Selected Prose of Heinrich Von Kleist

by Heinrich von Kleist

  But of all the fruitless efforts he made to support his cause, this trip proved the most unfortunate. For but a few days later, Sternbald pulled back up into the yard, driving the carriage in which Lisbeth lay stretched out with a bad bruise on her breast. Kohlhaas, who rushed to the carriage, white in the face, was unable to elicit any coherent account of the cause of this misfortune. The Majordomo, as Sternbald related, was not at home when they got there; they were consequently obliged to spend the night in an inn not far from the castle; Lisbeth left the inn the following morning and instructed the servant to stay behind with the horses; and not before nightfall did she return in this sorry state. It seems she tried to boldly press her way forward to speak to the Elector in person, and through no fault of his, was driven back by an overzealous guard, who landed her a blow to the breast with the shaft of his lance. This at least is what bystanders said, who brought her back to the inn that evening, unconscious; for she herself was hardly able to speak, still gagging as she was on the blood that poured from her mouth. The appeal was later taken from her by a knight. Sternbald said that he had immediately wanted to leap on a horse and inform him of this terrible mishap; but Lisbeth insisted, despite the caution urged by a physician who’d tended to her wound, that she be taken back post haste to her husband in Kohlhaasenbrück without any advance warning. Her condition aggravated by the journey, Kohlhaas carried her to bed, where, painfully gasping for air, she lived a few days longer. Vain attempts were made to bring her back to consciousness to try and shed some light on what happened; she lay there in a daze, staring before her with a blank and broken expression, and did not say a word. Only moments before her death did she regain consciousness. By her bedside, reading to her in a loud, albeit sensitively solemn, voice from a chapter in the Bible, stood a priest of the Lutheran persuasion (to which faith, gaining ground at the time, she had converted, following her husband’s example); and all at once she looked up at the priest with a dark expression, grabbed the Bible out of his hands, as if to say there was nothing more in it for her, leafed and leafed through its pages, and seemed to be searching for something; and turning to Kohlhaas, who sat by her side, she pointed with her forefinger to a verse: “Forgive your enemies . . . do good to them that hate you.” She squeezed his hand with a deeply soulful look in her eyes, and died. Kohlhaas thought: “Let God never forgive me if I forgive the Junker!” and kissed her, the tears welling up, pressed her eyes shut, and left the room. He took the hundred gold guldens that the magistrate had already advanced for the stables in Dresden and ordered a funeral fit more, so it seemed, for a princess than for the wife of a horse trader; in an oaken casket with metal rims, fitted with silken pillows, with gold and silver tassels, in a grave dug eight yards deep, lined with fieldstones and limestone. He himself stood by the graveside, supervising the work, with his youngest child in his arms. On the burial day, the body lay white as snow in an open casket in a hall whose walls were covered with black cloth. The priest had just concluded a stirring sermon beside her bier when he received the Elector’s resolution in answer to the appeal presented by the deceased, which said, in sum: that he should go fetch his horses from Tronkenburg Castle, and at the risk of imprisonment, cease and desist from any future petitions in this matter. Kohlhaas put the letter in his pocket and had the casket brought to the hearse. As soon as the grave had been covered back up, the cross had been planted in it and the guests who’d been present at the funeral had departed, he threw himself one last time before her now empty bed, and promptly turned to the business of revenge. He sat himself down and drafted a final ultimatum, in which he demanded that within three days of receipt thereof, Junker Squire Wenzel von Tronka himself, by the power invested in him, lead the nags he took from him and worked half to death in his fields back to Kohlhaasenbrück and personally feed them their fill in his stables. He sent his demand via mounted messenger, and instructed the man to return to Kohlhaasenbrück immediately upon delivery. As the three days elapsed without delivery of the horses, he called for Herse; told him the final ultimatum he’d made to the young lord, that he personally bring back and feed his horses; asked Herse two things: first, if he would ride with him to Tronkenburg Castle to fetch the lord; and second, if the latter proved lax in the fulfillment of his demands in the stables of Kohlhaasenbrück, would Herse be prepared to use the whip? And as soon as Herse had grasped his meaning, and shouted for joy: “Yes Sir, I’m ready to ride today!” and hurling his cap in the air, swore he’d have a whip with ten knots braided to teach him how to care for a horse, Kohlhaas proceeded to sell his house, packed his children into a carriage and sent them across the border; and at nightfall, called his other men together, seven in number, every one of them sure as gold; fitted them with arms and a steed, and rode off to Tronkenburg Castle.

