Claus Peymann: Die Kunst des Regietheaters (German Edition)

---

Learn more about Amazon Prime. Get fast, free shipping with Amazon Prime. Get to Know Us. English Choose a language for shopping. Not Enabled Word Wise: Not Enabled Screen Reader: Enabled Amazon Best Sellers Rank: Amazon Music Stream millions of songs. Amazon Advertising Find, attract, and engage customers.

Amazon Drive Cloud storage from Amazon. Alexa Actionable Analytics for the Web. AmazonGlobal Ship Orders Internationally. Amazon Inspire Digital Educational Resources. Amazon Rapids Fun stories for kids on the go. Amazon Restaurants Food delivery from local restaurants. ComiXology Thousands of Digital Comics. East Dane Designer Men's Fashion.

Shopbop Designer Fashion Brands. Withoutabox Submit to Film Festivals. Amazon Renewed Refurbished products with a warranty. Amazon Second Chance Pass it on, trade it in, give it a second life. Since the highest state of emotional pleasure also signifies the highest state of physical well-being 8: The insight that even positive emotions and sensations can be either minute or exaggerated leads to the requirement of finding the right balance by a harmonization or a dialectical synthesis of the basic drives see Martinson, — Just as in the early history of the individual, Schiller distinguishes three stages through which the human being passes in his development from childhood to manhood; in the perspective of universal history he speaks first of the development from the tribal existence of the natural human being to the civilized nation 8: The point of unity, the synthesis, is created by a kind of aesthetic condition.

In this and other writings, we can see that anthropological presuppositions are powerful not only in aesthetics; they are also valid to the same degree for the fields of cultural history, politics, and society. It must be noted here that in the discussion of freedom, emphasis falls on the notion of self-determination, the most important concept of philosophical anthropology at the time of the Enlightenment.

Where nature lends to animals and plants their determination and executes it all by itself, human beings are distinguished by the fact that they must themselves realize the determination prescribed to them by nature. These are the acts of a free person who is responsible for his own deeds. In the German Enlightenment view of the anthropology and history of the formation of an individual, maturity and the discovery of selfconsciousness are often the names of a single idea.

Here he differentiates in the human being between an absolute being that is grounded in itself, that is, the person, and a dependent condition, being, or becoming. Schiller expresses this fundamental process as follows: Nevertheless, from this limited anthropological constellation, Schiller derives the two fundamental principles of sensual-rational nature that, conceived at the point of their highest fulfillment, should lead to the concept of divinity. If the first of the laws insists on absolute reality, the second one emphasizes absolute form.

In a procedure typical for him, and one that is evident in the writings of his youth, Schiller posits a play drive Spieltrieb alongside the material and form drives, in which the two basic drives are united. Thus, the play drive would be in a position to place the individual in a state of physical and moral freedom 8: In the aesthetic condition the individual experiences himself in the fullness of his possibilities.

Now it becomes clear how the concept of beauty as a medium and mediator, anthropologically conceived, becomes the compensatory model of modernity, which is characterized by defects like fragmentation and a loss of reality. He deals with the conditions in the lower as well as in the civilized classes, and notes even more negative syndromes in the higher classes than in the lower ones. Schiller criticizes the prevailing system of egoism, returning to thoughts from his Philosophische Briefe concerning the politically and socially relevant antitheses of egoism and altruism, tyranny and love 8: Whereas at the time of Greek antiquity nature united all things, today understanding Verstand leads to the segregation of the different realms of life.

In modern times, the original unity is torn asunder: Here Schiller formulates a powerful metaphor for the mechanization of human life and disenchantment through rational culture, which left a lasting impact on his contemporaries. Only beauty can connect theoretical with practical culture 8: That is the point where aesthetics becomes a political and social preparatory school.

In this text, the aesthetic state, which is also capable of establishing an aesthetic culture, is, for Schiller, the precondition of freedom 8: Schiller differentiates between three different moments or stages in human development, in both the individual and the species. In his physical condition the individual endures the forces of nature; in the aesthetic condition he rids himself of these forces; and in the moral condition he governs nature 8: This psychic triad correlates with the political one: Whereas in the dynamic state nature is tamed by nature and in the ethical state the individual will is subjugated to the general will, only in the aesthetic state is the will of the whole accomplished through the nature of the individual.

The basic anthropological conditions or forces of human existence characterize — again triadically — political institutions and societies, depending on which of the basic conditions or forces is dominant. At this point in the text, Schiller indicates, interestingly, the necessity of an intermediary force that is successful in changing the rolling wheel of state at the moment of its reversal.

In other words, if, for Schiller, it was at first the aesthetic state that appeared to catalyze a smooth shift of paradigms from the natural state to the moral state, then at the end of his text, he posited a triadic development, the highest point of which is occupied by the aesthetic state, since here the instrument that serves is the free citizen: That was most certainly on his mind when, on July 13, , he wrote the following to Duke Friedrich Christian von Augustenburg: In his last, most important text, the question changes but not the basic anthropological conception.

Not by chance is the idyll understood as a synthesizing concept, in which the opposition of reality and ideal, satire and elegy, appears to be suspended 8: Nevertheless, in both parts of the argument, the triadic cognitive model that will become characteristic of the dialectics of idealistic philosophy is still directly and indirectly perceptible.

Characteristically, in a footnote, Schiller introduces a three-stage model Dreischritt in the context of poetic genres and types of sensation, in which the ideal is raised up as the sought-after concept of synthesis. He distinguishes three moments epistemologically and classifies them cultural-historically as follows: In der zweiten stehen wir. In his three major philosophical texts, Schiller works with opposing concepts that are ultimately united into a synthesis. What makes his writings especially interesting documents of the time is that they never attempt to cover up their ruptures or resolve their contradictions.

At the end of each of his three major texts, Schiller emphasizes not only the experimental character of his reflections but also draws attention to the discrepancies between theory and practice, idea and reality. From this point of view, it comes as no surprise that with each new writing he should, to some extent, start anew methodologically and thematically. This does not mean, however, that he altered his anthropological concept of the human being, which runs as a red thread throughout all his theoretical statements.

If we visualize in overview the smaller as well as the more comprehensive contributions to the philosophical discourse of the time, it is strikingly clear that from the pamphlets of his youth to the well-known essays of the last decade of the eighteenth century, Schiller formulates a set of fundamental principles concerning the psychosomatic conditions of human existence.

Darstellung der leidenden Natur; zweitens: Art, in this case theater, turns out to be the aesthetic demonstration of the divine atomic nucleus in the human being, a view that can, moreover, be found in Wieland as well as in Herder, and whose intellectual origins are in Christian stoicism10 and the tradition of baroque drama. Pathetic representation illustrates the real purpose of art: Here Schiller captures the dichotomies of his dissertation more precisely as person and condition, being and time, which human beings experience in different ways.

Just as in Theosophie des Julius, he brings the antitheses of egoism and love into functional relation with the corresponding political institutions, with despotism and the free state 8: The schema of self-diminution and self-expansion that the essay Theosophie des Julius connects with the positive and negative characteristics of egoism and love supplies the framework for the comparison of the statecraft of Lycurgus and Solon. Schiller expresses this principle as follows: His unquestionably high opinion of the human being — in no way a rare view among eighteenthcentury intellectuals — must also be reflected in political institutions and society.

In this way, the historian would indeed become an author of pathetic representation, whose business it would be to report the triumphs of the person over the surrounding circumstances. Whereas the first thesis in Latin was rejected again, the second was accepted. Both were written in ; the last one was also published in the same year. To be more correct, one could speak here of transcendental aesthetic concepts that early romanticism took over and continued. Reprint of the second edition of , edited by Leonard Forster.

Schings, Der ganze Mensch: Anthropologie und Literatur im Works Cited Abel, Jacob Friedrich. Eine Quellenedition zum Philosophieunterricht: An der Stuttgarter Karlsschule — Poesie, Reflexion und gesellschaftliche Selbstdeutung. Dewhurst, Kenneth, and Nigel Reeves. Medicine, Psychology and Literature. Von der Bestendigkeit De Constantia. Sein und Zeit, 11th ed. Hinderer, Walter, and Daniel O.

Die Anthropologie des jungen Schiller. Das Erdbeben von Lissabon. Fritz Martini and Hans Werner Seiffert. Since various forms of classicism had been prevalent in European letters for around three centuries, at first sight we might view German classicism as a mere footnote. Learn hence for ancient rules a just esteem; To copy Nature is to copy them. The adoption of the ancient authors as literary models would mean a restoration of simplicity, moderation, and good sense. Rather, the corruption that surrounds him is merely a symbol for the work of temporality in general, and the pure form displayed by Greek art is to be seen less as the product of a free society than as an achieved conquest of time.

Whereas Schiller might seem to be outbidding Pope merely in adding a new strand of political polemic to the traditional advocacy of a classical aesthetic, he is in fact heightening the neoclassical argument by rephrasing it as a metaphysical one, for he is attributing to a classically inspired art a power not just of liberation but of redemption.

It is not possible to point to one overpowering new idea that Winckelmann contributed to the discussion. As Hatfield argues, his thought is an eclectic synthesis. Altogether, his work denotes a multiple shift in the approach to antiquity: Last but not least, we can observe the shift from the idea of antiquity as the source of rational norms to one of Greece as a lost paradise and the object of insatiable yearning.

The protracted composition of this tragedy had left Schiller dissatisfied with his achievements to date and with his working method, and the study of the ancients was intended to enhance his skills. It is notable that Schiller had to use the available translations of Euripides into Latin, French, and German, for unlike Goethe and Wilhelm von Humboldt, he never had the opportunity to study the Greek language thoroughly.

Thanks to the progress of moral culture and the comparatively milder spirit Geist of the times, the modern author enjoys an inherent advantage over the ancients. With the third phase, we see Schiller returning to a more speculative preoccupation with antiquity. In the early part of each treatise, an eloquent passage praising Greek culture for its harmony with nature is encountered, while the possibility is also held out that, with our higher level of rationality and morality, the moderns can actually surpass the Greeks.

Schiller had earlier planned a drama, Die Malteser, that was intended to conform to the pattern of ancient tragedy. Though he resumed work on it in these years, it was left unfinished at his death. The most classical of the completed plays of this period is Die Braut von Messina The Bride of Messina, , in which Schiller attempted a synthesis of ancient and modern techniques and motifs, including a chorus, the use of which he justified in his Foreword by philosophical arguments.

But Wallenstein also contains in Gordon a figure whose role is based on that of the ancient chorus, and even the romantic tragedy Die Jungfrau von Orleans The Maid of Orleans, has a scene act 2, scenes 6—7 derived from an episode from the Iliad and written in iambic trimeters, the Greek tragic meter.

