Friedrich Schiller’s Secret Beloved

Photograph courtesy of Alexander Wells.

The small eastern German city of Rudolstadt sits on a curve of the river Saale. All through the summer of 1788, the great poet-philosopher-playwright Friedrich Schiller used to stride around this bend, impatient to meet up with the love of his life, his future wife, Charlotte—but also with her sister Caroline. When he couldn’t see them, he sent love letters, often several a day, and these were sometimes addressed not to one sister but both. They would gather on a bridge across the river. They would swim and sing and talk and read. When the girls’ parents were away, they spent time together in their family home. What happened inside is now unknowable. “You have already become so much to my heart,” Schiller wrote, that formal you being potentially either singular or plural.

Three years later, when Schiller and Charlotte were married and living together in the nearby town of Jena, a young poet named Karl Gotthard Graß became a regular visitor at their house. The painter once wrote Schiller a letter in which he marveled at the lack of jealousy and quarreling between the two women of the household. “I cannot hide my feelings about the love of these two splendid sisters, for each other and for you,” he wrote. “It was often as if [their mother] had only one daughter and you … had two wives.” It was, the painter continued, just like a fairy tale.

***

To get to Rudolstadt from Berlin, you pass through prime Goethe-and-Schiller country. These two friends—Goethe being older, more courtly, and more of a polymath; Schiller being younger, more furiously abstract, and more beloved by his public—take pride of place in Germany’s cultural heritage, especially in this particular stretch of central Germany, which encompasses the main stomping grounds of their Weimar Classicism period as well as the major sites of the younger Romantics, whom they overlapped with and encouraged. Every German student has to read, sometimes even to memorize, the work of Goethe and Schiller. Their names are synonymous with German cultural greatness. Their legacy is a reliable source of domestic tourism coin; it also lends historical glamour to cities that didn’t exactly have the best twentieth century.

And people really are mad for them there. In Leipzig, you can visit a house where Schiller spent a summer, or a café whose hot chocolate Goethe liked, or if you’re as lucky as I was, during an impulsive solo tour around the area, you can walk down Schillerstraße into the Schillerpark and take a selfie with the Schiller bust there, only to get laughed at by beer-drinking youths in terrible Matrix coats. Down in Jena, where Schiller and Goethe and the younger Romantics all Bloomsburied out in the 1790s and 1800s, you can visit Schiller’s garden house, a Romantikerhaus, or the botanical gardens that Goethe helped redesign, which are home to a gingko tree my wife hates because one time for work she had to read a bad English translation of a bad but famous Goethe poem about it. I wandered agog around these various sites, thrilled to finally be doing—after years of study in far-flung Australia and then of semi-integrated expat life in Berlin—some of the properly serious Great Literature stuff that had lured me to Europe in the first place. Goethe and Schiller! Museums, plaques, and busts!!

The city of Weimar has a Goethe house, a Goethe garden house, a house where Schiller spent his later years, and a large bronze statue of Schiller and Goethe together, both holding one laurel wreath while Goethe gently rests his hand on Schiller’s shoulder. (Replicas of this statue have been erected by wistful German émigrés in Syracuse, Milwaukee, and San Francisco.) In its various gift shops, I contemplated books by Schiller, books about Schiller, mugs with cats on them, Goethe busts, Schiller busts, a wine corker with Schiller’s head on it, porcelain plates with Goethe and Schiller’s heads on them, Schiller applesauce, Goethe strawberry and lavender jam, and an A3 facsimile of Schiller’s “Arbeits- und Finanzplan für die Jahre 1802–1809” (Work and finance plan 1802–1809), before settling on a lovely little postcard with the gingko poem, which I mailed to my wife immediately. Saw this and thought of you xx.

Before continuing to Rudolstadt, I sat in a chain bakery and dug into The Robbers, the rebellious play from 1782 that made young Schiller a star (and Coleridge “tremble like an Aspen Leaf”). The tenor is thrusting and vigorous, as with much of early Schiller; it tells the story of a good-hearted man who is forced by tyranny and corruption to lead the life of a righteous outlaw. Like the rest of Schiller’s oeuvre—even the later history plays—it is lit up by a philosophical boisterousness, a lust for liberation and renewal, and a search for ever grander forms of “unity” outside a dried-out, teetering, dictatorial social order. While it might feel “carpe diem” corny today, its spiritedness is genuine and occasionally contagious. But I was having trouble reading, which upset me. Had I fried my brain on the American internet? Had I read too many posts? Still, all the Germans I meet tend to agree that Schiller is tough going, perhaps more admired than actually read. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a big white lamp in the shape of Goethe’s head, its plug unplugged and dangling loose. Where’s my man Schiller? I battled through another two pages of The Robbers, then boarded my train.

