Schiller, Time and Again

by Stephanie Barbé Hammer
Schiller, Time and Again
Stephanie Barbé Hammer
The German Quarterly
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University of California, Riverside

Schiller,Time and Again

How is it that the same persons who would proudly be thought wiser thantheir predecessors appear at the same time only as the ghosts of departed wisdom?

(Thomas Paine, Rights of an)'

Schiller's sentimental poet is, as many critics have noted, a study in contradiction: at once a satirist, an elegist, and a creator of idylls; at once enraged and disappointed by the present and unable to regain the past; at once hopeful for, and fed of, a future which could only be guaranteed by a return to an original, idealized childhood. Correspondingly, the utopian future con- ceived at the beginning of the seminal ~ber naive und sentimentalische Dichtung

(1795) was that of a perfect historical circle:

Wir waren Natur wie sie [die Kinder], und unsere Kultur soll uns auf dem Wege der Vernunfi und der Freiheit zur Natur zu- riickfiihren. Sie sind also zugleich Darstel- lung unserer verlorenen Kindheit. . . . Zugleich sind sie Darstellungen unserer hijchsten Vollendung im Ideale. (Dichtung 414)

Certainly, we can detect in Schilleis famous, if cryptic, comments the outlines of a para- doxical temporal sensibility which was to characterize the aesthetic projects of much 20th-century Western writing. Michel Fou- cault reminds us that the "attitude ofmoder- nitf is characterized by precisely such an awareness of a 13%

between the present and the past, as Marcel Proust's grand title A la recherche du temps perdu (1913-1927) sig- nifies. Much of being modern, Foucault and others have suggested, is tied to a sense of living in animmediate "today" whichis quali- tatively different from the past, and there- fore of unstable ontological properties (Fou- cault42; Bersani 47). Schiller combined this sense of todayness (Berghahn 11)-its danger and its possibility-with alongingfor the creative powers of the juvenile. The loss of, and nostalgia for, a childish perceptual acu- ity and poetic ability which must somehow be rediscovered (itselfa creative misreading of Rousseau) resonate throughout European Romanticism, as M. H. Abrarns has power- fully argued (Abrarns 199), but it is irnportant to recognize that it invests modern belles lettres and culture as well.

Two early 20th-century examples come to mind as usell exponents of this preoc- cupation. The first is, once again, Proust. Like Schiller, Proust recognizes the crucial, and crucially "true," nature of childhood perception, and the story of Marcel and of everyone else in the pageant of Le temps perdu must fmt embed itself, literally and figuratively, in the traumatic "baker du soif episode, before it can go anywhere else. And the place the narrative "goes to" is appropriately the beginning; seven books later, Marcel is at last ready to write the book that we have just read. In this manner, the man rediscovers the child in himself, recovers and repairs the past (Bersani 21) and gives birth to a narrative about him- self-thereby replacing, symbolically at least, the mother who deferred his gratifi- cation so long ago: a male writer made fem- inine through art. Likewise, in another fin de sikcle fiction, the British children's clas- sic Peter Pan (1911), J. M. Barrie also affirms the psychic power and psychological

The German Qrtarterly 67.2 (Spring 1994) 153

veracity of the male child, whom he places as the guardian of a utopian realm where children never grow up; at the same time, the structure of the narrative embarks on a process of homoerotic remembering which takes the absence of the mother as its point of departure, and to which it ob- sessively ret~rns.~

But, now using Proust and Barrie to look back at Schiller, we can see that, even in this psychoanalytic con- text, the strategies of ~ber naive und sentimentalkche Dichtung are not so very different from those of Le temps perdu and Peter Pan, for Schiller also invokes the mother as the female person-site to be transcended and then recuperated and in- corporated by (his) masculine art:

Mit schmerzlichem Verlangen sehnen wir uns dahin zuriick, sobald wir angehngen, die Drangsale der Kultur zuerfahren, und hkn im fernen Auslande der Kunst der Mutterriihrende Stimrne. (Dichtung427)

We can hear echoes of this fascination with circular time, with return, with the child, and, by implication, with a revised, feminized notion of masculinity in more con- temporary artistic constructions as well. Schillefs precept "wir sind, was sie waren, sie sind, was wir wieder werden sollen" per- meates the writing of male authors James Joyce and Thomas Wolfe, Giinter Grass, Peter Handke, and Roland Barthes; it even has iduenced filmmakers such as Wm Wenders, who, in Der Himmel iiber Berlin, has his angelic hero recite a prose poem which begins with the SchiUerian "Als das KindKindwar.. ."

There is,on one level, no surprise in the fact of Schiller's resonance on these issues within modernity. Time has been the 20th- century West's most important intellectual obsession, reverberating outward through Western culture from the popularization of Einstein's theories of space-time and rela- tivity, although the conversation about it arguably began earlier, with Dilthey's re- actions to Hegel. However, as students of

modern literature and culture already know, there is, within contemporary aes- thetic explorations of time, an enormous contradiction in its manner of representation. There is, on the one hand, the sense that time isrunning out, both for the individual (Proust's narrative is chock-111 of reminders of mortality) and for the spe- cies as a whole (although, interestingly, this concern actually surfaced long before H. G. Wells in Wieland's satiric Geschichte der Abderiten [I7741 and in Mary Shelley's futurist novel The Last Man [1826]).3 Such a view of time explains the attractiveness of the Schillerian circle of return as a way to defeat the foreseeable end of human exis- tence. But, on the other hand, time as experienced and recorded by individuals- that is to say, time as history-tends to repeat itself. Thus, if the return to origin often appears asthe utopian dream ofmod- ern Western literaturdculture, it is the specter of temporal repetition which forms its nightmare opposite. We should remem- ber that, at the beginning of this century, Sigmund Freud was also drawn to the phe- nomenon of repetition, which he saw as a profoundly neurotic symptom connected evocatively and problematically both with mourning and with melancholy.

This paradox-that time runs out and that personal history repeats-and the psy- chological crisis which it implies are pow- eddy expressed later in this century by Albert Camus inLe Myth desisyphe where a heroiclawbreaker pushes the same stone up a hill for eternity. The chilling idea ex- pressed in that essay, that we are both con- demned to, and redeemed by, a temporal repetition that we cannot evenimagine our way out of has become particularly reso- nant in the post-World War I1era; it forms the dynamics of Marguerite Duras's Hiroshima, mon amour, Peter Handke's Die Wderholung, and the recent American film Groundhog Day. More strangely still, both the horror of repetition and the nos- talgia for return are inextricably linked to the darker imaginings of contemporary Anglo-American science fiction. Schiller's Sehnsucht for the perceptive capacity of the child is frequently enunciated in hturist narratives, and within the most dystopic possible scenarios--ones where a grisly future world repeats through a grim parody the very worst that the Western world had to offer politically and morally. In such un- likely places as the films Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, Bladerunner, and the ubiq- uitous Zkminators 1and 2 (themselves re- petitive indicators of the fascination with repetition), the return to nature and to childhood isheralded even asthe worlds in question arelocked on a course ofrepetitive self-destruction.

This whirlwind tour through highly di- verse 20th-century literary and cinematic productions in connection to Schiller will undoubtedly strike many readers as bi- zarre, to say the least. What in the world, one might ask, have these creations to do with the Stiirmer und Dranger turned clas- sicist or, for that matter, with German lit- erary history? What can a low-culture American commodity such as science fic- tion have in common with the high culture of Germany's second-greatest writer? My essay turns precisely on the fmt question (although an answer to the second and third will necessarily be implied), and, ac- cordingly, my argument will turn to the no- tions of returning, repetition, circularity, and history in Schiller's dramas Die Rauber, Die Verschioorung des Fkco zu Genua, and Wallenstein. At the end of my analysis, Iwillalsoreturn to the importance of contemporary science fiction by way of coda-specifically, to Russell Hoban's novel Riddley Walker and to the 7krminator films.

