The eight canonical stories, those published in the two-volume book edition of 1810–11, vary in length from the two or three pages of The Beggarwoman of Locarno to Michael Kohlhaas, which has the dimensions of a short novel. Kleist also filled up the pages of the Berliner Abendblätter with some miscellaneous anecdotes of lesser importance; in addition there is some reason to believe that he did in fact write a full-length novel (as he states in a letter of July 1811) though this has never come to light. It may have been destroyed by Kleist himself, or suppressed by his family with other revealing personal papers which were rumoured to be still secretly extant in this century but were finally lost during the Second World War. The present edition of the stories departs slightly from Kleist’s own arrangement of them in the book edition, since it aims to approximate to the chronological order of their composition, or partial composition, so far as this is known. As we have noted, most of them first appeared in one or another short-lived periodical, exceptions being The Foundling and The Duel which were published in the book edition for the first time. the text of St Cecilia or The Power of Music in the same volume is an extended and improved version of the original story which had come out earlier. The preliminary fragment of Michael Kohlhaas, probably conceived in 1805, and printed in the November 1808 number of Phoebus, ran to only a quarter of its final length. Apart from this more complicated case there seems to be no good reason for assigning to any of the stories a date of composition in whole or in part significantly earlier than that of their first publication. On this basis, the first (or first completed) stories were The Earthquake in Chile and The Marquise of O—. The former was probably written in 1806 or early in 1807, appearing in September of that year in Cotta’s Morgenblatt; the latter, on which Kleist was probably working during his imprisonment in France, appeared in Phoebus in February 1808.
These two stories make an interesting stylistic contrast, although they might both be said to deal with a basically similar theme which is also that of the other stories and of most of the plays. Virtually all his important work reveals Kleist’s epistemological obsession, his preoccupation with the tragic or potentially tragic deceptiveness of appearances in the world and in human nature. He constantly presents situations and characters which are disturbingly paradoxical and intractable to rational analysis; they point towards the ‘absurdity’ of life, as Albert Camus was to call it nearly a century and a half later, and it is therefore not surprising that in his treatment of them he can range between the tragic and the comic modes.
The Earthquake in Chile, in some ways the most remarkable of all the stories, is starkly tragic and raises, by implication at least, the deepest theological and existential questions, leaving them of course unanswered. It is constructed with consummate artistry and also serves as a particularly good example of the laconic self-effacement which is Kleist’s typical stance as a narrator. In general his method is to abstain from comment on the events he chronicles, and indeed from almost any kind of explicit communication with the reader; where value-judgements occur in the course of the narrative they can usually be seen to be incidental and relative, arising from a kind of momentary dramatic identification with the particular character in an immediate situation, rather than representing the author-narrator’s overall viewpoint. Kleist here simply puts before us a sequence of events, based on the historical fact of an earthquake which destroyed Santiago on 13 May 1647; he had some knowledge of the details of this disaster, though it is not clear from what source. But uppermost in his mind must have been the famous earthquake of 1755 which not only shattered Lisbon but severely shook the optimistic theodicy of the Enlightenment. His story about the Chilean earthquake offers no explanation of why it has occurred, or rather it suggests a number of different possible explanations which cancel each other out. We are left with the impression that the author is no better placed to interpret his story to us than the reader or even the characters themselves. This ‘deadpan’ narrative effect is one of the factors that give Kleist’s work a more modern flavour than that of most of his contemporaries, and has led to its being compared with that of Kafka, who, it is known, greatly admired his stories.
