Presidential Address (December, 2004) Schiller vs. Goethe: Revisiting the Conflicting Reception Vectors of Heinrich Heine, Ludwig Börne, and Wolfgang Menzel

Summary

IN THE CUSTOMARY OVERVIEW of German literary history, the reputations of Goethe and Schiller come into a contradictory relationship around the end of Goethe's life, with Schiller for a time ranked in some quarters higher than Goethe on grounds of freedom, moral purity, and patriotism, at least up to the Schiller Centennial of 1859, after which they gradually come to be seen as complementary but with Goethe as, so to speak, the senior partner. The nonantagonistic relationship was already imaged in 1857 by Ernst Rietschel's Goethe-Schiller monument in Weimar, where Goethe not only appears as the protective older brother but also as slightly taller than Schiller, which I believe was not the case in real life. But at first, as Norbert Oellers put it: “Die Volkstümlichkeit Schillers … befestigte sich sogar in dem Maße, in dem das Ansehen Goethes zur gleichen Zeit sank.” However, the initial situation at the end of Goethe's life is convoluted and, since it has not always been clearly seen, another look at the details may be appropriate as we approach yet another Schiller anniversary.

In Heinrich Heine's perhaps best written and certainly most disastrously conceived book, Ludwig Börne. Eine Denkschrift of 1840, Börne, during Heine's visit to him in November 1827, is made to praise Wolfgang Menzel's Die deutsche Literatur, which had just appeared, postdated 1828, especially for its hard line against Goethe: Menzel “hat viel Courage, er ist ein grundehrlicher Mann, und ein großer Gelehrter! An dem Goethe ist gar nichts,er ist eine Memme,ein serviler Schmeichler und ein Dilettant.”