THE MARQUISE OF O—
AND OTHER STORIES
HEINRICH VON KLEIST, born in 1777, came of an old Prussian military family but disliked military life and resigned his commission in 1799 to devote himself to studious pursuits. He turned to creative writing after undergoing an intellectual and personal crisis in 1801, and during the next ten years produced some of the most remarkable plays in German literature (notably the comedies Amphitryon and Der zerbrochene Krug, the tragedy Penthesilea and the problem drama Prinz Friedrich von Homburg) as well as eight masterly short stories and various minor writings.
Kleist had an unstable and almost schizophrenic personality; he was intensely ambitious yet unsure of his gifts. His works reflect his passionately uncompromising nature and his periodic fits of wild enthusiasm and morose melancholia. Episodes of great lyrical beauty alternate with scenes of the most frenzied brutality, and the highly emotional style predominating in his plays is often replaced in the stories by one of clinical detachment. Kleist committed suicide in 1811.
DAVID LUKE was born in 1921 and is an Emeritus Student (Emeritus Fellow) of Christ Church, Oxford, where he was Tutor in German until 1988. He has published articles and essays on German literature, and various prose and verse translations, including Stifter’s Limestone and Other Stories, Selected Tales by the brothers Grimm, Death in Venice and Other Stories by Thomas Mann, and Goethe’s Selected Verse, Parts One and Two of Faust, a volume of his erotic poetry, Iphigenia in Tauris and Hermann and Dorothea. His translation of Faust Part One was awarded the European Poetry Translation Prize in 1989.
NIGEL REEVES was born in 1939 and graduated at Worcester College, Oxford, in 1963, taking his D.Phil. in 1970. He was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the University of Tübingen and from 1975 to 1990 was Professor of German at the University of Surrey. Since 1990 he has been Professor of German at Aston University and was Head of the Department of Languages and European Studies from 1990 to 1996. He has translated stories by Kleist and Keller for the Penguin Book of German Stories and has published monographs on Heinrich Heine and Friedrich Schiller.
HELNRICH VON KLEIST
The Marquise of O—
AND OTHER STORIES
Translated with an Introduction by
DAVID LUKE AND NIGEL REEVES
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
Penguin Books India (P) Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India
Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, Cnr Rosedale and Airborne Roads, Albany, Auckland, New Zealand
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
www.penguin.com
This translation first published 1978
Reprinted with a new Chronology and Further Reading 2004
30
Translation and Introduction copyright © David Luke and Nigel Reeves, 1978
Chronology and Further Reading copyright © David Deißner, 2004
All rights reserved
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s
prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in
which it is published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
EISBN: 9781101489802
Contents
INTRODUCTION
THE EARTHQUAKE IN CHILE
THE MARQUISE OF O—
MICHAEL KOHLHAAS
THE BEGGARWOMAN OF LACORNO
ST CECILIA OR THE POWER OF MUSIC
THE BETROTHAL IN SANTO DOMINGO
THE FOUNDLING
THE DUEL
CHRONOLOGY
FURTHER READING
Introduction
IN the spring of 1799 the 21-year-old Heinrich von Kleist wrote to his half-sister Ulrike that he found it ‘incomprehensible how a human being can live without a plan for his life (Lebensplan); the sense of security with which I employ my present time and the calm with which I look to the future make me profoundly aware of just what inestimable happiness my life-plan assures me’. But fear evidently lay behind this confidence, and indeed behind the very notion of a ‘life-plan’, for he continued: ‘Existing without a life-plan, without any firm purpose, constantly wavering between uncertain desires, constantly at variance with my duties, the plaything of chance, a puppet on the strings of fate – such an unworthy situation seems so contemptible to me and would make me so wretched that death would be preferable by far.’ Less than thirteen years later Kleist wrote to Ulrike that there was no remedy for him on earth, and within hours of his completing this letter two shots rang out from beside the Wannsee near Berlin. In a suicide pact for which he had long sought a willing partner Kleist had first shot dead Henriette Vogel, a 31-year-old woman suffering from incurable cancer, and had then blown out his own brains. During those thirteen years Kleist had written plays and stories of a kind quite unprecedented in German literature. The special interest of his best work, its peculiar inner tension, lies in its negative expression of the ideals of the Enlightenment at the very point of their collapse as he personally experienced it. A typical intellectual product of the late eighteenth century, Kleist had started from certain unquestioned assumptions: that life can be planned, that its random element can be eliminated, that happiness can be achieved and assured if we go about it the right way, that man is educable and society perfectible, that the world is rationally ordered and that all things in principle can, and in due course will, be completely understood and explained. His creative writings expressed the state of mind that follows upon the loss of every article of this faith. They radically called in question the idealistic humanism which still inspired the mature works of Goethe and Schiller, the representative masterpieces of Weimar Classicism. Among his contemporaries Kleist met with little or no positive response. Goethe took a patronizing interest in him for a time, then snubbed and dropped him, writing him off as a pathological case, quite failing to recognize his genius and evidently sensing in him a threat to his own precariously-won Olympian balance. And yet it is precisely Kleist’s vulnerability and disequilibrium, his desperate challenge to established values and beliefs, that carry him further than Goethe or Schiller across the gap between the eighteenth century and our own age.
