(1777-1811) dramatist, novelist
Heinrich von Kleist, born in Frankfurt into a family of the minor Prussian nobility, led a life as troubled as the political fortunes his native country would experience under Napoleon. After entering the Prussian army in 1792, following his family’s tradition of military service, Kleist found that his temperament did not suit a life of rigid discipline and unquestioning obedience. He resigned in 1799 to devote himself to study, but overtaxed himself at the University of Frankfurt and left in 1800 to seek a cure for his health. He settled in Switzerland, intending to take up the rustic life, but his fiancee, Wilhelmine von Zenge, declined to join him, and their engagement ended.
In the following years, he turned to writing plays and reading the works of the great philosophers; he identified with rousseau and leibniz, but reading kant’s theories about the absence of absolute truth shattered Kleist, who believed the search for truth was his chief goal in life. Lack of funds forced him to take a position as a civil servant in 1805, which he resigned the next year to take up the series of travels, failed enterprises, bursts of writing, and bouts of desperation that marked the remaining years of his life. In this time he spent six months in prison after being mistaken for a spy. Disillusioned by the cool reception given his plays, disappointed by the failure of his literary enterprises, destitute, and feeling he had failed his family, Kleist ended his own life in an act of double suicide with his friend Henriette Vogel, who was dying of uterine cancer.
Throughout his life, Kleist wrote many letters. Those which he wrote to his elder half sister Ulrike, the one person he felt never abandoned him, show a sensitive nature torn between grandiose ambition and keen despair. His first play, The Family Schroffen-stien (1803), was a gloomy tragedy that debated the adequacy of reason as a guide for human existence. He next began Robert Guiscard, a tragedy based on the life of the historical Norman adventurer, but frustration with his progress led him to burn the manuscript in a fit of temper. Also in 1803 he began work on The Broken Jug, inspired by a competition among his friends. Completed in 1806, the play, a farce of justice taking place in a courtroom where the judge himself is the perpetrator of the crime, emerged as one of the best German comedies. Amphitryon, begun in 1803 as a translation of the play by moliere, examines in detail the inner torment of its female character, Alcmene. In Penthesilea (1807), Kleist drew on his own anguish to create the violent, passionate tale of the doomed Amazon queen who loved and destroyed Achilles. In Kate of Heilbronn (1810), a medieval fairy tale with knights and maidens, he created a different sort of heroine, patterned on his ideal of the virtuous, self-sacrificing woman. His Battle of the Teutoburger Wald (begun in 1808) shows the stirrings of a nationalism that would culminate in the patriotic spirit of his last and best work, Prince Friedrich of Homburg, written in 1810. Friedrich was never staged during Kleist’s life because his patrons did not approve of a Prussian soldier feeling such a desperate fear of death, but the play, subtle in its psychology, rather emphasizes the ideals of enlightened devotion and service to country.
Kleist also wrote a number of short stories, which survive, and a novel, which likely met the same fate as Robert Guiscard. Some critics hail Kleist as a forerunner of the age of modern drama, and had he been born a hundred years later, it is possible audiences would have appreciated him. The criticism of his contemporary goethe, who had a low opinion of the German Romantic spirit in general, did much to discourage Kleist. His writings return again and again to the impact of fate on human life, the causes and consequences of chaos, and the imperative to find some means of spiritual protection or understanding of the broader design. If Kleist failed in anything, it was in finding a way to reconcile his vivid interior world with the forces at work in the outer one. Though he never succeeded in surpassing the brilliance of Goethe or schiller, his influence on later dramatists and thinkers grounds him firmly in the tradition of great German literature.
English Versions of Works by Heinrich von Kleist
The Marquise of O—and Other Stories. Translated by Martin Greenberg. New York: Ungar, 1973.
Heinrich von Kleist: Three Major Plays. Translated by Carl R. Mueller. Lyme, N.H.: Smith and Kraus, 2001.
Works about Heinrich von Kleist
Allan, Sian. The Plays of Heinrich von Kleist: Ideals and Illusions. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Brown, Hilda Meldrum. Heinrich von Kleist: The Ambiguity of Art and the Necessity of Form. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
