Rüdiger Safranski Goethe und Schiller Geschichte einer ...

Translated extract from
Rüdiger Safranski
Goethe und Schiller
Geschichte einer Freundschaft
Carl Hanser Verlag
München 2009
ISBN 978-3-446-23326-3
pp. 5-15
Rüdiger Safranski
Goethe and Schiller
The Story of a Friendship
Translated by Rodney Livingstone
© 2010 Litrix.de

CONTENTS
Prologue
Chapter One
First meeting in 1779. Prize-giving at the Karlsschule. The student and the
famous visiting poet. Storm and Stress: the spirit of the age. Goethe’s and
Schiller’s character. Goethe discovers the intermaxillary jawbone, Schiller
discovers freedom. The Robbers leapfrog mankind. Iphigenie calms man
down. The desire to have an effect, in moderation and without.
Chapter Two
Flight and transformation for both men. Schiller escapes from Duke Karl
Eugen of Württemberg and ends up in Weimar. Goethe escapes to Italy.
Schiller in Weimar among the gods and the idolaters. Goethe in absentia.
Everyone waits for him, including Schiller.
Chapter Three
Schiller and Charlotte von Lengefeld. A summer of love together with
antiquity. Encounter with Goethe at the Lengefelds. Goethe remains
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eserved. Schiller’s love-hate. Two love stories. Christiane and Charlotte:
Goethe marries beneath him, Schiller above him.
Chapter Four
Goethe and Schiller find the French Revolution a challenge. Schiller’s
pathos in a nutshell. View of the ocean of mankind. Goethe forms his own
circle. The great art of ignorance. Opposition to an over-excited age.
Goethe’s art as refuge and Schiller’s playing fields of revolution. Dignity
and Grace. Nature’s blue-eyed boy takes offence.
Chapter Five
Schiller’s trip to Swabia. Association with Cotta. Founding the journal Die
Horen. Literary matters. Invitation to Goethe. A turning point in Goethe’s
life. The happy event: the meeting in summer 1794. Schiller’s great birthday
letter. The first exchange of ideas. Schiller’s first visit to Goethe’s house in
the Frauenplan.
Chapter Six
Collaboration on Wilhelm Meister. The ‘sentimental’ Schiller in the
workshop of the ‘naïve’ genius. The play instinct. Audience reactions.
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Schiller… ‘when confronted by excellence, there is no freedom but in love.’
Schiller’s suggestions and criticisms. Wilhelm Meister – just a happy stroke
of fate?
Chapter Seven
Die Horen. Great ambitions. Two kinds of apolitical politics. Goethe’s social
education and Schiller’s aesthetic education. Schiller infuriates Fichte. How
much style does philosophy need? Die Horen in crisis. The Roman Elegies
as sheet anchor. Quarrel with the Schlegels. The end of Die Horen.
Chapter Eight
Goethe in Jena. Pictures of a friendship. Charlotte and Christiane. Taking
leave of a disorderly love life. Schiller and Christiane by moonlight. Men in
conversation on the commanding heights of literature. The Xenia. Schiller,
Egmont and cruelty. 1797 - The summer of ballads.
Chapter Nine
Hermann and Dorothea. Goethe plans his third Italian journey. Schiller
wants to hold him back. Hölderlin between the two masters. Goethe’s auto-
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da-fé before his departure. The dialogue in letters about symbolic
perception. Goethe on Schiller’s track in Swabia. The idea for William Tell.
Chapter Ten
Goethe’s inspiration dries up. Schiller: writer’s block and creative frenzy.
The philosophy stall shuts up shop. The aesthetic mood. Wallenstein.
Triumphant return to the theatre. Goethe helps and admires. The idea of the
totality of the world in its vastness. Schiller in the garden house.
Chapter Eleven
Epic and drama. After Schiller’s Horen, Goethe’s Propyläen. Never-ending
antiquity. The collector and his collections. A family romance. Group
picture with Schiller. How much reality can art bear? The pleasure of
creating schematic patterns. Against dilettantism. Fichte’s expulsion from
Jena. Schiller’s move to Weimar.
Chapter Twelve
Weimar dramaturgy. Against the unnatural and the all-too-natural. Duke
Karl August’s taste. Translation exercises: Goethe’s Voltaire, Schiller’s
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Shakespeare. Goethe as friend and superior. Maria Stuart. How much
religion and which one to choose? Faust and the rule of force.
