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selenakOkay, one of my christmas presents was a Schiller biography. And being utterly corrupted by fandom, I found myself thinking that if German universities were more like lj world, Goethe/Schiller would so be the OTP of all OTPs.
Behold, English-speaking world in ignorance of the saga: When they first met, they were profoundly irritated by one another. Goethe was ten years older and had left the Sturm und Drang behind which Schiller was just embarking on, and was busy trying to be respectable in Weimar. Schiller was all youthful rebellion and thought Goethe had sold out and most of all was angry that Goethe ignored him. Which resulted in him writing to a friend that "Goethe was like a proud bitch one had to get pregnant in order to humiliate her in front of the world", I kid you not. (The original German is "eine stolze Prüde, der man ein Kind machen muß, um sie vor der Welt zu demütigen".)
Then Goethe went to Italy for two years, found himself again as a poet (and had lots of sex), and when he returned to Weimar, Schiller had settled into married stability and the bourgeois life. He also had just founded a new literary paper for which he needed well-known names as co-workers. Which led to a meeting with guess whom and a letter. This time, they hit it off. Even in his very old age Goethe got misty eyed when speaking of the "happy event" (das glückliche Ereignis) when they had their very first friendly argument, resulting in Schiller saying, re: one of Goethe's points, "but that's not an experience, that's an idea!". The next day, Schiller wrote a rather long wooing letter, and the result was German classicism, i.e. intense correspondance, lots of meetings, and the poems and plays these two literary giants are most famous for. The relationship also kept being compared to a love affair. Quoth August Schlegel (he who co-wrote the most famous Shakespeare translation) and had something of a feud going with Schiller:
"In any case, Goethe tried to mediate between us rather charmingly. His delicate concern for Schiller, which resembled the care a tender husband takes with his hysterical wife, did not stop him from being friends with us." ("Us" being the Schlegel brothers, the Coen brothers of their day. In the German original: "Überhaupt trat Goethe auf eine sehr liebenswürdige Weise vermittelnd ein. Seine sorgsame Schonung für Schiller, welche der eines zärtlichen Ehemannes für seine nervenschwache Frau glich, hielt ihn nicht ab, mit uns auf dem freundschaftlichstem Fuße fortzuleben." )
And here's Schiller's most famous summing-up of the relationship, in one of the letters:
"...it has become a kind of religion for me to make your cause to mine, to form all which is reality in me to the purest mirror of the mind which lives in this form, and so to deserve being called your friend. How vividly did I find out on this occasion that the sublime is a power, that it can only be felt as a power even in a selfish heart, for there is no freedom against him who is sublime but love."
(Sounds better in German: "....und das schöne Verhältnis, das unter uns ist, macht es mir zu einer gewissen Religion, Ihre Sache hierin zu der meinigen zu machen, alles was in mir Realität ist, zu dem reinsten Spiegel des Geistes auszubilden, der in dieser Hülle lebt, und so, in einem höheren Sinn des Worts, den Namen Ihres Freundes zu verdienen. Wie lebhaft habe ich bei dieser Gelegenheit erfahren, daß das Vortreffliche eine Macht ist, daß es auf selbstsüchtige Gemüter auch nur als eine Macht wirken kann, daß es, dem Vortrefflichem gegenüber keine Freiheit gibt als die Liebe.")
As for Goethe, years later after Schiller's death, the recitation of a Schillerian ballad was enough to let him burst into tears and tell the actress who was doing the reciting: "I cannot, cannot forget this man!" (And Goethe was avowedly not the bursting into tears type, especially not in his old age.) They got sick at the same time, only Schiller died of it and Goethe lived. Now if this was a film or a tv show or a novel, you can bet the slashers would have been salviating eons ago. True, both men had their canon love interests as well. Schiller was married, and Goethe was living, scandalously for the time, with his mistress Christiane Vulpius whom he married years later. Which didn't stop the Weimar society from cutting poor Christiane, both for the long living together unmarried thing and because of her working class origins. I must say Schiller wasn't behaving well at all in this regard - in Goethe's letters, there are always greetings for Mrs Schiller, but Schiller managed to spend weeks at Goethe's house where Christiane was the hostess without even mentioning her in his thank you note. However, if you take the slash explanation, then everything is clear - he was jealous!
Anyway, canon relationships never stopped 'shippers of any calibre. So, if German literature were a fandom, you'd have the initial enemies state, then the meeting of minds state, and then the two-of-us-against-the-world state (they even got into flame wars with other writers; brush up the Xenien). And then the heartrendering death plus post-mortem angst and grief on the part of the survivor.
Am I glad I got my doctorate years ago. They'd never take me seriously now. This is fandom. Fandom did this to me...
