From Maynard Solomon’s Beethoven:
“For Beethoven’s German and Austrian contemporaries, the Napoleonic image was especially potent: Bonaparte’s admirers included Kant, Herder, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schiller, Goethe, Hölderlin, Wielan, and Klopstock. Grillparzer, in his Autobiography wrote, ‘I myself was no less an enemy of the French than my father, and yet Napoleon fascinated me with a magic power … He put me under a spell, as a snake does a bird.’” (p. 134)
Why am I not surprised by that list of names? Are there any military dictators they didn’t or wouldn’t admire?
Related: Hegel on how the great men of history (most of them military conquerors) are doing God’s work:
I was a bit startled to see Schiller’s name on the list of Napoleon’s admirers. Of course, just because I’ve read a medium amount by him and about him. This article, in German, seems to take the position that Schiller was silent about Napoleon because he was opposed to him:
https://literaturkritik.de/id/13608
But Maynard Solomon may be right. I’m not a Schiller expert.
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