Carl Hanser Verlag 2009

‘I thought I had lost myself and find that I have now lost a friend and with him half my life.’ This is how Goethe wrote to the composer Karl Friedrich Zelter in 1805, deeply affected by the illness he had now recovered from and by Schiller’s death. His alliance with Schiller had assumed mythic proportions even during their lifetime. As Dioscuri, as heavenly twins in spirit, they both put their stamp on what is probably the most important epoch of German literature, the Classical period (of roughly 1790-1830). Even today, the era is so closely identified with their joint activities that the union of the two seems as immutable and statuesque as Ernst Rietschel’s famous double monument in the market square in Weimar.....