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From Goethe to Gundolf

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Roger Paulin

Goethe and Schiller: Goethezeit

3. Schiller

Wallenstein 1

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  • 1  This chapter is largely based on my ‘Schiller, Wallenstein’, in Landmarks in German Drama, ed. by (...)

Fig. 3 Wallenstein, from Friedrich Schiller’s drama trilogy Wallenstein, steel engraving after a drawing by Friedrich Pecht, c. 1859. Wikimedia, https://commons.wikimedia.org/​wiki/​File:Wallenstein_aus_Schillers_Wallenstein.jpg, public domain.

Fig. 3 Wallenstein, from Friedrich Schiller’s drama trilogy Wallenstein, steel engraving after a drawing by Friedrich Pecht, c. 1859. Wikimedia, https://commons.wikimedia.org/​wiki/​File:Wallenstein_aus_Schillers_Wallenstein.jpg, public domain.
  • 2  For an account of the reception of Wallenstein, with an extensive bibliography, see Schillers ‚Wal (...)

1Critics and commentators are in general agreement that Wallenstein represents the pinnacle of Friedrich Schiller’s achievement as a dramatist.2 Contemporaries like Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Wilhelm von Humboldt sensed that this was a new high point in German tragedy. Goethe had followed the genesis of the play in his correspondence with Schiller and was even behind the idea of using a trilogy as the only aesthetically satisfactory means of presenting the vast panorama of history. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s and Benjamin Constant’s translations are an indication of its reception beyond Germany.

  • 3  G. W. F. Hegel, ‘Über Wallenstein’, in Schillers ‚Wallenstein‘, ed. by Heuer and Keller, 15f.
  • 4  Ludwig Tieck, ‘Die Piccolomini. Wallensteins Tod’, ibid., 21–40.
  • 5  Otto Ludwig, ‘Schillers Wallenstein’, ibid., 47–52.

2Only those critics who identified one-sidedly with another tradition or with different notions of tragedy found fault with Wallenstein. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel around 1800 saw no religious sense behind the presence of fate in the drama, comparing it unfavourably with Greek tragedy.3 Ludwig Tieck, in 1826, found the love scenes superfluous and not organic to the action, making comparisons with Shakespeare’s very different technique in Romeo and Juliet.4 Otto Ludwig, in 1859, found Wallenstein’s ‘reflective’ nature unheroic and untragic and — crucially — un-Shakespearean.5 Wallenstein does not reduce so easily to the classic relations between free will and necessity that inform traditional tragic practice.

  • 6  ‘Freedom of thought’.

3These criticisms indicate nevertheless that the modern writer of tragedy is bound to be subjected to the scrutiny of the two major traditions that go before him: Greek drama and Shakespeare, in German terms ‘fate’ versus ‘character’. Anyone who cares to look will find elements of Sophocles or Shakespeare (especially Henry IV, Macbeth and Richard III) or even Racine in Wallenstein. We know that the reading of Shakespearean plays during the early stages of work on the play helped Schiller to resolve, to his own satisfaction, the questions of history, fate and character. But we need to bear in mind that Schiller’s historical and aesthetic sense was that of his own age and its needs. He was deeply aware of the unique and irrevocable nature of classical antiquity, the ‘unrepeatability’ of Sophocles. Similarly, his reading of Shakespeare recognized elements irreconcilable with his own dramatic practice. His dramatic development — from Die Räuber/The Robbers to Fiesco to Don Carlos — shows a move away from Shakespearean characterization to figures in the guise of the idealist. These act not so much out of passions and emotions in themselves, but come to represent a kind of philosophical postulate (freedom in the case of Karl Moor, ‘Gedankenfreiheit’6 in the case of Marquis Posa). In that sense, Wallenstein, with its ambiguities, is hardly a continuation of Schiller’s dramatic practice of the 1780s.

  • 7  ‘Sublime’; ‘beautiful’.
  • 8  ‘The true artistic world of the poet’; ‘seeming’; ‘free play’.

