Schiller: Eine Einführung, and: Friedrich Schiller, and: Schiller (review)

Goethe Yearbook 273 moralischer Freiheit nicht so ohne weiteres aus dem Zusammenhang des dramatischen Geschehens lösen: "In a play that deals with the inadequacy of simple moral principles in the world of politics it seems something of an invalidation of the complexity with which that world is portrayed if Maria's death is seen as a triumph over politics" (271). Vier Schiller-Monographien sind in den letzten fünf Jahren erschienen, und Sharpes Beitrag ist nicht nur die umfangreichste Darstellung unter diesen vier, sondern bietet wohl auch die sorgfältigste Einführung zu Schillers Leben und Werk. Als solche ist die Studie gelungen, hat die Autorin ihr Ziel mit Bravour erreicht. Dabei spricht die scheinbare Mühelosigkeit dieser Unternehmung für Sharpes breites Wissen und Belesenheit ebenso wie für ihren flüssigen, klaren Stil. Das Buch liest sich leicht, bleibt verständlich auch für Nicht-Schillernde, und die wenigen Druckfehler, die es zu vermerken gibt—z.B. "auto de fe" (83) statt auto-da-fé, "maria Stuart" (ν) in der Inhaltsübersicht—tun dem keinen Abbruch. Selbst wenn neue Impulse für die Forschung ausbleiben, so haben doch Witte und Garland in Lesley Sharpe eine würdige Nachfolgerin gefunden. Davidson College Burkhard Henke Koopmann, Helmut, Schiller: Eine Einführung, Artemis-Einführungen 37 (München: Artemis, 1988); Gert Ueding, Friedrich Schiller, Beck'sche Reihe 616: Autorenbücher (München: Beck, 1990); TJ. Reed, Schiller, Past Masters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991)· One neither expects nor receives a radical reappraisal of a major author from books as short as the ones under consideration here. Such outlines have value, however, in that the narrow compass forces the critic to make firm choices, with a minimum of hedging, as to why he judges an author to be worth reading and what gives him his historical importance. The value is all the greater when, as here, the outlines are written by eminent scholars who have already published extensively on the author and the period. Significantly, and despite various differences of style and interpretation, Koopmann, Ueding and Reed concur in viewing Schiller essentially as an "Aufklärer." In doing so they present a consensus that has crystallized over the past twenty years or so in the wake of the "Klassiker-Kritik" of the late sixties and early seventies. That movement was motivated by a rejection of German political quietism, reflected in an academic cult of Weimar as locus of a Winckelmannian serenity, and it has led to a view of Schiller that emphasizes his involvement in worldly affairs and his commitment to political freedom. Older affirmative views of Schiller as an idealist and a classicist are now treated as flawed insofar as they imply a withdrawal from social reality into an ideal or aesthetic "Hinterwelt." Even the older criticisms of him (notably Nietzsche's), as a moralizing rhetorician and a philosophical (i.e., not a "real") poet are now turned on their heads; yes, we read, he was a 274 Book Reviews moralist, and yes, he used rhetoric to incline his reader towards the good, but these tendencies fall within Enlightenment traditions and merely underline his commitment to his age. As for his poetry, most critics now accept the unfairness of judging Schiller's poetry against a standard abstracted from the wholly different poetry of Goethe. We can be particularly grateful for one consequence of this reappraisal, and that is the attention paid to Schiller's three early prose dramas, which are overtly concerned with social discontent and rebellion. These plays have been brilliantly analyzed by Peter Michelsen, Hans-Jürgen Schings and Karl Guthke, among others, and such critics have buried once and for all the cliché of an immature Schiller who needed Goethe's magic touch before he could become a real poet. These plays, for all their exaggerations and grotesqueries, are now accepted as vital documents of the spiritual and social anguish of the 1780s. The image of Schiller the "Aufklärer," on the other hand, is no longer new, and it is surely time we began to consider whether it is not capable of improvement in some areas. For one thing, the scholarly view of Schiller prior to I968...