Strictly speaking, Kleist does not maintain a wholly neutral attitude in his story of Jerónimo and Josefa but seems to invite our sympathy for the lovers and compassion for their fate. The paradoxes nevertheless remain. A young girl, forced into a convent against her will, cannot renounce her lover, becomes pregnant by him, and eventually collapses in labour pains on the steps of the cathedral during a solemn festival. She is condemned to death for fornication and sacrilege, and an enormous crowd makes elaborate preparations, in a spirit of sanctimonious vindictiveness, to watch her execution. A matter of minutes before what they describe as divine justice can take its course, Josefa’s life is spared by the earthquake, which at the same time kills thousands of other innocent people. The earthquake also saves her imprisoned lover Jerónimo only seconds before he is about to hang himself in despair, shattering the walls of his prison and terrifying him into a renewed desire for mere physical survival. It destroys both the just and the unjust, those who like the Abbess have been merciful to the young couple and those who have condemned them. The common disaster brings out in human nature both the best – heroic courage and self-sacrifice, mutual help and compassion, and the worst – the frenzied search for a scapegoat and the religious zeal that serves as a pretext for sickening cruelty. In the central section of the story the lovers are reunited, along with other survivors, in the countryside outside the stricken city, and in this idyllic interlude, the eye of the storm as it were, hope temporarily revives – the fabric of corrupt civilization has collapsed and what Rousseau regarded as the natural goodness of mankind has apparently been restored. But in the conclusion, with dreadful irony, Jerónimo and Josefa perish after all: returning to the only church in the city left standing to give thanks to God for their deliverance, they hear their sin denounced from the pulpit and are then recognized and lynched by a fanatical mob, only their child surviving when the wrong baby has been savagely killed instead. If the earthquake has been an ‘act of God’, then human reason can make very little of God’s deeds, unless on the hypothesis that he is an omnipotent and highly sophisticated devil. In two letters written in 1806 Kleist expresses the hope that, contrary to evidence, the world is not governed by an evil spirit, but simply by one who is not understood. At least The Earthquake in Chile renders impossible any theodicy to which the concepts of mystery and paradox are not central. The world as experienced here by human beings is theologically ambiguous, as is the world of real life; in this sense the story is radically truthful. It is no accident that it presents the church and the clergy in so unfavourable a light; at this level of questioning, the answers offered by conventional and institutional religion cannot avail.
The Marquise of O— operates in a very different literary vein. The mystery with which it deals is domestic and psychological rather than cosmic. In it Kleist refers to what he was fond of calling die gebrechliche Einrichtung der Welt, the faulty or imperfect or unstable structure or ordering of the world, the flaw in the scheme of things: but here he modulates this concept in a non-tragic direction. Gebrechlich strictly means ‘fragile’, which the earth’s crust in The Earthquake in Chile literally is. In the Marquise of O—, the phrase gebrechliche Einrichtung der Welt occurs at the end, when the world’s ‘inherent imperfection’ is invoked as a reason for the conciliatory conclusion of the story (P. 113); but at another crucial point (P. 93) a significant variant of the idea is offered: the heroine thinks of the ‘order of the world’ as not only ‘inexplicable’ (unerklärlich) but also ‘great and sacred’ (gross und heilig), and we are told that she ‘wholly submits’ to it, intellectually at least. She has still to learn the full facts of her particular situation, and to face her own feelings; when this more personal acceptance is in due course achieved the story reaches its foreseeably happy ending. It would be a mistake to take either the story or its end
ing too solemnly: as in the case of Amphitryon, Kleist’s treatment hovers ambiguously between the serious and the comic. The contemporary setting of The Marquise of O— and the relative realism of its numerous and extensive dialogues (especially those in direct speech – an untypical feature) are consistent with an at least partly humorous intention; the style is pitched in an altogether lower key than that of most of the other stories. Although it must be conceded that the Marquise has in a certain sense been raped and that rape is not an unserious matter, it is worth noting that at no point is she threatened with anything more grave than a certain amount of social scandal and at worst a breach with her artistocratic family, of whom she is in any case financially independent. The basic idea – and here again Amphitryon is a parallel – has a long, ribald ancestry. Like that of rape by impersonation (Jupiter–Amphitryon–Alcmene) the theme of a woman made pregnant without her knowledge (while asleep or drunk or in a swoon) has wide currency in world literature and occurs for example in the following anecdote from Montaigne’s essay Of Drunkennesse (here quoted in Florio’s translation):
A widdow Country-woman, reputed very chaste and honest, suspecting herself to be with childe, told her neighbours, that had she a husband, she should verily thinke she were with childe. But the occasion of this suspition encreasing more and more, and perceiving herselfe so big-bellied, that she could no longer conceale it, she resolved to make the Parish-priest acquainted with it, whom she entreated to publish in the Church, that whosoever hee were, that was guilty of the fact, and would avow it, she would freely forgive him, and if he were so pleased, take him to her husband. A certaine swaine or hyne-boy of hers, emboldned by this proclamation, declared, how that having one holliday found her well-tippled with wine, and so sound asleep by the chimnie side, lying so fit, and ready for him, that without awaking her he had the full use of her body. Whom she accepted for her husband, and both live together at this day.
