By the time Frederich Schiller came to write the Wallenstein trilogy, his reputation as one of Germany’s leading playwrights was all but secured. Consisting of Wallenstein’s Camp, The Piccolomini and The Death of Wallenstein, this suite of plays appeared between 1798 and 1799, each production under the original direction of Schiller’s collaborator and mentor, Johann Wolfgang (von) Goethe.…
Schiller’s Don Carlos, written ten years before his great Wallenstein trilogy, testifies to the young playwright’s growing power. First performed in 1787, it stands at the culmination of Schiller’s formative development as a dramatist and is the first play written in his characteristic iambic pentameter. Don Carlos plunges the audience into the dangerous political and personal struggles t…
"Friedrich Hölderlin’s only novel, Hyperion (1797–99), is a fictional epistolary autobiography that juxtaposes narration with critical reflection. Returning to Greece after German exile, following his part in the abortive uprising against the occupying Turks (1770), and his failure as both a lover and a revolutionary, Hyperion assumes a hermitic existence, during which he writes his letter…