die Zelte! Der Flammen Wut vermehre das Entsetzen, Und drohend rings umfange sie der Tod! (ll. 1503–5) Dünois and La Hire urge moderation: “Nimm das Schwert, das tödliche, nicht selbst,” but her (unhistorical) reply is: “Wer darf mir Halt gebieten?” And, as an afterthought, she refers to the powers authorizing her actions — appearing once again in their typical ambiguity, not to say duplicity: evil spirit (“Geist”) and “Gott” (ll. 1516–23). Against the background of such ambiguity, Johanna’s motivation is all the clearer, and it is dramatically, palpably present — the bloodthirst of the “reine Jungfrau.” This manifests itself as “die Schreckliche” confronts Montgomery. The woman who compares herself with Noah’s white dove (l. 315) acts out murderous military aggression — which she once again sanctifies only afterwards with references to her “Sendung” (which, to be sure, did not include a word about brutality). What one sees on stage is a fit of nationalist frenzy that welcomes any and all bloody means to achieve its ends: Wenn dich das Unglück in des Krokodils Gewalt Gegeben oder des gefleckten Tigers Klaun, Wenn du der Löwenmutter junge Brut geraubt, Du könntest Mitleid finden und Barmherzigkeit, Doch tödlich ist’s, der Jungfrau zu begegnen. Denn dem Geisterreich, dem strengen, unverletzlichen, Verpflichtet mich der furchtbar bindende Vertrag, Mit dem Schwert zu töten alles Lebende, das mir Der Schlachten Gott verhängnisvoll entgegen schickt. [. . .] Auch Englands Mütter mögen die Verzweiflung nun Erfahren, und die Tränen kennen lernen, Die Frankreichs jammervolle Gattinnen geweint. [. . .]

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Ich muß [. . .] ein Gespenst des Schreckens würgend gehn, Den Tod verbreiten [. . .] Noch vielen von den Euren werd’ ich tödlich sein, Noch viele Witwen machen[.] (ll. 1594–602; 1632–34; 1660–66) She slays Montgomery in the brief combat that follows. Obviously, Schiller, with his intuitive knowledge of human nature enhanced by his education in the medically-based psychology of his time, is not bent upon demonstrating, in this scene, that Johanna’s purity and divinity are strangely alien in an impure world, nor that Johanna’s heinous brutality can be excused by her “furchtbar bindenden Vertrag mit dem Geisterreich” as the Nationalausgabe blithely assures us (NA 9:430). Hardly does Schiller’s Jeanne d’Arc act in this scene with exemplary idealism (as has been said not only in French but also in English [Grappin; Miller, 42]). On the contrary, Schiller is fascinated by Noah’s dove turned predator, by a human soul that has room for many contradictory elements at close quarters: for “eignes Gelüsten” in the form of bloodthirsty barbarity and blindly fanatical patriotism and for the belief, not implausible in the medieval world, in a “göttlichen Befehl” to the chosen individual. Note a telling detail: why does Johanna in this context — “Sendung” — invoke the authority of a “Götterstimme” commanding her, rather than a “Gottesstimme,” which would fit the metrical pattern equally well (l. 1660)? Is it, then, a voice from the polytheistic, heathenish realm of the druids’ tree, rather than from the aura of the chapel, that presses Johanna into service? Is the god of battle she refers to a terrifying Jahwe, or is it an equally fearsome Celtic equivalent of Wotan? Or is it Johanna herself interpreting whatever voice she claims to have heard as a command to kill and burn, as a brief to make English blood flow (“Kein französisch Blut soll fließen,” l. 1719)? Clearly, Schiller intends to suggest such questions, rather than answers. As if to discourage any doubts about this, Schiller in the next scene has Johanna turn her thoughts in the same direction, even before the Black Knight appears to her, who will stir her self-doubt even more. Having killed Montgomery, she feels no longer comfortable in her warlike role. In retrospect she speaks of her pity (“Mitleid”) with the adversary just murdered ad majorem dei gloriam and of her wrongdoing, and her reflexion is couched in religious terms: “Die Hand erbebt, / Als bräche sie in eines Tempels heil’gen Bau” (ll. 1680–81). She shudders at the sight of the bloodied sword — if only to reassure herself somewhat spuriously with the thought: “Doch wenn es Not tut, alsbald ist die Kraft mir da” (l. 1684). No doubt about it: that is Johanna’s escape from the voice of her conscience into the safety of heteronomy; it is here that she begins to have doubts about herself — about the conflict in her soul and, between the lines, about her “Sendung” itself, or at least about her Sendungsbewußtsein.


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If one pays close attention to Johanna’s own reflection about her savagery on the battlefield, the controversial encounter with the Black Knight that follows in act 3 becomes virtually self-explanatory. To be sure, there may never be an incontrovertible answer to the question of the identity of the unnamed figure rising up before Johanna’s eyes in that scene (Frey; Herrmann). Beyond quibbling, however, is the function of the apparition of the Black Knight: Johanna is confronted, dramatically and almost palpably, with her own doubts, not coincidentally so soon after her murder of Montgomery. Confronted with the Black Knight, she arrives at an unprecedented stage of the development of her consciousness: how will she master the growing conflict in her soul, she asks herself, quite at a loss. The Black Knight warns her (not without ambiguity) against continuing her mission as she understands it. To Johanna, this must sound like a warning against her success, against the warlike atrocities that she has so amply demonstrated. In other words, the Black Knight verbalizes her own doubts, previously at least hinted at, about the uncomfortable ensemble of contradictory motivations in her soul. That is why the words of the stranger shatter her and confuse her so much: it is her own conscience speaking (Pfaff, 416–17). Is the “Geist, [. . .] der aus mir redet” an Ungeist (l. 1723)? Isn’t the Virgin Mary who demands such bloody sacrifices not uncomfortably similar to many a pagan deity? What sort of “heaven” is it that is in favor of France in such an atrocious fashion? Of course, what transpires on the stage amounts to Johanna’s rejection of the voice of her conscience: “Nicht aus den Händen leg’ ich dieses Schwert, / Als bis das stolze England niederliegt” (ll. 2432–33); she sticks to her mission. But it is equally clear that the Romantic apparition of the Black Knight has confirmed Johanna’s self-doubt about her patriotic brutality that had arisen in the Montgomery scene at the latest. This is borne out by the Lionel scene, which follows immediately. Like the Montgomery scene, it is one of Schiller’s inventions, as was the order to kill and not to love (in the wording of Johanna’s mission) that is the subtext of both of these scenes (Sauder, 354). It follows from this subtext that, just as before the onset of her self-doubt Johanna considered the killing of Montgomery a triumph of her god-willed mission, she now interprets her erotic attraction to Lionel and her subsequent failure to slay him as a betrayal of her mission and therefore as her “guilt,” a transgression against the divine. “Gebrochen hab’ ich mein Gelübde” (l. 2482). When Lionel escapes unharmed, Johanna is in despair, wishing to atone with her own death: “Laßt [mein Blut] mit meinem Leben / Hinströmen” (ll. 2516–17) — words echoing the dying words of Talbot the nihilist a little earlier! But is Johanna right when she identifies the reason for her despair as her failure to live up to the mission that required her not to love but to slaughter men? Generations of critics, from Schiller’s contemporaries to ours, and including the editors of the Nationalausgabe, have agreed: What happens in the

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confrontation with Lionel is Johanna’s abandonment of her mission, the breach of her vow of chastity, which was one of its conditions. Does the text sustain this reading? Or does Johanna’s despair following the Lionel scene in act 4 point to her doubt about the “Sendung” itself — the divine mission that amounts to an obligation to murder, as Johanna had come to realize in the confrontation with Montgomery and with the Black Knight — and as she realizes again in her encounter with Lionel? As a “blind tool” of God, it now dawns on her, she was not “menschlich” (ll. 2578, 2567) — not “menschlich” in the dual sense of not “edel, hilfreich und gut” and not “whole” in terms of the Über die Ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (On the Aesthetic Education of Man, 1795). To be sure, her thoughts almost habitually return to the “furchtbar bindenden Vertrag” (l. 1600), to her mission ordained by God, when she says: “Es war nicht meine Wahl” (l. 2613). And with this in mind, she re-iterates that her guilt (“Schuld”) was the breach of this contract allegedly forced on her (she spared the life of Lionel, and part of the contract was to kill, not to love). But it is hard to disagree with a modern critic who diagnoses Johanna’s rationale as self-delusion (Pfaff, 416). In reality, Johanna, far from suffering from a breach of what she considers her contract, labors under the enormity of her role, all too eagerly embraced, of an avenging angel in the French cause and in the name of the Virgin Mary: Mußtest du ihn auf mich laden Diesen furchtbaren Beruf, Konnt’ ich dieses Herz verhärten, Das der Himmel fühlend schuf! (ll. 2594–97) Remembering these lines, one can easily read Johanna’s guilt-ridden words about her lapse from her mission in act 4 as self-delusion, either active or passive — “dialectical psychology” (Pfaff) is hardly required; common sense will do. After all, it was Johanna herself who pressed God or the Virgin into service as guarantors of her self-appointed mission, not the other way around. Not surprisingly, Johanna holds it against herself that she “raised” herself “vainly” over her sisters when she plunged into her military adventure, with arrogance (“Hochmut”) and on her own initiative (ll. 2938, 130). Now she will atone for such vanity, “büßen [. . .] mit der strengsten Buße” (l. 2937) — atone for patriotic presumption and regressive brutality. It is these urges, she now realizes, that have flourished with disastrous consequences in the shadow of her sense of a mission, her Sendungsbewußtsein, the supposed calling that is now seen for what it is: “furchtbar,” inhumane, and wrongful. It is not the abandonment of the mission, then, that is the target of Johanna’s self-questioning and doubt, but the mission itself, or more accurately — her belief in a mission. The “tumult” in her soul is the alarm


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about the conflicted ensemble of very different feelings in her own self. One of them may be regret about her failure to live up to her “Sendung.” But what remains decisive is her realization that her brutal frenzy of activity in the cause of France has deprived her of her “Menschlichkeit” — that her sense of a mission was not above question. However, she overcomes the “Streit in meiner Brust.” Regenerated, rising out of the shock that had literally dumbfounded her in Reims, Johanna reaffirms her mission at the outset of the final act. But hardly has she regained her emotional balance when it is upset again in the following scene. Once again she is in the grip of what she calls her weakness (l. 3179): despair about her mission, her sense of being abandoned by God, her deathwish even. Why? Because she is to meet Lionel again, thus repeating the encounter that, in a shock of recognition, made her see her inhumanity. As the “Streit” of contradictory emotions is rekindled right after Johanna’s wordy articulation of her new-found balance, we see the familiar sight of the Fury once again. In captivity now, she proudly speaks of the “Ströme Engelländschen Bluts” she has shed (l. 3234). That is indeed a cue for her barbaric will to power, coupled with rabid patriotism, to reassert itself, this time in yet another encounter with Lionel and in what follows it. Far from giving in to any erotic appeal, she addresses Lionel, who approaches his prisoner with warm words of kindness, as the hated enemy of her people. With the “Trotz der Rasenden” (l. 3368) she directs the dialogue toward the chauvinism that animated her every word up until her first encounter with Lionel on the battlefield. And in the scenes subsequent to this second confrontation with the enemy, the tenor remains the same: furiously single-minded and war-mongering: “Verderben über England” (l. 3410). Johanna is in chains, to be sure, but “frei aus ihrem Kerker schwingt die Seele / Sich auf den Flügeln eures Kriegsgesangs” (ll. 3414–15), she says, all but parodying the sublime: the escape of the soul from the chains of this world is animated by martial music. In the famous teichoscopy, it is once again the truculent patriot foaming at the mouth that is foregrounded, as well as the ferocious doer of manly deeds (with a strangled “Tigerwolf ” in her past). It is interesting to see how the metaphysical power (whose tool Johanna often claimed to be) is brought into play here: merely as support for her own will, just as in the prologue and in the first act. “Höre mich, Gott, in meiner höchsten Not, / [. . .] Du willst und diese Ketten fallen ab” (ll. 3463, 3470). Whereupon she breaks her “zentnerschwere Bande” and rushes into battle without a word of thanks for the heavenly helper — thus giving a cue to some AngloSaxon critics who like to point out that her escape was not a matter of divine intervention at all but of will power and strong muscle (Mainland, 100). Be this as it may: carrying her sword rather than the Virgin Mary’s banner, Johanna storms into the heavily armed enemy lines like a warlike Fury and wrenches “sichern Sieg” from the English (l. 3492).

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Her end is equally victorious, if differently so. Dying on the battlefield, rather than at the stake like the historical Jeanne d’Arc, and on the point of being, like Schiller’s Mary Stuart, “ein verklärter Geist,” Johanna once again affirms her divinely ordained mission (“Ich bin keine Zauberin”) or rather her subjective belief in such a mission, believing that “heaven” is now opening its gates to her (ll. 3515, 3522, 3537). But equally important to her, in her last words, is that she is “wirklich unter meinem Volk,” freed not only from the bonds of this world but also from the English occupation forces. With dimming eyes she recognizes: “Das sind Frankreichs Fahnen!” (l. 3529 [author’s emphasis]). And the same ensemble of religious and national liberation is repeated in her final apotheosis, which a recent critic has suspected of being a self-apotheosis (Luserke, 663): “Hinauf — hinauf — die Erde flieht zurück — / Kurz ist der Schmerz und ewig ist die Freude!” (ll. 3543–44). That sounds like the purification and redemption that traditional scholarship makes out to be the ultimate meaning of the action from beginning to end, thus validating Johanna’s words in terms of theology or idealism. However, not only does Schiller point out in a stage direction that as Johanna sees herself surging to heaven, leaving the earth behind her, she in fact “sinkt tot” — to earth (Luserke, 661). More important is Schiller’s reminder here that the heaven Johanna now believes to enter is viewed as no less francophile than it always had been in Johanna’s view: her dead body is submerged by a sea of French flags; there are no religious symbols to set off the national ones. Isn’t this to be taken as the dramatist’s final hint that we should not see, as we commonly do, Die Jungfrau von Orleans as a tragedy of a “Sendung” but rather as one of “Sendungsbewußtsein” — a sense of a mission that, regrettably, shares Johanna’s ample soul with bloodthirsty chauvinism and with that personal, instinctive conquistadorial will to power that had fascinated Schiller ever since his early poem “Der Eroberer”? The stereotypical phrase tagging Johanna the “in die Welt gesandte Heilige,” who enters “heaven” or “die Welt des Ideals” (Einführung, NA 9:391) is hardly the last word — no more than the equally conventional cliché of the non-religious perfection of human nature on its triumphal progress from Arcadia to Elysium. What the author brings to life before the audience in the final scene is clearly not (or not only) a perfect or a transcendent self that is beyond all earthly-all-too-earthly entanglements or, at any rate, claims to be. First and foremost, Johanna is a creature of “this world,” a frail and indeed barbarically flawed human being: the shepherdess from the village of Domrémy making her way through patriotic gore, the “widowmaker” stepping over dead bodies, the slayer of the “Tigerwolf” acting out of her over-abundant energies. Whether there is really, “objectively” (Miller, 41) a divine command corresponding to the sense of a mission that Johanna uses to validate her actions — that is a question often answered in the affirmative, with enviable clairvoyance, but one that a dramatist who


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does not aspire to theological insight cannot answer. What he presents on the stage is not the “divine” and its “fate” on earth, in human incarnation (thus the view held by several generations of readers until the late twentieth century) but a human being believing in such transcendent entities. And Schiller concentrates all his creative energies on showing how this human being, being human, lapses from this belief and troubles herself with severe self-doubt and moreover, how she is a believer to the point of imitatio Christi but also given to “this world” in a manner that is presented as less than admirable, a manner that is especially problematic from the perspective of humanist Weimar. Johanna is an idealist with blood on her hands.7

Notes 1

Richard Wagner, “Publikum und Popularität,” Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, 10:88. Quotations and paraphrases from Die Jungfrau von Orleans are identified by line number; the text is that of the Frankfurter Ausgabe of Werke und Briefe (Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1988–), vol. 5. Unidentified source references are to this volume as well. The abbreviation NA refers to the Nationalausgabe.

2

Dieter Borchmeyer, 1982, 70. Gerhard Kaiser calls both Tell and Johanna “Heilige der Natur” (1974, 114; 1978, 201); Gert Ueding sees Tell as a “säkularisierten Heiligen und Märtyrer” (395; quoting Kommerell, 188). 3

Werke und Briefe, 5:620, 621, 622, 623, 626, 627.

4

Benno von Wiese, 734–35; Oberkogler, 58–59, 76–77, 90–91; Oellers, 262–68.

5

“Gottgesendet” (989–90).

6

That Johanna is “ein mit allen Schwächen behafteter Mensch” is rather too gallant a formulation (Luserke, 660). I note with pleasure, however, that my general view of the play, first formulated in my book Schillers Dramen (1994), has been accepted by Luserke in the Frankfurt edition of Werke und Briefe (660–61). 7

“Das leibhaftige Ideal ist ohne blutriefende Hände nicht vorstellbar,” says Gert Mattenklott, referring primarily to the early works of Schiller (307). In 1955, Grappin still managed to see Die Jungfrau von Orleans as an exemplary illustration of the idealism of Weimar classicism.

Works Cited Borchmeyer, Dieter. “Schillers Jungfrau von Orleans: Eine Oper für Richard Wagner.” In Ethik und Ästhetik: Werke und Werte in der Literatur vom 18. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert: Festschrift für Wolfgang Wittkowski zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Richard Fisher, 277–91. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1995. ———. “ ‘Altes Recht’ und Revolution. Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell.” In Friedrich Schiller: Kunst, Humanität und Politik in der späten Aufklärung. Ein Symposium, ed. Wolfgang Wittkowski, 69–113. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1982.

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Frey, John R. “Schillers Schwarzer Ritter.” German Quarterly 32 (1959): 302–15. Graham, Ilse. Schiller’s Drama: Talent and Integrity. London: Methuen, 1974. Grappin, Pierre. “La Jeanne d’Arc de Schiller.” Études Germaniques 10 (1955): 119–27. Guthke, Karl S. “Die Jungfrau von Orleans : Ein psychologisches Märchen.” In Schiller’s Dramen: Idealismus und Skepsis, 235–57. Tübingen: Francke, 1994. Herrmann, Gernot. “Schillers Kritik der Verstandesaufklärung in der Jungfrau von Orleans: Eine Interpretation der Figuren des Talbot und des Schwarzen Ritters.” Euphorion 84 (1990): 163–86. Ide, Heinz. “Zur Problematik der Schiller-Interpretation: Überlegungen zur Jungfrau von Orleans” Jahrbuch der Wittheit zu Bremen 8 (1964): 41–91. Kaiser, Gerhard. “Idylle und Revolution: Schillers Wilhelm Tell.” In Kaiser, Deutsche Literatur und Französische Revolution, 87–128. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1974. Also in Kaiser, Von Arkadien nach Elysium. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck u. Ruprecht, 1978. ———. “Johannas Sendung: Eine These zu Schillers Jungfrau von Orleans.” Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft 10 (1966): 205–36. Also in Kaiser, Von Arkadien nach Elysium, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1978. Kommerell, Max. Geist und Buchstabe der Dichtung. 3rd ed. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1944. Luserke, Matthias. “Deutungsaspekte.” In Schiller, Werke und Briefe. Vol. 5, 658–64. Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1996. Mainland, William F. Schiller and the Changing Past. London: Heinemann, 1957. Mattenklott, Gert. “Schiller’s Räuber in der Frühgeschichte des Anarchismus.” Text ⫹ Kontext 9 (1981): 300–314. Miller, R. D. Interpreting Schiller: A Study of Four Plays. Harrowgate: The Duchy Press, 1986. Oberkogler, Friedrich. “Die Jungfrau von Orleans”: Eine Werkinterpretation auf geisteswissenschaftlicher Grundlage. Schaffhausen: Novalis, 1986. Oellers, Norbert. “Schiller’s Jungfrau von Orleans als Mädchen aus der Fremde.” In Oellers, Friedrich Schiller: Zur Modernität eines Klassikers, ed. Michael Hofmann, 262–68. Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1996. ———. “ ‘Und bin ich strafbar, weil ich menschlich war?’: Zu Schillers Tragödie Die Jungfrau von Orleans.” In Oellers, Friedrich Schiller: Zur Modernität eines Klassikers, ed. Michael Hofmann, 247–61. Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1996. Pfaff, Peter. “König René oder die Geschichte: Zu Schillers Jungfrau von Orleans.” In Schiller und die höfische Welt, ed. Achim Aurnhammer, Klaus Manger, and Friedrich Strack, 407–21. Tübingen M. Niemeyer, 1990. Reed, T. J. Schiller. Oxford, New York: Oxford UP, 1991.


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Sauder, Gerhard. “Die Jungfrau von Orleans.” In Interpretationen: Schillers Dramen, ed. Walter Hinderer, 336–84. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1992. Staiger, Emil. Friedrich Schiller. Zürich: Atlantis, 1967. Storz, Gerhard. Der Dichter Friedrich Schiller. Stuttgart: Klett, 1959. Ueding, Gert. “Wilhelm Tell.” In Schillers Dramen: Neue Interpretationen, ed. Walter Hinderer, 385–422. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1992. Wagner, Richard. Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen. 2nd ed. Leipzig: Fritzsch, 1888. Wiese, Benno von. Friedrich Schiller. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1959.

Wilhelm Tell Karl S. Guthke

1.

W

ILHELM TELL (1804) — unique in Schiller’s oeuvre in that it is subtitled “Schauspiel” — has always been taken to be the most easily accessible of Schiller’s plays, appealing primarily, if not exclusively, to children and the Swiss, to opera lovers appreciating the son et lumière, as well as to connoisseurs of familiar quotations, and, just possibly, to aficionados of kitsch, be they naïve or sophisticated. No wonder at least one critical intellectual, Swiss as it happens but no doubt speaking for many others, fantasized about a “Schiller without Wilhelm Tell ” (Muschg). Schiller himself had hoped that Tell would appeal to the “heart and senses” and be “effective on stage,” in other words, that it would be a “Volksstück,” “für das ganze Publikum.”1 Whether taking such hints or not, audiences have usually experienced the work as a celebratory play or a festive event, a Festspiel jubilating about the victory of a popular sort of idealism that restores the sovereignty of the people with unfailing aplomb. Tell was something for everybody, then (who could be against it, other than totalitarian regimes, such as Hitler’s [Fetscher, 152–53]) — and something for all seasons. But that is where popularity becomes problematic. For Schiller’s celebration of an event of thirteenth-century Swiss history is so rhetorically vague and operatically enthralling that it gained a dubious kind of universality and adaptability allowing it to be appropriated by a motley crew of ideologies. After all, hadn’t Schiller himself instrumentalized his chosen moment in medieval local history to express concerns about his own political present (Fink, 59)? So why not look for timely applications at a later period? As a result, Tell came to be a multipurpose political play. Although the men of the twentieth of July right-of-centre conspiracy against Hitler may not have claimed Schiller’s Tell as an archetypical model themselves, recent scholars have confidently done so on their behalf (Müller-Seidel, 143; Herbst). East German Communists thought nothing of welcoming the rebellion of the Swiss “lower strata of society,” indeed of the “Volk,” against the feudal order as an analogue of their own seemingly successful class struggle (Braemer); and as they pointed to the French Revolution as yet another analogue — hadn’t Schiller, commenting on Tell,

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spoken of a storm on the Bastille (Braemer, 327)? They might have taken comfort from the fact that the historical, or rather mythical, Tell of the Swiss tradition had indeed been a heroic idol of the Jacobins (Borchmeyer 1982, 69–70). Likewise, Tell was claimed as a precursor of late-twentiethcentury freedom fighters (Ueding, 413), of mid-twentieth-century terrorists (Frisch, 122), and, most recently, of the anti-Communist liberation movement in East Germany culminating in 1989 (Piedmont); finally, the play has been read as a case study of colonialism in the guise of “modernization” (Ndong). If Tell can be appropriated by so many — and diverse — political ideologies, then maybe its own intellectual signet is wishy-washy enough that it can be said to have no political message, or even implication, at all. The play has indeed been seen that way. Pre-1968 generations reveled in the euphoria of Wilhelm Tell as a Gesamtkunstwerk celebrating the triumph of Schiller’s concept of “aesthetic education”; as such, it was a timeless, universally human, pointedly unpolitical vision of the “whole man” cultivating his serene inner freedom and autonomy, complemented by the “aesthetic state” he is providentially fortunate to live in; Tell was beauty of existence beautifully presented, with ideological dynamite conspicuous by its absence (Martini). One particularly beautiful moment in this view is the sun rising, at the conclusion of the Rütli scene, as a harbinger of the realization of this aesthetic ideal. But every reasonably alert contemporary would have registered that the rising sun had been the ubiquitous symbol of the French Revolution (Borchmeyer 1982, 98; Fink, 71). Hadn’t Schiller himself, quite apart from his reference to Tell’s storm on the Bastille, remarked that at a time when Swiss political “freedom” seemed to have vanished he wanted to make “den Leuten den Kopf wieder warm” with his play (5:753)? “Wieder” — the American War of Independence was still a talking point for the author of Kabale und Liebe; the French Revolution, its turbulent aftermath extending well into the early 1800s, was never far from his thoughts, and the Helvetic Republic of 1798 collapsed while Schiller, suspected of subversive leftist propensities himself, was writing his play about the quasi-mythical Swiss freedom fighter. So how could this play not be a “Lehrstück über rechtes Verhalten unter bedrohlichen politischen Verhältnissen” (Koopmann 1988, 129), perhaps even one with an in tirannos motto? The political message or implication of Tell has been analyzed in depth and repeatedly, largely by competent students of intellectual history and political philosophy. Yet, oddly enough, not only has there been no agreement but the most sophisticated analyses have diagnosed a complicated, highly differentiated ideological stance of such sophistication in legal and constitutional thought that one wonders how “das ganze Publikum” for whom the “Volksstück” was intended could have been expected to follow the subtleties of such an argumentation. At issue,

