'Playing with the Rules: Schiller's Experiments in Short Prose Fiction: 1782-1789', in Schiller's Literary Prose Works: New Translations and Critical Essays, ed. Jeffrey L. High (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2008), pp. 188–201. by Nick Martin | Papers by Nick

Playing with the Rules Schiller‟s Experiments in Short Prose Fiction, 1782-1789 Nicholas Martin Schiller‟s career as a writer of prose fiction was short-lived. It lasted only seven years, from 1782 (when he was twenty-two years of age) until 1789. His short stories of this period have begun to attract significant critical attention in recent years.1 However, even the texts which are today considered to be Schiller‟s principal prose writing achievements of the 1780s, notably The Criminal of Lost Honor (1786) and The Ghost-seer (1786-89), remain to a large extent overshadowed by his simultaneous achievements as a dramatist and lyric poet.2 The period during which Schiller composed all of his published prose fiction coincided with the writing of his important early dramas The Robbers (Die Räuber, 1781), The Conspiracy of Fiesko in Genoa (Die Verschwörung des Fiesko zu Genua, 1782–83), Love and Intrigue (Kabale und Liebe, 1782–84), and Don Karlos (1783-87). The overshadowing of Schiller‟s prose writing by his dramas is truer still in the case of Schiller‟s shortest short stories, which will be the focus of this essay: A Magnanimous Act from Most Recent History of 1782;3 Duke Alba at Breakfast at Castle Rudolstadt in the Year 1547, published in 1788;4 and Game of Fate: A Fragment of a True Story (1789).5 The relatively low esteem in which Schiller‟s short stories are still held is attributable, at least in part, to 2 the brevity of his career as prose writer, to the relatively meagre output (in terms of quantity) of this career as well as to Schiller‟s later, disparaging remarks on his own prose fiction in particular, and on the genre in general. He dismissed the Alba anecdote, for example, as something “of little consequence,”6 and he appears to have regarded even the more substantial and far superior story, Game of Fate, as “insignificant.”7 More damning still, as far as the reputation of his prose fiction is concerned, is Schiller‟s remark in On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry (Über naïve und sentimentalische Dichtung, 1795-96) that the novelist is a mere “half-brother of the poet.”8 Schiller‟s short stories of the 1780s are at once late variants on a longestablished tradition of prose fiction writing in eighteenth-century Germany and fledgling experiments in what was to become the peculiarly German tradition of the novella (Novelle), from Goethe to Kafka and beyond. While it did not enjoy anything like the prestige of (classical) drama in eighteenthcentury Germany, the epic genre had nevertheless acquired a degree of respectability, thanks in large measure to the writings and journals of Gottsched, Wieland and others. Gottsched‟s weekly journals of the 1720s owed much, in their turn, to English models and precursors such as Addison and Steele‟s Spectator and Tatler. Their primary function was educative, publishing short stories that made tangible the abstract maxims contained in the more theoretical contributions to the journals and weeklies in question.9 From the middle of the eighteenth century, however, and largely under the influence of French writers such as Jean François Marmontel, whose 3 Contes moraux (Moral Tales) appeared from 1755 onwards in the journal Mercure de France, a new type of prose writing began to emerge on the German literary scene – the “moral short story” (“Moralische Erzählung”). Marmontel‟s successful recipe was to mix entertaining “human interest” stories with morally improving maxims and warnings. In Germany this recipe was imitated, with considerable popular success, in the 1770s and 1780s in the satirical prose writings of Johann Carl Wezel (1777-78), the short texts by Johann Heinrich Merck, which were published from the late 1770s in Wieland‟s Teutscher Merkur, and in prose fiction published by Sophie von La Roche and Christian Lebrecht Heyne in the early 1780s. In the words of Jürgen Jacobs: Marmontel, and his many later German imitators, are concerned above all with feminine virtue, false ambition and the mistakes made by parents when raising children. Although the short stories often deal with members of the nobility, they nevertheless preach the burgherly moral virtues of family values, thrift, duty, and the cult of sensibility.10 While the young Schiller was aware of these developments and acutely conscious of the morally didactic animus of contemporary prose fiction, a more immediate, formative influence on the themes of his prose writing was the work of Christian Garve, to which he had been introduced by his Karlsschule professor and mentor, Jakob Friedrich Abel. In his Thoughts on What Interests Us (Gedanken über das Interessirende, 1779) Garve sets out a theory of intellectual perception based on the division and co-existence in man of mind (or soul) and body. An individual‟s interest is engaged, Garve argues, when his sensuous or intellectual curiosity is aroused or, ideally, when both are 4 aroused simultaneously. Garve‟s