25 Facts About Schiller

Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller was a German playwright, poet, and philosopher.

Schiller grew up in a very religious Protestant family and spent much of his youth studying the Bible, which would later influence his writing for the theatre.

Schiller's father was away in the Seven Years' War when Friedrich was born.

Schiller was named after king Frederick the Great, but he was called Fritz by nearly everyone.

Kaspar Schiller was rarely home during the war, but he did manage to visit the family once in a while.

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Father Moser was a good teacher, and later Schiller named the cleric in his first play Die Rauber after him.

Schiller's father had not been paid for three years, and the family had been living on their savings but could no longer afford to do so.

Schiller entered the Karlsschule Stuttgart, in 1773, where he eventually studied medicine.

Later, Schiller would be made an honorary member of the French Republic because of this play.

Schiller fled Stuttgart in 1782, going via Frankfurt, Mannheim, Leipzig, and Dresden to Weimar.

The last living descendant of Schiller was a grandchild of Emilie, Baron Alexander von Gleichen-Rußwurm, who died at Baden-Baden, Germany, in 1947.

Schiller remained in Weimar, Saxe-Weimar until his death at 45 from tuberculosis in 1805.

Coffin containing what was purportedly Schiller's skeleton was brought in 1827 into the Weimarer Furstengruft, the burial place of the house of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach in the Historical Cemetery of Weimar and later Goethe's resting place.

The physical resemblance between this skull and the extant death mask as well as to portraits of Schiller, had led many experts to believe that the skull was Schiller's.

Schiller's image appeared on the German Democratic Republic 10 Mark banknotes of the 1964 emission.

In September 2008, Schiller was voted by the audience of the TV channel Arte as the second most important playwright in Europe after William Shakespeare.

Some Freemasons speculate that Schiller was a Freemason, but this has not been proven.

Schiller synthesized the thought of Immanuel Kant with the thought of the German idealist philosopher, Karl Leonhard Reinhold.

Schiller elaborated upon Christoph Martin Wieland's concept of, a human being whose emotions have been educated by reason, so that are no longer in conflict with one another; thus beauty, for Schiller, is not merely an aesthetic experience, but a moral one as well: the Good is the Beautiful.

The "gods" in Schiller's poem are thought by modern scholars to represent moral and aesthetic values, which Schiller tied to Paganism and an idea of enchanted nature.

Schiller wrote two important essays on the question of the sublime, entitled "" and ""; these essays address one aspect of human freedom—the ability to defy one's animal instincts, such as the drive for self-preservation, when, for example, someone willingly sacrifices themselves for conceptual ideals.

Schiller is considered by most Germans to be Germany's most important classical playwright.

Pivotal work by Schiller was On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, first published 1794, which was inspired by the great disenchantment Schiller felt about the French Revolution, its degeneration into violence and the failure of successive governments to put its ideals into practice.

Schiller wrote that "a great moment has found a little people"; he wrote the Letters as a philosophical inquiry into what had gone wrong, and how to prevent such tragedies in the future.

Schiller's focus on the dialectical interplay between Formtrieb and Sinnestrieb has inspired a wide range of succeeding aesthetic philosophical theory, including notably Jacques Ranciere's conception of the "aesthetic regime of art, " as well as social philosophy in Herbert Marcuse.

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