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Reviewed by:
  • A Companion to the Works of Friedrich Schiller
  • Stephanie Hammer
Steven D. Martinson, ed. A Companion to the Works of Friedrich Schiller. Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture. General Editor: James Hardin (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2005). Pp. xiv, 333. $90.00.

In that problematic disciplinary space that is German studies of the eighteenth century, Friedrich Schiller occupies a troubling and not entirely central place. At once a playwright, poet, aesthetician, and historian, Schiller was a highly creative and restless personality. He eventually became a professor, and as such, he presents an odd mirror image to many of us laboring to write about him. At the outset an intellectual and artistic rebel, Schiller was expelled from his home-town by the production of his first play, The Robbers (a creation that eventually garnered him honorary citizenship in the newly formed French Republic), and he was forced to cobble together a living through the theater, a university professorship, and the patronage of the Weimar Court and other interested aristocrats. Like the contemporary academic, Schiller seems to have been an underpaid but highly “respected” cultural worker on the constant lookout for grants.

Perhaps because of our kinship with him, a certain nervous caution runs through much Schiller criticism. Notable contemporary exceptions to this rule are the lively, accessible books of Lesley Sharpe, the sole doyenne of Schiller studies, and the theoretically sophisticated, feminist analyses of Gail Hart. Both brilliant female scholars understand the fascination of Friedrich Schiller.

For fascinating he is. Currently, productions of the Wallenstein dramas—the David Rabeesque trilogy about the Thirty Years’ War—proliferate in the reunified Germany; on New Year’s Eve 2007 they even ran as a one-night marathon in Leipzig. Schiller’s plays are produced regularly on the continent, and it is noteworthy that he inspired English-speaking authors as various as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charlotte Brontë, Ayn Rand, and the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. Looking at the reception and production history of Schiller, particularly in the twentieth- and early-twenty-first centuries, one cannot help but wonder—in the wake of theoretical works by Eagleton, Foucault, Barthes, Kristeva, and Žižek—about Schiller’s relationship to gender, class, queerness, the perverse, anarchy, power-relations, academics, empire, and desire.

However, the writers included in the handsomely covered Camden House collection of essays are manifestly uninterested in these by-now established realms [End Page 591] of inquiry. Instead they pursue trenchantly traditional approaches to Schiller and his work. They stress Schiller’s importance as an idealist; he was a philosophical writer interested in classical aesthetics, an artist concerned with perfecting the genre of tragedy and the Baroque style, and above all a writer devoted to the idea of love as transcendent value. This assessment of Schiller may have merit, but it certainly is not the new, “cutting-edge” criticism proposed on the Camden House jacket copy. Indeed, the essays in this volume are penned predominantly by a set of senior Germanists, many of whom are German, and whose work any specialist will have read elsewhere and at greater length.

There are a few exceptions to this predominantly Northern European grouping. The aforementioned British scholar Lesley Sharpe delivers her usual, cogent, and user-friendly analysis of Schiller’s aesthetics—as articulated in The Aesthetic Letters—and Canada-based David Pugh writes a clear summation of Schiller’s use of Platonic duality in pursuit of an idiosyncratic version of classicism. Steven D. Martinson, the editor from the University of Arizona, writes a straightforward introduction to the matter at hand and gives us a useful overview of Schiller’s medical dissertations in the opening pages to his own essay on Maria Stuart.

Interestingly, among the cavalcade of Goethezeit all-stars (including such names as Walter Hinderer and Karl Guthke), the truly revelatory essay of the collection comes from University of Cologne historian Otto Dann, who takes on Schiller’s now much-neglected historical writings. Martinson translates many of the essays in the volume; his translation of Dann is particularly lively and engaging, and it’s no wonder, because the essay is compelling, insightful, and smart. Dann argues for the centrality and, indeed, the...

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