The Marquise of O and Other Stories (3 page)

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 owing 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 taken the law into his own hands. Thereupon he is beheaded; both sides have made their point.

This, at least, is the story as Kleist might have completed it: the story of an individual grievance developing, with fascinating and dreadful realism, through ever-increasing complexities until it becomes a major affair of state and is then brought to a paradoxical but impressively logical resolution. It is thought that the Kohlhaas chronicle was originally suggested to Kleist as the theme for a drama; it has obvious theatrical potential, and this was in fact well exploited recently by James Saunders in his brilliant stage adaptation of the story under the title
Hans Kohlhaas
, which was produced at the Questors Theatre in London in 1972 and also broadcast as a radio play (it has also been produced in Germany). Mr Saunders used the sequence of events outlined above, with no essential alteration, merely filling out some of the details and accommodating the present-day taste for Brechtian distancing effects. The result had great force and unity. Unfortunately, however, Kleist was not content to finish
Michael Kohlhaas
on those lines, but introduced a bizarre and fantastic sub-plot which seriously damages the artistic structure of an already long and complex narrative. This added material, which Mr Saunders wisely omitted, contains the episode of the gypsy-woman and her mysterious prophecy about the fate of the ruling dynasty of Saxony, which she writes on a piece of paper and gives to Kohlhaas as a kind of talisman which he can use to bargain for his life with the Saxon Elector. The latter learns at the time of the horse-dealer's extradition to Brandenburg that it is he who is in possession of this fateful secret, and desperately tries every means to have him rescued or pardoned or somehow to retrieve from him the piece of paper which Kohlhaas carries with him everywhere; but Kohlhaas goes to his death rather than surrender it. The
Elector, as he sees it, has cheated him by solemnly promising him an amnesty and then violating it in connection with the Nagelschmidt affair. Warned by the gypsy-woman, who also turns out inexplicably to be a kind of
Doppelgängerin
of his dead wife, that the Elector intends to recover the paper from his body after his execution and that for this purpose he will be standing incognito beside the scaffold, he removes it from around his neck just before putting his head on the block, tantalizingly reads it to himself in full view of the man whom he knows to be the Saxon Elector, and then swallows it so that it is lost for ever.

There are several artistic objections to this digressive subplot. For one thing, Kohlhaas's final action destroys the sense of reconciliation at the close. Despite having at last, on Luther's authority, received absolution and taken the sacrament, he dies gratifying a thirst for revenge, like Piachi in
The Foundling
. Moreover, the fact that the old gypsy-woman has furnished him with this last and only weapon of vengeance against the Elector, and generally added fuel to his vindictiveness, makes nonsense of the supposed identification of her with his deceased wife who had died begging him to forgive his enemies. It might be argued that Kleist intends all along to stress the obsessive, irrational element in Kohlhaas's nature and to suggest, especially in the final scene, a psychologically realistic obscurity in the distinction between justice and vengeance – an illustration in advance, as it were, of the truth of Nietzsche's punning aphorism to the effect that
ich bin gerecht
(I am just) really means
ich bin gerächt
(I am avenged). On the other hand it seems that Kleist was certainly motivated by an artistically extraneous desire to discredit Saxony. As we have seen, he had at about the time of completing
Michael Kohlhaas
become a fervent spokesman of the patriotic campaign of hatred against Napoleon. A few years earlier Saxony had joined the Confederation of the Rhine, the group of German states allied to France and enjoying Napoleonic protection; this had been
in 1806, not long after the disastrous defeat of Prussia at Jena. Accordingly, in
The Battle with Hermann
, the King (as he now was) of Saxony had under a transparent allegorical disguise been represented as a traitor to the German cause. In 1810, filled with hopes of a Prussian resurgence, Kleist found it appropriate to invent in
Michael Kohlhaas
the notion of a prophecy foretelling the fall of Saxony and the future prosperity of Brandenburg–Prussia; he could thus underline the latter's historic mission and greatness, which he was to celebrate again in
Prince Friedrich of Homburg
.

His reasons for adding the gypsy episode may also have included a literary intention, misguided in this case, of deliberately creating mystery.
Michael Kohlhaas
has the dramatic urgency of the best of Kleist's other stories, but none of their economy of means. Its ever increasing and ever more confusing complications suggest that the narrator wishes to lose both himself and the reader in an impenetrable world, in a maze of detail and coincidence. The mystifying affair of the old woman was to have been, perhaps, the culmination of this process, raising it to a supernatural level. Not only the Holy Roman Emperor, but God himself, or Fate, is brought into play. Whereas, for example,
The Earthquake in Chile
implicitly raises theological questions and, as will be seen, certain other stories
(The Beggarwoman of Locarno, St Cecilia, The Foundling)
introduce or suggest a dimension of the more-than-natural, they all do so with great subtlety and tact. In
Michael Kohlhaas
the ‘real' and the ‘fantastic' are not compellingly fused but clumsily mixed. Close inspection of the episode of the gypsy's prophecy shows it to have been cobbled on to the rest of the text with considerable carelessness. As already mentioned, the
Phoebus
fragment stops precisely at the point where Kohlhaas, after his wife's funeral, rides off to attack Tronka Castle. In the book version he accidentally meets the Elector of Saxony while he is being escorted to Berlin and, not
recognizing him, tells how he acquired the mysterious piece of paper kept in a lead locket which he has worn round his neck ever since. It was, he says, on the very day after his wife had been buried, and while he was on his way with armed followers to Tronka Castle, that he encountered simultaneously the Electors of Saxony and of Brandenburg, who were conferring in Jüterbock. He goes on to relate how, in the evening, the two princes had mingled with the crowd in friendly conversation, and how he, having paused at an inn with his men, stood idly watching them speak to the old gypsy-woman, in an incident roughly following the pattern of the meeting of Macbeth and Banquo with the three witches. Brandenburg frivolously asks the woman to make a prophecy about himself and receives an auspicious answer; Saxony does the same but the woman, instead of replying, writes her answer on a piece of paper and hands it to Kohlhaas. All this happens in public, in circumstances in which the horse-dealer, although not near enough to the two Electors to hear their conversation with the gypsy, obviously has easy access to them, and they are after all the ultimate judges in his dispute with the Tronka family. He gives in his account, however, no explanation of why he did not at least attempt to petition them for justice, nor does he even mention that it occurred to him to do so. It seems that he merely stood looking on, even exchanging a genial remark with the gypsy-woman when she approached him, as if the death of his wife and the events leading up to it had never happened. Thus the sub-plot, at its point of juncture with the main line of the Kohlhaas story, involves a gross improbability of behaviour on the part of Kohlhaas himself. This reinforces the reader's impression that the whole thing is an artistically unfortunate afterthought; a further explanation may be that Kleist wanted to appeal to the popular taste, at this peak period of German Romanticism, for folkloristic, fairytale-like material. He had done the same thing in
Kätchen of Heilbronn
which for that very
reason, although arguably the weakest of his plays, was the only one to be produced with some degree of success in his lifetime. But Kleist was ‘romantic' and irrationalistic in too profound a sense to have needed to make such concessions to literary convention.