Schiller, I believe, is crucial to our un- derstanding, not only of German but, in- deed, of Western modernity as a whole, as well as to our understanding of ourselves within that temporal modality. This is not to say that Schiller's writing did not emerge from, and clearly belong to, his moment-the apex and demise of European Enlight- enment-but I would like to stress at the outset (and Iwill return to this idea at the end) that his work speaks volumes to our moment as well: he is the dark side of our own modernity and ofour culture; he writes repeatedly about that which we would most like to deny, and what we must, as aculture, overcome.His oeuvre isso crucial to usprecisely because it inaugurates and encapsu- lates the struggle of modern literature and culture to rethink time and history, and through this rethinking to fabricate a political ethos which looks beyond history's traditional actor and recorder-man.4 Schiller was one of the first European writers to see the connection between history and maleness, between masculinity and the politics ofwar, or, more precisely, politics as war.5 His dramas consequently display masculinity as a diseased mythos which seeps to the cultural surface as a series of linked symptoms:6 as a desire for personal freedom so strong that it becomes mania, as intermale relationships so passionate that they interrupt and violate the stan- dard circuit of male homosocial bonding (Sedgwick25),and as a blood-lust so over- whelming that it must mow down every-

thing in its path. Violence in Schiller is frequently masked, with self-conscious imperfection, by poetry, by a republican rheto- ric of the beautiful which uses words to authorize the most heinous possible acts. It is rhetoric which allows men to lie to them- selves about what they do, and it isthis gap

between masculine Schein and Sein-the

lacuna separating the appearance from the

truth of the world of men-that Schiller

lays bare over and over again.

Indeed, from Die Rauber to Wallenstein and beyond, Schiller's drama is a pageant ofviolence, of death, of disastrous and futile political upheavals, and of murky male de- sires. AU this is set in a turbulent world where too much happens too soon-leib- niz's monadic plenitude gone mad in the worst of all possible worlds, rife with mis- understanding and with fatally belated comprehension. Thisworld of rapidly shift- ing events is arguably the classical tragic world--of peripeteia and surprise, of sacri- ficeand suffering (Porcell32). But Schiller's ironic treatment of characters who are no better than they must be (and often agreat deal worse)7 and the equally ironic closure of the plays make the depicted worlds ones which we cannot fail to recognize. These dramaticsystems display for us the contra- dictory temporal worlds of modernity, worlds where time is continually both run- ning out and running down in a plummet- ing spiral.$ In Schiller's plays, the myth of the return usually becomes a vicious circle, with the result that his drama critiques in powerful ways the idealistic political-his- toricalvisions articulated in hisphilosophical prose (Karthaus 222f.).9

Linked to the accelerated passage of time-to time as tragedy-is the specter of repetition, and repetition haunts almost every potential political revolution in Schiller's plays, transforming it from turn- about to turnaround-an apparently for- ward movement around the perimeter which brings the characters back to the point where the circle began. It is no coin- cidence that the word "revolution" was be- ing discussed and revised in the late 18th century, as Dieter Borchmeyer has noted in the beginning of his essay on Wilhelm 7bll ("Altes Recht" 72f.); the term meant a po- litical changeover which would return to principles of basic rights, and gradually came to mean a political upheaval that broke with the past. However, the original meaning seems to have clung to the second, asThomas Paine sensed when he carefully (and to modern readers, ironically) ob- served that, in the case of the French Revo- lution, "what we now behold may not irnproperly be called a 'counterrevolution"' (Common Sense and Other Writings 114). Schiller's drama played with the paradox at workin the word"revolution,"suggesting that the two senses were not separable; up- heaval and circulation must go hand in hand in a masculine political history that could not set itself right.

The notion of political history as vicious circle had already been voiced in 1754 by Rousseau in aterrifying passage in hisDiscours sur l'origine de l'incigalitd parmi les hommes. Thiswas, in and of itself', nothing new. Discussions of cyclical history were commonplace throughout the 18th century (Berlin 64); the idea belonged to enlight- enment Europe's classical heritage as disseminated by the Renaissance, and emerged long before Rousseau in Giambatr tista Vico's Scienza Nuova (1725; 1730).11 But Rousseau politicized it-using the problem of historical circularity to ground a republican argument which struggled to see "man" differently-not asHobbes's bru- tal, aggressive animal (Lovejoy 26), but as the far less masculine "homme naturel." Against this mild (Eovejoy 19), androgy- nous, resolutely non-patriarchal, literally pre-historical human origin, Rousseau jux- taposed a horrific future which looks like science fiction indeed. He predicted that, if the progress ofpolitical despotism were not halted, human society would collapse, and man would regress to a state of anarchy much more barbarous than the original state from which he emerged:

DBs cet instant aussi il cesserait d'Btre question de moeurs et de vertu; car partout oh regne le despotisme . . . il ne sou£& au- cun autre maitre; siGt qu'il parle, il n'y a ni probit6 ni devoir & consulter. . . C'est ici le dernier terme de l'inBgalit6, et le point extrBme qui ferme le cercle et touche au point d'oh nous sommes partis.. ..C'est ici que tout se ramitne & la seule loi du plus fort et par consBquent ti un nouvel Btat de nature diffQrent de celui par lequel nous avons comrnenc6, en ce que 1'un Btait l'Qtat de nature clans sa pureG, et que ce dernier est le fruit d'un excBs de corruption . . . (Rousseau 232)

In this manner, Rousseau sketches Euro- pean political history on its current trajec- tory asa vicious circle, one with an orbit that seems to decay mher with each completion of the circuit.12 It is this particular scenario that Schiller plays out obsessively; these artistic scenarios explore, critique, and seek to undo the dications of the closed circle of time and of manly actions forlwithin that hellish framework

Dkauber (1782)is aclear case in point. In Schiller's first play, the nostalgia for the return to childhood and to an idealized cul- tural state near, but not identical to, nature isstrong and consistent, and so seductively rendered that the original audience appar- ently collapsed into an ecstatic fit at the end of the perfomance.13 The eventual de- cision of the recalcitrant Robber Moor to return to his homeland marks the psycho- logical turning point of that character and paradoxically testifies-through the re- membrance of childhood-to his growing maturity and to the emergence of moral sensibility. By Act 3, Karl Moor already be- gins to look back to his childish past as the forgotten ethical ground for the present, and later, on the border ofhis father's lands, Karl dreams of a return to childhood which also signifies his own transformation into the father:

Die goldne Maienjahre der Knabenzeit le- ben wieder auf in der Seele des Elenden- da warst du so gliicklich, warst so ganz, so wolkenlos heiter. . . . Hier solltest du wan- deln dereinst, ein groner, stattlicher, ge- priesener Mann-hier dein Knabenleben in Amalias bliihenden Kindern zum nvei- tenmal leben-hier! (IVIl)

But Karl, as is typical of him, fails truly to understand the significance of the elegiac words heutters; the return to childhood, and toa rediscovery ofthose original sensibilities, isat odds with the vision of masculine great- ness which he has created for himself-a contradiction which his cohort Grimm has recognized in a preceding scene:

MOOREs warehie Zeitwoichnicht scldafen

konnk, weim ich mein Nachtgebet ver-

gessen hat&

GRIMM:Bist du wahnsilmig? Willst du dich

von deinen Bubenjahren hofnieistein


MOOR(legt sein Haupt auf GrimrnsBrust)

Bruder! Bruder!

GRIMM:Wie? sei do& kein Kind-ich bitte


MOORWii? ich9s-wi2 ich's wieder!

GRIMM:Pfii! Pfii! (IIV2)

Devoted to the virile business of organized violence, Grimm is repulsed by Karl's dan- gerou~l~unrnanly

thoughts, andhis reaction suggests covertly this man acts so boyish that he becomes asweak as a girl or, worse, an effeminate boy. Thus,Karl's desire to return to an idealized boyhood causes him, ironically, to be regarded as generically am- biguous by the other robbers, and this am- biguity eventually catches up with him, ef- fecting his final, fatal disenfranchisement fiom the very men for whose love he has sacrificed everything (Hammer, The Sublime Crime92f.).