A letter of July 26, , shows that he had not abandoned the conclusions of the foregoing speculative phase. The drive towards unification, of which humanity is the goal, goes beyond the immediate human sphere. Perhaps we can infer, he suggests, something about our future: Schiller seems to be hovering between a Christian affirmation of the immortality of the soul and a more mysterious suggestion as to a future deification of humankind. Schiller is intensifying the conventional concept of perfection, Vollkommenheit, to the point where the difference between humanity and God is suspended.

The theme of the poem is the birth of Venus, which brings about a softening and rejuvenation in the natural world, and which for humankind signals the arrival of civilization after a somewhat Hobbesian prehistory. Venus is again the presiding deity here, for it is her worship at the shrine at Amathus that forms the focus of this magnificent poem, and instead of the heroic exploits of Hercules, Schiller celebrates a form of interaction between gods and mortals that is more appropriate to this goddess: In its full complexity, it states that in antiquity human beings were more human than they are now, in the sense of being more natural and less corrupted by culture.

In particular the Greeks did not try to approach divinity as Christians do, that is, by misguidedly suppressing their humanity through an ascetic morality, and they also did not suffer from the division of labor that distorts and fragments the modern personality. However, and only here do we see the full paradox, the Greeks came closer than we do to divinity precisely by disclaiming any desire to be more than human.

But the nature that is enshrined in Greek culture is not the nature of Alexander Pope. Pope understands nature as a codification of the rules of good sense, whereas Schiller to compress the impressions left by the poem into a single phrase presents it as a perpetual springtime of youth, dance, and free love. The common thread running through the Greek panorama, with its numerous mythological vignettes, is the unity of nature and spirit or of human and divine.

With remarkable dialectical skill, Schiller portrays modernity in this poem as groaning under both an ascetic Christianity and an abstract, mechanistic science, each of which is presented as a result of the same original estrangement. He adheres to the same intellectual model in his essays of the next decade. The course of history is characterized here as a fall from a state of nature into one of culture, with the latter being understood as the fragmentation wrought by the destructive faculty of the understanding.

Its full scope is revealed in two further statements that illuminate each other. As the juxtaposition of the two statements shows, nature stands as both the first and the last term in a triadic scheme, for the future ideal is itself associated with the concept of nature.

And yet the ideal nature is not identical to the original nature, but is posited as existing at a higher level of consciousness and morality. On the one hand, they represent a paradigm of unity and harmony to an age that has lost these qualities, and hence they are an object of aspiration and longing. Therefore the Greeks must also represent a stage that humanity has outgrown and must outgrow further. In a handwritten comment on an essay by his friend Wilhelm von Humboldt, Schiller sketched an analogy for this dialectic of unity and division in the cognitive process: In the second phase, we still long for the first, but in the third, we have no need to do so.

Similarly, in the third phase of history, we will no longer wish for the return of the Greeks 8: It is of course ironic to find the Greeks at the heart of such a quintessentially un-Greek argument, though it is also possible to relate it to the Neo-Platonic dialectic of fall and return that M. Abrams has applied so effectively to the Romantic era. In the context of the eighteenth-century argument, nature and culture are antithetical terms. How, we wonder, can it then make sense to describe Greek culture as natural?

Winckelmann had also used the concept of nature to establish the superiority of Greek sculpture, but his argument is largely restricted to matters pertaining to anatomy, such as the athletic training of Greek youths. Schiller expands the argument far beyond this narrow base. First, as we have seen, he defines nature as unification, and he uses this term to illuminate not only the Greek religion, which projects humanity into nature and the divine world, but also the quality of Greek society, with its less advanced division of labor, and even Greek individuality, in which the human faculties are not fragmented.

But Schiller is clearly aware of the problem that the Greeks also had a flourishing culture, and so he describes them as having achieved the maximum degree of culture that is still reconcilable with nature: The further advance of culture in modern times necessarily brought a rupture with nature, and the breach can only be healed by the reconstitution of nature at an ideal level, however that is to be understood.

In their poetry we do not come across the idea of nature, for nature was their immediate life and not an object of reflection or longing. The stress on simplicity as a feature of Greek poetry may be consistent with the old neoclassical doctrine, but this concept is now embedded in a speculative system of which Boileau and Pope had no inkling. On one hand, it stands for the dominion of the intellect that, with its compartmentalization and mechanization, has disrupted an original, natural unity. On the other hand, it means the process by which the rupture can be healed and the unity restored at a higher level.

How did Schiller envisage this higher art? It may seem to be making matters still more complicated when in the Ninth Letter he tells us that Greek art preserved the achievements of Greek nature, but this provides us with our answer. A simple formulation comes in the ninth Brief, where, desiring to preserve the young artist from the harmful influences of modernity, Schiller sends him to school in Greece. Here he is able to cause the predominantly dactylic rhythm to express a poised and wistful lyricism: For Schiller, the Greeks may represent the best instantiation to date of the fusion of form and life, for which he calls in the Fifteenth Letter, but the principle of form is itself timeless, a metaphysical force that enables us to master the world of flux in which we live.

We are not all that far from the world of Gottsched and German neoclassicism here. The original chorus, he writes, grew from the natural and mimetic art of ancient Greece. However, since modern art is not mimetic, the chorus can be retained, albeit with a different justification. Far from reflecting reality, the task of modern art is to transform reality according to a model that is at once natural and ideal. Although Schiller speaks of the future state as different from Greece, it is still based on Greece as its prefiguration.

