Lessing’s development from freelance to ducal employee is refl ected in Schiller’s career after the success of The Robbers.
Faced with a complete prohibition on any further writing from the autocratic Duke of Württemberg, who had already forced him away from theology into service as a regimental surgeon, Schiller fl ed his homeland for Mannheim where he became resident playwright at the theatre which had fi rst produced him. He wrote two more plays on the problems of revolt and political succession, one of which, Intrigue and Love ( Kabale und Liebe, 1784), made effective theatre out of the contemporary German material 60
in which Lenz had specialized. In a telling sub-plot, a tragic farewell to obsolete Anglophilia, the hero discovers in the English mistress of his prince not the corrupt handmaid of tyranny he had imagined (the prince has sold his subjects as mercenaries to fi ght in the American war) but a spirit of the liberty which he is fated not to enjoy. Even though his contract in Mannheim was not renewed Schiller resolved to continue the attempt to earn his living from literature, editing journals and writing historical works while he struggled to give shape to his next play, Don Carlos (1787), a grand and over-complex historical drama in verse. Only the generosity of friends in Leipzig and Dresden rescued him from penury. He put out feelers to Weimar, where his fi ancée had been brought up, and in 1789, partly thanks to Goethe, he was given an unsalaried professorship of history at the nearby university of The age of ide
Jena and a small pension from Duke Karl August which enabled him to marry. A much more generous grant from the Crown Prince of Denmark allowed him to devote himself to the study of alism (1781–1832)
Kant at a point when overwork had undermined his health, and for a while he transformed himself into a philosopher. Schiller was disappointed that Kant did not have a theory of beauty which gave a proper dignity and importance to the literature to which he was, in every sense, devoting his life. (Kant had a good reason for not having such a theory: he thought nothing could, by defi nition, be more important than morality, doing what was right, and what he said about beauty was deliberately designed to prevent the slide from aesthetic into moral and theological language that had been encouraged by talk of poets as ‘creators’ and genius as ‘god-like’).
Picking up a metaphor that was common in the circle around Goethe Schiller started to treat literature as a kind of ‘art’, and in a number of studies – notably On the Aesthetic Education of Humanity in a Series of Letters ( Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen, 1795) – he developed a systematic account of beauty as the sensuous manifestation of moral freedom, and so of artists as the moral liberators and educators of the human race. Armed with this fl attering theory he approached Goethe, who had hitherto kept him at a distance, with 61
the proposal that they should jointly edit a new literary journal, The Horae ( Die Horen, 1795–7).
Goethe had originally seen in the author of The Robbers, with its vision of Germany as a place of hopeless and unproductive confl ict, the representative of everything he was trying to escape when he came to Weimar in 1775. But their different developments led them on convergent paths. Goethe had begun life in Weimar by cutting himself off completely from the commercial book-trade (in which he had earned a lot of money for the pirate publishers, but none for himself ). For ten years, he published almost nothing, giving himself instead to the small world of administration and court life (he was made a Privy Councillor, and ennobled) and to a semi-tutorial relationship with his friend and patron, the young duke. He continued to write but completed little beyond the fi rst version of a play, Iphigenia in Tauris (1779 and 1786–7), in prose, but in the courtly French ature er form approved by Gottsched, on the healing power of a resolute faith in the goodness of things. That faith was severely tried as the duchy came to seem constricted and unreformable and as German Lit
his poetry all but dried up, but in 1786 in desperation he broke out: he fulfi lled a lifelong ambition to follow Winckelmann and travel to Rome, and he returned to publishing by signing a contract to bring out a collected edition of his writings. Over the next few years he completely changed the basis of his presence in Weimar, withdrawing from his originally total commitment to a princely court and rebalancing his relationship with the middle-class reading public. His visit to Rome turned into a two-year sabbatical, spent enjoying the art and landscape of Italy and the life of the German artists’ colony, from which he returned with reluctance; he persuaded the Duke to relieve him of his administrative duties and treat him fi rst and foremost ‘as a poet’; he completed his edition, fi nishing Egmont and Torquato Tasso, the fi rst tragedy with a poet as its hero, and putting Iphigenia into fl uent blank verse; and to the horror of titled Weimar he 62
set up house with a middle-class woman, Christiane Vulpius (1765–1816), who bore him several children of whom only a son survived infancy. Karl August, however, expected something in exchange for the salary on which Goethe, despite his private means, had come to rely, and from 1791 put his poet in charge of his theatre. Goethe did his duty, but with mixed feelings. Drama had been his medium in the time of Storm and Stress, which he had now put behind him, and theatre as court entertainment had little appeal when he had so recently committed himself at last to addressing a wider public through print. The ducal institution that now attracted him was the university of Jena, which, with the recent appointment of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) and of Schiller himself, had become the principal centre of Kantianism after Königsberg. Schiller’s proposal of collaboration came at just The age of ide
the right time.