While the one virile brother dreams of the utopian return which he can never achieve, the other, that villainous, effemi- nate philosophe Franz Moor-an enlightr enment materialist gone mean-has another view entirely of temporal circling. He refers disgustedly to human existence as "der morastige Zirkel der menschlichen Bestimmung" (lV12). Rather than rebelling against the filthy cycle of human destiny, as does his brother, Franz Moor adds his own circular plan-a magical circle of nega- tive emotions ("magischer Kreis von Fliichen"; 112)-in an attempt to destroy his father psychologically, and to assume his place. But in the end, the image of another father intervenes-God the father-forc- ing Franz back to the point of origin which motivated his actions in the fmt place: his own self-hatred. This imagined confronta- tion with theultimate patriarch causes him to commit suicide, forcing him to perform upon himself the very psychic murder he had planned for his dithering parent (Por- cell 27).

Circularity, fathers killing sons with kindness or neglect, and a dual obsession with power and with masculine love drive the plot of DieRauber toward a repetitive orgy of death and sacrifice made on the altar of male bonding: Franz plots the downfall of Karl Moor, and so does Spiegelberg- both in a quest to rule as supreme leader- while Hermann andDanielstruggle toforestall Franz; the Count von Moor ensures the death of both his sons and dies himself of shock; Schweizer dies for Karl while Karl sacrifices an entire town to avenge his dog and, later, to rescue the problematic Roller. Karl impales Amalia for the robbers' sake, and then dies for yet another father: the "armer Schelm . . . der im Tagelohn arbeitet und eilflebendige Kinder hat" W2).Order is restored at the end of Schiller's first play,

but it is the silent, "scandalous" order of death which reigns (Porcell24); and in the background, the other robbers still wage war against a society which seems no more just than they. Rousseau's deadly circle of political violence remains unbroken. Men kill each other, but nothing changes, and

the world degrades another degree.14

Schiller's second play, Die Verschwo- rung des Fiesco zu Genua (1785)' tightens the connection between masculinity, his- tory,and repetition. Here, the past-in the form of the lost Roman Republic15-haunts the present to no avail; the conspirators' attempt to return Genoa to its political youthfulness-in this case, to the idealized pre-empire Rome-gives birth to a brief revolution which, in the literal sense of the word, returns the state of Genoa to exactly where it was at the beginning, minus the hero, his wife, and the villainous inheritor of the duchy.16 SchiUer foregrounds the fal- lacy of such nostalgia throughout the piece, by displaying the internalized ideological boundaries which limit the characters in advance as they try to imagine a different way of doing things, and a different world. Even before he actually makes his fatal de- cision to assume the dukedom, Fiesco re- veals that his view ofpoliticalhistory isthat of a universal Aesopian fable -the truth of which never changes:

FIE~CO: Reich der Tiere

Genueser-Das kam einst in biirgerliche Gamng, Parteien schlugen mit Parteien, und ein Fleischerhund bemachtigte sich des Throns. . . . Itzt ward ein Reichstag ge halten, die plje Frage zu entscheiden, welche Regierung die gliicklichste sei? . . . Genueser,fiirwelche hattet ihrentschieden?

EWER BURGER Fiirs Volk. Alle fiirsVolk.

FIESCO:Das Volk gewann's. . . . Dieses
Staatssystem ward also venvorfen. Ge-
nueser, worn wiiret ihritzt geneigt gewe-


Zum Ausschd! Frei- lich, zum AusschulJ!

F'XESCO: Diese Meinung gefiel! . . . Die Tiere emporten sich. LaOt uns einen Monarchenwiihlen, riefen sieeinstimmig. . .


In this political speech designed to win the citizens to his side, Fiesco unwittingly pre- dicts the outcome of his own efforts-the return of the duke. Schiller delivers an ironic send-up both of political rhetoric-which always means quite differently than it sounds--and of the notion that political progress can be achieved by a cyclical return to origin (Craig 397), for, as the powefi imagery reminds modern readers, human origins are not spiritual but animal.

In an even more tellingscene, Fiesco and his surrogate father (and eventual mur- derer) Verrina meet an accomplished, overtly middle-class painter, who presents them with yet another incident of the nos- talgia to return-a neoclassical painting which idealistically renders Appius Claudius killing his daughter Virginia. Both Verrina and Fiesco react strongly to the picture in what is one of the rare exam- ples of self-reflexivity in Schiller's dramatic art.The former falls into a trance in which he literally sees the past as the present and prepares to act accordingly. The latter is enthralled with the depiction of the bosom of the expiring Virginia-an appropriately sexualized foreshadowing of the violence which he will later perf'onn upon his own wife. But while Verrina surrenders to the picture-awakening from the spell to pose the pregnant questions: "Wo sind sie hingekommen? Weg wie Blasen?" (11117)- Fiesco resists the possible meanings of the painting (aswell as the figuratively castra- tive power which the picture exerts over the now passive, unmanned Verrina) and turns upon the artist:

Du prahlst mit Poetenhitze, der Phantasie marklosem Marionettenspiel, ohne Hen, ohne tatenerwikmende Kraft,stiirzestTyrannen auf Leinwand-bist selbst ein elender Sklave? Machst Republiken mit einem Pinsel frei-kannst deine eigene Ketten nicht brechen? . . . Geh!-Deine Arbeit ist Gaukelwerk . . . (IU17)

This sudden, nasty dismissal of art on the Platonic grounds that it is a slavish imita- tion of reality also inaugurates a different understanding of what is happening here. Fiesco9s sudden anger r,t the modest (and aptly named) Romano derives fiom the fact that he senses, and must project upon the other man, the awareness that he himself is the very artist whom he decries-the mountebankwho cannot breakhis ownchains, the creative political thinker enslaved by the limitations of his own thoughts, and whose creations unfold lifeless on the canvas of his own imagination. Why else would he insist so unnecessarily on the difference between the two of them: on his own virile activity, as opposed to the other's weakand childishpas- sivity?

This scene bespeaks Fiesco's anxiety about virility; he protests too much, and this suggestion isborne out in the later cru- cial scene where Fiesco resolves to assume ducal powers. The decision derives from a stark vision of masculinity and power which reminds us, again reading back- wards, of Nietzsche:

Dd ich der grol3te Mann bin im gailzen Genua? .. . Gehorchen!-Herrschen!-ungeheure schwindligte KlufGLegt alles hinein, was der Mensch Kostbares hat- ewe gewonnene Schlachten, Eroberer- Kiinstler, eure unsterblichen Werlre- eure Wolliiste, Epikure4ure Meere uld Inseln, ihr Weltumschiffer. Gehorchen

und Herrschen!-Sein und Nichtsein!


In this manner, Schiller recasts Hamlet's fa- mous existential question (Miicke 14) intoa harrowing conflation of tyranny, maleness, greatness, and goodness which in turnboth reduces and incorporates allother drives and accomplishments within itsmonstrous clus- ter. Again, Schiller's argument cuts both ways. Fiesco is spectacularly wrong to equate artists, conquerors, and discoverers, and to mingle the lust and hedonism with the other motivations driving exemplary men. Or is he? There is a terrible truth in Fiesco's reading of his culturein those mas- culinist terms; for all the high-minded emo- tional histrionics between the conspirators, such scenes as the penultimate one suggest that the dichotomybetweenugehorchenwand "hemchenwisindeed the determining one in male existence. The passionate, loving em- brace between Verrina and Fiesco culminates in murder. The fact that Fiesco's as- sassination comes on the heels of this physical gesture makes it clear that the com- petition for mastery must perforce play itself out to the death between men, even and es- pecially men who love each other; it is the only "real" expression of passion that "real" men can allow themselves (Sedgwick 113).

As inDieRauber, men's emotions, espe- cially sexual ones, are substituted by the violent will to power. There is no room for both emotion and power-mastery within the male psyche, as Leonore warns herhus- band in her resonant speech of Act 4:


Doch, mein Fiesco. In dieser stiir-

mischen Zone des Throns verdorret das

zarte Pflkchen der Liebe. . . .Wolltest

du jetzt an meinem Busen dich wiegen,

pochte ein stijrriger Vasalle an dein

Reich-Wollt' ich jetzt in deine Arme

mich werfen, horte deine Despotenangst

einen Morder aus den Tapeten hervor-

rauschen, und jagte dich fliichtig von

Zimmer zu Zimmer. . . .

