Heinrich Von Kleist : Artistic and Political Legacies [1 ed.] 9789401210300, 9789042037816

Citation preview

Heinrich von Kleist

170

Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft

Begründet von Alberto Martino und in Verbindung mit Francis Claudon (Université Paris-Est Créteil Val de Marne) – Rüdiger Görner (Queen Mary, University of London) – Achim Hölter (Universität Wien) – Klaus Ley (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz) – John A. McCarthy (Vanderbilt University) – Alfred Noe (Universität Wien) – Manfred Pfister (Freie Universität Berlin) – Sven H. Rossel (Universität Wien)

herausgegeben von

Norbert Bachleitner (Universität Wien)

Redaktion: Paul Ferstl und Rudolf Pölzer Anschrift der Redaktion: Institut für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, Sensengasse 3A , A-1090 Wien

Heinrich von Kleist Artistic and Political Legacies

Edited by Jeffrey L. High and Sophia Clark

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2013

Cover concept designed by Joseph C. High Cover image created by Aldo Gonzalez Le papier sur lequel le présent ouvrage est imprimé remplit les prescriptions de “ISO 9706:1994, Information et documentation - Papier pour documents Prescriptions pour la permanence”. The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. Die Reihe “Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft” wird ab dem Jahr 2005 gemeinsam von Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam – New York und dem Weidler Buchverlag, Berlin herausgegeben. Die Veröffentlichungen in deutscher Sprache erscheinen im Weidler Buchverlag, alle anderen bei Editions Rodopi. From 2005 onward, the series “Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft” will appear as a joint publication by Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam – New York and Weidler Buchverlag, Berlin. The German editions will be published by Weidler Buchverlag, all other publications by Editions Rodopi. ISBN: 978-90-420-3781-6 E-Book ISBN: 978-94-012-1030-0 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2013 Printed in The Netherlands

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments Seán Allan (University of Warwick), Foreword: Heinrich von Kleist and His Legacy

5

Jeffrey L. High (California State University, Long Beach), Introduction: Heinrich von Kleist’s Legacies

17

Karl J. Fink (St. Olaf College), Kleist’s Justice beyond Tears: Kohlhaasian Manifestos after Kleist

23

Jeffrey Champlin (Bard College), Reader Beware: Wild Right in Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas and Eichendorff’s Das Schloß Dürande

45

Amy Emm (The Citadel), The Legacy of Kleist’s Language in Music: Schoeck, Wolf, Bachmann, and Henze

59

Tim Mehigan (University of Queensland), The Process of Inferential Contexts: Franz Kafka Reading Heinrich von Kleist

69

Curtis Maughan (Vanderbilt University) and Jeffrey L. High (California State University, Long Beach), Like No Other? Thomas Mann and Kleist’s Novellas

87

Jennifer M. Hoyer (University of Arkansas), A Michael Kohlhaas for the Post-Holocaust Era: Nelly Sachs’ Eli. Ein Mysterienspiel vom Leiden Israels

113

Markus Wilczek (Harvard University), The Puppet Inside: Reading Stuffing in Heiner Müller’s Kleist

131

Carrie Collenberg-Gonzalez (Longwood University), Kleist in the Reception of the Red Army Faction

149

Daniel Cuonz (Universität St. Gallen), Robert Walser, Christa Wolf, and Kleist on the Move: Portraits of the Writer on his Way to Writing

169

Bernd Fischer (The Ohio State University), What Moves Kohlhaas? Terror in Heinrich von Kleist, E. L. Doctorow, and Christoph Hein

185

Friederike von Schwerin-High (Pomona College), Causality and Contingency in Kleist’s “Das Bettelweib von Locarno” and Judith Hermann’s “Sommerhaus, später”

197

Mary Helen Dupree (Georgetown University), “The Glazed Surface of Conviction”: The Motif of the Broken Jug in Kleist’s Der zerbrochne Krug and Ian McEwan’s Atonement

221

Marie Isabel Schlinzig (University of Oxford), Artistic Reincarnations of the Author and his Texts: Adaptations of Kleist and Henriette Vogel’s Double Suicide

241

Hans Wedler (Bürgerhospital Stuttgart), No Home on Earth: Suicide in the Narratives of Kleist and David Foster Wallace

263

Index

283

Acknowledgments We wish to express our gratitude to the contributors for their excellent work and dedication in completing Heinrich von Kleist: Artistic and Political Legacies, which evolved over the course of six panels in five years at the annual conference of the German Studies Association (GSA). This unusually long and successful run at the GSA would not have been possible without the support of GSA Executive Director Professor David E. Barclay (Kalamazoo College), who initially suggested a series of Kleist panels to run from 2007 until the 200th anniversary of Kleist’s death in 2011. For this we thank him. Our sincere thanks go to Colleen Brown and Sierra Patheal (CSULB) for their excellent work as copy editors and to Colleen Brown again for her work in creating the indexes. We also owe a debt of gratitude to several participants of the 2011 Kleist Seminar at the German Summer School of New Mexico, who performed the first proofreading: Alexander Lotz (UC Irvine), Yannleon Chen (University of Oregon), Edith Harris (Pomona College), and Lisa Valleroy-Djang (University of New Mexico); as well as to the participants in the 2011 Kleist Seminar at CSULB, who performed the second proofreading: Alicia Alderson, Alex Aparicio, Lauren Brooks, Eastyn Cazin, Natalie Garac, Edward Hamrock, Joshua M. J. James, Jeffrey G. Jarzomb, Julie Kijewski, William Peightal, Carolina Rojas, Prisilla Sanchez, Brianne Schaer, Elizabeth Talbott, Selma Tipura, James Todd, Theodore Vagenas (all at CSULB), and Curtis Maughan (Vanderbilt University), who coordinated the proofreading. We are grateful to Ryan Adams (CSULB), Anna Angeli (University of South Florida), Adeline Bauder (CSULB), Lisa Beesley (Vanderbilt University), Lauren Brooks (Pennsylvania State University), Wyatt Fry (CSULB), Cathy Gamble (University of New Mexico), Lujun Guo (CSULB), Mitchell Holthaus (CSULB), Tara Rensch (CSULB), Matt Straus (CSULB), Meagan Tripp (University of Minnesota), and Leah Turner (CSULB), who were responsible for proofreading parts of the final manuscript. We also wish to thank Joseph C. High for the cover art concept and Aldo Gonzalez for his constant revisions of the graphic design. Mike Hiegemann (Vanderbilt University) provided consultation on style and formatting issues and Adan Gallardo (Pomona College) provided tireless technical support. Finally, we are indebted to Rudolf Pölzer (Universität Wien) and John McCarthy (Vanderbilt University) for their advice and patience.

Seán Allan Foreword: Heinrich von Kleist and His Legacy Although today the importance of Kleist’s impact on the European cultural imagination is beyond dispute, it is important to remember that this enigmatic author’s rise to prominence in the German literary canon is a predominantly twentieth-century phenomenon. In 1911, in an article marking the centenary of Kleist’s death, the director of Vienna’s Burgtheater, Berthold Viertel, complained that, “While the mythologisation of Kleist’s life is proceeding apace, his works have still to be discovered.” But as Viertel adds, with uncanny prophetic accuracy, “Kleist can afford to be patient. Time is on his side and he will be the subject of many anniversary celebrations in the future. His work has a lasting quality.” The view that, even a century after Kleist’s death, the author’s works had not yet fully “arrived” in the Germanspeaking world is also echoed in an article written by the celebrated Berlin actor, Ferdinand Gregori: 1

Kleist would surely starve were he to return to our “liberated” Germany today. But he and his work will survive even if he has to wait another 100 years for recognition. Then, perhaps, Penthesilea […] Prinz Friedrich von Homburg, Der zerbrochne Krug (The Broken Pitcher), and Das Käthchen von Heilbronn (Kate of Heilbronn) — all of them in their original versions — will truly belong to a German public that even today is still not demanding to see his works.2

It is no coincidence to find such views expressed by figures from the world of the theatre, for even at the beginning of the twentieth century, Kleist’s reputation as a writer owed more to his novellas than to his dramas. Kleist, we are told by Clemens Brentano, “felt quite humiliated at having to lower his

1

2

“Die Mythenbildung um sein Leben herum wird mit Eifer betrieben. Aber indessen wartet das Werk […] Nun, Kleist kann warten. Er hat Zeit. Er hat noch manchen hundertjährigen Gedenktag vor sich. Er ist ausdauernd.” Heinrich von Kleists Nachruhm. Eine Wirkungsgeschichte in Dokumenten, ed. by Helmut Sembdner (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1984), No. 396. Subsequent references abbreviated to “Nachruhm” followed by the entry number. “Aber Kleist würde wirklich verhungern, wenn er heute auf die ‘befreite’ deutsche Erde herunterstiege […] Aber er erträgt auch noch hundert Jahre der Wartezeit, und vielleicht gehört dann Penthesilea, […] Der Prinz von Homburg, Der zerbrochne Krug und Das Käthchen von Heilbronn ohne jede textliche Veränderung wirklich dem deutschen Volke, das heute noch nicht nach Kleist verlangt” (Nachruhm, No. 397).

6

Seán Allan

sights and abandon the genre of drama in favour of prose fiction.”3 As far as we know, he never saw any of the (very few) productions of his stageworks during his lifetime. Any hopes he may have entertained of living up to Christoph Martin Wieland’s extravagant description of him as a writer whose talents would enable him to surpass the achievements of even Goethe and Schiller in the sphere of drama were dashed, at least in part, by the reluctance of the contemporary theatrical establishment to embrace the radical character of his work. Kleist’s long-running feud with August Wilhelm Iffland, the director of Berlin’s Königliches Nationaltheater, Goethe’s catastrophic production of Der zerbrochne Krug in Weimar in 1808, and his damning verdict that the play “was written for a theatre that is yet to come,”4 all contributed to the marginalization of Kleist’s dramatic oeuvre during his lifetime. And, as Gregori’s remarks above underline, nineteenthcentury productions of his plays were often based on grotesquely distorted versions of the text that reflected the pragmatism of nineteenth-century theatre managers and their predominantly bourgeois audiences. Such public acclaim as Kleist enjoyed during his own lifetime was, for the most part, a reflection of his achievements as a writer of short stories and co-editor of the short-lived newspaper project, the Berliner Abendblätter. Kleist’s novellas were published both individually from 1807 onwards and in two widely reviewed collections of Erzählungen (Tales) in 1810 and 1811 respectively; and the eclectic mix of contributions for the Berliner Abendblätter — the first edition of which appeared on 1 October 1810 — was enthusiastically received until the undertaking was brought to an abrupt halt on 30 March 1811. Kleist’s ability to both shock and impress the contemporary reading public is evident in early reactions to his novellas. Reviewing “Die Marquise von O…” for the Berlin newspaper Der Freimüthige on 4 March 1808, Karl August Böttiger writes: “The Marquise is pregnant and does not know how, or by whom? Is this really the kind of material that merits inclusion in a journal about art and aesthetics?”5 In a similar vein, the portrait painter Dora Stock, writes to a friend complaining that “no young woman

3 4

5

“Pfuel sagte mir [Clemens Brentano], daß sich vom Drama zur Erzählung herablassen zu müssen, ihn [Kleist] grenzenlos gedemütigt hat” (Nachruhm, No. 73a). “Nur schade, daß das Stück auch wieder dem unsichtbaren Theater angehört.” Heinrich von Kleists Lebensspuren. Dokumente und Berichte der Zeitgenossen, ed. by Helmut Sembdner (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1984), No. 185. Subsequent references abbreviated to “Lebensspuren” followed by the entry number. “Die Marquise ist schwanger geworden, und weiß nicht wie, und von wem? Ist dies ein Süjet, das in einem Journale für die Kunst eine Stelle verdient?” (Lebensspuren, No. 370).

Foreword: Heinrich von Kleist and His Legacy

7

could read Kleist’s story about the Marquise von O… without blushing.”6 By contrast, Wilhelm Grimm’s review, published in the Leipzig newspaper Zeitung für die elegante Welt on 24 November 1810, offers a much more conciliatory reading of the novella, pointing out that “the terrible crime is there to allow the development of the unfortunate Marquise’s strength of character to be displayed in all its glory.”7 While the “unheard of events” and paradoxical situations that crop up so frequently in Kleist’s novellas may have alienated some sections of the contemporary reading public, they were the very life-blood of the Berliner Abendblätter. Few writers, past or present, have displayed such a talent as Kleist’s for combining reports on political controversies, technological marvels, and gruesome crimes with witty anecdotes and short, but profound, philosophical essays into such a compelling format. Indeed, we can only speculate as to how Kleist’s career might have developed, had his brush with the Prussian authorities not led to the premature collapse of his journalistic ambitions. What first brought Kleist to the attention of an English-speaking audience, however, was not his published work, but rather the news of his death on 21 November 1811. The scandal of his suicide with Henriette Vogel was reported not only in the Berlin and Viennese press, but also in a spread of French newspapers. On 28 December 1811, a translation of an article published eleven days earlier by the Parisian daily, Le Moniteur Universel, appeared in The Times. Yet, as the report suggests, even Kleist’s death was an issue on which his Berlin contemporaries could not agree: The attention of the people of Berlin has lately been very much occupied by the tragical adventure of M. [Monsieur] Kleist, the celebrated Prussian poet, and Madame Vogel. The reports which were at first circulated with regard to the cause of this unfortunate affair, have been strongly contradicted by the family of the lady; and it has been particularly denied that love was in any respect the cause of it.8

The speculation surrounding the motive for the suicide, the release of subsequent accounts revealing its meticulous preparation, and the controversy that ensued (a matter on which even the Prussian monarch Friedrich Wilhelm III felt obliged to express his disapproval)9 might all be seen as pre6 7 8 9

“Seine [Kleists] Geschichte der Marquisin von O… kann kein Frauenzimmer ohne Erröthen lesen” (Lebensspuren, No. 261). “[…] die Schandtat dient nur dazu, die hohe Charakterwürde der unglücklichen Marquise in ihrer ganzen Herrlichkeit zu entwickeln” (Lebensspuren, No. 370). The Times, 28 December 1811, 2. See the letter from King Friedrich Wilhelm III to Hardenberg of 27 November 1811 (Lebensspuren, No. 541).

8

Seán Allan

liminary stages in the subsequent mythologisation of Kleist’s life as a tortured Romantic idealist unable to come to terms with the pragmatic realities of a prosaic and authoritarian state. Yet with Kleist, nothing is quite so straightforward; like his novellas, in which the reader has to come to terms with a multiplicity of often incompatible narrative perspectives, to say nothing of moments where crucial information is quite simply withheld, Kleist’s biography remains an interpretative puzzle and one which, two hundred years after his death, has still not been fully resolved. It is, however, precisely this lack of certainty that has made it possible for members of often diametrically opposed factions to claim him as one of their own. In an article published on 20 October 1927 in the national daily, the Vossische Zeitung, celebrating the 150th anniversary of Kleist’s birth, Jürgen von Kleist remarked of his illustrious ancestor: “It is striking how just about every group you can imagine […] has laid claim to this writer; all of them pick out certain aspects of the totality that is Kleist, and are both right and wrong simultaneously; for like a precious mosaic, this problematic and often contradictory human puzzle was anything but simple.”10 The interpretative challenge presented by Kleist’s life and works is compounded by the transitional character of the historical context in which he grew up. Born in 1777, Kleist’s life was profoundly shaped by the French Revolution of 1789 and he lived through one of the most turbulent phases of German history. As a fifteen-year-old lieutenant, he had served in the Prussian army and taken part in the First Coalition War and the siege of Mainz; and in 1802, the expansionist ambitions of his bête noire, Napoleon Bonaparte, had put paid to his plan to establish a quasi-Rousseauesque existence far from civilization on the island of Thun in Switzerland. The sense that he was living in a world in a state of transition comes across clearly in a letter written towards the end of 1805 to his friend Rühle von Lilienstern: “The times, it seems, would bring about a new order of things, and we shall live to see nothing of it but the mere overthrow of the old.”11 Only a few months later, in 1806, Napoleon defeated the Prussian forces at the battles of Jena and Auerstedt, a defeat that not only brought about the collapse of the Holy 10

11

“Es ist eigentümlich, wie […] jede nur mögliche Richtung den Dichter für sich in Anspruch nimmt; alle berufen sich auf einzelne Züge in dem Gesamtbild Kleists, und alle haben recht und unrecht gleichzeitig; denn einfach war diese wie ein kostbares Mosaik zusammengesetzte problematische Natur, dies Rätsel voller Widersprüche nicht” (Nachruhm, No. 464b). “Die Zeit scheint eine neue Ordnung der Dinge herbeiführen zu wollen, und wir werden davon nichts, als bloß den Umsturz der alten erleben.” Heinrich von Kleist, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. by Helmut Sembdner, 7th extended and revised edition, 2 vols (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2008), vol. 2, p. 761. Subsequent references abbreviated to “SW” followed by volume and page number(s).

Foreword: Heinrich von Kleist and His Legacy

9

Roman Empire, but at the same time saw the start of a process of farreaching political and social modernization in Prussia. What Kleist would have made of Napoleon’s defeat at the battle of Waterloo and the period of political stagnation that followed the Congress of Vienna we shall never know. But while his view of Napoleon is unremittingly negative, it is striking that even his “patriotic writings” of 1809 are anything but simplistic chauvinistic works of nationalism. Nowhere is this more clearly the case than in the nationalistic drama Die Hermannsschlacht (The Battle of Hermann, 1808); often dismissed by critics as an inferior one-dimensional propagandistic drame à clef, recent scholarship has highlighted its rhetorical complexities and restored it to its rightful place within the canon of Kleist’s major works. It was, however, not just the political transformation of Europe at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries that made such a deep impression on Kleist; no less influential was the revolution in philosophy and science inspired, at least in part, by the philosophy of Kant and the eighteenth-century French philosophes. While Kleist’s earliest letters reveal the imprint of an upbringing in the philosophical traditions of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, his literary works reflect the extent to which increasingly these ideas were being subjected to critical scrutiny. Accordingly, while the twenty-one-year-old author of the “Aufsatz, den sichern Weg des Glücks zu finden und ungestört — auch unter den größten Drangsalen des Lebens — ihn zu genießen!” (Essay on the Most Certain Way to find Happiness, And — Even Amidst Life’s Greatest Hardships — How to Appreciate the Journey Undeterred, 1799) concludes that “in virtue and virtue alone lies the source of human happiness; and thus the most virtuous man is also the happiest,”12 such conventional codes of eighteenth-century ethics are radically called into question in “Der Findling” (The Foundling, 1811), Die Hermannsschlacht, and the humourous essay “Allerneuester Erziehungsplan” (The Very Last Word in Modern Educational Theory, 1810). In a similar vein, Kleist’s enduring interest in developments in science and technology is offset by a deep sense of suspicion — one nurtured by his reading of Rousseau and confirmed by his negative experience of Paris in 1801 — that technological progress was a double-edged sword. “Man has an incontrovertible desire for enlightenment,” he writes on 15 August 1801. “Without enlightenment he is little more than a beast. His mental requirements would drive him to science even if his physical requirements did not.” Yet in the very same letter he adds that:

12

“[…] die Tugend, und einzig allein nur die Tugend ist die Mutter des Glücks, und der Beste ist der Glücklichste” (SW 2, p. 303).

10

Seán Allan all my faculties confirm what I have long felt, namely that science neither improves us nor makes us happier […] I cannot describe the impression that this combination of the most advanced scientific knowledge combined with the most extreme moral depravity made on me. Where will destiny lead this nation [France]? God alone knows. She is riper for fall than any other in Europe.13

It is never easy to be sure just how much of what appears in Kleist’s letters about Paris and the French Enlightenment is a genuine reflection of what he believes, and how much of it is self-stylization, literary experimentation, and a conscious attempt to imitate the critical tone of contemporary travel writing. The same problem arises when dealing with his reception of works by his literary idols, Rousseau, Goethe, and Schiller. “I hear the words and observe the deeds of thousands of people, and never does it occur to me to ask: to what end? They themselves do not know, dark impulses lead them, the moment guides their actions. They are forever dependent and their destinies remain a game of chance,” he writes to his sister, Ulrike, in a letter of May 1799 that, both rhetorically and philosophically, calls to mind Goethe’s poem “An Charlotte von Stein.”14 At times, it seems that Kleist’s experience of the world is itself mediated through the prism of the contemporary authors he so admired. Having sent his long-suffering fiancée, Wilhelmine von Zenge, a copy of Schiller’s Wallenstein (1798–99), he urges her: “Read everything that Max Piccolomini says […] as though it were spoken by me, and I shall read everything that Thekla says […] as though it were spoken by you.”15 It is impossible to ignore the numerous references — both implicit and explicit — to the work of Goethe and Schiller in Kleist’s plays and stories, and yet the relationship of influence is anything but straightforward. Indeed Kleist’s literary technique might be described as one of constructive “quotation”; when inserted into their new literary and aesthetic contexts, literary motifs from the likes of Goethe and Schiller are relativised, ironised, and thereby subjected to a telling critique. At one level 13

14

15

“[…] alle Sinne bestätigen mir hier, was längst mein Gefühl mir sagte, nämlich daß uns die Wissenschaften weder besser noch glücklicher machen [...] O ich kann Dir nicht beschreiben, welchen Eindruck der erste Anblick dieser höchsten Sittenlosigkeit bei der höchsten Wissenschaft auf mich machte. Wohin das Schicksal diese Nation führen wird — ? Gott weiß es. Sie ist reifer zum Untergange als irgend eine andere europäische Nation” (SW 2, p. 681). “Tausend Menschen höre ich reden und sehe ich handeln, und es fällt mir nicht ein, nach dem Warum? zu fragen. Sie selbst wissen es nicht, dunkle Neigungen leiten sie, der Augenblick bestimmt ihre Handlungen. Sie bleiben für immer unmündig und ihr Schicksal ein Spiel des Zufalls” (SW 2, p. 488). “Alles was Max Piccolomini sagt, möge […] für mich gelten, alles was Thekla sagt, soll […] für Dich gelten” (SW 2, p. 518).

Foreword: Heinrich von Kleist and His Legacy

11

the Prince’s death monologue in Prinz Friedrich von Homburg (The Prince of Homburg, 1811) calls to mind the sublime rhetoric of Schiller’s idealist heroes; yet the ending of Kleist’s drama, poised as it is between bathos and pathos, forces us to reevaluate not only the Kleistian hero, but also to reread Schiller’s work in the light of the later text. In a similar vein, the central figure of the novella Michael Kohlhaas (1810) might be regarded as a reworking of Schiller’s Karl Moor from Die Räuber (The Robbers, 1781), while Kleist’s treatment of the relationship between Greek and “barbarian” Amazon culture in Penthesilea (1808) together with his characterization of the play’s heroine points to a critical engagement with the concepts of Hellenism and humanity that we find in Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris (Iphigenie in Tauris, 1787). Finally, in some of his works Kleist appears to promote the possibility of a Rousseauesque withdrawal from civilization and the creation of a utopian realm in which the vicissitudes of conventional society might be transcended; one thinks of the final act of Die Familie Schroffenstein (The Schroffenstein Family, 1803) or the valley in “Das Erdbeben in Chili” (The Earthquake in Chile, 1806/1811). Yet in each case the idyllic state — if that is what it is — is fractured, ultimately with quite devastating consequences. The numerous references to the works of his eighteenth-century literary forebears underline how fascinated Kleist was by questions of aesthetics, the process of artistic creation, and above all, the use of literary traditions. Although it is common to see Kleist’s work as profoundly anti-Goethean or anti-Schillerian, to do so is to underplay the high esteem in which he held both writers. However, Kleist understood better than most of his contemporaries the way in which great works of art from the past often posed an insuperable obstacle for aspiring young writers questing for originality. In the fictional “Brief eines jungen Dichters an einen jungen Maler” (Letter from a Young Poet to a Young Painter, 1810), he offers us — via the analogy of painting — some insight into the appropriate use of the “Old Masters.” First, young artists should copy these works so as to discover and practice the techniques of painting; then they should immerse themselves in the spirit of the work in order to retrace the thought processes that led to its creation. It is at this point, however, that the aspiring artist is in serious danger. If the observations derived from the contemplation of great works of art are assembled into a pseudo-aesthetic theory, in which an orthodox “correctness” is implicit, there is always a risk that the apprentice artist will resort to the theory in the (mistaken) belief that its application will necessarily result in the production of other, equally great works of art. To do this, however, is to reduce the works of the Old Masters to a pattern book of correctness and almost invariably leads to a decline in a particular genre of painting. Accordingly, the young poet of Kleist’s essay warns his artist friend

12

Seán Allan

not to give in to the temptation to paint in the manner of the great artists, but to find his own style, for “the objective, after all, is not to become someone else, but to be yourself.”16 We should not, of course, ignore the great artistic achievements of the past; for as Kleist reminds us, in the “Gebet des Zoroaster” (Prayer of Zarathustra, 1810), “if not for the ages long past and the sacred songs that remain to tell of them, we should have no glimmer of those heights, O Lord, whence man may look all around him.”17 But if these past achievements are to function as an inspiration — rather than an obstacle — then we must “set off in a totally different direction to seek out and scale the summits of art.”18 In short, a process of emulation, rather than imitation. Kleist’s determination to produce works of genuine artistic quality at a time when, as he put it, “the majority of human beings have lost any sense of the wonders of poetry and literature,”19 together with his understanding of the creative process — as articulated in his theoretical essays and embodied in his own literary practice — has been instrumental in making him, above all, a writer’s writer. E.T.A. Hoffmann, Achim von Arnim, and Ludwig Tieck were just some of his contemporaries who held his work in great esteem; later writers would include the likes of Friedrich Hebbel, Theodore Fontane, Frank Wedekind, Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, Christa Wolf and Heiner Müller. But perhaps no writer is more clearly heir to the Kleistian oeuvre than Franz Kafka. In his letters to Felice Bauer, Kafka even goes as far as to describe Kleist as one of his “blood relatives.”20 Moreover, the sense of isolation Kleist experienced — both in relation to his immediate family and as a writer struggling to establish himself — was something with which Kafka could easily identify. However, as Kafka’s biographer Max Brod would point out, both structurally and stylistically, there are striking similarities between the works of Kleist and Kafka. For example, the labyrinthine structure of both Der Prozess (The Trial, 1925) and Michael Kohlhaas seems to reflect a world in which the protagonists’ quest for justice is thwarted at every turn. At the same time, the configurations of 16 17

18 19 20

“Denn die Aufgabe, Himmel und Erde! ist ja nicht, ein anderer, sondern ihr selbst zu sein” (SW 2, p. 336). “[…] wenn die Vorwelt nicht wäre und die göttlichen Lieder, die von ihr Kunde geben, so würden wir gar nicht mehr ahnden, von welchen Gipfeln, o Herr! der Mensch um sich schauen kann” (SW 2, p. 325). “[…] in diametral entgegengesetzter Richtung, den Gipfel der Kunst, […] auffinden und ersteigen” (SW 2, p. 337). “[…] die Wunder der Poesie der großen Mehrzahl der Menschen auf Erden fremd geworden sind” (SW 2, p. 423). Franz Kafka, Briefe an Felice, ed. by Jürgen Born and Erich Heller (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1967), p. 460.

Foreword: Heinrich von Kleist and His Legacy

13

irony that result from multiple levels of narration in the prose fiction of both Kleist and Kafka has led to each writer’s work being subjected to interpretations that are diametrically opposed. Indeed it is precisely this resistance to conventional interpretative paradigms that, in Kafka’s case, has prompted theorists such as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to propose the category of “minor literature” as a means of approaching his oeuvre;21 and, in an age where scholars and writers alike have increasingly moved away from the centre and focused instead on the margins of cultural production, the idea that Kleist’s work might also be seen as a form of eighteenthcentury “minor literature” has played a key role in promoting it as a precursor of developments in early twentieth-century literary modernism. Not surprisingly, many of those who would see Kleist as a quintessentially modern writer — even a writer “out of his time” — look to the socalled “Kant-crisis” that is the subject of a number of his letters dating from the spring of 1801: If everyone saw the world through green glasses, they would be forced to judge that everything they saw was green, and could never be sure whether their eyes saw things as they really are, or did not add something of their own to what they saw. And so it is with our intellect. We can never be certain that that which we call Truth is really Truth, or whether it does not merely appear so to us.22

Despite intensive critical investigation, the extent to which Kleist’s idiosyncratic interpretation of Kantian epistemology can be taken at face value remains an open question. Whether Kleist’s writing can really be seen as anticipating a full-blooded critique of logocentric modes of representation seems doubtful. Nonetheless, the conflicts we witness in his works — whether between Greeks and Amazons in Penthesilea, between blacks and whites in “Die Verlobung in St. Domingo” (The Betrothal in San Domingo, 1811), or between Romans and Germans in Die Hermannsschlacht — have increasingly come to be seen as discursive conflicts that expose the ideological operations of self-interest in the allegedly “transcendent” metaphysical systems through which we, and others, interact with the world. As Literary Studies has increasingly moved towards an investigation of narrative theory and dis21 22

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Pour une littérature mineure (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1975). “Wenn alle Menschen statt der Augen grüne Gläser hätten, so würden sie urteilen müssen, die Gegenstände, welche sie dadurch erblicken, sind grün — und nie würden sie entscheiden können, ob ihr Auge ihnen die Dinge zeigt, wie sie sind, oder ob es nicht etwas zu ihnen hinzutut, was nicht ihnen, sondern dem Auge gehört. So ist es mit dem Verstande. Wir können nicht entscheiden, ob das, was wir Wahrheit nennen, wahrhaft Wahrheit ist, oder ob es uns nur so scheint” (SW 2, p. 634).

14

Seán Allan

cursive constructions of identity, arguably it is Kleist’s works — rather than those of his great rivals Goethe and Schiller — that have greater currency among scholars today. Not surprisingly, Kleist’s radical conceptualization of femininity and the Amazon state in Penthesilea has exerted a particular fascination for writers and critics working within the fields of Feminism and Gender and Identity Studies. As ever, however, opinions are divided as to whether Kleist portrays gender in essentialist terms or as an effect of performance. For the French theorist Hélène Cixous — “I […] owed my life to Kleist”23 she confesses in La jeune Née of 1975 — Kleist’s work is seen as a form of “écriture feminine,” that is to say, as a form of discourse in which the binary either/or logic of patriarchal discourse might be transcended. The centrality of Penthesilea to an understanding of Kleist’s life and work is also emphasised in the work of the New German Cinema director Helma Sander-Brahms (in her quasi-biographical film Heinrich, 1977), and in the film Heinrich Penthesilea von Kleist (1983), directed by the theatre and opera director, Hans Neuenfels. The Kleist that is invoked in such films is, of course, not the Kleist of the early letters to Wilhelmine von Zenge in which the author’s program of female education turns out to be little more than a patriarchal construct modeled on Book VI of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile, but rather Kleist the author of Penthesilea. Yet it is striking that, for all its supposed utopianism, the feminist discourse that emerges from both Cixous’s work (and indeed the films of Neuenfels and Sanders-Brahms) is one that, far from breaking with allegedly “natural” modes of femininity and masculinity, merely succeeds in reinscribing essentialist concepts of feminine identity, albeit at another level. Whether explored in terms of gender (as in Penthesilea) or in terms of race (as in “Die Verlobung in St. Domingo”), much of the critical discussion of Kleist’s politics has tended to focus on what might be described as the politics of identity. Although echoes of his works feature prominently in both the New German Cinema movement and in a range of plays and novels by late twentieth-century authors such as Christa Wolf, Heiner Müller, and Monika Maron, more often than not the political dimension of the author’s life is reduced to what Thomas Elsaesser has described as “the metaphysics of private revolt”24 and deployed as a means of bypassing conventional politics of both left and right. In the works of the East German authors Wolf 23

24

Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, trans. by Betsy Wing (London: Tauris, 1996), p. 112 (originally published as La jeune Née; Paris: Union Générale des Editions, 1975). Thomas Elsaesser, The New German Cinema: A History (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 1989), p. 88.

Foreword: Heinrich von Kleist and His Legacy

15

and Maron in particular, the “Kleistian Turn” was part of a more general revival of German Romanticism in the GDR during the 1970s and 1980s, and one that, by focusing on Kleist’s marginalization in his native eighteenthcentury Prussia, reflected the predicament of a generation of writers and artists who felt alienated from the conventional literary paradigms of socialist realism. However, it is important to remember that, during his life, Kleist did harbour ambitions to become actively involved in the nationalist politics of liberation, and that during the first half of the twentieth century his name was, on more than one occasion, invoked in support of more reactionary forms of nationalism. In his Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (Reflections of an Nonpolitical Man) of 1918, Thomas Mann cites Kleist’s supposed creative irrationalism and his patriotic essay “Was gilt es in diesem Kriege?” (“What is at Stake in this War?”) in support of his own conservative cultural agenda during World War I. And just 16 years later, in an article for the Leipziger Tageszeitung of 10 January 1934, the Nazi Reichsdramaturg Rainer Schlösser singled out Kleist as the one writer who, as he put it, “could truly do justice to the new cultural ideology of blood and honour.”25 Such grotesque misappropriations of Kleist’s work go some way to explaining his muted legacy, at least in Germany, in the immediate post war years. It was not long, however, before a new generation of creative artists — notably the filmmakers of the New German Cinema movement — sought to dispel the myth of Kleist “the demonic irrationalist” and redeploy the author for their own cultural and political agendas. At one level, Kleist’s canonical status meant that proposals to adapt his work for the screen were often rewarded with generous state subsidies; on the other hand, the radical character of his prose fiction seemed to lend itself to treatments of the contemporary political situation in Germany. The tone was set by George Moorse’s loosely worked adaptation of Der Findling (The Foundling, 1967), in which the conflict between Piachi and Nicolo is used to launch a critique of bourgeois capitalism. This was followed soon after by Volker Schlöndorff’s Michael Kohlhaas — der Rebell (Man on Horseback, 1969) and HansJürgen Syberberg’s San Domingo (1970), both of which explicitly attempted to link discussions of anarchy and rebellion in Kleist’s novellas to the development of the student movement and the rise of the Außerparlamentarische Opposition (extra-parliamentary opposition). Yet the case of Syberberg in particular underlines just how contested Kleist’s artistic and political legacy remains even today. In the 1970s, Syberberg’s engagement with Kleist reflected a profoundly anti-bourgeois cast of mind that challenged not only conventional modes of representation, but also the very infrastructure of 26

“Nur ein Dichter seiner Art [Kleist] kann der rechte Kronzeuge für unser neues bluts- und ehrbewußtes Wollen sein” (Nachruhm, No. 484).

16

Seán Allan

capitalist film production, distribution, and exhibition. However, Syberberg’s more recent works — notably the expansive Kleist-monologues Penthesilea (1987) and Ein Traum was sonst (A Dream, What Else?, 1994) invoke Kleist’s oeuvre, almost in the manner of a latter-day Thomas Mann, as an embodiment of a form of high-art aestheticism around which German national culture might reestablish itself in the face of an onslaught from the trivial cultural products of an increasingly globalised capitalist media. That Kleist’s work should, even in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century elicit such diametrically opposed responses in one and the same figure, serves as an important reminder of just how provocative and divisive his artistic and political legacy has been for past generations of writers and artists — and no doubt will continue to be — for those to come. University of Warwick

Jeffrey L. High Introduction: Heinrich von Kleist’s Legacies Wirklich, in einem so besonderen Fall ist noch vielleicht kein Dichter gewesen. Truly, perhaps no poet has ever been such an unusual case as I am.1

At the 2007 annual German Studies Association Conference in San Diego, two panels focused on Kleist reception in political movements and in recent German prose works. In St. Paul in 2008, two panels expanded the discussion to include all non-academic adaptations of and responses to Kleist and his works. For 2010 in Oakland, papers on all areas of Kleist reception outside the field of literary scholarship were sought, including papers that address the presence of Kleist and/or his works in film. The topic to be addressed was formulated as follows in the final call for papers for GSA 2011: What is the artistic, political, and legal legacy of Kleist, his works and his life, on the eve of the 200th anniversary of his suicide in 2011? Which artists, political movements, and other non-academic interests have adapted or alluded to Kleist’s works or Kleist himself, modeled works after those of Kleist, embarked from Kleistian tropes, figures, politics, philosophy, metaphysics, aesthetics, stylistic or authorial gestures in literature, film, essay-writing, political and legal discourse, or other media?

Like the carefully selected GSA papers, the expanded essays on Kleist’s legacies presented here comprise a coherent response to one of the more complicated questions that can be asked about a canonical artwork or an artist: What are the characteristics that explain the enduring relevance of the work or the author? In an authorial class with dramatists and authors of literary prose such as Goethe, Schiller, Thomas Mann, Brecht, and Kafka, Kleist remains near the very top in international evaluations of artistic genius when measured by continued relevance of content, style, and impact; popular reception (theater performances, book sales); artistic resonance (literary, filmic, and musical 1

Kleist’s letter to his cousin Marie von Kleist of Summer 1811. Heinrich von Kleist, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. by Helmut Sembdner, 2 vols (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2008), vol. 2, p. 873. Subsequent citations as “SW” with volume and page number(s). Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine.

18

Jeffrey L. High

adaptations), legal, philosophical, and scientific criticism; and perhaps foremost political rage. Scholars have long been fascinated by Kleist’s biography and works, and not in the least so because of the interest of Kleist’s fellow authors, philosophers, political thinkers, filmmakers, psychologists, and perhaps primarily that of non-academics, who regard Kleist along with Edgar Allan Poe in somewhat of a league of their own, one in which being a “classic” requires neither literary-historical justification nor theoretical introduction. This volume seeks to address the phenomenon of two centuries of engagement with Kleist and his works from the angle that has proven most important to their canonical status — enduring relevance beyond the academic. Kleist, a skilled mathematician, spent the final decade of his life (1801– 1811) with the grim scientific awareness that the Enlightenment had not resulted in an enlightened age, but in the ironic partially-enlightened conclusion that secure knowledge was demonstrably unlikely. Kleist concluded that he had no reason to pursue a life plan based on any illusion of knowledge, including divine revelation and any concept of afterlife: “no truth is discoverable here on earth.”2 Simultaneously disabused of reason and faith, Kleist’s works represent the replacement of his previous beliefs with a literary algebra of the utter absence of intelligent design.3 As a result, Kleist’s life and works comprise compelling parallel narratives of insecurity (or “fictions of security”),4 featuring an author, narrators, and characters struggling to survive “betwixt” the disorientation of “a false reason and none at all,”5 with no ability to distinguish between earthquakes, be they real, metaphorical, or imagined. Kleist’s refined sensibility for what does inform events in human history — the forces of nature in the broadest sense, then anthropology, then tribalism, then incomplete enlightenment and uninformed reason, compounded by individual psychology in the most isolated and extreme crises — is the story behind his stories that still resonates. Two of his early dramatic works demonstrate the source of the enduring modernity of Kleist’s ironic outrage. In his first published work, Die Familie Schroffenstein (The Schroffenstein Family, 1803), Kleist already delivers the multi-layered and “gebrechliche Einrichtung der Welt” (fragile arrangement 2 3

4 5

Kleist’s letter to Wilhelmine von Zenge of 22 March 1801 (SW 2, p. 421). My phrase here is an adaptation of John Simon’s phrase, “the great lack of design.” John Simon, “Foreword,” in German Romantic Novellas, ed. by Frank G. Ryder and Robert M. Browning (New York: Continuum, 2001), p. xiii. See the title of Seán Allan’s volume of essays on Kleist: Seán Allan, The Stories of Heinrich von Kleist: Fictions of Security (Rochester: Camden House, 2001). Tim Mehigan, “‘Betwixt a false reason and none at all’: Kleist, Hume, Kant, and the ‘Thing in Itself,’” A Companion to the Works of Heinrich von Kleist, ed. by Bernd Fischer (Rochester: Camden House, 2003), pp. 165–188.

Introduction: Heinrich von Kleist’s Legacies

19

of the world, SW 2, p. 15) that informs his later works in the analysis of a random and violent struggle for survival. Here, tribalism, false deduction, and psychology conspire to cause two competing branches of a family (the human race) to murder each other into oblivion, ending with a helpless declaration of retarded insight: “ein Spaß zum Totlachen!” (So much fun, one should die laughing!; SW 1, p. 152). As an administrator in the Prussian Finance Ministry in 1806, during the period of his prophetic liberal criticisms of the Prussian land reform, Kleist chose the imperial justice system as the situation for the first of his two comedies, Der zerbrochne Krug (The Broken Jug, 1806/1811), demonstrating a similarly ironic view of the corrupttion of earthly justice in the comic pursuit of a self-serving judge (Adam, the first man and thus the common ancestor of every man) to bury the actual facts that would prove him guilty of a series of crimes (such as property damage, falsification of documents, sexual coercion, and dereliction of duty). The regional court supervisor Walter, aware of all of this, nonetheless sees no grounds for dismissal, and the disgraced Judge Adam will be allowed to return to the bench. In the end, the helpless plaintiff, Frau Marthe, reminds Walter that the case was about an actual injustice (the long since forgotten broken jug), asking him where she can find the administration building in Utrecht, to which he responds: “Weshalb, Frau Marthe?” (What for, Frau Marthe?)6 If the Schroffenstein tragedy was so much fun that one should die laughing, the cause of the comedy in Der zerbrochne Krug is so unfunny, one should die crying. But Kleist’s works — which offer “shreds and fragments” wherever readers look for closure — evoke more speechlessness and puzzlement than laughter or tears.7 The proto-Brechtian irony (identified by Schiller as the future form of empathy in 1795)8 of such finaleswithout-resolution provokes instead a mixture of stultified laughter and a muffled scream of anguish at the great evolutionary necessity of the thinking animal — the (almost) universal human capacity for denial and (often mind6

7

8

SW 1, p. 244. The Broken Jug, in Heinrich von Kleist. Selected Writings, ed. and trans. by David Constantine (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004), p. 65. Subsequent citations as “Constantine” with page number(s). Kleist’s preoccupation with the insufficiency of language is often mirrored in the speechlessness of his protagonists: “Selbst das einzige, das wir besitzen, die Sprache taugt nicht dazu, sie kann die Seele nicht malen, und was sie uns gibt sind nur zerrissene Bruchstücke” (SW 2, p. 626). “Language, all we have, is not adequate to the task, it cannot depict the soul and gives us only shreds and fragments.” Kleist’s letter to his half-sister Ulrike von Kleist of 5 February 1801 (Constantine, p. 420). “Seine Darstellung wird also entweder satyrisch oder sie wird [...] elegisch seyn.” Friedrich Schiller, Ueber Naïve und Sentimentalische Dichtung, in Schillers Werke. Nationalausgabe, ed. by Julius Petersen et. al. (Weimar: Herrman Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1943ff). Here vol. 20, p. 441. See the essay by Karl Fink in the present volume (p. 37).

20

Jeffrey L. High

less) perseverance in the face of catastrophe. Kleist states his ironic case succinctly: “And despite what history tells us about Nero and Attila and Cartouche and the Huns and the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition still our planet rolls amiably through space, spring comes round again, and people live, enjoy themselves and die as they always did.”9 As was proven fatally evident by his suicide in 1811, Kleist was an evolutionary dead end in this regard, born with a keen eye but no personal capacity for repression, and subsequently no capacity for mindless acceptance of what he concluded was unacceptable. If Kleist represents the end of a physical bloodline in this context, for the same reason, he, perhaps better than any other thinker, marks the beginning of a new, modern intellectual and literary bloodline. From thematic and stylistic relevance for the subsequent authors of German Literary Romanticism to political and philosophical relevance in the nineteenth century, to proscriptive dominance in the articulation of the German Novelle, to functionalization in the service of Nazi propaganda, to broad artistic and political reception in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Kleist and his works remain “überhaupt sondergleichen” (utterly unique) more than half a century after Thomas Mann described them as such in 1950.10 That both Kleist’s biography and his works continue to pass the test of a forever fluid concept of modernity is an obvious prerequisite for his popularity, and twenty-first century readers need not read far before finding the familiar laments of the most recent century in Kleist: “Confused by too many shapes I cannot come to any inner clarity of perception […] the most we ever manage is to stay where we are.”11 Two-hundred years after his suicide, Kleist, a failure in so many personal matters and professional endeavors, is exacting a measure of Kohlhaasian revenge against his many literary and political critics. In particular, the recognition of the inherently modern and liberal character of Kleist’s rage against the machine evident in this volume constitutes a rather decisive refutation of Georg Lukács’ dismissal of Kleist as “ein bornierter preußischer Junker” (a narrow-minded 9

10 11

Kleist’s letter to his fiancée Wilhelmine von Zenge of 15 August 1801 (Constantine, p. 422). “Und was uns auch die Geschichte von Nero, und Attila, und Cartouche, von den Hunnen, und den Kreuzzügen, und der spanischen Inquisition erzählt, so rollt doch dieser Planet immer noch freundlich durch den Himmelsraum, und die Frühlinge wiederholen sich, und die Menschen leben, genießen, und sterben nach wie vor” (SW 2, p. 683). Thomas Mann, “Heinrich von Kleist und seine Erzählungen,” in Gesammelte Werke in zwölf Bänden, vol. IX. Reden und Aufsätze (Oldenburg: Fischer, 1960), p. 823. Kleist’s letter to Marie von Kleist (1761–1831) of Summer 1811 (Constantine, p. 424). “Ich kann, von zu viel Formen verwirrt, zu keiner Klarheit der innerlichen Anschauung kommen […] alles, was man gewinnen kann, ist, daß man auf dem Punkt bleibt, wo man ist” (SW 2, pp. 873–874).

Introduction: Heinrich von Kleist’s Legacies

21

Prussian nobleman)12 and Brecht’s mocking of Kleist’s “Knechtverstand” (servile worldview),13 while Lukács and Brecht, for all their other modern insights, appear forever destined to view Kleist through a dated, dusty, green lens. What was the matter with Kleist and how has he managed to remain more modern and relevant than many of his century-younger critics? The legacies of Kleist’s works and personal life (and death) discussed in this volume regard the most modern matters of fatal urgency — anthropological, socio-logical, political, legal, philosophical, psychological matters of life and (almost always) death — delivered in an elevated but relentless style that fuses content, form, and function. What mattered to Kleist has mattered to centuries of readers, and thus all the more to artists and thinkers with an urgent message yet to convey. The following essays address the legacies of Kleist’s biography and his works spanning two centuries of philosophical reception (Franz Kafka), legal and political criticism and ideology (Eichen-dorff, Kafka, National Socialism, the Red Army Faction), musical reception, reception of madness (Stefan Zweig), and artistic reception informed by all of the former (among many others, Eichendorff, Thomas Mann, Kafka, Franz Rosenzweig, Robert Walser, Nelly Sachs, Heiner Müller, Christa Wolf, E. L. Doctorow, Elfriede Jelinek, Christoph Hein, Judith Hermann, Ian McEwan, and Dagmar Leupold). The interdisciplinary thematic cross-pollination of the wide-ranging topics addressed in the following essays demonstrate a coherence in contemporary popular Kleist reception and academic studies thereof. All of the essays address Kleist reception: cases of influence (Maughan and High, Mehigan, Hoyer), self-identification (Maughan and High, Cuonz), intertextuality (Dupree, Hoyer, von Schwerin-High), adaptation (Emm, Fischer), and finally, Heinrich von Kleist as a literary and film figure (Cuonz, Wilczek, Schlinzig, Collenberg). Beyond the concrete relationships of subsequent artists, thinkers, and movements to Kleist and his specific works lies a vortex of critical considerations indicative of the dynamic tensions in Kleist’s oeuvre that explain his enduring relevance and the attraction Kleist holds for artists and thinkers who tread a parallel path to the one Kleist trod — through the metaphorical earthquake of inductive inference that never leads to definitive, helpful, or even merely harmlessly false conclusions. The present collection of essays further examines a broad cross section of critical considerations: the often ruinous quest to progress, from subjective reaction to 12 13

Georg Lukács, “Die Tragödie Heinrich von Kleists” [1936], in Deutsche Literatur in zwei Jahrhunderten, vol. 7 (Neuwied and Berlin: Luchterhand, 1964), p. 48. Bertolt Brecht, “Über Kleists Stück Der Prinz von Homburg,” in Gesammelte Werke, ed. by Elisabeth Hauptmann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1967), vol. IX, p. 612.

22

Jeffrey L. High

phenomena, to objective knowledge of their meanings (Mehigan, von Schwerin-High); the destructive potential of (unrelenting, even violent) empathy for the elusive pursuit of happiness of the individual toward the happiness of the whole (Fink, Mehigan); the analysis of repression and resignation (Fink, Wedler); genre theory as a formula for scandalous artistic success in the portrayal of destruction (Maughan and High); models for social criticism (Fink, von Schwerin-High), legal criticism (Champlin, Mehigan); demands for justice and liberation (Fink, Hoyer); and defining moments in the history of propaganda (Fink, Wilczek), terrorism (Fischer, Collenberg, Champlin), depression (Wedler), and suicide (Schlinzig, Wedler). Now several years after the two-hundredth anniversary of his suicide, the analysis of the phenomenon of Kleist’s artistic and political legacies results in a register of the matters that matter still, and likely will continue to matter as long as individuals despair at the insight into their own inability to conclude what might happen next, based on the fragmented knowledge of what has happened thus far; and as long as the public delights in the algebra of disorientation, and artists calculate how to disorient audiences. Shortly before his suicide, Kleist summarized his unhappiness in a concise formula that sheds light on his enduring relevance to unconventional artists and other thinkers: “Truly, perhaps no poet has ever been such an unusual case as I am.”14 Certainly very many poets and thinkers could have identified with Kleist’s struggle with seeing things differently, most notably and famously, Goethe. Goethe, however, chose to kill off Werther rather than himself, and let the suicidal Faust live (and live it up) for another sixty years (1774–1832). Kleist’s strangely hopeful work itself constitutes an act of defiance in the face of hopelessness. This, more than his suicide on 21 November 1811, is the enduring link between Kleist and the many others who struggle with creation and convention, and with art and politics. Kleist is forever thirty-four years old, forever at his most productive, forever struggling to get his message across to a literary and political establishment that does not (can not or will not) recognize his brilliance, forever choosing the most spectacular consequences for his failures. Kleist remains both relevant and inspiring as the eternal artist and dynamic artwork in one, like a moment captured on a Grecian urn — or reflected in the fragments of a shattered Dutch jug. California State University, Long Beach

14

“Wirklich, in einem so besondern Fall ist noch vielleicht kein Dichter gewesen.” Kleist’s letter to Marie von Kleist of Summer 1811 (SW 2, p. 873).

Karl J. Fink Kleist’s Justice beyond Tears: Kohlhaasian Manifestos after Kleist In Democracy Matters (2004), Cornel West writes: “it has always bothered me that Socrates never cries — he never sheds a tear” (West, p. 212). West suggests new ways of balancing the Athenian tradition of analysis and reasoning “with the passionate fervor and quest for justice of the prophetic” (West, p. 214). In Herder’s Briefe zu Beförderung der Humanität, we find a new anthropology of the human being as a work in progress designed by its own intentions: “He constitutes his self; he constitutes with those of his ilk a new community according to sacred inalienable rights” (Herder, Letter 29). Individuals reclaim control of their bodies in bold acts of self-determination through a new set of rules. Kleist’s character Michael Kohlhaas is a self-constituted individual, who takes his punishment in the satisfaction that his body even conceals evidence of the fate of his enemies. This claim to self-determination is embedded in declarations, mandates, and manifestos that advance humanity by cold decisions for justice beyond tears, reservations, and regrets. Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas is a case study of those individuals whose sentiments of wrath and joy overstep the laws of the community and replace normative ethics with aesthetics in the art of living.

The idea that Socratic questioning would sustain a democratic way of life has come upon hard times even as we reaffirm the “classical defense of reform in liberal education.”1 Cornel West has taken exception to claims for an Athenian foundation to modern democracy, posing of equal value other traditions, including the Jewish commitment to justice, and the Afro-American tragicomic commitment to hope.2 In the final analysis, he concludes, “our Socratic questioning must go beyond Socrates” to embrace “the guttural cries” of oppressed people: “it has always bothered me that Socrates never cries — he never sheds a tear” (West, p. 212). The expectation here is that we infuse our democratic institutions with an affective rigor equal to that given cognitive forms of reasoning.

1

2

Martha C. Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity, A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), gives evidence from interviews at academic institutions across the United States on how the dynamics of selfexamination is alive and well in discourse supported by “logical analysis,” learning to “dissect the arguments,” and “to think critically” (p. 18). Cornel West, Democracy Matters, Winning the fight Against Imperialism (London: Penguin, 2004), pp. 16–17. Citations above and throughout as “West” with page number(s).

24

Karl J. Fink

I. Inside the New Thinking The idea of shaping political power with empathetic structure is not new. In 1925 Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929) wrote a landmark essay on “The New Thinking” that would make “teaching empathetic.”3 Writing in Weimar at the cusp of Nazi belligerence, he saw the limitations in Kantian and Hegelian system ethics and proposed a new look at dialogic narrative as a way of connecting people through speech.4 His “new thinking” was meant to keep the conversation going eternally fresh in the present tense. His idea was that the narrator “does not want to say how it ‘actually’ was, but how it really took place” (West, p. 81). West’s vision of a democracy, too, calls for a dialog that encompasses varied traditions, which he knows will create as many riddles as it solves. That is why the conversation must go on and why the infusion of affective instruction must begin. This was Johann Gottfried Herder’s (1744–1803) vision for the advancement of humanity.5 His opus is a narration, a discourse on the oldest documents of cultures that traditionally have registered the voice of oppression.6 Herder depended on Moses Mendelssohn (1729–86) for his understanding of the higher order of dialogic discourse as a means to the advancement

3

4

5

6

Franz Rosenzweig, “The New Thinking,” in Franz Rosenzweig’s “The New Thinking,” ed. and trans. by Alan Udoff and Barbara E. Galli (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999), pp. 67–102. Rosenzweig wrote the essay in 1925 to condense his philosophy of dialogic narratives published as Der Stern der Erlösung (The Star of Redemption, 1921), p. 75. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung, Philosophische Fragmente (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1988 [1st edn, 1969]), recognize the loss of human completeness designed by the Hellenistic urge to define intellectual capacities of the mind by analytical categories of truth and proof: “Die Entzauberung der Welt ist die Ausrottung des Animismus” (p. 11). See Johann Gottfried Herder, Älteste Urkunde des Menschengeschlechts, in Sämtliche Werke, ed. by Bernhard Suphan, 33 vols (Hildesheim: Georg Olm, 1967 [Reprint, 1881]), vol. 6, pp. 193–510; vol. 7, pp. 1–172, from his earlier writings and from his later writings see the “Vorrede zu Sakontala” (vol. 24, pp. 576–80), where not only poetry and prose blend, but so do comedy and tragedy, as pointed out by Michael Coulson, Three Sanskrit Plays (New York: Penguin Books, 1981), pp. 18–24. Subsequent citations as “SA” with volume and page number(s). Herder, “Neger-Idyllen,” in Briefe zu Beförderung der Humanität (1967) introduces letter 114 in his tenth collection from 1797 with the observation that cultures disturb the peace of others as soon as they begin to develop: “Selbt das Christentum, sobald es als Staatsmaschine auf fremde Völker wirkte, drückte sie schrecklich” (SA 18, p. 222). See also Herder’s collection Zerstreute Blätter (Scattered Leaves; SA 15 and 16) written over a twelve-year period from 1785–97, perhaps the first serious effort to document multicultural diversity around the globe.

Kohlhaasian Manifestos after Kleist

25

of humanity.7 In his essay on “Das Leben und Charakter des Sokrates” (The Life and Character of Socrates, 1776), Mendelssohn had argued that Socrates had dedicated his life to one of the fundamentals of democracy: the pursuit of happiness.8 And in his philosophical discourse on Socrates’ conversations with his disciple, Phädon, Mendelssohn shows how Socrates explicitly chose not to follow the Greek tradition of cries, lamentations, and petitions at his trial and death penalty: “Do not be angry Athenians, that I, contrary to the habits of the defendant, do not speak to you in tears.”9 Mendelssohn found Socrates happy in his moment of death. And so Mendelssohn balanced his own capacity for analytical reasoning with empathetic modes of discourse, particularly in his view that the separation of church and state (Staat und Religion) is more successfully accomplished as a matter of practical rather than theoretical discourse: “This is in politics one of the most difficult tasks, which for centuries has been looking for a solution, and only occasionally here and there perhaps with more success pragmatically applied than theoretically resolved.”10 Herder took inspiration from Mendelssohn’s view that the advancement of humanity by democratic principles depends more on human empathy than on analytical reasoning.11 The point 7

8

9

10

11

Herder, in the second edition of his review of recent German literature from 1768, “Ueber die neuere Deutsche Litteratur, Fragmente” [2nd edn, 1768], documented the source of his secularized ideas on human development: “two blind heathens” (zween blinden Heiden), “two Catholic Christians” (zween Katholischen Christen) and in more recent times “an academician and a Jewish intellectual: Maupertuis and Moses Mendelssohn” (einem Akademischen und einem Jüdischen Weltweisen: Maupertuis and Moses Mendelssohn; SA 2, p. 68). Moses Mendelssohn, “Leben und Charakter des Sokrates,” in Phädon oder die Unsterblichkeit der Seele, in drey Gesprächen (Berlin: Nicolai, 1776), pp. 1–52, “Die Glückseligkeit des menschlichen Geschlechts war sein einziges Studium” (p. 28). Subsequent citations as “Mendelssohn” with page number(s). “Werdet nicht ungehalten, Athenienser! daß ich, wider die Gewohnheit der Verklagten, nicht in Thränen zu euch rede” (Mendelssohn, p. 39). Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine. Moses Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, Oder über religiöse Macht und Judentum (Berlin: Maurer, 1783), writes that “dieses ist in der Politik eine der schwersten Aufgaben, die man seit Jahrhunderten schon aufzulösen bemühet ist, und hie und da vielleicht glücklicher praktisch beygelegt, als theoretisch aufgelöst hat” (p. 3). Allan Arkush, Moses Mendelssohn and the Enlightenment (Albany, NY: State University of New York, 1994), argues in his chapter on “The Crisis of Reason” that “even in his early works he acknowledged the degree to which moral truths were more readily accessible to common sense than to reason. The decisive turnabout came […] above all, when he was writing Jerusalem” (p. 87). Herder, “Ueber die neuere Deutsche Litteratur,” 1766–67 (1967), quotes Mendelssohn’s view on the limits of analytical and systematic discourse: “Ich bekenne es, daß sich zu blos spekulativen Untersuchungen kein Vortrag besser schickt, als der strenge

26

Karl J. Fink

that both understood is that trust invested in a dialog of the people had a bigger yield than did the systematic reasoning of professional philosophers. This is “the new thinking.”

II. The Tick in the Constituted Self By the time Herder wrote his Briefe zu Beförderung der Menschheit (Letters on the Advancement of Humanity, 1793–97), he had shed completely any dependence on divine providence in his anthropology of the human being. In this collection of one hundred and twenty-five letters he advanced the proposition that language and culture develop from an internal process of readiness for reflection and expression.12 Letter twenty-nine in the third collection is of particular interest. Here, Herder reminds us that the study of “Menschennatur” (human nature; SA 17, p. 143) has always revealed to us “die Erkenntnis unsrer Kräfte und Anlagen, unsres Berufes und unsrer Pflicht” (the recognition of our energies and capacities, our calling and our duty; SA 17, p. 143).13 Herder felt that writings of antiquity were without the reflection that comes with a timeline of evidence that marks the human capacity to create, invent and design its own potential for improvement.14 In Herder’s view, the human being is bestowed with a “Wille” (will) “des Gesetzes fähig” (capable of law) and with “Vernunft” (reason), which to the

12

13

14

Systematische. Ich traute mir aber das Vermögen und die Fertigkeit nicht zu, meine Gedanken ständig an eine so strenge Ordnung zu kehren” (SA 1, p. 225). Andreas Gailus, Passions of the Sign, Revolution and Language in Kant, Goethe, and Kleist (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), writes that “the operative and highly charged term here is Besonnenheit (circumspection, reflection, presence of mind), which from Johann Gottfried Herder onward has meant the human capacity for interiorization and, more specifically, the ability to maintain a reflective attitude toward one’s sensory experience” (p. 84). More than a century later, Max Weber echoed Herder’s question by asking specifically about the chain of events that placed issues of cultural progress “on occidental soil” (auf dem Boden des Okzidents): “Nur im Okzident gibt es ‘Wissenschaft’ in dem Entwicklungsstadium, welches wir heute als ‘gültig’ anerkennen.” Max Weber, “Vorbemerkung,” in Die Protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus, in Max Weber. Die Protestantische Ethik, ed. by Johannes Winckelmann, 2 vols (Hamburg: Siebenstern, 1975 [Original Edition, Tübingen: Mohr, 1920]), vol. 1, pp. 9–26 (p. 9). Harold Bloom, The Breaking of the Vessel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), examines how literature acts “on the living with the force of an increasing majority” (p. 39), which Karl J. Fink examined in Herder’s essay on “Tithon und Aurora,” Zerstreute Blätter (SA 16, pp. 109–128), where “to tithonize” meant to draw inspiration from a legend or a parable toward a discussion beyond the knowable. “Tithonism, Herder’s Concept of Literary Revival,” in Johann Gottfried Herder: Language, History, and the Enlightenment, ed. by Wulf Koepke (Columbia, SC: Camden: 1990), pp. 196–208.