4There is another major difference. Schiller, between writing Don Carlos and Wallenstein, had been active on two fronts. He had been a practising historian, and he had committed to writing abstract notions about the idea of human moral freedom in the work of art. Is Wallenstein therefore a demonstration in dramatic form of, say, Schiller’s reception of Immanuel Kant? It has been common to test Wallenstein against some aspects of Schiller’s indebtedness to Kant: the categories of ‘erhaben’ and ‘schön’,7 of ‘Realist’ and ‘Idealist’, of ‘moralisch’ and ‘ästhetisch’. But none in practice gives secure purchase. The aim of theatre to create ‘die wahre Kunstwelt des Poeten’, the world of aesthetic ‘Schein’, of ‘freies Spiel’8 against the merely material, is only partially fulfilled in the sombre interplay of mankind and history.

  • 9  ‘Phantastic spirit’; ‘the great and idealistic’; ’common and everyday life’. Goethe, ‘Die Piccolom (...)
  • 10  Wilhelm Dilthey, ‘Wallenstein’, ibid., 74–103 (76).

5We must always remember that Schiller is a dramatist to his fingertips, not a philosopher who thinks in dialogue. Yet it is right to seek a philosophical, theoretical and dramatic centre to this play, a problem around which it revolves. Goethe, so much involved in its genesis, believed he had put his finger on it in 1799: it was the ‘phantastischer Geist’ associated with ‘das Große und Idealische’, as against ‘das gemeine wirkliche Leben’.9 But how could one square those fairly abstract ideas with the material that underlies the whole action, the history of Wallenstein in his own age? Wilhelm Dilthey, looking back on the emergence of the genre in the nineteenth century, called Wallenstein the first German historical drama.10 That is certainly true in the sense that Schiller is in this play closer to his historical sources than in any other (despite the invention of Max and Thekla). It is also true in that Schiller agonized over the material he had expertly marshalled in his Geschichte des dreissigjährigen Krieges/History of the Thirty Years’ War and its sources and over the best way to present it dramatically. We might question whether his deference to Goethe’s suggestion of a trilogy was the best solution, especially since Schiller was acutely aware of Goethe’s shortcomings as a dramatist.

  • 11  ‘Thus Wallenstein fell, not because he was a rebel, but he rebelled because he was falling’. All q (...)

6Yet Schiller never regarded history as more than the quarry from which he drew the raw material for the finished work of art. History is a means to an end, nothing more. But he possesses nevertheless the historian’s sense of a great figure standing out from his own age, incorporating it, explaining its currents and impulses, part of it yet transcending it. He does not abandon the ability to document, but he has the capacity to sum up what is dramatically essential in history. ‘So fiel Wallenstein, nicht weil er Rebell war, sondern er rebellierte, weil er fiel’11 is the proposition in Geschichte des dreissigjährigen Krieges. It is a philosophical paradox, and an aphorism, held together in the figure of the chiasmus. It is stating that Schiller is not primarily concerned with the tradition of the rise and fall of the great, the pattern that informed Greek and Senecan and seventeenth-century German tragedy. Wallenstein cannot be explained solely in terms of superbia, hubris, overweening ambition, although they are part of his character. Rather he displays a sense of the inadequacy of the material world, a will to change that glimpses beyond the world of the senses to some kind of ideal state. This is the aspect of Wallenstein which Schiller found most fascinating. He is not like Macbeth, in whom we can clearly trace the steps leading up to his crime and the stages towards his downfall. The dramatic graph is different. At the time of the action, over a decade of the Thirty Years’ War is past, with Wallenstein’s greatest deeds of heroism and generalship, the years of the Count of Tilly and Gustavus Adolphus, the battle of Lützen, now over.

7Rather it is the sense of an age that Schiller wishes to convey. Indeed, his prologue had expressed the appropriateness of the work of art to sum up the essentials of his own times:

  • 12  ‘ […] Not unworthy of the exalted hour,
    The time in which we strive and live’. Prologue, 55–56.