FIESCO:. . . Leonore, hor' auf. Das ist eine

As Leonore's speech indicates, Fiesco's very insistence on the primacy of "hemhen" makes me- heterosexual relations between them impossible. Paradoxically, such a view of manliness renders the man in question uninterested in-and, by impli- cation, incapable of-the very act which pro- claims his manhood; virility as power pro- duces, she suggests, impotence. Fiesco senses the truth of this description even as he escapes into denial, for he cannot move beyond the vicious circle of his own preju- dices. In fact, he seems to be relieved by Leonore's accidental murder; the death of this feminine appendage to himself allows him to lay an even stronger claim to manly greatness (see Vl3). But Leonore's critique of masculinity remains unanswered, and the key to the play's meaning lies perhaps in her early observation:

Abscheuliches Geschlecht! Bis itzt glaubte ich, du betriigest nur Weiber; das hab' ich nie gedt, du auch an dir selbst zum Ve16ter wkst. (IIB)

This brief remark identifies the two linked themes of the play: men who betray each other, and a definition of manliness which must always betray itself.

And what of the artist? In Fiesco, art is overtly feminine; in the scene with Romano, the hero notes archly that the two men love the same woman, while Fiesco's critique of the artist's passivity clearly suggests that the artist is not quite a "man" (Schwenger, Phallic Critiques 18).The other potential "artists" of the piece shore this gender prob- lem up; the Moor Hassan consistently be- haves like an actor, while Leonore directly invokes the gestures of painting when she delivers her critique of Fiesco's philosophy of power. Fiesco's insistence on mastery as the ground for his existence explains retro- actively the curious language of his earlier dismissal of art,for there is no room for the artist in a world made up of masculine mas-

tersand feminine slaves. The artist and his picture serve as subversive, disturbing re- minders of the slipperiness of the dichoto- mous terms on which gender and class are based; the agency and prosperity of the bourgeois artist clearly suggest that the masterlslave rubric is not universal, while the subject matter of his painting suggests that tyranny ismorally wrong and sexually problematic. This is perhaps why Romano must be feminized, infantilized, and silenced. But, at the same time, Schiller sug- gests that the artist is implicated in the culture for which he paints. Romano is indeed an artistic historian, as was Schiller, and as such he is dangerous in yet another way. The artistic historian glorifies the past-which is, in this case, a paean to the familiar violence of the fathers upon their powerless, obedient, feminized progeny. Through such a paean, the artist ishimself a slave to the history which he seems to criticize; worse yet, his art has the ability to enslave others to its power, seducing them to repeat the past, ashappens to Ver- rina. From this perspective, Fiesco was not so wrong, after all,to discount the picture. To his credit, Schiller poses the problem of art and that of his own position as a male artist in the culture which he criticizes, and leaves the questions troublingly unan


A brief reading of these early Sturm und Drang plays and their politicized evo- cations of history, masculinity, and repeti- tion enables us to perceive certain key pat- terns emerging which themselves repeat in Schiller's dramatic depictions. The same parade ofcharacters appears over and over again, and these tend themselves to repeat within the same play. The stock characters come in pairs, repetitive mirror images of each other: the aging father, who is either the fading center of power or is powerless (Moor, Daniel; Doria), and his double, the strict upholder of law and order, the blood- less enforcer of patriarchal authority (the pastor and priest; Verrina); the passionate rebellious son (Karl and Franz Moor; Fiesco) and hisdouble-brother, friend, foe, competitor, mentor, surrogate son (Her- mann, Spiegelberg, Kosinsky; Bourgo- gnino, Romano); a virtuous female love- object (Amalia; Laura and Bertha) and her double, a clever, subversive, and sexual feminine presence (Franz Moor; Julia).The same tangled patriarchal-filial relation- ships prevail, and these usually reverse the oedipal scenario.17 As in that Urtext of Ger- manic culture, the Hildebrandslied, Schiller's fathers kill their sons, reversing the biological order in the name of a higher duty-the paradoxical duty of the battle- field, the ethic of war. After the Count von Moor and Verrina, come the President von Walther, King Philip, and Octavio Pic- colomini who all sacrifice their boy children to the deity of the state and to their own personal power-Abrahams whose hands no divine mandate can stay.

But it is important to note that Schiller became more, not less, critical of such pa- ternalpractices, and if the style ofhis rheto- ric moves from the wild incoherence of Sturm und Drang to the measured classi- cism offormalverse metrics, this high style serves a highly subversive purpose: to ex- pose and indict the vicious circle of men's history. Correspondingly, this critique builds in complexity and scope from the choppy histrionics of Die Rauber toward historical venues such as those of Fiesco and Don Carlos-vents taken from the European Renaissance and late Rliddle Ages, moments of European transforma- tions into nation-states. During his theat- rical career, Schiller seems to have quite self-consciously escorted his audience through every major European country in hisplays-from Germany to Italy, and then to Spain, England, France, and Switzer- land-in order to play out those same ob- sessions with power and with homosocial passion which unfolded so disastrously in Die Rauber. His oeuvre makes an increas- ingly universal appeal to truth with a kind of desperation which makes one shudder.

It is significant that Schiller's Wallen-

stein trilogy (1798-1799)-the dramatic creation most overtly concerned with man- hood, homosocial bonds, the military, with the past and the future of Germany-is riddled with images ofthe circle as well aswith references to the following: a past that haunts and threatens the present, the im- age of the child, a longing for innocence which is completely out of reach, and amasculinity embattled and ambiguous from the start. Much has been written about Wallen- stein, but too little has been said about how very strange a dramatic work it is.18It con- sists of one historical event stretched to the point ofgrotesqueness, where everything is accordingly skewed out of shape. The frst play in the series is an extended first act in which nothing happens (Muller-Seidel, "Episches im Theater der deutschen Klas- sik" 350f.), and Schiller distends his characteristic withholding of the protagonist (Seidlin in Heuer 238f.) to such a degree that he never even appears on stage. In the Lager, the characters are flattened to the point of caricature, functioning as types rather than as personalities in an odd, ironic pageant which reminds modern readers of two bizarre exponents of the 20th-century pastoral: the epic theatrical- ity of Die Dreigroschenoperlg and the curi- ously disembodied poetry of Peter Hand- ke's Uber die Dorfer. Wallenstein is, taken asawhole, aplay whichcontinually repeats itself, reiterating itself, revolving around itself three times until it finally reaches the innermost circle of the plot, which concerns not the life, but the death of the hero. It is, arguably, an obsessive work about Schiller's grand obsessions: violence be- tween men, history, and heroism.

It is worth noting in this regard that Schiller himselfseems to have been baffled, and even somewhat frightened, by his own desire to work with the material.20 He wrote to Korner in 1797: "Der Stoff. . . ist in der Tat abschreckend, und mit einer sauren Arbeit mu0 ich den Leichtsinn biinen, der mich bei der Wahl geleitet" (Sch,illers Dranzen 2: 547f.). Yet the project haunted him even as it eluded his fmn grasp, and the spectrality of the piece is evident from the beginning, in the curious prologue to WallensteinsLager. Delivered in 1798in conjunction with the reopening of the Weimar theater, this dramatic intro- duction strikes a seemingly celebratory tone, at once touting the modernity of the new stage and its "now perfected" talents, and relying on the old as a means to prove the mettle of its aesthetic newness. Thus, it is the past made present ("erfrischt und verjiingt") that Schiller wishes to display to his audience; the proposed drama must lead the elite circle of the audience ("vor einem auserlesnen Kreis"; 531)to, explic- itly, imagine themselves out of another cir- cle:

Die neue &a, die der Kunst Thaliens

Auf dieser Buhne heut' beginnt, macht


Den Dichter kuhn, die alte Bahn verlas-


Euch aus des Biirgerlebens engem Kreis

Aufeinen hohern Schauplatz zu


Nicht unwert des erhabenen Moments

Der Zeit, in dem wir strebend uns


Denn nur der -fie Gegenstand vermag

Den tiefen Grund der Menschheit


Im engen his verengert sich der Sinn,

Es wachst der Mensch mit seinen grijfiern

Zwecken. (532f.)

