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Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805) |
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Leading German 18th-century dramatist, poet, and literary
theorist. Friedrich von Schiller's first play, The Robbers
(1781), was a landmark in German theatrical history. According to Schiller, a play is not a means to
enjoyment; it is the very thing enjoyed. Aesthetic education is
necessary, he argued, not only for the proper balance of the individual
soul, but for the harmonious development of society. Schiller has been called "the Poet of Freedom". So long as man is pure—not, of course, crude—nature, he functions as an undivided sensuous unity and as a unifying whole. Sense and reason, passive and active faculties, are not separated in their activities, still less do they stand in conflict with one another. His perceptions are not the formless play of chance, his thoughts not the empty play of the faculty of representation; the former proceed out of the law of necessity, the latter out of actuality. Once man has passed into the state of civilization and art has laid her hand upon him, that sensuous harmony in him is withdrawn, and he can now express himself only as a moral unity, i.e., as striving after unity. (from Naive and Sentimental Poetry, in Naive and Sentimental Poetry, and On the Sublime: Two Essays, translated, with an introduction and notes by Julius A. Elias, New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1967, p. 111) Friedrich Schiller was born in Marbach, Württemberg, of Lutheran
parents. His father, Johannes Kaspar Schiller, was an officer and
surgeon. Elisabeth Dorothea, Schiller's mother, was a pious,
serious-minded woman. The Duke Karl Eugen (Charles II), who had control
over his subjects' children, ordered Schiller attend the military
academy (later the Hohe Karlsschule in Stuttgart) instead of studying
theology. In 1773 Schiller left home and spent
miserable years under strict discipline, which only strengthened his
longing for freedom. Female relations were forbidden entirely and the
dormitory was kept lit even at night to keep the students from
masturbating under the blankets. Reading Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) was punished. The Duke himself controlled the
school, and had
the pupils to compose flattering speeches to him. "I see before me the
father of my parents," wrote also Schiller, "whose gifts I cannot
recompense. I see him, and he takes my breath away." ('Introduction' by Nicholas Dromgoole, in Schiller: Volume One: The Robbers; Passion and Politics, translated by Robert David MacDonald, 2013) Schiller studied
first law and entered then the newly created medical department. During
this period his teacher Jakob Friedrich Abel introduced him to the
ideas of European Enlightenment and tried to persuade him to join
the Illuminati, a secret society founded by Adam Weishaupt in 1776 to abolish monarchy and religion. In 1780 Schiller was dismissed from the academy after writing a controversial essay on religion, On Relation Between Man's Animal and Spiritual Nature. At the age of 21, he was forced to join his father's regiment. Despite his father's efforts, Schiller continued to write. His first drama, Die Räuber,
was printed at his own expense in 1781, and performed next year in
Mannheim. The play about a Karl Moor, the leader of a band of robbers,
who has rejected his the values of his father, gained with its
revolutionary appeal immediate success among students. "The theatre was
like a madhouse-rolling eyes, clenched
fists, hoarse cries in the auditorium," wrote an eye-witness.
"Strangers fell sobbing into each other's arms, women on the point of
fainting staggered towards the exit. There was a universal commotion as
in chaos, out of the musts of which a new creation bursts forth." (Reading, Writing, and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception by Lucy Newlyn, 2000, p. 319) The
playwright himself was nearly arrested for neglecting his military
duties in Stuttgart, where he was a regimental doctor. Romantic writers in England, especially Samuel Taylor Coleridge, admired The Robbers, and greeted with enthusiasm its theme of liberty. In a letter Coleridge wrote: "Who is this Schiller? This Convulser of the Heart?" (Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education by Michael John Kooy, 2002, p. 9) However, Coleridge's translation of Schiller's Wallenstein (1796-99) from 1800 was so savagely criticized that he did not want to touch to Goethe's Faust. The theme of the conflict between a father and son continued in Don Carlos
(1787), in which the eldest son of Philip II of Spain, Don Carlos, is
torn between
love and court intrigues. This time the forces of reaction win,
although the movement of history is on the side of the representatives
of the new way of thinking. (In real-life history, Don Carlos, "unhappy
prince of Spain," was not in love with his stepmother. Moreover, he was
