Introduction: Why Is This Schiller [Still] in the United States?

Introduction: Why Is This Schiller [Still] in the United States? Jeffrey L. High HE INTERNATIONAL SCHILLER CONFERENCE, “Who is this Schiller T[now]?” took place from Thursday 10 September through Saturday 12 September 2009 in the The Karl Anatol Center for Faculty Development at California State University Long Beach (CSULB). This volume com- prises the revised and expanded papers of what was an unusually lively and productive conference on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of Friedrich Schiller’s birth in 1759. The conference featured thirty-one papers in the course of three days. The average paper drew an audience of over eighty listeners, from a high of more than 120 listeners for a paper delivered in English on Thursday to a low of more than sixty-five listeners for a paper delivered in German on a Saturday — on a commuter campus. Although a substantial number of the audience members were academics from other universities in Southern California and from other programs and departments at CSULB, the largest group of audience members was made up of undergraduate and graduate students from CSULB, young people, educated in Southern California, and, once exposed to them, enthusiastic students of Schiller and his works. Why was “Who is this Schiller [now]?” held in the United States and why did a Schiller conference attract such an unusually large and dedicated audience? There are compelling reasons that have deep roots in US political and — to a lesser extent — immigration history; in the parallels between the moral-political philosophy of the founders of the United States and Schiller’s own, and thus in US-American identity formation; and, subsequently, in US theater history and in the most resonant — and Schillerian — tropes of US-American art. In an article by New York Times theater critic Matthew Gurewitsch in May 2009, British theater and film director Phyllida Lloyd (Mary Stuart, Mama Mia) is quoted expressing her surprise at Schiller’s US presence. At a Mary Stuart rehearsal in New York, soon after her jog through Central Park was interrupted by the sight of the Schiller bust that has stood there since 1859, Lloyd registered her surprise: “I’ve discovered that Schiller has had an extraordinary place in America that I was completely ignorant of . Here I thought we were pioneers. In the meantime, we’ve discovered WWTS_TEXT.inddTS_TEXT.indd 1 003/02/113/02/11 114:24:544:24:54 2 ! JEFFREY L. HIGH that Schiller was performed in the United States as early as the 18th cen- tury. There are statues to him everywhere.”1 Indeed, prominent Schiller statues grace US parks and gardens from the Northeast (Rochester, Syracuse) and the showplaces of the American War of Independence (Philadelphia) to the Midwest (Columbus, Cleveland, St. Louis, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul, Omaha) to the far west (San Francisco). Two hundred and thirty years before Lloyd rediscovered Schiller’s presence in the United States, in his first dissertation, Philosophie der Physiologie (Philosophy of Physiology, 1779), Schiller had documented that he had in fact been in the United States from the beginning, if at first only in theory: “Imagine I see the ocean. The ocean reminds me of a boat. The boat reminds me of the American war.”2 In a letter to Henriette von Wolzogen of 8 January 1783, as he begins writing Don Karlos, in his mind Schiller is already there: “If North America becomes free, then it is settled that I will go there.”3 Schiller (1759–1805) and the Early United States That Schiller was already “there,” and that he is still “here” makes perfect revolutionary-dramatic common sense. In his teenage years at the Hohe Karlsschule (1775–80), during the most eventful years of the US War of Independence (1775–83), Schiller studied the works of Common Sense Scottish philosophy taught by Abel and Plouquet, including several of the same works that had informed Thomas Jefferson’s education under William Small at the College of William and Mary, which subsequently informed the happiness discourse in the Declaration of Independence (4 July 1776).4 In this regard, three philosophers and texts are particularly significant: Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711) by Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713), An Inquiry Concerning Moral Good and Evil (1725) by Frances Hutcheson (1694– 1796), and Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) by Adam Ferguson (1723–1816). Here parallel liberal educations and tyrannical situations result in parallel pursuits: Jefferson cites all three during the American Revolution’s “pursuit of happiness,” and Schiller cites the same authors and works in his university treatises on virtue and happiness in 1779–80.5 Given the temporal and ideological proximity of Jefferson’s political works and Schiller’s earliest philosophical and literary works, and given the flood of news regarding the American War of Independence in Germany,6 it is hardly surprising that Schiller’s employment of the Scottish happiness discourse has a distinctly political and American flavor, however, one with Swabian roots as well. The exiled Ludwigsburg publisher and pro-Ameri- can poet and editor of the Augsburg newspaper Teutsche Chronik, Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart (1739–91), the father of Schiller’s classmate WWTS_TEXT.inddTS_TEXT.indd 2 003/02/113/02/11 114:24:544:24:54 INTRODUCTION ! 