Amidst a baBling assemblage of geographi- cal, geological, and biological movements- diverging from old roads, ascending to new heights, destabilizing the depths of man- kind, the individual growing like a plant- images ofthe circle dominate. The circle here is evil: it is the vicious circle of bourgeois concerns which marks a life that goes no- where; it isthe narrow circle which constricts the mind andretards its growth toward clear thinking. And yet, it isprecisely by invoking yet another circle that Schiller will enable hisaudience to transcend their own. Apath beyond the somber close of the 18th century ("an des Jahrhunderts ernstem Ende"; 532) presents itself only after the audience has turned back to the past-a repetitive move which they have made before:

Noch einmal l&t des Dichters Phantasie

Die diistre Zeit an euch voriiberfin,

Und blicket hher in die Gegenwart

Und in der Zukunft hoffnungsreiche

Ferne. (533)

The pat, familarcomfort that a lookinto the past will give those of the present iscanceled out by what follows, for we are not meant merely to survey the past but, indeed, imagi- natively to relive it,and to feel it on the most visceral possible level. Through the time machine of theaterF1 Schiller transports his audience literally into the middle of the Thirty Years' War, much as the well-known American television documentary You Are There aimed, muchlater, to make its viewers believe that they were participants in the historical venues whose images they per- ceived. SchiLler paints a vivid scene of utter desolation-one whose violent overtones must have reminded hisfmtaudience of the similar scenes being played out at that mo- ment in neighboring France. And equally importantisthe fact that Wallenstein, whose name cannot even be mentioned here, will appear to us under a contradictory aegis- not as he has in historical accounts, but, on the one hand, as a living personage for whom we must perforce feel sympathy and, on the other hand, as a ghost, only perceptible asa silhouette:

Doch euren Augen sol1 ihnjetzt die Kunst,

Auch eurem Herzen menschlich niiher

bringen. . . .

Nicht er ist's, der auf dieser Biihne heut'

Erscheinen wird. Doch in den kiihnen

Scharen . . .

Beseelt, wird euch sein Schattenbild be

gegnen . . . (533f.)

There is,then, in Schiller's festive prologue, the not so hidden suggestion that the past is not truly past, that the future isno improve- ment, and that the apparent villain of the

Thirty Years' Waris exemplary in amanner which itwillbe crucial for us to compreRend (Seidlin in Heuer 238).But the act of com- prehension isno simple matter, for the object of knowledge seems tobeastrangely shifting one. Schiller's insistent deferral of the person for whom we areto feel (and whom, through feeling, we are to understand) seems com- pletely removed from us: an empty spirit, a form we willonly meet byhappenstance. The specter of Wallenstein is, Schiller promises, important; yet, at the same time, he is,as a ghost, ungraspable-a patriarchal revenant whose relevance to the present can only be glimpsed, rather than directly apprehended. The "auserlesener Kreis" of the audience of Wallenstein is, in this manner, transformed into a circle of Hamlets; mod heirs to a rotten realm, they have no other recourse than to question a ghost in order to direct their (and the country's) future.22 And tied to the apparition of Wallenstein is a subtle but important problematization of history (Richards 242).If the past is a specter which haunts and disturbs the present, how do we go about confronting and banishing it? Can we ever lay the past to rest altogether? Should we want to? What can the figure and phght of Wallenstein have to say in answer to these questions?

TheLager reinforces rather than solves the mystery-juxtaposing the by now fa- miliar masculine insistence on the primacy of "herrschen" in Schiller with the view of the anny as a protean monster, an indis- criminate morass dedicated both to de- struction and self-perpetuation, and the unnatural son of their commander.23 Like the Bohemian robbers and the Genovese conspirators, Wallenstein's soldiers are dedicated to a practice of virile violence which they elevate to an absolute value in and of itself, a value that will ensure their collective claim to greatness, and wiU tran- scend their present and astound those in the future--causing others, undoubtedly, to imitate their glory. With a joyful exuber- ance reminiscent of Spiegelberg's account of the mass-rape in the convent, a jaeger predicts the legendary quality ofthe my's activities:

.. . wo Ihr nach uns fragt, WE heilJen des Friedlhders wilde Jagd, Und machen dem Namen keine

Schande Ziehen fi-ech durch Feindes und Freundes Eande, Querfeldein durch die Saat, durch das

gelbe Korn- Sie kennen das Hokische Jagerhorn!- Ineinem Augenblick fern und nah, Schnell wie die Siindflut, so sind wir da-Wie die Feuerflamme bei dunkler Nacht In die Hauser met, wenn niemand

wacht-Da hilft keine Gegenwehr, keine Flucht, Keine Ordnung gzlt mehr und keine

Es strsubt sich--der Krieg hat kein
Das Magdlein in unsern sennigten

Armen-Fragt nach, ich sag's nicht, urn zuprahlen; In Bayreuth, im Voigtland, in Westfalen, Wo wir nur durchgekommen sind- Erzjihlen Kinder und Kindeskind Nach hundert und aber hundert Jahren Von dem Holk noch und seinen Scharen.


Speaking for all in one collective male voice, the second jaeger &is the male power of the army, which, like a force of nature, sweeps aside all aspects of civilization (houses and farms) and lays low everything inits path-culminatingin anecstaticvision of rape, a violent but procreative act which willbiologically ensure that there areindeed progeny to marvel at the activities of their fathers. The entire world has become a bat- tleground for men, and male power is wielded with its crudest, most visible emblem:

In diesem Rock FiiW ich, sieht Er, des Kaisers Stock Alles Weltregiment, muf3 Er lvissen, Von dem Stock hat ausgehen miissen; Und das Zepter in Kdnigs Hand 1st ein Stock nur, das ist bekannl. Und wer's zurn Korporal erst hat ge


Der steht auf der Leiter zur hochsten Macht, Und so weit kann Er's auch noch treiben. (I/7)

The Wachtmeister explains the state of things better than he knows, when he ob- serves the source of all temporal power, it takes only a dash of Freudian analysis to perceive the stick in the skirt of the soldier's coat asa fetishized phallus-at once the ac- tualorgan used to penetrate the struggling Wagdlein," the primitive fighting weapon (staff), and insignia of patriarchal power (scepter). This instrument, the Wachtmei- ster confidently tells his troops, will enable them to rise to the heights of power, to "henschen." Clearly, it is to those sexually resonant heights that Wallenstein's soldiers dream of reaching, as though fantasizing about an erection without limit. Moreover, the reign of the stick, the first jaeger asserts, isa perfect world, which returns the present to the idealized past of patriarchal origin:

Es ist hier wie in den alten Zeiten, Wo die Klinge noch alles Gt bedeuten .. (L'6)

But in undertones, the insidiousness of the martial world makes itself felt amidst the %ail fellow, well metw boisterousness of the soldiers. The muted voices of those on the margins of the army-the frightened peas- ant boy, the starving peasant, the resigned, weather-beaten canteen woman-suggest that the behavior of the soldiers diverges substantively from their own self-assess- ment, while the bombast in the army's self- glorification causes the rhetoric to backfii upon itself, revealing the destructive and na- ive violence which informs the entire martial project?

