During the last seventeen years of his life (1788–1805), Schiller developed a productive, if complicated, friendship with the already famous and influential Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

They frequently discussed issues concerning aesthetics, and Schiller encouraged Goethe to finish works that he had left as sketches.

They also worked together on Xenien, a collection of short satirical poems in which both Schiller and Goethe challenge opponents of their philosophical vision.

Schiller grew up in a very religious Protestant[1] family and spent much of his youth studying the Bible, which would later influence his writing for the theatre.

Father Moser was a good teacher, and later Schiller named the cleric in his first play Die Räuber (The Robbers) after him.

At school, he wrote his first play, The Robbers, which dramatizes the conflict between two aristocratic brothers: the elder, Karl Moor, leads a group of rebellious students into the Bohemian forest where they become Robin Hood-like bandits, while Franz Moor, the younger brother, schemes to inherit his father's considerable estate.

The play's critique of social corruption and its affirmation of proto-revolutionary republican ideals astounded its original audience.

To extricate himself from a dire financial situation and attachment to a married woman, Schiller eventually sought help from family and friends.

The last living descendant of Schiller was a grandchild of Emilie, Baron Alexander von Gleichen-Rußwurm (1865–1947), who died at Baden-Baden, Germany, in 1947.

This statue of the German playwright was commissioned by Detroit's German-American community in 1908 at a cost of $12,000; the designer was Herman Matzen.

An Ignatium Taschner bronze of Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller stands in Como Park - Saint Paul, MN.

[21] In September 2008, the German-French TV channel Arte conducted a poll among its viewers to determine the greatest European playwright ("King of Drama").

The link between morality and aesthetics also occurs in Schiller's controversial poem, "Die Götter Griechenlandes" (The Gods of Greece).

[25] There is general consensus among scholars that it makes sense to think of Schiller as a liberal,[26][27][28] and he is frequently cited as a cosmopolitan thinker.

[29][30][31] Schiller's philosophical work was particularly concerned with the question of human freedom, a preoccupation which also guided his historical research, such as on the Thirty Years' War and the Dutch Revolt, and then found its way as well into his dramas: the Wallenstein trilogy concerns the Thirty Years' War, while Don Carlos addresses the revolt of the Netherlands against Spain.

Schiller wrote two important essays on the question of the sublime (das Erhabene), entitled "Vom Erhabenen" and "Über das Erhabene"; these essays address one aspect of human freedom—the ability to defy one's animal instincts, such as the drive for self-preservation, when, for example, someone willingly sacrifices themselves for conceptual ideals.

Critics like F. J. Lamport and Erich Auerbach have noted his innovative use of dramatic structure and his creation of new forms, such as the melodrama and the bourgeois tragedy.

A pivotal work by Schiller was On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters[33] (Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen), first published 1794, which was inspired by the great disenchantment Schiller felt about the French Revolution, its degeneration into violence and the failure of successive governments to put its ideals into practice.

The conflict between man's material, sensuous nature and his capacity for reason (Formtrieb being the drive to impose conceptual and moral order on the world), Schiller resolves with the happy union of Formtrieb and Sinnestrieb, the "play drive", which for him is synonymous with artistic beauty, or "living form".

He writes, "Schiller's Letters ... aim at remaking of civilization by virtue of the liberating force of the aesthetic function: it is envisaged as containing the possibility of a new reality principle.

[37] In 1787, in his tenth letter about Don Carlos, Schiller wrote: "I am neither Illuminatus nor Mason, but if the fraternization has a moral purpose in common with one another, and if this purpose for human society is the most important, ..."[38] In a letter from 1829, two Freemasons from Rudolstadt complain about the dissolving of their Lodge Günther zum stehenden Löwen that was honoured by the initiation of Schiller.

[38] Ludwig van Beethoven said that a great poem is more difficult to set to music than a merely good one because the composer must rise higher than the poet – "who can do that in the case of Schiller?

In 1923, German composer Frieda Schmitt-Lermann wrote the music for a theatre production (Das Lied von der Glocke) based on Schiller's text.

A poem written about the poet's burial: Two dim and paltry torches that the raging storm And rain at any moment threaten to put out.

A vulgar coffin made of pine With not a wreath, not e'en the poorest, and no train – As if a crime were swiftly carried to the grave!