Nicht unwert des erhabenen Moments
Der Zeit, in dem wir strebend uns bewegen.12

8Historical drama, as an aesthetic exercise, may point to the great movements and commotions of its own age, in Schiller’s case the aftermath of the French Revolution (the reference is to the First Consul, Bonaparte). By the same token, the work of art is not bound to the limits of its own circumstances; art by its very nature raises and transcends:

  • 13  ‘ […] Thank her that she the gloomy face
    Of truth brings over into art’s serene
    Domain, the feinted, (...)

Ja danket ihrs, daß sie das düstre Bild
Der Wahrheit in das heitre Reich der Kunst
Hinüberspielt, die Täuschung, die sie schafft,
Aufrichtig selbst zerstört und ihren Schein
Der Wahrheit nicht betrüglich unterschiebt,
Ernst ist das Leben, heiter ist die Kunst.13

9How can ‘das düstre Bild der Wahrheit’ and ‘das heitre Reich der Kunst’ be reconciled, and how can they be made to reflect both the historical moment and a transcendent ideal?

  • 14  ‘Fortune’; ‘game’.

10Schiller’s use of the trilogy to some degree reflects the resolution of this. Wallensteins Lager/Wallenstein’s Camp presents us with the great general’s power base, not the man himself; Die Piccolomini/The Piccolomini centres on the conflict between father and son, Octavio and Max Piccolomini; Wallensteins Tod/Wallenstein’s Death brings us the act of rebellion and the downfall. Each part of the trilogy has its own terms of reference and ‘feel’. Schiller does not follow the Shakespearean pattern of alternation between high and low styles — a pattern that has consequences for nineteenth-century verse tragedy in general. Die Piccolomini and Wallensteins Tod are characterized by the interior setting of French tragedy, with its restricted numbers on stage, and use of verse (here blank verse). The Lager stands out formally through the use of ‘Knittelverse’ and their ‘altteutsch’ (‘old German’) or Faustian associations and the comic mode of the Capuchin monk’s sermon. Wallenstein does not appear. For this is the army that is occupying Bohemia and draining its substance. It is characterized by venality, materialism, the forces of ‘Glück’ and ‘Spiel’.14

  • 15  ‘His camp alone explains his crime’. Prologue, 118.
  • 16  ‘Deep in thought’, ‘pointedly’, ‘taken aback’. Piccolomini, 40, 41, 77.
  • 17  ‘We leave this place, but not the way we came’. Piccolomini, 81.
  • 18  ‘With soul of kings’. Piccolomini, 66.
  • 19  Tod, 1620ff.
  • 20  ‘To Prince Piccolimini’. Tod, 3867.

11Schiller‘s own commentary is ‘Sein Lager nur erkläret sein Verbrechen’.15 Here he is close to the sense of baroque drama. For there is an interpenetration of all spheres of the high tragedy by the Lager. We see this in the very first scene of Die Piccolomini, where the generals, not the ‘Soldateska’ (‘soldiery’) are assembled, with its military language, its use of ‘Fremdwörter’ (‘foreign words’) and above all the accentuated theatricality of its stage directions (‘nachdenkend’, ‘mit Bedeutung’, ‘betroffen’).16 Buttler’s ‘Wir gehn nicht von hier, wie wir kamen’17 has an ominous ring — when we know of his later role in Wallenstein’s fall. We sense that Wallenstein’s power base is built not on high ideals but on mercenary service and plunder. The much-vaunted charismatic power of Wallenstein to raise armies — another reason why Buttler must murder him in the night before the Swedes are due to arrive — is based also on his power to pay (‘der Königlichgesinnte’,18 as the venal condottiere Isolani calls him). Wallenstein is aware of this, as he stoically notes when Isolani deserts him for the Emperor.19 It is the world of the Lager — but reflected in its highest officers — that enters into the proceedings at the banquet in Die Piccolomini where Isolani and Illo brawl; that disturbs the action of Wallensteins Tod, in the representatives of the Pappenheim regiment; that explains the mentality of Buttler and his hired assassins, and which ultimately underlies the punchline of the play, ‘Dem Fürsten Piccolomini’.20

12We should not overlook that, at significant moments in the play, Wallenstein does fulfil the claims made about him in the Lager: he demonstrates an unsentimental and almost brutal attitude towards those in power and those close to him. We might cite here the scenes with Questenberg and Wrangel, his attitude to Thekla, and his insensitive dismissal of Max as a potential son-in-law. Instead, once his power to act is invoked — as at the end of Wallensteins Tod I — his personality shows a formidable and awesome aspect, confirming Max’s words at the end of Die Piccolomini:

  • 21  ‘ […] For this kingly man’s downfall
    Will bring a world down when it collapses, And as when a ship (...)