His project was very ambitious. Supported by the Stuttgart alism (1781–1832)
businessman Johann Friedrich Cotta (1764–1832), in whom he had at last found a publisher who believed in paying his authors well, Schiller intended to gather in all Germany’s big names from its courts and universities and provide them with an outlet whose circulation would rival that of Wieland’s German Mercury. The elite culture of the offi cials, the aesthetic education of which he was just writing the theory, would meet the volume market of the commercial and professional classes: the German-speaking world would have a unifi ed literature, at once sophisticated and popular. Launched amid intense curiosity in 1795, The Horae, the fi rst venture to link the names of Goethe and Schiller, was dead in the water after two years. It failed, essentially, because it closed its pages to the one thing everyone wanted to read about: politics, and especially the French Revolution. The restriction was unavoidable: had political discussion been allowed, it would have revealed the deep divergence of interests between the two wings of the middle class which the journal was trying to unite.
With its failure the gap opened up anyway, and recognition 63
of it became a permanent feature of offi cial literature: Xenia ( Xenien, 1796), the collection of satirical epigrams with which Goethe and Schiller took their revenge on the commercial book market, inaugurated a tradition of critique of the bourgeois public ( Publikumsbeschimpfung) which has lasted to the present day.
Goethe was probably not surprised by the fate of The Horae. At the same time, his novel Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Apprenticeship ( Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, 1795–6) also met with a cool reception. He sensed that the future of German literature lay with the new generation inspired by the new philosophy, who, whether they admitted it or not, could not rely on a mass public to share their concerns. For a decade young intellectuals, especially those hoping for a career as servants of the state, saw the Kantian philosophical revolution as Germany’s moral alternative to the French political revolution and looked to Kantianism to reinterpret or replace the religious faith that ature er Enlightenment had shaken. Wilhelm Meister was written for them, though it had something more disturbingly revolutionary to teach them than they were perhaps willing to learn. Through German Lit
a story of emancipation from the Storm and Stress illusion of the transformative power of literature and the theatre, it
tells the deeper story of a young man’s education out of the delusive belief that his life is in the hands of some external power, such as providence or fate, and into the recognition that meaning is something he has to make for himself. Goethe recognized that, however conciliatory it appeared on the surface, philosophical idealism was based on a self-assertion profoundly disruptive of our relation with our historical and natural origins, and that in that sense it was indeed part of the same revolution that was taking a political form in France. As the military consequences of the Revolution gradually engulfed Germany Goethe made repeated attempts, none of them wholly successful, to represent it directly in literature. Success came indirectly when, at Schiller’s urging, he resumed work on Faust, of which he had published a fragmentary version in 1790. He revised and greatly extended 64
his ‘ Urfaust’ draft, altering his original conception so much that he decided to divide the material into two parts, of which the fi rst was ready for the printer by 1806. If the Urfaust was a transposition of an old story into a contemporary mode, Faust.
