Es reden und träumen die Menschen viel

Von bessern künftigen Tagen,

Nach einem glüklichen goldenen Ziel

Sieht man sie rennen und jagen,

Die Welt wird alt und wird wieder jung,

Doch der Mensch hoft immer Verbesserung!

Schiller, “Hofnung” (1797; NA 1: 401)

Schiller was born in Marbach am Neckar, not in the country that is known as Germany today, but in the Duchy of Württemberg, one of the some three-hundred states of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation (926–1806). The seat of the empire was in the capital city of the most powerful of the German-speaking states, Vienna, Austria, ruled at the time of Schiller’s birth by Empress Maria Theresa (1717–1780) and Emperor Franz I (1708–1765) of the Habsburg/Habsburg-Lorraine line, which governed the empire from 1440 until its dissolution in the face of aggression led by Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) in 1806. Although Schiller is frequently and somewhat misleadingly referred to by the title of nobility “von Schiller,” he was born and raised in relative poverty and received his patent of nobility for his service to the empire as an artist, philosopher, and historian on November 16, 1802, just over two years before his death in 1805 at the age of forty-five. Schiller was in fact a subject of Duke Carl Eugen of Württemberg (1728–1793) and was born and raised a “Sklave” (slave) by rank, if not in spirit, as one of his early literary role models—the poet, journalist, and musician Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart (1739–1791)—described the subjects of Europe’s petty feudal tyrants, and of Carl Eugen in particular. “Leibeigenschaft” (bondage) was the law for all inhabitants but the nobility in Württemberg until 1817.

Schiller’s parents provide a paradigmatic case of the emerging tensions between feudal tradition, increasing freedom of thought, and upward mobility, producing in a son who attended law school before becoming a Doctor of Medicine in 1780, one of seventeen international political activists declared citizens of the French Republic in 1792, and the recipient of a patent of nobility. His paternal grandfather was village sheriff (Schultheiß) in Bittenfeld, and all four of his grandparents were professional bakers; his mother, Elisabetha Dorothea Kodweiß (1732–1802), continued the tradition, barely making ends meet during her husband’s military service for the first three years of Schiller’s life in a small apartment in Marbach. His father, Johann Caspar Schiller (1723–1796), served in the Seven Years’ War and rose from ensign in 1745, to army medic in 1753, to lieutenant in 1758, to captain in 1767, finally retiring from the Württembergian army in 1785, at which time he was appointed by the duke to supervise the botanical gardens at the residence in Ludwigsburg, where he was promoted to sergeant-major in 1794. He directed the forestry academy in Ludwigsburg and became a pioneer in cultivating fruit trees, and Schiller helped him publish his book, Die Baumzucht im Großen (Aboriculture on a Large Scale, 1795), which was considered a standard work for over a century. None of these accomplishments resulted in anything but a meager existence. In even more difficult financial times, Schiller’s parents also had five daughters, two of whom died very young, and one who died at the age of eighteen: Elisabetha Christophina Friederika “Fina” (1757–1847, later Reinwald), Luise Dorothea Katharina (1766–1836, later Franckh), Maria Charlotte (1768–1774), Beata Friederike (May 1773–December 1773), and Caroline Christiane “Nanette” (1777–1796).

In 1762, the Schiller family moved into a modest apartment in Ludwigsburg, and in 1764 into more affordable rooms in the shop of a blacksmith in nearby Lorch, where Schiller received instruction in Latin and Ancient Greek from Pastor Philipp Ulrich Moser (1720–1792), who provided the inspiration for the eponymous, sympathetic, and serious character in Schiller’s first drama, Die Räuber (The Robbers, 1782). From 1766 to 1772, Schiller attended the Latin School in Ludwigsburg. Without exception, Schiller—or “Fritz,” as he was known—is described as an unusually bright child, whose most striking characteristic was his willingness to give his few possessions to less fortunate children, a habit his father forbade him. In almost every available description of his youth—most of which merely restate bourgeois fabrications of the nineteenth century—one reads how the six/seven-year-old Schiller delivered play sermons, an anecdote that generally leads to the disingenuous conclusion that Schiller was, at some point after his childhood, genuinely religious. The only evidence for such a conclusion is a few letters with pious greetings either written to relatives under the watchful eyes of his parents, composed under strict supervision while a teenager in college, or delivered in his sister Christophina Schiller’s one reminiscence of how their father had decided early that Schiller would become a clergyman (NA 42: 3). Theology, however, was not only a common subject of study for future state servants, whether or not they were particularly pious, but also launched many a pedagogical, literary, and philosophical career for a growing class of first-generation college students, all of whom were male. There are only two recorded remarks from Schiller on the topic, one firsthand to the duke in the paper, “Bericht an den Herzog Karl Eugen über die Mitschüler und sich selbst” (Report to Duke Karl Eugen on the Classmates and on Myself; Fall 1774), written just before his fifteenth birthday, in which he wrote that he would like to become not a minister, but a “Gottesgelehrter” (theologian; NA 22: 15), a subject not offered at the Karlsschule, an institution that he very much hoped to leave. Schiller, however, did not study theology, and the second remark on the topic appears in a reminiscence of Schiller’s classmate Karl Philipp Conz (1762–1827) regarding an encounter in 1781 that establishes the irrelevance of the first, during which Schiller stated that he was happy to have studied medicine: “Was wäre ich denn? Ein Tübingisches Magisterchen” (What would I be? A little magistrate in Tübingen; NA 42: 19). There is no evidence that Schiller ever gave the matter any further thought, and there is a great deal of evidence that religious studies was not a spiritual interest for Schiller, but a sub-field of anthropology, history, and psychology, and possibly even a disingenuous argument for leaving the Karlsschule. His only acquaintances who ever implied that Schiller had religious tendencies as an adult were his servant Georg Gottfried Rudolph (1777–1840) and his sister-in-law Caroline von Wolzogen (1763–1847). In line with her own increasingly religious worldview, Wolzogen appears to imagine a religious Schiller on a number of occasions: upon Schiller’s death in 1805 (NA 42: 431–432)—in testimony that was rebutted by Schiller’s close friend Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835)—in her biography Schillers Leben (Schiller’s Life) of 1830, and in a letter of 1840 to Schiller-biographer Gustav Schwab (1792–1850; NA 42: 279).

At the age of thirteen, Schiller was ordered by the duke to attend the strictly regimented military academy the duke himself had founded and personally supervised, the Hohe Karlsschule, which had begun as a military orphanage at Castle Solitude in 1770, became a military academy in 1773, moved to Stuttgart in 1775, received university status from Emperor Joseph II (1741–1790) in 1781, and was disbanded in 1794 by Carl Eugen’s brother, Duke Ludwig Eugen (1731–1795)—one of the very few (dubious) accomplishments in his short reign after the death of his brother. Schiller spent eight years studying at the Karlsschule, at first studying law from 1773 to 1775 without any particular passion or success, before being granted permission to change majors and study medicine in 1775 upon the creation of a medical program. Schiller thrived as a medical student, regularly receiving awards for his work—three of which he received during Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s (1749–1832) visit to the Karlsschule in December 1779—and demonstrating a defiant tendency for unconventional, dialectical, and interdisciplinary approaches, as well as a critical edge that his professors found disrespectful toward established scholars, and a literary style and ironic sense of humor they likewise found inappropriate (NA 21: 24).

Schiller’s earliest poems, influenced foremost by those of Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (1724–1803), demonstrate what he described as his “brennender Hass” (burning hatred) of despotism in all its forms, but, in particular, in its most virulent and destructive form, that of the military conqueror and occupier. Sixteen years after his birth in the geographical and chronological midst of the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), Schiller’s first published poems are concerned with two forms of enslavement that he lived with from birth to death: native serfdom and foreign occupation, as evident in barely veiled expressions of support for the US-American War of Independence in his first two published poems, “Der Abend” (At Dusk, 1776/1777) and “Der Eroberer” (The Conqueror, 1776/1777). Already these first poems demonstrate the Deist concept of gods as poetic projections and a concept of judgment and immortality as secular matters strictly limited to human morality and human history, ideas he likely adapted from his reading of Moses Mendelssohn’s (1729–1786) Phädon, oder über die Unsterblichkeit der Seele (Phaedo, or On the Immortality of the Soul), an adaptation of Plato’s seventh dialogue on the death of Socrates, a resonant work that had appeared in four editions (1767, 1768, 1769, and 1776) by the time Schiller was sixteen years old. Here, too, the seeds of his strategic, kaleidoscopic blur of metaphors become evident, an approach necessary for free expression at the Karlsschule that served him well in outmaneuvering censors throughout his career. Between the ages of twelve and sixteen, Schiller also drafted at least four dramas prior to Die Räuber, including Die Christen (The Christians, 1772)—about which we know nothing—Absolon (1772), the content of which is hinted at in Schiller’s description of Absolon’s pursuit of power through deception in the first Karlsschule speech; and the plan for Der Student von Nassau (The Student of Nassau, 1775). Cosmus von Medicis (1776), which Schiller destroyed, dealt with the hatred between two brothers and their competition for the same woman, and likely left traces in Die Räuber, from which he read excerpts of a draft to classmates at the Karlsschule and which he completed in late 1781. Aside from Die Räuber, the only other theater work from Schiller’s university years to survive is the two-scene “lyrical operetta” Semele (1779/1782; NA 5: 195–245), a singspiel inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses about a fatal affair between the Theban princess Semele and Zeus that begot Dionysis and led to her death, a work that Schiller disavowed in an early meeting with his future wife Charlotte von Lengefeld (1766–1826) and later chose to leave out of his collected works edition.

After changing his major from law to medicine in 1775, Schiller wrote two philosophical speeches—“Rede über die Frage: Gehört allzuviel Güte, Leutseeligkeit und grosse Freygebigkeit im engsten Verstande zur Tugend?” (Speech on the Question: Does all too much Kindness, Sociability, and great Generosity necessarily Constitute Virtue?, 1779) and “Die Tugend in ihren Folgen betrachtet” (The Consequences of Virtue Considered, 1779–1780; NA 20: 30–36). Both speeches were assigned by the duke to be written in praise of Baroness Franziska von Hohenheim (1748–1811)—the duke’s mistress from 1772 until 1785, when she became his second wife—on consecutive birthdays. Although both speeches have been widely overlooked by scholars, they lay the philosophical foundation for a lifelong program of promoting a reasoned, secular alternative to faith-based role models, embarking from and concluding with the Scottish Enlightenment/Common Sense thesis that the destiny of humankind is happiness, and the path to happiness is virtue, both of which rely on what became the familiar Schillerian connection between moral rationalism and sensual foundation. A striking feature of the First Virtue Speech of 1779 is Schiller’s relative silence toward Christ and his focus on pagan characters as moral exemplars and perversions, demonstrating with all clarity that virtue is a universally human potential that cannot be brought about through coercion. Thus, Socrates, without any possible knowledge of more recent divine revelation, serves as Schiller’s most sublime figure in all of antiquity (NA 20: 3). In addition to the two speeches, Schiller wrote one assigned report on the religious conviction, moral constitution, dislikes, inclinations, hygienic habits, and relationships to faculty of classmates, the aforementioned “Bericht an Herzog Karl Eugen über die Mitschüler und sich selbst.” This was followed by a minor case study on the depression of a classmate, “Über die Krankheit des Eleven Grammont” (On the Illness of Cadet Grammont, 1780; NA 22: 19–30), and three medical dissertations. Schiller’s first dissertation, Philosophie der Physiologie (Philosophy of Physiology, late 1779), was criticized by committee members Johann Friedrich Consbruch (1736–1810), Christian Klein (1741–1815), and Christian Gottlieb Reuß (1742–1815) for its literary style and academic inconsistency, unwittingly describing the text’s primary virtue in their review, namely, Schiller’s interdisciplinary virtuosity, which combines the science of physiology with philosophical treatises and literary examples (NA 21: 114–115)—including the reckless prank of citing his own drama Die Räuber as a medical case study. Schiller’s second unsatisfactory submission, De discrimine febrium inflammatoriarum et putridarum (On the Difference between Inflammatory and Putrid Fever, November 1780; NA 22: 31–62), a more traditional scientific treatise written in Latin, though rich in literary language and citations, focuses almost exclusively on the physical processes that accompany fevers, and was rejected for its general sloppiness. Schiller’s third successful submission, Versuch über den Zusammenhang der thierischen Natur des Menschen mit seiner geistigen (Essay on the Connection between the Animal Nature and the Intellectual Nature of the Human Being, November 1780; NA 20: 37–75), though likewise criticized for poetic expression and excessive imagination, was approved; the thesis, written in German, was subsequently published by Cotta in Stuttgart. After completing his comprehensive examinations, Schiller received his doctorate on December 15, 1780, having just turned twenty-one years old.

Upon receiving his medical degree, Schiller was assigned to serve as Assistant Medical Officer in Stuttgart. From February 1, 1781 until September 23, 1782, Schiller sublet a very modest and—according to his classmate Georg Friedrich Scharffenstein (1760–1817)—spectacularly messy room in an apartment, in a building that belonged to the father of another of Schiller’s classmates, the author and publisher Balthasar Haug (1731–1792), who had printed Schiller’s first two published poems in 1777. His landlady was a captain’s widow, Luise Dorothea Vischer (1751–1816), with whom Schiller had an affair, immortalized as “Laura” in a series of popular love poems, one of which was later set to music by Franz Schubert (1797–1828), and for which Schubart admonished Schiller in the poem “An Schiller” that revolution, not love poetry, was his calling. During this period, Schiller embarked on his first attempts at publishing journals, serving as co-editor for Wirttembergisches Repertorium der Litteratur (Württembergian Repertorium of Literature), a quarterly journal co-edited with former classmate Johann Wilhelm Petersen (1758–1815), which appeared three times from 1782 to 1783, and Anthologie auf das Jahr 1782 (Anthology for the Year 1782), which, as its title implies, only appeared once. Here, too, on June 7, 1784, Schiller made the acquaintance of Henriette von Wolzogen (1745–1788), the widowed mother of four Karlsschule students, including his classmate Wilhelm von Wolzogen (1762–1809), who was to become Schiller’s brother-in-law after Wolzogen married Schiller’s recently divorced sister-in-law Caroline von (Lengefeld) Beulwitz in 1794 (NA 23: 146–147).

Seldom in the history of rises from utter obscurity to stardom has there been a story like that of Schiller and Die Räuber, which saw Schiller recognized as among the most resonant authors from the stages of continental Europe in 1782 to those of New York City by 1795. The play shocked the audience at its January 13, 1782 premiere at the Nationaltheater Mannheim with its violent and emotional rant against any form of coercion, featuring dueling sublime criminal brothers who embody the antagonism of drives that informs Schiller’s Karlsschule writings. The timeliness, rebellious energy, and originality of Schiller’s “dramatischer Roman” (dramatic novel; NA 3: 244) marked the play early—morally and politically—as a future canonical subversive work, and, according to one account, left audiences in a state ranging from insensible to ecstatic to outraged. In addition to the reality of highway robbers in the 1770s, including a substantial number of displaced Seven Years’ War veterans, the play was inspired by three of Schiller’s favorite works, Schubart’s essay Zur Geschichte des menschlichen Herzens (Toward a History of the Human Heart, 1767), Johann Anton Leisewitz’ (1752–1806) Julius von Tarent (1774), and Friedrich Maximilian Klinger’s Die Zwillinge (The Twins, 1776), all of which feature extreme cases of sibling rivalry. After the tumultuous premiere and successful performances in Hamburg, Leipzig, and Erfurt in 1782, Die Räuber was alternately condemned by the literary authorities—Goethe and Christoph Martin Wieland (1733–1813)—repeatedly banned from the stage for “endangering the youth” until the early 1800s, embraced by the very young—Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843) and Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853)—and met with awe by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834): “Who is this Schiller, this convulser of the heart?” (Coleridge 1: 96–97).

Written almost completely while Schiller was still in medical school, the play features a number of the theories that inform his early philosophical and scientific writings. At the most basic level, the conflict is driven by the binary opposition of Karl Moor’s one-sided revolution of feeling and self-individuation versus Franz Moor’s one-sided domination of reason and self-indulgence that precludes the possibility of positive societal order (as opposed to mere coerced obedience to tradition), due to a failure to achieve the inner harmony of humanity’s rational and sensual natures. Both the Enlightenment materialist villain, Franz Moor, and the ideologically dangerous Sturm und Drang idealist, Karl Moor, declare war on distinct aspects of social tradition in response to injustices. In 1782, in Württembergisches Repertorium der Litteratur, Schiller describes the conflict: devoid of compassion due to childhood trauma, the second-born and unattractive Franz exploits the most recent developments in enlightened and progressive thought—moral, religious, and civil law; reason, equal rights, modern medical theory, and the dismissal of Christian beliefs—to create a system of vice designed to usurp his father’s throne, which is by birthright his brother’s. Franz exposes the romantic concept of love as a mask for the fulfillment of animal sexual drive, deconstructs fatherly love to reveal the narcissistic pride of a failed artist for his deeply flawed creation, and orchestrates a complicated plan for the psychosomatic murder of his father. Conversely, Karl, to whom nature and tradition have given everything, has every reason to be invested in the philosophy of love, wisdom, virtue, and happiness that has privileged him over his brother, and which is too easily shattered when he is deceived into believing that his father has disowned him, leading him to direct a war on society most notable for its recklessness, rape, arson, and murder. Thus, ironically, Franz and Karl, both of whose primary virtue is resistance, arrive at similar conclusions and become what Schiller calls “Ungeheuer mit Mäjestät” (monsters with majesty; NA 3: 244) via two very different paths, both in pursuit of, among other goals, the allegorical representation of virtue, Amalia, whose character and selfless sacrifice demonstrate the balance of feeling and reason that constitutes inner freedom.