Lustiger fi.eilich mag sich's haben,

ijber anderer Kijpf wegtraben. (I/11)

In like fashion, the soldiers glorify their leader, making him into an omnipotent, om- niscient entity to whom they promise com- plete fealty-in a closing scene which reca- pitulates both Die Riiuber and Fiesco. Like his surrogate sons, the army soldiers, Wal- lenstein seems relentlessly masculine; at once invincible and mysteriously impene- trable, he resembles the legendary Achilles (who,aswe recall, also suffered from consid- erable gender trouble). However, when Wal- lenstein finally appears on stage in Act 2 of Die Piccolomini, a rather different impres- sion awaits us. His entrance and presence are surrounded by spherical images-the twelve chairs which are to seat his faithfd inner circle, the warrior's wreath with which he is to crown his daughter, the magic circle of destiny which holds Max thrall to Thekla, the fruitful knot of opportunities which Illo seesasnecessitatingimmediate action, and, lastly, the very movement of the planets in Wallenstein's own astrological forecasts. Here, both senses of the word "revolutionw are explicitly entwined; Wallenstein will ground his personal revolution-his rebellion against the emperor-upon the revolu- tion of the stars, an eternal, self-repeating circuit which only great men such as him-self-sons of the thunderbolt-wielding father-king of Greek mythology-can com-


-Die Kreise in den Kreisen, die sich eng

Und enger ziehn urn die zentralische


Die sieht das Aug nur, das entsiegelte,

der hellgebonlen, heitern Joviskinder.


Like the self-aggrandizing Fiesco, Wallen- stein uses rhetoric to affirm and validate his powerin avision ofhistory as afured, eternal, general truth (Richards 232).26 These two sorts of revolution-his own and that of the planets-will inaugurate yet another turnabout: namely, the return of Wallenstein's

own glory-days as the emperor's chosen:

Vor neun Jahren, Beim Dkenkriege, stellf ich eine Macht ihm auf Von vierrigtausend Kijpfen oder fSZig. .. Da war noch eine Zeit! Im ganzen Kaiser-

Kein Nam' geehrt, gefeiert wie der
meine . . . (IU7)

And yet, even at this relatively early stage in the dramatic proceedings, Schiller makes it clear that Wallenstein's will to power has rendered him strangely impotent-a rapt stargazer unable to decide upon an actual course of action. Addicted to, and dependent upon, the esteem of other men, Wallenstein eagerly pumps hiswife for information as to how he was talked about at the court of Vienna, coyly vaunts his power before Terzky, and, moments later, impatiently informs IUo that his troops' blind submission to him is not enough to satisfy him; in the latter two conversations, he seems to take a perverse pleasure in refising to act. Thus, Wallen- stein's insistence on his own masculine su- premacy causes him to appear weirdly pas- sive and effeminate incomparison to the very picture which the soldiers of the Eager draw of him. Correspondingly, he seems to hide fi-om the soldiers who serve him. Schiller has him appear before a vast assemblage only once, and the dramatic spaces which hold him aresmall, domestic, and private. Seen from this point of view, Wallenstein repre- sents a more sophisticated version, not only of Fiesco but also of Franz Moor, the hys- terical, fatally hesitant malefactor of Die Rii~ber.~~

Like Franz, Wallenstein can bring himselfto do very little; the plot is advanced through the machinations of lesser charac- ters (1110,Tenky, and Butler), and through the absent powers of the emperor (in a man- ner reminiscent of the absent Fiirst in Kabale und Liebe).2s

Trapped in the vicious circles of his de- lusions of grandeur, his astrological super- stition, and his understanding of time as repetiti~e,~~

Wallenstein seems doomed from Act 2 of Die Piccolonzini on-which explains Schiller's withholding him as long as possible; there is not, in the end, very much to say abouthim.30 The abortiverevo- lution reverts, and events come tldl circle, leaving the patriarchal power structure in- tact to repeat itself in continued wars, as Wallenstein has already predicted:

Das wird es, treuer Isolan. Zu -ern Wird alles gehn, was wir bedachtig bau- ten. Deswegen aber hd't sich doch ein Feld- hem, Und auch ein Kriegsheer lauft noch wohl dem Kaiser Zusammen, wenn die 'I'rommel wird geschlagen. (1117)

In an uncharacteristically modest moment, Wallenstein sees the awfX truth about the role that he plays: he is not a great man, but a replaceable cog in the perpetual war ma- chine energized automatically by the beat- ing of a drum.With this monstrous vision of a disembodied, eternally replaceable army, the Wallenstein plays look forward to a very contemporary view of war and the warrior. Such avisioninfonns The Drminator, where soldiers have become unstoppable mascu- line-looking, but biologically neuter (and sterile) cyborg;. But already in his quest for "henschen," the character of Wallenstein re- sembles the military man as robot; he seems to be missing an essential human compo- nent.

Max Piccolomini has already suggested as much when he looks forward to the day 'wenn endlich der Soldat / Ins Leben heim- kehrt, in die Menschlichkeit" (DiePiccolomini, Y5)-implying that the soldier is neither alive norhuman untilhe has ceased to fight. To drive this truth home even fiwther, Schiller juxtaposes Wallenstein with Max, an unwilling wanior and man of sen- sibility, who articulates, in appropriately sentimental terms, a return to the child- hood days offable, when the world was mo- tivated not by "herrschenm/"gehorchen" but by the fountainhead of emotions:

Auch fiir ein Liebend Herz ist die gemeine Natur zu eng, und tiefere Bedeutung Liegt in dem Marchen meiner Kinder-

Als in der Wahrheit, die das Leben
lehrt. . . .

Die alten Fabelwesen sind nicht mehr,

Das reizende Geschlecht ist ausgewan-


Doch eine Sprache braucht das Herz, es


Der alte Trieb die alten Namen wieder,

Und an dem Sternenhimmel gehn sie

jetzt . . .

Dort winken sie dem Liebenden herab. . . .


Oskar Seidlin has noted, suggestively, that Max's guiding planet is not masculine, but feminine-the emotioerotic realm of Venus (Heuer 243). Under her alternative influ- ence, Maxand Thekla both speaka language different from the rest of the characters-a discourse of futurity which celebrates a new life not rooted in the past (Miiller-Seidel in Heuer 374f). But like Karl Moor, Max learns that the hture as return to the past is a fraud. For all his dreams of an alternative existence, Max cannot break out of the circle of patriarchal duty; he renews his allegiance to his biological father and to the choplogic of masculinity, and dies for them, indirectly causing the death of Thekla. Wallenstein, for hispart,understands only in the final scenes of Wallensteins Tbd (conveniently, too late) what Max represents for him-the organic, feminized object of beauty which he both re- quired and desired to make himselffeelmore vital and manly:

Die Blume ist hinweg aus meinem Leben, Und kalt und farblos seh' ich's vor mir liegen. .. . Denn iiber alles Gliick geht doch der Freund, Der's fmend erst erschant, delJs teilend mehrt. (V/3)

How are we to break out of repetition? This is the agonized question which Die Rauber, Fiesco, and Wallenstein pose with an appropriate repetitiveness as they link the problem ofhistory with the sharpening awareness that repetition istied to a vision of masculinity impossible to fulfdl (Tyler 411, and which is,at its core, not only radi- cally self-destructive but, indeed, destruc- tive of everything in its path-a black hole which sucks in the entire human universe. Thus,implicit in these and, arguably, in all of Schiller's plays is a radical critique of history as created and misunderstood by men. Significantly, for Schiller, it is not woman who represents repeatability asthe familiar, perfidious, carnal,unclean womb/ tomb (Rich 188).Instead, he makes an altogether different argument: it is man who creates repetition, and, specifically, those men who would be, and never can be, "real menw-powerful, masterfbl captains of des- tiny. Indeed, while Schiller's female char- acters serve primarily as decoration in the three plays Ihave discussed, the degree to which their marginalization is fore-grounded (i.e., the manner in which they are so visibly made absent from masculine power dealings) produces a decidedly de- stabilizing effect on the dramatic fraterni- ties presented to us-marking the danger in these apparently unproblematic rela- tions between men. Suchanunderstanding is corroborated by the fact that the two plays which Schiller wrote immediately after Wallenstein feature tragic heroines trapped by patriarchal power structures and struggles. Both Maria Stuart and Die Jungfrau von Orleans telegraph the urgent message that women, too, are implicated in,and influenced by, the patriarchal struc- tures of history (Prandi 125),31 and that until powerfid women succeed in remaking history, Rousseau's bloody revolution will repeat until time runs out once and for all.

