You go in for a mild-mannered classic and get something that intense. There are two scenes that shook me, enough to feel physically uncomfortable, to have to put down the book for a moment: Spiegelberg talking about the sacking of the Abbey in 2nd act, 3rd scene and Franz forcing old Daniel to promise him to kill "the count" in 4th act, 2nd scne. There is so much sickening unmitigated cruelty in both and both make so much sense in the context and for the characters ... Not easy to read, not at all, but oh so good.

Hab’s heute während meinen Deutsch Vorabi durchgelesen joaa

Ich wünschte ich könnte dem 0 Sterne geben, geht aber leider nicht

Not really my cup of tea. Schiller, like his buddy Goethe, has this Germanic sensibility that takes sentimentality and moral quandary into the bleakest corners. The Robbers is a play that shot Schiller to fame, influenced by and reminiscent of much in Shakespeare, but without the evocative language in the translation I read and somewhat disjointed in the presentation of information.

Old Count Moor had two sons, and neither one to his credit. Charles (or Karl in German) is the elder, a handsome rogue who lives like a party boy racking up debts in the city, to whom his father can’t say no. And Francis (Franz in German) who is called ugly by his father, a sniveling sneak who’s whole plan in life is to get rid of his father and brother and take over the keys to the kingdom. Forging a letter concerning Charles, Francis convinces his father to disinherit the first born. Upon finding out about his disinheritance and rejection by a beloved father, Charles decided to follow his friends bad advice and go on a blood soaked vengeance spree throughout the countryside. In the end, everything burns. Charles regrets his hotheadedness and Francis considers whether God might exist to judge him and everything burns to the ground.

Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) German romanticism is not my cup of tea. I can do a Greek tragedy or one by Shakespeare, but “stress literature” is not something I eagerly seek out, let alone think of in the school of romanticism. A good tragedy, possibly better told in the German, from a perspective that somehow manages to romanticize the death and destruction of villainy.