The Loss of Paradise and the History of Freedom: German Philhellenism in the 1790s

Abstract

Early in May 1789, as the estates-general was convening in Paris on the eve of the fateful confrontations that would usher in the French Revolution, the 29-year-old Friedrich Schiller was preparing to deliver his first lecture at the University of Jena. The post as an unsalaried lecturer in the philosophy faculty had been obtained through the efforts of Goethe, who had written to the university in late 1788, that Schiller would be a good acquisition, all the more since he would be obtained at little cost for them.¹ Schiller would deliver a course of lectures on universal history. This could only occur in the philosophy faculty, since history otherwise served in an auxiliary role either as ecclesiastical history in the faculty of theology or as the history of law in the juridical faculty.² Before Schiller began to speak, the lecture hall had filled up and the demand was so great, that, as he wrote to his friend Christian Körner, they had to march down the street to a bigger venue. The tradition of universal history had taken various forms in the eighteenth century.³ In Germany, the most significant variant, associated with August Ludwig von Schlözer in Göttingen, postulated what Ulrich Muhlack has called a “utilitarian approach”: history was the scene of material improvements, including the improvement in manners that Schlözer called the “ennoblement” (Veredelung) of man.⁴