Rudolstadt, like many small cities in post-Communist eastern Germany, seems rather unsure how to define itself. They have a picturesque castle belonging to a very minor noble; they were once famous for their porcelain, and for producing a domestic competitor to LEGO. The surrounding region votes far right, but the city is run by independents. It is neither very rich nor very poor. They host a Tough Mudder event and a world music festival. In recent decades, though, they seem to have gambled a lot of their identity on Schiller—and on one saucy chapter of the author’s life. Already at the station, the marketing campaign is apparent. A big sign bids welcome to “Schiller-city Rudolstadt.” The pedestrian tunnel has a drawing of Schiller’s face and the unofficial town motto, Schiller’s Secret Beloved—adopted as part of an enthusiastically Schiller-based marketing campaign in the aughts—next to pictures of Schiller and two women interconnected with Cupid-ish arrows, cartoon hearts, and quotations. Then there are big blown-up photos of three young actors dressed in period garb. They pose in front of a church in one, and in another they look out over a castle, two of them holding hands behind the other’s back. Somebody with a pen has furiously scratched out the faces of Schiller (just a bit) and one of the women (quite a lot) on one photo.

As I approached the town square, I noticed a Schiller bust—beside the bust of two women—and then a city works van with Schiller’s Secret Beloved printed on the side. All the signs were pointing west, toward the Schillerhaus, to something. And so on I went, past the shop advertising open-faced sandwiches with raw pork mince and uncooked white onions—parsley photoshopped on top—and past the popular outdoors shop named “Sport Schart.” Past the bakery that tried to sell me a doughnut called Kameruner, like Cameroon, in the shape of a dinosaur; past the clothing store with a spiffy window display of leopard print, a discount rack featuring outgoing summer styles of leopard print, and a rack of freshly arrived fall fashions—leopard print. I even passed a plaque proclaiming Goethe once stayed there.

I got to the Schillerhaus in the early afternoon. The sun was mild, the leaves were rouging. The house itself sat elegantly understated, three boxy white floors festooned with ivy and topped with a gently sloping orange roof. Inside, a quotation from Schiller had been painted on the wall near the entrance: “All art is dedicated to joy,” it read, “and there is no higher and no more serious task than to make people happy.” All right, then, I thought, do your best. The first room was dedicated to Goethe and Schiller’s first meeting—which technically happened here, although they didn’t get along, as their letters to mutual friends attest. (Goethe considered Schiller immature and overzealous; Schiller found Goethe “an egoist of exceptional degree.”) Someone had the idea of reenacting their meeting using video screens, each containing the head of an actor: Goethe, Schiller, the two sisters, another woman, all talking over each other and attempting to be witty, then falling silent for several seconds. It felt to me, not knowing better, authentic. If you focus on Schiller, you notice him exchanging sultry looks and winks with one sister, then with the other, and then the first again. The actors were doing a great job. I recognized their faces from the photos at the station.

***

It was on a chance social visit to this house in December 1787 that Schiller met these two sisters—Charlotte von Lengefeld and Caroline von Beulwitz. What happened next is a drama that reveals itself primarily in letters, since Schiller did not keep a proper diary and none of them wrote explicitly about the situation in their published works. The love triangle shows up in some biographies of Schiller, and a couple of critics and historians have plundered the epistolary archive in search of the truth. Yet all these chunks of evidence merely orbit around the unknowability of what was really done and felt and said in closed rooms during the late eighteenth century.

Charlotte was younger and more demure; she liked the English language and drawing. Caroline, three years older, was bolder and more radical in inclination—but she had already been married off to a dull businessman. It was a loveless marriage, and he was often away on work trips, so she lived almost completely independently. Both sisters dreamed of traveling widely, although the farthest they would ever get was Switzerland. They read widely and translated—their father wanted them educated beyond their small-town context. But each of them was waiting, somehow, to find a path into the wider world.

