The Dedalus Book of Literary Suicides

by Gary Lachman

  In 1912, Trakl returned to the military, and was sent to work in an army hospital in Innsbruck. Here he had his first and only stroke of good luck. At the Café Maximilian, Trakl met Ludwig von Ficker, publisher of the literary journal Der Brenner (which, among other things, was in part responsible for the Kierkegaard revival in the early twentieth century.) Predictably, the meeting took some effort; Trakl sat apart from the group around Ficker for hours, paralysed by shyness. Finally, he asked a waiter to deliver his card. Ficker invited him over, and from then on until his death, Der Brenner would publish a Trakl poem in every issue. Through Ficker Trakl met the only men of genius equal to his own that he would know: the satirist Karl Kraus, the painter and playwright Oscar Kokoschka, and the architect Adolf Loos. Through Der Brenner the novelist Franz Werfel (who followed the trail Walter Benjamin took through the Pyrenees; see “The Political Suicide”) read his poems and was so impressed that he convinced his publisher, Kurt Wolff, to publish them. In July 1913, Gedichte (Poems), the only collection published in Trakl’s lifetime, appeared; a second collection, Sebastian in Traum (Sebastian in a Dream) was also accepted, but appeared after his death.

  Yet although his time in Innsbruck and his association with Ficker was probably the happiest and most promising of his life, Trakl was never really happy and its clear he suffered from some form of mental imbalance, most likely schizophrenia. To a friend at this time he was “silent, reserved, shy, entirely turned inward … sensitive, sick.” He had “hallucinations” and “raves.”24 One hallucination, which he said had also come to him as a child, was of a man standing behind him with a drawn knife. Later, when under observation by army physicians, Trakl confessed that he heard bells; he also told them that his real father was a cardinal and that he himself was destined for some greatness – a not unusual remark from a poet, and in part justified. Trakl probably had visions throughout his life and, as in the case of the French poet Gérard de Nerval, his friends may have simply chalked these up to his temperament. At a country fair, for example, he once pointed to a calf’s head and announced, “That is our lord Christ!” He would also sit for hours in company without saying a word, then suddenly erupt into a monologue having nothing to do with whatever anyone else had been talking about.

  That he himself had doubts about his sanity can be seen in a letter Trakl wrote to Ficker, ostensibly about his concern over his sister’s marital problems and recent miscarriage. (She had married an older man for security, but soon realized her mistake, and, like Georg, had used drugs to compensate.) He told Ficker, “I no longer know in from out,” a concise description of a schizoid split. “It is such an indescribable disaster when one’s world breaks apart. Oh my God, what a judgement has broken over me. Tell me that I must have the power to live on and act truthfully. Tell me that I’m not insane. A stony darkness has broken in. Oh my friend, how small and unhappy I have become.”25

  Although it’s difficult to see Trakl ever overcoming his difficulties, the outbreak of WWI made this more or less impossible. Trakl was sent to Galicia, on the eastern front, and, with no medical training, was single-handedly responsible for the care of ninety badly wounded soldiers following the battle of Grodek. Trakl could do little to help and the screams and shrieks of pain were terrifying. A soldier who could no longer stand it shot himself in the head, and Trakl could see pieces of his brain sticking to the wall. He ran outside, but there, in the courtyard, he saw the corpses of partisans hanging from the trees; it’s possible he may even have seen one place the noose over his own head. This was too much, and at dinner that evening he announced that he would shoot himself, and ran outside. He was stopped before he could pull the trigger and put under arrest. He was sent to Cracow, where he shared a room with a lieutenant suffering delirium tremens; understandably, his condition worsened.

