Abstract
Friedrich Nietzsche's opinion about Friedrich Schiller is well known and culminates in 1888 in the disqualification “Schiller: oder der Moral-Trompeter von Säckingen” (KSA 6.111), but at the same time it is recognized that his considerations are contradictory and that they change in the different moments of his productive life. Nicholas Martin's study from 1996 marks a caesura in this subject by refuting the widespread view that only the young Nietzsche experienced admiration for Schiller and that there was a growing distance afterwards. Nietzsche's debt to Schiller, according to Martin, is constant and is manifested above all in his reception of the aesthetic letters. We would like to demonstrate in the tradition of Wolfgang Riedel that the essay Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung is equally or even more important in this context, especially when it is approached from the standpoint of cultural criticism. Several statements by Nietzsche, such as the one formulated in 1870 “Ich bin nicht im Stande, jene herrliche Schillersche Terminologie auf das ganze weiteste Bereich aller Kunst anzuwenden” (KSA, 7, 184) confirm this assumption, and when, at the very moment when Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geist der Musik was being prepared, Nietzsche proposed that the “[…] Begriff des Naiven und des Sentimentalistischen ist zu steigern” (KSA, 7, 206), the attempt to link both key works of the two Dichterphilosophen from the point of view of cultural criticism is justified.
Keywords:
Friedrich Schiller; Friedrich Nietzsche; Cultural Criticism; Cultural Dichotomies