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Friedrich Schiller, in full Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller, (born Nov. 10, 1759, Marbach, Württemberg [Germany]—died May 9, 1805, Weimar, Saxe-Weimar), leading German dramatist, poet, and literary theorist, best remembered for such dramas as Die Räuber (1781; The Robbers), the Wallenstein trilogy (1800–01), Maria Stuart (1801), and Wilhelm Tell (1804).

Early years and plays

Friedrich Schiller was the second child of Lieut. Johann Kaspar Schiller and his wife, Dorothea. After Johann Kaspar retired from military service, he devoted himself to horticulture and was appointed superintendent of the gardens and plantations at Ludwigsburg, the residence of Duke Karl Eugen of Württemberg. Johann Kaspar gave his son Friedrich a sound grammar school education until the age of 13 when, in deference to what amounted to a command from his despotic sovereign, he reluctantly agreed to send his boy to the Military Academy (the Karlsschule), an institution founded and personally supervised by the Duke. Against the wishes of the parents, who had hoped to have their son trained for the ministry, the Duke decreed that young Friedrich was to prepare for the study of law; later, however, he was allowed to transfer to medicine. Having endured the irksome regimentation at the academy for eight years, Schiller left to take up an appointment as an assistant medical officer to a Stuttgart regiment.

His adolescence under the rule of a petty tyrant confronted Schiller with the problem of the use and abuse of power, a theme that recurs in most of his plays. His resentment found expression in some of his early poems and especially in his first play, Die Räuber, a stirring protest against stifling convention and corruption in high places. The hero of the play, Karl Moor, a young man of fiery spirit and abundant vitality, has led a somewhat disorderly life at the university. His villainous younger brother Franz poisons their aged father’s mind against the prodigal elder son. When the old Count Moor disowns Karl, the young man turns brigand and defies all established authority at the head of a band of outlaws, until, before long, he discovers that however corrupt the existing order may be, violence and anarchy do not offer a workable alternative and society cannot be reformed by terrorism and crime. He decides to give himself up to justice, thus submitting to the law that he had flouted. Schiller could therefore claim to have written in defense of law and morality. At the same time, Karl Moor is represented as a “sublime criminal,” and the play is a scathing indictment of a society that could drive so fundamentally noble a character to a career of crime.

In order to have the play accepted, Schiller had to prepare a stage version in which the rebellious ardour of his original text was toned down. Nevertheless, the first performance (Jan. 13, 1782) at the National Theatre at Mannheim created a sensation; it was a milestone in the history of the German theatre. Schiller travelled to Mannheim without the Duke’s permission in order to be present on the first night. When the Duke heard of this visit, he sentenced the poet to a fortnight’s detention and forbade him to write any more plays. To escape from this intolerable situation, Schiller fled from Stuttgart at night and set out for Mannheim in the hope of receiving help from Heribert Baron von Dalberg, the director of the theatre that had launched his first play. He brought with him the manuscript of a new work, Die Verschwörung des Fiesko zu Genua (1783; Fiesco; or, the Genoese Conspiracy), subtitled “a republican tragedy”: the drama of the rise and fall of a would-be dictator, set in 16th-century Genoa, picturing, in Schiller’s own phrase, “ambition in action, and ultimately defeated.”

The new play was rejected, however, and when Schiller prepared a revised version with a different ending, this was rejected, too. Dalberg, not anxious to provoke a diplomatic incident by sheltering a deserter, kept him at arm’s length. For some tense weeks Schiller led the hand-to-mouth life of a refugee, until he found a temporary home with Henriette von Wolzogen, whose sons had been fellow students of his and who invited him to stay at her house at Bauerbach in Thuringia. There he finished his third tragedy, Kabale und Liebe (1784; Cabal and Love). In this work about the love of a young aristocrat for a girl of humble origin, Schiller’s innate sense of drama comes to the fore. The appeal of its theme (the revolt of elemental human feeling against the artificialities of convention), the vigour of its social criticism, and the vitality of its dialogue and characters combine to make Kabale und Liebe great theatre.