conviction that sensuous and moral drives guide man in equal measure lead him to demand that, if literature is seriously to engage the interest of the reading public, it must shape and present gripping stories taken from real life. This belief that only a careful examination of the interaction of body and soul can reveal the true workings of an individual is precisely the anthropological and psychological perspective of the late Enlightenment that will govern Schiller‟s experiments in short prose fiction.11 Equally powerful influences on the concerns and methods adopted by Schiller in his short prose fiction, with Abel once again acting as mediator, were the creative reworkings of psychological and criminal case studies in Karl Philipp Moritz‟s Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde (1783-93) and the fourteen volumes of August Gottlieb Meißner‟s Skizzen, published between 1778 and 1796.12 When discussing plans for a new journal with Christian Gottfried Körner in 1788, for example, Schiller declared that material similar to the dialogues in Meißner (“Meissnerische Dialoge”) should be included in the new publication.13 Meißner‟s and Moritz‟s collections had begun to move away from the concerns of the traditional “moral short story.” Admittedly, the representations of characters‟ passions and drives remained largely faithful to the Enlightenment aspiration of educating the reader, but these representations or fictional reworkings of actual events tended to privilege the psychological dimension of their subjects over the moral.14 It was this psychological dimension, and the human and narrative possibilities it opened up, which particularly appealed to the young Schiller, who was simultaneously 5 investigating the division and co-existence in man of mind (or soul) and body in his medical studies.15 The prose fiction published by Meißner and Moritz had begun to problematize the notion of moral education. While not questioning its inherent value, texts published in their collections had started to explore the limits or efficacy of an individual‟s moral education, once s/he is placed in an extreme situation. Schiller was to take up and pursue this type of exploration in his short stories of the 1780s by confronting “enlightened,” burgherly characters with extreme situations and cruel blows of fate in order to test their psychological (and moral) resilience. Much like his early dramas, Schiller‟s short stories become a creative psychological laboratory, in which the limits of human autonomy and freedom of action – cherished tenets of Enlightenment – are tested by exposing a fictional(ized) character to inner and/or outer crises.16 Theoretical considerations are naturally important when interpreting Schiller‟s short stories, as is an awareness of the literary-historical context in which he was writing. However, we must not overlook the practical, personal context. Schiller did not write in an ethereal realm, free of mundane concerns. For most of his career he was driven by the urgent need to earn a living from his writing. As he wrote to Körner in 1788: “I must make a living from writing and be on the look-out for things that will be lucrative.”17 Peter-André Alt‟s description of the type of contribution Schiller needed for his journal (Rheinische) Thalia, launched in 1784, and of the (economic) motives 6 underlying this need, applies equally well to the motivation behind all of Schiller‟s prose fiction in the period under review here (1782-1789): [Schiller‟s] Thalia required contributions which would grip the readers‟ interest and satisfy the entertainment needs of as wide a circle as possible. This meant that abstract theoretical treatises as well as dry, didactic writing had to be excluded. The urgent need was to maximize the journal‟s appeal by publishing short, pithy and exciting texts.18 Schiller makes this imperative clear in the foreword to Thalia. Of the eight types of material he lists as desirable for inclusion in the journal, the first is headed “Portraits of Remarkable People and Actions.”19 Under this heading Schiller states that he wishes to include “newly discovered cogs in the unfathomable clockwork mechanism of the soul.” (This is already an implicit subversion of the Enlightenment notion of the “divine watchmaker.”) Schiller continues: “individual phenomena which resolve themselves as a curious improvement or deterioration are, I confess, more important [to me] than the dead treasures in the antiquarian‟s cabinet or a newly discovered neighbour of Saturn.”20 The first of Schiller‟s short stories to be published, A Magnanimous Act from Most Recent History, appeared in October 1782 in the second number of the journal Wirtembergisches Repertorium der Litteratur, which was edited by Schiller himself, his Karlsschule professor Jakob Friedrich Abel, and his schoolfriends Johann Wilhelm Petersen and Johann Jakob Atzel. The first two numbers appeared before Schiller‟s flight from Württemberg, and he was the major contributor to both. It seems likely that he wrote A Magnanimous Act from Most Recent History during the summer of 1782.21 The story is so short – 7 barely four pages long in the edition cited here – that it is almost an anecdote. Indeed, it