Kohlhaasian Manifestos after Kleist

27

human being is the law. The human being thinks its “Gesetz” (law) is “heilig” (holy), but that does not mean that it is god-given or in steady state. Rather it evolves because it is generated by “der Geist” (the mind). The human capacity to think, to reflect, and to project not only controls but also designs its own nature.15 Put in terms of modern biology, the human being is a bundle of genetic codes framed and conditioned over time by its own intention, and with each new generation destined by its own inventions.16 From Herder’s perspective it is proper that mankind control its own “Handlungen” (behavior), but that we act on this privilege not by personal measures, rather by a “allgemeinem Principium der Welt” (general principle of the world).17 The human being is fully integrated and prepared to sustain and perpetuate its self. For this reason democracy was inevitable, for humans cannot tolerate external forms of “Zwang” (force and coercion). That is, at the core of human nature is a capacity unto its own law and at the same time incapacity for compulsion and constraint exerted upon it by external impulses. Yes, the track record of human history gives evidence that individuals and cultures live by re-inventing themselves. The human being “constitutes the self. It constitutes with others like unto itself a society according to holy and inviolable laws.”18 By these “inviolable laws” we should expect that democratic societies would eventually learn to infuse politics with human readiness for compassion, hope, and justice. This was the an-

15

16

17

18

Helmut Müller-Sievers, Self-Generation: Biology, Philosophy, and Literature around 1800 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), locates the victory of epigenesis theory, that organisms generate themselves, in Herder’s theory of language acquisition, but draws more heavily on Wilhelm von Humboldt for its broader cultural implications: “Diversity in languages and hence diversity of linguistically national worldviews is, as Humboldt’s grand opening chapters narrate, the result of a progressive history of the foundational force” (p. 110). Karl J. Fink examines Malthusian growth patterns in Herder’s Ideen, such as “the entire course of an individual’s life is change; all of man’s life stages are fabrications of this change and consequently the entire human race is in a prolonged metamorphosis” (Der ganze Lebenslauf eines Menschen ist Verwandlung; alle seine Lebensalter sind Fabeln derselben und so ist das ganze Geschlecht in einer fortgehenden Metamorphose), Herder, Ideen (SA 13, pp. 253–254). Karl J. Fink, “Herder’s Life-Stages as Forms in Geometric Progression,” Eighteenth Century Life, 6 (1981), pp. 39–59. Nearly a century later (1883–85), Friedrich Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra, Ein Buch für Alle und Keiner, in Nietzsche Werke, ed. by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, 9 vols (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1967), radicalized Herder’s positions when he had Zarathustra observe “dass Gott todt ist,” focusing his mission on defining the creative human being: “Ich lehre euch den Übermenschen” (pt. 6, vol. 1, p. 8). Herder, Briefe (1967), “Er constituiret sich selbst; er constituirt mit andern ihm Gleichgesinnten nach heiligen, unverbrüchlichen Gesetzen eine Gesellschaft” (SA 17, p. 143).

28

Karl J. Fink

thropology of the Storm and Stress writers that found its way into the critical discourse of romantics a generation after Herder. But there is a tick in Herder’s definition of the human being as a selfgenerating and evolving entity designed by the mastery of its own mind.19 The hitch is that human beings constitute themselves in concert with others like unto themselves into societies of friends, spouses, and citizens of their own ilk. According to Herder they have organized themselves into a great “Stadt Gottes auf Erden” (city of God on earth) that rules, orders, and connects “ein Gesetz, ein Dämon” (one law, one demon; SA 17, p. 143). The tick in Herder’s concept of human development is that the law of the land is at the same time uniform and arbitrary and demonic and involuntary. Humanity follows the lay of the land; it can be no other than the product of its own making.

III. A Community of that Ilk The empathetic structure of a community with shared “holy and inviolable laws” is not kind to an individual with sensibilities that suspend normative experiences.20 The story of Kleist’s life tells us what happens when a writer makes a case study of emotions that defy the deified as was proposed in Goethe’s “Prometheus”: “Here I sit, I form humans / After my own image; / A race, to be like me, / To sorrow, to weep, / To enjoy and delight itself, / And to heed you not at all — / Like me.”21 This short list of sentiments that shaped an empathetic community of Storm and Stress writers is not a bad start for an era romanticized by “prophetic genius” and exalted by the 19 20

21

Weber, also sees the anomaly in Hellenistic progress ideology, “at least as we like to see it” (wie wenigstens wir uns gern vorstellen; Weber, “Vorbemerkung,” p. 9). Edmund Burke argues the preservation of the “general wealth” gained by the church and state, while Thomas Paine responded to Burke in sentiments of the Storm and Stress with new designs for a new community of inviolable laws grounded in the argument that “Man has no property in man; neither has any generation a property in the generations which are to follow.” Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution, ed. by J. G. A. Pocock, (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987 [1790]), p. 86; Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, ed. by G. Claeys, (Indianapolis, IN, 1992 [1792]), p. 15. An Anthology of German Literature of the Romantic Era and Age of Goethe, ed. and trans. by Klaus-Peter Hinze and Leonard M. Trawick (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1993), p. 36. “Hier sitz’ ich, forme Menschen / Nach meinem Bilde, / ein Geschlecht, das mir gleich sei, / Zu leiden, zu weinen, / Zu geniessen und zu freuen sich, / Und dein nicht zu achten, / Wie ich!” Goethes Werke, herausgegeben im Auftrag der Grossherzogin Sophie von Sachsen, 4 pts., 143 vols (Weimar: Böhlau, 1887– 1919), vol. 2, pp. 76–78 (p. 78). Subsequent citations as “WA” with volume and page number(s).

Kohlhaasian Manifestos after Kleist

29

“world-historical individual” for “the preservation of a people, a state, of the well-ordered spheres of life.”22 In this kind of dynamic, where the “inviolable laws” of the old regime are suspended, Friedrich Schiller tested Kant’s universals of ethical behavior with his own analysis of the human sentiments that fuel the empathic structure of the community. Few in this era were better qualified to lead the dialogue on the ilk of the new community that would reshape “those inviolable laws,” for he had escaped intellectual and physical serfdom by means of a poetry that would manifest the community and at the same time sustain the ethical integrity of the individual.23 Schiller does not sacrifice the individual to the blind cause of history; rather he examines the sentiments shared by a new generation of individuals focused more on affective than cognitive clarity.24 In his essay Ueber naive und sentimentalische Dichtung (On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, 1795), Schiller does what Kant before and Hegel after him failed to do, which was to look at the empathetic structure of human sentiments much as Herder was doing in his letters on the advancement of humanity.25 The essay addresses the issues of shared human appreciation for 22

23

24

25

Georg W. F. Hegel, Reason in History, trans. by Robert Hartman (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1997 [1837]), pp. 40–41, generally is criticized for sacrificing the “wholeness of man” for the prime mover in history, which means to neglect “the intrinsic morality of man within the universal progress of Reason” (p. xxxix). Subsequent citations as “Hegel” with page number. Hegel offers two factors important to the course of history: one is the preservation of a people, a state, of the well-ordered spheres of life. This is the activity of individuals participating in the common effort to bring about its particular manifestations: “It is the preservation of ethical life,” and the other “is the decline of a state” (Hegel, p. 38), which we cannot treat because “we are concerned with the Spirit’s development, its progression and ascent to an ever higher concept of itself” (Hegel, p. 39). András Nagy, “Schiller: Kierkegaard’s Use of a Paradoxical Poet,” in Kierkegaard and His German Contemporaries (Tome III: Literature and Aesthetics), ed. by Jon Stewart (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 171–80, examines the various roles of staged figures that Schiller invented “for the purpose of concealing his true self” and that Kierkegaard employed in his “‘polyphonic’ thinking and playful personality, so apparent in the pseudonymous writings” (p. 173). Subsequent citations as “Nagy” with page number(s). Friedrich Schiller, On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, in Friedrich Schiller, Essays, ed. and trans. by Walter Hinderer and Daniel O. Dahlstrom (New York: Continuum, 1993), pp. 179–260. Subsequent citations as “Schiller, Essays” with page number(s). Schiller published his essay in the journal, Die Horen, in three separate issues that place focus on the personality of the writer: “[…] über naive und sentimentalische Dichter nebst einigen Bemerkungen einen charakteristischen Unterschied unter den Menschen betreffend” (p. 179). All three issues were published together in the collected edition of Schiller’s Kleinere prosaische Schriften (Leipzig: Crusius, 1800), pp. 43–76. See also Friedrich Schiller, Ueber naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, in Schillers Werke, National-

30

Karl J. Fink

an object of nature when contrasted with an object of art that “puts it to shame.”26 There is “shame” here in the play space allowed individuals to manifest sentiments that define the community: “Regarded in this way, nature is for us nothing but the uncoerced existence, the subsistence of things on their own, being there according to their own immutable laws.”27 Schiller defines the naïve broadly as that moment when the condition of nature is joined with a condition of art, and here also we find the “inviolable laws” that come when individuals recognize their condition of nature and their sense of the community as a whole. The personalities of the individual human being then vary in this point of sensibility, some more naïve, and others less so. Those less simplistic are more reflective and follow their sentiments, so Schiller writes, “the poet I say, either is nature or he will seek it. The former makes for the naïve poet, the latter for the sentimental poet.”28 The former is the naïve and the latter the sentimental and together they are the expanded middle that moves the community to be of one mind in the way it defines its self at that juncture where nature “puts art to shame.”29 The tension between the naïve and the sentimental is not in any kind of dialectics or antagonism, rather it is at the edge of a community with shared values, where Schiller finds respect for nature and the naïve as the truth of innocence like nature.30 While Homer and Shakespeare shared a tendency

26 27

28

29

30

ausgabe, ed. by Julius Petersen, Lieselotte Blumenthal, and Benno von Wiese, 42 vols (Weimar: Böhlau, 1943–), vol. 20, pp. 413–503. Subsequent citations as “NA” with volume and page number(s). Schiller, Essays, p. 180; “d. h. daß die Natur mit der Kunst im Kontraste stehe und sie beschäme” (NA 20, p. 413). Schiller, Essays, p. 180; “Natur in dieser Betrachtungsart ist uns nichts anders, als das freiwillige Daseyn, das Bestehen der Dinge durch sich selbst, die Existenz nach eignen und unabänderlichen Gesetzen” (NA 20, p. 413). Schiller, Essays, p. 200; “Der Dichter, sagte ich, ist entweder Natur, oder er wird sie suchen. Jenes macht den naiven, dieses den sentimentalischen Dichter” (NA 20, p. 436). Paul Bishop, Analytical Psychology and German Classical Aesthetics: Goethe, Schiller, and Jung (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), seeks this “holism” in Weimar classicism, where he sets up the complementary traits of Schiller and Goethe for artistic-intellectual discourse that later resonated in Wagner and Nietzsche and again in Freud and Jung, locating in Schiller the “pioneering, or ‘prophetic’ work” (95) Über die Ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (1795) that engaged Jung in the Psychological Types of 1921. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1966 [Jenseits von Gut und Böse, Leipzig: Naumann, 1866]), shatters centuries of Aristotelian logic and dialectic discourse by asking “How could anything originate out of its opposite?” (p. 9), which takes him beyond “good” and “evil,” beyond the farce of a “divinely unconcerned dialectic” (p. 12), beyond “the hocuspocus of mathematical form” (p. 13), to a “doctrine of the development of the will

Kohlhaasian Manifestos after Kleist

31

toward the naïve extroverted personality, Schiller sees those of this ilk increasingly out of place in a world growing in artificial dimensions. And so too is a person of reflective impressions alienated in a community without natural roots, and “the very same thing said here of the diverse forms of humanity may be applied to those two corresponding forms of poets as well.”31 What Schiller discovers in the essay is that the sentimental personality type is left to develop a different set of skills that will be more “satirical or elegiac” as a means to accessing the universal values shared by the community and here Schiller considers the pre-Storm and Stress generation of poets for their manifestation of the “inviolable laws” of the community.32 By Schiller’s thesis the condition of a community becomes increasingly artificial, so it should come as no surprise that among the pre-Storm and Stress generation there were sentimental poets who worked by reflective impressions as a way to shape the universals of humanity.33 Here at the center of a community, Schiller concludes the point of the essay in a footnote defining “inclusiveness” at the core of a concept of humanity, to which both “idealist” and “realist” contribute for “only by means of the perfectly equal inclusion of both can justice be done to the rational concept of humanity.”34 This “Einschließung” (inclusiveness) is a basic principle of affective values that define the struggles of Kleist’s most human of beings. The point is that the shared effects of realism and idealism expand the wholeness of human beings. The effects of the realistic sentiments are “wohlthätig” (beneficial),

31

32

33

34

to power” grounded in “a proper physio-psychology,” by which “we sail right over morality, we crush we destroy perhaps the remains of our own morality” (p. 31). Schiller, Essays, p. 202; “Dasselbe, was hier von den zwey verschiedenen Formen der Menschheit gesagt wird, läßt sich auch auf jene beyden, ihnen entsprechenden, Dichterformen anwenden” (NA 20, p. 439). “Seine Darstellung wird also entweder satyrisch oder sie wird (in einer weitern Bedeutung dieses Worts, die sich nachher erklären wird) elegisch seyn” (NA 20, p. 441): “Unter Deutschlands Dichtern in dieser Gattung will ich hier nur Hallers, Kleists [Ewald von] und Klopstocks erwähnen” (NA 20, p. 452). Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, [Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, 1930], trans. by James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), examines “the strange attitude of hostility to civilization” (p. 38), despite advances in “science and technology” (p. 43), which he argues centers “round the single task of finding an expedient accommodation — one, that is, that will bring happiness — between this claim of the individual and the cultural claims of the group” (p. 50). Schiller, Essays, p. 250; “Ich bemerke, um jeder Mißdeutung vorzubeugen, daß es bey dieser Eintheilung ganz und gar nicht darauf abgesehen ist, eine Wahl zwischen beyden, folglich eine Begünstigung des Einen mit Ausschließung des andern zu veranlassen. Gerade diese Ausschließung, welche sich in der Erfahrung findet, bekämpfe ich; und das Resultat der gegenwärtigen Betrachtungen wird der Beweis seyn, daß nur durch die vollkommen gleiche Einschließung beyder dem Vernunftbegriffe der Menschheit kann Genüge geleistet werden” (NA 20, pp. 492–493).

32

Karl J. Fink

while those of the other by contrast “unsicher und öfters gefährlich” (uncertain and often dangerous), primarily because this personality type strives for “das unwandelbare und unbedingt nothwendige” (what is immutable and unconditionally necessary).35 Setting aside the question of Kleist’s personality type, it would be fair to say that Michael Kohlhaas both benefits the community in his trade and family loyalty, and puts it at risk primarily because he seeks “immutable” and “inviolable” wholeness in the laws of the community, which has grown artificial and is “put to shame” by objects of nature.36 The prophetic sees the defect of our own making, puts us to shame, and that is why the conversation must go on.

IV. Sentiments at Risk The older Schiller of Weimar Classicism might have anticipated the aesthetic juncture of rage and joy that Kleist captured in his case study of the human being in Michael Kohlhaas (1810). Schiller never met Michael Kohlhaas, but if he had, he might have been reminded of his own rage in “An die Freude” (Ode to Joy, 1785), where in his younger days he had aroused a community of students to the joy of brotherhood and at the same time to anger towards the tyranny of authority. It turns out these two sentiments became an aesthetic movement in history; in fact they might in concert amount to Schiller’s own definition of “beauty” as form in motion (“Freiheit in der Erscheinung”).37 Today many might not know this poem, had Ludwig van 35 36

37

Schiller, Essays, p. 259; NA 20, pp. 502–503. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil ([1866] 1966), in the chapter on “Our Virtues,” returns to the issue of the “Preface” where he examines the assumption that “truth is women,” (p. 1), and argues for a reevaluation of Dante and Goethe’s thesis that the “Eternal-Feminine attracts us higher” by arguing that “she believes the same thing about the Eternal-Masculine” (p. 165), which leads to a “hostile tension,” and to our dreams of “equal rights, equal education, equal claims and obligations — that is a typical sign of shallowness” (p. 166), a shallowness of philosophers of antagonisms, binary thought structures, and to opening sarcasm in the critique of religious tensions: “It is so neat, so distinguished to have one’s own antipodes!” (p. 63). Adolf Nowak, “Freiheit in der Erscheinung, Ästhetische Reflexion und musikalische Erfahrung in Schillers Briefwechsel mit Christian Gottfried Körner,” in Schiller und die Musik, ed. by Helen Meyer and Wolfgang Osthoff (Weimar: Böhlau, 2007), pp. 35– 53, examines the famous quotation from Schiller in a letter to Körner (1793), that “Schönheit also ist nichts anders als Freiheit in der Erscheinung,” and that the “inertia” (Schwere) in life experiences is conquered by form in motion, in movement (p. 35). See also Schiller, “Fragmente aus Schillers aesthetischen Vorlesungen vom Winter Halbjahr 1792–93” (NA 21, pp. 66–88), “Freiheit eines Dinges in der Erscheinung ist dessen Selbstbestimmung, wiefern sie in die Sinne fällt” (p. 86).

Kohlhaasian Manifestos after Kleist

33

Beethoven (1770–1827) not reshaped it in 1824 after a lifetime of reflecting on ways to set to music a poem of anger and joy expanded at their physiopsychological sutures.38 We tend to forget that Schiller’s “Ode” expressed two sentiments, joy and rage, and that only the happy one survived, while the controversial one was massaged by a composition of sounds beyond words where aesthetics overcame ethics. The sentiment at risk of being lost is wrath, the rage that moves individuals and whole communities, a sentiment in the Christian world traditionally in God’s purvey, but increasingly also available to individuals in acts of defiance and rebellion.39 Yes, few at the time between Schiller’s death (1805) and Kleist’s (1811) looked with a critical eye to see that the sentiments of wrath and joy are both at work in a community racked by tyranny as the fight for freedom rages. So when we prize Schiller for realizing the form of joy we must also accept the sentiment of wrath as the flip side of the coin, apparently the part that embarrassed Schiller later in life.40 Indeed, the part that Beethoven cut

38

39

40

Wolfgang Osthoff, “Die Neunte Symphonie und Schiller,” in Schiller und die Musik (2007), pp. 193–210, examines how the “Ode” became a “Trinklied” in Schiller’s time at Jena (p. 194), and how Beethoven preserved the words of “brotherhood” from the first stanzas but cut out the sentiments of rage and saber rattling (p. 194), and how Wagner in 1849 replaced Schiller’s sentiments with Goethe’s Faust, and how the “Ode” was used to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall, and how the “Ninth” became a “national hymn” of the EU without any text at all. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment. A Novel in Six Parts with Epilogue, trans. by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Random House, 1992), explicitly moves each character forward with sentiments of “rage” that began with Raskolnikov’s “agitation” at the thought of the pawnbroker’s greed (p. 9), and gathered “strength that was born in him” as he swung the axe in murder (p. 76), turned into the “joy” that he felt in initial reflection on the deed, and moved to more subtle forms of rage in other characters as well, as Razumikhin, who “all but flew into a rage” (p. 257), but intensified in Raskolnikov as his physiological condition took him beyond reality into dreams where he replayed the murder and “Rage overcame him” (p. 276), and later under interrogation where “he sensed that he might lose his mind from rage” (p. 345), which turned “almost joyful” as he considered himself safe from the interrogations (p. 355). Erich Trunz, “Schillers Lied ‘An die Freude’ und Beethovens IX. Symphonie,” in Weltbild und Dichtung im Zeitalter Goethes, ed. by Erich Trunz (Weimar: Böhlau, 1993), pp. 99–107, observes how Schiller did not publish the poem in his collection of poetry from 1800, which he explained to his friend Körner was “a bad poem” (ein schlechtes Gedicht) in bad taste because it mixed matters of the heavenly (jenseits) with the earthly (diesseits) where it should have stayed (p. 102). See also Schiller, “Anmerkungen zu Band 1” (NA 2: 2A, pp. 146–148, where editors reference the lines from Schiller’s poem on universal brotherhood in Herder’s Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1786) and in letter 123 of his Briefe zu Beförderung der Humanität (1797) from Herder’s Sämtliche Werke (SA 18, pp. 295–301): “Keiner für sich

34

Karl J. Fink

out of Schiller’s poem is all about wrath, the anger against the mythos of tyranny.41 Beethoven’s surgery two decades later is radical, for in stanza six, Schiller sets up the same sentiment of wrath that shaped Kleist’s understanding of justice beyond tears, when “Anger and revenge be forgotten, / Our deadly enemy be forgiven, / No tears shall be shed / No remorse shall gnaw at him.”42 Schiller’s two sentiments of joy and wrath were not in opposition as much as two forces that together suspend the ethical and replace it with the aesthetic where we find “Freiheit der Erscheinung” (the freedom of appearance).43 Beethoven reworked the sentiments into one composition focused on joy that comes with the music that emotionally marshals the fight for the freedom of brotherhood, while Kleist too reworked Schiller’s poem in an entirely new format that looks more like a case study, in which the patient, Michael Kohlhaas, is examined for the sentiments of rage and joy that cost him his life but raised him to a new state of happiness beyond tears in a new relationship with the divine in humanity.44 In effect, Kleist’s most human of beings put the community to shame.

41

42 43

44

allein, jeder für Alle; so seyd ihr alle euch einander werth und glücklich” (SA 18, p. 300). Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment ([1866] 1992), puts “Schiller” between the Raskolnikov and Svidrigailov, his disreputable double, who accuses Raskolnikov of being “a Schiller! You — an idealist!” and then declares that he is “fond of Schiller” (p. 471), later finding it “delightful” that Raskolnikov loathes his despicable self: “And do you think I don’t seem ludicrous to myself right now?” (p. 482). “Groll und Rache sei vergessen, / unserm Todfeind sei verziehn, / Keine Thräne soll ihn pressen, / keine Reue nage ihn” (NA 1, p. 171). Richard E. Novak, “Freiheit der Erscheinung,” in Schiller und die Musik (2007), calls this an “affective art” (Kunst des Affekts), which he notes Hegel had declared the “art of modernity” (Kunst der Moderne), p. 37. Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment ([1866] 1992) further examines the “extraordinary individuals” like Napoleon considered above the law, and beyond guilt, when his detective, Porfiry asks the murderer Raskolnikov “who in our Russia nowadays doesn’t consider himself a Napoleon?” (p. 265), which he came to realize during his confession to Sonya meant he was a very ordinary murderer with illusions of grandeur unfulfilled by the shame of an “unmonumental” murder of a “ridiculous old crone” (p. 415).

Kohlhaasian Manifestos after Kleist

35

V. The Cold Side of Joy Kleist’s creative instincts were by no means exhausted by a “Kant crisis” (Kant Krise), nor did his artistic observations suffer from “Verwirrung des Gefühls” (confused emotions) suggested by Goethe (1807).45 Still both perceptions have come down to us as landmarks of Kleist’s poetic personality,46 just as Beethoven’s version of “An die Freude” has entered the psyche of the modern world without Schiller’s sentiment of wrath suspended by joy.47 The dynamic sentiments of rage and joy that move the struggle to freedom took different shapes even in Schiller’s last dramas as in Die Jungfrau von Orleans (The Maid of Orleans, 1801), where the rage was mollified to an aesthetic of harmony in a hero driven to killing but also possessing angelic qualities that made her a candidate for sainthood in her Church.48 Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas also possesses redeeming virtues, but more importantly shares with Schiller’s Joan of Arc the pursuit of happiness beyond tears where in conviction there are no regrets, no more questions. Near the end of her struggle in captivity, Joan is staged in a festive hall surrounded by 45

46

47

48

Johann W. Goethe, “Verwirrung des Gefühls,” in Schriftsteller über Kleist, ed. by Peter Goldammer (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1976), set the cliché in motion in a comment from July 13, 1807, based on a reading of Kleist’s Amphitryon, which Goethe found “a sign of the times” (Zeichen der Zeit) in the way Kleist engaged the “Zwiespalt der Sinne mit der Überzeugung. Wie im ‘Miles gloriosus’ das eine Mädchen zwei Personen vorstellt, so stellen hier zwei Personen eine dar” (p. 425). Bernhard Blume reviews both the “Kanterlebnis” (150–51), and the “Verwirrung des Gefühls” (pp. 165–169), in the latter arguing that Michael Kohlhaas (and Penthesilea) are the axis on which Kleist’s literary work turns, where the “Zweikampf” leads to sentiments of death not because the hero follows feelings to his death, rather because he destroys the world with them: “Die Tragik in diesen Werken liegt nicht darin, daß ein Mensch seinem Gefühl folgt und daran zugrunde geht, sondern darin, daß er damit die Welt zerstört.” Bernhard Blume, “Kleist und Goethe” [1946], in Heinrich von Kleist. Aufsätze und Essays, ed. by Walter Müller-Seidel (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buch Gesellschaft, 1967), pp. 130–85 (p. 167). Blume, “Kleist und Goethe,” argues that Kleist examined the “Akt der Rache” (act of revenge) that Schiller found in the “Wesen der Gewalt“ (core of violence): “daß nämlich nichts des Menschen so unwürdig ist, ‘als Gewalt zu erleiden, denn Gewalt hebt ihn auf,’” which explains “die Häufigkeit des Rachemotivs bei Kleist” (pp. 165– 166). Charles Passage, “Introduction,” in Friedrich Schiller. Mary Stuart and The Maid of Orleans, Two Historical Plays, trans. by Charles Passage (New York: Ungar, 1961), pp. i–xi, argues that Schiller took historical information from a far off place, and “fashioned from them a drama which was to be sustained by its own poetic truth,” in which “the nineteenth century public came to know her story and to revere her profoundly,” so that “In the early twentieth century her Church officially canonized her as a Saint” (p. v). Subsequent citations as “Passage” with page number(s).

36

Karl J. Fink

music as she expresses these two sentiments: “One sense of joy exultant fills this place, / And one thought beats in every heart tonight; / What hate had sundered lately in disgrace / Now shares the common pleasure with delight.”49 And later in the soliloquy she begs to be free of the struggle but immortalizes the formula for justice beyond tears: “Choose when you proclaim your might / Those in your eternal sight / Who free of sin about you stand; / To spirits pure give your command, / Deathless spirits, who will keep / their vows, who neither feel nor weep!”50 Schiller does not put the sentiment of wrath at risk, and some of those that followed him, like Kleist, picked it up as he had originally framed it in his “An die Freude.”51 More to that point would be Franz Kafka’s (1883–1924) reading of God’s wrath in Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas,52 where the heinous crimes suspend the norm of ethical behavior, and advance both the rage and joy in humanity to a singular emotive behavior that becomes cold and calculating.53 49

50

51

52

53

Passage, p. 86. “Und einer Freude Hochgefühl entbrennet, / Und ein Gedanke schlägt in jeder Brust, / Was sich noch jüngst in blutgem Haß getrennet, / Das teilt entzückt die allgemeine Lust.” Schiller, Die Jungfrau von Orleans, in Werke (NA 9, pp. 165–315), p. 268. Passage, p. 88. “Willst du deine Macht verkünden, / Wähle sie, die frei von Sünden / Stehn in deinem ewgen Haus, / Deine Geister sende aus, / Die Unsterblichen, die Reinen, / Die nicht fühlen, die nicht weinen!” (NA 9, p. 270). William E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Barnes and Noble, [1903] 2003), pp. 48–57, used this passage as a motto to frame his essay “On the Meaning of Progress,” where he recognizes in the “tiny community” of freed slaves “a halfawakened common consciousness, sprung from common joy and grief” (p. 53), that progress “is necessarily ugly” (p. 55). Franz Kafka, “Eine Geschichte, die ich mit wirklicher Gottesfurcht lese,” in Kleist. Ein Lebensbild in Briefen und zeitgenössischen Berichten, ed. by Klaus Günzel (Berlin Verlag der Nation, 1984), p. 569, writes that when he reads the work one “astonishment” (Staunen) displaces the previous and moves the work toward “perfection” (Vollkommenes) that could not be real, were it not for the crude ending, by which he means that in every literary work one expects a “tick of humanity” (ein Schwänzchen der Menschlichkeit) that soon begins to flap and destroy the “godliness of the whole” (Gottähnlichkeit des Ganzen; p. 569), meaning that it is the tick in Kohlhaas that in the end makes it real. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling: Dialectical Lyric by Johannes de silentio, trans. by Alastair Hannay (London: Penguin, 2003 [1843]), pp. 45–48, examines the wrath of God by expanding the story of Abraham’s sacrifice of his son Isaac, “in order to see how monstrous a paradox faith is, a paradox capable of making a murder into a holy act well pleasing to God, a paradox which gives Isaac back to Abraham, which no thought can grasp because faith begins precisely where thinking leaves off” (p. 82). Subsequent citations as “Kierkegaard” with page numbers. See Nagy, pp. 171–80, for a range of references to Schiller, where “the aesthetics” trumps ethics (p. 175) and invites faith: “when Kierkegaard leaves the aesthetic and describes the approach to faith, Schiller reappears” (p. 177).

Kohlhaasian Manifestos after Kleist

37

The news from Kant on the limitations of knowledge hit Kleist hard, but fortunately he had prepared himself for the crisis with an essay on securing happiness. He had written it on the occasion of his decision to quit a military career. He discusses the crisis in an exchange of letters with Wilhelmine von Zenge in a response to her question: “Wie sieht es aus in Deinem Innern?” (How are things with you on the inside).54 From reading Wieland in his youth, Kleist had learned to value truth as the fulfillment of purpose in life gained through education: “I do not know, dear Wilhelmine, if you can think of these two concepts, truth and education, with the same holiness, as I do.”55 Clearly the transition from Wieland to Kant was for Kleist an intellectual crisis at a time when western civilization was undergoing a revolution that over time has changed only in form. For Kleist the crisis was more philosophical, or even spiritual, for if it is true that we cannot distinguish between reality and appearance, then we take any truth that we have gained to the grave with us, and all effort to acquire an “Eigentum” (individual intellect) is “vergeblich” (in vain; SW 2, p. 634). Kleist was desperate. He wrote to Wilhelmine about the need to cry on her shoulder, to gain strength from hugging a friend. He did not cry but reports that on that day he ran through the rain and he did hug a friend. Kleist was shattered by the discovery that not only can we not arrive at truth, but also that what we possess today is after our death something completely different. This idea disgusted Kleist and he could not even look at a book, let alone continue his studies. So the next day he wrote to Wilhelmine that he would travel. Kleist recovered from his crisis and wrote his own manifesto on how human beings constitute the self. In his version human beings take claim for the aesthetic creations of their own making. This is what Michael Kohlhaas does when he seeks ownership of property that he constituted. The pair of black horses was his creation. He owned more than just a couple of animals; they were constituted in his image. He explains this in “Aufsatz, den sichern Weg des Glücks zu finden und ungestört — auch unter den größten Drangsalen des Lebens — ihn zu genießen!” (Essay on the Most Certain Way to find Happiness, And — Even Amidst Life’s Greatest Hardships — How to Appreciate the Journey Undeterred, 1799).56 It reads like a manifesto to 54

55

56

Heinrich von Kleist, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. by Helmut Sembdner, 2 vols (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2008), vol. 2, p. 632. Subsequent citations as “SW” with volume and page number(s). Letter to Wilhelmine von Zenge of 22 March 1801: “Ich weiß nicht, liebe Wilhelmine, ob Du diese zwei Gedanken: Wahrheit und Bildung, mit einer solchen Heiligkeit denken kannst, als ich” (SW 2, p. 633). Kleist, “Aufsatz, den sichern Weg des Glücks zu finden und ungestört — auch unter den größten Drangsalen des Lebens — ihn zu genießen!” (SW 2, pp. 301–315), was first printed in 1885 and was based on secondhand sources, although is referenced in

38

Karl J. Fink

guide a life of truth without regrets, without tears. Michael Kohlhaas cries, of course, but not in the end. He shed specifically “eine Träne” (one tear; SW 2, p. 22) on a page of the letter from an official in Dresden who had rejected his case, and “Tränen flossen” (tears flowed; SW 2, p. 30), when his wife died trying to deliver a petition for his case. To that point in the story, Kohlhaas had written only normal bureaucratic communiqués, letters, and petitions. At first Kohlhaas lived a normal life of crying, and maybe laughing like every one else. The image of “justice beyond tears” appears later in the story with “ein sogenanntes ‘Kohlhaasisches Mandat’” (a so-called ‘Kohlhaas mandate; SW 2, p. 34), which at that point he also referred to as “([d]iese Erklärung” (this declaration: SW 2, p. 34) in the language of the American Revolution.57 But there was something new in the term “das Mandat,” and in Kleist’s story it went through several permutations. There was even a phony mandate not written by Kohlhaas. In the second half of the story Kohlhaas identifies with the mandate, he lives for it, and he dies for it. In the end at his execution he hugs his children, gives the enemy a cold stare, swallows the capsule of evidence prophesying the fate of the monarchy, and puts his head on the chopping block. He took justice with joy as noted at the end of the story: “In the past century there were still several happy and robust descendants from Kohlhaas living in Mecklenburg.”58 This was sufficient confirmation of a dialogue that must go on. Someone had to live to tell the story. The American claim to the inviolable right of individuals to the “pursuit of happiness” has its roots in the European Enlightenment taken from Gottfried W. Leibniz’s (1646–1716) essay “Von der Glückseligkeit” (On Happiness, 1710[?]).59 It is significant that even in the early text by Leibniz,

57

58 59

a letter by Kleist to his former teacher, Ernst Martini, dated March 18 and 19, 1799, in which Kleist explained the reasons for resigning from the military (SW 2, pp. 472– 478). Henry Miller, “Eine Erklärung durch die Repräsentanten der Vereinigten Staaten von America im General-Congress versammelt,” Pennsylvania Staatsbote, Stück 813 (den 9. Juli, 1776), pp. 1–2, translated and printed the text in German only five days after it first appeared English. “Vom Kohlhaas aber haben noch im vergangenen Jahrhundert, im Mecklenburgischen, einige frohe und rüstige Nachkommen gelebt” (SW 2, p. 103). Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, “Von der Glückseligkeit,” in Philosophische Schriften, ed. and trans. by Hans H. Holz, 1st edn [1965], 5 vols (Frankfurt: Insel, 1986), vol. 1, pp. 387–401, is an unusually early philosophical text written in modern German, and historically is also significant in that abstract metaphysical concepts are embedded in an anthropology of the human being. “Es ist aber genug, daß er in Stand ist, die Freude zu empfinden, so oft er daran denken will, und daß inzwischen daraus eine Freudigkeit in seinem Tun und Wesen entsteht” (vol. 5, p. 397). Subsequent citations as “Leibniz” with volume and page number(s).

Kohlhaasian Manifestos after Kleist

39

happiness was cast in physical terms, in “Empfindung” (sensation; Leibniz 5, p. 91), although the text as a whole grounds happiness in classical Aristotelian logic by definition. The Enlightenment concept as used in the American “Declaration of Independence” links happiness to the freedom to own physical property, to possession. Kleist’s conception on the other hand is aesthetic. It is felt to the core of the human body, as stated in the opening lines of his essay on a sure way to happiness: “We see the great ones of the earth in possession of the goods of the world. They live in splendor and surplus, the treasures of art and nature seem to grow around them for them, and that is why they are called the minion of fortune.”60 But displeasure and annoyance in their countenance (Unmut), the pain (Schmerz) in their pale cheeks, and the grief and anxiety (Kummer) speak from every movement. The look of satisfaction is found not among those with possession, rather among those in struggles for daily bread. Indeed, in every form of “Begünstigungen des äußern Glückes” (preferential conditions of fortune), we have “Tränen in den Augen” (tears in our eyes; SW 2, p. 301): “I believe, my friend, it is there, where it is enjoyed and wanted: on the inside.”61 Yes, happiness is inside the body, and Kohlhaas had to learn this the hard way. He had to lose every outer pleasure of life to find in justice the road to happiness. That is how Kleist’s justice without tears works. It is internal peace, a “satisfaction with our self” (Zufriedenheit unsrer selbst; SW 2, p. 305). Kleist disconnects happiness from external possessions and locates it the discomfort of extreme conditions. He chooses the image of a handcuffed prisoner, much like the condemned man in Franz Kafka’s (1883–1924) story about a penal colony (“In der Strafkolonie,” 1919), where the “Verurteilte” (condemned man) goes through various stages of passivity from lack of interest, to curiosity, to acceptance.62 Kafka’s condemned man was at peace 60

61 62

“Wir sehen die Großen dieser Erde im Besitze der Güter dieser Welt. Sie leben in Herrlichkeit und Überfluß, die Schätze der Kunst und der Natur scheinen sich um sie und für sie zu versammeln, und darum nennt man sie Günstlinge des Glücks” (SW 2, p. 301). “Ich glaube da, mein Freund, wo es auch nur einzig genossen und entbehrt wird, im Innern” (SW 2, p. 301). Franz Kafka, “In der Strafkolonie” [1st edn, Leipzig: Kurt Wolff Verlag, 1919], in Das Urteil und andere Erzählungen (Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag [1st edn, 1994], 2001), pp. 129–165: at first the condemned man follows the conversation of others about his execution machine “mit einer Art schläfriger Beharrlichkeit” (p. 134), later hoping that the visiting traveler “den geschilderten Vorgang billigen könne” (p. 137), and still later was at peace: “Der Verurteilte hatte den Kopf niedergelegt und sah friedlich aus” (p. 146), in the end happy that he was freed from an injustice: “Zum erstenmal bekam das Gesicht des Verurteilten wirkliches Leben” (p. 156), and “Der Verurteilte lachte ohne Worte leise vor sich hin” (p. 157).

40

Karl J. Fink

with his fate, but then when freed carried on an innocent banter with a common soldier. They teased each other; still somehow the condemned man was struck by the “Ahnung irgendeines großen Umschwungs” (sense of some great transition; Kafka, p. 160). This was Kohlhaas, at the end of the story at peace with himself and the world. This was Socrates in prison, at peace with the world and free from tears, from the lamentations of the maddening crowd. This is Kleist’s “Bilde des wahren innern Glückes” (image of the true inner happiness; SW 2, p. 306). But Kleist did not stop with happiness in the divine suspension of rules that defined the old regime. At the end of the story he still needed to put the advancement of humanity into a communal context. It is insufficient to think of constituting the self in a selfish way. This is what Schiller had called “beauty,” when we find that aesthetics has guided the “Freiheit in der Erscheinung” (freedom in appearance). In this aesthetic moment, Kleist saw how “die Menschenliebe” (the love of human beings) forms the self, and advances humanity: “Yes, truly my friend, without love of human beings there is no possible happiness, and those that live a life against human beings are not worthy of true happiness.”63 So, in the end, Kohlhaas did love his fellow human beings more than his horses, and that is why he had nothing to cry about. That is why he became silent.

VI. The Silent Room of the Heart At the end, Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas grew silent for he had taken the step beyond the “supreme principle of morality” that had grounded normative ethics in universal duty argued by Kant.64 Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas had tried to live by the inviolable principles of the community, but they failed him and he decided to enter a new “relationship to the divine,” much like Kierkegaard had presented in his case study of “Abraham” a generation later (Kierkegaard, p. 88). The point of Kierkegaard’s analysis of the “Abraham” story is that, like Kleist’s Kohlhaas, Abraham faces a juncture, a threshold, where he stands at an extremity and at some point is no longer resigned to 63

64

“Ja, wahrlich, mein Freund, es ist ohne Menschenliebe gewiß kein Glück möglich, und ein so liebloses Wesen wie ein Menschenfeind ist auch keines wahren Glückes wert” (SW 2, p. 314). Immanuel Kant, Groundings for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. by James W. Ellington, 3rd ed (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), from the Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (1785), p. 15. Kant shapes his case studies from the principle “that all moral concepts have their seat and origin completely a priori in reason, and indeed in the most ordinary human reason just as much as in the most highly speculative” (pp. 22–23).

Kohlhaasian Manifestos after Kleist

41

the conditions of life and comes to a new and personal understanding of his relationship to his destiny. And so Kierkegaard, in the pseudonym of Johannes de Silentio, breaks down the threshold with a characterization of the “knight of resignation” (Kierkegaard, pp. 67–75) and the “knight of faith” (Kierkegaard, pp. 75–79), in other words, giving a title to those resigned to a life of knowing as framed by Kant, and another to those who entered ambiguity beyond knowing, “in the silent room of the heart.”65 Kierkegaard finds “Resignation” easy; it is a parade of experiences in a reality of commerce and activity, and so only the knight of faith “is happy, only he is heir apparent to the finite” (Kierkegaard, p. 79) and learns to live life beyond points of resignation. Both Kleist and Kierkegaard looked inside the whole emotive person and proposed a new thinking that accepts ambiguity, where life is a paradox of possibilities that become concrete in experiences. That is why “the learned man” in Kierkegaard’s analysis wants to share “the shudder of thought” of murdering his son Isaac with Abraham (Kierkegaard, p. 44).66 Indeed, the dialog that Kierkegaard had truncated between resignation and faith was renewed in Kafka’s novel on The Trial of an everyman called simply “K.,” who learns to live in solitude in an alien world of absurdity much as experienced by Abraham, Kohlhaas, and others like Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov.67 Kafka keeps the dialog going, as recommended by his contemporary, Franz Rosenzweig, in the Jewish tradition of learning by parables and commentary. Kafka continued the form of mediating individuals at the edge of a community. His “K.” found himself so all alone, but in a community of that ilk; they all share solitude beyond tears as they crossed the threshold of values from ethics to aesthetics. This is a quest that the priest and K. discuss in the parable “Vor dem Gesetz” (Before the Law), where Kafka’s hero spends a whole lifetime seeking the self, some would say 65

66

67

Nagy, “Schiller: Kierkegaard’s Use of a Paradoxical Poet” (2008), references Schiller’s metaphor of the “silent room of the heart” where one can seek refuge in the “battle of faith” (p. 179): “Schiller is used here paradoxically; but through this paradox, Kierkegaard can present the divine in the human. And, consequently, just the opposite” (p. 180). Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, ([Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, 1930] 1961), argues that “the religions of mankind must be classed among the mass delusions, […] by which men strive to gain happiness,” setting up “the art of living” (p. 32), as the subject of “our enquiry concerning happiness” (p. 37). Franz Kafka, The Trial, trans. by Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Schocken Books, 1992 [1st edn, 1925]), locates the famous parable “Before the Law” (pp. 213–215), in the story of “K.,” who never learns what crime he has committed but in the end does experience some satisfaction in understanding the level of deception in our higher expectations from life: “The important thing was that he suddenly realized the futility of resistance” (p. 225).

42

Karl J. Fink

too late, nevertheless in the same sober clarity found “in the silent room of the heart” where those of that ilk live. The priest in dialogue with Kafka’s “K.” does not seek a definite statement of justice, rather he builds ambiguity by keeping the conversation going, by minimizing the role of the “doorkeeper,” who seems no more than one of Kant’s case samples, driven by duty to the categorical imperative, “a precisian with a stern regard for duty” (Kafka, p. 215), “moved neither by pity nor rage” (Kafka, p. 216).68 And as “K.’s” understanding of the doorkeeper’s “simple-mindedness” grows, he also begins to see the “conceit” where the authority of the doorkeeper turns into condescension and delusion (Kafka, p. 217). In the end neither the doorkeeper nor “K.” know anything about “the interior of the law,” but nor did the priest, and nor did Kleist or any other in the community of that ilk. They seek, but must “hover ambivalently” between subjective sensations and half-truths.69 Kafka’s “K.” broadens the scope, as he feels both he and the “doorkeeper” are greatly deceived, so he reached a “melancholy conclusion” that “turns lying into a universal principle” (Kafka, p. 220). In the end, the priest and “K.” did not agree on the lesson learned from the parable, partly because in the course of the conversation the story had lost its clear lines and the priest “accepted his comment in silence” (Kafka, p. 221). But more to the point is the way they parted in darkness where the priest in subtle moves separates himself from “K.,” who experiences the same “cold joy” that Schiller, Kleist, Kierkegaard, and Dostoyevsky had experienced: “You were so friendly to me for a time, […] and explained so much to me, and you let me go as if you cared nothing about me” (Kafka, p. 221).

68

69

Kant, Groundings for the Metaphysics of Morals ([1785] 1993), does not propose these case studies in order to examine them for empirical reality, rather to show that we cannot legislate moral acts and that moral behavior can be expressed only in “categorical imperatives but not at all in hypothetical ones” (p. 33). Rheinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1952] 2008), examines the “schizophrenic” in the ironies of American political culture (p. 5), focusing on the gray areas between extreme situations, where the American “hovers ambivalently between subjection to the ‘reason’ which he can find in nature and the ‘reason’ which he can impose upon nature. But neither form of reason is adequate for the comprehension of the illogical and contradictory patterns of the historic drama” (p. 88).

Kohlhaasian Manifestos after Kleist

43

VII. Conclusion: To Be Continued So we observe that the dialogue on extreme justice has in fact continued just as was proposed in Herder’s Briefe zu Beförderung der Humanität and in Franz Rosenzweig’s “new thinking.” In the end “K.” is stabbed “like a dog,” but there is no glory in his search or sacrifice. Rather “it was as if the shame of it must outlive him” (Kafka, p. 229), which puts a twentieth-century twist on the legacy of martyrs from our own time, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945), Hans (1918–1943) and Sophie Scholl (1923–1943), and Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968), all individuals, who rose to the challenge of justice for the advancement of human beings constituting the self as they suspended the ethics of the old regime. In their memoirs we see the stories of Schiller, Kleist, Kierkegaard, and Kafka, very nearly prophetic, as in Inge Scholl’s (1917–98) memoirs of Die Weiße Rose (The White Rose), in the section on the “Augenzeugenberichte” (Eyewitness Reports) and “Reaktionen und Stimmen” (Reactions and Voices).70 These live accounts might serve as testimony for Kleist’s prophetic displacement of ethics into aesthetics of “justice beyond tears.” Here, hours before their execution, the friends of the resistance experience the range of Kohlhaas’ sentiments, from the despair of “selling life too cheaply” — “man gibt sein Leben zu billig her” ( Scholl, p. 153) — to the cold side of happiness: “The friends, who had received their death sentences, were silent and resolute, no tears, upright.”71 One eye-witness could not understand how Hans Scholl in these days could be “so happy” (so fröhlich; Scholl, p. 181), while another observed Sophie “crying” at the last meeting with her parents, but then asked to be excused from the sentiment as she recomposed her stature in the last hours “without shedding a tear” (ohne eine Träne zu vergießen; Scholl, p. 190). The crowning moment came as brother Hans placed his head on the executioner’s block shouting “Es lebe die Freiheit” (Long Live Freedom; Scholl, p. 191). Still, the literature of meaningful manifestos that has guided the behavior of those like Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas is pretty slim. And so the dialogue, as Cornel West and others have suggested, must continue, as when the Barmen theological “Beschlüsse” (resolutions) of July 11, 1933 were submitted

70

71

Inge Scholl, Die Weiße Rose (Frankfurt: Fischer, [1955] 1993), “Augenzeugenberichte” (pp. 121–194), and “Reaktionen und Stimmen” (pp. 195–205). Subsequent citations as “Scholl” with page number(s). “Die Freunde, die ihr Todesurteil vernommen hatten, waren still und gefaßt, keine Träne, aufrecht” (Scholl, p. 160).

44

Karl J. Fink

against Hitler’s regime,72 and became a working manifesto against the South African policy of apartheid.73 In this document we seem to “go beyond our Socratic questioning” and “embrace the guttural cries of oppressed people.” But the rage and tears continue to push the dialogue, and for a small, special group there is only a cold side to the joy that it is over.74 And that would seem to be the force of Kleist’s legacy.75 St. Olaf College

72

73

74

75

Karl Barth, “Die Beschlüsse,” in Die erste Bekenntnissynode der Deutschen Evangelischen Kirche zu Barmen, ed. by Gerhard Niemöller (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Rupprecht, 1959), pp. 196–209, among others prepared the text with explicit rejection of the ultimate authority of the state: “wir verwerfen die falsche Lehre, als gebe es Bereiche unseres Lebens, in denen wir nicht Jesus Christus, sondern anderen Herren zu eigen wären, Bereiche, in denen wir nicht der Rechtfertigung und Heiligung durch ihn bedürften” (p. 196). Kairos: Three Prophetic Challenges to the Church, ed. by Robert McAfee Brown (Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1990 [1st edn, 1988]) presents the “Kairos” document as a “challenge to the Church” in South Africa without single authorship, much as the “Barmen Beschlüsse” were written against the Nazi regime on July 11, 1933, attaching the six point Barmen resolutions in Appendix C as “The Barmen Declaration” in English translation (pp. 156–158), the final pages of the “Kairos” document. Cornel West, The Kairos Covenant: Standing with South African Christians, ed. by Willis H. Logan (New York: Meyer-Stone Books, 1988), pp. 114–123, argues that before violence “all alternatives have to be exhausted and you have to be able to point to historical evidence that they are exhausted” (p. 121). Elie Wiesel, Night, trans. by Marion Wiesel (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006 [1st edn, 1958]), gives life to the prophetic, with a memoir on the dying sustained by the movements of Beethoven’s music: “I shall never forget Juliek. How could I forget this concert given before an audience of the dead and dying?” (p. 95).

Jeffrey Champlin Reader Beware: Wild Right in Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas and Eichendorff’s Das Schloß Dürande Eichendorff’s Das Schloß Dürande parallels Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas in its account of a character who follows a path from careful obedience within a series of legal appeals to a wild and illegal turn to violence. Yet while the final pages of Kleist’s novella leave open questions of law and authority that have inspired a long critical debate, Eichendorff’s text appears to end with a simple moral. Embarking from the closing words of the story, which resonate both as warning and reading instruction, the present study reads the threat of the “wild animal” as the mobilization of an important motif from Michael Kohlhaas that both articulates Eichendorff’s thematic appropriation and resists his apparent effort to domesticate Kleist. An analysis of the Kohlhaas stereotype reveals the influence of its themes on conservative protocols of literary form, opening both a new perspective on Eichendorff’s Kleistian inheritance and casting new light on the lines of opposetion that texts face from their own apparent precursors.

Kleist was continually concerned with the problem of popularity, not only in his own struggle to stage his dramas and publish his stories, but through his leadership of the daily Berliner Abendblätter (Berlin Evening News). The author who famously — and fatally — blamed Goethe for the failure of Der zerbrochne Krug (The Broken Pitcher, 1806/1811) also gave the popular media a prominent place in his work, opening “Die Marquise von O…” (The Marquise of O., 1808) with a scandalous advertisement in search of an unknown rapist. Kleist was one who recognized and relished the power of the press, its iterations, its runs and run offs, the repeatability of type. Measuring his impact, we want to follow his types and stereotypes, particularly that of the compellingly perplexing “Kohlhaas-figure,” as it is still known in German literary and political discussions. Michael Kohlhaas (1810) has long been popular, and the twentieth century saw numerous rewritings and the film version in 1981 of E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime (1975). Closer to Kleist’s time, the late romantic poet Joseph von Eichendorff (1788–1857) took up Michael Kohlhaas in his novella Das Schloß Dürande (Castle Dürande, 1837) and tried to domesticate and subdue the radical effects of Kleist’s textual insurrection. Indeed, many of the great figures of German literature and thought around 1800 were concerned with popularity, at once resisting it and courting it. Avital Ronell attunes us to the anxious valences it announces in the work of Kant, who, according to his own testimony, had to disavow ex-

46

Jeffrey Champlin

amples and popular language in order to craft a style that could approach real popularity only in the rational realm of common sense. While Eichendorff appears to have evaded what Ronell calls Kant’s “double rapport to popularity,” looking at his appropriation of Kleist will complicate the dominant view of his work as a sweet literary product for the post-Napoleonic reading public.1 Famous as an author who picks up on the popular of all ages, from the Spanish Golden Age and folk songs to Weimar Classicism and the earlier Romantics, Eichendorff also turned to Kleist (who resists the categories of literary history) in his 1837 text. His character Renald, the hunter, who joins murderous revolutionaries to defend his sister’s honor in Das Schloß Dürande, follows Michael Kohlhaas in his specific path from a careful obedience within a series of legal appeals to a wild and illegal turn to violence. Yet while the final pages of Kleist’s novella leave open questions of law and authority that have inspired a long critical debate, Eichendorff’s text seems to end with a simple moral: “But you be on guard against waking the wild animal in the breast, so that it doesn’t suddenly break out and tear you apart.”2 The present study investigates the status of this warning by reading the threat of the “wild animal” as the mobilization of an important motif from Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas that allows us to specify Eichendorff’s thematic appropriation and at the same time resists his apparently successful effort to domesticate Kleist. This focused reading opens both a specific additional perspective on Eichendorff’s Kleistian inheritance and casts new light on the lines of resistance that texts in general face from their apparently docile precursors. Achieving his greatest prominence after the celebrated peak of High Romanticism, Eichendorff is generally considered to undertake a literary project of restoring order in the wake of disruptive provocations in the realms of art and politics.3 According to standard introductions, his work reflects 1 2

3

Avital Ronell, Stupidity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), p. 285. “Du aber hüte dich, das wilde Tier zu wecken in der Brust, daß es nicht plötzlich ausbricht und dich selbst zerreißt.” Joseph von Eichendorff, Das Schloss Dürande, in Werke, ed. by Wolfgang Frühwald, Brigitte Schillbach, and Hartwig Schultz, 6 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985), vol. 3, pp. 421–465 (p. 465). Subsequent citations as “Eichendorff” with page numbers. All translations from German texts are my own. Dennis F. Mahoney, “Introduction,” in The Literature of German Romanticism (Rochester: Camden House, 2004), pp. 1–24, carefully speaks of “two and perhaps even three phases in the years from 1795 and 1830 — Früh-, Hoch-, and Spätromantik (Early, High, Late Romanticism),” p.14. The word “perhaps” prompts the question: is Late Romanticism (of which Eichendorff is the classic representative) best thought of as a separate literary period, or, does what Mahoney calls its “repetitive self parody” relegate it to a mere epiphenomenon of High Romanticism?

Wild Right in Kleist and Eichendorff

47

not only his social conservatism (he was both Catholic and belonged to the nobility) but also a fundamentally conservative literary practice that finds its forms and themes in works of earlier authors.4 Das Schloß Dürande appears to fit this model very well in that it both draws on the theme of a break from the law from within the law as depicted in the earlier Michael Kohlhaas, and makes it clear that this break threatens man and society in such a way that it must be avoided. The present reading of Kleist’s novella as a more disruptive source for Eichendorff takes its orientation from a counter-tradition of Eichendorff critics starting with Theodor Adorno and Georg Lukáçs that laments his reception as a conservative and suggests that his work exceeds this reception’s narrow, often moralistically simplistic, interpretations.5 Following a bold path opened by Adorno, a subsection of these critics have engaged Eichendorff’s very repetition in order to dislodge his reputation as one who merely copies, spelling out the precise context of his duplications in such a way that replication gives way to renewal and rhythm replaces redundancy. Stefan Nienhaus provides a review of the scholarship that has sought to make this case since the 1970s and argues that Eichendorff’s repetition of motifs and specific phrases constitutes an essential aspect of his unique literary style.6 More recently, John Hamilton has proposed that Eichendorff’s repetitions have implications for broader questions of aesthetics, productively engaging the earlier Romantic theory of Friedrich Schlegel not in terms of the split levels of irony but through a temporal difference that opens new vistas of freedom through variations of a surface. Focusing on the musicality of his work, Hamilton writes that “Eichendorff is alive and dynamic not in spite of but because of the repetition and rhythm implicit in every cliché.”7 Shifting from the lyric (which has been the main focus of critics interested in the displacements of Eichendorff’s reproductions) to the novella, the present study seeks to extend this line of inquiry by picking up on the print run of the Kohlhaas stereotype in order to measure the impact 4

5

6 7

Robert O. Goebel, Eichendorff’s Scholarly Reception: A Survey (Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1993), provides a concise overview of Eichendorff criticism that reveals how even those scholars who challenge his conservative reputation tend to do so only partly and rely nonetheless on his conservative reputation as a starting point. Georg Lukáçs, Deutsche Realisten des 19. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 1956). Theodor W. Adorno, “Zum Gedächtnis Eichendorffs,” in Noten zur Literatur (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1958). Stefan Nienhaus, Eichendorffs Wiederholungsstil. Eine Untersuchung des Erzählwerks (Münster: Kleinheinrich, 1991). John T. Hamilton, “Music on Location: Rhythm, Resonance, and Romanticism in Eichendorff’s Marmorbild,” Modern Language Quarterly 70:2 (2009), pp. 195–221 (p. 198).

48

Jeffrey Champlin

of its theme on apparently conservative protocols of literary form. The question to be pursued is whether Eichendorff does indeed succeed in taming Kleist’s novella, in penning it up like a wild animal, or if perhaps he may be seen to have penned a text that has a much more intricate relation to its model.

I. Staying on Track In the final sentence of the novella, Das Schloß Dürande insists on its own significance through an imperative that abruptly changes the narrator’s form of address. I wish to begin my reading here with this turn to the “du” (you) as a primal scene of literary exegesis, as an attempt at a wrap-up that will open the way for Kleist’s intervention: “Du aber hüte dich, das wilde Tier zu wecken in der Brust, daß es nicht plötzlich ausbricht und dich selbst zerreißt” (But you be on guard against waking the wild animal in the breast, so that it doesn’t suddenly break out and tear you apart; Eichendorff, p. 465). This parabasis orients an interpretation of the novella by rhetorically dividing the text into the sequence of narrated events and a statement about the meaning of those events. The biographically-oriented assumptions indicated above would reinforce (or perhaps even found) a basic correspondence between reading subject and object: having read the story of Renald and his desperate end, the reader should be careful not to lose control of himself in the same way. Beneath this lesson, however, lies an implicit instruction about how to interpret the story, especially through “das wilde Tier” (the wild animal) as a figure of surprising danger. At this level, the moral tells us to read the story as a cautionary tale about the perils of losing self-control, which leads to self-destruction. In order to follow the stated moral, one has to be able to understand the story in the sense of the moral first. It is not immediately clear how this is to be accomplished, since a brief summary fails to reveal the moment when Renald “suddenly” succumbs to irrationality as the moral suggests. Believing that the younger Count Dürande had an affair with his sister Gabrielle, the hunter Renald first informs the Count’s father and then appeals to the police and a series of corrupt lawyers for help before attempting to deliver an appeal to King Louis XVI himself. This attempt fails and Renald is placed in an insane asylum on Dürande’s word, but escapes when the revolution breaks out in Paris, at which point he leads a group of revolutionaries to attack the Dürande family in their castle. Since Renald’s path seems to be set from the start, it is hard to see where he changes direction and goes wrong.

