Game of fate

Friedrich Schiller painting by Anton Graff

Spiel des Schicksals ( a fragment from a true story ) is a short story by Friedrich Schiller that appeared anonymously in the January issue of Teutsche Merkur in 1789 . In 1792 he took them almost unchanged into the collection of smaller prosaic writings .

action

Aloysius von G *** , son of a commoner, rose to the prince's court in a short time thanks to his youthful fire and ambition. "Obstacles did not frighten him, and no failure could overcome his persistence." A passionate friendship developed between him and the prince. So the climber flies "from one promotion to another", soon buries himself in the books and finally becomes the "ruler of his prince". Modesty leaves him, and “a certain hardness in his being” becomes just as visible as a lavish arbitrariness and lust for power, because he whimsically distributes gifts or takes revenge on subordinates.

Among the secret envious people there is one who carefully watches every step he takes. A Piedmontese count named Joseph Martinengo , jealous and devious, who slowly and deliberately forges an intrigue. The arrogant and self-confident Aloysius thinks he is safe and thus commits the “mistake that Richelieu made in leaving Ludwig the thirteenth to play with the young le Grand ”.

With "disguised subservience", the count succeeds in sneaking into the prince's favor without being noticed, denouncing his rival and performing a "fatal trick". The narrator suspects that Martinengo presented the prince with suspicious correspondence, which testifies to an alleged connection with a neighboring court. The prince is horrified, considers a friend to be an ungrateful traitor and has him demoted , led away and imprisoned before the parade in front of more than five hundred people .

Aloysius discovers that it was himself who had this “place of damnation” built in order to let “a deserving officer” perish in it. It is thanks to the compassionate help of a garrison preacher that he was initially granted easier conditions of detention and after ten years he was pardoned.

After some time, he climbed another “brilliant summit” in foreign service, but eventually returned to his old home and met the prince again. Although "both hearts ... shame and fear have separated", Aloysius soon regains his old dignities. After 19 years he dies “as the commander of a fortress in which state prisoners are kept”. Anyone who expects he has changed and has become milder is mistaken, because he treated the imprisoned "harshly and capriciously."

interpretation

In addition to the tyrannical rule of Duke Karl Eugen in Württemberg , Schiller highlights the psychology and personality of the main character, whose contradictions he describes in detail. By combining psychological analysis and political criticism, the author avoids a one-sided Manichean view, according to which the despot does nothing more than suppress the innocent victim.

Technique and storytelling

The narrator describes the events from the first person perspective . He explains that he "was able to collect the news ... only from oral traditions" in order to refer to the oral as a previously uncertain source and to be able to withdraw the truthfulness of his work from possible criticism. At another point in the story, which deals with the means of intrigue, the author relies on a conjecture: "Whether genuine or hypothetical, opinions are divided ..." This also allows him to play off the poetic truth against the historical and to disguise possible real connections to the court. Especially in the dramatic scenes of his story, Schiller frequently changes to the historical present .

background

Portrait of Philipp Friedrich von Rieger

As in the stories Criminals from Lost Honor and A Magnanimous Plot, from the latest story , Schiller again took up an authentic case with Spiel des Schicksals , with which he had something in common: Schiller's godfather, Philipp Friedrich von, was the model for Aloysius von G *** Rieger . Schiller was baptized the day after he was born because people feared he would not survive long because of his weakness. Rieger, whom Schiller got to know personally in the late autumn of 1781, had been in the Württemberg service since 1755 and was at the height of his power at the time of his sponsorship.

Like Aloysius in the story, Rieger was also initially a favorite of a ruler: Duke Karl Eugen , whom he had made indispensable for himself with his drastic forced recruiting and building an army of six thousand men. He made a name for himself through harshness and ruthlessness and soon had a reputation for being a cold-hearted man-smoker. On deserters of not very battle-ready troops he praised a bounty and understood it skillfully to control the so-triggered "Open Season".

Schiller met his godfather, the commander of Hohenasperg Fortress , personally in the late autumn of 1781 and took the opportunity to visit Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart during his ten years in prison, an encounter that is significant in terms of literary history. The latter's story, The History of the Human Heart , published in the Swabian Magazine in 1775, had the most lasting influence on Schiller's first drama Die Räuber with the character constellation of two unequal sons ( Wilhelm and Carl ) of a nobleman.

Emergence

Duke Karl Eugen of Württemberg

Duke Carl Eugen had Schiller arrested for two weeks in 1782 because he had secretly left the military academy . Years later, in December 1788, Schiller received a visit from Ludwig Schubart , son of the former prisoner and a former classmate of the Karlsschule, in Weimar . A short time after this visit, Schiller began to write the short work, which he initially published anonymously.

His friend Christian Gottfried Körner , who in addition to the enthusiastic Ludwig Ferdinand Huber had already promoted the creation of the ghost seer, recognized his characteristic writing style immediately and wrote to him on December 30th: “... the game of fate is yours. I loved the style already recognized [...] The tone of the story is very successful in my opinion. Lively presentation without pretension is a manner that I find difficult to imagine. "

For other readers this was not so easy. Schiller's future wife Charlotte von Lengefeld, for example, was unable to recognize the author. Presumably it was based on his previously known personal style, which was established and known primarily through the dramas The Robbers , Cabal and Love and Don Karlos .

