Friedrich Schiller

Friedrich Schiller was the only son of a Württemberg officer who also worked as a surgeon and grew up with his five sisters in Schwäbisch Gmünd, Lorch and later in Ludwigsburg. There he attended the Latin school and, after passing the Protestant state examination four times, began studying law at the Karlsschule on 16 January 1773. Three years later, he switched to medicine and was awarded his doctorate in 1780. With his theatre debut, the play The Robbers, which premiered in 1782, Schiller made a significant contribution to the drama of Sturm und Drang and world literature.

In 1782, now a military doctor, he fled from his sovereign Duke Karl Eugen from Württemberg to Thuringia because he was threatened with imprisonment and a ban on writing for unauthorised removal from duty. In 1783, Schiller began work on Don Karlos. When his employment as a playwright at the Mannheim National Theatre expired, Schiller travelled to Leipzig in 1785 to meet his future friend and patron Christian Gottfried Körner. In the following years, he met Christoph Martin Wieland, Johann Gottfried Herder and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in Weimar. Together they shaped Weimar Classicism.

In addition to his theatre debut and Don Karlos, the historical dramas Wallenstein, Maria Stuart, The Maid of Orleans and William Tell in particular belong to the standard German repertoire. As an author and theorist, he was a role model and antagonist for subsequent playwrights. In addition to his dramatic work, Schiller wrote numerous aesthetic treatises such as Die Schaubühne als eine moralische Anstalt betrachtet, Über Anmut und Würde, Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen, Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung and Vom Erhabenen, in which he set out his poetics and showed literature new paths through a hitherto unknown depth of reflection. His ballads are among the best-known German poems. His thought poetry and didactic poems are of equal importance.

Friedrich Schiller was born in Württemberg and later became a citizen of Saxony-Weimar. In 1792, he was awarded honorary French citizenship and thus also French nationality - in honour of his drama The Robbers, which was performed in Paris and was seen as a fight for freedom against tyranny.

Friedrich Schiller was the second child of the officer, wound doctor and head of the court garden in Marbach am Neckar Johann Kaspar Schiller and his wife Elisabetha Dorothea Schiller. Kodweiß, the daughter of a host and baker, was born in 1759 in Marbach am Neckar. Frederick was two years younger than his sister Christophine, with whom he established a close relationship. Four other sisters only followed after six years; two of them died in childhood. Since his father received a job as an advertising officer and worked in the imperial city of Schwäbisch Gmünd, the family moved to Lorch in 1764. Shortly after Frederick's second sister Luise was born in 1766, the family moved to Ludwigsburg. In the same year, Frederick entered the Latin school there. At the age of thirteen he wrote the plays Absalon and Die Christen, both of which are no longer preserved.

On the orders of his parents, Schiller was forced to retire. It was called "Military Planting School", 54 days later, on its arrival. He was then housed in Solitude Castle near Gerlingen (Württemberg) and Stuttgart. Schiller began his legal studies. The tugs were robbed militarily, which may have contributed to him being still in bed at fifteen years; twice he was severely punished for this. Schiller secretly snapped tobacco and read forbidden writings together with his comrades.

The oldest known portrait of Schiller is a shadow torn which shows him as a student of the High Carlsschule. The artistic ornament around the said silhouette of the young Friedrich Schiller created the music publisher Heinrich Philipp Boßler.

In 1775, he moved from Solitude Castle to Stuttgart. Schiller changed his studies and turned to medicine. During this time he was captivated by the works of the poets of Storm and Drang and the poems of Klopstock. Friedrich Maximilian Klinger was particularly influential.

In the same year he wrote the play Der Student von Nassau. In 1776 he published his first printed poem, Der Abend. Schiller studied the works of Plutarch, Shakespeare, Voltaire, Rousseau and Goethe. In 1776 he began work on the liberation drama Die Räuber. In 1779 he passed the first medical examina and asked to be discharged from the military academy to become a military doctor.