Wild Right in Kleist and Eichendorff

49

While the moment of the eruption of the wild resists location on the level of thematic paraphrase, a strict guiding thread in the realm of the signifier offers hope of tracking it down. In this endeavor, we, like Renald, must employ our hunting skills. The adjective “wild” appears throughout the narrative and in the moral itself in a manner that promises a series of individual wild descriptions that lead up to an understanding of the wider sense of the term at the end. The text employs this adjective over fifteen times, establishing a rhythm that traverses descriptions of a number of characters. It always has resonances of the animal, and in Renald’s case this animal character is specifically linked to his descent into violence. It indicates a target, creating an object of evaluation, as can be seen when the elder Dürande first uses the term in connection with Renald. When the hunter reports what he takes to be the abuses of the younger Count Dürande, the father replies: “such a young wild swan must be plucked, but don’t make it too hard on him.”8 This metaphor describes the younger count as an animal that needs to be controlled, as one who must be restrained and brought back within normal boundaries.9 By extension it implies that once this occurs, he will be cured of his excesses. The narrator then adopts this characterization of Renald, a shift that indicates a move to a higher level of authority within the novella. At first the narrator only uses the term in passing to describe Renald at specific points during his visit with the revolutionaries in Paris. Along with the concluding moral warning, these instances of foreshadowing could be seen as the first stages of the animal waking up. The moment where Renald really becomes wild, at least in the realm of the text’s language, occurs after the revolution when he returns to Castle Dürande to violently punish the family. At this point the narrator names him “den verwilderten Renald” (the wild Renald; Eichendorff, p. 448) and shortly thereafter “den wilden Jäger Renald” (the wild hunter Renald; Eichendorff, p. 451). Here the adjective describes not a passing emotion, but rather a more static characteristic. Das Schloß Dürande thus employs the adjective “wild” to indicate a man who has become an animal by virtue of losing the power to reason, a loss that his violence demonstrates. Comparing this trajectory with the final line of the novella, one 8 9

“[…] so ein junger wilder Schwan muß gerupft werden, aber mach Er’s mir nicht zu arg” (Eichendorff, p. 438). Andrzej Wicher, “Wildness and Revolution in Joseph von Eichendorff’s Das Schloß Dürande,” in The Wild and the Tame: Essays in Cultural Practice, ed. by Wojciech Kalaga and Tadeusz Rachwal (Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu ŒlĊskiego, 1997), pp. 47–53, provides a brief but useful thematic overview of wildness as a politically charged term in Das Schloß Dürande. Wicher specifically points to the “fascination of the Counts Dürande [...] with wildness in general, and the wildness of the revolution in particular” (p. 51).

50

Jeffrey Champlin

can locate the point where the “wild animal” awoke in Renald. While even his earliest and most peaceful attempts to attain justice are cast with some suspicion, his attack on the castle and its inhabitants clearly marks an internal change. His suicide at the end is the final consequence of his wildness. This tight tracking of the signifier meets the demands of the moral of the story, but the significance is pushed to a formalist extreme that opens the question of its explanatory power. A typographical indicator is established, but not a convincing explanation. In fact, by stubbornly holding to the moral as a literal and non-negotiable principle, the reader risks falling into the same trap as Renald, who stubbornly holds to his principle of justice at all costs. In other words, this reading works, but only mechanically, creating a counter-totality that contrasts starkly with the narrative as a whole. Facing the division between these two levels, we return to the reason why the moral seemed unpersuasive in the first place, but are now in a position to articulate the problem more precisely. Renald’s violence toward others and himself suggests that he went wrong somewhere, but since he holds to his motivation consistently throughout, one has difficulty locating the precise point of his error. He only seeks an appropriate response to the injustice suffered by his sister at the hands of what should have been a protective noble family. Das Schloß Dürande thus articulates two parallel tracks: on the one hand its theme emphasizes consistency and faithfulness to a higher law, while on the other hand the moral, in conjunction with a certain path of the signifier, insists on the irrationality of bestial violence. Rather than trying to break out of the strong grip of the moral directly, I propose that we stay with its insistence on the signifier and use it as our guide to Michael Kohlhaas. Following the term “wild” to Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas will show how this term functions in a very similar account of a violent break from the logic of the law to which the main character demonstrates a firm commitment.10 Kleist, however, charges right into the paradoxical clash of the law with wildness that Eichendorff tries so hard to avoid. This collision resists direct representation but takes place around the figure of the 10

Although the various collected editions of Eichendorff’s work report that no documents pertaining to the compositional history of Das Schloß Dürande exist, there is an uncommon agreement among critics that Michael Kohlhaas was a direct influence. While this investigation primarily tracks the intertextual links and leaps of the two texts on the level of theme and language, it is important to note a little acknowledged biographical connection: a marginal note by Eichendorff in one of his handwritten copies of the novella Eine Meerfahrt indicating his intention to revise the novella in Kleistian style: “im Kleistischen Relationston wie Schloß Dürande.” Willibald Köhler, “G. Pauline, Eine Meerfahrt,” Aurora: Jahrbuch der Eichendorff-Gesellschaft, 17 (1957), pp. 112–113; originally G. Pauline, “G. Pauline, Eine Meerfahrt de Eichendorff,” in Etudes Germaniques, 10 (1955), pp. 1–16.

Wild Right in Kleist and Eichendorff

51

animal. On one of his regular trips between Brandenburg and Saxony, the horse dealer Kohlhaas is unexpectedly forced to leave behind two shiny black horses as a deposit at Wenzel von Tronka’s new tollgate. When this toll turns out to be illegitimate, he returns to find that the horses have been worked nearly to death and undertakes a long series of attempts to have them restored to him in good health. Kohlhaas begins by trying to rectify the situation peacefully, first by confronting von Tronka directly, then by hiring lawyers (who fail due to corruption), and lastly by an attempted personal appeal to the Elector of Brandenburg by his wife. When she is killed in this effort, Kohlhaas attacks von Tronka’s castle, then Wittenberg and Dresden in his pursuit of first restitution and finally also revenge. Kleist’s genius lies in figuring Kohlhaas’ horses not as mere property but as a metaphor for the right to property. The resultant struggle for justice reveals a tenuous relationship between the individual and the law that produces ever more complex negotiations right up until the end of the novella. Kleist’s two uses of the adjective “wild” inform an interrogation of the law that relates his mistreatment to his claim against the society that sanctions it. When Kohlhaas’ wife Lisbeth asks why, after learning that his attempts to pursue his case in court have failed, he has decided to sell his house, Kohlhaas answers: “[…] because I am unable to remain in a country, my dear Lisbeth, in which one will not protect my rights. Better to be a dog, if I should be tread on by feet, than a man!”11 In contrasting himself with a canine, Kohlhaas creates the logical justification to resort to extra-legal measures: If the justice system treats him like a beast, then it is justified to respond in kind. Lisbeth appears to mirror Kohlhaas emotionally with her reply: “How do you know, she wildly asked, that one will not protect your rights?”12 In response to his wife’s objections, Kohlhaas agrees to allow her to try to deliver one final appeal for justice. When guards kill her in the course of 11

12

Heinrich von Kleist, Michael Kohlhaas, in Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. by Helmut Sembdner, 7th extended and revised edition, 2 vols (Munich: Hanser, 1984), vol. 2, pp. 9–103. Subsequent references abbreviated to “SW” followed by volume and page number(s). “[…] weil ich in einem Lande, liebste Lisbeth, in welchem man mich, in meinen Rechten, nicht schützen will, nicht bleiben mag. Lieber ein Hund sein, wenn ich von Füßen getreten werden soll, als ein Mensch!” (SW 2, p. 27). “Woher weißt du, fragte jene wild, daß man dich in deinen Rechten nicht schützen wird?“ (SW 2, p. 27). On another register, this protest can be read as a contrast that insists that a human defend his rights. By leaving, Kohlhaas would retain his humanity and the distinction between himself and the animal. But he does not choose to emigrate to a country where his rights would be better preserved. Instead, he declares war on civil society.

52

Jeffrey Champlin

her attempt, Kohlhaas raises a small army of rebels, burning cities that he believes to be sheltering Wenzel von Tronka without regard for their innocent inhabitants. Kohlhaas only interrupts his murderous attacks at Martin Luther’s request. Here, at their discussion of a possible peace treaty, both Kohlhaas and Luther invoke the figural border between human and animal. Kohlhaas explains that he needs the community’s protection to continue his trade and claims that the authority who denies him this protection: “[…] stößt mich zu den Wilden der Einöde hinaus” (thrusts me out to the savages of the wilderness; SW 2, p. 45). In response to Kohlhaas’ request for damages, Luther accuses him of “wild[e] Selbstrache” (wild revenge; SW 2, p. 46). In a description that mirrors the elder Dürande’s view of Renald, Luther sees Kohlhaas as breaking the law for his own perverse economy of rage. Unlike his formidable precursors in classical Weimar, Kleist’s texts indicate no model for overcoming the dangers of savagery. By comparison, in his Ästhetische Briefe (Aesthetic Letters, 1795), Schiller opposes the savage to the barbarian as two threats to freedom. He urges caution against both the “Wilder” (savage), whose emotions overcome his rational powers, and the “Barbar” (barbarian), who permits reason to destroy his moral sentiment. Viewed with Schiller in mind, Michael Kohlhaas recounts the failure to reconcile these extremes, to reach the subtle balance between reason (the law) and feeling (nature) that Schiller advocates.13 However, in the context of the present reading of Eichendorff, the “Wild[e]” (savages) that Kohlhaas speaks of here are neither fully human nor fully animal, but rather they undo the strict opposition between these two terms. This is important because it illustrates, albeit indirectly, Kohlhaas’ political theory, which places him not outside the law but as a challenger to it who cannot easily be located. The subtle change in the signifier from “wild” to “Wild[e]” disrupts the opposition be-tween wildness and civilization, indicating a conceptual place not so much out of civilization but before the drawing of a distinction between civilization and wildness. Luther does not argue with this theory, but instead focuses on the reason for the impasse, telling Kohlhaas that the Elector of Saxony has no knowledge of Kohlhaas’ complaint.14 Convinced by this argument with perplexing 13

14

Friedrich Schiller, Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen, in Schillers Werke, Nationalausgabe, ed. by Julius Petersen, Lieselotte Blumenthal, and Benno von Wiese, 42 vols (Weimar: Böhlau, 1943 –), vol. 20, p. 318. Subsequent citations as “NA” with volume and page number(s). I would like to thank Jeffrey High for pointing out this important connection in his extensive comments on an earlier version of this paper. In framing Kohlhaas’s attacks, the two uses of “wild” examined here indicate key points of reference for the lively debate in Kohlhaas scholarship over the legitimacy of

Wild Right in Kleist and Eichendorff

53

ease, Kohlhaas agrees to return to the community, apparently accepting that he was never really cast out of it in the first place. Kohlhaas’ renewed recognition of the power of the sovereign indicates a puzzling inconsistency in his program. Even after having burned whole cities and killed innocent people in disregard of all social standards, he is willing, if not eager, to re-enter the logic of the law. With his references to savages (Wild[e]), Kohlhaas indicates a step away from the law while remaining concerned, even obsessed with it, yet he lingers in a violent and conceptually evasive state without immediately positing a new order. His demand of Luther at the height of his rebellion, that the horses be restored, indicates that he would be satisfied with the return of the old law in a more consistent instance. This reading of Kohlhaas prompts attention to an analogous passage in Das Schloß Dürande, one that appears to undermine the closing moral of the story.

II. Sealing the Law Focus on the final sentence of Das Schloß Dürande, which seems to urge the mere suppression of wild violence in favor of the traditional order, has obscured the fact that when Renald submits to the wild beast within, he, like Kohlhaas, reaches a point where violent rebellion coincides with the concept of justice that undergirds society.15 Critics have not failed to notice this paradox, but their vastly divergent responses indicate the hermeneutic validity of another attempt to understand it. Helmut Koopman, one of the critics who insists most persuasively on the connection between Renald and

15

his cause. Paul Michael Lützeler, “Heinrich von Kleist, Michael Kohlhaas,” in Romane und Erzählungen der deutschen Romantik. Neue Interpretationen, ed. by Paul Michael Lützeler (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1982), pp. 213–239, emphasizes the historical legal background of the novella, as does Jochen Schmidt, Heinrich von Kleist: Die Dramen und Erzählungen in ihrer Epoche (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2003). The work of Joachim Bohnert, “Kohlhaas der Entsetzliche,” Kleist Jahrbuch (1988/89), pp. 404–431, and Wolfgang Wittkowski, “Is Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas a Terrorist?” Historical Reflections / Reflexions Historiques 26.3 (2000), pp. 471–486, exemplify another group of critics who see the strictly legal interpretation as insufficient and employ the contemporary term “terror” to negotiate its shortfalls and shift the debate towards philosophical and theologically inflected readings. The term “right” (Recht) plays a specific role in Das Schloß Dürande by emphasizing a system of rules guaranteed by tradition. While it is true that “law” (Gesetz) in the sense of a contractually understood positive law tends to dominate Michael Kohlhaas, this opposition does not hold completely, as Kohlhaas also speaks of his demand in terms of “right” (Recht) at important moments. In the present investigation, the question of one’s relation to a legal economy provides the commonality between the two texts.

54

Jeffrey Champlin

Kohlhaas, begins with the common insistence on right over revenge. This may make Renald “a basically conservative man,” at least at the start of the novella. However, it does not necessarily follow that with his attacks he wishes to “restore injured law.”16 Yet the other extreme, as proposed by Thomas Hoeps, also attributes to Renald too much institutional power.17 Hoeps argues that Renald even takes a step further than Kohlhaas. By killing the Dürandes, Renald furthers “the destructive change of system, the imposition of the French Revolution on the country.”18 In the terms of the present analysis, Koopman emphasizes Renald’s adherence to right and Hoeps proposes a reading that emphasizes the animal character of his behavior. A close reading of Renald’s attack crosses these two options by insisting on a wild right. As proof of legitimacy, he demands that the nobleman mark a provide a writ on a “mit dem gräflichen Wappen besiegelten Pergament” (manuscript sealed with the count’s insignia; Eichendorff, p. 454), but this imposition of the written document indicates a commitment to the binding power of the law when it is in fact not in effect. When the younger Count Dürande returns from Paris, he witnesses the repercussions of political events that invalidate all tradition. The representatives of social and church power are on the run, with nobles fleeing the advancing forces of the revolution and nuns driven from the cloister near his castle. With the fall of the traditional powers that had protected the Dürandes and prevented Renald’s initial attempts to attain justice, he would now appear be free to punish the family in any manner he chooses. Yet within this range of supposed freedom, the choice he makes is surprising and, strictly speaking, impossible. In this context of rebellion Renald orders 16

17

18

Helmut Koopman, Freiheitssonne: Reflexe der Französichen Revolution im literarischen Deutschland zwischen 1789 und 1840 (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1989), “ein konservativer Mensch” (p.152), “verletztes Recht wiederherstellen” (p. 152). In their opposing interpretations, Koopman and Hoeps try to resolve a contradiction that is not resolved in the texts. With his claim for redress in the terms of an old system without the enforcing power of that system, Renald cannot be seen to make a general appeal for the old, but neither does he appeal to the new. Instead he insists on a particular demand in the absence of any larger system. “den umstürzlerischen Systemwechsel, die Durchsetzung der Französischen Revolution auf dem Lande” (p. 69). Thomas Hoeps, Arbeit am Widerspruch: »Terrorismus« in deutschen Romanen und Erzählungen (1837–1992) (Dresden: Thelem, 2001). With his suggestions of other possible models in addition to Michael Kohlhaas, Klaus Lindemann, Eichendorffs Schloß Dürande. Konservative Rezeption der Französischen Revolution (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1989), reminds us that a text certainly need not restrict itself to one precursor. An expanded understanding of the not always submissive role of Eichendorff’s models offers hope for future research discoveries from careful examinations of the connections between Das Schloß Dürande and Goethe’s “Novelle” as well as Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell (to mention just two of Lindemann’s links).

Wild Right in Kleist and Eichendorff

55

Count Dürande to take Gabriele “als seine rechtmäßige Braut” (as his lawful bride; Eichendorff, p. 454), precisely when the revolutionary uprising that makes his demand possible simultaneously invalidates the foundation of right.19 The elder Count Dürande resolutely rejects Renald’s demand. The terms in which he does so indicate a slight skip from the track of the German adjective “wild” to its homonymic counterpart “Wild” (game), but ultimately returns us to the term’s oppositional orbit. “Game” (Wild) refers to a specific subset of animals, those such as the deer and the hare that are customarily kept in a semi-wild state and objects of a hunt. Eichendorff uses “Wild” as a metaphor for the first time in the novella when, in contrast to his usual duty of hunting animals, Renald tracks “ein ganz anderes Wild” (a completely different kind of prey; Eichendorff, p. 423), the man who engaged in a secret affair with his sister. The hunter, who lives on the land of the noble family he ostensibly serves, instead places the family in his sights. Now, when Renald follows up his demand for the document with a gunshot, the elder Dürande acknowledges this designation himself, saying, “nun wendet sich die Jagd, wir sind jetzt das Wild, wir müssen durch” (now the hunt turns, we are now the prey, we must make it through; Eichendorff, p. 454). Through the German adjective “wild” and noun “Wild,” Count Dürande and Renald track each other, maintaining a set hierarchy that can be overturned but not dismantled. Despite this apparently fixed terminological and conceptual opposition, at this point in the text, the slight shift in the strict line of the signifier from “wild” (wild) to “Wild” (game) opens the space for a conception of the wild right that has its precursor in Kohlhaas’ transformation into a savage (“Wild[e]”). Das Schloß Dürande thus not only appropriates the figure of the individual whose extreme adherence to the law leads to a violent transgression of the law; it goes further, narrating a continued fidelity to a specific injury in the absence of the system that gave that injury meaning. The result is neither a turn to the right, as Koopman argues, nor the left, as Hoeps sees it, but a disjunction that sets these coordinates out of power. Michael Kohlhaas operates in a fundamentally analogical manner, but the distinction is perhaps even stronger, since at the height of his violence Kohlhaas does not call for the restoration of the old law but “for the institution of a better 19

Admittedly, the fact that Renald ultimately proves to be wrong about what he assumes to be the injury that causes his rebellion marks a very important difference between him and Kohlhaas. However, at some point in the course of events it is not really accurate to say that Kohlhaas is actually right either. In this sense, despite this key difference both novellas interrogate being right in the sense of being correct about a particular judgment as a challenge that potentially compromises the greater system of right as law on which it depends.

56

Jeffrey Champlin

order of things.”20 Yet he also continually insists (as evident in his meeting with Luther) on the specific restoration of the horses.

III. Reading in the Wild Even before their respective conclusions, Michael Kohlhaas and Das Schloß Dürande have already come to very different ends. The last scene of Kleist’s novella continues to be the subject of critical debate because it fails to resolve the problem of the relation of society to its violent other in a manner that is either clearly conservative or clearly revolutionary. In what Carol Jacobs succinctly describes as a nearly simultaneous affirmation and denial of authority, Kohlhaas both accepts the death sentence from the Elector of Brandenburg and deprives the Elector of Saxony of the capsule text that means so much to him.21 Indeed Kohlhaas structurally repeats the assertion that so infuriated Luther, insisting that he can stand outside, or, to use a slightly less problematic term, before, the law even while submitting to it. Kohlhaas announces his full satisfaction with the paradoxical resolution of his case and this satisfaction shines through in his steady gaze upon the Elector of Saxony while devouring the critical slip of paper. Renald, on the other hand, ignites stored munitions that blow up Castle Dürande with him still inside. This appears to be an act of desperation, since he learns shortly before that his sister was not actually kidnapped as he believed but rather that she secretly followed the younger Dürande to Paris without him knowing it. The sense of right that Renald held to so fiercely reveals itself to have deceived him and without it he cannot live. The conclusion of Das Schloß Dürande requires that the reader go along with this collapse; through an idyllic description of the ruins of the castle softly entwined in leaves, its final paragraph indicates a distance from the dangerous story of the past. After this description there is a dash, followed by the moral tracked throughout this article. According to a common reading, the dash would be the graphical mark that continues the distancing effect of the previous sentence. By transitioning to a portrayal of nature, the narrator leaves the story behind so that the reader can reflect on its meaning. Yet the clash between wildness and the law witnessed above suggests that this dash 20 21

“zur Errichtung einer besseren Ordnung der Dinge” (SW 2, p. 41). Carol Jacobs, “Soothsaying and Rebellion,” in Uncontainable Romanticism: Shelley, Brontë, Kleist (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), pp. 138–158, writes that “Kohlhaas satisfies his curiosity, perhaps, but as simultaneously as matters permit he also willingly forfeits his head. He knocks the seat of electoral power unconscious, but the same extended gesture affirms the power of the law” (p. 158).

Wild Right in Kleist and Eichendorff

57

may not simply serve as a post that can fence in the previous disruptive insight. Instead, the dash suggests a more Kleistian reading, as a break that marks a challenge to understanding.22 Eichendorff himself invites a Kleistian, more disruptive, reading of the moral. In his later work on the history of German literature, Eichendorff writes of Kleist in nearly the same words as those that end Das Schloß Dürande: “Hüte jeder, das wilde Tier in seiner Brust, daß es nicht plötzlich ausbricht und ihn selbst zerreißt! Denn das war Kleists Unglück […]” (Everyone should be on guard against waking the wild animal in his breast, so that it doesn’t suddenly break out and tear him apart! Because that was Kleist’s misfortune).23 Critics generally jump quickly from the literary to the autobiographical to reinforce the moral of Das Schloß Dürande: take the story as a warning, or you will end up like Renald and Kleist. This formulation of the quote indicates that each person should beware of the animal, but the novella provides good reasons for skepticism regarding the efficacy of this warning.24 First of all, it needs to be read in light of two earlier warnings in the same form. In both cases the warning fails. The first occurs when Renald meets the revolutionary leader who gives him a paper to show the younger Dürande that reads: “Hütet Euch. Ein Freund des Volks” (Be on guard. A friend of the people; Eichendorff, p. 442). Dürande does not accept this warning or even consider it. The second warning occurs when the elder Dürande learns that Renald is on his way to the castle and says, “Hüte sich, wer einen Dürande fangen will!” (Be on guard, he who wants to catch a Dürande!; Eichendorff, p. 450), and runs away from his servants. This warning has no effect on the absent Renald, who is its primary addressee. Nor does it prevent the servants from catching their deranged master and putting him in his sickbed. Comparing the wording of these multiple warnings reveals an important, if subtle, distinction that justifies skepticism toward the closing moral of the story. The reflexive construct in Das Schloß Dürande speaks first of watching 22 23

24

Kleist infamously inserts a dash in the place of the key scene of violation in “Die Marquise von O…” (The Marquise of O., 1808; SW 2, p. 106). Joseph von Eichendorff, Geschichte der poetischen Literatur Deutchlands, in Werke, ed. by Wolfgang Frühwald, Brigitte Schillbach, and Hartwig Schultz, 6 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985), vol. 6, pp. 13–280 (p. 227). Dieter Heimböckel, “Eichendorff mit Kleist,” Aurora: Jahrbuch der Eichendorff-Gesellschaft, 65 (2005), pp. 65–81, is one of the few critics to question the potential interpretive efficacy of the moral, especially when considered in light of the tradition of the French moralists Marmontel, Diderot, and Voltaire. In this context, Heimböckel (p. 75) also insightfully refers to Kleist’s decision to abandon the title “Moralische Erzählungen von Heinrich von Kleist” (Moral Tales by Heinrich von Kleist) for the collection of his stories that appeared in 1810–1811.

58

Jeffrey Champlin

oneself rather than the animal: “Du aber hüte dich,” — “Best beware” in the literal and colloquial sense of “watch yourself” — “das wilde Tier zu wecken in der Brust.” One needs to watch one’s step, to tiptoe softly, so as not to awaken the animal. Here the animal itself is not the object of concern. The surveillance system needs to be set up not to guard against an internal threat, but against the breakdown of the surveillance system. Holding onto this literal reading of the moral that closes the story, Das Schloß Dürande leaves readers not so much with a picture of the moral looming over the meaning of the text, as with the feeling that the moral is an inconsistent epilog, a paranoid retreat that threatens to forget the text and its wild signifiers. Renald’s commitment to wild right, which the moral disowns, but which is articulated with the help of Kleist, suggests another mode of reading. Here the critic, like Renald, would hold onto aspects of the text that resist its explicit reading instructions and the philological traditions that enforce them. Working from within these traditions, the reader would face a wild moment of holding onto the injustices of tradition at the very moment they are placed in abeyance. Bard College

Amy Emm The Legacy of Kleist’s Language in Music: Schoeck, Wolf, Bachmann, and Henze Although Kleist’s oeuvre has inspired many musical works, few have made a lasting contribution to the repertoire. This essay examines the extent to which Kleist’s celebrated language has hindered successful musical adaptation. It surveys some better-known Kleist adaptations from orchestral music and opera, in order to explore the role Kleist’s language has played for composers and librettists from the late eighteenth to the early twenty-first centuries.

In 2007 Hans Neuenfels directed an acclaimed revival of Othmar Schoeck’s one act opera, Penthesilea (1927),1 based on Heinrich von Kleist’s play of the same name. Culture and music critic Peter Hagmann’s laudatory review summarizes the problems surrounding Kleist’s reception in music: Penthesilea by Othmar Schoeck does not exactly belong among the pillars of the repertoire, but the one-act opera from 1927 is not entirely unknown. And again and again, the piece came to a curiously armored, unpleasantly loud tone, which left Heinrich von Kleist’s well-formed sentences incomprehensible over long passages and drove the listener to exhaustion. The case is completely and agreeably different in this first-class production from the Theater Basel, which commemorates not only the 50th anniversary of the composer’s death, but also attends exemplarily to the 20th century repertoire.2

First, although Kleist has a substantial and diverse legacy in music, it has mostly been forgotten. Kleist’s plays, short stories, anecdotes, poems, epigrams, and even his letters have inspired a range of musical works, from 1 2

Othmar Schoeck, Penthesilea (Zürich: Musikhaus Hüni, 1927). “Penthesilea von Othmar Schoeck gehört zwar nicht gerade zu den Stützen des Repertoires, aber ganz unbekannt ist der Einakter von 1927 nicht. Und immer wieder kam das Stück zu einem eigenartig gepanzerten, unangenehm lauten Klang, der die wohlgeformten Sätze Heinrich von Kleists über weite Strecken unverständlich bleiben liess und den Zuhörer in die Erschöpfung trieb. Das ist in dieser erstklassigen Aufführung durch das Theater Basel — das damit nicht nur an den fünfzigsten Todestag des Komponisten erinnert, sondern auch beispielhaft das Repertoire des 20. Jahrhunderts pflegt — ganz und wohltuend anders.” Peter Hagmann, “Wenn Küsse Bisse werden: Hans Neuenfels inszeniert Penthesilea von Othmar Schoeck im Theater Basel,” in NZZ Online, Neue Zürcher Zeitung AG, 5 Nov. 2007: . Retrieved on 30 October 2011. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine.

60

Amy Emm

incidental music, overtures, preludes, symphonic poems, and chamber music, to operas, choral works and Lieder.3 Yet few of these works have entered into the repertoire. As with Neuenfels’ production, the revival of twentieth century Kleist compositions tends to be motivated by commemoration, rather than by pure music appreciation. Second, the concern with preserving Kleist’s language haunts his musical reception. Operatic Kleist adaptations in particular are subject to the critique that when Kleist’s language is replaced by, or forced to compete with, music, the resulting work only degrades or oversimplifies the original.4 Thus Hagmann goes on to praise the arrangement and re-orchestration of Schoeck’s score by conductor Mario Venzago and dramaturg Hartmut Becker because it rendered more of Kleist’s language audible. Hagmann’s critique suggests that the second problem derives from the first, namely that efforts to do justice to Kleist’s language produce difficult musical works that are exhausting to listen to. Kleist reception in music thus has a reception problem of its own, parallel to Kleist’s contemporaries’ experience of his language as difficult and alienating.5 While the question of musical qualities is perhaps best left to musicologists, this essay will explore from a literary perspective how musical adaptations attempt to reflect or evade the tensions of Kleist’s language. It will consider examples of Kleist reception in instrumental music and in opera, before concluding with some thoughts on the directions of Kleist’s musical legacy in the twenty-first century.

3

4

5

The most recent reliable bibliography of musical works inspired by Kleist remains Klaus Kanzog’s “Heinrich von Kleist und die Musik: Eine Bibliographie,” in Werke Kleists auf dem modernen Musiktheater, ed. by Klaus Kanzog and Hans Joachim Kreutzer (Berlin: Schmidt, 1977), pp. 172–210. Selected updates may be found in Kai Köhler’s handbook entry “Musiktheater,” in Kleist-Handbuch: Leben — Werk — Wirkung, ed. by Ingo Breuer (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2009), pp. 456–458. Irene Krieger’s overview serves as a starting point for further research: Die Bedeutung der Musik für Heinrich von Kleist und die Vertonungen seiner Werke (Freiburg: Centaurus Verlag, 2010). The problem of meaningful musical adaptation is not limited to Kleist’s works, as twentieth-century debates over the quality of Literaturoper attest. See Carl Dahlhaus, Vom Musikdrama zur Literaturoper: Aufsätze zur neueren Operngeschichte (München: Katzbichler, 1989). Kleist’s language in performance provoked a variety of reactions from his contemporaries: for instance, a reading of Die Familie Schroffenstein triggered laughter, according to Heinrich Zschokke, quoted in Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. by Helmut Sembdner (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2008), vol. 1, p. 919, (Subsequent citations as “SW” with volume, page, and line numbers), and readings from Penthesilea that introduced pantomimed scenes by Henriette Hendel-Schütz met with incomprehension in the Vossische Zeitung; Penthesilea’s tragic actions “sah man hernach besser, als man es vorher gehört hatte” (SW 2, p. 1009, n. 862).

Kleist’s Language in Music

61

I. When Language Shapes Music: Hugo Wolf’s Penthesilea Most purely instrumental Kleist adaptations consist of incidental music, overtures and preludes for productions of his plays, but Austrian composer Hugo Wolf’s (1860–1903) symphonic poem, Penthesilea, is a notable exception.6 Symphonic poems emerged in the nineteenth century as part of the trend towards program music — the musical representation of an extramusical narrative or concept. A departure from the multiple movements of the traditional symphony, a symphonic poem consists of one uninterrupted movement inspired by a literary work or idea. The form was established by Hungarian composer Franz Liszt (1811–1886), who looked to literature for inspiration and mood, but left the exact relationship between literary text and music ambiguous.7 Wolf, by contrast, sought a clearer musico-poetic correlation. He explored musical forms in search of “coherent structures that could match poetry’s expressive power and precision.”8 Wolf found success as a composer of Lieder, and was particularly inspired by the poetry of Goethe, Eichendorff, and Mörike. He was known for his intimate preoccupation with the texts he set, and before playing his compositions he insisted on first reading the original poems aloud (Glauert, p. 51). Wolf’s awareness of music’s tendency to obscure or distort language suggests a composer uniquely attuned to the issues surrounding the musical adaptation of Kleist. Wolf was profoundly acquainted with the language of Penthesilea: in the summer of 1883, he reportedly carried a copy of it around “like a breviary” and read and quoted from it constantly to his friends (Walker, p. 143). However, turning to Kleist meant, for Wolf, turning away from the familiar musico-poetic relations of the Lied,9 towards an experiment in the purely instrumental form of the symphonic poem. In line with the formal conventions established by Liszt, Wolf’s Penthesilea contains three sections linked by the transformation of themes and their

6

7

8 9

Hugo Wolf, Penthesilea: Symphonische Dichtung, ed. by Robert Haas and Hans Jancik (Vienna: Musikwissenschaftlicher Verlag, 1971). This is a reprint of the 1937 edition which restored the work to Wolf's last revisions of 1897, after a posthumous edition in 1903 introduced substantial alterations. See Frank Walker, Hugo Wolf: A Biography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 188–189. Louise Cuyler, The Symphony, 2nd edn (Warren, MI: Harmonie Park Press, 1995), pp. 174–175; Keith T. Johns, The Symphonic Poems of Franz Liszt, rev., ed., and intro. by Michael Saffle (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 1997), p. 10. Amanda Glauert, Hugo Wolf and the Wagnerian Inheritance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 52. Wolf had been encouraged by Liszt earlier that year to produce a “larger-scale” work, according to Walker, p. 140.

62

Amy Emm

associated motifs.10 But Wolf appears to be far more attentive to the structure of the play. Whereas Liszt was known to rewrite or rearrange his program to accommodate certain musical structures or ideas,11 Wolf appears to have meticulously reproduced the structure of his program. The most recent studies of Wolf’s Penthesilea maintain that its thematic and tonal transformations align with the 24-scene structure of Kleist’s play (Griswold-Nickel, p. 99; Metzger, pp. 122–124). The first section of the symphonic poem, “Auf-bruch der Amazonen nach Troja” (Departure of the Amazons for Troy), corresponds to scenes 1–13 of the play; the second section, “Der Traum Penthesileas vom Rosenfest” (Penthesilea’s Dream of the Rose Festival), to scenes 14–18; and the final section, “Kämpfe, Leidenschaften, Wahnsinn, Vernichtung” (Battles, Passions, Madness, Annihilation), to scenes 19–24. Griswold-Nickel’s thesis highlights the parallels between Wolf’s music and the dramatic emotional and psychological shifts of Kleist’s heroine (Gris-wold-Nickel, pp. 100–102.). Through a musical analysis of Wolf’s final section according to the emotional scenarios catalogued in its title, she identifies how the original battle and love themes metamorphose into dis-sonance and chaos. From the musicological perspective, it seems that Wolf faithfully conveys the form and characterizations of Kleist’s drama. But given Wolf’s intimacy with his source, it is tempting to see the programmatic origin of his thematic transformations in Kleist’s language. When Wolf’s intricate web of themes breaks down into “musical chaos,” it might be seen to represent the breakdown of linguistic and aesthetic distinctions with which Kleist’s play concludes.12 The confusing disruptions of theme and rhythm in the “Wahnsinn” (madness) component of the piece, for instance, suggest the disjointed communication of the scenes preceding Penthesilea’s attack on Achilles. In scene 20, the news of Achilles’ challenge must be repeated for the queen, who herself repeats and rephrases it until 10

11

12

Raphael Metzger, “Hugo Wolf’s Symphonic Poem, Penthesilea: A History and Analysis” (doctoral dissertation, Peabody Conservatory of Music at Johns Hopkins University, 1979), identifies three major themes (pp. 141–153). Jennifer Ann GriswoldNickel, “Hugo Wolf’s Penthesilea: An Analysis Using Criteria from His Own Music Criticism” (master’s thesis, University of Cincinnati, 2007), argues that there are five (pp. 68–99). For example, Liszt substantially modified Schiller’s poem “Die Ideale” (1795) in order to include, among other things, a closing apotheosis. See Johns and Saffle, p. 46, and Vera Micznik, “The Absolute Limitations of Programme Music: The Case of Liszt’s ‘Die Ideale,’” Music and Letters, 80.2 (1999), pp. 207–240. Cf. Griswold-Nickel, p. 101. Such a breakdown is by no means foreign to the symphonic poem. Complaints about formlessness were often aired by early critics, as noted by Johns and Saffle (p. 6).

Kleist’s Language in Music

63

she stops listening and seems to go mad.13 As Wolf transforms his love and war motifs to the point of inaudibility, he seems to achieve a musical representation of the play’s infamous collapse of kisses and bites (“Küsse, Bisse”; SW 1, p. 425, l. 2981). However, the thematic structure of Wolf’s composition is more apparent when reading the score than when listening to the music (Griswold-Nickel, p. 132). Wolf was inexperienced with fullscale orchestration and had trouble translating his vision into an effective score. A trial performance of Penthesilea by the Vienna Philharmonic produced such discordance that it was laughed at by the orchestra members, and the composer’s 1897 revisions of the scoring only added to the “thick and noisy effect” (Walker, pp. 183, 192). Perhaps because Wolf’s musical structures recreate the linguistic tensions of Penthesilea, the tension between his score and its performative realization ultimately repeats the difficulty of effectively staging Kleist’s language.

II. Operatic Interpretation: Bachmann and Henze’s Der Prinz von Homburg While Wolf was concerned with representing the inherent conflicts of Kleist’s play, Ingeborg Bachmann and Hans Werner Henze approached their adaptation of Prinz Friedrich von Homburg in the late 1950s with the stated purpose of defusing Kleistian agonism. Their opera, Der Prinz von Homburg, premiered in Hamburg on 22 May 1960. Both composer and librettist were at pains to distance their Kleist from the nationalism and militarism that the Nazi theater had glorified — for instance in Paul Graener’s Homburg adaptation of 1935. Bachmann expressed the hope that the “new music” of post-war serialism would capture the true, humanist spirit of Kleist.14 Similarly, Henze emphasized the universal values of the work and declared the historical dimension of the text coincidental.15 Yet Henze’s actual compositional practice conflicts with his narrow reading of Kleist. Henze is known for his productive engagement with tradition through

13

14

15

SW 1, pp. 321–428. See especially lines 2375–2391, 2420, and 2427. Subsequent citations of Kleist’s dramas as “SW” with volume, page, and line number(s) in the text. Ingeborg Bachmann, “Enstehung eines Librettos,” in Werke, ed. by Christine Koschel, Inge von Weidenbaum, and Clemens Münster, 5th edn, 4 vols (München: Piper, 1978), vol. 1, pp. 369–374 (p. 370). Subsequent citations as “Bachmann” with volume and page number(s). Hans Werner Henze, Musik und Politik. Schriften und Gespräche: 1955–1984, ed. by Jens Brockmeier (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1984), p. 77.

64

Amy Emm

modern compositional techniques.16 In an introduction to Henze and Bachmann’s opera, musicologist J. J. Gordon argues that Henze’s unconventional combination of serial and tonal music produces moments of “sonic ambiguity” for the listener.17 For instance, while a martial theme is composed serially to emphasize the regimentation of battle, melodic and rhythmic qualities evoke a paradoxically tonal effect (Gordon, p. 178.). Unlike Wolf’s complexly interwoven but unheard themes, Henze’s “sonic ambiguity” seems to convey Kleistian ambivalence to the listener, despite the composer’s interpretive preference. Like Henze, Bachmann advocated for a humanistic interpretation of Homburg and downplayed the violence and historical specificity of the text. As several comparisons of the opera and libretto attest,18 the libretto cuts Kleist’s text down to about a third, reduces Kleist’s fifteen speaking roles to seven soloists, streamlines the plot, and focuses on the figure of Homburg at the expense of the Elector. Bachmann also significantly reduces battle descriptions and militaristic language, but adds a scene in which Homburg is confronted with his own grave. The resulting opera seems to present an unambiguous reading of Kleist’s play, a “scarcely nuanced ‘glorification of a dreamer.’”19 Bachmann’s reductions and simplifications, while necessary for an effective libretto, nevertheless seem to deflate the tensions of Kleist’s play. In Kleist’s fifth act, for instance, when the Elector summons Homburg to underscore his own death sentence, he chastises Kottwitz: “He shall

16

17

18

19

Thomas Beck, Bedingungen librettistischen Schreibens: Die Libretti Ingeborg Bachmanns für Hans Werner Henze (Würzburg: Ergon, 1997), p. 111. See also Antje Tumat, Dichterin und Komponist: Ästhetik und Dramaturgie in Ingeborg Bachmanns und Hans Werner Henzes ‘Prinz von Homburg’ (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2004), pp. 107–109. “Introductory Remarks to Henze’s Opera Der Prinz von Homburg,” in Beiträge zur KleistForschung, 12, ed. by Wolfgang Barthel und Hans-Jochen Marquardt (Frankfurt an der Oder: Kleist-Gedenk- und Forschungsstätte, 1998), pp. 167–186 (pp. 176–177). See Karen Achberger, “Ingeborg Bachmann’s ‘Homburg’ Libretto: Kleist between Humanism and Existentialism,” Modern Austrian Literature, 12.3/4 (1979), pp. 305– 315; Annette Förger, “Verherrlichung eines Träumers: Anmerkungen zu Hans Werner Henzes Oper Der Prinz von Homburg,” Frankfurter Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft, 4 (2001), pp. 29–76, [30 October 2011]; Hans Joachim Kreutzer, “Libretto und Schauspiel: Zu Ingeborg Bachmanns Text für Henzes Der Prinz von Homburg,” in Werke Kleists, pp. 60–100. For considerations of the opera in the broader context of Bachmann’s aesthetics, see Thomas Beck, Petra Grell, Ingeborg Bachmanns Libretti (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1995) and Antje Tumat (see n. 16). My translation; “kaum mit Zwischentönen versehene ‘Verherrlichung eines Träumers’” (Förger, p. 32).

Kleist’s Language in Music

65

instruct you, that I guarantee, what battle duty and discipline mean!”20 Bachmann’s reworking of the line for the libretto reads: “He shall instruct you all, this I guarantee, what freedom and what dignity mean.”21 Bachmann replaces the emulation-worthy values of “battle duty and discipline” with humanitarian ideals: “freedom and dignity,” and while Kleist’s Elector engages a single interlocutor with the singular pronoun “you” (dich), Bachmann’s addresses several using the plural “you” (euch). With the diffusion of his authority, the Elector is so weakened in the libretto that he cannot even wag the proverbial Zeigefinger (pointer finger) directly. But while the historical power structures have disappeared in the pacifistic libretto, violence has not necessarily vanished with them. Indeed, Bachmann consciously preserves what she acknowledges is one of the play’s most antagonistic lines, the infamous concluding battle cry: “To dust with all foes of Brandenburg!”22 In her essay, “Entstehung eines Librettos” (Emergence of a Libretto), Bachmann doesn’t explain her decision to preserve the original conclusion, but she justifies it with the notion that those who truly understand the text will focus on another line preserved from the original and sung earlier in the opera by Princess Natalie von Oranien: “Oh what is human greatness, human glory.”23 Bachmann’s redirection of readerly attention is consistent with her reading of Homburg, but it is impractical from a formal perspective. Natalie delivers her rhetorical lament late in the second act, about two thirds of the way through the opera, at the conclusion of an aria that describes Homburg groveling for his life. In the piano score, the line is musically overshadowed by a crescendo accompanying the previous line: “To such despair, I believed, could no-one sink!”24 Henze’s music emphasizes Natalie’s despair and the extreme of

20

21 22

23 24

Prince Frederick of Homburg, trans. by Peggy Meyer Sherry, in Heinrich von Kleist: Plays, ed. by Walter Hinderer (New York: Continuum, 1982), pp. 269–341 (p. 332). “Der wird dich lehren, das versichr’ ich dich, / Was Kriegszucht und Gehorsam sei!” (SW 1, p. 699, l. 1616–1617). Subsequent citations by page and line number in text. My discussion of this line follows Achberger’s (p. 309), but emphasizes the diffusion of authority where Achberger focuses on the shift in values. My translation: “Der wird euch lehren, das versichr’ ich euch, / was Freiheit und was Würde sei.” Der Prinz von Homburg, in Bachmann 1, pp. 351–368 (p. 362). My translation: “In Staub mit allen Feinden Brandenburgs!” (Bachmann 1, p. 368; Cf. SW 1, p. 709, l. 1858). Cf. Meyer Sherry: “Down with all the foes of Brandenburg” (p. 341). I use a literal translation of “In Staub” in order to discuss the motif in depth below. Bachmann 1, p. 374. Meyer Sherry’s translation (p. 316). “Ach, was ist Menschengröße, Menschenruhm!” (Bachmann 1, p. 357; SW 1, p. 681, l. 1174). My translation. “Zu solchem Elend, glaubt ich, sänke keiner!” Hans Werner Henze, Der Prinz von Homburg (Mainz: Schott, 1991), p. 186.

66

Amy Emm

Homburg’s desperation, and renders dubious the rhetorical appeal to humane values. By contrast, the battle cry at the end of the opera cannot be entirely overheard. In Bachmann’s libretto, it competes with simultaneous singing from male and female halves of the ensemble (Bachmann 1, p. 368). But then the ensemble repeats the final line in unison: “To dust with all foes of Brandenburg!” In the piano score, the arrangement is somewhat different but equally, if not more, emphatic. The ensemble and the orchestra fall silent, and against only music from inside the castle on stage, Homburg sings “to dust” (Henze, Der Prinz von Homburg, p. 286.). While much of an operatic text may be lost amid the music, the orchestra’s silence ensures that these words will be heard. The male voices echo him, and then together they complete the line, with the female voices joining in on the final word, “Brandenburg.” Homburg’s solo cry, quickly echoed and then joined by all, seems to highlight, rather than redirect, one of the play’s most blatant calls to violence. However, when the opera textually and musically highlights the phrase, “to dust,” it preserves a central ambivalence associated with the play’s representation of violence. Kleist’s play repeats the phrase thirteen times, almost always with verbs of downwards motion: sinking (SW 1, p. 656, l. 546; SW 1, p. 661, l. 676), falling (SW 1, p. 660, l. 634; SW 1, p. 678, l. 1081), trampling (SW 1, p. 669, l. 839; SW 1, p. 671, l. 901), dripping or spilling blood (SW 1, p. 670, l. 876; SW 1, p. 698, l. 1589), drilling (SW 1, p. 690, l. 1386), and grinding (SW 1, p. 705, l. 1789). Under the weight of all this repetition, the final battle cry carries on the crushing downward trajectory. But the phrase is used as often from the perspective of the downtrodden as it is from the perspective of the one who viciously treads. The phrase often describes both allies and leaders falling in battle (SW 1, p. 656, l. 546; SW 1, p. 660, l. 634; SW 1, p. 661, l. 676). It also applies to the gesture of selfsacrifice: Natalie throws herself to the dust at the Elector’s feet — “zu [s]einer Füße Staub” — to plead for Homburg’s life (SW 1, p. 678, l. 1081). A fall into the dust can thus occur in the name of averting violence, just as readily as it appears to exalt violence in the play. Considering that the libretto retains about a third of the original text, instances of the phrase are retained in near equal proportion, and thus retain their motivic weight. Of the play’s thirteen distinct repetitions of “to dust,” the opera preserves four, or about one third. Only two of the libretto’s dustward motions include a violent verb: falling and dripping blood (Bachmann 1, pp. 346 and 352), otherwise Natalie’s prostration and the battle cry retain the ambivalence of the “to dust” motif. In the libretto, as in the play, the final cry is ironically preceded by Homburg’s own fall into a faint (stage direc-

Kleist’s Language in Music

67

tion, Bachmann, p. 340; SW 1, p. 708). The German idiom of Kleist’s stage direction, “Der Prinz fällt in Ohnmacht,” underscores the irony: Homburg’s fall reveals him to be without power (ohne Macht). His gesture of powerlessness echoes Natalie’s earlier supplicative fall and undermines the powerful stance he adopts in his final violent call to battle. In the end, the libretto’s concentration of language highlights, rather than dissolves, the motivic tensions of the play. Although Bachmann and Henze express a purely humanist vision, their de-Prussianized opera still retains the ambivalence of Kleist’s language.

III. Twenty-first Century Approaches In the examples considered above, Kleist’s language frustrates composition. In the case of Wolf’s Penthesilea, the musical interpretation of Kleist’s drama results in a score so complex as to be nearly unplayable. In Henze and Bachmann’s Der Prinz von Homburg, the complex layers of Kleist’s motifs resist being flattened into a single interpretation. Recent composers have sidestepped these problems by taking a less holistic approach to the adaptation of Kleist’s works. Instead of representing a single text, new productions have turned to Kleist’s biography for inspiration together with material from his literary works (Köhler, pp. 456–457). The 2008 opera Kleist by Rainer Rubbert (composer) and Tanja Langer (librettist) for example, integrates episodes from Kleist’s life and imaginary encounters with contemporary authors as well as figures from his works. With a libretto that avoids detail — whether from Kleist’s life or his works — Rubbert’s music is free to express Kleistian tension without being evaluated according to the gold standard of Kleist’s language. At the same time, the influence of musical adaptations can be seen in theatrical productions of Kleist’s dramas. If operatic adaptations have tended to exceed Kleist’s texts in rendering visible what the author left unseen (Köhler, p. 457), dramatic productions have also turned increasingly to music in order to address the extratextual in Kleist. Stephan Kimmig’s 2005 production of Penthesilea intertwines Kleist’s text with music, dance, and pantomime, so that performance takes precedence over the language.25 Kimmig manages to shift the focus away from Kleist’s language without raising critical ire, and a host of Kleist scholars respond positively in Ortrud 25

Ortrud Gutjahr, “Gewalt im Spiel: Kriegsschauplätze in Kleists Penthesilea,” in Penthesilea von Heinrich von Kleist: GeschlechterSzenen in Stephan Kimmigs Inszenierung am Thalia Theater Hamburg, ed. by Ortrud Gutjahr (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007), pp. 21–39 (p. 25).

68

Amy Emm

Gutjahr’s essay collection dedicated to the production. Both Kimmig’s postdramatic approach to Kleist, together with the biographical angle of recent composers, suggests that the twenty-first century offers productive new directions for Kleist’s musical legacy, albeit without resolving the problematic relationship of Kleist’s language to music. The Citadel

Tim Mehigan The Process of Inferential Contexts: Franz Kafka Reading Heinrich von Kleist Kleist’s works, particularly his stories, initiate open processes of enquiry about the world in response to the breakdown of received inferential contexts. This breakdown was a consequence of an intellectual crisis Kleist experienced after encountering the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. The intellectual crisis Kleist experienced in 1801, in turn, provides a clue to his importance for Franz Kafka, whose breakthrough as a writer can be linked to his intense interest in Kleist, beginning around the Kleist centenary in 1911. Kafka’s own oeuvre is notable for its radicalization of the consequences resulting from the breakdown of received inferential contexts. Kafka dramatizes the dimension of loss attaching to Kleist’s Kant crisis, without compensating for this loss in ways that can occasionally be found in Kleist’s multi-layered response to Kant’s philosophy. The failure to temper the loss of received inferential contexts by developing workable replacement contexts can be seen as one of the main results arising from Kafka’s reading of Kleist.

That Franz Kafka (1883–1924) and Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811) are linked by manifold stylistic and thematic concerns is uncontentious: Kafka himself acknowledged Kleist as a “blood relative”1; his enthusiasm for Kleist’s works, particularly Kleist’s story Michael Kohlhaas (1810), is wellknown. Several authoritative critical voices, among them Wilhelm Emrich,2 have found the connections between Kafka and Kleist to be compelling. It cannot therefore be the aim of any new addition to this scholarship to amplify what is already self-evident. My aim is rather to come at the question of influence and aesthetic inheritance from a new angle. As this aim requires me to make certain assumptions about Kleist and Kafka — assumptions that might not be immediately underwritten by others — I state them at the outset. These statements also serve as points of orientation for the analysis that is developed in the rest of this essay. First, Kleist abandoned the 1

2

Quoted in John M. Grandin, Kafka’s Prussian Advocate: A Study of the Influence of Heinrich von Kleist on Franz Kafka (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1987), p. 23. Subsequent citations as “Grandin” with page number(s). Wilhelm Emrich: “Kleist und die moderne Literatur,” in Heinrich von Kleist: Vier Reden zu seinem Gedächtnis, ed. by Walter Müller-Seidel (Berlin: Schmidt, 1962), pp. 9–62. An excellent discussion of the relationship between Kleist and Kafka can be found in Lilian R. Furst, “Reading Kleist and Kafka,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 84.3 (July, 1985), pp. 374–395.

70

Tim Mehigan

aesthetic and cultural projects followed by fellow writers in his own day: the Romantics on the one hand, the Weimar classicists Goethe and Schiller on the other. This abandonment was a consequence of an intellectual crisis Kleist experienced after encountering the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Second, the intellectual crisis brought on by Kant’s philosophy had two basic effects: one, it led Kleist into literary isolation; two, it led him to make procedures of inductive inference central to his literary project (I define what I mean by inductive inference at the start of the first section below). Kleist’s works, particularly the stories, initiate open processes of enquiry about the world in response to the breakdown of received inferential contexts. Third, Kafka’s emergence as a writer is closely linked to his identification of the role played by inductive inference in the work of Kleist.3 Building from this insight, Kafka’s own oeuvre is notable for its radicalization of the consequences resulting from the breakdown of received inferential contexts. Kafka dramatizes the dimension of loss attaching to Kleist’s Kant crisis, without compensating for this loss in ways that can occasionally be found in Kleist’s multi-layered response to Kant’s philosophy. The failure to temper the loss of received inferential contexts by developing workable replacement contexts can be seen as one of the main results arising from Kafka’s reading of Kleist. Provided below is a working definition of induction for present purposes followed by a discussion of how it may be situated in the context of historical changes in understanding that eventually led to Heinrich von Kleist.

I. The intense interest in the study of induction in a range of areas in modern science is a relatively recent phenomenon. The rise of systems theory in engineering, physics, and sociology, rational choice theory and game theory in economics, inferential learning theory and problem solving in behavioural science and cognitive psychology, and programmable expert systems in the area of artificial intelligence, all of which are premised on, and follow, inductive procedure, did not occur before the twentieth century. The groundwork for these developments was arguably laid in the early nineteenth century when statistics was deployed as an explanatory tool in demographic studies and what Richard Dawkins, quoting Ernst Mayr, has called “popu-

3

Grandin also notes the close link between Kafka’s breakthrough as a writer and his intense occupation with Kleist’s works (Grandin, pp. 12–13).

Inferential Contexts: Kafka Reading Kleist

71

lation thinking”4 emerged from Darwin’s theory of evolution, which latter is itself an example of inductive inference par excellence. Induction encompasses “all inferential processes that expand knowledge in the face of uncertainty.”5 The success of strategies that manage uncertainty through inductive procedure can only be assessed with reference to the current knowledge of the particular context or system in question (Holland et al, p. 5). For this reason, induction is “highly context dependent, being guided by prior knowledge activated in particular situations that confront the system as it seeks to achieve its goals. The study of induction, then, is the study of how knowledge is modified through its use.”6 Before the study of induction had become the complex science it is today, formal investigation into the nature of induction was confined to the domain of philosophy. A significant early advocate of inductive thinking was the philosopher Francis Bacon, who based his ambitious plan to establish a new basis for scientific knowledge in the early seventeenth century on a revolution against the methodology of the medieval schools. The logical procedure known as syllogism, on which much of scholastic philosophy was based, had been associated since Greek antiquity with the teachings of Aristotle. Instead of a type of reasoning whereby knowledge took the form of conclusions deduced from premises, but could not advance beyond these premises, Bacon proposed an experimental procedure where knowledge would not be arrived at in advance of the assumptions governing the procedure nor deduced directly from them. Bacon rather imagined an open inquiry where results would emerge from the accumulation of data-clusters. Conclusions would be suggested through evaluation in a final stage of the inquiry that would lead to the formulation of natural laws and other definitive statements about the data. Bacon’s plan of the new knowledge, though it was paralleled by similar thinking undertaken by Descartes, was the first comprehensive attempt to establish a coherent theory of induction in modern science. 7

4

5

6 7

For Dawkins’s discussion of the inferential dimensions of “population thinking,” see Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution (London: Bantam, 2009), pp. 21–27. Cf. Induction: Processes of Inference, Learning, and Discovery, ed. by John H. Holland, Keith J. Holyoak, Richard E. Nisbett, and Paul R. Thagard (Cambridge, MA and London, England: The MIT Press, 1986), p. 1. Subsequent citations as “Holland et al.” in the body of the essay with page number(s). Holland et al., p. 5 [emphasis in the original]. For a useful discussion of Bacon’s contribution to the establishment of principles of induction in science, see William Whewell, The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Founded upon their History (London: John W. Parker, 1847), esp. pp. 21–46. For a re-

72

Tim Mehigan

Although science moved forward slowly along the path laid out by Bacon during the early modern era, art and literature of the same era, once part of a common endeavour with science, at least in the Platonic universe, became further and further removed from it. As late as 1750 in much of the European world the ambition of art and literature, like its close cousin scholasticism, was still determined by the question of how to imitate the soaring examples of antiquity. While a debate in art about the relative status of the moderns and the ancients had coursed through intellectual circles in the 1690s, beginning in France,8 it did not overturn the reverence for antiquity nor end its preeminence for artists.9 In Germany the cultural ascendancy of especially Greek art remained unquestioned at least until 1800. (As late as the 1920s Brecht’s epic theatre, which opposed the allegedly illusionistic techniques that arose from Aristotelian conceptions of theatre, was still able to take on a radical appearance and be linked to an emerging literary avantgarde.) In 1755 Winckelmann cast the cultural trajectory of German art in terms of a paradox of imitation: the Germans were enjoined to imitate the example of the Greeks in order, themselves, to become inimitable.10 The literary program known as Weimar Classicism established by Goethe and Schiller in the early 1790s, which continued Winckelmann’s interest in the model of antiquity, was predicated on this same ideal of cultural imitation. While the later German Romantics rejected the example of Greek and Roman antiquity, most retained the notion of imitation by attaching their literary and cultural program to an idealized view of the Christian Middle Ages. Even in German philosophy of the early modern period, Leibniz’s influential doctrine of “pre-established harmony” had the effect of anchoring thinking to a mode of — arguably Platonic — understanding that sought connections preeminently with what was already known.11

8

9

10

11

cent view on the value and importance of scientific induction, see Dawkins, pp. 9– 18. This debate within the Académie française, which has become known as the “querelle des anciens et des modernes,” opposed views maintaining the timelessness of the art of classical antiquity with views that held that modern authors were bound to surpass the knowledge that was available in antiquity. Joan DeJean, Ancients against Moderns: Culture Wars and the Making of a Fin de Siècle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), “The Ancients introduced all the plans for institutional and pedagogical reform that proved successful in the long run, and the Moderns had virtually no success in initiating change” (p. xi). Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst [Erste Ausgabe 1755 mit Oesers Vignetten] (Nendeln/Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprint, 1968). As Hidé Ishiguro explains, Leibniz’s thesis of pre-established harmony was a reaction against causal views of the mind-body problem which had insisted that material particles go out of one and into the other. Hidé Ishiguro, Leibniz’s Philosophy of Logic and

Inferential Contexts: Kafka Reading Kleist

73

New thinking of Baconian provenance, that is, thinking that, through inductive processes, seeks to expand knowledge in the face of uncertainty, could not begin to enter mainstream philosophical debates in Germany until the publication of the first edition of Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason) in 1781, which had grown from Kant’s awareness of the seriousness of the sceptical critique of reason. By reframing the basic question of philosophy as the question of “how synthetic a priori judgments are possible,”12 which is to say, by subsuming the question of objective knowledge under a more complex question of the relation of phenomena (or “appearances”) to noumena (or “things in themselves”), Kant effectively turned knowledge of objects into a problem that could only be approached on the basis of inductive inference (note that Kant had dedicated this work to Francis Bacon). Even then, the implications of the inductive impulses that ran through Kant’s philosophy were not immediately appreciated. In Reinhold’s Briefe über die Kantische Philosophie (Letters on Kantian Philosophy), first published in 1786 and 1787 in the journal Der Teutsche Merkur, and then in book form 1790–1792, which were held to be an authoritative account of Kant’s thinking well into the 1790s,13 the moral-religious dimension in Kant’s thinking is viewed as the ultimate rationale of his philosophy. While Schiller and the Schlegel brothers were alive to the importance of Kantianism, it was the writer Heinrich von Kleist who most responded to the open, inductive trajectory of Kant’s philosophy, elaborating on the crisis that overcame him as a result of an encounter with Kant’s thinking in letters written in early 1801. It is in this crisis — a crisis marking the loss both of an interior world of scholastic truths and a deep attachment to ancient cultural ideals and artistic practices — where the present assessment of the literary relationship between Kleist and Kafka really begins.14

12

13

14

Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 148. His solution to this problem, along with his doctrine of sufficient reason, nevertheless restricts, if not denies outright, the entry of genuine novelty into the world. “Wie sind synthetische Urteile a priori möglich?” This is the famous question that Kant introduces in the introduction to the first Critique. See Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, ed. by Raymund Schmidt (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1956), p. 51 (B: 19). Karl Ameriks has called Reinhold’s Briefe “arguably the most influential work ever written concerning Kant.” See his introduction to Karl Leonhard Reinhold, Letters on the Kantian Philosophy, trans. by James Hebbeler. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. ix. Note that Bert Nagel has also observed that Kleist’s Kant crisis is important for assessing Kafka’s responsiveness toward Kleist and his works. Cf. Bert Nagel, Kafka und die Weltliteratur (Munich: Winkler, 1983), pp. 209–242. Also note John Grandin’s awareness of Nagel’s insight (Grandin, p. 97).