  Trakl’s suicidal impulse may have broken out earlier than this. At Grodek he’s said to have tried to rush to the front line; it took six men to disarm him, a resurgence, perhaps, of the same urge that had him step in front of a moving train. While in Cracow he expressed concern that he would be tried for cowardice, and perhaps this led to his final attempt, although a military that could put as unstable an individual as Trakl in charge of ninety badly wounded men should itself have faced a court martial. A doctor in charge of Trakl remarked that his case represented an interesting example of “genius and madness,” and noted that his patient “ ‘wrote poetry’ ”, the inverted commas suggesting the dubious character of the practice. Ficker managed to see Trakl in Cracow; it was then that he suggested writing to Wittgenstein, who was also at the front, to ask him to visit. (Ficker had been chosen by the philosopher to distribute his donations.) Ficker also asked Trakl if he had any drugs. “Would I be alive otherwise?” the poet replied, ironically making clear that they were the only thing keeping the horror of reality from overwhelming him. Evidently they couldn’t do this for long, and on that November day, Trakl used them for another, more lasting release from an unbearable situation.

  Heinrich von Kleist

  Immanuel Kant was perhaps the most influential philosopher of the last few centuries and his Critique of Pure Reason is one of the most important philosophical works in the canon. By the time of his death in 1804 he was clearly aware of his achievement and of the enormous impact his work had on his contemporaries. What Kant wouldn’t know was that seven years after his death his ideas about epistemology, the study of how we know what we know, would lead to a suicide, a double one in fact. On 21 November 181126, on a grassy knoll overlooking Lake Wannsee just outside Berlin, the playwright and novelist Heinrich von Kleist put a bullet through the heart of his companion Henriette Vogel, a 31 year-old woman with an incurable cancer, and then placed the barrel of the gun in his mouth and fired. Although Kleist, like Harry Crosby, had shown an inclination to form suicide pacts, with both male and female friends, from an early age, it was his study of Kant that sent him over the edge. “My one supreme goal has vanished, and I am bereft,” he wrote after reading the sage of Königsberg. Kleist read Kant in 1801, and in that year, legend has it, he and some friends walked along the Wannsee, discussing the best methods of killing oneself. Ten years later, at the age of thirty-four, Kleist decided to put some of their ideas to the test.

  Kleist’s ‘supreme goal’ was to order his life according to the Enlightenment ideals of reason and logic. Like many of his time, he strove to organize a methodical ‘life plan’ and to put it into effect. Knowledge, understanding, and planning, he believed, could master life’s chaos and reduce the wild and arbitrary to the controlled and orderly. Happiness could be attained, provided one pursued it rationally. But Kant, as far as Kleist was concerned, had pulled the rug out from under this project by showing that we can never know the world as it is in itself, but only as our perceptions show it to us; only, that is, as appearance. All we can know is the world of the senses, and they are by no means infallible. What the world is really like is a mystery. Our knowledge, and the certainty it provides, is, Kant argued effectively, severely limited. This troubled Kleist. “We cannot decide if what we call truth is really truth, or whether it only seems that way to us,” he despaired in a letter of 1801, the year of his ‘crisis’.

  Such abstruse metaphysics may leave most of us unperturbed, but their effect on Kleist was devastating. “Regardless of whether this interpretation tallied exactly with Kant’s teaching,” Kleist’s biographer Joachim Maass writes, “it pierced Kleist’s heart like a poisoned arrow and sent him staggering.”27 The result, or so Kleist believed, was a shattering insight into life’s fundamental uncertainty, its dissonance with our own hopes and aims, a discontinuity that carried through down to the individual and society. This dark, disturbing vision became the essence of Kleist’s work, seen in his novel Michael Kohlhaas, in stories like “The Earthquake in Chile,” and even in comedies like The Broken Jug. Writing of Kleist’s plays, E.L. Doctorow remarked that their “overwhelming sense […] is of immense disorder, teeming madness,
an infernally wild fluctuation of feeling and event.”28 Kafka, he says, loved Kleist’s work, and read him aloud to his friends.