Denn dieser Königliche, wenn er fällt,
Wird eine Welt im Sturze mit sich reißen,
Und wie ein Schiff, das mitten auf dem Weltmeer
In Brand gerät mit einem Mal, und berstend
Auffliegt, und alle Mannschaft, die es trug,
Ausschüttet plötzlich zwischen Meer und Himmel,
Wird er uns alle, die wir an sein Glück
Befestigt sind, in seinen Fall hinabziehn.21

13The first two lines suggest the Shakespearean analogy with Caesar; the image of ship and fortune — but with explosive power of expression — reminds us the century that produced both the historical Wallenstein and baroque drama.

  • 22  Goethe, ‘Die Piccolomini’, 8f.

14Goethe, in the first important analysis of the play, contrasted the ‘gemeine Wirklichkeit’ (‘base reality’) of power and the ‘phantastischer Geist’ (‘fantastic mind’) of an ideal that this world cannot fulfil.22 We note in Die Piccolomini and in the early scenes of Wallensteins Tod the preoccupation with the word time, ‘Zeit’: that it is not yet time to act, that things will be ordained in their own time. This is not merely the hubris of the Macbeth-like ruler (for hubris involves choosing the wrong time): Wallenstein also believes in a constellation of things beyond time. Think of the opening of Wallensteins Tod:

  • 23  W. ‘See! In our favour, how at last
    Fate’s hand unites the mighty Three,
    While Jupiter and Venus, as (...)

WALLENSTEIN. Glückseliger Aspekt! So stellt sich endlich
Die große Drei verhängnisvoll zusammen,
Und beide Segenssterne, Jupiter
Und Venus, nehmen den verderblichen,
Den tückschen Mars in ihre Mitte, zwingen
Den alten Schadenstifter mir zu dienen.
[…]
SENI. Und beide große Lumina von keinem
Malefico beleidigt! der Saturn
Unschädlich, machtlos, in cadente domo.
WALLENSTEIN. Saturnus‘ Reich ist aus, der die geheime
Geburt der Dinge in dem Erdenschoß
Und in den Tiefen des Gemüts beherrscht
Und über allem, was das Licht scheut, waltet.
Nicht Zeit ists mehr zu brüten und zu sinnen,
Denn Jupiter, der glänzende, regiert
Und zieht das dunkel zubereite Werk
Gewaltig in das Reich des Lichts - Jetzt muß
Gehandelt werden, schleunig, eh die Glücks-
Gestalt mir wieder wegflieht überm Haupt,
Denn stets in Wandlung ist der Himmelsbogen.
(Es geschehen Schläge an die Tür).23

  • 24  ‘He strides agitatedly through the room, stands still, in contemplation’. Tod, 183.
  • 25  ‘Courage light and free’, Tod, 180; ‘the overflow of heart’, Tod, l74.
  • 26  ‘Dream’, Tod, 143; ‘thought’, Tod, 148; ‘hope’, Tod, 151; ‘the overflow of heart’, Tod, 174.
  • 27  ‘The common round’, Tod, 207f.