Hence he calls for the revival of Greek motifs in drama, not merely the chorus but also the creation of a more external and public form of life: Although Schiller used the chorus only once, one can recognize in this wider explanation some more general features of his later dramatic style. This brings us to the question of whether Schiller responded in any way to the political legacy of ancient Greece.

Reise durch die Nacht

The answer here must be mainly negative. The problem of disunity in Greek history, that is, the actual fragmentation of the country into warring statelets and the frequency of civil strife within them, is barely touched upon.

No customer reviews

Schiller is thinking here of a national theater as a means of overcoming German Vielstaaterei. And yet, as he would have had to acknowledge, the theater failed to have any such effect in Greece, and the similar hopes placed in the German theater would turn out to be no less chimerical. What is left is the fallback position of the theater, or of art in general, serving as a refuge for ideals for which there is no room in real life, that is, as a substitute and a consolation and not as a means of making them a reality.

Two qualifications should be made to this depoliticized picture. Castigating the Spartan legislator, Schiller writes: All this is still abstract, but further on in the lecture Schiller writes that Solon understood these relations correctly, and hence built a state in which, in contrast to the Spartan tyranny, men governed themselves and were thus capable of the highest cultural attainments.

For this reason, the references to the historical Athens and the poetic image of the Greek Golden Age do not really represent distinct interpretations of Greece but are rather the two faces of a single complex idea. Greece figures here as the locus of two succeeding eras, both of which are states of nature, although the second is also one of culture.

Next, in a passage of astonishing concreteness, he describes the arrival of civilization and its advance in Greece up to the limits set by nature. Greek religion, art, technology, commerce, and exploration all receive their due. Even the inevitable social disunity can lead to new forms of cooperation: Significantly, it is not the selfgovernment of the Greek republics but their patriotism that Schiller celebrates, and also, by his skillful translation of the Thermopylae epitaph ll. This is not to suggest that individual texts are inaccessible to a straightforward reading.

The ballad, based on a story from late antiquity, tells of the unmasking of two murderers at a performance of the Eumenides of Aeschylus, during which the chorus of the Furies provokes such terror in the criminals that they spontaneously confess their crime.

The Play of Regie

The elegy begins with an evocation of the close relationship in antiquity between poets and their audience, and goes on to celebrate the wider harmony existing at that time between idea and reality; not only were the gods visible, the poet also did not have to struggle for an inner vision but took his inspiration from the reality that surrounded him. In both poems, Greece serves as the ideal locus for a paradigm of humanity and society.

They portray a world in which aesthetic, religious, and ethical experience all work together, in which inner and outer experience mirror each other, and in which the poet is the mouthpiece for communal beliefs. It is a powerful vision, and we do not disparage Schiller by saying that he based it on the deficiencies and absences that he felt in himself and in the world in which he lived. But with its combination of personal engagement and intellectual sophistication, of formal clarity and moving lyricism, it deserves to be counted among the finest and most interesting versions of classicism to have appeared in European letters.

It is more likely that his ideas were transmitted to him by Wieland. Klaus Harro Hilzinger et al. Known as the Frankfurter Ausgabe; Frankfurt am Main: Poems are quoted from vol. His hexameter translation of part of book 1 is a school exercise and is of less interest. The name Ludovisi refers to the Roman villa where the original could be inspected. As Rolf-Peter Janz informs us in his commentary 8: Schiller must thus have known it only from hearsay. This crisis in his concept of nature gives rise to the rupture in his aesthetics between the concepts of the beautiful and the sublime.

On page 73, Auerbach quotes his own definition of figura from a previous article: For a recent discussion, see Ritzer. Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature. The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. The Poetry of Desire. The Poet and the Age. Poetik und Hermaneutik 4. Aesthetic Paganism in German Literature: From Winckelmann to the Death of Goethe. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Griechenland in Herders typologischer Geschichtsphilosophie.

Loeb Classical Library, London: Iphigenie und Maria Stuart. Goethes und Schillers Literaturpolitik, ed. Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy. Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums. Resigning his post as a military doctor in Stuttgart in September left Schiller without a steady income and heavily in debt. As a historian he gained new intellectual perspectives, social connections, and sources of income. In Schiller moved from southwest to central Germany and soon became a noted partner in the flourishing book and newspaper industry.

Already well known as a dramatist, as a writer he encountered personal engagement and intellectual interest within socially open-minded literary and artistic circles in Leipzig, Dresden, Jena, and Weimar. In the second issue of the magazine, in February , the second act of Don Carlos appeared. The encouragement of the prominent Weimar writer Christoph Martin Wieland in the fall of was critical. The young historical narrator became courageous.

In this subsequent work, at least four volumes of personal memoirs from European history since the Middle Ages were to appear annually. Schiller accepted the task of writing an introductory historical overview for every volume. But that was not enough: His involvement in the German university system, with which he was not yet familiar, was a personal challenge. Schiller also recorded other of his earliest lectures and published them soon thereafter. The end of saw the continuation of his Geschichte des Abfalls der Vereinigten Niederlande. He overestimated his energy, and became a victim of the book until, in January , his appalling physical condition caused him to take a break, at which point he either dropped his previous commitments or handed them over to someone else.

