"Wilhelm Tell" Again

One last word (really) on Wilhelm Tell. Safranski mentions that Goethe, while in Switzerland in 1797, wrote to Schiller of his idea of writing a drama about Wilhelm Tell. For several years afterward, he turned the idea over in his head, but nothing came of it.

Why was Goethe unable to write the play? Partly I would guess it was because of the French Revolution, which even in at the time was considered a historical "turning point." As Nicholas Boyle has written, Goethe was unable, despite various attempts, to produce a major work in response to the Revolution. He did write four dramas or dramatic fragments, portraying stages of the Revolution, none of which is very memorable. Der Gross-Cophta, for instance, on the affair of the the French queen's necklace, is described as a comedy, but is (according to The Oxford Companion to German Literature) one of the more heavy-footed of Goethe's works.

Goethe had written a play on another historical turning point several decades earlier, namely, the 1773 play Goetz von Berlichingen. That drama had made Goethe famous, even before The Sorrows of Young Werther. The visit to Switzerland in 1797, which recapitulated certain stages of Goethe's first visit to Switzerland in 1775, may have led him to think he could repeat that earlier success with a drama on a different historical subject.

Goetz von Berlichingen, however, takes place in the 16th century. It has been pointed out that the same period of time -- two centuries -- separated Goethe from his historical sources as divides us from Goethe. Still, there is a difference between a period of "historical significance" in the past and history in the making. It is one thing to immerse oneself in archives and historical records, as Goethe did in preparation for writing Goetz, another to make sense of events occurring in one's own life. Moreover, Goethe had long abandoned -- indeed repudiated -- the so-called Shakespearean style and often rough language that had made Goetz such a triumph when it first appeared.

Schiller, according to Safranski, was "as if electrified" by Goethe's letter, and, within several years, after Goethe had abandoned the attempt, wrote his own version of the Wilhelm Tell legend. If Goethe was unable to produce anything of significance in connection with the French Revolution, Schiller had been seeking to make sense of it since The Aesthetic Letters. As I mentioned in my last post, the contemporary public reaction to Schiller's Wilhelm Tell leaves no doubt that people understood the connection between the long-ago events in Switzerland and the tyranny posed by Napoleon.

Schiller's enthusiasm for writing his drama probably had much to do with his continuing absorption in the theme of freedom, but it also strikes me that Schiller may have been attempting, with Wilhelm Tell, to re-create for himself the success that Goethe had achieved with Goetz. Wilhelm Tell, as Safranski points out, abandons the future-oriented vision of free men of The Aesthetic Letters. Instead it posits the source of freedom in the past, in the native and natural traditions of an independent community. Both Tell and Goetz are men of action and representatives of freedom and natural right. Moreover, both have identifying characteristics, one a crossbow, the other an iron hand.

Goethe's play, which concerned a man out of joint with his times, was also meant to indicate something about the Germany of the 1770s. In the end it was Schiller who was able to make the connection between the past and the present with an historical drama concerning an even earlier rebel. By wrapping up his material in a "classical" five-act drama, he avoided reminding Goethe all too vividly of his Sturm und Drang enthusiasms.

Friedrich Schiller's "Wilhelm Tell"

Now to what Rüdiger Safranski writes about Schiller's Wilhelm Tell. After finishing The Bride from Messina, which was "administered to the public like a strong dose of medicine" (I have seen the play, and it does feel like medicine), Schiller got seriously down to work in the spring of 1802 and finished a draft of his mountain play in August 1803. He wrote to Goethe in November that he was not letting himself get distracted by anything and predicted finishing it by March. He even thought of traveling to Switzerland, to visit the places associated with the Tell legend, but his health did not permit it. In any case, he felt that his own imagination and Goethe's account had made him familiar with the "Genius loci." As with an earlier play, Wallenstein, Schiller worked closely with Goethe, who was eager for a new play for the Weimar stage.

