1797, The"Year of the Ballad"—In the Poets’ Workshop

By Rosa Tennenbaum

The year is 1797. Eight years after the beginning of the French Revolution, all hopes which had initially been placed in this uprising were dashed by the bloody terror of the Jacobins and the guillotine. The attempt to bring the American Revolution back to Europe had failed.

In answer to this failure, Friedrich Schiller, the great German poet and dramati…