He devoted his time first to aesthetic and anthropological questions, publishing them in extensive pamphlets. In , poetry and drama moved back to the center of his attention, partly due to the influence of his friendship with Goethe.

Theatertreffen Blog 2013

For it is based on a problematic approach that is retrospective in nature, and in many respects often the anti-historical resentment of those who are committed to literature in the narrower sense. One has to keep in mind that Schiller the historian was still an artist. For him and his contemporaries, art and science were the two great cultural realms, and were related in their investigation and mediation of truth. Beginning in Stuttgart, stories based on authentic life experiences fascinated Schiller.

Buy for others

As an author he had a need to tell true stories. In the story he reports on the destiny of two brothers in the environs of Stuttgart. He places the story into the context of the most recent history and its educated society, telling it in the form of a drama. Here the original relationship between his literature and his historical project becomes graphically clear, as Schiller narrates once again a nexus of occurrences that extend from the framework of the everyday and were of special interest to him.

As an author, he considered it his task to bring them back to life with the aid of narrative representation. But, before writing the final version of Verbrecher aus Infamie, Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre Criminal Out of Dishonor, , which was based on the life of an actual criminal, Schiller reflected thoroughly on the functions of historical narration and its specific methods. The first printing of the second act of Don Carlos, the most important historical drama of the young Schiller, is the focus of attention of the aforementioned second issue of Thalia.

His preparations for writing the play included considerably more study of historical literature than for his earlier pieces. In the process of studying the literature, Schiller recognized that an appealing, modern literary-historical narration ran parallel to traditional historiography. For some time, Schiller had known Sebastien Mercier, the French dramatic poet who at that time was capturing the stage with his Tableaux historiques.

In the second issue of Thalia, Schiller published a translation of a characterization of King Philip II of Spain by Mercier that was associated thematically with Don Carlos, thereby presenting another piece of historical prose. Even though he borrowed the topos, the verse makes it clear that, next to narrative stories, Schiller also had an overarching concept of universal history. As has been mentioned, in the course of the year Schiller took on a new literary project that included the term history in its title: In addition to the many forms of historical narration and reflections on history that Schiller undertook during this period, we point once again to the two historical dramas that originated in these years.

After delving into all of these forms of historical representation that he had been using since , in the fall of Schiller shifted to history. The forms of historical thinking and representation that he had developed previously affected his new practice of critical, referenced, and pragmatic historical portrayals. It is only at this point that Schiller depicts himself as a historian and is recognized as such by his readership. The transition to scientific historical narration was indeed a leap for Schiller in an existential sense.

In his letters of January of that year, Schiller underscores the following points: Instead, in historical narration, he borrows themes taken from external sources and is able to process them freely. He hopes for a different audience. Schiller does not only want to write for friends of belles-lettres, who are mostly women. He also wishes to reach the politically and economically interested businessman.

He needs a higher income. After his previous bad experiences, he now places his bets on historical literature and on collaboration in magazines. In sum, for Schiller, the transition to professional historical writing was tied to a new outline for his life that goes beyond a change of subjects. He wanted to be better anchored socially and, with the means at his disposal, to be active in public life. In the various states of the Holy Roman Empire, the s were high points for the reform movement and its initiatives, especially in education.

His interest in alternative social behavior was visible early on. With his second drama project, Fiesco , he referred back to a national uprising in the city of Genoa. In Kabale und Liebe Intrigue and Love, written —83, published , he staged the social conflicts of his own epoch, and, in Don Carlos , the stage became the world theater of European history.

It was only after these historical dramas that Schiller completed the transition to the writing of history, thematizing the Dutch revolution of the sixteenth century in his Geschichte des Abfalls der vereinigten Niederlande von der spanischen Regierung. As he writes in his introduction, he wished to erect a monument to the strength of the middle class: In reading the introduction 6: Schiller first became aware of the history of the Dutch revolution of the late sixteenth century in conjunction with the writing of his drama Don Carlos. He began writing in August , after settling in Weimar.

At the beginning of October he informed his publisher that he had completed the text. One could almost say that, on that evening, the historian Friedrich Schiller was born. Wieland, the influential editor of the journal Teutscher Merkur, was present, and, as Schiller was to report to Huber in his letter of October 26, , proclaimed that Schiller was born to write histories. Wieland agreed to publish the text in his journal.

It appeared in that publication at the beginning of In an accompanying note, Wieland declared the dramatist and poet to be a historian. His audience, the German educated class, now expected a historical work from him. Motivated by Wieland, as well as by the prospect of a professorship at the University of Jena, Schiller knitted together the next phase in his life by turning decidedly in this direction.

He now concentrated completely on historical work and on source materials with which he had not been familiar, but which provided him with a new self-awareness. Before completing his account of the Union of Utrecht in July of , Schiller had begun to envision continuing this thread of history in a multi-volume project on the topic of the fall of the Netherlands. He also provided a comprehensive summary of his historical research for the volume.

He named the sources from which he had profited most 6: Second, Schiller cited more recent authors, specifically from the fields of statistics and economic history, with whose help he could add a cultural-historical dimension to his manner of representation. Influenced by the then-increasing interest in psychology, Schiller dedicated considerable space to character analyses of his leading dramatic figures.

Beginning with Don Carlos Schiller succeeded in helping to bring about a breakthrough in the direction of historical writing in Germany. Schiller wanted to tie these traditions together. He wanted to go back to the sources themselves in a critical and pragmatic manner. At the same time, he wanted to write in a polished style. With such historical narration Schiller aimed at practicing a philosophical way of thinking about history that places stories into a modern context of development.