Kleist may well have read this pleasing little tale in France where he probably wrote The Marquise of O—; he himself claimed (in a note appended to the table of contents in the periodical where it first appeared) that his story was founded on fact, on events which he had fictionally transposed ‘from the north to the south’, i.e. to Italy, presumably from Germany. What matters, however, is that Kleist as narrator of course knows from the outset who is responsible for this virtuous young widow’s condition intéressante, and that from an early point in the story he allows the reader to share this knowledge. Like several of his works (The Duel among the stories and The Broken Pitcher and Amphitryon among the plays), The Marquise of O— has something of the character of a detective-story, a ‘who-dunnit’, thus betokening yet again his preoccupation with the problem of truth. All these four works revolve entirely around the seeming misconduct of a virtuous young woman. The Broken Pitcher is scarcely more than a straightforward farce in which the accidental breaking of a valuable ornamental jug is ingeniously made to symbolize the suspected loss of a simple young girl’s virginity, and the fat rogue of a village judge is involved in the ludicrous situation of trying a case in which he knows he is himself the culprit. Amphitryon ends satisfactorily with the vindication of the heroine’s moral if not technical innocence (of which the audience is of course aware all along) and her husband’s acquiescence in the prospect of becoming the putative father of Hercules as his reward for having unwittingly conceded the jus primae noctis to Jupiter; but Kleist also emphasizes Alcmene’s confusion and anguish and subtly exploits the theme’s serious potential. His procedure in The Marquise of O— is essentially similar. What has happened? During the storming by Russian forces of a citadel commanded by the heroine’s father, she has fallen into the hands of some ruffianly enemy troops who attempt to rape her; she is rescued from them by the young Russian officer Count F—, but he himself, in the heat of battle, yields to the sudden temptation offered by her fainting-fit. Kleist at first withholds this last fact from the reader by teasingly inserting a dash into the middle of a sentence, but we are almost at once supplied with two clues to it: the Count’s unexplained embarrassment when asked to identify the would-be perpetrators of the outrage, and secondly his cry, as he falls apparently mortally wounded in another battle, of ‘Giulietta, this bullet avenges you’ – using what we are told is the Marquise’s first name. The narrative presently refers to her unaccountable symptoms of early pregnancy, and then immediately to F—’s extraordinary first visit to her family’s house, when with inexplicable insistence he urged her to marry him at once: inexplicable, that is, to the Marquise and her relatives, but the reader by now at the latest shares the Count’s and the narrator’s knowledge of the true facts. If the slowness of everyone else to grasp them, and the extraordinary consternation and fuss that follow their eventual disclosure, seem excessive to the present-day reader, he must bear in mind the standards and prejudices of North German aristocratic families such as Kleist’s own – the code by which what this gentleman has done to this lady is not only unspeakable but literally unthinkable. What is not wholly clear is whether, and if so to what extent, Kleist consciously intended to put the melodramatic behaviour of Giulietta and her family in an ironic, parodistic light. If he did not, then the story does not really come off as a work of art; if he did, then it has a subtlety comparable with that of Amphitryon. In either case, however, it is a text of considerable psychological interest. One curious feature is Kleist’s depiction of the extreme rage of the father at his daughter’s supposed fall from virtue, and the more or less explicitly incestuous element in the scene of their reconciliation. The motif of a father’s jealous and protective love for his daughter and her passionate devotion to him, brought into currency by Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse, was in Kleist’s time a literary topos in German drama (cf. Lessing’s Emilia Galotti, Lenz’s The Soldiers, H. L. Wagner’s The Infanticide, Schiller’s Luise Miller; post-Kleistian parallels are Hebbel’s Maria Magdalena and Hauptmann’s Rosa Berndt). In The Marquise of O— Kleist accentuates this commonplace theme, parodistically perhaps, to a point verging on the grotesque. Then there is Giulietta’s dramatic polarization of her lover or assailant into ‘angel’ and ‘devil’; this too might be dismissed as a literary cliché, but it seems to be something more. Giulietta’s whole relationship to the Count is an enigma to her, which she can only gradually resolve. The Count himself is enigmatic, with a dark and irrational streak in his nature. He rescues Giulietta from his troops, only to use her himself a moment later as a prize of war – we are reminded of the paradoxical association of love and violence in Penthesilea. Above all, Count F— carries with him, as we learn in what is certainly the oddest passage in the story (p. 82), a memory of having once as a child, on a perverse impulse, hurled mud at a beautiful white swan, an act of ‘defilement’ which he unconsciously identifies with his violation of the chaste Giulietta. Emotionally disturbed as he was, Kleist clearly had some strangely modern insights into erotic psychology; in the final scene of Penthesilea he had even unwittingly anticipated, by a certain choice of metaphor, Freud’s theory that slips of the tongue can express repudiated unconscious drives. Needless to say, The Marquise of O— was no less incomprehensible than Penthesilea to his contemporaries, who found both works deeply shocking and offensive to good taste, or at best ludicrous.