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broadly speaking, is this: does the author, known to have opposed the French Revolution, come out on the side of the democratic-republican ideals, natural law, and the rights of man (all proclaimed in 1789), that is to say, on the side of a new social contract for “the moral-rational state of the future” (Martinson, 266; cf. Braemer, Thalheim, Kaiser, Hinderer, et al.)? Or does the play advocate a conservative revolution in the sense of restoring established rights, agreed upon in writing? In other words, does the play advocate the restoration of the ancien regime — which the proponents of liberté, égalité, fraternité overthrew in the name of unwritten natural rights? (This is the view of Benno von Wiese [765–67] and many others who, in effect, turn a deaf ear to Attinghausen’s “Das Alte stürzt, es ändert sich die Zeit, / Und neues Leben blüht aus den Ruinen” [ll. 2425–26]). The former view might recommend itself more easily if one keeps one’s eyes fixed on Tell, the latter if one listens to the Rütli conspirators. Can one blame critics for arguing “yes and no”? The most sensitive and knowledgeable among them see an uneasy yet subtle and sophisticated ensemble of an ideology bent on restoring ancient cantonal constitutional rights and a political vision indebted to the natural law that the French Revolution had recourse to (Borchmeyer 1982; Fink, Müller-Seidel, Knobloch). And don’t the Rütli conspirators speak with two voices themselves when, on the one hand, they insist they are non-subversive in their abidance by the emperor’s written guarantees of their liberty: “Wir stiften keinen neuen Bund, es ist / Ein uralt Bündnis nur von Väter Zeit, / Das wir erneuern!” (ll. 1155–57; cf. ll. 1215, 1326) — while, on the other hand, they appeal to the droits de l’homme in the state of nature; it is the same person, Stauffacher, who speaks for them: Nein, eine Grenze hat Tyrannenmacht, Wenn der Gedrückte nirgends Recht kann finden, Wenn unerträglich wird die Last — greift er Hinauf getrosten Mutes in den Himmel, Und holt herunter seine ewgen Rechte, Die droben hangen unveräußerlich Und unzerbrechlich wie die Sterne selbst — Der alte Urstand der Natur kehrt wieder, Wo Mensch dem Menschen gegenüber steht — Zum letzten Mittel, wenn kein andres mehr Verfangen will, ist ihm das Schwert gegeben — Der Güter höchstes dürfen wir verteid’gen Gegen Gewalt — Wir stehn vor unser Land, Wir stehn vor unsre Weiber, unsre Kinder! (ll. 1275–88) So the rebels stand for both: for the conservative restoration of positive law and the affirmation of the people’s and the individual’s sovereign natural

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right to institute a new social contract. This seems to be confusing indeed. To be sure, the uneasy ensemble of opposites in the Swiss political platform would not sanction terreur. Instead it would, in the felicitous formulation of a recent critic, amount to a paradigm of how the French Revolution “hätte ausfallen müssen, um ‘gut’ zu sein” (Borchmeyer 1983, 81). But then the question arises: is the French Revolution as presented by Schiller also “good” for the man who is celebrated in the grand finale as its exponent, namely Tell himself? Is it really correct to say that Wilhelm Tell is unique among Schiller’s plays in that it “das politische Ideal ungetrübt Wirklichkeit werden läßt”? (Borchmeyer 1982, 108; cf. 110–11). “Ungetrübt”? Here we are touching on the nerve of the drama: does Tell’s life, or his personality, remain unharmed after the two master shots, the one in Altdorf, aimed at the apple on his son’s head, and the one in Küssnacht, killing Gessler? Does Tell remain “unverstört in der Einheit seines Wesens,” in “Harmonie mit sich,” emotionally “unversehrt,” untouched by tragedy, beyond any conflict in himself, “jenseits des Konflikts”? (Martini 112, 117; v. Wiese, 770; Kaiser 1978, 215). Strangely, there is hardly a word about Tell himself, the “Stifter” of republican liberty (l. 3083), in the recent sophisticated treatises on the political philosophy of the play about the rebellion of the Swiss cantons — treatises that discern such a sophisticated blend of political philosophies in the patriotic program of the conspirators that they leave readers untrained in the nuances of political theory wondering. But then, the play itself is “keine staatsrechtliche Abhandlung über die Rechtmäßigkeit des Tyrannenmords” (Luserke, 823). Its very title features a heroic character. And doesn’t the drama repeatedly return from its focus on the ideological conspiracy (the Rütli plot for short, which leads to the storming of the Swiss Bastille) to the dramatis persona whose name is more intimately connected with this revolution than any other? It does, but significantly, there is little if any connection in terms of pragmatic dramatic action between the two. True, Tell, while refusing to join the Rütli group, does not expressly part company with them: “Bedürft’ ihr meiner zu bestimmter Tat, / Dann ruft den Tell, es soll an mir nicht fehlen” (ll. 444–45). But he remains solitary, and certainly a man without a political philosophy. When he kills Gessler, he does not act on behalf of the conspirators and their ideology, nor does he foresee political consequences — just as the apple shot had not been the signal for the storm on the feudal fortresses (Fink, 75; Sharpe, 295). So there is a certain incongruity in the Swiss “Volk” cheering Tell in the finale as the creator of their newly won freedom. Surely the point is not that Schiller wishes to demonstrate that the French Revolution, or any revolution, is “good” if the dirty work, the bloody deed, is, as luck would have it in the Swiss case, done not by the principals (who remain beyond suspicion of any morally questionable action) but by outsiders: by Tell and by Parricida, whose assassination of the emperor is, historically

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speaking, “the most important political fact” (McKay, 110). And yet the isolation of Tell from the Rütli conspirators did not just happen. It was Schiller’s own doing, in deliberate contradiction of his sources, Tschudi’s Chronicon Helveticum (1734) and Johannes von Müllers Der Geschichten schweizerischer Eydgenossenschaft erster und zweyter Theil (History of the Swiss Commonwealth, Parts One and Two, 1786) (Fink, 59–62, 74, 78). Indeed, even within the play this separation of Tell from the conspiracy is thematized, not only in Tell’s proverbial “Der Starke ist am mächtigsten allein” (l. 437) but more significantly in that Schiller is at great pains to point out that Tell, acting on his own in killing Gessler who forced him to risk shooting his child in the apple-shot scene, is in conflict with the stated aim of the insurgents: Denn Raub begeht am allgemeinen Gut, Wer selbst sich hilft in seiner eignen Sache. (ll. 1464–65) Moreover, by isolating Tell in this way, Schiller invited the interpretation that Tell, the killer (appropriating for his part the subversive “rights of man” and “law of nature”), would be suspected of Jacobinism, as indeed he was when Iffland voiced his concern in connection with the 1804 performance in Berlin (5:801). But would that not also make Tell a Jacobin troubled by his conscience? And is it really a Jacobin whom the patriotic Swiss cheer in the final scene? Would that not implicate the real conspirators as well? In the light of the abundant writing on Tell, it still remains unclear just what Schiller intended by isolating Tell from the conspirators and what the play gained from this decision. The various readings, taken together, unintentionally suggest more questions than answers: contractual rights of the medieval tradition or the natural justice and droits de l’homme of 1789, anti-Jacobinism (and anti-terreur) or Jacobinism, conservative revolution or progressive revolution? And replacing the either-or by both-and only muddies the waters of political philosophy and legal theory even more. But should that not be a hint that the play ought to be read not in terms of theories of state and society but in terms of Tell himself — so carefully removed from close contact with the revolutionary event based on political ideology? Schiller, the dramatist, shaper, and explorer of characters, is no doubt more interested in emphasizing the human dimension of the historical event, with its philosophical implications forming no more than its backdrop. Once one sees that not ideology but Tell is the crux, that is: once one focuses on the human rather than the political or philosophical dimension, the “Schauspiel” Wilhelm Tell ceases to be as exceptional in Schiller’s oeuvre as it has long seemed to be and still is to many readers. For the human dimension opens up that tragic perspective that is Schiller’s dramatic signet. This comes into view when one takes seriously the question

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posed earlier: does the revolution succeed, that is, is it “good,” also in the sense that it leaves Tell’s moral and psychic harmony intact, “ungetrübt,” “unverstört,” “unversehrt”? Only if one approaches the play with this question in mind — the question that would have exercised the dramatist renowned for his Menschengestaltung — can one ultimately understand why Tell is conceived to be a figure apart and, vice versa, how the drama as a structured whole gains its meaning only in relation to this figure and its inner conflicts. If, then, the old and perennially vexing question of the isolation of Tell from the revolution that bears his name is thought through again from this point of view, an interesting answer might emerge.

2. Schiller was aware that the isolation of the protagonist was at the core of the play as a whole and that its structure depended on it. While still working on the manuscript, he wrote to Iffland on December 5, 1803: “So [. . .] steht der Tell selbst ziemlich für sich in dem Stück, seine Sache ist eine Privatsache, und bleibt es, bis sie am Schluss mit der öffentlichen Sache zusammengreift” (5:755). This, then, is the heart of the matter: just how do the personal and public, the moral and the political, the events around Tell and the uprising against the Hapsburg governors in their feudal fortresses interact, not pragmatically, but intellectually and thematically? This question has been at issue for two centuries: champions of a “glückliche Symbiose” or unbroken fusion are confronted by those critics who see an unrelieved tension between the two or even a breaking apart amounting to a serious flaw (Koopmann 1988, 128 vs. Sharpe, 307–8 and Stahl 141–42, 145). In other words: does Tell’s deed become a “representative event” in the course of the action, giving meaning to the entire play, or doesn’t it? One thing is clear: the “public matter” would point in the general direction of an intellectually undemanding “Volksstück,” while the “personal matter” suggests an approach Schiller was intimately familiar with: thinking through a problem in the medium of character portrayal. Which of the two had more weight in Schiller’s deliberations with himself? He leaves no doubt about this in his remarks written in the margins of Iffland’s catalog of concerns on April 10, 1804. Here, he defends Tell’s soul-searching monologue in act 4, which Iffland had found to be inappropriately loquacious, Tell being a self-admitted man of action, not words; Schiller confides: he would not have written the play if it had not been for this particular scene (5:807). And, generalizing from that other soul-searching scene, the dialogue with Parricida in the final act, he goes on to say that the literary merit of the play (“das poetisch große”) was to be found “in dem Gehalt der Situationen und in der tragischen Dignität der Charactere.

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Wenn Tell und seine Familie nicht der intereßanteste Gegenstand im Stücke sind und bleiben, wenn man auf etwas anderes begieriger seyn könnte, als auf ihn, so wäre die Absicht des Werks sehr verfehlt worden” (5:808–9). Yet how does Tell come to be the most interesting component of the play? This question equally addresses the drama as a whole, for if the overall intention cannot be realized without a proper grasp of the most fascinating character, then Schiller is saying the Tell plot and the revolution plot together make up the distinctive essence of the play; they must therefore be linked, related to each other. Now the link that Schiller has in mind cannot be a pragmatic one of dramatic plot construction, for that sort of connection he deliberately avoided, contradicting the historical sources he used. The link must therefore be an intellectual or thematic connection that relates the Selbsthelfer and the storm on the Uri Bastille. And those critics who, unlike others, do not deny that such a connection exists, easily find this link in the operatic finale, in the people’s celebration of their Helvetic freedom and of Tell as its “Stifter” (creator). But is Tell now truly integrated into the community? Can the supra-tragic harmony of the jubilant tableau concluding the play, which at this point does seem to become a Festspiel of the purest water, really be taken at face value, as it has been from early on through the 1959 Schiller jubilee to the late 1990s?2 If one sees a more or less uncomplicated harmony at the end, one prejudges the nature of what is brought into harmony in the final scene: the revolutionary action of the Eidgenossen on the one hand and Tell’s “soul,” on the other. Both are worth examination. The revolutionary action is beautifully simple. It moves ahead, driven by its own dynamics, gaining momentum from each new atrocity committed by the Hapsburg governors and the reactions it provokes. Wolfenschiessen attempts to rape Baumgarten’s wife; Baumgarten thereupon slays him with the proverbial “ax in the house.” Landenberg gouges old Melchthal’s eyes out in retribution for no misdeed of his, which drives his son into the arms of the dissidents. Incidents such as these lead to the Rütli conspiracy, which then brings about the destruction of the feudal strongholds (though sooner than originally planned because Rudenz urges them on for reasons of his own). As this sketch of causes and effects may suggest, Schiller is careful not to problematize the revolutionary action. The ideological niceties mentioned earlier — restitution of agreed-upon rights or institution of a radically new social contract or various amalgamations of the two — are submerged in the tumult of events and the noisy celebration of victory. The action around Tell, which does not get underway until almost mid-play (significantly, after the Rütlischwur), is largely self-contained, and its plot is simple. It moves “naturally” from the apple-shot episode to the shot in the “hohle Gasse” and on to the grand finale that brings the two

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strands of the action together as it celebrates the revolution and Tell, that is to say, both the political and the personal “Sache.” The rub is in the “and.” There would be a good fit if Tell could be included in the general jubilation in the manner of a suitable rather than a jarring prop, in other words, if Tell were of a piece with the rest of the patriotic Swiss that crowd the stage. This, however, would imply that Schiller would have abdicated as the shaper and portraitist of complex, “difficult” human beings that he normally is — as the shrewd and subtle Menschenkenner that Max Kommerell had in mind as long ago as the 1930s when he wrote: “Keine Tat verwirklicht die Idee, ohne sie zugleich zu verleugnen. Mensch sein is nicht nur Handelnkönnen, sondern Handelnmüssen, Handelnmüssen im Stoff der Welt mit sinnlichen Mitteln, und also handelnde Untreue an der Idee. Menschsein ist die Tragödie der Mittel.” He wrote this in an essay titled “Schiller als Psychologe.”3 If one reads Tell as a triumphant exposition of harmony beyond tragedy, as has usually been the case, certainly in German-speaking countries, Schiller, the doctor of medicine of a period when psychology was not a discipline distinct from “surgery,” as his dissertation amply demonstrates, would have failed to practice his psychological skill in creating the protagonist of the play. And sure enough, we are told that Tell cannot be “grasped” psychologically, as he is a “Heiliger der Natur” — as though that were a household term, like terrorist or resistance fighter (Kaiser 1978, 201; Martini, 109; Ueding, 395). In this view, Tell is a saint, or a mythical dragon-slayer, or a political messiah without moral scruples, in a word, a “fairy-tale figure” of superhuman dimensions fitted into a work that fuses “idealistisches Geschichtsdrama und Kultgesang auf die alten Heroen” into one play (Ueding, 394, 404). Such a Tell fits neatly, without jarring, into a Festspiel of political liberation. “Grasping” Tell this way surely preempts the need to consider what Schiller might have meant when he said in a March 3, 1804 letter to Karl August Böttiger that Wilhelm Tell was about “psychologische Motivierung” (5:797–98). If one ignores such a hint from the acknowledged master psychologist, one easily jumps to an idealization or canonization or blanket justification that transforms the assassin of Gessler into an ideal personified: Tell becomes an apostle or a saint or indeed a “savior,” a “säkularisierte Heilandsfigur,” a “Messiah” who performs “ein Wunder Gottes” (Karthaus, 233–39) — or even a paradigm of Schiller’s critique of Kant’s indictment of “Tyrannenmord” (Thalheim, 234). What all such interpretations miss is the human dimension of Wilhelm Tell, chamois hunter, husband, father, and neighbor. This is all the more surprising as Schiller goes out of his way, to the point of dramatic implausibility, to demonstrate that Tell’s drama is first and foremost an inner one, a drama of moral soul-searching. Why else the anguished monologue above the “hohle Gasse” and the somewhat contrived dialogue with Parricida attempting self-justification? Wasn’t taciturnity one of the

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defining characteristics of Tell, the man of action? No critic ignores these two purple passages, but all too many conclude that they embroider an open and shut case: “Der Zuschauer soll überzeugt werden, daß Tell einen gerechten Mord begeht [oder beging]” (Koopmann 1988, 134).4 And yet, Tell himself is deeply disturbed by his deed — the deed planned and the deed carried out. What troubles him is murder — the word “Mord” is repeated with conspicuous frequency — which does not make Tell the unproblematic hero required by the harmonizing readings of Tell. The fact that in his moral deliberations with himself Tell invokes the authority of an avenging god (l. 2596) surely does not validate his decision to take retribution in his own hands as has been argued by Vander Meulen; it certainly does not whitewash him any more than the faint echoes in his Küssnacht monologue of idealistic notions of what is good and just. If one argues along such lines, one ignores the manifest psychological focus of the dramatist who leaves Tell no less troubled for all that, but that is what continental critics normally do. However, things are different in countries where to this day the educated classes grow up with Shakespeare, who gives the benefit of his psychological acumen and sophistication, last not least, to his murderers. From early on Schiller was dubbed the Shakespeare of the Germans. This association may account for the fact that Anglo-Saxon interpretations of the protagonist of Wilhelm Tell, unlike continental ones, tend to see in him not the saint or the symbol of freedom or the hero of Swiss myth, one and all beyond reproach and indeed beyond scrutiny, but “a real human being” that allows and in fact requires a psychological approach (Lamport, 862). Character analysis as practiced in such English-language studies is, however, only the first of two steps to be taken. The other one is to inquire how a psychologically complex and interesting Tell contributes to the functioning of the play in its entirety and thus to its overall structure. For if Tell should turn out to be a fascinatingly problematized protagonist, rather than a monolithic saint or hero, then Wilhelm Tell as a whole cannot seriously be read as an idealistic Festspiel of freedom, political or otherwise.

3. The key passages that psychological attention must focus on are those that Schiller considered the intellectual core of the play: the monologue in Küssnacht at the scene of the murder and the justificatory dialogue with Parricida. It is in them that the inner drama expresses itself above all. The monologue, as Schiller said in responding to Iffland’s concerns about its possible political subversiveness, is “das beste im ganzen Stück”: Tell’s “Empfindungszustand” constitutes the emotional appeal of the play, and that was, to repeat, what persuaded Schiller to write Tell in the first

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place (5:807). In the same response, this time addressing Tell’s exchange with Parricida, he wrote the statement, already quoted, about Tell being the “interessanteste Gegenstand im Stück” and crucial to the “Absicht des Werks.” The two key passages are again coupled in Schiller’s letter to Iffland of April 14, 1804: “Auch Goethe ist mit mir überzeugt, daß ohne jenen Monolog und ohne die persönliche Erscheinung des Parricida der Tell sich gar nicht hätte denken lassen” (5:770). “Der Tell” — the play would be unthinkable without these two decisive scenes, and its protagonist as well. How then does Tell reveal his inner drama in these two key passages? The meditative prelude to the assassination of Gessler first: Mach deine Rechnung mit dem Himmel Vogt, Fort mußt du, deine Uhr ist abgelaufen. Ich lebte still und harmlos — Das Geschoß War auf des Waldes Tiere nur gerichtet, Meine Gedanken waren rein von Mord — Du hast aus meinem Frieden mich heraus Geschreckt, in gährend Drachengift hast du Die Milch der frommen Denkart mir verwandelt, Zum Ungeheuren hast du mich gewöhnt — Wer sich des Kindes Haupt zum Ziele setzte, Der kann auch treffen in das Herz des Feinds. Die armen Kindlein, die unschuldigen, Das treue Weib muß ich vor deiner Wut Beschützen, Landvogt — Da, als ich den Bogenstrang Anzog — als mir die Hand erzitterte — Als du mit grausam teufelischer Lust Mich zwangst, aufs Haupt des Kindes anzulegen — Als ich ohnmächtig flehend rang vor dir, Damals gelobt’ ich mir in meinem Innern Mit furchtbarm Eidschwur, den nur Gott gehört, Daß meines nächsten Schusses erstes Ziel Dein Herz sein sollte — Was ich mir gelobt In jenes Augenblickes Höllenqualen, Ist eine heilge Schuld, ich will sie zahlen. Du bist mein Herr und meines Kaisers Vogt, Doch nicht der Kaiser hätte sich erlaubt Was du — Er sandte dich in diese Lande, Um Recht zu sprechen — strenges, denn er zürnet — Doch nicht um mit der mörderischen Lust Dich jedes Greuels straflos zu erfrechen, Es lebt ein Gott zu strafen und zu rächen. (ll. 2566–96)

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Sie alle ziehen ihres Weges fort An ihr Geschäft — und Meines ist der Mord! setzt sich Sonst wenn der Vater auszog, liebe Kinder, Da war ein Freuen, wenn er wieder kam, Denn niemals kehrt’ er heim, er bracht’ euch etwas, Wars eine schöne Alpenblume, wars Ein seltner Vogel oder Ammonshorn, Wie es der Wandrer findet auf den Bergen — Jetzt geht er einem andern Waidwerk nach, Am wilden Weg sitzt er mit Mordgedanken, Des Feindes Leben ists, worauf er lauert. — Und doch an euch nur denkt er, lieben Kinder, Auch jetzt — Euch zu verteidgen, eure holde Unschuld Zu schützen vor der Rache des Tyrannen Will er zum Morde jetzt den Bogen spannen! (ll. 2620–2634) Hier gilt es einen köstlicheren Preis, Das Herz des Todfeinds, der mich will verderben. (ll. 2642–43) Es kann der Frömmste nicht im Frieden bleiben, Wenn es dem bösen Nachbar nicht gefällt. (ll. 2682–83) Not surprisingly — or should we by now say, surprisingly? — audiences more attuned to idealization than to awareness of problematical accents in Schiller’s character portrayal have loyally accepted this selfjustification without suspecting the latent guilt feelings of qui s’excuse.5 But doesn’t the situation present Tell, on the face of it, as a murderer, a murderer who ambushes his victim at that? “Mord” is what disturbs Tell. Does the purpose, be it a personal, moral, or political one, sanctify the means? Perhaps taking his cue from a commoner on the Rütli (“Schrecklich immer, / Auch in gerechter Sache ist Gewalt” ll. 1320–21), W. G. Moore, who was the first to have an eye for the problematic nature of this scene, noted: “Idealism prompts him to action which is incompatible with an idealistic view of things” (287). That would certainly be an issue familiar to Schiller. Karl Moor was in a comparable predicament, as were Verrina, Posa, and Joan of Arc: the idealists with blood on their hands who become painfully aware that in real life, where “eng im Raume stoßen sich die Sachen,” good intentions and evil means grate on each other. A conflict bearing the seeds of tragedy, certainly; but is it realized in the text of the play? Only if the Menschenkenner turned dramatist would give us to understand that Tell, who otherwise calls himself a man of action rather than thought (“wär ich besonnen, hieß ich nicht der Tell,” l. 1872), has an awareness of his own unresolved moral and intellectual dilemma — indeed

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a “tragic self-awareness,” as has been said, without offering textual documentation (McKay, 112). On the other hand, recent readings persist in maintaining equally airily that “no moral scruple” is evident in the monologue above the “hohle Gasse”: having accepted his role as the “messiah” of the country in the apple-shot scene, Tell merely reconfirms this mission before he actually carries it out (Ueding, 404, 405, 407, 414). What does the text itself reveal? Does Tell feel guilty? At first glance, the passage at issue is a speech of self-justification and self-exoneration. If one reads it with the specialized knowledge of the forensic trial lawyer, one recognizes here as well as in the Parricida scene a formal schema of legalistic argumentation with all the usual professional ruses, feints, or subterfuges. This would then prompt the conclusion that the speaker knows that he is guilty — and in effect confesses his guilt. And the reason why this “self-convicted murderer” gives himself up only to the justice of his own conscience, rather than that of a court of law, as Karl Moor did, seems equally clear from such a legalistic point of view: the patriotic figurehead cannot let the commonwealth down (Richards; see also Ryder). In this interpretation, the text is certainly read closely (which is not always the case), but it is read with the eyes of a juridical specialist — whom Schiller, who wrote Tell “für das ganze Publikum,” could not have had in mind. The legal layman will hardly be convinced that this is the proper way of convicting the defendant of guilt-feelings and consequently of guilt; he will not be familiar with and will not discern in Tell’s own words an alleged procedurally correct duel of the prosecution and the defense taking the form of Tell’s conflicted lawyerly strategy of repeated self-incrimination followed by self-defense (for instance: “Tell then applies the rule of utra lex potentior” [Richards, 482]). Taken on its own “human” terms, without recourse to such legalistic maneuvering, the Küssnacht monologue, through its repeated insistence on the word Mord, reveals all the more persuasively Tell’s latent but nonetheless real feelings of guilt, his pangs of conscience, his self-doubt, and even his despair, indeed his disbelief in his own defense (Best, 303; Mainland 1968, lviii). This view gains even more plausibility if one sees the monologue from the perspective of the Rütli scene and the Parricida scene. For in the Rütli scene the very idea of murdering Gessler was painstakingly avoided: “Die Zeit bringt Rat. Erwartets in Geduld” (l. 1437); and in the later scene Tell draws the line between himself and the regicide motivated by personal ambition and revenge with the lines: “Gemordet / Hast du, ich hab mein teuerstes verteidigt” (ll. 3183–84) — which amounts to a self-acquittal from what so deeply troubles his conscience in the Küssnacht monologue: “Mord.” Whether we are willing to take the self-acquittal in the Parricida scene at face value and therefore as a given of the play or not, the Küssnacht monologue points to Tell’s awareness of guilt (Best, 297; Mainland 1968,