  At daybreak of the third night, he and his little band of men fell upon the toll collector and the gatekeeper, who stood chatting at the gate, and trampled them under, galloping into the castle yard. And having set fire to the barracks and guardroom, while Herse hurried up the winding stairway to the castellan’s tower, where he found the manager and the overseer half-dressed, playing dice, and promptly cut them down, Kohlhaas rushed into the castle to seek out Junker Wenzel. So the angel of justice descended from heaven: the Junker, who had just then been reading aloud the horse trader’s ultimatum to a group of young friends visiting at the time, his friends responding with laughter, when he heard its author calling out in the yard, turned pale in the face, and cried out to his guests: ‘Brothers, save yourselves!’ and promptly disappeared. Bursting into the hall, Kohlhaas grabbed by the collar a Junker Hans von Tronka who came toward him and hurled him so hard against the wall he cracked his skull, and while the horse trader’s men overpowered and scattered the remaining knights who’d reached for their arms, Kohlhaas asked where Wenzel von Tronka was. Furious at the silence of the stunned guests, Kohlhaas kicked open the doors to two passageways that led to wings of the castle, and after scouring every corner of the far-flung premises and finding no one, cursing, he stormed back down to the castle yard to patrol any possible escape route. Meanwhile, the castle itself having caught fire from the barracks, thick columns of smoke rising now from every structure on the castle grounds, as Sternbald and three diligent companions dragged out everything that wasn’t nailed down and hauled it along as booty, along with the horses, a jubilant Herse hurled the corpses of the manager and the overseer, as well as their wives and children, out the open window. On his way down the castle steps, Kohlhaas encountered the Junker’s palsied old housekeeper, who flung herself at his feet. Pausing, he asked her where Junker Wenzel von Tronka was. With a weak and trembling voice, she replied that she thought he’d taken refuge in the chapel; whereupon Kohlhaas called two of his men, and lacking keys, had them break their way in with gunpowder and crowbars, overturned altars and benches, but to his anger and dismay, did not find the Junker. It so happened that at the same time Kohlhaas came back out of the chapel, a young stable boy in the Junker’s service ambled over to a stone stable threatened by the flames to save the Junker’s warhorses. Kohlhaas, who, that very moment, spotted his nags in a little straw-roofed shed, asked the boy why he didn’t save the nags. And when, thrusting the key into the lock of the stable door, the boy replied that the shed was already on fire, Kohlhaas tore the key out of the lock and tossed it over the wall, and, raining blows on the boy with the flat side of his sword, drove him into the burning shed, amidst the terrible laughter of his men, and forced him to save the nags. But when the boy emerged, pale with terror, leading the horses by the reins, and the stall collapsed behind him moments later, Kohlhaas was gone; and when the boy went to join the other stable hands in the castle yard and asked the horse trader, who kept his back turned to him: ‘What shall I do with these broken-down beasts?’ – with a fearful grimace, the latter drew back his boot and let loose a kick that would have killed him if he hadn’t dodged it, and without a word, mounted his chestnut brown steed, and from th
e castle gate watched in silence as his men went about their business.

  By daybreak, the entire castle, walls and all, had burnt to the ground, and no one but Kohlhaas and his seven men still stood within. He climbed down from the saddle and once again, in broad daylight, searched through every nook and cranny of the ruins now laid bare to the naked eye; and since, as painful as it was, he needed to confirm for himself that his action had failed, with a heaving breast he sent Herse and a few of his men to find out the direction in which the Junker had fled. He had his eye, in particular, on a well-endowed convent school named Erlabrunn located on the banks of the Mulde, whose abbess, Antonia von Tronka, was well-known in the region as a pious, charitable and holy woman; for it seemed all too likely to the unhappy horse trader that, stripped as he was of worldly possessions, the Junker would have taken refuge here, since the abbess was his aunt and the woman who had raised him. After learning of this eventuality, Kohlhaas climbed what was left of the overseer’s tower, a single room of which remained intact, and drafted the so-called “Kohlhaas Mandate,” in which he called upon the country to give no quarter to said Junker Wenzel von Tronka, with whom he was engaged in a just conflict, putting its people, the Junker’s relatives and friends included, under obligation, at the risk of bodily harm and death and unavoidable destruction of all their holdings and worldly possessions, to surrender this man unto him. He had word of this declaration dispersed throughout the land by passing travelers and strangers; indeed, he gave his man, Waldmann, a copy of the mandate with the aforementioned demand to deliver it in person to Antonia in Erlabrunn. Hereupon he spoke with several erstwhile servants of Tronkenburg Castle, who had been unhappy with the Junker, and who, enticed by the prospect of booty, wished to join his band; armed them as foot soldiers with crossbows and daggers, and instructed them to march behind his mounted troops; and after liquidating all the spoils his men had amassed and dispersing the money among them, he took a few hours’ rest from his woeful business under the castle gate.

  Herse returned at noon and confirmed what Kohlhaas’ heart, forever riddled with dark forebodings, had already told him: namely, that the Junker had indeed taken refuge in the convent at Erlabrunn, where he was welcomed by his aunt, the old abbess Antonia von Tronka. It appears that he escaped through a hidden door in the rear wall of the castle that opened onto a narrow stone stairway and led to a little covered dock, where several skiffs were attached, one of which he managed to commandeer down a moat that ran into the Elbe. At least Herse established for certain that he had pulled in around midnight in a skiff without rudder or oars to a village on the Elbe, to the surprise of the villagers who had assembled outside on account of the fire at Tronkenburg Castle; and that he had driven on in a donkey cart to Erlabrunn. Kohlhaas took a deep sigh at this news; he asked if the horses had been fed; and being told that they had, rallied his men, and three hours later stood before Erlabrunn. At the rumble of a distant thunderstorm that flashed on the horizon, with torches he’d ignited on the spot, he and his band entered the cloister yard, and Waldmann, his servant, who came striding toward him, reported that the mandate had been delivered, just when he spotted the abbess and the convent caretaker engaged in a troubled exchange stepping out under the gate. And while the caretaker, a little, old, white-haired man, cast angry glances at Kohlhaas, he had himself armored up, and boldly called to the servants who surrounded him to ring the bell – the abbess, pale as a sheet, with a silver effigy of the crucified savior in hand, flung herself, along with all the young girls in her charge, before Kohlhaas’ horse. While Herse and Sternbald easily overpowered the caretaker, who had no sword in hand, and led him as a prisoner in between the horses, Kohlhaas asked her: “Where is the Junker Wenzel von Tronka?” “In Wittenberg, Kohlhaas, my good man!” she replied, loosening a ring of keys from her belt, and with a trembling voice, added: “Fear God and do no wrong!” Then thrust back into the hell of his unsatisfied thirst for vengeance, he was about to cry: Set fire!, when a powerful bolt of lightning struck the ground at his feet. Turning his rattled horse back to her, he asked: “Did you receive my mandate?” And in a hushed, hardly audible voice, the woman replied: “Just now!” “When?” “Two hours, as God is my witness, after my nephew, the Junker, had already gone.” And when Waldmann, to whom Kohlhaas turned with a angry look, confirmed this fact in a nervous stutter, and told him that the waters of the Mulde, swollen by the rain, had prevented him from reporting back before now, Kohlhaas regained his composure; a sudden violent downpour that struck the flagstones of the yard and put out the torches, stilled the pain in his unhappy breast; tipping his hat to the lady, he turned his horse around, dug in with his heels, and with the words: “Follow me, brothers. The Junker is in Wittenberg!” rode out of the cloister.

  At nightfall, he stopped at an inn on the highway, where he had to rest for a day on account of the great fatigue of his horses, and recognizing that with a band of ten men (for such was now their number), he could not storm such a place as Wittenberg. And so he drafted a second mandate, wherein, following a brief account of what had befallen him, he called upon “every good Christian,” as he put it, in exchange for a modest payment and other spoils of war, “to take up his cause against the Junker von Tronka, as the common enemy of all good Christians.” In yet another mandate that followed soon thereafter, he called himself “a man free of worldly and imperial ties, beholden only to the Lord God,” a hot-headed and ill-conceived rallying cry that won him, as it were, along with the jingle of coins and the prospect of booty, the allegiance of a rabble that swelled in number after the peace treaty with Poland took the bread out of their mouths: such that he now counted thirty and some followers that gathered with him on the right bank of the Elbe preparing to burn Wittenberg to the ground. He camped with his horses and men under the roof of a broken-down old brick shed in the heart of a dark forest that surrounded the city at the time, and no sooner was he informed by Sternbald, whom he’d sent on ahead in disguise with the mandate in hand, that they were already familiar with it there, than on the holy eve of Whitsuntide, he and his band launched an attack, and while the townspeople lay fast asleep, they simultaneously set fire to several corners of the city. And while his men plundered on the outskirts of town, he fixed a paper to the doorposts of a church wherein he declared: “I, Kohlhaas, set your city on fire, and if the Junker is not handed over to me, will burn it to the ground, so that,” as he put it, “I won’t have to look behind any wall to find him.” The townspeople’s horror at this outrage was indescribable; and hardly had the flames – which on this, fortunately, rather windless summer night, had only destroyed nineteen buildings, including a church – been smothered, when the old Lord Governor Otto von Gorgas sent out a battalion of some fifty guards to capture this barbarian. But the captain of the guards, a man named Gerstenberg, failed so miserably in this engagement that, instead of toppling Kohlhaas, it rather raised his fearsome reputation as an extremely dangerous combatant; for since the captain divided his men into several smaller squadrons to surround and subdue the enemy, Kohlhaas responded by holding his troops together and striking out and badly beating them back at several points, such that, by the evening of the following day, not a single member of the captain’s battalion, in whom the locals placed their trust, was still standing. Kohlhaas, who lost a few men in these skirmishes, once again set fire to the city on the following morning, and his murderous efforts were so effective that, once again, a slew of houses as well as all the barns on the outskirts of town were burnt to the ground. While so engaged he tacked up another mandate, this time on the corners of the city hall, including word of the fate of Captain von Gerstenberg sent out by the Lord Governor and duly cut down. Whereupon the Lord Governor, infuriated by this defiance, himself took the lead of a company of some 150 men, including a number of knights. At the Junker Wenzel von Tronka’s written request, he gave him an armed guard to protect him from the anger of the townspeople, who were dead-set on chasing him out of town; and after hav
ing placed guard details in all the outlying villages and also stationed sentries round the city wall to protect against attack, the Lord Governor set out on St. Gervasius’ Day to capture the dragon laying waste to his land. But the horse trader was smart enough to elude this army; and once, through shrewd strategy, he’d lured the Lord Governor five miles outside the city, and given him to believe by various maneuvers that, chastened by the superiority of the opposing force, he had fallen back to neighboring Brandenburg – he suddenly turned his men around at nightfall of the third day and once again attacked Wittenberg, a third time setting the city afire. Herse, who slipped into the city in disguise, brought off this terrible trick; and on account of a fiercely gusting north wind, the raging flames were so ruinous and all-consuming that in less than three hours forty-two houses, two churches, several cloisters and schools and the Governor’s residence itself had been reduced to ruins. At daybreak, learning what had happened, the Lord Governor, who thought his opponent was in Brandenburg, staggered back, bewildered, to find the city in an uproar; the crowd gathered by the thousands in front of the Junker’s house that was barricaded up with beams and stakes, and hollered and howled their demand that he be driven out of town. Two mayors named Jenkins and Otto who, dressed in their official robes, were present at the head of the entire town council, declared in vain that they were obliged to await the return of an express courier sent to the president of the state chancellery to request permission to be allowed to take the Junker to Dresden, where, for various unspecified reasons, he himself wished to go; the unruly crowd, armed with pikes and crowbars, put no store in these words, and roughing up a few officials who had called for emergency measures, was in the process of storming the Junker’s house, just when the Lord Governor Otto von Gorgas came riding up with his army of knights. As some consolation, as it were, for the failed mission from which he returned, this worthy gentleman, who, by his mere presence, was accustomed to instilling respect and obedience in the people, succeeded in capturing two routed members of the deadly firebrand’s band directly in front of the gates of the city; and leading these louts in chains before the crowd, while offering assurances in a well-crafted speech to the members of the town council that, hot as he was on the bandit’s trail, he would soon bring back Kohlhaas himself in shackles – he managed, by the strength of all these mollifying circumstances, to defuse the fear of the gathered throng and to somewhat assuage their fury, convincing them to wait for the return of the express courier from Dresden. Surrounded by several knights, he dismounted, and after clearing away the barricade of beams and stakes, entered the house, where he found the Junker in the hands of two physicians doing their best with essences and irritants to rouse him back to life from a faint into which he had fallen; and Sir Otto von Gorgas felt indeed that this was not the right moment to bring up the question of his well-deserved expulsion from the city; so, with a look of quiet contempt, he merely told him to get dressed and to follow him to the prison for his own protection. As soon as they had dressed the Junker in a doublet and put a helmet on his head, and because he was still gasping for air, left his shirt half open, in which condition he appeared on the street, held under one arm by the Lord Governor and under the other by his brother-in-law, Count von Gerschau, a flurry of obscene and frightful curses rang out from every throat. Held back with great difficulty by armed troopers, the crowd called him a contemptible bloodsucker, a pestilent plague on the land and blight on humanity, the lowdown bane of the city of Wittenberg and the undoing of Saxony; and following a miserable march through the ruins of the city, several times during which he lost his helmet, without missing it, and a knight placed it back on his head, they finally reached the prison, where he was whisked into a tower and held there under the protection of an armed guard. In the meantime, the return of the express courier with the Elector’s reply gave the city new cause for concern. For the state government, which shortly before had received a pressing petition from the citizens of Dresden, declined the Junker’s request for sanctuary until the bloody villain Kohlhaas had been caught, but ordered the Lord Governor to hold and protect him with the force at his disposal wherever he was, since he had to be somewhere; the good city of Wittenberg was, however, informed, to dispel any lingering concern, that an army of some five hundred men under the leadership of Prince Friedrich von Meissen was on its way to protect them from any further attacks. But the Lord Governor knew full well that a resolution of this sort would by no means calm the people’s fears; for not only had the horse trader gained the upper hand in many small ways, but dire rumors also spread of his growing strength; the war he waged with disguised henchmen in the dark of night, with pitch and straw and flammable gunpowder, inconceivable and unprecedented as it was, could well overpower a far bigger army than the one with which the Prince of Meissen was drawing near. So, after brief consideration, the Lord Governor decided to suppress the gist of the resolution he’d received. He merely posted at the edge of town the letter which the Prince of Meissen had sent announcing his imminent arrival; a covered wagon that rumbled out of the courtyard of the Herrenzwinger Castle at dawn the next day, accompanied by six heavily armed men on horseback, was bound for Leipzig, though the mounted guards dropped hints along the way that they were bound for Pleissenburg; and since the people were so relieved to be rid of the wretched Junker, whom they associated with fire and sword, the Lord Governor himself subsequently set out with an army of three hundred men to join forces with Prince Friedrich of Meissen. In the meantime, given the reputation that Kohlhaas had acquired for himself, his forces grew to 109; and since he also managed to gather a stock of weapons in Jassen and therewith armed his troops to the teeth, informed of the two storm fronts blowing his way, he decided to ride like the wind and head off the threat before it fell upon him. So, the very next day, he lead an attack by night on the Prince of Meissen’s force stationed at Mühlenberg; in which skirmish, to his deep regret, he lost Herse, the first man to fall at his side; but embittered by this loss, in the course of the three-hour-long battle that ensued, Kohlhaas fought so fiercely with the Prince that the latter, caught unawares, having suffered several heavy wounds and given the disarray of his army, was compelled to beat a retreat to Dresden. Emboldened by this victory, before the Lord Governor could possibly have been informed of what had transpired, Kohlhaas turned his force around and led an attack on this second front in broad daylight in an open field in the village of Damerow, and although suffering heavy losses, fought on till nightfall, here too gaining the upper hand. Indeed, he would surely have resumed the attack with the rest of his men the following day, had not the Lord Governor, who had holed up in the churchyard at Damerow, received word of the defeat of the Prince at Mühlberg, and so deemed it wiser to wait for a more auspicious moment and returned post haste to Wittenberg. Five days after the defeat of these two armies, Kohlhaas stood before the gates of Leipzig and set the city on fire on three sides. In a mandate that he distributed on that occasion, he called himself “an emissary of the Archangel Michael come to punish all those with sword and fire who sided with the Junker in this dispute, and thereby to cleanse the world of the sorry state it had fallen into.” Meanwhile, from the Lützen Castle, which he had taken by surprise and where he and his men held up, he called out to the people to join him in his fight for a better world order; and concluded the mandate, with a hint of megalomania, as “proclaimed at the site of our provisional world government, the arrant castle at Lützen.” As luck would have it for the citizens of Leipzig, a persistent downpour kept the fire from spreading, so that, thanks to the rapidity of the local fire brigades, only a few shops around the Pleissenburg went up in flames. Nevertheless, the city’s dismay was unspeakable in the face of the raging incendiary and his fury at the fact that the Junker was in Leipzig; and since a force of a hundred and eighty stalwarts sent out to fight had returned defeated, not wanting to jeopardize the city’s fortune, the local magistrate had no other recourse but to lock the city gates and have its citizens
keep watch night and day outside the walls. To no avail did the magistrate have placards put up in villages in the outlying district assuring the population that the Junker was not in the Pleissenburg; the horse trader insisted in similar placards that he was in the Pleissenburg, and gave his own assurance that, even if the Junker were not there, he, Kohlhaas, would respond as if he were, and act accordingly, until he was furnished with the name of the place where he was being held. Informed by an express messenger of the danger faced by the city of Leipzig, the Prince Elector declared that he would presently assemble an army of two thousand men with himself in the lead to capture Kohlhaas. He issued a sharp rebuke to Sir Otto von Gorgas, chiding him for the duplicitous and injudicious cunning he applied to lure the murderer away from the environs of Wittenberg; and no one can describe the outrage that took hold of all of Saxony, and especially of the capital city, when word spread there that in the villages around Leipzig a declaration had been put up, it was not known by whom, addressed to Kohlhaas, the contents of which read: “Junker Wenzel is with his cousins Hinz and Kunz in Dresden.”