Part One is an ironical reversion to the old story itself: Goethe multiplies the points of contact with the original legend, in particular preparing the way for Faust to conjure up Helen of Troy in Part Two and so reducing the affair between Faust and Gretchen to an episode. But Part One still ends with the tragic scenes that conclude the Urfaust and the target of its irony is the notion that anything as inseparable from Christian ideas as the 16th-century tale of a man who sells his soul to the devil can have any relevance to the modern world. Faust emphatically dissociates himself from the Christian past when, in a new scene The age of ide
showing his agreement with Mephistopheles, he commits himself to living life to the full and for its own sake and wagers that he will never fi nd anything in the world more valuable than his own alism (1781–1832)
capacity for experiencing it. Part One is thus, in its own way, as much an updating of the myth as the Urfaust: its Faust represents an idealist and revolutionary era as much as his predecessor represented an era of Storm and Stress; and his catastrophic involvement with Gretchen amounts to as penetrating an interrogation of the moral foundations of modernity.
For nearly ten years after the arrival of Fichte, the university of Jena was the intellectual centre of Germany, the vortex, as Ezra Pound would have said, in which many of the philosophical, theological, sociological, and aesthetic ideas dominant in the modern world were formed. With Goethe, Herder, and Wieland nearby, Fichte and Schiller were a magnet for younger talent.
The brothers Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt (1767–1835
and 1769–1859), key fi gures in 19th-century philology and natural science respectively, were both attracted. Schiller’s Württemberg connections brought across three former students from the Lutheran seminary in Tübingen who between them changed the face of Western thought: the poet Friedrich Hölderlin 65
(1770–1843), and the two philosophers he inspired, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854) and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), both of whom held chairs in Jena.
The translator, literary critic, and gifted versifi er August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767–1845) took up residence in order to collaborate on The Horae and begin his verse translation of Shakespeare (completed 1823) and his brother Friedrich (1772–1829), a brilliant literary theorist and aphorist, but less sure-footed as a philosopher and novelist, soon followed. Friedrich Schlegel fi rst gave currency to the term ‘romantic’ as a description of post-classical literature generally, and particularly of literature that lent itself to being understood in terms of the new idealist philosophy, as an expression or exploration of subjectivity. If any one person can be said to have founded ‘Romanticism’, it is he.
With his brother he started a journal, Athenaeum (1798–1800), in which he published his own essays and ‘fragments’ – aphorisms and brief speculations on literary and philosophical topics – and ature er some of the fragments and poems of his close friend Friedrich von Hardenberg, known as ‘Novalis’ (1772–1801). Novalis had studied in Jena and still took time away from his post as a Saxon German Lit
mining offi cial to visit it, and he provided Schlegel with a tangible example of what ‘romantic’ literature might be. His Hymns to Night ( Hymnen an die Nacht) explicitly reversed the imagery of Enlightenment to proclaim a revival of the power of religion. But it was an idealist’s religion, which explored the universe – and Novalis had a polymath curiosity about the world – as a dimension of the self: ‘The way of mystery leads inwards. Within us, or nowhere, lies eternity with all its worlds’. To this total interfusion of world and self Novalis, like Schlegel, gave the name of ‘poetry’.
Novalis rescued religion from secularization, but at the price of making it indistinguishable from aesthetics. Schelling had no time for Novalis’ medievalism (provocatively expounded in Christendom or Europe [ Die Christenheit oder Europa], 1799) but, like Hölderlin and Hegel, he was impressed by Schiller’s theory of aesthetic education and gave ‘Art’, as the subject matter of aesthetics was now called, pride of place at the summit of his 66
System of Transcendental Idealism (1800). In lectures he argued that the support of ‘Art’ was a proper concern of the state, so advancing ‘artists’ – including poets – to the rank of functionaries like the clergy of the state church. Literature, thus understood, was a high calling, deserving the attention of metaphysicians, but it lost its direct link to the public, and to the market-place.
It could not take seriously the realistic stories of bourgeois life that were currently so successful with English book-buyers. And because it was to be written by offi cials, or by those aspiring to offi ce, it could not be written by women.