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lxvii). Even that may still be too legalistic a term. What is undeniable, however (as Mainland in particular has insisted, though he does speak of Tell’s consciousness of guilt), is the troubled and painful state of mind of this perfectly ordinary member of the community as he is suddenly faced with abandoning his principles — as murder becomes inevitable.6 The milk of human kindness has turned into “Drachengift” (ll. 2572–73). Tell is terrified by himself, by what he is about to do, and in retrospect also by what he did in Altdorf — a deed that now inexorably demands that he follow through: “Wer sich des Kindes Haupt zum Ziele setzte, / Der kann auch treffen in das Herz des Feinds” (ll. 2575–76). Tell now suffers the same “Höllenqualen” he experienced when he was about to shoot the apple off his son’s head (l. 2588), but not just because he remembers that moment and now relives it. For the present predicament carries its own moral anguish: to protect his children from similar atrocities that he can firmly count on in the future (ll. 2631–34) Tell now believes that he has to commit a deed that is contrary to his nature and to all he considers human. He does, to be sure, see himself as the executor of God’s will, of God’s revenge even (l. 2596), but his anguish is no less “terrible” for that (l. 2604). We may remember the line spoken on the Rütli: “schrecklich immer / Auch in gerechter Sache ist Gewalt” (ll. 1320–21). All the more surprising is the conventional view that Tell’s monologue amounts to a manifest justification of his personal deed and of the political cause at the same time. For though speaking as the defender of the family, as a father and a husband in this monologue, it is commonly argued that Tell also realizes the political implications of his personal cause: in protecting the family, he is protecting the natural and original cell of all social life and thereby the order of the political community. This is, of course, how Tell professes to see it after the fact: “Diese Hand / [. . .] / Hat euch verteidigt und das Land” (l. 3143); and it fits well with the ethos of the Rütli conspirators.7 But Tell is not one of them! Shouldn’t that give us pause? It is hard to see that Tell is convinced of the impeccable dignity of what he is about to do and that he emerges from his emotional ordeal as a hero: “Tells Selbstverständnis in diesem höchsten Augenblick der Entscheidung konvergiert endgültig mit dem Bild, das sich die anderen schon längst von ihm gemacht haben,” namely the image of the just (Ueding, 404–5, 414). What transpires in the monologue — “the best part of the entire play,” we recall — is not so much exoneration (which comes into play only on the surface and which Schiller did not identify as the function of the monologue) as the agony: the irresolvable emotional dilemma that offers no clear-cut moral justification to Tell and yet carries the moral demand of action. The theme of his speech is the curse of the good deed. To do it, Tell at last takes up his crossbow “zum Morde jetzt” (l. 2634) — in this decisive moment he pronounces the word that has been troubling him so unrelentingly, and still is. Why else, after the monologue

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but before the release of the arrow, Tell’s words in response to the news of a landslide in the canton of Glarus: “Wanken auch / Die Berge selbst? Es steht nichts fest auf Erden” (ll. 2666–67). Tell’s resolution to kill Gessler is unshaken from the beginning of the monologue. What is shaken is his peace of mind, and it remains so until the end of the play. Nonetheless, in the Parricida scene, Tell does come close to selfjustification. He claims “reine Hände” (l. 3180) and the “gerechte Notwehr eines Vaters”: “Hast du der Kinder liebes Haupt verteidigt?” (ll. 3176–77), he scolds Parricida. A “guter Mensch” himself, he curses the murderer (ll. 3171, 3181–84). But does this amount to a demonstration of “das Nothwendige und Rechtliche der Selbsthilfe in einem streng bestimmten Fall” (5:808) as Schiller put it himself? This interpretation is common to this day. It may convince Parricida, but does it convince the spectator — the spectator who is not in the mood for celebratory performance of patriotic virtue or the spectator who remembers that Schiller wrote the just-quoted words in an effort to appease Iffland’s concern about what might be taken as carte blanche for political assassination? And what about the word that Schiller, the superb craftsman, now has Tell throw at Parricida, the word that had disturbed Tell so much in the monologue: “Mörder?” Karl Moor, who is in many ways comparable, in his ultimate confrontation with himself put his rhetoric in the service of self-accusation. Tell puts his in the service of self-defense — and doesn’t he “protest too much,” thereby confirming, according to the psychological rule of thumb, what he denies, namely that his deed is at all comparable with Parricida’s. As early as 1949 Ludwig Kahn argued against the consensus: In fact, once we risk reading a meaning into Schiller that he certainly would have repudiated (had he been conscious of it), we may attribute to him a semiconscious apprehension as to the moral rectitude of his hero. Why else the fifth act with the scene of Tell’s self-justification? And does not Tell protest a little too much in this scene? Does not the very protestation betray the anxiety of the man who terribly much wants to be (but is not quite) sure that his hands are unsullied? Just before Tell had sent off the arrow that killed Gessler, he himself had spoken of his deed as murder. And if, as we said above, the task to which Tell is called is distasteful and repulsive to him, it is so in no small degree because of its moral opprobrium.8

This reading is not documented by textual references, and Kahn undermines his argument by suggesting that Schiller would have rejected it himself. Also, no dramatis persona in the play sees it that way, thus giving us a hint (in contrast to Schiller’s frequent practice). But are there no hints in Tell’s own words to Parricida that might suggest Tell’s latent awareness of guilt, just as was the case in the earlier monologue? In other words, is the point of this scene really the exoneration and justification of Tell, or is his

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attempted self-justification designed to direct the spectator’s attention elsewhere? In the face of Tell’s harsh rejection of the regicide and parricide from the position of his own “Unschuld” (l. 3188), one hesitates to mobilize the truism that one condemns a perceived fault in others all the more vehemently as one knows it to be one’s own. And yet how else to explain the sudden change in Tell’s tune when Parricida responds to this rejection with the words: “So kann ich, and so will ich nicht mehr leben!” (l. 3189)? Doesn’t this touch a sympathetic chord in Tell himself? For Tell’s immediate reaction is: Und doch erbarmt mich deiner — Gott des Himmels! So jung, von solchem adelichen Stamm, Der Enkel Rudolphs, meines Herrn und Kaisers, Als Mörder flüchtig, hier an meiner Schwelle, Des armen Mannes, flehend und verzweifelnd — verhüllt sich das Gesicht (l. 3190–94) Is this pity for the “murderer” — the murderer whom Tell had seen in himself in the monologue preceding the assassination of Gessler, not once but repeatedly? Of course it is, but does Tell not also perceive himself in Parricida, the fugitive murderer, despite the difference in motivation that he belabors?9 More concretely, why does he cover his face as he speaks these words? Schiller grew up in the tradition of European opera; its repertoire of gestures was familiar to him since Die Räuber at the latest.10 Covering the face does not signal pity, forgiveness, or innocence; a dramatis persona exhibiting those qualities may show his face; there is no shame in practicing the Christian virtues par excellence. It is the person aware of his guilt or shortcoming that covers his face, depriving it of the light of day and the glances of others that would reveal his guilt: not wanting to see is the psychological metaphor of not wanting to be seen. Schiller often uses this particular gesture,11 and in Tell he uses it again a little later to accompany words spoken by Parricida, making us wonder whether Parricida is so different from Tell after all: PARRICIDA verhüllt sich: Wehe mir! Ich darf nicht weilen bei den Glücklichen. (l. 3273–74) A further detail is equally telling. When Parricida asks Tell to help him escape, one might expect that Tell, who is normally so “unbesonnen” in the hour of need, would spontaneously offer a helping hand. But he does not: Kann ich euch helfen? Kanns ein Mensch der Sünde? Doch stehet auf — Was ihr auch gräßliches

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Verübt — Ihr seid ein Mensch — Ich bin es auch — Vom Tell soll keiner ungetröstet scheiden — Was ich vermag, das will ich tun. (ll. 3222–26) Why “Mensch der Sünde”? It is unlikely that this is merely a reference to the sinfulness that is the lot of Christendom; Tell is no preacher. Instead, does it dawn on him that his own deed, while surely done with different, indeed with the best of motivations, is at bottom a transgression of God’s command? Remember how only shortly before, his wife Hedwig had received her husband returning in a flush of triumph from the “hohle Gasse”: HEDWIG TELL HEDWIG

O Tell! Tell! tritt zurück, läßt seine Hand los. Was erschreckt dich, liebes Weib? Wie — wie kommst du mir wieder? — Diese Hand — Darf ich sie fassen? — Diese Hand — O Gott! (ll. 3140–42)

There is no textual evidence for the recent singular view that Hedwig’s revulsion refers to the hand that “shot at” their son (Schweitzer, 257). Tell’s hand at this moment is the hand of a murderer, even if his victim was Gessler. Calling himself a “man of sin,” he expresses his solidarity with Parricida, his shared humanity: “Ihr seid ein Mensch — Ich bin es auch” (l. 3224). Unless we want to take this as a Christian banality, for which there is no reason in a play devoid of specific Christian ethos, we should hear “homo sum” and its corollary: “Nil humanum a me alienum puto,” with humanum unmistakably meaning human weakness, the lack of moral perfection in non-religious terms. This, then, is what is hinted at by Tell’s astonishing identification with Parricida, the murderer.12 Hence Tell’s humility in the final moments of this scene. Keeping in mind these observations on the language of gesture and of allusion, the spectator will also find it plausible that in showing Parricida the way to Rome (and repentance), Tell also has in mind his own way from guilt or sin to forgiveness.13 Speaking to Parricida of his hoped-for “Ruh,” of his “Reuetränen,” and his “Schuld” (ll. 3231, 3251), Tell gives voice to his own troubled conscience. Symbolic language reinforces this point. Up to now, Tell has never been seen without his crossbow, but now we hear that he has placed the instrument of murder in a “heilge Stätte”; it will never be seen again (ll. 3137–38). It is hard to see how this is to be a hint that Tell is able from now on “Schuld in Unschuld zu erleben” (Koopmann 1988, 137) or that he has regained his peace of mind (Schweitzer, 262) or that the solitary hunter has become fully integrated into society (Kaufmann, 143; Ockenden, 41). One recent critic has even surmised that

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Tell, far from giving up his pre-civilized existence symbolized by the crossbow, will “return to his former life as a hunter,” since a self-respecting hunter “would own several cross-bows” (Schweitzer, 259, 262). On the contrary, as Tell deprives himself of the tool of his “Mordtat,” he also deprives himself of the innocence whose tool the crossbow had been before the deed. This symbolic detail, invented by Schiller without any prompting by his sources, points to what has been hinted at by the other dramatic devices mentioned earlier: Tell’s unresolved moral dilemma, the unrelieved agony of his conscience.

4. Tell’s dialogue with Parricida, which lifts his suppressed unease about his own similar yet different deed into the twilight of his consciousness, is interrupted by the arrival of the representatives of the cantons eager to honor and glorify Tell as the “savior” of their country and their freedom. Tell reacts with silence to their jubilant ovations. Could this possibly be read as Schiller allowing his hero to savor “his triumph” (Lamport, 868), to “enjoy his victory” (Ueding, 395)? Or doesn’t Tell’s silence rather point to the fact that he is still suffering those pangs of his conscience, however dull and inarticulate, which suggested themselves only minutes earlier? Doesn’t the jubilation (“Lautes Frohlocken”) rather confirm his newfound doubt about his really being “ein guter Mensch” (l. 3171)?14 This would of course imply that Schiller was not merely writing a popular Festspiel, a celebratory “Volksstück,” but was also continuing to explore the vein of tragic character portrayal that he had been pursuing throughout his career as a dramatist. But, to return to our earlier question, why juxtapose the Tell plot and the uprising of the people? Why keep the protagonist so deliberately solitary, isolated from his compatriots, contrary to what Schiller had found in his historical sources? The significance of the juxtaposition would be not so much a political one (the political agent and the political will of the people in ideal harmony) as a dramaturgical one: one that suits Schiller’s inclination to portray a problematic character and also brings into full view the Sinnstruktur of the entire play as a work of art and of thought. The subtitle of Tell notwithstanding, this Sinnstruktur would not be that of a “Schauspiel” culminating in festive exuberance. Instead, it suggests that the people’s revolution is just and worth celebrating — but that it succeeds only at a price. The price is paid by Tell. The happiness or redemption of the people — who may not deserve it any more than the rabble in Fiesko since none of them stood by Tell in the hour of need in Altdorf, as Hedwig notes bitterly (ll. 2369–70) — is achieved, and could only be achieved, through the undiminished anguish of the bringer of redemption, through his personal

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tragedy (Guthke, 304; Luserke, 819, 823). Tell suffers in silence; patriotic rejoicing drowns out the torments of his conscience, which is all the more troubled as he has no one with whom to share his anguish. Apart and lonely, he is a broken man. “It must needs be that [salvation, rather than the biblical “offences”] come; but woe to that man by whom [it] cometh” (Matthew 18:7). Realizing this, we look back in wonderment to readings common in simpler and easier times. Here is Ludwig Bellermann in 1905 (the year of a Schiller jubilee): “So tiefe Blicke ins innerste Geheimnis der Menschennatur, wie fast all übrigen Stücke Schillers, läßt [Wilhelm Tell] uns nicht tun.”15 On the contrary, while heartily joining in the celebration of the good deed, Schiller was also acutely aware that there is one who has to bear its curse. It is this awareness that allowed him to succeed in creating the “große Tragödie” that he had hoped to write (5:752).

Notes 1

References in this essay to Schiller’s works are to the Frankfurter Ausgabe, Werke und Briefe (Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1988–), volume 5. Here: 5:750, 751, 754. Subsequent references are in parentheses in the text by volume and page number. References following quotations or paraphrases from Tell are to line numbers.

2 Ockenden, 41; Schweitzer, 261–62, among many others. This view is modified somewhat by Herbst, 440–41. For a critical discussion of this reading, see Guthke, 291 n. 25. 3

Max Kommerell, Geist und Buchstabe der Dichtung, 3rd ed. (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1944), 187.

4

Cf. Stahl, 144; Lamport, 866; Luserke, 823; Schweitzer, 261–62.

5

Moore, 280, 283: “Is there in great drama another instance of a man so idealized, so brave, laconic, faithful, honourable, as the hero of this play?” “So thoroughly has the author justified him that the morality of his deed has been hardly discussed.” Moore himself sees the personal tragedy of the situation, but the links of his analysis with the text are too tenuous to carry conviction. 6

I see little point in the observation that Tell, as a hunter, is a member of a wild, primitive, pre-civilized world who after the deed, when he relinquishes his crossbow rises to the level of civilized society (Ockenden, 40–41).

7 ll. 2682–83; 2793–94; 1287–88; cf. 3181–84; for the interpretation described here, see Lamport, 865; Koopmann, 1977, vol. 1, 86; v. Wiese, 772–75: Tell the “Gerechte.” Others, of course, prefer to see an act of personal revenge in Tell’s slaying of Gessler (e.g., Ryder). 8

Ludwig W. Kahn, “Freedom — An Existentialist and an Idealist View,” PMLA 64 (1949): 13.

9 “It is unreasonable to suppose that at this stage in his dramatic career Schiller would invent the long tirades of the scene merely so that the audience might be

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shown the difference between Tell’s deed and Parricida’s. Yet this seems to be all that countless audiences have been advised to look for. It is odd that so many commentators have overlooked the connection between protestations which even they regard as excessive in the Parricida scene and the prominence of the word ‘Mord’ in the monologue. Just as the humiliation of Tell and that of Gessler are causally related, so there is here a linking of Tell’s deed with that of Johannes, which is dramatically and humanly far more impressive than any pointing of a moral or any demonstration of a political principle” (Mainland, 1968, lxiii). 10

Peter Michelsen, Der Bruch mit der Vater-Welt: Studien zu Schillers “Räubern” (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1979), 9–63. See also FA 8:173–74.

11

Fiesko, V, 14; Don Carlos, following ll. 4713, 4812, 4903, 5195, 5670, 5689; Wallensteins Tod, following ll. 1660; Die Braut von Messina, following ll. 2430. See also Gerhard Kluge, “Über die Notwendigkeit der Kommentierung kleinerer Regie- und Spielanwesungen in Schillers frühen Dramen,” editio 3 (1989), 90–97.

12

Cf. Mainland, 1968, lxv: “same guilt.”

13

Richards, 484: Tell “has confessed to equal guilt”; Mainland, 1968, lxv–lxvi; Ryder, 501. Ueding, 415, reads the directions to Parricida as implying that Tell’s path is a different one. For a rejection of the view that Tell is guilty and implicitly confesses his guilt, see also Herbst, 437, and Schweitzer, 261–62.

14

Best, 305; McKay, 112; Mainland, lxix; Richards, 484.

15

Ludwig Bellermann, Schillers Dramen, vol. 3, 3rd ed. (Berlin: Weidmann, 1905), 133. For a similar view, expressed in 1999, see Schweitzer, 262: Tell is not a tragic figure, does not lose his “peace of mind,” makes no “sacrifice,” there is no “Fluch der guten Tat.”

Works Cited Bellermann, Ludwig. Schillers Dramen. Vol. 3. 3rd ed. Berlin: Weidmann, 1905. Best, Alan. “Alpine Ambivalence in Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell.” German Life and Letters, n.s. 37 (1984): 297–306. Borchmeyer, Dieter. “ ‘Altes Recht’ und Revolution: Schillers Wilhelm Tell.” In Friedrich Schiller: Kunst, Humanität und Politik in der späten Aufklärung, ed. Wolfgang Wittkowski, 69–111. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1982. ———. “Um einen anderen Wilhelm Tell für die Schule bittend.” Der Deutschunterricht 35 (1983): 78–90. Braemer, Edith. “Wilhelm Tell.” In Braemer and Ursula Wertheim, Studien zur deutschen Klassik, 297–330. Berlin: Rütten and Loening, 1960. Fetscher, Iring. “Philister, Terrorist oder Reaktionär? Schillers Tell und seine linken Kritiker.” In Fetscher, Die Wirksamkeit der Träume, 141–63. Frankfurt: Athenäum, 1987. Fink, Gonthier-Louis. “Schillers Wilhelm Tell, ein antijakobinisches republikanisches Schauspiel.” Aufklärung 1:2 (1986): 57–82.

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Frisch, Max. Wilhelm Tell für die Schule. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971. Frye, Lawrence O. “Juggler of Freedoms in Wilhelm Tell.” Monatshefte 76 (1984): 73–88. Guthke, Karl S. “Wilhelm Tell: Der Fluch der guten Tat.” In Guthke, Schillers Dramen: Idealismus und Skepsis, 279–304. Tübingen: Francke, 1994. Herbst, Hildburg. “Recht auf Widerstand — Pflicht zum Widerstand: Der Fall Wilhelm Tell.” German Studies Review 21 (1998): 429–45. Hinderer, Walter. “Jenseits von Eden: Zu Schillers Wilhelm Tell.” In Geschichte als Schauspiel, ed. Walter Hinck, 133–46. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981. Kahn, Ludwig W. “Freedom — An Existentialist and an Idealist View.” PMLA 64 (1949): 5–14. Kaiser, Gerhard. “Idylle und Revolution: Schillers Wilhelm Tell.” In Kaiser, Deutsche Literatur und Französische Revolution, 87–128. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck u. Ruprecht, 1974. Also in Kaiser, Von Arkadien nach Elysium, 167–205. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck u. Ruprecht, 1978. Karthaus, Ulrich. “Schiller und die Französische Revolution.” Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft 43 (1989): 233–39. Kaufmann, Hans A. Nation und Nationalismus in Schillers Entwurf “Deutsche Größe” und im Schauspiel “Wilhelm Tell”: Zu ihrer kulturpolitischen Funktionalisierung im frühen 20. Jahrhundert. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1993. Kluge, Gerhard. “Über die Notwendigkeit der Kommentierung kleinerer Regie- und Spielanweisungen in Schillers frühen Dramen.” editio 3 (1989): 90–97. Knobloch, Hans-Jörg. “Wilhelm Tell: Historisches Festspiel oder politisches Zeitstück?” In Schiller heute, ed. Hans-Jörg Knobloch and Helmut Koopmann, 151–65. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1996. Also in Schiller-Handbuch, ed. Helmut Koopmann, 486–512. Stuttgart: Kröner, 1998. Kommerell, Max. Geist und Buchstabe der Dichtung. 3rd ed. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1944. Koopmann, Helmut. Friedrich Schiller. 2nd ed. Vol 2. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1977. ———. Friedrich Schiller: Eine Einführung. Munich and Zurich: Artemis, 1988. Lamport, F. J. “The Silence of Wilhelm Tell.” Modern Language Review 76 (1981): 857–68. Luserke, Matthias. “Deutungsaspekte.” In Schiller: Werke und Briefe. Vol. 5, 819–26. Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1996. Mainland, William F., ed. Schiller: Wilhelm Tell. London: Macmillan, 1968. Martini, Fritz. “Wilhelm Tell, der ästhetische Staat und der ästhetische Mensch.” Der Deutschunterricht 12:2 (1960): 90–118. Martinson, Steven D. “William Tell, or Natural Justice.” In Martinson, Harmonious Tensions: The Writings of Friedrich Schiller, 254–67, 377–83. Newark: U of Delaware P; London: Associated UP, 1996.

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McKay, G. W. “Three Scenes from Wilhelm Tell.” In The Discontinuous Tradition: Studies in German Literature in Honour of Ernest Ludwig Stahl, ed. P. F. Ganz, 99–112. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1971. Michelsen, Peter. Der Bruch mit der Vater-Welt: Studien zu Schillers “Räubern.” Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1979. Moore, W. G. “A New Reading of Wilhelm Tell.” In German Studies Presented to Professor H. G. Fiedler, 278–92. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1938. Müller-Seidel, Walter. “Verschwörungen und Rebellionen in Schillers Dramen.” In La Revolution Française vue des deux côtés du Rhin, ed. André Dabézies, 141–48. Aix en Provence: Publications de l’Université de Provence, 1990. Also in Schiller und die höfische Welt, ed. Achim Aurnhammer, Klaus Manger, and Friedrich Strack, 422–46. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1990. Muschg, Walter. “Schiller ohne Wilhelm Tell.” In Studien zur tragischen Literaturgeschichte, 82–104. Bern and Munich: Francke, 1965. Ndong, Norbert. “ ‘Sie werden kommen, unsre Alpen abzumessen . . .’: Über Friedrich Schillers Drama Wilhelm Tell.” In Andere Blicke, ed. Leo Kreutzer, 33–53. Hannover: Revonnah, 1996; also in Welfengarten 2 (1992): 5–21. Ockenden, R. C. “Wilhelm Tell as Political Drama.” Oxford German Studies 18/19 (1989/90): 23–44. Piedmont, Ferdinand. “ ‘Reißt die Mauern ein!’: Schillers Wilhelm Tell auf der Bühne im Jahr der ‘deutschen Revolution’ 1989.” German Studies Review 18 (1995): 213–21. Richards, David B. “Tell in the Dock: Forensic Rhetoric in the Monologue and Parricida Scene in Wilhelm Tell.” German Quarterly 48 (1975): 472–86. Ryder, Frank G. “Schiller’s Tell and the Cause of Freedom.” German Quarterly (1975): 487–504. Schweitzer, Christoph E. “A Defense of Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell.” Goethe Yearbook 9 (1999): 253–63. Sharpe, Lesley. Schiller and the Historical Character: Presentation and Interpretation in the Historiographical Works and in the Historical Dramas. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1982. Stahl, E. L. Friedrich Schiller’s Drama. Oxford: Clarendon, 1961. Thalheim, Hans-Günther. “Notwendigkeit und Rechtlichkeit der Selbsthilfe in Schillers Wilhelm Tell.” Goethe: Neue Folge des Jahrbuchs der GoetheGesellschaft (1956): 216–57. Ueding, Gert. “Wilhelm Tell.” In Schillers Dramen, ed. Walter Hinderer, 385–422. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1992. Vander Meulen, Ross. “The Theological Texture of Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell.” Germanic Review 53 (1978): 56–62. Wiese, Benno von. Friedrich Schiller. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1959.

Schiller’s Legacy

The Reception of Schiller in the Twentieth Century Wulf Koepke

Schiller, Nationaldichter

D

URING THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, Schiller’s work and the memory of the man and writer took on increasing significance for the German nation. He became one of the leading symbols of the German Kulturnation, and his statues were monuments of and for the Germans and Germany — everywhere, not least in the United States. This veneration became most pronounced in 1848 and led to the exuberant festivities of 1859 — the one-hundredth anniversary of his birth — when Schiller was celebrated as the herald of the forthcoming German nation and definitively established as a national icon. In its function as Bildungstheater and as representation of the national ideal, the German theater put Schiller’s plays in first place. However, the concept of history in Schiller’s plays and the style of their performances also led to his identification with norms of classicism and artificiality. As a result, modernizing trends that strove for a more realistic drama took aim at Schiller as a major obstacle. Georg Büchner is the forerunner of this opposition, followed by the naturalists, primarily Gerhart Hauptmann, and, in the early twentieth century, Bertolt Brecht. This meant that Schiller was admired and used politically for festive occasions, but criticized and opposed by successive young generations who, nevertheless, found much to their liking in Schiller’s rebellious early plays. As the object of academic scholarship he was valued as one of the German Classics, yet through his primary medium, the theater, his texts remained vigorous in the non-academic sphere. His plays and poems served as texts in German schools. As a result, numerous quotations from Schiller’s works, including parodies, entered the daily language. After German cultural and political unity had been achieved, Schiller retained the aura of herald of the German nation — despite the scarcity of textual references to German history in his works. His protagonists, like Wilhelm Tell and Jeanne d’Arc, fight and die for their nation, but it is never the German nation. It takes a tour de force to make Schiller’s Wallenstein into a champion for German unity.

