Teachers have grave responsibilities. I recall things that I was taught in school more than fifty years ago that I have believed all my life and that have guided my thoughts. Sometimes, it requires a half-century to extricate oneself from dogma preached at an early age.
When I was a Senior in High School, I took a physics class taught by a very fine instructor, Byron Anderson. When you are a teenager, a five or six year difference in age seems enormous. Mr. Anderson was wise and experienced, good-looking, as I recall, with a cheerful, witty personality. He was probably about 23 when I attended his class. I am now forty-five years older than Byron Anderson’s age when I admired him as a High School physics teacher.
One afternoon, Mr. Anderson described the Michelson-Morley experiment contrived to detect the presence of the luminiferous ether through the use of an interferomter. The experiment’s rationale was to measure deviations in the speed of light that might be attributed to currents in the ether thought to pervade the universe. (Light had to be propagated through some substance, at least, so it was believed, and the ether was hypothesized to be that medium.) The 1887 experiment didn’t detect the luminiferous ether for the simple reason that it didn’t exist. Mr. Anderson told us that the instrument for the measurement of the speed of light was a very carefully constructed coil that used camel hair as a spring to detect the impulse of photons. He said that only the hair from a certain kind of Bactrian camel was sufficiently fine for this application while also possessing characteristics of tensile strength necessary for the experiment. This seemed like an odd detail, but Mr. Anderson was highly intelligent, enthusiastic about physics, and who was I to doubt this peculiar fact. With another student, Mr. Anderson chauffeured us across the city to Hamlin University where the three of us were enrolled in a physics class aimed at constructing a home-made laser. (In those days, lasers were big, throbbing tangles of electrical equipment with mirrors arranged in a solemn procession, exotic devices that filled an entire room and that, certainly, could not be used to tease pussy-cats and flash signals to low-flying airplanes.) We never finished the laser – if I recall right, there was insufficient power to get the light spewed from the device into any sort of coherency and, probably, the mirrors were a few millimeters out of alignment; in any event, the laser wouldn’t lase. But during one of those drives from the suburb of Eden Prairie to west St. Paul, I asked Mr. Anderson about the camel hair detail in his presentation of Michelson-Morley experiment. He chortled a little and said that he had just made-up that part of his lecture: “Sometimes, you have to fabricate details to hold the interest of the students.” I had half-suspected hoax with regard to the spring-like coil of Bactrian camel hair, so I wasn’t particularly surprised. However, I have often thought about that deception and, even, now wonder a little about the ethics of that pedagogical fraud.
At the University of Minnesota, I took a course in German literature. It was a well-subscribed class with about thirty students and, therefore, taught by two instructors, both of them young men, probably in their very early thirties. At their direction, we read novellas by Ludwig Tieck, Theodor Storm, Kleist, and Thomas Mann. During the second part of the semester, we studied Guenter Grass’ novella Katz und Maus. The two teachers made an odd couple. One of them had dark hair and always wore a navy blue or slate-grey business suit with a red tie. This man had neatly trimmed side-burns of the kind popular in 1975. He was a perfect minute homunculus, slightly built but with broad shoulders. To me, he looked like the little groom in his frock coat atop a wedding cake. The other instructor was tall and haggard. He had the long jaw and deep set eyes of Max von Sydow and his hair was dish-water blonde. He spoke with a melancholy drawl that contrasted with the fast clipped speech of his partner. Both men were also employed by Twin Cities Public TV, at least so I was given to believe – I have no idea what they did for the Station. The University teaching job was a part-time gig for them. I suspected that they were homosexual and, even, lovers although there was no evidence for that proposition.
These co-instructors were effective, judicious, but, also, very opinionated. I wasn’t a serious German student at that time; rather, I was just accumulating elective credits toward my degree. In German classes at the University, I always had the sense that I was joining the conversation about six months after it had begun, that there were prerequisite classes that the other students had taken of which I was ignorant; I was, so to speak, belated. Therefore, I had a faint sense of confusion when, one morning, the discussion turned to the relative merits of Goethe and Schiller. Both teachers concurred that Goethe was still relevant and that some of his writings retained their power to impress and persuade. But the co-instructors were unanimous that Schiller was worthless and a waste of time. They advised that Schiller had been grossly over-rated in his epoch, that he was impossible to understand, and exceptionally tedious.
At that time, I had only a vague interest in the subject. When Goethe and Schiller were both alive – they are contemporaries roughly speaking – German literati described them as the Dioscuri, that is, the divine twins, Castor and Pollux. They were imagined to have been born from their mother Leda’s same egg, although one was the son of Zeus (who had ravished Leda in the form of a swan) and the other was fathered by a mortal, Tyndareus. German critics, apparently, viewed Goethe and Friedrich Schiller as fraternal in their literary aspirations but, nonetheless, different in various ways. To persist in this metaphor, the two teachers suggested that Goethe was the progeny of Zeus and, therefore, immortal, but that Schiller had a lesser father and was doomed to oblivion. The curious thing about this presentation was that it was made by Dioscuri themselves, two German teacher who looked quite different and spoke with separate emphases and diction, but who are now fused together in my imagination, welded into a single form with four arms and four legs and two heads facing away from one another, but both mouths pronouncing the same verdict on Schiller – don’t bother reading him.
I thought this verdict was a bit odd but was willing to accept it on face-value. In a later class, I had an anthology of German poetry that contained a few works by Schiller. I read them and, although uninformed, thought the verse was pretty good. Of course, I knew that Schiller was the author of the words (An die Freude) that Beethoven set to music in the final movement of his Ninth Symphony, the famous “Ode to Joy.” The text to that chorale seemed overblown, pretentious and windy to me. But this was possibly because Beethoven’s setting is windy as well, vastly extended choir passages with soloists blown off course by great gusts of orchestral music. In a lecture class conducted by Gerhard Weiss in rudimentary German, the professor provided a sketch of Schiller’s life and works, punctuated by the anecdote that the great poet couldn’t compose unless a plate of rotting apples were set on his writing table directly under his nose. I doubted that I understood this punctum and assumed that I had somehow misinterpreted the German spoken by the Professor – I was generally about fifteen words behind what he was saying in my understanding. It couldn’t really be possible that Schiller, renowned for his nobility of mind and tediousness, was some kind of olfactory fetishist and had to sniff rotting apples in order to write. But, many years later, when I looked up this fact, it turns out to have been reputedly true. (Goethe himself is the source of this detail: one day, Goethe came to visit Schiller but found that he wasn’t home. He went into Schiller’s room, planning to leave a note on his writing desk. The room was suffused with a sickly sweet stench. Goethe found that Schiller had a desk drawer full of rotten apples. The odor was so strong that Goethe, who tended toward hypochondria, felt light-headed, went to the window and threw open the sash. When Goethe mentioned the stench to Charlotte, Schiller’s wife, she said that her husband was unable to write unless inspired by the smell of rotting apples.)
The University of Minnesota Dioscuri gave no evidence for Schiller’s summary dismissal from Parnassus. I suspect that they had been forced to read Schiller’s long essay on “Naive” and “Sentimental” art – a text that is distinguished by the author’s insistence on using the two guiding terms (“naive” and “sentimental”) in a specialized way that is precisely contrary to the dictionary meanings for these words. Someone once told me that upon approaching the essay, the reader must transpose “naive” for “sentimental” and “sentimental” for “naive” each time these defining terms occur in the essay. Probably, the Dioscuri, in their travels of Germany, had seen one too many statues of the poet with his shabby clothes (although his writings had made him very wealthy) and disheveled hair, chin thrown back to belligerently confront the cold northern skies over his commemorative plinth.
