This dissertation studies representations of civil war in nineteenth-century German drama. It marks the first systematic attempt in the field of German studies to employ the concept of civil war to generate new readings of individual dramas. I argue that bringing civil war and drama together not only sheds new light on these plays’ aesthetic and socio-historical significance, but also enhances existing theories of civil war. My claim is that the category of civil war does not denote an objectively verifiable conflict but rather a conceptual device used to imagine a community’s potential for cohesion at the moment of its disintegration. Political and theoretical approaches tend to overlook this imaginative element, but dramatic depictions of civil strife bring fully into view the imaginative quality of civil war and its relation to social cooperation. In close readings of individual works, I demonstrate this claim by showing that the social world created by a drama is as essential to its form as individual characters and their actions. Drawing from the theoretical approaches of René Girard, Victor Turner, Carl Schmitt, and others, I conceptualize dramatic civil strife as the interplay of two opposed dynamics that set the world of the drama into motion: destabilization, a result of the loss of differentiating social structures; and stabilization, which follows upon increased social differentiation. The dissertation deploys this differentiation-based framework to identify paradigmatic elements within dramatic representations of civil war, such as recurring mechanisms that bring about the end of a conflict through a strengthening of social distinctions (banishment, external war, scapegoating). Rather than emphasizing civil war’s fatalistic destructiveness, these readings analyze how the social indeterminacy characteristic of civil war generates dramatic worlds. The suspension of civil life creates a space for aesthetic and utopian experiences as well as opportunities for social self-reflection across a range of social strata. In Friedrich Schiller’s Wallenstein, civil war is unleashed when the sovereign state loses control over its military. The army radicalizes and makes explicit a form of warfare implied by the logic of the state: war conceived as autonomous play. By challenging the distinction between war and civil war itself, this loss of social differentiation calls into question the categories that underly international warfare at the most fundamental level. Franz Grillparzer’s Die Jüdin von Toledo depicts a latent civil war as a loss of social distinctions spreading from the state’s sovereign core into all domains of social life. Here, the increasing degree of social indeterminacy not only escalates a political crisis, but also facilitates interpersonal encounters beyond the limitations of social structures. Friedrich Hebbel’s Judith dramatizes a crisis of a religious-symbolic order. Civil war is caused by the community’s increasing uncertainty regarding its own institutions. Overcoming this crisis brings about a strengthened cultural order that rests on the creation of new interpretive resources to respond to outbreaks of violence. Moreover, in its exposure of social contingency, Hebbel’s theater becomes a means for society to reflect on its institutions and commitments without jeopardizing its internal cohesion.