Page 2 of 2 Europe's tragedy, and Europe's tragedian
By Spengler
Schiller convulses the heart because he so well discerns the humanity even in
the most despicable characters. Heinrich Heine remarks that there are no minor
characters in William Shakespeare or Goethe, because, like gods, when they
direct their attention to a character, it cannot be minor, simply because
Shakespeare or Goethe are looking at it.
By contrast, there are no unsympathetic characters in Schiller. Unlike his
friend Goethe, Schiller has nothing of the Olympian about him, but his sympathy
for humanity in all of its expressions gives us unparalleled portraits of
individuals, even "amid the yelling of fiends". Goethe observes his characters
like a Greek god, with a preternatural combination of intensity and detachment:
he has the miserable Gretchen tear our hearts out at the end of the first part
of Faust, and discards her when her services to the
drama no longer are required. For all his faux Hellenism, Schiller lives with
his characters in their sorrow and terror; if our response does not seem as
overwrought as that of Coleridge, it is because Coleridge saw and felt more
deeply than we do.
There is no tragedy in literature quite like that of Wallenstein, the greatest
man of 17th-century Germany, but also the most destructive. The drama has some
dreadful weaknesses, including a cloying Romantic subplot, but it illuminates
European history like few other works of literature. The first of the
Wallenstein plays depicts the soldiers in their Bohemian winter camp. We never
learn their names - they are introduced only by rank and regiment - but their
nerve, craftiness and raw courage make us like them, despite the fact that
their self-recognition as a new people frightens us. Wallenstein's army stands
opposed to civil society - indeed, it is consuming civil society - but its
soldier-citizens will risk their lives to perpetuate it. They swear to support
their generalissimo against the intrigues of the Austrian court, and conclude
the first play of the trilogy in chorus:
Drum frisch, Kameraden, den
Rappen gezaumt,
Die Brust im Gefechte geluftet!
Die Jugend brauset, das Leben schaumt,
Frisch auf! eh' der Geist noch verduftet.
Und setzet ihr nicht das Leben ein,
Nie wird euch das Leben gewonnen sein.
[Let's go, comrades, bridle your steeds.
And lift your breasts in combat!
Youth roars and life foams,
Let's go before the spirit fades.
If you don't stake your life on it,
You will never win life for yourself.]
We are horrified, but we
want to join the song. These are the outcasts of Europe to whom Wallenstein has
given hope and purpose, and we are drawn into their enthusiasm even when we
know that their hope is perverse and their purpose is malignant. In the
assemblage of mercenary adventurers that comprised Wallenstein's camp, we hear
a humanity that draws us near to it. It is all the more poignant because we
know that everyone we see on stage will die, and die soon.
By the same token, Schiller finds greatness of soul in the unfortunate Mary
Stuart, the Catholic antagonist of Elizabeth I, and makes Elizabeth into a
monster. No stricter apologist of the Protestant cause set pen to paper than
Schiller, who saw in the Protestant revolt against Spain and in the revolt
against the Empire in the Thirty Years' War the first stirrings of European
freedom. In his unpublished poem "German greatness" he wrote,
Schwere
Ketten druckten alle
Volker auf dem Erdenballe
Als der Deutsche sie zerbrach
Fehde bot dem Vatikane
Krieg ankundigte dem Wahne
Der die ganze Welt bestach.
[Heavy chains oppressed
All the peoples of the earth
When the German (Luther) smashed them,
Declared a feud against the Vatican,
And War against the insanity
That corrupted the entire world. ]
Schiller's histories
(written in the early 1790s when he taught at the University of Jena) are
almost as dreadful. As an historian, Schiller prefigures the Whig
interpretation of history, in which enlightened Protestantism gradually
triumphs over the medieval obscurantism of the Catholic Church. But as a
dramatist he abandons the Enlightenment notion of progress in favor of a much
darker view.
He understands European history not as the shift of power from obscurantist
Catholicism to enlightened Protestantism, but rather as the death-tragedy of
Catholicism and of Europe itself. And what guides him is a surprising sympathy
for the great Catholic personages of the Religious Wars.
His two book-length histories are unabashed Protestant polemics and far
inferior to the dramas. The first is a sympathetic portrayal of the
Netherlands' revolt against Catholic Spain, whence came the materials for his
"black legend" drama about Philip II and the Inquisition, Don Carlos.
The unspeakably evil Grand Inquisitor in Schiller's drama is said to have
inspired Fyodor Dostoyevsky's character in The Brothers Karamazov. The
second is a history of the Thirty Years War, which makes the astonishing claim
that "Europe came out of this frightful war unoppressed and free" because it
destroyed forever the principle of Catholic universal empire. And his novella The
Spiritualist (Der Geisterseher) is a Gothic tale of Catholic
intrigue against a Protestant ruler.
All the more striking, then, is Schiller's fictional account of Mary Stuart's
last confession. As Mary faces execution on false charges of conspiring against
Elizabeth I, she despairs that her captors have prevented her from making her
final confession and receiving the sacraments. A former servant, Melville,
arrives to reveal that he secretly has become a priest and has brought a host
blessed by the pope to administer her final communion.
Mary confesses her sins, including her complicity in the murder of her first
husband, takes communion, and goes to the scaffold to expiate her youthful
misdeeds with her own death, in a state that Schiller portrays as beatific. The
scene surely is one of the most touching representations of Catholic ritual
ever to be shown on the stage.
Schiller, despite his partisan Protestant stance, displays an intuitive
sympathy for the key Catholic personages of the Wars of Religion: Mary Stuart,
Joan of Arc, and above all Wallenstein. He juxtaposes the pettiness of
Elizabeth and the narrow ambition of the Swedes to the expansiveness of their
Catholic antagonists. Even in the aberrant ambitions of the Soldateska,
Schiller perceived the possibility of a European universalism. Wallenstein,
like Napoleon, was a tragic figure. Europe had the capacity to bring forth a
new people and instead it gave rise to a murderous horde. The tragedy in the
wars of religion was the death of Catholic universalism, and the tragedy of a
mediocre people that could find nothing which which to replace it - until the
American Revolution.
As the Napoleonic Wars wore on, Schiller's hopes turned away from the great
European states and their leaders. The Swiss burghers rising against foreign
oppressors in his last play, William Tell, recognizably are American
revolutionaries. The character of Tell drives the drama less than that of the
ordinary people who find the means to become extraordinary. The mediocrity of
the Europeans is redeemed in American circumstances, and the peoples emerge as
heroic protagonist rather than as tragic hero.
Spengler is channeled by David P Goldman, senior editor at First Things
(www.firstthings.com)
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