According to Scharffenstein, Schiller achieved his goal to write a book the oppressors would have to burn (NA 42: 16): Die Räuber was censored in Bavaria and Austria, and never performed in its original form in Schiller’s lifetime. In short, in his own words, Schiller—who had played the gadfly at the Karlsschule for most of his stay—also demonstrated many of the qualifications to become a proper outlaw. After the newspapers had reported on the positive reception of Die Räuber, the duke learned that Schiller had broken the law by leaving the state twice in four months to attend both the play’s premiere in January—in a carriage with Dorothea Vischer and Henriette von Wolzogen—and a further performance in Mannheim on May 25. The duke had Schiller arrested, imprisoned him for fourteen days, and forbade him in a public announcement to write any further dramas. Ironically, while in jail from June 28 to July 12, Schiller worked on his drama, Die Verschwörung des Fiesko zu Genua. Ein republikanisches Trauerspiel (The Fiesco Conspiracy at Genoa; A Republican Play of Mourning), a study in anti-republican tyranny (Abel 1: 304). Soon thereafter, in the night from September 22 to 23, 1782, Schiller fled with his classmate, musician Johann Andreas Streicher (1761–1833), in a cloak-and-dagger action planned to take place during royal wedding fireworks, featuring false names and passports, stolen horses, a calculated misdirection maneuver, two broken pistols for show, and—as scheduled—a unit guarding the Stuttgart South Gate in which only classmate and friend Scharffenstein would recognize the defectors (Alt 2009, 306). In order to avoid detection in Mannheim, Schiller (Dr. Schmidt), a military deserter and fugitive, and Streicher stayed at the inn “Zum Viehhof” (The Cattle Pen) in Oggersheim from October 13 to November 30, 1782, where he continued work on Fiesko and Kabale und Liebe, originally titled Luise Millerin. On December 7, 1782, Schiller arrived at the inn “Zum Hirsch” (The Stag) in Meiningen, where he was received by a stranger, court librarian, and author Wilhelm Reinwald (1737–1815) and found asylum at the home of Henriette von Wolzogen in Bauerbach under the pseudonym “Dr. Ritter”—all elements of the Gothic tradition Schiller’s works would soon inform. Reinwald went on to publish frequently in Schiller’s journals and married Schiller’s sister Christophina, a private art instructor twenty years his junior, in 1786. Despite the many testimonials regarding the despotic conditions at the Karlsschule and the tyranny of Carl Eugen, the duke’s mild response to Schiller’s defection and the fact that Schiller’s family suffered no consequences for the actions of a renegade son demonstrate the duke’s fondness for the defiant subject Schiller as much as the arbitrariness of a despot who had also sent local publisher and poet Schubart to a decade (1777–1787) in the dungeon Hohenasberg, overlooking Asberg near Stuttgart, for little worse. Schiller’s rise from obscurity to international prominence was, as Thomas Mann (1875–1955) wrote, “ein blutendes Trotzdem” (a bleeding act of defiance; Mann VIII: 372), and, for all the dialectical contrariness that marked his works from the medical theses to his final dramas, Schiller owed much to his simultaneous education and experience of coercion at the Karlsschule (Thomas, 24).

As was the case with Schiller’s early and late philosophical treatises, in which happiness leads to happiness, and freedom yields freedom, the cause and effect of Schiller’s exile in Mannheim were the same, namely, his relationship with the theater director Freiherr Wolfgang Heribert von Dalberg (1750–1806) and his prospects for a position as house dramatist at the Nationaltheater Mannheim. On July 27, 1783, Schiller was appointed house playwright by Dalberg. The first fruit of this collaboration was Schiller’s second drama, Fiesko, the prophetic play of mourning by no means focused on the downfall of the reckless and opportunist titular character, but rather on his entirely resistible rise, which threatens the future of the flawed and vulnerable, if humane, republic, a focus seemingly self-evident in its subtitle. As the follow-up to the wild success of Die Räuber, Fiesko was a box-office failure, leading Schiller to rework the drama to feature an optimistic ending, in which Fiesko surprises all by revealing that what appeared to be selfish ambition was in fact a test of the republican resolve of his supporters. Schiller was disgusted with the Mannheim theater audience’s discomfort with the historical tragedy of the stolen dream of a republic, and summarized the Fiesko experience in a letter of May 5, 1784 to Reinwald: “Den Fiesko verstand das Publikum nicht. Republikanische Freiheit ist hier zu Lande ein Schall ohne Bedeutung, ein leerer Name—in den Adern der Pfälzer fließt kein römisches Blut” (The audience did not understand Fiesko. In this state, republican freedom is a sound without a meaning, an empty signifier—no Roman blood flows in the veins of the Palatines; NA 23: 137). Not only Schiller and his audience in Mannheim were disappointed in their taste agendas, but, for entirely different reasons, the censors in Vienna responded to the frank portrayal of the selfish motivations of those who usurp the freedom of the people by substantially rewriting Fiesko, deleting the word “Freiheit” (freedom) as well as the author’s name (Glossy, 35).

Writing in Bauerbach near Meiningen, Schiller completed his third drama, Luise Millerin, in July 1783. At the urging of prominent actor and playwright August Wilhelm Iffland (1759–1814), Schiller published the play with the revised title Kabale und Liebe. Ein bürgerliches Trauerspiel (Intrigue and Love: A Bourgeois Play of Mourning) in March 1784, and the play premiered to mostly positive reviews in Frankfurt on April 9—starring the poet and actress Sophie Albrecht (1756–1840) as Luise Miller. Not all of the reviews were positive: the prominent author and critic Karl Philipp Moritz (1756–1793) denounced the language and the story of courtly corruption, inter-class romance, blackmail, and murder-suicide as “Schillerschen Schmutz” (Schillerian filth) and “Unsinn” (nonsense; Staats- und gelehrte Zeitung, 831–833). Like Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s (1729–1781) title character in Emilia Galotti (1772), the middle-class protagonist Luise Miller, whose mother harbors dangerous social ambitions, becomes the focus of both noble and bourgeois suitors in a labyrinthine conspiracy to preempt her involvement with Ferdinand von Walter—the son of the president of a corrupt minor feudal state run by a prince whose court and behavior closely resemble those of Schiller’s Duke Carl Eugen—by marrying her off and sealing her fate as an unhappy wife and mistress. With her path to happiness effectively rendered hopeless by class tradition and the extraordinary efforts of the court, Luise consumes a drink poisoned by Ferdinand, who has been misled into a jealous rage. Ironically, it was Ferdinand’s liberal view of love that first led Luise to dream that they could be happy together, a view diametrically opposed to that of his opportunist father, who had murdered his predecessor in order to rise to power. In Act I, Scene 7, father and son engage in a heated debate pitting the base hunger for power against the ideal of true love, featuring the terms “Glück” and “Glückseligkeit” (happiness) five times in less than half a page (NA 5: 37–38, footnote). In Act II, Scene 2, the moral failure of the state is revealed in all clarity in a detailed adaptation of a scene from the historical Ochsenfurt Mutiny of mercenaries of May 10, 1777, which took place less than 90 miles from Ludwigsburg, ending with the troops’ ironic declaration of defeat, “Juchhe nach Amerika!” (Hurrah! To America!; NA 5: 50). Schiller himself indicated in 1784 that he was indeed aware that the numerous references to happiness—or the lack thereof—and political freedom in Kabale und Liebe were understood as criticism of pro-British German rulers in the conscious context of the sale of German mercenaries to fight for England in the US-American War of Independence. This is evident in his specific reference to the United States in his May 1, 1784, letter to his theater director Dalberg: “Ifland wird den Kammerdiener spielen, den ich, mit Wegwerfung aller amerikanischen Beziehungen, wieder ins Stük hineingeschoben habe” (Iffland will play the Courtier, whom I have reinserted into the play, while throwing out all American references; NA 23: 134).

During his tenure as house poet in Mannheim, Schiller led the complicated personal life of a young celebrity, including a Gothic pursuit of a grifter known only as Julia, an infatuation with Charlotte von Wolzogen—who was the daughter of his landlady Henriette von Wolzogen, and who served as one of the models for his character Luise Miller—and with the daughter of his publisher Christian Friedrich Schwan (1733–1815), Anna Margaretha Schwan (1766–1796), to whom Schiller proposed in April 1785 after he left Mannheim; her father rejected the proposal without consulting his daughter. In May 1784, Schiller began a years-long affair with the married noblewoman Charlotte Sophia Juliane von Kalb (1761–1843), whose husband was an often-absent French military advisor during the US War of Independence, and who was also an acquaintance of Goethe, Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803), and Jean Paul Richter (1763–1825). At the urging of Kalb and Dalberg, Schiller presented himself to Duke Carl August of Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach (1757–1828) on December 26, 1784 in Darmstadt, and read to him from a draft of Don Karlos (1787). The following day, the duke conferred on Schiller the honorary title “Rath” (councillor), bringing Schiller one step closer to Weimar, and Goethe. In October of 1785, in the company of Henriette and Wilhelm von Wolzogen, Schiller briefly met his future mother-in-law Louise Juliane Eleonore Friederike von Lengefeld (1743–1823) and her two daughters, the recently married Caroline von Beulwitz (1763–1847) and the unmarried Louise Antoinette Charlotte von Lengefeld (1766–1826).

Expecting his dismissal as house dramatist in Mannheim, Schiller hoped to find employment as the secretary of the “Kurpfälzische Deutsche Gesellschaft” (German Society of the Electorate of the Palatinate), to whose members he delivered the lecture “Vom Wirken der Schaubühne auf das Volk” (On the Effect of the Stage on the People) on June 26, 1784. A revision of the speech appeared in 1785 in the first issue of Schiller’s second journal Rheinische Thalia (Rhenish Thalia) published in Mannheim by Schwan - as “Was kann eine gute stehende Schaubühne eigentlich wirken?” (What Effect Can a Good Permanent Theater Actually Achieve?), and then again in 1802 as “Die Schaubühne als moralische Anstalt betrachtet” (The Stage considered as a Moral Institution) in Schiller’s Kleinere prosaische Schriften (Schiller’s Shorter Prose Works). Schiller’s promotion of the educational benefits of a national theater, first attempted by Lessing in Hamburg, contrasts the superior benefits of the “autonomous process of self-fashioning” (Moggach, 534) through aesthetic education with the merely heteronomous functions of the law and religion, which only enforce negative laws, which Schiller states become superfluous for morally educated individuals: “Wenn keine Moral mehr gelehrt wird, keine Religion mehr Glauben findet, wenn kein Gesez mehr vorhanden ist” (When morality is no longer taught, religion no longer believed, when laws no longer exist; NA 20: 92), audiences will still experience “heilsame Schauer” (healing sense of horror) and a “lebendige Glut zur Tugend, brennender Haß des Lasters” (lively glow for virtue, burning hatred of vice; NA 20: 92) at the sight of the misdeeds of Medea, Lady Macbeth, and Franz Moor. Thus, the process entails self-enlightenment and liberation from the legion of “Schlachtopfer vernachläßigter Erziehung” (victims of neglected education; NA 20: 98) by learning from the failures of one’s predecessors. In keeping with Schiller’s thesis that the aesthetic experience revives and promotes wholeness through reconciliation of e.g. amusement and instruction, rest and exertion, the state of aesthetic reception appears here as “einen mittleren Zustand” (an intermediary state; NA 20: 90) between animal physical sensation and human intellect that was already present in his first and third dissertations, in which it appeared as a “Mittelkraft” (transmutative force; NA 20: 13) between the material world and the intellect. The advantage of the stage is threefold: first, the medium of the stage is pleasurable (even more so than literature) rather than punitive; second, the experience of the medium is liberating rather than coercive; thus, “So gewiß sichtbare Darstellung mächtiger wirkt, als toder Buchstabe und kalte Erzählung, so gewiß wirkt die Schaubühne tiefer und daurender als Moral und Geseze” (Just as certainly as visual portrayal has a more powerful impact than the dead letter and cold narration, it is also certain that the stage has a deeper and more lasting impact than morality and law; NA 20: 93); and third, relatively speaking, the stage offers a level of freedom of speech only possible in the public sphere in the realms of art and—as Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) would explain in his December 1784 essay, “Was ist Aufklärung?” (What is Enlightenment?)—academia, in particular regarding criticism of rulers and state and religious institutions.

Not surprisingly, one of dozens of plays Schiller cites in the Schaubühne essay is Lessing’s Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise, 1779), which was subjected to severe censorship and had premiered only a year earlier when Schiller was twenty-four years old. Lessing’s play provides the model of presenting a meaningful exposé of the holy trinity of tyranny and majority bullying—political tyranny, church tyranny, and church-state-approved mob tyranny against minority interests—in an entertainment medium featuring the portrayal of the aesthetic education of a prince (Sultan Saladin) and an intolerant crusader knight toward not only tolerance but compassion. Schiller’s interest in characters who autonomously turn the historical condition of the human being, or fate in the most modern sense, into an object of free will serve as models, including Pierre Corneille’s (1606–1684) portrayal of Augustus’ forgiveness of and offer of friendship to Cinna in Cinna ou la Clémence d’Auguste (Cinna: or The Clemency of Augustus, 1641; NA 20: 93) and the sublime dedication of the title figure in Julius von Soden’s (1754–1831) Franz von Sickingen (NA 20: 93; NA 23: 313), allowing Schiller to conclude that just as the stage is superior to the law and religion, “wie groß wird mir da der Mensch, wie klein und verächtlich das gefürchtete unüberwindliche Schicksal!” (how great the human being appears to me, how small and contemptuous dreaded insurmountable fate!; NA 20: 93). The theater radiates reconciliation and happiness beyond the individual to “Menschen aus allen Kraisen und Zonen und Ständen” (individuals of all spheres and realms and classes), transcending historical situation and unfettered by convention in the awareness of belonging to “Ein Geschlecht” (One race) driven by reason to freedom and happiness through an “allwebende Sympathie” (all-interweaving compassion) and of what it means “Mensch zu seyn” (to be a human being; NA 20: 100).

In late 1784, Schiller had announced his second journal, Thalia, named after the Greek muse of joyous art, only the first issue of which was entitled Rheinische Thalia, which appeared in March 1785, with a conspicuously ingratiating dedication to Duke Carl August, his future patron. In his announcement of the journal of November 11, 1784, Schiller delivers by now characteristically defiant political and aesthetic rhetorical gestures that continue to inform his legacy as a social critic with serious street credibility, among them the statement: “Ich schreibe als Weltbürger, der keinem Fürsten dient” (I write as a citizen of the world, who serves no prince; NA 22: 93), proceeding to state that he lost his family and his fatherland, Württemberg, due to the political response to his first drama, Die Räuber. The first issue of Rheinische Thalia, which sets the tone for the next seven years of the journal, displays Schiller’s remarkable rate of production and versatility, featuring seven items—all written by Schiller—including the Schaubühne essay, the novella adapted from Denis Diderot (1713–1784), “Merkwürdiges Beispiel einer weiblichen Rache” (A Remarkable Example of Female Revenge), and the first acts of Don Karlos, two further essays on theater and the Mannheim Museum, and the results of an essay contest on theater for which Dalberg had provided the prompts. Rheinische Thalia was not a sales success, but subsequent issues as Thalia beginning in 1786 sold well under the supervision of the first of Schiller’s two most important publishers, Georg Joachim Göschen (1752–1828) in Leipzig, a friend of Schiller’s future confidante Johann Gottfried Körner (1756–1831), who helped Göschen establish his publishing house, and the second being Johann Friedrich Cotta (1764–1832) in Stuttgart. Thalia continued in seven issues through 1791, when Schiller’s serious illness postponed work until the first issue of Neue Thalia in 1792.

In April 1785, Schiller took leave from his friends and romantic entanglements in Mannheim, meeting last with his former classmate and fellow outlaw Streicher, with whom he had fled Württemberg, both vowing to succeed—Streicher as orchestra conductor, and Schiller planning to pursue a law degree in Leipzig and a career as a politician. Streicher went on to become a renowned piano maker, composer, and a close friend of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827). At the beginning of June 1784, the rather desperate Schiller had received a package including the gifts of a wallet and individual miniature portraits of two young couples in Dresden who were great admirers of his work: the portrait artist Dora Stock (1760–1832), the diplomat, author, and future revolutionary exile Ludwig Ferdinand Huber (1764–1804), and the salon host Minna Stock (1762–1843)—a scene from whose childhood appears in the eighth book of Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit, in which he describes visiting the Stock family in Leipzig during his student years—and one of Schiller’s most influential friends and collaborators, author and Saxon and Prussian state administrator Körner. Having no place to go after the termination of his position as house dramatist in Mannheim, Schiller took their open invitation quite literally; he stayed in Körner’s residence in Leipzig-Gohlis in the summer of 1785 and arrived in Dresden in early September, at first vacationing with them in Loschwitz, and then living with the newly married Minna and Gottfried Körner in Dresden until 1787, having created a studio and apartment in their garden house in Loschwitz on September 12, 1785. During this period, Dora Stock assisted the portrait artist Anton Graff (1736–1813) with his well-known portrait of Schiller, as well as producing three of her own, one of which was a pastel copy of Graff’s portrait. The Körners, who were extraordinarily well-connected in the theatre scene, constructed a small but impressive theater in their home, where scenes from Don Karlos were first performed; Dora Stock later became the first to perform as Johanna in an in-house reading of Schiller’s Die Jungfrau von Orleans (The Maid of Orleans, 1801), and her nephew Carl Theodor Körner (1791–1813), who became a prominent dramatist at the Burgtheater in Vienna and an anti-Napoleonic soldier-poet, became the first to portray Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell as a child.

