Friedrich Schiller

Born in Marbach in 1759 to a devoutly Protestant family and initially groomed for the priesthood, Schiller was steered into a military academy in Stuttgart in 1773 where he ended up studying medicine instead. His first play, The Robbers, written during those academy years, proved a breakout success. After a short run as a regimental doctor he left Stuttgart and eventually settled in Weimar, where in 1789 he became professor of History and Philosophy at the University of Jena and began producing historical works. In 1788 he struck up a productive, complicated friendship with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe that would last until Schiller's death in 1805 - a partnership that yielded the Weimar Theater, a collection of satirical poems called Xenien, and the aesthetic conversations that defined Weimar Classicism. Schiller spent those seventeen years nudging Goethe to finish abandoned sketches while cementing his own place as one of Germany's most important classical playwrights.