In any event, I persisted in my disdain for Schiller for the better part of 45 years. Then, I read Egon Friedell’s account of Schiller’s life and work in his magisterial book, Kultur Geschichte der Neuzeit (The Cultural History of the Modern Era). Friedell, simply stated, was a fan. He describes Schiller as the conduit of sometimes monstrous passion, a natural-born polemicist who cast his arguments into vehement poetry and tempestuous debate in his plays, and a great theatrical sensationalist. Friedell said that the torso of Demetrius, the fragmentary first act of a play that Schiller was writing at the time of his death, is the most compressed, savage, and brilliant bit of theater in all of German history. I found a copy of Demetrius and read it. The text is fantastically compressed, full of exuberant imagery that always finds momentary repose in aphorisms, the plot all tangled with passionate encounters and confrontations. (The subject involves Demetrius, an exiled son of Ivan the Terrible, plotting with Polish nobility to invade Russian and reclaim his throne; he’s driven in this endeavor by a mother who makes Lady Macbeth look nurturing, polite, and well-bred.) Friedell insists that Schiller is primarily an elevated kind of yellow journalist – he gravitates to the extreme, macabre, and histrionic; reality consists of violent conflict prosecuted by half-crazed and maniacal characters. Demetrius certainly had this aspect and encouraged me to read a couple of Schiller’s other plays, specifically his first triumph The Robbers (1781) and his last play actually to be performed Wilhelm Tell completed in 1804.
At the Mannheim premiere of The Robbers, fistfights erupted in the audience, grown men wept and virgins fainted. The Robbers is a pure blast of adrenaline-soaked hysteria. Its subject is fratricide, parricide, and terrorism with generous doses of blasphemy thrown in for a good measure. Schiller has anthologized the most extreme passages from Shakespeare, stuff from Macbeth, Othello, and Richard III, embedding this material in a plot frenzied with hatred, violence, and revenge. The diction is extreme, full of weird quasi-medieval words and invective. It’s hard to imagine a more feral assault on the audience and, even today, some of this stuff is legitimately shocking. Extremist aspects of German theater, for instance some of the provocations of Heiner Mueller (such as Hamletmaschine) all derive from this Ur-text.
The Robbers chronicles the vicious antics of one of Germany’s most dysfunctional families, the Moors. “Der alte Moor” (“the old Moor’) or DaM as Schiller abbreviates his title, is a minor Nobleman. (In English translations, he’s generally called “Count Moor”). DaM has two sons, one handsome and dashing, the other ugly in body and mind. Karl Moor, the good-looking elder son, DaM’s favorite, has gone away to college in Leipzig. Franz, the younger son remains at the family’s castle, scheming to malign his older brother and persuade his father into disinheriting Karl. Franz, a classic Shakespearian villain, disgorges his sinister motivations in long soliloquies full of spiteful invective. Like most bad guys in Shakespeare, Franz’ villainy far exceeds any rational cause, invoking evil for evil’s sake. If Franz can succeed in disinheriting Karl, he will reap a collateral benefit – that is, Amalia, Karl’s virtuous girlfriend whom, of course, Franz desires and, later, will threaten to rape.
Franz takes advantage of an innocuous letter from Karl, importuning DaM for money to finance his collegiate adventures. Franz rewrites the letter and reads it to his father. In Franz’ redaction, the letter is a lurid chronicle of criminality of all types. DaM, his good name, besmirched bemoans the situation and says “you have deprived me of my crutch” – that is, a colorful locution meaning that Karl’s misdeeds will put the old man in his grave before he has need for cane (or crutch). Franz, then, sends a letter to his brother, ostensibly from DaM in which the old Moor is made to say that if Karl has the temerity to return home, he will be confined in a tower in the castle, starved and tormented, until his fingernails have grown as long as claws of a carrion bird, his grey beard and disheveled hair described as the feathers of this beast. (This is the sort of diction in which Schiller delights.) Karl, who has been a good-natured frat-boy up to this point, decides that he is now an outcast, like Cain fated to wander the earth, and, so, he recruits fellow students to become a band of murderous robbers and rapists – surely, an over-reaction to this obviously forged letter.
Needless to say, this doesn’t bode well for the Moor family. Franz tries to rape Amalia but is dissuaded when she draws a knife on him. Franz, then, recruits a member of his retinue, Herman, a bastard, and tells him that he will grant him rights to Amalia (whom Herman loves) if he goes in disguise to DaM and brings him the false news that Karl has died on the battlefield. (The action takes place during the Thirty Years war.) DaM doesn’t receive this intelligence well – in fact, he falls into a swoon and, apparently, dies. Roller, one of Karl’s robbers, gets captured by authorities who torture him and plan his execution by hanging. Karl’s men sweep into the city where Roller is imprisoned and create distractions by setting fires. Unfortunately, one of these incendiary blazes encroaches on the tower where the town stores its gunpowder. This armory is blown sky-high with the result that 83 of the villagers are killed, among them old people, girls and boys, as well as women laboring in child birth. The city sends an army into the Bohemian woods to slaughter the robbers. Karl offers to turn himself in to avert the butchery, but his men rally around him and there is a pitched battle.
Somehow, Karl survives the fighting. He dons a disguise as the Count of Brand and tours the family castle with Amalia. Franz, who is becoming increasingly erratic – he now threatens to lock Amalia away in a convent – distrusts the mysterious Count. When they are alone, Karl reveals himself to Amalia, but, after some anguished conversation, the robber says that he is now irretrievably tainted by his violent acts and no longer suitable as a husband. Wandering around in the wilds near the castle, Karl comes upon a ghostly apparition, confined in a ruined fortress – this turns out to be DaM, not dead, but merely gone missing. A loyal family servant has spirited him off to this desolate place in a sealed coffin, hidden him in the ruins, and has been secretly feeding him. Karl reveals himself to DaM, who like, King Lear, dies from an excess of emotion. The noose is now tightening around the wicked Franz as the robbers are deputized to attack the castle, seize the evil brother, and bring him to Karl so that he can be tortured to death. Franz, however, is now completely mad and, after a colloquy, with a local pastor, about hell and eternal punishment, begs his servant to kill him. The servant, disgusted, turns away from the act and, so, Franz does the deed on his own, seemingly strangling himself to death – exactly how this is accomplished is unclear (although we’re told he uses the string on his hat for this purpose). Karl, deprived of his revenge, encounters Amalia. As one might expect, this course of events has disturbed her to the point of suicide. She threatens to play the role of Dido, outraging Karl who proclaims that only he has the right to kill her – which he promptly does. Karl, then, announces that he will turn himself into the authorities. This will be accomplished through a poverty-stricken day-laborer who, thereby, Karl says will earn a reward and be able to support his family. On this edifying note, Schiller’s carnival of mayhem and wild-eyed vituperation ends.
This plot summary simplifies the action considerably. The Robbers is long, sprawling play with various sub-plots and redundant in its effects. For instance, Franz doesn’t threaten to rape Amalia once, but twice – on the first occasion, Franz invokes a stratagem from Othello, falsely claiming that Karl has given a love-token, a ring from Amalia, to a prostitute; his second assault almost ends in a knife-fight with the feisty maiden. A sinister Jew, Spiegelburg, vies with Karl to be the leader of the robbers. At one point, Spiegelburg schemes to poison Karl Moor and, thereby, seize power. (In the play’s chaotic plethora of incidents, Schiller forgets this subplot – nothing comes of it and German critics characterize it as a “ein blindes Motiv”, that is, a motif that goes nowhere.) Later, when Spiegelburg foments an insurrection among the robbers, Roller, who is Karl Moor’s most loyal bandit, strikes him dead. Before they become blood-soaked terrorists, Karl and his merry band are a bit like rambunctious frat-boys offending the sensibilities of the good Burgers of Leipzig with their pranks. But these pranks are bizarre and have a monstrous dimension. In an early scene, Spiegelburg reminds Karl about the “great dog’s corpse”, an epithet for an exploit that is supposed to infuse Moor’s veins “with fire.” (Spiegelburg is encouraging Moor to transform his group of libertines into a band of murderer’s and rapists.) Some college kids shot Moor’s mastiff or great Dane (Dogge) in the leg. Moor sought a prescription for medication, presumably some sort of salve, for his wounded dog. But the City Fathers in Leipzig jested at Moor’s solicitude for his dog and refused to fill the prescription. So what does Karl Moor do? He buys up all the meat in town, thereby, inflating prices on fish and wild game. This leads to rioting. The powers-that-be, alarmed at the angry mobs of butchers and tailors and members of the trade guilds led by Moor against the city hall, order that anyone issuing a medicinal prescription for Karl’s dog will be paid 3 ducats from the public fisc. In an hour, 12 prescriptions are written, so many that the dog “croaks”(verreckte) from an overdose. (At every juncture, Schiller inserts conflict into his descriptions – the pharmacists, Spiegelburg recalls, competed so fiercely for the three ducat award that, in the end, they underbid one another to the point that instead of 3 ducats, the druggists were paid only three cents (Batzen).) The readers sees this stuff on the page but can’t quite believe his eyes. And this assault on Leipzig’s economy is mirrored a few scenes later in a literal attack on the city that destroys half of the town with 83 fatalities when the gunpowder tower is blown sky-high. The Robbers’ exploits have gone from farce to tragedy.