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It is remarkable, though, that through much of the twentieth century, the image of Schiller the writer remained intact for national celebrations, and in all of the changing political systems and contexts. Schiller commemorations punctuated the century, beginning in 1905, the centenary of Schiller’s death. Since there was no genuine anniversary relating to Schiller after 1933, the Nazis created a Schiller anniversary in 1934. In 1955 and 1959 (the two-hundredth anniversary of Schiller’s birth), the time came for separate celebrations in East and West Germany, with East Germany exploiting the advantage of the locations of Weimar and Jena for their political advantage, in order to claim the heritage of German Klassik. Events of minor importance took place in 1984. The attention given to the anniversaries of 1905, 1909, 1955, and 1959 in Germany and elsewhere rivaled the Goethe commemorations of 1932 and 1949 — whereas the Goethe year of 1999 might be called a year of “non-commemoration.” What will the Schiller Year of 2005 bring? While such commemorations accentuate the high symbolic and political value of a figure like Friedrich Schiller, they also call into question the reality of Schiller’s reception by a broader public. Is it his texts that are remembered, or has Schiller become nothing but a dead monument that does not necessarily come to life through readings in the Gymnasium and through theater performances? In the 1940 film Friedrich Schiller — Der Triumph eines Genies, the youthful Schiller of the Karlsschule rebelled against the duke and his strict discipline, but this film is now forgotten. Theater directors struggle with the perennial problem of how to bring the dead classics back to life. How much modernizing is useful or necessary? Could it be that a modernized version loses on both ends? It can never be really contemporary, and there may not be much “Schiller” left in it. The fact remains, however, that at least some of Schiller’s plays, especially Kabale und Liebe (Intrigue and Love, 1784), turn out to be among the most enduring of German classic plays for today’s audiences. As Schiller is primarily remembered for his plays, their relevance for our time has to be demonstrated on the stage: what can we at the beginning of the twenty-first century gain from them? Schiller’s reception and reputation can never rest on academic investigations and presentations, as searching and meaningful as they may be. His texts have to face a general public of theatergoers and readers. A sketch of Schiller’s reception in the twentieth century must consider these different perspectives: Schiller as a classic in the universities and schools; Schiller and his general readership; Schiller, the representative writer and poet in the political arena of a radically changing Germany; and, last but not least, Schiller in the repertoire of the theaters. Schiller was considered primarily a “German” writer, and his significance extends mainly to the German-speaking countries; we need only to be reminded of the role that his Wilhelm Tell (1804) played in Switzerland.

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At times, his fame reached beyond the borders of the German-speaking regions, albeit with inevitable misunderstandings. We know that because of Die Räuber (The Robbers, 1781) the French Revolution celebrated him as a poet of freedom. This is also how Schiller was received elsewhere, for instance in Russia and by the nationalist movements of the nineteenth century in Poland, Italy, and Spain. For the prominent French author of the seminal book De l’Allemagne (On Germany, 1813), Madame de Staël, Schiller was the exemplary German poet-thinker. Thomas Carlyle devoted a long biography to him, celebrating him as a genius who overcame adversity. In the United States, Schiller remained an icon for German-Americans, and monuments of him were built during the nineteenth century and up until the First World War in cities that had large numbers of German immigrants. However, Schiller did not, like Goethe, represent Germany’s cosmopolitan contribution to world literature, but instead a more specifically German idealism. It is a telling symptom for this perception that the cosmopolitan text of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (“An die Freude” [Ode to Joy], 1785), is often attributed to Goethe instead of its true author, Schiller.

The Celebrations of 1905 and 1909 The one-hundredth anniversary of Schiller’s death on May 9, 1905 was the occasion for countless speeches and journalistic articles, but it carried with it a good deal of sober reflection on the passage of time since 1859, as well as the fact that, to a considerable degree, Schiller’s unequaled popularity had faded. It seemed that Schiller was less familiar to the young generation than he had been to previous generations. It also became clear that the image of Schiller depended largely on one’s political persuasion. Kurt Eisner and Franz Mehring defended the “real” Schiller from the socialist perspective against a century of reactionary distortions. “Heute, ein Jahrhundert nach dem Tode des Dichters preist den Rebellen und Republikaner die ekle Gemeinschaft der Byzantiner” (Eisner; Oellers, 1966, 139). “Wo steckt denn nur eigentlich die Schwierigkeit, Schillers historische Erscheinung zu begreifen? Sie steckt in dem Walle der Tradition, womit sich die bürgerliche Klasse die Gestalt des Dichters verbaut hat” (Mehring, quoted in Oellers, 155). Mehring, author of the Lessing-Legende (1893), continues: “Ähnlich wie um Lessing hat sich auch um Schiller eine ganze Legende gewoben” (Oellers, 155). The bourgeois image of Schiller is characterized by a cheapening of the aesthetic qualities of his works and by the distortion of his political and philosophical views. Rosa Luxemburg, in her review of Mehring’s book, makes two points: “Schillers Dichtung ist nicht bloß zum ehernen Bestand der deutschen klassischen Literatur, sondern auch zum geistigen Hausschatz speziell des aufgeklärten kämpfenden Proletariats geworden” (Oellers, 162); but, she reminds her readers and

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comrades, it is not enough to look for suitable quotes and create a Schiller that is to one’s own liking. The proletariat must go beyond that. Now is the time to understand cultural and political phenomena objectively in light of their historical conditions. It is not the time to celebrate Schiller, but to arrive at a critical understanding of his texts. For Luxemburg, there was a timely parallel between the cooption of Schiller by the bourgeoisie and revisionist readings of Karl Marx, in opposition to which she attempted to guide the proletariat to a better appreciation of Marx’s revolutionary theories. Likewise, she contended that instead of political appropriation, a critical reading of Schiller, the idealist, was needed, but held that this could not be done without reading Karl Marx. Commemorations of Schiller brought to the surface the need for a total re-evaluation of the German cultural heritage so that it would make sense to the proletarian class but, equally, address the need for keeping the revolutionary Marxist attitude, in the spirit of Schiller the revolutionary. It was Kurt Eisner in particular who pointed out how damaging the social climate in Weimar and Jena was for Schiller and that he was unable to recognize the French Revolution as the decisive event in human history that is was. Instead, Schiller looked the other way and formulated letters on aesthetic education. Eisner, Mehring, Kautsky, and Luxemburg claimed emphatically the right of the proletariat to the classical heritage. Schiller was not a socialist; yet he was seen as a progressive spirit in his own epoch who opposed nationalism and the power of the churches and their dogmatism. If he did not recognize the meaning of the French Revolution, he kept fighting, nevertheless, for freedom and justice and against the first signs of exploitative capitalism (Jonas, ed., Schiller-Debatte; Hagen). It goes without saying that the majority of voices of 1905 Germany did not agree with this view. But Adolf Dörrfuß, a Lutheran minister, saw the strong participation of the working class and their publications in the Schiller anniversary year as a new aspect of Schiller’s Volkstümlichkeit (quoted in Oellers, 236–40). The tenor of the socialist voices of 1905 was, with few variations, continued in 1955 in the speeches in the German Democratic Republic (Schiller in unserer Zeit). Inevitably, comparisons were drawn between the unforgettable celebrations of 1859 and the reflections on “Schiller Today” in 1905. In the meantime, literary trends, naturalism in particular, had caused a considerable distance between contemporary writers and Schiller. The emphasis on Schiller texts in the Gymnasium was a mixed blessing. Max Liebermann, for instance, starts his answer to Julius Hart’s survey in Literarisches Echo with this phrase: “Nachdem mir das Gymnasium Schiller so viel als möglich ‘verekelt’ hatte . . .” (Oellers, 1966, 169). In his introduction (165–68), Hart points to the wide spectrum of attitudes among the writers, art historians, and artists who had been surveyed, and articulates his own initial


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skepticism: “Aber heute, was soll da Schiller als Nationalheld bedeuten?” (165) Hart’s question indicates how difficult it was to read Schiller as one of the classical writers and not see him as a mythological figure and admire or oppose him for supraliterary merits. Hart sees a distinct value in the commemoration of 1905: “Vor allem jedoch liegt der Wirkungswert dieses Gedenktages, wie mir scheint, darin, daß er für die führenden Geister ein Anlaß ist, sich über ihre Stellung zu Schiller deutlich klar zu werden” (166). In 1905, the “führenden Geister” felt a need, if not an obligation, to clarify their attitude toward Schiller — and, of course, Goethe. The GoetheSchiller connection and a comparison of the two is a dominant theme in all of the speeches. Konrad Burdach’s “Schiller-Rede” (Oellers, 184–202) is primarily a recounting of the relationship between the two poets and an implicit and, at times, explicit comparison. The same can be said of Richard M. Meyers’s speech “Schiller der Heros der Deutschen” (Oellers, 180–83). Since Goethe’s lifetime the question had been raised who the greater writer of them was. Goethe reacted somewhat testily to Eckermann that the Germans should be happy to have had both of them. The “Doppel-Denkmal” by Rietschel that was erected in Weimar in 1857 was part of the great Schiller enthusiasm of the mid-nineteenth century that symbolized their friendship and alliance. The idea of the “Dioskuren” was dominant around 1905, so that Goethe and Schiller, and not Goethe or Schiller was stressed by the speakers. One of the texts frequently mentioned was the correspondence between Schiller and Goethe, which Goethe had edited in 1828/29. In contrast to Goethe, however, the speakers noted Schiller’s enormous popularity and the cooling period later in the century, while Goethe’s fame and prestige seemed to remain constant. The reasons for some alienation from Schiller were related to his very popularity. One could call it over-saturation. Schiller was everywhere: in the schools, on the stage, in speeches for all festive occasions. Schiller was also associated with the idea of Humanität in the cosmopolitan sense, which seemed outdated in an age of fierce nationalism. In the attempt to save Schiller for the nation, the speakers began to discover new features in his life and work. The widespread observation that Schiller’s plays were too theatrical led to the criticism that he did not always motivate the actions carefully enough. In the age of Ibsen and Hauptmann with their psychological tragedies, this was an understandable criticism. Hugo von Hofmannsthal put it this way: “Seine [Schillers] Werke bei all ihrem Glanz und ihrer szenischen Schlagkraft erscheinen uns manchmal fast provisorisch und wie überhastet” (Oellers, 231). The inevitable comparison with Goethe’s characters leads Hofmannsthal back to the point of departure of most of the speakers: Schiller’s significance transcends aesthetic criteria: “. . . aber es wird in dem Gebrauch, den er von ihr [der Sprache] macht, etwas Höheres sehr großartig fühlbar: ein Auftrieb, an dem sich die Tiefe der Nation erkennen läßt” (Oellers, 231).

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Hofmannsthal realizes, “auf wie gefährlichen Boden ich mich begebe” (Oellers, 231) by defining “die Größe eines Künstlers” as something beyond his work, but this is precisely the point. A somewhat surprising point recurring in speeches, for instance by Erich Schmidt, the Großgermanist of the day, is the emphasis on Schiller’s aristocratic nature, his “Adel” as a person, and his elitist worldview, a point that had already been made by Goethe. Goethe’s views on Schiller, as reported by Eckermann, are an abundant source for all speakers and prove beyond the shadow of a doubt how much Germanistik was in fact “Goethe-Philologie.” In his ironic summary of the Schiller celebrations, Oscar Bie defines the situation when he states, “daß die Menge und der größte Teil der Gebildeten irgendeine Religion nötig hat, also auch religiöse Feste” (Oellers, 233). Celebrating somebody like Schiller is not the worst of all possible religions. It is pure faith. “Der Glauben ist die Gewähr dafür, daß der Magen noch unter dem Kopf sitzt, und die großen Gefühle, die der Aristokrat schweigend verehrt, sperren im Volk den Mund gar weit auf ” (Oellers, 233). What people say about Schiller, he contends, especially as a Nationaldichter and a praeceptor Germaniae, is a total misunderstanding. But that would seem to be inevitable. After the enormous energy spent on the 1905 anniversary, the 1909 anniversary that took place 150 years after Schiller’s birth was more muted. Alfred Kerr’s sarcastic commentary acknowledged once again: “Der Zeitpunkt kommt, wo jemand aufhört ein Schriftsteller zu sein und anfängt ein Mythus zu werden” (Oellers, 241). In the ironic words of Egon Friedell, the Viennese critic, playwright, actor, and cultural historian (1878–1938), best known due to his later three-volume Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit (1927–1932), Schiller’s great reputation turned out to be self-perpetuating: “Und als er tot war, hat das Schillerdrama unausgesetzt weitergespielt: in der Geschichte seines Nachruhms. Auch hier noch alles in sprunghaften und überraschenden Wendungen” (Oellers, 242). Schiller’s fame was experienced like a Schiller drama. Friedell continued: “Die Art, wie die Worte ‘Goethe und Schiller’ ausgesprochen, betont und verstanden werden, drückt alle Wandlungen aus, die die Auffassung Schillers im verflossenen Jahrhundert durchgemacht hat” (Oellers, 243). In Friedell’s opinion, Schiller is much more a distant monument than a living entity: “Als großes nationales Ereignis wird jedermann Schiller ehren und bewundern — ein Erlebnis ist er aber für die meisten nicht mehr” (Oellers, 243).

After 1918 and into National Socialism If the commemoration of 1905 demonstrated the division between the Marxist view of Schiller and the spectrum of liberal to conservative


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opinions, the political dichotomy became even more pronounced after 1918. Whereas leftist critics and writers tended to be critical or negative, the nationalists and the National Socialists began to claim Schiller as their own. At the same time, scholarly work was being conducted; however, it, too, tended to be ideological, as Germanistik was now dominated by Geistesgeschichte. Much of the Berlin theater of the twenties was experimental and iconoclastic. The “modernizing” of Schiller’s plays began in 1919 with Leopold Jessner’s Staatstheater production of Wilhelm Tell. Jessner continued with a series of radically new presentations of the classics. But the most provocative theater event of the twenties was Erwin Piscator’s production of Die Räuber in Berlin in 1926. As Herbert Ihering wrote in his review: “Erwin Piscator gibt die ‘Räuber’ also nicht, als ob sie eine erfundene, gedichtete Handlung hätten, sondern als ob sie ein tatsächliches Revolutionsereignis darstellten. Er nimmt dem Stück die Fabel und gibt ihm Sachlichkeit” (Oellers, 286). This was not, he insists, a formal experiment, on the contrary. Piscator goes beyond the many brilliant formal experiments then thriving on the stages of Berlin, to the substance, the core of the play. Other directors should not consider this as a stylistic model. The “Entpathetisierung” (287) means reality, not style. For Piscator, Spiegelberg was the genuine revolutionary, a reminder of Trotsky, and certainly not the ugly Jew that the Nazis saw in him. One of the ironies was that none other than Veit Harlan, the future director of the virulently antiSemitic film Jud Süß, was one of the major actors in this production, performing the part of Roller, the chief representative of the oppressed masses. On the other end of the political spectrum, Mathilde Ludendorff, wife of the famous general, published her book, Der ungesühnte Frevel an Luther, Lessing und Schiller im Dienste des allmächtigen Baumeisters aller Welten, in 1928. The purpose of the book was to prove that Luther, Lessing, and Schiller (Mozart was later added to the list) were assassinated by the Jewish-dominated Freemasons. The response was proof of the ongoing veneration for Schiller as national hero. The book was a hot seller and went through several editions. Its provocation prompted the Goethe-Gesellschaft to fund documentation on the circumstances of Schiller’s death and funeral, which was then edited by Max Hecker in 1935. The controversy around the book came to an end through a fiat of Joseph Goebbels who complained that the history of German culture should not be degraded as a series of criminal cases and mysteries, and the book was banned in 1936 — which then drove the controversy underground. The “Ludendorff-Bewegung” was still maintaining the worship of Schiller (Ruppelt, 20–23). While Max Kommerell, in Der Dichter als Führer in der deutschen Klassik (1928), returned to Schiller’s drama project “Die Malteser” to support his ideas of a male “Orden” and his notions of mentoring and

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friendship in the light of Stefan George and his group, the “völkische” view of German literature preferred to write about Schiller the man and his life and quoted selectively from his works. For some, Wilhelm Tell provided the best reference point, but it was undeniable that the only historical play on Germany’s past, Wallenstein, while arguably Schiller’s most important play, had a protagonist who could hardly serve as the paradigm of a Führer. Schiller, the Nationaldichter, provided little in his texts that could serve as Nationaldichtung. Therefore, in 1933, two opposing schools emerged, one of which adhered to the slogan, “Denn er war unser,” the other of which was more solidly grounded in the evidence that emphasized the distance and differences between Schiller and National Socialism, primarily in his ideas on Humanität and Weltbürgertum. The first group found its authoritative voice in Herbert Cysarz’s massive Schiller volume of 1934. The extreme thesis of Hans Fabricius, Schiller als Kampfgenosse Hitlers: Nationalsozialismus in Schillers Dramen (1932, second edition 1933), remained an exception, as respectable professors of Germanistik distanced themselves from the dominant trend of the early Nazi years to turn the entire history of German culture into a precursor of National Socialism. Cysarz’s method and image of Schiller were attacked by the spokesman of the opposing faction, Gerhard Fricke. In his review of Cysarz’s book in 1934, in the Deutsche Literaturzeitung (Ruppelt, 60), Fricke attacked its ahistorical approach. He had stated his position in 1927 in his book Der religiöse Sinn der Klassik Schillers: Zum Verhältnis von Idealismus und Christentum. After 1933, he retained his view of the “non-political” Schiller, as opposed to the political writer Heinrich von Kleist. The “Gleichschaltung” of Schiller by the propaganda machine overshadowed the ongoing research of Germanists. The 175th anniversary of Schiller’s birth, in 1934, provided an opportunity for an unprecedented spectacle (Ruppelt, 33–38; Deutsche Klassiker im Nationalsozialismus, 67–76). A relay of fifteen thousand young runners carried flowers to the monument in Schiller’s birthplace in Marbach, and, on June 21, the summer solstice, it all climaxed with a gigantic bonfire. There was a daylong performance of the Wallenstein trilogy in Berlin, a two-hour radio broadcast on all German stations on November 10, and celebrations throughout Germany and beyond. The government and Goebbels’s propaganda topped this with a “Reichsschillerwoche” in Weimar and a speech by Goebbels himself claiming Schiller for the new Germany. Since November 9 was the high holiday of the Nazi movement, the connection was evident. These celebrations helped to efface the memory of the terror and assassinations of June 1934 and cemented Hitler’s position as Führer after Hindenburg’s death. When the Second World War began, the manipulation of the Schiller image became much more pronounced, as his example was used to boost


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the morale of the troops and the population. This was eminently achieved by the popular film of 1940, Friedrich Schiller: Der Triumph eines Genies, with Horst Caspar representing the young rebellious Schiller (Ruppelt, 126–31). A curious episode in view of the general admiration for Schiller is Hitler’s order of 1941 that Wilhelm Tell, Schiller’s most popular play, should neither be performed nor taught in the schools. This order caused consternation and controversy among the top Nazi leaders, but was widely obeyed. The reason for Hitler’s aversion has remained unclear, although the most plausible explanation is Hitler’s fear of assassination, foreshadowed in the Tyrannenmord in Tell (Ruppelt, 40–45).

Editions and the Nationalausgabe “Die Zahl der Schiller-Ausgaben ist Legion” (Schiller-Handbuch, 810). The monument of nineteenth-century philology was the historical-critical edition of the Sämtliche Werke, in fifteen volumes, edited by Karl Goedeke and others, from 1867 to 1876. The Säkular-Ausgabe, in sixteen volumes, was edited by Eduard von der Hellen at the time of the 1905 commemorations of Schiller’s death. From 1892 to 1896, Fritz Jonas edited a sevenvolume edition of Schiller’s letters. The enormously influential and popular correspondence between Schiller and Goethe, first edited by Goethe, was reprinted in numerous editions, including critical editions. In 1943, during the Second World War, Julius Petersen (with Gerhard Fricke) laid the foundations for the crowning achievement of his life with the Schiller Nationalausgabe. This authoritative critical edition is now practically complete. It had the good fortune to survive the end of the Nazi era and then the Cold War period as a common project of East and West. Inevitably, some of the volumes reflect the political conditions of the day (Schiller-Handbuch, 811). Benno von Wiese was the chief editor for fifteen of its volumes. The present editor-in-chief is Norbert Oellers. A number of early volumes have been re-edited. The edition includes all Schiller texts, the letters to and from Schiller, and Schiller’s Gespräche. Both the name Nationalausgabe and the fact that it survived the division of Germany are tributes to the spellbinding nature of the name Schiller. In the meantime, new general editions with commentaries have emerged. The best-known examples are the Hanser edition in five volumes, edited by Gerhart Fricke and others, as well as a five-volume edition by Benno von Wiese and Helmut Koopmann. The most recent edition, in twelve volumes, the Frankfurter Ausgabe, has been in the process of being published by the Deutscher Klassiker Verlag since 1988. There are editions of Schiller’s Gespräche, of his commentaries on his own writings, of reviews of Schiller’s works, and of reviews of theater performances. The Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft offers documents and

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scholarship on German literature since Schiller’s time. All told, the attention given to Schiller has been overwhelming, if not exhaustive. Schiller is, indeed, not only a Klassiker of German literature but of German Literaturwissenschaft. Only Goethe and, arguably, Lessing have received similar attention. In this respect, Schiller still remains the Nationaldichter that he has always been. One aspect of this respectful attention are the bibliographies compiled by the Goethe-und-Schiller-Archiv in Weimar since 1959, and the numerous research reports, many of them in the Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft. The Deutsche Schillergesellschaft in Marbach/Stuttgart, which was founded in 1946 as the successor of the Schwäbische Schillerverein, emphasized its national mission. Its seat is the Schiller-Nationalmuseum in Marbach. In 1859, Emperor Wilhelm I established a Schillerpreis for the best drama and, in 1955, the Land Baden-Württemberg instituted the Schiller-Gedächtnis-Preis for eminent achievements of cultural and scholarly significance. There was a Deutsche Schillerstiftung of 1859 and a Schweizerische Schillerstiftung of 1905 that presented the Großen Schillerpreis. Thus many institutions support and honor authors and literary scholarship in the name of Schiller. Even with today’s proliferation of literary prizes, the preponderance of prizes named for Schiller shows that his status as a Nationaldichter continues.

In the Schools and on the Stage The use of Schiller texts in German schools merits much more research. Schiller’s plays and poems, mostly the ballads, were until recently a prominent feature of German instruction, especially in the Gymnasium. This was particularly true for the period up to the Second World War, but even since then Schiller has retained a special place, though somewhat reduced. His texts were used to teach values, but also to instill an awareness of the German Klassik and the Germans as the Volk der Dichter und Denker. Key values are expressed by the word Freiheit — including especially the famous Gedankenfreiheit in Don Carlos — Humanität, Sittlichkeit, Idealismus, and Vaterlandsliebe — as in Wilhelm Tell and Die Jungfrau von Orleans. Schiller’s tragedies were seen as heroic, sublime, manly — even those with female protagonists, Mary Stuart and Jeanne d’Arc, for example. Schiller’s phrases lent themselves as topics for class compositions. And although many students emerged from the Gymnasium with some disgust for Schiller’s texts, they knew poems and passages from the plays by heart. Georg Büchmann’s compilation of commonly-used quotations, Geflügelte Worte, first published in 1864 and in many editions ever since, is proof to what degree Schiller phrases, including parodies, had become part of daily life in Germany, and not only among the educated classes.


