The Robbers: A Tragedy (original: Die Räuber: Ein Schauspiel) was written by Friedrich Schiller. Johann Christoph Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) was a brilliant writer and aesthetician who is commonly seen as Germany’s greatest dramatist. During the last decade of his life he was the dominant writer of German letters, and his mystique has only grown in the centuries since his death. The Robbers was the genesis of the räuberroman genre. It is also a readable and occasionally enjoyable play.

The Robbers is about Karl Moor, the passionate, headstrong son of the Count von Moor. Karl, a university student, is an idealist who loathes the modern, hypocritical, weak, effeminate and law-bound age and longs for the days of the epic past, when bold, manly heroes could forge their own successes: “The law has never yet made a great man, but freedom will breed a giant, a colossus.”¹ Unfortunately, Karl does not realize that his brother Franz hates him. Karl was the favorite of the Count their father, who always had scornful things to say about Franz (“the dry, commonplace, the cold, the wooden Franz”²) and who always esteemed Karl. Moreover, Franz was not born handsome, like Karl, but instead was born with “this burden of deformity...why should I have this Laplander’s nose? Why should I have these blackamoor’s lips, these Hottentot’s eyes?”³ Franz is filled with jealousy of Karl and greed for the Count’s holdings, and Franz forges a letter to the Count which speaks of Karl’s gambling, his dueling, his dishonoring women, and of a price set on Karl’s head. The aging Count is horror-struck at the damage which Karl is doing to the good name of the von Moors and wants to cut Karl off and withdraw his protection. But the Iago-like Franz cunningly persuades the Count to let Franz be the one to write the letter to Karl informing him off his father’s actions. Franz writes to Karl and tells him that the Count has disinherited him. Karl is disgusted with humanity because of this, and when his drinking mates suggest to him that they become a band of robbers, with Karl as their captain, he is pleased with the offer. Franz meanwhile tries to seduce Karl’s cousin and sweetheart Amalia, but when she sees through his tricks he tries to rape her. He fails at this as well; she draws his sword and holds him off. Franz then has Hermann, a servant, disguise himself and appear before the Count pretending to have served with Karl in the army during the recent war between Austria and Prussia. Hermann tells the Count that Karl was killed during the war, at the battle of Prague. The Count believes Hermann and is nearly killed by the news of his son’s death. This is Franz’s intent, and when he later tells Amalia that the Count is dead, she believes him. But Hermann feels qualms of conscience over what he has done and tells Amalia all. But the Count has vanished and Amalia is powerless to prevent Franz from seizing power. He quickly becomes a cruel tyrant to his people.

Karl and his gang rob many rich people and give a great deal of their captured wealth to the poor. But as they practice their trade they kill increasing numbers of people, and Karl feels increasingly bad about these deaths. He returns home in disguise. He chats with Amalia and finds that she still loves him, but when he is told about the Count’s death he is convinced that he killed his father, which adds to his guilt. But then Karl discovers his father, still alive but secretly imprisoned by Franz and drastically aged through starvation and sorrow. From his father Karl (still in disguise) discovers exactly what Franz did. Karl vows to attack the castle and kill Franz. But Franz, miserable with guilt, has met with a priest and been told that the parricide is the worst creature on earth, so when he is told that the robbers are storming the castle, he strangles himself. However, this victory brings Karl no happiness. When the castle is taken and the Count is freed, Karl reveals himself to his father, who then dies from the shock. Karl tries to run away with Amalia, but the robbers remind him of his pledge of faithfulness to them and then demand that Karl give them Amalia. Karl and Amalia argue. Amalia is supremely unhappy at finding out that the man she loves is a murdering bandit, and she has only scornful things to say to Karl. When the robbers demand that she be given to them, she asks the robbers to kill her rather than rape her. When one of them attempts to oblige her, Karl stops him and kills her himself: “Moor’s Amalia shall die by no other hand than Moor’s.”⁴ Now tired of his life, Karl decides to surrender himself to a poor peasant so that the peasant can gain the reward for Karl’s capture.