mentally unstable.) Don Carlos was received much more warmly than Goethe's Torquato Tasso (1790). Verdi's famous opera from 1867 drew on Schiller's play. His works inspired also Brahms, d'Indy, Lalo, Liszt, Mendelssohn, Schubert, Schumann, Richard Strauss, and Tchaikovsky. 'An die Freude' (Ode to Joy), Schiller's best-known poem, was later set to music by Ludwig van Beethoven in the choral movement of his Ninth Symphony. - Other poems and ballads: Das Ideal und das Leben (Life and the Ideal); Der Spaziergang (The Walk); Die Macht des Gesanges (The Power of Song); Der Handschuh (The Glove); Der Taucher (The Diver). When the duke pressured Schiller for his Sturm und Drang output,
he fled to Württemberg. In 1783 he was given a post of theater-poet at
the Mannheim theater, but he lost it in 1784. During this period
Charlotte von Kalb, a married woman, inspired his work; she was
portrayed in Don Carlos
as Elizabeth of Valois. Unsatisfied with his play, produced in 1787,
Schiller completed no dramatic work for thirteen years. Between 1787 and 1792 Schiller lived in Weimar and Jena. He wrote almost exclusively on historical subjects, among others about the Thirty Years War (1791-93). In Weimar he assisted Goethe in the direction of the Court Theater by adapting many plays for the stage, including Goethe's Egmont and Iphigenia in Tauris, Jean Racine's Phaedra, and Shakespeare's Macbeth. The first part of a History of the Revolt of the United Netherlands from Spanish Rule (1788) did not only secure Schiller a Chair of History at the University of Jena, but stimulated the German historiography. When giving his inaugural lecture, the university turned out to be too small for the occasion, and Schiller marched with the enthusiastic crowd, shouting "freedom", to the town hall. In 1793 he met Friedrich Hölderlin, and helped the younger poet to obtain his first post as a tutor. Schiller also published some of Hölderlin's poems and fragment of his novel Hyperion (1797-99). In 1790 Schiller married Charlotte von Lengefeldt - a deep blow to Charlotte von Kalb, from which she never recovered. With Charlotte he had four children. Because of pneumonia and pleurisy, Schiller was forced to give up in 1791 his professional duties; he remained an invalid until his death. He wrote in the 1790s philosophical poems and studies about philosophy and aesthetics under the influence of Kant's Critique of Judgement. Goethe observed in 1827 that "the idea of freedom dominates all
Schiller's work . . . in his youth it was physical, in his later years
idea freedom that concerned him." (Researching the Song: A Lexicon by Shirlee Emmons and Wilbur Watkins Lewis, 2006, p. 405) In has been said many times, that Goethe and Schiller were kindred
spirits. There were profound differences too. One day, Goethe found to
his astonishment that Schiller kept rotten apples in his desk drawer;
he could not live or write without their scent. "An air that was
beneficial to Schiller acted on me like poison," Goethe said to Johann
Eckermann. (The Life of Goethe by George Henry Lewes, Second Edition, Volume the First, 1864, p. 138) Like Goethe, in due course, Schiller made his peace with the established order. Although Schiller first greeted the French Revolution with enthusiasm, he then became horrified by the wave of violence and planned to write a book or pamphlet in defence of the king. When he was made an honorary citizen of the French Republic by the Jacobines, he rejected the homage. "These two weeks past," he wrote in a letter in February 1793, "I can read no more French papers, so disgusted am I with these wretched executioners." (The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller by Calvin Thomas, 1901, p. 259) Schiller died in Weimar on May 9, 1805, at the age of 46. His last drama, Demetrius (1815), was left unfinished. Schiller's last words were: "Many things are growing plain and clear to me." (Epigrams of Art, Life, and Nature by William Watson, 1884, p. LXXXVIII) "Freude, schöner Götterfunken, Schiller's dramatic trilogy Wallenstein depicted the tumultuous period of the Thirty Years War. Before the work was completed, parts of it were performed in Weimar. Maria Stuart (1800) was about Queen Elizabeth I of England and the last days of Mary Queen of Scots, when she was held captive in the Castle of Fothernghay. Wilhelm Tell (1803), based on chronicles of the Swiss liberation movement, was dedicated as a New Year's Gift to the World. It tells about the famous hero, a mountain man who fought for freedom and became the embodiment of courage. "The mountain cannot frighten one who was born on it," Tell says to his countrymen in Act III. Schiller's idealism in Die Jungfrau von Orleans (1801, The Maid of Orleans) was parodied in Bertolt Brecht's Die Heilige Johanna der Schlachthöfe (1932, St. Joan of the Stockyards). Meeting with Goethe in July 1794 led to renewal of Schiller's creative talents. He encouraged Goethe to return to his Faust and Goethe contributed his journal Die Horen from 1795 to 1797. Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen
(1795, On the Aesthetic Education of Man) was written in the aftermath
of the French regicide and Reign of Terror. Schiller states that
aesthetic matters are fundamental for the harmonious development of
both society and the individual. In the society, where people are just
parts in a larger machine, individuals are unable to develop fully.