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During the Nazi years a strong first attempt was made to find texts that would prove that Schiller was an ardent German patriot and a true forerunner of National Socialism. This led to a repetition of the same texts, for instance the “Reiterlied” in Wallensteins Lager. Later, more sober voices began to dominate, pleading for a reading of the texts without undue political twisting. Deutschunterricht still could not do without Schiller’s classical plays Wallenstein, Maria Stuart, Die Jungfrau von Orleans, and above all, Wilhelm Tell, at least until 1941 (Ruppelt, 79–103). The resistance of teachers of German against a total Nazification of Schiller indicates the importance of Schiller’s texts, primarily the classical plays, for their instruction. Their sense of professional integrity stood in opposition to the party propagandists, even among those teachers who believed in National Socialism. The teaching of Schiller poems, especially ballads, and plays was inevitable for the instruction of German. Schiller texts appealed to young minds, and teachers clung to the idea of the German Klassik, of the Volk der Dichter und Denker — in the face of the reality of the Volk der Richter und Henker. The paradoxical outcome of this tenacious fight to preserve a “classical” Schiller for the Gymnasium was, at the time, a concerted effort to maintain distance between the schools and the party institutions. Nevertheless, after 1945, Schiller’s texts were indicted as nationalistic and Nazi-infected. It took ten years, that is, until the Schiller anniversary of 1955, to reintegrate Schiller into the curriculum as an author of the German Klassik. The later de-emphasis of the literature of the past, including Classicism, in the curriculum of the Federal Republic was due to other factors. The GDR took a different route, by reinterpreting Schiller in the light of Marxist orthodoxy. In this context, the early plays, Die Räuber, Fiesco, Kabale und Liebe and Don Carlos, were enlisted as expressions of the bourgeois revolution of the late eighteenth century that had led to the French Revolution. The honorary citizenship conferred on Schiller by the French Republic was therefore especially meaningful. Schiller wrote plays that can have a tremendous effect. Despite changing trends, ideologies, and tastes, some of his plays have always been appealing to audiences. The proof is that, in spite of the extreme events of German history and the concomitant changes in the mood of the Germans and their attitude toward their fatherland, his plays keep re-emerging with new aspects of relevance. While his classical plays, especially Wallenstein and Wilhelm Tell, were most suitable for festive occasions and were elevated to the status of Festspiele, the naturalists found enough realism in the early plays to suit their taste, while the “Romantic” elements of Wallenstein and Die Jungfrau von Orleans appealed to the neo-Romantic disposition. After the defeat of 1918 Schiller seemed at first out of place in the new republic. This was exemplified by the ambivalence of the young playwright Bertolt Brecht. The Berlin theater of the twenties reveled in experiments, and the pathos of expressionism did not lie too far from Schiller’s young

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heroes. In short, Schiller could again be integrated into the dominant mood of the time. Although somewhat burdened by the monumentalization of Schiller the man and his achievement, the Festspiel approach returned with a vengeance. The 175th anniversary of Schiller’s birth, 1934, was topped by the production of the entire Wallenstein trilogy in Berlin. Some of Schiller’s plays, however, drew unwanted reactions from audiences, for instance applauding Marquis Posa’s cry for Gedankenfreiheit in Don Carlos. In Wilhelm Tell, the Swiss peasants’ claims of victory evoked thoughts that were forbidden. In contrast to the schools and some of the scholarship, the theaters refrained, after the initial attempts to “Nazify” Schiller in an aggressive and clumsy way, from drawing all-too-obvious parallels with the present. Still, Schiller looked like an “official” author, and the pathos of his men and warriors was harnessed for the war effort. Schiller’s re-emergence after 1945 was rather surprising. Although Schiller’s pathos and heroic gestures seemed out of touch with the mood of the defeated and demoralized German people, his Die Räuber appealed to audiences, and he soon regained his position as the second-mostperformed classical author, after Shakespeare. The frequency of performances of Schiller’s plays was challenged for a time only by Bertolt Brecht. Among Schiller’s many dramatic works, Kabale und Liebe seems to speak most directly to today’s audiences. Schiller was, however, affected by the deep distrust of the German Klassik as such and the attempt to free the German cultural scene from the constraints of the tradition of the Bildungsbürgertum. This led to iconoclastic productions of Schiller plays by the “director” generation of Heyme, Zadek, and Peymann. The limits of these productions were immediately evident, together with the resistance of the majority of those who attended them. In this sense, a repetition of the 1920s took place: radical modernizations, including Piscator’s Räuber, ran their course, and more moderate ways to demonstrate the relevance of Schiller’s plays for the present were found (Wittkowski, ed., 333–87). The fundamental change is that Schiller is no longer celebrated on stage as the Nationaldichter, but instead his dramas are performed, like those of other playwrights, according to their appeal to directors and audiences.

1955 and 1959 The 150th anniversary of Schiller’s death created an opportunity for new and different official and academic recognition. This was particularly true for the German Democratic Republic, whose ideology claimed the classical heritage (klassisches Erbe) for the revolutionary working class. The political speakers went back to 1905 to find models for their arguments in the


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writings of Mehring, Eisner, and Rosa Luxemburg. During the Festwoche in Weimar, on May 8–15, 1955, speeches by Otto Grotewohl and Johannes R. Becher reflected the political situation and the claim of the German Democratic Republic to speak for the entire German people. Grotewohl stated: “So stellt Schiller die künstlerische Meisterschaft seines dichtenden Genies ganz bewußt in den Dienst der großen Aufgabe, die die Geschichte der Nation gestellt hat, ein souveränes, unabhängiges Vaterland zu schaffen, in dem das Volk gebietet” (Schiller in unserer Zeit, 33). “Unzerstörbar und unüberwindlich war des Dichters Glaube an Deutschland” (33). The moving account of the departure of the German mercenaries to America in the War of Independence in Kabale und Liebe was, according to Grotewohl, Schiller’s prophetic response to the integration of German troops into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Schiller came from the working class; therefore, Grotewohl could say: “Sind es nicht in der Tat immer die Werktätigen gewesen, die das Vaterland retteten, wenn es sich in Not und Gefahr befand?” (35). This leads to the last point: “In Schillers Werken pulsiert ein Stück lebendiger Geschichte unseres Volkes. Von diesem Werk, vor dem unsere geistigen Ahnväter Marx und Engels in Verehrung ihre Fahnen senkten, ist ein heiliger Wille ausgegangen zu Einheit, Demokratie und nationaler Unabhängigkeit. Es ist ein Teil unseres Wesens und Willens ” (39). In his speech, “Denn er ist unser: Friedrich Schiller der Dichter der Freiheit,” Johannes R. Becher stays closer to Schiller’s texts. Still, he starts with the following declaration: “Über Friedrich Schiller reden, heißt also über das sprechen, was uns Deutsche gerade heute besonders angeht, über das Problem der Freiheit” (Schiller in unserer Zeit, 43). His idea was real freedom, as opposed to what the West understood by the term. It is easy to integrate Schiller into the prehistory of German socialism because: “Für Schiller stellte sich sein Werk dar als ein sozialer und nationaler Befreiungsakt” (48). Becher is careful with the sequence of “sozial” and “national,” but the emphasis on the revaluation of the two terms is unmistakable. In the same manner, Becher tries to re-evaluate and update the heroic image: “Das, worauf Schiller wartete, diese seine eigentliche hohe Lebensstunde, war der Aufbruch seines Volkes zum Kampf um Einheit und Freiheit” (53). The conclusion then follows: “Wir sind im Begriff, die deutsche Tragödie abzuschließen und damit auch Schillers Tragik zu beenden” (55). That is, the tragedy of his life, the life of the forerunner. “Das ganze Deutschland ist es, das in Friedrich Schiller sich uns offenbart als unseres Volkes Not und Elend, als unseres Volkes Auferstehungsdrang und Auferstehen” (58). Das ganze Deutschland is still the magic formula, and Schiller leads us there: Denn er ist unser. A voice of the past spoke for the last time in 1955 in both parts of Germany, demonstrating das ganze Deutschland in a different way, in its continuity from the Weimar years to the present and to a better future: Thomas Mann. Weeks before his death, while speaking in Stuttgart and

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Weimar and then in Amsterdam, Mann implored the Germans to rise above their differences. Allusions to NATO and the Soviet Union are not necessary to understand Mann’s personal encounter with Schiller, for he considers himself a personification of the continuity of the humanistic spirit of Goethe and Schiller in the present. Mann represented German literary culture above the political fronts of the day, and his speech symbolized that writers were the only ones who still dared to differ from hostile ideologies (Schiller-Handbuch, 785–86). Thomas Mann’s “Schiller-Rede” was printed both in the East German collection of speeches Schiller in unserer Zeit and the West German volume Reden zum Gedenkjahr 1955, edited by Bernhard Zeller. It was also published in an expanded form as Versuch über Schiller, Mann’s last publication. Mann recounts Schiller’s life and work in his own way, including his early enthusiasm for Don Carlos, which found its literary expression in the novella Tonio Kröger (1903). Schiller’s pathos of “Gedankenfreiheit” merges here with Mann’s own liberal humanism. The allusions to the present emerge in the last paragraph, when he recalls the commemorations of 1859 and adds: “Es war ein nationales Fest, und das sei das unsrige auch. Entgegen politischer Unnatur fühle das zweigeteilte Deutschland sich eins in seinem Namen” (Schiller 1955, 28). But then he points beyond the nation; this Gedenkfeier, he says, should stand “im Zeichen universeller Teilnehmung nach dem Vorbild seiner hochherzigen Größe . . . von seinem sanftgewaltigen Willen gehe durch das Fest seiner Grablegung und Auferstehung etwas in uns ein: von seinem Willen zum Schönen, Wahren und Guten, zur Gesittung zur inneren Freiheit, zur Kunst, zur Liebe, zum Frieden, zu rettender Ehrfurcht des Menschen vor sich selbst” (28). Schiller is once more a secularized savior who can transform human lives and lift his people above their blind divisions, and above politics — this is one of the last manifestations of the true German Bildungsbürgertum. The ubiquitous metaphor for the survival of the German people after 1945, death and resurrection, is transferred to the image of Schiller, whose spirit is reappearing in a new incarnation, as it were. The West German collection of the speeches held during 1955 strives to transcend politics in the sense Schiller’s own journal, Die Horen (The Horae, 1795–97), had done. Even Theodor Heuss, the president of the Federal Republic, emphasized: “Ich enttäusche jene gerne, die meinen, weil ich gegenwärtig Bundespräsident bin, sei es meine Aufgabe, aus Schiller eine staatsaktuelle Werbeaktion zu machen. Dafür ist er mir zu groß, dafür bin ich mir zu gut” (Schiller 1955, 82). He makes a point not to talk about that Schiller, the legend, but the other, the real Schiller, namely, his own regional countryman. Still, Heuss primarily discusses Schiller’s fascination with politics, political history, and metapolitics, and the German tragedy — understandably so only ten years after the Second World War. But he did what he had promised: not to use Schiller as a spokesman for the West against the East.


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It was much easier for André François-Poncet to claim Schiller as “Unser Mitbürger” (Schiller 1955, 90–98). In 1792, Schiller had been made a citizen of the French Republic. François-Poncet addressed the “Europäer von heute und morgen,” the Germans and French, and urged them to overcome their differences of the past. Madame de Staël, he says, was able to recognize Schiller’s genius and present in her book on Germany an image of his personality and his work for the world. Schiller, deeply influenced by French thinkers, first among them Rousseau, had a major impact on French culture. As a “Weltbürger des Geistes” (98), he could still lead the way to the future. The vast majority of the commemorative speeches in both East and West were by academicians, and included scholars like Hans Mayer, Joachim Müller, Benno von Wiese, Gerhard Storz, Reinhard Buchwald, and Paul Böckmann. In the volume Schiller in unserer Zeit, the essays by Otto Grotewohl, Johannes R. Becher, and Alexander Abusch are followed by the work of Hans Mayer, Adolf Beck, Pierre Grappin, Georg Lukács, Johannes Müller, and Paul Reimann. It is telling, however, that the Schiller-Handbuch should have separate chapters on the general reception of Schiller in Germany and abroad, as well as for the Forschungsgeschichte. Even more than in the case of Goethe, there is a dichotomy of two Schillers: one for the nineteenth century, and one for at least two-thirds of the twentieth century: Schiller the legend and myth for festive occasions, and Schiller the writer whose ideas and literary qualities could be analyzed and debated by scholars. However, these dividing lines tended to cross each other constantly. Benno von Wiese, the editor of the Nationalausgabe and the author of the most quoted book on Schiller, his monumental Friedrich Schiller of 1959, was a frequent Festredner as well. Schiller’s function as a Nationaldichter brought Germanistik inevitably close to public functions and politics in a unique way, although the political implications of scholarship on many other authors are obvious as well — we need mention only Heine, Büchner, Kleist, Georg Herwegh, Gustav Freytag, and, of course, all the exiles of 1933. In the speeches of 1955, the demands for a new image of Schiller are heard. Repeatedly, Schiller’s contradictions are stressed. Tragedy is a preferred topic, as is the opposition between the ideal and life. Some of the speakers take issue with the accusation that Schiller’s language is characterized by empty rhetoric and that his words have degenerated into trivialities. These accusations imply the need for a determination of who the real Schiller was, beyond the varnish and idealization of the monuments. But the real question is the following: can we still relate to Schiller’s words? Can the works of Friedrich Schiller in any way help us in our own time and with our own miseries? Although Schiller scholars have underscored the importance of a more careful adherence to the textual evidence and stressed Schiller the writer instead of Schiller the tragic hero, they unanimously seek

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guidance in life from his words and works. Schiller, applauded or rejected, had to be more than just a writer. The inevitable comparison with Goethe remained typical of all speeches, although the question arose, here and there, that Schiller should first be considered in his own right. Even in the collections of the Reden im Gedenkjahr 1959 it is clear that there was “der Wille zu einer neuen Begegnung mit Schiller” (Zeller, 1959, 7). The commemorations were more academic and subdued than in 1955, just as they had been fifty years earlier in 1909. The references to the present and to the two Germanys were in evidence, of course, when Hans Mayer in “Dem Wahren, Guten, Schönen” (Schiller 1959, 159–69) stressed that Dannecker’s Schiller monument was “eine fragwürdige Harmonisierung des Menschen Friedrich Schiller” (161) and emphasized the tensions and antinomies. The West considers Schiller a phenomenon of the past: “Schiller lebt als ein Gerücht” (165). For Mayer’s society — the GDR — however, it should be different: “Schiller ist zu groß, als daß er irgendeiner Beschönigung bedürfte. Wir wollen ihn weder umdeuten noch als ein bloßes Gerücht betrachten, sondern mit ihm leben: mit seinen Spannungen und in einem Zustand lebendiger Spannung zwischen ihm und uns” (165). Schiller was not far away from his late antagonist, Bertolt Brecht: “Will Brecht die Verhältnisse ändern, um den Menschen zu befreien, will Schiller den Menschen ändern, seiner Freiheit zuliebe” (168). Brecht’s Heilige Johanna recognized that it was not enough to be good; one had to create “eine gute Welt.” And Schiller can help: “Unser Leben mit Schiller geht nicht zu Ende, sondern beginnt erst” (169). This is Schiller as an eingreifender Dichter — the other extreme is the conclusion of Emil Staiger’s speech “Schillers Größe” (293–309): “Sein ganzes heroisches Leben und Schaffen verkündet mit unverweslicher Schrift: Hier hat ein sterblicher Mensch in schwerester Prüfung die Not der Welt überwunden” (309). However, more typical is the speech by Dolf Sternberger, who discusses the political Schiller without asking about his relevance for the present, and the speech by Gerhard Storz, the Schiller scholar, which makes us forget that he happened to be cultural minister of BadenWürttemberg. There is nothing “official” in Storz’s speech; he does not claim Schiller for his state or appropriate him for his own political viewpoint, but appears as a Schiller scholar with academic credentials, yet with a persuasive, non-academic style, one who is concerned with the enduring beauty and value of Schiller’s work. The American volume Schiller 1759/1959: Commemorative American Studies, edited by John R. Frey, provides a telling example of the effect of anniversaries. The first sentence of Frey’s foreword underscores the significance of the edition. “It has been more than fifty years since anything even vaguely resembling this undertaking appeared on the American scene” (v). The previous undertakings had been products of the year 1905. Frey’s Schiller volume is demonstratively apolitical and offers no reference to the


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situation of German Studies in the United States at the time. Yet it is a powerful demonstration of the viability of Germanistik and, before the momentous changes of the sixties with their influx of German Germanists, a manifesto, as it were, again carefully understated, of the caliber of intellectual acumen and scholarly competence of the old guard, as exemplified by names like Harold Jantz, Henry Hatfield, Hermann Weigand, and Walter Silz, together with immigrants like Oskar Seidlin, Melitta Gerhard, Helmut Rehder, and Hans Jaeger. The emphasis here lies on theoretical problems and philological questions, of which Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen (On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, 1795) is the central text. Only Harold Jantz’s examination of the “Nadowessiers Totenlied” indicates an American connection. Frey’s bibliography shows the continuity of the scholarly interest in Schiller, but one curious item should be noted. It claims Thomas Mann’s speech on Schiller of 1955 for American Schiller research, since it was published in English translation in the Chicago Review 11 (1957): 3–18. Since then, North American scholarship has gone on to develop new approaches and ideas in close interdependence with German scholarship. In 1959, the emphasis shifted from commemoration to scholarship. It was the year of the synthesizing monographs, Friedrich Schiller by Benno von Wiese, Gerhard Storz’s Der Dichter Friedrich Schiller, and a revised edition of Reinhard Buchwald’s Schiller: Leben und Werk. These three books, as Wolfgang Paulsen put it, did not duplicate each other, “sondern im Gegenteil [einander] auf fruchbarste ergänzen; daß sie eine fortlaufende dreifache Spiegelung desselben literarischen Komplexes ermöglichen, wie das wohl kaum irgendwo in der Literatur wieder auf ähnliche Weise der Fall ist” (Paulsen, 384). Remarkably, all three books, which are the result of many years of research and thought, were begun and found their first form in the 1930s; their authors continued their research in subsequent books and articles. In their 1959 versions, they attempt to bridge the gap of 1945 from a new perspective in order to preserve what was important about Schiller scholarship during the Nazi years. In his Forschungsbericht, Paulsen was able to summarize the situation of Schiller scholarship and Schiller commemorations in a manner that would be hard to duplicate today. Bernhard Zeller’s Friedrich Schiller: Eine Bildbiographie had appeared a year earlier, in 1958. Emil Staiger’s Friedrich Schiller of 1967 can be regarded as a late response to these books. Since then, Schiller scholarship has been produced in books on more specific topics and shorter studies. The book by Steven Martinson, Harmonious Tensions. The Writings of Friedrich Schiller, 1996, is a rare exception. Shorter introductions have been offered by Gert Ueding, Friedrich Schiller, 1990, and Helmut Koopmann, Friedrich Schiller. Eine Einführung, 1988; Koopmann is the author of the two-volume Friedrich Schiller in the Sammlung Metzler. Two recent

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books treat the drama of Schiller: Karl S. Guthke, Schillers Dramen. Idealismus und Skepsis, 1994, and Lesley Sharpe, Friedrich Schiller: Drama, Thought and Politics, 1991.

Scholarship after 1959 As Koopmann notes in his exhaustive Forschungsgeschichte (published in Schiller-Handbuch, 809–932), essay collections (Sammelwerke) play an important role in the scholarship of the last several decades. The anniversaries, particularly 1959, had called for new perspectives on the works of Schiller, beyond political image-making. Equally, the three books by von Wiese, Storz, and Buchwald challenged the scholars to new responses. The scholarly re-examination eventually included all aspects of his oeuvre, as summarized in the Schiller-Handbuch, but some parts attracted special attention. One of them was the significance of Schiller’s early readings and his “pre-Kantian” philosophy and poetology. Benno von Wiese had drawn attention to this part of Schiller’s life, and numerous studies followed, leading to Wolfgang Riedel’s acclaimed book Die Anthropologie des jungen Schiller (1985). Still, there remains a sort of dichotomy between Schiller’s early plays and his later, “classical” work, as David Pugh makes clear in his survey of the reception of Schiller’s early works (Pugh, 2000). A considerable number of scholars, among them Helmut Koopmann and Steven D. Martinson, have questioned the central importance of Schiller’s readings of Kant for his later writings and pleaded for the continuity of his thought from the Karlsschule to the end of his career. Consequently, the writings emerging from the “Kantian years” have been scrutinized with a new vigor, above all the Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen, for example, by Lesley Sharpe in the present volume. In this case, as in others, theoretical interest is combined with political questions: Schiller’s alleged initial enthusiasm for the French Revolution and his aversion against a republic that executed a king is thoroughly re-examined. As far as the classical plays are concerned, Wallenstein holds its fascination on researchers who have also questioned in a more general way the interdependencies between Schiller’s poetological treatises and his plays. Are these plays really exemplifications of his theories on tragedy and the sublime? How significant is the tradition of rhetoric for Schiller’s poems and plays? Also, which transformations in style and structure are evident from Wallenstein to Wilhelm Tell? Schiller’s last year of production, the Demetrius fragment, and some of his dramatic projects have attracted new attention, and the thesis of an impending turn to realism in the case of Demetrius has found new adherents. The 1970s brought with them a fundamental critique of the concept of Klassik, to the point of being called a mere “Klassik-Legende,” as in the title of Reinhold Grimm and Jost Hermand’s volume of 1971. During this


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time of iconoclastic attitudes, several projects to write new histories of German literature were undertaken, and they called for a new definition of the Goethe period. Typically, these projects were undertaken not by individual scholars but by groups, and the same was true of the new assessments of Schiller’s life and works (Koopmann, 1982). Helmut Koopmann noted that comprehensive books on Schiller were written abroad rather than in Germany at that time. Later examples of this trend are Steven D. Martinson’s Harmonious Tensions: The Writings of Friedrich Schiller (1996), and Lesley Sharpe’s Friedrich Schiller: Drama, Thought, and Politics (1991). A sign of the times is the more detached tone and perspective of Dieter Borchmeyer in his introduction to his book Weimarer Klassik of 1980. The continuing reverberations of the Klassik critique can, however, be felt in many contributions of the 1980s, for instance in the collection of essays Verlorene Klassik? of 1986, edited by Wolfgang Wittkowski. With the traditional concept of the Dichter having been rejected by living German poets and writers, and the overwhelming dominance of the example of Goethe had weakened, Schiller’s language and approach to literary production could be seen in a different light. Criticism did not have to compare Schiller to Goethe to discover certain faults, and it did not have to downgrade Goethe to applaud Schiller’s achievements. A new emphasis on teaching the classics in the universities led to the publications of shorter introductions to Schiller’s life and works, for example Gert Ueding’s Friedrich Schiller (1990), Helmut Koopmann’s Friedrich Schiller: Eine Einführung (1988), and the two-volume Friedrich Schiller in the Sammlung Metzler, also by Koopmann. There seemed to be a remarkable coincidence: as Schiller research has become more scholarly and abstract and more distant from public debates, performances of Schiller plays no longer conform to the norms and prescriptions of traditional Bildung, and theater directors and scholars have to communicate in a new way. The theaters no longer play for classes of Gymnasium students and their teachers. This detachment from a cultural tradition during the last decades began with the idea of keeping the classics alive by shocking the audience. This aggressive and “dictatorial” attitude among directors, also called “Regietheater,” manipulated the texts in an iconoclastic manner. Examples of this are: Hans Hollmann’s production of Kabale und Liebe at the Schiller-Theater Berlin in 1969 (Piedmont, 86–89); Wilfried Minks’s production of Maria Stuart in Bremen in 1972 (Piedmont, 225–29); Claus Peymann’s production of Die Räuber in Stuttgart in 1975 (Piedmont, 53–56); and Hansgünther Heyme’s production of Don Carlos in Stuttgart in 1979 (Piedmont, 142–46). This phase had to pass and yield to productions with less aggressively dictatorial directors. However, they did create a place for “non-classical” versions. One example is the production of Kabale und Liebe at the Schauspiel Konstanz in 1983 under the direction of Markwart Müller-Elmau. Gerhard Stadelmaier writes in Theater heute: “So wird aus

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einer tragisch-unmöglichen Liebesgeschichte die Geschichte von der komischen Unmöglichkeit der Liebe” (Piedmont, 105). Kabale und Liebe turns into a tragicomedy with Ferdinand’s rash temperament and the melodramatic fifth act. Reinhart Baumgart, writing in Der Spiegel on Alexander Lang’s 1983 Don Carlos at the Munich Kammerspiele, comments similarly: “Da tobte eine Handvoll empfindungsseliger und — wütiger junger Menschen gegen ein starres, vom Mißtrauen aller gegen alle verdüstertes Lebenssystem. Lauscher sind in allen Nischen und Ecken postiert. Gerüchte und Intrigen hecheln nach Opfern. Orwell als rasend exekutierter Comic Strip — ein Orwell in Versen und von Schiller?” (Piedmont, 151). According to Peter Iden, writing in Theater heute on Hansgünter Heyme’s Wilhelm Tell in Stuttgart in 1984, “Heymes Inszenierung ist skeptisch gegenüber dem republikanischen Traum Schillers. Jedoch ist diese Skepsis nicht radikal, sie läßt noch Raum auch für Hoffnungen. Die Frage, mit der sie konfrontiert, heißt: Wo stehen wir jetzt?” (Piedmont, 275). This seemed to reflect the mood at the beginning of Helmut Kohl’s government. In other words, theaters seem to have few scruples in refashioning Schiller’s plays in the style of the day. To be sure, this can uncover new aspects of his texts. However, it often tends to undermine Schiller’s rhetoric and reduce the message to either an entirely political or completely private event. It is clear that the German-speaking stage cannot do without its Klassiker — including Goethe, Kleist, Grillparzer, even Hebbel. Nevertheless, it would like them to be different. This is particularly true for Schiller. Whereas Shakespeare, Büchner, and Brecht speak directly to today’s audiences, Schiller is no Shakespeare. He cannot be avoided, and that seems in itself to present the unending challenge of “de-Schillerizing” Schiller.

Schiller in Fiction Given the enormous popular, critical, political, and cultural attention Schiller has received over the centuries, it is surprising that he has not been terribly attractive to writers as a character in plays and novels. In the 1840s, Heinrich Laube’s play Die Karlsschüler (1847) and Hermann Kurz’s novel Schillers Heimatjahre (1843) established the character of the young Schiller that dominated most Schiller fiction. Thomas Mann’s Schwere Stunde of 1909 remained an exception in modern German literature. The figure of Schiller seemed more appropriate for historical fiction, as exemplified by Walter von Molo’s four-volume work Friedrich Schiller (1912–1916). Dramas and stories based on Schiller’s life seemed to echo the celebrations of 1905 and 1909, where enthusiasm crowded out critical judgment, and Schiller biographies destined for a larger audience during that period was hardly different in style and content from the historical fiction. Characteristically, Schiller remains a figure in the realm between fiction (or myth) and


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history. Schiller, the rebellious and idealistic youth, appealed to the Jugendbewegung and political youth organizations of all persuasions. Another spurt of Schiller fiction, with a nationalistic accent, occurred during the Nazi period. Schiller as a dramatic and fictional hero seems not to have survived the division of 1945. The selection of poems on and about Schiller offered by Norbert Oellers (473–502) is characterized, with few exceptions, by the overwhelming attraction of Schiller’s own style and rhetoric: his eulogists must have found it impossible to avoid a distinct Schiller tone. Exceptions are Conrad Ferdinand Meyer and post-1945 poets like Walter Höllerer and Georg Maurer — although here traces of Hölderlin may be detected. Schiller’s fictional image has remained that of the youthful rebel, of the aspiring poet and playwright, in spite of his classification as a Klassiker. Friedrich Hölderlin, another German writer and poet whose image has generated many fictional accounts, came into contact with Schiller during his time in Jena in 1795, but Schiller appeared distant and condescending to Hölderlin, and therefore, in accounts of Hölderlin’s life, Schiller appears in a rather negative light (as does Goethe). Thus, there are two faces of Schiller in the German imagination. While Hölderlin is a poet whose memory is preserved with an aura of other-worldliness, this aura is denied to the memory of Schiller: he is seen either as the rebellious youth or as the “cold” and distant Klassiker.