In the summer and fall of 1785, while in Gohlis—today part of Leipzig—at the invitation of Körner’s friend, the manor lord and patron of the arts Johann Hieronymus Hetzer (1723–1788), Schiller worked on the first three acts of his fourth completed drama Don Karlos and what was to become his best-known lyric work, the philosophical poem “An die Freude” (Ode to Joy). In late 1785, Schiller wrote as the defiant voice of the Age of Happiness, and his use of “Freude” (joy) here—the sensual counterpart to the political-philosophical term “Glückseligkeit” (happiness)—is an expression of the feeling of enthusiasm that both drives and accompanies the crowning achievement of reason and virtue—political freedom—and the overthrow of tyranny, violent if necessary—both of which are prerequisites of happiness. Although Schiller concluded in 1803 that it was “ein schlechtes Gedicht” (a bad poem) that “einem fehlerhaften Geschmack der Zeit entgegen kam” (catered to a flawed taste of the time; NA 30: 206), even by then, twenty-one years before the premiere of Beethoven’s setting, Schiller and Körner recognized the widespread popularity of the “Volkslied” (people’s song) in several letters in September and October of 1800 (NA 38/1: 347; NA 30: 206). Indeed, Beethoven’s setting of Schiller’s poem was preceded by approximately forty other melodies between 1785 and 1824, among them settings by Körner and Schubart, and fourteen of which appeared in the published collection, Vierzehn Compositionen zu Schillers ODE AN DIE FREUDE (Fourteen Compositions for Schiller’s ODE TO JOY), in 1800 (Hildebrandt, 123). In a series of packages sent to his publisher Göschen from November 29 to December 23, 1785, were the poem Schiller had referred to as “das Gedicht an die Freude” (the poem To Joy; NA 24: 28–29) from its very first mention—not “An die Freiheit” (Ode to Freedom), as has been speculated without compelling evidence—followed by Act II of Don Karlos, the poems “Freigeisterei der Leidenschaft” (Libertinism of Passion) and “Resignation,” both of which he suspected would be censored, and the latter of which contains the leitmotivistic secularist line: “Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht” (world history is the final judgment; NA 1: 168). In the same weeks, Schiller submitted the anonymous “Verbrecher aus Infamie” (Criminal of Infamy), and the final version of “Philosophische Briefe” (Philosophical Letters, 1786). In this work, a fictional dialogue adapted from discussions between Schiller and Körner, the enlightened Raphael seeks to debunk the theosophy of the younger Julius, causing the latter to experience an existential crisis. However, according to Schiller, it is natural and positive that the promotion of “Sceptizismus und Freidenkerei” (skepticism and libertinism; NA 20: 108) necessarily causes feverish convulsions of the human mind that accompany the progression from the “Irrthum” (error) of half-enlightened and mystical conviction to the triumph of “Wahrheit” (truth; NA 20: 108).

Four years in the writing, Don Karlos. Infant von Spanien, Schiller’s royal family portrait, revolutionary philosophical-political debate, and drama of forbidden love between former fiancé-turned-stepson Don Karlos and former fiancée-turned-stepmother and Queen of Spain Elisabeth of Valois, is among Schiller’s best-known works and was his fourth completed drama in the six years between 1781 and 1787. Work on Don Karlos began in May 1782 at the villa of Henriette von Wolzogen in Bauerbach when Dalberg, the director of the Nationaltheater Mannheim, sent his newest theater author, Schiller, Abbé Saint-Réal’s (1639–1692) historical novella Dom Carlos, nouvelle historique (1672) as a suggestion for a drama. Significantly, along with Kabale und Liebe, the drama becomes Schiller’s second to demonstrate his interest in the US War of Independence, and the second of what will be six dramas to address the war of liberation as a prerequisite for the pursuit of happiness of a population facing the horrors of occupation and oppression. Schiller’s awareness of the parallels between the liberation of the Netherlands and that of the British colonies and their significance for his biography as well as his art are reflected in his letter to Henriette von Wolzogen of January 8, 1783, written during the early phase of his work on Don Karlos: “Wenn Nordamerika frei wird, so ist es ausgemacht, daß ich hingehe” (If North America becomes free, then it is settled that I will go there; NA 23: 60). In Act III, Scene 10 of Don Karlos, arguably among the most significant scenes in the history of the dramatic portrayal of the struggle between absolutism and the rights of the human individual, Schiller’s advocate of humanity, Marquis Posa, and Philipp II—the ruthless ruler of Spain and of an empire on which the sun never sets—face off in a debate over heteronomy and autonomy. Schiller’s Posa both opens and closes his argument with a play on Schiller’s concept of the “Weltbürger, der keinem Fürsten dient”—“Ich kann nicht Fürstendiener sein” (I cannot be the servant of a prince; NA 6: 180)—in the process delivering the play’s signature line—“Geben Sie / Gedankenfreiheit” (Give freedom of thought; NA 6: 191)—and invoking the late eighteenth-century political concept of happiness literally twelve times in nine pages (High 2010, 102; NA 6: 181–189). Despite the success of his first four dramas, few authors of canonical status have been as critical of their own works as was Schiller, and his dissatisfaction with the early dramas resonates in his letters on his completion of his fifth drama, the Wallenstein Trilogy, some twelve years after the completion of Don Karlos.

Beginning in 1787, Schiller’s circle of influential acquaintances expands, and his tale of upward mobility takes further steps toward Weimar. In early 1787, Minna Körner reports that Schiller is “ganz toll und blind verliebt” (quite mad and blindly infatuated; NA 42: 106) in Henriette von Arnim (1768–1847), a relationship that the Körners opposed and which ended badly. In July 1787, Schiller accepted Charlotte von Kalb’s invitation to visit Weimar, where he met Herder and Wieland, but missed Goethe, who was on his famous Italian Journey. On August 9, 1787, Schiller writes to Körner that he thinks of Henriette von Arnim “fast zu oft” (almost too often; NA 24: 128). He writes to Körner on November 19, perhaps ironically, that he had recently visited the home of Wieland in Oßmannstedt and would ask for the hand of Wieland’s second daughter, Maria Carolina Friederica Wieland (1770–1851), whom he had seen only once, if he thought he were worthy (NA 24: 178–179). At the end of November 1787, Schiller again visited Henriette von Wolzogen in Bauerbach, where Wilhelm von Wolzogen suggested that Schiller should join him in visiting his aunt Luise von Lengefeld and his two self-described “superklugen Cousinen” (super-clever cousins; CvW Nachlass, 156) Charlotte von Lengefeld—whose hand in marriage represented the financial hopes of her family—and her unhappily married sister Caroline von Beulwitz, in Rudolstadt, which they did on December 6. In 1788, after a summer of pursuing relationships with both sisters, Schiller hoped to become engaged to marry Charlotte von Lengefeld, the daughter of the widowed Luise von Lengefeld and the Superintendant of Forests (Oberforstmeister) at the court of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, Carl Christoph von Lengefeld (1715–1775), as well as the godchild of Goethe’s confidante and inspiration, the author Charlotte von Stein (1742–1827), who was herself lady in waiting to Duchess Anna Amalia of Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach (1739–1807). Charlotte von Lengefeld was also a close friend of the poet, essayist, and translator Karl Ludwig von Knebel (1744–1834), who was, along with Wieland—one of Germany’s leading writers and the editor of the best-selling journal Teutscher Merkur—the tutor of the two princes of Saxe-Weimar, and a close friend of Goethe. Indeed, it was Knebel who introduced Goethe to Duke Carl August in Frankfurt in 1774, who in turn had invited Goethe to move to Weimar, which Goethe did in 1775. After the death of her husband in 1775, Luise von Lengefeld served as “Hofmeisterin” (house tutor) to the princes of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt at the residential palace Heidecksburg, which stands above Rudolstadt.

According to repeated testimony by all involved, Schiller’s potential mother-in-law, a devout Christian in search of a like-minded and financially secure husband for her daughter, would not readily have consented to the engagement, had Schiller—an unemployed celebrity commoner and renowned secularist—not found a permanent and respected position. Only in the spring of his courtship, Schiller had published the highly controversial poem “Die Götter Griechenlandes” (The Gods of Ancient Greece) in Wieland’s Teutscher Merkur (German Mercury) of March 1788, at which point readers who had somehow failed to recognize his hostility toward organized religion could not but admit the obvious. With no job, no patent of nobility, no religion, and a scandal brewing, Schiller, who otherwise mentions the Bible explicitly only very few times, goes on a charm offensive, mentioning the Bible three times in letters from July and August of 1788 and March 1789, all addressed to the Lengefelds and intended for the ears of the “Cher Mere,” for whom he orders an ornate English Bible just as the reactions to his poem begin to pour in (NA 25: 73; NA 25: 89). In March 1788 in the Teutscher Merkur, an anonymous and critical essay on polytheism appeared, as Schiller put it, “von Herrn v. Knebeln und Herdern zusammengestoppelt” (thrown together by Herr v. Knebel and Herder; NA 25: 56); in the August 1788 issue of Deutsches Museum, very recent Catholic convert and poet Friedrich Leopold Graf zu Stolberg (1750–1819) published an outraged accusation of blasphemy lamenting the sad relationship of the naturalist to the deity; in Thalia, Körner published a defense of Schiller and his poem; Catholic-leaning poet Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg, 1772–1801) expressed support for the “vortrefliches Gedicht” (outstanding poem; Novalis, 18–20); in April 1789, Schiller cites a letter in which popular poet Gottfried August Bürger (1747–1794) defends Stolberg’s good heart and simultaneously ridicules his “Schwachsinnigkeit” (feeblemindedness; NA 25: 251), stating that he expects more defenses of Schiller’s poem. The responses culminate in a spirited defense of the poet’s freedom of expression by world explorer and revolutionary thinker Georg Forster (1754–1794) entitled “Fragment eines Briefes an einen deutschen Schriftsteller über Schillers ‘Götter Griechenlandes’” (Fragment of a Letter to a German Author on Schiller’s “Gods of Ancient Greece”) in the May 1789 issue of Neue Litteratur und Voelkerkunde (New Literature and Ethnology; High 2013, Secularism, 319). Thus, by early 1789, the potential son-in-law had become an infamous atheist, yet, at the height of the scandal, Schiller achieved the requisite profile of a prospective husband when, at the urging of a family acquaintance and distant admirer, Goethe, he was named to a position as unsalaried Professor of History (technically Philosophy) at the University of Jena on May 11, 1789. At the age of twenty-nine, Schiller’s engagement on December 22, 1789 to the highly educated, enlightened, and popular daughter of a poor, but connected, noble family had not only brought about the personal happiness he had sought, but expanded his relatively small circle of acquaintances to include those who led him ever closer to Weimar—then the seat of German culture—first cultivated by Duchess Anna Amalia, who had served as regent since her husband’s death in 1758, and now ruled since 1775 by her son, the Duke Carl August.

The prose works that Schiller published in his journals from 1782 to 1789 and, to a somewhat lesser extent, his first four dramas, had an impact on transnational Gothic literature in the 1790s that was possibly unmatched. Of the many characteristics that comprised the Gothic mood in the eighteenth century, or what Edgar Allen Poe (1809–1849) later tellingly called “Germanism” and “gloom”—political, legal, and social failure; corruption, the inquisition, persecution, rebellion, and superstition; executions, frame-ups, murders, seances, special effects, pacts with the devil, and ventriloquism; confidence men, conspiracy, and disguises; evil monks, ghosts, prisoners, robbers, and spies; dungeons, forests, lairs, and castle ruins; and redundant and disingenuous claims of truth—Schiller delivered all in the eight years (1782–1789) that immediately precede the resonant German-English Gothic explosion of the 1790s. As a result, most of the leading British authors of the 1790s demonstrate an intimate familiarity with Schiller’s works, and the most strident critics of British Gothic literature cite Schiller as an important, if often unwelcome, presence behind the phenomenon (High 2011, 49). Schiller’s production as an author of novellas achieved watershed status on the merits of his final two completed works of seven attempts at literary prose, “Der Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre” (The Criminal of Lost Honor, 1786; originally “Der Verbrecher aus Infamie”) and Der Geisterseher (The Spiritualist, 1787–1789).

“Der Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre”—a psychological character study that Schiller refers to as a “Leichenöffnung” (autopsy) of the human animal (Christian Wolf)—reveals how individuals, societies, churches, and justice systems create rather than reform criminals, and provides a model for a new single-narrative frame novella, along with the frame novellas that constitute Der Geisterseher—each told by a new narrator and featuring the now-familiar genre-critical phrases “die Begebenheit, die sich […] ereignet hat” (the occurrence that took place; NA 16: 70), “merkwürdige Begebenheit” (unusual occurrence; NA 16: 77), “daß die erzählte Begebenheit sich wirklich ereignet habe” (that the occurrence narrated actually took place; NA 16: 92), “seltsame Wendung” (curious turn; NA 16: 71), “das Unerwartete dieser Wendung” (the unexpectedness of this turn; NA 16: 86), and the “Todesfall […] der sich […] ereignet” (death that had occurred; NA 16: 102). Ironically, although Schiller had conceived of Der Geisterseher in order to reap the per-page commission from his publisher, it quickly became an international Gothic pop-cultural phenomenon and one of Schiller’s best-selling works; the enthusiastic reception of the serial work left him once again profoundly annoyed with the public’s taste. By the time Schiller’s struggle with the broad popularity of and his personal distaste for Der Geisterseher had begun, literary prose had become a necessary financial evil, and Schiller produced a series of unhappy outbursts, referring to his hit as “der verfluchte Geisterseher” (the cursed Geisterseher), and describing his work as “schlecht” and “Schmiererei” (bad and scribbling), while bemoaning the project as a “sündlichen Zeitaufwand” (sinful waste of time; NA 25: 30; High 2011, 60), and wondering in a letter to Körner of March 17, 1788, if a demon had inspired it. As he reported to Körner on January 29, 1789, once it became a popular success, the project would not hold any further attraction for Schiller until he found a way to accessorize the Gothic tale with the insertion of a predictably less popular philosophical dialogue—“Philosophisches Gespräch aus dem Geisterseher,” in many ways a continuation of the Philosophische Briefe: “Stelle Dir vor, daß mir der Geisterseher anfängt, lieb zu werden” (just imagine, the Spiritualist is beginning to grow on me; NA 25: 188). Upon completion of the philosophical dialogue, which did not appear in subsequent book publications, Schiller promptly abandoned the project as a fragment.

Despite working on Wallenstein and the never-realized Don Karlos prequel Die Maltheser (The Maltese Knights) in the early 1790s, after the publication of Don Karlos in 1787, Schiller did not complete another dramatic work until Wallensteins Lager (Wallenstein’s Camp) in 1798, a fact that has led to a great deal of speculation regarding possible explanations for his sudden lack of dramatic production. It has long been a commonplace and facile approach to explain both Schiller’s lack of dramatic production in the early 1790s and his intensive study of Kant’s works—in particular Critik der Urteilskraft (Critique of the Power of Judgement, 1790)—as a result of his ostensible political disappointment with the course of the French Revolution. This flight-from-politics theory finds apparent support and a starting point in Schiller’s letter to Körner of February 8, 1793, in which he laments the unconstitutional execution of Louis XVI, and in the letter to Prince Augustenburg of the next day, which eventually evolved into the Ästhetische Briefe (Aesthetic Letters, 1795). In the former, Schiller expresses his disgust at the January 21, 1793 execution of Louis XVI: “Was sprichst Du zu den französischen Sachen? […] Ich kann seit 14 Tagen keine französischen Zeitungen mehr lesen, so ekeln diese elenden Schindersknechte mich an” (What do you say to the events in France? […] I have not been able to read any French newspaper for the past fourteen days; that is how much these wretched henchmen disgust me; NA 26: 183). Although there can be little doubt that Schiller would have embraced the revolutionary rule of law in France, if he had ever believed in its success, all the sources extant indicate that, rather than expressing unreflected enthusiasm at the outset, Schiller, the universal historian, expressed only a prescient concern for the consequences of its failure. Reflecting back on February 9, 1790, Caroline von Wolzogen writes: “Die Greuelsczenen hatten dort begonnen. […] Schiller hatte diese Begebenheiten schon bei ihrem ersten Entstehen ernst und ahnungsvoll aufgenommen; er hielt die Franzosen für kein Volk, dem echt republikanische Gesinnung eigen werden könnte” (The scenes of horror there had begun […] already from the outset, Schiller had viewed these events seriously and with a sense of foreboding; he did not consider the French to be a people capable of adopting a truly republican character; NA 42: 127). Since demonstrating Schiller’s ostensible disappointment in the French Revolution would require some expression of his early enthusiasm, the fact that there is no such expression to be found renders the notion rather empty. Often overlooked in this discussion is the inescapable fact that, in the period between 1784 and 1789, Schiller had completed one drama, which he had begun in 1783 and which was largely complete by the end of 1785. Thus, one will have to look beyond the revolution and Kant for the reasons. According to the evidence, beginning in 1788, a number of personal and professional preoccupations interrupted Schiller’s dedication to drama and led to a shift in focus. Among his preoccupations were his marriage, his health, and his new position as professor—ironically, one that he had embraced foremost in order to secure an income that would qualify him to become a husband in the first place, and one whose duties his fragile health made increasingly difficult to fulfill.