But if literature was not to be ‘Art’, what else could it be in a Germany where only those close to the central state power could have any sense of what really determined collective life The age of ide
and social identity? Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, known as
‘Jean Paul’ (1763–1825), in what, for want of a better word, must be called his novels, made a serious attempt to transfi gure the alism (1781–1832)
trivial alternative, and had a considerable commercial success, particularly with women readers. But in order to be realistic about the Germany that lay outside the orbit of the higher offi cials he had to concentrate on lives that were crushed, distorted, or excluded from power, and these he could make signifi cant only by diluting his realism with sentiment, fantasy, religiosity, and Sternean self-irony, unfortunately without Sterne’s concision. In Titan (1800–3), he satirized the aesthetic pretensions of Weimar society, on the margins of which he settled between 1796 and 1801.
Goethe, though, was actually rather sceptical of grand claims for the power of poetry. He could see that the tide had turned and that the aim of The Horae, to establish a republic of letters that could unite the Germany of the courts with the Germany of the publishers, was no longer feasible. After the treaty of Campo Formio in 1797, the Holy Roman Empire, which provided the political framework for the project, was clearly in terminal decline. And as the Empire disaggregated, under pressure from Napoleon, so the universities of the smaller states, which had relied on the Empire as their catchment area, lost their role.
67
Alone, Saxe-Weimar was not big enough to contain the energies concentrated in Jena: external threats led to the sacking of Fichte, on a charge of atheism, in 1799 and thereafter the luminaries trickled away.
Goethe turned to the court: perhaps in the theatre, which so far he had treated as a sideline, he could achieve on the small scale the cultural integration which had been too much for The Horae. In 1798 a completely rebuilt theatre was reopened with Schiller’s fi rst new play for over a decade, Wallenstein, a verse tragedy in three parts, and over the next seven years Goethe deliberately tried to create a house style that could accommodate both crowd-pulling sentimental or musical entertainments and advanced intellectual experiment. The
middle ground was triumphantly occupied by Schiller who had also achieved a successful compromise in his personal arrangements, maintaining his freedom by relying principally on his earnings from Cotta, but with insurance ature er provided by his ducal stipend and by the crucial promise of a pension if his frail health should give way. Between 1800 and his death in 1805 he wrote four more major plays for Weimar, German Lit
combining elements from both the Shakespearean and the French traditions, spectacular, stageable, popular, and profound.
In Wallenstein, Maria Stuart (1800), and The Maid of Orleans ( Die Jungfrau von Orleans, 1801), he tested out Kant’s moral psychology in circumstances of increasing complexity, striving for the impossible goal that his aesthetic theory had put before him: to give visible and tangible manifestation to human freedom and the human power of self-redemption, which he believed persist even when most implacably opposed by political reality. In Maria Stuart, for example, Queen Elizabeth is physically free but morally has chosen to become the slave of external forces, while Mary Queen of Scots, though physically imprisoned, acquires a moral autonomy that frees her from the burden of past guilt.
Schiller is able to represent Mary’s transcendental liberation, however, only by recourse to an older symbolic language – he stages a scene of sacramental confession and communion – which 68
7. A Glimpse of Greece at its Zenith (1825) by the artist and architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781–1841). The vision of a society at harmony with itself and Nature, and celebrating human and divine beauty through art, was the inspiration of the German Hellenistic, or ‘classical’, movement
presupposes a different source of redemption and can be seen as effectual only if it is not seen as a mere theatrical metaphor.
Schiller’s last completed play, Wilhelm Tell (1804), with its themes of collective, rather than individual, liberation, and of the justifi ability of murder in a political cause, suggests that when death overtook him he was already trying to move beyond the moral confi nes of Kantian idealism. But in his struggle with Kant’s immensely powerful analysis of subjectivity Schiller produced studies of human identity at odds with its political context which psychologically and formally are still as compellingly problematic as when he wrote them.
German Literature Page 8