Friedrich Schiller

Friedrich Schiller was, with Goethe, the central figure of German literature's classical age, and its foremost dramatist. Trained as a military surgeon at the Karlsschule in Stuttgart under ducal compulsion, he fled Württemberg after Die Räuber made him famous at twenty-two. Don Karlos followed in 1787, and then years of poverty and historical study, a professorship at Jena, and the friendship with Goethe that reshaped both men's work. That play, the Wallenstein trilogy, Maria Stuart and Wilhelm Tell all take political liberty and its costs as their subject. Ennobled in 1802, he died of tuberculosis at forty-five.