Intrigue and Love

Intrigue and Love, Friedrich Schiller’s play, becomes part of Michael Berg and Hanna Schmitz’s relationship through reading and performance. Michael first reads it for school and then aloud to Hanna, who makes his reading a condition of their intimacy; later, seeing the play performed together gives it a shared public setting and exposes the growing pull between Hanna and Michael’s life among his classmates.

From School Assignment to Shared Reading

While recovering from illness, Michael learns that his class has read Emilia Galotti and Intrigue and Love and has an essay due on them. He reads both after finishing his other work, but the lateness and fatigue mean that by the next day he has forgotten what he read and must start over. The play enters the relationship, then, not as an abstract literary interest but as unfinished schoolwork Michael is trying to master.

When Michael tells Hanna that students also read texts in their own language, she asks him to read the play to her. He offers to bring it, but the next day, when he arrives expecting to kiss her, she pulls back and insists that he read first. The book becomes a condition of access to their familiar intimacy, and Hanna’s decision gives the reading a specific place in their routine.

Reading as a Ritual

Michael reads Intrigue and Love aloud to Hanna for half an hour. Only afterward does she take him into the shower and then to bed. The sequence alters his own desire: the urgency he feels on arrival fades while he concentrates on giving the play’s different characters recognizable voices, then returns under the shower. Reading is therefore not merely a prelude to their intimacy; it temporarily redirects his attention and becomes one of its repeated stages.

This pattern develops into a ritual of reading, showering together, making love, and lying beside one another afterward. Hanna listens closely, reacting with laughter, contempt, anger, and enthusiasm as the action unfolds. Her impatience when she asks Michael to continue suggests that the characters’ foolishness entertains and exasperates her; her response, in turn, makes him eager to read on. As the days grow longer, he reads for longer, hoping to remain with Hanna in the twilight. On one such evening, she falls asleep lying on him while the saw in the yard goes quiet and the colors in the kitchen fade into shades of gray; Michael recalls himself as completely happy.

The Play in the Theater

Later, Michael takes Hanna to a theater in the next town to see Schiller’s Intrigue and Love. It is her first time at the theater, and she enjoys the performance as well as the champagne at intermission. The outing extends their earlier private reading into a shared public experience: Hanna encounters the play as staged drama, while Michael accompanies her as a couple rather than as her reader.

Michael puts his arm around Hanna’s waist and feels proud that he does not care what other people think of them. Yet that confidence is bounded by place. He knows he would care if they were in the theater in their hometown, and wonders whether Hanna understands the difference too. The contrast makes the outing more than a celebration of the play: it reveals how their closeness can feel easy in one setting while remaining exposed to judgment in another.

Place in Michael’s Divided Life

By the summer, Michael’s life no longer revolves only around Hanna, school, and study. He increasingly comes to her from the swimming pool, where his class does homework, plays soccer and volleyball and skat, and socializes. His time with Hanna remains important, but his place among his classmates matters as well; arriving late or leaving early for her makes him interesting without damaging his reputation.

The play’s role in their meetings sits within that tension. The extended reading lets Michael lengthen the private time he spends with Hanna, while his school and classmates form a competing world he is reluctant to miss. On his July birthday, a party at the pool makes leaving especially difficult. Hanna, exhausted and unaware that it is his birthday, receives him in a bad mood; their quarrel ends with Michael fearing he will lose her, apologizing until she takes him back, and remaining resentful. Against that conflict, their earlier shared reading of Intrigue and Love marks a form of closeness shaped both by Hanna’s attention and by the time Michael chooses to give her.