The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller

by Calvin Thomas

From the poem 'Evening', 1776.

When the Austrian War of Succession came to an end, in the year 1748, a certain young Suabian who had been campaigning in the Lowlands as army doctor was left temporarily without employment. The man's name was Johann Kaspar Schiller; he was of good plebeian stock and had lately been a barber's apprentice,—a lot that he had accepted reluctantly when the poverty of a widowed mother compelled him to shift for himself at an early age. Having served his time and learned the trade of the barber-surgeon, he had joined a Bavarian regiment of hussars. Finding himself now suddenly at leisure, after the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, he mounted his horse and rode away to the land of his birth to visit his relations. Reaching Marbach—it was now the spring of 1749—he put up at the 'Golden Lion', an inn kept by a then prosperous baker named Kodweis. Here he fell in love with his landlord's daughter Dorothea, a girl of sixteen, and in the course of the summer married her. He was at this time about twenty-six years old. He now settled down In Marbach to practice his crude art, but the practice came to little and Kodweis soon lost his property in foolish speculation. So the quondam soldier fell out of humor with Marbach, went into the army again, and when the Seven Years' War broke out, in 1756, he took the field with a Württemberg regiment to fight the King of Prussia. He soon reached the grade of lieutenant, in time that of captain; fought and ran with his countrymen, at Leuthen, floundered at peril of life in the swamps of Breslau and otherwise got his full share of the war's rough-and-tumble. From time to time, as the chance came to him, he visited his young wife in Marbach.

These were the parents of the poet Schiller, who was born November 10, 1759, ten years after Goethe, ten years before Napoleon. It is worth remembering that he who was to be in his way, another great protestant came into the world on an anniversary of the birth of Lather. He was christened Johann Christoph Friedrich.

The childhood of little Fritz unfolded amid conditions that must have given to life a rather somber aspect. After the close of the war Captain Schiller moved his little family to Lorch, a village some thirty miles east of Stuttgart, where he was employed by the Duke of Württemberg in recruiting soldiers for mercenary service abroad. This hateful business, which was in due time to form a mark for one of the sharp darts of 'Cabal and Love', seems to have been managed by him with a degree of tact and humanity; for he won the esteem of all with whom he had to do. At home, being of a pious turn and setting great store by the formal exercises of religion, he presided over his household in the manner of an ancient patriarch. Between him and his son no very tender relation ever existed, though the poet of later years always revered his father's character. The child's affections clung rather to his mother, whom he grew up to resemble in form and feature and in traits of character. She was a woman of no intellectual pretensions, but worthy of honor for her qualities of heart.[1] Of education in the modern sense she had but little. Her few extant letters, written mostly in her later years, tell of a simple and lovable character, tenderly devoted to husband and children. Tradition credits her with a certain liking for feeble poets of the Uz and Gellert strain, but this probably did not amount to much. Her sphere of interest was the little world of family cares and affections. Her early married life had been darkened by manifold sorrows which she bore at first with pious resignation, becoming with the flight of time, however, more and more a borrower of trouble.[2] At Lorch her trials were great, for Captain Schiller received no pay and the family felt the pinch of poverty. Here, then, was little room for that merry comradeship, with its Lust zum Fabulieren, which existed between the boy Goethe and his playmate mother at Frankfurt-on-the-Main.

In after-time, nevertheless, Schiller was wont to look back upon the three years at Lorch as the happiest part of his childhood. The village is charmingly situated in the valley of the Rems, a tributary of the Neckar, and the region round about is historic ground. A short walk southward brings one to the Hohenstaufen, on whose summit once stood the ancestral seat of the famous Suabian dynasty, and close by Lorch is the Benedictine monastery in which a number of the Hohenstaufen monarchs are buried. Here was the romance of history right at hand, but we can hardly suppose that it meant much to the child. The Middle Ages were not yet in fashion even for adults, and little Fritz had other things to think of. With his sister Christophine, two years older than himself, he was sent to the village school, where he proved so apt a pupil that his parents became ambitious for him and sent him to the village pastor, a man named Moser, to be taught Latin. The child looked up to his august teacher and resolved to become himself some day a preacher of the word. Not much is known of Moser, but to judge from his namesake in 'The Robbers', where all passions and qualities are raised to the _n_th power, he must have been a man for whom the reproof of sinners was not only a professional duty but a personal pleasure. The plan of making their Fritz a man of God was eagerly embraced by the pious parents and became a settled family aspiration.

