Schillers Rebellionskonzept und die Französische Revolution (review)

In this revised dissertation, Jeffrey High sets out to debunk a conventional mis-apprehension of Schiller's evolution, according to which his political attitudes went through three distinct phases: first a revolutionary "Jugendperiode," then a period of disappointment during which he saw his initial high hopes for the French Revolution dashed, and finally a period of flight from political engagement into philosophical abstraction. High argues, on the basis of a careful study of the relevant texts, that this view does not hold water. Schiller's political stance prior to 1789 was never that of a straightforward revolutionary. He was indeed interested in the phenomenon of rebellion, but his consistent view was that rebellions had to be judged on whether they furthered happiness and autonomy. There is no evidence that Schiller took part in the enthusiasm that seized some sectors of German opinion after the fall of the Bastille; when the National Assembly conferred French citizenship on him in the summer of 1792, that decision was based on the most imprecise knowledge of his works and opinions.

In the winter of 1792–93, Schiller briefly considered travelling to Paris to speak in the defence of Louis XVI, who was on trial for his life, and he made a bitter remark about "Schindersknechte" after the execution on 21 January 1793. However, High shows that the notion that Schiller turned from political engagement to philosophy is largely an optical illusion. In 1792 he had written to Körner about certain hopes that he entertained of the French, and some scholars have assumed that such hopes referred to the political realm. High shows convincingly that Schiller was in fact discussing career prospects pertaining to a possible relocation from Jena to Mainz. As for his turn to the study of philosophical aesthetics, this had in fact occurred in 1791, after the collapse of his health. Schiller's composition of the "Kallias" letters to Körner and then of Über Anmut und Würde in 1793 was thus part of a longer-standing programme of work and had little connection with events in France.

While this is all very good and helpful, I am not quite so satisfied by High's discussion of the period after 1793, in which he focusses on Schiller's "Publizistik" relating to the French Revolution, in practice on the Horen project, and on the Ästhetische Briefe. This is a sensible limitation of the book's terms of reference, but it does lead to the slightly anomalous decision to exclude Wilhelm Tell. After all, in his first chapter High has discussed the portrayal of rebellions in Fiesco and Don Carlos, and so the absence of Tell creates a certain lack of symmetry. In connection with the Horen, High assembles some interesting quotations from Schiller's letters that yield a differentiated picture of what he was intending. With reference to the Ästhetische Briefe, however, I find him a little too quick to endorse Schiller's state-ments that the work has concrete political goals. To be sure, Schiller wrote to the Duke of Augustenburg that civic freedom represented "das heiligste aller Güter, das würdigste Ziel aller Anstrengungen." However, his belief that the ennoblement of the individual character was a necessary prelude to the granting of such freedom surely exemplifies what T. J. Reed has called the tradition of German "unpolitics." Politics from this perspective becomes a matter of moral education, not of the building of institutions or the exercise of rights.

High's short book is strong on detail but has no space to consider the wider context. And yet Schiller's opinions belong to their age, and the political attitudes of the German Enlightenment are by no means self-explanatory. High cites but does not discuss Koselleck's classic Kritik und Krise, with its brilliant analysis of the unpolitical or even antipolitical opposition of the Enlightened German bourgeoisie. A work like Koselleck's can help us to...