Rüdiger Safranski Goethe und Schiller Geschichte einer ...

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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