Schiller's persistent exploration of the conditions under which the individual can express himself and impose his vision on the outside world was not the fruit of a theoretical interest in a modish topic of the day. It was rather a matter of immediate concern to one brought up in Württemberg under the conditions imposed by its ruler, Duke Karl Eugen. The son of a low-ranking army officer, Schiller was born on 10 November 1759 in the small town of Marbach, which lies to the north east of Württemberg's capital, Stuttgart. His boyhood was unremarkable until Karl Eugen intervened directly in his life and obliged him against his and his parents' wishes to leave home and become a pupil at the Duke's military academy, the so-called ‘Karlsschule’. The rigidity of life at the academy, the constant supervision, the suppression of the pupils' creative impulses and the detailed oversight maintained by the Duke himself were decisive in developing Schiller's life-long preoccupation with individual autonomy and the exercise of freedom.

Though not a small state by comparison with the many petty principalities that made up the Holy Roman Empire in the eighteenth century, Württemberg was something of a political backwater. In its vulnerable position between France and Austria it had suffered greatly in the previous century, first in the Thirty Years War and later from the incursions of foreign armies. In the eighteenth century the rulers of Württemberg tried to avoid foreign conflicts and allow the country to recover.