Bernd Heinrich Wilhelm von Kleist was born in Frankfurt an der Oder on 18 October 1777, the son of Joachim Friedrich von Kleist, a captain in the Prussian army, and his second wife Juliane Ulrike. The family belongs to the ancient nobility (Uradel) and has innumerable ramifications. Heinrich’s father died when he was only eleven, and his mother, though eighteen years younger than her husband, when he was fifteen. He was educated privately in Berlin by a Protestant minister and entered army service shortly before his mother’s death. This was a natural step since the family was, and continued to be, renowned in Prussian military circles. He soon experienced action during the Rhineland campaign against the armies of revolutionary France. But his heart lay elsewhere: he loved music, was a talented clarinet
tist, and studied mathematics with enthusiasm. Convinced that the maximization of his personal happiness was not only possible but his duty as a rational man, and that this goal could not be reached under the oppressive and dehumanizing discipline of the Prussian army, he resigned his commission in 1799 and embarked on what was to be a planless, uncertain, unstable life, never achieving a career or even holding a firm post, estranged from all but a very few members of his family, travelling restlessly about a Europe racked by the Napoleonic Wars. For a time he studied physics, mathematics, history and Latin at the University of Frankfurt an der Oder. In 1800, on little more than an impulse, he entered into a ‘suitable’ conventional engagement with the daughter of the local garrison commandant, Wilhelmine von Zenge, but set off the same year on a journey through Leipzig and Dresden, ending in Würzburg where he underwent some kind of unspecified medical or surgical treatment which would make him, as he enigmatically wrote to her, ‘worthy’ of his fiancée. (This obscure episode has never been clarified; in any case Kleist later broke off the engagement to Wilhelmine with callous abruptness, and a certain amount of mystery surrounds his sexual life in general.) A further attempt to settle down in state service, this time in a civilian capacity, lasted only a few months. Early in 1801 the conflict between his basic psychological instability and his frenzied longing for security broke out in the form of a crucial intellectual experience. The rationalistic and optimistic beliefs which he had imbibed from Wieland and other fashionable writers reflecting the spirit of the European and German Enlightenment were shattered by his reading of Kant. ‘Lately,’ he wrote to Wilhelmine in March 1801, ‘I became acquainted with the recent so-called Kantian philosophy.’ What exactly he had read is not certain, but it was the Kantian epistemological theory that seems above all to have disturbed him. Kant had demarcated the limits of human knowledge not in order to undermine confidence in man’s rational faculty or strengthen the case for atheism: on the contrary he had intended to clarify the true foundations for religious belief, to show what was properly beyond empirical exploration and therefore a matter of faith, not of knowledge. But Kant’s distinction between the unknowability of things in themselves as noumena and our cognitive operations with things as they appear (phenomena) seemed to Kleist to make a mockery of the ideal of self-cultivation, of man’s progress towards the complete possession of truth. If Kant was right, then appearance and reality, Kleist thought, were for ever confounded, nothing was predictable, there was no ascertainable single right answer or right way; human nature, our own selves, were a riddle, everything that had seemed straightforward became ambiguous and baffling. To Wilhelmine he wrote: ‘… we cannot determine whether what we call truth really is truth, or merely seems so to us’; and to Ulrike: ‘The thought that here on earth we know nothing of the truth, absolutely nothing… has shaken me in the very sanctuary of my soul – my only purpose, my supreme purpose has collapsed; I have none left.’ Yet it was precisely this breakdown of all his hopes, this very personal crisis of intellectual despair, that turned him into a creative writer.
In the years that followed Kleist travelled through Germany, lived for a while in Switzerland where he entertained Rousseauistic ideas of settling down on the land as a simple peasant, and even tried to join the French army in the hope of being killed during Napoleon’s planned invasion of England. Meanwhile his first play, The Schroffenstein Family, a grotesque tragedy of errors thematically indebted to Romeo and Juliet, had appeared anonymously in February 1803, and he had begun work on The Broken Pitcher, one of the few really successful German comedies. In 1803 he also wrote at least part of a grandly conceived second tragedy, Robert Guiscard, but burned the manuscript in a fit of discouragement. In 1805 a second attempt to join the Prussian civil service failed after a few months of preparatory studies. In January 1807 he was arrested by the French on suspicion of being a spy when trying to enter occupied Berlin without a passport, and spent nearly six months in a French prison. Here he wrote much of one of his finest works, the tragedy Penthesilea – stark, strange and ecstatic, breaking utterly with the established classicistic conception of Greek serenity and balance, and recapturing instead the Dionysian savagery of Euripides’ Bacchae which in part inspired this play. In Kleist’s version of the story of the tragic passion of the warrior Amazon queen for Achilles, love is shown to be ambiguously allied with hatred, a relentless elemental drive in which tenderness and the lust to destroy and devour are profoundly fused.