While Schiller was writing, Switzerland itself was in the process of losing its celebrated independence. Napoleon "liberated" the Swiss people, whose system of independent cantons was regarded as feudal, and proclaimed the Helvetic Republic in April 1798. Resistance to the French was particularly strong in the "Ur" cantons of Uri, Schwyz, and Nidwalden, the original partners in the oath on the Rütli meadow of 1291 (portrayed here in Heinrich Füssli's 1780 painting), which marked the beginnings of the Swiss Confederacy.

By swearing an oath, the Swiss had formed an alliance to protect their freedoms from would-be overlords. The memory of this earlier heroic period inspired their resistance to the French in the late 18th century.

By 1799 Switzerland had become a battleground featuring French, Austrian, and Russian armies. In Germany, too, the desire for freedom from French hegemony began to stir the natives. This desire would culminate a decade later in the wars of liberation against Napoleon. And, as in Switzerland, the voice of resistance appealed to incipient "German" traditions.

The resistance to tyranny in Schiller's play is portrayed as a conservative revolution. According to Safranski, Schiller abandoned his earlier vision of a new human being that would become capable of freedom through the process of aesthetic education. Instead, Schiller discovered revolutionary potential in the past, in the mountain world of Wilhelm Tell. The true revolution does not owe its existence to a "new man," as in The Aesthetic Letters," but in the defense of what has worked well in the past (Verteidigung des alten, wohlgeratenen). "Great deeds occur when what has proved itself takes up arms against bad reform" (Großes entsteht, wenn das Bewährte sich wehrt gegen eine schlechte Neuerung). In Schiller's drama, Wilhelm Tell defends an ancient, natural freedom of men against tyranny.

Schiller re-creates the original alliance, in a "cyclical drama." A community, in the course of its fight against tyranny, establishes a "covenant" (Bund) that reproduces what is originally a product of nature (naturwüchsig). The new, strengthened covenant is the outcome of an historical act. The community has been disturbed in its natural idyll by being cast into history, but in the end people return, richer in experience, to their idyllic origin.

Who acts? The community, yes, but above all Wilhelm Tell, who belongs to the community but also remains aloof from it. Thus, he does not take part in the oath on the Rütli meadow: "The strong man is most powerful when acting alone," he declares. When he kills Gessler, he is acting without a mandate; the responsibility is his alone. While triggering the collective freedom. he keeps the process from becoming all too political, from descending into strategic calculation. Safranski calls him a "self-helper."

The cyclical movement of the play applies to Tell himself. After killing Gessler, after the bloody excursion into history, he also returns home to the idyll. The same fire burns in the hearth, wife and children await him, the patriarchal world still stands, but Tell is no longer the same. By murdering the tyrant, he has lost his innocence.

Schiller, continues Safranski, was eager to absolve Tell of the crime of murder. In the last scene, a figure dressed as a monk appears at Tell's house. He is really Johannes Parricida, a duke of Swabia, who has murdered the emperor, his own uncle. Since the emperor has deprived him of his patrimony, he imagines Tell will be sympathetic: "You have slain the Governor who did you wrong. I too have slain a foe who robbed me of my rights. He was no less your enemy than mine. I've rid the land of him."

Tell will have none of this: "Dare you confound the crime of blood-imbrued ambition with the act forced on a father in mere self-defense. Had you to shield your children's darling heads, to guard your fireside's sanctuary - ward off the last, the direst doom from all you loved? ... You murdered, I have shielded all that was most dear to me." Schiller thus portrays Tell's act in the republican tradition of Brutus. As a side note, John Wilkes Booth, who assassinated Abraham Lincoln, defended his act with reference to Wilhelm Tell. Responding to the revulsion of contemporaries at Lincoln's murder, Wilkes wrote that he was only "doing what Brutus was honored for and what made Tell a Hero." Interestingly, the Helvetic Republic also sought to make use of the Wilhelm Tell legend by featuring the archer's image on its official seal.

Goethe was disturbed about one murderer blaming another murderer. As Safranski writes, Goethe would presumably have made his own "Wilhelm Tell" darker and more contradictory, but, when the play premiered in Weimar on March 17, 1804, he professed himself satisfied.