Das klassische Erbe Looking back on the twentieth century, the high degree in which the image of Schiller the man and his texts were enmeshed in the vicissitudes of European history is quite evident. However, the reception of both Goethe and Schiller, and their frequent comparison, reflect the Germans’ struggle with their cultural heritage and the ideals of Humanität, Weltbürgertum, and Freiheit that they had associated with the classical period. The Weimar Klassik was not only the pride of the Germans, and their justification to feel culturally equal to other Europeans; it was also the orientation point for Germany’s Einheit and Freiheit. Whatever political attitudes were attributed to Schiller, the reception of his work has never ceased to be political, although never exclusively so. Although Schiller and Goethe personified German Weltbürgertum, Schiller’s name continued to be associated with the word “Nation”: Nationaldichter, Nationalausgabe, Nationalmuseum, Nationale Gedenkstätten, Nationalfeiertag. If the Germans had been capable of creating a national holiday for a poet and writer, it would have been Schiller. He alone received the attribute “Größe,” and his works lend themselves to a festive mood that transports people beyond themselves and the times in which they are living.

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With the unhappy associations that the word “Nation” acquired during the twentieth century, it became an arduous task during the last decades of the century to disengage Schiller from his monumental past. On the one hand, Benno von Wiese’s book maintained unwavering reverence for a hero, but on the other hand it was the signal for decades of critical re-examination. In the foreword to his book, von Wiese writes that anyone who tries to narrate Schiller’s life and interpret his work, “um die Gestalt als ein Ganzes von neuem sichtbar zu machen” (v), will face one major difficulty: “Sie besteht in der bis heute unausrottbar gebliebenen Verkennung und Verfälschung, die Schiller durch die Nachwelt gefunden hat. Mehr noch als die Kritik seiner Gegner hat ihm das Lob seiner Verehrer geschadet” (v). Von Wiese’s book is directed against this “falschen Glanz” and “Götzendienst an Schiller,” the latter of which, he says, “scheint mir jener unwahre Mythos zu sein, der bereits vor hundert Jahren entstand und auch heute weiter nachwirkt” (v). In other words, Benno von Wiese set out to revise the Schiller myth that had literally been fixed in stone and bronze through the national celebration of 1859. He, too, wanted to claim the cultural heritage of “our” Schiller. But he wanted a human Schiller in his own historical and regional context, and it should be anything but a distant monument: “Der Verfasser dieser Gesamtdarstellung wollte sich selbst und seinen Lesern einen unmittelbaren und unverstellten Zugang zu Schiller” (vi). Purely scholarly discussions on the finer points should take second place to a narration and interpretation (Deutung), which can be understood as explanation and commentary. This does not mean a popular biography but confrontation with Schiller’s own words in his works and letters. Whatever the hermeneutic problems may be, the intention is clear: leave the “Nationaldichter” behind and confront Schiller “without his nation,” that is, the man, his ideas, and his creations. There is one preconceived notion, however: “In allen Phasen seines Lebens war Schiller stets der gleiche, jedoch auf einer immer wieder verwandelten Stufe” (vii). During the various periods of his life, and in his many activities, as a poet, playwright, philosopher, historian, Schiller was always the same: there is unity in diversity. Since 1959, numerous studies of Schiller have been written from a multitude of perspectives. Nonetheless, they tend to agree on these two points: to view Schiller in his own right and to seek unity in diversity, even when contradictions in his thinking must be acknowledged. The move away from celebration to investigation has, understandably, disclosed more problematic aspects of his work than before. Instead of comprising some preordained harmony, Schiller’s plays are examined for their disharmonies and for their all-too-human aspects. A two-tiered criticism is at work: on one level, the idea of a German Klassik has been thoroughly scrutinized, baring the limits of classicism as representation and of literature as representing German culture; on another level, the question has been asked how classical, and especially, how classicistic (not Romantic) Schiller really was, that is, where he


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stood in relation to Enlightenment and Romanticism. Thus, on the one hand, a revision of Schiller’s place in literary history — and more generally in cultural history — is taking place. On the other hand, Schiller’s specific ideas and structures are being more thoroughly analyzed in order to discover his true Gestalt — if that is possible. A motto for many of these investigations could be: Would the real Schiller please stand up? Yet theater performances and school instruction continue to emphasize the relevance of the texts for our age and for a particular group and audience, rather than for their specific aesthetic structures and the meaning that Schiller himself intended. In the post-postmodern climate of the beginning of the twenty-first century, thoroughly pragmatic as it is, and yet searching for assistance and orientation from the supersensory realm, Schiller’s texts are being read differently. To take stock of the confusing cultural heritage of the twentieth century as far as Schiller reception is concerned, more research is needed on performances of his plays and their reception; on the use (and misuse) of Schiller texts in schools and the image of Schiller created by these readings; on the public functions of Germanistik (and German Studies) and the intertwinement of the political, the festive, and the “official”; and on the academic reception of Schiller in the German-speaking countries and abroad, as well as on the interdisciplinary aspects of Schiller research and reception in general. Such areas of research require sociological methods and approaches beyond any ideologies and political agendas. Schiller’s life and work is the prototype for a multilayered reception of literature. After over forty years of specialized research, the time may have come, as it had around 1959, for a synthesis, that is, for synthesizing monographs that bring the Gestalt of Schiller, the man and his work, back into the grasp of interested readers and viewers, as Benno von Wiese attempted to do in the late fifties — a different Gestalt, yet possibly with some similar basic traits: unity in diversity in a different mode. As far as his texts are concerned, Schiller is a type of writer who is traditionally less valued by the Germans than a writer of the Goethean type. Schiller’s style is rhetorical and calculated, while inventive. While Schiller’s texts are rich in invention, they do not show, as Goethe’s do, those half-conscious intuitions that turn the poet into a medium for creation rather than a creator who demonstrates that he is a competent craftsman. Schiller himself was most aware of this difference, as his famous letter to Goethe of August 23, 1794 shows. Although it is often misleading to follow a writer’s own interpretations of his texts, it is a fundamental requirement to keep this difference in mind for an understanding and evaluation of Schiller’s texts — which has been much more carefully observed by foreign critics than it has been by German ones. Despite all the research that has been conducted on the theoretical aspects of Schiller’s work during the last half of the twentieth century, the specific character of Schiller’s genius and works are still in need of more clarification — and liberation from cultural prejudices.

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Works Cited Albert, Claudia, ed. Deutsche Klassiker im Nationalsozialismus: Schiller, Kleist, Hölderlin. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1994. Barner, Wilfried, Christine Lubkoll, Ernst Osterkamp, and Ulrich Ott, ed. Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft. Stuttgart: Kröner, 1959. Borchmeyer, Dieter. Die Weimarer Klassik: Eine Einführung. 2 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1980. Buchwald, Reinhard. Schiller: Leben und Werk. 4th rev. ed. Wiesbaden: Insel, 1959. Cysarz, Herbert. Schiller. Halle/Saale: Max Niemeyer, 1934. Fabricius, Hans. Schiller als Kampfgenosse Hitlers: Nationalismus in Schillers Dramen. Bayreuth: NS Kultur-Verlag, 1932. Frey, John R., ed. Schiller 1759/1959: Commemorative American Studies. Illinois Studies in Language and Literature vol. 46. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1959. Fricke, Gerhard. Der religiöse Sinn der Klassik Schillers: Zum Verhältnis von Idealismus und Christentum. 2nd ed. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1968. Grimm, Reinhold, and Jost Hermand, eds. Die Klassik-Legende. Frankfurt: Athenäum, 1971. Guthke, Karl S. Schillers Dramen: Idealismus und Skepsis. Tübingen and Basel: A. Francke, 1994. Hagen, Wolfgang. Die Schiller-Verehrung in der Sozialdemokratie: Die ideologische Formation proletarischer Kulturpolitik vor 1914. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1997. Jonas, Gisela, ed. Schiller-Debatte 1905: Dokumente zur Literaturtheorie und kritik der revolutionären deutschen Sozialdemokratie. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1988. Kommerell, Max. Der Dichter als Führer in der deutschen Klassik: Klopstock, Herder, Goethe, Schiller, Jean Paul, Hölderlin. 3rd ed. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1982. Koopmann, Helmut. “Forschungsgeschichte.” In Schiller-Handbuch, 809–932. ———. Friedrich Schiller. 2nd ed. 2 vols. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1977. ———. Friedrich Schiller: Eine Einführung. Munich and Zurich: Artemis, 1988. ———. Schiller-Forschung 1970–1980: Ein Bericht. Marbach: Deutsches Literaturarchiv-Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, 1982. ———, ed. Schiller-Handbuch. Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner, 1998. Ludendorff, Mathilde. Der ungesöhnte Frevel an Luther, Lessing, Mozart und Schiller: Ein Beitrag zur deutschen Kulturgeschichte. Munich: Ludendorff, 1936. Mann, Thomas. Versuch über Schiller. Berlin: S. Fischer, 1955.


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Martinson, Steven D. Harmonious Tensions: The Writings of Friedrich Schiller. Newark: U of Delaware P; London: Associated UP, 1996. Oellers, Norbert. Fünfzig Jahre Schiller-Nationalausgabe und kein Ende? Marbach, 1991. ———, ed. Schiller — Zeitgenosse aller Epochen: Dokumente zur Wirkungsgeschichte Schillers in Deutschland. Part II: 1860–1966. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1966. Paulsen, Wolfgang. “Friedrich Schiller 1955–1959. Ein Literaturbericht.” Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft 6 (1962): 369–464. Piedmont, Ferdinand. “Tendenzen moderner Schiller-Aufführungen 1965–1975.” Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft 21 (1977): 247–73. Pugh, David. Schiller’s Early Dramas: A Critical History. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2000. Riedel, Wolfgang. Die Anthropologie des jungen Schiller. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1985. Ruppelt, Georg. Schiller im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland: Der Versuch einer Gleichschaltung. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1979. Schiller in unserer Zeit: Beiträge zum Schillerjahr 1955. Ed. Schiller-Komitee 1955. Weimar: Volksverlag, 1955. Sharpe, Lesley. Friedrich Schiller: Drama, Thought and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. Staiger, Emil. Friedrich Schiller. Zurich: Atlantis, 1967. Storz, Gerhard. Der Dichter Friedrich Schiller. Stuttgart: Klett, 1959. Ueding, Gert. Friedrich Schiller. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1990. Wiese, Benno von. Friedrich Schiller. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1959. Wittkowski, Wolfgang, ed. Verlorene Klassik? Ein Symposium. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1986. Zeller, Bernhard. Friedrich Schiller: Eine Bildbiographie. Munich: Kindler, 1958. ———, ed. Klassiker in finsteren Zeiten. Eine Ausstellung des Deutschen Literaturarchivs im Schiller-Nationalmuseum. Marbach/Neckar, 1983. ———, ed. Schiller: Reden im Gedenkjahr 1955. Stuttgart: Klett, 1955. ———, ed. Schiller: Reden im Gedenkjahr 1959. Stuttgart: Klett, 1961.

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Contributors DIETER BORCHMEYER is Professor of German Literature at the University of Heidelberg and President of the Bavarian Academy of the Fine Arts in Munich. His publications cover the whole range of German literature from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. His primary focus is on Weimar classicism (Goethe and Schiller), Thomas Mann, and the interplay between music and literature (musical drama, Richard Wagner, Mozart, literaryhistorical opera studies). Among numerous other publications, he is the author of Goethe: Der Zeitbürger (1999) and Drama and the World of Richard Wagner (2003). In addition to various editorships, he has been featured in broadcast documentaries and television programs. OTTO DANN is Professor of Modern History at the University of Cologne. His scholarly interests include research on the nation, political theory, intellectual history, Herder, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and Schiller. He co-edited (with Norbert Oellers) Friedrich Schiller: Universalhistorische Schriften (1995), edited the volume Friedrich Schiller: Universalhistorische Schriften (1999) and wrote the notes to Schiller’s Historische Schriften und Erzählungen (2001/2002). Among his many publications are Nationalism in the Age of the French Revolution (1988, with John Dinwiddy), Nation und Nationalismus in Deutschland (3rd ed. 1996), and “Schiller” (Deutsche Erinnerungsorte II, 2001). KARL S. GUTHKE is Kuno Francke Professor of German Art and Culture at Harvard University, Corresponding Fellow of the British Institute of Germanic Studies, and a member of Sidney Sussex and Magdalene Colleges at Cambridge University. His publications include Schillers Dramen (2nd expanded ed., 2005), Trails in No-Man’s Land, The Last Frontier, Last Words, The Gender of Death, and Epitaph Culture in the West (Sprechende Steine, 2005), as well as several volumes of essays. WALTER HINDERER is Professor of German at Princeton University. His work on Schiller includes Von der Idee des Menschen: Über Friedrich Schiller (1998) and Der Mensch in der Geschichte: Ein Versuch über Schillers “Wallenstein” (1980). He has also edited or co-edited two collections of essays on Schiller. He has conducted advanced research at the Institute for Advanced Study (Wissenschaftskolleg) in Berlin and the Rosenzweig Research Center for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History at Hebrew University. He has been awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany and the Alexander von Humboldt Prize.

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ROLF-PETER JANZ is Professor and Chair of German at the Free University of Berlin. His scholarly interests include Romanticism, fin de siecle, aesthetics, and alterity (Faszination und Schrecken des Fremden, 2001). He has also published a commentated edition of Schiller’s complete theoretical work (Deutscher Klassikerverlag, 1992) and a book on the anthropological and aesthetic aspects of vertigo (Schwindelerfahrungen, 2003). WULF KOEPKE is Distinguished Professor of German, emeritus, at Texas A&M University. His publications are concentrated on German literature of the later eighteenth and earlier twentieth centuries. His published work includes monographs, textbooks, edited volumes, and numerous articles on, among others, Herder, Jean Paul Richter, Döblin, Feuchtwanger, exile literature, and Max Frisch. Koepke is co-editor of the Herder Yearbook and of the yearbook Exilforschung. He was honored by a Festschrift (1998) and the Herder-Medaille (2004). J. M. VAN DER LAAN is Professor of German at Illinois State University. He has written extensively on German literature of the eighteenth century. His research currently focuses on Goethe and Faust as well as the intersections of the humanities, the natural sciences, and technology. Van der Laan’s most recent publications include “Faust and Textual Chaos” (2001), “Temptation and Seduction in the Technological Milieu” (2004), and “Goethe, Hesiod and Yeats on Progress” (2004). STEVEN D. MARTINSON is Professor of German Studies and a member of the Associated Faculty in Religious Studies at the University of Arizona. His study Harmonious Tensions: The Writings of Friedrich Schiller (Delaware UP, 1996) received a Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award. Martinson is Vice President and President-Elect of the Lessing Society (2006). He is a recipient of a research fellowship and Wiederaufnahme of the same through the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany. NORBERT OELLERS is Professor of German, emeritus, at the University of Bonn. He is the editor of the Schiller Nationalausgabe and the editor of numerous volumes, including historical-critical editions of the work of Goethe, Lenau, and Else Lasker-Schüler. The collection of his essays, Friedrich Schiller: Zur Modernität eines Klassikers, was edited by Michael Hofmann (1996). 2005: Schiller. Elend der Geschichte, Glanz der kunst. DAVID PUGH is Professor of German and Chair of the Department of German at Queens University, Kingston, Ontario. His publications on Schiller include Dialectic of Love: Platonism in Schiller’s Aesthetics (1996) and Schiller’s Early Dramas: A Critical History (2000). LESLEY SHARPE studied at the University of Oxford. After postdoctoral work in Hamburg she was appointed to a lectureship at the University of Exeter, where she is now Professor. Her research interests lie in the field of eighteenth-century German literature with a particular emphasis on the

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work of Schiller, on whom she has written three monographs, including Friedrich Schiller: Drama, Thought and Politics (Cambridge UP, 1991), and on women writers. She recently edited the Cambridge Companion to Goethe (Cambridge UP, 2002), co-edited a volume on gender and canonicity, and is currently working on the German theater repertoire around 1800. WERNER VON STRANSKY-STRANKA-GREIFENFELS is Associate Professor of German, emeritus, at Stockholm University. He has published three volumes on Die Räuber (1998–2001). He is also a musicologist who focuses on the classical period. Following his retirement, he became responsible for language education in the Swedish Military School System.

Index Abel, Jakob Friedrich, 3, 29, 32–34 Abel, Jakob Friedrich, works by: Dissertation de origine characteris animi, 32 Abrams, M. H., 56 absolutism, 2, 125, 130, 149, 217, 219 Abusch, Alexander, 285 act of writing, 3, 10, 12–13 Adolphus, Gustavus, 80, 81–82, 84 Aeschylus, 62, 193 Aeschylus, works by: Eumenides, 62 aesthetic anthropology, 40 aesthetic condition, 37, 39, 158–60 aesthetic culture, 10–12, 38–39 aesthetic education, 11, 14, 185, 248 aesthetic mood, 39 aesthetic public space, 190 aesthetic state, 27, 30, 35, 39, 40, 60, 62, 147, 160, 161, 225 aesthetician, 13, 179 aesthetics, 11–14, 19–20, 27–28, 30, 36–37, 39, 42–43, 51, 55, 62, 147–48, 150, 153, 155, 157, 164, 174, 180 Akte Buttlar, 91, 94, 99 Aladdin story, 91, 92, 106 Albrecht, Sophie, 17, 29, 31, 33–34, 70 Alcmene, 181 alienation, 21, 38, 152, 190, 275 Alt, Peter-André, 7, 8, 15, 20, 33, 35, 40, 217 Alt, Peter-André, works by: Schiller: Leben — Werk — Zeit, 20 Altenmuhr, 94–97 America, 4, 9, 283 American Revolutionary War, 90 American War of Independence, 248 anagnorisis, 204

ancien regime, 10 ancient Greece, 48, 56, 59–60, 62, 153 ancient Greek art, 57 ancients, 41, 50, 169, 174 Anderson, Adam, 73 animal world, 17 Anschauung, 7, 36 anthropological aesthetics, 11, 34, 40, 44 anthropology, 11, 28–30, 34, 36–37, 43, 214 anti-Jacobinism, 251 antiquity, 38, 41, 47–52, 54, 56, 58, 61–62, 75 Apokatastasis panton, 111 Arcadia, 231, 242 Ariosto, 57 aristocracy, 10–11, 117, 119–21, 130 Aristotle, 47, 51, 74, 157, 170, 191, 204 Aristotle, works by: Poetics, 51, 170, 191 Aristotelian golden mean, 10 Arnold, Gottfried, 107 art, 10, 12–14, 30, 39, 41–43, 48–49, 51–52, 57, 59, 60–62, 69, 74, 77, 79, 90, 132, 141, 147–51, 153, 157, 160–62, 170, 173, 175–76, 180, 182, 184–86, 191–93, 230, 232, 263, 274, 276 artist, 48, 57, 69, 149, 154, 161, 163, 172, 205 astrology, 194, 197 atonement, 13 Atreus, 193 Auerbach, Erich, 115–16, 130 Aufenanger, Jörg, 20 Aufenanger, Jörg, works by: Friedrich Schiller: Biographie, 20

318

INDEX

Aufmerksamkeit, 32, 217 Augustenburg letters, 148, 157 Augustinian dualism, 111 autonomy, 37, 42–43, 49, 118, 126–29, 131–32, 150, 156, 161, 170, 209, 227, 248 Baggesen, Jens, 148 Barbarossa, 94, 95 Barnouw, Jeffrey, 158 Baroque, 9, 17, 109, 113 base humanity, 12 battle of Vermanton, 235 Baumgart, Reinhart, 290 Baumgarten, Alexander, 11, 253 Baur, Eva Gesine, 22 Baur, Eva Gesine, works by: “Mein Geschöpf musst du sein”: Das Leben der Charlotte Schiller, 20 beautiful, 5, 40, 52, 90, 108, 131, 147, 149, 150, 155–58, 161, 163–64, 170, 172, 179, 184–85, 215, 248 beauty, 14, 31, 36–40, 108–9, 147–48, 150, 152–57, 163–64, 176, 180–82, 185, 186, 216, 225, 248, 286 Becher, Johannes, 283, 285 Beck, Adolf, 285 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 8, 273 Bellermann, Ludwig, 264 Benjamin, Johann Erhard, 10, 27, 85 Berghahn, Klaus, 18–19 Berghahn, Klaus, works by: Friedrich Schiller: Zur Geschichtlichkeit seines Werkes, 18; Schiller: Ansichten eines Idealisten, 19 Best, Alan, 258 Beulwitz, Karoline von, 100, 169 Bible, 75, 201 Bie, Oscar, 276 Bildung, 10, 11, 225, 289 Bildungsbürgertum, 282, 284 Bildungsgesellschaft, 70 Bildungstheater, 271 blank verse, 192 Böckmann, Paul, 122, 285 body, 3, 13, 16–17, 33, 213–16, 218–22, 225

Boerhaave, Hermann, 29 Bohemian revolt, 81 Bohemian Woods, 97 Boileau, Nicolas, 47, 57 Boileau, Nicolas, works by: L’art poétique, 47 book reviews, 10 Borchmeyer, Dieter, 20, 189–90, 200, 203, 206, 248–50, 289 Böttiger, Karl August, 254 Bougeant, Guillaume-Hyacinthe, 70 Bougeant, Guillaume-Hyacinthe, works by: Historie des guerres et des négoticiations qui précédènerent le Traité de Westphalie, 70 bourgeois tragedy, 116–17, 189–90 Boxberger, Rudolf, 68 Braemer, Edith, 247–49 Brecht, Bertolt, 27, 106, 271, 281–82, 286, 290 Büchmann, Georg, 280 Büchner, Georg, 271, 285, 290 Buchwald, Reinhard, 285, 287, 288 Buchwald, Reinhard, works by: Schiller: Leben und Werk, 287 Burdach, Konrad, 275 Burdach, Konrad, works by: “SchillerRede,” 275, 284 Bürger, Gottfried August, 36, 40, 49, 85, 160 Burke, Edmund, 206 Burschell, Friedrich, 5–7 Buttlar, Wilhelm von, 91, 94, 113 Camden House, 20 Cardinal Legate Giuliano Cesarini, 104 Carlyle, Thomas, 273 Caspar, Horst, 110, 279 Castle Altenmuhr, 95 Castle Mittelmuhr, 95 Castle Neuenmuhr, 95 Catholic church, 108 Catholicism, 108 Celts, 234 central force, 13 Chicago Review, 287 chorus, 8, 51, 59, 62, 111, 191, 228 Christian transcendence, 235

INDEX Christian values, 232 Christian virtues, 261 Chronicon Helveticum, 251 church, 140, 142 civilization, 53, 58, 60–61, 151–52, 163 classic tragedy, 192, 194 classical aesthetic, 48, 58 classical heritage, 274, 282 Classicism, 47, 55, 62, 108, 113, 199, 271, 281, 292 Claudius, Matthias, 17 Clavigo, 2 Cold War, 279 collective cultural memory, 197 condition humaine, 233 Consbruch, Johann Friedrich, 17 conscience, 121, 238–39, 251, 258, 262–64 Continuum German Library, 20 Conz, Karl Philipp, 91 Cotta, Johann, 3, 154, 171, 180; Cotta Verlag, 3, 214 Council in Constance, 100 Count Ernst Heinrich von Schimmelmann, 6, 148 courtly culture, 11 crisis, 4, 19, 82, 83, 121, 123, 142, 208, 213–14, 220, 225 critical philosophy, 3, 5, 7, 9, 13, 18, 29, 31, 67, 71, 73–74, 77, 79, 81, 85, 115, 129, 147–48, 159, 216, 218, 222, 233, 247, 274, 277, 279, 290, 292 crusades, 107, 235 cultural re-formation, 14 Cysarz, Herbert, 278 d’Arc, Jeanne, 233, 238, 242, 271, 280 Dalberg, Wolfgang Heribert von, 84, 137 dance, 54, 173, 174, 175 Darsow, Götz-Lothar, 20 das bürgerliche Trauerspiel, 116, 137 das Idealschöne, 155, 157 Das Weimarische Wochenblatt, 8

319

death, 11, 15–16, 18, 51, 81, 94, 101–2, 104–5, 107–8, 128, 138, 140, 142, 174, 181–82, 194, 199, 203–4, 213, 220–21, 224, 231, 239, 272–73, 277–79, 282–84 Declaration of Human and Citizens’ Rights, 75 Defenestration of Prague, 100–102 democracy, 75, 161 Denmark, 68 der ganze Mensch, 27 Der Große Schillerpreis, 280 Descartes, 30 Descartes, works by: De homine, 30 Deutsche Literaturzeitung, 278 Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, 280 Deutsche Schillerstiftung, 280 Deutschunterricht, 281 development, 14, 16, 28, 33, 35, 39–40, 61, 74,-75, 77, 79, 82, 85, 130–31, 142, 147, 151, 153, 161, 169, 215–16, 225, 231, 234, 236, 239 Dewhurst, Kenneth, 17, 31 dialectic, 52, 56, 61, 207–9 dignity, 12, 29, 37, 40, 51–52, 86, 131, 142, 144, 156, 158–59, 163, 170–71, 194, 218–19, 259 distich, 174, 184 disunity, 60–61 divine, 99, 235 domestic tragedy, 116, 117, 123, 137 dramatis personae, 74, 108, 216, 218, 233, 234 dramatist, 9, 78, 109, 263 dualism, 92, 108, 149, 154 Duchess Anna Amalia, 5 Duchess Franziska von Hohenheim, 2 Duke Augustenburg, 43 Duke Carl August, 4–6, 79, 154 Duke Friedrich Christian, 6, 10, 40 Duke Karl Eugen, 1–2, 11, 16, 91, 113, 149, 214 Duncan, Bruce, 119 Dutch history, 73 Dutch rebellion, 67 Duchy of Württemberg, 1

