Jill A.Kowalik

(1949-2003)

in memoriam

Numerous critics have pointed out that with the exception of Schiller's Wilhelm Tell, the protagonists of his classical dramas die at the end: Wallenstein, Maria Stuart, Joan of Arc, and Don Manuel and Don Cesar, the two enemy brothers in Die Braut von Messina. If we associate Schiller with Romanticism, as Anglo-American criticism has done, this emphasis can be interpreted as part of the Romantic longing for death that we find in the works of his contemporaries from Novalis to Hölderlin. But if we classify Schiller as a representative of German Classicism, it is difficult to find an explanation for this preoccupation, because the affirmative aesthetics of German Classicism does not tolerate death and destruction. There is only one reference to the representation of death in Kant's Kritik der Urteilskraft of 1790. This reference is typical for the aesthetics of classicism, as it pleads for the indirect representation of the unpleasant. Kant claimed that sculpture excluded the representation of unpleasant or odious subjects by substituting allegory for the reality of nature, as for example, a beautiful genius figure for the representation of death: