The Reytag – Two Eleventh of Septembers – 9/11 and Jeanne d'Arc
On the same calendar date, two hundred years apart, a celebrated theater premiere and a catastrophe cross paths. Both are stories about the courage to stand up against injustice.
A chorus of a thousand voices
On the evening of September 11, 1801, the Comödienhaus at the Rannische Bastei in Leipzig is packed to the rafters. On stage stands a shepherdess from Lorraine who transforms into a military commander; in the audience sits a gaunt man, long since marked by illness, who senses that he has few years left—and who, at this very moment, is experiencing the greatest theatrical triumph of his life. The reaction erupts after the very first act. Amidst the roll of drums and the beat of kettledrums, a chorus of a thousand voices rises up—or so witnesses recount—shouting, "Long live Friedrich Schiller!" When the poet later leaves the theater, the crowd steps aside reverently; fathers lift their children high so they might catch a glimpse of the man who has just gifted Germany a new "Romantic tragedy."
The play is titled *The Maid of Orleans*, and it tells the story of Joan—the peasant daughter who, in the midst of the Hundred Years' War, sets out to liberate her occupied, humiliated country. Schiller had struck a nerve. Voltaire, the great Enlightenment thinker, had exposed the historical Joan of Arc to ridicule in an obscene narrative poem; now, of all people, a German stepped forward to rehabilitate the French heroine, rescuing her from mockery and restoring her lost dignity. In doing so, Schiller handled the historical record with creative freedom—even taking bold liberties. The historical Joan was burned at the stake as a heretic in Rouen in 1431, following a show trial whose injustice still leaps from the records today. Schiller, however, denies his heroine the stake. In his version, Johanna breaks her chains in the final act, rushes back to the battlefield, and dies—transfigured—at the moment of victory. "Brief is the pain, and eternal the joy"—with these words, she expires.
For Schiller’s Johanna is not a flawless heroine. Her greatness reveals itself precisely in her moments of doubt: when she confronts the English commander Lionel and finds herself unable to kill him because her heart is stirred, she becomes entangled in guilt, falls silent, and is cast out. Only at the end, facing death, does she find her way back to herself and shatter her chains. The courage Schiller envisions is thus not the fearlessness of a fanatic, but a hard-won fidelity to oneself—a courage that has been forged through the crucible of inner conflict.
The Human Being Who Wills
Why this bold change? Because Schiller was not a chronicler, but a philosopher of the will. *The Maid of Orléans* is not fundamentally about war, nor even about France, but about courage—or more precisely, about that inner freedom which cannot be broken even when overwhelming physical force crushes everything in its path. In his treatise *On the Sublime*, Schiller encapsulated this idea in a famous formula: "Everything else must; the human being is the creature that wills." Nature, violence, death—they can coerce, crush, and annihilate a person. What they cannot do is force them to give their consent. In the experience of the sublime, according to Schiller, a person discovers that something dwells within them that is greater than any threat: the moral freedom to say "no." The tragedy presents a hero who is physically defeated yet morally unconquered. Joan falls—but she does not yield. That is the core of the matter, and it is a deeply consoling thought.
One might reproach Schiller for sanitizing history and transforming the stark cruelty of Rouen into an idealized transfiguration. Yet Schiller did not seek to erect a monument to suffering, but rather one to resistance. He was preoccupied with a question that every era must answer anew: What does a person do when faced with injustice, when an overwhelming force tramples right and law underfoot? Do they cower? Or do they stand tall—even if standing tall might cost them their life?
It is no coincidence that Schiller chose Joan specifically. Max Weber would have recognized in her the ideal type of the charismatic figure: the ordinary woman who, by virtue of a mission perceived as supernatural, rallies an entire disheartened nation behind her—not through office or lineage, but through the sheer power of her calling. At the same time, the figure illustrates why great narratives possess such enduring resilience. Hans Blumenberg spoke of the "work on myth"—that never-ending process of rewriting handed-down stories across the centuries. Joan is a prime example: mocked by Voltaire, ennobled by Schiller, set to music by Verdi, adapted for film by Dreyer, and reinterpreted by Shaw and Brecht. Every era writes its own version of the Maid. One might object that this column, too, does nothing else.
An objection arises, and I do not wish to gloss over it. Anyone who turns the dead into symbols and victims into heroes risks sanitizing horror until it becomes bearable—and thus untrue. Schiller was aware of this temptation; it was not without reason that he called his play a tragedy rather than a celebration. The sublime does not justify suffering; it does not even ennoble it. It merely asserts that, within the suffering individual, there remains a freedom that no executioner can reach. It is essential to tread this fine line—today, and on this date.
The Rütli Oath, Three Years Later
It is no coincidence that, just three years after *The Maid of Orleans*, Schiller wrote another great drama of resistance—and that this drama is set, of all places, in Switzerland. *William Tell*, which premiered in Weimar in 1804, gave the Swiss Confederation the founding myth it cherishes to this day: the oath sworn on the Rütli meadow, the uprising of free men against the arbitrary rule of foreign bailiffs. "We want to be one single people of brothers, never to part in distress or danger." Schiller, who never saw Switzerland with his own eyes, thus became the poet of its freedom. A single thread runs from Orléans to Lake Lucerne: the conviction that there comes a point where passive endurance ends and standing tall begins. Anyone reflecting on courage in a Zurich arts column today would do well to remember that the greatest poet of such courage was a Swabian who knew the Alps only from books and maps.