When Schiller arrived in Rudolstadt in 1787, he was a famous young firebrand who wanted to liberate the self from social tyranny. His latest play, Don Carlos, was tragic, sensual, enamored of freedom. Yet he had also begun to crave a conventional family life. He had offered a few marriage proposals willy-nilly and seemed unsure whether he wanted a partner in thought and deed, or a woman who would live to serve him.

The three hit it off immediately when Schiller was brought by a friend to the Lengefeld family home—now the Schillerhaus. “Both sisters,” Schiller wrote to a friend, “possess some rapture, but in both it is subordinated to reason and tempered by intellectual culture. The younger one is not entirely free from a certain coquetterie d’esprit, which still gives more pleasure through modesty and unfaltering liveliness than it detracts.” It was decided that Schiller would return for a longer visit the next summer. The sisters’ mother was at court and their father away on business, so the house was often unoccupied. Schiller was put up in a cottage down the river, and the trio saw each other almost daily. They talked about literature and politics and gossip and music. That summer, and after Schiller again left town, an love triangle in letters established itself: hundreds of passionate missives traveled between Schiller and Charlotte, Schiller and Caroline, Schiller and both at once. (What was said between Caroline and Charlotte is lost to time.) Schiller would write to one in boisterous passion, while also inquiring about her sister’s “dainty little feet”; sometimes the women would answer together. On the Schillerhaus Rudolstadt’s top floor, you can stand among three silhouettes and hear actors reading the letters.

Their correspondence is heady, needy, and headlong. Charlotte wrote: “Let me hear from you as often as you can, and desire, so that the course of your spirit will not become strange to me, and so I can follow it.” Caroline wrote: “Nobody has ever known how to stir the sides of my innermost being like you—I have oft been moved to tears by how tenderly you nurtured and carried my soul through bleak moments.” And, to the “angels of [his] life,” Schiller wrote: “To be able to live only in the two of you, and you in me—oh, that is an existence which would put us above all other humans.” (I was beginning to feel bad about that postcard I sent my wife.)

The trio dreamed of continuing their Rudolstädter Sommer indefinitely. Schiller would marry Charlotte, with—it seems—the understanding that Caroline would join them. Caroline proposed to Schiller on Charlotte’s behalf. She also got the wary blessing of their mother, who must have been relieved that at least there would be one respectable marriage. They would live in two houses: one for Schiller and Charlotte and another, next door, for Caroline (and theoretically her absent husband). Schiller wrote excitedly about the prospect of this three-lover life, both to the sisters and to a friend. The wedding took place in 1790. Yet after that the paper trail goes relatively cold, in part because many of Caroline’s letters to Schiller were burned, allegedly by one of his daughters. What was really going on between them: boisterous friendship, love, competition? The lines were blurred. The literary critic Ursula Naumann has argued that it was a genuine ménage à trois, citing one contemporary who believed Caroline and Schiller were sleeping together; a mutual friend also wrote to her husband that, since their own throuple was going so well, Caroline’s situation might also turn out fine. From the letters, it is clear enough that something unfamiliar was being negotiated—something more dangerous and adrenal than simply a powerful man choosing between girlfriends. “Tell me,” Caroline wrote, after Schiller and Charlotte were officially engaged, “what is it between us? I can feel that it is something.” Schiller replied that her letter had been dear to him—that “a new hope has revived my own.”

Ultimately, Schiller and Charlotte found themselves in a rather standard bourgeois marriage. They posted up in Jena, not Rudolstadt; Caroline lived with them intermittently but found herself more and more excluded. Charlotte kept house and raised four children. Schiller wrote and wrote until his death in 1805, at the age of forty-five, having drifted ever deeper into illness, social isolation, and resentment toward younger Romantic upstarts, who constantly mocked him. Charlotte is remembered primarily as Schiller’s wife and the recipient of his poems and love letters. Caroline is remembered rather differently, if at all. She eventually got a divorce, wrote a novel, married a man who loved her greatly but bored her, traveled widely, had a kid (that some historians suspect was Schiller’s), and dedicated her later years to writing, producing the first proper biography of Schiller in 1830. In that biography, she hardly mentions the role she played in his life. Her sister and the great poet—that’s the love story that matters. Perhaps she wanted to keep for herself what she had experienced for herself—“really,” she wrote to a friend after his death, “we were the only ones that knew him.” It is Caroline who was scratched out with pen at the station.