320

INDEX

Ebreo, Leone, 198, 201 Ebreo, Leone, works by: Dialoghi d’amore, 198 education, 1, 2, 4, 10–11, 14, 20, 34, 70, 72, 143, 147, 151, 154, 160–61, 163, 190, 238, 274 Eisner, Kurt, 273–74, 283 elegy, 15–16, 40, 49, 61, 62 Elysium, 175, 231, 242 emancipation, 27, 76, 126, 128, 129 emblematics, 109 Emperor Friedrich I, 94 Emperor Wilhelm I, 280 Engels, Friedrich, 283 Enlightenment, 9–10, 13, 27–29, 36, 38, 75, 77,-78, 85, 139, 150–52, 197, 199, 208–9, 218, 293 ennoblement, 11, 152, 159 Epic Theater, 192 Erfahrungsseelenkunde, 76 eros, 54 ethical state, 39, 160 ethics, 11, 20, 159 Eumenides, 62 Euripides, 50, 193 Euripides, works by: Iphigenia in Aulis, 50; The Phoenician Women, 50 Europe, 72, 77, 81, 85, 156, 208, 209 evil spirit, 235, 237 Expressionism, 281 fall of man, 27, 75 Fabricius, Hans, 278 Fabricius, Hans, works by: Schiller als Kampfgenosse Hitlers: Nationalsozialismus in Schillers Dramen, 278 Ferguson, Adam, 32, 34, 77 Fester, Richard, 68 Festspiel, 247, 253–55, 263, 282 Fetscher, Iring, 247 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 30, 42, 150, 154 Ficino, Marsilio, 54 Ficino, Marsilio, works by: De amore, 54 Figurenballet, 92 Fink, Gonthier-Louis, 247–51

First World War, 273 Fischer, Bernd, 115, 129, 130–31 Fischer, Friedrich Christoph Jonathan, 73 Flight motif, 17, 215 Formtrieb, 13, 35, 154, 160 Forster, Georg, 10 Foucault, Michael, 76 fragmentation, 20, 27, 30, 38, 55, 60 François-Poncet, André, 285 François-Poncet, André, works by: “Unser Mitbürger,” 285 free play, 39, 160 free state, 39, 43 free will, 32, 131, 159, 220 freedom, 11, 14, 17, 28, 32, 36–37, 39–40, 43, 49, 72, 75–76, 78–79, 81, 106–7, 122, 126–29, 131, 142–44, 148–49, 152, 157–61, 174–75, 196, 208, 219–20, 228, 248, 250, 253, 255, 263, 273–74, 283 freedom of thought, 181 Freemasons, 277 Freiherren von Lentersheim, 95 French culture, 11, 285 French Revolution, 11, 18, 40, 47, 75, 76, 79, 85, 150–52, 189, 206, 209, 228, 248–50, 273, 274, 281, 288 Frey, John R., 239, 286, 287 Frey, John R., works by: Schiller 1759/1959: Commemorative American Studies, 286 Freytag, Gustav, 285 Friedel, Egon, 276 Friedel, Egon, works by: Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit, 276 Fricke, Gerhard, 278 Fricke, Gerhard, works by: Der religiöse Sinn der Klassik Schillers: Zum Verhältnis von Idealismus und Christentum, 278 Friedrich Schiller — Der Triumph eines Genies, 272, 279 Frisch, Max, 248 Funk, Rittmeister Karl Willhelm Ferdinand, 12 Furies, 62, 237, 241

INDEX Garve, Christian, 32, 34, 42 Gatterer, Johann Christoph, 77 Gatterer, Johann Christoph, works by: Handbuch der Universalgeschichte, 77 Gedankenfreiheit, 280, 282, 284 Geflügelte Worte, 280 Geistesgeschichte, 277 gender roles, 213, 217 genius, 7, 52, 85, 115, 154, 184, 198, 228, 273, 285, 293 genres, 40, 41, 57, 116, 117, 130, 137, 148, 163 George, Stefan, 116, 278 Gerhard, Melitta, 287 German classical heritage, 18 German Classicism, 47, 113, 271–72, 280–81, 292 German cultural heritage, 274 German culture, 11, 14, 277–78, 292 German Democratic Republic (GDR), 274, 281–83, 286 German Germanists, 287 German immigrants, 273 German language, 8, 19 German nation, 82–83, 271 German Neoclassicism, 58 German Romanticism, 9 German scholarship, 287 Germanistik, 276, 277–78, 285, 287, 293 Germany, 2, 3, 4, 6, 9, 11, 20, 47, 49, 67, 74, 77, 83, 85, 147, 248, 271–74, 278–80, 283, 285, 289, 291 Gesamtkunstwerk, 248 Geschichtsdrama, 82, 254 Geschichtsschreiber, 83 Geschichtsschreibung, 82, 86 Gestalt, 155, 174, 273, 292, 293 Gibbon, Edward, 77 God, 15, 16, 29–31, 33, 39, 53, 104, 108, 124, 181, 184, 230–36, 240–41, 259, 262 Goebbels, Joseph, 277, 278 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 2, 4–8, 12, 18, 20, 50–52, 59, 68, 116,

321

150, 151–54, 169–71, 176, 184, 191–94, 197–98, 201–2, 205 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, works by: Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, Faust, 7, 192, 198–99, 201–2; “Glückliches Ereignis,” 153; Iphigenie auf Tauris, 50, 209–10; Märchen, 230; Urfaust, 198 Goethe-Gesellschaft, 277 Golden Age, 61, 184, 199, 203 Golden Age myth, 55, 61 golden section, 99, 108–9, 112 goldener Schnitt, 109 Göschen, Georg Joachim, 3–5, 67–68, 79–81 Göttliche Proportion, 112 grace, 29, 40, 51–52, 131, 156, 159, 163, 170 Graf von Regensburg, 97 Graham, Ilse Appelbaum, 119, 229, 230 Grappin, Pierre, 238, 285 grave, 15, 128 gravity, 17, 127, 181 Greek art, 48 Greek chorus, 59 Greek culture, 51–52, 54, 56 Greek gods, 53, 59 Greek Golden Age, 61 Greek mythology, 59 Greek nature, 57 Greek religion, 61 Greek sculpture, 56 Greek tragedy, 51–52, 59, 157, 191 Greek tragic drama, 59 Grimm, Reinhold, 288 Grotewohl, Otto, 283, 285 Grotius, Hugo, 73 Gruber, Johann Gottfried, 5, 213 Guthke, Karl S., 12, 19, 116–19, 124–25, 227, 247, 264, 288 Gymnasium, 272, 274, 280–81, 289 Haller, Albrecht von, 17, 29, 31, 33–34 Hamburgische Dramaturgie, 190 Hamlet, 140, 199, 202 Hammer, Stephanie, 21

322

INDEX

Hammer, Stephanie, works by: Schiller’s Wound. The Theater of Trauma from Crisis to Commodity, 21 Harlan, Veit, 277 harmonious tension, 214, 225 harmony, 13, 18, 35, 38, 51, 55, 62, 90, 99, 108, 115, 131, 147, 149, 152, 156–59, 163–64, 174–75, 180, 200, 214–15, 224, 231, 252–54, 263, 292 Hart, Julius, 274, 275 Hatfield, Henry, 48, 287 Hauptmann, Gerhart, 104, 271, 275 healing, 8, 12, 13, 106, 110, 148, 222, 224–25 health, 224 Hebbel, Friedrich, 116, 290 Hebbel, Friedrich, works by: Maria Magdelena, 116 Hebe, 181, 185 Hecker, Max, 277 Hegel, Georg W. F., 7, 196, 208 Hegel, Georg W. F., works by: Ästhetik, 196 Heine, Heinrich, 205, 285 Heitner, Robert, 119, 131 Hellen, Eduard von der, 279 Helvetic Republic, 248 Helvetius, 32 Heracles idyll, 231 Herbst, Hildburg, 247 Herchenhan, Johann Christian, 203 Herchenhan, Johann Christian, works by: Geschichte Albrechts von Wallenstein, 203 Hercules, 53,-54, 172, 174, 181, 185 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 4, 5, 11, 27, 34, 42, 48, 56, 77, 150 Herder, Johann Gottfried, works by: Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität, 27; Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, 11, 77 Hermand, Jost, 288 Herren of Lentersheim, 94 Herren von Mur, 94, 95 Herrmann, Gernot, 239

Herwegh, Georg, 285 Herzogliche württembergische Militärakadmie/Herzogliche Karls-Hohe-Schule, 2, 15, 149 Hesiod, 55 Heuer, Fritz, 200, 206 Heuss, Theodor, 284 Heyme, Hansgünther, 289–90 Heyme, Hansgünther, works by: Wilhelm Tell, 290 Hiebel, Hans Helmut, 119 Hinderer, Walter, 11, 18, 19, 20, 27, 34, 42, 82, 220, 249 Hinderer, Walter, works by: Schillers Dramen: Neue Interpretationen, 18 Hippocrates, 92, 109, 110, 112–13 historian, 9, 28, 44, 67–69, 71, 73–74, 76–78, 81, 83, 86, 140, 153, 169, 170, 179, 185, 193, 276, 292 historical narration, 68–71, 74, 173 historical novels, 74 historiography, 70, 73, 76, 77, 81–82, 84 Historischer Calender für Damen, 5, 68, 79, 80–81, 84 history, 5, 8–10, 15, 17, 19–20, 28, 34–36, 40, 43, 55–57, 60–62, 67–84, 86, 89, 97, 100–101, 103, 107, 116–17, 132, 137, 152, 163, 169, 170, 172–73, 180, 185, 193, 203, 208, 210, 214, 216–20, 223–25, 227–28, 230–31, 247–48, 271, 274, 277–78, 284, 291, 293 Hitler, Adolph, 247, 278–79 Hofmann, Michael, 20, 227 Hofmann, Michael, works by: Schiller: Epoche-WerkWirkung, 20 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 275–76 Hohenasperg, 16 Höllerer, Walter, 291 Hollmann, Hans, 289 Holy Roman Empire, 72, 80, 82–83, 101 Homann map, 97, 99 Homer, 57

INDEX Homer, works by: Odyssey, 50 Horace, 203 Hoven, Friedrich Wilhelm von, 2, 29, 94 Huber, Ludwig Ferdinand, 67–68, 70, 73 human being, 2, 12, 15, 17, 21, 29, 30, 32–33, 35, 37–39, 42–43, 75, 103, 111, 128, 138, 143, 152, 162, 172, 175–76, 180–82, 198, 222, 225, 233–34, 242–43, 255 human culture, 41 human nature, 217, 230, 238 humane humanity, 8–9, 14–15, 19 humanist, 164, 230, 232, 243 Humanität, 27, 275, 278, 291 humanity, 4, 11, 27, 33, 37, 38, 49, 53–57, 60–62, 75–77, 138–39, 143, 150–52, 156, 158, 160, 163, 180, 185, 190–91, 204, 209, 223, 225, 231, 262 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 12, 41, 50, 52, 56, 79, 84, 153, 176, 180, 184 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, works by: Über das Studium des Altertums, und des Griechischen insbesondere, 41; Über Schiller und den Gang seiner Geistesentwicklung, 12, 19, 225 humor, 197 Huss, Jan Johannes, 100–101, 104–5, 107 Hussite Wars, 91–92, 100, 102–3, 106 Hussites, 97, 100–102, 104–6, 113 ideal, 8, 14, 19, 27, 30, 31, 33, 37, 40–41, 49–50, 55–56, 59, 61–62, 76, 90–91, 123, 143, 149, 151, 153–57, 163–64, 175–76, 180–81, 204–5, 208, 216, 225, 231, 248, 254, 263, 271, 285 idealism, 19, 34, 37, 151, 206, 214, 233, 238, 242, 247, 273 idealist, 12, 19, 40, 142–43, 203, 206, 217, 230, 231–32, 243, 274 idealistic, 33, 41, 142, 206, 223, 227, 231, 233, 255, 257, 291

323

Iden, Peter, 290 idyll, 40, 41, 57, 180, 205 Iffland, A. W., 117, 194, 251–52, 255–56, 260 Ihering, Herbert, 277 illness, 4, 12, 32, 148, 213–14 imagination, 10, 27, 32–33, 38, 52, 71, 102, 169–70, 172, 291 immortal soul, 108–9, 112–13 influxus corporis, 33 Inquisition, 100, 103–4, 137, 140, 142 instinct, 28, 184 intrigue, 59, 117–18, 129, 130, 141, 223 isosceles trapezium, 99, 110, 112–13 Jacobinism, 10, 85, 248, 251 Jaeger, Hans, 287 Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft, 18, 279–80 Jahwe, 235–36, 238 Janssen, Johannes, 68 Jantz, Harold, 119, 137, 139, 210, 287 Jerusalem, 56 Jessner, Leopold, 277 Jesuits, 107, 108 Jesus Christ, 234 Joan of Orleans, 228 Jonas, Gisela, 274, 279 Jonas, Gisela, works by: Schiller-Debatte, 274 Jud Süß, 277 Juno Ludovisi, 54, 155, 158, 163 Jupiter, 181, 189, 195–202, 204–5 justice, 13, 30, 118, 182, 227, 251, 258, 274 Kahn, Ludwig, 173, 260 Kaiser, Georg, 119, 231–32, 249–50, 254 Kalb, Charlotte von, 4, 73, 117–18 Kant, Immanuel, 3, 5, 13, 28–30, 36–37, 42, 51, 78, 84–85, 148–57, 159, 170–72, 186, 209, 216, 218, 222, 254, 288

324

INDEX

Kant, Immanuel, works by: “Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?,” 209; Critique of Judgment, 149–50, 157; Die transzendentale Dialektik, 172; Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht, 78; Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 172; Mutmaßlicher Anfang der Menschheitsgeschichte, 27 Karlsschule, 2–4, 6, 15, 29, 35, 77, 92, 100, 169, 272, 288 Karthaus, Ulrich, 254 Kaufmann, Hans, 262 Keppler, Johannes, 99 Kerr, Alfred, 276 Kieffer, Bruce, 119 King Wenzel, 101 Kittler, Friedrich, 119 Klassik, 19, 278, 282, 288–89, 291 Klassiker, 19, 278–80, 290–91 Klein, Christian Konrad, 17, 31 Kleist, Heinrich, 278, 285, 290 Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb, 17 Kluge, Gerhard, 122, 126 Knittelvers, 192 Knobloch, Hans-Jörg, 249 Kodweiss, Elisabetha Dorothea, 1 Koepke, Wulf, 18, 271 Kohl, Helmut, 290 Kommerell, Max, 254, 277 Kommerell, Max, works by: Der Dichter als Führer in der deutschen Klassik, 277 Koopmann, Helmut, 19, 116, 118–19, 123, 128, 131, 248, 252, 255, 262, 279, 287–89 Koopmann, Helmut, works by: Friedrich Schiller: Eine Einführung, 289; Schiller-Handbuch, 19, 118, 279, 284, 285, 288 Korff, Hermann August, 118, 125 Körner, Christian Gottfried, 3, 4, 12, 49, 50, 67–71, 83–84, 153, 169, 175, 193, 197–98 Koselleck, Reinhart, 28, 70 Kükelhaus, Theodor, 68 Kulturnation, 49, 271

La Mettrie, Offray de, 29 La Roche, Sophie von, 218 Lahnstein, Peter, 5, 12, 13, 16, 20 Lamport, F. J., 255, 263 Lang, Alexander, 290 Lang, Alexander, works by: Don Carlos, 290 Last Supper, 103 Laube, Heinrich, 290 Laube, Heinrich, works by: Die Karlsschüler, 290 Läuterungsdrama, 224 law, 5, 9, 14, 33–35, 39, 43, 78, 94, 149, 157, 175, 181, 193, 207–8, 215, 221, 249, 251, 258 Le Moniteur, 10 lebende Gestalt, 155 legitimacy, 170, 206–8 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 28, 36, 218 Lengefeld, Louise Antoinette Charlotte von, 6, 20, 79, 148, 153 Lentersheim, Eleonora von, 94 Lentersheim, Louisa von, 94 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 116, 137, 182, 190–91, 218, 273, 277, 280 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, works by: Emilia Galotti, 116, 137; Miss Sara Sampson, 116, 137 liberty, 60, 152, 249, 250 Lillo, George, 116 Lillo, George, works by: London Merchant, 116 Literarisches Echo, 274 literature, 4, 6–10, 13–14, 17–18, 21, 49–50, 69–71, 82, 84, 116–17, 129, 139–40, 154, 157, 186, 198, 214, 219, 222, 273, 278, 280–81, 289–90, 292–93 Lohenstein, Daniel Casper von, 109, 110 Lohenstein, Daniel Casper von, works by: Trauerspiel Epicharis, 110 Lorenz, Ottokar, 68 love, 6, 13, 15–16, 20, 30–31, 35, 38–39, 43, 49, 54, 106, 117–19, 121–25, 129–30, 137–44, 179, 198, 204, 223, 232, 239–40

INDEX Ludendorff, Mathilde, 277 Ludendorff, Mathilde, works by: Der ungesühnte Frevel an Luther, Lessing und Schiller im Dienste des allmächtigen Baumeister aller Welten, 277 Ludwig, Otto, 8, 34, 67, 77, 200 Lukács, Georg, 285 Luserke, Maathias, 229, 242, 250, 264 Luxemburg, Rosa, 273–74, 283 Lycurgus, 43 Madame de Staël, 273, 285 Madame de Staël, works by: De l’Allemagne, 273 Mainland, William F., 241, 258–59 Mann, Thomas, 18, 139, 199–200, 228, 283–84, 287, 290 Mann, Thomas, works by: Tonio Kröger, 139, 284; Versuch über Schiller, 228, 284 Marquard, Odo, 28–29, 36 Martini, Fritz, 119, 248, 250, 254 Martinson, Steven D., 1, 35, 86, 113, 123–24, 131, 144, 186, 213–15, 249, 287–89 Martinson, Steven D., works by: Harmonious Tensions: The Writings of Friedrich Schiller, 19, 213 Marx, Karl, 274, 283 materialist, 29 Maurer, Georg, 291 Mayer, Hans, 285, 286 McKay, G. W., 251, 258 mechanistic theories, 29 Medici family, 106 medicine, 2–3, 14–15, 29, 110, 113, 169, 213, 254 Mehring, Franz, 273–74, 283 Mehring, Franz, works by: LessingLegende, 273 melancholy, 198–99, 201–2 Mendelssohn, Moses, 214, 216, 222 Mendelssohn, Moses, works by: Briefe über die Empfindungen, 214 Menschengestaltung, 252 Menschenkenner, 254, 257 Menschlichkeit, 54, 241

325

Mercier, Sebastien, 70 Mercier, Sebastien, works by: Tableux historiques, 70 Meulen, Vander, 255 Meyer, Conrad Ferdinand, 291 Meyers, Richard M., 275 Meyers, Richard M., works by: “Schiller der Heros der Deutschen,” 275 Michelsen, Peter, 119, 124 middle class society, 11, 72, 76, 81, 218 Miller, R. D., 117, 119–24, 126–30, 233–34, 238, 242 mind, 3, 7, 10, 12–13, 16–17, 31, 33, 37, 40, 42, 52, 69, 76, 78, 81, 103, 119, 122, 131, 147, 149, 151–52, 158, 162, 213–23, 225, 229, 231, 236, 240, 252–54, 258, 259–60, 262, 293 mind and body, 3, 10, 29, 30, 32, 52, 112, 130, 179, 202, 209, 214, 216, 220, 222, 225, 230, 241 Minerva, 233–34, 236 Minks, Wilfried, 289 Mittelkraft, 13, 30, 31, 215, 223 modern, 7, 10, 17, 21, 27, 38, 48–52, 54–59, 70, 73–74, 76, 82–83, 109, 127, 139, 148, 152, 154, 157, 184, 190, 191, 193, 216, 228, 240, 290 modern tragedy, 51, 139 Molo, Walter von, 290 Molo, Walter von, works by: Friedrich Schiller, 290 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secundat, Baron de, 77 Moor, Karl, 14, 18, 29, 49, 91–93, 103, 111, 131, 139, 221–23, 257, 258, 260 Moore, W. G., 257 moral, 11, 14, 28, 33, 35–37, 39–40, 50, 55, 58, 76, 86, 118–19, 131–32, 142, 148–52, 154–61, 164, 205, 207, 209–10, 219–23, 225, 230, 232, 249, 252, 254–55, 257–60, 262–63

326

INDEX

morality, 13, 32, 34, 50–51, 54–55, 148, 150, 152, 156, 181, 184, 203, 217 Moritz, Karl Philipp, 92, 150 Mortimer, 14, 59, 223 Moser, Philipp Ulrich, 1–2, 107 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 108, 277 Müller, Joachim, 14, 77, 118–19, 137, 247, 285, 289 Müller, Johannes von, works by: Die Geschichten schweizerischer Eydgenossenschaft erster und zweyter Theil, 251 Müller-Dietz, Heinz, 14 Müller-Seidel, Walter, 119, 249 Munich Kammerspiele, 290 Mur, Hartwig von, 94, 96 Muschg, Walter, 247 music, 18, 108, 121, 173–75, 214–15, 241 mythology, 194–95, 197–99 naïve, 7, 41, 57, 163, 184–85, 231, 247 naïve and sentimental, 41, 57 naïve poetry, 41 Napoleon, 208–9 nation, 9, 35, 78, 85, 271, 275, 284, 292 national hero, 228, 277 National Socialism, 272, 276–78, 281 national theater, 60 Nationalausgabe, 19, 238–39, 279, 285, 291 Nationaldichter, 271, 276, 278, 280, 282, 285, 291–92 Nationaldichtung, 278 Nationalism, 227, 233, 274, 275 nationalists, 277 natural science, 8 natural state, 35, 39, 40, 163 nature, 4, 6, 9, 12, 17, 28, 31–39, 41, 43, 49, 51, 54–57, 60–62, 69, 76–78, 107, 111–12, 117, 142, 147–53, 156–63, 170, 175–76, 179–80, 182, 184–85, 198, 200–202, 205, 213–17, 220, 221,

223–24, 230–33, 236, 242, 249, 251, 253, 257, 259, 276, 279 Ndong, Norbert, 248 nemesis, 174, 193, 202 nerves, 31, 215, 216 Netherlands, 67, 73, 81, 140, 142, 148, 169 Nettesheim, Agrippa von, 198, 201 Nettesheim, Agrippa von, works by: De occulta philosophia, 198 New Testament, 103, 108 Noah, 237, 238 nobility, 11, 84–85, 95, 119–20, 130–32, 148, 221 nobility of character, 11, 39 North American scholarship, 287 North Atlantic Treaty Organization, 283 nostalgia, 205 noumenal world, 149 Ockenden, R. C., 262 Oedipus the King, 194, 195 Oellers, Norbert, 19, 20, 169, 227, 232, 273–77, 279, 291 Old Testament, 103, 108, 235 Olympus, 53, 58, 181 opera, 139, 144, 227, 230, 247, 261 Orestes, 57 Origen, 91, 106, 109, 111–12 Orphics, 199 Ovid, 55, 61 Ovid, works by: Metamorphoses, 55 Pacioli, Luca, 99 Pacioli, Luca, works by: Divina Proportione, 99 Pape, Walter, 115 Parcae, 175 pathos, 139, 204, 281–82, 284 Paulsen, Wolfgang, 287 Peace of Westphalia, 70, 84 perception, 34, 41, 149, 162, 173, 273 perfection, 13, 34, 41, 53, 155, 222, 231–32, 242, 262 “Pervigilium Veneris,” 49 Peymann, 282, 289

INDEX Pfaff, Peter, 234, 239–40 Pfeffel, Gottlieb Konrad, 171 Philip II, King of Spain, 70, 73, 137 philosopher, 5, 9, 57, 150, 170, 186, 198, 292 philosophical-anthropological aesthetics, 29 philosophy, 2, 3, 8, 29–30, 33–34, 37, 42–43, 49, 53, 55, 62, 68, 74, 84, 149, 159, 170, 172, 174–75, 181, 185–86, 213–14, 216, 219, 222, 248, 250–51, 288 physical condition, 5, 68 physiognomy, 34 physiology, 3, 8, 17, 29, 213–14, 216–17, 219, 221–22 Piccolomini, Max, 15, 190, 196–97, 202–3, 204 Piedmont, Ferdinand, 248, 289, 290 Pietism, 49, 91 Pilate, Pontius, 181 Pilling, Claudia, 119 Piscator, Erwin, 277, 282 Pitaval, 84 Platner, Ernst, 29–30, 32–33 Platner, Ernst, works by: Anthropologie für Ärzte und Weltweise, 29 Plato, 54 Plato, works by: Symposium, 54 play, 13, 16, 36–38, 40, 59, 69, 75, 91–92, 94, 99–100, 106, 109–11, 113, 115–26, 128–29, 138–39, 142, 147–48, 151, 155, 159, 175, 189, 196, 202, 213, 215–6, 218–19, 221, 224–25, 227–36, 241, 247–60, 262–63, 277–79, 288–90 Ploucqet, Gottfried, 29 Plutarch, 50, 60, 68, 169 Plutarch, works by: Lives, 50, 169 poet, 3, 16, 27, 30, 41, 62, 70, 71, 73, 78, 89, 90, 96, 99, 100, 105, 107, 111, 113, 148, 154, 170–71, 174–76, 180–82, 184–85, 189, 191, 193, 205, 272–73, 291–93 poetry, 2, 3, 8, 9, 14, 16, 17, 27, 32, 41, 47, 50, 57, 58, 68, 76, 169, 170–71, 173–76, 179, 182, 186