Chapter Thirteen
Goethe has too much world, Schiller too little. Romantic affairs in the
Schlegel household. The triangle Goethe, Schelling and Schiller. Schiller’s
Maid of Orleans and Goethe’s Natural Daughter. The Kotzebue affair.
Discord between Schiller and Goethe.
Chapter Fourteen
Schiller’s theatrical successes. Ban on cheering. Goethe cedes the William
Tell story to Schiller. The conservative revolutionary. Mme de Staël in
Weimar. The offer from Berlin. Goethe keeps Schiller in Weimar. Last
works. The confidence-trickster motif. Demetrius and the translation of Le
neveu de Rameau. Schiller’s death.
Epilogue or Schiller’s second career in the spirit of Goethe.
Bibliography
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Notes
Index of Persons
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Prologue
Friendship in the true meaning of the word is rare. To Aristotle we owe the
epigram: ‘my friends, there are no friends.’ Kant remarks, referring to
Aristotle, that friendship’ conceived in its ‘purity’ and ‘completeness’ is
doubtless no more than a ‘hobbyhorse of the novelists’. True friendship is at
any rate rarer than the inflationary use of the word might suggest. Goethe
and Schiller thought of their friendship as a strange, rare growth, a stroke of
fortune, a gift. They thought there was something incredible about what they
had achieved between them, whether by good luck or good management,
and they were both lost in wonder at it. Looking back, Goethe called
friendship a lucky event. It remains just that for us today, since we would
have to look long and hard at the history of the mind to find anything
comparable – to discover two men of the greatest gifts, putting aside their
differences and coming together for the stimulating exchange of ideas and
even joint labour.
Even at the time the friendship between the two was regarded as the
stuff legends are made of. The two friends were transformed into princes
among poets dwelling on a literary Olympus, and they were referred to as
the ‘Dioscuri’. Envy and resentment were also unavoidable. If people felt
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unable to criticize either of them, they could at least play one off against the
other, or rank them in a hierarchy. Who was the more important of the two
or could both of them be overestimated? Officially, they were both soon
revered as classics, sculpted in marble, but every generation produced its
rebels. When Goethe published his correspondence with Schiller in 1829,
Grabbe called it a ‘collection of cheap trivia’, and Börne wrote ‘that in their
own homes our two greatest minds are nothing at all…it is a true
miracle…the transformation of gold into lead.’
Goethe and Schiller were prepared for the day when people would
weary of them and they pre-empted this by practising the art of roundly
abusing their audience. They thought of their friendship as an alliance that
enabled them cheerfully to hurl heir thunderbolts at their literary
contemporaries. Goethe and Schiller had been rivals before they became
friends. Goethe felt oppressed by the fame the younger man had attracted. In
his eyes, Schiller was initially nothing more than an unwelcome memory of
his own Storm and Stress phase, which now lay behind him. For his part,
Schiller regarded Goethe as a proud prude who needed to be made pregnant
so as to humiliate him in the eyes of the world. Much had to change before
Schiller could write, ‘How keenly I have felt that… when confronted by
excellence, there is no freedom but in love’. While Goethe could write to
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Schiller: ‘You have procured for me a second youth and have made me a
poet once more, a vocation I had as good as abandoned.’
The full story of what had brought about this change is the subject of
this book. How the young Schiller gazed upon the much admired Goethe
when he saw him for the first time as the Duke’s guest at the prize-giving at
the Karlsschule. How the next few years produced curious parallel
developments in the two men’s lives: flight and transformation for both of
them. Schiller fled from Stuttgart and beyond the reach of Duke Karl Eugen.
Goethe fled to Italy. Both men were liberated to pursue a new career as
writers. Then there were two love relationships. Schiller and Charlotte,
Goethe and Christiane. Goethe fell in love and committed himself to a
woman beneath him socially; Schiller did likewise, though in his case,
Charlotte was above him socially. This was followed by the laborious
process of coming closer to one another. Schiller made tentative approaches
to Goethe, while the latter kept his distance. Then, in Jena, in the summer of
1794, came the real breaking of the ice. That is when the correspondence
begins, probably the most important joint endeavour of the two men and the
most important source for this book. Their friendship lasted from 1794 to
Schiller’s death in May 1805. The polar opposites of character and
temperament led in both men to an intensification of their creative powers,
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in Goethe’s case during the first few years of their friendship, in Schiller’s in
its last years.