Everyone is constantly swearing blood-curdling oaths. The robbers anticipate expiating their sins on the gallows, a motif that is repeated with lurid details throughout the play. Roller says that he expects to be hanged:
And, finally, hauled as a living body up into the sky, and defying storms and wind, defying the devouring belly of old Father Time in the sun and the moon, dangling there among the fixed stars, where the unreasoning birds of the heaven impelled by noble desires, will flock, making a heavenly choir and angels with feathery tails will convene at high-holy Synedrion... Isn’t it true? – if monarchs and potentates are consumed by worms and moths, how much more worthy to have the honor of accepting these emissaries of Jupiter, his royal eagles?
Synedrion is an example of Schiller’s extravagant vocabulary. The word, often anglicized as Sanhedrin means an assembly or council of Jewish elders. (Spiegelburg is said to be reading Josephus’ history of the Jewish Rebellion against the Romans – a text that signifies his insurgent role in the play.)
Roller’s praise of his own execution is mirrored late in The Robbers when Karl Moor blasphemously compares himself to the holy martyrs of the Church. Moor says that, by stabbing Amalia, he has “butchered an angel” and will never again be at peace with himself. One of his robbers says that he has repaid his guilt “with interest” and done for “(your) honor what no one else could do.” Karl begs to differ:
So you say that? Isn’t it true that the life of a saint is an unequal exchange for the life of a rogue? O I tell you that when each of you mount the scaffold and have one chunk of flesh after another pinched off your body by glowing tongs so that this martyrdom lasts eleven summer days, no one will shed any tears for you...(he laughs bitterly) The scars, the bohemian woods! Yes, yes! This must be richly repaid.
(Karl is referring to the wounds inflicted on the soldiers that attempted to apprehend the robbers in the battle in the Bohemian woods.)
To keep things suitably garish, Schiller’s villains are all aggressive atheists who scoff at virtue and the scriptures. Spiegelburg boasts about the robber’s raid on a convent. “We snatched more than a thousand Talers and had plenty of fun as well – my lads left behind souvenirs that these nuns will have to schlepp around with them for nine months.” (The verb here is, indeed, schleppen). He observes that the Corpus (using a technical theological term) of these Sisters will “swell with each hour until their bellies are fat as a Prelate’s gut.” Villains swear that they will punch the Four Evangelists in the mouth and deliver the Gospel to a knacker’s yard where nags are butchered and skinned, for the text to be flayed and thrown in a pile of offal.
Shakespearian echoes abound. In a single scene, Franz soliloquizes:
Calm! Calm now! Nothing more than a bit of sport ahead of me – I’ve already waded up to my ears in mortal sins so that it would be insane to swim back to shore, particularly since the bank is now far behind – No more thought of turning back – grace itself would be reduced to beggary and God’s infinite mercy would be declared bankrupt if all my debts could be made good – Therefore, forward like a man!
Sounds like Macbeth. Here’s a bit that seems derived from Lear by way of Richard III:
(Men are conceived by arbitrary squalid means.) The father, perhaps, he drank one too many bottles of wine, then, felt that itch – and, out of that, you get a man, and that man is maybe the last, someone who might perform all Hercules’ labors. Now, that itch comes to me also, just now – and, then, someone dies like a dog, certainly as a result of more reason and intention than accompanied his origin – The existence of most people depends on the heat of a July noon or on the enticing look of some bed linen, or, on the horizontal posture of a kitchen-vestal, or on a suddenly extinguished light! The birth of a human being is the work of bestial impulses – who can claim any merit or think himself significant just by virtue of having been born? ... The milk-craving, gouty moralist may harry flabby dames out of their bordellos and torment the old usurer on his death bed, but conscience will never find any audience with me.
This is Franz boasting that he kills out of the same arbitrary erotic tickle that engenders men and that his murders are more purposeful than most begetting. Human life is a messy, ugly affair. And keep conscience, which makes cowards out of us all, far away, out of the picture.
The Fifth Scene in The Robber’s Fourth Act, a part of the play, more or less, chosen at random is illustrative of Schiller’s maniacal and feral energy. The band of robbers is gathered in the woods near a ruined castle. The scene-setting is like something from Salvator Rosa: desolate woods, shadowy figures, witches and ghosts and overgrown ruins. The robbers sing a chorus that begins with the cheerful refrain: “Stealing, murdering, whoring, rioting / That’s how we kill time” and “In the morning we’ll all go to gallows/ So let’s be jolly today.” (Schiller’s play is full of little songs and, even, extended ballads including a couple about Brutus and Caesar and a mini-epic featuring Hector bidding farewell to Andromache before his death defending Troy. The songs seem influenced by Shakespeare, but they interrupt the plot, providing sardonic commentary on the events portrayed – the effect is Brechtian avant de la lettre.) After noting that they will go to their hanging “after slurping brandy,” the robbers fret about Karl, who has gone in disguise to his castle home to encounter Amalia. Spiegelberg takes advantage of Karl’s absence to again inveigle the robbers into accepting him as their leader. The robbers are loyal to Karl and call Spiegelberg “satan” and a “beast.” Spiegelberg tempts one of the thugs to kill Karl – “we’ll strangle this suckling in his cradle.” This offends a robber named Schweitzer who stabs Spiegelberg to death.
Karl, now appears. Gesturing at Spiegelberg’s lifeless body, Schweitzer tells him: “By God, I’ve really done it and, by the Devil, it’s far from the worse crime I’ve committed in my life.” Karl is contemplative. He advises that Spiegelberg misled him, encouraged him in his life of crime, and that his death is the work of the “inconceivable finger of revenging Nemesis.” Brooding over the corpse, Karl says that the “...the leaves are falling from the trees – my Autumn has come to me – get that thing out of my sight! –“ And, Spiegelberg’s carcass is hauled off-stage. There follows a ballad in which the ghost of Caesar, his apparition “trenched” (as Shakespeare would say) with 23 mortal wounds appears to Brutus on the eve of the Battle of Philippi. This song is a homage to Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. In Schiller’s version, Caesar accuses Brutus of patricide, claiming to be his murderer’s father. Karl now seems half-mad – as Macbeth saw a ghostly sword hovering over him, Karl draws his own pistol and brandishes it before his eyes, crying: “By the miserable pressing of a trigger-finger on this miserable thing – the wise and the foolish – the cowardly and the courageous – the noble and the rogue – all are made equal. There’s such harmony in soul-less nature why should reason’s world be so discordant?” After soliloquy of a page and a half that imitates “To be or not to be” in Hamlet, Karl decides not to kill himself. Hermann, the old retainer from the Castle Moor, appears to serve dinner to “the man of sorrows, the dweller in the (ruined) tower” crouching in the abandoned castle. The old Moor (“DaM”) appears in the rubble: he laments that he’s been a “dead dog lying in the crypt of (his) fathers” and “for three months hasn’t seen a beam of light in the vaults of (his) underground grave.” “No breath of air, no friends nor visitors, where wild ravens scratch” at the crumbling mortar and “owls hoot.” DaM goes on for a dozen lines describing the miseries of his hiding place and, then, treats the audience to a grisly account of how he was conveyed to the ruins in a coffin, scratching all the while at the lid of his sealed casket. The old Moor believes his confinement is just recompense for betraying and disinheriting his beloved son, Karl. “A thousand times, I wept to God, begging for death but this proper measurement of my punishment was withheld.” Karl Moor now responds, citing King Lear:
(Addressing the robbers:) Won’t this tale shake us out of our slumbers? Even those eternally asleep will be awakened! Look here! Look here! The laws of the world are just a cast of the die, the ties that bind Nature are all torn asunder, ancient discord is let loose: the son has struck down his father.
