Friedrich Schiller

Friedrich Schiller was a German poet, playwright, philosopher and historian whose work, alongside that of his friend Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, defined the Weimar Classicism of the late 18th century. He was born Johann Christoph Friedrich Schiller on November 10, 1759, in Marbach am Neckar, in the Duchy of Württemberg. He was conscripted in 1773 into the Karlsschule, the military academy of Duke Karl Eugen of Württemberg, where he studied medicine.

He completed and staged his first play, Die Räuber (The Robbers), in Mannheim in 1782 while serving as a regimental doctor. Its success and the duke's prohibition on further writing prompted him to flee Württemberg that year. The plays Don Carlos (1787), the historical trilogy Wallenstein (1798–99), Maria Stuart (1800), Die Jungfrau von Orleans (The Maid of Orleans, 1801) and Wilhelm Tell (William Tell, 1804) form the core of the German classical theatrical repertoire.

He was appointed professor of history at the University of Jena in 1789 and lectured on the Thirty Years' War and the revolt of the Netherlands. From 1794 he and Goethe began a correspondence and collaboration that lasted until Schiller's death and is one of the most-documented friendships in literary history. His 1785 ode An die Freude (Ode to Joy) was set by Beethoven in the choral finale of the Ninth Symphony in 1824 and was adopted as the anthem of the European Union in 1985.

His philosophical essays, particularly On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795), grounded a Kantian aesthetics that influenced 19th-century European thought. He was ennobled in 1802 and died of tuberculosis in Weimar on May 9, 1805, at the age of 45.

His name Friedrich is the German form of Frederick, from the Old High German Fridurih — from fridu ("peace") and rīh ("ruler, power"), giving the sense "peaceful ruler." It is a masculine name long borne by Prussian and Habsburg rulers.