The Schiller Institute is working around the world to defend the rights of all humanity to progress –material, moral and intellectual. It is named after Friedrich Schiller, the great 18th-century German poet and playwright, whose works have inspired republican opposition to oligarchic tyranny worldwide.
In America, the Institute, a non-profit corporation headquartered in Washington, D.C., was founded in May 1984. The Schiller Institute is also established in Australia, Canada, Russia, Denmark, Germany, France, Italy, Poland, Slovakia, Sweden, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, and has a growing influence in Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
Helga Zepp LaRouche, the founder of the Schiller Institute internationally, is also Chairman of its Board of Directors in the United States. A German citizen, Mrs. Zepp LaRouche is wife of Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., statesman and economist, who, with his wife, is a true citizen of the world, in Schiller’s sense. In her Founding Message for the American Schiller Institute, in 1984, Chairman Helga Zepp LaRouche outlined the Institute’s objectives as follows:
The clock of mankind has advanced to a point where the old lackluster ways will no longer work. According to all established criteria, mankind has gambled away all its chances for survival. Too many catastrophes are crowding in upon us, the entropic process has proceeded too far and the rift between the U.S.A. and Western Europe is all but accomplished.
For precisely this reason, we are founding the Schiller Institute. We do so not only because there is a vacuum we need to fill with institutions willing to revive the spirit of the American Revolution and the German classical period. We are founding the Schiller Institute because Schiller’s special method of approaching world-historical problems is the only one which can still bring about a solution today. The kernel of this method can be defined in Schiller’s own words: Man is greater than his fate. Even if the objective situation looks almost hopeless and desperate, we, like Schiller, are sure that a courageous spirit and human reason will always be able to find the higher level where the problems are solvable….
The Schiller Institute will work for this perspective. You, dear citizens of America, are called upon to help in this process. We can win, but. as Schiller stated, ‘world history is the world’s court of justice!’