The robbers are alarmed: “What’s the boss saying?
“Struck down, struck down, no! That word is too mild! – the son has broken his father on the wheel, impaled and tortured and flayed him! Even these words seem to humane – these crimes make these sins red, crimes over which cannibals would shudder, crimes that no devil throughout all the aeons has committed...”
Schiller heaps up impassioned verbs. The prose looks like Baroque poetry, an effusion similar to the lurid verse by Andreas Gryphius in some of his tragedies or sonnets – geraedert, gespiesst, gefoltert, geschunden (“broken on the wheel, impaled or his head put on a pike, tortured, skinned alive”).
The robbers swear by Belial, a demon, and “on all dragons” that they will revenge their boss’ father. Whereupon, Karl sends his lieutenants to capture the villain Franz so that he can “rend his flesh in bits and use that bloody meat to feed the vultures of the air.” One of the robbers departs, saying that he will drag Franz to their lair: “Either you’ll see the two of us return or no one at all.” And declaring himself an “avenging angel” (literally Wuergengel - throttling angel) the robber trots offstage.
You can say what you want about this sort of stuff – it’s hysterical, ridiculous, mawkish, and derivative from Shakespeare’s most bombastic fustian. But it’s obviously not dull. And all of The Robbers is like the eight or nine pages of the text that I have summarized here.
Schiller refines his theatrical craft but his instinct for the sensational never lessens. Indeed, if anything, his plays become even more impassioned and tightly coiled with conflict heaped upon conflict. In his last play, Wilhelm Tell, Schiller’s verse (the text is composed in iambic pentameter) achieves a classical equipoise that is clear, laconic, and aphoristic but in service of a narrative that that entwines spectacle with thrilling suspense. The play gives the impression of having been written with clenched fists – the verse is heightened, evenly noble and idealized but the action seems cinematic, devised as a system of conflicts pulling wildly in opposite directions. Schiller’s reflex is to cast everything into frenzied dispute. The first production in March 1804 at Weimar was directed by Goethe and, in effect, the famous poet and sage was producing a late 18th century thriller, a work of popular entertainment every bit as accomplished in its way as a Spielberg picture. Schiller’s impulse is always to pull out all the stops and fill his plays with show-stopping soliloquies and violent set pieces.
Consider the opening of the play: the setting is a lake in the high Alps surrounded by icy mountains. A thunderstorm is rapidly approaching and one must imagine that distant thunder gradually increases in volume until it reaches, at the climax of the scene, a sort of tempestuous, deafening level. (Schiller devises his scenes as having rising action, climaxes, and, then, transitional material leading into the next scene – in other words, each scene is constructed to have all the characteristics of a well-crafted play in itself.) Fisher-folk on the lakeside sing a panegyric to the lofty mountain landscape and the lake by which they feed their families. A chorus of hunters then praise the meadows and the chamois that they pursue over the cliffs and valleys. Some peasants comment on the impending storm. Then, a man hastens onto the stage – this is Baumgarten. He is fearful, enraged, fleeing the authorities who are, apparently, hot on his heels. The thunder becomes louder and more conspicuous, echoing the stormy passions on display. Baumgarten says that an Austrian official, a deputy bailiff, has tried to rape his wife. This official named Wolfenschiessen (‘Wolf-shooting’) was interrupted in his assault by Baumgarten who struck the man down with his axe. Baumgarten pleads with the fishermen for passage across the lake. But the fishermen are fearful – they don’t want to run afoul of the law and, further, are afraid of the rapidly approaching tempest. The sturdy Wilhelm Tell now appears and berates the fishermen and hunters for their cowardice. He seizes the boat himself, takes Baumgarten aboard, and sets forth in the raging waters (for the thunderstorm is now in full spate). Some mounted lancers appear and see Tell steering little skiff, bearing Baumgarten right into the teeth of the gale. The lancers are offended that Baumgarten has evaded them, although they expect the boat to founder so that Tell and the fugitive will drown. The bailiff’s men vow to burn down the huts and barns of the Swiss peasants in retaliation for Tell’s intervention. This scene is seven pages long. In the course of that short scene, Schiller sets up conflict between the Habsburg authorities and the Swiss; he dramatizes a conflict among the Swiss that will be thematic in the play – the Swiss are not united, frequently querulous and they quarrel among themselves: so we are shown tension between the Swiss and Wilhelm Tell as to Baumgarten’s rescue. Baumgarten’s plight arises from an attempted rape. Tell must cross the raging lake in a deadly thunderstorm – thus, there is a motif involving conflict of man against nature. At the end of the scene, the bailiff’s cavalry plot to destroy the houses and stables of the Swiss – thus, ending the scene with much wailing and grief as the peasants denounce the Wueterich (that is, the “tyrant”). By my count, the first scene is animate with, at least, four different types of conflict, all dramatized with breakneck, almost reckless, speed.
The entire play has this accelerando aspect. For instance, at the end of the Fourth act, a Swiss nobleman and patriot is dying in his castle. He seems to be in a coma and people are gathered around him. The man is very old and famous for his probity; he is the last of his line without wife or children. Walter Tell, the hero’s son, is kneeling at the feet of the old man. (A couple scenes earlier Wilhelm Tell was coerced by the wicked Gessler into shooting an arrow off the child’s head.) Not surprisingly, Hedwig, the boy’s mother and Tell’s wife, is outraged by the apple-sniping incident – Schiller’s innovation is to have the mother direct her anger at the play’s hero. In an aspect of the mythos not ordinarily explored, Hedwig bitterly denounces her husband, absent and thought to be in Gessler’s custody, for agreeing to the shooting challenging involving the apple on her son’s head. She sees this episode as an example of “male pride,” the cause of futile violence in the world, and complains: “O, the hard hearts of you men! When your pride is offended, then, you attend upon nothing else. In a blind rage, you gamble with the head of your child and the heart of his mother!” Thus, Schiller dramatizes the target-shooting incident as a skirmish in the war between the sexes: men are willing to sacrifice even their wives and children to their inflamed pride. Needless to say, the men gathered around the dying man are offended – as is little Walty Tell (as he is called) and, predictably, they all defend Wilhelm and approve his heroic act, something that Hedwig decries as simple, and nonsensical, male competitiveness. (This is an interesting theme: one senses that Hedwig and most other sane women would have had no compunction about bowing – or “doing reverence to” – Gessler’s hat posted in the marketplace. Viewed from Hedwig’s perspective, the entire notion of putting a hat on a lance and requiring people to bow to it seems fantastical, less an abuse of power, than a typically masculine symbolic gesture that would never occur to any rational woman.) When the men rise to Wilhelm Tell’s defense, Hedwig turns the tables on them and argues that they were present in the marketplace, witnesses to the duress under which Tell fired the arrow at the apple on his boy’s head, and that they were cowards for not intervening. None of the characters in this scene know that Tell, who was dragged from the marketplace to be imprisoned by Gessler, has escaped and is now a fugitive at large. Further demeaning the assembled men, Hedwig announces her own despair at the fate of Switzerland – without the heroic Wilhelm Tell to lead the insurgents the rebellion will surely be crushed. Schiller makes this transitional scene fairly crackle with tension between Hedwig and the men gathered at the old man’s bedside.
At this point, Attinghausen, the dying canton-leader (he’s the hereditary leader of Uri) revives. Attinghausen sees Walter Tell at his feet and speaks with Walter Fuerst, Tell’s father-in-law who obligingly brings him up-to-date on the dire political situation. Attinghausen bemoans the fact that he has gained consciousness only to witness the destruction of Switzerland. But Attinghausen, on death’s door, seems to be granted prophetic powers. He sits up and declares that he has a vision of warfare between heavily armored lancers and peasants with “naked breasts”. The peasants die in a mob of lances, but, with their blood, purchase the freedom of Switzerland. Crying “Be united! - united! - united”, he collapses. Just as Attinghausen succumbs, his nephew Rudenz appears. Rudenz has been a supporter of the Austrian oppressors but now he proclaims that he has joined the resistence. He has a personal motive: his betrothed, Bertha, has been “heimlich weggeraubt” (“secretly kidnapped”) by Gessler. Gessler is holding Bertha in his castle-keep to force her into marriage with him. Of course, Schiller instinctively inserts conflict into Rudenz’ interaction with the men. They doubt his loyalty since he has been earlier allied with Gessler and the Austrians. But with the sort of whiplash-inducing reversals of mood in which Schiller specializes, Rudenz has now switched sides and declares vehemently that all the fortresses built by the Austrian officials must be razed to the ground and that the armed rebellion will begin when signal fires flare on the tops of the mountains. Conflicts diagramed in this fairly short scene include Hedwig versus the Swiss men (female v. male), then, Hedwig declaring the would-be patriots as cowards, then, Attinghausen resurrected to battle with his own despair (man against himself) before declaring his vision of the battle on the mountain pass (naked breast against iron lance); Rudenz’ arrival intensifies things in that he announces a hitherto unknown subplot – Gessler’s abduction of his girlfriend; the supernumerary Swiss patriots challenge Rudenz’ loyalty (man v. man) and the young knight, then, adverts to the overarching conflict (Swiss v. Austrian administrators) with lurid imagery of fires on mountaintops and enemy castles collapsing into rubble. And the first half of the scene is intensified by suspense about whether the dying Attinghausen will revive – Attinghausen’s impending death plays the same role as the imminent thunderstorm in the play’s first scene.
This is florid, incendiary material and, at first blush, it seems a bit puzzling that this play is rarely revived and, therefore, infrequently performed. I suppose the melodramatic rhetoric about freedom is dated and unfashionable among the urban sophisticates and artistic elites that produce theater. The play’s politics are hard to categorize: we are shown a revolution spearheaded not by Marxist freedom-fighters but conservative mountain folks, “deplorables” or “hillbillies” as we might call them in the United States. Revolutions are not always liberal and Schiller seems to be celebrating a right-wing uprising, in fact, an insurgency that, probably, has more in common with the January 6, 2021 attack on the American capitol than the Sandinistas or Cuban guerillas fighting under Castro. But, all revolutions posture themselves as uprisings against tyranny and the language of liberation, of course, is equally available to both Right and Left. (The Nazis endorsed the language of Blut und Boden – “blood and soil”– extolled by the Swiss patriots in Wilhelm Tell and they encouraged productions of the show. But this backfired. A Swiss patriot, Marcel Bavaud, inspired by the play, traveled to Munich in 1941 and made elaborate efforts to position himself so that he could kill Hitler. In Bavaud’s eyes, Hitler was another version of the villainous Gessler whom Tell assassinated in the Hohlgasse, the “hollow lane”, a defile in the Alps. Having failed in Munich, Bavaud traveled to Berchtesgarten in the German Alps where Hitler maintained a chalet. But, again, he failed – Hitler had changed his plans and didn’t come to Berchtesgarten as anticipated by the gunman. Bavaud, now implicated, took a night-train to Paris, but was captured en route and, later, guillotined. Hitler ruefully remarked: Ausgerechnet Schiller musste diesen Schweitzer Heckenschiesser verherrlichen – that is, “Of all people, Schiller had to glorify this Swiss sniper...” The word Heckenschiesser is vivid: its describes someone who shoots you while hiding in the bushes.) A symbol of liberty, Wilhelm Tell, nonetheless, was deployed in allegorical engravings as an enemy of revolution. For instance, a widely circulated engraving exists shows Tell defeating the “chimera” of the French Revolution – that is, a false revolution in comparison with the genuine insurrection that Tell led. The chimera seems to have three heads: a wolf, mule, and a raptor of some kind, possibly a buzzard. The chimera that the doughty Tell has toppled is hissing smoke like a dragon whose fiery breath has just been extinguished and the creature has a long, writhing and serpentine tail. This is a bit puzzling in that Schiller’s inspirations for the play were the revolutions that had convulsed America and France in the preceding decades.
Most probably, however, Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell has fallen out of favor not on esthetic or political grounds but for reasons arising from show-business economics. The play is long, usually about four hours, although the action surges forward at a breakneck pace. But the work requires an army of actors – literally, in the sense that in several scenes, characters are described as hemmed-in by men with lances, many of them on horseback. There are twenty or so speaking parts and innumerable supernumeraries. Not one but two savage thunderstorms have to be staged and the sets required include high mountain passes, cliff-girt lake shores and alpine meadows, as well as various castles and villages. In the famous Ruetli scene, representatives of the three cantons in medieval Switzerland (Uri, Unterwald, and Schwyz) appear en masse with hordes of colorfully garbed peasants; there are soaring speeches delivered in a high meadow overlooking Lake Lucerne and, then, the crowd, described as about sixty on-stage actors, unanimously vow unity in their rebellion against the Habsburgs. In simple terms, the play is too expensive to mount. Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell displays the tendencies of theater throughout the long 19th century to aspire to the extravagance of opera and, later, film. Rossini’s equally lavish opera adapting Schiller’s play for the musical theater is, also, never performed – at least, this has been the case during my lifetime. Everyone knows Rossini’s overture, if only from radio shows and cartoons, but the opera that follows that prelude is never produced and, in fact, there aren’t even any You-Tube videos showing scenes from the opera – this seems peculiar because just about every other opera imaginable can be watched in excerpts on the Internet, but not Rossini’s Wilhelm Tell notwithstanding its famous and inspiring musical themes.
(Shakespeare poses similar problems. In the United States, Shakespeare is most frequently performed at summer festivals. These festivals avoid the problem of complicated stage machinery, lighting, and sets by simply putting on the show plein air and exploiting the local scenery. Furthermore, the huge casts required by Shakespearian theater can be managed, with much omission and doubling/tripling of parts, by casting young performers, generally kids on break from college. Festivals of this sort, which can produce very effective Shakespearian theater, exist as resume-builders for the young actors performing in these productions.)
Film is the Tell legend’s natural milieu. One of the first movies ever made is Georges Melies’ “trick film”, “The Adventures of Wilhelm Tell” produced in 1898. (Melies was a magician and conceived his films as exercises in prestidigitation to “fool the eye”– the picture is comical, involving a clown who assembles a mannequin of Wilhelm Tell that, then, comes to life and proceeds to shoot arrows at the poor protagonist.) Charles Pathe, another pioneer in film history, produced a reel on the subject in 1900. Early silent versions of the story tend to be divided into several tableaux – generally, these films show Tell battling the waves on Lake Lucerne as he rows a Swiss freedom-fighter to safety; this is followed by the Ruetli scene in which the leaders of the three cantons vow unity against Gessler; then, we see the scene in the market in which Tell refuses to bow to Gessler’s hat and must shoot the apple off his son’s head; then, there is a scene of Tell’s Sprung – that is, Tell leaping from the boat assailed by waves onto the shore, his Armbrust or crossbow in his hand; Tell, then, assassinates Gessler and these films end with a tableaux of bonfires on mountain tops signaling the advent of the rebellion. All of this can be presented in a brisk three to six minutes with the audience relied-upon to supply the narrative integument – in 1900, everyone knew the story.
The Italians followed suit with a film about Guilluame Tell in 1909. The Germans produced a prestige version of the story in 1923, starring the famous actor, Conrad Veidt, apparently a specialist in playing the part of the villain, Gessler, on stage. (The German film is lavishly made and an early title assures us that the pictures of medieval Swiss villages and costumes were researched by several redoubtable professors of history at universities in Berlin and Munich.) The 1923 version was sufficiently successful to inspire a talking picture in 1934, also starring Veidt. There are various versions throughout the next 25 years. In 1958, a TV series showed the adventures of Wilhelm Tell, a Germanic version of American shows about Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone. Another prestige picture follows in 1960. Max Frisch writes a subversive version of the story in 1971 – in his account Gessler, a mild-mannered Habsburg bureaucrat afflicted with administering the fractious and barbarous Swiss, is presented as the tale’s hero. (Comical treatments of the story are common – in English this genre was famously exploited by P. G. Wodehouse in his light verse epic Wilhelm Tell Told Again, published in 1904.) If anything, the pace accelerates in the 21st century: there’s a comedy version said to resemble a Mel Brooks’ film released in 2007. Brendan Frasier stars as Tell in Tell 3D made a few years later. One can assume that at this very moment, there is, at least, one and, possibly, two or three scripts about Wilhelm Tell in development or production.
It’s curious that the current insurrectionary political temper hasn’t incited “Don’t Tread on Me!” versions of the story. Schiller’s grandiose rhetoric can certainly be appropriated to foment uprisings on both sides of the political spectrum. The spectacle of mountain dwelling hillbillies opposing government intervention has a potent relevancy to some aspects of American culture in 2021. For instance, there is a peculiar tint to Gessler’s sadism that implicates conservative concerns about the right to bear arms embodied in the 2nd Amendment to the Constitution. Gessler taunts Tell and the rest of the well-armed Swiss yeomanry for carrying weapons: “Get to work (shooting the arrow off your son’s head)! One doesn’t bear weapons in vain. It’s dangerous to carry a murderous instrument of that sort – when you shoot, the arrow might recoil back at you. This proud right that you peasants assert offends the highest lord in this land. No one should bear arms without being bidden to do so. If you rejoices in carrying around this bow and arrow, well, then I will set the target for you.”
I can readily imagine interpretations of the play and opera as being staged among the Chiricahua Apaches, or set in Afghanistan or the Ozarks or amidst neo-Nazis in Idaho’s Rocky Mountains. One can imagine Wilhelm Tell inspiring Chechnyan rebels and freedom-fighters in Palestine. There are any number of provocative reboots available to this story – enough versions involving terrorists or other oppressed people to offend just about everyone. What about a version of the opera or play set in Haiti or, even, Alabama involving a slave revolt? The possibilities are endless.
And, indeed, Schiller seems to have felt a certain sense of anxiety about his rabble-rousing play. What if the oppressed and wretched of the earth took the drama seriously and rose up to cast off their fetters? One can imagine Goethe’s ambivalence about staging Schiller’s play, a Molotov cocktail of vehement revolutionary rhetoric. After all, Goethe was privy-counselor to Karl August, the Grand Duke of Weimar, an enlightened monarch but a dynastic ruler nonetheless. Karl August offended his fellow royals by emphasizing education that was supposed to result in “independence of judgement” in his subjects – to the other crowned heads of Europe, a little of this went a long way. Possibly, Goethe assimilated Schiller’s Republican rhetoric to Karl August’s pedagogical objectives. Most likely the play was construed as anti-Habsburg. The decrepit Habsburg empire had been scheming for years to annex Weimar, a political threat that had cast Karl August into an embrace with the Prussians, an ally ultimately more dangerous that Vienna. In any event, the play could be staged to emphasize the villainy of the Habsburg empire and, probably, this would justify the spectacle of virtuous yeomanry defying imperial authority. But aspects of Wilhelm Tell are inescapably revolutionary. After killing Gessler, Tell himself declares: Frei sind die Huetten – “The huts are free,” Huetten meaning the rustic cabins in which the Swiss peasants dwell. This slogan echoes the revolutionary epistle circulated by Georg Buechner, possibly Germany’s greatest playwright, in July 1834: Friede den Huetten! Krieg den Palaesten! (Peace to the Huts! War against the Palaces!) – the motto of Buechner’s Hessischer Landbote (“Hessian Manifesto”), a piece of vehement agit-prop that stirred up enough rage in the authorities that the young writer had to flee for his life. The influence of Schiller on Buechner, particularly his revolutionary drama Danton’s Death, deserves another essay.
Anxiety about the play’s political implications likely explains it’s rather peculiar anti-climax. The Swiss tear down the Austrian fortresses, cheerfully observing that what they were forced to build, they can just as readily destroy. Expecting an invasion as a reprisal for killing Gessler, the peasants plan to repel the attackers at the mountain passes and, more or less, expect to be slaughtered in the defense of their country, territory now made rein (that is, pure) of the Austrian bailiffs. (There is something slightly unsettling about the idea that murder and warfare purify the Patria, although we shouldn’t blame Schiller for events 125 years after his play was first produced.) Then, the course of events is turned aside by news of a surprising event. The Austrian Emperor has been assassinated by his nephew. Schiller provides precise details: the Emperor, Albrecht, was isolated from his body-guard when crossing the Danube by ferry. His nephew, aggrieved by being slighted in the dynastic succession, murders the ruler in a ruins of an old Roman city on the river-bank – an odd detail, but one that Schiller insists upon. (I think he wants to import classical overtones to his play and, perhaps, invokes for contrast, the example of Brutus and his murder of Caesar; the town is the legionnaires’ encampment at Vindomissa – the site from which Julius Caesar launched his campaign to conquer the Helvetii, that is, the Swiss barbarians.) Albrecht’s death has sparked a bloody vendetta spearheaded by the Queen of Hungary, Agnes, the daughter of the murdered man. She has vowed to slaughter everyone associated with the assassination, “servants, children, the children of children” so that she will “bathe in blood like the dew in May.” No one cares any longer about Gessler’s death and the guerilla war in the Alps and, so, the Swiss are spared Habsburg reprisals.
Schiller’s counter-revolutionary impulses are visible in Wilhelm Tell’s penultimate scene. A mendicant monk appears at Tell’s cabin. This spooky figure turns out to be Johannes Parricida, the Duke of Schwabia, and Emperor Albrecht’s assassin. Parricida explains that he killed Albrecht out of envy stemming from his uncle’s designation of another cousin as the rightful heir to the throne. “Envy gnawed my heart,” says Parricida and he describes how he fomented a league of conspirators to kill the King. It’s clear that Schiller imagines the murder of the Emperor as the dark shadow of the Swiss insurrection. The virtuous and patriotic motives of the Swiss are contrasted with Parricida’s self-aggrandizing conspiracy. Tell expresses disgust at the killing and refuses to shelter the fugitive. Instead, he tells the man to flee to Rome and make his confession to the Holy Father. Then, he provides Parricida with a road map, as it were, a description of the way that he must travel to reach St. Gotthard pass and, then, descend by that route to Italy.