15Here Jupiter (majesty) and Venus (beauty) hold destructive Mars in check, Saturn, the earth powerless. ‘The shining one’, not ‘all that shuns the light’, is in control. This alone gives Wallenstein the assurance that he can act. How different from Macbeth who trusts the witches. And yet he cannot act as he would wish. Note the stage directions (knocks at the door); Terzky arrives, then Wrangel. In the next scene, the instruction (‘Er macht heftige Schritte durchs Zimmer, dann bleibt er wieder sinnend stehen’)24 stresses the anguished necessity of acting within time. Political man does not enjoy the luxury of reflexion, of ‘des Mutes freier Trieb’, of ‘Überfluß des Herzens’,25 let alone the ideal aesthetic freedom which Schiller sees as vested in the beautiful, ‘das Schöne’. This scene, relatively abstract in its language, trusting in trope, where the images do not come tumbling out as in Shakespeare, is in many ways the turning-point of the tragedy. But is everything programmed for downfall and disaster merely because Wallenstein has decided that his options are foreclosed and he must act? Rather, it talks of things that once seemed to be (‘Traum’; ‘Gedanken’; ‘Hoffnung’; ‘Überfluß des Herzens’) and that no longer are.26 These are words connoting freedom from constraint, creations of the mind, imaginings indulged. They lifted him from time: now he must act in time. They raised him above the demeaning effects of ‘das ganz Gemeine’:27 he now must grapple with them.

  • 28  ‘Tragedy’; ‘a dramatic poem’.
  • 29  ‘Between you and my heart’. Tod, 718.

16This pivotal scene may tell us what the tragedy of Wallenstein is. Of course, Schiller only calls Wallensteins Tod ‘ein Trauerspiel’: the whole play is ‘ein dramatisches Gedicht’,28 the more neutral term that Gothold Ephraim Lessing’s Nathan der Weise/Nathan the Wise made current. Does that mean that the world of Wallensteins Lager, as it spills over into Die Piccolomini, is less tragic than the trilogy’s dénouement? The first two parts are more closely linked with the actual stuff of political power and the jostlings for supremacy in that world. Wallenstein’s great monologues, like the one in Wallensteins Tod I, 4, seem hardly to form part of this, showing as they do a character too complex to be confined in categories of good generalship or a warlord’s fortune. He has always been complex: trusting moods, intuitions, signs, coincidences, as he chooses. Now, he is forced to act. That does not make him tragic, although there is a tragic irony underwriting all of his tactical decisions. Surely what makes the major characters in this play tragic, not just Wallenstein, but Max, Thekla or Octavio, is that they have identified something beyond the historical and political moment, to which they appeal — in vain. It is summed up in the abstract noun that occurs repeatedly in this play: ‘Herz’, heart. It signifies something different at each usage, and it is never uncontaminated with other, often baser, associations. It situates this play in both the lexis and self-awareness of idealism and ‘Empfindsamkeit’, the cult of feeling; not the grand events that spur on the action in Shakespeare, but the appeal to inner sentiments. It is one reason why Schiller, in his explicit stage directions, wishes us to experience the interplay of inner and exterior reactions. It is what always sets Schiller apart from Shakespeare, even when the sentiments, as with Karl Moor or Marquis Posa, are often stridently expressed or inadequately excogitated. Had Wallenstein been Macbeth, he would have said at Max’s death: ‘He should have died hereafter’. Instead, his pondering of what ‘das Schöne’ in a human life might mean takes him into a moral sphere quite different from Macbeth’s. Had he been merely the ‘Realist’ of Schiller’s theory, he would not have allowed his mind to rise above the pragmatics of the situation. But ‘Herz’ is multivalent and ambiguous, like ‘remembrance’ in Hamlet or ‘honest’ in Othello. It means love, honour, probity, the integrated self; it helps to explain why loyalty can become a key issue in this historical drama, so unlike the naked struggles in Shakespeare’s Histories. But examining one’s heart means also consulting other interests: Octavio’s appeal to Max’s heart also involves imperial and dynastic loyalties; Wallenstein, similarly, but also Max’s ‘zwischen dir und meinem Herzen’,29 which, as we know, means as much choosing Thekla as remaining loyal to Emperor Ferdinand. ‘Herz’ also invites us to think, not in categories (such as ‘schöne Seele’, ‘beautiful soul’) but according to human experience. Max’s desperate end cannot be read as ‘schön’: what is there left to live for? Wallenstein’s heart goes out to Max — it is in human terms the most convincing love in the play — but it cannot be divorced from retaining the Pappenheim regiment and it rules out Max as a son-in-law. Hence we are seized and moved by Wallenstein’s ‘Herz’ in the elegiac mode of Acts Four and Five of Wallensteins Tod when there can be no more manoeuvrings and temporizings — and when thugs are planning his murder. Octavio is never more tragic than when he realises at the end that ‘Herz’ involves losing a son in the cause he espouses.