The Robbers’ enormous popularity spawned a number of imitations and essentially created the räuberroman, or “robber novel,” genre. The räuberroman was not wholly new. The concept was derived from medieval German myths and stories of Robin Hood and other similar figures. But The Robbers gave the idea of the noble bandit a modern gloss, which proved to be influential on authors (and artists) for over a century.

Die Räuber is the first of a large number of literary works based, in part, on robber bands of the time, of which the Buxen (1736-79) is perhaps the best-known. The historical reality of wild riders, ‘robber barons’, brigands, and bloodthirsty superannuated ex-mercenaries far exceeded the darkest imaginings of the average Gothic novelist. Robber bands were a reality of the time, especially in the Rhineland (where there was an epidemic of brigandage during the Gothic 1790s) and Black Forest areas of Germany and in the Abruzzo, Calabria and much of the Italian South. Some of the most celebrated Räuberromane reflect the impact of the exploits of real-life robbers such as Angelo Duca (1734-84, the model for the titular character of Rinaldo Rinaldini), Matthias Klostermayer (1738-71), and Johann Bückler (1777-1803) on the popular imagination. It is only the most lurid or supposedly ‘trivial’ Gothic novels that even begin to approach the everyday reality of murder, rape and robbery, and of legal systems that were, by later standards, completely inadequate.⁵

The Robbers is a play, rather than a novel. The standard version of The Robbers is the edition Schiller wrote, rather than the “acting edition” which was used when the play was staged, so that what is read is different from what was performed and has a different feel to it. So The Robbers can’t be reviewed in the same way that a novel would be reviewed. The Robbers was written in the eighteenth century, so the standards of judgment used for even early nineteenth century literature do not apply. And The Robbers was written in German, so there is the additional burden of translation which readers of The Robbers must bear in mind when judging the play.

All of that said, The Robbers is only moderately enjoyable. Schiller does pen the occasional good line or aphorism. Karl’s motivation is perhaps hard to credit, but Franz’s characterization, as someone tormented by greed and jealousy but also suffering from parental rejection and self-loathing, is given appropriate depth by Schiller and leaves Franz understandable, if not sympathetic. Franz is nicely Iago-like in his cunning and plots, but he has too much of a conscience and is too emotionally weak to match up to Shakespeare’s marvel of motiveless malignity. In his more expressive moments Franz speaks well of Milton’s Satan:

An intelligent mind, which neglects mean duties for a more exalted purpose, will be eternally unhappy, whereas the knave who has betrayed his friend and fled before his enemy ascends to Heaven, thanks to an opportune little sigh of repentance. Who would not prefer to roast in the furnace of Belial with Borgia and Catiline, rather than sit up above at table with that vulgar ass?⁶

But Franz is too human to completely imitate his idol, and knows pangs of guilt which Satan never could. He describes himself as “a howling Abbadona (see: The Messiah) among the flowers of a happy world,” and his despair eventually overwhelms his ambition.

But The Robbers also has its flaws. It is unavoidable that a play will seem stagy, and criticizing a play for seeming stagy is perhaps misguided, but there are plays, even ones much older than The Robbers, which have a more vital and less affected and artificial feel to them than The Robbers. The dialogue and monologues are for the most part dated and formal. The characterization of Karl and Amalia are overblown, as is the language.

But what is most likely to hamper the modern reader’s enjoyment of The Robbers is the extreme breast-thumping emotion which the characters suffer from and describe at length, the endless ventings of emotional torment and melancholy which Schiller graces the audiences with. This heightened state is typical of the Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement. This movement, which was dominant in Germany during the 1770s, privileged the noble genius, lyricism, emotion over rationalism, emotional suffering, a commitment to social justice, liberty, and attempts at realism. Movement writers embraced the idea of Sensibility (see: The Gothic, The Mysteries of Udolpho), or receptiveness to feelings and superiority of emotions to rationalism, and took it to extremes as a reaction against Enlightenment rationalism. The writers of the Sturm und Drang celebrated the misunderstood genius, a man of passion and power, who obeyed his emotions and longings in defiance of supposedly suffocating, materialistic society and the law. The Robbers is a late example of the movement, written toward its end but not published until several years after composition.