is referred to as such at the beginning of the second paragraph (NA 16, 3). The tale deals with the love of two brothers for the same woman, the decisions and courses of action of these three characters as well as the catastrophic consequences for all three of them of their respective decisions and actions. The story is framed in the style of a contemporary morality tale, though Schiller is at pains both in the title and in his opening, theoretical address to the reader to stress that the story is true: “The present anecdote of two Germans -which I write with both pride and happiness -- has an indisputable merit: it is true. I hope that it will leave my readers warmer than all of Richardson‟s novels about Grandison and Pamela.”22 Schiller‟s claim that the story is true, and the fact that he makes little attempt to disguise the real identities of his characters, make it relatively easy to identify the story‟s historical basis. It is based on the lives of Friedrich and Ludwig von Wurmb, the brothers of Schiller‟s future mother-in-law, Luise von Lengefeld. The woman to whom they were both attracted, initially without each other‟s knowledge, was Christiane von Werthern, a friend of Henriette von Wolzogen‟s, the mother of Schiller‟s schoolfriend and future brother-in-law, Wilhelm von Wolzogen. According to Alt, Henriette von Wolzogen -- who harboured the fugitive Schiller in Bauerbach during his flight from Württemberg in 1782 -- had heard Christiane von Werthern‟s deathbed confession, which forms the ironic climax to the story, and later confided it to Schiller.23 8 The plot of this very short story is quickly summarized. As already indicated, it deals with the love of two brothers, the “Barons von Wrmb.” for the same young woman, “Fräulein von Wrthr.” Each brother is initially unaware that the other is also in love with the woman, and she chooses not to enlighten either of them on this score. When the truth emerges, the elder brother performs the first “magnanimous act” of the tale by leaving Germany for Holland. However, he is unable to deal with the pain of separation, withers and almost dies. He returns to Germany in a precarious state of health, collapsing into the arms of his beloved. At this point the second “magnanimous act” occurs. The younger brother sacrifices himself, and his love for the woman, by going to live in self-imposed exile in Batavia in the East Indies, where, as he writes in a letter to his brother, he vows to start a new life despite the pain of separation that he is now experiencing in his turn. The elder brother marries the young woman but, after just one year of what in light of later revelations is ironically termed “the most blissful of marriages,”24 the woman falls terminally ill. On her deathbed, in what is arguably the third “magnanimous act” of the tale (at least towards the reader) she confesses to her dearest friend – presumably, Henriette von Wolzogen -- that she had always felt a stronger love for the younger brother, the one who had fled to the East Indies. Although A Magnanimous Act from Most Recent History is constructed and narrated in the manner of a conventional “moral short story,” by its end no unambiguous, improving moral has emerged. The young woman‟s deathbed 9 confession is related without comment, and it is left up to the reader to draw her/his own conclusions from the three “magnanimous acts” which frame the tale. In the words of Jeffrey L. High: “The painful irony of the lady‟s deathbed confession is typical of the particular anti-idealist tendency of Schiller‟s prose works. Here, three virtuous acts of Enlightenment morality vie for the reader‟s awe, and nobody wins but the reader.”25 A number of possible conclusions suggest themselves, all of which point to genuine scepticism on Schiller‟s part concerning the practical consequences of self-denying moral acts. The younger brother‟s “magnanimous act” – removing himself to the East Indies – is seen not only to deepen his own misery but also, arguably, to hasten the young woman‟s death. His “magnanimity” is, in fact, a disastrous and self-defeating repression of his emotions. The attitude of the young woman is also implicitly criticized. By withholding her true feelings until the end, seemingly to avoid interfering in the brothers‟ magnanimity towards each other, she appears to have denied herself, quite literally, a life-saving opportunity to make herself and at least one of the brothers genuinely happy. An element of social criticism can also be detected here. As Gert Vonhoff has suggested, the woman‟s submissiveness and quiescence is a product of the contemporary social order, which assigned to women the role of helpless victims.26 The psychologically gripping yet, in conventional didactic terms, negative and unsatisfactory ending of this “moral short story” indicates the extent to which Schiller is here deliberately playing with and subverting traditional expectations of the genre in order to reveal its shortcomings in 10 terms of narrative perspective as well as its underlying ideological flaws. As Ulrike Rainer has commented on the ending of A Magnanimous Act from Most Recent History: “This „moral‟ short story reveals itself on closer inspection to be highly