The Ghost-Seer (review)

Goethe Yearbook 279 occupation is overwhelming in Schiller's prose dramas. (Koopmann's assumption that Schiller, qua "Aufklärer," would have simply regarded Christianity as a barbaric superstition, seems particularly questionable.) What happens to God after 1791? The question seems to me well worth asking, and might help to explain the peculiar fervor of Schiller's belief in art. Finally, it would be a step in the right direction if scholars would refrain from special pleading and would acknowledge the incoherence of Schiller's philosophical works. This incoherence derives from his vacillation between immanent and transcendental values and is best encapsulated in his antithesis of the beautiful and the sublime. Too often, one reads commentaries that expound the progressive, "diesseitig" side of his thought and try to explain away the other, if they do not suppress it altogether. Reed emerges well from a comparison with Ueding here; he not only devotes space to the sublime, he also acknowledges the ambivalence at the heart of Schiller's "Antrittsvorlesung" (1789) as to whether a rational plan is inherent in history or whether it has merely been read in by us. Such ambivalences permeate Schiller's thinking, not only on history, and should be confronted as a premise of analysis rather than conceded shamefacedly at the end. Even if the reputation of his philosophical works suffered from a general admission of their incoherence, such an admission might nonetheless prove worthwhile for the light it sheds on the sources of Schiller's poetic creativity. Though I have been critical here of the anachronistic tendencies in these three books, it is probably impossible to escape such tendencies altogether . If so, the insecure situation created by the revolutions of 1989 to 1991 may offer us a new vantage point for understanding Schiller, especially in the last fifteen years of his life. As we confront a new century full of dilemmas—ethnic, ecological, cultural—that (pace Reed) may not respond to the familiar liberal methods, perhaps we will discover a new Schiller, a troubled explorer in another age of threatened certainties, who will seem more in tune with our own concerns than the self-assured ideologue of freedom whom we have encountered so often in the scholarship of the past two decades. Queen's University David Pugh Schiller, Friedrich, The Ghost-Seer. Trans. Henry G. Bohn. Intro. Jeffrey L. Sammons. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1992. "Der Leser des Geistersehers muß gleichsam einen stillschweigenden Vertrag mit dem Verfasser machen, wodurch der letztere sich anheischig macht, seine Imagination wunderbar in Bewegung zu setzen, der Leser aber wechselseitig verspricht, es in der Délicatesse und Wahrheit nicht so genau zu nehmen." These words of Schiller's, taken from a letter of 1789, along with other derogatory references (not to mention his negative assessment of the novel as a genre in Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung), de- 280 Book Reviews terred generations of scholars from devoting serious attention to the novel fragment, which was left unfinished when Schiller embarked on his career as a historian. And yet the work was immensely popular in its own time, giving rise to a host of imitations in Germany and abroad, including several by reputable authors. For scholars who share Schiller's distaste for popular literature, the work contains valuable pages of psychological analysis, as well as the long "philosophisches Gespräch," which Schiller excluded from later editions and which foreshadows his withdrawal from literature during his philosophical period. Clearly, the work contains material that cannot be ignored by scholars investigating Schiller's intellectual development. The welcome appearance of the present businesslike translation (first published 1849), which comes equipped with a characteristically learned and precise introduction by Jeffrey Sammons, provides an occasion to glance at the reappraisal of the work that has now been in progress for some years. In their books of 1959, both Benno von Wiese and Gerhard Storz devoted some thoughtful pages to the fragment and spoke up strongly for its merits. Their contributions are important on at least two counts. First, the open-minded reader of the Geisterseher will agree with them that Schiller was far more gifted in this genre than, to be consistent with his theories, he ought to...