His first book on the philosophy of physiology (1779) was widely rejected by the experts – professors and physicians of Duke Carl Eugene, who was present at the dispute. The reason was that this work was too much "fire" and "the whole learned world" had to feel insulted by the Eleven Schiller. A relatively well-known example of this work is his refusal to recognise the fact that the channels of the inner ear are filled with liquids, which was already proven at the time: Only one year later, after another unsuccessful attempt with a dissertation on fever, he was awarded the doctorate. He now wanted to do medical work. However, this was only granted to him in December 1780, after the publication of his dissertation attempt on the connection of the thierian nature of man with his spiritual. In it, the young doctor reflected the anthropologically justifiable relationship between the emerging "expertise" and a somatically oriented "doctoral science". Schiller was therefore attributed to the contemporary "philosophical doctors", which already pointed to his later development. Among Schiller's friends since his youth was the physician Friedrich Wilhelm von Hoven. Schiller, a doctor of medicine, joined the Ducal Württemberg Army as a regimental medium in the Grenadier Regiment of Augé (1767 formed from the two Grenadier companies of the 5th Infantry Regiment).) Kreis-Infanterie-Regiments Württemberg, also with von Augé as commander of the regiment, and teams of the Grenadier battalions 2, 3 and 4 which were disbanded between 1765 and 1767. He was probably dissatisfied with his professional situation from the outset: Not only that the reputation of his regiment was supposedly little shining, since, according to Schiller's description, it consisted only of "240 almost exclusively invalids and cripples". The relatively low pay of the regiment's doctor was similar to that of a prime lieutenant and allowed for 18 guilders per month. 15 guilders in the 20 guilders' foot) a modest lifestyle. There was no realistic prospect of a future improvement in the situation due to the lack of career opportunities for troop doctors at the time. In addition, the Duke had denied him the request to improve his merits with the treatment of civilians. However, other Württemberg military doctors had been allowed to practise civil practice on a case-by-case basis, as had the wearing of civilian clothing that Schiller had asked for from the Duke. However, this was also forbidden to him, although Schiller's father had already had a costly civil suit cut for his son.

At Hohenasperg fortress Schiller met the imprisoned poet Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart, who made him aware of the substance of the robbers. In 1781 Schiller completed his play, which was printed anonymously in the same year. On 1 January 1782, Die Räuber was successfully premiered by the Mannheimer Theater under the directorship of Wolfgang Heribert von Dalbergs. Jubelstürme sparked the play especially among young audiences - freedom-loving young people in the following months founded many "smuggler gangs" in southern Germany. Schiller was also present at the premiere with his friend Andreas Streicher and had secretly left the Karlsschule for this purpose without asking for official permission. Four months later, when he traveled a second time without a holiday permit to Mannheim, Duke Carl Eugene put the imbotsian poet in the Stuttgart Main Guard (now built over, Königstraße 29) for punishment for fourteen days and forbid him any further contact with the (Electoral Palatinate) abroad.

At the beginning of 1782 the anthology appeared on the year 1782 with 83 poems, mostly written by Schiller. When, in August of the same year, a complaint was made to the Duke that Schiller had denounced Switzerland with his robbers (because he had one of the robbers called Graubünden the "Athens of the Gauners"), the conflict between the lord and the author intensified. Schiller was threatened with fortress detention and banned any other non-medical writership. This made it impossible for Schiller, who had so far hesitated to flee due to his father, to stay in Stuttgart. References On 9 September 1782, in honor of the Russian Grand Duke Paul, later Tsar, and his wife, a niece of Carl Eugene, Schiller took advantage of the moment and fled the city with his friend Andreas Streicher. With this step Schiller took a great personal risk, as he had become a military doctor officially escaped. He first travelled to Mannheim, where he presented Dalberg's new drama The Conspiracy of Fiesco to Genoa. He then travelled to Frankfurt am Main, Oggersheim and Bauerbach in Thuringia. Later, Streicher described that time in his book Schillers Flucht von Stuttgart und Aufenthalt in Mannheim from 1782 to 1785.