Schiller's prose

Schiller's fame is not based on his stories , but on his poetry and, above all, the stage works . With his sense of pathos and the “great objects of humanity”, he is considered Germany's most important playwright . There is only a small supply of his prose , which contributed to the fact that he was given less attention as a stylistically groundbreaking narrator, and even overlooked. The picture only changed in the last few decades.

Since the text Strange Example of Female Vengeance is a translation of an original by Denis Diderot and Haoh-Kiöh-Tschuen is a fragmentary adaptation of a novel translated from Chinese, there are only four stories from the pen of Schiller. In addition to the fragmentary novel The Spirit Seer and Game of Fate only A Magnanimous Plot and The Criminal From Lost Honor .

Research now assumes that his theoretical writings are also included in this area, a perspective that is reflected, for example, in the concept of the Frankfurt edition , in which his narratives and historical writings are combined in a double volume .

In this context, the question is also asked where the line between literary and historiographical narrative is to be drawn. In a letter to Caroline von Wolhaben dated 10./11. In December 1788, Schiller spoke of the fact that historical truth could also be felt even though things did not actually happen that way. One learns “in this way to get to know the human being and not the human being, the species and not the individual who is so easily lost. In this great field the poet is lord and master. "

The fact that duty and inclination were the poles of Schiller's worldview is manifested - above all in his Sturm und Drang phase - stylistically alongside the hyperbola above all in the consistent antithetics that support and reinforce the pathos . In the early dramas such as lyric poetry, he sparked a firework of rhetorical figures that went as far as the oxymoron . With the characteristic sparkling antithesis , which can also be found in his prose, he was able to achieve great effects in passionate places and thus appealed primarily to the younger generation.

The ideal of Weimar Classics obliged Goethe and Schiller worked much of her work later at: Instead bold Word formations and sentence structure now the moderate expression, instead of assigning to now subordination rather excited conversational now a by-stylized sound rhythmically refined language.

literature

• Peter-André Alt : Schiller. Life - Work - Time , A Biography, Volume I, Verlag CH Beck, Munich 2000, pp. 478, 522 - 526
• Matthias Luserke-Jaqui: Friedrich Schiller , A. Francke Verlag, Tübingen and Basel 2005, pp. 179–181
• Michael Hofmann, Spiel des Schicksals , Schiller Handbook, Life - Work - Effect, Ed. Matthias Luserke-Jaqui, Metzler, Stuttgart 2005, pp. 315–319

Web links

• Game of fate in the Gutenberg-DE project

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Friedrich Schiller, Spiel des Schicksals , in: Complete Works, Volume III: Poems, Stories, Translations, Deutscher Bücherbund, Stuttgart, p. 518
2. ^ Friedrich Schiller, Spiel des Schicksals , in: Complete Works, Volume III: Poems, Stories, Translations, Deutscher Bücherbund, Stuttgart, p. 520
3. ↑ Friedrich Schiller, Spiel des Schicksals , in: Complete Works, Volume III: Poems, Stories, Translations, Deutscher Bücherbund, Stuttgart, p. 528
4. ↑ Michael Hofmann, Spiel des Schicksals , in: Schiller Handbook, Life - Work - Effect, Ed. Matthias Luserke-Jaqui , Metzler, Stuttgart 2005, p. 316
5. ^ Friedrich Schiller: Game of fate. In: Complete Works, Volume III: Poems, Stories, Translations. Deutscher Bücherbund, Stuttgart, p. 527.
6. ^ Friedrich Schiller , Matthias Luserke-Jaqui, A. Francke Verlag, Tübingen and Basel 20 05, p. 181.
7. ↑ Rüdiger Safranski, Schiller or the invention of German Idealism, first chapter, Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich 2004, p. 17
8. ↑ Rüdiger Safranski, Schiller or the invention of German Idealism, first chapter, Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich 2004, p. 17
9. ↑ Gert Sautermeister, Die Räuber , in: Schiller manual, Life - Work - Effect, Ed. Matthias Luserke-Jaqui, Metzler, Stuttgart 2005, p. 3.
10. ↑ Quoted from: Friedrich Schiller , Matthias Luserke-Jaqui, A. Francke Verlag, Tübingen and Basel 2005, p. 180
11. ^ Friedrich Schiller , Matthias Luserke-Jaqui, A. Francke Verlag, Tübingen and Basel 2005, p. 180
12. ^ Friedrich Schiller , Matthias Luserke-Jaqui, A. Francke Verlag, Tübingen and Basel 2005, p. 171
13. ^ Friedrich Schiller , Matthias Luserke-Jaqui, A. Francke Verlag, Tübingen and Basel 2005, p. 171
14. ↑ Quoted from: Friedrich Schiller , Matthias Luserke-Jaqui, A. Francke Verlag, Tübingen and Basel 2005, p. 170
15. ↑ Introduction to Stylistics, Karl-Heinz Göttert, Oliver Junge, Wilhelm Fink Verlag, Munich 2004, p. 221
16. ↑ Introduction to Stylistics, Karl-Heinz Göttert, Oliver Junge, Wilhelm Fink Verlag, Munich 2004, p. 221