One may conclude that Schiller followed the events in France with particular attention, sympathy, and expectation. He saw it necessary to create a new discourse concerning the idea and goal of universal history. Furthermore, new orientations opened up for the methodology and self-understanding of the writing of history. In his inaugural lecture, Schiller juxtaposes two different and fundamental approaches: The latter is the philosophical study of history.

However, historical writing since Aristotle had been focused only on actual occurrences; it was the responsibility of philosophy to inquire into the universal and the true. Schiller opposes this traditional limitation of history. He was convinced that universal history could achieve something that had been considered impossible in the Western tradition, namely, the arrival at universally valid truth-claims from a close study of the past. The individual human being would be liberated from the limitations of his private existence and placed into a larger social context.

This programmatic introductory address was followed by a number of lectures that illuminated specific connections between occurrences in human history. Three of these lectures have been preserved. They give us an impression of how Schiller completed his project of universal history. He refers to a biblical tradition, and presents an example that shows the courage and innovative power of his enlightened spirit to interpret the Bible in a new way. In a separate section of the essay, Schiller addresses the origins of social inequality.

He ends with an analysis of the origin of legends concerning monarchical sovereignty in light of the idea of the sovereignty of the people. Yet he also refers back to a report about ancient Egyptian mysteries. Here he highlights the problem of the self-liberation of an oppressed people.

Schiller singles out the constitutive role of Moses as the leader of his people, that is, the figure of a ruler. In addition, Schiller deals with the question of what significance religion can play in such a liberating process; on the one hand, for the common people, and, on the other hand, for the educated. At the same time, a third reality is involved: Its central themes stand in the foreground and form the criteria for the comparison: Eventually, in the discussion about constitutional patriotism in a republic of citizens, he pleads for representative democracy.

With that, his writing attains a political relevance achieved by no other universal-historical text. Schiller composed all of these universal-historical texts during the first year of the French Revolution. With his unswerving republicanism he was even ahead of developments, constitutionally. His vision, which was directed at those nations that were undergoing a process of emancipation, was broadened to a universal one.

In these weeks, he considered the ideal of a self-liberating humanity to be the only sensible mode of philosophically-oriented historical thinking. In light of the democratic revolution, which was now crossing national borders, history had indeed become a history of humanity.

He had already publicly posed these questions early in his career. That he asked the question in this way reveals that he had in mind different basic conceptions of the general significance of history and its future role in a middle-class society. Schiller points out that contemporary historiography still considered itself to be part of rhetoric, whose task it is to offer a moral explanation of past histories which, as he put it, warm the heart.

For his part, however, Schiller argues in favor of separating historical writing from rhetoric, to which it had been attached since ancient times. It could now concentrate on its own specific duties and have its own legitimate methods: Young Schiller makes his point on the basis of a psychology of the soul Erfahrungsseelenkunde that was then considered to be modern.

It is remarkable how clearly he pleads for the emancipation of the writing of history from rhetoric while separating drama from history, even though both merge in his person. The historian has to uncover the motives of human behavior with cold reasoning and has to explain its structural relationships, but not take a moral stand.

If he does this, he offends the republican freedom of the reading public, whose task it is to serve as the jury 7: He points out the historiographical significance of police, medical, and prison files 7: This call for a clear separation of historical writing and poetry by the young Schiller, which has hardly been recognized, makes his transition two years later from the one discipline, drama, to the other, history, more understandable. As the preface to the Geschichte des Abfalls der vereinigten Niederlande exhibits, Schiller underscores the separation of historical writing from the novel.

However, this raises the question of what form historical representation should take. The historian remains true to his credo: For him, contemporary historiography was on its way to becoming an empirically analytical science. The reference back to the sources and their critical analysis is of central importance here. By his own admission he did not want to become a professional scholar of history. His primary concern was with problems of historical interpretation, as well as with the transmission and presentation of historical connections.

Since the time of his more intensive study of history in Dresden, Schiller was influenced more and more by the historiography of the English-Scottish Enlightenment William Robertson, Robert Watson, Edward Gibbon. They saw it as a new science of humanity, a genus of nature that runs through different stages of progressive development to become, and further cultivate, middle-class society.

Schiller had become familiar with these works as a student at the Karlsschule. Schiller was impressed with this work, and even more so with Kant. He certainly did not overlook the fact that, in his foreword, Kant expressed the hope that the writing of history would have its own Newton. What Kant had in mind was a historian who not only supplied intellectual descriptions of events, but remained focused on the possible goal of a history of enlightenment, namely a world comprised of nation-states in which there was middle-class freedom for all and an internationally secure rule of law.

Schiller himself had in mind a universal history that was to be enacted methodologically and critically. But he held on to history as the central realm of experience that challenged not only the philosophical thinker but also the poet and dramatist. Schiller was no doubt the last historian to adopt the perspective of the Enlightenment before it was shattered by the experience of revolution. But even this he understood to be a challenge to his own thinking about universal history that further motivated him to rethink its own traits and their historical interconnections in the hope of achieving an authoritative standpoint in the present.

The winter semester of to was the first one during which Schiller devoted his full energies to his work at the university. Here he addresses the connection between the writing of history and the drama of history, the relationship between historical and political truth, and offers opinions about sublime events in history. This meant, above all, his critical assessment of the French Revolution. New problems and perspectives emerged from this experience of history.

