It would be hard to imagine a personality more contradictory than that of their creator, a man at once more brilliantly adept at the practice of his art and more painfully inept at the business of living.
Born October 18, 1777, in the market town of Frankfurt-an-der-Oder, in the Margraviate of Brandenburg, into a family of proud Prussian Junkers, a lineage that produced 18 generals in its genetic pool, Bernd Heinrich Wilhelm von Kleist (a.k.a. Heinrich von Kleist) was predestined to bear arms and constitutionally disinclined to do so. Entering the army at age 15 and rising to the rank of second lieutenant in the elite King’s Guards Regiment in Potsdam, he proceeded seven years later to resign his commission to pursue liberal studies, thereby vexing his next of kin and courting the disfavor of the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm II. Returning to Frankfurt to attend the university, after reading Kant, Kleist suffered a crisis of confidence and a paralyzing bout of existential doubt that forever shook his faith in pure reason and dispelled any prospect of an academic path, further rankling the already sorely disapproving clan. And when, thanks to family connections, he managed to get his foot in the door of the Prussian state bureaucracy, the last refuge of the prodigal aristocrat, and landed an entry-level position in the Royal Chamber of Crown Lands in Königsberg, he promptly lost interest and proceeded to squander all good will, once again seeking his discharge, resolved to pursue a free life of letters. Fed up, the family broke off ties.
Kleist left for Dresden, a cultural capital at the time, but on the way an unfortunate misunderstanding with Napoleon’s provisional military government, then occupying the region, landed him in the clink on suspicion of espionage. He was marched off to the Fort de Joux, the forbidding prison in which the Haitian rebel leader Toussaint l’Ouverture (1743–1803) had met his end. The experience would later provide the seed of Kleist’s story “The Betrothal in Santo Domingo.” Grim as the conditions were, the period of incarceration proved a welcome respite from responsibility. Later transferred to considerably more hospitable quarters in Châlonssur-Marne, Kleist put the time to good use, writing “The Marquise of O . . .” and “The Earthquake in Chile.” While still a prisoner, he learned that a friend had managed to get the latter story published in a respected magazine, the Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände (Morning Journal for Cultivated Classes). Shortly thereafter, by the terms of the Peace of Tilsit, Prussia capitulated to France, and its prisoners, including Kleist, were released.
Kleist went straight to Dresden, where he had high hopes of launching a successful literary career. Yet he proved remarkably clumsy at maneuvering the social niceties, alienating with immoderate words and rash behavior many of his would-be patrons and benefactors, including the aged poet Christoph Martin Wieland and the éminence grise of German letters, Johann Wolfgang Goethe in Weimar. Lacking financial backing and adequate readership, his shaky business venture Phöbus, a literary review, soon went under, as did a subsequent venture, Berliner Abendblätter, a newspaper launched in Berlin, though both served as venues for his work.
But even his literary succès d’estime, such as it was, proved a Pyrrhic victory. With a few notable exceptions, Kleist’s contemporaries missed the point and dismissed the result. His published plays were ridiculed. His stories were condemned by scandalized critics as “hack jobs,” “sheer nonsense,” “senseless frivolities,” “the work of a deranged mind,” “un-German, stiff, twisted and coarse.” As to the assessment of his next of kin, the author complained in a letter of 1811 to Marie von Kleist, a cousin by marriage and confidant, that his siblings viewed him as “a good-for-nothing link in the social chain no longer worthy of any attachment.”
“The truth is,” Kleist confided to a friend, “that I find what I imagine to be beautiful, not what I actually produce. Were I able to engage in any other useful pursuit, I would gladly do so: I only write because I can’t do anything else.”
His own verdict on the work, communicated to his half-sister Ulrike, was as witty as it was merciless: “Hell gave me my half-talents, Heaven grants a man a complete talent or none.”
On November 21, 1811, the house of cards came tumbling down. Acting as judge, jury, executioner and the condemned, in a suicide pact with Henriette Vogel, the wife of an acquaintance, a pact of convenience, rather than romance – she was dying of cancer and he had had enough – he put them both out of their misery with two pistol shots.
Yet till the end Kleist managed to press his Prussian discipline and bellicose breeding to the service of his writing, sublimating tactical maneuvers into intricate syntax, waging a one-man war with society and himself, and in the process hammering the German language into a powerful weapon of expression. His plays, “The Broken Jug,” “Penthesilea,” the fragment “Robert Guiskard,” and “Prinz Friedrich von Homburg,” would become classics of the German theater, remarkable for their mingling of the idiomatic and the poetic, the impossible and the matter-of-fact, though he never saw them staged.
The present volume is devoted to his prose. It includes two insightful meditations on the nature of thought and art, “On the Gradual Formulation of Thoughts While Speaking” and “On the Theater of Marionettes,” and his most powerful narratives, “The Earthquake in Chile,” “The Betrothal in Santo Domingo,” “The Marquise of O . . . ,” “Michael Kohlhaas,” and “St. Cecilia, or the Power of Music,” in which Kleist forged peerless prototypes of German fiction that would influence writers for generations to come.
A word concerning the inclusion of “The Betrothal in Santo Domingo.” One of Kleist’s most emotionally gripping, gut-wrenching stories, this tragic tale of the love of a white fugitive and a light-skinned, mixed-blooded erstwhile slave, set during the Haitian revolution, is soaked in racial clichés. Today’s reader will wince at the portrayal of the villain Congo Hoango, “a dreadful old Negro,” who repays the kindness of his former master who granted him his freedom by putting a bullet through the latter’s head, and slakes “his inhuman bloodlust” on a murderous rampage. All the more repulsive, albeit complex, character, his common-law wife, Babekan, a cunning mulatto, enlists the seductive charms of the heroine, her lovely, young mestizo daughter, Toni, to lure an unsuspecting white fugitive, Gustav, into a trap. But falling in love with him – after he has had his way with her – competing blood lines and allegiances battle it out in Toni’s heart.