Michael Kohlhaas is not only by far the longest story in the collection but also probably the best known or at least the most discussed. As already mentioned, about one quarter of it was first published in November 1808 in Phoebus; it is not clear when that fragment was written. The story in its general outline was founded on fact: Kleist’s chief source seems to have been an excerpt from an earlier chronicle published in 1731 which tells how in the middle of the sixteenth century a horse-dealer named Hans (not Michael) Kohlhaas from Kohlhaasenbrück, a village near Berlin and just on the Brandenburg side of the frontier with Saxony, had two of his horses wrongfully detained and ill-treated while travelling to Dresden; how his legal action for damages failed owin
g to corrupt intervention; how he then took the law into his own hands, hired an armed band and, bent on vengeance, pursued the Junker von Tronka, burning down his castle and also part of Wittenberg; and how this private war grew in scale despite an attempt by Martin Luther to reason with Kohlhaas and persuade him to desist. The chronicle also mentions inter alia the political complications, the involvement of the Elector of Brandenburg and the eventual execution of Kohlhaas in Berlin on the Monday after Palm Sunday. The main events of the Phoebus fragment may be summarized as follows: Michael Kohlhaas is a prosperous and honourable man with a strongly developed sense of justice and fair dealing. It is this very passion for justice that will turn him (Kleist states this characteristic central paradox in his first paragraph) ‘into a robber and a murderer’, and make him ‘one of the most honourable as well as one of the most terrible men of his age’. Kleist keeps to the outline of his source, but makes Kohlhaas’s grievance the more poignant by having his wife, Lisbeth, die from an injury sustained when she is warded off by a bodyguard as she vainly tries to present to the Elector personally her husband’s petition, hitherto suppressed by corrupt courtiers. Lisbeth’s intervention is Kohlhaas’s last step within the bounds of legality; he has already mortgaged his property to raise money for his resort to violence. Immediately after he has buried his wife, he assembles the first of his followers and rides off to attack Tronka Castle. The Phoebus fragment of 1808 breaks off at this point (page 138 of our text). The remainder was not written, or at least not finished, until the summer of 1810. In these further seventy-five pages Kleist greatly complicates the material. If he had followed the story’s natural line of development and adhered more closely to his main source, he would have narrated only the following events: Kohlhaas and his men storm Tronka Castle and destroy it, but the Junker Wenzel himself manages to escape to Wittenberg. Kohlhaas now begins to issue proclamations of an increasingly paranoid character, declaring himself to be the representative of the Archangel Michael and to have formed a new ‘world government’, calling upon all good Christians to support his just cause against Tronka, and demanding that the latter be handed over to him for chastisement. The pay he offers, together with the prospect of further gain from plunder, naturally attracts an increasing number of followers. He sets fire to Wittenberg three times, defeating or evading the ever more formidable military expeditions sent against him, and also attacks Leipzig, to which he thinks the Junker has been taken, although he is in fact still in Wittenberg under heavy guard. At this point Luther intervenes with a public proclamation addressed to Kohlhaas, condemning his course of action. The horse-dealer, who deeply reveres Luther, returns secretly to Wittenberg and presents himself to the theologian. Society, he argues, has set him outside the law by refusing him the law’s protection; he is therefore justified and compelled to use force. His quarrel with the Junker has already cost him his wife and it is too late to stop now. Luther, as his spiritual father, urges him (as his dying wife had done) to forgive his enemy, and when Kohlhaas remains obdurate on this point, refuses him absolution. He consents, however, to negotiate on his behalf with the Elector of Saxony who, it appears, has improperly been kept in ignorance of Kohlhaas’s justified legal claims. When Kohlhaas has left, Luther writes to the Elector, pointing out that the horse-dealer has in fact been wronged and virtually outlawed, and that in view of the increasingly strong public feeling on his side there is danger of a general revolt. He advises the Elector not to treat him as a rebel but to allow his case to be reopened in Dresden, granting him for this purpose a safe-conduct to the Saxon capital and an amnesty in respect of his deeds of violence. The Elector discusses this now extremely embarrassing situation with his advisers, who include Wenzel