On May 11, 1789, Schiller moved into his first apartment in Jena, where he immediately began writing lectures on a number of demanding topics, having never taught before and with no formal education as historian or philosopher. By the time he arrived in Jena, Schiller was already preparing for his wedding to Charlotte von Lengefeld, which took place on February 22, 1790, in what is now called the Schillerkirche in the suburb Wenigenjena. In addition to the historical and aesthetic studies required of an author, editor, critic, and professor, financial concerns dominated Schiller’s letters during the first four years of the French Revolution. As was the case with Der Geisterseher, Schiller sought to write a great deal of the material for Thalia, so that he could take advantage of the per-page commission. In a letter to Körner of November 26, 1790, Schiller stated that even if he were ready to write drama again, he could not afford to stop publishing on history, if only “um meine Existenz bestmöglichst zu verbessern” (in order to improve my financial situation as best as possible; NA 26: 58). This income from writing was of the utmost importance, since his professorship was actually an honorary position, and originally provided him with an honorarium plus student tuition totaling some 400 Reichsthaler, which, as Schiller explained in a letter to Körner of December 12, 1789, constituted approximately half of a minimal annual income (NA 25: 354–355).

Schiller’s first mention of Kant appears in a letter to Körner of July 23, 1787 (NA 24: 111), and the first evidence of Schiller’s interest in Kant’s works appears in a letter to Körner of August 29, 1787, regarding University of Jena Professor of Philosophy Karl Leonhard Reinhold’s (1757–1823) promotion of Kant’s essays that had appeared in the Berliner Monatsschrift, and in particular regarding Kant’s Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlichen Absicht (Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose, 1784). On May 26, 1789, Schiller delivered his inaugural lecture to a packed auditorium at the University of Jena, “Was ist und wozu studiert man Universalgeschichte?” (What is and to what end does one study universal history?), addressing a scholarly approach recently popularized foremost by Adam Ferguson (1723–1816), Christian Garve (1742–1798), Herder, and Kant. True to his mission to publish as much as possible based on his university research, Schiller’s publications closely follow the topics of his university lectures. Thus, the beginning of the final decade of the eighteenth century finds Schiller at the height of his work as a historian, which had first sparked his interest in Kant, had already produced a best-selling historical work and the drama Don Karlos, and would lead directly to his next history book and next drama project Wallenstein, which he worked on intermittently in 1791 and 1794. The research for Don Karlos had also laid the groundwork for Schiller’s best-selling historical work, Geschichte des Abfalls der vereinigten Niederlande von der Spanischen Regierung (History of the Revolt of the United Netherlands against Spain, 1788), which had first secured him the professorship in Jena. In the events and documents of the Dutch War of Liberation, where the North American colonists had found a legal precedence to support an actual rebellion in the Dutch Plakaat von Verlatinghe (Act of Abjuration, 1581), Schiller discovered a moral-legal argument with which to threaten feudal rulers with a modern historical-political inevitability, which he clearly formulates as a warning to all occupiers and oppressors: “Die Kraft also, womit es handelte, ist unter uns nicht verschwunden; der glückliche Erfolg, der sein Wagestück krönte, ist auch uns nicht versagt, wenn die Zeitläufte wiederkehren und ähnliche Anlässe uns zu ähnlichen Thaten rufen” (Thus the power that they wielded has not left us; the happy result that crowned their act of courage will not fail us, when the cycle of history repeats and similar contexts call us to similar deeds; NA 17: 11). As ever, Schiller is foremost interested in the past to the extent that it educates by reflecting the present and modeling the future; consequently, Schiller argues in a letter to Caroline von Beulwitz of October 12, 1788, that even as a historian, it is not “historische Warheit” (historical truth) that is of importance to his historiography, but human interest and the potential to excite readers by revealing “innere Wahrheit” (inner truth) and “philosophische und künstlerische Wahrheit” (philosophical and artistic truth). In Ueber das Pathetische, Schiller returns to the topic, stressing how relatively insignificant “historische[…] Realität” (historical reality) is for the aesthetic experience of fiction or history, which is in the end a form of fiction (NA 20: 218).

In the summer of 1790, Schiller lectured on the history of the Thirty Years’ War and the theory of tragedy, while he continued work on his second and final historical monograph, the popular Geschichte des Dreyßigjährigen Kriegs (History of the Thirty Years’ War), which he published in five serial installments in Göschen’s Historischer Kalender für Damen (Historical Calendar for Ladies) in 1791–1793. During the same period, Schiller published several shorter historical works, including further essays on the liberation of the Netherlands, and essays on the history of politics, including the essays “Die Gesetzgebung des Lykurgus und Solon” (The Legislation of Lykurgus and Solon, 1790) and “Die Sendung Moses” (The Mission of Moses, 1790), a secular analysis of Moses as politician and his contributions to an initially positive transition from polytheism to constitutional monotheism that had long since become both a guarantee of pseudo-virtue and a hindrance to true virtue and freedom. Schiller criticizes precisely this problem in a March 1793 letter to Körner regarding Kant’s Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft (Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, 1793–1794), of which Schiller concludes that Kant had unwittingly lent support to the history of surrogate virtue and pseudo-civilization by reconciling philosophy with “Kindervernunft” (reason of children) and thus had merely “das morsche Gebäude der Dummheit geflickt” (patched up the rotting house of stupidity; NA 26: 219).

In a letter to Körner of November 26, 1790, Schiller indicated his intention to conduct rigorous aesthetic studies before returning to drama or poetry: “Das Arbeiten im dramatischen Fache dürfte überhaupt noch auf eine ziemlich lange Zeit hinausgerückt werden. Ehe ich der griechischen Tragödie durchaus mächtig bin und meine dunklen Ahnungen von Regel und Kunst in klare Begriffe verwandelt habe, lasse ich mich auf keine dramatische Ausarbeitung ein” (Work in the field of drama is likely to be postponed for quite a long time. Before I have thoroughly mastered Greek tragedy and have transformed my obscure notions of rule and art into clear concepts, I will not embark on any drama project; NA 26: 58). On January 11, 1793—ten days before the execution of Louis XVI and before news of his death sentence could reach Jena—Schiller reports to Körner that in his preparations for Kallias he has recently read “Burke, Sulzer, Wepp, Mengs, Winkelmann, Home, Batteux, Wood, Mendelsohn,” in addition to five or six compilations, and hopes to read yet more works on aesthetics (NA 26: 174). Thus, Schiller’s study of aesthetics prior to his encounter with Kant had been broad, beginning with his college years and including a great number of the Scottish Enlightenment works Kant himself had read prior to writing Grundlegung einer Metaphysik der Sitten (Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, 1785) and Critik der Urteilskraft, corroborating the conclusion of Franz Mehring (1846–1919)—“In gewissem Sinne war Schiller schon Kantianer gewesen, ehe er Kants Philosophie kennenlernte” (In a certain sense, Schiller was already a Kantian before he became familiar with Kant’s philosophy; Mehring, 316)—and of Laura Anna Macor that Schiller was a “Kantianer ante litteram” (a Kantian prior to reading Kant; Macor 2011).

Schiller himself was clearly convinced that the nature of his publishing opportunities and commitments and his professorial duties were a major hindrance to his literary production which had all but stopped in 1787, not that he was happy with the arrangement. As the work on Geschichte des dreyßigjährigen Kriegs neared completion, Schiller wrote to Körner on September 21, 1792: “Sage mir nun woran ich mich jetzt zuerst machen soll? Mir ist ordentlich bange bey meiner wiedererlangten Geistesfreiheit. […] Ich hätte Lust mir durch ein Gedicht die Musen wieder zu versöhnen, die ich durch den Calender gröblich beleidigt habe” (Now tell me what should I now do first? I am truly frightened by my regained intellectual freedom. […] I would like to use a poem to reconcile myself with the muses, whom I have grossly offended through my work on the Calendar; NA 26: 152). In a letter to Körner of October 15, 1792, Schiller explained why it was practical for him as an author and editor to forego poetry and continue his comprehensive study of aesthetics:

Ich wollte Poesie treiben, aber die nahe Ankunft der CollegienZeit zwingt mich Aesthetik vorzunehmen. Jetzt stecke ich biss an die Ohren in Kants Urtheilskraft. Ich werde nicht ruhen, biss ich diese Materie durchdrungen habe und sie unter meinen Händen etwas geworden ist. Auch ist es nöthig, dass ich, auf alle Fälle, ein Collegium ganz durchdenke und erschöpfe, […] um mit Leichtigkeit, ohne Kraft- und Zeit-Aufwand etwas lesbares für die Thalia zu jeder Zeit schreiben zu können. (NA 26: 161).

[I wanted to practice poetry, but the imminent arrival of the semester compels me to pursue aesthetics. Now I am up to my ears in Kant’s Urteilskraft. I will not rest until I have thoroughly worked through this material, and it has become something concrete in my own hands. By all means, it is also necessary that I thoroughly think through and exhaust a subject […] in order to be able to write something presentable for Thalia on short notice, with ease and without expenditure of energy and time.]

Thus, although Schiller’s work beginning in 1787 shows a change of focus from drama and poetry to literary prose, history, and philosophy, this change clearly occurred several years before the outbreak of the French Revolution and before he studied Kant. Nowhere did Schiller or any acquaintance express the belief that a preoccupation with the revolution, or with Kant, caused this shift.

In 1792, gothic-revolutionary dramatist and Schiller-translator Jean Henri Ferdinand La Martelière’s (1761–1830) adaptation of Schiller’s Die Räuber, entitled Robert, Chef du brigands (Robert, Leader of the Robbers, 1792) was performed weekly at the Theatre du Marais in Paris. To some extent as a result, on August 26, 1792, the National Assembly in Paris awarded French citizenship to Schiller and other internationally prominent progressives and revolutionaries—among them Joseph Priestley, Thomas Paine, Jeremy Bentham, William Wilberforce, Joachim Heinrich Campe, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Klopstock, and Tadeusz Kościuszko, who, “par leurs écrits & par leur courage, ont servi la cause de la liberté, & préparé l‘affranchissement des peuples” (by their writings and courage served the cause of freedom and the liberation of humanity; Schmid 10). The honor was announced in the August 28 issue of Le Moniteur Universel, and the aristocratic annoyance with Schiller’s involvement became evident as soon as the news arrived in Weimar. In a letter from Charlotte von Stein to Charlotte Schiller of September 14, 1792, Stein asks: “[…] was hat denn Schiller zur Vertheidigung oder zum Lobe der Revolution geschrieben?” (what has Schiller ever written in defense or in praise of the revolution? C.v.S. 2: 288), and quietly relays a position expressed by Duchess Louise von Sachsen-Weimar (1757–1830) in a letter to Stein of September 10, 1792, in which the Duchess expressed her hope that Schiller would decline the citizenship offer (Wilson, Document 216). This epistolary evidence dispels one of the most stubborn myths regarding Schiller and the French Revolution, namely that his six-year silence on the subject of his French citizenship from August 1792 to March 1798 was due to his being unaware of the honor until actually receiving the documents in 1798. On the contrary, the list of honorees was anything but a secret and had been reprinted in Minerva, Schleswiges Journal, and Wiener Zeitschrift (Saine, 308n). A number of documents show that Schiller was widely criticized in Weimar for even this passive involvement with the French Revolution and for the equally passive transgression registered, when student demonstrators in Jena sang “Ein freies Leben führen wir” (A Free Life We Lead; Wilson 1999, 225) from Schiller’s Die Räuber, about which the privy councilors in Weimar expressed their dissatisfaction with Schiller’s inferred complicity (Wilson 1999, 225). Poet, scientist, long-time Goethe colleague, and Privy Counselor Christian Gottlob Voigt (1743–1819) wrote to the duke that Schiller’s French citizenship had resulted in a number of playful criticisms (Wilson 1999, 226), including Professor Heinrich Paulus’ complaint to the duke of the students’ “Raeuber- und Sauflieder” (robber and drinking songs), Privy Councilor Christian Friedrich Schnauß (1722–1797) complaining that “Schiller hätte auch etwas Besseres machen können” (Schiller could have come up with something better; Wilson, 226), and Duke Carl August writing on his birthday on October 12, 1792, to his mother that, at the moment, Die Räuber is his measure for annoying works of art (Carl August, 115).

In spite of the aristocratic discomfort in Weimar with Schiller’s revolutionary reputation and recognition, his letter to Körner of November 26, 1792, is the closest he came to expressing expectations for the French revolutionaries:

Seitdem ich den Moniteur lese habe ich mehr Erwartungen von diesen. […] Man hat darinn alle Verhandlungen in der Nat.Convention im Detail vor sich und lernt die

Franzosen in ihrer Stärke und Schwäche kennen. Die Maynzischen Aspecten werden sehr zweifelhaft für mich, aber in Gottes Nahmen. Wenn die Franzosen mich um meine Hofnungen bringen, so kann es mir einfallen, mir bey den Franzosen selbst beßere zu schaffen. (NA 26: 169–170)

[Since reading the Moniteur I have more expectations from them. […] You have all the negotiations in the National Convention in front of you in detail and you get to know the French in their strengths and weaknesses. The prospects in Mainz are becoming very doubtful for me, but in God’s name. If the French rob me of my hopes, it may occur to me to create better ones for myself among the French.]

In his first reference to hopes here, Schiller notes that his prospects for a position at the university in Mainz were growing dimmer with every day of the French occupation there since the creation of the Mainz Republic, led by Schiller’s erstwhile literary ally Forster. Citing dissatisfaction with Jena, financial concerns, and the need for a less demanding work schedule due to his health, Schiller produces a series of letters to Körner, Caroline von Beulwitz, Charlotte Schiller, and Huber dating back to November 1789 that reveals his serious desire to leave Jena for Mainz, where he hoped that his supporter Karl Theodor Anton Maria Reichsfreiherr von Dalberg (1744–1817)—Coadjutur in Erfurt, and future Prince-Archbishop of Konstanz (1800)—could provide him a more comfortable position upon becoming Elector of Mainz, which did not occur until 1802 (High 1995, 181–182). In a letter to Körner of December 21, 1792, Schiller strongly criticizes Forster’s rise to President of the French Rhine Republic in Mainz, predicting that the experiment would end in “Schande und Reue” (disgrace and regret) for Forster, and closing with a condemnation of the Mainz revolutionaries: “Für die Mainzer kann ich mich gar nicht interessiren; denn alle ihre Schritte zeugen mehr von einer lächerlichen Sucht sich zu signalisieren, als von gesunden Grundsätzen, mit denen sich ihr Betragen gegen die Andersdenkenden gar nicht reimt” (I cannot conjure up any interest in the Mainzer; for their every step bears witness more to a ridiculous addiction to drawing attention to themselves than to sound principles, which in no way rhyme with their behavior towards dissidents; NA 26: 171). Schiller’s objection to the dictatorial nature of the puppet republic and its virtue signaling as well as his concern for the freedom of thought of “Andersdenkende” provide a paradigmatic example in the microcosm of Mainz for his wariness of dogmatism.

Schiller’s second reference to his hopes “bey den Franzosen” refers to his plan to travel to Paris to deliver a constitutional defense of Louis XVI, whose trial on charges of treason had been debated for the better part of November and began on December 3, 1792, and here Schiller’s French citizenship appears to have played its intended role to some unintended extent. Based on his letters, Schiller paid less attention to the revolution from 1789 through August of 1792 than he did after being named a French citizen. His regular reading of the Moniteur and his plan to defend the French Constitution in Paris of November–December 1792 all took place in the four months after the announcement of his French citizenship. The nature of the weakness and strength in the National Convention becomes clear to Schiller in the November 13 speeches by two representatives, which were printed in the Moniteur of November 14: St. Just, who proposed the unconstitutional execution of the king without trial, and Morisson, who argued the king’s immunity based on the constitution. On November 23, three days before Schiller’s letter to Körner, the Stuttgart (somewhat irregular) daily, the Fortgesetzte Schubart’sche Chronik (Schubart’s New Chronicle), published a translation of Morrison’s speech. In the November 20 issue, Chronik publisher Gotthold Friedrich Stäudlin (1758–1796) had published a personal plea on behalf of Louis XVI. In the November 23 issue, Stäudlin referred back to this plea and then quoted the Moniteur of November 14 in a footnote to his report “Ludwig XVI.,” citing Morisson’s argument that although he personally sees the king’s guilt and would rather see the king punished for his crimes, there is nonetheless no provision in the constitution for punishing a king for pre-constitutional crimes, and that doing so would be a very bad step for a young state seeking to institute the rule of law: “Es ist wahr, Ludwig hat Unzählige der Unsrigen gemordet: aber wenn wir ihn durch neuere Geseze strafen wollen, so werden wir an ihm eben so sehr zu Mördern” (It is true that Louis murdered too many of our people to count: but if we want to punish him with newer laws, then we become just as much his murderers; Schubart, 769–770).

