Friedrich Schiller

Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (Marbach am Neckar, 1759 – Weimar, 1805) was a German poet, playwright, philosopher and historian. Alongside Goethe, he is regarded as Germany's most important dramatist and as one of the central figures of Weimar Classicism, a movement that sought a balance between reason, feeling and form. He began within the Sturm und Drang, but over the years turned his work toward a calmer reflection on human freedom, which is why he still holds a place in the history of thought.

The son of a military officer in the Duchy of Württemberg, he moved between several towns as his father's posts changed. In 1773, on the orders of Duke Karl Eugen and against his family's wishes, he entered the Hohe Karlsschule military academy, where he first studied law and then medicine under strict discipline. There he wrote The Robbers, which premiered in Mannheim in 1782 to great public acclaim and brought him a penalty: the duke forbade him from writing further plays, and Schiller spent fourteen days in confinement. After fleeing Stuttgart in 1782, he endured several years of financial insecurity in Mannheim, Leipzig, Dresden and Weimar, a period that produced Kabale und Liebe and the beginnings of Don Carlos.

In 1789 he took up a professorship at the University of Jena, where he taught history although his chair was in philosophy. His inaugural lecture on universal history argued that the study of the past has a moral purpose. In Weimar he deepened his friendship with Goethe from 1788 onward, a relationship of aesthetic debate and collaboration that led to the Weimar Theatre and to the Xenien, satirical epigrams with which the two answered their critics. In 1790 he married Charlotte von Lengefeld.

His thought rests largely on the philosophy of Kant, which he studied closely, and on the importance he gave to beauty as a means of forming the human being. In his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man he held that art can refine the senses and bring them closer to reason, so that the individual attains an inner freedom. That conviction runs through his historical dramas, among them the Wallenstein trilogy, Mary Stuart, William Tell and The Maid of Orleans, in which political conflicts appear as moral dilemmas faced by the characters.

He died in Weimar in 1805 at the age of forty-five, from tuberculosis. His influence on German theatre was decisive, and many of his plays remain in the repertoire, while his ballads are among the best-known poems in the language. Beethoven used parts of his Ode to Joy in the Ninth Symphony, which brought his verses to a very wide audience.