3 Ludwig Schubart, served as a role model for Schiller. Between 1774 and 1777, during Schiller’s years in Ludwigsburg and Stuttgart, Schubart published some 185 news items and commentaries on the political develop- ments in North America, overwhelmingly pro-revolutionary in tone. In April of 1775, Schubart published “From the Provinces of Freedom” in the Chronik, in which he states that an American war appears unavoidable, stressing that specifically “happiness” is at stake: “Boys and old men are reaching for their weapons, and everywhere dominates the terrible conclu- sion, ‘We want to die! To die for our holy freedom! Victory or death beneath the ruins of our fallen happiness!’”7 After reading reports about the Battle of Bunker Hill, Schubart wrote the poem “Freiheitslied eines Kolonisten” (Freedom Song of a Colonist, 1775) in which he focuses on the heroism of Connecticut Militia Colonel Israel Putnam. Schubart sees in the North American situation a model for German unity and the violent overthrow of feudalism: The Goddess Freedom’s flag does sway (One slaves can never heed). Go Brothers, see! She leads the way For her, prepare to bleed! Ha, Father Putnam leads the fight Our dangerous fate he’ll share; And like a Pharus tower to light The way his silver hair! . And there, behold Europa’s slaves How in their chains they rattle! Like herdsmen, tyrants need their knaves To live and die like cattle. Does he not signal us too? Father Putnam! Up brothers, to arms you speed! He who fears to fight for our freedom, Be cast into the sea!8 Schiller’s early intellectual environment appears to be of immediate political and rhetorical significance for his works. In October 1776 the publisher Balthasar Haug, also the father of one of Schiller’s classmates, published the first of Schiller’s poems anonymously. In “Der Abend” (At Dusk), in which Schiller refers to “other, oh happier worlds” (andre, ach glückselgre Welten; NA 1:3), it is evident from the description of the sun setting in Europe and rising across the Atlantic that by “happier worlds” North America is intended, and that Schiller, at the very start of his literary career, has also adopted “happiness” as the distinctive marker of the WWTS_TEXT.inddTS_TEXT.indd 3 003/02/113/02/11 114:24:544:24:54 4 ! JEFFREY L. HIGH discourse of modern revolution. One year after the appearance of the Declaration of Independence, Schubart, already excommunicated, was subsequently imprisoned from 1777–87 in the Hoher Asperg prison by Schiller’s own sovereign, Duke Karl Eugen, in part for his support of the US War of Independence, expressed in his news reports and poems, and in particular for his criticism of the Duke’s rumored sale of some three thou- sand Württembergian mercenaries to the British, a dereliction of feudal contract that would inform Schiller’s works for the better part of his career. Further evidence of Schiller’s ideological proximity to the American War of Independence and its philosophical codeword “happiness” can be found in his early dramas and poetry. In act 1, scene 7 of Kabale und Liebe (Intrigue and Love, 1782–84), written in the final years of the “American war,” Schiller delivered an entire thesis on anti-feudal happiness, featuring the terms “Glück” and “Glückseligkeit” (happiness) five times in less than half a page.9 Schiller himself testified in 1784 that he was indeed aware that the numerous references to happiness — or the lack thereof — and political freedom in Kabale und Liebe would be recognized by censors as criticism of pro-British German rulers in the conscious context of the American War of Independence.10 This is evident in his specific reference to the United States in his letter of 1 May 1784 to his theater director Wolfgang Heribert von Dalberg: “Iffland will play the Courtier, whom I have rein- serted into the play, while throwing out all American references.”11 For political reasons, Kabale und Liebe was originally performed without Schiller’s portrayal of the historical Ochsenfurt Mutiny of mercenaries of 10 May 1777, which ends with the troops’ ironic declaration of defeat, “Hurrah! To America!”12 In 1785, Schiller wrote what was to become

Load more