The Marquise of O and Other Stories

I
N
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 clarinettist, 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.