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  • Robbers, Readers, and Security:Christian August Vulpius and the Art of Mass Appeal
  • Gail Hart

Jedem Schrecknis der Natur ist der Mensch überlegen, sobald er ihm Form zu geben und in sein Objekt zu verwandeln weiss.

(Schiller, "Über die ästhetische Erziehung" VIII, 656)

German robber fiction of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries recommended itself primarily as a source of reading pleasure, and it has been of interest mainly to scholars who are concerned with reading pleasure, the roots of reading pleasure, and the social needs embedded in the texts that give readers pleasure. A sizeable body of work, including many dissertations, treats these Räuberromane individually and as an aggregate in terms of their relationship to historical reality, their function within the wider category of what some call Trivialliteratur, and the biographical quirks of their authors, usually portrayed as vicarious actors or even cynical marketers. This artilce will review these three categories in order to outline our present understanding of robber fiction in the absolutist German territories and then suggest some further utility of the genre on the example of Christian August Vulpius's well-known Rinaldo Rinaldini der Räuber Hauptmann (1799) and other related texts. In addition to addressing history or current events and providing entertainment and moral instruction, these tales and novels worked to instill a stronger sense of security in the historical subjects who formed their readership. Schiller once noted that his Die Räuber had not made the highways any safer, and the same can be said of Rinaldo Rinaldini and its generic fellows. However, where Schiller's play foregrounded the dramatic family tragedy, most robber fiction featured much more emphasis on robbers robbing and otherwise plying their trade, decrying the profession while admiring the professionals. Robbers were a fact of life in the German territories at the time, and the more distinct references to their profession in the fiction raised both general and specific questions of danger, the assessment of danger, and security – questions that the authors of robber novels explored in their portrayals of admirable, often contemplative robbers. Again, Schiller serves as an illustration with his Verbrecher aus Infamie, where he sought to make murder intelligible to his bourgeois readers by following the development of the murderer. The deep psychological portrait offered in that piece goes beyond the [End Page 318] portrayals in the novels that followed – Die Räuber appeared in 1781; Verbrecher in 1786; and what is widely acknowledged to be the first German robber novel, Heinrich Zschokke's Abaellino der große Bandit, was first published in 1793 – but in true Schillerian fashion Die Räuber evokes wider issues of crime, human nature, and human understanding. The fiction at issue was more narrowly constructed to elicit identificatory or empathic reading that imparted a sense of security without addressing the deeper causes of crime. Feelings of security are only part of a larger context for these works, and this analysis will return to this aspect after reviewing the context.

In the matter of documented historical reality and robber fiction's resemblance to it, debates about the actual existence of Robin Hoods or Sozialbanditen were extensive. But the currently prevailing opinion is that there were few if any noble robbers in the German territories outside of lending libraries. Eric Hobsbawm's work on the socially critical character of banditry and robbers as primitive revolutionaries cannot be validated for the German tradition, as Uwe Danker ("Bandits and the State") and others have shown. Matthias Klostermayer, "der Bayrische Hiesel," and other successful poachers or Wilddiebe may be cited as the rare exceptions, though their status is not beyond question. They tended to protect the farmers' crops from wanton destruction or consumption by the local lord's game animals while enriching themselves – and thus either as a side effect of self-interested action or as an intended consequence of defiance and altruism they were annoying the rich and relieving the less rich. Furthermore, where the nobility were not popular, defiance of their laws must have been agreeable, but this defiance, except in poaching, rarely took the form of stealing directly from the local lords. Rulers were not immediately threatened by these lawbreakers – except...

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