Writers

Friedrich Schiller

                                          Was sie gestern gelernt,  

                                             das wollen sie heute schon lehren. 

                        Ach! was haben die Herrn doch für ein kurzes Gedärm!

                                        

                                                                                                                  

Schiller was born on November 10th 1759 (10 years after Goethe and 10 before Napoleon) in Marburg. He went to the boarder school ("Herzögliche Pflanzschule") of the duke Carl Eugen., studying law, but soon got bored by it- he also didn´t like the militarian style the school was led with. So he started studying medicine and became regimetal doctor. In his first years of writing in this time, he was mainly influenced by Shakespeare.

At the age of 23 he wrote his first masterpiece Die Räuber (The Robbers). The premiere was a scandal, as the play showed all the hate of Schiller against any kind of tyranny. Although he tried to persuade the duke to let him go on with writing, he finally had to flee from Stuttgart  after having been in jail (he had illegally left his academy for the premiere of Die Räuber) and prohibition to write anything more. He stayed in Mannheim as a theatre pot for one year, but left with monetarian problems.

So he travelled through eastern Germany for 4 years (under the name Dr.Ritter- Dr. Knight) before he came to Jena where he got a professor seat for history at the university of Jena. His first lectures were attended largely as he was a kind of "star" with his first play, but as he was rather a story teller and dramaturgian than a historian, his lectures weren´t attended numerously after a certain time.

In 1792, Schiller got seriously ill and never recovered from that lungs illness for the rest of his short life (more 14 years). Here, the story that Schiller had rotten apples in his desk drawer to smell them when he felt a swoon coming, had its origin. Actually, it was a biological miracle he could live with his serious illness for so many years.

In 1794, the "frienship" with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe started. The two biggest writer of German history, united in writing things together, correcting, inspiring and competing with each other. But for me and many other historians, it wasn´t the big friendship it seemed to be. Start with their first meeting; Schiller called Goethe "unlikeable" and an "egoist in an enormous way". Goethe just hated Schiller (Schiller had been more successful around 1800 than Goethe, maybe the reason for it!). So it took them many years for a second meeting as Goethe was in Italy when Schiller came to Jena. By the way they talked with each other (1006 letters), you can see their friendship had a kind of distant feeling. They never came to the familiar German "Du" and stayed with rather distanced "Sie" for their whole life. But especially the way Goethe treated Schiller and his family after his death is really interesting, but that´s for later.

Although being seriously ill for all his life (he didn´t feel well from his early childhood on for big parts of his life; seldom was there a week without indisposition), Schiller created an enormous opus. Imagine: he was close to collapsing for probably 80% of his time; maybe 3 weeks ill, 1 week better and working doggedly, and the results are Maria Stuart, Wilhelm Tell, Wallenstein etc! That´s what  I admire so much about him; his pathetic way of describing situations in his plays- that pursuit of freedom, that pathetic way of demanding justice- and this was the way he lived too: only his strong will kept him working and living; while being traced with monetarian and sanitary problems, he always kept his independence from money lender as the duke could have been for him.

(It is this time of weak health that created the anecdote with the rotten apples: apparently, Schiller kept several rotten apples in his desk. Whenever he felt he was about to faint he would open the drawer of his desk where the apples were lying and the fumes of them would bring him back to full conscience.)

In 1805, Schiller died after a pneumonia; and here a sad story of 27 years began. Being a poor man, his family didn´t have the money for a proper burial and grave. In the middle of the night, he was buried  in a common grave- and while his wife Charlotte needed his help the most, Schillers "big" friend Goethe stayed at home, larmenting on his own. Many years later, some people had the idea of getting the bones of Schiller into an own grave. But as they couldn´t identify his bones in that common grave anymore, they just took the biggest bones of all (Schiller had been a big person). For the cranium, they put several of the ones from the grave in front of friends of Schiller and they had to decide which one resembled him the most.....this cranium then laid in a library until Goethe died in 1832. Then they were buried together in the duke´s grave. And finally Schiller had found his last calm- 27 years after his death.

Maybe you have realized that I don´t like Goethe that much. That´s true; first it is his opportunistic way of living his life free of problems as he was more adjusted than Schiller was (I have to accept this was his way of living, but I admire Schiller even more for not giving away his independence for an easy and sorrowless life), and then the way he didnt give any help to Schiller during his life and especially afterwards. I´m sure he only wanted to have Schiller as a friend as he wanted to be inspired by him and even lighted in Schillers presence- as I already wrote, Schiller was more popular this time and that first unlucky meeting took place when Schiller had just become popular- and then his character in general. He must have been a really unfriendly and egoistic person, and the way he treated women was just unworthy. He lived with his partner (he didn´t marry her) for many many years; but when he had guests, she had to stay silent in a room in the back of the house and was never introduced to Goethe´s friends (no joke). If you want to know more- "Johannes Lehmann, "Unser armer Schiller" . A fantastic book about the unknown sides of Schiller. This book came out at the perfect time for me; after having read several biographies and suspecting that this Schiller-Goethe friendship wasn´t all that true. But to do Goethe right, I have to say that Schiller liked Goethe and was inspired by him the same way Goethe was inspired by Schiller. Their "friendship" created a very productive phrase in both lives- without Schiller "Faust" would have never been finished! As well as several ballads and other writings of Schiller. But for me, Schiller is still the bigger one of these two.

Today, Schiller is one of the most read and played dramaturgian (in Germany the most played one); for me he is the writer that one has to appreciate the most among all the others. Compared with the short life time he had, the long periods of serious, strength-absorbing illness (he has never been free of pain during the last third of his life), the problems he had on his way with scandals around his plays which were demanding freedom, he has created an immense opus of highest quality. I bow my head in front of him in thought whensoever I think of him. 