When rumors were made that Duke Carl Eugene was seeking Schiller's extradition, the poet received an unobtrusive asylum under the pseudonym Dr. Knights in the Thuringian Bauerbach. Here he completed the work on Luise Millerin and began the first designs for Don Karlos. In the nearby residence town of Meiningen from the Duchy of Saxe-Meiningen, he met the librarian Wilhelm Reinwald during his visits to the court library of the Herzoghaus. Reinwald supplied Schiller with work material and met his older sister Christophine Schiller, whom he married in 1786.

At the invitation of the theatre director Dalberg, Schiller returned to Mannheim in July 1783 and took up the position of theatre poet in September. In the same month he fell ill with "Nervenfieber" (Malaria), which was still in the then swampy Rhine valley. In Mannheim he met Charlotte von Kalb. In January 1784, the Fiesco, in April 1784, premiered the drama Luise Millerin, which, on the recommendation of the actor August Wilhelm Iffland, had now been given the more popular title "Cabale und Liebe". In June 1784 Schiller lectured in front of the Electoral Palatine German Society in Mannheim on the question "What can a good standing stage actually work?". In December 1784, Duke Carl August of Saxe-Weimar, who had previously witnessed the reading of the first elevator of Don Karlos at the Darmstadt court, gave him the title of Weimar Council. After a year as a theater poet in Mannheim, Schiller's contract with Dalberg was not renewed, which led to Schiller's already precarious financial situation becoming even worse and the highly praised author had almost landed in the debt.

In April 1785 Schiller travelled to Leipzig with Christian Gottfried Körner, who helped him out of economic hardship. The acquaintance with Körner, who published a complete edition of Schiller's works from 1812 to 1816, had begun in June 1784 with an anonymous letter with four portraits: Körner and his friend Ludwig Ferdinand Huber had been married to the daughters Minna and Dora Stock of the Leipzig copper tech Johann Michael Stock (1737–1773) and had been criticized for this improper connection by their great-bourgeois authoritarian fathers. Therefore, the two pairs of bridals were able to identify themselves, in particular, with the depiction of the inaccurate relationship in Schiller's drama Cabale and Love and had expressed in the aforementioned anonymous letter to Schiller their unreserved veneration for his courageous dramas: “At a time when art is increasingly degrading itself to the fiery slave of rich and powerful wooldesses, it is right that a great man should appear and show what man can still do now.“ Only half a year later Schiller replied to this letter: “Your letters [...] met me in one of the saddest moods of my heart.”

After the happy encounter with the later friend Körner, the Ode An die Freude emerged in the summer and autumn of 1785. During his stay in Loschwitz Schiller met the daughter of the innkeeper Johanne Justine Segedin, who he later immortalized in Wallenstein's camp as "Gustel von Blasewitz" in 1797. In 1786, the second edition of Thalia magazine published the story of criminals from Infamie. A true story, which was later published under the title The Criminal of Lost Honour. Schiller stayed in Tharandt near Dresden and completed his Don Karlos in the Gasthof zum Hirsch.

References In 1787 Schiller travelled to Weimar, where he became acquainted with Herder, Wieland and the first Kantian Carl Leonhard Reinhold, who convinced Schiller to begin his Kant studies with his writings from the Berlinische Monatsschrift. During a trip through Rudolstadt he met Charlotte von Lengefeld and her sister Caroline, who became known under her marriage name Caroline von Wolzogen, after she first published under the pseudonym in Schiller's magazine Die Horen the novel Agnes von Lilien, which was at times attributed to Schiller or Goethe. In the same year, the drama Don Karlos was printed and performed immediately. The first meeting of Schiller and Goethe took place on 14 June. It took place at the Stuttgart Karlsschule in the Neue Schloss in Stuttgart, Germany. After Goethe returned from his trip to Italy in 1788, both poets came in contact for the first time on 7 July 1788. He died in Rudolstadt in 1788 in the garden of the Lengefeld family.

