Author Birthday 11/10: Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller

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Author name: Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller Birthplace: Marbach am Neckar, Duchy of Württemberg, Holy Roman Empire (near the present city of Stuttgart in Germany) Date of birth: 10 November 1759 Date of death: 9 May 1805 Language: German Friedrich von Schiller was a German poet and playwright. One of his least favorite poems, “Ode to Joy” (“An der Freude”) was used by Beethoven for the chorus in the final movement of his 9th Symphony. Schiller was friends with another German writer, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) who wrote The Sorrows of Young Werther (UGH.) Their discussions of philosophy and aesthetics led to a short-lived literary movement referred to as Weimar Classicism, a mixture of Romanticism, Classicism and Enlightenment thinking. An early play of Schiller, titled "The Robbers" ("Die Räuber"), was about a struggle between two aristocratic brothers. The older son, Karl, becomes something of a Robin Hood character, leading rather violent band of men into the Bohemian Forest for the sake of anarchy and perhaps revolution. Younger son Franz is scheming and rapacious, wanting to get his hands on his brother’s inheritance. The play may seem hackneyed now, but was a sensational in its time and made Schiller an overnight success. His contribution to speculative fiction is an unfinished novel, first published in serialized form beginning in 1787, "The Ghost-Seer" ("Der Geisterseher"). The audiences for it were largest during his lifetime of any of Schiller’s works. While there are themes on duty, passion and morality, the basic plot involved a secret Jesuit society trying to convert a Protestant German prince to Roman Catholicism and then install him on a throne. I don’t think it would be considered a page-turner these days. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ghost-Seer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Schiller https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ode_to_Joy