During his imprisonment Kleist’s friend Rühle von Lilienstern had found a publisher for his comedy or tragi-comedy Amphitryon, perhaps the subtlest of all the many dramatic treatments of this ancient tale, partly based on Molière’s version but reducing the latter, by comparison, to the level of elegant and unimportant farce. Then, upon his return from France, as if from the dead, his first completed short story, The Earthquake in Chile, appeared in a periodical under the title of Jerónimo and Josefa. In Dresden Kleist now founded a journal of his own in collaboration with the philosopher Adam Müller: they called it Phoebus and published in it The Broken Pitcher, The Marquise of O—, excerpts from Penthesilea and part of Michael Kohlhaas. But the venture was a financial failure and ended in a bitter quarrel between the two editors. Nor was the performance of The Broken Pitcher at the Weimar court theatre, under Goethe’s auspices, any more successful: Goethe’s production of it was a travesty and precipitated his final breach with Kleist. In 1809 it seemed possible that at least the disastrous political situation would improve and that Austria would be able to stem the tide of Napoleonic conquest. Since the crushing defeat of Prussia at Jena in 1806, Kleist had increasingly turned to fanatical patriotic fervour as a source of literary inspiration and for a sense of purpose in life; he wrote a number of political poems and tracts and notably, in 1808, The Battle with Hermann (Die Hermannsschlacht), a gruesome dramatic celebration of the Teutonic chieftain’s victory over the Roman legions in A.D. 9. But in July 1809 Austria was decisively defeated at Wagram; after visiting the scene of part of the campaign Kleist fled to the safety of Prague, where he fell seriously ill. After his recovery he returned to Berlin, and 1810 was perhaps the year of his greatest recognition as a writer during his lifetime. Kätchen of Heilbronn, a play designed to gratify the current popular taste for Gothick romance and chivalry, was performed in Vienna, and the first volume of his collected stories appeared, containing Michael Kohlhaas, The Marquise of O— and The Earthquake in Chile. At the same time Kleist became founder-editor of one of Germany’s first daily newspapers, the Berliner Abendblätter, which began very promisingly in October and in which he published two more of his stories, The Beggarwoman of Locarno and St Cecilia. These, together with The Betrothal in Santo Domingo (which had already been printed in another periodical), The Foundling and The Duel, then made up the second volume of collected stories which followed in 1811.
But Kleist’s relatively good fortune did not last. The initial popularity of the Abendblätter had been due much less to his own literary contributions than to articles on current affairs and above all, of course, to the sensational crime reports which during the first weeks were supplied to Kleist by the city chief of police. The government was embarrassed by some of the political comments and ordered strict censorship of the paper; its sales declined sharply and it closed down in March 1811, leaving Kleist in desperate financial straits. The small unofficial pension he had enjoyed from Queen Luise had ceased with her death, his own private means were long since exhausted, and his applications to rejoin the civil service or the army met, not surprisingly, with a cool reception. His most mature and balanced, yet still deeply enigmatic play, Prince Friedrich of Homburg, was completed in September 1811 and dedicated to Princess Amalie Marie Anne, wife of Prince William of Prussia, the King’s brother. But this work, though thoroughly patriotic in sentiment, found no favour with the royal family. Kleist’s psychological realism, already shockingly manifested in Penthesilea, had led him to include in it a scene in which the young hero, un
like any proper hero, Prussian officer or gentleman, collapses into elemental panic at the prospect of his imminent execution and begs for his life at any price, like Claudio in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. This breach of convention was found intolerable and the play was not published until ten years after Kleist’s death, which followed soon after. The suicide pact with Henriette Vogel was executed on 22 November 1811, and on 28 December The Times carried the following report:
The attention of the people of Berlin has lately been very much occupied by the tragical adventure of M. Kleist, the celebrated Prussian poet, and Madame Vogel. The reports which were at first circulated with regard to the cause of this unfortunate affair, have been strongly contradicted by the family of the lady; and it has been particularly denied that love was in any respect the cause of it. Madame Vogel, it is said, had suffered long under an incurable disorder; her physicians had declared her death inevitable; she herself formed a resolution to put a period to her existence. M. Kleist, the poet, and a friend of her family, had also long determined to kill himself. These two unhappy beings having confidentially communicated to each other their horrible resolution, resolved to carry it into effect at the same time. They repaired to the Inn at Wilhelm-stadt, between Berlin and Potsdam, on the border of the Sacred Lake [sic]. For one night and one day they were preparing themselves for death, by putting up prayers, singing, drinking a number of bottles of wine and rum, and last of all by taking about sixteen cups of coffee. They wrote a letter to M. Vogel, to announce to him the resolution they had taken, and to beg him to come as speedily as possible, for the purpose of seeing their remains interred. The letter was sent to Berlin by express. This done, they repaired to the banks of the Sacred Lake, where they sat down opposite each other. M. Kleist took a loaded pistol, and shot Madame Vogel through the heart, who fell back dead; he then re-loaded the pistol, and shot himself through the head. Soon after M. Vogel arrived, and found them both dead. The public are far from admiring, or even of approving, this act of insanity. An apology for this suicide, by M. Peghuilhen, Counsellor at War, has excited unanimously indignation among all who have the principles either of religion or morality…
The Marquise of O and Other Stories Page 1