In 1789 Schiller accepted an extraordinary professorship in Jena – despite his hopes at first without salary – and taught there as a historian, although he was a professor of philosophy. He was particularly interested in the history of the Netherlands. The news that the popular author of the robbers should start his teaching activities in Jena triggered true enthusiasm storms. The whole city was in turmoil. The prominence of interested students to his inaugural lecture What does it mean and to what end do you study universal history? On 1 May 1789, the capacity of the auditorium exploded, so that the countless listeners had to switch to the largest hall of the university at short notice. When Schiller's economic conditions were improved by the professorship – from February 1790 he received an annual salary of 200 thalers from the Weimar Duke – he wrote to Louise of Lengefeld for the hand of her daughter Charlotte in December 1789. In the same year, the first book edition of the fragmentary novel Der Geisterseher appeared, and Schiller became friends with Wilhelm von Humboldt. In 1790 he married Charlotte von Lengefeld and was married in the Schillerkirche in Wenigenjena. The priest was his colleague, the philosophy professor Carl Christian Erhard Schmid. During a visit to his sister Christophine and his brother-in-law Reinwald in Meiningen, Duke George I granted him the title of Duke. Friedrich Schiller the title Hofrat. There was a lot of evidence to suggest occupational improvements and family happiness.

But already towards the end of the year, Schiller fell critically ill. On January 3, 1791, he suffered a collapse in Erfurt, a convulsive cough and temporary fainting. At the end of January and in May, further seizures followed. Schiller was probably ill with tuberculosis, from which he did not recover for the rest of his life. The rumor of his death spread throughout the country and reached Copenhagen in June, where the poet Jens Immanuel Baggesen had gathered a congregation of Schiller admirers around him. When it was heard that Schiller was still alive, in December of the same year Ernst Heinrich Graf von Schimmelmann and Friedrich Christian von Augustenburg, members of the Danish Circle of Friends, granted Schiller an annual pension of 1000 thalers, which was limited to three years – a most welcome relief from the standard of living, which temporarily freed Schiller from the duties of earning a living, so that he concentrated entirely on his philosophical and aesthetic studies could. In 1792, Schiller became an honorary citizen of the French Republic for Die Räuber alongside Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, Johann Heinrich Campe, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, George Washington and Tadeusz Kościuszko. The occasion was more Schiller's reputation as a rebel than his actual work. Although he was initially quite sympathetic to the French Revolution, he foresaw the change into the Jacobins' reign of terror, which despised freedom and humanity, and deeply abhorred the later mass executions in revolutionary France.

In the same year, he completed the History of the Thirty Years' War, and the works Neue Thalia and Über die tragische Kunst were published. This was followed in 1793 by the treatise On Grace and Dignity. On September 14, his son Karl was born. In 1794 Schiller met the publisher Johann Friedrich Cotta, who agreed to publish the monthly magazine Die Horen and later the first volume of the Musen-Almanach published in 1796 by Salomo Michaelis in Neustrelitz.

Before Goethe and Schiller became the legendary pair of friends of Weimar Classicism, who visited each other almost daily and exchanged ideas not only in literature but also philosophically and scientifically, helped each other and motivated each other, they were competitors. Goethe felt besieged by the growing fame of the younger. For him, Schiller was initially nothing more than an annoying reminder of his Werther time and his own, now overcome Sturm und Drang. And Schiller saw in the already established Goethe, who seemed unapproachable and arrogant to him at the first meeting specially arranged by Charlotte von Lengefeld (on 7 September 1788 in Rudolstadt), a "proud prude who must be made a child in order to humiliate her before the world". What the two rivals later had in common was their joint work on their own work, because the declared purpose of this friendship was to promote each other in an intensive exchange of thoughts and feelings and to enhance each other themselves, the story of which was nothing less than a ten-year "practical test of the educational idea in the age of classicism". When Schiller died, an era came to an end for Goethe. In the meantime, the relationship had become so close that Goethe believed that he would lose half of his life, even himself, on Schiller's death – as he wrote in a letter to Carl Friedrich Zelter.

