Two Philosophers at the Easel: Schiller, Goethe, and the Making of Weimar Classicism

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Friedrich Schiller and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe met once in 1779 and again at Rudolstadt in 1788, and by most accounts neither much liked the other. What changed their relationship was a conversation in 1794, after both left a lecture at the Natural History Society in Jena, in which Schiller pressed Goethe on his theory of the Urpflanze, the archetypal plant from which he believed all plant forms could be derived. Goethe, who had expected a mere collector of dry categories, found instead a mind that could meet his own theory of nature on its own ground, and both later credited that exchange as the true start of their friendship. From 1794 until Schiller's death in 1805, the two corresponded and worked together constantly, over a thousand letters survive, testing Schiller's aesthetic philosophy against Goethe's own theory of form and morphology and producing what both later called Weimar Classicism. Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, serialized in 1795 in Die Horen, the journal Schiller edited and Goethe contributed to, is as much a product of that exchange as of Schiller's engagement with Kant. The partnership was not confined to prose: the pair also co-edited the Musenalmanach and jointly wrote the satirical epigram cycle Xenien in 1796. Their collaboration ended only with Schiller's death at Weimar on 9 May 1805.