SOURCE: “Schiller: Poet of Politics,” in A Schiller Symposium: In Observance of the Bicentenary of Schiller's Birth, University of Texas Department of Germanic Languages, 1960, pp. 31-48.

In the following essay, Seidlin asserts that the “complexities and perplexities of political man” is one of Schiller's most persistent themes, and claims that in his works the dramatist brings to life the ironies and paradoxes of political action—for example, that political ideals, however lofty, must be bound up with humans' particular desires and ambitions in order to be put into practice, but in being so bound lose their purity as ideals.

A Quarter of a century ago, when darkness descended upon Schiller's native country, a darkness that was to engulf all of mankind in the shortest possible time, a theater in Hamburg produced one of Schiller's great dramatic works, Don Carlos. It is the play which culminates in the stirring...