  • 30  ‘How glib the tongue of youth’. Tod, 779ff.
  • 31  ‘Wide’; ‘pure’; ‘hard’; ‘rough’; ‘bad’; ‘false’.

17The figure of Max distinguishes this play further from Shakespeare, a figure who represents ‘das Schöne’, while, as we saw, being drawn into the world of reality by family affiliation and profession. Shakespeare’s technique is different: his villains, Richard or Macbeth, are so commanding that they steal the show from the powers of legitimacy (Richmond, Malcolm). Yet Schiller’s play is not just a conflict between, in his terms, the ‘idealist’ and the ‘realist’. Max’s despair and death do not belong in the pure realm any more than Wallenstein’s actions. But it is Wallenstein who enunciates the principle of pragmatic action, while also looking beyond it. That is the sense of his famous speech in the second act of Wallensteins Tod, ‘Schnell fertig ist die Jugend mit dem Wort’,30 with its awareness of the contrasting spheres of ‘weit’ or ‘rein’ as opposed to ‘hart’, ‘grob’, ‘böse’ or ‘falsch’,31 its essential call for compromise, its opposition to what Max calls ‘Herz’. Through an irony, it is only after Max’s death that Wallenstein can appreciate the ‘dream’ of humanity he sees Max as representing:

  • 32  ‘He made real things into a dream’. Tod, 3446.

Er machte mir das Wirkliche zum Traum.32

  • 33  ‘The son of the house’, Tod, 2160.
  • 34  Tod, III, 18.
  • 35  ‘That Max, my Max, can leave me’ [my italics]. Tod, 2162. Thomas Mann, ‘Schillers Wallenstein’, ed (...)

18Max, as son, as the object of affection (‘Kind des Hauses’),33 brings out the inner side of the ruler, hidden from the world of the Lager.34 One thinks of Thomas Mann’s gloss on the line ‘Daß mich der Max verlassen kann’,35 where Wallenstein’s familiar, slightly colloquial word sums up his moral dilemma. He is bound by forces of affection, but he also needs Max’s regiment as part of the retention of power.

  • 36  ‘And in my mind was led into the thick of the fray’. Tod, 926ff.

19Max, too, is linked with that other aspect of Wallenstein’s belief in some higher awareness. Pragmatists simply write off Wallenstein’s vision as chance (‘Zufall’). For Wallenstein, it confirms that he may implicity rely on Max’s father, Ocatvio. One is reminded of the well-known speech in Wallensteins Tod, II, 3 (‘Und mitten in der Schlacht ward ich geführt / Im Geist’).36 Wallenstein’s belief is guaranteed by an inner sense of security and wellbeing. But we note that Max, by an irony in the economy of the action, finds his death in a scene (IV, 10) which echoes Wallenstein’s original dream vision.

  • 37  ‘Fickle shifting planets’. Tod, 3428.
  • 38  ‘Fate’, ‘planets’, ‘misfortune’, ‘hour’. Tod, 208ff.
  • 39  ‘Habit’, ‘holds fast’, ‘the common round’, ‘the eternal yesterday’, ‘old lumber’, ‘inheritance han (...)