In their time the works and writers of the movement were important and influential, but many aspects of the Sturm und Drang texts have aged poorly. The most dated and least enjoyable aspects are the violent outbursts of overstated, over-the-top emotion which the suffering, self-pitying, too-noble-for-this-world genius gives vent to. (Picture Hamlet’s monologues, only with more excessive hair tearing, purpler prose, and shriller, more apoplectic sentiments). The Robbers was enormously popular when it debuted, but Karl Moor’s emotional torments, described at length in the play, are unlikely to move the modern reader to anything except irritation.

An only slightly less irritating aspect of The Robbers is its portrayal of Karl Moor. Writers of the Sturm und Drang movement exalted the idea of the genius. The writers were themselves often called genies, or “geniuses,” and the 1770s, the decade of the Sturm und Drang, was called the Geniezeit, or “the genius years.” This privileging of the genius was not new to the movement, but the movement writers went farther than their predecessors in glorifying the genius. Movement writers stated that the genius transcended traditional rules, whether social or artistic. In The Sorrows of Young Werther Goethe wrote, “say what you will of rules, they destroy the genuine feeling of nature, as well as its true expression.”⁷

For the most part The Robbers agrees with this idea. Karl feels repressed by the materialism of the middle class and the effete, repressive politesse of German society and longs for more heroic times, and says so, vehemently and at length. Schiller’s audience responded to this message. The 1782 performances of The Robbers caused pandemonium, near riots, and made women faint. The show roused such emotion in its audience that it was banned after its second performance in Leipzig in 1782 and many young men took to the forests to live the life of banditry in imitation of Karl.

But the modern reader lives in a considerably different society from Schiller’s contemporary audience and is likely to react to Karl not with a desire to imitate, but with an urge to condemn. The notion that genius, and genius alone, sets a person above the laws of society as well as art will, human nature being what it is, inevitably lead to men and women who, like Picasso and Dali, go through the world like an open razor, to quote Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck. They may produce great art, but the cost in human suffering is by no means worth it.

Interestingly, Schiller understood this. His audience was meant to want to forgive Karl his crimes. But The Robbers conveys the idea that Karl does not deserve forgiveness. Karl Moor is a wanker. He is a noble, misunderstood genius. But Schiller also showed why such a figure is often not a salutary one, and that complete freedom has its price. Karl comes much too late to the realization that his acts, his self-appointed war on society, the robbery and rape and murder which he and his gang have committed, are not justified by his good intentions. Karl emotionally suffers for the lives lost, but he is responsible for those the acts which loses those lives. Knowing what will happen, he still sets fire to a city in order to rescue a friend who has been condemned for death. Karl hates the repressive, materialistic German society and its weak, vigorless people, and seeks to live heroically outside the trammels of the law, but his chosen course of action is to live as a thief, not as a hero, and he ultimately causes as much or more suffering as the society he loathed.

Print: Friedrich Schiller, The Robbers and Wallenstein, transl. F.J. Lamport. New York: Penguin Books, 1980.

Patrick Bridgwater, The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013.

¹ Friedrich Schiller, The Robbers and Wallenstein, transl. by F.J. Lamport (New York: Penguin, 1980), 36.

² Schiller, The Robbers and Wallenstein, 29.

³ Schiller, The Robbers and Wallenstein, 33.

⁴ Schiller, The Robbers and Wallenstein, 158.

⁵ Bridgwater, The German Gothic Novel, 171-172.

⁶ Qtd. in Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony (New York: Meridian Books, 1956), 56-57.

⁷ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther. Elective Affinities, transl. R.D. Boylan (Boston: F.A. Nicolls & Co., 1902), 12.