questionable. Perhaps it does not leave the reader „warmer‟ than „all the volumes of [Richardson‟s] Grandison and Pamela‟ but s/he will certainly feel more unsettled and more reflective.”27 Of the three short stories under discussion here, Duke Alba at Breakfast at Castle Rudolstadt in the Year 1547, first published in October 1788 in Teutscher Merkur, is the slightest, both in terms of its length and its significance -- as either a short story in its own right or as part of the larger story of Schiller‟s development as a writer of prose fiction. The text which, like A Magnanimous Act from Most Recent History, is characterized in the opening lines as an “anecdote,” was probably inspired by Schiller‟s visit, together with Wilhelm von Wolzogen and the Lengefeld sisters, to Rudolstadt Castle on July 7, 1788. The text can also be read in the context of Schiller‟s intensive engagement at this time with the history of Imperial Spain in the sixteenth century, as seen above all in his Revolt of the Netherlands (Geschichte des Abfalls der vereinigten Niederlande von der spanischen Regierung), published in the same year (1788). Schiller‟s source, which is also referred to in the opening paragraph, was a chronicle of 1670 by the Thuringian theologian Söffing, which Schiller had consulted in the library of a Rudolstadt privy councillor. Schiller‟s text presents a character portrait of Countess von Schwarzburg. In 1547, during the brief Schmalkaldic War 11 between the forces of Emperor Charles V and those of the Schmalkaldic League of Protestant German princes, the courageous Thuringian countess prevented Spanish troops from plundering her land and her subjects‟ property by holding hostage in her castle the commander of the Spanish army, the legendary Duke Alba, and threatening to kill him, until she received assurances that his soldiers would return any stolen property and leave peacefully. Duke Alba at Breakfast at Castle Rudolstadt in the Year 1547 stands out among Schiller‟s prose fiction of the 1780s, precisely because it is such an unremarkable text. However, as Alt has pointed out, the story is perhaps worthy of a footnote in the history of German prose fiction writing. According to Alt, it anticipates in some respects the type of anecdotal short story that would be cultivated and developed later by Heinrich von Kleist, which is characterized by tension and terseness, aimed at maximising the reader‟s sense of surprise.28 The surprise in Schiller‟s text, for Duke Alba and for the reader, is that breakfast should turn into a matter of life and death. None the less Duke Alba at Breakfast at Castle Rudolstadt in the Year 1547 remains little more than an uplifting anecdote, with a straightforward moral message. Perhaps for this reason it is slightly disappointing because, unlike Schiller‟s other prose fiction of the 1780s, it does not play with or challenge the rules of the subgenre of the morality tale. As we have already seen, Schiller himself thought the tale to be “of little consequence,” though it is unclear whether this was a judgment on the text‟s literary shortcomings or on the fact that it was 12 conceived, at least in part, as a eulogy to the ruling house of Thuringia by way of praising a famous ancestor, a motive which Schiller later came to regret.29 The story Game of Fate (Spiel des Schicksals), which was published anonymously in the January 1789 number of Teutscher Merkur, is of a different order of magnitude to the two texts discussed thus far, in terms of both its length (it occupies some twenty pages in the edition cited here) and its literary quality. It is also the only one of these three texts which Schiller chose to re-publish in his collection Shorter Prose Writings (Kleinere prosaische Schriften) of 1792, which would tend to confirm that the author himself held Game of Fate in relatively high regard, despite that negative remark to his future wife quoted above.30 Like the two earlier texts it rests on the twin foundations of (claimed) authenticity and a psychological examination of characters in extremis. However, and this makes comparison with the other two texts invidious perhaps, in Game of Fate Schiller allows himself far more space in which explore the psychological dimension. Specifically, he gives himself more scope to investigate how characters‟ behaviour is conditioned by the socio-political structures within which they are forced to live, and how one character in particular behaves when he suffers a sudden reversal of fortune and finds himself in an unaccustomed, extreme situation. The text relates the story of Aloysius von G***, a talented member of the middle classes, who serves with distinction in the army and whose potential is soon noticed by the Prince. G***‟s character is impetuous, fiery and stubborn. Not unlike the prince, G*** possesses an element of grandeur and 13 majesty, tempered by a degree of humility. Under the prince‟s affectionate patronage G*** enjoys a meteoric career and by the age of twenty-two he is effectively in control of most of the affairs of state. The prince is more than happy to delegate his authority to his faithful underling, so that he can enjoy more aristocratic pursuits. Meanwhile, G***‟s now more or less unfettered