Who Is This Schiller Now?: Essays on His Reception and Significance ed. by Jeffrey L. High, Nicholas Martin, and Norbert Oellers (review)

Lord Woodhouselee’s 1792 translation of Friedrich Schiller’s The Robbers (1781) kept Samuel Taylor Coleridge reading with “chill and trembling” in the wee hours of the morning; suddenly, he “could read no more” and wrote immediately to Robert Southey, asking, “Who is this Schiller? This convulser of the heart?” (9). Coleridge, who himself translated Schiller’s Wallenstein in 1800, thus posed the framing question for the 2009 Long Beach Schiller Conference commemorating the 250th anniversary of Schiller’s birth. Who Is This Schiller Now?: Essays on His Reception and Significance is a collection of twenty-seven revised lectures presented at this conference, which together challenge the view that Schiller was an inveterate idealist at hopeless remove from the heterogeneous reality of his day. Instead, this collection showcases recent scholarship on Schiller’s interdisciplinary engagement in political and moral philosophy, historiography, aesthetics, and the natural sciences; its reflection on his literary production; and the recent Schillerian renaissance on the English-language stage.

This interdisciplinarity is reflected in the structure of the volume, which is divided into five parts: Schiller’s drama and poetry, his aesthetics and philosophy, his historiography and politics, his reception, and current issues in Schiller studies. These essays confront many familiar conceptions of Schiller, including his alleged flight from political reality into an aesthetic ideal as his disillusionment with the violence of the French Revolution grew; the charge that his study of Kant and subsequent philosophical essays are the stuff of a mere epigone; that his œuvre is best divided into neat phases that emphasize rupture over continuity; that Schiller’s political thinking is both antimodern and naïve. Essays by Maria del Rosario Acosta López (“‘Making Other People’s Feelings Our Own’: From the Aesthetic to the Political in Schiller’s Aesthetic Letters”) and Henrik Sponsel (“Was sagte dieser Schiller (damals)? Schillers Antworten auf seine Kritiker nach 1945”), for example, challenge the notion espoused by Theodor Adorno, Paul de Man, Terry Eagleton, and others that Schiller’s aesthetics, enabled by a naïve idealism, led inexorably to an aestheticization of politics. Instead, they argue that Schiller was well aware of the dangers that such an aestheticization presents and actively sought to thwart them.

These and other essays also reflect an increasing recognition of Schiller’s realism. Noting the emphasis placed on Schiller the idealist in the anniversary years of 2005/2009, Wolfgang Riedel reclaims Schiller’s realism (“Religion and Violence in Schiller’s Late Tragedies”). Without diminishing Schiller’s enthusiasm for the ideal, Riedel points to Schiller’s relationship to history and his secular portrayal of religion as evidence of his grounding in reason. This emphasis on Schiller’s realism is likewise evident in T. J. Reed’s rousing critique of critics of Schiller’s historiography (“So Who Was Naïve? Schiller as Enlightenment Historian and His Successors”); his compelling argument would be strengthened by incorporating more of the blossoming scholarship devoted to Schiller the historian in the past twelve years, however.

Of the many reckonings with Schiller’s philosophical forerunners in aesthetics, two essays are particularly notable: Laura Anna Macor’s article “Die Moralphilosophie des jungen Schiller: Ein ‘Kantianer ante litteram’” and David Pugh’s “Aesthetic Humanism and Its Foes: The Perspective from Halle.” Macor disputes the primacy often accorded to Kant at the expense of Schiller’s own intellectual autonomy and challenges the partitioning of Schiller’s work into discrete phases. Rather, she argues, the moral philosophy that he articulates in his youthful works—essays, dramas, and prose—is consistent with those ideas he formulates after reading Kant and which are rooted in Schiller’s steady desire to create a pure morality independent of religion that can be transformed into action. David Pugh likewise argues that discussions of Schiller’s aesthetics should move beyond Kant to include Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten...