12 - Schiller and his public

Summary

Foreign readers of Schiller enjoy one distinct avantage over their German counterparts. They do not bring to the writer the inevitable prejudices and preconceptions that Schiller's name activates in his countrymen even today. To this day Schiller is the victim of the legend, indeed the cult, that arose around him during the nineteenth century and which reached its high point in the exorbitant praises of the centenary celebrations of 1859. Such adulation, coupled with force-feeding in school, could not but provoke in time a reaction of satiety, boredom and outright rejection. And Schiller might be seen doubly as victim of his own legend, for literary history has given Goethe and Schiller the title of Klassiker, setting them apart from and above their own age. This designation has tended to obscure their involvement in the debates of their times, reduce awareness of the experimental character of their work and thus make them suitable targets for iconoclastic reassessments.

The German words Klassik and Klassizismus can be translated into English by only one word, ‘classicism’, which cannot convey the particular connotations of the two German words. Klassizismus has come to be applied to works which imitate those of the ancients, and is often used when a distinction is being drawn between the classical influence on works of earlier eighteenth-century authors such as Gottsched and J. E. Schlegel, or the rococo, and those of Goethe and Schiller. Klassik at its most restricted is the term reserved for that phase of the work of Goethe and Schiller from Goethe's Italian journey in 1786 to Schiller's death in 1805.