Die Räuber (The Robbers)

Franz, the second-born son, feels cheated of his father's favor and seeks revenge. He plots against his older, favored brother Karl, who is subsequently disowned by his father. Hurt by his father's rejection, Karl joins a gang of robbers to fight against social injustice.

While Karl advocates for individual freedom and emancipation from the tyrannical state, Franz reveals the dark side of the quest for power. The situation spirals out of control, and the struggle for individual freedom becomes the catalyst for a relentless campaign of destruction. Hatred, self-centeredness, and unbridled violence take over.

When Schiller's play The Robbers premiered at the Nationaltheater Mannheim on January 13, 1782, the audience reacted with verve. Schiller's new stage tone was fast-paced, eloquent, and irreverent.

"The theater resembled a madhouse: rolling eyes, clenched fists, stamping feet, hoarse cries from the audience! Strangers fell into each other's arms, sobbing. Women staggered to the door, almost fainting. There was a general dissolution, as if in chaos, from whose mists a new creation emerges!"

At the Deutsches Theater, director Claudia Bossard had already explored the connection between family and violence in the bourgeois milieu in her celebrated premiere of Rainald Goetz's Baracke. By reading Schiller's famous classic as a historical document of mentality, she continues her examination of German bourgeois society and explores the interplay of art, ethics and politics in the terror of the fortress family.