Friedrich Schiller

• 1. Introduction

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  Friedrich Schiller was born on the 10th of November 1759 in Marbach, in the Duchy of Württemberg, named after King Frederick the Great but called Fritz by nearly everyone who knew him. He died at forty-five from tuberculosis, and in the years between those two facts he wrote plays that shook audiences, philosophical letters that tried to rescue civilization from its own worst impulses, and poems that Beethoven found so powerful he worried no composer could rise to match them. How does a boy from a garrison town, locked inside a military academy against his will, become a figure whose likeness ends up in Central Park, Lincoln Park, and on German banknotes across multiple eras? And what does it mean that, more than two centuries after his death, scientists announced that the skull in his tomb is not his?

• 2. A Soldier's Son

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  Kaspar Schiller, Friedrich's father, was away fighting in the Seven Years' War when his only son was born. That absence shaped the family's early years. Kaspar was a military doctor, rarely home, though he managed occasional visits to his wife Elisabetha Dorothea and their children, who sometimes traveled to wherever he happened to be stationed. When the war ended in 1763, Kaspar became a recruiting officer posted to Schwäbisch Gmünd, and the family moved to follow him. The high cost of living there, especially rent, pushed them to the nearby town of Lorch. It was in Lorch that Friedrich received his first schooling, and by his own account the lessons were poor enough that he regularly skipped class with his older sister Christophine. Because his parents wanted him to become a priest, the village cleric, Father Moser, was brought in to teach the boy Latin and Greek. Moser was a good teacher. Young Friedrich repaid the debt in the most durable way he could: he named a character in his first play after the man. The family's financial strain came to a head in 1766, when Kaspar had not been paid for three years and the family's savings were exhausted. They moved again, this time to Ludwigsburg, the Duke of Württemberg's principal residence, and that move placed Friedrich in the direct sight line of Karl Eugen, Duke of Württemberg, who would change the course of his life.

• 3. The Karlsschule Years

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  Karl Eugen ran an elite military academy called the Karlsschule Stuttgart, and in 1773 Friedrich Schiller entered it. He was initially enrolled to study law but eventually switched to medicine, graduating with a doctor of medicine in 1780. The school was a constraint, not an education in the sense Schiller craved. He read Rousseau and Goethe, debated Classical ideals with classmates, and somewhere inside that environment wrote his first play. The Robbers dramatizes two aristocratic brothers: Karl Moor, the elder, leads rebellious students into the Bohemian Forest where they become something like Robin Hood outlaws, while the younger Franz Moor schemes to seize their father's estate. The play's critique of social corruption and its proto-revolutionary republican ideals astounded its first audience. Schiller became an overnight sensation. The play's source was Julius of Taranto by Johann Anton Leisewitz, a favorite of the young Schiller, and the emotional intensity of its language made critics later identify it as the first European melodrama. In 1780, Schiller took a post as a regimental doctor in Stuttgart, a job he disliked. When The Robbers received its premiere in Mannheim, he left his regiment without permission to attend. For that act, he was arrested, sentenced to fourteen days of imprisonment, and forbidden by Karl Eugen from publishing any further works. The play that made him famous was also the one that made his position in Stuttgart untenable.

• 4. Flight and Philosophy

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  Schiller fled Stuttgart in 1782, moving through Frankfurt, Mannheim, Leipzig, and Dresden before reaching Weimar. During the journey, he had an affair with Charlotte von Kalb, an army officer's wife known in intellectual circles for both her cleverness and her instability. To escape that entanglement and a dire financial situation, he eventually sought help from family and friends. He settled in Weimar in 1787, and two years later, on the 26th of May 1789, he delivered his inaugural lecture at the University of Jena, where he had just been appointed professor of History and Philosophy. The lecture, titled What Is, and to What End do We Study, Universal History?, outlined his philosophy of history and the moral purpose of studying the past. His philosophical writing ranged widely. He synthesized Immanuel Kant with the German idealist Karl Leonhard Reinhold, and he elaborated on Christoph Martin Wieland's concept of die schöne Seele, the beautiful soul, arguing that a person whose emotions have been educated by reason no longer experiences duty and inclination as opposites. For Schiller, the Good and the Beautiful were the same thing. His two essays on the sublime examined a different edge of human freedom: the capacity to defy the animal drive for self-preservation when a person sacrifices themselves for an ideal. On the 22nd of February 1790, he married Charlotte von Lengefeld, sister of the writer Caroline von Wolzogen, and the couple had four children between 1793 and 1804.

