[In the following essay, Leidner notes that Die Räuber, Schiller's hugely successful first play, was and is so popular because of the charisma of the protagonist, Karl Moor, and because of the emotional ritual created in a work where the audience takes vicarious pleasure in identifying with a murderer.]

When Friedrich von Schiller, a twenty-two year old cadet at the Hohe Karlsschule in Stuttgart, went A.W.O.L. to attend the first performance of Die Räuber (1781), he could hardly have been disappointed with the response. “No play,” wrote one reviewer, “has ever had such an effect in the German theatre”¹; and another: “The theatre was like a madhouse, full of rolling eyes, clenched fists, stomping feet, and hoarse cries!”² There were, of course, also negative reactions, but his first drama was a sensation, and further productions—as well as imitations—in the 1780s testified to the fact that the work had hit a responsive chord with the German public. Surprisingly, the theme for Die Räuber was not very different from a number of other plays of the previous decade, often with violent protagonists who, like Schiller's Karl Moor, wildly expressed their frustrations with society. What, then, made Die Räuber so different from the storm and stress of Leisewitz, Klinger, and other dramatists of the 1770s whose work more often than not overwhelmed, rather than entertained audiences? I propose that the answer to this question lies in Schiller's sensitivity to the kind of group dynamics that, given Germany's social and political underdevelopment, was needed to improve the German theatre, and that his key innovation was to give his hero, Karl Moor, charisma. While theories of charismatic leadership do not catch up to Schiller until our own century, the principle of social unification through charisma is a neglected tradition of German classical humanism with its origins in Winckelmann's theories of Greek sculpture.

By the second half of the eighteenth century, Germany's centuries-old problem of political disunity had developed into the more subtle one of national identity. Among literary genres, drama suffered most acutely from this state of affairs, and it was drama that was in most need of attention. Certainly every dramatist must, by definition, deal in rituals that celebrate a culture, but the German dramatist had first to come to terms with his country's weak national self-image. He was faced with, above and beyond the usual demands of his craft, the task of creating a German public out of thin air. Given these facts. it is not hard to see why so many dramas of the 1770s failed to inspire the general public. Storm and stress faithfully reflected its public's dissatisfactions with the age and, in figures like Goethe's Götz, Leisewitz's Guido, Klinger's Guelfo, and Wagner's Evchen, tended to depict frustration without pointing the way toward psychological release. But Schiller, more than any other German dramatist before him, was aware that the tensions reflected by storm and stress were rooted in the social and political helplessness of the middle class and, especially, in Germany's lack of a healthy national identity. In his 1784 essay, “Die Schaubühne als moralische Anstalt betrachtet” (“The Theatre as a Moral Institution”), he proposed that a public and its theatre might simultaneously improve each other: “When we have a national theater, he argues, “then we will also have a nation.”³ He is, moreover, aware that Germany's lack of a closely-knit community with a unified and positive self-image was not just an intellectual, but also an emotional, problem.

“When a thousand burdens press on our soul and threaten to dampen our emotional susceptibilities,” he wrote, the stage welcomes us: in this artificial world we can dream the real world away; we are given ourselves again; our sensitivity awakens, healing passions shake our slumbering selves, and our blood is made to flow more vigorously. (8, p. 106)

The right kind of drama, in Schiller's opinion, holds the promise to “give us ourselves” as it liberates us from tensions that have been inhibiting our self-realization.

Contemporary theories of catharsis suggest, in fact, that Schiller's association of self-realization with discharge of tension may have been perfectly accurate. Although there has never been a consensus on what Aristotle meant by katharsis, in its most common interpretation—the one made popular by Freud's brother-in-law Bernays—it is a beneficial release of emotion that had formerly been impossible due to an inability to respond to a difficult situation. The specific beneficial effects of emotional discharge are equally controversial, but one twentieth-century school of cathartic therapy has advanced a theory of catharsis with fascinating implications for explaining the attraction of drama like Die Räuber. These psychologists—including T. J. Scheff, Percival Symonds, Michael Nichols, and Melvin Zax—maintain that catharsis is the most efficient approach to problems associated with a community's identity. Scheff writes: “The feelings of relief from tension, increased clarity of thought, and heightened fellow-feeling which follow collective catharsis give rise to extremely powerful forces of cohesion and group solidarity”⁴; and Nichols and Zax: “Aristotle's concept of catharsis is not simply a passive intellectual exercise. The shock of emotional arousal helps to rearrange perceptions and so leads to a modification of the audience's self-concept and world-view.”⁵ Emotional discharge, writes Percival Symonds, cures nothing in and of itself, but the dissolution of tension that it brings about can lead to “a change in the perception of the self” and, subsequently, “greater self-acceptance.”⁶ People, write Nichols and Zax, need only to be given “permission to experience their feelings” (p. 59) and, given the right conditions, there will follow a release of tension, an unburdening of frustrations, and a chance to take a new look at themselves.