Tell has characterized Parricida’s path as a fuerchterlich Strasse (“a fearful road”) and this metaphor becomes actual in the Swiss patriot’s description of the path to St. Gotthard Pass: “The way goes along the abyss (Abgrund) and is marked by many crosses, erected to the memory of travelers buried by avalanches.” This “abysmal” way illustrates a symbol that Schiller uses for revolution and insurrectionary violence. The impulse toward freedom that animates the Swiss arises from their landscape – these are people who dwell among savage forces of nature. The glaciers on the peaks shed ice and snow in avalanches; there are mud slides and floods when water impounded by the ice in the heights suddenly bursts free with devastating force. The play is replete with Swiss dialect terms for the various hazards that the mountains pose to their inhabitants. The most fundamental of these lethal dangers is the abyss or Abgrund. Schiller uses the Abgrund as a figure for revolution – the German word means that the Grund (or “ground”) is literally swept away. An Abgrund is a place where the solid earth and rock under our feet is suddenly gone – the abyss describes the insurrection that sweeps away the stony fortresses of the tyrant and that changes everything casting men into a fearsome gorge of freedom, dropping into a frightening and endless freefall.
Early in the play, Schiller has Tell describe how he met Gessler on a narrow lane on a mountain ledge. The question arose who should yield to whom. It was, as Tell recalls, bloss Mensch zu Mensch, und neben uns der Abgrund (“just man to man, and, at our side, the abyss”). Tell is armed in this confrontation and Gessler “shrinks against the side of the cliff,” afraid of him – this fateful encounter confirms Gessler in his hatred of Tell and the Swiss. Later, Rudenz woos Berta is a lonely and wild place: “All around abysses close us in...” The Swiss landscape with all its perils symbolizes freedom. Tell’s little son asks his father if there are places without mountains. Tell describes the mountain stream spurting from the glacier as descending into the lowlands where the river becomes slow and turbid, flowing ruhig und gemaechlich (“calmly and unhurried”). In the lowlands, the terrain is fertile and looks like a garden, but the fields are owned by the King and Bishop, and the harbor where the river meets the sea is also the King’s property – “the salt, the stream, the sea – none can fish without the King’s consent.” The little boy is appalled and says: “Father, I would feel narrow in such a broad land, I’d rather live among avalanches.” Tell replies: “Yes, it’s better to have the peak covered in glaciers at your back than wicked people.”
The equation between the abyss and freedom is made clear in the scene in which Rudenz converts from his allegiance to the Habsburgs to become a Swiss patriot: “The scales have fallen from my eyes – shuddering, I see that I have been led to an abyss – you (Gessler) have led my free judgement astray, have deluded my honest heart.” When Tell is hauled across Lake Lucerne in fetters after defying Gessler, another mighty tempest descends on the water – a fisherman says: “Hear, how the abyss rages, how the cyclone bawls...” Near the end of the play, two women fling themselves in front of Gessler, who is riding through the defile of the “Hollow Lane”. Schiller wants Gessler to die in the full spate of his villainy and, so, the tyrant callously ignores the women’s plea; they are petitioning him for the release of their husbands from his jail. Indeed, Gessler, even, threatens to crush them under the hooves of his horse just before Tell shoots him down with a bolt from his crossbow. One of the women describes herself as the wife of a poor “herdsman who works above the abyss mowing the free grass on those sheer heights so steep that even the beasts don’t dare climb them – “ Here the mountain abyss is the guarantor of a sort of freedom, albeit one that is impoverished and dangerous: the steeply sloping pastures offer “free grass” because they are too dangerous to harvest.
Swiss freedom is both “abysmal,” ground that shifts out from under your feet to cast you into the void, and dragon-haunted. In a soliloquy voiced before shooting Gessler, Tell hides among cliffs that, according to Schiller’s stage-directions, enclose him on all sides. Lamenting the fact that a peaceful farmer has now become a murderer stalking his prey, Tell addresses an imaginary Gessler saying: “You’ve terrorized me out of my peace – you’ve changed my pious and customary way of thinking into boiling dragon’s poison, you have accustomed me to the monstrous...” “Dragon’s poison”is Draechengift. Earlier in the play, a Swiss canton leader, Stauffacher describes the roots of the Swiss in the land that they have made and, indeed, reclaimed from dragons: “We have created this earth through the industry of our hands, changed the old wood that was once only the wild dwelling of bears into a place for people to live, we’ve killed the brood of dragons that reared up out of the swamps swollen with poison, we’ve shredded the banks of fog that hung as an eternal pall over this wilderness, we’ve burst the hard cliffs apart to make for wanderers a secure ascent over the abyss – this land is ours by virtue of a thousand years possession.” Stauffacher claims that, over a millennium of occupation, the Swiss have domesticated the mountains and made them habitable. The trope for this ascent from savagery to civilization is the killing of dragons. Therefore, it’s ironic that Gessler’s depredations have cast Wilhelm Tell back into the primordial Swiss wilderness – as dragons once had to be slain to make the land habitable, so the dragon will now arise and avenge those who trespass upon the mountains. In his soliloquy Tell identifies with the vicious dragons that once terrorized the Alps.
What is this about?
Schiller, unlike Goethe, never set foot in Switzerland. But he was an assiduous researcher. Schiller understood that a text leavened with place names and a few bits of Swiss dialect would create an impression of verisimilitude. Therefore, he sprinkles bits of Swiss lore throughout the play. This literary strategy was wildly successful – the Swiss regard the play as a national treasure, an epic that is uniquely true to their history and ethnic identity. The Alpine dragons are part of this lore.
Until about 1750, it was widely believed that remote valleys in the Alps were inhabited by dragons. Cryptids are often associated with remote and desolate landscapes and, within central Europe, there was no wilderness as spectacular and dangerous as the Alps. Roads into the mountains were few and poorly maintained. The high passes were terrifying, winding trails up to the peaks lined, as Schiller tells us, with crosses marking places where avalanches and rock falls had buried travelers alive. Wordsworth’s account of his crossing the Alps in The Prelude demonstrates that, even, in the early 19th century the high mountains were considered sublime, awesome, dangerous, and spectacular. Shelley’s poem “Mont Blanc” is to similar effect – the Alps were frightening places veritably vibrating with primordial power. And, indeed, high mountains are not inert – they roar with rock falls and snow-slides; their narrow valleys churn with cascades and rapids, water all milky with rock ground out under the glaciers. The wind makes the peaks sing and the valleys throb in their depths with rushing water. Everything shifts and changes underfoot.
Dragons were emblems of this fierce Alpine mutability. Konrad Gessner, a Swiss doctor and naturalist, described in the 16th century various dragons thought to inhabit the upper slopes of the Alps – some dragons, he wrote, were like huge worms without legs. Other dragons were said to be bearded. Everyone believed in these creatures – their presence had been documented for many years. Near Lucerne, there is a huge mountain called Mons Pileatus – this Latin means merely “Mountain with rock struts.” But the word “pileatus” sounds like Pilate and this sinister homophone gave rise to the folktale that Pontius Pilate himself sat on a throne in the bottom of an alpine lake dug into a high terrace on the mountain. Pilate didn’t like to be disturbed and, when rocks cascaded from the cliff overlooking the lake, he expressed his rage by stirring up enormous and deadly storms. (It was for this reason, fear that falling rocks would enrage the Roman procurator, that the City Fathers in Lucerne passed an ordinance forbidding anyone from climbing on the mountain – this law was in place until the late 17th century.) Sometimes, Pilate summoned dragons to perch above his water sepulcher. In 1420, a huge winged dragon landed in a meadow on the flank of the mountain, close enough to a peasant who was toiling in the field. The peasant fainted and, when he regained his senses, the dragon was gone. However, the creature left a souvenir, a perfectly round ball of “draconite”, an occult substance derived from dragon blood that has medicinal properties. This sphere of draconite was clotted with venomous dragon gore that had to be washed off the object. Then, the round ball, thought to be a meteorite, was passed from one Lucerne doctor to another down into the 20th century when the artifact was acquired by city’s Museum of Natural History. (The so-called Drachenstein – “dragon-rock” – has been assayed by CT scan and is not a meteorite but rather a bowling-ball-sized orb of fired clay covered in paint.) In the 18th century, the city rescinded rules against climbing Mount Pilatus (and the place is now a sort of Alpine amusement park) – but this was only after the lake where Pontius Pilate was said to dwell was drained and converted into a windswept and desolate moor.