  Such a vision is by now commonplace. Epistemological, moral and cultural relativity reign; it’s the so-called ‘postmodern condition’. But in Kleist’s time it was radical, and many, including Kleist’s older contemporary Goethe, who affirmed the harmony between personality and the world, took it as a sign of madness. Goethe is said to have burned his copy of Kleist’s play Das Kätchen von Heilbronn, about shared dreams and somnambulism, because it was “tainted with an incurable disease.”29 Like his other contemporary, E.T.A. Hoffmann (who Goethe also disapproved of), Kleist had an interest in trance, dreams and other altered states of consciousness, an expression of his rejection of reason and inherent mysticism.

  Today, like his near-contemporary Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Kleist is seen as ahead of his time, a precursor of contemporary literary themes like the theatre of the absurd, existentialism and post-modernism. After Kant, consciousness for Kleist, as for many of us, became a burden; it no longer illuminated the path to rational perfectibility, but the unavoidable descent to the abyss. Hence, in his brilliant and beautiful essay, “On The Marionette Theatre,” Kleist argues that no adult human being possesses the grace and unself-conscious ease of movement we find in puppets. He posits some future state in which this innocence may be recaptured, denied us since our exile from the garden and, more recently, our loss of childhood. “Grace,” he writes, “appears in that form which either has no consciousness or an infinite consciousness. That is, in the puppet or in the god.” Another form of unconscious grace, one that Kleist in the end would avail himself of, is, of course, death.

  Bernd Heinrich Wilhelm von Kleist – to give his full name – was born on 18 October 1777 in Frankfurt-on-the-Oder; Kleist himself, however, celebrated his birthday on 10 October, an indication of the ambiguity associated with his life. Kleist’s Prussian family was well known, and he came from a long line of generals, although there was one poet, Ewald von Kleist, a friend of Lessing’s, whose death fighting for Frederick the Great at the hopeless battle of Kunersdorf can be seen as a kind of suicide. Like many romantic young men, Kleist thought little of his family’s standing, and he said that he would gladly abandon honour, nobility and class, in exchange for love and happiness. There’s little known about Kleist’s childhood, which he thought of as ‘joyless’, and which, he claimed, was attended by ‘musical hallucinations’. His tutor spoke of him as a fiery spirit, provoked into rages by trifles, but also possessed of generosity and chivalry. An inordinate response to everyday incidents is a characteristic of both Kleist’s life and work, and early on he made a suicide pact with his cousin, agreeing to take their lives if “anything unworthy” should befall them.

  In this Kleist seems one of Hesse’s ‘suicides,’ who are ready at a moment’s notice to give up their self. There was, as Maass argues, “not a single work in which he did not treat explicitly or implicitly of this alternative, not a single defeat to which he did not respond with a yearning for self-destruction.” Like Jacques Vaché and Harry Crosby, he didn’t want to die alone; “the death drive and love were for him inseparable, a longing, as it were, for the ultimate embrace.”30 His closest relationship seemed to be with his half-sister Ulrike, from his father’s first marriage; in later life, after the failure of his own relationships, she provided some measure of emotional ballast, as well as frequent financial support. In his last days, however, a falling out with her precipitated his release from this world.

  At 14, Kleist joined a regiment of guards at Potsdam and had achieved the rank of second lieutenant before he decided to leave the military eight years later, after seeing service in the Rhine campaign against revolutionary France. He entered Frankfurt University, studying physics, mathematics, philosophy, cultural history and law. “I have set myself a goal that will require the unremitting exertion of all my powers and the use of every minute’s time,” he wrote, embarking on his project of self-betterment with the kind of intensity that would in the end undermine him. In the same year, 1799, he confided to Ulrike that he found it “incomprehensible how a human being can live without a plan for his life; 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.” Yet, this confidence concealed an insecurity. “Existing without a life plan,” he continued, “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.”31

