Friedrich Schiller is not merely one of Germany's foremost poets. He is also one of the major German contributors to world literature. The undying words he gave to characters such as Marquis Posa in Don Carlos and Wilhelm Tell in the eponymous drama continue to underscore the need for human freedom. Schiller cultivated hope in the actualization of moral knowledge through aesthetic education and critical reflection, leading to his ideal of a more humane humanity. At the same time, he was fully cognizant of the problems that attend various forms of idealism. Yet for Schiller, ultimately, love remains the gravitational center of the universe and of human existence, and beyond life and death joy prevails. This collection of cutting-edge essays by some of the world's leading Schiller experts constitutes a milestone in scholarship. It includes in-depth discussions of the writer's major dramatic and poetic works, his essays on aesthetics, and his activities as historian, anthropologist, and physiologist, as well as of his relation to the ancients and of Schiller reception in 20th-century Germany. Contributors: Steven D. Martinson, Walter Hinderer, David Pugh, Otto Dann, Werner von Stransky-Stranka-Greifenfels, J. M. van der Laan, Rolf-Peter Janz, Lesley Sharpe, Norbert Oellers, Dieter Borchmeyer, Karl S. Guthke, Wulf Koepke. Steven D. Martinson is Professor of German at the University of Arizona.

These letters provide a lively view of Benjamin's life and thought from his days as a student to his melancholy experiences as an exile in Paris. As he defends his changing ideas to admiring and skeptical friends - poets, philosophers, and radicals - we witness the restless self-analysis of a creative mind far in advance of his own time.

Art is the right hand of Nature. The latter has only given us being, the former has made us men.-Friedrich Schiller Only through Beauty's morning-gate, dost thou penetrate the land of knowledge. - Friedrich Schiller Friedrich Schiller Grace is the beauty of form under the influence of freedom. Friedrich Schiller - - Friedrich Schiller

This historical and critical survey of German drama in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries provides an introduction to major authors and works from Lessing, through Goethe, Schiller and Weimar Classicism, to Kleist, Grillparzer and Hebbel. F.J. Lamport traces the rise and development in the German-speaking world of the last form of "classical" poetic drama to appear in European literature. This development is seen as reflecting the intellectual and political ferment both within Germany and throughout Europe.