power causes his behaviour to become increasingly harsh, arbitrary and contrary. In his lust for and enjoyment of power, G*** is shown to be deeply capricious. He is capable of acts of both extraordinary kindness and vicious revenge. G*** is now no longer the prince‟s friend, merely his very able chief functionary. Joseph Martinengo, a Piedmontese count, becomes one of G***‟s numerous enemies. G***, who appointed Martinengo, fails to notice the threat posed by the seemingly mild-mannered and submissive count, while Martinengo makes himself invaluable by encouraging the prince‟s excesses, only to save him repeatedly from embarrassment. Martinengo plots G***‟s downfall. Martinengo succeeds in undermining G*** by showing the prince real letters (or perhaps falsely concocted ones) from G*** to a rival court, which „prove‟ the chief minister‟s unpardonable treachery. Martinengo has G*** humiliatingly arrested without charge at the parade ground, demanding his sword and badges of rank in front of five hundred silent onlookers. G*** is thereupon led away and cast into a dungeon. When he is given bread and water the next day, G*** asks what offence he has committed but receives no answer. Moreover, he discovers that he is languishing in a pit he had himself designed to punish an innocent man, 14 and that this same man is now his jailer. More humiliating still, the jailer is too magnanimous to exact any revenge on G***. Eventually, after G*** has spent sixteen months in solitary confinement, a garrison preacher asks the prince‟s permission to see the prisoner. Upon seeing G***‟s deplorable condition, the minister pleads with the prince to grant the prisoner more humane conditions. Long after Martinengo has fallen from grace, and after a ten-year sentence, G*** is pardoned and ordered to leave the state forever. Over the next twenty years G*** begins a new career elsewhere as a soldier and quickly works his way back to a position of power similar to the one he had enjoyed earlier under the prince. Shortly before his death, the prince begins to yearn for his erstwhile friend and invites G*** to return. The prince restores G*** to his former position and there he happily remains for nineteen years as warden of the *** prison. Having apparently learnt little from his own experience, G*** is harsh and unjust to his prisoners, and dies of a stroke at the age of eighty while raging at one of them.31 Game of Fate has not only a verifiable grounding in authentic, historical fact – it is a creative reworking of the fate of General Philipp Friedrich Rieger, one of Schiller‟s godparents -- it also possesses strong autobiographical elements.32 Indeed, the story contains marked traces of a reckoning on Schiller‟s part with aspects of the feudal, autocratic regime in Württemberg, which had to a large extent shaped (or scarred) his upbringing and education. Rieger, on whom Schiller‟s character Aloysius von G*** is based, was born in 1722. He was a ruthless careerist and protégé of Carl Eugen 15 (1728-1793), Duke of Württemberg, rising to become chief of the ducal military staff. Rieger fell from grace in 1762 as a result of the intrigues of a Count Montmartin (on whom Schiller modelled his character Martinengo), and was imprisoned for four years in Hohenentwiel fortress, before being rehabilitated by the duke in 1766. In 1771 the duke appointed him General Commandant of the Hohenasperg fortress, a few miles north of Ludwigsburg and not far from Schiller‟s birthplace in Marbach. The fortress complex housed a notorious prison, in which the dissident writer Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart was later to be incarcerated during Rieger‟s tenure as commandant. General Rieger died in 1782 of a stroke, precipitated it seems by his raging rebuke of one of the Hohenasperg‟s garrison soldiers, whom Rieger suspected of malingering. The young Schiller was required to compose a conventional poem of mourning (“Trauergedicht”) in remembrance of Rieger.33 His true feelings about Rieger, and the system which made him what he was, were not to emerge until the publication of Game of Fate in 1789. Schiller knew something of Rieger already, indeed he had met him in 1781 when paying a clandestine visit to Schubart at Hohenasperg. He would also have been familiar with Friedrich Nicolai‟s view of Rieger. After visiting Hohenasperg in July 1781, Nicolai characterized its commandant as an impetuous, astute but also rather cold individual.34 In his autobiography Life and Attitudes (Leben und Gesinnungen, 1793), published shortly before the death of his tormentor Duke Carl Eugen, Schubart characterized his jailer Rieger as “a rare combination of 16 manly greatness and childish pettiness, of the sublime and the base, of magnanimous goodness and destructive anger, of capacity for mercy and revenge, of blazing fear of God and entirely unholy deeds.”35 The most striking formal feature of Game of Fate is its furious yet controlled tempo which, as Alt points out, is contained with a five-part structure not unlike that of a classical tragedy: exposition, tension, climax, retardation and resolution.36 G***/Rieger also resembles a tragic hero in some respects. He is presented at the outset as one on whom the