{"id":9391,"date":"2020-07-10T23:59:55","date_gmt":"2020-07-10T23:59:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/?p=9391"},"modified":"2026-08-27T04:10:12","modified_gmt":"2026-08-27T04:10:12","slug":"why-schiller-still-matters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/2020\/07\/10\/why-schiller-still-matters\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Schiller still matters"},"content":{"rendered":"

I<\/span>n recent decades, Friedrich Schiller has been a major presence on British stages. Perhaps the high point was\u00a0Don Carlos,<\/i>\u00a0with Derek Jacobi as King Philip II, in 2005 at the Gielgud Theatre. A particular favourite, naturally for British audiences, has been\u00a0Mary Stuart<\/i>. The most recent production, at the Almeida in 2018, had Lia Williams and Juliet Stevenson playing the rival queens and tossing a coin each night to decide who would play which role. Spectators have been treated to political drama of the highest order. And yet Schiller was much more besides a great dramatist.<\/span><\/p>\n

He was born in 1759 at Marbach, near Stuttgart, in the principality of W\u00fcrttemberg, where his parents\u2019 very modest house is now open to visitors. The Duke of W\u00fcrttemberg, Karl Eugen, was a reformed libertine, now a social benefactor, but still an authoritarian. Bright boys were sent, irrespective of their or their parents\u2019 wishes, to the newly established Karlsschule, to be trained as servants of the state.<\/span><\/p>\n

Young Schiller was intended to be an army doctor. Before studying medicine, he received an excellent general education, including philosophy. His gifted teacher, J.F. Abel, encouraged critical thinking by making the boys debate philosophical positions, and allowed them, in a prophylactic spirit, to read even radical works of Enlightenment materialism.<\/span><\/p>\n

Schiller rebelled against the military discipline of the Karlsschule. After his explosive first play,\u00a0The Robbers\u00a0<\/i>(completed in 1780), had been performed at Mannheim, outside the Duke\u2019s territories, the Duke forbade him to write any more. Thereupon Schiller fled abroad, and for several years scraped a living while writing a series of plays focusing on resistance to tyranny, culminating in\u00a0Don Carlos<\/i>\u00a0(1787). Then for some ten years, partly supported by wealthy admirers, he concentrated on history and philosophy, returning to the theatre with\u00a0Wallenstein<\/i>\u00a0(1799). He died in 1805 while at work on a fascinating but fragmentary play,\u00a0Demetrius<\/i>, drawn from Russian history.<\/span><\/p>\n

Curiously, the diversity of Schiller\u2019s achievements has worked against him. His philosophy has too often been seen mainly as providing an intellectual framework for his plays, while the plays have been treated as dramatised philosophy. Yet his philosophical writings deserve to be valued in their own right as major contributions to aesthetics and to what the Enlightenment called \u201cthe science of man\u201d or (especially in Germany) anthropology.<\/span><\/p>\n

Besides addressing numerous specific aesthetic problems\u2014the dramatic portrayal of undeserved suffering, the enjoyment we derive from villains such as Richard III, the limitations of realism and the value of artifice\u2014Schiller, drawing on his medical training, asks about the desirable balance between the mind and the body, the intellect and the senses. His\u00a0Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man<\/i>\u00a0argue that this balance can be secured by art, which responds to humanity\u2019s innate urge for play\u2014an idea Johan Huizinga would later develop in\u00a0Homo Ludens<\/i>\u00a0(1938).<\/span><\/p>\n

But the inquiry Schiller conducts into human wholeness also has a political dimension. The\u00a0Letters<\/i>\u00a0were prompted by the spectacle of the French Revolution, with which Schiller had initially sympathised, going disastrously wrong. When the opportunity to establish a just and rational society had arisen, people were not yet fit to seize it. They were one-sided, tilted towards the hyper-rational intellect or towards brutal passions. The\u00a0Letters<\/i>\u00a0suggest the place of art in gradually educating humanity to create and inhabit the just republic of the future.<\/span><\/p>\n

