The German Genius

pre-Darwinian world.
    As Aristotle—and Leibniz—had before him, Herder sought to integrate the inner development of man with his outer, social arrangements. 57 In his lifetime (he died in 1803) the advent of the industrial revolution was not yet well enough advanced to have an impact in Germany (or anywhere for that matter), but the disjunction between the inner world and the outer, social world, would come to dominate nineteenth-century thought above everything else, as the concept of “alienation,” preoccupying everyone from Hegel to Karl Marx to Freud. Herder was the first to outline these lineaments in a language we recognize today.
    N EW F ORMS OF N OBILITY
     
    Johann Christoph Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) was born in Marbach am Neckar. His father was a military surgeon, and Friedrich was given a medical training in addition to a good general education. The medical faculty at the military academy at Marbach was excellent, and Schiller proved to be an exceptional pupil: his thesis—on physiology—was approved for publication by none other than the duke himself. (In small states dukes and princes sometimes took a personal interest in their clever charges.) Schiller’s thesis was accepted only on the third attempt—but even so he broke new ground, first bursting on the world as a scientist. In his 1780 thesis, titled On the Connection between the Animal and Spiritual Nature of Man , Schiller not only advanced the view that the mind regulates the body, and vice versa, but he also argued that “harmony” between the two was not the “default” position, as we would say today, but rather that human physiology “is a tension-filled process,” a precarious balance that needs to be nurtured and maintained. Within this view is the implication that such things as diet, physical circumstances, and personal relationships have an effect on “mental health” and not just one’s relationship with God.
    Medicine, important as it was for Schiller, was not his first love. At school, the Karlsschule, he was introduced to Kant, particularly his writings on aesthetics, and to Shakespeare (Schiller became known, later in life, as “the German Shakespeare”). Together with Goethe, Schiller’s works comprise the main elements in the “canon” now known as “Weimar classicism.” 58
    As with Herder, Schiller’s early adult life was unsettled—he moved around, from Mannheim to Dresden to Leipzig. His first play, Die Räuber ( The Robbers ), was written in 1781, printed at his own expense, and performed the following year in Mannheim. The central character is the leader in a band of robbers, but the chief theme is that leader’s rejection of the values of his father. The play is essentially about the nature of liberty—to what extent is it inner freedom, and to what extent outer social/political freedom?—such a focus being new and daring (at least in Germany with its many absolutist states). 59
    Among all Schiller’s plays, Kabale und Liebe ( Intrigue and Love , 1784), has always been the most popular, surviving everywhere as Luisa Miller in Giuseppe Verdi’s opera of that name. The play is an attack on the cruelty and oppressiveness of absolutism. Ferdinand and Luise, the two main characters, try to escape their class and the bourgeois and aristocratic conventions that imprison them. They fail. Ferdinand is prepared to risk all but not Luise, who (correctly) anticipates there will be reprisals against her father. Schiller’s point is that, under absolutism, characters are unable to become autonomous. 60
    Schiller’s first “overwhelming” masterpiece came next, Don Carlos being welcomed by a critic as “one of the world’s greatest pieces of literature.” 61 Here the theme of conflict between father and son is continued. Set in sixteenth-century Spain during the reign of Phillip II, Don Carlos, heir to the throne, is in love with his childhood friend, Elisabeth of Valois, to whom he was once betrothed but who is now his stepmother following her marriage to Phillip. Carlos is determined to resolve his passion for Elisabeth, and to do so enlists the aid of his friend, Rodrigo, Marquis of Posa, whose task is to engineer a meeting between the two would-be lovers. But Posa, charged with arguing the case of the oppressed people of Flanders, sees in this an opportunity for Carlos to foment a full-scale rebellion against his father’s tyrannical regime, which extends not just to his political