Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich

shil'er, Johann Christoph Friedrich (1759-1805), a German dramatist and poet. His grandfather and great grandfathers were bankers in a village on the Neckar. His father was an officer and later overseer of the grounds and gardens of the Duke of Wurtemberg near Stuttgart. Here, at the command of the duke, the lad was sent to a military academy. Later he studied law and medicine and received an appointment as a medical officer in a Stuttgart regiment. Schiller was never a satisfactory student. He preferred to read. He had come under the influence of Klopstock's Messiah, Shakespeare's plays, McPherson's Ossian, and, worst of all in the eyes of his orthodox friends, the writings of Rousseau. The result was the publication of a play, The Robbers. It was presented to an applauding audience at Mannheim, whither Schiller had stolen away without leave to see it acted. A second offense, for he held a military appointment, brought him two weeks' confinement in prison and a peremptory order from the duke to write no more and to close correspondence with outside friends. September 17, 1782, he fled from Stuttgart. His life for many years was that of a penniless wanderer. He managed usually to live with some acquaintance for a time in some quiet village in the vicinity of Mannheim, Leipsic, or Dresden while he wrote a play. He then put it on the stage. At Weimar he was made welcome by Herder, the grand old pastor of Weimar, one of the fathers of German thought.

Schiller's plays are chiefly historical. In the scholarly atmosphere of Weimar he betook himself to writing his histories, The Revolt of the Netherlands and The Thirty Years' War. These volumes possessed a freshness, an air of authenticity and a freedom of style that were pleasing to readers. They procured Schiller a call (1789) to a chair in the neighboring university of Jena. He was now able to marry and to have a home of his own. He also revisited his parents. At Jena an intimacy grew up between Goethe and Schiller. Goethe declared that Schiller made him a boy again. Under Goethe's quickening influence, Schiller acquired new ideas and new ambitions, and entered upon the most vigorous period of his intellectual activity. The two friends together wrote epigrams for an annual volume of poems and vied with each other in writing ballads. To this happy period of Schiller's life belong The Song of the Bell and the three Wallenstein plays, also Maria Stuart, The Maid of Orleans, and William Tell. During his later years, he retired from the university and resided at Weimar, the recipient of a literary pension.

He was a tall, slender, pale man with the formal carriage of a soldier, acquired in youth. Schiller was a fearless, thoughtful man gifted with the power of expression, and German to the core. He was serious, with little sense of humor,-a man of high aims, an uncompromising German patriot. His writing was done when French influence and French literary models, like French fashions, were all powerful, at a time when Germans needed a literature to rally around,-a literature to make Germans proud of the Fatherland. Of him it may be said truly that he turned a page in the history of German thought, for he was more thoroughly German and more courageous than Goethe. He is to this day the most read of the great writers of Germany.

Schiller died at Weimar in his fortysixth year. His remains were placed in an oak casket covered with laurel and were deposited in the ducal vault. A beautiful bronze memorial in the marketplace of Weimar represents Goethe tendering the laurel wreath of poesy to his younger brother in literature.

See Weimar; Goethe; Lessing; Wallenstein; Tell; Schaffhausen