When Schiller speculates on the self-realization that the right kind of theatre can make possible, he is not theorizing in a vaccuum; he is, of course, thinking of the function that drama was able to perform in France, where the writer, with a developed and settled society to work with, could be a flatterer of his nation's established ideals. The French theatregoer could feel himself part of an exclusive “in-group” whose members felt cultivated enough to appreciate and understand things that would leave the uninitiated cold. France woed the possibility of such socially invigorating group dynamics largely to the aristocracy, who had actively nurtured an indigenous French culture. But how different was the situation in eighteenth-century Germany, where the only aristocratic house in a position to unify the country had no interest in native German culture. The typical Prussian aristocrat's self-image and cultural values did not derive from German society and its traditions, but, rather, from his identification with other European nobility. The young Prussian nobleman completed his education by travelling to foreign courts in an attempt to shed as much of his Germanness as possible, then returned to rule a people with whom he was determined not to identify. Ironically, the only unity that the upper classes were in a position to contribute to Germany was the inadvertent one of providing a negative foil for middle-class virtue. Nonetheless, while a drama like Lessing's Emilia Galotti (1772) could begin to tap one source of pride by contrasting the unprincipled German aristocrat to the “good” bourgeois, its effect on German national self-consciousness was only a beginning. Emilia Galotti was not yet an emotionally liberating ritual that would allow its German public to “clear the air” as it reconsidered its view of itself. Decentralized Germany, without a well-knit social fabric and a corps of flattering writers, had not yet discovered an invigorating ingroup ritual that could make it feel like a nation.

Schiller, Germany's most avid proponent of the notion that art can mold society, triggered Die Räuber's liberating catharsis of self-realization by causing Karl Moor to be perceived as a charismatic leader, a role which, according to modern social psychology, always involves coaxing a particularly depressed collectivity into accepting constructive self-flattery. In the original Greek, kharisma refers to the grace, or favor, which a God can bestow on a human, and in the New Testament it is used to denote the gift of God's grace. But in the eighteenth century, charisma was becoming recognized more for its socializing properties. When, in 1764, Johann Winckelmann praised his favorite Greek sculpture—the so-called Beautiful Style which he ascribes to the Alexandrian Age—he claims that the qualities distingishing it from earlier sculpture were its “grace” and the impression that it was a “gift of god.”⁷ The Apollo Belvedere, his favorite example of the Beautiful Style, possessed a “more than common soul” that made it “lead us willingly along with it” (5, p. 215). It is clear from Winckelmann's description of his first encounter with the Apollo Belvedere that he sees in his favorite sculpture a human stance or pose that can inspire, admonish, and coax spectators to take pride in the ideals it represents while building their sense of dignity: “In the presence of this miracle of art I forget all else, and I myself take a lofty position for the purpose of looking upon it in a worthy manner. My breast seems to enlarge and swell with reverence.”⁸