74

Tim Mehigan

II. Goethe’s view of the novella, expressed in Johan Peter Eckermann’s Gespräche mit Goethe (Conversations with Goethe, 1836/48) as the narration of an “unheard of event” (unerhörte Begebenheit) and its consequences,15 may well have come about as a result of his familiarity with Kleist’s stories. At any rate, the description aptly records the preoccupation of these stories with “the shock of the new,”16 that is, with events that confront the protagonists in these stories with circumstances that unseat their emotions and overturn their understanding of the world. Little of a prior world and its “anticipations” (Bacon)17 remain as anchor points for orienting behaviour in view of the encounter with the new. Since the moral values and codes of the past have also been swept away in view of the shock of the new, or else no longer uniformly apply, the characters of these stories are compelled to devise their own strategies in order to manoeuvre through a profoundly changed physical and human environment. The stories focus on the stratagems that the characters develop in order to secure their survival. In the most pure form of these narratives realized in Kleist’s first story “Das Erdbeben in Chili” (The Earthquake in Chili, 1807/1810) and one of his last stories “Die Verlobung in St. Domingo” (The Betrothal in San Domingo, 1811), the physical survival of the main characters is quite literally at stake. In the end none of the protagonists in these stories, whether singly or in alliance with a compassionate partner, develops a strategy that successfully contends with the new complexity arising from the narration of, in Goethe’s parlance, the unheard of event. In other stories such as “Die Marquise von O…” (1808), where the physical survival of the main characters is ultimately not at issue, the success of the strategies followed by the protagonists is measured in terms of the quotient of happiness they may be permitted to look forward to. The question of future happiness, when viewed as an inductive problem, brings these stories into line with the recent work of psy-

15

16 17

Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens, ed. by Fritz Bergemann (Frankfurt am Main: Insel-Verlag, 1981), 29 January 1827, pp. 207– 208. This term was coined by Robert Hughes in 1980 in relation to modern art. See his The Shock of the New: Art and the Century of Change (London: Thames & Hudson, 1991). In his Novum organum (1620) Bacon held that “there will be no great progress made in sciences by means of anticipations, because errors which are radical and lie in the fundamental organisation of the mind are not put right by subsequent efforts and remedies, however brilliant” — see Francis Bacon, The New Organon, ed. by Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 38–39.

Inferential Contexts: Kafka Reading Kleist

75

chologists such as Daniel Gilbert,18 who view the question of the inferential strategies human beings develop in relation to the prospect of their happiness as one of the central questions of modern psychology. Kleist’s interest in the kind of inferential strategies now discussed in psychology arose as a result of his reading of Kant. Kleist’s response to Kant did not engage specifically with the moral trajectory in Kant’s philosophy, as adumbrated by Reinhold in Briefe über die Kantische Philosophie, nor does his main interest appear to have lain with the argument pertaining to aesthetic pleasure and taste set out in Kant’s third Critique, the Kritik der Urteilskraft (Critique of Judgment, 1790),19 insofar as this argument can be separated from the earlier two Critiques. It was initially rather Kant’s concession to sceptical propositions about knowledge, as argued by the early British empiricist Hume, in which the seeds of Kleist’s crisis can be found and which led him to lament the loss of his “highest” and most fervently believed goal20: the attainment of absolute truth through knowledge accumulation in this life. Yet once this crisis had occurred and Kleist had been obliged to revise all he thought he knew and believed, his subsequent philosophical position with respect to truth is broadly of a piece with thinking in the vein of Kant, at least insofar as this thinking sought to develop inferential strategies of open engagement with the world in view of the loss of true objecttivity, the loss of “the thing in itself.” The many dimensions of the reorientation entailed in this — philosophically speaking perhaps only “technical” — loss of absolute objectivity cannot be explored in detail here. Key among these dimensions is Kant’s concession to positions being explored at the same time in British philosophy, in which a new “empirical” science was beginning to gain significant purchase. Kant signaled awareness of these dimensions with the new term “critical philosophy,” a promotional tag for the philosophical system he believed himself to have inaugurated. While Kleist was no philosopher, his entire literary output, of which his stories are perhaps the clearest example, may be seen to lie broadly with the same “critical” ambit laid out by Kant. This ambit involved the abandonment of notions of a “great chain of being” 18 19

20

See Daniel Gilbert’s popular discussion of his work on subjective “prospection” in Stumbling on Happiness (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006). For a view that maintains the importance of Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft for Kleist, see Bernhard Greiner, Kleists Dramen und Erzählungen (Tübingen and Basel: Francke Verlag, 2000). For a detailed discussion of this point, see Tim Mehigan, “‘Betwixt a false reason and none at all’: Kleist, Hume, Kant, and the ‘Thing in Itself,’” in A Companion to the Works of Heinrich von Kleist, ed. by Bernd Fischer (Rochester: Camden House, 2003), pp. 165–188.

76

Tim Mehigan

in early modern thought, as defended notably in Leibniz’s rationalism,21 according to which a comprehensive rational cognition of objects was deemed possible, and the movement toward a new view that made the anticipations of rational subjects part of a wider problem of how to frame questions of judgment and thereby act successfully in the world. While this problem still retained rationalistic dimensions — indeed Kant’s philosophy is sometimes seen as a species of late Enlightenment rationalism22 — the abandonment of absolute objectivity, a non-negotiable part of Kant’s philosophy, had the clear effect of attenuating the rationalistic endeavour and accordingly threw the way open for alternative views about human striving in the world. While Kleist retained an underlying attachment to rationalist positions overall — I say this in awareness of trends in Kleist scholarship that maintain the opposite view23 — his discussion of the inferential strategies pursued by human beings under the pressure of an unheard of event opened out far beyond rationalistic arguments in consideration of the problem of action in the world. His own position is notable for eschewing guidance from older models of understanding in the manner of his literary coevals. Although it contains a certain constructive reaction to Kantian thought, this position cannot be placed alongside the somewhat recidivous thinking of the Romantics, who, at least at the beginning, also sought contact with Kant’s philosophy, yet who cultivated a sentimental attachment to the ideal of cultural imitation,24 as I have already indicated. Kleist’s dramas and stories are therefore both anti-classical in general outlook as well as in terms of the German project of cultural imitation, and philosophically proto-critical, if “critical” may be taken as a project, first outlined by Kant, which seeks to frame and develop inductive strategies of philosophical engagement with the world in view of the abandonment of absolute objectivity. While Kleist’s strategies arise from the importance assigned 21

22

23

24

Still one of the clearest accounts of Leibniz’s thinking is to be found in Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953), pp. 144–182. An account of Kant’s philosophy as a species of (disembodied) rationalism is put forward, for example, in George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999). Bernd Hamacher has noted the preponderance of readings of Michael Kohlhaas that emphasise the ambiguity of Kleist’s worldview, “Die Unlesbarkeit des Textes […] wird in vielen dekonstruktivistisch inspirierten Deutungen zur ‘Unlesbarkeit’ der Erzählung insgesamt verallgemeinert.” Bernd Hamacher, “Michael Kohlhaas,” in KleistHandbuch: Leben–Werk–Wirkung, ed. by Ingo Breuer (Stuttgart, Weimar: J.B. Metzler, 2009), p. 104. The Christian Middle Ages were important point of philosophico-religious orientation for the literary program of Romanticism developed by the Schlegel brothers.

Inferential Contexts: Kafka Reading Kleist

77

by Kant to a schematically rational understanding of consciousness, they do not reduce consciousness, and therefore the goal of action in the world, to any underlying systematic rationalism. Rather, the inductive strategies Kleist discusses in his dramas and stories set out a sophisticated anthropology whereby loyalty, love, and indeed general affect itself are equally strong input factors in strategies that seek to describe possible pathways toward the future happiness of characters. In Michael Kohlhaas, the story that Kafka clearly admired most (Grandin, p. 14), the factors conditioning the striving of the main character even lead beyond the confines of what might be considered a conventional anthropology: the motivation of the eponymous hero increasingly comes to be distinguished by an uncommon attachment to natural justice (Rechtschaffenheit)25 — an attachment, once such justice is denied him, that enjoins him to devote every moment of his being to the restoration of such justice in order that he may tolerate living at all. Whilst Kafka is known to have been devoted to this story, he is equally known to have abjured additions to the story that appeared in its second version published in 1810, referring to the story’s ending as “the weaker, in part roughly drafted ending […].”26 These additions had the effect of transforming the search for justice of the protagonist from a personal lawsuit issued against a local aristocrat, the Junker Wenzel von Tronka, pursued within the law and assuming the tenability of the legal order of the day, to a rebellion against this established order and the redrawing of notions of the law itself. The notable difference between the later extended version of the story and the first version, published in Kleist’s journal Phöbus in 1808, is Kleist’s recognition that Michael Kohlhaas could only hope to secure appropriate legal redress for the crime of defilement of property committed against him if the legal order of the day were first overturned and a new context of “positivistic” legality introduced into the story.27 The strategies Kohlhaas is de25

26

27

Kleist describes Kohlhaas as being “einer der rechtschaffensten zugleich und entsetzlichsten Menschen seiner Zeit.” Heinrich von Kleist, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. by Helmut Sembdner (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1983), vol. 2, p. 9. Subsequent citations as “SW” with volume and page number(s). “[…] der schwächere, teilweise grob hinuntergeschriebene Schluß […].” See Kafka’s letter to Felice Bauer, 10 February 1913, quoted in Heinrich von Kleists Nachruhm. Eine Wirkungsgeschichte in Dokumenten, ed. by Helmut Sembdner (Frankfurt am Main: InselVerlag, 1984), vol. 2, p. 335. See my discussion of this point in Tim Mehigan, “Legality as a ‘Fact of Reason’: Heinrich von Kleist’s Concept of Law, with special reference to Michael Kohlhaas,” in Recht und Literatur: Interdisziplinäre Bezüge, ed. by Bernhard Greiner, Barbara Thums and Wolfgang Graf Vitzthum (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2010), pp. 153–169. Clayton Koelb also provides an interesting discussion of the two versions of Kleist’s story, “Incorporating the Text: Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas,” PMLA. Publica-

Tim Mehigan

78

scribed as pursuing within the law in the first edition of the story, in other words, do not yet suggest that a just settlement of his legal dispute with the aristocrat is possible.28 In the second version of the story, Kohlhaas’s legal dispute against the aristocrat moves beyond the moment of its natural stasis, where the complete failure of Kohlhaas’s legal dispute is the likely outcome (the 1808 version of the story, however, remained unfinished), through to a moment of transformation of the terms of the narrative whereby a clairvoyant gypsy is introduced and her knowledge of the future lineage of the Elector of Saxony, which she entrusts to Kohlhaas, is turned into a prized possession. Yet it is precisely this new conclusion to Kleist’s story — a conclusion that occurs on legal grounds not envisaged at the beginning of the narrative — that Kafka disavows. Kafka’s disavowal is instructive. Even more than any manifest similarities in style and content, it is the point at which Kafka no longer pays homage to his great “blood relative” Kleist that gives insight into the deep connections that link the complex literary projects of Franz Kafka and Heinrich von Kleist.

III. There are grounds for the view that Kafka’s emergence as a writer is closely linked to Kleist, in particular to a study he might have made of Kleist’s short stories coinciding with the Kleist centenary in 1911. Of the nature of Kafka’s interest in Kleist in the context of the Kleist centenary, John Grandin has noted the following regarding Kafka’s Betrachtung (Observation, 1912): In a 1912 letter to his publisher, Kurt Wolff, Kafka requested that his first book, Betrachtung, have a format similar to the 1911 Rowohlt edition of Kleist’s Anekdoten […], which Kafka himself had so positively reviewed […]. With its bold print and wide margins, Betrachtung is a daring declaration of newness in language and style and simultaneously, through its identification with Kleist’s Anekdoten, a tangible indicator that the inspiration for this newness rests at least in part in Kleist. (Grandin, p. 59)

28

tions of the Modern Language Association of America, 105.5 (October 1990), pp. 1098– 1108. Kleist was very likely following an account of Kohlhaas’s fate in Peter Hafftitz’s Märckische Chronik, in which Kohlhaas’s feud against the aristocrat ends with Kohlhaas’s execution. For background on Kleist’s use of sources, see Hamacher, pp. 97– 100.

Inferential Contexts: Kafka Reading Kleist

79

Grandin goes on to observe the high level of interest in Kleist that Kafka expresses in letters of this period. On 10 February 1913 he wrote to Felice Bauer: Yesterday I didn’t write to you because Michael Kohlhaas kept me busy until late in the night (Have you read it? If not, then don’t. I’ll unread it for you!), which I read in its entirety but for a small part that I had read the day before yesterday. That was probably the tenth time. That is a story that I read with a genuine sense of the fear of God [...].29

Grandin lays out a convincing case of influence based on questions of style and affirmation of self according to which “personal fulfillment is the highest law” (Grandin, p. 19). These statements can be subscribed to without demur. They nevertheless do not convey the compelling feature of Kafka’s special reverence for Kleist, which I locate not preeminently in style nor in the idea of the self so much as in Kafka’s decision to focus attention on the nature of inductive inference, in other words, to turn inference and inductive procedure itself into the very subject of the narration. This may be observed not only in the narratives of Betrachtung, whose visual typography Kafka aligns quite consciously with Kleist’s Anekdoten (Anecdotes; Rowohlt, 1911), which had appeared a year before, but also in the breakthrough story “Das Urteil” (The Judgment), written during the night of September 22–23, 1912, in which the story begins with the protagonist’s innocuous intention to write to his friend in Russia and ends with his dropping from a bridge into a river, as if in execution of the judgment of his father that he suffer death by drowning. While one might justifiably ask questions about the meaning of the father’s “judgment” and the apparent willingness of the son to carry it out, and while textual information can be adduced to appraise both the judgment itself and the son’s decision to obey it, the new element in this story appears to me above all to be Kafka’s focus on the metaphysical nature of judgment formation: his decision to shed light on how it is that we decide something, and what it is that happens when we follow a process of decision through to an action. This focus on judgment formation inevitably turns attention back to the person judging, and to the manifold strategies that each person making a judgment must sift through in order to bring about an action and thereby increase or decrease future levels of happiness. 29

“Gestern habe ich Dir nicht geschrieben, weil es über Michael Kohlhaas zu spät geworden ist (kennst Du ihn? Wenn nicht, dann lies ihn nicht! Ich werde Dir ihn verlesen!), den ich bis auf einen kleinen Teil, den ich schon vorgestern vorgelesen hatte, in einem Zug gelesen habe. Wohl schon zum zehnten Male. Das ist eine Geschichte, die ich mit wirklicher Gottesfurcht lese […]” (Grandin, p. 14).

80

Tim Mehigan

The capacity to imagine strategies by which a successful action might occur is also the main subject of Kafka’s story Der Prozess (The Trial), which was begun in 1914 but remained unfinished in Kafka’s lifetime. (The title is popularly translated as “the trial” into English, but it also means “the process” in German, and thus carries a level of reference to an abstract procedure.) That a judgment is called for in response to the shock of new circumstances is dramatized at the beginning of the novel: Josef K., a notary with a bank, receives a surprise visit from two officials who inform him that he is under arrest. The charges are not specified. Josef K., without foreknowledge of the case against him, nor of the precise nature of his offence and therefore also of any punishment that might be meted out to him, is called upon to prepare a legal defence — a defence, which, on account of the openness of the charge against him, must also assay every conceivable grounds of justification of his conduct and being if it is to be successful. Josef K., an unremarkable official by any account, must therefore countenance every possible strategy not just to secure his future happiness, but also to avert the distinct possibility that his crimes might exact the ultimate sanction: his death. It has been concluded often enough that the story of Josef K. owes much to Kleist’s novella Michael Kohlhaas. Legal proceedings are central to both stories; a cloistered and secretive legal apparatus is arranged against the central character in each case. In both stories the plaintiff (Kohlhaas) and defendant (K.) must find an appropriate form of legal counsel; notwithstanding such counsel the plaintiff/defendant must determine for himself the value of the advice received and the type of action he must ultimately follow. Broadly similar outcomes to the legal cases are envisaged, especially if the gist of the 1808 version of Kleist’s story is followed: Josef K. never gains clarity about the case against him and is ultimately murdered by his executioners; Michael Kohlhaas, in what appears the likely conclusion to the story, does not receive legal redress in his dispute with the aristocrat and, as Kleist’s chronicle ordains, is condemned to death for treasonable offences against the state. Neither protagonist, in other words, achieves success before the law and both suffer death for offences that are arguably incidental to the cases themselves. Josef K. is perhaps slain for his failure to comprehend the need to give a proper account of himself, rather than for any palpable transgression against the law; Michael Kohlhaas dies on account of offenses arising from his frustration with the legal apparatus. These similarities are self-evident and can be accepted without question — they establish a strong case of influence. To my mind, however, they do not yet address the substantive level of influence, which concerns Kafka’s insight into the importance of inductive processes — processes that are di-

Inferential Contexts: Kafka Reading Kleist

81

rected at expanding knowledge in the face of uncertainty. Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas is the model for Kafka’s Prozess precisely because such inductive processes underlie the very structure of the narration. They rely on an unheard of event to bring them into being — this is signaled in Kleist’s story by the sudden appearance of a barrier preventing Kohlhaas from continuing his journey without payment of a toll — since it is the unheard of event that removes the support of received inferential contexts or makes these contexts appear unreliable. In the realm of law, which is utterly reliant on received inferential contexts for their efficacy, both Kleist and Kafka set their protagonists quite outside the law and turn their legal cases into a search for a proper place to stand before the law. In Kleist’s case, either Michael Kohlhaas’s legal dispute fails in the face of a bankrupt legality (the likely outcome to the unfinished 1808 version of the story), or it triumphs when a new basis of legality becomes conscionable, though punishment for offences committed against the state must still be exacted (the 1810 version of the story). In Kafka’s case, the protagonist is never aligned with legality to the point where Josef K.’s trial becomes clear or the legal outcome appears an obvious conclusion to it. In both cases the received inferential context itself is at issue because it has become unreliable or unreadable. In this way both Kleist and Kafka direct attention to the question of what constitutes a workable inferential context and how, if it must be considered absent, a more reliable inferential context might be brought into being. Replacing an unworkable inferential context with a workable context is at root a problem of induction, a problem comparable to the challenge of establishing and justifying a completely new scientific platform — a problem faced by Bacon and Descartes in the seventeenth century. Kafka’s treatment of this problem reaches a high point in the penultimate chapter of the novel, the so-called “Domkapitel” (Cathedral Chapter). In this chapter Josef K., who is supposed to meet a foreign visitor in front of the cathedral, instead goes into the church and encounters a prison chaplain, a lower functionary of the courts in which his trial is being heard. The chapter is largely taken up with the chaplain’s recounting of a mysterious parable and the manifold ways in which to interpret the parable (this was the only part of the story published during Kafka’s lifetime). Since Josef K. never manages to gain access to the courts where his trial actually occurs, the parable of the man from the country who stands before the law and K.’s responses to it can be looked upon as the first and only hearing Josef K. receives, indeed as the essence of the trial itself insofar as such an event can be said to take place in the novel. It is noteworthy that this trial is conceived not merely as a scene of reading; it is also an encounter where inferential strategies have the deeper-lying function of increasing knowledge in the face

82

Tim Mehigan

of uncertainty — a level of uncertainty that has escalated in view of K.’s failure to gain clarity about the nature of the trial over the course of the novel. The significance of Kafka’s novel, indeed, lies in dramatizing the role played by critical, which is to say, inductive procedures in producing a workable inferential context. How the parable itself should be read has been well worked over in Kafka scholarship. I will not add much to opinion here, except to say that the parable reveals dimensions of the prisoner’s dilemma,30 a classic expression of non-cooperative game theory:31 a man from the country seeks to gain entry to the law (in terms of the prisoner’s dilemma: escape) and must come up with a strategy to secure this outcome. The doorkeeper, while initially an opponent, is also a potential ally. In game-theoretical terms he is the second player in the non-cooperative game of chance the parable discusses. Each strategy the prisoner considers has pay-offs and penalties. If the man from the country (who is also the subject of the prisoner’s dilemma) somehow gains entry to the law by force, he is told that he faces even more powerful and forbidding doorkeepers the further he progresses into the law. If this information is accurate, the pay-off for success at the first level might be injury or death at the second, in which case a gain and a loss are the potential outcomes of such a strategy. This strategy might be described as the path of uncertain revolution. If the man from the country treats the doorkeeper as an authority and chooses to wait for the doorkeeper to step aside — this is the conservative path that underwrites the existing legality — he may well endure a fruitless waiting, in which case a gain and a loss are the potential pay-offs of the second strategy. If the man from the country treats the doorkeeper as a potential ally and seeks to win him over by bribery and favours — this is the more psychologically aware middle road between conservatism and revolution — he may induce the doorkeeper to yield, although the psychological disposition of his ally, and the question of whether he is open to inducements of this nature, remain unknown. This is the strategy ultimately followed by the man from the country, but it fails on account of a consideration explained at the end of the 30

31

For a discussion of game theory from the point of view of the prisoner’s dilemma, see William Poundstone, Prisoner’s Dilemma: John von Neumann, Game Theory and the Puzzle of the Bomb (New York: Anchor Books, 1993). For a discussion of basic notions of non-cooperative game theory, see David M. Kreps, Game Theory and Economic Modelling (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 9–36. I have applied game theory to Kleist’s story “Die Verlobung in St Domingo” in the following article: Tim Mehigan, “Literature and the Theory of Games: Kleist’s ‘Verlobung in St Domingo’ as an Example,” in In(ter)disclipine: New Languages for Criticism, ed. by Gillian Beer, Malcolm Bowie, and Beate Perrey (London: Legenda, 2007), pp. 188–198.

Inferential Contexts: Kafka Reading Kleist

83

parable: all along, the door leading into the law had been meant for him only. This means that the middle strategy of plying the second player with inducements, a strategy of effective non-decision that relies on the unknown psychological disposition of the second player in the game, was the only outcome of a game that had no positive pay-off and was certain to fail. The man from the country, now soon to die, thus misinterprets the rules of the game and receives a zero pay-off. Once this outcome is communicated, the doorkeeper signals the end of the game by closing the door to the law. The point about the parable for my purposes is not to determine whether or how Josef K. made a wrong choice in the dilemma described. The point is rather that Kafka introduces a classic schema of induction in the penultimate chapter of the novel in order to highlight the question he is most concerned with, the question of how inductive inferences are implicated in assessing the prospects of one’s future happiness, and, in terms of “the law,” how existing inferential contexts shape our responses to such a question unless we are able to bring about a radical change in the basic assumptions governing these contexts. In both questions the capacity of the protagonist to be recognized as a legal subject before the law is also at issue. To highlight the importance of inductive processes in the novel at this point, Kafka appends a long discussion between the prison chaplain and Josef K. after the narration of the parable. This discussion seeks to assess the meaning of the parable in critically exegetical terms. In this discussion the behaviour and character of the doorkeeper is reviewed as much as that of the man from the country. A range of allegedly authoritative readings is adduced to problematize each of the exegetical strategies that are considered. The provisional nature of these strategies, and the fact that they cannot be elevated to the status of truth, appears as one of the main conclusions of this discussion. As the chaplain explains: “‘[…] there is no need to conclude that anything is true, merely to recognize that it is necessary.’”32 One might paraphrase this conclusion in the following way: the question of univocal truth has no part to play in assessing the outcomes in a game of chance. Rather, the question of final truth recedes and is replaced by assessments focusing on the type of pay-offs one might expect. One must nevertheless assume that an outcome in the game of chance always applies, and that a decision involving an action or outcome must be taken. To this extent, as the chaplain explains, the game of chance is conditioned by the factor of necessity: one cannot not act in the prisoner’s dilemma.

32

“‘[...] man muß nicht alles für wahr halten, man muß es nur für notwendig halten.’” Franz Kafka, Der Prozess (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1977), p. 160.

84

Tim Mehigan

It is quite telling that Josef K. himself rejects this insight: “‘Depressing thought’ […]. ‘The lie is made the world order.’”33 He therefore reveals himself as an adherent to an older worldview, one that maintains the selfevidence of truth and of a morally transparent world. Josef K.’s strategy in the prisoner’s dilemma might be characterized as waiting for this moment of truth to become visible or suggest itself. The parable “Vor dem Gesetz” (Before the Law, 1915) reveals that the terms of this kind of truth-context no longer apply; they have been replaced with inferential contexts in which there are no final readings, there is no reliable apriori disclosure of complexity, where such complexity is brokered only through provisional responses that seek to optimize pay-offs in an overall context of inferential uncertainty. Since the parable of the prisoner’s dilemma is the logical vanishing point of the entire story, it also becomes the axis around which the story as game revolves: the story, from this angle, merges with its substory, the parable “Vor dem Gesetz,” thereby assigning game-theoretical assumptions to the “process” of Josef K.’s trial from the very beginning. Strictly speaking, then, Josef K.’s insight that lies become the new legal currency is entirely correct, at least in regard to the loss of absolute truth. Truths, as Nietzsche provocatively maintained, signaling the untrustworthiness of all received inferential contexts in a world characterized by the death of God, are indeed to be regarded as “Illusions, of which it has been forgotten that they are illusions […].”34 From another angle, as the prison chaplain is perhaps suggesting, it is unproductive to uphold a notion of truth-contexts in which only one view or outcome ever applies, and relatively more productive to think in the terms in which outcomes are fitted to their particular context of applicability. Josef K. hopes for instruction on the former but is instead introduced to the importance of the latter. In other words, he is introduced to the need to authorize action within open inferential contexts, which themselves can only be negotiated on the basis of inductive processes that seek apposite responses to contexts of applicability in ways that increase knowledge of these contexts. According to the new paradigm premised on inductive knowledge, available knowledge will inevitably be subject to modification through its use (Holland et al., p. 5.). Whether the disastrous outcome of Josef K.’s trial — his death amidst a shame that is said to outlive him — can be taken to lament the loss of older 33 34

“‘Trübselige Meinung’ […]. ‘Die Lüge wird zur Weltordnung gemacht’” (Kafka, p. 160). “Illusionen, von denen man vergessen hat, daß sie welche sind […].” Friedrich Nietzsche, Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinn, in Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke in Drei Bänden, ed. by Karl Schlechta (München: Carl Hanser, 1956), vol. 3, p. 314.

Inferential Contexts: Kafka Reading Kleist

85

inferential contexts that provided certainty, or criticism of the protagonist’s failure to embrace the new uncertainty, cannot finally be determined. It is certainly the case that the rules of the non-cooperative game that Kafka discusses in the parable — the inferential context within which the prisoner of the parable must operate — are not transparent or reliable. The same is true of the context in which Josef K. sets out to clear his name, just as it is also true of the first two-thirds of Kleist’s story Michael Kohlhaas, where Kohlhaas’s legal dispute with the aristocrat makes no progress against the forces of aristocratic allegiance arranged against him. Only in the continuation of the 1810 version of the story does Kleist decide to settle in favour of a just legal outcome for his protagonist, so reducing the ambiguity inherent in the story’s conclusion, although not the importance of the inductive processes involved in reaching this conclusion. The loss of reliable inferential contexts, and their substitution with a patently more “fragile arrangement of the world” (gebrechlich[e] Einrichtung der Welt),35 may be taken as one of the main lessons that flow from Kleist’s story. In Kafka’s literary reimagining of the story more than a hundred years after Kleist’s death, the prospects of organizing a happier arrangement of a now even less readable and reliable world, a world in which the protagonist might gain due recognition of his legal standing before the law, have dramatically receded. University of Queensland

35

Cf. Michael Kohlhaas (SW 2, p. 15).

Curtis Maughan and Jeffrey L. High Like No Other? Thomas Mann and Kleist’s Novellas Even compared to his fellow genre luminaries, it is evident that Thomas Mann was an unusually scientific author of German novellas, one who studied the genre and its pioneers in search of style and content models. In his rivalry with the naïve artist Goethe, Mann found theoretical comfort in Schiller’s Ueber naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, while creating a parallel narrative on his kinship with the sentimental artist Kleist. Mann’s preface to the first U.S. edition of Kleist’s novellas, “Kleist and his Stories,” presents striking parallels between Kleist and Mann as sentimental poets subject to and dependent on fits of naïve inspiration. Mann was a most self-aware executor of Kleist’s legacy, employing models of style, form, and content in homages to Kleist, with whom he identified personally and artistically — a kinship most evident in Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig.1

In a poll published in the Oder-Zeitung on 18 October 1927, Thomas Mann (1875–1955) responded to the question, “Wie stehst du zu Kleist?” (What do you think of Kleist?): “I became acquainted with the works of Heinrich von Kleist very early on, which left a mighty impression, and in the course of my life I have constantly engaged in the reassessment and renewal of this im-pression.”2 Almost thirty years later, in “Kleist and his Stories,” his preface to the first U.S. edition of Kleist’s novellas (delivered as a lecture at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule in Zürich in 1954 and published in 1960), Mann provides a sympathetic summary of the characteristics common to Kleist and his (Kleist’s) works:

1

2

Unless otherwise indicated, all Mann citations in German are from Thomas Mann, Gesammelte Werke in zwölf Bänden (Oldenburg: S. Fischer Verlag, 1960). Subsequent citations as “Mann” followed by volume and page number(s). Likewise, unless otherwise indicated, all Kleist citations in German are from Heinrich von Kleist: Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. by Helmut Sembdner, 2 vols (Munich: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2008). Subsequent citations as “SW” with volume and page number(s). Unless otherwise indicated, all English translations are ours [C. M. and J. H.]. “Das Werk Heinrich von Kleists habe ich früh mit mächtigstem Eindruck kennen gelernt und im Laufe meines Lebens diesen Eindruck immer wieder nachgeprüft und erneuert.” Heinrich von Kleists Nachruhm: Eine Wirkungsgeschichte in Dokumenten, ed. by Helmut Sembdner (Bremen: Carl Schunemann Verlag, 1967), p. 439.

88

Curtis Maughan and Jeffrey L. High He was one of the greatest, boldest, most ambitious authors in the German language; a dramatist like no other, — indeed in every way like no other, also as an author of prose, as narrator — utterly unique, transcending all etiquette and order, radical in his dedication to his eccentric plots bordering on madness, on hysteria, — no doubt deeply unhappy, with standards for himself that broke him, struggling for the impossible, any second laid low by psychogenic illness, and destined for early death.3

As indicated by the need for the parenthetical reference above (“Kleist’s”) to distinguish between the two authors, it is a challenge for the reader to keep clear that Mann is ostensibly talking about Kleist exclusively, and not often times about himself. If the selection of Thomas Mann to write the foreword to a volume of Kleist’s novellas is fairly obvious, if not unavoidable, Mann’s intimate treatment of Kleist as a wild-eyed brother of Tonio Kröger and Gustav von Aschenbach is telling. Mann, like Kleist, is not only the master of the German novella of his generation; he is also the very self-aware executor of Kleist’s legacy. He consciously employs Kleistian models and evident intertextual and transauthorial allusions regarding medium, technique, choice of scandalous content, biographical references, and authorial gestures, often in recognizable homages to Kleist, with whom Mann identified personally as much as he identified with Kleist’s works. The title of Mann’s essay, “Kleist and his Stories,” is paradigmatic for his understanding of Kleist. Mann clearly reads Kleist’s stories through the lens of Kleist’s biography, identifying the literary nexus of cultural-historical moment and individual personality that inform both Kleist’s works and his own.

3

Our translation. Unless otherwise indicated, all other translations of Mann’s Kleist essay are from: Thomas Mann, “Kleist and his Stories,” in Heinrich von Kleist, “The Marquise of O—” and Other Stories, trans. by Martin Greenberg (New York: Criterion, 1960), pp. 5–23. The preface itself was translated by Francis Golffing. Subsequent citations as “Kleist and his Stories” with page number(s). “Er war einer der größten, kühnsten, höchstgreifenden Dichter deutscher Sprache, ein Dramatiker sondergleichen, — überhaupt sondergleichen, auch als Prosaist, als Erzähler, — völlig einmalig, aus aller Hergebrachtheit und Ordnung fallend, radikal in der Hingabe an seine exzentrischen Stoffe bis zur Tollheit, bis zur Hysterie, — allerdings tief unglücklich, mit Ansprüchen an sich selbst, die ihn zermürbten, um das Unmögliche ringend, von psychogenen Krankheiten niedergeworfen alle Augenblicke und zu frühem Tode bestimmt.” The German version is a revision of the 1954 lecture, “Heinrich von Kleist und seine Erzählungen” (Mann IX, pp. 823–842, p. 823).

Mann and Kleist’s Novellas

89

I. Mann and Kleist’s Novellas in the Secondary Literature Thomas Mann’s extensive and enduring interface with the works of Kleist has produced a wide array of critical responses dealing with topics ranging from the biographical to the stylistic to the thematic. In particular, the secondary literature indicates a broad awareness of Mann’s engagement with Kleist’s theoretical essay on grace, “Über das Marionettentheater” (On the Marionette Theater, 1810). Paul Weigand, for example, examines the presence of the Kleistian concept of grace in Mann’s novella “Tonio Kröger” (1903).4 After a discussion that addresses the role of Friedrich Schiller’s Ueber Anmuth und Würde (On Grace and Dignity, 1793) in Thomas Mann’s aesthetic development, Weigand concludes: “Where Kleist proceeds beyond Schiller and becomes original, Thomas Mann, curiously, follows Kleist’s lead. Most conspicuous here are the matters of dancing and gracefulness, in which Thomas Mann resembles Kleist not only in theoretical regards, but also in the extent of elaboration” (Weigand, p. 145). In Weigand’s analysis of the characters in “Tonio Kröger,” the “unconscious blonde ones are good at dancing” (Weigand, p. 143) because they exhibit a Kleistian marionette’s sense of grace, unhindered by the inner uncertainty and intellectuality that forces Tonio Kröger to his withdrawn middle ground between the world of the artist and that of the Bürger.5 Gunter Reiss analyzes Kleist’s influence on Mann in terms of the “Sündenfall” (fall from grace through original sin), as presented in “Marionettentheater,” not only as a recurring theme in Mann’s writing (Der Bajazzo [The Buffoon, 1897]; “Tristan,” 1903; “Tonio Kröger”; Der Tod in Venedig [Death in Venice, 1912]; Der Zauberberg [The Magic Mountain, 1924]; and Doktor Faustus, 1947, among others), but also as the structural model of his Joseph novels.6 Alan F. Bance further articulates the fall from grace construct, or “triadic structure” — “From unconscious simplicity, through self-consciousness and critical knowledge, to final attainment on a higher plane of a second state of nature or naivety”7 — beginning with Schiller’s dialectical reconciliation of feeling and reason in Ueber naive und sentimentalische Dichtung 4 5

6

7

Paul Weigand, “Thomas Mann’s ‘Tonio Kröger’ and Kleist’s ‘Über das Marionettentheater,’” Symposium (Spring – Fall 1958), vol. XII, nos. 1–2, pp. 133–148. See also Thomas Mann, Frühe Erzählungen, ed. by Terence J. Reed and Malte Herwig, (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 2004), vol. 2.2, p. 147. Subsequent citations as “Reed” with page number(s). Gunter Reiss, “Sündenfallmodell und Romanform: Zur Integration von Kleists Marionettentheater-Thematik im Werk Thomas Manns,” Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft XIII (Stuttgart: Kroner, 1969), pp. 426–453. A. F. Bance, “Der Tod In Venedig and the Triadic Structure,” Forum For Modern Language Studies, 8 (1972), pp. 148–161 (p. 148).

90

Curtis Maughan and Jeffrey L. High

(On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, 1795/96) and proceeding to Kleist’s contribution to the vocabulary of the triadic progression toward self-recognition (Erkenntnis) in “Über das Marionettentheater.” Bance emphasizes the presence of the triadic structure in the novella tradition, concluding with Thomas Mann’s treatment thereof in the figure of Gustav von Aschenbach in Der Tod in Venedig. Andrea Rudolph draws a comparison between Kleist’s “Dornauszieher” (Spinario) and Mann’s representative of grace, Tadzio, to establish her argument that Aschenbach’s infatuation with a Polish teenager is “an erotic adaptation of the [Spinario] fable.”8 J. William Dyck’s Der Instinkt der Verwandtschaft includes a contribution from Julie Dyck dedicated to a comparison of Der Tod in Venedig and Kleist’s “Marionettentheater,” focused on “Die Sehnsucht und das Streben nach künstlerischer Vollkommenheit” (the longing and striving for artistic perfection)9 shared by the artists at the center of each work, Kleist’s Herr C. and Mann’s Gustav von Aschenbach. Dyck himself demonstrates that Kleist’s personality and biography provided inspiration for Mann’s works, arguing that Adrian Leverkühn in Doktor Faustus is a “Kleist-Typus,” characterized by a “Mangel an Seele” (lack of soul) and convinced of his own doom.10 Dyck expands the Kleist-Mann comparison beyond “Tonio Kröger,” Der Tod in Venedig, and Doktor Faustus to Mann’s other novellas, including “Der Wille zum Glück” (The Will to Happiness, 1896), “Die Hungernden” (The Hungry, 1903), and “Ein Glück” (A Happiness, 1904), to show that Mann, like Kleist, was preoccupied with Happiness (early in his life), as is evident in Kleist’s “Aufsatz, den sichern Weg des Glücks zu finden und ungestört — auch under den größten Drangsalen des Lebens — ihn zu geniessen” (1799).11 Regarding intertextuality in the novellas, John S. Angermeier traces Aschenbach’s symbolic pomegranate juice drink in Der Tod in Venedig to Mann’s reading of Kleist’s “Das Erdbeben in Chili” (The Earthquake in Chile, 1807/1810) and indeed all of

8

9

10 11

“eine erotische Variation der Dornauszieherfabel.” Andrea Rudolph, “Der Tod in Venedig: Das klassische Gleichgewicht und der erotisierte Dornauszieher Tadzio,” in Zum Modernitaխtsproblem in Ausgewaխhlten Erzaխhlungen Thomas Manns (Stuttgart: HansDieter Heinz, 1991), pp. 128–146 (p. 141). Julie Dyck, “Über das Marionettentheater und Der Tod in Venedig,” in J. William Dyck, Der Instinkt Der Verwandtschaft: Heinrich von Kleist und Friedrich Nietzsche, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht (Bern: Peter Lang, 1982), pp. 121–129 (p. 121). J. William Dyck, “Heinrich von Kleist und Thomas Mann,” in Der Instinkt Der Verwandtschaft, pp. 81–129. “Essay on the Most Certain Way to Find Happiness, and — Even Amidst Life’s Greatest Hardships — How to Appreciate the Journey Undeterred.”

Mann and Kleist’s Novellas

91

Kleist’s novellas in 1910.12 Through his analysis of the recurring pomegranate imagery, Angermeier concludes that Kleist’s earthquake novella is central to the understanding of Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig; an assertion supported by the parallel “sensual desires and illicit love [...] furthered by disasters that befall a community in both stories.”13 Lilian R. Furst demonstrates similarities between Kleist’s “Die Marquise von O...” (The Marquise of O..., 1808) and Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig in regard to the tension caused by the “assent and resistance” that characterizes the central relationships14 in both novellas, and which evokes a similar conflicted and excited reaction from the reader.15 The predominance of scholarly theses related to Mann’s reception of Kleist’s concept of a “final chapter in the history of the world,”16 as demonstrated by Weigand, Reiss, and Julie Dyck (among others), corroborates the significance of the concept for Thomas Mann, who invokes the theory to explain the philosophy behind Kleist’s suicide: “He killed himself because he was tired of his own incompleteness, out of a sense of metaphysical longing to cast his fragmented self into the universe, so that it might achieve a higher form of completeness.”17 This agreement between Mann and the secondary literature concerning the awareness of “incompleteness” inherent to self-understanding and the “longing” for dignity of the sentimental artist (versus the innate grace of the naïve artist) may serve as an introduction to the spectrum of approaches to Kleist’s importance for Mann. It also illuminates the paradigmatic influence of Schiller’s naïve and sentimental aesthetic dichotomy on the aesthetic thought of Thomas Mann, who, implicitly as often as explicitly (in his fiction as well as his theoretical writing), affirmed the significance of Ueber naive und sentimentalische Dichtung:

12 13 14 15

16 17

John S. Angermeier, “The Punica Granatum Motif in Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig,” Germanic Notes and Reviews, 26.1 (1995), pp. 12–15. Ellis Shookman, Thomas Mann’s ‘Death in Venice’: A Novella and Its Critics (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2003), p. 157. The relationships discussed are those between the Marquise and Count F. in Kleist’s novella, and between Aschenbach and Tadzio in Mann’s novella. Lilian R. Furst, “Assent and Resistance in Die Marquise von O — and Der Tod in Venedig,” in Through the Lens of the Reader: Explorations of European Narrative (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), pp. 53–66 (p. 53). Subsequent citations as “Furst” with page number(s). “The Puppet Theater,” in Heinrich von Kleist: Selected Writings, trans. by David Constantine (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004), pp. 411–416 (p. 416). Kleist and his Stories, p. 6; “[Kleist] tötete sich, müde seiner Unvollkommenheit, aus metaphysischer Sehnsucht, das Bruchstückhafte seiner Individuation ins All zu werfen, damit es vielleicht eine höhere Vollkommenheit daraus schaffe” (Mann IX, p. 823).

92

Curtis Maughan and Jeffrey L. High Schiller wrote the German treatise that […] encompasses all the possibilities of German essay writing. I am referring to the essay On Naïve und Sentimental Poetry. Intellect and nature, intellect and life, in principal, all German thought revolves around this opposition, and if the present trend, trumping Nietzsche, denounces intellect as anathema to life, then this is nothing more than taking sentimental longing for the naïve, for the creative subconscious, to a grotesque extreme. It shows that we do not live in times of classical justice and balance, but rather in times of passionate overcompensations. Nonetheless, I believe that Schiller would look upon this work toward a new idea of the individual with loving sympathy, and in it he would find his own spirit alive and well.18

As here, Mann employed his extensive knowledge of (German) literature and intellectual thought in his numerous theoretical and fictional engagements with his predecessors, i.e. “Goethe und Tolstoi” (1922) and “Versuch über Schiller” (1955), not only to establish their place within his concept of literary tradition, but eo ipso Mann’s place as well. Prominent among such efforts is Mann’s “Kleist and his Stories,” in which Mann revisits Kleist’s novellas while (re)writing Kleist’s personal history in the register of Schiller’s aesthetic treatise (among other intellectual literary constellations) as part of his ongoing moral-aesthetic project — the perpetuation of a progressive “continuity” of German “culture” after the French model19 — to re-engage thinkers like Schiller and Kleist. In order to trace the significance of Kleist’s legacy in the works of Thomas Mann, the present study will focus on the parallels Mann draws between his own biography and works and those of Kleist as sentimental personalities and artists, as articulated in Mann’s journals, letters, and novellas, and foremost in “Kleist and his Stories.” 18

19

From Mann’s answer to the poll question, “Ist Schiller noch lebendig?” (Is Schiller still relevant?), which first appeared in the 10 November 1929 edition of the Königsberger Allgemeine Zeitung: “Schiller hat den deutschen ‘Versuch’ geschrieben, in welchem, man kann so sagen, alle mögliche deutsche Essayistik ein für allemal enthalten ist. Ich meine den Aufsatz Ueber naive und sentimentalische Dichtung. Geist und Natur, Geist und Leben, um diesen Gegensatz kreist im Grunde alles deutsche Denken, und wenn das heutige, Nietzsche übertrumpfend, den Geist als Henker des Lebens, verfemt, so heißt das freilich, die sentimentalische Sehnsucht nach dem Naiven, dem Schöpferisch-Unbewußten, auf eine groteske Spitze treiben. Es zeigt, daß wir nicht in Zeiten klassischer Gerechtigkeit und Ausgewogenheit leben, sondern in solchen der leidenschaftlichen Überkompensationen. Und doch, meine ich, würde Schiller dieser Arbeit an einem neuen Menschenbilde mit liebender Teilnahme zusehen und seinen Geist in ihr lebendig finden” (Mann X, pp. 909–910, p. 910). “Sind wir Deutschen nicht allzusehr ein Volk des voraussetzungslosen Immer-NeuBeginnens und der Geschichtslosigkeit? Der Korrektur wegen sollten wir uns den echten Konservatismus der Franzosen, die Kontinuität ihrer Kultur, ihr Hineinnehmen alles Gewesenen in jeden neuen Zustand zum Vorbild dienen lassen. […] Zu fragen, ob Schiller noch lebt, deutet auf Mangel an Selbstbewußtsein; es ist nicht viel anders, als fragten wir, ob wir ein Kulturvolk sind” (Mann X, p. 909).

Mann and Kleist’s Novellas

93

II. Kleist and Mann: The Soldier as Poet and the Poet as Soldier Throughout Mann’s portrayal of Kleist’s life in “Kleist and his Stories,” the well-informed reader is presented with a description of Kleist that suggests a series of striking similarities between the two authors, similarities emphasized by Mann. Thomas Mann descended from a family of merchants and local politicians, residents of the Free Hanseatic City of Lübeck — men who lived in the service of state and commerce and who provided Mann with a model for a “life led consciously, that is, conscientiously,”20 if they might have shaken their heads at his decision to become an author. Mann’s description of Kleist’s lineage sets up the unavoidable comparison between two authors who mark parallel transformations of dynasties previously dedicated to practical concerns almost without exception: “Heinrich von Kleist was descended from a family of squires and officers, residents of Mark Brandenburg.”21 When the few inconsistencies between Mann’s burgherly and Kleist’s Prussian military derailments are resolved, one arrives at a familiar biography, namely that of Gustav von Aschenbach in Der Tod in Venedig: “[…] his forbears had all been officers, judges, departmental functionaries — men who lived their strict, decent, sparing lives in the service of king and state.”22 It is the lasting effect of growing up an artist among officers and senators, judges and merchants that instilled in Kleist and Mann (and in turn in Mann’s Aschenbach) a resolute sense of an artist’s duty to country — in particular during a state of war — that could only be fulfilled through “Gedankendienst mit der Waffe” (service with the weapon of thought).23 In citing Kleist’s own distaste for military service in “Kleist and his Stories” — “‘May God give us peace to enable us to make up, by more humane

20 21 22

23

From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901–1967, ed. by Horst Frenz (Amsterdam: Elsevier Publishing Company, 1969). Kleist and his Stories, p. 5. “Heinrich von Kleist, ein Sproß der märkischen Junkerund Offiziersfamilie derer von Kleist [...]” (Mann IX, p. 823). Thomas Mann, Death in Venice, in Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories, trans. by H. T. Lowe-Porter, (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), p. 8. Subsequent citations as “Death in Venice” with page number(s). “Seine Vorfahren waren Offiziere, Richter, Verwaltungsfunktionäre, gewesen. Männer, die im Dienste des Königs, des Staates ihr strafes, anständig karges Leben geführt hätten” (Mann VIII, p. 450). “Wie Hunderttausenden, die durch den Krieg aus ihrer Bahn gerissen, ‘eingezogen’, auf lange Jahre ihrem eigentlichen Beruf und Geschäft entfremdet und ferngehalten wurden, so geschah es auch mir; und nicht Staat und Wehrmacht waren es, die mich ‘einzogen’, sondern die Zeit selbst: zu mehr als zweijährigem Gedankendienst mit der Waffe.” Thomas Mann, Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1983), p. 9.

94

Curtis Maughan and Jeffrey L. High

deeds, for the time we kill so unethically’”24 — Mann draws attention to Kleist’s failure as an officer and decision to pursue a literary career, a narrative with multiple parallels in Mann’s biography and works.25 Indeed, Kleist and Mann delivered parallel performances as patriotic war poets and antioccupation voices, both in relation to Franco-German conflicts, namely the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic occupations of the German states that endured for almost the last two decades of Kleist’s life (1792–1811) and the colonial crises (1905–1914) that culminated in the First World War (1914–1918). These analogous political circumstances did not go unnoticed by Mann, who in his wartime collection, Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (Reflections of a Non-political Man, 1918), recalls Kleist and his anti-Napoleonic works as patriotic reinforcement against civilization’s literary men, the French,26 directly citing Kleist’s “Was gilt es in diesem Krieg?” (What is at Stake in this War?, 1809) and “Katechismus der Deutschen” (German Catechism, 1809) in his own political confessional and apology.27 Mann employs his poet-soldier analogy28 not only to Kleist, but also to himself and his characters, perhaps most strikingly in Der Tod in Venedig through the invocation of St. Sebastian as the model for the “new type of 24

25

26

27 28

Kleist and his Stories, p. 7. “‘Gebe uns der Himmel Frieden’, schreibt er, ‘um die Zeit, die wir hier so unmoralisch töten, mit menschenfreundlicheren Taten bezahlen zu können’” (Mann IX, p. 825). Mann’s complaints regarding his own military service feature a similar emphasis on wasted time: “yelling, wasting time, and iron laurels tormented me beyond measure.” Hermann Kurzke, Thomas Mann: Life as a Work of Art, trans. by A. Leslie Willson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 10. Hermann Kurzke, Thomas Mann: Das Leben als Kunstwerk (Munich: Beck, 1999), p. 23. “Geschrei, Zeitvergeudung und eiserne Schmuckheit quälten mich über die Maßen.” Original text in Thomas Mann, Lebensabriß (Mann XI, pp. 98–144, p. 112). Among Kleist’s anti-occupation poems are “Der höhere Frieden” (A Higher Peace, 1792), “An Franz den Ersten, Kaiser von Österreich” (To Francis I, Emperor of Austria, 1809), “Kriegslied der Deutschen” (War Song of the Germans, 1809), “An den Erzherzog Karl” (To Archduke Karl, 1809), “Rettung der Deutschen” (Liberation of the Germans, 1809/1810), “Die tiefste Erniedrigung” (The Deepest Humiliation, 1809), “Das letzte Lied” (The Final Song, 1809), “An den König von Preußen” (To the King of Prussia, 1809), “An die Königin Luise von Preußen” (To Queen Luise of Prussia, 1810), “Über die Rettung von Österreich” (On the Liberation of Austria, 1809), “Germania an ihre Kinder” (Germania to her Children, 1809), and “Notwehr” (Self-defense, 1810); prose works include the introduction to the journal Germania (1809), “Satirische Briefe” (Satirical Letters, 1809); the dramas include Die Hermannsschlacht (Hermann’s Battle, 1808) and Prinz Friedrich von Homburg (The Prince of Homburg, 1811). Betrachtungen, as well as Gedanken im Kriege (Thoughts during Wartime, 1914). Mann established his “poet as soldier” analogy in his political writing leading up to his completion of Der Tod in Venedig, in which the analogy characterizes Gustav von Aschenbach’s disciplined and prolific career.

Mann and Kleist’s Novellas

95

hero favoured by Aschenbach,”29 reinforcing Mann’s description of Aschenbach’s fortitude as a “heroism born of weakness.”30 In this regard, it is difficult not to infer a gesture of self-vindication in Mann’s assessment of the artist Kleist as the only Kleist who mattered in the end: If this name [Kleist] has a place among the constellations it is he [Heinrich von Kleist] and he alone who has put it there. I do not know, and doubt whether any-one else knows, what honors have accrued to Brandenburg through the deeds of the majors and generals von Kleist. But I do know that there is only one Kleist in all the world, and that is the one who wrote Penthesilea, Michael Kohlhaas, and the one tremendous act of Robert Guiscard […] Without our poet the name of Kleist would be nothing, yet he opines that his inspired labors are done only for the glorification of his family, every sign of disapprobation on whose part he feels as a stab. (Kleist and his Stories, p. 10)

III. Mann and Kleist between “Zucht und Zügellosigkeit” In February 1919, Thomas Mann became one of the more authoritative voices to recognize Kleist’s role in the development of German literary modernity when he wrote a journal entry on Goethe’s plan to write an Achilles drama: “The psychological or the pathological motif — Achilles, who knows that he is to die, falls in love with the Trojan woman and thus ‘utterly forgets’ his fate — is fascinating and strikes one as Kleistian, that is to say, modern.”31 Mann’s equivalence of the terms “Kleistian” and “modern” regards the paradoxical synchronicity of Aschenbachian “Zucht und Zügellosigkeit” (discipline and lack of restraint) as described in Der Tod in Venedig (Mann XIII, p. 494). Mann’s comment specifically addresses the capacity of psychological mechanisms — pathological, yes, but by no means 29

30

31

This new type of hero is further described as: “The conception of an intellectual and virginal manliness, which clenches its teeth and stands in modest defiance of the swords and spears that pierce its side.” (Death in Venice, p. 11). “[…] die Konzeption ‘einer intellektuellen und jünglinghaften Männlichkeit’ sei, ‘die in stolzer Scham die Zähne aufeinanderbeißt und ruhig dasteht, während ihr die Schwerter und Speere durch den Leib gehen’” (Mann VIII, p. 453). Death in Venice, p. 11; “[...] betrachtete man all dies Schicksal und wieviel Gleichartiges noch, so konnte man zweifeln, ob es überhaupt einen anderen Heroismus gäbe als denjenigen der Schwäche.” (Mann VIII, p. 453). “Das psychologische oder pathologische Motiv: Achill, der weiß, daß er sterben soll, sich in die Trojanerin verliebt und darüber sein Fatum ‘rein vergißt’, ist faszinierend und mutet übrigens irgendwie kleistisch an, was aber wohl heißen will: modern.” Journal entry of 26 November 1919 in Thomas Mann, Tagebücher 1918–1921, ed. by Peter de Mendelssohn (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1979), p. 161. Subsequent citations as “Tagebücher” with years and page number(s).

96

Curtis Maughan and Jeffrey L. High

alien to artists — to ignore the simplest dictates of reason. Mann concludes that Goethe’s Achilles, like Kleist’s Achilles in Penthesilea (1808), is in a moment capable of forgetting his conscious teleological purpose in pursuit of an entirely irrational drive that not only promises no hope of fulfillment but will endanger the political future of his tribe and ultimately negate the purpose of his own death. For Mann, modernity in the works of Kleist comprises the critical awareness of the unresolved struggle of animal drives, tribal behaviors, and what appear to be aberrational psychologies of outrage, denial, and subsequent irrational decisions in the post-Enlightenment subject, who through his literary self-portrayal and self-awareness is simultaneously a post-Enlightenment object. In the modern “Pathologische” (pathological state; Tagebücher, p. 161), in the conscious “Sympathie mit dem Tode” (predilection for death)32 on the part of the artist, and in the unconscious proximity to death on the part of his characters, Mann draws a line linking modern prose authors from the Goethe to Schiller to Kleist to himself.33 As Dieter Borchmeyer has written, if Goethe represents the unattainable fusion of naïve life and art for Thomas Mann, Schiller was the closest sentimental blood relative (particularly regarding Venice conspiracy novellas of liberation and self-destruction); Kleist, however, is the modern model.34 Kleist’s programmatic, personal exploration of the mechanisms of denial and outrage set the stage for the difficult marriage of “Zucht und Zügellosigkeit” that for Mann comes to define the “klassische Popularität” (classical popularity; Mann IX, p. 920) of a work and its creator, as well as the dynamic tension of form and content in the modern (German) novella, a tension that provides the central question of Der Tod in Venedig: “Who shall unriddle the puzzle of the artist nature? Who understands that mingling of discipline and license [lack of restraint; Zucht und Zügellosigkeit] in which it stands so deeply rooted?”35In Mann’s 32

33

34

35

Letter to Heinrich Mann of 8 November 1913. Thomas Mann, Briefe I, 1889– 1913. Grosse Kommentierte Frankfurter Ausgabe, vol. 21, ed. by Thomas Sprecher, Hans R. Vaget, and Cornelia Bernini (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2002), pp. 534– 535 (p. 535). Subsequent citations as “Briefe I” with page number(s). See Jeffrey L. High, “Goethe, Schiller, Kleist und Aschenbach. Thomas Manns Selbsterklärung zum Novellenklassiker in Der Tod in Venedig,” in Thomas Mann Memoria 1875–1955, ed. by Bodo Plachta and Walter Delabar (Berlin: Weidler, 2005), pp. 89–105. Subsequent citations as “High, Novellenklassiker” with page number(s). Dieter Borchmeyer, “‘Kunst ist Leben im Lichte des Gedankens.’ Thomas Manns sentimentalische Poetik,” in Kunst und Wissen in der Moderne. Otto Kolleritsch Zum 75. Geburtstag, ed. by Andreas Dorschel and Otto Kolleritsch (Wien: Böhlau, 2009), pp. 155–68 (p. 156). Subsequent citation as “Borchmeyer” with page number(s). “Zügellosigkeit” is a term that distinctly expresses a more reckless form of freedom than mere “license” (Death in Venice, pp. 46–47). “Wer enträtselt Wesen und Gepräge

Mann and Kleist’s Novellas

97

portrayals of Kleist, the author is not a dead footnote to the text; Mann focuses more on the artist Kleist than on his art, and on several occasions defends Kleist in the most vehement terms, foremost against criticism by Goethe. Significantly, Mann not only defends Kleist, but personally berates Goethe for his dismissal of Kleist’s ostensibly incongruous artistic union of “Zucht und Zügellosigkeit.” In his lecture on Kleist’s 150th birthday, “Kleists Amphitryon” (1927), Mann declares that he could never understand the “cruel frostiness of His beloved Majesty toward Kleist and toward his pathological choice of subjects.”36 In a letter to Heinrich Mann of 17 November 1910, Thomas Mann continues in the same vein; after rereading Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas, he is “furious with Goethe, who rejected him [Kleist] because of his ‘hypochondria’ and his ‘contradictory spirit.’”37 In his defense of Kleist, Mann articulates the tensions in the personality and works of Aschenbach, who shares with Kleist a form of “Hypochondrie” defined by Edo Reents as “not in the strictest sense pathological, but rather […] an expression of a world-weary mood of anguish.”38 In so doing, Mann thus defends the coexistence of unclassical “Zügellosigkeit” (content) with classicistic “Zucht” (form). This corroborates the understanding of modern art implied in Mann’s comment on Achilles in Kleist’s Penthesilea above, a tension Mann sees less as a disadvantage and more as a prerequisite for great art, and a tension particularly common to the German novella. In the Amphitryon essay, Mann addresses Goethe — author to author — with aggressive sarcasm, stating that Goethe (and perhaps every great artist) was necessarily painfully aware of the dark, personal secret (in Der Tod in Venedig, “dieses schlimme Geheimnis”; Mann VIII, p. 500) of modern art, and that Goethe himself found art in suffering, sympathy with death, and pathological subjects: “Tasso, I suppose, is healthy? To call Werther extreme would be a mistake? A figure like Mignon is not in the least calculated to cause any mental bewilderment?”39 In his essay, “Goethe als Repräsentant des burger-

36

37 38

39

des Künstlertums! Wer begreift die tiefe Instinktverschmelzung von Zucht und Zügellosigkeit, worin es beruht!” (Mann XIII, p. 494). “[…] die grausame Kälte Seiner [Goethes] geliebten Majestät gegen Kleist und gegen seine Neigung zu pathologischer Stoffwahl.” Thomas Mann, “Kleists Amphitryon” (Mann IX, p. 205). “[…] wütend auf Goethe, der ihn [Kleist] wegen seiner ‘Hypochondrie’ und seines ‘Widerspruchsgeists’ abgelehnt hat” (Briefe I, p. 443). “[…] ‘Hypochondrie’ — das Wort hier nicht im engeren Sinne als pathologischer Befund verstanden, sondern als Ausdruck für eine verzweifelt-lebensmüde Weltstimmung, die sich mit philosophischer Einsicht durchaus verträgt.” Edo Reents, Zu Thomas Manns Schopenhauer-Rezeption (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1998) p. 22. Thomas Mann, “Kleist’s Amphitryon,” in Essays of Three Decades, trans. by H.T. LowePorter, (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1947), pp. 202–240 (p. 219). Subsequent references

98

Curtis Maughan and Jeffrey L. High

lichen Zeitalters” (Goethe as Representative of the Bourgeois Age, 1932), Mann finishes the thought by comparing the more naïve Goethe with the more sentimental Schiller: “‘With suffering, with death was he [Schiller] familiar,’ but he himself [Goethe], who stood on a much more friendly footing with life, was he not, after all, the same?”40 Not only Kleist then, among the founders of the modern novella, but also Goethe and Schiller wrote on the narrow (l)edge that informs the works of modernity — by his own implication — specifically those of Thomas Mann.