327

politics, 4, 9, 11–12, 20, 36, 43, 49, 59, 81, 150, 162, 189–90, 203–4, 209, 213, 217, 220–21, 225, 284–85, 288–89 Pope Clemens XIV, 107 Pope Martin V, 100, 103 Pope, Alexander, 47–48, 54–55, 57 Pope, Alexander, works by: Essay on Criticism, 47 postmodernism, 8, 20, 21 power, 14–15, 30–31, 33, 35, 37, 40, 43, 48, 72, 75, 83, 85, 101, 107, 108, 111, 117–18, 123, 125–27, 129, 131, 138–43, 150, 158, 160, 162, 174, 201, 204–5, 207–9, 214, 218, 224, 230, 232–33, 235, 241–42, 274 practical reason, 14, 156, 159, 181 Prince Friedrich Christian von Schleswig-Holstein-SonderburgAugustenburg, 148 Prokop the Great, 104, 106 proletariat, 274 psychology, 8, 73, 76, 119, 205, 238, 240, 254 public space, 191 public sphere, 11 Pugh, David, 19–20, 47, 118, 131, 288 Queen Elizabeth, 213, 216–18 Queen Mary, 213, 216–18 Ragusa, Johann von, 104 rationality, 51 reading public, 76, 81 realist and idealist, 41 Realpolitik, 221 reason, 10, 28–30, 32, 36, 38–40, 61, 86, 97, 100, 111, 120, 129, 131, 138, 144, 149, 150–52, 156, 159–60, 163, 172, 174, 193, 206–7, 216, 222, 239, 258, 262, 279 reception, 9, 17, 19, 150, 170, 193, 272, 285, 288, 291, 293 reciprocal perfectibility, 8 Reed, T. J., 227

328

INDEX

Reeves, Nigel, 17, 31 Regietheater, 289 regulative idea, 14, 19 Rehder, Helmut, 287 Reichsschillerwoche, 278 Reign of Terror, 9, 11–12, 150 Reimann, Paul, 285 Reinhard, Karl Leonhard, 5 Reinhold, 42, 150, 159 Reinhold, works by: Briefe über die Kantische Philosophie, 159 Reinwald, 31 religion, 14, 34, 56, 75, 103, 118–19, 124, 129, 213, 220 representation, 14–15, 17, 42, 44, 69, 70–71, 73–74, 77, 82, 84, 112, 155–56, 271, 292 republicanism, 76 Reuss, Christian Gottlieb, 17 revolution, 11, 72–74, 76, 78–79, 83, 85, 140, 150, 207–8, 222, 249, 250–54, 263, 281 rhetoric, 73, 76, 154, 230, 260, 285, 288, 290, 291 Richard II, 91, 99 Richard III, 91, 139, 140 Richards, 258 Riedel, Wolfgang, 29, 32, 33, 42, 288 Riedel, Wolfgang, works by: Die Anthropologie des jungen Schiller, 288 Rieger, Philipp Friedrich, 16 Robertson, William, 70, 77 Rococo, 58 Roman Church, 101 Roman stoicism, 13, 77, 89 Romantic nationalism, 227 Romanticism, 156, 293 Romantics, 27, 38 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 150–52, 285 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, works by: Julie ou La nouvelle Heloïse, 152 Ruppelt, Georg, 277–79, 281 Ruppelt, Georg, works by: Deutsche Klassiker im Nationalsozialismus, 278 Ryder, Frank, 258

Saint Augustine, 92 Saint Joan, 228 Säkular-Ausgabe, 279 salvation, 14, 141, 264 Sämtliche Werke, 279 Saranpa, Kathy, 20 satan, 105, 121, 202, 234 satire, 40 Sauder, Gerhard, 229, 239 Schein, 147, 160, 161, 162, 193, 200, 201 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 186 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, works by: System des transcendentalen Idealismus, 186 Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich, works by: Allgemeine Sammlung historischer Memoirs vom zwölften Jahrhundert bis auf die neuesten Zeiten, 67, 78, 83 “An die Freude,” 3, 273 Anthologie auf das Jahr 1782, 16–17 Brief eines reisenden Dänen, 49, 53–55, 57 “Das Ideal und das Leben,” 37, 51, 53, 180, 224 “Das Reich der Formen,” 180 “Das Reich der Schatten,” 58, 171–72, 180 “Das verschleierte Bild zu Sais,” 171, 182 “Das weibliche Ideal. An Amanda,” 224 Don Carlos, 4, 50, 69–70, 72, 74, 131, 137–40, 142–43, 148, 189–90, 223, 228, 281–82, 284, 289–90 Demetrius, 206, 208–9, 288 “Der Abend,” 17, 171 “Der Eroberer,” 242 Der Geisterseher, 4, 70–71 Der Geistenseher. Eine Geschichte aus den Memoiren des Grafen von O**, 70 “Der Kampf mit dem Drachen,” 224

INDEX “Der Spaziergang,” 51, 61 “Der Tanz,” 171, 173, 175 “Der Triumph der Liebe,” 17, 49, 53, 58 Der Verbrecher aus Infamie, 4, 69, 76 Der Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre, 4, 14, 69, 216, 221, 223 Deutsche Größe, 83 Die Braut von Messina, 51, 59, 139, 190–91, 193, 194 Die Christen, 92, 107 Die Geschichte des Dreißigjährigen Kriegs, 5, 14, 68, 80–84, 199, 206–7 “Die Gesetzgebung des Lykurgus und Solon,” 60, 75 “Die Götter Griechenlandes,” 49, 54, 55, 157, 169, 193, 205 “Die Größe der Welt,” 17 “Die Herrlichkeit der Schöpfung. Eine Phantasie,” 17 Die Horen, 7, 15, 58, 85, 151, 153, 171, 173, 179, 181, 284 “Die Ideale,” 171, 176, 205 Die Jungfrau von Orleans, 20, 51–52, 144, 185, 194, 227–31, 233, 235, 237, 242, 280–81 “Die Kraniche des Ibykus,” 14, 62, 193 “Die Künstler,” 18, 58, 169, 193 “Die Macht des Gesanges,” 171, 175–76 “Die Malteser,” 277 Die Piccolomini, 192, 200–201, 203–6 Die Räuber, 2, 3, 14, 16, 34, 49, 72, 89–92, 94–95, 100–103, 105–7, 109–13, 137, 139, 209, 215–16, 221, 223, 233, 261, 273, 277, 281–82, 289 Die Rebellion der vereinigten Niederlande, 73 “Die Sänger der Vorwelt,” 51, 58, 62 “Die seligen Augenblicke,” 17 “Die Sendung Moses,” 75, 181

329

Die Verschwörung des Fiesco zu Genua, 3, 50, 72, 116, 137, 139, 142, 169, 228, 263, 281 Eine großmütige Handlung aus der neuesten Geschichte, 69 “Elegie,” 61, 171, 182, 184–85 “Elegie auf den Tod eines Jünglings,” 15 Etwas über die erste Menschengesellschaft nach dem Leitfaden der mosaischen Urkunde, 28, 75 Europäische Staatengeschichte, 83 Fortsetzung der Universalgeschichte, 83 Geschichte der französischen Unruhen, welche der Regierung Heinrichs IV. vorangingen, 83 Geschichte der Kreuzzüge, 83 Geschichte der merkwürdigsten Rebellionen und Verschwörungen, 67, 70, 73 Geschichte des Abfalls der vereinigten Niederlande von der spanischen Regierung, 67–68, 70–73, 77, 81, 85, 148, 169 “Hoffnung,” 15 “Hymne an den Unendlichen,” 17 Kabale und Liebe, 72, 115–19, 123–26, 131, 132, 137, 139, 218, 221, 223, 248, 272, 281–83, 289, 290 Kallias-Briefe, 36, 156 Laura-poems, 17 Luise Millerin, 117, 142, 218 Maria Stuart, 6, 14, 16, 18, 20, 59, 131–32, 144, 206, 213, 215–19, 221–25, 228–29, 281, 289 Merkwürdige Belagerung von Antwerpen in den Jahren 1584 und 1585, 85, 171 Musenalmanach, 171, 176, 180, 224 “Nadowessiers Totenlied,” 287 “Natur und Schule,” 171–72, 182, 184 “Pegasus in der Dienstbarkeit,” 171

330

INDEX

Schiller (continued) Philipp der Zweite, König von Spanien: Von Mercier, 70 Philosophie der Physiologie, 30, 35, 213, 216, 223 Philosophische Briefe, 15, 28, 30, 32, 35, 38–39, 49, 123 “Poesie des Lebens,” 171 Quellen-Editionsprojekt, the Allgemeine Sammlung historischer Memoirs, 78 Rede über die Frage: Gehört allzuviel Güte, Leutseeligkeit und grosse Freygebigkeit im engsten Verstande zur Tugend?, 214 “Resignation,” 70 Rheinische Thalia, 81 “Römische Geschichte,” 78 “Spruch des Confucius,” 171 “Stanzen an den Leser,” 171 Thalia, 67, 69, 70, 72, 81 Theosophie des Julius, 15, 30–31, 43, 123, 222–23 Theorie der tragischen Kunst, 79 “Trauer-Ode auf den Tod des Hauptmanns Wiltmaister,” 16 Über Anmut und Würde, 29, 35–37, 40, 42, 51–52, 155–56, 158–59, 163–64, 170, 184 Über das Erhabene, 43, 85, 176, 230, 231 Über das Pathetische, 42, 51 Über den Gebrauch des Chors in der Tragödie, 190 Über den Grund des Vergnügens an tragischen Gegenständen, 79 Über den moralischen Nutzen ästhetischer Sitten, 13 Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen, 6, 10, 12, 29, 30, 35, 36, 37, 39, 43, 47, 51–52, 60–61, 147, 148, 150–51, 153–54, 156–59, 161–62, 164, 170–73, 190, 207, 222, 225, 240, 287 Über die notwendigen Grenzen beim Gebrauch schöner Formen, 179

Über die tragische Kunst, 51, 79, 170, 191, 193 Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, 27, 29, 35, 38, 40, 41, 51, 55, 57, 59, 154, 157, 163, 170, 180, 182, 184, 205, 231 Über Völkerwanderung, Kreuzzüge und Mittelalter, 78 Universalhistorische Übersicht, 78, 83 Versuch über den Zusammenhang der tierischen Natur des Menschen mir seiner geistigen, 10, 17, 34, 42, 91, 111, 214 Vom Erhabenen, 42, 18 “Vom Zeitalter Karls des Großen bis zum Zeitalter Friedrichs II: König von Preußen,” 78 Wallenstein, 6, 7, 14–15, 17, 20, 51–52, 80, 82–85, 144, 148, 157, 170, 189–90, 192–210, 228, 233, 271, 278, 281–82, 288 Wallensteins Lager, 189, 192, 196, 281 Wallensteins Tod, 14, 193, 195–97, 202–4, 207, 209 Was heißt und zu welchem Ende studiert man Universalgeschichte?, 5, 68, 74, 78 Was kann eine gute stehende Schaubühne eigentlich wirken? 30, 42, 50, 147 Wilhelm Tell, 6, 18, 85, 208, 215, 223, 227–28, 247–51, 253–55, 257, 260, 261, 263, 264, 271, 272, 277–82, 288, 290 “Worte des Wahns,” 37, 203 “Würde der Frauen,” 162, 163, 171, 219 Zerstreute Betrachtungen über verschiedene ästhetische Gegenstände, 173 Schiller, Johann Kaspar, 1 Schiller in unserer Zeit, 274, 283, 284, 285

INDEX Schiller-Gedächtnis-Preis, 280 Schiller-Theater, 289 Schimmelmann, Charlotte von, 28 Schlacht bei Taus, 97 Schlegel, Friedrich, 48, 116, 172 Schlözer, August Ludwig, 34, 77 Schlözer, Ludwig, 34 Schmidt, Benjamin, 21 Schmidt, Erich, 276 Schubart, Christian, 16, 91, 94, 95, 99 Schubart, Christian, works by: Zur Geschichte des menschlichen Herzens, 91, 94 Schulze, Hagen, 10 Schwärmerei, 106, 143 Schweitzer, Christoph, 262, 263 science, 14, 17, 55, 69, 73–74, 77, 182, 184 Scott, Walter, 205 Second World War, 83, 278–80, 284 sectio divina, 99 Seidel, Siegfried, 247 Seidlin, Oskar, 287 Selau, Johann von, 101–2 Selbsthelfer, 144, 253 self, 30, 120, 203–4, 231, 234, 258 self-consciousness, 27 self-determination, 36, 128–29, 131, 150, 210, 225 self-diminution, 30, 32, 43 self-discipline, 12 self-expansion, 32, 35, 43 self-interest, 122, 131–32, 206 self-knowledge, 13 self-liberation, 75 self-love, 13 self-overcoming, 222 self-responsibility, 28 self-sacrifice, 144 Sendungsbewußtsein, 234, 238, 240, 242 sensibilities, 158 sensuous knowledge, 11 sentimental, 7, 41, 57, 116, 124, 185, 204 Shaftesbury, 150, 223 Shakespeare, 3, 27, 84, 91, 99, 139–40, 227, 255, 282, 290

331

Sharpe, Lesley, 19, 20, 116, 119, 147, 250, 252, 288, 289 Sharpe, Lesley, works by: Friedrich Schiller: Drama, Thought, and Politics, 289 Shaw, George Bernard, 228–29 Silz, Walter, 287 Simm, Hans-Joachim, ed., 20 Simm, Hans-Joachim, ed., works by: Insel-Almanachaud das Jahr 200. Friedrich Schiller: Zum 200 Todestag, 20 Sinnstruktur, 263 Smith, Adam, 77 social contract, 208, 249, 250, 253 Society for Natural Science (Naturforschende Gesellschaft), 7 Solitude, 2 Solon, 43, 60 Sophocles, 51, 59, 194 soul, 27, 31–33, 42, 53, 76, 107, 108, 112, 131, 156, 184, 198, 201, 213, 233–34, 238–39, 240–42, 252–54 space travel, 17 Spalding, Johann Joachim, 53 Spätaufklärung, 75 Spieltrieb, 13, 37–38, 40, 155, 159 spiritual renewal, 225 spirituality, 8 Staatstheater, 277 Stadelmaier, Gerhard, 289 Stahl, Georg Ernst, 29, 252 Staiger, Emil, 229, 286–87 Staiger, Emil, works by: “Schillers Größe,” 286 state of rights, 39, 160 Stein, Charlotte von, 5, 6 Stock, Minna, 3 Stofftrieb, 13, 35, 154, 160 Stoicism, 48 stories, 74, 84, 96, 103, 107, 199 Storm and Stress, 113, 139, 141, 144 Storz, Gerhard, 229, 230, 285, 286–88 Storz, Gerhard, works by: Der Dichter Friedrich Schiller, 287 Strich, Fritz, 118 Sturm und Drang, 17, 90, 153

332

INDEX

sublime, 14, 42, 52, 79, 86, 131, 139, 142, 149, 155, 156–61, 163–64, 176, 185, 223, 225, 233, 241, 280, 288 Sulzer, Johann Heinrich, 17 Sulzer, Johann Heinrich, works by: Dr. Sulzers Abgekürzte Geschichte der INSECTEN Nach dem Linaeischen System, 17 Süvern, Johann Wilhelm, 52, 157, 194 Süvern, Johann Wilhelm, works by: Über Schillers Wallenstein in Hinsicht auf griechische Tragödie, 194 Swabian pietism, 1, 2, 58, 91, 106, 112 Szondi, Peter, 41 Taborites, 92, 97, 101–6 Tartarus, 199 task of culture, 11, 37, 222 Tasso, Torquato, 199 tension, 1, 10, 13, 119, 121, 124, 131, 156, 157, 174, 214–17, 220–22, 224, 252 terreur, 250–51 terrorism, 138 Thalheim, 249, 254 theater, 2, 14, 42, 50, 60, 72, 82, 89, 115, 138, 144, 147–48, 189, 192, 228–30, 271, 272, 277, 279, 281, 289, 293 Theater heute, 115, 289, 290 Thekla, 15, 205, 208 theodicy, 28–29, 36 theoretician, 4, 13 theory of drives, 159 Thirty Years’ War, 68, 70, 79, 80, 83, 84, 100, 170, 199, 208 totality, 27, 30, 31, 33, 35, 37, 39, 41, 57, 192 tragédie classique, 137 tragedy, 42, 50–52, 79, 91, 115–18, 121, 123–24, 130–31, 139, 157, 189, 190–94, 196, 204, 208–9, 216, 221, 225, 227–28, 242, 250, 254, 257, 264, 283–85, 288 tragic irony, 195, 206, 208 transcendental philosophy, 29

Trauergedicht, 16 Tschudi, Aegidius, 251 Tschudi, Aegidius, works by: Chronicon Helveticum, 251 Turmhügelburg, 96 2002 Winter Olympics, 8–9 typology, 40, 57 tyranny, 11, 16, 38, 60, 126, 130, 143, 217 Ueding, Gert, 248, 254, 258–59, 263, 287, 289 understanding, 5, 8–11, 18, 20, 28, 32, 38, 55, 69, 74, 76, 103, 110, 111, 149, 169, 172, 175, 215, 218, 231, 236, 274, 293 Union of Utrecht, 73 United States, 271, 273, 287 unity, 35–38, 50, 55–57, 60–61, 151, 182, 190, 271, 292–93 universal history, 70, 74, 77, 85 University of Jena, 60, 73–74, 153, 159, 169 Uri Bastille, 253 utopia, 19, 175, 189–90, 225 Venus, 53–54, 58, 108, 112, 195–96, 204–5 Verjährung, 206 Versailles, 2, 74 Verstand, 10, 38, 41, 52, 55, 150, 160, 180, 183 Vertot, 84 Virgin Mary, 234–35, 239–41 Volk der Dichter und Denker, 280–81 Volk der Richter und Henker, 281 Volksstück, 247–48, 252, 263 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), 77, 194 Voss, Johann Heinrich, 50, 171 Wagner, Cosima, 195 Wagner, Richard, 189, 195, 228 war, 5, 35, 40, 58, 61, 80–81, 84, 94, 105, 132, 150–51, 158, 177–79, 183, 196–97, 206–7, 209, 215, 227, 230, 233–34, 236, 240–41, 257, 276, 278, 282–84, 292

INDEX Watson, Robert, 70, 73, 77 Watson, Robert, works by: History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V, 70 Weckherlin, Johann Christian, 15 Weigand, Hermann, 287 Weimar Classicism, 9, 199 Weimar Secret Council, 169 Weinrich, Harald, 29 Weitbrecht, Carl, 119, 124 Weltgeschichte, 70, 227 Weltliteratur, 6 Werner, Charlotte, 20 Werner, Charlotte, works by: Friedrich Schiller und seine Leidenschaften, 20 wholeness, 149, 156–57 Wieland, Christoph Martin, 4–6, 27, 33, 38, 42, 49, 58, 67, 73, 80, 84, 142 Wieland, Christoph Martin, works by: Geschichte des Agathon, 4; Neuer Teutsche Merkur, 6, 49, 80 Wiese, Benno von, 115–16, 232, 234, 249–50, 279, 285, 287–88, 292–93 Willoughby, L. A. 158, 160 Wiltmaister, Johann Anton, 16 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 18, 48–49, 56, 153 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, works by: Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der

333

Malerei und Bildhauerkunst, 48; Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums, 48 Wittkowski, Wolfgang, 131, 282, 289 Wittkowski, Wolfgang, works by: Verlorene Klassik?, 289 Wolf, Christian, 14, 18, 221–23 Wolzogen, Caroline von, 9, 12–13, 169, 219 Wolzogen, Caroline von, works by: Schillers Leben, 12 women, 10–11, 20, 71, 79, 101, 162–63, 218–19 writer, 4–6, 9–10, 11–21, 35, 47. 50, 58, 67, 81, 83, 96, 100, 107, 148, 163, 169, 175, 181, 192, 213–19, 271–72, 275, 278, 285–86, 291, 293 Xenien project (Goethe/Schiller), 7, 154 Zeller, Bernhard, 1–3, 7, 158, 284, 286–87 Zeller, Bernhard, works by: Schiller. Reden im Gedenkjahr 1959, 286; Schiller. Reden zum Gedenkjahr 1955, 284 Zimmermann, Johann Georg, 32–34 Ziska, Jan, 101–6 Zustand, 30, 36, 60, 158, 192, 286


Contributors: Steven D. Martinson,Walter Hinderer, David Pugh, Otto Dann,Werner von Stransky-StrankaGreifenfels, J. M. van der Laan, Rolf-Peter Janz, Lesley Sharpe, Norbert Oellers, Dieter Borchmeyer, Karl S. Guthke, Wulf Koepke. Steven D. Martinson is Professor of German Studies and a member of the Associated Faculty in Religious Studies at the University of Arizona; Vice President and President-Elect of the Lessing Society (2006); and has written extensively on the literature of the Age of Goethe.

Friedrich Schiller is not merely one of Germany’s foremost poets. He is also one of the major German contributors to world literature. In Germany, Schiller celebrations and commemorations still play a role in the formation of public opinion, and the undying words he gave to characters such as Marquis Posa in Don Carlos and Wilhelm Tell in the eponymous drama continue to underscore the need for human freedom. Schiller cultivated hope in the actualization of moral knowledge through aesthetic education and critical reflection, leading to his ideal of a more humane humanity. At the same time, he was fully cognizant of the problems that attend various forms of idealism. Yet for Schiller, ultimately, love remains the gravitational center of the universe and of human existence, and beyond life and death joy prevails. This collection of cutting-edge essays by some of the world’s leading Schiller experts constitutes a milestone in scholarship that is particularly timely in view of the 200th anniversary of the poet’s death in 2005. Special attention is given to both the paradigm shifts in Schiller’s work in its development over time and the indelible imprint of the early writings on his later works. The contributors also remain sensitive to the multiple levels on which the poet was working. The volume includes in-depth discussions of Schiller’s major dramatic and poetic works, his essays on aesthetics, and his activities as historian, anthropologist, and physiologist, as well as of his relation to the ancients and of Schiller reception in the twentiethcentury.

Edited by Steven D. Martinson I SBN 1 -5 7113 -1 83 -3

Camden House

668 Mt. Hope Avenue Rochester, NY 14620-2731 and P.O. Box 9 Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK www.boydellandbrewer.com and www.camden-house.com

Jacket Design: Lisa Mauro

Edited by 9 781571 131836

Steven D. Martinson

Jacket image: Painting of Schiller by Anton Graff, completed 1791. Museum für Stadtgeschichte, Dresden. Used by permission of Ullsteinbild.

A Companion to the Works of Friedrich Schiller (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

A Companion to the Works of Alfred Döblin (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

A Companion to the Works of Heinrich von Kleist (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

A Companion to the Literature of German Expressionism (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

A Companion to the Works of Thomas Bernhard (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

A Companion to the Works of Grimmelshausen (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

A Companion to the Works of Hartmann von Aue (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

A Companion to the Works of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

A Companion to the Works of Franz Kafka (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

The Life And Works Of Friedrich Schiller

An Introduction to the Works of Peter Weiss (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

Friedrich Schiller: Drama, Thought and Politics (Cambridge Studies in German)

A Companion to Wagner's Parsifal (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

Music and Literature in German Romanticism (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

Music and Literature in German Romanticism (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

Women and Family Life in Early Modern German Literature (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

German Literature, Jewish Critics: The Brandeis Symposium (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

German Literary Culture at the Zero Hour (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

A Critical History of German Film (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

A History of Austrian Literature 1918-2000 (Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture)

Nolten the Painter: A Novella in Two Parts (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

A Critical History of German Film (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

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Reading Goethe: A Critical Introduction to the Literary Work (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

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The First World War as a Clash of Cultures (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

Politics and Culture in Twentieth-Century Germany (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

Storytelling in the Works of Bunyan, Grimmelshausen, Defoe, and Schnabel (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

A Companion to the Works of Friedrich Schiller (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

A Companion to the Works of Alfred Döblin (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

A Companion to the Works of Heinrich von Kleist (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

A Companion to the Literature of German Expressionism (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

A Companion to the Works of Thomas Bernhard (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

A Companion to the Works of Grimmelshausen (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

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A Companion to the Works of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

A Companion to the Works of Franz Kafka (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

The Life And Works Of Friedrich Schiller

An Introduction to the Works of Peter Weiss (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

Friedrich Schiller: Drama, Thought and Politics (Cambridge Studies in German)

A Companion to Wagner's Parsifal (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

Music and Literature in German Romanticism (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

Music and Literature in German Romanticism (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

Women and Family Life in Early Modern German Literature (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

German Literature, Jewish Critics: The Brandeis Symposium (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

German Literary Culture at the Zero Hour (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

A Critical History of German Film (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

A History of Austrian Literature 1918-2000 (Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture)

Nolten the Painter: A Novella in Two Parts (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

A Critical History of German Film (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

A companion to modernist literature and culture

Reading Goethe: A Critical Introduction to the Literary Work (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

Recasting German Identity: Culture, Politics, and Literature in the Berlin Republic (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

A Study of the Major Novellas of E.T.A. Hoffmann (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

Second-Generation Holocaust Literature: Legacies of Survival and Perpetration (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

German Literature of the 1990s and Beyond: Normalization and the Berlin Republic (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

The First World War as a Clash of Cultures (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

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