Schiller's friendship with Goethe remade German letters
Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805), playwright, poet, philosopher and historian, stands among Germany's classical giants. The son of a Lutheran army doctor, he was meant for the pulpit, trained in medicine at a ducal military academy, and became famous overnight with his first play, The Robbers.
He was born in Marbach in Württemberg while his father was away at the Seven Years' War, the only boy among six children, and named for Frederick the Great though everyone called him Fritz. In Lorch he often skipped poor lessons with his elder sister Christophine, but the village priest, Father Moser, taught him Latin and Greek so well that Schiller later gave his name to a character in The Robbers. As a boy he dressed in black and played at preaching.
Unpaid for three years, his father moved the family to Ludwigsburg, where Duke Karl Eugen noticed the boy and placed him in the Karlsschule in 1773. He began in law, switched to medicine and qualified as a doctor in 1780, while reading Rousseau and Goethe. The Robbers, about a noble son turned Robin Hood-style bandit and his scheming younger brother, stunned audiences with its republican fire and later earned him honorary citizenship of the French Republic.
Leaving his regiment without permission to see its Mannheim premiere cost him fourteen days' arrest and a publishing ban, so in 1782 he fled Stuttgart, drifting through several cities, an affair with the married Charlotte von Kalb and serious debt. He settled in Weimar in 1787, became a history professor at Jena in 1789 and married Charlotte von Lengefeld in 1790; they had four children.
From 1788 he formed a productive if complicated friendship with Goethe, pressing him to finish abandoned sketches and co-writing the satirical Xenien. Back in Weimar from 1799, the pair founded the Weimar Theater, Germany's leading stage. Ennobled in 1802, he died of tuberculosis at 45. DNA tests in 2008 showed the skull in his ducal-vault coffin was not his, leaving the tomb empty.
Source: Friedrich Schiller