...but I still wonder why there are no G/S 'shippers around...
Behold, English-speaking world in ignorance of the saga: When they first met, they were profoundly irritated by one another. Goethe was ten years older and had left the Sturm und Drang behind which Schiller was just embarking on, and was busy trying to be respectable in Weimar. Schiller was all youthful rebellion and thought Goethe had sold out and most of all was angry that Goethe ignored him. Which resulted in him writing to a friend that "Goethe was like a proud bitch one had to get pregnant in order to humiliate her in front of the world", I kid you not. (The original German is "eine stolze Prüde, der man ein Kind machen muß, um sie vor der Welt zu demütigen".)
Then Goethe went to Italy for two years, found himself again as a poet (and had lots of sex), and when he returned to Weimar, Schiller had settled into married stability and the bourgeois life. He also had just founded a new literary paper for which he needed well-known names as co-workers. Which led to a meeting with guess whom and a letter. This time, they hit it off. Even in his very old age Goethe got misty eyed when speaking of the "happy event" (das glückliche Ereignis) when they had their very first friendly argument, resulting in Schiller saying, re: one of Goethe's points, "but that's not an experience, that's an idea!". The next day, Schiller wrote a rather long wooing letter, and the result was German classicism, i.e. intense correspondance, lots of meetings, and the poems and plays these two literary giants are most famous for. The relationship also kept being compared to a love affair. Quoth August Schlegel (he who co-wrote the most famous Shakespeare translation) and had something of a feud going with Schiller:
"In any case, Goethe tried to mediate between us rather charmingly. His delicate concern for Schiller, which resembled the care a tender husband takes with his hysterical wife, did not stop him from being friends with us." ("Us" being the Schlegel brothers, the Coen brothers of their day. In the German original: "Überhaupt trat Goethe auf eine sehr liebenswürdige Weise vermittelnd ein. Seine sorgsame Schonung für Schiller, welche der eines zärtlichen Ehemannes für seine nervenschwache Frau glich, hielt ihn nicht ab, mit uns auf dem freundschaftlichstem Fuße fortzuleben." )
And here's Schiller's most famous summing-up of the relationship, in one of the letters:
"...it has become a kind of religion for me to make your cause to mine, to form all which is reality in me to the purest mirror of the mind which lives in this form, and so to deserve being called your friend. How vividly did I find out on this occasion that the sublime is a power, that it can only be felt as a power even in a selfish heart, for there is no freedom against him who is sublime but love."
(Sounds better in German: "....und das schöne Verhältnis, das unter uns ist, macht es mir zu einer gewissen Religion, Ihre Sache hierin zu der meinigen zu machen, alles was in mir Realität ist, zu dem reinsten Spiegel des Geistes auszubilden, der in dieser Hülle lebt, und so, in einem höheren Sinn des Worts, den Namen Ihres Freundes zu verdienen. Wie lebhaft habe ich bei dieser Gelegenheit erfahren, daß das Vortreffliche eine Macht ist, daß es auf selbstsüchtige Gemüter auch nur als eine Macht wirken kann, daß es, dem Vortrefflichem gegenüber keine Freiheit gibt als die Liebe.")
As for Goethe, years later after Schiller's death, the recitation of a Schillerian ballad was enough to let him burst into tears and tell the actress who was doing the reciting: "I cannot, cannot forget this man!" (And Goethe was avowedly not the bursting into tears type, especially not in his old age.) They got sick at the same time, only Schiller died of it and Goethe lived. Now if this was a film or a tv show or a novel, you can bet the slashers would have been salviating eons ago. True, both men had their canon love interests as well. Schiller was married, and Goethe was living, scandalously for the time, with his mistress Christiane Vulpius whom he married years later. Which didn't stop the Weimar society from cutting poor Christiane, both for the long living together unmarried thing and because of her working class origins. I must say Schiller wasn't behaving well at all in this regard - in Goethe's letters, there are always greetings for Mrs Schiller, but Schiller managed to spend weeks at Goethe's house where Christiane was the hostess without even mentioning her in his thank you note. However, if you take the slash explanation, then everything is clear - he was jealous!
Anyway, canon relationships never stopped 'shippers of any calibre. So, if German literature were a fandom, you'd have the initial enemies state, then the meeting of minds state, and then the two-of-us-against-the-world state (they even got into flame wars with other writers; brush up the Xenien). And then the heartrendering death plus post-mortem angst and grief on the part of the survivor.
Am I glad I got my doctorate years ago. They'd never take me seriously now. This is fandom. Fandom did this to me...
...but I still wonder why there are no G/S 'shippers around...