Montaigne regards a successful friendship as a process in which ‘two
souls are fused’. But this was not the case with Goethe and Schiller. They
were by no means absolutely of one mind and it was to the benefit of both
that they attempted no such thing. Given their very different natures, this
could have led only to disappointment. Goethe abided by the maxim he had
formulated in December 1798 in a letter to August Herder: ‘If only we were
more circumspect and attached ourselves to friends only from that side of
them that truly harmonizes with us, while ignoring the rest of them,
friendships would be far more enduring and undisrupted. Normally,
however, it is a delusion of youth, which we do not rid ourselves of even in
old age, that we expect a friend to be, as it were, another self, that he should
form a whole with us, a notion that we deceive ourselves about for a while,
but which cannot last.’
Goethe had initially allowed only one side of himself to become
attached to Schiller and Schiller likewise was careful not to place too much
weight on the relationship. But what bound them to each other was
important enough. It was in fact the most important thing of all: the effort
they expended on their own writings, which in their friendship became a
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shared endeavour. The pleasure they derived from feeling that this was at all
possible enabled them to go beyond a merely one-sided contact.
Nevertheless, the work relationship remained the basis and the core. To lend
each other assistance and encourage each other through the intensive
exchange of ideas and feelings – that was the declared purpose of their
friendship. Inclination, even love, Goethe remarked, contributes little to
friendship; a true, productive friendship consists in going through life in step
with one another, so that a friend can approve of my aims and I of his, and
we can go forward together. Schiller calls such a friendship a relationship
built on reciprocal perfectibility, and Goethe observed that if he wanted to
sum up the benefits of a friendship, he would say it had enabled him to
progress. So what we have, then, is an alliance for mutual assistance while
working away at oneself, a common enterprise for self-improvement. The
history of the friendship between Goethe and Schiller is a practical test of
the idea of education in the German classical age.
Goethe once confessed that the maxim ‘know thyself’, which sounds
so significant and canonical, had always appeared suspect to him because
when examining yourself, you can never quite determine whether what you
see is truly there or has been invented. He recommends making a detour via
the world since man knows himself only in so far as he knows the world and
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is known by it. For this reason, Goethe went on, instead of losing his way in
his internal hall of mirrors, he had made a practice in his later years of
directing his attention to ensuring that ‘others might recognize me so that
through them I might obtain greater clarity about myself and my inner
being’. In this respect, meeting Schiller must have been a great stroke of
good fortune for him. A better mirror than Schiller, that genius of reflection,
he could not have found. Goethe made use of Schiller to shed some light on
the riches of his inner life. Why was this inner life so rich? Quite simply
because he had absorbed so much from the external world. Every new
object, contemplated fully, opens up a new organ in us. The reverse is true of
Schiller. He complained about his lack of worldly experience. He wrote to
Goethe in 1795: ‘I often find it strange to think of how you have been hurled
into the world, while I sit surrounded by my paper windowpanes with
nothing before my eyes but paper.’ Schiller, surrounded by his paper
windowpanes, had a surplus of reflexivity. The weight of his experience did
not quite match his intellect. He could make his mind available to his friend
to use as a mirror and to tap his experience of life. Goethe could offer him an
entire continent, and if he could not appropriate it, he could at least explore
it. Moreover, Goethe, with his genius for intuition, could inspire him with
confidence in his own unconscious powers. Only through his friendship with
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Goethe did Schiller learn that a man’s creative powers are rooted in a realm
that by its very nature cannot be grasped by conceptual thinking. The two
men complemented each other to a miraculous degree; the one took care of
clarity and consciousness, the other of the creative links to the opaque and
the unconscious. Their common ideal was to bring the two regions together
– idea and experience, freedom and nature, concept and ambiguity. They
themselves dubbed it the ‘classical’ – and posterity emphasized this even
more than they had done. In this way, the two friends took pleasure in each
other and made use of one another. ‘Keep on introducing me to my own
works,’ Goethe wrote and Schiller replied: ‘The mercurial nature of your
imagination amazes and delights me, and even if I cannot follow your
example, it is pleasurable and profitable for me to see what you have done.’
When Schiller died, Goethe realized that an epoch of his life had
come to a close. The bonds between them had become so intimate that
Goethe was able to confess to Zelter, the friend of his later years, ‘I thought I
had lost myself and find that I have now lost a friend and with him half my
life.’ Schiller died without being able to pass a final judgement on this
period of their friendship. He died in the midst of his own work, and the
work they did together. He was busy engaged on looking through Goethe’s
notes on Diderot’s Neveu de Rameau. In his last letter, he wrote,
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‘Meanwhile, I find myself in some disagreement with you on this point.’
Their friendship has many dimensions and is rich in the stories it gives rise
to. This explains why so much can be done with it.
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