After Schiller had moved to Jena in the spring of 1794 and had obtained from Goethe in the summer the promise to collaborate on the monthly magazine Die Horen, the first friendly correspondence developed between the two. When Schiller had written his second letter to Goethe on August 23, 1794, Schiller was invited by Goethe to Weimar in September 1794 and spent two weeks in his house. He maintained his usual daily routine, which meant he slept until noon and worked at night. Aware of Schiller's conservative morality, Goethe and his long-time partner Christiane Vulpius covered up their "wild marriage". Christiane and her five-year-old son August remained invisible in their own house. Schiller described his relationship with Mademoiselle Vulpius as Goethe's "only nakedness" and criticized him in a letter for his "wrong ideas about domestic happiness". Goethe spoke of his "married state without ceremony". Schiller's passion for card games and tobacco disturbed Goethe, who could sometimes be malicious towards friends; the often circulated anecdote that Schiller could only write poetry at the smell of rotten apples also comes from him.

In 1795, Die Horen was published for the first time. The most famous writers and philosophers of the time contributed to the magazine. These included Herder, Fichte, August Wilhelm Schlegel, Johann Heinrich Voß, Friedrich Hölderlin, Wilhelm von Humboldt and his brother, the scientist Alexander von Humboldt. In the same year, Schiller also completed the treatise On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry and his elegy The Walk. In 1796, both Schiller's father and his sister Nanette died. His second son Ernst was born. From 1796 to 1800, Schiller published the literary journal Musenalmanach, in which Goethe, Herder, Tieck, Hölderlin and August Wilhelm Schlegel, among others, collaborated. In 1797, the Xenias appeared in the Almanac of the Muses for the year 1797, in which Schiller and Goethe jointly mocked literary grievances.

In March 1797, Schiller acquired a garden house in Jena. There he spent the summers of 1797 to 1799 with his family.

The year 1797 is known as the "Ballad Year" because many ballads by Goethe and Schiller were written in that year. Schiller in particular was extremely prolific: The Diver, The Glove, The Ring of Polycrates, Knight Toggenburg, The Walk to the Iron Hammer, The Cranes of Ibycus; In 1798, the ballads Die Bürgschaft and Der Kampf mit dem Drachen followed. In the same year, Schiller was also finally served with the certificate that made him an honorary citizen of the French Republic.

Around 1791, the influence of Kantian philosophy – especially aesthetics from the critique of judgment – became increasingly clear in Schiller's work.

Kant had overcome the dogmatic form of metaphysics with which he had "the destiny to be in love" with his critique of pure reason. Metaphysics, insofar as it wants to appear scientifically, can only be understood as a critical limitation of what brooding reason has always sought, the inevitable questions of God, freedom and immortality. Ultimately, reason cannot make certain statements about these ideas beyond experience, as dogmatic metaphysics has long claimed, but at most show the conditions of the possibility of experience – and this also means the limits of cognition. It is not the things themselves that are recorded, but their appearances. But what man carries into it of his own accord – a priori – were, according to Kant, forms of perception and categories of the understanding. Kant distinguished reason from this, or more precisely the ideas of reason, which have a merely "regulative" function and are therefore not "represented" in empirical reality. Only in the form of an analogy was an indirect representation possible. From this perspective, Kant's definition of beauty as a "symbol of the moral good" can be explained. According to Kant, an action based on inclination could not be moral, since in this case the determinants of the will were heteronomous, thus dependent on external factors and could not be an expression of freedom. In a free action, the subject affirms the moral law of the categorical imperative out of insight by mediating the "reasonable" feeling of "respect for the law".