gods smile, before his hubristic ambition takes over, and this is followed, inevitably, by downfall and nemesis. In presenting G*** as a man who believes he is untouchable, but who is, in fact, sleepwalking to disaster, Schiller may be well be echoing an important theme of Goethe‟s Egmont, a text which Schiller had recently reviewed. Like G***, Egmont is naively or arrogantly insouciant, refusing to believe that he is any danger. As a result he falls into the clutches of his executioner Alba.37 For similar reasons G*** falls foul of Martinengo‟s intrigues. (Martinengo bears more than a passing resemblance, of course, to the jealous, scheming character Wurm in Schiller‟s play Love and Intrigue (Kabale und Liebe, 1782–84).) The cruel and arbitrary nature of G***‟s subsequent imprisonment in the story deliberately recalls the fate of Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart. Schubart, who had been incarcerated without trial by Duke Carl Eugen in Hohenasperg from 1777 to 1787, was a dissident writer and something of a political and literary hero to Schiller. Schubart‟s son, Ludwig, visited Schiller in Weimar in December 1788, and it seems likely that 17 the memories and associations inspired by this visit were the catalyst for the writing of Game of Fate. The principal interest and focus of the story lies in its psychological investigation of G***‟s character. However, unlike the psychological experiments Schiller had conducted in A Magnanimous Act from Most Recent History and the Alba anecdote, which are largely playful, on this occasion the psychological examination has a serious, political purpose. As Michael Hofmann has recently pointed out: The psychological analysis [in the short story] exposes the mechanisms through which careers are made and destroyed in the feudal system of governance and control; on the one hand, the analysis exposes fundamentally the perversity of this political system, but on the other hand indicates pressingly that the individuals caught up in this system become to some extent infected by this perversity, such that they themselves become collaborators, even perpetrators.38 Like his real-life counterpart, Rieger, G***‟s character and temperament have become so corrupted by his identification with the values and ethos of the absolutist system that, even after he has become a victim of this system and been imprisoned by it in inhuman conditions for a decade, he is unable to change his ways or learn from his experience. Schiller‟s perhaps depressing, but psychologically persuasive, conclusion is his sceptical insight that people caught up in a(ny) system that survives on instrumentalisation will be unable to learn from their experiences or to transcend the exploitative mechanisms that have made them what they are.39 In this sense, as Gerhard Kaiser has maintained, the heroes of Schiller‟s short stories are, in fact, not heroes at all, because they are no longer the focus of the poetic world. They are presented as 18 inseparable from a complex constellation of socio-political events, which is in turn a specifically modern mode of experience.40 As this essay has tried to indicate, it is not possible to argue that Schiller‟s shortest stories of the period 1782-1789 should be ranked alongside his achievements as a dramatist and lyric poet. It is possible, however, to argue that, as well as being entertaining and challenging in their own right, they can be read as important complements to the anthropological and social concerns of Schiller‟s early dramas and as pointers to the more sophisticated anthropological pessimism that Schiller develops in his theoretical writings of the mid-1790s, and in his dramas from Wallenstein (1796-99) onwards. Specifically, Schiller mounts successful challenges to the tradition of the “moral short story” (“Moralische Erzählung”) by playing with and undermining the assumptions of this sub-genre. Underlying these experiments is Schiller‟s belief in a fundamental dualism in man, not only of an inner kind – the divide and interaction between our physical and moral natures – but also of an outer kind – the interaction between man and his (socio-political) circumstances, which casts doubt on the practical efficacy of much conventional moral wisdom. In the words of Benno von Wiese: As a story-teller [Schiller] interprets the dualism of person and situation […] This is not „realism‟ in the sense of mimesis (a representation of reality soaked in the detail of individuals and things), but an „analytical realism‟ which deals with fixed, general constants and brings them into contact, experimentally, with ever-changing external conditions.41 19 The outcome of these experiments, as we have seen, is often surprisingly pessimistic, as well as entertaining and enlightening, though not always in ways which Enlightenment, in the narrow sense, would necessarily endorse. Commenting on Schiller‟s decision to give up writing prose fiction after 1789, T. J. Reed has observed that “Schiller is one of the eighteenth century‟s great lost novelists, lured away by the traditional cultural prestige of tragic drama.”42 In a sense, however, Schiller‟s early short stories form part of this dramatic achievement, at least thematically. Whether