The German Genius

Naïve and Sentimental Poetry ) Schiller carried his argument still further and produced a thesis that some, at least, have seen as “one of the founding documents of literary modernity.” His argument here is that the naïve poet is preoccupied with nature, whereas the sentimental poet is preoccupied with art and that something is lost in the latter process. 67 For Schiller, human beings in antiquity were closer to nature, and therefore were “more human” than they are now, primarily because they were less corrupted by culture (here is one origin of the German distinction between culture and civilization). For him the Greeks were more noble than we are, precisely because they disclaim “any desire to be more than human.” 68 Poetry therefore ennobles us only insofar as it keeps us close to our true nature. This aspiration to nobility, to self-improvement, to Bildung, on the part of the middle classes was for him (as it was for others in the eighteenth century, such as Edward Gibbon, Hume, and Adam Smith), “the most important element in modern history.” 69
    Having made his mark as a medical scientist, a playwright, a theorist about poetry, and a philosopher of aesthetics, in 1792 Schiller turned historian and published his Geschichte des Dreissigjährigen Krieges ( History of the Thirty Years War ), in which he painted some unforgettable pictures of the main protagonists, most notably Gustavus Adolphus and Wallenstein. 70 Work on this book seems to have given him new ideas about the dramatic realm because, four years later, he began his three great late dramas, which were to join the canon of the Weimar classics. These were Wallenstein , Maria Stuart , and Wilhelm Tell .
    Wallenstein , completed in 1799, when Schiller was forty, shows him gathering strength as a tragedian. Lessing, in his Hamburgische Dramaturgie , had argued in favor of bourgeois tragedy, on the grounds that “the concept of the state is far too abstract to appeal to our senses.” Schiller, in complete contrast, took a leaf out of the Greek book, realizing that the stage is essentially an aesthetic public space, making it perhaps the only location where we can overcome the alienation between the state and the individual.
    Count Albrecht Wallenstein, a (real) Bohemian Protestant who has become a Catholic, serves Emperor Ferdinand, becoming the Thirty Years’ War’s most famous commander. Wallenstein is as ferocious as any of those who have committed atrocities during the conflict but, in 1643, he sees a chance of concluding a peace with the (Protestant) Swedes, despite the fact that such a peace is against the will of the emperor. Wallenstein’s initiative is not carried out only from the highest motives, of course—he has been as corrupted as the next man—and he himself is accused of treason and murdered on the emperor’s orders, and the peace negotiations founder. But Schiller is asking here whether motives need to be pure for peace, suggesting that war is so corrupting that even a peace achieved for less than pure motives is still a noble aim.
    Every hand is raised
Against the other. Each one has his side.
No one can judge. When will it end and who
Untie the knot that endlessly adds to
Itself.
     
    Wallenstein seizes the moment, but the moment backfires. The experience of revolution, Schiller is saying, teaches us that any attempt to destroy an existing state based on pure reason (i.e., ignoring other political realities and the existing power structure and the emotions they engender) produces only catastrophe and chaos. 71 The plot, and indeed the character of Wallenstein, are much closer to Schiller’s own time than to the Thirty Years’ War, which is the setting. Wallenstein himself is closer to Napoleon than to any personages in the earlier conflict, and contemporary audiences recognized this. Wallenstein is important because it is an early sighting of that (predominantly German) view that reason is not the be-all and end-all of forces shaping the human condition, a tradition that was to consume Marx, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Richard Wagner, and culminate in Nietzsche, Freud, and Martin Heidegger.
    Schiller has given us some of the most magnificent women of the stage. In Intrigue and Love , the skirmishes between Luise and Lady Milford, who occupies a much higher social standing, are a remarkable rhetorical duel. In Maria Stuart the rivalry between Elizabeth and Mary is, if anything, an even higher level of combat. The