The boy himself was very susceptible at this time to religious impressions. Sister Christophine carried with her through life a vivid memory of his appearance at family worship, when the captain would solemnly intone the rimed prayers that he himself had composed for a private ritual. 'It was a touching sight', she says in her recollections[3] of this period, 'to see the reverent expression on the child's winsome face. The pious blue eyes lifted to heaven, the light yellow hair falling about his forehead, and the little hands folded in worship, suggested an angel's head in a picture.' From the same source we learn that Fritz was very fond of playing church, with himself in the role of preacher. Another reminiscence tells how he one day ran away from school and, having unexpectedly fallen under the paternal eye in his truancy, rushed home to his mother in tearful excitement, got the rod of correction and besought her to give him his punishment before his sterner parent should arrive on the scene. Still another, from a somewhat later period, relates how the mother was once walking with her children and told them a Bible story so touchingly that they all knelt down and prayed. This is about all that has come down concerning Schiller's early childhood. He may have seen the passion-play at Gmünd, but this is uncertain. In any case it only added one more to the religious impressions that already dominated his life.

Toward the end of the year 1766, having exhausted his private resources at Lorch, Captain Schiller applied for relief and was transferred to duty at Ludwigsburg, where the family remained under somewhat more tolerable conditions for about nine years. At Ludwigsburg he began to interest himself in agriculture and forestry. In 1769 he published certain 'Economic Contributions', which exhibit him as a sensible, public-spirited man, eagerly bent upon improving the condition of Suabian husbandry. In 1775, having become known as an expert in arboriculture, he was placed in charge of the ducal forests and nurseries at Castle Solitude, and there he spent the remainder of his days in peaceful and congenial activity. He died in 1796.

For the impressionable Fritz one can hardly imagine a more momentous change of environment than this which took him from a quiet rural village to the garish Residenz of a licentious and extravagant prince. Karl Eugen,[4] Duke of Württemberg, whom men have often called the curse, but the gods haply regard as the good genius, of Schiller's youth, came to power in 1744 at the age of sixteen. The three preceding years he had spent at the Prussian court, where Frederick the Second (not yet the Great) had taken a deep interest in him and tried to teach him serious views of a ruler's responsibility. But the youth had no stomach for the doctrine that he was in the world for the sake of Württemberg. Having come to his ducal throne prematurely, through the influence of the King of Prussia, he began well, but after a few years shook off the restraints of good advice and entered upon a course of autocratic folly that made Württemberg a far-shining example of the evils of absolutism under the Old Régime. Early in his reign he married a beautiful and high-minded princess of Bayreuth, but his profligacy soon drove her back to the home of her parents. Then a succession of mistresses ruled his affections, while reckless adventurers in high place enjoyed his confidence and fleeced the people at pleasure. To gratify his passion for military display he began to raise unnecessary troops and to hire them out as mercenaries. In 1752 he agreed with the King of France, in consideration of a fixed annual subsidy, to supply six thousand soldiers on demand. The money thus obtained was mostly squandered upon his private vices and extravagances. On the outbreak of the Seven Years' War the French king demanded the promised troops; and so it came about that the Suabian Protestants were compelled, in defiance of public sentiment, to make war against their co-religionists of Prussia. In the inglorious campaigns which followed, the Duke of Württemberg cut a rather sorry figure, but criticism only exasperated him. He promised another large body of troops to France, and the men were raised by harsh measures of conscription. The Estates of the duchy protested against this autocratic procedure, and, as Stuttgart sided with the opposition, the duke determined to punish his unruly capital by removing his court to Ludwigsburg, where an ancestor of his, early in the century, had founded a city to match Versailles and serve the express purpose of a 'Trutz-Stuttgart'.

The removal of the court to Ludwigsburg took place in 1764, three years before the Schiller family found a home there. From the first a purely artificial creation, the little city had been going backwards, but it now leaped into short-lived glory as the residence of a prodigal prince who was bent on amusing himself magnificently. The existing ducal palace was enlarged to huge dimensions and lavishly decorated. Great parks and gardens were laid out, the market-place was surrounded with arcades, and an opera-house was built, with a stage that could be extended into the open air so as to permit the spectacular evolution of real troops. Everything about the place was new and pretentious. The roomy streets and the would-be gorgeous palaces, flaunting their fresh coats of yellow and white stucco, teemed with officers in uniform, with blazing little potentates of the court and with high-born ladies in the puffs and frills of the rococo age. Here Karl Eugen gave himself up to his dream of glory, which was to rival the splendors of Versailles. He maintained a costly opera, procuring for it the most famous singers and dancers in Europe, and squandered immense sums upon 'Venetian nights' and other gorgeous spectacles. For all this barbaric ostentation the people of Württemberg were expected to foot the bills. 'Fatherland!' said his Highness, when a protest was raised on behalf of the country, 'Bah! I am the fatherland.'

Here it was, then, that the young Friedrich Schiller got his first childish impressions of the great world; of sovereignty exercised that a few might strut in gay plumage while the many toiled to keep them in funds; of state policies determined by wretched court intrigues; of natural rights trampled upon at the caprice of a prince or a prince's favorite. There is no record that the boy was troubled by these things at the time, or looked upon them as anything else than a part of the world's natural order. It is a long way yet to President von Walter.