Just a few days later, Schiller links his vague reference to better hopes with travel plans. Inspired by the reports described above, Schiller intends to travel to Paris to deliver a defense of the king and the constitution. In the first week of December, Caroline von Beulwitz and Wilhelm von Humboldt offered to accompany Schiller to France (NA 34/1: 202; NA 34/1: 204), and in a letter of December 21, Schiller asks Körner to find him a translator for his defense:

Kaum kann ich der Versuchung widerstehen, mich in die Streitsache wegen des Königs einzumischen, und ein Memoire darüber zu schreiben. […] Hätte jeder freisinnige Kopf geschwiegen, so wäre nie ein Schritt zu unserer Verbesserung geschehen. Es gibt Zeiten, wo man öffentlich sprechen muß, weil Empfänglichkeit dafür da ist, und eine solche Zeit scheint mir die jetztige zu sein (NA 26: 171–172).

[I can hardly resist the temptation to get involved in the dispute about the king and write a position paper about it. […] If every liberal mind had always been silent, no step toward our improvement would ever have happened. There are times when one has to speak publicly because there is a receptive audience, and the present appears to me to be such a time.]

That Schiller believed there was an audience for such a plea (Empfänglichkeit) resulted from his awareness of the legal argument of representatives such as Morisson and from Schiller’s knowledge of his French citizenship, an indication that the National Convention knew and respected him. Fellow citizenship-honorands Cloots, Paine, and Priestley (who did not serve) were all elected to the National Convention in September. In a letter of December 27, 1792, Körner lambastes the French revolutionaries for their “politische Sophisterei” (political sophism; NA 34/1: 214) before agreeing to arrange for a translator for Schiller’s speech (NA 34/1: 213). At this point, Körner’s skepticism toward the project apparently prompted Schiller to proceed without him (NA 34/1: 213). On December 30, both Beulwitz and Schiller wrote in strictest secrecy to family friend Rudolph Zacharias Becker (1752–1822) to recruit him as translator of Schiller’s plea (NA 26: 657). The fate of Louis XVI was decided less than three weeks later on January 17, and he was executed on January 21, 1793. Some three weeks after the execution of Louis XVI, on February 8, 1793, Schiller informs Körner: “Ich habe wirklich eine Schrift für den König schon angefangen gehabt, aber es wurde mir nicht wohl darüber, und da ligt sie mir nun noch da” (I really had already started writing a text for the king, but I had second thoughts, and there it still lies; NA 26: 183).

During his three years as professor in Jena, Schiller had often lamented the combination of his poor health and the financial necessity of work as professional historian and philosopher—not only a barrier to his aspirations as a dramatist, but to some important extent the work of a bread-fed scholar that he had decried in the Universalgeschichte lecture. Indeed, before he even began in his new position, Schiller jests in a letter to Körner of March 9, 1789, that if he could find a wealthy wife, he could make a living as a writer and that then the University of Jena “möchte mich dann im Asch lecken” (could then kiss my ass; NA 25: 222). In February 1791, Schiller suffered the first serious bout of the lung affliction that effectively ended his academic career and would eventually end his life. As a Doctor of Medicine and not yet thirty-two years old, by May of 1791 Schiller was keenly aware that his time was growing short. That summer, Schiller received notification that reports of his near fatal condition and indeed news of his death had spread in Denmark, where Schiller’s admirers, radical Danish poet and freemason Jens Immanuel Baggesen (1764–1826), Duke Friedrich Christian von Schleswig-Holstein-Augustenburg (1765–1814), and court minister Ernst Heinrich Count von Schimmelmann (1747–1831) held a private memorial service. Upon hearing of the service, Jena philosopher Reinhold informed Baggesen that, although Schiller was indeed dangerously ill, he was in fact still alive. In a letter to Schiller of November 27, 1791, the duke and the count employ the cosmopolitan rhetoric of Schiller’s Don Karlos and Marquis Posa in their offer of a stipend to promote his writing and alleviate his workload: “Zwey Freunde, durch Weltbürgersinn mit einander verbunden, erlassen dieses Schreiben an Sie […] Nehmen Sie dieses Anerbieten an edler Mann! Der Anblick unsrer Titel bewege Sie nicht es abzulehnen […] Wir kennen keinen Stolz als nur den Menschen zu seyn […] Ihre Brüder” (Two friends bound together by a sense of cosmopolitanism issue this letter to you […] Accept this offer, noble man! Let not the sight of our titles persuade you to reject it […] We know no pride other than to be human beings […] your brothers; NA 34/1: 114). In his letter to Körner of December 13, 1791, Schiller writes, somewhat optimistically: “Ich habe einmal Muße zu lernen und zu sammeln, und für die Ewigkeit zu arbeiten” (For once I have the leisure time to learn and collect, and to work for eternity; NA 26: 117). A day later, Schiller writes the first of his letters to Duke Augustenburg, which later appeared revised in serial form as the first of the Ästhetische Briefe in Die Horen (The Horae). Despite the stipend, which would be extended for three years, the task of writing to maintain a steady income remained a matter of pressing concern until 1795, by which time, as he wrote to Abel on April 3, 1795, Schiller had received a guarantee from Duke Carl August of a doubled stipend in the very likely event of permanent disability (NA 27: 169). Schiller would remain weakened for the rest of his life, yet, in accord with the ideas presented in his third dissertation, he faced his final fourteen years with the defiant conviction that his physical state, dictated by nature, could not be considered part of his self, but rather “etwas Auswärtiges und Fremdes” (something external and foreign), a resistance of fate Goethe later attributed to Schiller’s “Evangelium der Freiheit” (gospel of freedom; Safranski, 8).

From 1790 to 1793, intermittently interrupted by his illness, Schiller wrote the majority of his moral-philosophical essays, all of which stem in part from his experience as a creative artist and his continued study of the most recent works of philosophy, preeminently those of Kant. They comprise to a significant degree the results of his Summer 1789 and 1790 university lectures on the theory of tragedy and his Winter 1792–1793 lectures on aesthetics, and almost all of the essays appeared in the third iteration of his second journal, which appeared as Neue Thalia beginning in 1792. In the first issue of January 1792, Schiller published the essay Über den Grund des Vergnügens an tragischen Gegenständen (On the Cause of the Pleasure We Derive from Tragic Objects), which hearkens back to the Schaubühne essay of 1784 in Schiller’s description of the mechanisms of entertainment and morality, in which the audience benefits by cursing history’s great criminals while enjoying on the stage the very horror of their crimes, and while experiencing both the pain and the joy of watching tragic heroes face coercion with moral resistance. In the second issue of Neue Thalia of March 1792, Schiller published Über die tragische Kunst (On the Art of Tragedy), in which he responds to Lessing, Mendelssohn, and Kant’s theories of the sublime in a practical consideration of the means and ends of tragic art, namely the experience of the moral enjoyment of one’s own compassion.

From January 25 to February 23, 1793, Schiller and Körner composed the series of letters that were to constitute the unrealized book project, Kallias, the artistic ends of which, beyond the quest for an objective definition of beauty, are stated clearly in the first paragraph of the first letter: “Die Untersuchung über das Schöne, wovon beynahe kein Theil der aesthetik zu trennen ist, führen mich in ein sehr weites Feld, wo für mich noch ganz fremde Länder liegen. Und doch muss ich mich schlechterdings des Ganzen bemächtigt haben, wenn ich etwas befriedigendes leisten soll” (The investigation of the beautiful, which can hardly be separated from any part of aesthetics, has led me into a wide field […] And yet I must become master of the whole realm if I am to produce any satisfying work; NA 26: 175; Concerning Beauty, 145). To that end, Schiller engages Kant’s distinction between pulchritude vaga (free beauty) and pulchritude fixa (adherent beauty), which appears in Section 16 of Die Kritik der Urteilskraft, seeking to demonstrate that the beautiful includes works of art created according to rules, and that if both nature and art can bring about the same reaction to beauty in the subject by overcoming the logical nature of their object, then there is no reason to distinguish between them as “Freiheit in der Erscheinung” (freedom in its appearance). Über Anmut und Würde (On Grace and Dignity) appeared in Neue Thalia in mid-July 1793, presenting in part results of Schiller’s work on Kallias and the Augustenburgerbriefe. In his thesis statement that grace is “die durch Freiheit bewegten Gestalt” (the form moved by freedom), Schiller addresses a long-term interest in the natural gestures of actors, which had appeared in essays from “Über das Teutsche Theater” (On German Theater, 1782) to Kallias. Vom Erhabenen (Concerning the Sublime) appeared in the third and fourth issues of Neue Thalia in September 1793 and August 1794, again embarking from Kant’s theory of the sublime in an explication of how the imaginative faculties of mathematical recognition or desire facilitate the disinterested experience of pleasure at viewing tragic or awe-inspiring events in the realms of both nature and art; again, Schiller is more driven by the concerns of the creative artist than those of the aesthetic philosopher. Ueber das Erhabene (On the Sublime), composed between 1794 and 1796, and first published in Volume 3 of the 1801 edition of Schiller’s Kleinere prosaische Schriften, analyzes the concept of the sublime as the portrayal and experience of moral resistance against coercion: “Alle andere Dinge müssen; der Mensch ist das Wesen, welches will. Eben deswegen ist des Menschen nichts so unwürdig, als Gewalt zu erleiden, denn Gewalt hebt ihn auf” (All other things must; the human is the being that wills. Precisely for this reason, nothing is so unworthy of the human being as to suffer violence, for violence negates them as human beings; NA 21: 38). In “Über das Pathetische” (On the Pathetic) composed in 1793 and first published in 1801, Schiller posits that “das übersinnliche Prinzip” (the supersensual principle)—the triumph of active freedom of the will over instinct—distinguishes the human from the animal; thus the portrayal of suffering without resistance is one of mere animal determinism, and not the stuff of tragedy. Zerstreute Betrachtungen über verschiedene ästhetische Gegenstände (Reflections on Different Aesthetical Objects) appeared in the fifth issue of Neue Thalia in October 1794. Here, Schiller attempts to demonstrate how Kant’s concept of beauty as the subjective basis of taste can be expanded by the objective experience not of beauty but of the beautiful and the sublime. In art, specifically in drama, and in particular in the tragedy, a mediation process occurs in the dynamic subjective experience of objective beauty on the stage.

In the winter of 1792–1793, Schiller wrote to his former foil Duke Carl Eugen of Württemberg to ask whether he, as fugitive and persona non grata, could be allowed to visit his family in Ludwigsburg for what would be his first and only visit to his home state in the eleven years since his exile in 1782. Although the duke did not respond directly, he let it be known that Schiller was free to visit, and would be ignored, and in September 1793, after visiting Heilbronn in August, the Schillers rented the second floor of the house at Wilhelmsstraße 17, where, on September 14, they welcomed the first of four children, Karl Ludwig Friedrich (1793–1857), who was followed by Ernst Friedrich Wilhelm (1796–1841), born in Jena; Karoline Luise Friederike (1799–1850), born in Weimar; and Emilie Henriette Luise (1804–1872), born in Jena. In addition to parenting and running the household, like her sister, who published the serial novel Agnes von Lilien (1796–1797) in Schiller’s journal Die Horen, Charlotte Schiller was a lifelong writer and the author of the unpublished novel Die heimliche Heirat (The Secret Marriage). While Schiller was in Ludwigsburg, he visited with a number of old friends, his childhood friend, politician and poet Anselm Karl Elwert (1761–1825); his college friend Hoven, and his Karlsschule professor Abel, now at the University of Tübingen. On 24 October, Duke Carl Eugen died. According to Hoven, he and Schiller visited the grave of the recently deceased duke in November 1793, eliciting a surprising gesture of reconciliation from Schiller: “Da ruht er also […] dieser rastlos tätig gewesene Mann! Er hatte große Fehler als Regent, größere als Mensch; aber die erstern wurden von seinen großen Eigenschaften weit überwogen, und das Andenken an die letztern muß mit dem Toten begraben werden” (So there he rests […] this tirelessly active man! He had great faults as a regent, greater as a man; but the former were far outweighed by his great qualities, and the memory of the latter must be buried with the dead; NA 42: 176–177). While in Ludwigsburg, at the end of September, Schiller met the aspiring poet Hölderlin, then twenty-three years old. Although Schiller never embraced Hölderlin’s poetry, he did play a role in aiding Hölderlin’s eerily familiar escape from his mother’s wish that he become a minister in order to pursue a career as a poet. In a letter of May 28, 1793, Charlotte von Kalb had asked Schiller to help her find a Hofmeister for her son Fritz, and Schiller ultimately recommended two fellow Württembergians whose acquaintances he had made in Ludwigsburg and Tübingen, Hölderlin and philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), who—along with a third, philosopher and a future husband of Caroline Schlegel, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854)—had until recently been roommates while studying theology at the University of Tübingen’s Tübinger Stift seminary. In March 1794, Schiller met the publisher Cotta in Tübingen, who had published his dissertation, in a meeting arranged by Abel, and the two quickly agreed to work together. In May, Schiller returned to Jena. At the University of Jena, Schiller met the student and future linguist, political theorist, diplomat, and educational reformer Wilhelm von Humboldt. The two became collaborative spirits and met regularly, even twice daily, from 1794 to 1797, remaining friends until Schiller’s death. Humboldt’s affinity with Schiller’s educational and political ideas is evident in his contributions to secularism in Prussian educational reform against the wishes of his colleague, the seminal figure in the history of hermeneutics, Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768–1834), in the founding of the Friedrich Wilhelm University at Berlin (later Humboldt University), and in his work toward convincing Austria to join the anti-Napoleonic coalition in 1813. Humboldt quickly became active publishing in Schiller’s journals, as would Goethe just shortly thereafter.

Before Schiller’s relationship with Goethe began in earnest in 1794, a collision between the two appeared inevitable. In December 1779, just after Schiller’s twentieth birthday, Duke Carl August of Weimar and Goethe made an appearance at the Karlsschule to bestow the annual student awards, three of which were silver medals awarded to Schiller as a medical student. On September 7, 1788, soon after Goethe’s return from his Italian Journey, he and Schiller spoke cordially for the first time at the home of the Lengefelds in Rudolstadt, but, while Schiller was impressed with what he saw, he did not get the impression that the feeling was mutual, as he expresses in a letter to Körner of September 11: “[…] ich zweifle, ob wir einander je sehr nahe rücken werden. […] er ist mir, (an Jahren weniger als an Lebenserfahrungen und Selbstentwicklung) so weit voraus, daß wir unterwegs nie mehr zusammen kommen werden” (I doubt whether we can ever become very close […] he is so far ahead of me (less in years than in self-development) that we shall never come together on our paths; NA 25: 107). As late as March 9, 1789, Schiller could conclude in a letter to Körner: “Dieser Mensch, dieser Göthe ist mir einmal im Wege, und er erinnert mich so oft, daß das Schicksal mich hart behandelt hat. Wie leicht ward sein Genie von seinem Schicksal getragen, und wie muß ich biss auf diese Minute noch kämpfen!” (This person, this Goethe, is in my way for better or worse, and he reminds me so often that fate has treated me harshly. How easily his genius was borne by his fate, and how I must still struggle to this minute!; NA 25: 222). By the time Goethe first truly engaged Schiller in 1794, their remarkable collaboration during the final decade of Schiller’s life appeared highly unlikely, as Goethe reports: “Als ich ihn kennen lernte, glaubte ich, er lebte keine vier Wochen mehr” (When I first met him, I was convinced that he would not live another four weeks; Safranski, 7). Schiller’s letters show that he was preoccupied with his health until 1794, when he makes clear his decision not to linger on his illness and to use his remaining time as productively as possible, as he explained in his letter to Goethe of August 31, 1794: “Eine große und allgemeine Geistesrevolution werde ich schwerlich Zeit haben, in mir zu vollenden aber ich werde thun was ich kann, und wenn endlich das Gebäude zusammenfällt, so habe ich doch vielleicht das Erhaltenswerthe aus dem Brande geflüchtet” (I will scarcely have time to complete a great and comprehensive intellectual revolution within myself, but I will do what I can, and when the building finally collapses, I may have saved that most worth preserving from the fire; NA 27: 32). To this end, as was the case with coffee, alcohol, and tobacco, according to Humboldt, Schiller sought to make of his illness a creative advantage, which he confirms in a letter to Garve of November 6, 1797: “Auch die Kränklichkeit ist zu was gut, ich habe ihr viel zu danken” (Even illness is good for something, I owe it a great deal; NA 29: 156).

After their meeting in Ludwigsburg, the first collaboration between Schiller and Cotta was to be a political quarterly, edited by Schiller, Die Allgemeine Europäische Staatenzeitung (The General European Political Journal), which would be entirely dedicated to the analysis of European politics, a contract for which Schiller signed on May 28, 1794 (NA 27: 206–207)—a serious indication that Schiller was perceived as an important political thinker at a point in history when legend would have it he had turned his back on politics. By July 10, 1794, however, Schiller’s preference for the literary journal Die Horen over the Staatenzeitung, which he pleaded repeatedly in letters to Cotta, finally won out (NA 27: 7–8, 21). Die Horen was to feature an impressive list of contributors, including the new collaborators Goethe, August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767–1845), Humboldt and his younger brother Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), as well as, among others, Louise Brachmann (1777–1822), Friederike Brun (1765–1835), Fichte, Herder, Amalie von (Imhoff) Helvig (1776–1831), Sophie (Schubart) Mereau (later Brentano; 1770–1806), Elisa von der Recke (1754–1833), and Caroline von Wolzogen.