I didnt´t write reviews on his books, as I think there are many people that can do that better and as I don´t think I can do that as I have completely lost the objective way of looking at his works. This link might help you; you can read the books on your own...

Funny enough, his first and his last play are my favourites. I love the pathetic way in Die Räuber he describes Karl Moor´s feeling when being treated unfair; you can almost feel it yourself. And I like Wilhelm Tell; ít is again concerned with the topic of unjustice and fight for freedom; I think it is beside the first one not only his strongest but his most perfect play.

James Hogg                                             (thanks to slainte.org  for this picture)

I came across this Scottish writer of the 19th century in the context of a course I took during my stay at the University of Stirling, when we read his most famous and notorious novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner which struck me as one of the greatest novels ever written. I kept this knowledge in my mind and didn't pick it up until now- he will be the object of my thesis!

In my research, I quickly met one significant point about his life- his rejection in upper-class society due to his origins. But to understand better what is meant with that we need to go back to the very beginning. James Hogg was born ~1770 as a son of a shepherd in the Scottish Borders and due to the bankruptcy of his father he had to herd cows and sheep from the early age of 7 on and therefore stayed almost completely illiterate until his mid- teens. It was only then that he educated himself and started writing songs and poems that were sung by other shepherds and "lassies" that gave him the nickname "Jamie the Poeter". In his songs, he dealt with the oral tradition and folklore of the Borders.

In 1801, Hogg visited the big cultural centre Edinburgh for the first time. Having finished his business with sheep, he decided to write down all the poetry he had in his mind and give it into print straight away. The Mountain Bard was successful and allowed him to buy an own farm. So although he had been to Edinburgh and had his own wee success there, he still stayed the shepherd of Ettrick- which gave him the nickname "The Ettrick Shepherd"- a name he cherished but also came to feel uneasy about later in his life. Several of his early writings in 1803/04 were published under the author "A Shepherd" or "A Scots Shepherd" and were of indigenous humour and originality.

When he failed with his own farm in 1810 he decided to go back to Edinburgh to dedicate himself to become a writer. This decision was made rather by his failure as a shepherd and the need to earn money than by his preferences for making a living- which clearly were being a shepherd (writing should only be a sideline then- his bankruptcy forced him to take it up as his principal income). Back in Edinburgh, he wasn't as welcomed though as he had expected. The posh society didn't accept him as one of them but as the shepherd, the curiosity from Southern Scotland and regarded many of his writings (eg his magazine The Spy) highly offensive and indecorous. Hogg, the rather rough and naive writer from the country side, did write what came to his mind (which made up a part of his charm as a writer), and often also deliberately behaved this way as he knew that a big part of his attraction then was his background and that people were highly attracted by the "simpleton" with the shepherd's roots that seemed so similar to Robert Burns (who had been from the "common people" as well) who had only died a decade before (and in whose shoes Hogg actually wanted to step).

The "Noctes Ambrosianae", a column that took shape in conversations in a pub, saw Hogg appearing as the "The Ettrick Shepherd". Initially, Hogg liked the image presented to the public. He knew that part of his charm was this "otherness" of him within the Edinburgh élite. But with the years moving on, the "Shepherd" of the "Noctes" more and more appeared to be of such a simple, naive and rather crude nature that Hogg felt that his reputation as a serious writer would suffer from that image. Also many people of that time that met James Hogg in real life were surprised to meet such a well-behaved and refined person and not the "Shepherd. Despite his requests to clarify he wasn't the "Shepherd", the writers of the "Noctes" went on using this stereotype and also quite rudely making fun of him. (One shouldn't forget that Sir Walter Scott too, a backer of Hogg for the second half of his life, took part in making fun of Hogg- eg his name and its closeness to "hog"- a pig. Scott's attitude towards Hogg was never of an equal, but of a superior friend). Magazine articles that dealt seriously with the writer Hogg decreased while satires on Hogg increased. A contemporary writer of James Hogg, John Wilson (also one of the writers of the "Noctes"), stated quite clearly that Hogg had no right to an intellectually and socially equal membership in the literary circles of the élite in Edinburgh. Due to this sadly widely spread opinion, Hogg stayed an outsider in those circles. His writings, amongst them the successful epic story-poem The Queen's Wake (1813) and the condemned novels The Three Perils of Man and The Three Perils of Woman (1822 and 1823) couldn't change this attitude. Even his biggest work, the fantastic gothic-horror-satirical-psychological novel on religion and society, the already mentioned The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1825) did nothing to help Hogg there. It was even a failure and didn't achieve the deserved attention until long after Hogg's death in 1835.

Hogg had two ambiguous ways of dealing with that. On the one hand, he wrote satirical articles and books (as The Poetic Mirror when he satirised the poets of his age), on the other hand he tried assimilating. Several of his writings show that he tried fulfilling the conventions of his age; often not very successful.

It is only due to James Hogg's self-confidence that he never gave up but kept writing (although his last years show how he had given up on writing ambitious pieces)- works that are often forgotten behind the stereotype he was attached to and that were bowdlerised and therefore deprived of their own originality and freshness of writing- especially in the Victorian period when no writing should send a "blush to the ladies' cheeks". He was only fully rediscovered in the second half of the 20th century and is meanwhile recognised as one of the great Scottish writers of the 19th century- a reputation that suits him very well and that he deserves!

 

If this ambiguous personality has now attracted your attention I suggest you turn your attention to The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner . An amazing book on which I could spend another hour praising its contents, structure and originality! As a last fact at the end: this book is often considered as inspiration for Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hide....

 

 

James Kelman (yet to come)

As preparational work let's just all read this book until I manage to write something about him...!