He is the "rebel from Arcadia", the author of the lyrics to the modern European anthem, Ode to Joy, and a passionate champion of free spirits. But for some time Germany seemed to forget all about the man who was arguably the country's most famous Romantic thinker. Not any more. Friedrich von Schiller is back, along with a new fascination with his tumultuous love life.

Just as Britain has been rediscovering the attraction of its Romantics, after documentaries about Byron by actor Rupert Everett and the release of Bright Star, the new Jane Campion film about Keats, Germany is also enjoying a romantic revival. And the 250th anniversary of Schiller's birth has given scholars the chance to rediscover one of its most distinguished poets and philosophers.

A racy new film, Schiller, portrays the poet as a dashing, flame-haired womaniser, mixing high philosophy with simple lust, and dramatises his feverish search for recognition and success as an author.

Meanwhile, a string of biographies have revealed, among other things, that piano music and foul apples inspired Schiller to write, that a brothel visit probably triggered his first passionate scribblings ("Your glances, when they smile love, could stir marble to life"), and that the loves of his life were two aristocratic sisters to whom he penned a joint love letter.

Birgit Lahann, author of Schiller: Rebel from Arcadia, describes how the poet became the "pop star of his time" and a "cult throughout Germany": the author of Ode to Joy, which Beethoven set to music in the final movement of his Ninth Symphony, and of the plays Mary Stuart, The Maid of Orleans and Don Carlos. His charm lay as much in his disorganised, chaotic appearance as in his brilliance. "He was scruffily dressed and had unkempt hair," writes Lahann: a kind of 18th-century role model for high-minded rebellion.

But most intriguing of all is what she refers to as his "double-love" – "his relationship to two women which was the stuff of the best type of scandal".

Detailed in Volker Hage's book, From a Fireball to a Classic, is the "dare-devil" Schiller's erotic obsession focused on two sisters, Charlotte, 21, and Caroline von Lengefeld, 24, the latter of whom was unhappily married. Schiller, then 29, spent the summer with them in 1788 – "a summer which he so didn't want to end he dragged it out until November until the concerned mother of the young ladies told him it was time to go home," according to Hage.

Schiller, who died at 45 in May 1805, expressed his love to the women whom he referred to as "the angels of my life". The phrase was coined in a single letter in which he wrote: "To be able to live only in the two of you, and you in me – oh, that is an existence which would put us above all other humans." He eventually married the younger Charlotte and had four children with her. Schiller said the marriage brought him the "harmonious parity" he needed to be able to write.

Some of his love letters are on display in the newly reopened Schiller National Museum, located in his birthplace, Marbach in southern Germany. The museum boasts 700 exhibits, including a sample of the green wallpaper in his workroom that scientists have discovered contained lead, copper and arsenic that might have contributed to his chronic lung complaint and premature death.

Also on show are his shoe buckles, spoons and hand-warmers. Restored by the British-based David Chipperfield architects, the museum places on display everything from the writer's toothpicks to his blue-and-white-striped silk stockings.

The most disappointing aspect of the commemorations for enthusiasts – albeit a stark illustration of the lengths Schiller experts have been prepared to go to find out as much as possible about him – is the discovery that the skull that his great friend Goethe displayed on his desk, apparently believing it to be Schiller's, did not belong to him.

Extensive forensic investigation over years, costing tens of thousands of euros, including taking DNA samples from Schiller's descendants, has revealed that the skull is probably a fake.

Rüdiger Safranski, a Schiller expert, has delivered a fresh and touching account of the friendship between the two poets, and how they inspired each other, in Goethe and Schiller: History of a Friendship. The two men even composed poems together, despite the difficulties they had in reconciling their different daily rhythms – Goethe was a morning person, Schiller, because of the cramps he suffered at night, decidedly a nightbird. Goethe, he relates, was nonplussed at Schiller's insistence on maintaining a drawer full of rotten apples in his workroom, claiming he needed their decaying scent in order to be able to write.

The new Schiller revival, believes Safranski, may be a short-lived and bittersweet affair, in the best Romantic tradition. Safranski, who also wrote Romanticism – A German Affair, points to the nation's current mediocre capacity for the grandeur of Schiller's passions, observing: "From a romantic point of view, we've reached the end. Romanticism is dead, our sense of possibility is dried out."