The announcement of Schiller’s third journal, which appeared on December 10, 1794, has proven significantly more controversial than its actual contents, providing many scholars with a model of Weimar Classicism that is relatively rare beyond a very small set of texts. Already long weary of the divisive debates over the triumphs and failures of a French Revolution that had become best known for its spectacular, unconstitutional violence toward French citizens and subjects of the German states, in particular regarding its propagandistic promotion in Johann Friedrich Reichardt’s (1752–1814) journals Deutschland and Frankreich, Schiller’s announcement seeks to fill a market niche with a healing national forum promoting an aesthetic education of the individual that would reconcile division:

Zu einer Zeit, wo das nahe Geräusch des Kriegs das Vaterland ängstiget, wo der Kampf politischer Meinungen und Interessen diesen Krieg beinahe in jedem Zirkel erneuert und nur allzuoft Musen und Grazien daraus verscheucht, wo weder in den Gesprächen noch in den Schriften des Tages vor diesem allverfolgenden Dämon der Staatskritik Rettung ist, möchte es ebenso gewagt als verdienstlich sein, den so sehr zerstreuten Leser zu einer Unterhaltung von ganz entgegengesetzter Art einzuladen. (NA 22: 106)

At a time when the near roar of war frightens the fatherland, where the struggle of political opinions and interests renew this war in almost every circle and all too often scare off the muses and graces, where neither in discussion nor the writings of the day offer salvation from this all-pursuing demon of state criticism, it may be as daring as it is meritorious to invite the so very distracted reader to a form of entertainment of an entirely opposite kind.

The announcement responds to the partisan writing that had divided German intellectuals since the French Revolution began in 1789, bringing with it attacks on both pro- and anti-revolution authors, and a crackdown in many states in which the degree of censorship intensified just when late Enlightenment thinkers had reason to hope that progressive evolution might preclude revolution. As a result, the concept of German constitutional unity through a national literature and theater, as proposed by Lessing, one Schiller had all but propagandistically pursued since the publication of “Ueber das gegenwärtige teutsche Theater” in 1782, had suffered a setback. Just as Schiller’s Schaubühne essay had suggested the long-term preparation of the people for self-government through aesthetic education, his announcement of Die Horen delivers the decidedly patient and by this point leitmotivistic motto—at a point when patience was in short supply—of a national forum dedicated to “[…] dem stillen Bau besserer Begriffe, reinerer Grundsätze und edlerer Sitten, von dem zuletzt alle wahre Verbesserung des gesellschaftlichen Zustands abhängt” (the steady creation of better concepts, purer principles, and nobler manners, upon which all true improvement of the state of society ultimately depends; NA 22: 107). In stark contrast to its programmatic foreword, Die Horen, and likewise Schiller’s Musen-Almanach were critical enough of the French Revolution and its German supporters, and so alternatively pro-evolution through aesthetic education, that Schiller and Goethe’s foils soon seized on the disharmony between the announcement and the actual product in reviews of Die Horen. Even a glance at the contents of Die Horen suffices to demonstrate that the desire to lead discussions of the political future away from discussions of the French Revolution proved impossible. Neither Schiller nor Goethe delivered much that did not in some regard address the most recent developments in France, and three of the four contributions that comprised the first issue featured allusions to France that were at best ill-concealed: Goethe’s poem “Epistel,” the first installment of his novella Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten (Discussions of German Emigres), and Schiller’s Ästhetische Briefe. There were, however, a large number of contributions that adhered to the program of Die Horen as announced. One of the breakout hits of the journal was Caroline von Wolzogen’s serial novel Agnes von Lilien, which some believed had been written by Goethe or Schiller and which attracted the attention of Anne Louise Germaine (Madame) de Staël (1766–1817).

In 1795 and 1796, Schiller completed work on his most important treatises on the philosophy of art, which comprise to a significant degree the results of his continuing lectures on the theory of tragedy and his Winter 1792–1793, Winter 1794–95, and Summer 1795 lectures on aesthetics, and all of which were first published in Die Horen. Über die notwendigen Grenzen beim Gebrauch schöner Formen (On the Necessary Limits in the Use of Beautiful Forms, 1795) appeared in the ninth issue of Die Horen in September following Schiller’s rejection of Fichte’s essay “Über Geist und Buchstabe in der Philosophie” (On Spirit and Letter in Philosophy), Fichte’s criticism of the obscurity of Schiller’s philosophical essays, and Schiller’s statement in the 26th of the Ästhetische Briefe that he would return to the topic of “Grenzen des schönen Scheins” (limits of the appearance of beauty; NA 20: 401). Schiller proposes that there is a danger in the proliferation of portrayals of morality as an appeal to aesthetic feeling without interruption by focused rational cognition. Schiller’s essay Über das Naive (On the Naïve) appeared in the eleventh issue of Die Horen, and Humboldt responds in an effusive letter of November 1, 1795, praising Schiller’s unique ability to fuse “Geist” (intellect) and “Natur” (nature): “Diesen Charakter, sagen Sie, theilen Sie mit allen Modernen, und hierin bin ich ganz und gar Ihrer Meynung, nur ist diese Eigenthümlichkeit in Ihnen […] stärker als sonst irgendwo, darum sind Sie, wenn ich so sagen darf, der modernste” (You say that you share this character with all moderns, and in this I agree with you entirely, only this peculiarity is stronger in you […] than anywhere else, which is why you are, if I may say so, the most modern”; NA 36/1: 6). Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung (On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry) appeared in the 11th, 12th, and 13th issues of Die Horen of November, December, and January 1795/1796. Schiller proposes categorizing poets and poetry as naïve (direct narrative description) or sentimental (self-reflective portrayal) in approach—in contrast to Friedrich Schlegel, without consideration of literary-historical era or content—citing most of the ancient Greeks, Shakespeare, and Goethe as examples of the former and himself, Euripides, and the majority of modern authors as examples of the latter.

There can be little doubt that the most enduring contribution to Die Horen was the serial publication of Schiller’s own Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen (Letters on the Aesthetic Education of the Human Individual in a Series of Letters, 1795), which, far from representing a flight from politics, Schiller called his “politische[s] Glaubensbekenntniß” (political confession) in a letter to Garve of January 25, 1795 (NA 27: 125), a confession that embarks from the insight in the Augustenburgerbriefe that “man wird damit anfangen müssen für die Verfassung Bürger zu erschaffen, ehe man den Bürgern eine Verfassung geben kann” (one will have to begin creating citizens for the constitution before one can give the citizens a constitution; NA 26: 265). Despite the stated significance of the French Revolution for the Augustenburgerbriefe and its self-evident presence in their universalist revision, the Ästhetische Briefe are not Schiller’s newly conceived view of the prerequisites of enduring political progress in response to the horrors of the French Revolution, but a restatement of ideas regarding the individual pursuit of happiness that he had articulated prior to 1789, perhaps nowhere more clearly than in the Schaubühne essay, in which the goal is to convince wise rulers that the path to widespread autonomy and happiness can best be achieved by art, which has the unique ability to reconcile by inspiring the people themselves to become “Quellen der Glückseligkeit” (sources of happiness; NA 20: 90). In the sixth of the Ästhetische Briefe (NA 20: 319), Schiller’s diagnosis of the ills of modernity borrows from the concept of “Leichenöffnung” (autopsy) that he first learned as a medical student and expanded to psychological analysis in “Der Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre” (NA 16: 9). The forensic analysis of the state of humankind reveals a division of individuals into classes of half-enlightened “Barbaren” (barbarians) and unenlightened “Wilde” (savages), driven at best to achieve a state of pseudo-virtue through the enforcement of negative duties—resulting in a “Surrogat der wahren Tugend” (substitute for true virtue; NA 26: 331), and at worst by the unchecked rage of “rohe gesetzlose Triebe” (base, lawless drives; NA 26: 319), both sharing the same inhumane end: “Der Nutzen ist das große Idol der Zeit, dem alle Kräfte frohnen und alle Talente huldigen sollen” (Utility is the great idol of our age, for which all powers are supposed to toil and to which all talents are supposed to pay homage; NA 20: 311). Unlike the ancient Greeks, who ostensibly led whole lives, Schiller presents a picture of the fragmented existence of the modern subject: “Ewig nur an ein einzelnes kleines Bruchstück des Ganzen gefesselt, bildet sich der Mensch selbst nur als Bruchstück aus, ewig nur das eintönige Geräusch des Rades, das er umtreibt, im Ohre, entwickelt er nie die Harmonie seines Wesens, und anstatt die Menschheit in seiner Natur auszuprägen, wird er bloß zu einem Abdruck seines Geschäfts, seiner Wissenschaft” (Forever chained to a single small fragment of the whole, the human being develops into nothing but a fragment; whose ear is forever subjected to the monotonous sound of the wheel that they turn, they never develop the harmony of their being, and instead of putting the stamp of humanity upon their own nature, they become nothing more than the imprint of their occupation; NA 20: 323).

As in the dissertations and in the Schaubühne essay, so in Ästhetische Briefe, the fragmented individual, divided between animal physical sensation and human intellect, is reconciled through the “Mittelkraft” (medial force) into “einen mittleren Zustand” (a medial state) between physical and mental activity, ideas rearticulated as the “dritten Character” (third character state) in the 18th, 20th, and 23rd of the Ästhetische Briefe. In the 15th letter, this reconciliation of drives results in the state of freedom from internal and external coercion that constitutes the state of play: “Denn […] der Mensch spielt nur, wo er in voller Bedeutung des Worts Mensch ist, und er ist nur da ganz Mensch, wo er spielt” (The human being plays only there, where they are human beings in the fullest sense of the term, and they are only fully human beings there where they play; NA 20: 359). Only in this aesthetic state, in which the violence of passions and the rigidity of principles are reconciled, is the human being free to practice compassion by making “fremde Gefühle zu den unsrigen” (other people’s feelings our own; NA 20: 350). After a long century of widespread critical skepticism toward Schiller’s political ideas, twenty-first century observers of wobbling republics are finding it increasingly difficult to ignore the fact that these are not post-revolution reactions but post-progressive radical ideas that directly address the concrete political dangers of an orthodoxy of ignorance and the foundational political thesis of the 9th letter that “Alle Verbesserung im Politischen soll von Veredlung des Charakters ausgehen” (All improvement in the political realm should begin with the ennoblement of individual character; NA 20: 332), resulting in the regulative idea of movement toward “Totalität des Charakters” (wholeness of character; NA 20: 318). After a run of only two years, Schiller and Cotta ended the journal due to workload considerations and falling subscription rates. Nonetheless, Die Horen is considered to be among the most significant journalistic contributions to philosophy and literature in European history.

Schiller’s parallel project to Die Horen, Der Musen-Almanach (1795–1799), which followed a format popularized in France, constitutes perhaps the best-known such publication internationally due to the renown of the editor and contributors as well as the quality and subsequent resonance of the content, particularly regarding poetry. In addition to Schiller and his many enduring Musen-Almanach contributions—“Der Ring des Polykrates,” “Der Taucher,” “Die Kraniche des Ibycus,” “Die Bürgschaft,” and “Das Lied von der Glocke”—featured authors included Goethe, Karoline von Günderrode (1780–1806), Herder, Hölderlin, A.W. Schlegel, Tieck, and two Schiller proteges, the actress and poet Sophie Albrecht and Sophie Mereau. In contrast to his constant grumbling about many of his other contributors, Schiller predicts a brilliant career for Mereau after reading her novel Eduard und Amanda: “Für die Horen hat mir unsere Dichterin Mereau jetzt ein sehr angenehmes Geschenk gemacht, und das mich wirklich überraschte. […] und wenn sie auf diesem guten Wege weiter fortgeht, so erleben wir noch was an ihr” (Our poet Mereau has now given me a very pleasant gift for Die Horen, and it really surprised me […] and if she continues on this good path, we can look forward to big things from her; NA 29: 93). Mereau continued to be productive, but died after childbirth in 1806, as did Günderrode, who committed suicide after the traumatic end to a relationship. If, as Schiller wrote, the muses had been run out of the German states by the roar of French canons and internal partisan political debate, the appearance of Schiller and Goethe’s many partisan and political Xenien in Der Musen-Almanach of 1797 did nothing to encourage the muses to return. The Xenien comprised 414 critical distiches by Schiller and Goethe aimed at the mediocrity of their rivals—a very large number of which were specifically intended to expose the artistic haplessness and political insightlessness of their growing number of adversaries.

In a letter to Goethe of November 23, 1795, Schiller laments his growing legion of literary enemies (NA 28: 110)—a number of them members of the extended Göttinger Hain group—who now, after Schiller’s legendarily harsh review of his poetry, included Bürger, Friedrich Schlegel, to whom Schiller took an instant disliking, and August Wilhelm Schlegel. Bürger’s tenuous alliance with Schiller, which had begun with his defense of “Die Götter Griechenlandes” in 1788, proved short-lived. According to Schiller-critic Caroline (Michaelis, widowed Boehmer) Schlegel (later Schelling; 1763–1809), Schiller’s legendarily harsh review of Bürger’s poetry in 1791 had robbed her friend of “alle menschliche Ehre” (all human honor; Caroline Schlegel, 1: 225). To some extent as a response to Schiller’s review of Bürger’s poetry, August Wilhelm Schlegel criticized Schiller’s moralizing tone in a poem entitled “An einen Kunstrichter” (To a Critic, 1792) in the Göttinger Musenalmenach, and published a decidedly frosty review of Thalia (AWS 10, 30–36). By late 1792, Schiller had already lost his patience with a number of the friends of the Schlegel circle—Stolberg, who had accused Schiller of blasphemy in 1788; Forster, whose participation in the Rhine Republic had annoyed Schiller; and Schiller’s erstwhile friend, the diplomat and author Huber. Huber had been all but disowned by the Schiller circle after he abandoned Körner’s sister-in-law Dora Stock while sharing a house in Mainz with his future wife Therese (Heyne) Forster (1764–1829), Forster himself, and Therese’s childhood friend, Caroline Böhmer.

Somewhat surprisingly, after the death of his former University of Göttingen professor and ally Bürger in 1794, and after his first unfriendly review of Die Horen, August Wilhelm Schlegel joined the teams of Die Horen and Der Musen-Almanach in 1795, arriving in May 1796 in precisely the kind of position he had aspired to, precisely where he had aspired to be—in Jena, working with Schiller and Goethe (as well as his friend Humboldt), and soon finding himself in the middle of a tribal turf war involving friends and family. Shortly after marrying in July 1796, Caroline Schlegel joined August Wilhelm Schlegel in Jena, as did Friedrich Schlegel. Based on all evidence prior to 1796, despite their reservations the Schlegel brothers were genuine Schiller admirers, and both aggressively sought his approval and patronage. The constellation of characters in their circle, however, made fruitful collaboration increasingly difficult, notably Friedrich Schlegel himself—“who could be a menace,” was “an unruly presence,” and who “effectively destroyed August Wilhelm’s good working relationship with Schiller” (Paulin, 67)—and Caroline Schlegel, who, like her brother-in-law, was found annoying by many, including her friends, Therese (Heyne-Forster) Huber (Hoock-Demarle, 137) and her short-term sister-in-law Dorothea Mendelsohn (Veit) Schlegel (Roetzel, 378).

Despite the best efforts of Körner to convince Schiller of Friedrich Schlegel’s respect for him, Schiller’s reluctance to work with Schlegel led the latter to seek work with yet another Schiller-adversary, Reichardt, and the two collaborated on a series of hostile reviews of Die Horen that appeared in Reichardt’s rival journal, Deutschland, attacking everything from the hypocrisy of the announcement of Die Horen, to Goethe and Schiller’s dishonesty, to their “diktatorische[n] Übermuth” (dictatorial arrogance; NA 2/2: 485) in a review rumored by Woltmann to have been written by Caroline Schlegel (NA 37: 31–32). To this, both Charlotte Schiller—in whose circle Caroline Schlegel was referred to as “Madame Luzifer” (Oellers 1990)—and later, in May 1797, Körner took an instant dislike to her, likely due in some part to her proximity to the estranged Huber. The hostile reviews of Schiller’s works in Deutschland were only the first shots of many, which, along with Friedrich Schlegel’s 1796 review of the Musen-Almenach poem “Würde der Frauen” (Dignity of Women; Deutschland 2, 348–360), led Schiller to fire August Wilhelm Schlegel as contributor to Die Horen. This firing elicited an emotional response from both August Wilhelm and Caroline Schlegel on June 1, 1797, in which he asks for the opportunity to prove his loyalty and disavows his brother’s critiques of Schiller, and she declares her unqualified admiration and love for Schiller (NA 37: 32), in stark contrast to the dim view of him presented in her letters. This attempt at reconciliation did nothing to prevent a thorough series of retaliatory Xenien by Schiller and Goethe published in Schiller’s Musen-Almanach of 1797. A large number of the Xenien targeted the Schlegel circle, including all Schlegels, Bürger, Reichardt, and Forster (High 2004, 133–143) and called into question which of the hostile parties had raised the culture of the ancient Greeks to a form of cult worship—one of several narrow notions of Weimar Classicism—by labeling Friedrich Schlegel the key figure in a movement Schiller derides in his Xenien “Griechheit” (Greekness) and in “Die zwey Fieber” (The two Fevers) as “Gräcomanie” (Greco-mania), a replacement for the “Gallomanie” (Franco-mania) of Schlegel’s waning enthusiasm for the French Revolution (NA 2: 348).

