Schiller’s Die Räuber: “Der Ort der Geschichte ist Teutschland”

Friedrich Schiller’s Theatre as a moral institution from 1784, in which he presented himself as an advocate of ‘national theatre’, did inspire many dramatists. Schiller’s theoretical reflections were preceded by his play The Robbers (1781). In her analysis of both text and performances, Kati Röttger not only critically reflects upon the topical debate on nationalism and what she terms ‘a national hype’, but illustrates that the performance history of The Robbers teaches us that one and the same text can offer a multiple set of visions of the (national) past. The performances of the play reviewed by Röttger stress the particular ambivalence that haunts the idea of the nation. Instead of affirming a stable ‘origin’ of something that can be called a German nation, they highlight the cultural temporality of the nation that inscribes a more transitional social reality.