Scholarly Schiller

“Friedrich Schiller: Drama, Thought and Politics” is a scholarly analysis of the famous German playwright (1759-1805). To a larger audience, he is mostly known as the author of “Ode to Joy”. Or unknown, since everyone assumed that's Beethoven (who composed the version set to music)!

Unfortunately, Sharpe's analysis is *too* scholarly for the general reader. You must have a working knowledge of Schiller's plays and essays to find this study useful. Nothing wrong with that, per se, but it does narrow the audience considerably. I've read Schiller's famous letters on the aesthetic education of man, and his unfinished novel “The Ghost-Seer”, but nothing more.

That being said, the book did confirm most of my impressions of Schiller. He had a “Platonist” perspective, with a dualism between a spiritual world of moral ideas and political ideals, and a natural world which was anything but ideal. Perhaps inevitably for a playwright and poet, Schiller somehow believed that art could bridge the gap and “save” humanity. Or maybe he really didn't, since most of his plays strike me as strongly pessimistic, Schiller apparently being disenchanted by the failure of the French revolution to establish an ideal society. Only “William Tell” has a happy ending, and even there, the main hero stays aloof of politics…

While Schiller's ideas can be analyzed in their own right, it's difficult not to see a connection between them and the poet's own life and personality. It seems that Schiller was sickly and depressed, while also being something of an idealist and Enlightenment optimist. Perhaps it was the duality in his own soul which made him see the world as a (perhaps) unbridgeable duality between the spiritual and the natural? I admit a certain sympathy for that position…

Curiously, Schiller had a collaborative relationship with Goethe, who was his exact opposite in most ways: older, conservative, “earthly” and “evolutionary”. This may explain where I first encountered Schiller: a Swedish edition of “On the Aesthetic Education of Man” published by the Anthroposophists. The creator of Anthroposophy, Rudolf Steiner, obviously favored Goethe and almost saw himself as a latter-day version of the universal genius. Steiner loved to quote the conversation between Goethe and Schiller about the Urpflanze, the primordial plant or plant archetype, which Goethe believed was a real organism, while Schiller insisted that it must be an Idea. However, it seems the Anthroposophists like Schiller's ideas about aesthetic education, connecting it somehow to their Waldorf pedagogy.

With that little digression, I close this review of Lesley Sharpe's Schiller study.