Schiller’s "The Robbers" in the theatre of the 20th century between historicity and up-to-dateness

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Nina Birkner
• Subject Area: Theatre and Media Studies ; German Literary and Cultural Studies (Modern German Literature)
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 497095340

The effective history of Schiller’s "The Robbers" in the German theatre of the 20th century is still waiting to be systematically reviewed. A reason for this desideratum can be easily pinned down: most of the relevant sources are filed up in theatre collections as well as archives and are, therefore, only hard to access, while a larger part of this material is located at the Berlin Academy of Arts (AdK). The project to be presented here aims at filling the desideratum just sketched.For this purpose, it is, first, envisaged to develop a monographic inquiry that provides a historical survey concerning the performances‘ history of Schiller’s drama by means of analyzing paradigmatic stage productions of "The Robbers". At the center lies the question of how the directors, actors and producers have dealt with the tension between the text’s historicity and the up-to-dateness of the actual performance, on a content-based and thematic as well as on a theater-aesthetic level. Moreover, it is planned to investigate the relevant performances from the perspective of their reception history; this is done in order to clarify how critics locate these performances between the priorities of historicity and up-to-dateness, more concretely, inhowfar they consider these performances to be current contributions to political, socio-cultural and/or aesthetic debates within their period of time. In a concluding step, the previously selected theatre productions will be examined from a field-theoretical perspective. This is relevant for reasonably elaborating on the highly pertinent question of how directors locate themselves within the context of their contemporary theatre scene in order to establish and argue for a link between theatre's 'social structure' and its aesthetic forms.Second and additionally, Erwin Piscator‘s promptbooks for productions in 1926 (Berlin) and 1957 (Mannheim) having set the benchmark of staging "The Robbers" will be published for the first time plus a comprehensive commentary to turn these important documents more accessible to further research. While the first of these performances elicited the debate about the „death of the classic“ by radically updating the material, the second one is described by contemporary critics as being broadly ‚faithful to the text‘. In referring to these two productions it is possible to work out the tension between historicity and up-to-dateness that is constitutive of every performance of a classic.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants