Community and Forest Management in A. W. Iffland's Die Jäger

Abstract

August Wilhelm Iffland (1759–1814) was one of the Age of Goethe’s most prolific playwrights and gifted actors.1 His portrayal of Franz Moor in Friedrich Schiller’s Die Räuber (1782) cemented his popularity across Germany. He sustained his fame with the role of the Oberförster in his own drama Die Jäger (1785), which Goethe selected to inaugurate the Weimar Court Theater in 1791. Die Jäger, like many of Iffland’s melodramas, centers on a patriarch from the lower ranks who wants the best for his family. Audiences generally enjoyed his plays because of their sentimentality, but Iffland argued that social critique was a key part of his message. In the “Vorbericht an Schauspieler und Leser,” published with the play’s first version in 1785 and not reprinted until the twentieth-century Reclam edition, the playwright announces that the use of torture in legal proceedings is the key question of Die Jäger, and he requests that others in public administration send him additional cases in which excessive emotions led to conflict and punishments. While Iffland does not detail what he aims to achieve by entering into late eighteenth-century debates on torture, he claims that plays like his are useful to the state because they educate the public “wie gute Menschen durch Schwächen und Vorurteil sich das Leben verderben”