In my conversation with my daughter about Germanophone literary history last night, I recalled a remark by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) in an 1829 conversation with Johann Peter Eckermann (1792-1854): "Das Klassische nenne ich das Gesunde und das Romantische das Kranke" ("For me, the classic is healthy and the romantic is sick"). Goethe and his friend Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) were the leading figures of Weimar Classicism, but Goethe's use of illness as a metaphor erases that Schiller himself was chronically ill throughout his life (malaria, pneumonia, tuberculosis). As Schiller wrote in 1793: "Jedes Zeichen im Tierkreis bringt mir ein anderes Leiden" ("Every sign of the Zodiac brings me another illness"). (Andrew Shields, #111words, 19 March 2026)