• 5. Goethe and Weimar Classicism

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  During the last seventeen years of his life, Schiller developed a friendship with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe that was productive, complicated, and historically consequential. Goethe was already famous and influential when the two men began their conversations about aesthetics. Schiller pressed Goethe to finish works he had left as sketches. Together they founded the Weimar Theater, which became the leading theater in Germany, and they collaborated on Xenien, a collection of short satirical poems aimed at opponents of their shared philosophical vision. The period their collaboration produced is now called Weimar Classicism. Goethe also persuaded Schiller to return to writing plays after Schiller had retreated into historical and philosophical work. Schiller had been ennobled in 1802 by the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, receiving the nobiliary particle "von" added to his name. He remained in Weimar until his death in 1805. The first authoritative biography came from a family member: his sister-in-law Caroline von Wolzogen published Schillers Leben in 1830.

• 6. The Aesthetic Letters

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  On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters was first published in 1794, and its origin was despair. Schiller wrote the Letters in response to the French Revolution, which had collapsed into violence and failed to translate its ideals into stable governance. He described the situation with a line that cuts: "a great moment has found a little people." The Letters propose that you cannot build a just society without first cultivating the souls of its citizens through beauty. Schiller found that idea already in his own poem Die Künstler, which contains the line "Only through Beauty's morning-gate, dost thou penetrate the land of knowledge." The philosophical architecture of the Letters introduces three drives. The sensuous drive, Sinnestrieb, pulls humans toward material experience. The formal drive, Formtrieb, pushes toward conceptual and moral order. Schiller's original move is to resolve the conflict between them with a third term, the play drive, Spieltrieb, which he borrowed from Kant's Critique of the Faculty of Judgment. Spieltrieb, for Schiller, is synonymous with artistic beauty, what he calls living form. He sketches, on that basis, a future ideal state where the free play of Spieltrieb makes everything beautiful and everyone content. The philosopher Herbert Marcuse returned to these ideas in Eros and Civilization, writing that Schiller's Letters "aim at remaking of civilization by virtue of the liberating force of the aesthetic function." The political theorist Jacques Rancière's conception of the aesthetic regime of art is also traceable to this work.

• 7. Music Borrows His Words

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  Beethoven said that a great poem is more difficult to set to music than a merely good one, because the composer must rise higher than the poet. He then asked, of Schiller specifically, who could do that. The answer, as it turned out, was Beethoven himself, who set Schiller's "An die Freude" as the final movement of his Ninth Symphony, the text better known now as the Ode to Joy. Franz Schubert set forty-four of Schiller's poems as Lieder, mostly for voice and piano, including "Des Mädchens Klage" and "Die Bürgschaft". Johannes Brahms set "Nänie" as a choral work. The Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi adapted Schiller's plays repeatedly: I masnadieri from The Robbers, Giovanna d'Arco from The Maid of Orleans, Luisa Miller from Intrigue and Love, Don Carlos from Don Carlos, and La forza del destino partly from Wallenstein's Camp. Gaetano Donizetti's Maria Stuarda comes from Mary Stuart, and Rossini's Guillaume Tell adapts William Tell. Tchaikovsky's 1881 opera The Maid of Orleans drew partly on Schiller's version of the Joan of Arc story. The 20th-century composer Giselher Klebe adapted The Robbers for his first opera, which premiered in 1957. In September 2008, the German-French television channel Arte polled its viewers to name the greatest European playwright, calling it the King of Drama contest. Schiller came in second, after William Shakespeare.

• 8. Monuments and an Empty Tomb

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  Stuttgart erected a statue of Schiller in 1839 on a square that was renamed Schillerplatz. Berlin unveiled a Schiller monument at the Gendarmenmarkt in 1871. The German-American community of New York City donated a bronze sculpture to Central Park in 1859, making it the first installed sculpture in that park. Chicago dedicated a statue in Lincoln Park. In Columbus, Ohio, Schiller Park has been centered on a statue of his likeness since it was donated in 1891; during the First World War, anti-German sentiment led the city to rename the park Washington Park, though the name was later restored. Detroit's German-American community commissioned a Friedrich Schiller statue for Belle Isle in 1908 at a cost of twelve thousand dollars, designed by Herman Matzen. A bronze by Ignatium Taschner stands in Como Park in Saint Paul, Minnesota, dedicated in 1907. His face has appeared on the 1964 East German ten-mark banknote, 1972 East German twenty-mark commemorative coins, and 1934 German five-Reichsmark commemorative coins. At Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, a plaster bust of Schiller has made regular campus appearances since 1957, including a spot on The Colbert Report in March 2010. The question of where Schiller himself actually rests remains open. What was purportedly his skeleton was moved in 1827 into the Weimarer Fürstengruft, the ducal vault that also became Goethe's resting place. On the 3rd of May 2008, scientists announced that DNA tests had shown the skull in that coffin is not Schiller's. His tomb is now vacant. The last known living descendant, his great-grandchild Baron Alexander von Gleichen-Rußwurm, died at Baden-Baden in 1947.