KARL MOOR'S FAILED REVOLUTION: RADICAL CRITIQUE AND MODERATE POLITICS IN SCHILLER'S DIE RÄUBER

Abstract

Recent scholarship tends to agree that Die Räuber is a play about two rebels, Karl and Franz Moor, who respectively represent the idealist and materialist strands of Enlightenment thought. What is often overlooked, however, is the brothers’ desire not merely to rebel against the status quo but also to establish new systems of authority. This article argues that Schiller's Die Räuber is primarily concerned with the problem of revolution. More than a mere rebel figure, Karl Moor seeks to replace the top-down system of authority based on the power of the law with a bottom-up system of power based on consent; similarly, Franz seeks to invert the top-down structure of law-based ethics with an egoistic system of behaviour based on desires. The drama reveals both revolutionary attempts to be doomed to failure, for neither bottom-up systems are able to escape the violence of necessity that govern all authority systems. Ultimately, the politics of Die Räuber is paradoxical: it evinces both the need for radical social transformation and the acknowledgement that such transformations are impossible. In the end, the reader is left to contemplate the gap between our desire for utopia and the limits of material reality.