On one of my last days in Germany, I went to Marbach, only a few minutes by train from where I was staying. I had considered it over the previous weeks because it was Friedrich Schiller’s birthplace, but I didn’t realize the Schiller National Museum along with an extensive Literature Archive is the centerpiece of the town.
Schiller was born in Marbach in 1759, when his father served in the military for the Duke of Württemberg who lived in Ludwigsburg. Later Schiller’s father retired to manage the parks, forests, and botanical gardens I have mentioned in earlier posts. Now these areas provide public space for the city, but at that time they were part of the Duke’s plantations and hunting grounds. I wonder if young Schiller skipped along the tree-lined walkways or whether his father created some of the nearly hidden pathways through the vegetation around the castle.
Because of his father’s connection to the Duke, the Schiller family was subject to the Duke’s wishes, and when Friedrich reached the age of thirteen, the Duke insisted he be sent to military school. The family had hoped he would become a minister, but the education he received allowed him to study medicine and law. Still, the Duke’s intrusion into the family sparked a life-long interest for Schiller in how power can be abused, a theme that appeared in his first play, The Robber. It was performed in Mannheim, and Schiller spent time in jail because he failed to ask permission to leave Ludwigsburg. In addition to jailing him briefly, the Duke also insisted he never write drama again. It wasn’t long before Schiller sought asylum and refused to abide by the Duke’s orders.
The elegant museum devoted to his legacy opened in 1903. There are no English translations for the exhibits as in many German museums, but it is a rare treat to see the handwriting, portraits and personal effects of so many writers. One wing of the classically designed museum is devoted exclusively to Schiller. A wall of portraits dominates the first room, and additional rooms are focused on his letters and manuscripts. For me, the pages that show his revisions—lines crossed out or arrows that specify where lines should be moved--are favorites because they reveal more about the mind at work than pages with a perfect surface.
Beyond the manuscripts, I found myself admiring a rough drawing he made of his arm and closed fist. One room contained his clothes—two sets—one more formal than the other. Something about these personal items—his hat, his shoes, his mirror—provide the imagination with more access to the mystery of the person than any of the portraits. He owned a large quartz crystal and several prisms, and I can only assume he was fascinated by light.
The second major wing of the museum houses the work of his contemporaries—Goethe, Hölderlin, Kant, Mörike and many others. Here, there are only small samples, a page or two from each person with presumably many more stored in the library archives.
A connecting hallway in the basement allows access to the Museum of Modern Literature. The entrance, a narrow, dark green room, is devoted to Eduard Mörike who was born in Ludwigsburg. His death mask appears near the door, and as in the older museum, some of his personal effects are on display. The most notable part of this exhibit is a series of wooden pieces of different lengths leaning against the wall, each with an engraved line from the poem “Am Mitternacht” (“At Midnight”). The exhibit invites slow reading and contemplation while walking the length of the room. In the poem, a personified night, “leans dreaming against the mountain wall.” She is the mother of small streams who sing to her a lullaby about the blue skies of day, but “she is tired of it / and thinks the blue skies sound sweeter.” Her discontent is a bit surprising, and in the context of the poem it is understated. She cannot escape either her identity or time.
Further into the modern museum, two exhibits will extend into 2019, The Invention of Paris and Thomas Mann in Amerika, which had not quite opened when I was there. The Invention of Paris features candid street photos of Paris and the work of writers such as Heinrich Heine, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Paul Celan. Here, too, each display case holds manuscript pages and letters. A few samples are available at the link above.
On the way back to the train I found myself winding through the city's seventeenth-century houses and cobblestone streets. Though it would have been nice to visit Schiller’s birth house, where his family lived until he was four, it was too late in the day. The Schiller Museum was enough, and now that I've left Germany, I'm finding the well-orchestrated and layered website provides access to treasures far beyond what I encountered while I was there.
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