ABSTRACT
In 1781 the 22 year-old field medic Friedrich Schiller sent the manuscript of his first play to the general director of the Mannheim National Theater. What was remarkable about this was not that The Robbers (Die Räuber) was in fact produced in the city of Mannheim (and in time became a classic), or even that its wild premiere resulted in a draconian gag order for the young playwright due to the play’s incendiary political implications. Most remarkable was the fact that such a thing as a national theater existed at all in the eighteenth century. Furthermore, Mannheim was not the first German city to boast of a national theater. Hamburg chartered the first Deutsches Nationaltheater in 1767, more than a century before Germany was incorporated as a modern nation-state. What can it have meant for a German playhouse to have been a national theater, and what were the implications of being national for the way these theaters operated?