Dalberg eventually offered Schiller an appointment as resident playwright with the Mannheim theatre. Schiller accepted and had the satisfaction of seeing Kabale und Liebe score a resounding success, but his hopes of clearing his debts and gaining a measure of financial security were doomed. When his contract expired after a year, it was not renewed; and once again Schiller needed the help of friends to extricate him from both his financial predicament and an emotional crisis caused by his attachment to a married woman, the charming but unstable Charlotte von Kalb. Schiller moved to Leipzig, where he was befriended by Christian Gottfried Körner. A man of some means, Körner was able to support Schiller during his two years’ stay in Saxony, toward the end of which Don Carlos, his first major drama in iambic pentameter, was published (1787).

Don Carlos marks a major turning point in Schiller’s development as a dramatist. On one level, the work is a domestic drama concerned with the relations between the aging King Philip II of Spain, his third consort, Elizabeth of Valois, and his son by his first marriage, Don Carlos, who is in love with his stepmother. The conflict between father and son is not confined to their private lives, however; it has broad political implications as well. The change of focus from the domestic to the political sphere produced a play of inordinate length and a tortuous plot. But positive qualities compensate for these faults: a wealth of exciting and moving scenes and a wide range of sharply individualized characters, the most memorable being the complex, brooding, and tragic figure of King Philip. The characteristically resonant note of Schiller’s blank verse is heard here for the first time. Blank verse had been used by German playwrights before (notably Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in Nathan der Weise [1779]), but it was Schiller’s Don Carlos, together with Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris (1787), that definitely established it as the recognized medium of German poetic drama.

Historical studies

Schiller had accepted Körner’s generous offer of hospitality and financial help in the spirit in which it was made. He gave jubilant expression to his new mood of contentment in his hymn “An die Freude” (“Ode to Joy”), which Beethoven was to use for the choral movement of his Ninth Symphony. Schiller could not stay with Körner indefinitely, however, and in July 1787 Schiller set out for Weimar, in the hope of meeting some of the men who had made Weimar the literary capital of Germany. Goethe, who was in Italy at the time, returned to Weimar in the following year. A chance meeting between Schiller and Goethe in 1794 and the ensuing exchange of letters mark the beginning of their friendship, a union of opposites that forms an inspiring chapter in the history of German letters.

In spite of the initial distance between them, Goethe had recommended Schiller for appointment to a professorship of history at the University of Jena, Schiller having presented the requisite credentials in his Geschichte des Abfalls der vereinigten Niederlande von der spanischen Regierung (1788; “History of the Revolt of the United Netherlands against the Spanish Government”). His Geschichte des dreissigjährigen Krieges (1791–93; “History of the Thirty Years’ War”) further enhanced his prestige as a historian; later it also provided him with the material for his greatest drama, Wallenstein, published in 1800.

In 1790 Schiller married Charlotte von Lengefeld, a cultured young woman of good family, who bore him two sons and two daughters. In the second year of their married life, Schiller’s health gave way under the strain of perpetual overwork. For a time he lay critically ill, and, although he rallied after several relapses, he never fully recovered from a combination of chest trouble and digestive disorder that proved intractable. The rest of his life was a losing battle, fought with superb fortitude, against the inexorable advance of disease.

Friedrich Schiller

Calamitous as Schiller’s illness was, it produced a piece of great good luck. To give him time to recuperate at leisure, two Danish patrons granted him a generous pension for three years. Schiller decided to devote part of this time to studying the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. As he proceeded to assimilate Kant’s views, he soon felt the urge to formulate his own. The encounter with Kant’s philosophy thus produced between 1793 and 1801 a series of essays in which Schiller sought to define the character of aesthetic activity, its function in society, and its relation to moral experience: the essays on moral grace and dignity, “Über Anmut und Würde,” and on the sublime, “Über das Erhabene,” as well as the celebrated essay on the distinction between two types of poetic creativity, “Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung.” The latter, like his letters on the aesthetic education of man, “Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen,” first appeared in Die Horen, an ambitious but short-lived literary periodical edited by Schiller and published by Johann Friedrich Cotta, one of Germany’s leading publishers, whom Schiller had met during a visit to his native Swabia in 1793–94.