The best source for lore about the dragons of the Alps is the Latin volume Itinera per Helvetiae alpines regiones facto annis 1702 - 1711 written by the Zurich botanist and medical doctor, Johann Jakob Scheuchzer. Scheuchzer died in 1733 but his books, particularly the Itinera were famous throughout Europe. The Itinera, published initially in four Latin quarto volumes, was translated into German in 1752. We know that Schiller consulted the book extensively. Indeed, with Tschudi’s Chronicum Helveticum (noteworthy for its account of Wilhelm Tell’s adventures), Scheuchzer’s travel narrative was a principal source for the German poet’s 1804 play.
Scheuchzer reports in his Travels (“Itinera”) through the Alpine Regions of Switzerland that Swiss peasants were convinced that dragons were living amidst the high peaks and gorges and glaciers. One man saw a dragon with the head of a cat with large eyes atop a long neck. The creature had four limbs and something like teats pendant from its belly. The dragon’s tail was said to be one foot long. No wings were reported. The chimera’s body was covered with colored scales. The man who encountered this animal prodded it with a stick – it seems that the creature may have been dead. The animal was soft and full of poisonous blood. The peasant discovered this to his dismay when a drop of that ichor fell on his leg causing it to immediately swell.
Alpine dragons were said to come in several species. Some were called Tatzelwurm (snake body with two to four legs), the Lindwurm (serpent body with two legs no wings), the Iaculo (snake body with two wings), the Vivema (snake body with two wings and two legs), and the Anfittera (winged dragon with no legs). Some of these serpents had human faces, others sported crested crowns; some were simply lizards with many tails.
Dragons were associated with dangerous storms. One man saw a dragon under a large fir tree. The animal had silver-colored wings dotted with red spots. Two days after this creature was sighted, a hail storm smashed through the woods and knocked down many saplings. Scheuchzer thought dragons emerged from their dens “after the dilution of the air (by moisture) and before it rains” – just as downpours could be predicted by snakes and lizards coming out of their holes. In this regard, Scheuchzer cited a chronicle from two-hundred and fifty years earlier – a dragon was observed swimming upstream with an undulating motion in the Reuss River. This was on May 26, 1499. (The Reuss is the river that the Habsburg emperor, Albrecht was crossing when he was assassinated by Johann, the “Parricide” in 1308). Predictably, two days after the elongated eel-like beast was seen, a terrible storm scourged the land.
Scheuchzer was skeptical about the stories that he collected. He was looking for tangible evidence that dragons existed. Some mountain people led him to cave high in the Alpine cliffs at the Ober Urner Schuendi where there were dragon bones said to be strewn among the stalagmites. Scheuchzer saw the bones but identified them as belonging to a the skeleton of a bear and surmised that a rock fall had sealed the cave in which the bear was hibernating resulting in its death. This seems plausible. Scheuchzer’s conjectures, however, weren’t always right. He recorded the features of an antediluvian man found fossilized in a slab of rock in a quarry near Berne. The ancient man had a large skull with enormous eye-sockets in bone shaped like a mantle falling over his shoulders and ribs with small flipper-like hands and stubby feat. This type of human lived before the flood but was drowned by that deluge. It wasn’t until 1837 that Georges Cuvier identified the antediluvian giant as a kind of prehistoric salamander. Nonetheless, Cuvier was gracious enough to name the creature Salamandra Scheuchzeri.
Why were the Alps thought to be full of dragons? Scheuchzer had a theory on that point. During the first phase of the so-called Little Ice Age (1300 to about 1450), cold conditions enlarged the valley glaciers spilling off the peaks in the Alps. Some of these glaciers actually encroached on villages and towering tongues of ice destroyed places where people were dwelling. These glaciers sprawling along the bottom of twisting gorges looked like great white serpents. They were dangerous in that the glaciers often sent cascades of ice crashing into the valleys below and, further, sealed off lakes of melt water with frozen dams prone to collapse with catastrophic results. The Alpine word “dragonare” means “flooding”. A related word, “dracare” signifies heavy snowfall. It was Scheuchzer’s hypothesis that these terms had been confused with words for “dragon” and that the monsters of the Alps were, in fact, mythological representations of valley glaciers.
There is another weird creature claimed to have stalked the Alps. This is the antagonist to the Stier von Uri – “the bull (steer) of Uri”. In Fifth Act (first scene) of Wilhelm Tell, Schiller brings the “Bull of Uri” on-stage. The Swiss are tearing down the hill-forts built with forced labor by Gessner. The “Bull of Uri” in this play seems to be simply some burly peasant famous for his strength. The character even gets one line: in the response to the question: “Where is the Bull of Uri?” he responds “Here. What do you want of me?” One of the peasants tells the man to climb to the top of the peak and blow a blast on an Alpenhorn (the sort of elongated brass instruments featured in Ricoli cough-drop commercials). The “Bull” leaves and that’s his one and only appearance in the play.
Apparently, the “Bull of Uri” was a popular figure in the Wilhelm Tell mythos although he has almost no role in Schiller’s version of the story. In both the 1923 and 1934 version of film Wilhelm Tell, there is a character listed in the credits as the Stier von Uri. As far as I can determine, the “Bull” is a huge peasant with mutton-chop sideburns who seems to be preternaturally stupid and jolly.
The “Bull of Uri” is on the heraldic device identified with the Canton of Uri. On the Canton’s crest, there is a large glaring bull’s head shown with curling horns and a red ring through the beast’s nose. The “Bull” originates in a strange legend.
In the remote past, a shepherd watched his flocks on a high ridge between the Canton of Uri and the Oberwaldner Valley – this place was called the Surenalp. The pasture was near a cloister and the milk and cheese produced by animals grazing on the mountain provided food for the monks. One day, some strange men who seemed to be from the low lands made their way up to the Surenalp heights. They had a flock of sheep with them that were beautiful, fleecy animals of a kind unknown to the herdsmen in the high mountains. The shepherd begged the strange visitors to give him one of their lambs. At first, they refused but, after he pleaded with them, the men left a particularly wonderful lamb with the young shepherd. The young man became obsessed with the lamb and it never left his side (much like the lamb that Mary had). Concerned about the fate of the lamb’s soul, the young shepherd asked the monks to baptize the animal. They were appalled at this request and refused. So the shepherd broke into the cloister, took some holy water, and baptized the lamb himself. Immediately, a terrific storm roared down from the peaks and the clouds seemed to develop arms and legs that uprooted trees and boulders and hurled them about. In a flash of lightning, the shepherd saw a hideous monster advancing on him. The creature tore the shepherd limb from limb.
After that day, the Surenalp was haunted by this monster, called the Greis (“old man”) by the people in the area. The Greis slaughtered cows and sheep and poisoned wells. Everyone fled. The monastery was able to buy all of the meadows on the ridge for almost nothing. No one could use the grazing land and, even, the monks weren’t able to safely keep animals on that height.
A traveling scholar spent the night in the monastery and heard about the monster of the Surenalp. He said that he knew how to rid the local peasantry of this dangerous creature. However, first he demanded a purse full of gold coins and that his goblet be filled seven times in a row to the brim as he drank down the wine. Presumably, good and drunk, the scholar said that the villagers should chose a snow-white steer and raise it for ten years. During the first year, the steer should be fed on the milk of a single cow. During the second year, the steer would be nourished by two cows and, then, three the third year and so on until the bull was ten years old. Then, a virgin, dressed in a white gown should lead the bull by the ring in its nose up onto the Surenalp where the animal would confront the Greis and kill that creature.
As the girl climbed the steep ridge leading the bull, another terrible storm blew down from the high peaks. For several days, the alpine meadows were inaccessible. When, at last, the villagers reached the place where the virgin had last been seen, the bull was found torn to pieces. Next to the bull was a strange, deformed creature also mutilated and ripped apart. There was no sign of the girl.
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