Schiller‟s motives for abandoning prose fiction writing after 1789 were cultural, personal, financial or political (his attention was, after all, distracted by events elsewhere in 1789), it is nevertheless true that Germany lost her first great modern novelist as a result -- and acquired her foremost dramatist. University of Birmingham Notes 1 See, for example: Christa Bürger, “Schiller als Erzähler? Von der Kunst des Erzählens zum Erzählen als Kunst,” in: Friedrich Schiller. Angebot und Diskurs: Zugänge, Dichtung, Zeitgenossenschaft, edited by Helmut Brand (Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau, 1987), 33-48; Ulrike Rainer, Schillers Prosa. Poetologie und Praxis (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1988); Achim Aurnhammer, “Engagiertes Erzählen: Der Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre,” in: Schiller und die höfische Welt, edited by Achim Aurnhammer, Klaus Manger and Friedrich Strack (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1990), 254-70; Peter-André Alt, Schiller: Leben – Werk – Zeit, 2 vols (Munich: Beck, 2004, 2nd revised edition), 1: 467-99; Gert Vonhoff, “„Die Macht der Verhältnisse‟: Schillers Erzählungen,” in: Friedrich Schiller, edited by Heinz Ludwig Arnold and Mirjam Springer (Munich: edition text + kritik, 2005), 71-81; Jeffrey L. High, “Schiller, the Author of Literary Prose,” in: Friedrich Schiller: Playwright, Poet, Philosopher, Historian, edited by Paul Kerry (Oxford and Berne: Peter Lang, 2007), 117-151. 20 2 Der Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre and Der Geisterseher, in: Schillers Werke. Nationalausgabe, edited by Julius Petersen et al. (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1943ff.), Vol. 16, pp. 7-29, 45-184; Henceforth references to Schiller‟s writings will be given in the form NA, followed by the volume and page number. 3 Eine grossmütige Handlung, aus der neusten Geschichte (NA 16, 3-6). 4 Herzog von Alba bei einem Frühstück auf dem Schlosse zu Rudolstadt. Im Jahr 1547 (NA 16, 30-32). 5 Spiel des Schicksals. Ein Bruchstück aus einer wahren Geschichte (NA 16, 33-44). 6 “von wenigem Belang” (to Körner, 1 Oct. 1788: NA 25, 112). 7 “Daß Sie einen Aufsatz von mir [Spiel des Schicksals] verkannt oder doch fast verkannt haben, sollte ich Ihnen als Autor und als Ihr Freund nicht vergeben; denn auch bey unbedeutenden Produkten, wie an diesem z.b. nicht viel ist, auch nicht seyn soll, bildet sich doch der Autor ein, daß man seine Manier kennen müsse” (to Charlotte von Lengefeld, 5 Feb. 1789: NA 25, 198). 8 “Halbbruder des Dichters” (NA 20, 462). 9 See Alt, 1: 467-68. 10 “Es geht bei Marmontel – wie später bei seinen zahlreichen deutschen Nachahmern – vor allem um weibliche Tugend, um falschen Ehrgeiz und um elterliche Erziehungsfehler. Obwohl die Erzählungen häufig adliges Personal bemühen, predigen sie die bürgerlichen Tugenden des Familiensinns, der Sparsamkeit, des Pflichtbewußtseins und des empfindsamen Gefühlskults” (Jürgen Jacobs, “Die deutsche Erzählung im Zeitalter der Aufklärung,” in: Handbuch der deutschen Erzählung, edited by Karl Konrad Polheim (Düsseldorf: Bagel, 1981), 56-71, here 58. For further discussion of these developments, see Alt, 1: 468. 11 See Alt, 1: 469. 12 See Alt 1: 470. Alt also mentions François Gayot de Pitaval‟s Causes célèbres et intéressantes (1734-43) in this context. For further discussion of Pitaval‟s importance to Schiller, see Alexander Košenina, “Schiller‟s Poetics of Crime,” in: Schiller: National Poet – Poet of Nations. A Birmingham Symposium, edited by Nicholas Martin (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006), 201-217. 13 To Körner, 12 June 1788: NA 25, 70. 14 See Alt 1: 470. 15 See Kenneth Dewhurst and Nigel Reeves, Friedrich Schiller: Medicine, Psychology and Literature (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1978). 16 See Alt, 1: 472-73. In this context Alt also stresses Schiller‟s debt to the “psychological” concerns of eighteenth-century French and English novelists, including Rousseau, Fielding, Prévost, Richardson, Laclos, Sterne and, above all, Diderot, whose novel Jacques the Fatalist and his Master (Jacques le fataliste et son maître, 1771) was one of Schiller‟s favourite texts. He translated and published an episode from the novel in the Thalia in 1785 and later recommended it enthusiastically to Goethe (Alt, 1: 473). 17 “Ich muß von Schriftstellerei leben, also auf das sehen, was einträgt” (to Körner, 18 Jan. 1788: NA 25, 5). 18 “die Thalia verlangt nach Beiträgen, die das Interesse der Leser fesseln und das Unterhaltungsbedürfnis möglichst breiter Kreise befriedigen. Das schließt tiefgründige theoretische Abhandlungen ebenso wie spröde Lehrdichtung aus. Dringend geboten bleibt die Veröffentlichung spannungshaltiger Texte, die durch Kürze und Prägnanz zu wirken vermögen” (Alt, 1: 467). 19 “Gemälde merkwürdiger Menschen und Handlungen” (Ankündigung der Rheinischen Thalia: NA 22, 95). 20 “Neugefundene Räder in dem unbegreiflichen Uhrwerk der Seele – einzelne Phänomene, die sich in irgend eine merkwürdige Verbesserung oder Verschlimmerung auflösen, sind mir, ich gestehe es, wichtiger als die toten Schätze im Kabinett des Antikensammlers oder ein neu entdeckter Nachbar des Saturnus” (ibid.). 