This period of critical stocktaking also produced some exquisite reflective poems: “Das Ideal und das Leben” (“Life and the Ideal”), “Der Spaziergang” (“The Walk”), “Die Macht des Gesanges” (“The Power of Song”). These are “philosophical lyrics” in the true sense: not versified philosophy, but poetic utterance inspired by an intellectual experience. They contain the quintessence of Schiller’s philosophical and critical thinking, and they are among his best poems, but they are poems for the few. On the other hand, the ballads written in 1797 (including “Der Handschuh” [“The Glove”], “Der Taucher” [“The Diver”], and “Die Kraniche des Ibykus” [“The Cranes of Ibycus”]) are among his most popular productions. In these poems and in the famous “Lied von der Glocke” (“The Song of the Bell”) Schiller shows how to make poetry accessible to the man in the street without debasing it.

In the Wallenstein cycle—a work on the grand scale, consisting of a prefatory poem, a dramatic prologue, and two five-act plays—Schiller reached the height of his powers as a dramatist. The play portrays Albrecht Wenzel Eusebius von Wallenstein, the commander-in-chief of the armies of the Holy Roman Empire during the Thirty Years’ War. Against the sombre background of the war there rises the sinister figure of Wallenstein, who in his secret heart is meditating high treason: by joining forces with the enemy, he hopes to make himself the arbiter of the empire. Wallenstein sees himself as a privileged being, a superman beyond good and evil, the man of destiny. While these traits repel, his bearing in the hour of crisis compels admiration and even wins a measure of sympathy. His portrayal is a profound study of the lure and the perils of power.

Working against time, Schiller produced four more plays in quick succession: Maria Stuart (first performed in 1800), a psychological drama concerned with the moral rebirth of Mary, Queen of Scots; Die Jungfrau von Orleans (1801; The Maid of Orleans), a “romantic tragedy” on the subject of Joan of Arc, in which the heroine dies in a blaze of glory after a victorious battle, rather than at the stake like her historical prototype; Die Braut von Messina (1803; The Bride of Messina), written in emulation of Greek drama, with its important preface, Schiller’s last critical pronouncement); and Wilhelm Tell (1804; William Tell), which depicts the revolt of the Swiss forest cantons against Habsburg rule and the assassination of a tyrannous Austrian governor by the hero, with the underlying question of the play being the justifiability of violence in political action.

Each of these plays of Schiller’s classical period has its own distinctive merit, but as a piece of dramatic craftsmanship Maria Stuart surpasses the rest. The action of the play is compressed into the last three days in Mary’s life, before her execution at Fotheringhay; all the antecedents—her French marriage, her brief and troubled Scottish reign, her long imprisonment in England—emerge by means of retrospective analysis. Although Schiller repeatedly diverged from the recorded facts in his treatment of the subject, he displays in his play a profound grasp of the historical situation. Schiller offers a disturbing analysis of the problems that arise whenever political expediency masquerades as justice and judges are subjected to the pressures of power politics or ideological conflict. Mary turns outward disaster into inward triumph by accepting the verdict of the English tribunal—which she regards as unjust—in expiation of her sins committed in former days. By giving to the decree of her judges a meaning that they had not intended, she rises superior to their jurisdiction, a sinner redeemed and transfigured. This conforms to Schiller’s theory of tragedy, which turns on the hero’s moral rebirth through an act of voluntary self-abnegation.

Schiller was ennobled (with the addition of a von to his name) in 1802. Death overtook him in 1805 while he was working at a new play on a Russian theme, Demetrius (1805). Judging by the fragments that remain, it might well have developed into a masterpiece.

Legacy

“The idea of freedom,” Goethe said, “assumed a different form as Schiller advanced in his own development and became a different man. In his youth it was physical freedom that preoccupied him and found its way into his works; in later life it was spiritual freedom.” Schiller’s early tragedies are attacks upon political oppression and the tyranny of social convention; his later plays are concerned with the inward freedom of the soul that enables a man to rise superior to the frailties of the flesh and to the pressure of material conditions; they show the hero torn between the claims of this world and the demands of an eternal moral order, striving to keep his integrity in the conflict. In his reflective poems and in his treatises, Schiller sets out to show how art can help man to attain this inner harmony and how, through the “aesthetic education” of the individual citizen, a happier, more humane social order may develop. His reflections on aesthetics thus link up with his political and historical thinking.

One of the most striking features of Schiller’s oeuvre is its modernity, its startling relevance to the life of the 20th century. Although for a time he fell out of favour with the German intelligentsia, the enduring value of his work is not likely to be obscured by fashions in criticism.

Courtesy - William Witte

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Johann Von Schiller

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