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Friedrich Schiller (January 10, 1759 — May 9, 1805), German historian, philosopher, physician, playwright, poet |
World Biographical Encyclopedia
Karlsschule Stuttgart, where Schiller was educated.
Career
Gallery of Friedrich Schiller
Schiller as a medical officer in 1781 - 1782.
Gallery of Friedrich Schiller
Portrait of Schiller by Ludovike Simanowiz (1794)
Achievements
Theaterpl. 2, 99423 Weimar, Germany
The Deutsche Nationaltheater and Staatskapelle Weimar (the Weimar Theater) and Goethe–Schiller Monument (1996), honoring them as founders of the leading theater in Germany.
The Deutsche Nationaltheater and Staatskapelle Weimar (the Weimar Theater) and Goethe–Schiller Monument (1996), honoring them as founders of the leading theater in Germany.
(One of Schiller's most fascinating prose works, whose his...)
One of Schiller's most fascinating prose works, whose historic and philosophical implications have still to be plumbed by literary critics, The Ghost-Seer, with its exotic Venetian setting, remains an interesting, highly readable work.
(The Thirty Years War: Friedrich Schiller's classic histor...)
The Thirty Years War: Friedrich Schiller's classic history of the savage war of religion that devastated Germany and tore apart the Holy Roman Empire and the Catholic Church during the years 1618 to 1648.
(A classic of eighteenth-century thought, Friedrich Schill...)
A classic of eighteenth-century thought, Friedrich Schiller’s treatise on the role of art in society ranks among German philosophy’s most profound works. In addition to its importance to the history of ideas, this 1795 essay remains relevant to our own time.
(Mary Stuart (German: Maria Stuart) is a verse play by Fri...)
Mary Stuart (German: Maria Stuart) is a verse play by Friedrich Schiller that depicts the last days of Mary, Queen of Scots. The play consists of five acts, each divided into several scenes.
(The Maid of Orleans is a tragedy by Friedrich Schiller, p...)
The Maid of Orleans is a tragedy by Friedrich Schiller, premiered on 11 September 1801 in Leipzig. During his lifetime, it was one of Schiller's most frequently-performed pieces.
(William Tell is a drama written by Friedrich Schiller in ...)
William Tell is a drama written by Friedrich Schiller in 1804. The story focuses on the legendary Swiss marksman William Tell as part of the greater Swiss struggle for independence from the Habsburg Empire in the early 14th century.
(Written at the age of twenty-one, The Robbers was his fir...)
Written at the age of twenty-one, The Robbers was his first play. A passionate consideration of liberty, fraternity and deep betrayal, it quickly established his fame throughout Germany and wider Europe. Wallenstein, produced nineteen years later, is regarded as Schiller's masterpiece: a deeply moving exploration of a flawed general's struggle to bring the Thirty Years War to an end against the will of his Emperor.
The German dramatist, poet, and historian Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller ranks as one of the greatest figures in German literature. He is best remembered for such dramas as Die Räuber, the Wallenstein trilogy, Maria Stuart and Wilhelm Tell (1804).
Background
Friedrich Schiller was born on November 10, 1759, in Marbach, Germany; the only son of Johann Kaspar Schiller, a military doctor, and Elisabeth Dorothea Kodweiss. Friedrich had five sisters, including Christophine, the eldest. The Schillers were a very religious family. In 1763, when the Seven Years' War ended, Schiller's father became a recruiting officer and moved with his family in Schwabisch Gmund. As it was expensive enough to live there, the family moved to the nearby Lorch. In 1766, the family left Lorch for Ludwigsburg.
Education
Schiller received his primary, but fairly bad education in Lorch. He was also instructed in Latin and Greek by the pastor of the village. In 1773 Schiller entered the Karlsschule Stuttgart, a military academy founded by Karl Eugen, Duke of Wurttemberg, where he studied law and eventually - medicine. At school, he wrote his first play, Die Räuber (The Robbers), which criticized social corruption and affirmed proto-revolutionary republican ideals. He attended the duke's military academy for two years. After the academy was moved to Stuttgart, Schiller endured five more years of harsh discipline there.
In December 1780 Schiller was appointed medical officer in Stuttgart. In 1782 his work Die Räuber, which he had written while a student, received its first stage performance, in Mannheim. Though well-accepted by the public, Die Räuber was criticized by the Duke of Wurttemberg. The same year Schiller published his Anthologie auf das Jahr 1782, which were inspired by a 30-year-old widow, Dorothea Vischer, who had three children.
Meantime, Schiller's conflict with the Duke of Württemberg forced him to flee Stuttgart in September 1782.
In September 1783 Schiller became dramatist at the Mannheim theater. During his time there he composed Die Verschwörung des Fiesko zu Genua (1783) and Kabale und Liebe (1784). He also began work on Don Carlos, Infant von Spanien, which appeared in 1785 and in its revised form in 1787.
In 1784 Schiller completed Die Schaubühne als moralische Anstalt betrachtet, which appeared in his Rheinische Thalia, a literary journal, in 1785. The second issue of Thaliacontained Schiller's hymn An die Freude later inspired Ludwig van Beethoven to create his magnificent Ninth Symphony in D Minor. In the third issue of Thalia Schiller published part of Don Carlos. Schiller occupied himself for many years afterward with the themes he employed in this drama.
In 1788 Schiller got acquainted with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and the same year his poems Die Götter Griechenlands and Die Künstler, and Geschichte des Abfalls der vereinigten Niederlande, a history of the revolt of the Netherlands against Spain, appeared. These works assured Schiller's fame and social position, and gained him a professorship of history at the University of Jena (nowadays Friedrich Schiller University Jena) in 1789, which he held for 10 years.
