The Man and His Life

Johann Christoph Friedrich Schiller was born to Johann Kaspar Schiller and Elisabetha Dorothea Kodweiss in Marbach am Neckar on November 10, 1759. His father served in the Württemberg military as a lieutenant and medic. Following the Seven Years’ War, he was promoted to the rank of captain and became a recruiting officer. The duchy of Württemberg included among its largest cities Stuttgart, Tübingen, and Ludwigsburg. The small city of Marbach lies just northeast of Ludwigsburg on the Neckar River. The Landeskirche was Evangelical-Lutheran with which Swabian pietism soon conflicted. Not only that, but the duke, Karl Eugen, was Catholic, a vestige of which can be seen in the beautifully appointed chapel in the Ludwigsburg castle itself. The antagonistic confessional stands of the duke and his protestant subjects formed one of the bases of the political tension that reverberated throughout the province.

The house in which Friedrich Schiller was born is a short walk uphill from the best Gasthaus (to this day) in Marbach, the Goldener Löwe. This is where Johann Kaspar Schiller met his wife-to-be, the innkeeper's daughter Elisabetha. When their son was only five years old, the family moved to Lorch, where they spent the next three years. In the Remstal, young Schiller had access to the Klosterkirche and cemetery atop the Marienberg, a small castle, an outlying estate with its colossal walls, and, within an hour's walk, the Hohen-Staufen.

Johann Kaspar Schiller was a restless individual who desired the even greater education that his son, Friedrich, was to receive and for which he was grateful. Of Schiller's mother, Elisabetha Dorothea Kodweiss, Bernhard Zeller records that she must have been a lively, imaginative, generous, and pious woman (9). While in Lorch, the family was influenced strongly by the local pastor, Philipp Ulrich Moser. Schiller would later leave a legacy, albeit a problematic one, to him in his first highly successful drama, Die Räuber (The Robbers, 1781). Under Moser's instruction, young Schiller began to master Latin and became familiar with Greek, and it was through Moser that Schiller would be influenced by Swabian pietism. In this environment Schiller considered the possibility of becoming a pastor. The seeming ridicule that his attempts at declamation received, however, may well have dissuaded him from pursuing this path.