Kantian ethics opposes eudaemonism, which regards virtue as a source of feelings of happiness. One does not act morally in order to feel good, but in the awareness of freedom (autonomous spontaneity) before the moral law, one feels – as a consequence, not as a goal – a feeling of satisfaction and joy. Kant called this pleasure of virtue "self-satisfaction". When man is aware of the moral maxims and follows them – without inclination – he feels the "source of a [...] associated [...] unchanging satisfaction". "Inclination is blind and servile, whether it be benign or not." Even pity seems "annoying" to Kant when it precedes the consideration of what duty is.

In the Critique of Judgment, Kant explained beauty in terms of its effect on the subject and distinguished between two forms of "pleasure". The pleasure was, firstly, "disinterested", i.e. not based on the idea of the existence of the beautiful object, and secondly, related to a pleasure in the inner purposiveness of the beautiful object, without associating it with a practical intention – for example, in the use of the object.

According to Kant, the free judgment of taste is a creative achievement of the recipient. In 1791, Körner drew Schiller's attention to the fact that Kant described beauty only in terms of its effect on the subject, but did not examine the differences between beautiful and ugly objects. Almost two years later, Schiller began to formulate his answers to these questions. As a "salary aesthete", he also defined beauty as a product of the mind in the form of artistic beauty. In a letter to Körner in 1792, he wrote that he had found the "objective concept of the beautiful that Kant despairs of", but later limited this hope again.

In the first of the Callias letters of 25 January 1793, Schiller was confronted with the difficulty of "objectively establishing a concept of beauty and legitimising it completely a priori from the nature of reason [...] almost unmissable". Beauty dwells "in the field of appearances", where there is no room for Platonic ideas. Beauty is a property of things, of objects of knowledge, and a "thing without properties" is impossible. It was here that Schiller formulated his famous formula that beauty is "freedom in appearance".

In his philosophical treatise On Grace and Dignity, the first great reaction to Kant, in which he formulated his thoughts – albeit rhapsodic, not systematically and deductively – Schiller wrote: "In Kant's moral philosophy, the idea of duty is presented with a severity that shrinks all graces from it, and could easily tempt a weak mind to seek moral perfection by way of a dark and monastic asceticism. However much the great worldly sage tried to defend himself against this misinterpretation, [...] he himself [...] nevertheless gave a strong occasion for it (although perhaps hardly avoidable in view of his intention) through the strict and glaring opposition of both principles, which act on the will of man." In contrast to Kant, he represented the ideal of a morality that sought to combine inclination and duty. He saw this possibility in the field of aesthetics. Through art, the spiritual and sensual forces were to develop harmoniously. Aesthetics is the way in which the sensual human being is made rational." It is in a beautiful soul, then, that sensuality and reason, duty and inclination harmonize, and grace is their expression in appearance." Freedom in the Kantian sense means for the subject to be free from external determinations and its own legislator. For Schiller, this self-determination now appears in the autonomy of the work of art. In its harmony, it seems to follow no external purpose, but only its own internal laws. While Kant defines beauty from the perspective of the beholder, Schiller also concentrates on the essence of the beautiful art object.

Schiller wanted to establish a concept of beauty that conveyed nature and reason, the world of the senses and the moral world. Beauty is impossible without sensual appearance, but the sensual material – art – was only beautiful if it corresponded to the idea of reason. Beauty was therefore to be regarded as the "citizen of two worlds, one of which she belongs by birth, the other by adoption; it receives its existence from sensual nature, and attains citizenship in the world of reason." In order to clarify the relationship between Kant and Schiller, reference was often made to the famous distichon "scruples of conscience": "I like to serve my friends, but unfortunately I do it with inclination / And so it often annoys me that I am not virtuous." Schiller, on the other hand, did not regard Kant as an opponent, but as an ally and himself pointed out "misunderstandings" of Kant's teachings. Above all, Schiller assessed the interplay of rational and sensual elements differently than Kant. While Kant saw it as only one of many duties, Schiller considered it essential for virtue. The distichon, then, does not seriously reflect Schiller's opinion of Kant's ethics.