20Thus in the last scenes of the play, as Wallenstein accepts the guilt for Max’s death, we sense almost a sublimity (‘Erhabenheit’, in Schiller’s sense) entering in. It is not real, but dramatically devised. Wallenstein has not so much changed; he is not on an ascendant moral curve. But our aesthetic satisfaction demands that his end be different from Macbeth’s or Richard’s. Think of the moving scene V, 3, with its renunciation (‘trüglich wankenden Planeten’).37 It contrasts with the tragic sense of impending catastrophe and end, and rises above the sphere of the brutal Buttler and his henchmen. The heavens are darkened; the atmosphere is lyrical; Max is the light of his life, not extinguished, but safe from the things that have held Wallenstein in their thrall, ‘Schicksal’, ‘Planeten’, ‘Unglück’ and ‘Stunde’.38 Yet for all that, Wallenstein has not entirely abandoned his hopes for the coming day, which for him will never dawn. It takes us back to his earlier monologue in the first act (I, 4). His ambition is not just to rule, but to fulfil a vision of change, to set new values against ‘Gewohnheit’, ‘sich befestigt’, ‘das ganz Gemeine’, ‘das ewig Gestrige’, ‘alter Hausrat’ and ‘Erbstück’.39 It is a vision, not of habitual recurrence, but of change. It lifts us — momentarily only — above intrigue. It deludes Wallenstein into thinking that ambition, double-dealing and the naked exercise of power may be justified if the end is worthwhile. It is this vision which constitutes the major difference between Octavio (and by extension the Emperor) and Wallenstein, between the old order and a glimpse of the new. It is related to Max’s vision of peace and humanity, ‘Menschlichkeit’, in Die Piccolomini I, 4. But Wallenstein is too taken up with the present, with the ambition of a crown, a dynasty, a pax romana, to grasp the full implications of this ‘Menschlichkeit’. He sees fulfilment in the other, Max, not in himself. Wallenstein still sets his face against the real future, which we know will bring his demise and the tragic denouement; for Max there is no future to fear:

  • 40  ‘For him there is no future, and no fate
    Spins malice in its toils,
    His life is bright and without c (...)

Für ihn ist keine Zukunft mehr, ihm spinnt
Das Schicksal keine Tücke mehr, — sein Leben
Liegt faltenlos und leuchtend ausgebreitet,
Kein dunkler Flecken blieb darin zurück,
Und unglückbringend pocht ihm keine Stunde.40

Notes

1  This chapter is largely based on my ‘Schiller, Wallenstein’, in Landmarks in German Drama, ed. by Peter Hutchinson (Berne: Peter Lang, 2002), 47–57. It also appeared as the introduction to Flora Kimmich’s translation of Friedrich Schiller, Wallenstein: A Dramatic Poem (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2017), https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0101

2  For an account of the reception of Wallenstein, with an extensive bibliography, see Schillers ‚Wallenstein‘, ed. by Fritz Heuer and Werner Keller, Wege der Forschung 420 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1977). See also Friedrich Schiller, ‚Wallenstein‘: Erläuterungen und Dokumente, ed. by Kurt Rothmann, Reclams Universal-Bibliothek 8136 [3] (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1982). Recent studies in English include T. J. Reed, The Classical Centre. Goethe and Weimar 1775–1832 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), 136–49; T. J. Reed, Schiller, Past Masters (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 80–85; Lesley Sharpe, Schiller and the Historical Character. Presentation and Interpretation in the Historiographical Works and in the Historical Dramas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 72–105; Lesley Sharpe, Friedrich Schiller, Drama, Thought and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 217–50; F. J. Lamport, ‘Wallenstein on the English Stage’, German Life and Letters, 48 (1995), 124–47.

3  G. W. F. Hegel, ‘Über Wallenstein’, in Schillers ‚Wallenstein‘, ed. by Heuer and Keller, 15f.

4  Ludwig Tieck, ‘Die Piccolomini. Wallensteins Tod’, ibid., 21–40.

5  Otto Ludwig, ‘Schillers Wallenstein’, ibid., 47–52.

6  ‘Freedom of thought’.

7  ‘Sublime’; ‘beautiful’.

8  ‘The true artistic world of the poet’; ‘seeming’; ‘free play’.

9  ‘Phantastic spirit’; ‘the great and idealistic’; ’common and everyday life’. Goethe, ‘Die Piccolomini. Wallensteins erster Teil’, ibid., 3–9 (9).

10  Wilhelm Dilthey, ‘Wallenstein’, ibid., 74–103 (76).

11  ‘Thus Wallenstein fell, not because he was a rebel, but he rebelled because he was falling’. All quotations from Schiller are taken from Sämtliche Werke, ed. by Gerhard Fricke, Herbert G. Göpfert and Herbert Stubenrauch, 5 vols (Munich: Hanser, 1960), here IV, 688. References in footnotes indicate part and line number.

