SCHILLER, Johann Christoph Friedrich
(), German dramatist, poet, historian and
philosophic thinker: b. Marbach in Swabia, 10
Nov. 1759; d. Weimar, 9 May 1805. His father
was an officer in the army of the Duke of
Württemberg, his mother a pious housewife
nowise distinguished above her kind. The
parents early decided to fit their son for the
priesthood in the Lutheran Church. To this
end they sent him to the Latin school at
Ludwigsburg, which was then the ducal residence. Duke Karl Eugen was conspicuous among the German princelings who aped the style of the Bourbon kings, Ludwigsburg being his Versailles. Here he maintained a costly opera, spent large sums on building projects and governed through mistresses and adventurers. The boy Schiller had thus a good opportunity to observe the ways of petty autocracy under the old régime, and he used his eyes to good advantage. Presently the duke experienced a change of heart, became an exponent of virtue and went in for works of benevolence. In this spirit he founded a military academy which was to train the sons of his officers for the public service. That he might have the boys under his own eye and mold them to his liking, he assembled them under his own roof in his castle “Solitude,” where for a time he played the schoolmaster with them. His offer of a scholarship to the boy Schiller was a princely favor not to be rejected by the loyal parents, though it involved giving up their plan of making him a pastor. To this school the lad went in 1773 and started in as a student of law, but floundered badly at first. After two years the school was transferred to Stuttgart, where it became virtually a university minus the theological faculty. A medical faculty was now added, and to secure students certain élèves (French was the official language of the school) were allowed to go over to medicine. Schiller, who had been at the foot of his class, eagerly accepted this chance. From this time (1775) on he devoted himself with average assiduity and success to medical studies. In 1780 he was honorably dismissed, but without a doctor's degree.
The discipline of the school was severely
military. The students were kept under
constant surveillance, their reading was censored
and their quarters often searched for contraband
books. But they found ways to smuggle
in the forbidden literature, which of course
tasted the sweeter for the prohibition. It is
certain that young Schiller read nearly all the
revolutionary productions — works of the
so-called “storm and stress,” — that were just then
coming out. They soon raised his incipient
radicalism to the boiling-point. A friend called
his attention to a magazine story by Schubart
dealing with a pair of enemy brothers, a
theme just then in favor with the literary
radicals. The hint was enough. Schiller, who by
this time felt sure that the writing of tragedy
was to be his vocation, began to pen his
‘Robbers,’ in which a dissolute but soft-hearted
young nobleman named Karl von Moor, while
leading a wild life as a Leipzig student, receives a harsh letter from his dotard father telling him that he is disinherited. Driven to fury by the missive and not suspecting the machinations of his scoundrel brother, Franz, he puts himself at the head of a band of
scapegrace students and leads them to the
Bohemian Forest, where they become outlaws
and run amuck against society. Moor robs
and murders on a terrific scale, yet not for
vulgar gain. He tries to correct the inequalities
and injustices of the social order, imagining
that he is doing a righteous work as the
avenger of the poor and oppressed, and fully
believing that God is on his side. When he
learns the truth he gives himself up to the
law which he has outraged. Thus the play
is a tragedy of fanaticism, and as such it
marks the emergence of a new dramatic type. It has glaring faults of extravagance and overemphasis, but is none the less the work of a born dramatist, all clearly visualized for action and powerfully bodied forth. It was chiefly the fame of this thunderous play that led, in the course of time, to Schiller's being made an honorary citizen of the first French republic. There is an authentic tradition that in reading the scenes of the nascent ‘Robbers’ to his spellbound fellow-students, he would sometimes snort and roar and stamp in the white heat of his indignation.