  Ironically, a wavering, unstable life was precisely what was in store for Kleist; again like Thomas Lovell Beddoes, he would find himself shifting back and forth between several cities: Dresden, Paris, Frankfurt, Leipzig, Berlin, Basle, Prague. In 1800, in an effort to anchor himself in respectability, he initiated an engagement with Wilhelmine von Zenge, the daughter of a regimental commander. The two were unsuitable and the engagement was another part of his ‘life plan’. It had little time to succeed, as Kleist soon left Frankfurt for Leipzig and Dresden. In Würzberg he underwent some kind of surgery which, he informed his fiancé, would make him ‘worthy’ of her. There’s suspicion that Kleist was impotent and/or homosexual, or that he had some deformity (he did suffer from a speech defect, which made him uneasy in company); in any case his sexual life remains mostly obscure (he seemed to exhibit a lifelong abstinence), and the engagement was soon broken off. Not, however, before Wilhelmine tried to refute the new scepticism that had overtaken him. She was concerned that his obsession would interfere with him obtaining some position that would enable them to marry. He was concerned that it had undermined the entire foundations of life. In 1802 he abruptly ended the engagement and, more or less, jettisoned any claim on normality. That same year he began to write.

  In 1803 Kleist moved between Berne, Milan, Geneva and Paris. At some point on his return to Prussia, he had a nervous breakdown. He contemplated following Rousseau’s philosophy and thought of living as a peasant while getting ‘back to nature’; at the same time he considered joining Napoleon’s army in the hopes of being killed during his planned invasion of England. His first play, The Schroffenstein Family, appeared anonymously, and he began work on The Broken Jug. He also started work on a tragedy, Robert Guiscard, but burned the manuscript in disgust. Kleist had by this time met Goethe, Schiller and Wieland and his literary profile, if not his professional one, was rising. In 1805 he tried for a second time to enter the Prussian civil service, but was predictably unsuccessful. In 1807, while trying to enter occupied Berlin without a passport (the year before, Napoleon had routed the Prussians and had occupied the country), he was arrested by the French and spent six months in prison. Here he wrote Penthesilea, which anticipates Nietzsche’s savage vision of the Dionysian character of Greek tragedy, rejecting the received notion of Apollonian serenity embraced by Goethe. On his release from prison, his first short stories started to appear.

  In Dresden, with the philosopher Adam Müller, Kleist started a literary journal, Phoebus; here he published perhaps his best known story, “The Marquise of O,” about a woman who discovers she is pregnant but has no idea how it happened or who is responsible. The journal however soon went bust and Kleist and Müller parted on bad terms. Kleist suffered another failure at the hands of Goethe, who staged an unsuccessful production of The Broken Jug; Kleist was so enraged he wanted to challenge Goethe to a duel. Perhaps prompted by his imprisonment, Kleist had become fanatically patriotic and he devoted himself to writing political poems and tracts. But in 1809, Austria was trounced at Wagram and Kleist fled to Prague where he fell seriously ill with some unspecified complaint. Rumours that he had been admitted to an insane asylum competed with others that he had planned to assassinate Napoleon; he did, indeed, ask a friend to procure arsenic
for him, but this probably had more to do with a planned suicide attempt than a political murder. At any rate, Kleist felt at an end; writing, he said, had become pointless. “How shall I ever pull myself together?” he asked Ulrike in a letter. The “imperfect state of the world, the fundamental irreconcilability of the social order with justice and decency” that Thomas Mann saw at the centre of Kleist’s vision had, it seemed, triumphed.

  1810 was a better year, at least at first. He finally settled in Berlin and there started the city’s first daily newspaper, the Berliner Abendblätter. Initially successful, it was later censored by the government, and its readership dropped. By early 1811, it folded, and Kleist was again left adrift. Financially insecure, his work, although acknowledged by his peers, having little public success, Kleist again tried to gain a toehold in the civil service, but again failed. He had by this time met Henriette Vogel, one of the ‘interesting’ women courted by the Berlin romantics; she had already been one of Müller’s lovers, but he left her to marry a woman Kleist had been in love with.

  At 33, Henriette was no longer pretty. But she had wit, an appetite for knowledge, was an accomplished pianist and singer and, perhaps most resonant with Kleist, was given to spiritual exaltation. She was also suffering from a terminal uterine cancer, and had not concealed her yearning for a quick death, to avoid a certain slow and painful one.