12  ‘ […] Not unworthy of the exalted hour,
The time in which we strive and live’. Prologue, 55–56.

13  ‘ […] Thank her that she the gloomy face
Of truth brings over into art’s serene
Domain, the feinted, her creation,
Breaks with her own hand, and truth
Does not give out for its appearance.
Serious is life, but art serene’. Prologue, 133–38.

14  ‘Fortune’; ‘game’.

15  ‘His camp alone explains his crime’. Prologue, 118.

16  ‘Deep in thought’, ‘pointedly’, ‘taken aback’. Piccolomini, 40, 41, 77.

17  ‘We leave this place, but not the way we came’. Piccolomini, 81.

18  ‘With soul of kings’. Piccolomini, 66.

19  Tod, 1620ff.

20  ‘To Prince Piccolimini’. Tod, 3867.

21  ‘ […] For this kingly man’s downfall
Will bring a world down when it collapses, And as when a ship upon the main
Goes up in flames and bursts
Apart, and all its crew
Flings out, up in the air,
So he will tear down in his fall
All those dependent on his fortunes’. Piccolomini, 2639ff.

22  Goethe, ‘Die Piccolomini’, 8f.

23  W. ‘See! In our favour, how at last
Fate’s hand unites the mighty Three,
While Jupiter and Venus, ascendant,
Force devious Mars between them
To make him serve me.’
S. ‘And both great Lumina not crossed
By any Malifico! While Saturn
Shorn of power, in cadente domo.’
W. ‘Saturn’s rule is ended, he who
Controls the secret birth of things
In earth’s womb and in the humours’ depths,
Commanding all that shuns the light.
This is no time to brood now or to ponder,
For jovial Jupiter commands
And draws the processes of darkness
Over to the realm of light.
Now we must act, and quick, before
My lucky star flies out beyond my ken,
For the arc of heaven is constantly at move.’
(There are knocks at the door.) Tod, 9–35.

24  ‘He strides agitatedly through the room, stands still, in contemplation’. Tod, 183.

25  ‘Courage light and free’, Tod, 180; ‘the overflow of heart’, Tod, l74.

26  ‘Dream’, Tod, 143; ‘thought’, Tod, 148; ‘hope’, Tod, 151; ‘the overflow of heart’, Tod, 174.

27  ‘The common round’, Tod, 207f.

28  ‘Tragedy’; ‘a dramatic poem’.

29  ‘Between you and my heart’. Tod, 718.

30  ‘How glib the tongue of youth’. Tod, 779ff.

31  ‘Wide’; ‘pure’; ‘hard’; ‘rough’; ‘bad’; ‘false’.

32  ‘He made real things into a dream’. Tod, 3446.

33  ‘The son of the house’, Tod, 2160.

34  Tod, III, 18.

35  ‘That Max, my Max, can leave me’ [my italics]. Tod, 2162. Thomas Mann, ‘Schillers Wallenstein’, ed. by Heuer and Keller, 139–56 (141).

36  ‘And in my mind was led into the thick of the fray’. Tod, 926ff.

37  ‘Fickle shifting planets’. Tod, 3428.

38  ‘Fate’, ‘planets’, ‘misfortune’, ‘hour’. Tod, 208ff.

39  ‘Habit’, ‘holds fast’, ‘the common round’, ‘the eternal yesterday’, ‘old lumber’, ‘inheritance handed down’. Tod, 197, 198, 208, 213, 214.

40  ‘For him there is no future, and no fate
Spins malice in its toils,
His life is bright and without crease
Unfolded, no dark spot there to mar,
Fate knocks not at the door with its bad tidings’. Tod, 3422–26.

List of illustrations

Title Fig. 3 Wallenstein, from Friedrich Schiller’s drama trilogy Wallenstein, steel engraving after a drawing by Friedrich Pecht, c. 1859. Wikimedia, https://commons.wikimedia.org/​wiki/​File:Wallenstein_aus_Schillers_Wallenstein.jpg, public domain.
URL http://books.openedition.org/obp/docannexe/image/24305/img-1.jpg
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