Announcement in the Rheinish Thalia

 

Friedrich Schiller:        Announcement for the „Rheinischen Thalia“

A translation by J. Marc Rakotolahy

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As so many journals, so many knowledgeable and sensitive newspapers are already flooding Germany year after year, I am uncertain how the public will receive this new invitation. Too often, it already happened that behind the sacred words of patriotism and common good, only the speculation of a tradesman surfaced.

 

- The recess of my predecessors (I will exclude only a few) has frightened the amateur reader. They have, the same way as Macbeth has blamed his sorceresses, satisfied our ear but have broken our hope. The blind confidence of the public is the unique thing which I can still reckon at – Maybe to win this, should people allow me an excess.

 

I write as a citizen of the world who does not serve any prince. Early on, I have lost my fatherland in order to exchange it for a greater world which I, precisely, only knew through a telescope. A strange extravagance of Nature has declared me a poet in my birthplace, however, inclination for poetry injured the laws of the institute in which I was educated and contradicted the plan of its founder.

 

For eight years, my enthusiasm struggled against the military rule which was prevailing there; however, my passion for the art of poetry was as fervent and strong as a first love. What the institute should have diminished, it has only amplified.

 

To flee from relationships which were only a torture for me, my heart digressed into an ideal world – however, unfamiliar with the reality from which I was rigorously separated – unfamiliar with the human beings – for the four hundred persons who surrounded me, constituted a unique creature, the faithful cast of one and the same model, from which the plastic nature has broken up with joyfully – unfamiliar with the inclinations of freer, self exempting characters, for here, only one inclination came into maturity, one which I, for now, will not tell about; all the other remaining force of the willpower were weakened, while a unique one was stretched convulsively; every specificity; every rejoicing aspect of the manifold, playful characteristics of Nature were wasted in the regular tempo of the prevailing order.

 

- Unfamiliar with the beautiful gender – the doors of this institute were opened, as people will know, only to young ladies before they begin to become interesting and after they have ceased to be so – unfamiliar with the human beings and the human destiny, my pen must be missing, necessarily, the intermediary traits existing between an angel and a demon, it must be producing something gigantic which did not exist, fortunately, in the world in which I only would like to wish for it immortality, in order to eternalize the example of a birth which the counter nature association of subordination and genius put in the world. – I mean by that the creation of “The robbers”.

 

This play has been published. The whole moral world has called its author an offender of majesty – The whole responsibility was blamed to the atmosphere under which it was created. If from all the numerous articles against the “Robbers” a unique one touched me, hence, it is the one that I, two years ago, agreed with: to depict the human being before even encountering one.

 

The „Robbers“ has cost me my family and my fatherland - - In an era where, still, the appreciation of the crowd must guide our wavering pride, where the warm blood of a young person lively flows under the happy sunrays of approval, where thousand ingratiating presentiment of future greatness surround his misleading soul and the divine posterity lies in beautiful dawn before him – in the midst of the enjoyment of the first seductive praise, the unexpected and undeserved decision against me came from remote provinces: people proscribed me, in my birthplace, into a penalty of confinement – to write.

 

My resolution is known – I conceal the rest of the story because I do not find it, in any case, decent to put myself against the person, who until then, was my father. My example will not remove any leave from the laurel crown of this prince who will invoke eternity. His educational institute has made the fortune of many people, even if it should, also, have failed mine directly.

 

From then on, all my links with him were dissolved. The public is to me, now, everything: the subject of my study, my sovereign, and my confident. To it alone I belong now. Before this one and not any other tribunal I will stand. This one only I should fear and honour. Something great transformed me into this vision of not carrying any other chain than the appreciation of the world – of not calling, any more, on any other throne but the human soul.

 

It is maybe unusual to find in the announcement section of a newspaper the story about the youth of the author, and yet, there is not any other so natural way of leading the reader into the inner side of my enterprise than when I acquainted him with the human being who should be carrying this enterprise out.