Inevitably, the Schlegels respond in kind: Friedrich Schlegel publishes back in an essay in Forster’s defense in 1797, and writes in Fragmente über Literatur und Poesie (Fragments on Literature and Poetry, 1797): “Es giebt für die Kunst keinen gefählicheren Irrthum, als sie in πολ [Politik] und Universalität zu suchen wie Schiller” (There is no more dangerous an error for art than to seek it, like Schiller, in politics and universality; Schlegel, 194) and “Keines Menschen Poesie ist weniger idealisch als Schillers” (No person’s poetry is less ideal than Schiller’s; Schlegel, 413). After his firing, August Wilhelm Schlegel promptly published a second critique of Die Horen, and in 1797, the Schlegels joined forces with Schleiermacher and Novalis to establish the journal Athenaeum, adding two further critical and anti-secularist voices to the mix. In “Apologie,” the introduction to Über die Religion (On Religion, 1799), Schleiermacher addresses the “Verächter der Religion” (those who despise religion)—secularist writers like Schiller and Goethe—and launches an assault on Schiller’s central unifying concept, “Freude” or “Glückseligkeit,” as had Novalis in “Kann ein Atheist auch moralisch tugendhaft aus Grundsätzen seyn?” (Can an Atheist also be Moral out of Principal, 1789; Novalis, 20). Although Schiller was on average only some eleven years older than the Athenaeum contributors, the journal is often understood as the critical founding document of the forward-looking program of German Romanticism, created by a revolutionary youth movement that ironically simultaneously railed against Schiller as too political, too secularist, and not ideal enough, as well as against the imagined restrictions of the highly selective and poorly defined set of tendencies known as Weimar Classicism, all the while fairly worshipping Goethe, the author most identified with the concept. In fact, the notion of a theoretical clash between classical and modern movements is a serious oversimplification of a story that regards at its core a constellation of notably difficult characters. It is self-evident that one editorial principle of Athenaeum (like Deutschland) was to disgrace Schiller, his works, and his theories, one driven by a personal animosity that is—despite the hard feelings over Schiller’s treatment of Bürger—largely absent from the Schlegels’ comments prior to what August Wilhelm Schlegel called “den großen Haß” (the great hatred; AWS Briefe, 186) of 1796, which fueled a war of criticism and informed reception long after Schiller’s death. For his part, Schiller appears to have moved on after expressing his disdain in the Xenien. Yet, even Friedrich Schlegel’s criticism of Schiller had its limits; after fifteen years of seething resentment, in an 1812 lecture delivered in Vienna, Schlegel praised Schiller’s entire oeuvre, concluding of the early dramas that Schiller was “erfüllt von jenen schwärmerischen Hoffnungen, von jener kühnen Opposition gegen alles Bestehende, welche der Revolution vorangingen” (full of those fanatical hopes and that bold opposition to all the existing circumstances that preceded the revolution; Schlegel 1841, 16: 460). Schlegel’s preference for Schiller’s early dramas expressed here represents perhaps the first attempt to create a Schiller of progressive and conservative phases, rather than recognizing that Schiller’s early and late dramas were written in two distinctly different political and artistic eras, one focused more on liberation from native and internal forms of tyranny, and one focused more on foreign and external forms of tyranny.

Despite the time required for writing, teaching, and research, and despite his illness, Schiller’s rate of production and versatility from 1789 to 1796 leave no room for theories of a revolution-inspired writer’s block, nor do they indicate a sudden change of focus after the violence of the French Revolution, but the continuation of a shift that dates back years. On the contrary, Schiller’s quantity and quality of production during the entire period from 1789 until the work on his late dramas and poetry is entirely in line with that of the remarkable run from 1781 through 1789, which already, according to Benno von Wiese, bordered “ans Unfaßbare” (on the incomprehensible; von Wiese, 351). As of his letter to Goethe of October 16, 1795, Schiller appears satisfied that he has achieved his most important goals as an aesthetic and political philosopher and is prepared to refocus on drama and poetry: “Soviel habe ich nun aus gewißer Erfahrung, daß nur strenge Bestimmtheit der Gedanken zu einer Leichtigkeit verhilft […] Ich bin jetzt in der That froh, daß ich es mir nicht habe verdrießen lassen einen sauren Weg einzuschlagen, den ich oft für die poetisierende Einbildungskraft verderblich hielt” (I now know one thing from certain experiences, that only strict clarity of thoughts leads to adeptness […] I am actually glad now that I did not let myself be discouraged from following a sour path, which I often held to be ruinous for the poetic imagination; NA 28: 79).

As Schiller begins work on his second series of dramas, the rebellious spirit of the early dramas later missed by Friedrich Schlegel remains glaringly evident, if Schiller understandably took aim at a more relevant target. As Schiller’s universal-historical model had anticipated in Abfall der Niederlande in 1788, when the cycle of history repeats, similar contexts will call the victims of the most urgent form of oppression to similar acts of liberation. Since, by the late 1790s, the now mostly occupied and diminished German princes were no longer the prime movers of oppression, Schiller returns to the earliest source of his outrage, the Conqueror, now in the form of French occupation. Thus, it is not that Schiller’s politics of autonomy had changed, but that the politics of enslavement itself had changed. Beginning with his condemnation of the French annexation of Mainz in 1792–1793, Schiller was a keen observer of the many French violations of the autonomy of the German states (High 2006, 231–232). On March 15, 1793, Schiller wrote to his publisher Göschen of the French: “Wir wollen hoffen, daß ihnen das deutsche Brod bald verleidet werden soll” (Let us hope that they will soon become sick of German bread; NA 26: 232). In early July 1796, the political became personal when French troops commandeered the Solitude residence in Stuttgart, where Schiller had studied, and where his family had sought refuge from the French. In a letter of July 20, 1796, Schiller’s sister Christophina Reinwald details how the Schiller family packed their valuables but could not flee due to the father’s terminally ill condition. She reports that on July 18 and 19, French troops plundered Stuttgart, poked the Schillers with rifles, and stole some of the clothing right off their bodies, and that she and her sister had spent a day hiding in a cave to avoid being raped (NA 36/1: 277–78). In a letter of July 21 and 22 (NA 36/1: 280), she describes further indignities of occupation, including the theft of a blind beggar’s shoes. In his letter to Goethe of July 23 or 25, 1796, Schiller describes the French takeover of the city: “Die Franzosen sind in Stuttgardt, wohin die Kaiserlichen sich anfangs geworfen haben sollen, so daß jene die Stadt beschießen mußten” (The French are in Stuttgart, where the imperial forces were initially supposed to have dashed, so that the former had to bombard the city; NA 28: 269). On July 25, Schiller heard from Karlsschule classmate and sculptor Johann Heinrich von Dannecker (1758–1841) that “Schwaben und Franken von Soldaten wimmeln” (Swabia and Franconia are swarming with soldiers); on July 31, 1796, Schiller writes to Goethe that he had no idea where his family was (NA 28: 275); and on August 15, 1796, Schiller wrote to Reinwald that his sister Christophina could not travel “ohne Gefahr der ärgsten Mißhandlungen” (without the danger of the most egregious assaults; NA 28: 286), later citing cases of “Roheit” (brutality) and “Vandalism der Franzosen” (vandalism of the French; NA 29: 193). In 1797, Schiller publishes a stinging series of Forster criticisms in the Xenien, concluding that Forster will land in metaphorical hell (the judgment of history) for his role in the occupation of German territories.

Ironically, just when Schiller’s merely skeptical attitude toward the developments of the French Revolution had turned to outrage over the perpetual French invasions, he unexpectedly received the documents of his French citizenship on March 1, 1798, accompanied by a letter from the author, educational reformer, and fellow French citizen Joachim Heinrich Campe (1746–1818), and shared the news with Goethe the following day: “Gestern habe ich nun im Ernst das französische Bürgerrecht erhalten, wovon schon vor 5 Jahren in den Zeitungen geredet wurde” (Seriously, yesterday I finally received the French citizenship documents that were announced in the newspapers five years ago; NA 29: 214). Goethe took an ironic distance to the news in his letter of March 3, 1798, in which he playfully points out that everyone who had handled the documents, including Danton, Roland, and Custine, was dead: “Zu dem Bürger Decrete, das Ihnen aus dem Reiche der Toden zugesendet worden, kann ich nur in so fern Glück wünschen als es Sie noch unter den Lebendigen angetroffen hat, warten Sie ja noch eine Weile ehe Sie Ihre verewigten großen Mitbürger besuchen” (As for your citizenship documents from the realm of the dead, I can only congratulate you for being among the living when they arrived. Please do wait a while before you visit your great immortalized countrymen; NA 37/1: 257–258). Goethe is evidently responding to Schiller’s ill-concealed enthusiasm over his own historical significance. Nonetheless, Schiller was clearly not alone in his interest in the documents: Duke Carl August requested that the documents be given to the library in Weimar, and, in his letter of March 26, 1798, Körner is curious to see the accompanying letter from the then Minister of the Interior Jean-Marie Roland (1734–1793; NA 37/1: 267), but dismisses the importance of the citizenship decree while expressing only annoyance with the French: “Die Pariser Ehrenbezeugung will zur Zeit nicht viel bedeuten. Das Comödianten Wesen dieser Menschen ist mir widerlich” (The Parisian honor does not count for much given the situation. The clownish nature of these people disgusts me; NA 37/1: 267–268). In a letter to Campe of March 2, 1798, Schiller tactfully suggests that he had earned this honor through nothing but his agreement in principle with the motto of the revolution (freedom, equality, fraternity), and carefully applied a condition to his acceptance in the form of an if/then sentence (Wertheim, 434): “[…] wenn unsre Mitbürger über dem Rhein diesem Wahlspruch immer gemäß handeln, so weiß ich keinen schöneren Titel, als einer der ihrigen zu sein” ([…]if our countrymen across the Rhine always act in accordance with that motto, then I cannot think of a better title than to be considered one of them; NA 29: 212). Clearly, by 1798, the French had failed to do so in Schiller’s eyes. Thus, in precise doublespeak, Schiller confirmed his affinity with the original ideals of the revolution, while quietly distancing himself from its course and the current hegemonic program.

The reductive understanding of the term Weimar Classicism as a period of the wooden pursuit of form and its almost mythical national function stand in curious contrast to the reality on the ground in Schiller’s Sachsen-Weimar during the composition of his last five completed dramas. As was the case with his relative caution in responding to the French Revolution, Schiller, who clearly responded to the phenomenon of Bonaparte, never mentioned him by name in any writing extant. Prior to the premiere of Wallensteins Lager in October of 1798, beginning in 1794, Bonaparte had already won twenty-six battles, and his success in Italy resulted in the expulsion of the Austrians and the occupation of Northern Italy, as well as both his invasion of Austria in 1797 and the strategic French occupation of Switzerland also in 1797, which occurred at his urging. Likewise, prior to the first performance of Wallensteins Lager, Bonaparte had conquered Malta in June of 1798 and won three battles in Egypt by July 21 of that year. The French invasion of Switzerland in 1798 and Bonaparte’s coup in 1799 find resonance in Schiller’s decision to work on the French liberation hero, Joan of Arc, in 1800, and to work at the same time on the drama of the Swiss liberation hero William Tell in 1802 (Wertheim, 446). In his letter to Goethe of March 13, 1798, Schiller cheers the Swiss resistance against France: “Man sagt hier daß die Franzosen bei Murten eine Schlappe bekommen. Es sollte mich herzlich freuen, denn auch ein kleines Glück, und gerade an diesem Ort, würde am Anfang besonders sehr gute Folgen für die Schweizer haben” (They say here that the French have suffered a failure to perform in Murten. That would make me happy to the bottom of my heart, because even a little success, and there, at the start, would have very good consequences for the Swiss; NA 29: 218).

The Napoleonic occupations are reflected in Schiller’s late dramas: just as Fiesko is not about sixteenth-century Italy and Don Karlos is not about sixteenth-century Spain, neither are the late dramas about seventeenth-century Bohemia or fifteenth-century France. They are about the pursuit of happiness, and to that end of all ends, they are about the prerequisites of happiness, liberation, political autonomy, and personal autonomy. Likewise, in keeping with the Scottish reconciliation philosophy that informed Schiller’s Karlsschule works, his historical writings, theoretical works, and the announcement of Die Horen, his dramas reveal a striking consistency in the belief in the negative influence of “Zwietracht” (discord) and the positive potential of “Eintracht” or “Vereinigung” (unity or unification) on matters of the most common concerns of morality, a phenomenon mechanized in the shared experience of the violation of autonomy that is coercion, war, and which appears most graphically in the portrayal of foreign occupation. Like his first four completed dramas, the final five each embark from a historical-political situation, each posing its own challenges in transforming a political fable into compelling drama, transforming the past into the present, and transforming historical truth into what Schiller called philosophical and artistic truth.

If Schiller had postponed his return to drama in some small part due to anxiety over the influence of his first four dramas, the success of the first of his final five dramatic works, Wallenstein, likely put his worst fears to rest. Written for the premiere of Wallensteins Lager at the newly rebuilt Weimar Theater in October 1798, Schiller’s prologue demonstrates his clear intention to invoke the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War as portrayed in his historical works by describing what is at stake on the 150th anniversary of its end in 1648, a period of relative peace ending in Bonaparte’s wars of aggression: “Und jetzt an des Jahrhunderts ernstem Ende / […] Um Herrschaft und um Freiheit wird gerungen” (And now, at the century’s grim conclusion / […] A struggle takes place between the power to rule and freedom). Schiller’s timely implication is that the struggle between the “power to rule and freedom” refers to that between “gewaltiger Naturen” (powerful personalities; NA 8: 4)—Bonaparte and his opponents—and anyone who happens to be in their path, including foremost the German states. Like Fiesko, Don Karlos, and Wallenstein, power politics and cabinet intrigue likewise lie at the center of Maria Stuart, which Schiller conceived in 1793 and which premiered in Weimar on June 14, 1800 and focuses on the highly fictionalized portrayal of the brief period between Mary Stuart’s death sentence and her execution, reaching its climax in an invented meeting of Mary Stuart and Elizabeth I; whereas Schiller’s Maria Stuart had exploited her sexuality for personal autonomy and political gain, his Elizabeth accomplishes the same by declaring herself free of gender constraints: “Das Weib ist nicht schwach […] / […] Ich will in meinem Beisein / Nichts von der Schwäche des Geschlechtes hören” (Woman is not weak […] / [...] I will, in my presence, / Hear no more of the weakness of the sex; NA 9: 52). The opening scene of Die Jungfrau von Orleans, which Schiller began just after the French invasions of southern German states in 1798 and which premiered on September 11, 1801, portrays the inhabitants of an idyllic, yet defenseless, shepherd village betrayed by opportunistic politicians, and in need of a hero to free them from the approaching tyranny of military occupation. The French heroine states the case for the right to a war of self-defense in poeticized Kantian moral terms herself—“Was ist unschuldig, heilig, menschlich gut, / Wenn es der Kampf nicht ist ums Vaterland?” (What is innocent, holy, humanly good, / If not the defense of the fatherland?; NA 9: 235). She demonstrates the same clarity of purpose—the removal of the conqueror—in Prologue, Scene 4: “Und wie die rasche Schnitterin die Saat, / Den stolzen Überwinder niederschlagen” (And, as the ripened corn the reapers mow, / Hew down the conqueror as he triumphs there; NA 9: 181). The political message in the context of 1801 is self-evident; if there is anything holy about Joan of Arc, then the French should be the first to recognize what it is—her calling to liberation from the conqueror.

Far from focusing on the great men of history, Schiller’s late dramas mirror his early dramas in their complicated portrayals of highly problematic characters, an intention made clear in his letter to Wilhelm von Humboldt of March 21, 1796 regarding his character Wallenstein: “Er hat nichts Edles, er erscheint in keinem einzelnen LebensAkt groß. […] Seine Unternehmung ist moralisch schlecht, und sie verunglückt physisch. Er ist im Einzelnen nie groß und im Ganzen kommt er um seinen Zweck” (There is nothing noble about him, he does not appear great in any single action in life. His undertaking is morally bad, and it fails physically. He is never great in any particular detail and, on the whole, he does not achieve his intention; NA 28: 204). Similarly, the only thing great about Schiller’s Maria Stuart is her sublime composure before her execution, a direct result of her frank admission of her complicity in the murder of her husband Darnley; in a hopeless situation of her own making, she finds strength in the promise of life after death in the last five acts of the life of a Catholic power politician lived at odds with Christian principles. Schiller’s Elizabeth I is appropriately aware that her rival, Maria Stuart, is younger and considered to be more attractive, and Philipp II felt the same way about his, Don Karlos. While Schiller’s Elizabeth I vacillates and accomplishes her highly problematic goal in an act of silence, his Wallenstein vacillates and fails silently, and his Johanna vacillates between a bizarre concept of faith and a clear liberation mission before committing to the latter and triumphing in death. Indeed, Schiller’s heroines and heroes have much more in common than not, and a great deal in common with the complicated protagonists of his early dramas.

