of September. The body of Schill was buried at Stralsund, his head sent to Leiden, where it remained until 1837. Monuments were erected at Brunswick, Stralsund and Wesel, and the 1st Silesian Leib-Hussars have borne Schill's name since 1889.
See Haken, Ferdinand von Schill (Leipzig, 182); Barsch, Ferdinand von Schill's Zu und Tod (Leipzig, 1860), and F. von Schill, ein Charakterbild (Potsdam, 1860); Petrich, Pommer' sche Lebensbilder, (Stettin, 1884); Francke, Aus Stralsunds Franzosenzeit (1890).
SCHILLER, JOHANN CHRISTOPH FRIEDRICH VON (1759–1805), German poet, dramatist and philosopher, was born at Marbach on the Neckar, on the 10th of November 1759. His grandfather had been a baker in the village of Bittenfeld, near Waiblingen; his father, Johann Kaspar (1723–1796), was an army-surgeon, who had settled in Marbach and married the daughter of an innkeeper, Elisabeth Dorothea Kodweis (1732–1802). In 1757 Schiller's father again took service in the army and ultimately rose to the rank of captain. The vicissitudes of his profession entailed a constant change of residence; but at Lorch and at Ludwigsburg, where the family was settled for longer periods, the child was able to receive a regular education. In 1773 the duke Karl Eugen of Württemberg claimed young Schiller as a pupil of his military school at the “Solitude” near Ludwigsburg, where, instead of his chosen subject of study, theology, he was obliged to devote himself to law. On the removal of the school in 1775 to Stuttgart, he was, however, allowed to exchange this subject for the more congenial study of medicine. The strict military discipline of the school lay heavily on Schiller, and intensified the spirit of rebellion, which, nurtured on Rousseau and the writers of the Sturm und Drang, burst out in the young poet's first tragedy; but such a school-life had for a poet of Schiller's temperament advantages which he might not have known had he followed his own inclinations; and it afforded him glimpses of court life invaluable for his later work as a dramatist. In 1776 some specimens of Schiller's lyric poetry had appeared in a magazine, and in 1777–1778 he completed his drama, Die Räuber, which was read surreptitiously to an admiring circle of schoolmates. In 1780 he left the academy qualified to practise as a surgeon, and was at once appointed by the duke to an ill-paid post as doctor to a regiment garrisoned in Stuttgart. His discontent found vent in the passionate, unbalanced lyrics of this period. Meanwhile Die Räuber, which Schiller had been obliged to publish at his own expense, appeared in 1781 and made an impression on his contemporaries hardly less deep than Goethe's Götz von Berlichingen, eight years before. The strength of this remarkable tragedy lay, not in its inflated tone or exaggerated characterization — the restricted horizon of Schiller's school-life had given him little opportunity of knowing men and women — but in the sure dramatic instinct with which it is constructed and the directness with which it gives voice to the most pregnant ideas of the time. In this respect, Schiller's Räuber is one of the most vital German dramas of the 18th century. In January 1782 it was performed in the Court and National Theatre of Mannheim, Schiller himself having stolen secretly away from Stuttgart in order to be present. The success encouraged him to begin a new tragedy, Die Verschwörung des Fiesco zu Genua, and he edited a lyric Anthologie auf das Jahr 1782, to which he was himself the chief contributor. A second surreptitious visit to Mannheim came, however, to the ears of the duke, who was also irritated by a complaint from Switzerland about an uncomplimentary reference to Graubünden in Die Räuber. He had Schiller put under a fortnight's arrest, and forbade him to write any more “comedies” or to hold intercourse with any one outside of Württemberg. Schiller, embittered enough by the uncongenial conditions of his Stuttgart life, resolved on flight, and took advantage of some court festivities in September 1782 to put his plan into execution. He hoped in the first instance for material support from the theatre in Mannheim, and its intendant, W. H. von Dalberg; but nothing but rebuffs and disappointments were in store for him. He did not even feel secure against extradition in Mannheim, and after several weeks spent mainly in the village of Oggersheim, where his third drama, Luise ' Müllerin, or, as it was subsequently renamed, Kabale und Liebe, was in great part written, he found a refuge at Bauerbach in Thuringia, in the house of Frau von Wolzogen, the mother of one of his former schoolmates. Here Luise Müllerin was finished and Don Carlos begun. In July 1783 Schiller received a definite appointment for a year as “theatre poet” in Mannheim, and here both Fiesco and Kabale und Liebe were performed in 1784. Neither play is as spontaneous or inspired as Die Räuber had been; but both mark a steady advance in characterization and in the technical art of the playwright. Kabale und Liebe, especially, is an admirable example of that “tragedy of common life” which Lessing had introduced into Germany from England and which bulked so largely in the German literature of the later 18th century. In this drama Schiller's powers as a realistic portrayer of people and conditions familiar to him are seen to best advantage. Although Schiller failed to win an established position in Mannheim, he added to his literary reputation by his address on Die Schaubühne als eine moralische Anstalt betrachtet (1784), and by the publication of the beginning of Don Carlos (in blank verse) in his journal, Die rheinische Thalia (1785). He had also the opportunity of reading the first act of the new tragedy before the duke of Weimar at Darmstadt in December 1784, and, as a sign of favour, the duke conferred upon him the title of “Rat.”
In April 1785 Schiller, whose position in Mannheim had, long before this, become hopeless, accepted the invitation of four unknown friends—C. G. Körner, L. F. Huber, and their fiancées Minna and Dora Stock with whom he had corresponded, to pay a visit to Leipzig. He spent a happy summer mainly at Gohlis, near Leipzig, his jubilant mood being reflected in the Ode an die Freude; and in September of the same year he followed his new friend Körner to Dresden. As Körner's guest in Dresden and at Loschwitz on the Elbe, Schiller completed Don Carlos, wrote the dramatic tale, Der Verbrecher aus Infamie (later entitled Der Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre, 1786) and the unfinished novel, Der Geisterseher (1789). The Rheinische Thalia was continued as the Thalia (1786–1791 ; in 1792, again renamed Die neue Thalia), and in this journal he published most of his writings at this time. Körner's interest in philosophy also induced Schiller to turn his attention to such studies, the first results of which he published in the Philosophische Briefe (1786). Don Carlos, meanwhile, appeared in book form in 1787, and added to Schiller's reputation as a poet. In adopting verse instead of prose as a medium of expression, Schiller showed that he was prepared to challenge comparison with the great dramatic poets of other times and other lands; but in seeking a model for this higher type of tragedy he unfortunately turned rather to the classic theatre of France than to the English drama which Lessing, a little earlier, had pronounced more congenial to the German temperament. The unwieldiness of the plot and its inconsistencies show, too, that Schiller had not yet mastered the new form of drama; but Don Carlos at least provided him with an opportunity of expressing ideas of political and intellectual freedom with which, as the disciple of Rousseau, he was in warm sympathy.
A new chapter in Schiller's life opened with his visit to Weimar in July 1787. Goethe was then in Italy, and the duke of Weimar was absent from Weimar; but the poet was kindly received by Herder and Wieland, by the duchess Amalie and other court notabilities. The chief attraction for Schiller was, however, Frau von Kalb with whom he had been passionately in love in Mannheim; but not very long afterwards he made the acquaintance at Rudolstadt of the family von Lengefeld, the younger daughter of which subsequently became his wife. Meanwhile the preparation for Don Carlos had interested Schiller in history, and in 1788 he published the first volume of his chief historical work, Geschichte des Abfalls der vereinigten Niederlande von der spanischen Regierung, a book which at once gave him a respected position among the historians of the 18th century. It obtained for him, on the recommendation of Goethe, a professorship in the university of Jena, and in November 1789 he delivered his inaugural lecture, Was heisst und zu welchem Ende studiert man Universalgeschichte? In February of the following year he married Charlotte von Lengefeld. Schiller's other historical writings comprise a Sammlung historischer Memoires, which he began to publish in 1790, and the Geschichte des dreissigjährigen Krieges (1791–1793). The latter work is more perfunctory in execution and written for a wider public than his first history, but the narrative is dramatic and vivid, the portraiture is sympathetic, and the historical events are interpreted by the light of the rationalistic optimism of the later 18th century.
Before, however, the History of the Thirty Years' War was finished, Schiller had turned from history to philosophy. A year after his marriage he had been stricken down by severe illness, from the effects of which he was never completely to recover; financial cares followed, which were relieved unexpectedly by the generosity of the