Freedom can occur only through education. The key to education is the
experience of beauty. But as the English general Talbot says in Die Jungfrau von Orléans: "Against stupidity the very gods / Themselves contend in vain." (Schiller's Maid of Orleans, translated by Anna Swanwick, 1899, Act III, Scene VI, p. 102) Nietzsche twisted this aphorism into another form: "Against boredom even Gods struggle in vain." (The Antichrist, translated from the German with an introduction by H.L. Mencken, 1920, p. 137) Schiller's advice in to an artist was: "Live with your century; but do not be its creature; render to your contemporaries what they need, not what they praise." (On the Aesthetic Education of Man, translated with an introduction by Reginald Snell, 1954, p. 54) In another major theoretical essay, Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung (1794-95, On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry), Schiller
explorers the contrasts between the "naive" and "sentimental" modes,
enlarging his study into analysis of nature and culture, feeling and though, the finite
and the infinite. Modern poets will never regain the immediate and unconscious-the naive-relationship to nature. Poets, he argued "will either be nature, or they will seek
lost nature." Introspective by nature, Schiller considered himself
"sentimental" or reflective writer, when his friend Goethe was an
archetype of the "naive" genius. The ideas presented in On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry have
been developed further by thinkers such as Hegel, C.G. Jung, Herbert
Read, and Herbert Marcuse. Thomas
Mann said that the essay "suggests in its superlative brilliant fashion
that speculative and intuitive minds, given genius in both, must meet
halfway, because they are of equal rank and belong together." (Last Essays by Thomas Mann, 1959, translated from the German by Richard and Clara Winston and Tania and James Stern, p. 15) Schiller was in the Nazi Germany a more attractive figure than
Goethe. Goebbels claimed that Schiller was "the poet of the
German revolution", referring to the Nazi seizure of power. (Nazi Germany and The Humanities: How German Academics Embraced Nazism by Wolfgang Bialas and Anson Rabinbach, 2014, p. 59) The 175th anniversary of the poet's birth, in 1934,
was made into a national spectacle. When Hitler visited the
Schiller House, he placed a bouquet of red roses with a swastika
garland on Schiller's deathbed. Mathilde Lundendorff, a
neuropsychiatrist and General Ludendorff's wife, who had a large
following among Nazis, maintained in her pamphlet Mozarts Leben und gewaltsamer Tod (1936), that Mozart, like Schiller, Lessing and many others, had been poisoned by the Freemasons. For further reading: The Life of Friedrich Sciller by Thomas Carlyle (1825); Das Drama Schillers by Wilhelm Spengler (1932); Schiller by William Witte (1949); Schiller's Writings on Aesthetics by S.S. Kerry (1961); Friedrich Schiller by Emil Stariger (1967); Schiller: Zeitgenosse aller Epochen, ed. by Norbert Oellers (1970-76); Schillers Rhetorik by Gert Uding (1971); Friedrich Schiller by John Simon (1981); The Classical Center: Goethe and Weimar by T.J. Reed (1986); Schiller to Derrida by Juliet Sychrava (1989); Friedrich Schiller: Drama, Thought and Politics by Lesley Sharpe (1991); The Development of German Aesthetic Theory from Kant to Schiller by Patrick T. Murray (1994); Dialectic of Love: Platonism in Schiller's Aesthetics by David Vaughan Pugh (1997); Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller by C. Thomas (2001); A Companion to the Works of Friedrich Schiller, edited by Steven D. Martinson (2005); Who Is This Schiller Now?: Essays on His Reception and Significance, edited by Jeffrey L. High, Nicholas Martin, and Norbert Oellers (2011); Aesthetic Reason and Imaginative Freedom: Friedrich Schiller and Philosophy, edited by María del Rosario Acosta López and Jeffrey L. Powell (2018); Goethe und Schiller in der filmischen Erinnerungskultur by Jana Piper (2019); Friedrich Schiller im Nationalsozialismus: die Festreden Heinrich Lilienfeins als Generalsekretär der "Deutschen Schillerstiftung" by Judith Gloria Pörschke (2021); Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self by Andrea Wulf (2022); Schillers Feste der Rhetorik, herausgegeben von Peter-André Alt und Stefanie Hundehege (2022) Selected works:
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