After having moved to Jena, Schiller met a number of women of the court, among whom was Charlotte von Lengefeld, to whom he proposed. When the wedding was announced in December , the ruling duke, Carl August of Saxony-Weimar, took a personal interest in the marriage. Schiller was named Hofrat and thereby became worthy of appearing at court and entitled to all attending rights and privileges.

At first, he received a modest stipend. His wife could not live without a maidservant, nor Schiller without a servant, and the latter immediately became his scribe. Schiller adopted a new orientation to life. In addition to newspaper reports, the personal accounts of those who had traveled to Paris gained in importance by the end of the year, especially his first conversations with Wilhelm von Humboldt, the skeptical liberal.

To Schiller, Humboldt radiated an enlightened disposition that was realistic and reserved in the face of any idealization of political revolutions, and they became close friends. It was not until May that Schiller was able to turn his attention to the development of this project for the Calender. He began this undertaking in the manner of his previous optimistic view of history, but texts being written at that time were characterized by a different view of political relationships and developments.

They are the subjects of history. People are arranged mainly according to their activities. Since the time of its appearance at the fall book fair of , it was a huge success and enjoyed the most positive reviews. Within a year of the appearance of the first part of the work, Wieland would write in his Neuen Teutschen Merkur: Selten ist in Deutschland eine Schrift mit lebhafterem und allgemeinerem Beifall gelesen worden [. The unusually high honorarium he would receive for writing the work was not the least of the reasons why Schiller accepted. As he was working on it, from May on, it became clear to him that the project would not be restricted to one essay.

His depiction of the war of states begins in Book 2, following a masterfully written overview of political and religious issues in the Holy Roman Empire — according to an outline of political relations in the European states — with an account of the so-called Westphalian War — Schiller interpreted the Bohemian Revolt —20 as an intra-Habsburgian occurrence during which the young emperor Ferdinand II had to prove himself.

In connection with the portrayal of the war, these personages are now brought into the foreground. In the course of Book 2, the two main characters, Wallenstein and Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, are introduced. The problem of the creation of a European community, with which Schiller had opened his portrayal, remains unsolved. They also have his earlier historical writing more firmly in mind, above all the Geschichte des Abfalls der vereinigten Niederlande.

With this work Schiller departed from the academic style of historical writing. He no longer included references to his sources and did not carry out a timeconsuming study of source materials before beginning to write. Schiller the historical writer of no longer considered the battle for freedom and political independence from a despotic ruler legitimate, either during the Bohemian revolt or that of the Netherlands. Princes and military commanders determined the events. Character sketches instead occur upon the death or departure of historical personages.

The writer thus heightens the significance of the leading figures as representatives of their time. In the first part of the work, Gustavus Adolphus is the most prominent hero. In part two, which was written two years later, Schiller gives greater attention to the politics of his ascendancy. With the historiographical work that he had begun in and then continued during his professorial appointment in Jena, he had an academic audience in mind. Following his experiences with the time-consuming work of the historian and his quarrels with colleagues at the university, he was disillusioned by the academic world and sought a way to leave the university at the end of In his historical writing it became increasingly more difficult for him to bridge the gap between the academic form and the interests of his readers.

In spite of the pointed topic of a war history, his work resonated broadly. By the end of the eighteenth century, the German reading public included large portions of middle-class society. Schiller possessed a critical consciousness and a high regard for the reading public.

The announcement for his next Thalia-project, the Rheinische Thalia 8: He knew his readership was divided. A new mass public stood in contrast to the traditional, academic one. With the advent of this public, Schiller developed a need for greater knowledge of historical development. The new interest in history among the German intellectual classes and in the schools — which contemporary reviews clearly show — was tied directly to the increasing interest in and consciousness of the development of a German nation.

This interest in history could not be satisfied by academic historiography: Schiller had known for some time now that the theater offered that opportunity. Therefore, it is not surprising that immediately following the success of his historical work, Schiller would have been contemplating a drama about Wallenstein, although he did not realize this plan until Wallenstein became a drama of a new kind.

Having taken up a broad study of history, Schiller wanted to create a true drama of history Geschichtsdrama. He was concerned with the representation and interpretation of a historical reality and, unlike before, with the idealization of historical personages. In the meantime, it was acclaimed as the most modern, realistic drama of the nineteenth century Hinderer, , By , the Geschichte had gone through several editions.

Even today, most of the interest in the historical work is sparked by the drama, including that of scholars of literature in particular. What is yet to be evaluated is a depiction of history that is no longer driven by a teleological viewpoint, but is immanent and oriented toward the concrete — a Geschichtsschreibung in transition.

Three interrelated dimensions should be emphasized: First, its connection to its time. As the Holy Roman Empire reached more and more of a crisis through the challenge posed by the French, a depiction of its earlier time of great crisis must have been especially interesting. The depiction of the birth of the modern European state system could also demand interest at a time in which that system was being questioned because of the division of Poland and the challenge that revolutionary France presented.

Next, the person of Wallenstein. From the start, Schiller perceived Wallenstein as a rebel against the emperor and the empire. He then pursued this relationship in his drama and explored the problem of a possible revolution within the empire. Schiller raised two aspects of this problem for discussion: In this regard it was not overshadowed until the Second World War. Schiller was considered by the educated public of the time to be the most modern writer of history Geschichtsschreiber in Germany.