On April 29, 1802, shortly before the birth of their daughter Caroline Henriette Luise on October 11, 1802, Schiller and Charlotte Schiller, now with three children and financially secure, moved from their apartment in the Windischgasse in Weimar into what is now known as the Schiller House on the Weimar Esplanade, today Schillerstraße 12. Between the publications and premieres of Die Jungfrau von Orleans and Die Braut von Messina, Schiller received his title of nobility on November 16, 1802, just two and a half years prior to his death. The decidedly aristocratic form of recognition of Schiller’s service to German culture during a dangerous period of Franco-German relations led to renewed expression of annoyance over Schiller’s French revolutionary citizenship with the appearance of Carl August’s annual Hochfürstlich Sachsen-Weimar und Eisenachischen Hof- und Adreßkalender on January 13, 1803. Schiller’s revised entry reflected both his new title of nobility and included a second new and, for a citizen of Weimar, surprising title: “Herr D. Friedrich v. Schiller, Bürger von Frankreich” (Herr Dr. Friedrich von Schiller, Citizen of France). The revision of 1803 was clearly unauthorized, as is evident from Privy Council Voigt’s prompt report to Goethe, in which Voigt dismisses second-hand testimony from the printer that Schiller had delivered his calendar entry personally—“Wir wissen zwar wohl besser, wie es zugegangen ist” (We both know better how this came about; Jahn 1: 322)—adding that his only regret was that a misunderstanding could result in Schiller losing his new title of nobility. Since Schiller did not write the entry, someone else must have done so, and it follows from the context that Schiller was the victim of a prank that drew attention to the ideological gulf between the title “Bürger von Frankreich” of 1792 and the more recent title of nobility (High 2003). Schiller’s final two dramas would leave no doubt as to his feelings about the human rights record of the most recent government of France.

Schiller published his final two completed dramas, Die Braut von Messina (The Bride of Messina, 1802) and Wilhelm Tell (1804)—the second and third of three consecutive dramas that embark from historical occupation situations—during the final three years of his life. Set during the eleventh-century Norman occupation of Sicily, Die Braut von Messina premiered on March 19, 1803. Early in the play, a member of Schiller’s intentionally alienating chorus provides the intrusive narration of the back story as the prophecy of the demise of Messina appears to prove true: “Und jetzt sehen wir uns als Knechte / Untertan diesem Fremden Geschlechte” (And now we see ourselves enslaved / Subjects of this foreign race; NA 10: 28). A second chorus member corroborates: “Sklaven sind wir in den eigenen Sitzen, / Das Land kann seine Kinder nicht schützen” (We are slaves in our own lands, / The nation cannot protect its children; NA 10: 28). In addition to the innovative form and the occupation setting, Schiller once again portrays a main character’s evolution from medieval to modern worldview and maturity, as well as the freedom to resist what appears to be fate; like Johanna before her, when the gods abandon Queen Isabella in her hour of need, she abandons the gods in order to defend her people on her own: “Warum besuchen wir die heilgen Häuser, / Und heben zu dem Himmel fromme Hände? / Gutmüthge Thoren, was gewinnen wir / Mit unserm Glauben” (Why do we visit the holy temples, / And raise pious hands to heaven? / Compliant fools, what do we receive / In return for our faith?; NA 10: 108). Nonetheless, the lack of unity and preponderant discord that first led to the occupation leads to the deaths of both heirs to the throne, and, with them, any hope of liberation, and political and individual autonomy. In the final scene of the play, Queen Isabella begs of her son, Don Cesar: “Lebe, mein Sohn! Laß deine Mutter nicht / Freudlos im Land der Fremdlinge zurück” (Live on, my son! Leave not your mother / Behind, joyless, in the land of the foreigners; NA 10: 122). Her plea goes unanswered, and so, it is not fate as actual nemesis, not the fulfillment of prophecy, but the belief in fate that dooms Messina.

Schiller wrote the opening scene of Wilhelm Tell just after the French march into Switzerland, which Schiller refers to as the “Unglücksfälle” (unfortunate events) in a letter to Cotta of August 7, 1802 (NA 31: 154). The play opens with a fisher boy singing of paradise among peace-loving shepherds, only to be interrupted by an Austrian police action. Imperial occupation forces pursue the rebellious lumberjack Baumgarten, who fought back when his wife was sexually assaulted by the emperor’s castellan, a characteristic violent gesture of occupation recalling Schiller’s story of his sisters hiding in a cave from French troops. According to his letter to Wilhelm von Wolzogen of October 27, 1803, Schiller was fully aware of the significance of the French occupation of Switzerland for the potential resonance of Wilhelm Tell: “[…] jetzt besonders ist von der schweizerischen Freiheit desto mehr die Rede, weil sie aus der Welt verschwunden ist” ([…] now in particular Swiss freedom is an even more popular topic, since it has disappeared from the earth; NA 32: 81). Like no other drama by Schiller, the play is repeatedly punctuated by inspirational speeches regarding inalienable rights, the right to self-defense, and the potential of unity on clear moral matters. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that, by invoking three occupation settings in dramas published between 1801 and 1804, Schiller’s target is Bonaparte, and he is certain that the play, a “Neujahrsgeschenk auf 1805” (New Year’s Gift for 1805)—as advertised on the cover of the first edition—will unavoidably touch a nerve in some theaters and result in “Anstoß” (umbrage; NA 32: 124). His prediction was to prove prophetic, repeatedly: due to its portrayal of the justified murder of a tyrant, Joseph Goebbels and Adolph Hitler banned both the teaching and performance of Wilhelm Tell in 1941 (Ruppelt, 41). Despite his renewed success, Schiller remained critical to the end, expressing that, of the final five dramas, he was least satisfied with Maria Stuart and Wilhelm Tell, and less dissatisfied with Wallenstein, Die Jungfrau von Orleans, and Die Braut von Messina.

In a letter to Wilhelm von Humboldt of October 5, 1795, just as Schiller returned his attention to literary pursuits after the publication of Ästhetische Briefe, he had delivered a telling self-portrait in revealing a future marketing principle—artistic experimentation:

Noch wollte ich, […] mich zugleich in einer neuen Gattung zu versuchen, eine romantische Erzählung in Versen machen […] Ich habe mich nach und nach in sovielen Fächern und Formen versucht, daß die Frage entsteht ob ich den Kreis nicht vollenden soll. Auch ist das Publikum wie es scheint auf diese Mannichfaltigkeit bey mir aufmerksam geworden, und sie scheint ein Ingrediens der Vorstellung zu seyn, unter der ich den meisten Lesern erscheine. Auf diesem Wege scheint also der Kranz zu liegen, der für mich zu erringen ist. (NA 28: 72)

I still would like […] to try my hand at a new genre, to create a romantic story in verse […] Over time, I have experimented with so many subjects and forms that the question arises as to whether I should not complete the circle. The public, too, seems to have become aware of this versatility in my production, and it appears to be a factor in the image I project to most readers. Thus the wreath that I can yet earn seems to lie on this path.

It is remarkable that Schiller already saw his career in this light in 1795, given that his most experimental works of drama and poetry were yet to come. Indeed, for a dramatist who had experienced unusual streaks of success, Schiller’s consistent experimentation with a variety of dramatic forms borders on reckless. Not only are the plots and characters in Schiller’s dramas remarkably diverse, but, in stark contrast to prevailing definitions of Weimar Classicism, Wilhelm Tell marks the end of his most diverse run of dramas, in which the subtitles alone suggest a conscious focus on variety and inventiveness and an anti-programmatic approach to dramatic forms and functions: Die Räuber. Ein Schauspiel, which Schiller initially conceived of as “ein[] dramatische[r] Roman” (a dramatic novel; NA 3: 244); Fiesko. Ein republikanisches Trauerspiel; Kabale und Liebe. Ein bürgerliches Trauerspieln; Dom Karlos, Infant von Spanien, first Ein Trauerspiel in prose, which appeared later the same year as Ein dramatisches Gedicht (a dramatic poem) in iambic pentameter; Wallenstein. Ein Trauerspiel (A Play of Mourning); Die Jungfrau von Orleans. Eine romantische Tragödie (A Romantic Tragedy); Die Braut von Messina oder Die feindlichen Brüder. Ein Trauerspiel mit Chören (A Play of Mourning with Choirs); and, at first, Wilhelm Tell. Tragödie (A Tragedy; NA 10: 368), ultimately Wilhelm Tell. Schauspiel. Zum Neujahrsgeschenk auf 1805. Nonetheless, a common thread is clear: Schiller’s aesthetic program is not only diverse in form, but also international by design. Defiant in exile in 1784, Schiller had opened the Schaubühne speech by declaring himself a “Weltbürger” (citizen of the world) and concluded the speech with the declaration that the greatest human experience is the awareness of the common potential for self-improvement and that this defines what it means “ein Mensch zu sein” (to be a human being; NA 20: 100). Schiller further articulates this position in a letter to Körner of October 13, 1789, writing: “Es ist ein armseliges kleinliches Ideal, für eine Nation zu schreiben” (It is a pathetic, petty ideal, to write for one nation; NA 25: 304). In Über das Pathetische (1793), Schiller labels the artistic focus on “Nationalgegenstände” (topics of national interest) and “Privatinteresse” (private interest) a sign of “barbarischen Geschmack” (barbaric taste; NA 20: 218–219). According to the 1797 poem, “Hofnung,” the human condition is the universal pursuit of perpetual improvement: “Die Welt wird alt und wird wieder jung, / Doch der Mensch hoft immer Verbesserung!” (The world grows old and grows young again, / But the human being hopes always for betterment!; NA 1: 401). In the “Prologue” to Wallensteins Lager of 1798 and in the poem fragment, “Deutsche Größe” (On German Greatness, 1801), all human beings become siblings in the fight for reason and the civil rights of all peoples: “Freiheit der Vernunft erfechten / Heißt für alle Völker rechten / Gilt für alle ewge Zeit” (To fight and win the freedom of reason / Is to argue the rights of all peoples / And endures for time eternal; NA 2I, 431). True to his international mission, by his death on May 9, 1805, seven of Schiller’s nine completed dramas were set in what are today the Czech Republic, England, France, Italy (2), Spain, and Switzerland, and only two were set in what are today German states, and both of those—Die Räuber and Kabale und Liebe—feature individual struggles for autonomy against the backdrop of systemic international tyranny. As his fellow dissident and exile Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) put it, Schiller, who is often referred to as the German national poet, never aspired to any such distinction, but aspired to be a “Kosmopolit” (cosmopolitan), a practicing Weltbürger, neither foremost a Swabian nor a German, but foremost a Mensch.

On April 28, 1805, Schiller was on his way to a theater performance when he saw Goethe for the last time; Goethe was not well enough to accompany him, and Schiller fell ill that night. From May 6 until his death on May 9, Schiller was intermittently of clear mind or semi-conscious and delirious, reportedly speaking in Latin, speaking of war and soldiers (NA 42: 435)—or not (NA 42: 432, 725)—and mentioning either the dead author Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) or the Castle Leuchtenberg several times (NA 42: 435). According to Caroline von Wolzogen and Schiller’s servant, Georg Gottfried Rudolph (1778–1840), an otherwise mostly incomprehensible Schiller had a religious conversion experience shortly before his death on May 9, 1805, a phenomenon Schiller had portrayed as the climax of atheist Franz Moor’s nervous breakdown and sudden fear of judgment in Die Räuber. There are twenty-six eyewitness reports of Schiller’s final days from eight sources. The reports by Rudolph and Wolzogen, and only theirs, are peppered with portrayals of visions, rays of light, sudden joy, and prayer. Of the four reports attributed to Rudolph, three are religiously informed (NA 42: 428–435). Of the nine reports by Caroline von Wolzogen, four strongly imply that Schiller experienced a religious awakening, three of which report that on May 7, two days before his death, Schiller exclaimed “Ist das euer Himmel? ist das eure Hölle?” (Is this your heaven? Is this your hell?; NA 24: 431). According to Rudolph, Schiller uttered “Judex” several times on May 9 (NA 42: 434). However, Rudolph and Wolzogen also write that Schiller had been deliriously reciting from his own works for the three days since May 6, foremost from the unfinished drama Demetrius (NA 42: 431, 434), which features the line: “Ist das euer Himmel? ist das eure Hölle?” Wilhelm von Humboldt, who knew both Schiller and Wolzogen well, expresses skepticism in his response: “Es ist zweifelhaft, ob er dies in eigener Wahrheit, oder wie im Stück gesagt” (It is not clear whether Schiller was stating this from his own point of view or as he had written it in the piece”; NA 42: 321). Of the thirteen firsthand reports by Charlotte von Schiller, Carl von Schiller, Luise von Göchhausen (1752–1807), Johann Heinrich Voß (1751–1726), Anton Genast (1765–1831), and Dr. Wilhelm Ernst Christian Huschke (1760–1828), none make any reference to religion. The final count of religious references and their uneven distribution provide reason for skepticism: Rudolph and Wolzogen make seven references to Schiller and religion in thirteen reports; everyone else who knew Schiller during his adult life make none in thirteen reports. Perhaps the most compelling testimony on the subject comes from Schiller’s daughter Caroline, who sought and regretted finding “kein Zeugnis für das Christentum” (no evidence of Christianity; Renneke, 1103) in her father’s writings. Based on the evidence, any effort to lend comfort, rehabilitate, or co-opt through post-deathbed conversion would have been offensive to the dramatist and philosopher who sarcastically described last-minute conversion as the “mächtiges Wunderwerk der Religion” (mighty miracle feat of religion; NA 20: 110) in Philosophische Briefe (1786). To the essayist who recognized “die Gerichtbarkeit der Bühne” (the justice of the stage; NA 20: 92) before that of the state and the church, to the poet who wrote that “Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht,” “Judex” means judgment in the secular (moral and aesthetic) court of human history (High 2012, 163).

Schiller died on May 9, 1805, at the age of forty-five in Weimar, 180 miles from his birthplace in Marbach, some seventeen months before the fall of Prussia to Bonaparte on October 14, 1806. He had come a long way from his humble beginnings to international renown as a dramatist, historian, and philosopher, though the furthest he had ever traveled was to Berlin for a festival of his dramas in May 1804. He began in obscurity, became the foil to a tyrannical duke, met many of the leading thinkers of his age, and was courted by princes; he rose from a teenager who could only experience chamber music, symphonies, and operas at a state university Schubart described as a slave plantation to an author whose poetry inspired Schubert and Beethoven, and whose dramas inspired operas by Rossini, Donizetti, Verdi, and Tchaikovsky. Nevertheless, the inner circle of the philosophical poet who characterized his most resonant poem, “An die Freude,” with the line “Diesen Kuss der ganzen Welt!” (This kiss is for all the world; NA 1: 169) was limited to a small number of those who not only witnessed but contributed to his happiness, as he wrote to Körner, Minna Körner, and Dora Stock in a letter of August 15, 1798: “[…] ich muß gestehen, daß Ihr, Humboldts, Göthe und meine Frau die einzige Menschen sind, an die ich mich gern erinnre wenn ich dichte und die mich dafür belohnen können, denn das Publicum, so wie es ist, nimmt einem alle Freude” (I must confess that you, the Humboldts, Goethe, and my wife are the only people who I like to think about when I write and who can reward me for what I write, for the public, such as it is, takes away all of one’s joy; NA 29: 262). Shortly thereafter, in letters of January 31 and July 2, 1799, regarding performances of Die Piccolomini and Wallensteins Tod, it is evident how highly Schiller also valued the opinion of Charlotte von Kalb (Palleske, 248).

Schiller’s education as a Mensch of letters began in an environment where actual autopsies were performed and proceeded to the literary performance of allegorical, anthropological, psychological, and philosophical autopsies that sought to understand the whole human being as physical and intellectual synthesis through dissection or dissolution—as in the “Leichenöffnung” (autopsy) of Christian Wolf’s psychology in “Der Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre” or the description of the philosopher as “Scheidekünstler” (chemist) in Ästhetische Briefe. Appropriately, his story ended with his own somewhat Gothic autopsy, performed by Huschke and Herder’s son Emil Gottfried von Herder (1783–1855), who concluded that, although the immediate cause of Schiller’s death had been acute pneumonia caused by tuberculosis, the whole had succumbed to multiple failures of its constituent parts. The autopsy demonstrated that Schiller’s left lung was completely destroyed, his kidneys were almost dissolved, his heart muscle atrophied, and his spleen and bile were greatly enlarged; only the bladder and stomach were intact. Huschke concluded his report with a sober assessment: “Bey diesen Umständen muß man sich wundern, wie der arme Mann so lange hat leben können” (Under these circumstances, one must wonder how the poor man could have lived so long; NA 41/2: 535 footnote). Schiller was buried in a mass grave, the Kassengewölbe (Treasury Mausoleum) in Weimar, during the night of May 11–12, and later exhumed and reinterred in 1807 in the Weimar Fürstengruft (Ducal Mausoleum) in a midnight service attended only by Ernst von Schiller (1796–1841) and Goethe’s son, August von Goethe (1789–1830). Goethe himself was too moved to attend. On May 3, 2008, for some reason, scientists assembled to verify Schiller’s remains prior to the 250th anniversary of his death and announced that DNA tests had demonstrated that none of the bones reinterred in the Fürstengruft belonged to Schiller (see Hinderer). The coffin next to Goethe’s in the tomb there now lies vacant.Footnote 1