After 1790 Schiller became intensely interested in the philosophy and esthetics of Immanuel Kant. His Geschichte des Dreissigjährigen Krieges, a history of the Thirty Years War, appeared in 1791-1792. His studies in esthetics accompanied his historical researches.
Schiller wrote his important essay in esthetics, Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, in 1795-1796.
In 1798-1799 Schiller completed his great trilogy on Albrecht von Wallenstein, the condottiere of the Thirty Years War — Wallensteins Lager, Piccolomini, and Wallensteins Tod.
Schiller returned with his family to Weimar from Jena in 1799. Goethe convinced him to return to playwriting. He and Goethe founded the Weimar Theater.
Schiller wrote his most popular play, Maria Stuart, in 1800. The next play Die Jungfrau von Orleans came in 1801, and Die Braut von Messina two years later.
Schiller revealed his technical mastery at its most supreme in Wilhelm Tell (1804). 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.
Friedrich Schiller is considered to be one of the founders of modern German literature. He managed to conceive new forms of expression in drama like bourgeois tragedy and melodrama. Schiller authored many papers on philosophy, ethics and aesthetics. Many of his stage plays have been adapted by composers of the 20th century and later.
During his lifetime, Schiller formed a close friendship with the famous writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and thus became the one, who encouraged Goethe to finish many of his incomplete works. Their discussions led to the creation of what came to be known as ‘Weimar Classicism'. Together they became founders of the Weimar Theater, the leading theater in Germany.
For his achievements, Schiller was ennobled in 1802 by the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, adding the nobiliary particle "von" to his name.
Schiller was born into a strict Lutheran home. For most of his childhood, Friedrich dreamed of becoming a minister and preaching the Gospel to his flock. Later in life he considered himself to be no Christian, but man of the enlightenment, a self-styled "citizen of the world."
Schiller’s support of the Protestant cause was nominal rather than heartfelt. As he looked back through European history for exemplary, he found both only among Catholic personages. His catholicity brought him back to Catholic protagonists. Not the daughter of Henry VIII, but rather the Franco-Scottish Mary Stuart, not the self-interest Protestant princes but rather the larger-than-life Generalissimo Wallenstein, attracted him.
Politics
Although Schiller had vaguely republican sympathies, he despised the destruction of civil society in the French Revolution.
Views
Schiller’s early tragedies are attacks upon political oppression and the tyranny of social convention. In Don Carlos the conflict between love and the demands of the state was exalted into the idea of the dignity and freedom of man. The struggle against love is a struggle for a high goal, and it is not the love of Don Carlos for the Queen or his friendship for the Marquis of Posa that forms the crux of the play but the ideal of spiritual and national freedom.
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.
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. Schiller was convinced that only art can ennoble the barbarian and bring him culture. Thus art became, for Schiller, in the Platonic sense a basis of education. By means of the esthetic form man can "annihilate" the material aspects of life and triumph over transient matter. Man thus becomes the creator of a pure and permanent world.
Art, said Schiller, teaches man how to overcome his desires. Art is the first step away from the bondage of the flesh into a realm where the nobility of the soul reigns. The artist frees form from material in the same manner that waves separate a reflection from its source. In nature the artist discovers the laws of beauty. For example, in a tree he perceives the form of a pillar, and in the crescent moon the artist becomes aware of the mystery of the universe. For Schiller reality was merely illusion; only in the higher, spiritual realm was truth to be found.
Quotations:
"Respect the dreams of thy youth."
"Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain."
"Deeper meaning resides in the fairy tales told to me in my childhood than in any truth that is taught in life."
"A tyrant's power has a limit."
"The voice of the majority is no proof of justice."
"It is not flesh and blood but the heart which makes us fathers and sons."
"Live with your century but do not be its creature."
"Great souls suffer in silence".
"I am neither Illuminati nor Mason, but if the fraternization has a moral purpose in common with one another, and if this purpose for human society is the most important, ..."
"Did you think the lion was sleeping because he didn't roar?"
"The joke loses everything when the joker laughs himself."
"To save all we must risk all."
"Every true genius is bound to be naive."
"We shall be free, just as our fathers were."
"Only those who have the patience to do simple things perfectly will acquire the skill to do difficult things easily."
Membership
It is speculated that Schiller was a Freemason, but this has not been proven.
Personality
Friedrich Schiller had a compelling sense of himself as a spiritual being who is the searcher and the seeker of truth. He enjoyed a fine mind, and was an analytical thinker, capable of great concentration and theoretical insight. Schiller’s spontaneous generosity remained with him his entire life.
In 2008, after DNA tests, scientists found that the skull found in this German poet and writer’s coffin was not his and his tomb now lies vacant.
Quotes from others about the person
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: "Schiller's blank verse is bad. He moves it as a fly in a glue bottle. His thoughts have their connection and variety, it is true, but there is no sufficiently corresponding movement in the verse. How different from Shakespeare's endless rhythms! … There is a nimiety — a too-muchness — in all Germans. It is the national fault. Lessing had the best notion of blank verse. The trochaic termination of German words renders blank verse in that language almost impracticable."
Interests
Philosophers & Thinkers
Gotthold Lessing, Moses Mendelssohn, Johann Gottfried Herder, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, Karl Leonhard Reinhold,
Writers
Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, Goethe, Heinrich Wilhelm Gerstenberg, Plutarch, William Shakespeare, Christoph Martin Wieland
Connections
On February 22, 1790, Schiller married Charlotte von Lengefeld. The couple had four children - Emilie Henriette Luise, Ernst Friedrich Wilhelm, Karl Ludwig Friedrich, and Karoline Luise Friederike.