von Tronka’s cousins, Hinz and Kunz, both high officials at the court, and eventually decides to issue a proclamation to Kohlhaas in the sense advised by Luther. On reading it, Kohlhaas disbands all his men in accordance with the Elector’s stipulation, proceeds to Dresden and reopens his case against Junker Wenzel, applying to the court as before for his punishment, for damages and for restitution of all losses, including restoration of the horses to their former healthy condition. The Junker is released from Wittenberg and received in Dresden by his cousins, who are furious with him for making their family a laughing-stock. To make matters worse, it turns out after some investigation that the two horses are still alive but in so neglected a state that they have already been handed over to a knacker, who is ordered to bring them to Dresden. Hearing that the emaciated animals are on public display in the market square, Wenzel and Kunz von Tronka hasten to the scene; Kohlhaas is summoned to identify the horses as his, but the Tronka servants refuse to touch creatures in such a disgraceful condition and a riot breaks out. This grotesque incident turns public sentiment against the horse-dealer, and he is now willing to settle out of court for a simple payment of compensation. But chance, or rather the natural entropy of events in a corrupt human world, again operates against him, for a number of his officially dispersed followers led by a certain brutal and unscrupulous Johann Nagelschmidt (who is mentioned in Kleist’s source) have started to plunder the countryside under cover of Kohlhaas’s name and cause. Kohlhaas at once publicly dissociates himself from Nagelschmidt, but the Tronka family see their advantage: the amnesty is in danger of collapsing, time is on their side, and they begin to prolong the case by vexatious special pleadings. Kohlhaas notices that the number of lansquenets set to guard his house have increased and realizes that he has in effect been made a prisoner. To test this – for it is clear by now that he is obsessed by a desire to unmask official hypocrisy and politic dissimulation – he attempts to leave on a social visit but is prevented by a series of transparent pretexts. Nagelschmidt now writes to him suggesting that he should resume command of the band, and offering to engineer his escape. Unknown to Kohlhaas, this letter has been intercepted and read by the authorities. Since he now despairs of the amnesty and the whole affair, and intends to abandon his claims and emigrate, he writes back accepting Nagelschmidt’s offer and thus falls into the trap which the Tronka party have persuaded the Elector to lay for him. His letter to Nagelschmidt is published in order to discredit him, he is put on trial for conspiracy, makes no defence and is condemned to death by burning and quartering. He has, however, a friend at the Electoral court in Berlin, who has now at last succeeded in bringing the whole inside story of the affair to the notice of the Elector of Brandenburg. The latter intervenes; he dismisses the corrupt official who, as a relative of the Tronka family, had prevented Kohlhaas’s previous submissions from reaching him, and motivated partly by a desire to show his political strength as a potential ally of Poland, which is threatening Saxony with war, he makes the following demands: Kohlhaas, as a Brandenburg citizen, is to be transferred immediately to Berlin, where a Saxon attorney may present the case against him for his acts of violence in Saxony on which he will be tried according to Brandenburg law; and a Brandenburg attorney is to be allowed to come to Dresden to ensure that the Saxon court deals properly with Kohlhaas’s own case against Wenzel von Tronka. The Saxon Elector reluctantly agrees to the extradition of the horse-dealer but decides to appeal to the Holy Roman Emperor, who is not bound by any Saxon amnesty whether broken or unbroken; the Emperor is petitioned to send a representative to Berlin who will prosecute Kohlhaas for breach of the Imperial peace. All this is done, and the Berlin court duly pronounces sentence of death by beheading on Kohlhaas. He accepts this with equanimity on hearing that his claims against Tronka are also to be met in full. At the place of execution he finds the Elector of Brandenburg waiting, together with the Imperial prosecutor and other officials; his two fine black horses, the mistreatment of which set the whole terrible train of events in motion and which run through the tale as a sort of leitmotiv, are presented to him fully restored to health; the Junker, he is informed, has been sentenced in Dresden to two years’ imprisonment. He declares himself fully satisfied and ready in his turn to make reparation to the Emperor for having t
aken the law into his own hands. Thereupon he is beheaded; both sides have made their point.
The Marquise of O and Other Stories Page 2