IV. Mann and Kleist’s Novellas Like his descriptions of Schiller in “Schwere Stunde” (A Weary Hour, 1905) and “Versuch über Schiller,” Mann’s description of Kleist in “Kleist and his Stories” is highly personal; indeed, it is intimate and sympathetic. As was the case with Schiller, Mann appears to accentuate the similarities between Kleist and himself, overemphasizing the fact that — unlike Goethe and Schiller, their common predecessors as masters of the German novella — Kleist, like Mann, produced relatively little lyric poetry: “The only genre hardly cultivated by Kleist is the lyric — and we may ask why he chose to bypass it, why this extraordinary master of poetic rhetoric, whose plays abound in magnificent flights of poetry, could never get himself to speak directly and freely in propria persona” (Kleist and his Stories, p. 6).41 The fact of the matter is, however, that Kleist produced a substantially less modest body of poetry (both quantitatively and qualitatively) than did Mann (see SW 1, pp. 7–46). Since Kleist did not write any proper novels, and Mann completed only one play (Fiorenza, 1907), Mann’s point serves to draw attention to the common area of dominant production, the novella.42

40

41

42

as “Mann, Essays” followed by page number(s). “Tasso ist wohl gesund? Werthern extrem zu nennen, wäre wohl fehlerhaft? Eine Gestalt wie Mignon ist zweifellos ganz ungeeignet, Verwirrung des Gefühls hervorzurufen?” (Mann IX, p. 205). “Goethe as Representative of the Bourgeois Age” (Mann, Essays, pp. 66–92, p. 85). “‘Dem Leiden war er [Schiller], war dem Tod vertraut’, sagte er [Goethe] von seinem Freund Schiller; aber er selbst, der mit dem Leben auf so viel freundschaftlicherem Fuße stand, war er es nicht auch?” Thomas Mann, “Goethe als Repräsentant des bürgerlichen Zeitalters” (Mann IX, pp. 297–332, p. 322). “Was fehlt, ist das lyrische Gedicht. Warum fehlt es? Warum kann man sich bei diesem eminenten Sprachkünstler, der in seinen Stücken doch herrliche lyrische Höhepunkte erreicht, das freie und unmittelbare Sichaussingen nicht einmal vorstellen?” (Mann IX, p. 824). If Kant and Kleist (more than Schiller and Goethe) share the distinction of articulating the enduring aesthetic, moral-philosophical, and stylistic crisis parameters that distinguished the early German death novella from the great majority of its Euro-

Mann and Kleist’s Novellas

99

Mann was convinced that, like Kleist, his own future fame would derive from his novellas, and there can be no doubt that Mann had a very articulate concept of the characteristics of the German novella (as discussed below) and that this concept was informed to a great extent by Kleist. In his letter to Bedrich Fucík of 15 April 1932, Mann names “Tonio Kröger” and Der Tod in Venedig as his works with the best chances of future resonance, “[…] because I believe that the closed and pregnant form of the novella has more potential for endurance than the more flexible and expansive form of the novel.”43 In his letter to Josef Ponten of 4 October 1919, Mann documents a detailed awareness of the characteristics of the novella in his analysis of Ponten’s short prose work, Der Meister (The Master, 1919): “It is not a novel, not even a short novel, it is a classic novella, closely akin to the drama, as is appropriate for the former.”44 Mann goes on to point out the “unusual, metaphysical intensity of the concept of character and fate” and the “rigid typological nature of the figures” — genre characteristics that can aptly be applied to the novellas of Kleist and Mann. In marveling at Kleist’s masterful portrayal of physical gesture, Mann reveals further evidence of a sense of literary kinship in his discussion of “Der Findling” (The Foundling, 1811): “Yet the story would lack something without the grim gesture with which Piachi, on the gallows ladder, raises his hands, cursing the inhuman law that denied him his place in hell” (Kleist and

43

44

pean predecessors, Sigmund Freud and Thomas Mann established the revised parameters of the twentieth century German novella, not so much replacing as rearticulating Kant and Kleist, again more than Schiller and Goethe, who had both already examined modern insecurity through psychology and the perils of subjectivity in their prose works, notably in Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werther (The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774) and Schiller’s “Der Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre” (The Criminal of Lost Honor, 1786). Not surprisingly, Mann followed his essay on Kleist’s Amphitryon (1927) with an essay on Sigmund Freud (1929). See Jeffrey L. High, “Crisis, Denial, and Outrage: Kleist (Schiller, Kant) and the Path toward the German Novella(s) of Modernity,” in Heinrich von Kleist and Modernity, ed. by Bernd Fischer and Tim Mehigan (Rochester: Camden House, 2011), pp. 187–203 (p. 189). Subsequent citations as “High, German Novella(s) of Modernity” with page number(s). “[…] weil ich vermute, daß die geschlossene und prägnante Form der Novelle mehr Aussicht auf Bestand hat als die lockere und gedehnte des Romans.” Thomas Mann, Briefe III, 1924–1932. Grosse Kommentierte Frankfurter Ausgabe, vol. 23.1, ed. by Thomas Sprecher, Hans R. Vaget, and Cornelia Bernini (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2004), pp. 619–624 (p. 622). “Es ist kein Roman, auch kein kurzer, es ist eine klassische Novelle, dem Drama sehr nahe stehend, wie es sich für eine solche gehört” Thomas Mann Briefe II, 1914–1923. Grosse Kommentierte Frankfurter Ausgabe, vol. 22, ed. by Thomas Sprecher, Hans R. Vaget, and Cornelia Bernini (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2004), pp. 310–312 (p. 312). Subsequent citations as “Briefe II” with page number(s).

100 Curtis Maughan and Jeffrey L. High

his Stories, p. 18). Similarly, in the history of novella expositions, Mann considers the opening line of Kleist’s “Das Erdbeben in Chili” to be a model: The first sentence of The Earthquake in Chile has long been famous as a masterpiece of succinct exposition: everything the reader needs to know has been compressed into a very few words, and the narrative, as sober as it is beautifully articulated, betrays at once the hand of a master [...].45

Mann’s praise for Kleist’s opening line of “Das Erdbeben in Chili” can certainly be seen as an act of trans-authorial flattery, but can also be interpreted as self-referential promotion, since Mann’s expository first line of Der Tod in Venedig clearly adheres to the stylistic standard set by Kleist and before him Schiller in “Der Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre.” Beyond articulating where and how Kleist is a master of short prose, Mann conspicuously employs a number of Kleist’s trademark syntactical gestures and phases. Foremost among these is the usage of a hyphen in place of a scandalous (implied) occurrence. The foul deeds curtained by the deft employment of a hyphen are integral to the novellas in which they occur.46 The answer to whether Kleist’s Marquise von O. was raped and/or who impregnated her is both implied and obscured by the same punctuation device that Mann uses to allude to incest in his 1921 novella, “Wälsungenblut” (The Blood of the Walsungs).47 Mann’s scholarly awareness of Kleist’s 45

46

47

Kleist and his Stories, p. 15. “In St. Jago, der Hauptstadt des Königreichs Chili, stand gerade in dem Augenblicke der großen Erderschütterung vom Jahre 1647, bei welcher viele tausend Menschen ihren Untergang fanden, ein junger, auf ein Verbrechen angeklagter Spanier, namens Jeronimo Rugera, an einem Pfeiler des Gefängnisses, in welches man ihn eingesperrt hatte, und wollte sich erhenken” (SW 2, p. 144).” Note the stylistic similarities demonstrated by the first line of Der Tod in Venedig: “Gustav Aschenbach oder von Aschenbach, wie seit seinem fünfzigsten Geburtstag amtlich sein Name lautete, hatte an einem Frühlingsnachmittag des Jahres 19.., das unserem Kontinent monatelang eine so gefahrdrohende Miene zeigte, von seiner Wohnung in der Prinz-Regentenstraße zu München aus, allein einen weiteren Spaziergang unternommen” (Mann VIII, p. 444). Here, Kleist’s usage of the dash in “Die Marquise von O...”: “Er stieß noch dem letzten viehischen Mordknecht […] mit dem Griff des Degens ins Gesicht […]; bot dann der Dame, unter einer verbindlichen, französischen Anrede den Arm, und führte sie […] in den anderen, von der Flamme noch nicht ergriffenen, Flügel des Palastes, wo sie auch völlig bewußtlos niedersank. Hier — traf er, da bald darauf ihre erschrockenen Frauen erschienen, Anstalten, einen Arzt zu rufen […]” (SW 2, pp. 105–106); and Mann’s usage of the dash in “Wälsungenblut”: “Sie […] berauschten sich wie Hoffnungslose, verloren sich in Liebkosungen, die übergriffen und ein hastiges Getümmel wurden und zuletzt nur ein Schluchzen waren — —” (Mann VIII, p. 410). “Ähnlich wie bei der Vergewaltigung in Kleists Marquise von O. wird der Moment des Inzests durch Interpunktionszeichen mitgeteilt bzw. verschleiert” (Reed, p. 340). See

Mann and Kleist’s Novellas 101

“utterly unique” style is evident in his praise of the link between Kleist’s fusion of idiosyncratic syntactical tendencies, mood, and content: We are faced with a style hard as steel yet impetuous, totally matter-of-fact yet contorted, twisted, surcharged with matter; a style full of involutions, periodic and complex, running to constructions like “in such a manner … that [dergestalt, daß],” which make for a syntax that is at once closely reasoned and breathless in its intensity. (Kleist and his Stories, p. 14)

It is no surprise that Thomas Mann focuses on Kleist’s trademark usage of the “dergestalt, daß” construct,48 since Mann himself reappropriated the otherwise increasingly rare phrase in his own works, i.e. in Der Tod in Venedig: “[...] his lips appeared too short, curling back in such a manner, that they laid bare the long, white, glistening teeth to the gums.”49 As Furst has demonstrated, “Mann’s phraseology does indeed bear the imprint of Kleist in its tendency to parataxis and prolongation as well as in its exactness. Mann also appropriates some of Kleist’s favorite ciphers of contingency: ‘zufällig,’ ‘Es fügte sich,’ ‘So geschah es’” (Furst, p. 64). Mann’s trans-authorial gestures extend beyond punctuation and phraseology and into the narrative itself through the use of similar literary devices, as highlighted in Mann’s analysis of Kleist’s authorial tendencies: “[Kleist’s] physical illnesses bear a strong resemblance to the fainting fits which occur over and over in his writing — so that we may look upon them as recoveries through a profound return to the unconscious, to the sources of life [...]” (Kleist and his Stories, p. 13).50 Whereas fainting spells occur at a noteworthy rate in Kleist’s tales, the state of unconsciousness is also important to Mann’s narratives, as seen in the change of perspective afforded by the loss of conscious control and its subsequent effect on the character arch of central figures in Mann’s novellas “Der kleine Herr Friedemann” (Little Herr Friedemann, 1897), “Tonio Kröger,” and Der Tod in Venedig.

48

49

50

also Kurzke, “Die Hunde im Souterrain. Die Philosophie der Erotik in Thomas Manns Roman Joseph und seine Brüder,” in: “Heimsuchung und süßes Gift”. Erotik und Poetik bei Thomas Mann, ed. by Gerhard Härle (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1992), pp. 126–138 (p. 131). As Lilian Furst has pointed out, “The hyperemphatic turn, “dergestalt dass” […] is sufficiently unusual in modern discourse to be recognized by German readers as an echo of Kleist” (Furst, p. 64). Our translation. “[…] seine Lippen schienen zu kurz, sie waren völlig von den Zähnen zurückgezogen, dergestalt, daß [our emphasis] diese, bis zum Zahnfleisch bloßgelegt, weiß und lang dazwischen hervorbleckten” (Mann VIII, p. 446). Mann uses similar language in describing the healing power of sleep (and in turn, its allure) in his 1909 autobiographical essay Süßer Schlaf, once again blurring the line between author (Mann) and subject (Kleist, Friedemann, Kröger, Aschenbach).

102 Curtis Maughan and Jeffrey L. High

Having himself found much success with his literary foray into the English speaking world, Mann confidently predicts (in “Kleist and his Stories”) that Kleist would also be well-received by the American reading public, in part due to his (Kleist’s) choice of scandalous content: All Kleist’s stories are told in this unusual style, and none of them fails of extra-ordinary effect. [...] The present collection should find a large and responsive public, for everything in it is exciting, amazing, not to say sensational. Being an extremist, Kleist delights in out-of-the-way subjects and psychological borderline cases, and he can be brutal at times. (Kleist and his Stories, p. 15)

Again, the need for parenthetical reference is a result of the similarities between some of the more extreme plots of Kleist and Mann’s novellas: psychic vampires Nicolo (“Der Findling”), Gerda von Rinnlingen (“Der kleine Herr Friedemann”), and Detlev Spinell (“Tristan”) drive the fragile objects of their affection into states of utter confusion, which are immediately followed by death; a doomed romance unfolds as a city is ravaged by a powerful natural phenomena; family members engage in incestuous circumstances; a wronged upstanding citizen exacts mortal revenge on a public authority figure. Kleist is Mann’s precursor on many scandalous fronts, most regarding the portrayal of sexuality — a masturbation scene and Nicolo’s sexual addiction in “Der Findling,” cloister garden sex in “Das Erdbeben in Chili,” rape in “Die Marquise von O...” — and most featuring the death of the main character, a German novella tradition codified by Kleist and mined by Mann. It is Kleist’s revolutionary willingness to expose what Mann calls a “persönliches Gefühlsabenteuer” (adventure of feeling)51 with the requisite “Zügellosigkeit” (lack of restraint) and Kleist’s practice of framing the innermost personal crisis in classical form, that make him a model for Mann. Following this frame of logic, it is telling that Thomas Mann remarks that Kleist “can be brutal at times,” and in doing so distances himself from his predecessor. In fact, Mann sees Kleist’s tendency to depict violence as “the true Kleistian touch” (Kleist and his Stories, p. 21), referring to the brutality of Kleist’s stories numerous times throughout the preface as a characteristic utterly unique to Kleist.52 The focus on brutality in Kleist’s novellas and the nearly overwhelming absence of it in Mann’s points to something more subtle and significant than a difference in the level of spectacle; the violence found in Kleist’s tales is often times the symptom of, and the only “cure” for, the quandaries of a universe shaped by communication failure, 51 52

Letter to Carl Maria Weber of 29 July 1920 (Briefe II, pp. 359–360, p. 360). “As usual Kleist pushes the logic of the story to a point of extravagant violence” (Kleist and his Stories, p. 18).

Mann and Kleist’s Novellas 103

justice denied, unchecked rage, and metaphysical despair. Where Kleist portrays clenched fists raised in anger against the controlling forces of his world, Mann opts for a more satiric, sometimes pathetic, even (passively) tragic resolution of less concrete crises that relate better to Kleist’s unusual personal struggles (and to the internal struggles of his characters) than to the unheard of external events of his novellas.53 The lack of brutality in Mann’s novellas, when compared to the abundance thereof in those of Kleist, is by no means comforting; it constitutes a novelistic choice between the relative analytical horrors of rape or incest, suicide by castle fire or by crawling into a pond, and death by earthquake or acquiescence to cholera outbreak.

V. Mann, Kleist, and Der Tod in Venedig In “Versuch über Schiller,” written shortly before his death in 1955, Mann coined a term for the principle of enduring literary relevance that had so strongly influenced his artistic development, namely, “das Seltenste: klassische Popularität” (that most rare quality, classical popularity; Mann IX, p. 920). According to his letter to Heinrich Mann of 17 February 1910, shortly before the serious work on Der Tod in Venedig began, it is clear that in his quest to achieve the same — a classical, popular, modern novella, indeed, “das Meisterwerk des 20. Jahrhunderts” (the masterpiece of the twentieth century)54 — Mann places Kleist in a select class with Schiller and Goethe as the models of classical popularity for his short prose writing in Der Tod in Venedig: “What I have is the psychological material, but I am struggling with the plot, the action. I also need to be careful that the batter doesn’t overflow the cake-pan, and the material for a novella not grow into a novel again. I am reading Kleist’s prose in order to get a grip on myself.”55 In the same letter, Mann calls Kleist’s “Die Verlobung in St. Domingo” (The Betrothal in San Domingo, 1811) “a magnificent example of narrative 53

54 55

Indeed, Mann’s conflation of Kleist’s life and his works is crucial to understanding his analysis of Kleist’s novellas. Mann’s knowledge of Kleist’s medical history guides his interpretation of “the fainting fits” in Kleist’s work: “His physical illnesses bear a strong resemblance to the fainting fits which occur over and over in his writings — so that we may look upon them as recoveries through a profound return to the unconscious, to the sources of life; and his stubbornness and will to maturity is such that it puts all robustness to shame” (Kleist and his Stories, p. 13). “Über die Kunst Richard Wagners” (Mann X, pp. 840–842, p. 842). “Was da ist, ist das psychologische Material, aber es hapert mit der Fabel, dem Hergang. Auch muß ich aufpassen, daß der Kuchen nicht wieder so auseinandergeht und daß nicht wieder aus einem Novellenstoff ein Roman wird. Ich lese Kleists Prosa, um mich so recht in die Hand zu bekommen” (Briefe I, p. 443).

104 Curtis Maughan and Jeffrey L. High

art,”56 and already Mann’s title — Der Tod in Venedig — demonstrates the distinctive construct of Kleist’s novella titles — noun-preposition-object (“Das Erdbeben in Chili,” “Das Bettelweib von Locarno” [The Beggarwoman of Locarno, 1810]) — the first of many similarities between Der Tod in Venedig, Kleist’s works, and other seminal texts in the history of the modern German novella, foremost those of Schiller and Goethe.57 In “Kleist and his Stories,” Mann locates the intersection of Kleist’s biography, works, literary figures, and a long list of his own works and figures — in particular Der Tod in Venedig and Gustav von Aschenbach — within the greater framework of the (German) novella tradition. Importantly, it appears that Mann is describing himself as much as Aschenbach, since no character embodies Mann’s portrayal of the tension between mere dignity on the one hand and artistic freedom and personal confession on the other as does Aschenbach. Prior to his final trip to Venice, Aschenbach’s ideal of classicity had prevented him from becoming Kleistian; in Venice, he leaves his tribal-societal concerns behind, accepts abandonment with abandon, embraces death willingly as a condition of unfettered freedom, exposes a “persönliches Gefühlsabenteuer,” and produces his only work of Kleistian form, content, and quality. Regarding the formal characteristics, it is difficult to overlook that in Der Tod in Venedig Mann consciously conducts an extended tour of the history of the “classic” German novella that he described in his letter to Ponten cited above (Briefe II, p. 312). In addition to the specific connections between Kleist and Mann’s novellas already discussed, Der Tod in Venedig features many of the novella characteristics provided in Frank Ryder’s long list:58 Goethe’s “unerhörte Begebenheit” (unheard of occurrence; Ryder, p. xvii), which, as Tim Mehigan has recently speculated, may derive from Goethe’s reading of Kleist;59 Ludwig von Tieck’s “Wendepunkt” (turning point) and August Wilhelm Schlegel’s “Wendepunkte” (turning points; Ryder, p. xxii); Paul Heyse’s theory of a recognizable novella “Silhouette,” a central focus or “Falke” (Boccaccio’s central falcon; Ryder, p. xviii), and the predominance of the “tiefste und sittlichste Fragen” (deepest moral questions; Ryder, p. xxi) anchored in the story of a “nicht alltäglicher Vorgang” (an unusual 56 57 58 59

“[…] ein Prachtstück von Erzählkunst” (Briefe, I, p. 443). Among others, Schiller’s “Der Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre” (1786) and Goethe’s “Der Mann von funfzig Jahren” (1808). See High, Novellenklassiker, pp. 97–98. Frank Ryder, Die Novelle (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), pp. xviii– xxvi. Subsequent citations as “Ryder” with page number(s). Tim Mehigan, “The Process of Inferential Contexts: Franz Kafka Reading Heinrich von Kleist,” in the present volume, p. 75. See Goethe’s definition of the novella in Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens, ed. by Fritz Bergemann (Frankfurt: Insel-Verlag, 1981), pp. 207–208 (29 January 1827).

Mann and Kleist’s Novellas 105

event; Ryder p. xix); Theodor Storm’s analogy of the novella as the “Schwester des Dramas” (sister of the drama), demonstrating “die strengste Form der Prosadichtung” (the strictest form of literary prose; Ryder, p. xxiv); Paul Ernst’s focus on a “Schicksalsproblem” (problem of fate; Ryder, p. xix); a well-defined body of imagery and symbol (Ryder p. xxiv); “the intrusion of irrational or uncontrollable forces upon an ordered existence” (Ryder, p. xxiii); and the frequency of “non-linear narration” (Ryder, p. xxiii). The same can be argued for a number of other novella conventions that contribute to the “family resemblance” of the genre (Ryder, p. xv), including “verisimilitude of action” (Ryder, p. xviii), the prominent role of chance (Zufall), and the practice of artificially reinforcing historical urgency by disguising place names through omission, a practice common in the short prose works of Christoph Martin Wieland (1733–1813) and Schiller, but perhaps most associated with Kleist. Indeed, there is widespread scholarly agreement that the history of the German novella can be divided into two broader eras, BKE and AKE — Before and After [awareness of] the Kleistian Era (High, German Novella(s) of Modernity, p. 189). Mann’s notion of the enduring resonance of his novellas, as expressed in his letter to Fucík cited above, is closely linked to his ongoing engagement with ideas of classicity. As Ritchie Robertson has pointed out, modern readers are left to marvel at the gulf between the Spartan concept of “new classicism” aspired to in Mann’s essay “Über die Kunst Richard Wagners” (On the Art of Richard Wagner, 1911) and the balance of formal discipline and lack of creative restraint achieved in Der Tod in Venedig.60 The concept of classicity that informs Aschenbach’s struggle in Der Tod in Venedig places him before a choice with the most costly personal and most sublime artistic consequences, that between the wooden mimicry of Apollonian classicism as Goethe represents it in his rejection of Kleist and the free exercise of Dionysian Romanticism as Goethe often enough practiced it in life as in art. It is, of course, by no means merely classicistic execution that makes Der Tod in Venedig a classic, but much more the content so delivered, the explosive world of feeling or “Gefühlsart” (sense of feeling expressed).61 Here biography and work meet again, and Mann and his protagonist share yet another biographical and artistic distinction, namely a confessional masterpiece regarding Aschenbach’s “great and burning question of art and taste” 60

61

Robertson compares Goethe’s definition of a classic writer (national relevance and prominance, exemplary style, and emulation of the classics) with Aschenbach and his works and with Mann and Der Tod in Venedig in: Ritchie Robertson, “Classicism and its pitfalls: Death in Venice,” in The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Mann, ed. by Ritchie Robertson (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002) pp. 95–106 (p. 97). Letter to Carl Maria Weber of 4 July 1920 (Briefe II, pp. 347–353, p. 348).

106 Curtis Maughan and Jeffrey L. High

(Death in Venice, p. 45)62 and Mann’s tale of “homoerotic” and “forbidden love,” a tale of “passion as confusion and humiliation” that simultaneously contains “the affirmation of an individual.” The reconciliation of “Zucht und Zügellosigkeit” in Der Tod in Venedig, which began as the “story of the aged Goethe”63 pursuing a teenaged girl, comprises Mann’s most compelling case to posthumously convince Goethe of Kleist’s artistic validity; the concept frames Goethe’s biography in terms that mock his “Majesty[’s]” rejection of Kleist and drags Goethe (for all his grace) back to Marienbad — into the lagoon (or primordial swamp) that lies between the unconditional pursuit of beauty and the mere aspiration to escape with one’s dignity.

VI. Conclusion: Mann and Kleist as Sentimental Novella Authors In “Kleist and his Stories,” Mann returns to his criticisms of Goethe’s views of Kleist while indicating important parameters for Mann’s adaptation of the concept of naïve and sentimental artistry as Schiller described it: “The poet, I said, is either nature, or he will seek it. The former embodies the naïve poet, the latter the sentimental.”64 The polarization evident in Mann’s criticism of Goethe and his defense of Kleist is captured in Mann’s novelistic summary of the artistic struggle within and without Aschenbach, between the anti-classical anarchy of content (Zügellosigkeit) and the classicistic discipline of form (Zucht) that consistently informs the novella above all genres. Borchmeyer summarizes Mann’s sentimental situation as “The art […] of the conscious concept that simultaneously longs for freedom from the constraint of concept, for nature’s creative — naïve — spontaneity. This is the sentimental way of writing, in which concept and longing are one.”65

62 63

64

65

“ein gewisses großes und brennendes Problem der Kultur und des Geschmacks” (Der Tod in Venedig, p. 492). “[…] Leidenschaft als Verwirrung und Entwürdigung war eigentlich der Gegenstand meiner Fabel, — was ich ursprünglich erzählen wollte, war überhaupt nichts HomoErotisches, es war die — grotesk gesehene — Geschichte des Greises Goethe zu jenem kleinen Mädchen in Marienbad, das er […] heiraten wollte, was aber die Kleine durchaus nicht wollte […]” (Briefe II, pp. 347–353, p. 349). “Der Dichter, sagte ich, ist entweder Natur, oder er wird sie suchen. Jenes macht den naiven, dieses den sentimentalischen Dichter.” Friedrich Schiller, Ueber naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, in Schillers Werke, Nationalausgabe, ed. by Julius Petersen, 42 vols (Weimar: Böhlau, 1943–), vol. 20, pp. 413–503 (p. 436). “die Kunst […] des Gedankens, der sich doch nach dem Gedankenlosen, der naturgegebenen schöpferischen — naiven — Spontaneität sehnt. Das ist die sentimentalische Dichtungsart, in der Gedanke und Sehnsucht eins sind” (Borchmeyer, p. 156).

Mann and Kleist’s Novellas 107

Borchmeyer’s articulation of Schiller’s importance for Thomas Mann’s aesthetic theory is likewise significant for Mann’s relationship to Kleist: And this sentimental is the crux of Thomas Mann’s poetic theory, the secret of his irony, which rises above that, with which it longs to be one, if it did not violate the very constitution of modernity not to abandon any concept of unruptured feeling of unity. Thomas Mann shares this fundamental experience of modernity with Schiller, who was the first to articulate it.66

Mann also shares this experience with Aschenbach, “[…] the writer of that impassioned discourse on the theme of Mind and Art whose ordered force and antithetic eloquence led serious critics to rank it with Schiller’s Naïve and Sentimental Poetry” (Death in Venice, p. 8).67 In “Schwere Stunde,” Mann employs the theory of naïve and sentimental artistry in his portrayal of Schiller’s insecurity toward Goethe: “[…] the thought of that other man, that radiant being, so sense-endowed, so divinely unconscious, that man over there in Weimar, whom he loved and hated.”68 Mann’s description of Schiller in “Schwere Stunde” is informed throughout by the contrast of naïve and sentimental art and life, a dichotomy Mann reapplies in his portrayal of a hopeless competition between Kleist and the naïve artist Goethe: Kleist’s ambition was in its very essence damaged by hubris, jealousy and envy, always overreaching itself, the passion of one pretending to a crown that is not rightfully his and which must be torn from the head of its true owner, in this case the most great, most richly blessed Goethe. (Kleist and his Stories, p. 10)69

66

67

68

69

“Und dieses Sentimentalische ist der Angelpunkt von Thomas Manns Poetik, das Geheimnis seiner Ironie, die sich über das erhebt, mit dem sie gerne eins ware, wenn es nicht das Stigman der Modernität bildete, allen ungebrochenen Einheitsgefühlen entsagen zu müssen. Diese Grunderfahrung der Moderne teilt Thomas Mann mit Schiller, der sie zum ersten Mal artikuliert hat […]”(Borchmeyer, p. 156). “[...] der Verfasser […] der leidenschaftlichen Abhandlung über »Geist und Kunst«, deren ordnende Kraft und antithetische Beredsamkeit ernste Beurteiler vermochte, sie unmittelbar neben Schillers Raisonnement über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung zu stellen” (Mann VIII, p. 450). Thomas Mann, “A Weary Hour” in: Little Herr Friedemann and Other Stories (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), pp. 151–159 (p. 156). Subsequent citations as “A Weary Hour” with page number(s). “Aber er fühlte schon den Stachel dieses unvermeidlichen Gedankens in seinem Herzen, des Gedankens an ihn, den anderen, den Hellen, Tastseligen, Sinnlichen, Göttlich-Unbewußten, an den dort, in Weimar, den er mit einer sehnsüchtigen Feindschaft liebte […]” (Mann VIII, p. 377). No doubt, Mann’s defense of Kleist indicates the belief that many artists, perhaps foremost Kleist, but by implication Schiller and Mann himself, would have preferred to be more like they saw Goethe, and less like they all feared Goethe might see them.

108 Curtis Maughan and Jeffrey L. High

In “Schwere Stunde,” Mann’s preoccupation with the sentimental artist’s paradoxical ambition and requisite sense of lacking parallels his portrayal of Kleist above, as Schiller’s ambition (and his rivalry with Goethe) causes him to despair at the failure that is Wallenstein: “And here he stood by the cold stove, awake, alone, tormented; blinking across at the work in which his morbid self-dissatisfaction [Ungenügsamkeit] would not let him believe.”70 “Ungenugsamkeit,” the awareness of lacking that drives the sentimental artist to flee his failure and observe it from a distance, appears again in Mann’s description of the mysterious emergence and intoxicating lure of “Reiselust”71 (longing to travel; Mann VIII, p. 446) in Der Tod in Venedig, challenging Aschenbach’s long-established practice of countering insufficiency with a rigorous work ethic and iron self-discipline: There was no extraordinary difficulty here, rather, what had paralyzed him were scruples of dissatisfaction manifested in an overwhelming sense of lacking. Already in his youth, lacking had served as the very essence and innermost nature of talent, and it was out of awareness of lacking that he had reined in and grown cold toward feeling, because he knew that feeling is inclined to cheerfully settle for mediocrity and half perfection.72

As cited above, Mann evokes a similar sense of lacking — now transferred to the psychological realm — in his telling of Kleist’s biography, deeming the author’s suicide as the extreme and tragic result of a self-dissatisfaction left unchecked: “He killed himself because he was tired of his own incompleteness, out of a sense of metaphysical longing to cast his fragmented self into the universe, so that it might achieve a higher form of completeness.”73 However, in “Schwere Stunde,” a productive, perhaps even positive symp70

71

72

73

A Weary Hour, p. 152; “Und er stand einsam wach am erkalteten Ofen und blinzelte gequält zu dem Werk hinüber, an das seine kranke Ungenügsamkeit ihn nicht glauben ließ [...]” (Mann VIII, pp. 372–373). Similar to Aschenbach’s “Reiselust,” Mann’s Schiller distances himself from his work: “He had risen in order to put a little space between him and his task, for physical distance would often result in improved perspective, a wider view of his material and a better chance of conspectus” (A Weary Hour, p. 152); “Er war aufgestanden, um sich ein wenig Distanz davon zu verschaffen, denn oft bewirkte die räumliche Entfernung vom Manuskript, daß man Übersicht gewann, einen weiteren Blick über den Stoff, und Verfügungen zu treffen vermochte” (Mann VIII, p. 372). “Hier bot sich keine außerordentliche Schwierigkeit, sondern was ihn lähmte, waren die Skrupeln der Unlust, die sich als eine durch nichts mehr zu befriedigende Ungenügsamkeit darstellte. Ungenügsamkeit freilich hatte schon dem Jüngling als Wesen und innerste Natur des Talentes gegolten, und um ihretwillen hatte er das Gefühl gezügelt und erkältet, weil er wußte, daß es geneigt ist, sich mit einem fröhlichen Ungefähr und mit einer halben Vollkommenheit zu begnügen” (Mann VIII, pp. 448–449). Kleist and his Stories, p. 6; Mann, IX, p. 823. See footnote 17.

Mann and Kleist’s Novellas 109

tom of Mann’s self-dissatisfaction theory appears as “ein blutendes Trotzdem” (a sense of bloody defiance) that drives Schiller’s uncompromising competition with the naïve “other” and necessitates his return to Wallenstein: “this burden, this pressure, this torture of conscience, this Ocean, from which he had fled.”74 Schiller’s Promethean defiance of his physical maladies, whether congenital or self-inflicted,75 foreshadows the St. Sebastian imagery in Der Tod in Venedig, the enduring model of stringent self-sacrifice (in spite of physical and creative short-comings)76 that defines Aschenbach’s existence as a professional, if not a natural artist, until he is lured to Venice and to Tadzio, and his embrace of death — the price for the lack of restraint which is the prerequisite for enduring art. Parallel to his portrayal of Schiller and Aschenbach, in “Kleist and his Stories,” Mann portrays Kleist as sickly and misunderstood, yet his “abnormality [...] resulted in an increase of poetic power, rather than the opposite.”77 Like Mann’s Schiller, his Kleist remains resolute in spite of his setbacks — physical, professsional, or psychological: “But even during [Kleist’s] fits of anguish his gaze remained fixed on the crown of the Olympian Goethe” (Kleist and his Stories, p. 11). Nonetheless, the hope for artistic legacy/classicity remains within reach for Mann’s sentimental artists. In “Schwere Stunde,” Schiller’s potential for artistic greatness appears as a conscious synthesis of naïve and sentimental qualities: “One thing was absolutely necessary: The good courage to give his life great and beautiful names! […]. To be healthy enough to actually be touching — to see and feel beyond the merely physical! To only be in this 74 75

76

77

“[…] von dem er geflohen war, dieser Last, diesem Druck, dieser Gewissensqual, diesem Meer” (Mann VIII, p. 372). “Those youthful excesses, the nights without sleep, the days in close, smoke-laden air, straining his mind and heedless of his body; the narcotics with which he had spurred himself to — all that was now taking its revenge. And if it did — then he would defy the gods [...]” (A Weary Hour, p. 154); “Die Ausschweifungen seines Jugendmutes, die durchwachten Nächte, die Tage in tabakrauchiger Stubenluft, übergeistig und des Leibes uneingedenk, die Rauschmittel, mit denen er sich zur Arbeit gestachelt — das rächte, rächte sich jetzt! Und rächte es sich, so wollte er den Göttern trotzen […]” (Mann VIII, p. 374). Aschenbach’s waning physical strength is mentioned at the opening of the novella, “He had sought but not found relaxation in sleep — though the wear and tear upon his system had come to make a daily nap more and more imperative [...]” (Death in Venice, p. 3); “[...] und den entlastenden Schlummer nicht gefunden, der ihm, bei zunehmender Abnutzbarkeit seiner Kräfte, einmal untertages so nötig war” (Mann VIII, p. 444). A permanent physical limitation is mentioned in the second chapter: “By medical advice he [Aschenbach] had been kept from school and educated at home” (Death in Venice, p. 9). “Ärztliche Fürsorge hatte den Knaben vom Schulbesuch ausgeschlossen und auf häuslichen Unterricht gedrungen” (Mann VIII, p. 451). Kleist and his Stories, p. 13; “Aber selbst in ihr bleibt sein heißer Blick auf den Kranz des Olympiers gerichtet” (Mann IX, p. 829).

110 Curtis Maughan and Jeffrey L. High

sense naïve, when otherwise in every way aware!”78 A more refined and emphatic articulation of an artistic path is presented at the close of Mann’s “Schwere Stunde,” when an exhausted Schiller is suddenly inspired by a pressing revelation: “He must descend into chaos, or at least he must not stop there. Rather out of chaos, which is fullness, he must draw up to the light whatever he found fit and ripe for form. No brooding! Work! Define, eliminate, fashion, complete!” (A Weary Hour, p. 158).79 Attempting to follow the model of Schiller’s epiphany, Aschenbach descends into a (Dionysian) chaos from which he is unable to reemerge. His tragic death, however, is not in vain; through his descent, he is able to reach his artistic zenith, immortalized in “that page and a half of choicest prose, so chaste, so lofty, so poignant with feeling, which would shortly be the wonder and admiration of the multitude.”80 In “Kleist and his Stories” Mann portrays Kleist as a forerunner of Aschenbach, one who plunged too deep into the abyss, driven toward artistic legacy by his awareness of a higher calling than form: For Kleist knew deep down that there was something in him which might, eventually, enable him to outdistance Goethe and Schiller, those favorites of the gods — something pre-Olympian, titanic, barbaric; something elementally dramatic, having nothing to do with erudition, humanitas, the golden mean, Winckelmann’s brand of Hellenism, or any moralizing poetry of ideas; something ecstatic and enthusiastic, generating excesses of expression down to the smallest details of a brutally frank style. (Kleist and his Stories, p. 11)

In his sentimental struggle, Thomas Mann’s Kleist was not “like no other” after all. Mann’s visceral, personal tone and his (self-)revisionist portrayal of Schiller as a child of artistic fortune betrays the intention of its author; once again, Thomas Mann writes himself into literary history, broadening his selfimage to encompass Kleist’s “pre-Olympian” power (as demonstrated by Aschenbach’s confessional masterpiece). In writing his own literary identity (and rewriting the identities of his predecessors), Thomas Mann embraces

78

79

80

“Eins war not: Der gute Mut, seinem Leben große und schöne Namen zu geben! […] Gesund genug sein, um pathetisch sein — um über das Körperliche hinwegsehen, hinwegfühlen zu können! Nur hierin naiv sein, wenn auch sonst wissend in allem!” (Mann VIII, p. 375). “Nicht ins Chaos hinabsteigen, sich wenigstens nicht dort aufhalten! Sondern aus dem Chaos, welches die Fülle ist, ans Licht emporheben, was fähig und reif ist, Form zu gewinnen. Nicht grübeln: Arbeiten! Begrenzen, ausschalten, gestalten, fertig werden […]” (Mann VIII, p. 379). Death in Venice, pp. 45–46; “[...] jene anderthalb Seiten erlesener Prosa formte, deren Lauterkeit, Adel und schwingende Gefühlsspannung binnen kurzem die Bewunderung vieler erregen sollte” (Mann VIII, p. 493).

Mann and Kleist’s Novellas 111

Kleist as his fellow embodiment of the modern sentimental artist, who defiantly engages tradition in pursuit of nature’s creative spontaneity. Vanderbilt University & California State University, Long Beach

Jennifer M. Hoyer A Michael Kohlhaas for the Post-Holocaust Era: Nelly Sachs’ Eli. Ein Mysterienspiel vom Leiden Israels While not returning to canonical literary tradition, Jewish-German poet Nelly Sachs (1891–1970), a quintessential Holocaust poet, invoked canonical German writers and traditional literary forms in her postwar work in order to confront the impossibility of writing after Auschwitz. One of the clearest examples of such an act of literature is her 1945 verse play Eli. Ein Mysterienspiel vom Leiden Israels, which bears a number of parallels to Heinrich von Kleist’s 1810 novella Michael Kohlhaas (Aus einer alten Chronik). Sachs takes up Kleist’s examination of justice and revenge by resetting her Michael in a postwar ruined borderland between Poland and Germany, among Jews and Germans haunted by the past. Sachs’ play throws into relief not only the ambiguous nature of justice, but also the destabilized meaning of reconciliation in the postwar, post-Holocaust era.

Nelly Sachs (1891–1970) was a poet caught between a desire to return to earlier literary traditions and the knowledge that the traditions could not contain or represent the abyss created by war and genocide.1 Belonging neither strictly to the generation of Kahlschlag (total clearing) or Stunde Null (literary zero hour), nor to the writers seeking to revitalize the traditions of the past, Sachs’ earliest postwar works (ca. 1945–1950) evoke canonical writers and invoke traditional forms in an apparent effort to demonstrate how very much the world, and the corresponding range for literary tropes to represent that world, had changed as a result of Nazi atrocities.2 The plays and poems she wrote or developed between the mid-1940s and the early 1950s often bear striking resemblances to, in particular, works by Goethe and Kleist. The play Nachtwache (Nightwatch, 1962) for example, begun in 1945, is set outside a concentration camp and features a main character who views himself a kind of vigilante outcast survivor and perceives of his hands — not one, but both — as made of iron, in a probable evocation of Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen (1774). More striking still is the resemblance of Sachs’ verse drama Eli. Ein Mysterienspiel vom Leiden Israels (Eli: A Mystery Play of the Sufferings of Israel, 1951) to Heinrich von Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas (Aus einer 1

2

Sachs acknowledged over many years that literary traditions had been rendered sterile by the Nazi genocide, for example in the letter to Walter Berendsohn dated 24 November 1948 in Briefe der Nelly Sachs, ed. by Ruth Dinesen and Helmut Müssener (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1985), p. 99. See Jennifer M. Hoyer, “Painting Sand: Nelly Sachs and the Grabschrift,” The German Quarterly, 82.1 (Winter 2009), pp. 20–37.

114 Jennifer M. Hoyer

alten Chronik) (Michael Kohlhaas: From an Old Chronicle, 1810). Kleist’s story of a horse-dealer, who, denied legal justice, is simultaneously just and reprehensible in his pursuit of a corrupt man and the state that have grievously wronged him and others, bears similarities to the problems faced by Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. Sachs’ Eli takes up many of the key issues in Kohlhaas, among them coincidence, the irrational, the experience of being cast out, and the ambiguities of justice and revenge. In its evocation of a maun character named Michael set in a charred and mangled postwar landscape, Sachs’ Eli presents the reader with a Kohlhaas for the post-Holocaust era: representative of Jewish mysticism and survivor guilt, and the search for justice for an entire people at the mercy of chance and whim and denied the protection of law. Ultimately, the play leaves the audience to ponder the meaning of justice, revenge, and reconciliation in the aftermath of the atrocities of the twentieth century.

I. A Dog-Eared Copy of Michael Kohlhaas During her work on Eli, in a flurry of evenings between 1943 and 1945,3 Nelly Sachs never suggested that the drama was meant to evoke Kleist’s Kohlhaas; however, the archival evidence that she revered and was inspired by Kleist, especially in the immediate postwar era, is strong. The holdings in the Nelly Sachs archive at the Royal National Library of Sweden in Stockholm contain Sachs’ own personal library. Among the books is an Insel Verlag edition of Kleist’s collected stories published in 1908,4 which suggests, considering that Sachs’ library consists largely of books that post-date the war, that this was one of the books Sachs managed to preserve during her persecution in Germany and have shipped to Sweden, all the more remarkable for the circumstances under which she fled there: the family had lost most of their possessions.5 Sachs must have valued Kleist’s work very

3

4 5

Sachs famously remarked that she wrote this play in an intense handful of nights, though her correspondence indicates that she actively worked on it between 1943 and 1945. See Nelly Sachs, Zeichen im Sand: Die szenischen Dichtungen der Nelly Sachs (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1962), and numerous letters in Briefe, until November 1945, when she announced that the play is finished. Heinrich von Kleist, Heinrich von Kleists Erzählungen, ed. by Erich Schmidt (Leipzig: Insel, 1908). Subsequent citations as “Insel” with page number(s). See Ruth Dinesen, “Und Leben hat immer wie Abschied geschmeckt”: Frühe Gedichte und Prosa der Nelly Sachs (Stuttgart: Hans-Dieter Heinz, 1987), pp. 15–20. Dinesen calculates that there are about 100 books from Sachs’ Berlin life in the collection. She, too, notes that the Kohlhaas text was well used; it may also be worth noting that the

Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas and Nelly Sachs’ Eli 115

much indeed. The Michael Kohlhaas text from Sachs’ library is heavily marked with angular strikes and notations consistent with Sachs’ handwriting. The marked passages are those that tend to draw the most attention, but, one notices immediately, they also reflect the circumstances under which Eli was written. Of particular interest are the sections in which Kohlhaas is understood or presents himself as a figure not only in search of his own justice, but helping others to restitution; the scene in which his dying wife Lisbeth points to the biblical verse advocating Christian forgiveness; sections in which Kohlhaas refers to the failure of legal justice and to being cast out; sections in which coincidence or incidental remarks influence events; the passage in which Kohlhaas recognizes a certain similarity between a mysterious gypsy and Lisbeth, his dead wife; passages in which the topic of revenge surfaces; and the final line: “Some hale and hearty descendants of Kohlhaas, however, were still living in Mecklenburg in the last century.”6 As clearly as Sachs’ Eli evokes the themes represented in these passages, it also contains critical differences that demonstrate that the elements of the Kohlhaas-milieu relevant for Jews and gentiles in postwar Germany and Poland have been pushed to or reflect an extreme appropriate for the postwar context. The main character in both pieces is called Michael, and the ambiguity between justice and revenge is maintained; the role of chance is driven ad absurdum, an entire people is denied the protection of law, and, perhaps most importantly, there is no place for Christian forgiveness — this is a reconfigured mystery play set in a postwar, post-Holocaust Jewish context, emphasizing Jewish values and Jewish mysticism.

II. This “Legend made of Truth” Eli consists of 17 scenes set between a ruined Jewish village in Poland and a village just over the German border in the time “Nach dem Martyrium” (After the Martyrdom), that is, after the second World War. The landscape is already burnt and destroyed (so there is no call, as happens in the narra-

6

Egmont text in Sachs’ Goethe edition has similar marks and notations, though not, curiously, Götz von Berlichingen. Heinrich von Kleist, Michael Kohlhaas, in The Marquise of O— and other Stories, trans. by Martin Greenberg (New York: Criterion, 1960), pp. 85–183 (p. 183). Subsequent citations as “Criterion” with page number(s). “Vom Kohlhaas aber haben noch im vergangenen Jahrhundert, im Mecklenburgischen, einige frohe und rüstige Nachkommen gelebt” (Insel, p. 108); Heinrich von Kleist, Michael Kohlhaas (Aus einer alten Chronik), in Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. by Helmut Sembdner (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2008), vol. 2, pp. 9–103 (p. 103). Subsequent citations as “SW” with volume and page number(s).

116 Jennifer M. Hoyer

tive Kohlhaas, to set any cities on fire), the actions already past and the victims already dead that occasion the plot. In Kohlhaas, the reader experiences the mounting injustices and traumas inflicted on and by Michael Kohlhaas that lead him to pursue the men he believes to be at fault; in Eli, this information is backstory told by the villagers, who appear throughout the play like a chorus and comment on past and current events. The play begins as a washerwoman recounts the death of the title character: Eli, an 8-year-old Jewish shepherd boy, ran after his parents and others as they were being marched out of the village by German soldiers. Eli raised his shepherd’s pipe and piped into the sky, which aroused the confusion and ire of a soldier, who then killed the boy by striking him on the head with the butt of his rifle. The baker’s wife asks how it came to be that their cobbler, Michael, was not able to save the boy. The washerwoman explains by way of a story she heard from the widow Rosa, who has since died. Michael, according to the widow, was in the burning synagogue, saving the children inside, but then: And the widow Rosa added too that Michael came a minute too late, a tiny minute, look, tiny as the eye of my needle with which I had just been sewing up the torn seam of Eli’s shirt. Why do you think he came too late, he whom no enemy detained? He took one step into the side street, a single step, there where the house of Miriam once stood, and then he turned around — and Eli was dead.7

7

Nelly Sachs, Eli: A Mystery Play of the Sufferings of Israel, trans. by Christopher Holme, in O the Chimneys: Selected Poems, including the verse play, Eli, trans. by Michael Hamburger, Christopher Holme, Ruth and Matthew Mead, & Michael Roloff (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967), pp. 309–385 (p. 316). Subsequent citations as “O the Chimneys” with page number. “Es hat die Witwe Rosa noch hinzugefügt, / Daß der Michael eine Minute zu spät kam, / Eine winzige Minute, / Sieh, so winzig wie das Öhr meiner Nähnadel, / Mit der ich vorhin noch diesen eingerissenen Saum / An Elis Hemd festnähte. / Was meinst du, warum er zu spät kam, / Er, den kein Feind aufhielt? / Er tat einen Schritt in die Nebengasse, / Einen einzigen Schritt, / Da wo der Myriam ihr Haus einmal gestanden hat — / Und dann wandte er sich um — / Und der Eli war tot.” Nelly Sachs, Eli: Ein Mysterienspiel vom Leiden Israels, in Das Leiden Israels: Eli, In den Wohnungen des Todes, Sternverdunkelung. Einmalige Sonderausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996), pp. 5–67 (p. 9). Subsequent citations as “Leiden Israels” with page number(s).

Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas and Nelly Sachs’ Eli 117

Michael, according to the rumor, allowed his personal grief to interfere. Miriam was his bride-to-be, who was kidnapped and murdered on their wedding day. Sachs’ Michael has thus lost his wife, just as Kohlhaas had, and moreover, this event is a key catalyst in the rest of the action: because of his momentary indulgence in his own grief, the child Eli is dead. As if to check her rash commentary, the widow, according to the washerwoman, added: But Michael has the unbroken vision, not like ours which sees only fragments — he has the Baalshem vision, from one end of the world to another —8

Their world, their minds, represented in the fragmenting hyper-hyphenated lines of the original German, are in ruins and shards, but Michael has an unbroken gaze associated with the legendary founder of Chassidism, the Baal Shem Tov, and the Tzaddikim. Martin Buber instructs: “[…] that the Chassidim tell of their ‘Tzaddikim,’ the leaders of their community, belongs to the innermost life of the Chassidic movement.”9 The word Tzaddikim has links to both charity and justice, as well as learned leaders, but equally important is its meaning in the sense of the Chassidic legend of the “36 Tzaddikim,” or “36 Hidden Just Men.”10 The villagers believe Michael may be one of these men, as is suggested in the tenth scene: “He may be one of the Thirty-six / on whose deeds the world rests —.”11 Only in the notes to the play does Sachs state this explicitly: “In Hassidic mysticism he is one of the secret servants of God who, thirty-six in number (and quite unaware of it themselves), carry the invisible universe.”12 That is, Michael is a kind of 8

9

10 11 12

O the Chimneys, p. 316. “Hat doch der Michael den ungebrochenen Blick, / Nicht den unserigen, der nur Scherben sieht — / — den Balschemblick hat er, / von einem Ende der Welt zum anderen —” (Leiden Israels, p. 10). Unless otherwise indicated all translations are mine. “[...] dass Chassidim sich von ihren ‘Zaddikim’, von den Führern ihrer Gemeinschaften Geschichten erzählen, das gehört zum innersten Leben der chassidischen Bewegung.” Martin Buber, “Vorwort,” in Martin Buber, Die Erzählungen der Chassidim (Zürich: Manesse, 1996 [Orig. Ed. 1949]), pp. 5–14 (p. 5). See Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism and other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken, 1995), pp. 251–256. O the Chimneys, p. 361. “Ein Sechsunddreißiger kann er sein / auf dessen Taten die Welt ruht” (Leiden Israels, p. 47). O the Chimneys, p. 386. “Nach der chassidischen Mystik ist er einer der geheimen Gottesknechte, die, sechsunddreißig an der Zahl — und ihnen gänzlich unbewußt —, das unsichtbare Universum tragen.” Nelly Sachs, “Anhang zu Eli. Ein Mysterienspiel vom Leiden Israels,” in Zeichen im Sand: Die szenischen Dichtungen der Nelly

118 Jennifer M. Hoyer

knight of God, holding the balance of good and evil in the world and therefore, to some extent, a representative of (or perhaps rather a conduit for) divine justice on earth. The villagers only ever seem to suspect he is a “lamedvavnik,” a “36er,” but also insinuate that he is driven by guilt; these are not mutually exclusive interpretations of Michael, as such black-and-white assessments are impossible in a world created by the concentrationary universe, a “Legende aus Wahrheit” (Legend made of truth; O the Chimneys, p. 386; Anhang, p. 344). He is perhaps motivated by personal guilt, in addition to being a secret servant of God. That the main character in both legends based on truth is called Michael is certainly the most obvious similarity the texts share, and indeed neither instance is coincidental. Both are meant to evoke the archangel Michael,13 and perhaps we might consider that Sachs’ Michael is meant to evoke Kohlhaas as well. Kleist’s Michael, cast out and in pursuit of justice against a state thoroughly corrupted, comes to regard himself as “a viceroy of the Archangel Michael,”14 and a “free gentleman of the Empire and the world, owing allegiance to none but God.”15 Sachs’ Michael, and the Jewish community he represents, having had their village destroyed and their citizenship revoked, do answer only to God, and Michael’s actions are presumably divine intervention — although the villagers as well as he himself (and, one might think, the viewing audience) remain uncertain or even completely unaware of this. Michael himself never addresses the actual motive of his quest; he simply finds himself consumed by guilt and compelled to seek the murderer. The ending of the play, even for the reader familiar with mystical symbolism, is ambiguous. Michael is an outcast and wanderer who is plagued by grief and appears to be a representative of divine justice, whose purpose it is to restore order to a world destroyed by the long arm of a government corrupted in the extreme. Just as the reader is compelled to ask whether Kohl-

13

14 15

Sachs (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1962), pp. 344–345 (p. 344). Subsequent citation as “Anhang” with page number. Cf. Hilda Meldrum Brown, Heinrich von Kleist: The Ambiguity of Art and the Necessity of Form (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), p. 110, especially footnote 19: “The coincidence of name is not fortuitous: Kleist has altered the name of the historical Kohlhaas (Hans) with the intention of linking his protagonist more closely to an absolute, supraearthly form of justice. Some commentators (e.g. Klaus Müller-Salget, Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, p. 746) read this change as Kleist’s method of illustrating Kohlhaas’ hubris and his wrongful assumption of divine status.” Brown’s reference to “DKV” regards: Heinrich von Kleist, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, 4 vols (Frankfurt/Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1987–1997). Criterion, p. 121; “[…] einen Statthalter Michaels, des Erzengels” (SW 2, p. 41). Criterion, p. 116; “[…] einen Reichs- und Weltfreien, Gott allein unterworfenen Herrn” (SW 2, p. 36).

Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas and Nelly Sachs’ Eli 119

haas is pursuing justice or revenge, so the question has been raised about the nature of the justice Sachs’ Michael pursues: Is he a figure of revenge for the “martyrdom,” or is he a figure of reconciliation?

III. “So esse ich sein Gesicht”16 The play itself allows for this question. In the fifth scene of the play, Michael is about to set off on his quest to find Eli’s murderer. Unlike Kohlhaas, Sachs’ Michael never assures others that he will help them pursue restitution (this is conveyed continually by the chorus, who repeat their belief in Michael’s task to “connect upper with lower” for the benefit of future citizens17); he is however equally consumed with his task: after Michael and Samuel, Eli’s grandfather, have experienced a shadowy image of the perpetrator, Michael announces, “[The image] is gone / and burns in my eyes. / Until I find him / it will get between me and everything on this earth, / it will hang in the air — / In the bread I eat / this nightmare dust will be my food. / In the apple I eat / the murderer’s face will lurk.”18 Passages such as this and the potential that Michael is pursuing the perpetrator because he committed a murder Michael should have prevented may have contributed to the interpretation of the work and Michael as exacting revenge. The perpetrator and his own child die in the play, but Michael does not kill them himself. Uwe Naumann wrote in 1986: Michael finds Eli’s murderer at the end of the play, and the murderer crumbles into dust under the gaze of God’s servant. But Michael is not a figure of revenge; his role is completely passive, or more precisely: he carries out a task. With the death of the murderer, the cobbler’s mission is fulfilled and the balance in God’s creation is restored.

16

17

18

The translation of this segment obscures the active nature of the declamation. Michael literally says that when he eats an apple, so he will be eating the face of the perpetrator. The translator, no doubt anxious to appease the American censor’s position of reconciliation, translates the passage: “In the apple I eat / the murderer’s face will lurk —” O the Chimneys, p. 332; Leiden Israels, p. 22. O the Chimneys, p. 318; Leiden Israels, p. 11. The emphasis here on future generations is also indicative of Chassidic tradition. Buber writes that telling is more than mere telling, it conveys the idea into action among the future generations. Cf. Buber, “Vorwort” (p. 5). O the Chimneys, p. 331–332. “[Das Bild] ist fort / und brennt in meinen Augen; / bis ich ihn finde, / wird es sich vorschieben jedem Ding auf dieser Erde, / stehen wird es in der Luft — / Esse ich mein Brot, / so esse ich diesen Schreckensstaub, / esse ich einen Apfel, / so esse ich sein Gesicht” (Leiden Israels, p. 22).

120 Jennifer M. Hoyer

Naumann takes the position that Michael is not acting out of personal conviction, thus he cannot be a figure of revenge; but again, without having read the playwright’s notes, the reader can never determine this from the text alone. Naumann makes this assertion because audiences did interpret Michael as a figure of revenge, in particular because producers, directors, and moreover composers interpreted him as a figure of revenge. On the other end of the spectrum, this play and much of Sachs’ work generally have been understood as too forgiving, aimed at reconciliation for an unforgivable transgression: “The reasons for the lack of reception of Sachs’ theater pieces are the same as apply to her poetry. Nelly Sachs’ dramatic work was stigmatized in West Germany as ‘Theater of Reconciliation.’”19 Sachs herself intervened in the debate in 1959 in a letter to Moses Pergament, the Finnish composer primarily responsible for creating the first operatic version of Eli: All earthly success is irrelevant to me — the message is to come first. For this reason German Rundfunk (radio) was very cautious with each word […] because they too wanted to contribute to presenting the Germans with a message. A message from the divine — of reconciliation. Now the opposite has hit: people think that this is a poem of revenge. I have received many phone calls asking “Why?” If this opera is to appear on stage or anywhere in radio, everything must be done to clarify that Michael is a figure from Chassidic mysticism — neither an Orpheus, nor a revenging cobbler […]20

Characteristically ambiguous in her own response, she is admonishing German radio for its emphasis on reconciliation — that is, restoring friendly relations — with German audiences. There is a message, but it is divine reconciliation, not earthly reconciliation. She never explains what she means by 19

20

“Die Gründe für die mangelnde Rezeption ihres szenischen Werkes sind dieselben wie im Falle der Lyrik. Nelly Sachs’ dramatische Dichtung wurde in der Bundesrepublik als ‘Wiedergutmachungstheater’ stigmatisiert.” Ehrhard Bahr, Nelly Sachs (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1980), p. 163. See also Hellmut Geißner, “Sprache und Tanz: Versuch über die szenischen Dichtungen der Nelly Sachs,” in Das Buch der Nelly Sachs, ed. by Bengt Holmquist (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968), p. 368. “Aller weltliche Erfolg ist mir gleichgültig — Die Botschaft soll hervorkommen. Darum waren sie im deutschen Rundfunk auch so vorsichtig mit jedem Wort — ja sie hüteten es direkt — denn auch sie wollten dazu beitragen, daß den Deutschen eine Botschaft dargebracht wird. Eine Botschaft aus Göttlichem — aus Versöhnung. Nun ist hier das Entgegengesetzte eingetroffen: Die Menschen glauben, dieses wäre ein rächendes Gedicht. Ich habe so viele Anrufe bekommen, die mir sagten, warum so? Sollte diese Oper auf die Bühne kommen oder auch woanders im Radio, so muß alles getan werden, um aufzuklären, daß Michael eine Gestalt aus der chassidischen Mystik ist — weder ein Orpheus noch ein rächender Schuhmacher [...]” (Briefe, p. 206). Letter to Moses Pergament dated 21 March 1959.

Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas and Nelly Sachs’ Eli 121

this, however; she merely says, in no uncertain terms, that Michael is a Jewish mystical figure, secretive and complex, not a traditional Orpheus whose song overcomes even death itself, nor a revengeful cobbler. The emphasis on mysticism indicates that Sachs meant to retain the ambiguity of the play; Pergament had made a heroic tenor of Michael, thus casting him undeniably as a figure of vengeance. Not having the opportunity to discuss the matter with the playwright, audiences interpreted the play as either reconciliatory or revengeful; ultimately, however, the more perplexing question is, what exactly does Sachs mean by “reconciliation,” since she clearly does not mean restoring friendly relations? Reconciliation and revenge are difficult to absolutely embrace or reject from the text itself. The Jewish villagers never speak of any kind of revenge or reconciliation, they are more concerned with rebuilding the village and preparing for the New Year, as if despite being oppressively haunted by the past, they have forgotten exactly what happened or how, or at whose hands. This constitutes an equivalent to Kohlhaas turning back to Kohlhaasenbrück in consideration of the “gebrechlich[e] Einrichtung der Welt” (the fragile constitution of the world; SW 2, p. 15), here contingent on once merely unreliable, now crumbled foundations: acknowledgement of fault and acceptance of loss. This, too, is criticized in the play, because the losses have been incomprehensibly unjust. In every scene where the villagers speak hopefully of the future, the Dajan reminds them of the horrors and at whose hands they occurred, rebuking the villagers for not confronting the crimes and not digging deep enough to start afresh: “I saw one who gnawed his own flesh / filling himself out to one side like the moon / and thinning down toward the other world — / I saw a child smile / before it was thrown onto the flames — / Where is that now? My God, where is that now?”21 The Dajan maintains that the Jews are trying to recreate what was in a context where this is impossible; he seeks and seeks for the root of the hatred of the Jews, urging his fellow villagers not to lose sight of that hatred, which has by no means simply vanished with the end of the war. He is a figure of retribution, a concept not all too distant from revenge. Michael’s monologues, delivered as he seeks the murderer, have a definite sense of comeuppance, and indeed in the final sequence in which he faces the murderer, the murderer dies a grisly death under Michael’s gaze — all the while crying out for help and justice. The character of the perpetrator, whom the audience encounters in his postwar life as a father haunted by chattering 21

O the Chimneys, pp. 352–353. “Ich sah Einen sein eigenes Fleisch benagen, / sich wie der Mond nach einer Seite rundend, / und magernd hin zur andern Welt — / Ich sah ein Kind lächeln, / bevor es in die Flammen geworfen wurde — / Wo bleibt das? / Mein Gott, wo bleibt das?” (Leiden Israels, pp. 39–40).