***

In Out of Sheer Rage, Geoff Dyer describes the sinking feeling that comes at the climax of a literary pilgrimage: “You look and look and try to summon up feelings which don’t exist.” To this, I can only counter with the Schillerhaus in Rudolstadt, a place about which I had no expectations, and which triggered a number of very real feelings—feelings like, for instance, Huh??? The saucy insinuations posted relentlessly around the city’s various walls, tunnels, work vans, etc., did succeed in stimulating a certain curiosity. That curiosity powered me through the Schillerhaus—its brightly painted domestic rooms, its busts and beds and samovars and pens, its love letters written out in alluring carmine cursive on the walls. This was the Lengefeld family house, not Schiller’s, and it felt that way, for all the Great Poet branding. The sisters’ dresses were hung between the rooms. One little display case held Caroline’s matchbox, her silver spoons, her mug with a landscape painting of Rudolstadt on it, and a handsome little globe—a pell-mell collection perhaps, but also a bittersweet record of a half-free woman’s hunger for the world. The place was elegant, staid, and basically empty. I could only think of these two sisters, of their anxieties and hopes and frustrations, and of the way the young poet’s theoretical love for freedom collided with the thorny world of human coexistence. And I discovered I wanted details—juicy details. Who did what with whom and when? What did it all mean? Was there somebody I could ask?

And perhaps there is nothing so odd about remembering the Weimar Classicists and Romantics via gossip. These people, after all, were scenesters. They said things like “in vino veritas” and meant it. They ran magazines together, they wrote and dreamed and argued together, they slept with each other’s partners and fell out after writing nasty hatchet jobs. Such porous boundaries between life and sex and art were also a matter of program. Schiller and his contemporaries, especially the Romantics that came to prominence after him, were high on the concept of self-determination. But once you’ve liberated yourself, well, how do you live with other people? By what new social codes do you collaborate and talk and fuck and love? It was not just in their work, but also in their messy home lives, that they were trying to work all these things out.

It was a time of vigorous, lurching, experimental sociality. Gender dynamics were being renegotiated, but only partly. (Fichte’s belief in the absolute Ich was only really extended to men, while Novalis’s idealized love for a tween cousin was more absolute ick.) Schiller himself seemed conflicted. He sought out friendships with people like Caroline and published many women in his magazines, but he also resorted to bourgeois patriarchal norms around the home. I did start to wonder, back in the sunny garden of the Schillerhaus Rudolstadt, if the temporary ménage à trois was less a goofy interlude and more a tragic missed moment. Should he—should they—have bloody well gone for it and tried to live together permanently as a trio? Caroline von Humboldt, wife to the Prussian linguist William von Humboldt and a mutual friend, regretted that Schiller had chosen “calm” over “challenges,” while Humboldt himself later reflected that Schiller had never seemed so full of his own great qualities as he was during that year before his marriage, the year of the epistolary throuple.

***

On my last night in Rudolstadt, I sat by the river and leafed through Schiller’s poems. I stumbled across one I initially thought it was the one titled “Ode an die Freude” (“Ode to Joy”), a world-famous piece of kitsch he later disavowed, but it turned out to be “An die Freunde,” dedicated to his friends, and translated into English by Edgar Alfred Bowring. “Yes, my friends!—that happier times have been / than the present, none can contravene,” he wrote, in his ode to the boys, and not to joy:

But, with all the charms that splendor grants,
Rome is but the tomb of ages past;
Life but smiles upon the blooming plants
That the seasons round her cast.

I sent a photo of the river, unsolicited, to a friend back in Berlin. And I got to thinking about what a horror it is to be canonized—to be transformed into a name, a bust, a chore, not someone willful and alive and part of a wriggling, warm-blooded mass. I watched some tiny oval bats dive narrow loops around the bridge; I heard the jackdaws croaking darkly and the church bells ringing dinner. And then I felt my phone—it’s H.!—and there he was, offering up some gossip. “wanna hear something funny?” Oh yes, I do.