A Companion to the Works of Friedrich Schiller (review)

242 Book Reviews protagonist commits a murder, but gets away with it, is never punished. This drama is an overwhelmingly positive valuation of a murder. IsTeIl a murderer out of "Notwehr"? Is he a "Selbsthelfer" who takes the law into his own hand? Hart delivers a subtle analysis of several important aspects involved here: protecting the father's honor, the life and honor of his family, the freedom of the country. (When discussing the "father" aspects she might have referred to Peter von Mart's intelligent essay on the topic.) She shows that the decriminalization and justification of Tell's murder resides in an appeal to extralegal experience. Different from other scholars she does not simply agree with Tell's attack on Johann Parricida but sees Johann as the scapegoat, absorbing all the guilt. She is right when stating that Schiller's reflections on crime and punishment culminated ambiguously in Wilhelm Tell.The ambiguity is probably larger than she indicates. Would Switzerland, as portrayed in Schiller's drama, have been freed without Johann Parricidas deed?Tell's friends indicate that the emperor—were he still alive—would have sought revenge and punished the Swiss cantons with draconian measures. If the emperor had not been killed, Tell's deed would probably have meant the beginning of the end of Swiss autonomy and not its liberation. Don't the Swiss, according to the drama, owe their freedom to Johann Parricida and not to Tell? Parricida had only his property and entitlements in mind when killing his uncle, the emperor. Tell's deed was motivated by more altmistic feelings and ideas. Yet independent of the motives: the fact remains that only the removal of the Habsburg emperor by Johann Parricida enables the Swiss to enjoy their new liberty. Towards the end of the book Hart sees connections between Schiller's story "Der Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre" and Heinrich Böll's Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum. Like Karl Moor, Christian Wolf in Schillers text leads a robber band, while never completely losing his sense of decency. Both Blum and Wolf are murderers, and both kill in order to restore their honor. She also reminds us of the fact that Anthony Burgess's novel A Clocktvork Orange and Stanley Kubrick's 1971 film adaptation of the book show a number of important references to Schiller's work. The novel and the movie bring the idea of the charismatic criminal to bear on the investigation of humanity. Hart shows how Schiller parses criminality and that he elevates and admires "great" criminal deeds and transgressions as signs of a great human spirit, reflecting the same energy and intelligence that support heroism. It is a thought-provoking book that sheds new light on many aspects of Schiller's work, in particular on crime, punishment, autonomy, and political liberty. Washington University in St. Louis Paul Michael Lützeler Steven D. Martinson, ed., A Companion to the Works of Friedrich Schiller. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2005.333 pp. This collection of essays by twelve distinguished scholars, all published for the first time and five of them translated into English by editor and contributor Steven D. Martinson, places Schiller in the richest possible context of biographical , historical, textual and inter-textual readings with a minimum of repetition. Without polarizing Schiller's thought against postmodernist formulations, this virtual textbook of Schiller-in-his-age teases out multiple threads that weave throughout Schiller's monumental tapestry of major works in order to clarify the questions—and this collection is full of questions—raised by studying Schiller's Goethe Yearbook 243 works today. The detailed studies of individual works in this book's long middle section are bracketed by introductory discussions of Schiller's anthropology, his relation to antiquity, and his uses of history and by a concluding survey, full of its own kind of drama, of the twists and turns of Schiller's reputation in the twentieth century. Impressive for its coherence and timeliness, Martinson's collection is also immensely readable. Martinson's introduction, "Schiller and the New Century," touches on all the elements of the Schiller Story: Schiller's original inclination to the ministry, his military school training, his ill...