122 Jennifer M. Hoyer

teeth, fears retribution and revenge for his action, and not coincidentally loses his own child to a mysterious fever. Both revenge and reconciliation are represented, and both are criticized. The audience is left to ponder the uneasy situation, as has been suggested for Kohlhaas by, for example, Denys Dyer: “The ambivalence of Kohlhaas’ character is consistent throughout, he is both ‘rechtschaffen’ and ‘entsetzlich’ — and that ‘zugleich’!”22 Dyer remarks that the reader is “implicity invited” to review Kohlhaas’ actions, and the reasons for them (Dyer, p. 124). In refusing a clear interpretation of the play, by, among other things, invoking a mystical context and critiquing every possible avenue associated with justice, Sachs makes it possible for audiences to interpret Michael and the play as reconciliation and revenge at the same time. On the one hand, this can provide a sense of reassurance. If the reader of Michael Kohlhaas might feel confirmed in their suspicions of bureaucracy and arbitrary injustice, and finally both jubilant and sad at the courage of one man to stand up in the name of others, then perhaps in Sachs’ play, audiences could feel reassured that, while they needed no confirmation or vilification of bureaucracy or arbitrary injustice, there is some kind of Creator and figure of justice. On the other hand, what is justice in this context? What is revenge, retribution, or reconciliation in the time “after the martyrdom?” Is it a child for a child, or a murder for a murder? Is it forgive and forget? Is it to remain trapped in an abyss of guilt and loss? And finally, whether earthly or divine, what is reconciliation meant to look like in this play?

IV. “Blessed be all onions!” The loaded postwar context raises questions about the nature and scope of guilt, as well as the arbitrary nature of earthly (in)justice. The arbitrary, even absurd, nature of earthly law and justice in Sachs’ context, the fact that such horrors can even be allowed to transpire, leaves the Jewish villagers only the hope for proof of divine justice where all else has been rendered void. The gentiles cannot quite grasp the sudden revelation of arbitrary law, either, which is perhaps best exemplified by scene fourteen. A young German gentile in a schoolyard sees Michael wandering past the school, and takes aim at him with a stone. A teacher catches him and tells him not to do it, to which he answers:

22

Denys Dyer, The Stories of Kleist: A Critical Study (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1977), p. 124. Kohlhaas is “upright” and “terrible,” and that “at the same time.”

Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas and Nelly Sachs’ Eli 123 BOY: Why yesterday and not today? SCHOOLTEACHER: Although I teach arithmetic, that’s a mathematical puzzle I can’t solve. Michael walks past. BOY (to himself): Yesterday I’d have sent the stone after him, it’d have fallen near the manure pit, I expect, after first tripping two feet. Today it stays in my hand…23

There is no absolute, reasonable basis to policy; it is the whim of the ruling power. Nearly everything that has come to pass in the play is described in terms of chance, which happens to be the case in Kohlhaas as well. One cause for the mounting injustice is that nearly every official Kohlhaas would need to turn to is related by blood or marriage to the Junker von Tronka, the initial guilty party (SW 2, p. 24), which Kohlhaas discovers from a few chance remarks. Eli is murdered because he happened to confuse and frighten a soldier, and because Michael happened to pause for a moment; if only the character referred to as “Das Wesen” (The Creature), but who Michael recognizes to have once been Hirsch the tailor, had listened and gone to America, he would be among the living; and one survivor’s story in particular makes a point of underscoring the role and absurdity of chance in just and unjust events. He remarks: The soldier who filled in the earth over us and buried us — blessings be on him — he saw by the lantern light, for it was night, that they had not slaughtered me enough and that my eyes were opening — and he fetched me out and hid me — […] The soldier that morning — so he told me later — had had a letter from his mother. Blessings be on her! For that reason he was not intoxicated like the rest and saw the blinking of my eyes.24 23

O the Chimneys, p. 375. “KNABE: Warum denn heute nicht und gestern ja? LEHRER: Obgleich ich Rechenlehrer bin, / kann ich dieses mathematische Rätsel nicht lösen — Michael geht vorbei. KNABE für sich: Gestern hätte ich dir den Stein nachgesandt, / er wäre wohl dort, neben der Dunggrube niedergefallen, / nachdem er zwei Füße mit zum Fallen gebracht hätte; / heute bleibt er in meiner Hand [...]” (Leiden Israels, p. 59).

124 Jennifer M. Hoyer

He was not originally to have that letter on that day, but owing to a long list of chance occurrences, among them a neighbor who came to fetch onions from the soldier’s mother, he did, and therefore “Blessed be all onions! — / and she was given an onion / and took the letter to the post / and the soldier got it on that morning / and did not get intoxicated like the others — / and saw the blinking of my eyes” (O the Chimneys, p. 359–360; Leiden Israels, pp. 45–46). When life and death are dependent on such arbitrary and whimsical matters, how is one to trust, let alone seek justice in Kleist’s breakable, fragile world,25 which Sachs, it seems, echoes when she writes: “alles ist zerbrechlich auf Erden” (Leiden Israels, p. 53; Everything is fragile on earth; O the Chimneys, p. 368)?

V. “Justice, Justice shall you pursue”26 The search for justice is the crux where Sachs’ play and Kleist’s story make the most interesting comparison. Central to the ethical and legal problems in Kohlhaas is the continual presence of the Christian exhortation toward forgiveness. As Lisbeth lies on her deathbed she takes the Lutheran bible from Kohlhaas and “turned page after page, apparently looking for a passage; then her forefinger pointed out this verse to Kohlhaas, who was sitting at

24

25

26

O the Chimneys, pp. 359–360. “Der Soldat, / der die Erde über uns zuschüttete / und uns begrub — / gesegnet sei er — / er sah bei der Laterne Schein, / denn es war Nacht, / daß sie mich nicht genug geschlagen hatten, / und daß sich meine Augen öffneten, / und er holte mich heraus / und verbarg mich — […] Es hatte der Soldat — / dies sagte er mir später — / am gleichen Morgen einen Brief von seiner Mutter bekommen. / Gesegnet sei sie! / Darum war er nicht berauscht wie die andern / und sah das Zwinkern meiner Augen. / Die Mutter schrieb: / ‘Diesen Brief wollte ich eigentlich zu den Strümpfen legen, / den selbstgestrickten. / Aber die Sehnsucht ließ mir keine Ruhe —’ / gesegnet sei sie! / ‘Und ich schreibe schon heute / und warte nicht, bis sie fertig sind.’ […] Aber es war nicht so, / daß sie den Brief gleich einstecken konnte, / denn sie wurde krank über Nacht. / Da kam eine Nachbarin — / gesegnet sei sie! — / fragte nach dem Ergehn — / aber eigentlich wollte sie nur eine Zwiebel haben — / eine kleine Zwiebel für die Kartoffeln, / denn zu Ende waren ihre eigenen. / O, daß sie Kartoffeln aß / und keine Rüben — / Gesegnet seien alle Zwiebeln! — / Und sie erhielt eine Zwiebel / Und nahm den Brief zur Post / Und der Soldat erhielt ihn an jenem Morgen, / Und berauschte sich nicht wie die andern — / Und sah das Zwinkern meiner Augen” (Leiden Israels, pp. 45–46). See Dyer, pp. 110–111, and also John Gearey, Heinrich von Kleist: A Study in Tragedy and Anxiety (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968). See also Criterion, p. 94; SW 2, p. 15. Deuteronomy 16:20. Robert Alter, The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary (New York: Norton, 2004), p. 962.

Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas and Nelly Sachs’ Eli 125

her bedside: ‘Forgive your enemies; do good to them that hate you.’”27 She gives him a meaningful, soulful look and then expires. Luther himself admonishes Kohlhaas for taking the matter into his own hands, suggesting that this is a matter for the prince, and ultimately God. This brand of forgiveness is an idea that has no sensible place in Judaism. Rabbi Joseph Telushkin illustrates this difference in a most extreme example: Bishop Desmond Tutu’s visit to Jerusalem in 1989, during which he, according to Telushkin, “told his Israeli hosts that the time had come for Jews to forgive the Nazis for the murder of six million Jews.”28 Telushkin goes on to remark that: Almost all Jews found Tutu’s advice offensive. For one thing, Jewish tradition would consider it immoral for Jews to forgive murderers for acts committed against people other than themselves. Also, it would be unjust for murderers of men, women, and children to go on living unpunished. That Tutu believed that mass murderers should be left unpunished and unmolested struck most Jews as quintessentially unjust — and hence, un-Jewish.29

Generalizations notwithstanding, Jewish ethical tradition prescribes Nächstenliebe, love for one’s neighbor, but it also strictly prescribes consistent justice for wrongdoing, even if it is a case of confronting God himself for unjust behavior. Eli is set in a Jewish context meant to emphasize Jewish traditions and problems. Jewish ethics reject the idea of Christian forgiveness because it is unjust, and indeed this is embodied in Michael as one of the 36 Tzaddikim:

27

28

29

Criterion, p. 110. “[...] blätterte und blätterte, und schien etwas darin zu suchen; und zeigte dem Kohlhaas, der an ihrem Bette saß, mit dem Zeigefinger, den Vers: ‘Vergib deinen Feinden; tue wohl auch denen, die dich hassen’” (SW 2, p. 30). Joseph Telushkin, Jewish Literacy: The Most Important Things to Know About the Jewish Religion, Its People, and Its History (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1991), p. 499. Subsequent citations as “Telushkin” with page number(s). Telushkin, pp. 499–500. See also Rabbi Hayim Halevy Donin, To Be a Jew: A Guide to Jewish Observance in Contemporary Life (New York: Harper Collins, 1991 [1972]), pp. 57– 58. In the section on “Acts of Justice,” Rabbi Donin points out that it is forbidden to strike another “beyond punishment inflicted by a court of law.” He goes on: “But if one is a victim of attack or sees another so victimized and he cannot save either himself or his friend from the attacker unless he strikes the attacker, it is permissible to strike him.” There are, then, just acts of violence.

126 Jennifer M. Hoyer The Torah’s emphasis on justice has deeply affected subsequent Jewish legislation. For example, the English word “charity” comes from the Latin caritas, meaning “from the heart” and implying a voluntary act. The word for charity in Hebrew is tzedaka, which is simply the feminine form of the Hebrew word for justice, tzedek. In Jewish law, one who does not give charity is not just uncharitable, but unjust as well. Thus, Jewish courts had no compunctions about compelling people of means to give tzedaka. Jews have frequently been accused of supporting revenge in the name of justice. (Telushkin, p. 499)

There can be no Martin Luther advocating forgiveness and condemning revenge, no Lisbeth directing her husband in her last moments to forgive his enemies and do good to those who hate him. Kohlhaas rejects this idea because the injustices done him — and indeed the community at large — are too great to let lie, and thinks to himself, immediately after Lisbeth’s death, “May God never forgive me the way I forgive the Junker!”30 In other words, Kohlhaas intends to give the Junker von Tronka exactly what he feels is a just punishment for all the wrong he has done and injury he has caused, and he hopes God’s forgiveness is not of the same sort. As it turns out in Eli, God’s forgiveness is very much like Kohlhaas’ idea of forgiveness. In Sachs’ play, God forgives the murderer as Kohlhaas will forgive the perpetrator. It is not Michael’s job, as a secret bearer of justice, to forgive in the Christian sense; it is his job to find the guilty party and bring him to justice — in this case, death. Implicit in the role of the Tzaddik-cobbler, especially according to the villager chorus, and implicit in the word “tzedek” itself, is the restoration of balance, through appropriate (that is, fitting, balancing) punishment. Pragmatically speaking, someone must stand up for the good of future generations, especially where the government has failed to do so, even if Luther cannot envision such an eventuality: “Cast out of society!” exclaimed Luther, staring at him [Kohlhaas]. “What kind of crazy ideas have got hold of you? How could anyone cast you out of the community of the state in which you live? Where, indeed, as long as states have existed has there ever been a case of anybody, no matter who, being cast out of society [the state]?”31

30 31

Criterion, p. 110. “[...] so möge mir Gott nie vergeben, wie ich dem Junker vergebe!” (SW 2, p. 30). Criterion, p. 125. I have added “the state” in brackets to the translation where it reads “society,” since it is clear that Luther means the STATE. “Verstoßen! rief Luther, indem er ihn [Kohlhaas] ansah. Welch eine Raserei der Gedanken ergriff dich? Wer hätte dich aus der Gemeinschaft des Staats, in welchem du lebtest, verstoßen? Ja, wo ist, so lange Staaten bestehen, ein Fall, daß jemand, wer es auch sei, daraus verstoßen worden wäre?” (SW 2, p. 45).

Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas and Nelly Sachs’ Eli 127

Sachs’ play depicts the “Legend made of truth” that answers Luther’s question. Kohlhaas makes clear what he means in a statement that applies, without reservation or change, to the Jewish victims of the Nazi regime: “‘I call that man an outcast,’ Kohlhaas said, clenching his fist, ‘who is denied the protection of the laws!’”32 As of 1935 Jews began to lose their place in society, and finally their citizenship; stateless during the war, they then became displaced persons afterwards. They are entirely cast out in the sense Kohlhaas defines, and indeed even feel that they are no longer under the protection of God; the only other thing they are subject to — and this applies to Jews and gentiles in the play — is their own prison of memories, be they of trauma, guilt, or both. The villagers hope for the end of the moment “da Er uns verlassen” (Leiden Israels, p. 33; when He forsook us; O the Chimneys, p. 344), and both gentiles and Jews are haunted by footsteps and voices, both alive and dead at once; they are pursued by the sound of chattering teeth and blades of grass made of fingers. In Michael Kohlhaas, it is the character of Kohlhaas that causes incredulity; in Eli, it is the world. Kleist’s Martin Luther finds Kohlhaas’ actions reprehensible, but not incomprehensible; incomprehensible is a case of anyone — whoever it may be — being cast out of the state, by the state, without just cause. Sachs’ play depicts precisely this unthinkable case, and suggests the question, how can there be justice or reconciliation for something so incomprehensible?

VI. A Work of Reconciliation? In the end, the main characters in Kohlhaas are brought to some form of justice, rechtschaffen (just) and entsetzlich (terrible): Kohlhaas’ horses have been returned, and his progeny are elevated and go on to live well; Kohlhaas himself is executed for crimes against the peace of the empire, but not before he has punished the Elector of Saxony by swallowing a piece of paper on which the Elector’s fate has been recorded. For all the harm they have caused, Kohlhaas’ actions have led to some element of restitution for the community at large. In the final scene of Eli, Michael comes across the soldier he has been seeking, and as he turns to look upon him, the soldier begins to crumble to dust, crying: “If he hadn’t thrown his head back / I shouldn’t have struck him down […] But — that was contrary to Order —

32

Criterion, p. 125. “Verstoßen, antwortete Kohlhaas, indem er die Hand zusammendrückte, nenne ich den, dem der Schutz der Gesetze versagt ist!” (SW 2, p. 45).

128 Jennifer M. Hoyer

/ to throw the head back — / that had to be corrected.”33 He casts his own action as an action of balance, consistent with the law (which we know from scene fourteen is completely arbitrary). The man’s feet crumble as he begs “Help, shoemaker, / the milk-tooth is growing out of the earth — / beginning to gnaw at me — / right through my shoe.”34 Michael does not help him. The perpetrator shrieks as he disappears: “Where’s the Order in all this, the World Order — […] It’s a mistake, a mistake, / I’m crumbling, crumbling — / I’m a stump — / sitting on the sand / that a moment ago was my flesh —”35 As he stands watching, Michael, too, disappears into the ether, illuminated by a “primal light.”36 So ends the play, with no exposition and no further commentary. Because Michael stands and watches as the man crumbles, acknowledging his demise and not answering his pleas for help, audiences might read this as a moment of revenge; on the other hand, because Michael simply stands and watches as the earth eats the man, audiences might understand this as suggesting that human beings are absolved of pursuing justice, since either the earth or a divine power will perform this task for them. There is nothing said about how this act of retribution will reconcile Jews with Germans, or indeed anyone with anyone else. If Michael Kohlhaas examines the meaning of justice and revenge through Kohlhaas’ increasingly extreme behavior, Eli ponders the meaning of justice and reconciliation in a world previously considered unthinkable. Kleist seems to have fulfilled the need of his time for bolstering the individual; Sachs’ audience, however, had somewhat different needs. Most of Europe was already completely destroyed, and heroics were of little consequence, as everyone in the play has fought and lost, their heroic sacrifices had turned out to be meaningless. The ambiguity of revenge, retribution, and justice is still resonant for Eli, but the identity of the protagonist has been shored up. He is not only the angel of justice, laden with a series of metaphorical cues that mark him as any number of avenging and Godly figures; he has also been given the specifically Jewish-mystical role of one of the 36 Tzaddikim. This suggests that Kleist’s Kohlhaas is obsolete in the postwar landscape, because the injustices of the mid-twentieth century far 33

34

35

36

Criterion, p, 382. “Wenn er den Kopf nicht nach hinten geworfen hätte, / so hätte ich ihn nicht erschlagen, [...] Aber — das war gegen die Ordnung — / den Kopf nach hinten zu werfen — / das mußte zurechtgerückt werden” (Leiden Israels, p. 65). O the Chimneys, p. 383. “Hilfe, Schuhmacher, / der Milchzahn wächst aus der Erde — / beginnt mich anzuknabbern — / durch meine Schuhe hindurch —” (Leiden Israels, p. 66). O the Chimneys, p. 383. “Wo ist da die Ordnung, die Weltordnung — […] Es ist ein Irrtum, ein Irrtum, / ich zerfalle, zerfalle — / Ich bin ein Stumpf — / sitze auf dem Sand, / der soeben noch mein Fleisch war —” (Leiden Israels, p. 66). O the Chimneys, p. 383; Leiden Israels, p. 67.

Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas and Nelly Sachs’ Eli 129

outstrip him; it can also be read as a barbed comment for postwar audiences. Sachs was notoriously oblique on her religious beliefs, so the presence of God may or may not reflect her own understanding of the universe; but whereas in Kleist’s world, it was possible to inspire the oppressed individual for the rights of man, the postwar audience sought absolution from the task of finding their own justice, or another absolute power to dispense it. The search for a clear, unambiguous message of reconciliation with Germans or revenge is also indicative of this need, and Nelly Sachs routinely refused to indulge it. Michael’s quest may be divine justice, but, as Naumann suggests, it requires a human to carry it out. The ambiguities of the play, cast in a surreal but not entirely fictitious setting, require the audience to face the abyss, confront the unthinkable, and seek — not pursue, but first seek, as it is surely not easily determined — justice. Only then can any future reconciliation, in any sense of the word, be possible. The plausible conclusions are both terrible and just, all at the same time. University of Arkansas

Markus Wilczek The Puppet Inside: Reading Stuffing in Heiner Müller’s Kleist Was Kleist, in reality, a puppet? This is the surprising question that arises from Heiner Müller’s mime “HEINRICH VON KLEIST SPIELT MICHAEL KOHLHAAS,” conceived in 1976 as part of the play, LEBEN GUNDLINGS FRIEDRICH VON PREUSSEN LESSINGS SCHLAF TRAUM SCHREI. The text first stages Heinrich von Kleist as the master of puppets who manipulates a number of puppets and props related to Michael Kohlhaas (1810) — for instance, a Horse-Puppet and an Executioner’s Block. While Kleist’s position as an autonomous author-subject seems to be secure in these images, in a final plot twist, Kleist opens his artery and sawdust trickles out. This final act of self-destruction blurs the distinction between the artistic agent and his creation. Kleist, it seems, is just another puppet in yet another play. By exposing the puppet-like interiority of Kleist’s body, Müller’s piece offers a shrewd commentary on the making and unmaking of legacies. By focusing on the materiality of the body rather than sophisticated ideas of what Kleist might stand for, the text probes the potential of the body to resist political appropriations.

I. Reading Stuffing Was Heinrich von Kleist in fact a puppet? Though the question may sound odd, Heiner Müller’s 1976 mime, “HEINRICH VON KLEIST SPIELT MICHAEL KOHLHAAS” (Heinrich von Kleist Plays Michael Kohlhaas) — the penultimate image of the play, LEBEN GUNDLINGS FRIEDRICH VON PREUSSEN LESSINGS SCHLAF TRAUM SCHREI (Gundling’s Life Frederick of Prussia Lessing’s Sleep Dream Scream) — appears to suggest precisely that.1 Müller engages with Kleist’s work and life

1

This article does not attempt to comprehensively analyze LEBEN GUNDLINGS. For an interpretation of the play in its entirety, see the recent anthology of essays and material, Sire, das war ich. Leben Gundlings Friedrich von Preussen Lessings Schlaf Traum Schrei. Heiner Müller Werkbuch, ed. by Wolfgang Storch and Klaudia Ruschkowski (Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2007). Subsequent citations as “Storch and Ruschkowski” with page number(s). LEBEN GUNDLINGS has been read as Müller’s engagement with the Prussian state, and in particular with the relations between intellectuals and Prussian state authority. In this regard, Kleist — who according to Müller’s stage directions should be played by the same actor who plays Friedrich and Lessing — is taken as a case study about the struggle between intellectuals and state authority in Prussia. This study shifts the emphasis away from seeing Kleist as just another varia-

132 Markus Wilczek

numerous times throughout his career, but it is in this scene that he develops his most daring ideas not just about the meaning of Kleist’s artistic legacy, but also about the nature of artistic production and the interpretation of art in general. The following study will therefore focus on this instance of Müller’s engagement with Kleist and refer to other moments of this engagement only when they shed light on this scene.2 Since the text is relatively short, and as small details of its diction will prove significant, the full quote is provided, both in translation and in German: HEINRICH VON KLEIST SPIELT MICHAEL KOHLHAAS Verkommenes Ufer (See bei Straußberg). Kleist, in Uniform. Kleistpuppe. Frauenpuppe. Pferdepuppe. Richtblock. Kleist berührt Gesicht Brust Hände Geschlecht der Kleistpuppe. Streichelt küßt umarmt die Frauenpuppe. Schlägt mit dem Degen der Pferdepuppe den Kopf ab. Reißt der Frauenpuppe das Herz heraus und ißt es. Reißt sich die Uniform vom Leib, schnürt den Kopf der Kleistpuppe in die Uniformjacke, setzt den Pferdekopf auf, zerhackt mit dem Degen die Kleistpuppe: Rosen und Därme quellen heraus. Wirft den Pferdekopf ab, setzt die Perücke (fußlanges Haar) der Frauenpuppe auf, zerbricht den Degen überm Knie, geht zum Richtblock. Nimmt die Perücke ab, breitet das Frauenhaar über den Richtblock, beißt sich eine Pulsader auf, hält den Arm, aus dem Sägemehl rieselt, über das Frauenhaar auf dem Richtblock. Vom Schnürboden wird ein graues Tuch über die Szene geworfen, auf dem ein roter Fleck sich schnell ausbreitet.3

2

3

tion in this very particular historical context, and proposes to read the scene as a comment on Kleist’s peculiarly modern approach to artistic production. For a broader overview of Müller’s engagement with Kleist, see Hans-Christian Stillmark, “Zur Kleist-Rezeption Heiner Müllers,” Kleist-Jahrbuch (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1991), pp. 72–81; Jonathan Kalb, “Müller as Kleist,” in The Theater of Heiner Müller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 44–56. Subsequent citations as “Kalb” with page number(s); Monika Meister, “Zu Heiner Müllers Kleist-Lektüre,” in Der Text ist der Coyote. Heiner Müller Bestandsaufnahme, ed. by Christian Schulte and Brigitte Maria Mayer (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004), pp. 177–189. Subsequent citations as “Meister” with page number(s); and Hans-Thies Lehmann, “Kleist /Versionen,” in Das politische Schreiben. Essays zu Theatertexten (Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2002), pp. 154–170. These studies provide useful surveys of the different Kleist allusions and sources that can be found in Müller’s texts, and meditate on the general nature of Müller’s approach to Kleist. Heiner Müller, LEBEN GUNDLINGS FRIEDRICH VON PREUSSEN LESSINGS SCHLAF TRAUM SCHREI, in Werke, vol. 4 (Die Stücke 2), ed. by Frank Hörnigk et. al., (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001), p. 532. Subsequent citations as “Müller, Werke” with volume and page number(s).

Reading Stuffing in Heiner Müller’s Kleist 133 HEINRICH VON KLEIST PLAYS MICHAEL KOHLHAAS Despoiled shore (lake near Straußberg). Kleist in uniform. Kleist-Puppet. Woman-Puppet. Horse-Puppet. Executioner’s block. Kleist touches the face breast hands genitals of the Kleist-Puppet. Caresses kisses embraces the Woman-Puppet. Cuts the head off the Horse-Puppet with his sword. Tears the heart out of the Woman-Puppet and eats it. Tears the uniform off his body, laces up the head of the Kleist-Puppet in the uniform jacket, sets the horse-head on top, slashes at the Kleist-Puppet with the sword: roses and guts gush out. Throws aside the horse-head, sets the wig (with footlength hair) from the Woman-Puppet on top, breaks the sword over his knee, goes to the executioner’s block. Takes the wig off, spreads the woman’s hair over the executioner’s block, bites open one of his veins, holds his arm, out of which sawdust trickles, over the woman’s hair on the executioner’s block. From the flies a gray cloth is thrown over the scene, on which a red spot quickly spreads.4

Working with elements both from Kleist’s biography and textual universe, Müller’s text reads like a highly peculiar version of a bio-bibliographical sketch. On stage, the spectator finds Heinrich von Kleist (the man) accompanied by three puppets: one in Kleist’s image — the “Kleist-Puppet” (Kleistpuppe) — and two that evoke the discourse of his work, namely the “Woman-Puppet” (Frauenpuppe) and the “Horse-Puppet” (Pferdepuppe).5 In a complicated choreography that simultaneously juxtaposes and conjoins acts of tenderness and destruction, Kleist the man dismembers the various puppets and uses parts of the destroyed puppets as props or accessories before he turns the violence against himself. Initially, this account confirms what one commonly might expect from the behavior of humans and puppets: the human being, Kleist, acts like the puppeteer who does whatever he wants with the puppets, which, in turn, remain entirely passive. Kleist is, as it were, the author-subject who is in control of the situation, and who engages in seemingly random acts of violence with the puppets at his disposal. Finally, however, things become more 4

5

This translation follows Jonathan’s rendering of the text in Kalb (p. 48). The only slight modification is that, like in the German original, I have set the text in italics — a seemingly minor detail that is nonetheless important because it sets the segment apart from the direct speech of the drama. Note also that the English translation introduces two possessive pronouns (“his knee,” “his veins”) that are absent from the originnal German. Unless otherwise indicated, all other translations are mine. To be sure, these references do not necessarily point to a specific text, but evoke a Kleistian discourse. Given the heading of the segment, the Horse-Puppet seems to point in a straightforward fashion to Michael Kohlhaas, but the Woman-Puppet could refer to many of Kleist’s female characters. The presence of puppets on stage alludes to Kleist’s essay “Über das Marionettentheater” (1810), even though there is, of course, a significant difference between puppets (Puppen) and puppets-on-a-string (Marionetten). Rather than assuming a one-to-one relation between an object on stage and an object in Kleist’s work, one needs to focus on the relations between the objects to understand Müller’s engagement with Kleist.

134 Markus Wilczek

complicated when he turns the violence against himself. Recall the last two sentences: “Takes off the wig, spreads the female hair over the execution site, bites open an artery, holds the arm, from which sawdust trickles, over the female hair on the execution site. On a gray cloth, which is thrown from the flies over the stage, a red spot quickly spreads.” What we witness in this scene is a double inversion: surprisingly, Kleist’s body loses sawdust instead of blood — an indication that Kleist is made of the same material as the puppets, and that Kleist is not essentially different from the puppets that he has just destroyed, after all. Yet, as soon as the gray cloth conceals the scene, the spreading red spot seems to indicate that Kleist is actually losing blood like a human being — though, it is important to note, the text refrains from using the word “blood” in reference to the substance that is spreading on the cloth. The question, then, is not simply whether Müller’s Kleist might be a puppet or a human being, but first and foremost: what is the stuff that Kleist is made of? Sawdust or blood? This question is addressed in the following in a reading of stuffing, a metaphor that allows the reader to conceive of a character’s interiority not necessarily as something deep or metaphysical, but as something just as material as exterior surfaces. Müller’s staging of the interaction between Kleist and the puppets subverts the dichotomy of interiority and exteriority. This subversion carries far-reaching consequences for the ways in which we understand artistic production and the interpretation of art. One can read this scene as a poetological commentary that promotes a model of reading beyond hermeneutic meaning production. Indeed, rather than focusing on the revelation of an inner truth, Müller’s text exposes a model of reading that is guided by the external properties of sights and sounds.

II. Of Puppets and Men To be sure, the scene from LEBEN GUNDLINGS is not the only one in Müller’s work that blurs the boundaries between humans and puppets. The uncertainty as to whether we are encountering a human being or a puppet also figures prominently in, for example, Nachtstück (Night Piece) in Germania Tod in Berlin (Germania Death in Berlin, 1956/1971). In this text, a “man” is introduced as “larger than life, maybe a puppet,” and throughout the relatively short text, he is designated no fewer than five times as “a man who may be a puppet.”6 That the “man who may be a puppet” is subjected to 6

Heiner Müller, Germania Death in Berlin, in Explosion of a Memory, ed. and trans. by Carl Weber (New York: PAJ Publications, 1989), pp. 82f. Instead of “dummy,” I chose “puppet” as translation for Müller’s “Puppe,” since the former suggests a unidi-

Reading Stuffing in Heiner Müller’s Kleist 135

violent dismemberment hints at a very pragmatic reason for the probable use of puppets instead of human actors in this scene as well as in the one from LEBEN GUNDLINGS: using puppets allows the author to devise scenes featuring extreme acts of violence that human actors could not possibly perform. From this perspective, the puppet would function as a standin or a dummy for the human actor. Taking his cue from Walter Benjamin’s comments on the presence of puppets in the baroque Trauerspiel (mourning play), Rainer Nägele suggests that, beyond these pragmatic considerations, the application of puppets calls the very divide between the human body and puppets into question: “Does the puppet represent the body, or does the body represent the puppet? If the representation can move in both directions, the simple opposition of autonomous interiority and marionettelike unfreedom collapses.”7 The puppet does not simply stand in as a dummy for the human body, but rather the human being becomes, as it were, a dummy for the puppet. Ultimately, however, in such a binary model of twoway substitution, the distinction between puppets and human beings is still upheld. The present reading proposes that Müller’s text operates not only with a model of two-way substitution, but with a model of circulation that connects the realms of puppets and humans in such a fashion that they become indistinguishable. Poetologically speaking, this means that the puppeteer as author-subject cedes his privileged position over the process of creation and becomes just one part among many in the process of artistic production. In an interview from 1990 — the same year he was awarded the Kleist-Preis — Heiner Müller emphasizes how this leveling of the field on which playwright and play operate marks the advent of modern theater: “Brecht was able to keep his distance and was the puppet master who moved his puppets. This is not possible any more. Now, one is a puppet oneself and is moved oneself, even by one’s own figures.”8 Even before Kleist mutilates himself, thereby exposing the sawdust, the boundaries between that which is human and the realm of puppets are less than clear-cut. Consider that Kleist, having caressed the Woman-Puppet just a moment ago, rips the heart from the Woman-Puppet in order to consume it: “Tears the heart out of the Woman-Puppet and eats it.” Not only does

7

8

rectional vector of representation between “man” and “dummy.” Heiner Müller, GERMANIA TOD IN BERLIN (Müller, Werke 4, pp. 372 f.). Rainer Nägele, “Puppet Play and Trauerspiel,” in Theater, Theory, Speculation. Walter Benjamin and the Scenes of Modernity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), pp. 1–27 (p. 6). Subsequent citations as “Nägele” with page number(s). Heiner Müller, “Kein Text ist gegen Theater gefeit” (Müller, Werke 11, pp. 565–586, p. 568). The German reads: “Der Brecht konnte sich noch heraushalten und war der Puppenspieler, der seine Puppen bewegt. Das geht nicht mehr. Man ist jetzt selbst eine Puppe und wird bewegt, sogar von den eigenen Figuren.”

136 Markus Wilczek

the Woman-Puppet possess a heart — an organ commonly understood as the privileged metaphorical site of human emotion and interiority — but the heart is transplanted from the puppet’s interiority into that of Kleist’s: the organ of the puppet begins to circulate, transcending the boundaries between human and puppet as it enters Kleist’s metabolism.9 In this case, Kleist the man is not simply employing the heart as a prop, but interiorizes it by digestion without ever ejecting it again. By contrast, Kleist takes up some of the members or parts of the destroyed puppets and wears or uses them temporarily, plugging them into his body and unplugging them again. In particular, he wears the head of the Horse-Puppet and the wig of the Woman-Puppet — two actions clearly exposed as parallels in the text through the repetition of the wording “setzt […] auf” (puts on) and the only slightly varied gesture of “wirft […] ab” and “nimmt […] ab” (throws off and takes off). While Kleist does not interiorize these parts, he is certainly acting out a particular identity that is associated with these props: crossdressing between the male and female gender as well as between the species of humans and puppets. In doing so, Kleist performs a Denkfigur (thought gesture) that, as Müller points out, became quite important for his texts in the 1970’s: the process of “becoming-woman” or “becoming-animal.” In his autobiography, Krieg ohne Schlacht (War without Battle, 1992), Müller even goes so far as to equate art itself with this very process: “Art may also be an attempt at becoming-animal in the sense of Deleuze’s and Guattari’s book on Kafka.”10 It is true that the adaptation of this concept through Müller’s 9

10

As Ole M. Høystad, A History of the Heart (London: Reaktion Books, 2007), p. 33, highlights, “the coincidence of heart and soul” is far from self-evident. It is only with Aristotle and Galen that the view of the heart as central to the human organism and as the closest approximation to the soul in matter becomes the predominant tradition in Western culture (Høystad, A History of the Heart, pp. 52–55) — a tradition that comes to a head in German literary history with the insistence of Goethe’s Werther on the incommunicability of his heart. A number of Müller’s texts make it a point to call attention to the materiality of the heart in order to subvert precisely the Wertherian notion that this organ escapes the depths of physicality. Cf., for instance, Heiner Müller, “Heartpiece,” Hamletmachine and Other Texts for the Stage, ed. and trans. by Carl Weber (New York: PAJ Publications, 1984), p. 121; or the second and third tableaus of Hamletmachine, in Hamletmachine and Other Texts for the Stage, pp. 54–55, which feature a number of elements that are reminiscent of our text: the potential desire to eat someone’s heart, arteries that have been opened, and clothes that have been torn. For the German, see “Herzstück” (Müller, Werke 5, pp. 67–69) and Hamletmaschine (Müller, Werke 4, pp. 547–549). Subsequent citations of Hamletmaschine in English as “Texts for the Stage” with page number(s). “Kunst ist vielleicht auch ein Versuch der Tierwerdung im Sinne von Deleuzes und Guattaris Buch über Kafka.” Heiner Müller, Krieg ohne Schlacht. Leben in zwei Diktaturen. Eine Autobiographie (Müller, Werke 9, pp. 247).

Reading Stuffing in Heiner Müller’s Kleist 137

Kleist does not squarely follow the logic of the concept as put forward in this book — most importantly, Kleist remains a single and unique character on stage (with his equally single and unique mirror-puppet), whereas Deleuze and Guattari stress that the process of becoming-animal generates a multiplying effect.11 Yet, both in Müller and in A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze and Guattari, the main significance of the process of becoming-animal rests in its function to open up “a line of escape” that enables an individual to break out of the logic of filiation: rather than evolutionary, “becoming is involutionary, involution is creative” (A Thousand Plateaus, p. 238). Deleuze and Guattari go on to claim that “becoming-animal” is not about “resemblance” but rather “proliferation” or “process,” indeed that “[w]hat is real [in the act of becoming-animal] is the becoming itself” (A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 233 and 238). For Müller’s Kleist, the process of becoming-animal thus offers a way to transgress the boundaries of his identity without appropriating a new one. We will return to the significance of becoming in the last segment of this article. As random as Kleist’s acts seem at first sight, it is important to note that these appropriations of body parts and accessories follow a strict logic. While Kleist readily appropriates parts of the Woman-Puppet and the Horse-Puppet — as we saw, he eats the Woman-Puppet’s heart and wears the head of the Horse-Puppet as well as the Woman-Puppet’s wig — he does not connect the parts of the Kleist-Puppet to his body. Neither does he consume the roses and intestines that spill out of the Kleist-Puppet, nor does he put on the head of the Kleist-Puppet. Without hesitation, Kleist takes on props — and by extension, identities — from the two other puppets, but he insists on not mixing his body with parts of the puppet that is made in his image. Rather than plugging these parts into his body, he even takes care to conceal them in accessories that ordinarily would conceal his own body. The circulation of props comes to an end when Kleist, before he bites open his artery, restores his original identity — or one should perhaps rather say: default identity — by taking off the Woman-Puppet’s wig. The final act of self-destruction is preceded by an ostensible restoration of the purity of the self. 11

In their book on Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari imply this multiplying effect in the notion of “becoming-molecular.” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka. Toward a Minor Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 37. However, it is only in A Thousand Plateaus that they fully unfold the connection between becoming-animal and multiplicity. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. 239f. Subsequent citations as “A Thousand Plateaus” with page number(s). It would be a promising undertaking to conduct a study that investigates Müller’s engagement with Deleuze and Guattari more comprehensively.

138 Markus Wilczek

III. Inside the Puppet Is Outside the Puppet After this first glance at the text, one could describe the actions on stage as a circulation of exchanges that transforms the matter of puppets into human matter, and vice versa. In fact, the scene consists exclusively of the physical actions of material bodies, and not a single word is spoken in “HEINRICH VON KLEIST SPIELT MICHAEL KOHLHAAS.” It appears as though the focus of the scene rests on physical actions alone, and that linguistic expression — a commonplace of interpreting modern theater — is relegated, if not cancelled out entirely. Nonetheless, I would like to suggest taking a closer look at the linguistic expression that is present in the stage directions, and reading the directions not only as a negligible means to an end (i.e., as if they were just as a paratext to be effaced by the actual action on stage), but as a text in its own right. After all, these directions, however technical they may appear, offer the only point of access to the text. This critical maneuver presupposes, of course, that one not dogmatically pit performance-based analysis (theater) against text-based analysis (drama), and instead acknowledge that, insofar as they complement each other, the text of the stage directions allows us to see what cannot be performed on stage, while only the actions on stage bring the text to life.12 Even though, as mentioned above, the activity on stage remains unspoken and places emphasis on the physicality of the action, the stage directions suggest a different approach to the theme of interiority and exteriority. How does the text of the stage directions manage to establish some kind of interiority, given the immense physicality of the scene? To be sure, the tone of the directions is fairly matter-of-fact, refraining from any kind of psychologizing, but rather describing physical actions. Interiority is not established 12

In recent years, “theater” and the “body” have often been played out against “drama” and the “text.” While the importance of recalling the actual theatrical dimension to an often text-centered criticism is undeniable, the impetus with which the return of the theater has been celebrated unfortunately helped to perpetuate a dichotomy between drama and theater that is as narrow-minded as an exclusive focus on drama as text. Rather than furthering the strange division of labor between performance and drama analysis, drama and theater can be considered alongside each other. Stage directions in particular operate on what one could call the threshold between “text” and “performance” and warrant a comprehensive approach. Two recent studies on stage directions employ such an approach: Anke Detken, Im Nebenraum des Textes. Regiebemerkungen in Dramen des 18. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2009), and Annette Storr, Regieanweisungen. Beobachtungen zum allmählichen Verschwinden dramatischer Figuren (Berlin: Parados, 2009), pp. 164ff. Ironically, it is the text-centered approach to drama analysis that proves quite indifferent towards stage directions as it deems them to be nothing but “technische Hilfen für eine Aufführung und nicht als Bestandteil der Dichtung selbst” (cf. Peter Küp quoted in Detken, Im Nebenraum, p. 4).

Reading Stuffing in Heiner Müller’s Kleist 139

in the manner typical of stage directions in, for instance, German Naturalism — neither does Müller’s text employ verba cognoscendi nor does it insert any spatio-temporal qualifications that would go beyond that which is discernible from the stage action.13 The objectifying tone of Müller’s directions goes so far that even possessives are omitted completely: when Kleist bites open his artery, in the language of the text he bites open an artery (“beißt sich eine Pulsader auf”), and when the sawdust starts trickling, it trickles from the arm, not his arm (“hält den Arm, aus dem Sägemehl rieselt”). The language of the stage directions takes the perspective of a disinterested, detached camera that focuses on the surface of things, observing closely how Kleist acts on the puppets, but never opening a window into his interiority — or so it seems. For, on the linguistic level, there is one, innocent-looking, small word that opens up the room of interiority: the reflexive pronoun sich. Recall that the reflexive pronoun sich has a long history of usage and rejection in German philosophical discourse — even to the point of Friedrich Kittler’s bold declaration to simply not use sich any more, so as to rid language of all the metaphysical baggage and the assumption of interiority that this word carries.14 In a text that so ostentatiously avoids any interiorizing, let alone psychologizing gestures, the repeated use of sich clearly stands out. 13

14

Gerhart Hauptmann’s stage directions are commonly given as the prime example for Naturalism’s tendency to psychologize stage directions. For an overview of the conventional wisdom regarding stage directions, see Bernhard Asmuth, Einführung in die Dramenanalyse (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1980), p. 53; and Manfred Pfister, Das Drama. Theorie und Analyse (München: Fink, 1977), pp. 35ff. and 107. Kittler states in an interview: “[…] one fine day I simply forbid myself to use the word sich. […] The whole Adornism depended on the use or non-use of the word ‘sich,’ reflexive pronoun! Everything that Adorno is about writes itself with the reflexive pronoun, and when this is gone, one writes quite differently, and a certain idealism disappears. There is no more relation to oneself as the word sich is prohibited, just like when Heidegger says ‘an ihm selbst’ instead of ‘an sich selbst,’ which was an important example for me. Instead of reflection […] one put transitive relations to an outside instead of an inside. ‘Sich’ is always a relation to an inside and ‘ihm’ or ‘ihr’ one to an outside […]” (“[…] habe ich mir einfach eines schönen Tages verboten, das Wort sich zu benutzen. […] An dem Gebrauch oder Nicht-Gebrauch des Wortes ‘sich’, Reflexivpronomen, hing der ganze Adornismus! Alles, was an Adorno ist, schreibt sich eigentlich mit dem reflexiven Pronomen, und wenn das weg ist, schreibt man ganz anders, und ein bestimmter Idealismus verschwindet. Es gibt keine Beziehung mehr zu sich selbst, weil das Wort sich verboten ist, also wie wenn Heidegger sagt ‘an ihm selbst’, anstatt ‘an sich selbst’, was ein wichtiges Beispiel für mich war. Anstelle der Refelexion […] setzte man transitive Beziehungen nach draussen statt nach innen. ‘Sich’ ist immer eine Beziehung nach innen und ‘ihm’ oder ‘ihr’ eine nach aussen […]”). Friedrich Kittler and Stefan Banz, Platz der Luftbrücke. Ein Gespräch, ed. by Iwan Wirth (Köln: Oktagon, 1996), pp. 44f. To be sure, Heidegger’s maneuver is actually a combination of reflexivity and anti-reflexivity.

140 Markus Wilczek

A search of the text produces only three instances of the reflexive pronoun sich: the phrases that read “Reißt sich die Uniform vom Leib” (Tears the uniform off his body) and “beißt sich eine Pulsader auf” (bites open one of his veins) as well as the very last phrase which, almost with a ring of Adornian word order, reads that “auf dem ein roter Fleck sich schnell ausbreitet” (on which a red spot quickly spreads). It is striking that the two occurrences of the sich take place precisely when Kleist has just injected something into his body — he has eaten the Woman-Puppet’s heart — and when he ejects something from his body, namely the sawdust. One could say that the two sich-phrases function like a frame, enclosing the integrity of Kleist’s body. Note also that the first sich is carefully introduced to the text through a repetition of the same verb: first, “Reißt der Frauenpuppe das Herz heraus und ißt es” (Tears the heart out of the Woman-Puppet and eats it), which is then followed immediately by “Reißt sich die Uniform vom Leib” (Tears the uniform off his body). As we know from earlier drafts of the text housed in the Heiner Müller Archiv, this passage originally read “Zieht die Uniform aus,” suggesting that Müller’s change to the more dramatic “Reißt sich die Uniform vom Leib,” was a conscious decision to highlight the re-petitive verb structure as well as the appearance of the reflexive pronoun.15 Significantly, with the move from “ausziehen” to “sich reißen,” the charged notion of “Leib” enters the text. In both instances, the action designated by the reflective sich attempts to remove obscuring surfaces and get closer to the interior: by getting rid of the uniform, Müller’s Kleist strips off the socially coded dress and exposes his “Leib” (body). In his second move, he attempts to penetrate even this surface, only to realize that the “Leib” — contrary to the implications of the term — does not conceal a soul.16 Rather, the assumed interiority and singularity turns out to be nothing but sawdust, material stuffing readily available to all puppet makers. The thrust of the reflective action indicated linguistically by sich penetrates the surfaces in search of an “inner,” yet always only exposes another surface layer. The two verbs that go together with the reflexive pronoun sich — “reißt sich” and “beißt sich” — rhyme uncannily. In addition, it should certainly make readers suspicious when a character named Kleist takes his own life by

15 16

See, for instance: “Die Zugangs- und Auslegungsart muß vielmehr dergestalt gewählt sein, daß dieses Seiende sich an ihm selbst von ihm selbst her zeigen kann.” Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2006), p. 16; my emphasis. The “harte Fügung” of “sich” and “an ihm” is quite typical (cf. p. 35). Heiner Müller Archiv 3394, facsimile in Storch and Ruschkowski, pp. 272f. Cf. the entries on “lemma” and “Leib,” Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1854–1960) vol. 12, pp. 580–594, in particular, p. 583.

Reading Stuffing in Heiner Müller’s Kleist 141

biting rather than using the sword, which he, after all, had at hand, and which would have proved a much more convenient weapon. Taking a life by wielding the sword — in this particular case, that of the Horse-Puppet and that of the Kleist-Puppet — is a household staple of “manly” stage death, and frankly less than original. But biting someone to death? The only precursor of such an act that comes to mind is, of course, Penthesilea — a character, as we know, who also delivers the rhyme pair “Küsse, Bisse” (kisses, bites), or, to quote in full: “So — it was a mistake. Kissing — biting, / that rhymes, and who loves from the heart, / may take the one for the other.”17 Furthermore, Penthesilea’s killing of Achilles is presented as an action of tearing apart, both in the teichoskopia (“She strikes, tearing the armor from his body / She sinks her teeth into his white breast”)18 and in Penthesilea’s own words — “I tore him apart” and “I really tore him apart? Speak!”19 With biting, kissing, and tearing apart, as well as the linguistic resemblance of two of these elements, all the elements are in place that govern the structure both of Müller’s scene and Kleist’s Penthesilea. To be sure, Müller’s scene rearranges these elements: while Penthesilea “reißt” Achilles’ armor “vom Leibe,” Müller’s Kleist “reißt sich” his own uniform “vom Leib.” While Penthesilea rhymes “Küsse, Bisse” and introduces the verb “zerreißen” as another way to describe her actions later, Müller’s stage directions rhyme “reißt” with “beißt,” after having shown Kleist kissing the Woman-Puppet earlier. It is true that it is not possible to simply map the texts onto each other, but this is exactly the point: Müller’s text treats and uses Kleist’s text, not so much as a semantic point of reference, but as the matrix for a certain structure. Müller’s text works with the grid of Kleist’s text, taking Kleist’s language in its materiality and rearranging it into a new scene. Just as, for Penthesilea, the signifier takes precedence over the signified, in Müller’s Kleist-scene the governing structure works by phonetic resemblances and displacements. Reading Müller’s text thus becomes an exercise that follows the practice of Penthesilea’s “misreadings.”

17

18 19

“So war es ein Versehen. Küsse, Bisse, / Das reimt sich, und wer recht von Herzen liebt, / Kann schon das eine für das andre greifen.” Heinrich von Kleist, Penthesilea, in Heinrich von Kleist, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. by Helmut Sembdner (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2001), vol. 1, p. 425. Subsequent citations as “SW” with volume and page number(s). “Sie schlägt, die Rüstung ihm vom Leibe reißend / Den Zahn schlägt sie in seine weiße Brust” (SW 1, p. 413). “Ich zerriß ihn” (SW 1, p. 425) and “Zerrissen wirklich? sprecht?” (SW 1, p. 425).

142 Markus Wilczek

IV. Poetic Blood But this is not yet the full story. As stated above, another moment of selfreflexivity occurs in the last sentence, when it is said that “ein roter Fleck sich schnell ausbreitet.” In this instance, the subject of the “sich schnell ausbreiten” is inanimate, but the sich suggests agency and functions as an anthropomorphizing indicator. And this seems to make sense, since finally — after the shock that Kleist may be a puppet — this last sentence appears to reassure the spectator that Kleist is human and made of flesh and blood — or at least the appearance of blood, since we observed earlier that the text never names the red substance “blood.” To better understand this strange reversal, it is helpful to keep in mind that we are dealing, here, with a special kind of blood. This is made very clear when, in an earlier draft of the text, Heiner Müller types beneath the title of the scene, just like a motto: “le sang d’un poete.”20 With this note, Müller opens up the question of the poet’s vital and artistic production in general, but more specifically alludes to Jean Cocteau’s first feature film, Le sang d’un poète (The Blood of a Poet, 1930). Given the surrealist quality of Cocteau’s film, it would be difficult to pinpoint any influences.21 Nonetheless, two correspondences are obvious: structurally, both Le sang d’un poète and LEBEN GUNDLINGS consist of a number of images that meditate on a theme rather than follow a consistent plot, and, thematically, both film and text problematize the act of artistic creation and the relationship of the artist to his art. One scene of particular interest is the first sequence of Cocteau’s film: it shows an artist who sketches a face, and after a short while, attempts to erase the mouth from the face. This attempt fails, as the mouth is transferred to the very hand that tried to erase it, and ultimately to a statue that is animate or animated by the mouth.22 Taken together, these elements — the circulation of a body part, the oscillation between animate and inanimate, as well as the protagonist’s interactions with the statue — evoke the actions of the Kleist character in Müller’s text. In this constellation, it becomes clear that what is at stake both

20 21 22

HMA 3394, facsimile in Storch and Ruschkowski, p. 272. Jonathan Kalb appears to be the only critic who picked up on the “surrealistic” quality of the scene, yet without further analyzing it. Cf. Kalb, p. 48. Jean Cocteau, Two Screenplays, trans. by Carol Martin-Sperry (London: Calder & Boyas, 1970), pp. 9–18. The entire film features images that inform Müller’s text — most importantly, perhaps, that of a poet committing suicide: “The blood spurts out of his temple, flows onto his body and turns into a red cloth that is draped around him. A laurel wreath appears on his head” (p. 35). As we will see, Müller will turn this scene of poetic apotheosis into one in which the artist disappears under the cloth completely.

Reading Stuffing in Heiner Müller’s Kleist 143

in Cocteau and Müller is the paradox of how the artist is able to create something that is separate from him, yet which continues his existence. In unfolding this paradox, Müller’s text works with and against Cocteau’s imagery. For Cocteau, there appears to be a seamless continuity between artist and creation when he comments, about the film, that he wanted to demonstrate that “poets […] shed not only the red blood of their hearts, but the white blood of their souls, that flows and leaves traces which can be followed” in order to create.23 In an uninterrupted flow between interiority and exteriority, the essence of the artist becomes the essence of the art. For Müller, however, there is no easy transitioning of one and the same substance from the artist to his creation. Instead, the poet’s blood in Müller’s scene is a highly unstable compound: it becomes visible as blood only when it is concealed. Only when the inner is withdrawn or hidden from the spectator’s gaze — an effect produced quite ostentatiously through the stage mechanics of the flies — does the shadow of its substance match the spectator’s expectations. Without concealment, however, Kleist’s exposed interior becomes visible only as sawdust — a material that is not life-giving but lifeless, not productive but merely a derivative byproduct.24 In order to make sense of the way in which artistic production is portrayed in the Kleist-scene, it is helpful to look at the Lessing-triptych — the last image of the play, which directly follows the Kleist-scene. Here, we can observe another instance of the blood and sawdust economy. In this scene, entitled “LESSINGS SCHLAF TRAUM SCHREI,” the disillusioned and overly-tired Lessing proclaims: “Ich habe ein / zwei Dutzend Puppen mit Sägemehl gestopft das mein Blut war […]” (I stuffed one / two dozen dolls with sawdust that was my blood […]).25 Could it be possible that our beginning question, i.e. the question of whether the stuff that Kleist is made of is blood or sawdust, was phrased misleadingly since, ultimately, blood and sawdust cannot be neatly separated? This is not to say that the two substances are identical, since the Kleist-scene shows, and the language of the Lessingtriptych implies, a temporal succession. As soon as the author’s blood exits his body and is about to enter the puppet, it becomes visible as sawdust. 23

24

25

Jean Cocteau, “Postscript,” Two Screenplays, pp. 61–67 (p. 66). Müller’s relation to Cocteau and, for that matter, to surrealism (a label Cocteau himself resisted) appear not yet to have been treated with sufficient attention. In these respects, sawdust resembles another material commonly used for the stuffing of puppets, “Werg.” Cf. Rainer Nägele’s comments on this term and its occurrence in Rilke (Nägele, pp. 24–25). Texts for the Stage, p. 77; Müller, Werke 4, p. 533. We find yet another variation on the theme of the circulation of sawdust in “TRAKTOR,” where it reads in one of the commentaries: “Puppen, mit Wörtern gestopft statt mit Sägemehl” (puppets stuffed with words instead of sawdust; Müller, Werke 4, p. 492).

144 Markus Wilczek

What is important about this notion of the creative act is that it assumes a fundamental break between the artist and his creation.26 Rather than conceiving of the creative act as a blood transfusion — an idea that we encountered in an exemplary fashion in Cocteau — Müller depicts creation as an act of stuffing.27 Due to its quality as physical waste, the material used for this stuffing, the “sawdust that was my blood,” remains exterior even once it has been interiorized: the binary distinction between interior and exterior is thus suspended.

V. Before and Behind the Curtain Hans-Thies Lehmann has argued that the modernity of Kleist’s theater has to do with its radically new conception of theatrical space: in an oft-quoted letter to Goethe, Kleist points out that, with the exception of the theater in Weimar, all other German stages are not set up on a fashion — “weder vor noch hinter dem Vorhang” (neither before nor behind the curtain) — that would be suitable for a successful production of Penthesilea , a statement that Müller repeatedly paraphrases with respect to his own dramatic production.28 Stressing the “weder vor noch hinter” the curtain, Lehmann argues that Kleist introduces a conception of theatrical space that gives equal importance to that which is happening on stage and to the spectators, to “Publikum und Szene,” which together make up one unified communication 26

27

28

While Müller shifts away from the idea that the author’s blood circulates through her works, he acknowledges a blood-stream within the literary tradition itself. In his autobiography, for instance, Müller points out that the tradition of the German Knittelvers is, “ein Anschluß an einen Blutstrom, der durch die deutsche Literatur geht” (a connection to a blood-stream that goes through German literature; Müller, Werke 9, p. 177). Cocteau, of course, is just one proponent of this model. The German idiom “etwas mit Herzblut schreiben” makes clear just how deeply rooted the idea of artistic creation through blood transfusion is. By no means limited to the discourse of Romanticism, this notion even survives in poststructuralist writings: cf., for example, Hélène Cixous, Stigmata. Escaping Texts (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 84: “[…] at the beginning of every book, there is this: the ‘unexpected discovery’: I see my blood gush forth, I see the inside come out. […] I see my invisible.” It is precisely this idea of seeing one’s inside through one’s work with which Müller’s model takes issue. Letter from Kleist to Johann Wolfgang Goethe of 24 January 1808: “Unsre übrigen Bühnen sind weder vor noch hinter dem Vorhang so beschaffen, daß ich auf diese Auszeichnung rechnen dürfte” (SW 2, pp. 805–806). Cf. Hans-Thies Lehmann, “Kleist/Versionen,” Das politische Schreiben. Essays zu Theatertexten (Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2002), pp. 154–170 (p. 164). Regarding Müller’s “unacknowledged paraphrase of Kleist,” see Kalb, p. 56.

Reading Stuffing in Heiner Müller’s Kleist 145

space (Kommunikationsraum). Against the background of Müller’s staging of Kleist, one could take Lehmann’s idea a step further: whereas Lehmann stresses the unity of the one “Kommunikationsraum,” perhaps the emphasis should be placed on the division of space into a visible and an invisible space by the curtain. If we take Kleist’s mention of the curtain seriously — that is, if we do not simply assume the curtain is raised — then that, which lies hidden behind the curtain, becomes an integral part of the performance.29 In a playful manner, Heiner Müller’s staging of Kleist explores the potential of this vision of the historical Kleist: when, in the Christo-like last move of the scene, “Vom Schnürboden wird ein graues Tuch über die Szene geworfen” (From the flies a gray cloth is thrown over the scene), the boundaries between the outside and the inside of the stage are redefined horizontally. Not only does the gray cloth shift the conventional theatrical outside/inside paradigm from the distinction before/behind to the distinction over/under, it also turns the original “outside” of the stage “inside.” What the spectator now sees is the cloth, the leveling surface, and on the surface that which she couldn’t see as long as the quest for the interior was conducted with full force on stage: the substance of the interior, “a red spot.” The direct and penetrating gaze, the desperate attempt to get beyond the surface — both on the part of Kleist and the spectator — could never catch a glance of the interior; only by looking at the surface can the interior be seen.30

29

30

Similarly, Monika Meister observes that the “Paradoxon in Kleists Denken und in seiner Poesie” (paradox of Kleist’s thought and poesy) rests in the oscillation of presence and absence: “das Nicht-Darstellbare, das Unsichtbare, das Hinter-der-Bühne, das Ausgeschlossene, das einzig durch das Dargestellte wahrnehmbar wird” (the non-presentable, the invisible, the behind-the-stage, the ostracized, that is perceptible only through that which is presented) (Meister, p. 180). Veiling and unveiling is an important theme throughout LEBEN GUNDLINGS, but an analysis of all pertinent instances — such as, for instance, the scene in which Frederick is forced to watch the execution of his friend Katte, or the scene in which Frederick forces the Saxon woman to watch her husband’s execution — would go beyond the scope of this article.

146 Markus Wilczek

VI. From Form to Formation This final act of concealment reveals not so much an essence, as a process. It is important to note that what shows itself as the interior exterior or exterior interior is by no means static, as the scene doesn’t simply end with a red blot but rather with the rapid spreading of a red blot. Whereas a scene that is driven by verbal exchanges has to afford someone the last word, this scene’s emphasis on the visual leaves the spectator not with a punctuated end, but only with the evocation of an ending. Rather than concluding with a fixed form, the scene leaves the spectator with the impression of formation and color. The stress on formation as well as the red color suggests that we read the final turn of the scene in light of Christian iconography. If we bear in mind that medieval depictions of the crucifixion often show Christ’s flowing blood forming droplets that resemble the shape of a rose, then the somewhat surprising indication that “roses and guts gush out” of the Kleist-Puppet arouses the suspicion that the original question of the delineation between humans and puppets is further complicated by the entry of the divine.31 Similarly, the emphasis on opening in Kleist’s final action — “aufbeißen” (biting open) — echoes Augustine’s stress on John the Evangelist’s choice of words: “Vigilanti verbo evangelista usus est, ut non diceret: Latus eius percussit, aut vulneravit, aut quid aliud; sed aperuit […]” (His side was neither struck nor wounded […] but opened […]).32 When we see the “red spot” that “quickly spreads” in this context, we are again reminded of the ways in which medieval depictions staged the crucifixion: these depictions frequently portray the blood as gushing forth in streams — streams that connect Christ’s body with those of sinners, who gain redemption through Christ’s blood. But while there are striking similarities between the Christian problem of how Christ’s “blood — although shed in death — is enlivening and alive” (Bynum, p. 155) and the aesthetic problem of how an author as “second Maker”33 invests life into his creation, Müller’s scene is not a simple transposition of the Christian theme into an aesthetic one. Whereas Christ as savior naturally figures in the center of most depictions, in Müller’s the cloth obscures the figure from which the blood is erupting, thus putting the 31

32 33

Caroline Walker Bynum, Wonderful Blood. Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), pp. 3 and 177. Subsequent citations as “Bynum” with page number(s). Augustinus, In Iohannis evangelium tractatus 120, 2 (Corpus christianorum. Series latina, vol. 36, pp. 661, 6–10). Regarding the impact of this reading, cf. Bynum, pp. 170–171. Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, “Soliloquy, or Advice to an Author,” in Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 3rd ed. (London: Darbt, 1723), vol. 1, p. 207.