When we look forward again to our own time, we can see that this very warning constitutes the core of the best contempo- rary science fiction. It resonates powefiy, for example, from Russell Hoban's 1980 novel Riddle- Walker-a work much prized by the science fiction community, and cited with increasing frequency in critical discus- sions of Armageddon and postnuclear im- ages in literature. More significant to my mind, however, is the fact that we find here, recast in the postnuclear future, all the con- cerns, motifs, and images seen in the Schiller plays Ihave discussed. In a wasteland of what once was England, where primitive, illiterate men engage in an all-out effort to reinvent nuclear power (the only technology they have any interest in mastering [Mannix 85]),Rousseau's anar- chic future comes to pass with a vengeance, as Riddley-a 24th-century version of the unaggressive, sensitive Max Piccolominiembarks on a series of misadventures which culminate in his creation of a travel- ing puppet show. Schilleis patriarchal world of male bonding is perverted and de- graded to the darkest possible degree; yet it still holds, although the masculinist cul- ture of Riddey Walker is devoid of any of the politico-moral categories that have in- vested Western culture with meaning. As Rousseau had predicted, there are no bnger concepts of goodevil, justice, free- dom, duty, or integrity to be consulted- these notions have simply ceased to exist. 'Inland" is the Schillerian Bohemia turned inside out-an uneasy, dangerous place of shifting alliances between surrogate fa- thers, sons, and brothers as they struggle for power. Here, the competition for "herrschen" among men is naked and undisguised; Rousseau's 'droit du plus fortn usually takes extremely violent and sexual forms, as elder men not uncommonly tor- ture andor rape younger ones.

The antagonist who dominates much of the novel is also a familiar Schillerian fig- ure. Goodparley, the Pry hfincer, is Inland's charismaticleader, a postnuclear Fiesco de- termined to "to do things here . . . to get thingsmoving" (Hoban 41), and who subtly alters the Eusa puppet show in order to put forward a plan for the future which is,once again, a return to the past:

Good Time which I mean every thing good and every body happy and tecknenlogical progres moving every thing hntways farther and farther all the time. You name it wewl do it. (Hoban 48)

Behind it all, there lies Goodparley's obses- sion with power which he elevates to the single masculine metaphysical principle "Every thing wants to man dont it" (Hoban 142). Yet, ironically, Goodparley's insistence on manliness conceals avery feminine past, and he is eventually killed by the same man (his surrogate father) who repeatedly raped him when he was a boy; near the end of the book, the Pry Mincer ispenetrated once and for all by the father whose poundmg tool pierces his skull. In this manner, the novel makes explicit many of the darker sugges- tions implicit in Schiller's depictions ofpower and masculinity-suggesting that men's relations with each other are,at least under patriarchy, both murderous and covertly ho- mosexual.32

Appropriately both describing and trac- ing circles (Schwenger, "Circling Ground Zeron 255-57), the novelsimultaneously as- serts the Schillerian desire to return and demonstrates in no uncertain terms what the price of such a mythos is. Using the fragmented rhetoric of the barbarized En- glish language (only recently made usable again in written form), the twelve-year-old "adultn Riddley regards his double-a 'childn of seven-with a familiar sentimen- tal nostalgia and wonders why history must always repeat:

\$%en we gone out thru the gate there wer a kid up on the hy walk sames I use to be up there all times of nite when I wer a kid. 7 or 8 he wer may be. Sharplittle face liting and shaddel-ing in the shimmying of the gate house torches ...\Thy is Punch crookit? Why wil he allways kil the babby She can? Parbly Iwont never know its jus on me to think on it. (Hoban 219f.)

But the answer to his question has already been given early on by Lorna Elswint-the localUtel woman" (wisewoman) and the lone female character of the work. Herutel" warns the inhabitants of the well-named settle- ment "Widdem Dumpn (a feminine site of mourning and of that which must be thrown away) against trying to return to a past mistakenly perceived asglorious:

What ben that new life coming in to? . . . You know what they ben doing there. . . . They ben digging up that old time Bad Time black time. . . Youve seen what come of that connexion. . . . Now its broak weve got to make a new 1.(24)

AdifTerent but equally terrible aspect of the Schillerian critique isarticulated in the immensely popular nrminator films of 1983 and 1991. Here, the spectral, repeti- tive history of fathers and sons is both in- verted and reinforced by the presence of paternal ghosts from the future who haunt our present. A brief summary suffices to indicate the grimness (and incestuous in- tricacy) of the plot:33 Atriumphant warrior of the future (John Conner) sends Reese, hismost loyal lieutenant (a young man who looks up to the commander as a father-mes- siah figure), into the past to be his father and to assist his mother (Sarah Conner) in what will prove to be a fatal battle (for Reese) against a killer cyborg. This robot has also been sent from the future to mur- der the mother before she has a chance to produce the son who will deliver humanity from the extermination camps designed by a mechanical civilization, of which the Ter- minator cyborg is the most advanced pro- totype. Because of the paradox generated by the time-loop, this same procedure must repeat eternally, for, if the son-father does not undertake the suicide mission to the past so that his father-son may live, hu- manity as a whole will be wiped from the face of the earth by the machines.

The frst l2rnzinator film evidences the modern concern with time at its most hys- terical. Repetition is not only a necessary part of history; it is that which will prevent human history from ending altogether. We must repeat in order to have a history;and yet, that history is itselfutterly horrifying, devoid of telos and meaning-an infernal circle reminiscent of Dank. But, signifi- cantly, the sequel, 7krn~inator2, explicitly rejects masculine repetitive history through the foregrounding of a powerful fe- male protagonist, Sarah Conner, who achieves an agency denied female charac- tersin the works which Ihave discussed so far. Like Fiesco's Leonore, Sarah is portrayed at the beginning of the film as the marginalized Cassandra whom no one will believe-the peripheral critic of a patriar- chal world of doctors, policemen, and scien- tists. But she progressively invades, and becomes the center of, the filmic text be- cause she cannot accept the future, which haunts her in the form of a recurring night- mare involving a nuclear blast at a children's playground. Her eventual decision to breakthe temporalpattern thathas been laid out for her is a refusal of the indissol- uble connection between history and re- peatability, in favor ofher as yet uncod3ed story-symbolized by the image of the unmarked highway which begins and ends the film. She chooses-for herself and for all-a world in which events do not repeat, where things happen once. And to inhabit that world is to relinquish the fantasy of control that repeatability seems to promise; it is to accept finality, to accept loss, and to accept the validity ofsentiment, for Sarah's love--directed toward the lover, the son, and humanity itself-is that which trans- forms her from waitress to woman warrior.

As Ihope these cursory readings ofRid- dley Walker and the Terminator films sug- gest, Schiller's immense importance for us lies in the fact that his work saw, at the end of his century, what we are still struggling to see at the end of ours. Produced on the cusp of modernity, Schilleis prescient drama was at the same time able to look beyond the historical moment of which his own work was the marker. Beheld today, his art is time travel indeed; his dramatic time machines enabled him to see the fu- ture in the past, and to lay bare the deeply troubled gendered ground on which our conceptions of time are erected. Upon such a ground, history as made and conceived by men is the history of war, the masculine

history of deadly repetition where, as Riddley notes, the father will always kill the son if he ~an~~-a

circular history whose damage art cannot repair.

". . . Soldaten, Helden und Herrscher habe ich vor jetzt herzlich satt," wrote Schiller to Goethe in March of 1799 after completing Wallensteins llbd (Schillers Dramen 2: 533). But the material of Wallenstein haunted him,as it haunts us-in our battlefields, in our streets, and in our wildest fantasies, until we reject the reign of the stick and make a different 'connex- ionn:

.. . ich werde nicht eher ruhig sein, bis ich meine Gedanken wieder auf einen be- stimmten Stoff mit Hoffnung und Nei- gung gerichtet sehe. (Schiller to Goethe, 19 March 1799)

Now weare ready for the new so let it

come. (RiaUey Walker 24)

No Fate But What We Make. (Terrn,inator



lI wish to thank John Ganim and Robert Gross for their help in the development of this essay.