In modern usage, charisma has come to denote a special quality of leadership. Irvine Schiffer writes that a charismatic individual does not “carve out his own public image from ingredients of his own personality”; rather, society projects such an image onto a suitable person.⁹ A society searches for the charismatic individual, writes Schiffer, just as it would search for its own sense of self: when we search for the charismatic leader, we are on a “quest for identity.” (p. 21) His success provides us with a “short-cut to an identity, a quick solution to the agonizing problems of maturation.” (p. 51) While Schiller cannot provide his society with an actual leader, he can create a protagonist to provide it with a form of relief from its own problems of identity—and perhaps even hint at directions his public may someday be able to take in order to build a unified community. So that he may win over his audience, Karl is given qualities that no other raging anti-hero of storm and stress ever possessed: vision, imagination, and “great plans.” (II. iii) The robbers, who immediately recognize Karl's charisma, recruit him for his ability to pull them together into an effective group with a positive self-image. By giving convincing expression to their righteous indignation, he makes the actions of misfits poignantly appropriate, makes outsiders feel like insiders, and makes crime feel divinely inspired. “Without Moor,” exclaims Roller, “we are body without soul” (I. ii). And Schweizer, who has been given the honor of avenging Karl's father, declares: “Today you have made me proud for the first time” (IV. v). Karl's charisma, which inspires the band despite its criminal violence, infects Die Räuber's audience as well, a group to whom Schiller appeals as to a public reaching out for a better understanding of itself. Karl, after all, is a spirited hero who successfully turns an impeccable but rudely disappointed moral life into a battle cry, who dares to act vigorously on behalf of the vital, if invisible, principles of his religious background. Schiller's audience, on whom history had not bestowed a social and political tradition with which it could proudly identify, was still in possession of a vital moral heritage, and here was just the hero to bring it into relief. Karl leads Schiller's public to live vicariously a role denied to it by a religious tradition that tended to capitulate in the vainglorious affairs of the worldly life in order to be masters of the inner life. Identifying with this robber captain, the audience is flattered into envisioning that it constitutes a special in-group capable of appreciating Karl's point of view. What I am suggesting, then, is that Schiller's first play is a moral fantasy that allowed an otherwise respectable middle-class audience to luxuriate in its capacity to appreciate the acts of a horribly violent man. And in giving the public an opportunity for vicarious criminality, it also let them discharage their frustrations with a society that had—along with other political inequities—let the needs of national identity go unanswered.

Through the magic of its protagonist's charisma, Die Räuber offers an audience—or, rather, this special audience whose strengths are not social but religious—a standard around which it can rally, and for which it can be flattered. But a dicussion of Karl Moor's charisma is not complete without mentioning its inauthentic side. We remember that the process that makes this play's spectators feel like a society is analogous to the same process Karl uses to infuse pride into a band of murderers. Irvine Schiffer finds in all followers of charismatic leaders unacknowledged complicity in a scheme that helps the group avert attention from their worst shortcomings. In order better to flatter us for our stengths, in other words, charisma draws attention away from our weaknesses. As a “victory for our jeopardized self-esteem,” charisma is therefore also “an uplift from the depression and helplessness that would infiltrate our awareness, expose our limitations, and force us into a recognition of all those failures that we find most difficult to reconcile” (Schiffer 50). For both the robbers and Schiller's first auditors, an inspiring sense of social unity was built on a comfortable self-deception made possible by the “grace” of charismatic flattery. As it succumbed to the pleasurable sensation of a communal life in the theatre, Schiller's spectators let themselves be blinded to the contradiction inherent in accepting a multiple murderer as a hero—and in the belief that their vicarious indulgence in anti-social behavior constituted a viable social foundation.

Still, Schiller's achievement was remarkable. Despite the sharp discontinuity between the communal feeling inspired by Karl's charimsa and the sad realities of German life, Die Räuber is, in the last analysis, the work of a master dramatist who knew how to create an appropriate emotional ritual for his audience. After a decade of dramatists whose rebellious heroes had realistically reflected a non-society's own frustrations, here was a writer to provide a release by inviting his public to project on a hero the invigorating flattery of Winckelmann's Apollo Belvedere. “Strangers,” states one account of Die Räuber's premiere, “fell, sobbing, into each others’ arms.” (Buchwald, p. 352) The sense of community that he successfully created in the theatre—however brief and by whatever means it had been purchased—was Schiller's gift to a nation searching for itself.

Notes

1. Julius W. Braun, Schiller und Goethe im Urtheile ihrer Zeitgenossen, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Schlicke, 1882), p. 23. Translations are my own.

2. Reinhard Buchwald, Schiller, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Insel, 1937), p. 352.

3. Friedrich Schiller, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 8 (Berlin: Aufbau, 1955), p. 105.

4. T. J. Scheff, Catharsis in Healing, Ritual and Drama (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), p. 53.

5. Michael P. Nichols and Melvin Zax, Catharsis in Psychotherapy (New York: Gardiner Press, 1971), p. 59.

6. Percival Symonds, “A Comprehensive Theory of Psychotherapy.” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 24 (1954), pp. 707-08.

7. J. J. Winckelmann, Johann Winckelmanns sämtliche Werke, vol. 5, edited by Joseph Eiselein (Osnabrück: Zeller, 1965), p. 221.

8. J. J. Winckelmann, History of Ancient Art, vol. 2, translated by G. Henry Lodge (Boston: Osgood, 1880), p. 313.

9. Irvine Schiffer, Charisma: A Psychoanalytic Look at Mass Society (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973), p. 19.