Who Is This Schiller Now? Essays on His Reception and Significance (Camden House, 2011)

Co-edited with Jeffrey L. High and Norbert Oellers.

The works of Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) - an innovative and resonant tragedian and an important poet, essayist, historian, and aesthetic theorist - are among the best known of German and world literature. Schiller's explosive original artistry and feel for timely and enduring personal tragedy embedded in timeless socio-historical conflicts remain the topic of lively academic debate. The essays in this volume address the many flashpoints and canonical shifts in the cyclically polarized reception of Schiller and his works, in pursuit of historical and contemporary answers to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's expression of frightened admiration in 1794: "Who is this Schiller?" The responses demonstrate pronounced shifts from widespread twentieth-century understandings of Schiller: the overwhelming emphasis here is on Schiller the cosmopolitan realist, and little or no trace is left of the ultimately untenable view of Schiller as an abstract idealist who turned his back on politics.

Ehrhard Bahr, Matthew Bell, Frederick Burwick, Jennifer Driscoll Colosimo, Bernd Fischer, Gail K. Hart, Fritz Heuer, Hans H. Hiebel, Jeffrey L. High, Walter Hinderer, Paul E. Kerry, Erik B. Knoedler, Elisabeth Krimmer, Maria del Rosario Acosta López, Laura Anna Macor, Dennis F. Mahoney, Nicholas Martin, John A. McCarthy, Yvonne Nilges, Norbert Oellers, Peter Pabisch, David Pugh, T. J. Reed, Wolfgang Riedel, Jörg Robert, Ritchie Robertson, Jeffrey L. Sammons, Henrik Sponsel.

Jeffrey L. High is Associate Professor of German Studies at California State University Long Beach, Nicholas Martin is Reader in European Intellectual History at the University of Birmingham, and Norbert Oellers is Professor Emeritus of German Literature at the University of Bonn.

Schiller: National Poet – Poet of Nations. A Birmingham Symposium (Rodopi, 2006)

Edited volume

To mark the 200th anniversary of Schiller’s death, leading scholars (including Norbert Oellers, T. J. Reed, Lesley Sharpe, Ritchie Robertson, Francis Lamport and David Pugh) have contributed commemorative essays to this volume. These were first presented at a symposium hosted by the Department of German Studies at the University of Birmingham in June 2005.

The essays collected here shed important new light on Schiller’s standing as a national and trans-national figure, both in his own lifetime and in the two hundred years since his death. Issues explored include: aspects of Schiller’s life and work which contributed to the creation of heroic and nationalist myths of the poet during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; his activities as man of the theatre and publisher in his own, pre-national context; the (trans-)national dimensions of Schiller’s poetic and dramatic achievement in their contemporary context and with reference to later appropriations of national(ist) elements in his work.

The contributions to this volume illuminate Schiller’s achievements as poet, playwright, thinker and historian, and bring acute insights to bear on both the history of his impact in a variety of contexts and on his enduring importance as a point of cultural reference.

CONTENTS

Nicholas Martin: Introduction: Schiller After Two Centuries
T. J. Reed: Wie hat Schiller überlebt?
Lesley Sharpe: A National Repertoire: Schiller and the Theatre of his Day
Norbert Oellers: Schiller, der “Heros”. Mit ergänzenden Bemerkungen zu einigen seiner Dramen-Helden
Jochen Golz: Monumente zu Lebzeiten? – Schiller als Herausgeber seiner Werke
K. F. Hilliard: “Nicht in Person sondern durch einen Repräsentanten”: Problematik der Repräsentation bei Schiller
David Hill: Lenz and Schiller: All’s well that ends well
Steffan Davies: Schiller’s Egmont and the Beginnings of Weimar Classicism
John Guthrie: Language and Gesture in Schiller’s Later Plays
Francis Lamport: Virgins, Bastards and Saviours of the Nation: Reflections on Schiller’s Historical Dramas
Ritchie Robertson: Schiller and the Jesuits
Alexander Košenina: Schiller’s Poetics of Crime
Jeffrey L. High: Schiller, “merely political Revolutions”, the personal Drama of Occupation, and Wars of Liberation
Maike Oergel: The German Identity, the German Querelle and the Ideal State: A Fresh Look at Schiller’s Fragment “Deutsche Größe”
David Pugh: Schiller and the Crisis of German Liberalism
Nicholas Martin: Images of Schiller in National Socialist Germany
Paul Bishop: The “Schillerbild” of Werner Deubel: Schiller as “Poet of the Nation”?
Anhang/Appendix: Schillerjahr 2005. Selected Events and Publications
Personenregister/Index of Names
Register der Werke Schillers/Index of Schiller’s Works

Nietzsche and the German Tradition (Peter Lang, 2003)

Edited volume

The essays collected in this volume are selected papers from the 7th Annual Conference of the Friedrich Nietzsche Society, which was held at the University of St Andrews in September 1997.

The three distinct but related issues examined in this book are centrally important to the search for Nietzsche's intellectual and cultural roots. The first concerns Nietzsche's attitudes to his German cultural tradition, the second is Nietzsche's view of his German present, and the final issue is the extent to which dealing with Nietzsche and his legacies has itself become a tradition since his death in 1900.

Implicitly or explicitly, the contributors reveal Nietzsche's ambivalent, double-edged attitude to tradition. All the essays collected here take account of the latest developments in Nietzsche scholarship and, together, make an important contribution both to understanding the ways in which Nietzsche problematises tradition and to recognising the difficulties, and opportunities, arising from the Nietzschean tradition(s) of the last hundred years.

CONTENTS: Daniel W. Conway: Nietzsche's Germano-mania - Thomas H. Brobjer: Nietzsche as German Philosopher: His Reading of the Classical German Philosophers - Christa Davis Acampora: 'The Contest Between Nietzsche and Homer': Revaluing the Homeric Question - Duncan Large: 'Der Bauernaufstand des Geistes': Nietzsche, Luther and the Reformation - Ben Morgan: Fear and Self-Control in The Antichrist: Nietzsche's Prussian Past - Christopher Janaway: Schopenhauer as Nietzsche's Educator - Hans-Gerd von Seggern: Nietzsches (anti-)naturalistische Ästhetik in der Geburt der Tragödie - Paul J. M. van Tongeren: Nietzsche's Naturalism - Jim Urpeth: Nietzsche and the Rapture of Aesthetic Disinterestedness: A Response to Heidegger - Gerd Schank: Race and Breeding in Nietzsche's Philosophy - Malcolm Humble: Heinrich Mann and Arnold Zweig: Left-Wing Nietzscheans? - Nicholas Martin: Nietzsche in the GDR: History of a Taboo.

Literary Reflections of Modern War (2005)

Ed., Special Issue of Forum for Modern Language Studies, Vol. 41, no. 2 (2005)

Nietzsche and Schiller: Untimely Aesthetics (Oxford University Press, 1996)

Single-authored monograph

Nietzsche's Die Geburt der Tragodie and Schiller's Asthetische Briefe are two texts which make a vital contribution to the history of aesthetic and cultural theory. This is the first work to make a comparative study of the texts, bringing a mutually illuminating perspective to bear on them.

Dr Martin counters the widespread belief that Nietzsche and Schiller represent a black-and-white contrast, showing the wide extent of the early Nietzsche's debt to Schiller's aesthetics, and drawing a convincing picture of the common aesthetic ground shared by the two writers. The four key aspects of their aesthetic theories are compared: the brilliant diagnoses of cultural crisis; the historical framework of each theory; the catalytic function of the Greek experience in both theories; and the metaphysical and psychological underpinnings by which the theories stand or fall. At the heart of the study lie the claims of both Nietzsche and Schiller for the `untimeliness' of their texts. Dr Martin concludes that, whatever the shortcomings of the texts, they remain outstanding and enduringly relevant contributions both to aesthetic theory and to our understanding of what it is to be human.