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 dramatist, had already shown, in 1795, in his letters On the Aesthetical Education of Man, how the natural state, which depends solely on raw power, can be replaced by a state of reason, which takes into account the dignity of the free man. This aim could only be attained through the education of man into a self-conscious, responsible citizen, and only the fine arts could lead him there, because they alone address man in his entirety, and set into motion simultaneously his sensuous and his spiritual nature. Schiller himself, and with him Johann Wolfgang von Goethe1 and a few others, answered this challenge and broadened the “realm of beauty”—t…