S<\/span>chiller was an upholder of the Enlightenment, though he stressed that true enlightenment demanded an expansion of human sympathies if it were not to decline into selfish calculation. He was no cloudy-headed idealist. At the end of his essay\u00a0On Na\u00efve and Sentimental Poetry<\/i>, one of the masterpieces of German literary criticism, he distinguishes two antithetical human types, the idealist and the realist. The idealist attends only to the supposedly absolute demands of reason and wishes to impose them on humanity. Because actual people fall short of his ideals, he is tempted to despise them, and to sacrifice the present to the future. (Such revolutionary figures as Robespierre come to mind.) The realist accepts people as they are and bows to what he considers the necessary course of events. He will make no heroic sacrifices, but nor will he do any great harm.<\/span><\/p>\n

This psychological opposition has often been thought to provide a way into Schiller\u2019s dramas. In practice, it is reductive: none of the characters conventionally classified as idealists or realists entirely fits the model. But it can sharpen one\u2019s eye for the human and political problems that the dramas explore.<\/span><\/p>\n

There is a link, for example, between the idealist type and the character of Karl Moor in\u00a0The Robbers<\/i>, written some fifteen years earlier. Karl is an unruly though good-hearted student. Hearing of his excesses, his brother Franz persuades their father, the ruler of a small but independent territory, to disinherit Karl. Franz is an unscrupulous schemer, who confides in the audience, as Richard III does, and reveals himself as a master of psychological manipulation and an expert in the relations between the mind and the body: he knows how to induce emotions that will have the requisite disabling physical effects on his father. He illustrates Schiller\u2019s worries about an Enlightenment that trains the intellect while impoverishing the sympathetic feelings.<\/span><\/p>\n

The disinherited Karl, after his initial fury, recruits some disreputable associates to form a band of robbers. Such gangs, known as\u00a0Mordbrenner<\/i>\u00a0(\u201cmurderous arsonists\u201d), often spread terror in early modern Germany. Karl stands out by his determination to punish oppressors. His victims include villainous politicians, corrupt financiers, and a Catholic priest who lamented the decline of the Inquisition. After a successful robbery, he gives his share of the booty to orphans and impoverished students. Although this generosity baffles his associates, who are intent on plunder, murder, and rape, they submit to Karl\u2019s authority. He for his part is so loyal to them that he leads them in burning an entire town to the ground to release one gang member who is imprisoned there.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the final showdown, Franz strangles himself with his hat-band just as Karl\u2019s gang are storming the Moor family castle. But Karl does not triumph. He realises, not only that he cannot shake off the robbers, but also that his efforts to amend violence by violence were an impious attempt to correct providence, and that \u201ctwo men such as I would destroy the whole moral order of creation\u201d. This statement is opaque, but I would interpret it as follows. Franz was obviously a villain. He deserved his fate, and his example will not corrupt anyone. Karl, however, performed and promoted villainous actions in the name of good. To rectify social injustice, he committed murder and arson. Thus he made good look like evil, and evil like good. In this sense, he risked destroying the moral order.<\/span><\/p>\n

Insofar as Karl is an idealist, therefore, his idealism is infinitely more dangerous than Franz\u2019s naked wickedness. This message looks even more compelling with hindsight. For the tragedy of the French Revolution was that in trying to realise the ideals of liberty, fraternity and equality, the revolutionaries stumbled into the Reign of Terror. Terror was explicitly used to promote \u201cvirtue\u201d. Schiller already anticipated this dynamic in 1780.<\/span><\/p>\n

Unlike Goethe in\u00a0The Natural Daughter<\/i>\u00a0(1803), Schiller did not try to deal with the French Revolution in drama. His last completed play, however,\u00a0Wilhelm Tell\u00a0<\/i>(1804), can be read as a demonstration of how a revolution should happen. Schiller had supported the American Revolution, and in 1783 had even contemplated emigrating to America. In\u00a0Tell<\/i>, where Schiller is not afraid of anachronism, the leaders of the three Forest Cantons hold a democratic discussion on how to break free from Austrian rule, and conduct a successful rebellion which neatly coincides with the abolition of the feudal system.<\/span><\/p>\n

Compared to the earlier political plays,\u00a0Wallenstein<\/i>\u00a0and\u00a0Mary Stuart<\/i>\u00a0(1800),\u00a0Tell<\/i>\u00a0is a little too much like a textbook of democracy. Even if these two plays presuppose a moral order, it is remote, and the foreground is filled with conflicts arising from what Schiller and his contemporaries called\u00a0Staatskunst<\/i>\u00a0or \u201creason of state\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n