2See my analysis "AsYou Desire Me? Nasty Boys, Feminine Longing, and Mourning the Mother in Peter Pan and The Witching Hour," Proceedings from the 1993 Eaton Confirenee on Fantasy and Science Fiction.

3Significantly, explicitly futurist narratives emerge for the first time in the West during the course of the 18th century-a phenomenon which, according to Alkon, marks the begin- ning of "the modern world's most revealing mode of literary statement." See Origins of Futurist Fiction.

4To reparaphrase Georg Luucs (who claims an important dialectic consciousness in Schiller's work), Schiller was a feminist Mitkiimpfer in spite of himself. See Luk5cs 94-96.

5Such a reading contextualizes and ex- plains Uhich Karthaus's compellhlg observa- tion that Schiller had recognized the problem- atic of the French Revolution before it actually happened. See Karthaus 213.

6X rely here on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's work on the paradoxes of masculinity, in particular her analysis of the homosocial in her bril- liant literary historyBetween Men. Her discus- sions of English texts focus on what she calls the homosocial circuit- male-female-male triangle through which men use women to bond with, and a h their superiority over, other men. Further, she argues that such male bond- ing between ostensibly heterosexual men is a key feature in the distribution and mainte- nance of patriarchal power in a hierarchical so- ciety. This argument is, I believe, of great importance for an understanding of gender in Schiller-an aspect of his work which has been much neglected-as well as for the gender dy- namics in modern German literature as a whole.

7Wolfgang Wittkowski notes with under- statement that "Schiller's dramas do not con- tain many perfect characters." Wittkowski in Ugrinsky 5.

8This movement represents a complete con- kast to(andaradicalrejectionof)whatAbmms calls the "Romantic Spiral," or %regress by re- version," in which a "self-moving circle . ..m tates along a . . . vertical dimension to close where it had begun, but on a higher plane of value" (182-84).

sElfiiede Heyer argues persuasively for yet another division in Schiller's writing practice- that between Schiller the political theorist and Schiller the histoxian. See Heyer in Ugrinsky 71-79. We should also keep in mind that those very views expressed in Schiller's essays are themselves ambiguous; their significance has been, and continues to be, open to debate. See Benjamin Bennett's useful overview of Schil- ler's role in the history of ideas in Wittkowski 164-67.

IVhe biggest exception to this rule is Mlhlm Tell. See Karthaus's analysis of the play 227-39. Dieter Borchmeyer has argued that this play demonstrates at once a conservative critique of the French Revolution, resignation vis-A-vis the Terror, and a stubborn allegiance to the ideal of "Naturrecht." See Borchmeyer, "Altes Recht."

"See Abrams's excellent historical over- view of the Neoplatonist legacy of the "circui- tous journey" in Chap. 3 ofNatural Supernatu- ralism.

12Correspondingly, for cultural man, the very gesture of imagining works in exactly the same circular fashion. See Poulet 111.

13See Alan C. Leidner's discussion of au- dience reactions to Die Rauber in "'Fremde Menschen fielen einander schluchzend in die he9."

I4Thus, f,fmm being ambivalent about the father-son relationship, as Richard Kochas argued, Schiller's play depicts father-son rela- tions as deeply traumatizing and traumatized, and this depiction is radically negative. See Koc's essay "Fathers and Sons" and Borch- meyer, Macht und Melancholie.

15See Paul Michael Liitzeler's cogent ac- count of Roman influences on the play and on the visual art of the late 18th century in "'Die grone Linie zu einem Brutuskopfe'."

lqlsewhere in the play, odd, tortuous, circular images resonate--the most peculiar one being the comparison of the state of Genoa with the state of Rome which in tturn is compared with a tennis ball colliding with a racket wielded by the juvenile Octavius (Augustus) Caesar (Fiesco II/5).

17See Lorant's excellent analysis of the Oe- dipus complex in Don Carlos, Oedipus Rex, and Hadet. His remark ". . . the father is present hm the beginning to the end and immolates the son"(148) is surely apt for many of Schiller's plays.

18Sharpe refers, tellingly, to the play's "aloofness" (76).

l?I'his connection is particularly strong when one considers the crucial role that music was to play in the original version of the Lager. SeeZeyringer 26.

20Several critics have discussed the difficul- ties which Schiller faced with this colossal project; as Elfi-iede Heyer notes, "no material caused Schiller more agony, no language pre- sented more challenge than the Wallenstein trilogy" (Heyer in Ugrinsky 77). See also Zey- ringer's intriguing discussion of deleted pas- sages in the work

21Walter Hinck makes the provocative ar- gument that the German historical drama functions suigeneris as a kind of time machine. See his introduction to Geschichte als Schau- spiel.

22Th~s,it is not so much Wallenstein who resembles Hamlet (as many critics have argued), but the audience who is positioned to experience the Hamletian quandary. This in- terpretation was inspired by Jacques Derrida's linkage of Marx, Hamlet, spectrality, and hisb ry in his lecture "LeSpectre de Mam" delivered at the Whither Marxism" Conference at the University of California, Riverside, in April 1993.

23See the Wachtmeister's speech at the end of Scene 2. 241n fact, the entire play is so ironic(Sharpe 83)that it seems to border on satire.

25Borchmeyer argues for the profound irony of this statement, for Llrallenstein is both liter- ally and figuratively the child-not of Jupiter but of Saturn, the exiled, castrated father-king of a former Golden Age (51). Borchmeyer's in- triguing study Macht und Melancholie con- tends that the character ofwallenstein canbest be understood by an appeal to Renaisssance theories of the four temperaments-a body of knowledge that the young Schiller studied with enthusiasm (9-11). He suggests in turn that Wallenstein is a quintessential melancholic-a son of Satunl-although the boors argument veers away from actually saying that Schiller's hero is mentally disturbed. This affirmation of Wallenstein's melancholy points in a number of interesting directions, ofwhich the most impor- tant, to my mind, is the relevance of this "mel- ancholy" to Freud's famous discussion of the syndrome in conjunction with both mourning and mania-a direction which Borchmeyer does not pursue in his book. This is unfortu- nate, given the implicit linkage in some of the Renaissance illustrations of the temperaments between male personality and sexuality (see plate 3) as well as the persuasive work of such scholars as Karin Barnaby who note that Schil- ler was an important early theorizer of modern psychology (Barnaby in Ugrinsky 119-28).

"Oskar Seidlin argues that Wallenstein's vision of power extends to conquering time itr self. See Seidlin in Heuer. Also, see John Neu- bauer's similar analysis of Wallenstein's con- ception of himself as a force of nature in "The Idea of History in Schiller's Wallenstein."

27He is, £ram this perspective, not a new character type, as Heyer argues in Ugrinsky 77. 2SS~~h

a reading suggests that Schiller remained closer to his original %ealisticm intentions concerning his main character-as Klaus Zeyringer understands them-than he himself realized. See Zeyringer 22.

2Yl'hus it is not time which is Wallenstein's enemy-as David Richards, relying on Seidlin's earlier essay, has argued (241)-rather, it is his perception of time asgeneral and self-repeating which consistently causes him to make fatal errors. This is, for example, the basis for his misguided trust in Octavio Piccolomini (Rich- ards 237).

30Wallenstein's rather conspicuous absence from thethreeplays about himmay explain the opposing accounts of his character given by litr erary criticism. See Montoux's summary of the debate 26.

31This is already implied in Schiller's depic- tions of the Gdn Terzky, the Herzogin, and Thekla; these women are trapped-as are Maria Stuart and Elisabeth-in the false fem- inine opposites of the Machtweib and the docile wifdover.

32Sedgwick notes: "For a man to be a man's man is separated only by an invisible, cai-efully blurred, always-already crossed line fmm king interested in men"' (89).

33See Constance Penley's groundbreaking essay in The Future of an Illusion.

34Similarly, Oellers cites Schiller's com- ments that the world should be united under the (feminine) principles of t~xth and beauty, and observes that "eine Revolution mit der Faust nicht mehr zu denken war" (118-19).

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