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‘I thought I had lost myself and find that I have now lost a friend and with him half my life.’ This is how Goethe wrote to the composer Karl Friedrich Zelter in 1805, deeply affected by the illness he had now recovered from and by Schiller’s death. His alliance with Schiller had assumed mythic proportions even during their lifetime. As Dioscuri, as heavenly twins in spirit, they both put their stamp on what is probably the most important epoch of German literature, the Classical period (of roughly 1790-1830). Even today, the era is so closely identified with their joint activities that the union of the two seems as immutable and statuesque as Ernst Rietschel’s famous double monument in the market square in Weimar.
And yet there could be no question of equality between the two, as Rüdiger Safranski shows in his book Goethe und Schiller: Geschichte einer Freundschaft (Goethe and Schiller: Story of a Friendship), which appeared in 2009. Goethe accompanied Karl August, Duke of Weimar to Stuttgart in 1779 to attend the commemoration of the opening of the Hohe Karlsschule and encountered Schiller on this occasion. But while Goethe, as the author of Götz von Berlichingen and The Sufferings of Young Werther, had already made a name for himself, Schiller was still a pupil at the school founded by Duke Karl Eugen. So what he wants is simply to attract Goethe’s attention, while for his part Goethe takes no notice of him. And yet, Schiller, too, had already launched himself as a writer; his play The Robbers was almost finished and was published two years later, while in 1782 the premiere in Mannheim was a triumphal success. However, when the Duke forbade him to continue writing he decided to escape.
On the one hand, then, the well-provided-for Privy Councillor and successful writer, on the other, the penniless refugee. Despite these very different lives, Safranski discerns the first signs of subsequent intersections and agreements. For Goethe’s flight across the Alps, his Italian Journey, was also an act of self-liberation, a step in the direction of an autonomous existence. And in fact the author of this double biography seems to have learned from his protagonists, since he conceives of the history and prehistory as a novel of education in the classical mould, in which the two poets are raised to a higher plane, one where they can be said to come into their own.
The circles of the future friends drew ever closer. Even before Goethe had returned from Rome in 1788, Schiller too moved to Weimar, that Athens in miniature which had attracted the entire intellectual elite of Germany, and not long after, he was made a professor of history in Jena. Safranski gives a vivid account of the initial difficulties in their personal relationship. He describes Goethe’s mistrustfulness and makes it clear that there was but little evidence pointing to their later friendship. It is a history of attraction and repulsion. Their view of themselves as writers was strikingly different. Schiller was concerned from the outset with his impact on the public; he regarded himself as a professional writer. By contrast, Goethe initially wrote for a small circle of educated people.
Their divergent approaches, their different views of nature, art and the French Revolution – all these stood between them when they met in Weimar for the first time in 1788. Schiller envied Goethe the apparent facility of his success as a writer. He regarded him as a competitor, writing to his friend Christian Gottfried Körner on 9 March 1789: This man, this Goethe, is standing in my way, and he often acts as a reminder to me of how badly fate has treated me. How lightly his genius is borne aloft by his destiny, and how hard I have had to fight right down to the present day’ After that initial disappointment (‘I doubt whether we shall ever come very close to each other’), it was not until the summer of 1794, after an invitation to contribute to Schiller’s journal Die Horen, that the ‘happy event’ of a genuine breakthrough took place, beginning with a conversation about Goethe’s ‘Metamorphosis of Plants’.
We are told much more about the friendship that now came into being, in particular, the interest each took in the other’s work. Schiller was given all the sections of Wilhelm Meister to read as they were written (while, for his part, he sought Goethe’s advice on Wallenstein). Schiller adapted Goethe’s Egmont for a stage production (not always to the latter’s satisfaction), while Goethe surrendered the subject-matter of William Tell to Schiller. Together they wrote the Xenia, both the tame and the less tame variety, while Goethe’s Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten [Conversations of German Émigrés] can be seen as a covert response to Schiller’s Aesthetic Letters. The genesis of these works, the creation of literature, and its roots in its age – all this becomes visible and comprehensible. And yet, their collaboration is not just about high-minded intellectual projects but is concerned also with simpler pleasures and worries, illnesses and cures, joint excursions and meals, money problems and professional quarrels – in short, with life itself.
And Safranski is not content simply to regurgitate long familiar facts. He has a talent for describing complicated relationships and events in a straightforward and vivid manner, as he has shown in his earlier books, biographies of Schopenhauer, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Schiller, his studies in evil and of Romanticism. And the same may be said of the present work. Herder and Wieland, Frau von Stein and Madame de Staël, the Schlegel brothers and Humboldt, Hölderlin and Fichte do not become our contemporaries, but they are brought to life.
Safranski is no detached, objective observer; he evaluates and judges. He also rejects some of the beliefs current among literary scholars. Goethe’s Märchen [A Fairy Tale], beloved and much interpreted because of its complexity, is nothing more than a ‘jeu d’esprit for generating interpretations, a kind of higher crossword puzzle’. Schiller’s and Goethe’s satirical verses on their rivals and on the literary situation appear to him to be ‘anodyne and feeble from where we are standing. It is hard to imagine why they should have been in fits of laughter as they wrote them.’
In Safranski’s eyes the alliance between Schiller and Goethe is a ‘practical test of the idea of culture in the age of German classicism’. His book is far more than the chronicle of a friendship. It is a lively, elegantly written portrait of an era. It will give pleasure both to those who know their Weimar and those for whom this is all unfamiliar. And, last but not least, it is a book that invites the reader to renew their acquaintance with the German classics.
Matthias Weichelt
August 2010
[Translated by Rodney Livingstone]
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