He saw himself as being drawn to great historical events. This enormous productivity was suddenly interrupted at the beginning of by a physical collapse that became more aggravated in May of that year. Schiller was compelled to radically reduce his activities as a historian, which had reached a new high point. His lectures on history at the university were cancelled immediately and never taken up again.

He was able to place the Allgemeine Sammlung historischer Memoirs into the hands of his Jena colleague and friend Paulus. Wieland had written a preface for this volume and, at the end, developed a unique perspective: Schiller could have a much greater, even a national, effect through the writing of historical dramas; he could become a German Shakespeare. With that, Wallenstein was introduced to the public: Schiller had been working on the drama since the beginning of In December the Danish nobility offered Schiller a three-year annual stipend, which put him solidly in a position to start a new plan of work.

Schiller could then turn more intensively to the clarification of aesthetic-philosophical questions that had become increasingly pressing for him since Even his work with the literature of ancient Greece continued in dialogue with Humboldt. Alongside this, in the spring, he had written two insightful introductory texts to writings that he agreed to edit for a publisher in Jena: However, we should not be misled into thinking that this was the end of his interest in history and its representation.

To a great extent, the Wallenstein project alone shows how important history was for him. His treatment of the Peace of Westphalia was original and served as a crowning touch to his work. Were military geniuses now the great movers of history? Here, the genius of the young commander Alexander von Parma is celebrated. With the Wallenstein drama, which he worked on beginning in , the confrontation with this political-historical topic was renewed and deepened.

Could a genial commander and organizer like Wallenstein be a model for a national-political revolution in Germany? Schiller had lost his earlier perspectives on the development of a universal history as he had drafted them in his inaugural lecture at Jena, due to his disappointments over the course of the French Revolution and its consequences in Europe. From mid-July on, Schiller no longer believed that political revolutions were meaningful, and even considered them a fundamental danger, in a similar way as had Kant.

In his historical studies he gave up completely the political concept of revolution that formed the basis of his Geschichte des Abfalls der vereinigten Niederlande. In a letter on May 5, , Schiller wrote to Erhard: History could no longer be regarded as a source of general truths and knowledge. Schiller now wanted to show how intellectual and moral sovereignty can assert itself even against the backdrop of a fundamentally incomprehensible course of history. In conclusion, one of the most important insights that Schiller gained as a historian was the practical experience that the tremendous effort of a coherent Geschichtsschreibung supported by reliable sources goes unrewarded.

He thus came to understand the impact of attitudes that inform and are shaped by history. The possibility of greater composure and dignity from the perspective of the sublime, for example, was to be of major consequence for the subsequent writing of history 7: Translated by Steven D. Works Cited Hinderer, Walter. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, vol.

As such, it can be understood only from within the panorama of contemporary history. At the same time, the drama also has a religious historical background, the structures of which are significantly more complex than previously acknowledged. The Trauerspiel has become the standard text for theater directors.

Since the Mannheim premiere performance, in , the version in the Soufflierbuch stage text has been staged. It forms the basis of the original performance and later variations. The Trauerspiel is most consistent with that text. In short, the Trauerspiel has been performed, while the Schauspiel has been read and interpreted. Although a series of interpretations have been published on the Zwote, verbesserte Ausgabe Second Improved Edition, from a number of different perspectives, hardly any of these interpretations undertakes an in-depth analysis of the text.

Scholarship has been even less concerned with the surface of the text. Such analysis reveals important differences not only between these two versions but, above all, among previous interpretations of the Schauspiel. In the suppressed preface to the drama, he writes: The finer component parts are combined according to the principles of symmetry and harmony. To acquaint ourselves with how Schiller goes about his work and in this way to understand the drama more fully, it is essential that we read the text carefully on the surface, in part to ascertain the poetic, artistic, sociological, political, philosophical, and, not least, the religious-historical panorama of the time.

It is reported that following the initial performance, the Mannheim public was ecstatic. They cheered, cried, and went wild. In short, they were recruited through notoriously underhanded means. Consequently, we can postulate that, on the one hand, the work contains numerous keywords, all of which have various specific functions and, on the other hand, that Schiller falls back on a number of highly diverse models in his great early work that he then weaves together in an artistic manner.

In part, this lends his Schauspiel a different content than has been expressed in published interpretations and analyses since the time of the original performance of the drama. This contribution will show that Schiller thoroughly researched the models he used. His fellow student Karl Philipp Conz submitted an informed report: This procedure discloses both the way in which Schiller works and some unique features of his personality. The dialogue is not only fully integrated into the new context that surrounds it, but it also takes on new significance.

In addition, Schiller shows a certain impudence bordering on insolence, since this work had to be defended publicly, that is, in front of an assembly of fellow students and instructors with the strict Duke Karl Eugen at its head. The story of the robbers is based on the historical example of the Hussite Wars. By the end of act 3, these models are largely exhausted. These four models are themselves subordinated to a fifth, namely the structure of Richard II. The models noted here form the basis of both the structure and the framework of the story. This framework makes its mark mainly by the Trauerspiel version of the play.

• Suffering Loss
• STRICTLY GROWTH BUSINESS
• Sei meine Hure! (German Edition)
• If Jesus Had a Dog
• Verdrängte Nachbarn: Wadi Salib - Haifas enteignete Erinnerung (German Edition)
• Augenblicke erleben (Zeit zum Träumen 1) (German Edition)