Friedrich Schiller wrote the “Ode to Joy” that Beethoven set to music, created some of the greatest plays in the German language, and formed the most celebrated literary friendship in history with Goethe. He also spent years as a fugitive after his first play so enraged the Duke of Wurttemberg that he banned Schiller from writing. And when authorities opened his tomb decades after burial, they found the wrong body inside — launching a two-century forensic mystery.

This episode traces Schiller from his medical school rebellion through the fugitive years, the friendship with Goethe, the plays and poems that defined German Romanticism, and the empty tomb that became one of literary history’s strangest unsolved cases.

• Schiller’s military academy education and the premiere of The Robbers that made him a fugitive
• The years of flight, poverty, and the illness that plagued him for the rest of his short life
• The friendship with Goethe and the extraordinary creative partnership it produced
• The “Ode to Joy,” his death at forty-five, and the forensic mystery of his missing remains