Reading Stuffing in Heiner Müller’s Kleist 147

emphasis on the blood as effect rather than its origin. Further, Kleist’s blood simply spills out, without being redirected into a circulation of redemption. Just as the origin of the blood is erased, so too, the end of the scene leaves unanswered where the red spot on the cloth is actually headed. And finally, in contrast to depictions of the crucifixion, even this blood-aseffect never becomes visible as actual blood; rather, it is a “red spot” that “quickly spreads.” What is stressed in this “excess of color” is the “pan,” a concept Georges Didi-Huberman employs to designate “the emergence of the spot in painting within the system of the image.”34 What is stressed, in brief, is excess, emergence, and becoming. If we read Kleist’s biting-open of his artery as the origin of his legacy, this artistic legacy turns out to be one, not of form, but of formation: a legacy of becoming that resists essentializing appropriations. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari comment on Kleist’s “most uncanny modernity”: “the secret is no longer a content held within a form of interiority; rather, it becomes a form, identified with the form of exteriority that is always external to itself. Similarly, feelings become uprooted from the interiority of a subject, to be projected violently outward into a milieu of pure exteriority” (A Thousand Plateaus, p. 356). Müller’s Kleistscene radicalizes Deleuze’s and Guattari’s observation by reversing the perspective. Whereas Deleuze and Guattari focus on projection, Müller stages a scene of introspection — an introspection that, however, fails. For the most forceful and violent quest for the interior reveals layer for layer just another surface. Where Deleuze and Guattari still employ a dichotomous model of interiority and exteriority, the failed attempt of Müller’s Kleist to transition from exteriority to interiority shows how the dichotomy of exteriority and interiority itself collapses.35 What this performance tells us about reading 34

35

“Es handelt sich um einen lokalen Exzess […], um einen Exzess der Farbe; die Emergenz des Flecks (pan) in der Malerei innerhalb des Systems des Bildes (tableau).” Cf. Georges Didi-Huberman, “Blut der Bilder,” in Transfusionen. Blutbilder und Biopolitik in der Neuzeit, ed. by Anja Lauper (Berlin: Heitz, 2005), pp. 21–49 (p. 49). In another essay, Huberman reflects further on the coincidence of blood and pan: “So the pan is defined as the part of painting that interrupts ostensibly […] the continuity of the picture’s representational system. It is the accidental and sovereign outcropping of a deposit, of a colored seam: it makes meaning, with violence and equivocation, as a wound on white skin gives meaning — gives gushing-forth — to the blood that pulses below.” Georges Didi-Huberman, “The Detail and the Pan,” Confronting Images. Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), pp. 229–271 (p. 266). Another critical engagement with Deleuze’s and Guattari’s view of Kleist can be found in Katrin Pahl, “Gefühle schmieden, Gefühle sehen,” in Kleist-Jahrbuch (2008/ 2009), pp. 151–164. In contrast to Deleuze and Guattari, Pahl emphasizes “die Fabrikation […] von Gefühlen” (the fabrication […] of affects) (p. 152).

148 Markus Wilczek

Kleist — if it is possible to generalize at all — is that we should be suspicious of the hermeneutical impulse to penetrate the surface of the text to reach its inner core. Rainer Nägele remarked that the “classical drama and its subject ideal appear as the dream of a self that dreams itself beyond the fates of its corporeality” (Nägele, p. 25). One could add that a reading that ignores the surface of the text is like a text that ignores its own physical surface. Kleist’s texts — and Müller’s — can serve as reminders against such ignorance. Harvard University

Carrie Collenberg-Gonzalez Kleist in the Reception of the Red Army Faction Conspicuous links between the artistic reception of the Red Army Faction and the biography and work of Heinrich von Kleist inform Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Die Ehe der Maria Braun (1979), Elfriede Jelinek’s Wolken.Heim. (1988), Rainald Goetz’ Kontrolliert (1988), and Dagmar Leupold’s Die Helligkeit der Nacht (2009). This paper focuses on the revolutionary ideas associated with Kleist and their relationship to and influence on representations of radical politics, concluding with a discussion of Frank Lentricchia and Jody McAuliffe’s Crimes of Art and Terror (2003) and the intersections between Kleistian themes, twentieth-century German literature, and the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2011.

You are the one and only woman on earth I should wish to see again in the beyond. Not Ulrike? Yes and no: let her own feeling decide. She has not, it seems to me, understood the art of sacrificing oneself, of going under utterly for the one thing one loves […] Adieu!1 — Heinrich von Kleist Aye, yai, yai, Kleist! — Ulrike Meinhof2

Heinrich von Kleist’s two-hundredth birthday celebration on 18 October 1977 coincided with one of the most influential postwar dates in German history and the history of terrorism. On this day — the pinnacle of what is referred to as Deutscher Herbst (German Autumn) — three ongoing events that had been plaguing the Federal Republic of Germany came to an end: 1) A special commando of the German government rescued all eighty-six passengers from a German Lufthansa plane in Mogadishu, Somalia that had previously been hijacked on 13 October 1977 by PFLP terrorists demanding 1

2

Heinrich von Kleist, Selected Writings, ed. and trans. by David Constantine (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2004), p. 425. “Du bist die allereinzige auf Erden, die ich jenseits wiederzusehen wünsche. Etwa Ulriken? — ja, nein, nein, ja: es soll von ihrem eignen Gefühl abhangen. Sie hat, dünkt mich, die Kunst nicht verstanden sich aufzuopfern, ganz für das, was man liebt, in Grund und Boden zu gehn […] Adieu!” Letter from Kleist to Marie von Kleist of 19 November 1811, two days before his death (SW 2, p. 885). “Ei, ei, ei der Kleist!” Letter from Ulrike Meinhof to Kleist, in Dagmar Leupold, Die Helligkeit der Nacht: Ein Journal (Munich: Beck, 2009), p. 31. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine.

150 Carrie Collenberg-Gonzalez

the release of Red Army Faction (RAF) prisoners; 2) Prominent RAF members Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe committed suicide in their jail cells in the high-security Stammheim prison in Stuttgart and Irmgard Möller was found critically injured;3 3) Hanns-Martin Schleyer, an industrialist who had previously been kidnapped by the RAF on September 5, 1977, was killed. This date and these events — in particular the deaths of the RAF terrorists — have been seared into the collective memory of Germany, a fact that is demonstrated by the large number of films, literary works, artworks, and critical studies on the RAF that have been published since, several of which reference Heinrich von Kleist. Although it could be inferred that the association between Kleist and the RAF is simply a result of the date they share, this uncanny relationship both includes and transcends the coincidence of the date.4 To a certain extent, the reverence demonstrated for Kleist’s work and biography in relation to one of the most traumatic moments of this generation honors Kleist — a figure known for his radically transgressive behavior, soul-searching, fervent pursuit of justice, understanding of history, isolation from society, his murder/suicide death, and characters who follow similar ethical codes. Although Kleist may have been an outsider in the early nineteenth century, he seems to have found his place in history with the unfortunate turn of events on 18 October 1977 and with members of a generation who understood him, or at least tried to, in an attempt to understand their past. The connection between Kleist and the RAF is not only serendipitous but also traceable when considering the history of terrorism. Both were products of certain historical moments when revolutionaries were romanticized and change was believed possible and are related to distinct transformations in the understanding of terrorism. Although tyrannicide and various forms of terrorism have existed throughout human history and have been well documented in literature,5 the terms “terrorism” and “terrorist” came about as Kleist was coming of age. Walter Laqueur places their first use around the time of the French Revolution (1793–1794) and in specific relationship to

3

4

5

The deaths of other prominent and influential RAF members Ulrike Meinhof and Holger Meins are also important precedents to the deaths of 1977. Meinhof hanged herself on 9 May 1976 in Stammheim prison and Holger Meins died of a hunger strike in Justizvollzugsanstalt Wittlich on 9 November 1974. There is some dispute as to whether Kleist’s birthday was the 10th or the 18th of October. See Horst Häker, “10. oder 18. Oktober? Ein Plädoyer für Kleist,” Beiträge zur Kleist Forschung, 7 (1993), pp. 149–154. The list usually begins with Book V of Aristotle’s Politics (c. 350 B.C.E.), in which he writes about the nature and origins of tyranny.

Kleist in the Reception of the RAF 151

the Jacobins and the Reign of Terror.6 According to Laqueur, urban terrorism is a twentieth-century phenomenon that gained momentum after the defeat of rural guerrillas such as Che Guevara in the late 1960s and groups (such as the RAF) in Europe, North America, and Japan attracted a large amount of attention. It was the attention that distinguished this form of terrorism, not necessarily the practices of the terrorists.7 He writes: Seen in historical perspective it [urban terrorism] was no more than a revival of certain forms of political violence that had been used previously in many parts of the world. These methods had been widely described, analyzed and debated at the time from every possible angle. But given the frailty of human memory it was perhaps not surprising that the reemergence of terrorism should have been regarded in recent years as an altogether novel phenomenon and that its causes and the ways to cope with it should have been discussed as if nothing of the kind had ever happened before. (Laqueur, Terrorism, p. 20)

Although Laqueur suggests that the attention given to these groups is historically unwarranted, one would think that he, as a German Jew whose parents were killed in the Holocaust, would acknowledge the specifically German relationship to the desire for revolution and change in the 1970s and to Germany’s violent past. It was precisely the consciously collective amnesia 6

7

According to Laqueur, “the meaning of terrorism was given in the 1798 supplement of the Dictionnaire of the Académie Française as système, régime de la terreur. According to a French dictionary published in 1796, the Jacobins had on occasion used the term when speaking and writing about themselves in a positive sense; after the 9th of the Thermidor, “terrorist” became a term of abuse with criminal implications. It did not take long for the term to reach Britain; [Edmund] Burke, in a famous passage written in 1795, wrote about “thousands of those hell hounds called terrorists” who were let loose on the people. Terrorism at the time referred to the period in the French Revolution broadly speaking between March 1793 and July 1794 and it was more or less a synonym for “reign of terror.” Subsequently it acquired a wider meaning in the dictionaries as a system of terror. A terrorist was anyone who attempted to further his views by a system of coercive intimidation. Even more recently, the term “terrorism” (like “guerrilla”) has been used in so many different senses that it has become almost meaningless, covering almost any, and not necessarily political, act of violence.” Walter Laqueur, Terrorism (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1977), p. 6. Subsequent citations as “Laqueur, Terrorism” with page number(s). Laqueur writes that terrorism, from a historical perspective, has “seldom been more than a nuisance,” but that we [in 1999] are witnessing a radical transformation in terrorism. See Walter Laqueur, The New Terrorism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 3–4. Global terrorism is a twenty-first century phenomenon that marks a radical transformation in the character of terrorism in terms of technology, the number of casualties possible, and the potential of the media as was witnessed on 11 September 2001. For discussions of global, twenty-first century terrorism, see Walter Laqueur, No End to War: Terrorism in the Twenty-First Century (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2003).

152 Carrie Collenberg-Gonzalez

of Germany’s recent violent past that prompted the attention given to the RAF and the question of whether violence should be used to attain their political aspirations. With this in mind, it is also not surprising that many writers and filmmakers turned to Kleist, whose “terrorism” is located a century before the World Wars and confined to fiction. Kleist was not a terrorist but his fictional characters, in particular Michael Kohlhaas and Penthesilea, are well known for their uncompromising pursuit of justice and therefore their relationship to romanticized approaches to revolutionaries so popular in the 1960s and 1970s. Kleist was also subject to this type of stylized hope in the revolutionary as demonstrated by the subjects of his fiction. Wolf Kittler makes a viable case about how Kleist’s works such as Die Hermannschlacht (1808), Penthesilea (1808), “Das Erdbeben in Chili” (1807/1810), and Michael Kohlhaas (1810) correspond to early perceptions of partisan and guerilla tactics as a strategy specifically aimed at Germans in order to defeat the French and demonstrate to the reader how to risk one’s life for the ideal state.8 According to Uwe Schütte in Die Poetik des Extremen: Ausschreitungen einer Sprache des Radikalen (2006), Kleist’s eccentric biography and the motifs in his writing are unparalleled around 1800 and Michael Kohlhaas was the first in the trend in German literature to sympathize with the terrorist, a trend that is continued in writing about the RAF. Although Kleist was not the first to write in a way that sympathizes with the terrorist — Schiller’s Die Räuber (1781), “Der Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre” (1786) and Wilhelm Tell (1804) all precede Michael Kohlhaas — terrorism was polemical at both historical moments (post-French Revolution and post-1968), and there was a sense among the more radical thinkers during these periods that revolution in Germany was necessary and possible. There are reasons other than the historical relationship to terrorism that connect Kleist to the generation of 1968. Kleist, as an outsider in the shadow of Kant, Goethe, and Schiller and as an outsider to the Romantic movement, can be understood as the muse of the 1968-generation in both East and West Germany and its hopes, failures, and desire to understand history. Michael Kohlhaas and Penthesilea gave men and women revolutionary role models in the pursuit of justice and passion; “Das Erdbeben in Chili” and Kleist’s other novellas provided fodder to contemplate and discuss the complex relationship between the individual and law, religion, morality, natural catastrophes, chance, and history; Kleist’s love letters to his fiancée, sister, and cousin offered insight into his soul, his commitment to his dreams, and love; and the manner of his death, when Kleist shot Henriette Vogel and 8

Wolf Kittler, Die Geburt des Partisanen aus dem Geist der Poesie (Freiburg: Verlag Rombach, 1987), pp. 218–325.

Kleist in the Reception of the RAF 153

then himself at the Kleiner Wannsee (Little Wannsee), demonstrated his commitment, despair, and radical transgression. The 1968-generation found a kindred spirit in Kleist and his fiction. For many writers and filmmakers in both East and West Germany, the German Enlightenment and Romantic periods represented the height of German creative activity that they wanted to reanimate, it is hardly surprising that of all choices, the works and biography of Heinrich von Kleist became a focus. Christa Wolf’s Kein Ort. Nirgends (1977) follows a fictional conversation between Kleist and Karoline von der Günderode, a poet who also committed suicide in 1806, at an imaginary meeting in June 1804.9 In an interview, Wolf says that she was examining “the parameters of failure, the connections between despair in society and failure in literature,” and that she did not have to “invent” any people because they were encompassed in the materials she had.10 Heiner Müller also felt a special kinship with Kleist as “the paradigm of the insider become outsider”11 both in his personal life as well as in his references to Kleist in Wolokolamsker Chaussee (1984–1988), Leben Gundlings Friedrich von Preußen Lessings Schlaf Traum Schrei (1976/1979), and Mauser (1970/1975) (Kalb, Theater, p. 44). While writers in East Germany may have drawn on Kleist and other writers of the Romantic period to express their distinct relationship to despair, isolation, and the state, West German writer Heinrich Böll is perhaps one of the first writers to link Kleist and the RAF semantically in an oblique comparison between Michael Kohlhaas and Ulrike Meinhof. 9 10

11

Christa Wolf, Kein Ort. Nirgends, (Frankfurt am Main: Luchterhand Literaturverlag, 1989). See Hajo Drees, A Comprehensive Interpretation of the Life and Work of Christa Wolf: Twentieth-Century German Writer (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2002), p. 109. The quotation is from an interview by Frauke Meyer-Gosau in 1982. Wolf’s Kassandra is also thematically related to Kleist’s Penthesilea. Jonathan Kalb writes that “Kleist was the paradigm of the insider become outsider for Müller. Scion of a noble Prussian military family that was too ashamed of him to tend his grave for a century after his suicide, Kleist functioned in Müller’s work as the figure of a Germany that habitually went to war with itself in protracted throes of self-definition […] In less dispassionate terms, Müller’s attachment to Kleist seems to have opened a channel to the strong emotions surrounding a string of enforced separations in his life […].” Jonathan Kalb, The Theater of Heiner Müller (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 44–56. Subsequent citations as “Kalb” with page number(s). Uwe Schütte quotes Heiner Müller, who concludes: “Es gab ein Vakuum von links aus gesehen, wo Leute immer wieder in diese Isolierung gekommen sind, und in dieses Vakuum und aus dieser Leere, aus diesem Vakuum dann auch in die Verzweiflung getrieben worden sind, auch in extreme und radikale Aktionen und in selbstmörderische Aktionen.” Heiner Müller’s Ich bin ein Neger, as cited in Schütte, p. 19.

154 Carrie Collenberg-Gonzalez

After a bank robbery on 22 December 1971 in Kaiserslauten, during which police officer Herbert Schoner was shot and killed, the Bild-Zeitung published a headline that read “Baader-Meinhof Gruppe mordet weiter” (Baader-Meinhof Group Murders On), without substantial evidence that it was, in fact, the Baader-Meinhof group who was responsible for Schoner’s death.12 For Heinrich Böll, the unfair reporting was the last straw, and his exasperation at the Axel Springer press resulted in his sympathy for the goals of the Baader-Meinhof Group. Böll (who received the Nobel Prize for Literature the same year) published an essay in response to the bold headline of an article published in Der Spiegel on 10 January 1972 entitled, “Will Ulrike Gnade oder freies Geleit?” (Does Ulrike want pardon or free conduct?).13 With regard to Böll’s essay and its titular and thematic relationship to Kleist, Volker Schlöndorff writes: He [Böll] asked matter of factly: How can six people, the former Baader-Meinhof Gang, be such a danger to sixty million people, that the government was incapacitated, the police were mobilized, and the media initiated mass hysteria? Shouldn’t one offer the leader of the gang “safe conduct” and halt the escalating violence with rational discussions? The term “safe conduct” was familiar to me through Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas. Exactly that is what Martin Luther demands for the man who disturbed the public peace. It is a legal term that goes back to the Middle Ages — and Böll consciously cited an archaic feeling of justice that was, unfortunately, shared by few.14 12

13 14

The article marks the third death associated with the RAF — two police officers and Petra Schelm — and precedes the attacks on the US facilities in May when three American soldiers were killed in a bombing. Heinrich Böll, “Will Ulrike Gnade oder freies Geleit?” Der Spiegel, January 10, 1972, pp. 54–57. “Er [Böll] fragte nur nüchtern: Wie sollen sechs Leute, die damalige Baader-Meinhof Bande, eine solche Gefahr für ein Volk von sechzig Millionen sein, dass der Rechtsstaat sich selbst außer Kraft setzte, der Polizeiapparrat aufgerüstet wurde und die Medien eine Massenhysterie auslösten? Sollte man dem Kopf der Bande nicht lieber ‘freies Geleit’ geben und durch vernünftige Gespräche die Eskalation der Gewalt, die sich anbahnte, unterbrechen? Der Begriff ‘freies Geleit’ war mir geläufig durch Kleists Michael Kohlhaas. Genau das fordert dort Martin Luther für den Mann, der den Landesfrieden gebrochen hat. Es ist ein juristischer Begriff, der auf das Mittelalter zurückgeht — und Böll berief sich bewusst auf ein archaisches Gefühl für Gerechtigkeit. Leider wurde das von wenigen geteilt.” Volker Schlöndorff, Licht, Schatten und Bewegung: Mein Leben und meine Filme (München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2008), p. 211. From Michael Kohlhaas: “Wir etc. etc. Kurfürst von Sachsen, erteilen, in besonders gnädiger Rücksicht auf die an Uns ergangene Fürsprache des Doktors Martin Luther, dem Michael Kohlhaas, Roßhändler aus dem Brandenburgischen, unter der Bedingung, binnen drei Tagen nach Sicht die Waffen, die er ergriffen, niederzulegen, behufs einer erneuerten Untersuchung seiner Sache, freies Geleit nach Dresden; dergestalt zwar, daß wenn derselbe, wie nicht zu erwarten, bei dem Tri-

Kleist in the Reception of the RAF 155

Indeed, in Michael Kohlhaas, Martin Luther urges the Elector of Saxony to grant Michael Kohlhaas amnesty and to err on the side of caution for fear that the people would side with Kohlhaas, revolt, and that the state would be rendered powerless. It was not only a matter of an “archaic sense of justice,” as Schlöndorff suggests, but also a prescient analogy that corresponded to the political and social climate of West Germany in the 1970s. The character of Michael Kohlhaas and the themes of justice, law, corruption, morality, and violence were a tidy fit with the sympathetic leanings of the New Left towards the first generation of the RAF. One of Schlöndorff’s first films, Michael Kohlhaas: Der Rebell (1969), clearly demonstrated a relationship between the radical student movement and Kleist.15 Although Schlöndorff did not overtly link Kleist and the RAF, his films demonstrate his interests in Kleist, revolutionary politics, and the reconstruction of history as demonstrated in Die Blechtrommel (1979), Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum (1975),16 his contribution to Deutschland im Herbst (1978), and Die Stille nach dem Schuss (2000). Helma Sanders-Brahms is well known for her adaptation of Das Erdbeben in Chili (1975) and for Heinrich (1977), for which she received the prestigious Golden Shell award, and her contribution to representing history is best known in Deutschland Bleiche Mutter (1980).17 HansJürgen Syberberg also directed numerous adaptations of Kleist as well as Hitler: Ein Film aus Deutschland (1977). And then there are Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s contributions, to which we will return shortly. Although the

15 16

17

bunal zu Dresden mit seiner Klage, der Rappen wegen, abgewiesen werden sollte, gegen ihn, seines eigenmächtigen Unternehmens wegen, sich selbst Recht zu verschaffen, mit der ganzen Strenge des Gesetzes verfahren werden solle; im entgegengesetzten Fall aber, ihm mit seinem ganzen Haufen, Gnade für Recht bewilligt, und völlige Amnestie, seiner in Sachsen ausgeübten Gewalttätigkeiten wegen, zugestanden sein soll.” Heinrich von Kleist, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. by Helmut Sembdner (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2001), vol. 2, p. 53. Subsequent citations as “SW” with volume and page number(s). See Seán Allan, “Revolutionary Aesthetics? Kleist, 1968, and the New German Cinema,” German Life and Letters, 64 (2011), pp. 472–487. Schlöndorff and von Trotta’s Die Verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum was an adaptation of the popular novel by Heinrich Böll who wrote the novel, Die Verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum, in response to the smear campaign lauched against him after his essay on Ulrike Meinhof and in response to new regulations (Extremistenbeschluß and Radikalenerlaß) that allowed for legal investigations of all civil servants suspected of anti-constitutional behavior. By 1976, more than half a million people had been investigated. Eventually, Sanders-Brahms connected Kleist and the RAF in Ulrike. Mondzeit — Neonzeit (1998), a play which consisted of two monologues performed by Eva Mattes, that were a conversation between Kleist’s sister Ulrike von Kleist and Ulrike Meinhof. Ulrike. Mondzeit — Neonzeit was performed on 16 October 1998 at the Kleist Theater in Frankfurt an der Oder.

156 Carrie Collenberg-Gonzalez

preoccupation with reconstructing history and revolutionary politics through filmmaking are hallmark descriptions of New German Cinema, they do not necessarily reveal why Kleist was such an important figure. One can surmise that these filmmakers were drawn to Kleistian ideas in their attempt to make sense of and represent their past, which, for most, began with the Second World War when they were born. Even Thomas Elsaesser, one of the most well-known scholars of New German Cinema, uses Kleist to describe the difficulties New German Cinema directors and film scholars have in conceptualizing the relationship between film and history. Elsaesser writes: These difficulties have to do with two complexes that are at the same time the traces of historical traumas and conceptual impasses. One appears to be specific to Germany and German history, namely the question of continuity and discontinuity, of new beginnings and recurring cycles, of the return of the repressed, and the desire for radical breaks. The latter is usually referred to as “zero hour thinking,” especially when serving politicians as the founding myth of the Federal Republic. Filmmakers have treated this cutoff point as problematic, and many found in a novella by Heinrich von Kleist, The Earthquake in Chile, an appropriate fictional precedent. Kleist took a natural disaster as the foil for criticizing the tabula rasa thinking of the French Revolution. Conceptually, the “Chile complex” can be seen as a condensation of the question of historical agency and historical change (or lack of it).18

Elsaesser is referring to Edgar Reitz (who directed the Heimat series in 1984 and also contributed to Deutschland im Herbst) but his comments also apply to many New German Cinema filmmakers and projects. Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film Die Ehe der Maria Braun (1979) can be understood as a film that demonstrates the “Chile complex” at work as well as the convergence of historical reconstruction, references to Kleist, and references to the RAF. Die Ehe der Maria Braun is often understood as a film that documents and critiques the postwar economic miracle in Germany. While it most certainly does represent this time period, film expert Anton Kaes argues that this film can “best” be understood as a direct response to the RAF events in October 1977, which took place two years before the film was released.

18

Thomas Elsaesser, “The New German Cinema’s Historical Imaginary,” in Framing the Past: The Historiography of German Cinema and Television, ed. by Bruce Arthur Murray and Christopher J. Wickham (Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992), p. 282.

Kleist in the Reception of the RAF 157 His [Fassbinder’s] film The Marriage of Maria Braun can best be understood as a product of, and a response to, the political crisis which also brought forth Germany in Autumn. […] The events of September and October 1977: the kidnapping and murder of the industrialist Hanns-Martin Schleyer, the Mogadishu hijacking of a Lufthansa jet by German terrorists, and the mysterious suicides of Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe in a maximum-security prison as well as the severe countermeasures of the government (such as the news black-out and the officially condoned witchhunt of leftist sympathizers) — these events of the fall of 1977 confronted the generation of Fassbinder (who was born in 1945) with the kind of rigid authoritarianism and disregard for individual democratic rights that could only be understood “historically” in the context of Germany’s recent past. As Alexander Kluge has pointed out, the crisis of the fall of 1977 ruptured the collective amnesia and brought back memories of the psychological terrorism of the Hitler regime.19

Elsaesser’s “Chili Complex” is also at work in Kaes’ interpretation that the Stammheim suicides in 1977 prompted Fassbinder to retell his life story, which, like the film, began in 1945. The ending of the film demonstrates the destructive power of forgetfulness and the belief that change was not possible in the Federal Republic of Germany despite the advances of the socalled Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle; Kaes, p. 362). In addition to using Kleistian themes as a key to understanding the narrative of the film, Die Ehe der Maria Braun also counts as one of the first works that overtly combines Kleist with the RAF. The idea that “representations of the past are motivated and shaped by present concerns” guides Anton Kaes’ argument that Die Ehe der Maria Braun is not only a representation of the past but also a severe critique of the time when the film was made — in 1979, just two years after the terrorist events 1977 and one year after Fassbinder’s contribution to the film Deutschland im Herbst. Kaes demonstrates how the visual frame narrative, which begins with a portrait of Hitler and ends with a portrait of Helmut Schmidt, is overlaid with the radio broadcast of the 1954 World Cup, and uses this example to emphasize the importance of 1945, when the film’s narrative begins; 1954, when the narrative ends; and 1979, when the film was released. The idea of the “Chile complex” is further demonstrated in the scene just prior to the series of portraits. Here, Maria Braun (played by Hanna Schygulla) lights a cigarette after she had previously forgotten to turn off the gas on the stove, thus igniting the gas and creating an explosion in which both 19

Anton Kaes, “History, Fiction, Memory: Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979),” in German Film and Literature, ed. by Eric Rentschler (New York: Methuen, 1986), p. 41. Kaes’ reference to Kluge regards Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Geschichte und Eigensinn (Frankfurt am Main: Zweitausendeins, 1981), p. 362. Subsequent citations as “Kaes” with page number(s).

158 Carrie Collenberg-Gonzalez

of them presumably die. This ending — the ending of the economic miracle as embodied by Maria Braun — symbolically demonstrates the fatal conesquences of forgetfulness (leaving the stove on) and collective amnesia and underscores again the question of “historical agency and change (or lack of it)” mentioned above. It also references Fassbinder’s conversation with his mother in Deutschland im Herbst, where he, like many others of his generation, challenges his mother’s selective amnesia (for the sake of moving on, economic survival, and growth) regarding the Second World War. A similar pattern of heterogenic sound is found in the otherwise seemingly insignificant scene in which Kleist is mentioned. Here, fourteen minutes into the film, Maria Braun briskly walks through the streets to a bombed-out building where she meets a shady vendor in a dark blue suit, a cameo played by Fassbinder himself, and trades her mother’s broach for a dress and a bottle of alcohol on the black market. While she is there, the vendor asks Braun if she would be interested in a valuable 1907 complete edition of Kleist’s work. Braun declines his offer, stating that books burn too easily and do not keep you warm. The vendor accepts her excuse. She gives him the broach. He kisses her hand and wishes her luck, and they part ways. End of scene. At first, this casual meeting appears to be little more than a quirky cameo or, at best, a plot device to historicize the wartime black market and show how Maria Braun gets the dress she wears at the American bar. However, like the ending sequence of portraits of the chancellors and the implied meaning when combined with the soundtrack, this scene takes on a different meaning when one considers the soundtrack, which features the problematic first verse of the German national anthem. On her way to the bombed-out building to meet the vendor, Braun allows a military police jeep to pass before she walks into an enclosed entryway where she is approached by other people trying to exchange their valuables. The offers made to Maria Braun are silent and only her footsteps, street sounds, and a conversation between an accordion player and a man, who both remain offscreen, are heard. In the conversation, the musician asks the man if he would like to hear a song and whether he has any requests. The man asks to hear “Das Deutschlandlied” and begins to sing the first verse, “Deutschland Deutschland über —.” The accordion player interrupts him before he can finish singing the first line and begins to play another song. As soon as it is apparent that the new song is not the national anthem, the man tells him to stop and laments that people are not allowed to play the national anthem anymore. Braun then meets the vendor (Fassbinder), and as soon as their conversation starts, the accordion player (presumably the one who previously refused to play the national anthem) starts playing the anthem again. The song then accompanies the conversation be-

Kleist in the Reception of the RAF 159

tween Braun and the vendor and ends when their conversation ends. This synchronicity further emphasizes that this is neither a time when books are read nor a time in which change would be possible. After the atrocities of WWII, even the street musicians, whose faces remain unseen, continue to play melodies that provide a haunting soundtrack to daily life. The untimely link between the text of “Das Deutschlandlied” (1841) and National Socialism resonates in Braun’s comment on a case of actual change since the war, the idea that instead of merely censoring books or ritually burning them, one now burns books for warmth. To a certain extent, declining to buy books because they have no use suggests that the ideas contained on those pages are also useless, thus demonstrating the futility of democracy, of the Kohlhaasian partisan, of the pursuit of justice, and of advocating despair and suicide as in Kleist’s own suicide and the suicide of the RAF members, some of whom were Fassbinder’s friends. As the use of the World Cup radio broadcast locates the film in the patriotic fervor of 1954, the use of the national anthem — in particular the overtly problematic first verse — locates the film in the ambiguous postwar period when the anthem, officially beginning with “Deutschland Deutschland über alles,” was forbidden and then officially recognized again in 1952 by German president Theodor Heuss and again by Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, who specified that the third verse, beginning with “Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit,” should be sung at state events. The national anthem was and still is a particularly loaded, if complicated, reference. On the one hand, the lines of the first verse bear an unfortunate resemblance to the military aspirations of National Socialism; on the other hand, it — especially the third verse — references the more metaphoric (i.e. less geographic) aspirations of nineteenth-century liberalism in Germany and is linked to the early aspirations for democracy in Germany, to a time before the World Wars of the twentieth century, and to a sentiment Kleist and many of his Romantic compatriots shared. Anton Kaes describes the reference to Kleist in Die Ehe der Maria Braun as an example of “directional enunciation” and further describes a thematic parallel between the works of Kleist and Fassbinder: “Heinrich von Kleist, the German romantic poet […], like Fassbinder, dealt with the destructiveness of uncompromising love” (Kaes, p. 362). Whether it was uncompromising love, the pursuit of justice and fervent belief in the potential of the state, or, later, the relationship to futility, terrorism, violence, and suicide, Heinrich von Kleist can be understood as the blue flower of the Nestbeschmutzer (those who foul their own nests or denigrate their one own tribes), outsiders, and creative bad-boys like the authors and directors mentioned above, looking for someone who will understand them and finding it in a

160 Carrie Collenberg-Gonzalez

wink and nod to a ghost and an audience who also understands the messages of the dead. Ten years later, Austrian Netzbeschmutzerin par excellence and recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature Elfriede Jelinek wrote Wolken.Heim. (1988).20 Wolken.Heim. is a montage of excerpts from other texts — something the reader knows only because Jelinek discloses her sources at the end, where she writes: “The texts used here are from Hölderlin, Hegel, Heidegger, Fichte, Kleist, from the letters of the RAF between 1973 and 1977, among others.”21 Although Wolken.Heim. is not a text that combines Kleist and the RAF exclusively, it is significant as the first text that is committed to this connection. She interweaves their texts into one another so that one can hardly tell them apart; indeed, perhaps one is not supposed to be able to distinguish them. It is important that Jelinek notes from whom the texts originated and, specifically, that she uses not just letters of the RAF but letters from between 1973 and 1977. This is an important distinction in the reception of the Red Army Faction. Generally, this first generation had the sympathy of the student movement who agreed with their principals but not necessarily with their increasingly violent means of seeing them through. The original leaders, Ulrike Meinhof, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Jan-Carl Raspe, and Holger Meins, were arrested and incarcerated in 1972 and died in 1974 (Meins), 1976 (Meinhof), and 1977. Therefore, they were absent from the escalating violence after their arrests, watching it from the inside of prison, and slowly falling apart. Their deaths are considered by many to be more of a tragedy than a relief. By choosing to include the letters (instead of the manifestos) of RAF members, Jelinek provokes on different levels. She demands that the letters 20

21

Elfriede Jelinek, Stecken, Stab und Stangl / Raststätte. oder sie machen’s alle, Wolken.Heim. Neue Theaterstücke (Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1997). Wolken.Heim. premiered at Schauspiel Bonn on September 21, 1988 and was directed by Hans Hoffer. Jelinek’s 2005 addition to the Berliner Ensemble performance of Wolken.Heim. Und dann nach Hause was performed during the Kunst-Werke exhibition Zur Vorstellung des Terrors: Die RAF-Ausstellung. Klaus Bertram directed the film adaptation for television in 1997. Jelinek’s play Ulrike Maria Stuart connects Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin with Maria Stuart and Elisabeth I and first premiered on 28 October 2006 at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg, directed by Nicolas Stemann. See Ortrud Gutjahr, Ulrike Maria Stuart von Elfriede Jelinek (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007). “Die verwendeten Texte sind unter anderem von: Hölderlin, Hegel, Heidegger, Fichte, Kleist und aus den Briefen der RAF von 1973–1977.” Jelinek, Wolken.Heim., p. 187. Several investigations have deciphered the exact location of the quotations in Jelinek’s montage and found that she used excerpts from Kleist’s Hermannschlacht, Die Familie Schroffenstein, Penthesilea, Prinz Friedrich von Homburg, and “Das Erdbeben in Chili.”

Kleist in the Reception of the RAF 161

originate from human beings and not fictitious characters or monsters and yet, by placing the letters next to excerpts from fiction, she suggests that they can be also understood as fiction. In this way, she forces the reader to consider the juxtaposition of RAF letters alongside the fiction of established German authors, feeding off the polarity of this juxtaposition and discussions about the “elevation” of the RAF to mythical or literary (read admirable) figures. And yet, she simultaneously suggests that “literature” is not a superior category from which characters as insidious as terrorists are to be excluded. In any case, Kleist, the RAF, Hölderlin, Hegel, Heidegger and Fichte, and the ideas and time periods they represent, are united by their language and their longing for identity. Although Jelinek’s book provides them with a home where they can finally be united, the title suggests that this home is still the clouds. The title of her text, Wolken.Heim. has been compared to Wolken as a metaphor of the Romantic, Daheim in den Wolken, and Wolkenkuckkucksheim.22 While these make sense in certain interpretations, Wolken.Heim. is also connected to roots and to identity, which is unequivocally the main theme of this text. The word wir (we) is repeated nearly 400 times and often coupled with “zu Hause” (at home). Like Christa Wolf’s Kein Ort. Nirgends, Jelinek’s Wolken.Heim. is a montage text and also shares a punctuation stop in the title. Like Wolf, Jelinek is also concerned with rescuing Kleist (and others) from the limbo insinuated in Wolf’s title. While Wolf suggests that there is no place where such thoughts can converge, Jelinek names the place but suggests that this place, this home, is in the clouds and that there is still no place on Earth where these people and their ideas can rest in peace. The relationship between dead RAF members, Kleist’s suicide, and the futility of their revolutionary ideas is briefly but poignantly referenced in Rainald Goetz’ novel Kontrolliert (1988):23

22

23

See Evelyne Polt-Heinzl, “Nachwort,” in Elfriede Jelinek, Wolken. Heim. (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2004), pp. 40–63 and Georg Stanitzek, “Kuckuck,” in Gelegenheit. Diebe. 3x deutsche Motive, ed. by Dirk Baecker, Rembert Hüser, and Georg Stanitzek (Bielefeld: Haux, 1991), pp. 11–80. Rainald Goetz, Kontrolliert (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988).

162 Carrie Collenberg-Gonzalez And so it was that no one wanted to stray too far from the tuning fork of the real human voice — neither gloomily into the depths of deadly nature nor too far away in the much too lofty ether — otherwise thinking wouldn’t make sense anymore. Without proper tuning, thinking only recognizes one single exact thought — namely, death. If the powers that have the ability to distinguish are weak then death prefers to abandon thoughts and mix with life in the act of suicide. The suicide however, and the person who committed suicide at the Wannsee who turned 200 today, only demonstrate this nonsense — not the op-posite — and was and is the absurdity that has been reported here today, dong. Here is German Radio. Good day, esteemed listeners, it’s eight o’clock. And now the news.24

In the narrator’s opposition to the decision for the RAF prisoners to commit suicide and by relating them to Kleist, they are harnessed together here on Earth. It seems as if the narrator also wants their radical transgression to be acted out among the living — perhaps the equivalent to Goetz’ own punk gesture of publically cutting his forehead with a razor blade — and not to die or escape into the ether, into the clouds.25 Kontrolliert consists of three sections of a story told from different perspectives. The first section, “Schwarze Zelle” (Black Cell), is told as an inner monologue from a first-person narrator in an attic apartment in Paris who is listening to radio announcements of the GSG rescue of the Landshut hostages in Mogadishu and the suicides in Stammheim. In the second section, “Diktat” (Dictation), the narrator recalls the nine months of 1977 from January to September and suggests his identity is RAF member Christian Klar. The third section, “Im Namen des Volkes” (In the Name of the People), consists of forty-four sections that correspond to the forty-four days between the kidnapping of Hanns-Martin Schleyer on 5 September 1977 and 24

25

“So kam es also, daß keiner zu weit weg gehen wollte von der Stimmgabel der wirklichen menschlichen Stimme, weder finster hinein in die Tiefen der tödlichen Natur, noch zu hoch davon in allzu hohe ideale Äther, sonst stimmte das Denken in dem Hirn nicht mehr. Ohne Stimmung aber kennt das Denken exakt einen klaren einzigen Gedanken, nämlich Tod. Sind die Kräfte, die getrenntes trennen, schwach, möchte sich der Tod am liebsten aus dem Denken in das Leben mischen in der Tat des Suizids. Der Suizid jedoch, und der Wannseeselbstmörder, heute auf den Tag zweihundert, beweist den Unsinn, nicht das Gegenteil, war und ist die Trottelei, wie mehrfach hier gemeldet, gdong. Hier ist der Deutschlandfunk, guten Tag verehrte Hörer, acht Uhr, wir bringen Nachrichten.” Goetz, Kontrolliert, p. 280. Uwe Schütte cites Goetz: “Der Attentäter’ in dem der von radikalem Haß auf die Welt und die Gesellschaft getriebene Ich-Erzähler aus Kommandoschriften der RAF zitiert und seine Aggressionen in einer Gewaltphantasie über die brutale Ermordung eines Kleinkindes sublimiert, die an das Ende des kleinen Juan im Erdbeben in Chili erinnert” (Schütte, pp. 393–394). Goetz created a scandal when he cut his forehead with a razor blade and let it bleed during a reading in 1983, as performance art and an introduction to Punk Literature.

Kleist in the Reception of the RAF 163

the discovery of his corpse on 18 October 1977. The narrator becomes one in a chorus of narrators and then wakes up in his attic apartment, bringing the reader back to the beginning and the narrator’s shock at the Stammheim suicides. Although there are numerous texts that overtly take the RAF as their subject, Goetz’ novel Kontrolliert is considered “one of the most substantiated and aesthetically interesting literary discussions of German Autumn and the question of radical opposition in general.”26 It is hardly surprising then that Kleist makes an appearance. Dagmar Leupold, on the other hand, prefers that Kleist and Ulrike Meinhof remain ghosts and allows their ideas to wander through her novel Die Helligkeit der Nacht: Ein Journal (2009), the most recent addition to the works connecting Kleist and the RAF, and one whose publication, like the others, happens to coincide with the anniversary of 18 October 1977.27 Up until this point, a discernible trend emerged when considering the names of the artists mentioned in this paper who take Kleist as their subject: Christa Wolf, Heiner Müller, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Elfriede Jelinek, and Rainald Goetz. These writers are notorious for their transgressive, radical approach to literature and representation, and it makes sense that they found their way to Kleist and were interested in the RAF. While Leupold’s work could hardly be described as transgressive, she is interested in the project of retelling history and understanding the past.28 In the fashion of an epistolary novel, Die Helligkeit der Nacht: Ein Journal consists of approximately one hundred letters from Heinrich von Kleist to Ulrike Meinhof written between March 2008 and February 2009. They appear to be letters, in that most begin with “Liebe Ulrike” (Dear Ulrike), address her directly, and end with “Ihr Kleist” (Your Kleist). Occasionally they are interrupted with brief responses from Meinhof that are set off parenthetically and in italics and occasionally begin with the address “Lieber Kleist” (Dear Kleist), but rarely end with “Ihre Ulrike” (Your Ulrike).29 These details are important because the understanding of the book changes significantly depending on whether it is seen as an epistolary novel “documenting” a fictitious correspondence 26

27 28 29

Thomas Hoeps considers the book to be one of “den fundiertesten und ästhetisch interessantesten literarischen Auseinandersetzungen mit dem ‘Deutschen Herbst’ ebenso wie mit der Frage radikaler Opposition allgemein.” Thomas Hoeps, Arbeit am Widerspruch: ‘Terrorismus’ in deutschen Romanen und Erzählungen (1837–1992), p. 294. Dagmar Leupold, Die Helligkeit der Nacht (Munich: Beck, 2009). See Leupold’s Nach den Kriegen: Roman eines Lebens (2004), in which she explores her father’s past as a member of the Nazi party and attempts to come to terms with it. Of approximately forty letters, only two are signed “Ihre dornige Ulrike” (your thorny Ulrike) and “Ihre alte Ulrike” (your good old Ulrike). Although they are from different letters (9 and 13 June 2008), they are so close in time that they appear next to each other on two pages (Leupold, Die Helligkeit der Nacht, pp. 66–67).

164 Carrie Collenberg-Gonzalez

between Heinrich von Kleist and Ulrike Meinhof or as a journal (as the title implies) in which the figure of Kleist imagines he is engaged in a conversation with Ulrike Meinhof. The title, Die Helligkeit der Nacht: Ein Journal, insists on the latter interpretation despite its reception in various reviews.30 As such, in this journal, the ghost of Kleist meets and becomes preoccupied with the ghost of Ulrike Meinhof, which helps him confront his own past. In the first entry, Kleist refers to a meeting and a walk in Oßmannstedt.31 He wonders whether they talked about why they were there, wonders why he is writing to her, thinks about birth and death and rebirth, that he knew her pictures, and that she smiled. The last sentence of the first entry suggests that this is indeed a journal — a series of internal letters: “Ich schließe diesen inneren Brief wie einen echten mit Ihr H. K.” (I close this internal letter like a real one with — Your Kleist; Leupold, Die Helligkeit der Nacht, p. 9). Here, it is obvious that the reader is about to embark on a journey in which Kleist ponders life and tries to come to terms not only with his past, but with time, history, love, and the past of Ulrike Meinhof. His obsessive internal letters are as manic as the ones sent to his fiancée, sister and cousin. He seems to fall in love — not necessarily with the woman Ulrike Meinhof, but with his projection of her and her history, to her understanding of him (many of her comments are directed towards him and the impact his work had on her). In his mind, she almost seems to embody one of Heiner Müller’s comments, and a particularly male fantasy: “Ulrike Meinhof, daughter of Prussia and late-born bride of another foundling of German literature who buried himself by Wannsee.”32 The most progressive aspect of this text, and what sets it apart from other RAF texts or artworks that associate Kleist with the RAF, is that Kleist takes Ulrike Meinhof as his muse, and not the other way around. The following excerpt, also from the first entry, describes Kleist’s hope for what will come of this strange encounter:

30

31 32

Jan Bürger, “Posthumer Ernstfall: Dagmar Leupold lässt in ihren Roman Die Helligkeit der Nacht die Toten auferstehen,” Die Zeit, 17 (22 April 2010), p. 50; Martin Halter, “Seelenpost nach Stammheim,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 80 (7 April 2010), p. 30; Angelika Overath, “Schreiben zwischen Gewalt und Gnade,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 301 (7 April 2010), p. 30. See Alexander Kluge, Fontane-Kleist-Deutschland-Büchner: Zur Grammatik der Zeit (Berlin: Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, 2004). Kalb, Theater, p. 40. Müller cast Ulrike Meinhof as Ophelia in Die Hamletmaschine (1977). Heiner Müller, Die Hamletmaschine, in Werke, vol. 4. (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2001).

Kleist in the Reception of the RAF 165 In Latin, birth and death are only separated by one syllable, natus and denatus. That is how one spoke and wrote about the dead during my time, especially in official notifications. You can read about it in the autopsy report. (If only the living knew how much insight we have into their dealings!) Denatus — that seems so enlightening to me. One is not dead, like in English, but unborn. Or, as in the latest case, if you would agree: renatus. Reborn.33

In Die Helligkeit der Nacht, Leupold provides a space where Kleist and Meinhof can be reborn with all of their dreams and failures. They are not looking for a home (as in Wolken.Heim.) or relegated to an abyss (as in Kein Ort. Nirgends). Instead, they transcend time and the direction of progressive history. Instead of looking back for the answers, Kleist is looking forward and, in the process, both he and Meinhof are reborn and catapulted into the twenty-first century together. As with all contemporary discussions of the RAF and terrorism, the present study would not be complete without acknowledging the impact of the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001; one book that addresses this topic stands out in particular. Frank Lentricchia and Jody McAuliffe’s Crimes of Art and Terror (2003) begins and ends with Heinrich von Kleist.34 It begins with an epigraph from Michael Kohlhaas and ends with a short piece of fiction about Kleist followed by a Coda. The last story, entitled “The Last Maniacal Folly of Heinrich von Kleist (A Fiction),” can be understood as a type of script that describes the evolution of a writer who stages a killing in a play and reenacts the same scene later in real life. It begins with Kleist’s murder of Henriette Vogel and suicide and then travels back in time to Kleist’s audition with Karoline von Günderode in 1804, transitions to a peculiar dialog between the two, and shifts to a letter from F. C. Dahlmann, who describes the premiere of Kleist’s Penthesilea in an insane asylum.35 The final section then describes how Günderode kills herself, and concludes with the synopsis of how the love of Kleist and Vogel is at last fully realized in what Lentricchia and McAuliffe refer to as the “one of the earliest acts of performance art, violent death as art” (Lentricchia and McAuliffe, p. 148) in the 33

34

35

“Im Lateinischen sind Geburt und Tod nur durch eine Silbe getrennt, natus, denatus, so sprach und schrieb man zu meiner Zeit von den Verstorbenen, besonders im Amtlichen; im Obduktionsbereicht ist es nachzulesen. (Wenn die Lebenden wüssten, wie viel Einblick wir haben in ihre Geschäfte!) Denatus — das scheint mir sehr einleuchtend. Nicht verstorben ist man, wie im Deutschen, sondern entboren. Oder, wie im jüngsten Fälle, wenn Sie diesen zugestehen mögen: renatus. Wiedergeboren” (Leupold, Die Helligkeit der Nacht, p. 8). Frank Lentricchia and Jody McAuliffe, Crimes of Art and Terror (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). Subsequent citations as “Lencentria and McAuliffe” with page number(s). A reference to Wolf, Kein Ort. Nirgends.

166 Carrie Collenberg-Gonzalez

“actualization in the flesh of the theatrical juncture of Penthesilea and Achilles,” resulting in the “perfect incarnation of Kleist’s art in the criminal act” — “rotting flesh on the tables left behind for the relatives to try to recognize, but the bodies transformed” (Lentricchia and McAuliffe, p. 165). In the Coda of Crimes of Art and Terror, the authors ask the readers to imagine a dialogue between Kleist and Mohamed Atta, one of the hijackers of the first plane to crash into the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001. In this short dialogue, which takes place after their respective deaths, Atta and Kleist ask each other why they did it. Kleist describes the step-bystep process of murder and suicide while Atta tells Kleist about his own desire for the moment when the nose of the plane will touch the tower and he will meet Allah, his own moment of murder and suicide. The frame suggests that the dialogue should allow the reader to “try to imagine an understanding (because we cannot truly understand) as to why and how the impulse to create transgressive art and the impulse to commit violence lie so perilously close to each other” (Lentricchia and McAuliffe, p. 167). Lentricchia and McAuliffe suggest that the link between the two can be understood not as a desire for transformation, but in terms of “Wallace Stevens’s characterization of the imaginative process, as knowing ‘desire without an object of desire’” where “the object of desire is the doing and only the doing of the act itself, the experience of desire is its own object” (Lentricchia and McAuliffe, p. 168). It is possible that the dialog between Kleist and Atta focuses on the “moment” and the feeling they had in that moment, because it is the last moment they can remember. They did, after all, die in the act. The living, the seeing, are left with the pieces, to try to make sense of the aesthetic impact of what happened and under what circumstances murder or suicide can be considered courageous. By restricting the dialogue between Kleist and Atta to the moment of death and suggesting that their objective was to experience desire, Lentricchia and McAuliffe suggest that the meaning behind their acts did not necessarily concern the audience. While the dialogue between Kleist and Atta may demonstrate this point, the act of writing an obviously fictitious dialogue yields to the symbolically charged visual language of their deaths and the desire of the audience to “read” and understand what was witnessed or the impact it had on others. By creating a fictional dialogue between Kleist and Atta, Lentricchia and McAuliffe create a certain distance from which they can approach murder-suicide as a type of performance art. By posing the murder-suicide as art, they challenge cherished ideas about the transformative potential of representation and the idea that art and artists be somehow humane, an assumption at the heart of the

Kleist in the Reception of the RAF 167

discussion of artists and terrorists and their relationship to transgression, violence, and modernity. Lentricchia and McAuliffe also attribute the beginning of transgressive art to Heinrich von Kleist and frame their book along this chronology — beginning with Michael Kohlhaas and ending with the dialog between Kleist and Atta. In the introduction, they describe the other chapters in the book as “historically provocative indications, each in distinctive ways, of what has been at the core of self-conscious art since the late eighteenth century: an attitude of revolt that defines the way ambitious artists after Kleist routinely conceive of what it means to be an ambitious artist” (Lentricchia and McAuliffe, p. 3). Kleist was not the first in the Western world or even in Germany to write ambiguous texts about death, war, rape, murder, and justice, or to write a text in which politics is mixed with prose or there is sympathy for the justification of violence. His premeditated murder-suicide and its relationship to the murder-suicides of 1977 and 2001 is what makes him most appealing to connections to radical extremism or terrorism, as demonstrated by Lentricchia and McAuliffe. While the current “Age of Terror” may share branding similarities with the “Reign of Terror” of the French Revolution and its subsequent political malaise and literary aftershocks in Germany, bracketing 1789 with Deutscher Herbst or 9/11 is more symptomatic of an attempt to come to terms with these traumatic events by contextualizing them historically, linking them with a permeating Romantic tradition, or grouping them together as forms of transgressive art seeking social change. Bracketing the French Revolution with German Autumn or 9/11 suggests a hope that there will be an end to violence if a beginning and a pattern can be established. While the transgressive qualities of Kleist and his work can be understood and related to one another as tidy modernist projects, they reveal more when considered as universal aspects of human nature. The approaches to Kleist and terrorism considered here reveal less about the actual patterns of violence and death and more about how violence and death are processed in a given cultural and historical context. Longwood University

Daniel Cuonz Robert Walser, Christa Wolf, and Kleist on the Move: Portraits of the Writer on his Way to Writing In addition to serving as a history of travel routes, plans, and impressions, Kleist’s early letters are important documents of his philosophical and poetological reflections on becoming a writer. Kleist’s insistent discourse of “being on the way” is not reducible to biographical facts. Artistic Kleist reception in twentieth century German literature has made these aspects the very focus of interest. Robert Walser’s short prose pieces “Kleist in Thun” and “Kleist in Paris” both thematize Kleist’s struggle toward becoming a writer, linking arrivals and departures to questions of creativity and inspiration. In Christa Wolf’s novel Kein Ort. Nirgends (1979), an encounter between Kleist and Karoline von Günderode takes place on a promenade — a literal “Aus-Weg” (way out). In the texts of both Walser and Wolf, the literary character Kleist appears literally and figuratively on his “way to writing.”

A scholarly classic on the beginnings of Kleist’s literary writing carries the title “Kleists Weg zur Dichtung” (Kleist’s Way to Literature).1 This phrase — which can be found in almost all studies on the young Kleist of the last fifty years — addresses a remarkably persistent question: How could it happen that a barely twenty-five-year-old descendant of the Prussian establishment around 1800 abandoned “the whole splendid lot of nobility and class and honor and wealth”2 in order to become, of all things, a poet? Walter Müller-Seidel, who coined the phrase, is often no longer cited in this context. “Kleist’s Way to Literature,” however, seems to have become firmly established as a metaphorical matter of course within Kleist scholarship.3 Metaphors of being on the way and of travel are common and 1

2

3

Walter Müller-Seidel, “Kleists Weg zur Dichtung,” in Die deutsche Romantik. Poetik, Formen, Motive, ed. by Hans Steffen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1967), pp. 112–133. “[…] den ganzen prächtigen Bettel von Adel und Stand und Ehre und Reichtum.” Kleist’s letter to Wilhelmine von Zenge of 13 November 1800, in Heinrich von Kleist, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. by Helmut Sembdner (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2008), vol. 2, p. 588. Subsequent citations as “SW” with volume and page number(s). Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine. It can be added that the phrase appears remarkably often in chapter titles or at crucial points of an argument. To mention one particularly telling example, on the first page of Dirk Grathoff’s ingenious book, Kleists Geheimnisse. Unbekannte Seiten einer Biographie

170 Daniel Cuonz

convention-alized in discourses about careers.4 But in the case of Kleist, their frequency and insistence are, to say the least, exceptional. And indeed there seems to be an inner connection between Kleist’s turning to literary writing and the discourse of being on the move. The fact that Kleist’s first attempts at literary writing occur during a period that is marked by intensive travel activities is one thing; the fact that Kleist’s early references to his actual travels considerably helped to shape his literary writing is another. In other words, Kleist’s first encounters with the possibilities and the limits of conveying meaning through language, the successive transfers from discoursive to poetic speech, are inseparably linked to his epistolary reports about travel plans, travel routes, and travel experiences — or more precisely, to a rising awareness of the conceptual potential of such notions as “departure,” “way,” and “arrival.” However, the unreflected use of the phrase “Kleist’s Way to Literature” — as it is handed down from one generation of scholars to the next — has rather obscured than elucidated these matters. Likewise unhelpful is the jargon of neo-esotericism and popular psychology, which contents itself with the trite phrase that the “way is the goal.” In contrast, the literary Kleist portraits by Robert Walser and Christa Wolf consider the various biographical and poetological implications of Kleist’s referring to himself as being on the move without straightening the beginnings of his literary writing to a “way to literature.”

I. In order to fully recognize the artistic legacy of Kleist’s poetology of traveling, it is necessary first to briefly describe its most important manifestations in his own writing.5 The earliest examples for Kleist’s consideration of the metaphorical tradition and the conceptual potential of being on the way can be found in those letters, in which he writes about his plans for the future; this means for the young Kleist, about plans to arrive at personal happiness. In a letter to his sister, dating from 1799, the metaphor of life as a journey appears to illustrate an ideal of purposefulness that is projected on the screen of the addressee’s alleged indetermination:

4 5

(Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1993), he writes: “Zu erklären bleibt der rätselhafte Weg, den Kleist zur Dichtung nahm, nach wie vor, wir wissen nur Unzulängliches darüber” (p. 9). This is reflected not least in the German expressions “Laufbahn” and “Werdegang,” which are both equivalent to the English “career.” For a more detailed investigation into Kleist’s poetics of being on the way, cf. Daniel Cuonz, “Die Kunst weiterzugehen. Schreib- und Lesebewegungen bei Heinrich von Kleist,” Kleist-Jahrbuch (2007), pp. 213–235.

Robert Walser, Christa Wolf, and Kleist on the Move 171 A traveler who knows his destination and the route to that destination has a travel plan. What a travel plan is for a traveler, a life plan is for the person in general. To undertake a journey without a travel plan would mean to expect Chance to lead us to a goal we ourselves would not foreknow. To live without a life plan would mean leaving to Chance whether we should arrive at a happiness, of which we ourselves have no prior conception. It is really incomprehensible to me how a person can live without a life plan, and in the secure way I make use of the present, I feel with such inwardness the calm with which I look to the future, the priceless happiness that my life plan affords me; while the condition of being without a life plan, without a firm vocation, forever hesitant between uncertain desires, ever in contradiction to my sense of duty, a plaything of Chance, a puppet on the string of fate — such an ignoble condition would seem to me so contemptible, would render me so unhappy that I would by far prefer death.6

The insistence with which the necessity of having a travel plan for the journey of life is propagated gives reason to doubt whether the concept of a life that is structured in terms of stages and milestones really is a convincing concept. Already the fact that the plea for the planning of individual happiness is presented only ex negativo stands in opposition to the pretended fitness for departure. In addition to that, the vehement strategy of immunization against the idea of living without a travel plan is clearly undermining itself. On the one hand, Kleist seems to be eager to gain argumentative terrain by formulating a sentence that does not seem to want to end; on the other hand, he symptomatically traps his own argument in the rhetorical manifestation par excellence of not moving on, that is to say, in a tautology. The critique that the perspective of incomprehensible happiness is incomprehensible actually reveals the fear that an inability to plan and incomprehensibility could be the conditiones sine quibus non of happiness. The

6

“Ein Reisender, der das Ziel seiner Reise, und den Weg zu seinem Ziele kennt, hat einen Reiseplan. Was der Reiseplan dem Reisenden ist, das ist der Lebensplan dem Menschen. Ohne Reiseplan sich auf die Reise begeben, heißt erwarten, daß der Zufall uns an das Ziel führe, das wir selbst nicht kennen. Ohne Lebensplan leben, heißt vom Zufall erwarten, ob er uns so glücklich machen werde, wie wir es selbst nicht begreifen. Ja, es ist mir so unbegreiflich, wie ein Mensch ohne Lebensplan leben könne, und ich fühle, an der Sicherheit, mit welcher ich die Gegenwart benutze, an der Ruhe, mit welcher ich in die Zukunft blicke, so innig, welch ein unschätzbares Glück mir mein Lebensplan gewährt, und der Zustand, ohne Lebensplan, ohne feste Bestimmung, immer schwankend zwischen unsichern Wünschen, immer im Widerspruch mit meinen Pflichten, ein Spiel des Zufalls, eine Puppe am Drahte des Schicksals — dieser unwürdige Zustand scheint mir so verächtlich, und würde mich so unglücklich machen, daß mir der Tod bei weitem wünschenswerter wäre.” Letter to Ulrike von Kleist of May 1799 (SW 2, p. 490).