The action of the trilogy\u00a0Wallenstein<\/i>\u00a0covers a few days in February 1634, just over half-way through the Thirty Years\u2019 War.
\nWallenstein, the general whom the Imperial side finds indispensable, is secretly negotiating with their Swedish antagonists. His purposes are unclear even to himself. To impose peace on Europe? To become King of Bohemia? Or is he just playing with possibilities? Meanwhile, one of his officers, Octavio Piccolomini, is secretly an agent of the Imperial court, and is plotting to detach Wallenstein\u2019s other officers from his cause and, if necessary, to have Wallenstein outlawed. Yet Wallenstein has insisted on regarding Octavio as a special friend and therefore confided his intentions to him. Is Octavio right in letting his duty to the Emperor override personal loyalty? Or are his actions a base betrayal\u2014especially as he may well be relying on a forged letter to alienate one of Wallenstein\u2019s staunchest supporters?<\/span><\/p>\n

Octavio may seem close to Schiller\u2019s definition of a realist. He pleads necessity to justify his actions. But, depending on how severely you judge his deception of Wallenstein, he may also seem like a dangerous idealist, stooping to treachery in pursuit of a supposedly noble cause. Wallenstein may be seen\u2014as he is by Octavio\u2019s son Max\u2014as a charismatic, heroic figure, not to be judged by everyday standards, and brought low by a petty manipulator\u2014or by what Wallenstein himself calls \u201clife\u2019s ambiguity\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n

T<\/span>he ambiguities of politics dominate Schiller\u2019s next play,\u00a0Mary Stuart<\/i>. Mary is held in English captivity, and has been found guilty of plotting Elizabeth\u2019s death. In the great council scene in Act II, where Burleigh, the Lord Chancellor, demands that Mary be executed, and Shrewsbury, her guardian, urges clemency, we may seem to have a conflict between pragmatism and humanity. But it is more complicated than that. Pragmatism may dictate Mary\u2019s death: Burleigh is perfectly right to claim that as long as she is held captive, she will attract ruthless Catholic terrorists determined to free her. Schiller has invented such a figure, Mortimer, a secret Catholic convert with access to Mary\u2019s cell and a plot to liberate her at whatever cost in lives. On the other hand, Elizabeth knows that Mary\u2019s execution, on legally dubious grounds, will damage her reputation for justice, undermine her shaky position as a monarch whose legitimacy is imperfect, and alienate the public which she despises but has to conciliate. So pragmatism also dictates humanity.<\/span><\/p>\n

These options, of course, are not laid out on a drawing-board but voiced by three-dimensional dramatic characters. Burleigh\u2019s vindictive fury makes his \u201creason of state\u201d even less acceptable; Shrewsbury\u2019s defence of Mary makes Elizabeth suspect he is half in love with her; and Elizabeth\u2019s favourite, Leicester, is playing a double game, since Schiller has also invented a love-relationship with Mary for him. Personal antagonism to Mary proves decisive in making Elizabeth decide on her execution. Schiller has often been blamed for thus making women seem irrational, but the charge is unjust: all the characters in the play are swayed by emotion. The least so is Shrewsbury, who finally deplores Elizabeth\u2019s decision with the words \u201cI have failed to save \/ Your better part.\u201d Politically, Elizabeth has won; morally, she has taken an irreversible step downwards.<\/span><\/p>\n

Schiller thus introduces a recurrent theme in German political drama: the necessary crime. In B\u00fcchner\u2019s\u00a0Danton\u2019s Death\u00a0<\/i>(1834), Danton agonises over the necessity of the September Massacres. Duke Ernst, in Hebbel\u2019s\u00a0Agnes Bernauer<\/i>\u00a0(1851), orders the heroine\u2019s execution on pragmatic grounds; Hebbel (without disapproval) described the Duke as a Machiavelli figure. And in Brecht\u2019s\u00a0The Measures Taken\u00a0<\/i>(1929), set among undercover communist agitators in China, the idealistic Young Comrade who shows compassion to coolies and refuses to eat with an exploiter has, however reluctantly, to be killed, because his humanity endangers their mission and thus the greater good. Schiller, the first in this series, is also the last to appeal to a moral order.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The great dramatist was an Enlightenment philosopher as well as playwright. His inquiries into humanity had a political dimension<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9459,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[644],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9391","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9391","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9391"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9391\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9418,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9391\/revisions\/9418"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9459"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9391"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9391"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}