Who Is This Schiller Now? Essays on His Reception and Significance ed. by Jeffrey L. High, Nicholas Martin, Norbert Oellers (review)

This essay collection aims to give “contemporary answers” to the question posed by Schiller reader and translator Samuel Taylor Coleridge – namely “Who is this Schiller now?”– and to “the many questions and responses that followed” (xi). While in line with “important Schiller scholarship” from the second half of the twentieth century onward, the answers given in the volume aim to “indicate pronounced shifts from widespread twentieth-century understandings of Schiller” (xi). In this attempt to render an up-to-date picture of the author, the emphasis is on Schiller the “cosmopolitan realist,” instead of on the “lopsidedly abstract idealist” (xi).

The volume incorporates twenty-eight essays (counting the introductory contribution by Jeffrey L. High) and a foreword composed jointly by the editors. The contributions, written by notable scholars, are arranged in five thematic sections: I, “Schiller, Drama, and Poetry”;II, “Schiller, Aesthetics, and Philosophy”;III, “Schiller, History, and Politics”;IV, “Schiller Reception – Reception and Schiller”;andV, “Schiller Now.”

Many Schiller myths are debunked in these essays. While the emphasis remains on the dramatic works, Schiller’s “manifold activities” and “interdisciplinary oeuvre” are studied through “cross-disciplinary approaches” (xii). Some of the general conclusions are that Schiller did not submit to Kant but rather selectively adapted what suited his “moral, philosophical, and aesthetic needs” (xii); that he was uncannily aware of the destructiveness of the aestheticization of politics; that his place in the history of Gothic literature needs to be reconsidered; that Schiller’s works demonstrate his place between Germany and England, and Germany and the United States, as well as in the history of ideas and of theatre, the latter conceived by him as a site for aesthetic education; and that in his portrayals of religion and religious conflicts, secularism, historiography, and cosmopolitanism play important roles. Overall, the essays paint a portrait of Schiller as a politically and socially engaged writer whose cosmopolitan intellectual horizon stretched beyond the Atlantic. All this is to show that the “flight to abstraction” (xii) construct, central to much previous Schiller scholarship, is untenable.

The essays offer a wealth of new knowledge and provocative claims. In High’s introduction we learn that Schiller was performed in the United States as early as the eighteenth century, and he himself not only was ideologically influenced by the discourse of the American Revolution (Thomas Jefferson), that of freedom and the pursuit of happiness, and by the War of Independence, but also incorporated the concepts of and allusions to these issues in his works, in portraying revolutions “in deed” rather than in “thought” (xii). In addition, with a view to recent film, High asserts that the plot and character constellation of Star Wars mirrors the Schillerian “liberation drama” (14), especially Don Karlos. “Schiller never really left the U.S. cultural scene” (15).

The essays in part I deal with Schiller’s dramas and poetry. Hans H. Hiebel discovers that Schiller adapted J. M. R. Lenz’s use of “dialect and sociolect” (25) for his own literary establishment of spoken language and the emphasis on “Erleben” (33). Matthew Bell identifies three types of melancholy in Schiller’s dramas and discovers in Schiller a “melancholy philosophy [. . .] of transience” (51), while Erhard Bahr shows that Schiller contributed to modern literature through conceiving it as a “Literatur der Trauer mit einer Tendenz zur Idylle und Utopie” (66). Peter Pabisch expounds on the “Spracharbeit” represented by Schiller’s ballads, which worked toward establishing German as a “Weltsprache” (71), and notes a resurgence of interest in classical languages and German philosophy at American universities. Norbert Oellers reinterprets the Wallenstein drama following Goethean precepts in transcending its specific spatio-historical context and pointing rather to the “Allgemeine” (90), which involves recognizing Wallenstein as the cause of his own failure.

Part II deals with Schiller’s aesthetics and philosophy. Laura Anna Macor traces Schiller’s...