On 11 October 1799, his daughter Caroline Henriette Luise was born, and on 3 December Schiller moved with his family to Weimar. In that year, Schiller completed Wallenstein and Das Lied von der Glocke.

In 1800 he finished work on the drama Mary Stuart, and in 1801 The Maid of Orléans. His poem Der Antritt des neuen Jahrhundert (The Beginning of the New Century) was published. In 1802 he bought a house on the Weimar Esplanade, which he moved into on 29 April 1802. His mother died on the same day. On November 16, 1802, Schiller was ennobled and presented with the diploma of nobility. From now on, he was allowed to call himself Friedrich von Schiller.

In 1803 Schiller finished his work on the drama The Bride of Messina. On 18 February 1804 he completed William Tell and immediately began his work on Demetrius, which he was not to complete. On July 25, 1804, his daughter Emilie Friederike Henriette was born. He fell ill more and more often during this time. A few months before Schiller's death, a newspaper spread the false report that he was dead. But in February 1805 Schiller actually fell seriously ill – and on 1 May he met Goethe for the last time on his way to the Weimar Court Theatre. Shortly before his death, Schiller completed the translation of Jean Racine's classic tragedy Phèdre (1677).

On 9 May, Friedrich Schiller died in Weimar at the age of 45 from acute pneumonia, presumably caused by tuberculosis. As the autopsy revealed, Schiller's right lung was completely destroyed. The kidneys were also almost dissolved. The heart muscle had regressed and the spleen and gall bladder were greatly enlarged. The autopsy was carried out by Wilhelm Ernst Christian Huschke and Gottfried von Herder. Ferdinand Jagemann drew Schiller on his deathbed. Johann Christian Ludwig Klauer made his death mask. Schiller's body was initially buried in the vault of the Jacobsfriedhof in Weimar. In 1826, his bones were to be recovered. However, they could no longer be identified. As a result, the bones that were most likely to be considered were brought to the Duchess Anna Amalia Library. In the autumn of 1826, Goethe secretly borrowed the skull from there. He only told his friend Wilhelm von Humboldt, who told others. In the sight of the skull, Goethe wrote the poem Bei Betrachtung von Schillers Schädel. On 16 December 1827, the mortal remains were transferred to the Prince's Crypt in the new Weimar cemetery, where Goethe was later buried "at Schiller's side" at his own request.

In 1911, another skull was found, which was also attributed to Schiller. For years, people argued about which one was the right one. In order to clarify this, the research project "The Friedrich Schiller Code" was launched on behalf of the Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk (MDR) and the Klassik Stiftung Weimar, in the context of which it was to be clarified whether one of the two skulls in the Weimar princely crypt that had been awarded as a Schiller skull was really Schiller's. In the spring of 2008, it was concluded that neither of the two skulls could be assigned to Schiller. This was revealed by elaborate DNA analyses of the bones of Schiller's sisters and the comparison of this DNA with that from the teeth of the two princely crypt skulls.

At the same time, a facial reconstruction took place on the skull, which was previously considered authentic. This resulted in a similarity to Schiller's face, although the scientist did not know the goal of the project. However, since the DNA analyses carried out by two independent laboratories are considered unambiguous, little attention was paid to the result of the facial reconstruction. The skeleton previously in Schiller's coffin was also examined. Its parts can be assigned to at least three different people; the DNA of the Schiller skulls does not match the DNA of the skeletal parts.

So the Klassik Stiftung Weimar decided to leave Schiller's coffin empty in the prince's crypt. The foundation is not to search further for the true skull. Scientists at the University of Freiburg have also ended the search for the real skull without result after extensive examinations of the skull collection of the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen.