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  • Who Is This Schiller Now? Essays on His Reception and Significance ed. by Jeffrey L. High, Nicholas Martin, Norbert Oellers
  • Michael André
Jeffrey L. High, Nicholas Martin, and Norbert Oellers, eds., Who Is This Schiller Now? Essays on His Reception and Significance. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2011. xviii + 494 pp. [End Page 279]

Drawn from the international conference of the same name, held at California State University, Long Beach, in September 2009, Who Is This Schiller Now? offers twenty-eight essays reexamining Schiller’s work in categories ranging from drama and poetry, aesthetics and philosophy, and history and politics, to Schiller reception and, finally, “Schiller Now.”

Full section titles (for example “Schiller, Drama, and Poetry” or “Schiller Reception—Reception and Schiller”) suggest that this collection aims to relieve Schiller studies of the generic and theoretical pressures to which they have been subjected, and to consider his legacy anew. Thus the title of the collection, prompted by Coleridge’s excited letter of November 3, 1794 to Robert Southey, upon reading Die Räuber, emerges as a founding principle for the entire project: to consider what Schiller’s work and thought mean in and for our present. Accordingly, as the editors point out in the foreword, contributions take to task common or previously reigning assumptions about Schiller the idealist, the Kantian, the classicist—the collection intends to break down barriers of classification and periodization, and reposition Schiller as a forerunner of modernism, his work as world literature (xi–xii).

Several contributions seek to revise our literary and philosophical readings of Schiller. Four of the five essays in part 1 (“Schiller, Drama, and Poetry”) grapple with perceived misreadings or unrecognized influences (Hans H. Hiebel on Lenz’s influence, for example, or Matthew Bell on melancholy in Schiller’s drama). Essays in part 2 (“Schiller, Aesthetics, and Philosophy”), part 3 (“Schiller, History, and Politics”), and beyond not only weigh in on the development and meaning of Schiller’s philosophical and aesthetic thought, but also examine the valence of religiosity in his drama and history (contributions by Elisabeth Krimmer and Wolfgang Riedel), and take up decidedly more sensitive questions of Schiller’s political thought (María del Rosario Acosta López on aesthetics and politics, Yvonne Nilges on democracy, and Henrik Sponsel on post-1945 criticism of Schiller).

These contributions remind the reader that, even at a basic textual level, Schiller’s work still reveals secrets. The import of such revelations, on the other hand, is of rather mixed quality. The authors in part 1, for example, seem more content to reinterpret, while paying decidedly less attention to the need for reinterpretation. Jennifer Driscoll Colosimo’s essay “Schiller and the Gothic” is a rare attempt to correct the record of literary history in its demonstration that Schiller played a more influential role in the development of an international gothic genre than Germanistik has traditionally admitted. Likewise, Laura Anna Macor’s “Die Moralphilosophie des jungen Schiller” is a well-organized and readable refutation of the “flight to Kant” thesis, tracing the development of a moral-philosophical bent in Schiller that predates his reading of Kant.

The pinnacle of this revisionist strand of argument is occupied by the very direct contributions of Peter Pabisch and T. J. Reed. Pabisch’s passionate rhetoric on behalf of the German classics is stirring—unfortunately, he allows the stated subject of his contribution, Schiller’s ballads, to be upstaged by routine arguments in favor of the salutary effects of literary study. Reed, on the other hand, makes admirably short shrift of Schiller’s historian-critics by asserting that Schiller’s perceived “naive” belief in progress and his recourse to Enlightenment humanism constitute a progressive realism, “a way of living in and with history. What other way is there?” (278). In the efficiency and directness of his argument, and his ability to address not just textual but also, indeed, human [End Page 280] concerns, Reed provides this collection’s best defense of Schiller’s contemporary relevance and, perhaps, of the relevance of eighteenth-century studies.

Several essays focus on Schiller’s reception from his own time to the present. Concentrated in parts 4 and 5 (“Schiller Reception” and “Schiller Now...

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