A Quiet Tuesday
And now, the leap forced upon us by the calendar itself. Exactly two hundred years after that triumph in Leipzig—on September 11, 2001—the date turned into its exact opposite. Where the stage had celebrated courage in 1801, reality brought naked injustice in 2001.
I remember it as if it were yesterday. I was still a student, working a part-time job at a company that afternoon, when the first news report broke. We stood there, frozen. None of us could believe what we were hearing. Then came one piece of devastating news after another—the second plane, the Pentagon, the collapse of the towers—and we remained there, stunned and motionless, eventually waiting in dread for further horrific updates. As I cycled home that evening, the world was more hushed than ever before. It was a quiet Tuesday evening, one where even the streets seemed to hold their breath.
Almost three thousand people died that day—innocent, without warning; many of them never even learned why they had to die. It was injustice in its purest, coldest form: an act of violence devoid of theater, of glorification, or of meaning—nothing but destruction for destruction’s sake.
In the days that followed, the images played on an endless loop, threatening at times to lose their significance, yet never truly doing so. Something had shifted—irrevocably. One could sense, without being able to put it into words, that an era was coming to an end and another, more uncertain one was beginning. Those who were young at the time realized on that Tuesday that history is not merely something in the past; it can break in at any moment—right in the middle of an ordinary workday, right inside a company where, just moments before, people had been discussing trivial matters.
Power and Violence
Hannah Arendt provided the concepts needed to comprehend this horror without succumbing to it. In her essay *On Violence*, she draws a sharp distinction between things that everyday language often conflates. Violence is instrumental; it destroys but creates nothing. It can bring towers crashing down, kill people, and tear apart the delicate fabric of a city—yet it remains fundamentally mute, lacking the spoken word, shared action, and the consent of others. Power, by contrast, arises only when people come together and act in concert. Terror is pure violence: a speech that brooks no reply, a monologue of annihilation.
And yet, even on that day, the other force revealed itself. Aboard one of the hijacked planes—United Flight 93 over Pennsylvania—passengers rose up against their captors. They knew there was no escape for them; nevertheless, they acted together, thereby in all likelihood preventing an even greater atrocity. It was, in Arendt’s sense, power pitted against violence—and, in Schiller’s sense, an act of the sublime: human beings physically lost yet morally free. The Maid of Orléans, for one final moment, high above the fields of Pennsylvania.
Arendt would also have warned us against the most obvious reaction. Those who respond to violence with mere counter-violence may win a battle, but they enter into the logic of violence and ultimately validate it. Violence, she writes, multiplies wherever it is employed; it begets further violence, not a new order. The years following 2001 have provided more than one bitter confirmation of this insight. True resistance to injustice lies not in becoming like it, but in refusing to abandon shared action, the rule of law, and the power of speech.
And yet!
Here—and not in the catastrophe itself—lies, for me, the true lesson of this dual date. Max Weber concluded his lecture "Politics as a Vocation" with a single, defiant word. Only the person certain that he will not crumble if the world proves too stupid or too mean for what he wishes to offer it—and who is able, even then, to say "nevertheless!"—only such a person has a calling for politics, and, we might add, for life itself. This "nevertheless" is the secular translation of Johanna’s courage. It is not optimism—Weber was the most sober of thinkers—but the determination to look the harshest realities in the eye and carry on regardless.
To be sure, Walter Benjamin left us the Angel of History, driven backward into the future with wide-open eyes while the wreckage piles up to the heavens before him. It is an image of terrible truth, and September 11, 2001, added fresh debris to the heap. Yet we must not stop with this angel. For human beings are, in Arendt’s words, creatures of natality—beings who are born and therefore possess the gift of making a fresh start, time and again. Every birth is a quiet promise that the chain of catastrophes is neither the final word nor the whole story.
Long live courage
By the time these lines appear, it will be the day before September 11—twenty-five years after the attacks in New York and Washington, two hundred and twenty-five years after that evening in Leipzig. Two September elevenths, separated by two centuries and united by a single word: courage.
I think back to that hushed Tuesday evening, to the silence that lay over the world as I cycled home. And I think of the chorus of a thousand voices crying "Long live Friedrich Schiller!" as it surged through the Leipzig Playhouse in 1801. Between that silence and that jubilation lies the entire realm of the human experience. Schiller’s Joan teaches us that one can remain upright even while falling. Arendt teaches us that violence may destroy, but it can never found anything new. Weber teaches us that hope is a decision, not a gift.
Let us not lose heart, then. Not because injustice is rare—it is frequent, and it will return—but precisely because it is. Walking upright is no insurance against a fall; it is simply the way to avoid having already fallen before the tumble begins. The towers have collapsed, the dead remain dead, and no act of transfiguration can ever undo that. But as long as people rise up when injustice befalls them or others—on a plane over Pennsylvania, on a battlefield near Orléans, in a meadow by Lake Lucerne—the final word has not yet been spoken. Long live courage. And long live those who do not lose it.
Sapere aude!
S.
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