Schillerplatz

Schillerplatz

The last time I saw Schiller, they had put him in a box. Oh, no, not the kind that leaves you six feet under. This one was a skeleton of scaffolding neatly surrounding Herr von Schiller as he stood in all his brazen glory in the square next to the Stiftskirche in Stuttgart. The glory had accumulated too much verdigris and needed a cleaning.

I was disappointed not to be able to see the statue. Obligingly, however, one side of the box had been covered with a giant billboard-like photograph of the statue, so that by standing in the right spot and pointing the camera just so, one could get the illusion of having taken a picture of the Schiller statue in front of the Prinzenbau after all. The only problem was that the billboard photo showed a bright blue sky, whereas on the day we visited the skies were overcast; the illusion in my photo is imperfect.

But in a way, this is in keeping with the rest of the Schillerplatz, where the bronze statue stands surrounded by buildings that seem fantastically ancient. The Old Palace, massive with thick round ivy-covered towers, dates from the Renaissance. The Stiftskirche with its mis-matched spires, the symbol of Stuttgart, has parts going back to the twelfth century. The Fruchtkasten next to it has a magnificent gable that was added in 1596. Or rather, it once had a gable that was added in 1596. What the visitor sees today is the Fruchtkasten as it was rebuilt in the 1950s—as were the Stiftskirche, the Old Palace, and the Prinzenbau and Old Chancellery that flank the remaining two sides of the Schillerplatz. All the buildings around the Schillerplatz burned to the ground in a hail of bombs in 1944.

But the people of Stuttgart meticulously reconstructed their city’s architectural glories after the war. I, for one, am glad they did. Looking at the Stiftskirche and Fruchtkasten today, there is no patch of incongruously blue sky to intrude on an image that looks just like the black-and-white photo of the Schillerplatz in 1900. The only thing missing from today’s scene is the railing which ran around the base of the statue’s pedestal then.

Unlike their fenced-out forefathers, twenty-first century Stuttgarters can, and do, sit on the steps leading up to Schiller as he stands lost in thought, clasping his bronze draperies around him, loosely holding a book with his index finger pinched between two pages to mark a spot. He looks slightly bemused, as if he was not quite sure why he is wearing a bed sheet over his eighteenth-century jacket and a laurel wreath on his curly head. Knowing his personal history, one might assume he had just come back from a fraternity toga party and was struck by poetic inspiration on his way back to bed.

Schiller attended a military academy in Stuttgart, and in 1781 had to flee for his life after the publication of his politically inflammatory first play. His flight eventually led him to Weimar and into close collaboration with Goethe. But apparently all his subsequent years of living in the North and becoming Germany’s second-most famous poet never could erase his Swabian dialect; Stuttgart came with him wherever he went. Stuttgarter people are proud of “their” poet. Stuttgarter fauna, however, show little respect for the literary giant: I have a photo of him presiding regally over the Christmas market in the square with a pigeon perched on top of his head.

When I’m asked “Where are you from?” I usually reply “I was born in Stuttgart.” But really, that answer is as misleading as the reconstruction of the Fruchtkasten. We moved away from Stuttgart when I was two; growing up, I knew practically nothing of the city. I am not the real thing. It was not until I was an adult that I began to get to know my “native” town on visits back to Germany.

One of those occasions was that visit to the Christmas market. It’s a child’s dream. Brass bands playing the old carols echoing all across the square, booth upon booth filled with delights—toys, crafts, candles, Christmas decorations, baking, hot food, handiwork, household goods… I came home with an extra-fat wooden rolling pin, a coloured candle, and a cookie cutter shaped like a little donkey. There was no snow then, but it was easy to imagine the soft flakes settling on Schiller’s laurel wreath as he overlooked the roofs of the stalls beneath him.

Come to think of it, when the poet lived there in the flesh, the scene he saw was perhaps not so different from today’s. He would have been a young boy then, darting between the booths, perhaps longingly staring at a carved rocking horse or tin whistle—and if he was lucky, spending a Pfennig or two on gingerbread.

Yes, I know the buildings we see today are not the genuine article, the ones he would have seen two hundred years ago. They are replicas. But if his bronze eyes today could see, he would hardly know the difference. The physical substance of the Stiftskirche, the Fruchtkasten, and the Old Palace might be mostly new, but, in a way, their essence is not. They have been there for centuries, and they still are. Their destruction and reconstruction is but one chapter of their history.

When we left the city last year, they were dismantling the scaffolding box—Schiller had once again been tidied up. And from inside of the box, I know, his statue reappeared just as the picture showed on the outside. The real Schiller was in there all along. Only now he is cleaner, and no longer surrounded by a patch of artificially blue sky that one can only properly photograph from one particular viewpoint in the square.

Once again Stuttgarter people can sit on the steps below his gaze, and Stuttgarter pigeons land on his head. I don’t think he minds. He belongs, and so do they.