Die Räuber (The Robbers) was first published anonymously by Tobias Löffler in Stuttgart in 1781 and premiered at the National Theatre in Mannheim on January 13, 1782. Schiller was twenty-two. The performance created a sensation — audience members reportedly fainted, strangers embraced in the aisles, and the play’s success was so immediate and so explosive that it made Schiller both famous and a fugitive (he fled his patron, Duke Karl Eugen of Württemberg, who had forbidden him to write).
Karl Moor is the noble brother: idealistic, passionate, betrayed by his father (who has been tricked by the villainous younger brother, Franz, into disinheriting Karl). Expelled from family and society by Franz’s machinations, Karl becomes the leader of a band of robbers in the Bohemian forests — criminals, yes, but criminals who attack only the wealthy and corrupt, who redistribute to the poor, who represent (Karl believes) a higher justice than the law provides.
Franz Moor is the villain: physically slight, intellectually brilliant, utterly without moral feeling. He manipulates his father into rejecting Karl, imprisons the old man, pursues Karl’s beloved Amalia, and justifies everything through a philosophy of pure self-interest that anticipates Nietzsche by a century. He is the Enlightenment’s dark twin: reason liberated from conscience, intelligence without love.
The play’s devastating conclusion demolishes Karl’s idealism: revolutionary violence, however nobly motivated, inevitably destroys innocent lives. Karl, forced to kill the woman he loves to free his comrades from a rash promise, recognizes that his rebellion has made him not a liberator but a murderer — and surrenders to justice.
Collecting Die Räuber
First edition (Tobias Löffler, Stuttgart, 1781): Published anonymously. Extremely rare.
Market values:
- First edition (1781): $5,000–$20,000+ (museum-quality rarity)
- Early nineteenth-century editions: $100–$500
- First English translation (Tytler, 1792): $500–$2,000
- Modern scholarly editions: $15–$40
One of the landmarks of German literature and a founding text of European romanticism. Original first editions are institutional-level rarities.