Foreword

Summary

Who is this Schiller?

This convulser of the heart?

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge

WHO IS THIS SCHILLER? Who has he been? Who is this Schiller now? When is this Schiller? Whose Schiller is this? What is Schiller? A dramatist, a poet, a historian, an aesthetician, a philosopher, an essayist, a political theorist? The 2009 Long Beach Schiller Conference sought contemporary answers to the question already posed in 1794 by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the translator of Wallenstein (1800), and to the many questions and responses that followed and still linger. The revised lectures presented here address Coleridge's question both indirectly and directly. The responses demonstrate several trends that indicate pronounced shifts from widespread twentieth-century understandings of Schiller. In accordance with important Schiller scholarship of the second half of the twentieth century and in particular in the most recent decade, but in stark contrast to the common convictions of the generally less well-read, little or no trace is left of Schiller the lopsidedly abstract idealist who turned his back on politics. That widespread yet demonstrably ignorant fashionable view, commonly espoused from the late 1950s through the 1980s, has been rejected as a scholarly aberration imposed by a combination of the intrusion of German history and a plethora of competing “politically correct” agendas, this latter concept itself already grown heavy with its own antique 1980s dustiness. The essays presented here, by senior and junior Schiller scholars alike, emphasize and document instead Schiller the cosmopolitan realist, from his balanced views of the dynamics of religious conflict to his warnings regarding the dangers of imbalance itself, be it moral, psychological, aesthetic, or political.