21 See Michael Hofmann, “Eine grossmütige Handlung, aus der neusten Geschichte,” in: Schiller-Handbuch: Leben – Werk – Wirkung, edited by Matthias Luserke-Jaqui (Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler, 2005), 299-301, here 299. 21 22 “Gegenwärtige Anekdote von zween Teutschen – mit stolzer Freude schreib‟ ich das nieder – hat ein unabstreitbares Verdienst – sie ist wahr. Ich hoffe, daß sie meine Leser wärmer zurücklassen werde als alle Bände des Grandison und der Pamela” (NA 16, 3). Schiller is here aligning himself with late Enlightenment scepticism concerning the practical and moral efficacy of the type of sentimental and entirely fictional prose, which was thought be exemplified in Samuel Richardson‟s novels. The story is narrated in a sober, sparse style quite unlike Richardson‟s and, indeed, quite unlike the at times extravagantly rhetorical and pathosridden style of Schiller‟s early dramas. 23 See Alt 1: 477. 24 “die seligste der Ehen” (NA 16, 6). 25 High, 122. 26 See Vonhoff, 73. 27 “Diese „moralische‟ Erzählung entpuppt sich bei näherer Betrachtung als höchst fragwürdig. Sie läßt vielleicht den Leser nicht „wärmer‟ zurück als „alle Bände des Grandison und der Pamela,‟ doch sicherlich beunruhigter und nachdenklicher” (Rainer, 98). 28 See Alt, 1: 478. 29 To Körner, 1 Oct. 1788. See also Alt, 1: 478. Schiller had met Ludwig Friedrich von Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, the ruling hereditary prince of Thuringia, on May 29, 1788. 30 See Michael Hofmann, “Spiel des Schicksals. Ein Bruchstück aus einer wahren Geschichte,” in: Schiller-Handbuch: Leben – Werk – Wirkung, edited by Matthias Luserke-Jaqui (Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler, 2005), 315-319, here 316. See also High, 128. The negative comment to Charlotte von Lengefeld concerning Game of Fate (see n. 7 above) reflects Schiller‟s annoyance at her failure to recognize his authorship rather than any fundamental dissatisfaction with the text itself. 31 This plot summary is indebted to the synopses provided by High (128-29) and Hofmann (317-18). 32 According to the commentary in the edition cited here, Game of Fate does not seek to provide an historically accurate account of the events it relates. Rather, the short story is concerned with “the poetic shaping of an historical case” (“Es ist die poetische Gestaltung eines historischen Vorgangs” (NA 16, 411)). 33 See Alt, 1: 525-26, and Hofmann, 315-16. 34 “Obgleich sein äußeres Ansehen etwas ernsthaft und auch sein Diskurs meist ernsthaft war; so war doch alles was er sagte, mit Scharfsinn, Witz und Laune gewürzt. Dabey sprach er über manches mit seltner Offenherzigheit” (Friedrich Nicolai, Gesammelte Werke, edited by Bernhard Fabian and Marie-Luise Spieckermann, 20 vols (Hildesheim, Zürich and New York: Georg Olms, 1984), Vol. 19, III.9, 162). 35 “eine seltene Mischung von männlicher Größe und kindischer Kleinheit, von Erhabenheit und Niedrigkeit, von menschenbeglückender Güte und Zerstörungsgrimm, von Fähigkeit des Erbarmens und Rachsucht, von hellodernder Gottesfurcht und ganz ungottseligen Taten.” Quoted in: Friedrich Schiller, Der Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre und andere Erzählungen, mit einem Nachwort von Bernhard Zeller (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1964), pp. 66-67. 36 See Alt, 1: 523. 37 See Alt, 1: 523-24. 38 “Die psychologische Analyse [in der Erzählung] verdeutlicht die Mechanismen, nach denen im feudalen Herrschaftssystem Karrieren gemacht und wieder zerstört werden; sie verdeutlicht dabei einerseits und grundlegend die Perversität dieses politischen Systems, andererseits wird aber eindringlich darauf verwiesen, dass die Personen, die sich in dem System bewegen, von dieser Perversität gewissermaßen angesteckt und so zu Kollaborateuren, ja Tätern werden” (Hofmann, 317). This syndrome is what Vonhoff calls, more succinctly, “die Verstrickung des Bürgertums in das Machtsystem des Absolutismus” (Vonhoff, 75). 39 For further discussion, see Hofmann, 317. 40 “ein epischer Held, der eigentlich gar kein Held ist, nicht in der Sinn-Mitte der dichterischen Welt steht, sondern als Glied einer Konstellation begegnet, die ihrerseits den Sinn trägt. Denn der Mensch als Moment einer Konstellation – das ist ja wohl eine spezifisch moderne Erfahrungsweise der Person” (Gerhard Kaiser, “Der Held in den Novellen: „Eine großmütige 22 Handlung, aus der neuesten Geschichte‟ und „Der Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre,‟” in: Gerhard Kaiser, Von Arkadien nach Elysium. Schiller-Studien (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1978), 45-58, here 46. 41 “[Schiller] interpretiert als Erzähler den Dualismus von Person und Situation [...] Es ist dies zwar kein „Realismus‟ im Sinne dinglich gesättigter, individualisierter Wirklichkeitsdarstellung, sondern ein ‚analytischer Realismus‟, der mit festen, allgemeinen Konstanten rechnet und sie experimentell mit jeweils wechselnden äußeren Bedingungen zusammenbringt” (Benno von Wiese, Friedrich Schiller (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1959), pp. 30809). 42 T. J. Reed, The Classical Centre: Goethe and Weimar 1775-1832 (London: Croom Helm, 1980), 105.