While in Chicago, Rosenberg wrote politically charged plays to be performed in the several working-class theatres of the city.Harmut Keil and Heinz Ickstadt, "Elements of German Working-Class Culture in Chicago, 1880 to 1890," in Harmut Keil (ed.), German Workers' Culture in the United States, 1850 to 1920. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988; pg. 97. One of these dramas, Die Nihilisten (The Nihilists), was performed in honor of the Paris Commune in 1882 and featured three future defendants in the 1886 Haymarket affair — Michael Schwab, August Spies, and Oscar Neebe — playing leading roles. The play dealt with legal proceedings against a group of Nihilists in the Russian Empire, who were sentenced to exile in Siberia, and finally freed by their comrades following the overthrow of the Tsar.Christine Heiss, "Popular and Working-Class German Theater in Chicago, 1870 to 1910", in Harmut Keil (ed.), German Workers' Culture in the United States, 1850 to 1920, pg. 194. In the May 18, 1882 performance in North Side Turner Hall, the role of the liberators was played by members of the local Lehr-und-Wehr Verein (Education and Defense Society), an armed workers' militia movement sweeping the German-American radical community in the Chicago area at the time. The implications of this casting could not be missed.