Fashioning a faithful English take, this translator was inevitably reminded of the problems of staging “The Merchant of Venice” in our time. Like Jessica in “The Merchant . . . ,” Toni betrays her next of kin to follow her heart. Yet whereas Shakespeare resolves the conflict in a cutting comedic fashion – even if the laughs may jar modern ears – Kleist, no doubt hearkening back to the double death in another Shakespearean classic, whips up the frenzy of passion and betrayal, perceived and real, to a fever pitch finally defused in a blood bath. But the plot is so adroitly knotted, the action so compelling, and the young heroine so emotionally vulnerable and endearing – no character in Kleist’s fiction is quite as scintillating – that, racist though it may be, “The Betrothal . . .” makes for a thoroughly riveting read. It would have been a literary calumny to leave it out.
No less a master than Thomas Mann recalled discovering “the work of Heinrich von Kleist early on; it made a powerful impression on me then and this impression was always confirmed and renewed in the course of my life.” Mann paid tribute to the language in an essay posthumously published as the preface to an English language edition of Kleist’s tales issued in America by Criterion Books:
Kleist’s narrative language is something completely unique. It is not enough to read it as “historical” – even in his day nobody wrote as he did. [. . .] An impetus squeezed out with iron, absolutely un-lyrical detachment, brings forth tangled, knotted, overloaded sentences [. . .] painstakingly soldered together [. . .] and driven by a breathless tempo.*
Another ardent admirer, Franz Kafka, found inspiration for his own style and stance in those of the disaffected Prussian Junker,
treasuring, in particular, “Michael Kohlhaas” – “a story I read with true reverence.” There are indeed striking parallels in the narrative technique employed by the two authors, a shared fondness for bureaucratic precision and dispassionate description to evoke the ineffable. Kafka extolled Kleist in a letter to his own betrothed, the subsequently forsaken Felice Bauer, as “one of the four men I consider to be my true blood-relations.”† The German satirist and critic Kurt Tucholsky recognized this elective affinity, calling Kafka “the grandson of Kleist.”
Kleist formulated his own fate in words that prefigure Kafka: “Oh, it is my inborn misshapen tendency always to live elsewhere than where I am, and in a time gone by or not yet come.”
The future confirmed Kleist’s assessment. His Marquise inspired the spare aesthetic of the French Nouvelle Vague in Eric Rohmer’s faithful screen adaptation (in which the young Bruno Ganz pulls off a tour-de-force performance, embodying the soul of the author). And in an artistic tribute on this side of the Atlantic, E. L. Doctorow effectively reset Kleist’s Kohlhaas in blackface, conjoining injustice and racism, in his novel, Ragtime.
Kleist’s prose may give pause to the contemporary English-speaking reader, accustomed, since Hemingway, to the simple and the succinct. Like Van Gogh in painting and Mahler in music, Kleist left no empty space, no room for silence or doubt. The effect can be a bit disconcerting.
The paragraphs often stretch for pages without a break. The sentences – which this translator decided, wherever possible, to leave largely intact – are complex syntactical puzzles, claustrophobic labyrinths of pronominally linked subordinate clauses joined by semicolons that confound any prospect of foreseeable closure.
The plots defy reason, driven more by single-minded obsession carried to the bitter end than by any novelistic norms – and in this, read eerily modern.
As to character development, such as it is, Kleist’s protagonists resemble the mercilessly pummeled dummies in car crash tests and the anatomical figures in medical atlases, in which the outline of the digestive tract is visible under the musculo-skeletal system and the skin. You can practically hear the heart thumping and see the words congeal in a vapor of raw emotion, but try and identify with them and you’ll fall flat. For this is neither a literature of relationships nor of confession, nor is it the instructive stuff of a Bildungsroman. As in classical Greek drama and Biblical narrative, the die has been cast from the start, and all the reader/spectator can do is watch in stunned amazement as destinies spin out to their ineluctable end. “The Marquise of O . . . ,” an unlikely, albeit strangely compelling, account of a highborn Mary minus the halo, impregnated in her sleep, shocked contemporary readers, as much because of the author’s detached telling, as on account of its socially unacceptable subject. Her mind made up from the start, the only development the marquise undergoes is in her womb. Ticked off by injustice, Michael Kohlhaas rages with a mechanical fury: all we can do is wait for his psychic batteries to drain. Josephe and Jeronimo, the ill-starred lovers in “The Earthquake in Chile,” make out, break out and march to their doom just as surely as the social norms and the walls of Santiago come tumbling down around them. Toni literally loves Gustav to death in “The Betrothal in Santo Domingo.”
Depending on how you view them, from the outside in or the inside out, Kleist’s narrative structures, engineered to harness and channel the demiurges that drove him to the brink, are either emotional arches about to collapse overhead, or pressure cookers about to explode, that hold somehow, while the pressure gauge whirrs out of control.
His words overwhelm. His stories suck you into a visceral virtual reality. Surrendering, you stagger through the telling like a sleepwalker, gasping, unable to catch your breath or find your footing, trapped by the syntax, until finally Kleist lets you drop with a merciful period and an inkling of the human condition.
Peter Wortsman
* The Marquise of O . . . , and Other Stories, Criterion Books, 1960.
† In two letters from Franz Kafka to Felice Bauer, dated February 9–10, 1913, and September 2, 1913, Kafka praised “Michael Kohlhaas” and designated Grillparzer, Dostoyevsky, Kleist and Flaubert as “my true blood-relations.” Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice, Schocken Books, 1967.
Selected Prose of Heinrich Von Kleist Page 25