"It's a pretty silly, awful play, this Robbers that Schiller, our Schiller, wrote when he was 19 or 20 years old. What doesn't happen in it? The old Count Moor is presented with a fake letter from his son Karl, and already the old Moor is ready and willing to disinherit and curse his son. No sooner has the son heard that he has been disinherited than Karl Moor gives up his former life and allows himself to be elected captain of the robbers instead of seeking out his father and having a few sensible words with him. No sooner has he joined the robbers than Franz wants to kill his father in an intelligent way, again with a fake message that Karl Moor has been killed in battle. He hopes that the shock will kill his father. But no! Unfortunately! The father is not dead, he is only unconscious, and Karl, the scoundrel, has the unconscious man, who is still alive, carried away and placed in a coffin. Terrible! It's pure kitsch! But old Moor is rescued from the coffin. 
He can still live for a while. What is happening here! (...) Kitsch triumphs, trivial literature at every turn and everything that is worst in trivial literature, people cannot even recognize themselves. Old Moor can't recognize his son Karl, maybe he's senile, but young Amalie, the pretty young woman, Karl's bride, he comes in disguise and she can't recognize her groom either. What's all this nonsense, it never ends. (...) Ladies and gentlemen, it is utter nonsense, accompanied by chatter the likes of which has never been heard before. Schiller protests through Karl Moor against the “ink-stained secular age” – not a bad turn of phrase, God knows! But he, Schiller, represents the ink-blotting secular age; he can't even hold the ink. There is endless chatter and swearing here. (...) In short: a work of trivial literature, a miserable, foolish, shameful piece. Ridiculous and silly. – But I must confess that I love it." 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           Marcel Reich-Ranicki

In her acclaimed premiere of Rainald Goetz's Baracke at the DT, director Claudia Bossard explored the connection between family and violence in the bourgeois milieu. By reading Schiller's famous classic as a historical document of the mentality of the time, she continues her examination of German bourgeois society and explores the interplay of art, ethics, and politics in the terror of the family fortress.