172 Daniel Cuonz

praise of having a travel plan for the journey of life reflects itself — against the intention of the one who intones it — as a “pursuit of unhappiness.”7 The quest for the right “way to happiness” is explicitly at stake in one of Kleist’s first longer essays.8 In this early text, however, the unreflected use of travel metaphors symptomatically undermines the point Kleist is trying to make. Kleist’s specific poetology of being on the move is developed only gradually — “step by step.” Of interest in this respect is mainly a sequence of letters dating from the fall of 1800; that is to say, the references to the socalled “Würzburg Journey.” There have been a lot of controversial discussions on the question of what might have been the purpose of this “inexplicable journey.”9 The relevance of another question, however, is still underestimated: How was Kleist dealing with the problem of communication that is at stake here? In the letters to his sister and to his bride, Kleist is constantly mentioning an actual purpose of the journey, but he does not say anything specific about it — except for the repeatedly mentioned fact that it is impossible to say anything specific about it for the time being. Kleist’s discourse on his being on the way reveals itself more and more clearly as the expression of a rising awareness of the difficulty of meaning und understanding. Thus, the letters of this period can be considered as a conceptual combat zone. On the one hand, there are still manifestations of an unbroken optimism of arriving: “Allow me to pursue my goal confidently, Wilhelmine,” he writes at one point, “I am on the right path, I feel this in my ever more serene selfawareness, and the contentment that warms me within.”10 On the other hand, there is the occasional praise of being on the move. It is striking that it

7

8

9 10

The allusion to the famous subtitle of a popular-paradoxological bestseller by Paul Watzlawick can be completed by the fact that Watzlawick’s theory of happiness also refers to the metaphor of travel and of being on the way, and that it comes to a conclusion that is similar to the one Kleist develops ex negativo in his letter. The title of the chapter in question is “Beware of Arriving.” Cf. Paul Watzlawick, The Situation is Hopeless, but Not Serious. The Pursuit of Unhappiness (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1983), p. 65. Cf. Kleist’s “Aufsatz, den sichern Weg des Glücks zu finden und ungestört — auch unter den grössten Drangsalen des Lebens, ihn zu geniessen” (Essay on the Most Certain Way to find Happiness, And — Even Amidst Life’s Greatest Hardships — How to Appreciate the Journey Undeterred, 1799) (SW 2, pp. 301–315). “d[er] Zweck meiner Reise” and “meine unerklärliche Reise.” Kleist’s letter to Wilhelmine von Zenge of 20 August 1800 (SW 2, p. 522, 524). “Laß mich nur ruhig meinem Ziel entgegen gehen, Wilhelmine. Ich wandle auf einem guten Wege, das fühle ich an meinem heitern Selbstbewußtsein, an der Zufriedenheit, die mir das Innere durchwärmt.” Letter to Wilhelmine von Zenge of 5 September 1800 (SW 2, p. 547).

Robert Walser, Christa Wolf, and Kleist on the Move 173

almost reads like an anticipation of the aesthetics of the Road Movie in the following passage: At times I enjoy moments of utter contentment. Sitting on the open wagon, my cloak wrapped about me, my pipe well lit, with Brocks next to me, sturdy horses, good roads, and constantly changing sights to the left and right in a rarity-show — and before me my beautiful goal and behind me my dear girl waiting — — and within me contentedness — then, yes, then I am happy, truly happy at heart.11

And finally, there are even passages in which Kleist’s writing stages its struggle with the definition of goals and destinations, formulations that reveal a certain degree of an arrival skepticism. In the so-called “Vessel of Happiness Letter,” for example, Kleist extensively employs imagery of the anticipation of arrival, only to finally admit the incongruence between this old imagery and his actual situation: “[…] and on it goes — whereto? You shall know it. I do not know it for certain myself.”12 It is certainly true that the reason for the decreasing euphoria of goal orientation partly lies in the multiple occasions of an actual “alteration of our travel plan.”13 What was probably more important was a process of losing control of a seemingly harmless staging of secrecy. The illusion of being able to tell the truth about the destination and the purpose of the journey seems to have gotten lost in the entanglement of suspended and mystified information and in the speculations about what the addressees are able or unable to understand and what they are entitled or forbidden to know. Thus, the letters of the following months testify to a gradual process of abandoning the quest for Truth and its metaphorical fixation to the notion of arrival. This process culminates a few months later in a letter to his bride, which has become the most famous of all of Kleist’s letters. On 22 March 1801, Kleist informs Wilhelmine von Zenge about his insight that “we cannot decide whether what we call Truth really is Truth or whether it merely appear so to

11

12 13

“Zuweilen bin ich auf Augenblicke ganz vergnügt. Wenn ich so im offnen Wagen sitze, der Mantel gut geordnet, die Pfeife brennend, neben mir Brockes, tüchtige Pferde, guter Weg, und immer rechts und links die Erscheinungen wechseln, wie Bilder auf dem Tuche bei dem Guckkasten — und vor mir das schöne Ziel, und hinter mir das liebe Mädchen — — und in mir Zufriedenheit — dann, ja dann bin ich froh, recht herzlich froh.” Letter to Wilhelmine von Zenge of 5 September 1800 (SW 2, p. 549). “[...] dann geht es weiter, wohin? das sollst Du erfahren, ich weiß es selbst noch nicht gewiß.” Letter to Wilhelmine von Zenge of 20 August 1800 (SW 2, p. 525). “Veränderung unseres Reiseplans.” Letter to Wilhelmine von Zenge of 3 September 1800 (SW 2, p. 542).

174 Daniel Cuonz

us.”14 As is well known, the most important aspect of this letter is widely seen in what Kleist cites as the reason for this trepidation, namely the fact that he “recently became familiar with the recent so-called Kantian philosophy.”15 Thus more scholarly attention has been dedicated to the “Kant Crisis” than to Kleist’s concluding response to the lost perspective of truth: “Dear Wilhelmine, let me travel!”16 Heinz Politzer was the first to suggest the possibility that this letter could have been written for the purpose of nothing else than the plea to be allowed to travel.17 However, this remark remained without much effect in Kleist scholarship. The possibility that Kleist’s allusions to traveling could imply more than the biographical facts to which they are usually reduced has not been considered so far. This seems surprising because the following less frequently quoted sentences of the letter clearly build an analogy between the allusion to an envisaged actual journey on the one hand, and the sphere of thinking and writing on the other: I cannot work, that is not possible, I do not know to what purpose. If I stayed at home, I would have to lay my hands folded in my lap. So I would rather go for a walk and think. The movement of a journey will be more bearable to me than this brooding in one place.18

In the letters of the following months, Kleist continues the discussion of possibilities of the knowledge of Truth by staging it as a continued interplay between depression about the lack of goals and the joy of being on the way — with a clear tendency toward the latter. Unlike in earlier letters or popular-philosophical essays on the question of personal happiness, and unlike in the period in which the paradigm of happiness was replaced by the paradigm of Truth, now, in the period of Kleist’s turning to literary writing, 14

15 16 17

18

“Wir können nicht entscheiden, ob das, was wir Wahrheit nennen, wahrhaft Wahrheit ist, oder ob es uns nur so scheint.” Letter to Wilhelmine von Zenge of 22 March 1801 (SW 2, p. 634). “Vor kurzem ward ich mit der neueren sogenannten Kantischen Philosophie bekannt […]” Letter to Wilhelmine von Zenge of 22 March 1801 (SW 2, p. 634). “Liebe Wilhelmine, laß mich reisen.” Letter to Wilhelmine von Zenge of 22 March 1801 (SW 2, p. 635). Heinz Politzer, “Auf der Suche nach Identität. Zu Heinrich von Kleists Würzburger Reise,” in Kleists Aktualität. Neue Aufsätze und Essays 1966–1978, ed. by Walter MüllerSeidel (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1981), p. 76. “Arbeiten kann ich nicht, das ist nicht möglich, ich weiß nicht zu welchem Zwecke. Ich müßte, wenn ich zu Hause bliebe, die Hände in den Schoß legen, und denken. So will ich lieber spazieren gehen, und denken. Die Bewegung auf der Reise wird mir zuträglicher sein, als dieses Brüten auf einem Flecke.” Letter to Wilhelmine von Zenge of 22 March 1801 (SW 2, p. 635).

Robert Walser, Christa Wolf, and Kleist on the Move 175

there is a growing attention for the conceptual attractiveness of the metaphor of being on the way. In February 1802 — Kleist is staying in Thun at that time — he writes to his friend Heinrich Zschokke: If you and Gessner will grant me the pleasure of a visit, then pay attention to a house on the wayside on which is written a saying that goes as follows: “I come, I do not know from where. I am, I do not know what. I go, but I do not know where I am going. I wonder why I find this so enjoyable.” I like this saying very much and I cannot think of it without pleasure, when I am going for a walk.19

II. Against the background of his tormented reflections on career goals and life plans, Kleist’s fascination for the conceptual attractiveness of the liberation from the pressure of anticipation arrival is more than comprehensible. Yet the “pleasure” of being on the way, as it is expressed in this letter, seems a little too deliberate, a bit too constructed. It cannot conceal the fact that Kleist’s attempt to experience the spirit of being on the way as a profound satisfaction ultimately remains a weary self-imposition. However, it is not the fear that, in spite of everything, one needs a goal in life in order to arrive at happiness that accompanies Kleist for his entire life. Rather it is the preoccupation of not having the strength to stay on track, to keep going — to not only write about the ideal of being on the way, but also to live it. This self-tormenting thought can be recognized as the autobiographical thorn in Kleist’s famous essay “Über das Marionettentheater” (On the Marionette Theater, 1810). It is hardly accidental that the conversation scene staged in this essay is structured by the principle of being on the way. It has been aptly remarked that this scenario belongs in the literary history of the promenade.20 This particular poetological setting evidently influences the metaphorics employed by the protagonists. At crucial points of their conversation, both Herr C. and the narrator refer to “the way of the dancer’s 19

20

“Wenn Sie mir einmal mit Geßnern die Freude Ihres Besuchs schenken werden, so geben Sie wohl acht auf ein Haus an der Straße, an dem folgender Vers steht: ‘Ich komme, ich weiß nicht, von wo? Ich bin, ich weiß nicht, was? Ich fahre, ich weiß nicht, wohin? Mich wundert, daß ich so fröhlich bin.’ — Der Vers gefällt mir ungemein, und ich kann ihn nicht ohne Freude denken, wenn ich spatzieren gehe.” Letter to Heinrich Zschokke of 1 February 1802 (SW 2, p. 717). This is an observation of Gerhard Neumann, “Das Stocken der Sprache und das Straucheln der Körper. Umrisse von Kleists kultureller Anthropologie,” in Heinrich von Kleist. Kriegsfall — Rechtsfall — Sündenfall, ed. by Gerhard Neumann, (Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 1994), p. 20.

176 Daniel Cuonz

soul”21 or to the “journey around the world.”22 The reference to the latter stands, in the truest sense of the word, in the center of the essay,23 though it does not mark an argumentative midpoint, but rather a terminological implementation of an irreversible thinking and writing process that is already being undertaken. Along with the metaphor of the “journey around the world” goes the image of the “point where the two ends of the round earth meet,”24 that is to say, the point where the absolute conscience of the god and the absolute non-conscience of the marionette merge into each other. The utopian energy that would be set free at this point refers to the solution of a problem of conscience that is foremost at stake in Kleist’s “Ŝber das Marionettentheater.” The German-Austrian author Daniel Kehlmann diagnosed this problem as “self-constraint by hesitation und reflection”25 and as a “longing for lightness.”26 Indeed, is it not exactly this sense of lightness, whose aesthetic manifestations are thematized in the “Über das Marionettentheater,” that is at stake in the “dramas of consciousness”27 staged in Kleist’s early letters? Is this not exactly what it is all about when the young Kleist writes the constraints of purposefulness off his chest and praises “being on the way”? If Kehlmann is right and all of Kleist’s writing implies a longing for lightness, then it must be added that Kleist never got closer to this ideal than when he conceptualized it as the unbearable lightness of being on the way.28 21

22 23

24 25

26 27

28

“der Weg der Seele des Tänzers” (“Über das Marionettentheater,” SW 2, p. 340). It is with regard to this phrase that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari consider Kleist’s “Über das Marionettentheater” to be “without question one of the most spontaneously oriental texts in Western literature.” A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. by Brian Massumi, (New York/London: Continuum, 2004), p. 561, fn. 80. “die Reise um die Welt” (“Über das Marionettentheater,” SW 2, p. 342). This is an observation of Helmut J. Schneider in “Dekonstruktion des hermeneutischen Körpers. Kleists Aufsatz ‘Über das Marionettentheater’ und der Diskurs der klassischen Ästhetik,” Kleist-Jahrbuch (1998), p. 164. “[…] der Punkt, wo die beiden Enden der ringförmigen Welt in einander [greifen]” (“Über das Marionettentheater,” SW 2, p. 343). “Selbsthemmung durch Zögern und Reflexion,” Daniel Kehlmann, “Die Sehnsucht, kein Selbst zu sein,” Kleist-Jahrbuch (2007), p. 19. Subsequent citations as “Kehlmann” with page number(s). “Sehnsucht nach Leichtigkeit” (Kehlmann, p. 20). The accurate term “Bewusstseinsdramen” is borrowed from Karl Heinz Bohrer; cf. Der romantische Brief. Die Entstehung ästhetischer Subjektivität, (München: Hanser, 1987), p. 46. This thought is also raised (albeit allusively) in Kehlmann’s own reflections: “The truth is that there was no help for him [Kleist] in this world. But the truth also is: Not for him and not for anyone of us. Of this hopelessness, he knew to speak, in sentences so perfect that they make us feel bright: ‘Life, so the dervish tells us, is a

Robert Walser, Christa Wolf, and Kleist on the Move 177

III. The texts discussed in the following examine the concepts of departures, arrivals, and being on the way by transforming them into narratives. In the Kleist portraits by Robert Walser, the literality of the “departures” to literary writing — as it is employed in Kleist’s letters — is taken into consideration in a particularly consistent way. This narrative transformation is already evident in the titles. Unlike Walser’s numerous other portraits of writers and poets, here, the writer is first geographically localized. Both the famous prose piece “Kleist in Thun” (1907) and its recently rediscovered complementary text “Kleist in Paris” (1922) begin with an arrival and end with a departure. In both “Paris” and “Thun,” Walser’s Kleist is again on his way. It is certainly true that, with both “Kleist in Thun” and “Kleist in Paris,” Walser presents a counter-representation to “Kleist in Prussia,” or, in other words, to the nationalistically tinted Kleist image of his time. The dynamics of being on the way, which structures both texts, keep consistently on the move, as if to thereby save him from being monumentalized by ensuing ages.29 However convincing this historical approach might be, it seems worth equal consideration that these portraits refer in a very specific way to Kleist’s own writing. By focusing on the theme of being on the way, these texts restage the most important discoursive and metaphoric element of Kleist’s early writings. At first, the localities named in the titles seem to provide evidence for a biographical “localization” of Kleist becoming a writer. But they turn out to be mere way stations and not destinations. Thus, the reader’s interest is directed — “step by step” — toward the conceptual potential of the experience of being on the move. In “Kleist in Paris,” the interrelation between traveling and writing, between being on the way and being creative, is virtually chanted in a rhythmic interplay of questions and answers: “In April 1801, Kleist traveled to Paris. What might have been the purpose of this journey? What drove him to go there? He was twenty-three years old and it had just dawned on him that he could become a poet. Could? No, not only could, but must. He knows that he has to do that and, therefore, he makes this journey.”30 It becomes evi-

29

30

journey, / A brief one. Indeed.’ Indeed, his was very brief. It is still lasting” (Kehlmann, p. 20); the quote is from Prinz Friedrich von Homburg, Act IV, Scene 3 (SW 1, p. 686). Peter Utz, Tanz auf den Rändern. Robert Walsers “Jetztzeitstil,” (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998), p. 220. Subsequent citations as “Tanz auf den Rändern” with page number(s). Utz has the merit of having rediscovered this prose piece. It had first appeared in 1922, but its existence was unknown to scholars prior to Utz’ research. “Im April 1801 reiste Kleist nach Paris. Was er wohl damit bezweckte? Was trieb ihn dorthin? Er war 23 Jahre alt, und es dämmerte ihm eben auf, er könnte Dichter

178 Daniel Cuonz

dent, however, that this has at best marginally to do with the destination itself: Does the man of the world arise within him? Probably. But why does he want to travel to Paris, of all places, why into the hustle of the metropolis? Why that? Is he drawn into the stream of life? This is doubtlessly true, because he is driven by something greater. At the same time, he may be longing for both, for noise and stillness at the same time. That might be true, too.31

More importantly, it appears that the experience of traveling is more than the sum of its parts, and therefore not to be considered as a series of single travel adventures. Walser’s Kleist “does not travel in order to give an account of his journey, he does not travel in order to experience something and to then take it for something meaningful.”32 It is for another reason that, at the beginning of Walser’s portrait sketch, Kleist is sitting in a stagecoach on the way to Paris: “In his mind he already has a rough sketch, because there is a work to be finished. It is to this end and for no other reason that he makes this journey.”33 In other words, the journey of the prospective writer is aimed at the breakthrough in writing and not at the experience of the places to which this journey leads him — and from which it will necessarily lead him away again. In “Kleist in Paris,” the strict impossibility of staying in one place is only insinuated. At the end of “Kleist in Thun,” however, it is presented with its consequences. Here, Kleist is suffering from some sort of mental catalepsy caused by an exaggerated and thus necessarily deceived aim for creativity:

31

32 33

werden. Könnte? Nein, nicht nur könnte, sondern müßte! Er weiß, daß er das muß und reist deshalb.” Robert Walser, “Kleist in Paris,” in Akzente 1/1996, p. 5. Subsequent citations as “Kleist in Paris” with page number(s). “Erwacht der Weltmann in ihm? Kann schon sein. Aber warum will er gerade nach Paris reisen, in den Trubel der Weltstadt? Weshalb das? Zieht es ihn in den Strom des Lebens? Zweifellos, denn es treibt ihn ja in etwas Größeres. Zugleich sehnt er sich vielleicht nach beidem, nach Lärm und nach Stille zugleich? Auch das mag sein” (“Kleist in Paris,” p. 5). “[Er] reist nicht, um Reisebereicht abzustatten, reist nicht, um etwas zu erleben und es dann für etwas Bedeutendes zu halten” (“Kleist in Paris,” p. 5). “Im Geist ist schon ein Entwurf, denn es gilt ein Werk fertigzubringen. Darum und sonst um nichts reist er [...]” (“Kleist in Paris,” p. 5).

Robert Walser, Christa Wolf, and Kleist on the Move 179 What he writes makes him grimace: his creations miscarry. Toward autumn he is taken still […] His face has the expression and the color of a man whose soul has been eaten away. His hair hangs clotted in thick pointed hanks over his temples, which are contorted by all the thoughts which he imagines have dragged him into filthy pits and into hells.34

The departure appears to be a salvation from utter distress: “He lays his hand in his sister’s and is content to look at her, long, and in silence. Already it is the vacant gaze of a skull, and the girl shudders […] Then they leave.”35 Indeed, the regained experience of being on the way does not miss its effect. Kleist’s tension breaks up, and “he feels quite well now; in pain, but well at the same time,” and “then come moments when he is outright happy.” And his sister, too, “of course, is glad that he is feeling better. On and on, well, well, what a journey it is.”36 At the end of his “Kleist-Essay,” almost twenty years later, Walser revisits these matters, proclaiming that, “in [his] opinion, Kleist was from time to time one of the happiest men of his age, which could be seen in all desirable clarity from his partly downright glittering work.”37 The necessary condition for the realization of such moments of happiness is unmistakably formulated in the essay’s final line: “Writing and Living were supposed to flow together in one single coherent, brilliant, meaningful whole.”38 Between these two thoughts, Walser inserts an important additional remark that can be considered as a belated comment on the prose pieces “Kleist in Thun” 34

35

36

37

38

“Sein Schaffen zieht ihm die Grimasse, es misslingt. Gegen den Herbst wird er krank”; “Sein Gesicht hat die Züge und die Farbe eines an der ganzen Seele Zerfressenen”; “Die Haare hängen ihm in dicken, spitzen Klumpen von Strähnen in die Stirne, die verzerrt ist von all den Gedanken, die ihn, wie er sich einbildet, in schmutzige Löcher und Höllen hinabgezogen haben.” Robert Walser, “Kleist in Thun,” in Das Gesamtwerk. ed. by Jochen Greven, (Geneva/Hamburg: Kossodo, 1966–1975), vol. 1, p. 182. Subsequent citations as “Kleist in Thun” with page number(s). Based on Robert Walser’s Selected Stories, with a foreword by Susan Sontag, trans. by Christopher Middleton and others (New York: The New York Review of Books, 1982). “Er gibt seiner Schwester die Hand und begnügt sich, sie lange und stillschweigend anzuschauen. Es gleicht bereits einem Glotzen, und das Mädchen schauert. Dann reisen sie” (“Kleist in Thun,” p. 183). “ganz wohl; weh, aber zugleich wohl”; “Momente, wo er geradezu glücklich ist”; “[die Schwester] ist natürlich seelenfroh, daß es ihm besser geht. Weiter, hei, hei ist das eine Wagenfahrt” (“Kleist in Thun,” p. 184). “[seiner Ansicht] nach von Zeit zu Zeit einer der glücklichsten Menschen seiner Epoche [war], was ja aus seinem teilweise geradezu glitzernden Schaffen mit wünschenswerter Klarheit hervorging.” Robert Walser, “Kleist-Essay,” in Das Gesamtwerk, vol. 9, p. 256. Subsequent citations as “Kleist-Essay” with page number(s). “Dichten und Leben sollten ihm in ein einziges, zusammenhängendes Glänzendes, Bedeutendes fließen” (“Kleist-Essay,” p. 257).

180 Daniel Cuonz

and “Kleist in Paris.” The metropolis Paris, Walser writes, was not a place Kleist “would have been able to make much use of,”39 and in the small Swiss town Thun, “he set expectations for himself that were too high.”40 In other words, the essence of the temporary ability to enjoy happiness, which becomes momentarily readable in Kleist’s writing, lies in the fact that it cannot be localized — neither as a stage nor as a destination, neither in Prussia nor abroad.41 The lesson of traveling that Walser’s Kleist is learning is that the concordance of living and writing is a transient experience. The attempt to make it a permanent condition is literally “u-topian.” But in a likewise literal sense, it is momentarily “er-fahrbar.”42

IV. Some fifty years after the publication of Robert Walser’s “Kleist-Essay,” this utopian potential reappears in the title of the probably most important literary Kleist portrait of the 20th century: Kein Ort. Nirgends (No Place on Earth, 1977). Christa Wolf’s “desirable legend”43 of an encounter between Kleist and Karoline von Günderode begins with a depiction of the conditions that make this encounter so desirable. Kleist and Günderode find themselves imprisoned in a world that is prefigured through the tea party they are attending — in a society that tends to “see everything in terms of Either-Or,”44 as it is said about one character. This is also and especially true for the neat separation of living and writing. At one point, the stagnant conversations turn to Kleist’s breakup with his friend Ernst von Pfuel, and court counselor Wedekind finds it strange “that two friends, two civilized adults, should be capable of ending up at daggers drawn over a couple of lines of verse. Was this not carrying reverence for literature a little too far? Indeed was it not impermissible to breach 39 40 41

42 43

44

“[...] wenig anzufangen gewusst […]” (“Kleist-Essay,” p. 256). “[...] an sich selbst zu große Ansprüche gestellt […]” (“Kleist-Essay,” p. 256 f). This is a partial objection to Peter Utz’ conclusion that the “Durchbruch zum eigenen Schreiben” is foremost due to the experience of “Fremde” (Tanz auf den Rändern, p. 221). The literal meaning of the German expression “Erfahrung” (experience) can be translated as “something that has been achieved by means of driving.” “erwünschte Legende.” Christa Wolf, Kein Ort. Nirgends, in Werke, ed. by Sonja Hilzinger, (München: Luchterhand, 1999–2001), vol. 6, p. 11. Subsequent citations as “Kein Ort. Nirgends” with page number(s). Translations from this text are based on: No Place on Earth, trans. by Jan van Heurck, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982). Subsequent citations as “No Place on Earth” with page number(s). No Place on Earth, p. 80; “für alles ein Entweder-Oder hat” (Kein Ort. Nirgends, p. 73).

Robert Walser, Christa Wolf, and Kleist on the Move 181

that wall that has been erected between literary fantasies and the actualities of the world?”45 Yet these are the words of a character of whom it is said that “to be sure” is “his favorite phrase.”46 For Kleist, however, things are obviously more complicated than that: “Immorality! They don’t know the meaning of the word. But he knows. To fail to pay life the debt it demands, to feel truly alive only when one is writing [...].”47 The ultimate consequence of this belief is expressed in a thought reported by Günderode: “I may easily fail at both living and writing; but I have no choice.”48 It is the existential need for synergies between living and writing in spite of their hopeless incongruence that binds Kleist and Günderode to each other, and that is what makes this constellation so interesting for Christa Wolf. In several essays and interviews, she has stressed the fact that the analysis of this dilemma was also an analysis of her own situation as a writer in the German Democratic Republic at that time: “That was a time when I found myself obliged to examine the preconditions for failure, the connection between social desperation and failure in literature.”49 One possible reaction to the fact “that the alternatives in which we are living are collapsing one after another so that life offers fewer and fewer real alternatives”50 seems to be anticipated in a characterization of her own writing that Wolf had attempted a few years earlier:

45

46 47

48 49

50

No Place on Earth, p. 12; “[…] Befremden [darüber], daß erwachsene gesittete Menschen, Freunde aufs Blut sich streiten können um ein paar Verse. Hieße das nicht den Respekt vor der Literatur übertreiben? Ja: Sei es nicht überhaupt unstatthaft, jene Wand zu durchbrechen, die zwischen die Phantasie der Literaten und die Realität der Welt gesetzt ist” (Kein Ort. Nirgends, p. 18). No Place on Earth, p. 11; “gewiss […] sein Lieblingswort” (Kein Ort. Nirgends, p. 18). No Place on Earth, p. 17–18; “Unmoral! Die wissen nicht, was das ist. Er weiß es. Dem Leben schuldig bleiben, was es fordert; wahres Leben nur fühlen, indem man schreibt [...]” (Kein Ort. Nirgends, p. 23). No Place on Earth, p. 35; “Ich kann beides verfehlen, Leben und Schreiben, doch habe ich keine Wahl” (Kein Ort. Nirgends, p. 37). “Das war in einer Zeit, da ich mich selbst veranlasst sah, die Voraussetzungen von Scheitern zu untersuchen, den Zusammenhang von gesellschaftlicher Verzweiflung und Scheitern in der Literatur.” Christa Wolf, “Projektionsraum Romantik. Gespräch mit Frauke Meyer Gosau,” in Werke, vol. 8, p. 236. Subsequent citations as “Projektionsraum Romantik” with page number(s). The translation given is from “Culture is What You Experience — An Interview with Christa Wolf,” New German Critique 27 (1982), pp. 89–100. The most striking external reason for such reflections of this kind was, as is well known, the expatriation of Wolf Biermann in 1976. “Meine Erfahrung ist, daß die Alternativen, in denen wir leben eine nach der anderen zusammenbrechen und daß immer weniger wirkliche Lebensalternativen übrigbleiben” (“Projektionsraum Romantik,” p. 242).

182 Daniel Cuonz Epic prose should be a genre, which aims to penetrate [the] individual, the prose reader, along trails, which have not yet been blazed. It must get through to his innermost core, the nucleus where the personality is formed and made solid […] This region is accessible to the voice of another human being; prose can reach it […] not to take control of it, but to free psychic energies.51

To one of these “trails, which have not yet been blazed,” Wolf directs the protagonists of Kein Ort. Nirgends. Their conversational encounter makes it at least conceivable that there is an alternative to social isolation and artistic stagnation. Significantly, this encounter takes place outdoors, and, more important than that, on a promenade. While at the beginning of the story, Kleist and Günderode were depicted as passive and isolated outsiders at the tea party, they now actively choose an alternative path — “the path leading upstream, while the rest of the company turns onto the right-hand path along the shore.”52 The way out, on which the story lets the protagonists take a few steps, is a literal one. The conversation begins with the topic of being on the way. In response to Günderode’s insistent questions, Kleist provides her with details about his journey to Paris: That journey — it was very strange, from the outset it was governed by two stars. In part, I wanted to make it in order to seek diversion, for, through more intimate acquaintance with the philosophy of Kant, I had lost my only and highest ideal — the acquisition of truth and the cultivation of the mind — for now it appeared to me impossible to achieve knowledge. Yet in part the journey was also imposed on me. My sister did not wish to relinquish her participation in my lot, so in order for her to accompany me, we had to obtain other papers recording the goal and purpose of our undertaking. What was I to say to the authorities? Then suddenly there was “Paris” written on my papers,

51

52

“Die epische Prosa sollte eine Gattung sein, die es unternimmt, auf noch ungebahnten Wegen in das innere dieses Menschen da, des Prosalesers, einzudringen. Diese Region kann die Stimme eines anderen Menschen, kann Prosa erreichen [...] nicht, um sich ihrer zu bemächtigen, sondern um seelische Kräfte freizusetzen.” Christa Wolf, “Lesen und Schreiben,” in Werke, vol. 4, p. 268. The translation is from The Author's Dimension. Selected Essays, introduction by Grace Paley, ed. by Alexander Stephan, trans. by Jan van Heurck (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). No Place on Earth, p. 87; “[…] stromaufwärts, während die übrige Gesellschaft den rechten Uferweg wählt” (Kein Ort. Nirgends, p. 79). This contrast between different forms of being in opposition to what others do is also discussed by Eva-Maria Schulz-Jander, in “‘Das Gegenteil von Gebrechlichkeit ist Übereinkunft.’ Christa Wolf’s Kein Ort. Nirgends,” in The Age of Goethe Today. Critical Reexamination and Literary Reflection, ed. by Gertrud Bauer Pickar and Sabine Cramer (Munich: Fink, 1990), p. 234.

Robert Walser, Christa Wolf, and Kleist on the Move 183 and to my astonishment and incredulity: “For the study of mathematics and natural science.” I, who had nothing in mind than to flee from all knowledge!53

This dense montage of citations from letters of the period between the “Kant Crisis” and the journey to Paris are reminiscent of the sentences by which the literary character Kleist was introduced at the beginning of the story: “A man, Kleist, afflicted with this overly acute sense of hearing, flees on the pretext of excuses he does not dare to see for what they are. Aimlessly, it seems, he sketches with his eccentric footprints the lacerated map of Europe.”54 An alternative understanding of these departures without destinations can be found in a letter dating from 1803, in which Kleist tells his sister about a conversation he had with the renowned mathematician Hindenburg. The issue of the conversation is Kleist’s alleged educational journey to Paris. In response to the professor’s question of how things were going with mathematics in Paris, Kleist can only answer evasively. Eventually, Hindenburg disappointedly asks: “So you have merely been traveling around?” Nevertheless, the conversation ends on a conciliatory note, as Kleist can add that he is “indeed working on something.” After a brief hesitation, they cordially embrace each other and Hindenburg acknowledges that “every man has to cultivate the one talent that he finds predominant within himself.”55 In other words, he probably came to understand that this “merely traveling around” has been an educational journey insofar as it helped Kleist to discover literary writing as his predominant talent and to accordingly cultivate it. This perspective of a reconciliation between living and writing is also evoked at the end of Kein Ort. Nirgends: “To understand that we are a rough sketch — perhaps meant to be thrown away, perhaps to be taken up 53

54

55

No Place on Earth, p. 90; “Jene Reise — sehr eigentümlich stand sie von Anfang an unter einem Doppelstern. Teils wollte ich sie, um mich zu zerstreuen, da mir durch die nähere Bekanntschaft mit der Kantischen Philosophie mein einziges, höchstes Ziel, mir Bildung und Wahrheit zu erwerben, als unerfüllbar versunken war; teils wurde sie mir aufgezwungen: Da meine Schwester auf ihre Teilnahme nicht verzichten wollte, benötigten wir andere Pässe, in die Ziel und Zweck der Unternehmung eingetragen wurden. Was sollte ich sagen? Da stand plötzlich ‘Paris’ und, zu meiner ungläubigen Verwunderung: ‘Studium der Mathematik und Naturwissenschaften.’ Ich, der nichts vorhatte, als dem Wissen zu entfliehn!” (Kein Ort. Nirgends, p. 81f.). No Place on Earth, p. 4; “Einer, Kleist, geschlagen mit diesem überscharfen Gehör, flieht unter Vorwänden, die er nicht durchschauen darf. Ziellos, scheint es, zeichnet er die zerrissene Landkarte mit seiner bizarren Spur” (Kein Ort. Nirgends, p. 11). “So sind Sie bloß so herumgereiset?”; “dass [er] doch an etwas arbeite”; “der Mensch müsse das Talent anbauen, das er in sich vorherrschend fühle.” Letter to Ulrike von Kleist of 13/14 March 1803 (SW 2, p. 730).

184 Daniel Cuonz

again.”56 Once more in this narrative, it is hard, if not impossible, to decide “who is speaking.”57 However, this very inability to decide helps to communicate the alternative concept of self-awareness that is proposed here. At the point where the narrative presents this concept, it will already have fulfilled its purpose. The attempt to consider real life biographies as drafts that might be productively rewritten is what this literary text is all about. Its theme is not only an encounter between two persons that never took place in real life, but also the fact that such an encounter is rendered possible by means of literary writing. This double perspective is obviously a very Kleistian legacy. In the beginnings of his career, Kleist, too, considered writing as the very place where expectable and desirable events could tentatively be brought in contact. It is well known that this place revealed itself as “No Place.” And “No Place” is, as it has been aptly remarked, also and above all “no place to stay.”58 Therefore, when toward the end of Kein Ort. Nirgends, the changing of the light and the voices from afar remind the protagonists that it is time for the inevitable journey back, the narration, too, heads back from the “desirable legend” to the well-known biographical facts. In this sense, the famous last sentence of the story would indeed have the last word: “We know what is coming.”59 The penultimate sentence, however, evokes an alternative. What the reader is offered here is the possibility not to conclude the reading with the knowledge of what is inevitable, but to think about how it could have been different: “Simply go on, they think.”60 Universität St. Gallen

56 57

58

59 60

No Place on Earth, p. 118; “Begreifen, daß wir ein Entwurf sind — vielleicht, um verworfen, vielleicht, um wieder aufgegriffen zu werden [...]” (Kein Ort. Nirgends, p. 105). No Place on Earth, p. 4. The question “Wer spricht?” (Kein Ort. Nirgends, p. 12) is the most obvious feature of a specific narrative technique that consists of constantly challenging the heterogeneity of the auctorial subject; cf. Helga G. Braunbeck, Autorschaft und Subjektgenese. Christa Wolfs Kein Ort. Nirgends (Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 1992). Jürgen Engler, “Herrschaft der Analogie,” Kritik 79. Rezensionen zur DDR-Literatur (Halle/Leipzig, 1980), pp. 227–234, quoted as in Sonja Hilzinger, Christa Wolf (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1986), p. 120. No Place on Earth, p. 119; “Wir wissen, was kommt” (Kein Ort. Nirgends, p. 105). No Place on Earth, p. 119; “Einfach weitergehn, denken sie” (Kein Ort. Nirgends, p. 105).

Bernd Fischer What Moves Kohlhaas? Terror in Heinrich von Kleist, E. L. Doctorow, and Christoph Hein The present paper discusses three adaptations of the Kohlhaas-story: Heinrich von Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas, E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, and Christoph Hein’s Der neue (glücklichere) Kohlhaas. At the center of each text lies a complex emotion that triggers a number of plot devices that contribute to the narrative construction of terror and the terrorist mind. My analysis highlights the topicality of Kohlhaas’ political psychodrama, which has, for instance, received considerable attention in psychoanalytical theories of narcissistic injury. In addition, the comparative aspects of the paper touch upon a potential historical outline of continuities and ruptures in the phenomenology of terror. Common to the three texts is, for example, the initial political promise of justice and fair play of the respective emerging or declining civic societies — as internalized by the aspiring proto- or post-bourgeois heroes in very different historical settings. Intentional historical rupture is a primary marker of the actual catastrophic event that centers the plotlines in the psychology of terror. Thus, a (literary) history of terrorist rupture — by its very nature — disrupts the ideological underpinnings of terror.

Heinrich von Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas (1810), E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, (1975), and Christoph Hein’s Der neue (glücklichere) Kohlhaas offer representations of a complex passion that to this day feeds numerous ideological paradigms: terror. My hope is that a comparative reading of the three adaptations of the Kohlhaas-motif can help identify elements that are constitutive for the narrative construction of terror-inflicting violent moments that inform the plotlines of political resistance, as well as the accompanying terrorist mind. Common to the three texts — and perhaps generic to all adaptations of the Kohlhaas-motif — is the broken promise of the justice of fair play and the betrayal of humanist values as anticipated and partially internalized by the stories’ aspiring proto- or (in Hein’s case perhaps) post-bourgeois heroes.1 In that sense, terror arises at the other side of historically specific disappointments about the hollow foundations of civil society and —

1

For an overview of literary Kohlhaas adaptations with radically shifting ideological parameters (from the nineteenth to the end of the twentieth century) cf. Thomas Mueller, “Kohlhaas-Metamorphosen in der deutschen Literatur des 20. Jahrhunderts,” in Bausteine zu einem transatlantischen Literaturverständnis, ed. by Hans W. Panthel and Peter Rau (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1994), pp. 150–156. The article is based on Mueller’s 1988 dissertation.

186 Bernd Fischer

where religion comes into play — the political impotence of humanism, if not the metaphysical void of modernity itself. Years ago, when I first worked on Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas, I was fascinated by the story’s portrayal of the functionality of vengeance within the context of highly politicized ethics, a theme that was, for instance, of interest from the perspective of the theory of partisan warfare that emerged during the Napoleonic occupation of Europe.2 I still believe that the ethics of revenge is the central theme of Kleist’s story, which interweaves the virtue of righteousness and a strong sense of justice with the violence of an allconsuming passion for revenge. Kleist pulls all registers in staging this emotion: “Kohlhaas, flung back into the hell of unfulfilled vengeance, turned his horse and was about to cry out: ‘Burn it [the cloister] down!’ when a vast thunderbolt fell to earth very close to him.”3 However, when I returned to Kleist’s politics a second time, this time with a focus on the aesthetic construction of national intentionalities,4 I could appreciate more fully that — in a poeticized version of Fichte’s political applications of his philosophy of identity — Kleist links the ethics of violent rebellion, at times, to a fleeting sensation of absolute identity and existential purpose. A good example is Die Hermannsschlacht, in particular, scene fourteen of act five: Septimus is being executed, outside of any military conventions, with a “Keule doppelten Gewichts” (club of double weight; SW 1, p. 612), as “[d]er Nornentag bricht an” (the day of the Norns commences; SW 1, p. 613), and the chorus of the bards sings about the justice of the imminent battle. Hermann leans against an oak tree and, for a moment, loses his composure so that he has to ask Winfried to take his place and announce the battle orders eagerly awaited by the Germanic tribes. Hermann, “violently shaken, sinks back towards the oak tree.”5 For a brief moment, in the midst of his propagandistic machi2

3

4

5

Cf. Bernd Fischer, Ironische Metaphysik: Die Erzählungen Heinrich von Kleists (München: Fink, 1988), pp. 57–83; and for Michael Kohlhaas within Kleist’s poetics of partisan warfare: Wolf Kittler, Die Geburt des Partisanen aus dem Geist der Poesie (Freiburg: Rombach, 1987), pp. 291–324. Heinrich von Kleist: Selected Writings, ed. and trans. by David Constantine (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1997), p. 229. Subsequent citations as “Constantine” with page number(s). Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine. “[...] so wandte Kohlhaas, in die Hölle unbefriedigter Rache zurückgeschleudert, das Pferd, und war im Begriff: steckt an! zu rufen, als ein ungeheurer Wetterschlag, dicht neben ihm, zur Erde niederfiel.” Heinrich von Kleist, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. by Helmut Sembdner, 2 vols (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2008), vol. 2, p. 35. Subsequent citations as “SW” with volume and page number(s). Cf. Bernd Fischer, Das Eigene und das Eigentliche: Klopstock, Herde, Fichte, Kleist. Episoden aus der Konstruktionsgeschichte nationaler Intentionalitäten (Berlin: Schmidt, 1995), pp. 271–320. “[...] sinkt, heftig bewegt, wieder an die Eiche zurück” (SW 1, p. 613).

Terror in Kleist, E.L. Doctorow, and Christoph Hein 187

nations and political calculations, Hermann is at one with all aspects of his cause: his violent rage, his intellectual mandate, his religious justification, and the collective self of the united tribes the battle is to bring about. As he says in act four, scene ten: “Do I fight for the sand I am stepping on / Do I fight for my bosom? […]/ Where Hermann stands, he is victorious, / and the Cheruska, therefore, too.”6 To establish Hermann’s Cheruska, its fields and settlements will be sacrificed, but that is a price he is willing to pay. The primary attribute of Hermann’s revenge is neither the drive for possession and power nor the wish for a better world; rather, it is the violent establishment of an unassailable identity, born out of the insult he has suffered once he understands the nature of Rome’s colonial mindset. Unlike Hermann, the intellectual architect and propagandist of a successsful war of liberation, Kleist’s other heroes appear far less as masters of their fate. Rather — in a remarkably skeptical interpretation of idealistic theories of the sublime — they tend to drift somewhat unwillingly towards their extraordinary moments of absolute oneness, so to speak, on a sloping path of a negative dialectic of insult and humiliation. This, furthermore, is often portrayed as an uncontrollable automatism of chance events, bureaucratic contingencies, and atavistic emotions that shift in a bi-polar manner between hyperbolical self-assertion and devastating doubt.7 These heroes are, nevertheless, politically designed to demonstrate what it actually takes to achieve the radical change of violent intervention and far-reaching rebellion. For one, the mounting onslaught of insult and humiliation tends to be answered by an escalating destruction of symbolic power structures; in Kleist’s Kohlhaas, for example: “The dragon that was laying waste the land”8 moves from Wenzel von Tronka to the duke of Saxony himself. In Ragtime, Coalhouse Walker escalates his rebellion from the fire chief Conklin all the way to the financial mogul J. P. Morgan. In Hein’s Kohlhaas, Hubert K. carries his complaint from the local union representative all the way to the high court in Berlin. Even at the peak of his murderous rebellion that begins to threaten the entire state of Saxony, Kleist’s Kohlhaas continues to suffer from an endless array of bureaucratic humiliations until his resolve “had indeed been broken 6 7

8

“Kämpf ich auch für den Sand, auf den ich trete, / Kämpf ich für meine Brust? / […] Wo Hermann steht, da siegt er, / Und mithin ist Cheruska da” (SW 1, p. 599). Peter Horn has recently discussed a large number of considerations that support his hypothesis “dass Kleist an einer ‘bipolaren affektiven Störung (manisch-depressive Psychose) gelitten hat” (that Kleist may have suffered from a bi-polar affective disturbance [manic-depressive psychosis]). Peter Horn, Verbale Gewalt oder Kleist auf der Couch. Über die Problematik der Psychoanalyse von literarischen Texten (Oberhausen: Athena, 2009), p. 138. Constantine, p. 231; “[...] d[er] Drach[e], der das Land verwüstete” (SW 2, p. 37).

188 Bernd Fischer

by the events on the marketplace.”9 Indeed, his “grief-stricken soul had [already] given up,”10 before the mysterious gypsy woman (which could be his wife Elisabeth intervening from beyond the grave) finally offers him the power to experience a moment of absolute fulfillment, which — following the logic of negative dialectics — must also be his last moment. For political reasons, the Brandenburg court has decided to provoke the duke of Saxony and grants Kohlhaas all the satisfaction he had demanded — the reconstituted horses, compensation for his and his servant’s material losses, as well as two years of imprisonment for Wenzel von Tronka: “[…] quite overwhelmed by his feelings, he crossed his arms on his breast and knelt, at a distance, before the Elector.”11 But the justice offered by the Elector is not enough to satisfy Kohlhaas’ hunger for revenge. At the moment of his execution, Elisabeth (or the gypsy woman) arranges for his ultimate satisfaction: highly personal and, at the same time, highly political. She enables him to first read and then swallow the future of the entire dynasty of Saxony. Kohlhaas stepped up close to the Elector of Saxony, “he took out the paper, unsealed it, read it: and staring fixedly at the man with blue and white plumes, who was already beginning to entertain sweet hopes, he put it into his mouth and swallowed it. The man with the blue and white plumes, seeing this, fell down unconscious, twitching violently.”12 Revenge is sweeter than life, and to use his power to save his life, as the Elector of Saxony has proposed to him, is out of the question for Kohlhaas: “Sir, if your sovereign came and said: I will annihilate myself with all the band of those who help me rule — annihilate myself, do you understand me, which is of course my soul’s dearest wish — I would still refuse to give him the paper which matters more to him than his existence, and should say: ‘You can bring me to the scaffold, but I can do you injury, and I will.’”13 9 10 11

12

13

Constantine, p. 251; “Der Roßhändler, dessen Wille, durch den Vorfall, der sich auf dem Markt zugetragen, in der Tat gebrochen war” (SW 2, p. 64). “hatte seine, von Gram sehr gebeugte Seele […] aufgegeben” (SW 2, p. 77). Constantine, p. 279; “[…] so ließ er sich, aus der Ferne, ganz überwältigt von Gefühlen, mit kreuzweis auf die Brust gelegten Händen, vor dem Kurfürsten nieder” (SW 2, p. 102). Constantine, p. 279–280; “[…] er nahm den Zettel heraus, entsiegelte ihn, und überlas ihn: und das Auge unverwandt auf den Mann mit blauen und weißen Federbüschen gerichtet, der bereits süßen Hoffnungen Raum zu geben anfing, steckte er [den Zettel] in den Mund und verschlang ihn. Der Mann mit blauen und weißen Federbüschen sank, bei diesem Anblick, ohnmächtig, in Krämpfen nieder” (SW 2, p. 103). Constantine, pp. 267–268; “Wenn Euer Landesherr käme, und spräche, ich will mich, mit dem ganzen Troß derer, die mir das Szepter führen helfen, vernichten — vernichten, versteht Ihr, welches allerdings der größeste Wunsch ist, den meine Seele hegt: so würde ich ihm doch den Zettel noch, der ihm mehr wert ist, als das Dasein,

Terror in Kleist, E.L. Doctorow, and Christoph Hein 189

As far as the politics of terror are concerned — not the least in the context of the Napoleonic wars, that is, Saxony’s collaboration with France — this scene marks a turning point in that Kohlhaas realizes that his hunger for personal revenge and his all-consuming hatred has superseded his fight for justice and a righteous political order. Later, the old gypsy woman (or Elisabeth) repeats the Elector’s offer: “Kohlhaas, rejoicing in the power thus granted him to wound his enemy mortally in the heel just as it was grinding him into the dust, replied: ‘Not for the worlds, old Lady, not for the worlds.’”14 The gypsy woman or Elisabeth, who had pleaded with him on her death bed to obey the Christian commandment and forgive his enemy, has finally accepted his position: “The woman, setting down the child, said that in some way he was right and he could do as he pleased.”15 Throughout the story, Doctorow’s Coalhouse Walker Junior also anticipates the moment of satisfaction when the city of New York will finally give in to his demands. But his last moment can hardly be seen as a grand experience of private and public fulfillment. Rather, he is gunned down by the police squadron as soon as he steps into the street, before a court hearing about his cause could seriously threaten the powers that be.16 Coalhouse’s inner emotions remain a secret to the end. On the other hand, it may be this psychological dark spot that serves as a catalyst for the terrorist mindset of his followers, the collective Coalhouse as they call themselves. The group already includes a tourist in terror, Younger Brother, the narrator’s uncle, who, after his affair with the archetypical starlet Evelyn Nesbit has ended, is on “the verge of a nervous collapse.”17 He is soon hooked on bombing for a cause and ultimately ends up offering his services as a bomb maker to any revolutionary movement that has use for his skills. It all started when he

14

15

16

17

verweigern und sprechen: du kannst mich auf das Schafott bringen, ich aber kann dir weh tun, und ich wills!” (SW 2, p. 86). Constantine, p. 275; “Kohlhaas, der über die Macht jauchzte, die ihm gegeben war, seines Feindes Ferse, in dem Augenblick, da sie ihn in den Staub trat, tödlich zu verwunden, antwortete: nicht um die Welt, Mütterchen, nicht um die Welt” (SW 2, p. 97). Constantine, p. 276; “Die Frau, indem sie das Kind auf den Boden setzte, sagte: daß er in mancherlei Hinsicht recht hätte, und daß er tun und lassen könnte, was er wollte” (SW 2, p. 98). In many ways, Kleist’s Kohlhaas can be read as an allegory of a potentially successful bourgeois rebellion: Fate and history are on the side of the story’s bourgeois hero, while corruption, bureaucracy, pomposity, and a hint of madness have left Saxony’s aristocratic order in shambles. Doctorow and Hein have no such allegory of a potentially successful rebellion to tell. E. L. Doctorow, Ragtime (New York: Random House, 1975), p. 151. Subsequent citations as “Doctorow” with page number(s).

190 Bernd Fischer

first saw Coalhouse’s mangled Ford Model T half submerged in a pond. “There ran through him a small current of rage, perhaps one one-hundredth, he knew, of what Coalhouse Walker must have felt, and it was salutary” (Doctorow, p. 152). The narrator explains: Coalhouse’s “controlled rage affected [his followers] like the force of a magnet. […] They believed they were going to die in a spectacular manner. This belief produced in them a dramatic, exalted self-awareness. Younger Brother was totally integrated in their community. He was one with them. He awoke every day into a state of solemn joy” (Doctorow, p. 206). The “force of Coalhouse’s will made them all feel holy” (Doctorow, p. 207). “They said they were a nation” (Doctorow, p. 249). Younger Brother belongs; he paints his face black and shaves his head, “a ritualistic grooming for the final battle” (Doctorow, p. 207). At the same time, Doctorow describes this transformation as preparation for a comical minstrel show, perhaps the ultimate minstrel show. Terrorism is show business, and a bomb layer can become as famous and admired as the starlet that rejected him in order to become the first sex goddess in the emerging film industry of the Baron of Ashkenazy. There is no moment of absolute rage, redemption, holiness, or dissolution of self in a grand collective fate for Christoph Hein’s accountant Hubert K. Although Hein’s narrator seems eager to follow Kleist’s narrator and embarks from the etymological source of “Rechtschaffenheit” (righteousness),18 it appears that “to make right”19 is even less dependent on personal integrity and courage and even more a chance event in the Brandenburg of the early 1970s than it is in Kleist’s Brandenburg. In Hein’s fictional account everyday life and intrigue in the GDR, injustice does not allow for even a hint of a possible rebellion. Rather it is the insatiable political ambition of a young apparatchik that brings about a turn in Hubert K.’s legal fate. The High Court’s revision of two lower court decisions and its ruling in K.’s favor is a mere ploy in a personal power game. Imagining a popular uprising or any form of violent subversion remains inconceivable in Hein’s story, because Hubert K.’s most cruel adversaries (and the loudest defenders of the status quo) are none other than his co-workers, his local union representatives, the general public, and, not least, his wife Elvira. After his case has been rejected for the second time, “loud laughter filled the hall immediately”20 — not in reaction to the conflict resolution committee’s cynical decision, but rather as an expression of “Schadenfreude“ (gloating; Hein, p. 18

19 20

Christoph Hein, “Der neue (glücklichere) Kohlhaas,” in Nachtfahrt und früher Morgen (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1982), pp. 125–144 (p. 125). Subsequent citations as “Hein” with page number(s). Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine. “sich sein Recht schaffen” (Hein, p. 125; italics in the original). “[...] breitete sich im Saal augenblicklich eine lärmende Heiterkeit aus” (Hein, p. 134).

Terror in Kleist, E.L. Doctorow, and Christoph Hein 191

134) over K.’s stubbornness in insisting on his “Rechtsgefühl” (sense of justice; Hein, p. 133). In the eyes of his comrades he is “ein engstirniger Federfuchser” (a narrow minded pedant; Hein, p. 143). Elvira does not shy away from insulting him in front of their four-year-old son. “The neglected wife’s bodily aversion to her partner increased after the holidays. His concern — not to allow an injustice, even if it was of little consequence — seemed banal and unmanly to her, the result of a petty and closed mind.”21 In Hein’s adaptation of the Kohlhaas motif, the longing for justice has become the absolute other of society, that is, the indiscernible void at the center of a totalitarian state and society. Without being able to elaborate this point in this paper, Hein’s story can be read within the parameter of inner emigration, insofar as it engages Werner Bergengruen’s adaptation of the Kohlhaas motif in his 1949 novel Das Feuerzeichen, as well as Brecht’s Die Rundköpfe and Adolf Dresen’s adaptation of the play for the Deutsches Theater in 1977.22 The emasculated grumbling of Hein’s Hubert K. stands in stark contrast to the celebrated manliness of Kleist’s Kohlhaas, “a viceroy of Michael, the Archangel,”23 […] “a great sword like that of the Cherubin, on a red leather cushion, decorated with tassels of gold, was carried before him and twelve men followed after with burning torches.”24 Coalhouse Walker’s manliness — “hardened into a ceremony of vengeance in the manner of the ancient warrior […, whose] eyes with their peculiar gaze of unswervable intention appeared now to be looking beyond what they saw to the grave” (Doctorow, p. 205) — brings even Booker T. Washington to his knees: “we might both be servants of our color who insist on the truth of our manhood and the respect it demands. Washington was so stunned by this suggestion that he began to lose consciousness.”25 21

22

23 24

25

“Bei der vernachlässigten Ehefrau verstärkte sich nach dem Urlaub die auch körperlich empfundene Abneigung gegenüber dem Partner, dessen Anliegen — eine Ungerechtigkeit nicht zuzulassen, selbst wenn sie von geringerer Bedeutung sei — ihr banal und unmännlich erschien und getragen von einem kleinlichen, engherzigen Geist” (Hein, p. 137). Cf. Siegfried Mews, “Brechts ‘dialektisches Verhältnis zur Tradition.’ Die Bearbeitung des Michael Kohlhaas,” Brecht Jahrbuch (1975), pp. 63–78; and Rudolf Heukenkamp, “‘Michael Kohlhaas’ auf der Bühne,” Weimarer Beiträge 23, 9 (1977), pp. 171– 177. Constantine 1997, p. 233; “Statthalter Michaels, des Erzengels” (SW 2, p. 41). Constantine 1997, p. 235; “[…] ein großes Cherubsschwert, auf einem rotledernen Kissen, mit Quasten und Gold verziert, ward ihm vorangetragen, und zwölf Knechte, mit brennenden Fackeln folgten ihm” (SW 2, pp. 43–44). Doctorow, p. 238. Hein’s Hubert K., on the other hand, remains utterly emasculated to the very end. After the decision of the Berlin court, he “celebrates” alone in his empty apartment. Elvira has long left him and divorces him three months after his

192 Bernd Fischer

It is important, however, to remember that while the possibility of violent resistance in Hein’s Kohlhaas adaptation is completely lacking, it is only tenuously connected to the achievement of justice in the other two stories as well. Here too, justice is portrayed as little more than a side effect of political intrigues and career strategies: chief of police versus chief prosecutor in the middle of presidential ambitions and plutocratic power games in Ragtime, political struggles between Saxony and Brandenburg in Kleist’s Kohlhaas, and party power games and career strategies in Saxony and Brandenburg in Hein’s Kohlhaas. We have already touched upon a number of items that could belong on a list of narrative constructions of a terrorist mindset: insult and crisis of identity, escalating dialectics of continued humiliation and (symbolic) destructtion, the anticipated moment of redeemed revenge, sublime sublation in a collective, channeled rage, the freedom of the uninhibited violence of irregular warfare, the ideological and propagandistic parameters of a cause, and a strong taste (or remnants of an anthropological sense) for justice.26 Let me add another item, which has dominated most of the psychoanalytical studies of the terrorist mindset: narcissism. Interestingly enough, Kleist’s Kohlhaas has played a major role at the very foundation of scholarly debates about the narcissistic mind. If I see it correctly, psychoanalytical readings were among the first to diagnose Kleist’s Kohlhaas figure as a terrorist. This peculiar interplay of literary fiction and psychoanalytical theorizing was prompted by a scholarly debate over the status of narcissistic tendencies. The question at the heart of psychoanalytical analyses of Kohlhaas’ development was whether a clinical diagnosis of Kohlhaas’ mind could support a proposed appreciation of narcissism as a separate developmental line. H. Kohut made this case in 1972 by describing Kleist’s story as “a gripping description of the insatiable search for revenge after a narcissistic injury.”27 A decade later, James W. Hamilton criticized Kohut’s theory of narcissism by pointing to the story’s abundant allusions to wounded breasts, nourishment, and consuming

26

27

hollow “triumph.” We have to read between the lines of this particular story to suspect that the terror that Hubert K. experiences from his immediate community is, in the end, a reflection of systematic state terror, which has instilled a level of fear into its citizens who anxiously suppress even the most harmless signs of resistance. Seldom is Kleist as explicit in drawing the contours of a literary experiment as in Kohlhaas: “posterity would surely have blessed his memory had he not, in one virtue, gone to extremes. His sense of justice turned him into a robber and a murderer” (Constantine, p. 209); “die Welt würde sein Andenken haben segnen müssen, wenn er in einer Tugend nicht ausgeschweift hätte. Das Rechtgefühl aber machte ihn zum Räuber und Mörder” (SW 2, p. 9). Heinz Kohut, “Thoughts on Narcissism and Narcissistic Rage,” The Psychoanaytic Study of the Child, 27 (1972), pp. 360–400 (p. 362).

Terror in Kleist, E.L. Doctorow, and Christoph Hein 193

fires. Thus, the story could be read as supporting the subjugation of narcissism under a broad theory banner of oral fixation. For Hamilton “the genetic roots of [Kohlhaas’ revengefulness] as described by Kleist can be traced to unresolved oral conflicts, the primitive rage of which is acted out in the form of arson and symbolic attacks on the breast. These findings […] suggest that narcissism does not pursue its own maturational course.”28 However quaint these psychoanalytical debates may seem today, I would maintain that Kleist’s story does indeed offer a multitude of illustrations for the difficult interconnections of loss, insult, emasculation, narcissism, revenge, and terror that lie at the core of this psychoanalytical debate. Terrorism cannot be understood entirely in philosophical and political terms, and narcissistic injury indeed offers a plausible strategy for the description of a terror-enabling humiliation. Propagating a grand collective cause can, from this vantage point, also be seen as a cloaking device that is regularly utilized by deeply injured narcissistic personalities. Among our three stories, Kleist offers the most striking example. Kohlhaas extends his cause to all of Christendom and God himself. His fourth political decree — “approaching insanity” — bears the signature: “Signed here at the fortress of Lützen, the seat of our provisional world government.”29 Coalhouse Walker signs his decrees as “President, Provisional American Government” (Doctorow, p. 200). Both arrange for their wives the most splendid funerals fit for a queen or a saint. The narcissism of these economically successful parvenus is, of course, also expressed in their pride over the beauty of their material possessions, the gleaming black stallions and the shiny Ford Model T, symbols of an emerging class of self-made nouveau riche that provoke the envy of Kleist’s lower aristocracy and Doctorow’s all-white fire brigade. Let me add yet another item to our list that has already been mentioned in passing: Terror feeds on the acceptance of death, if not the longing for a most spectacular death.30 In Kleist’s and Doctorow’s stories, this embrace of death is motivated through the self-sacrifice of the heroes’ wives. It is, of course, entirely missing from Hein’s story. Here a death wish is only imaginable as a result of complete and irreversible alienation. 28

29

30

James W. Hamilton, “Implications for current concepts of narcissism in Heinrich von Kleist’s ‘Michael Kohlhaas.’” The International Review of Psycho-Analysis, 8 (1981), pp. 81–84 (p. 83). Constantine, p. 233; “[…] mit einer Art von Verrückung, unterzeichnet: ‘Gegeben auf dem Sitz unserer provisorischen Weltregierung, dem Erzschlosse zu Lützen’” (SW 2, p. 41). This is the point of departure for the psychological Terror Management Theory (TMT); cf. Tom Pyszcynski, Sheldon Solomon, and Jeff Greenberg, In the Wake of 9/11: The Psychology of Terror (Washington DC: American Psychological Association, 2003).

194 Bernd Fischer

Finally, I would like to point to one item that we find primarily with Kleist and in a radically altered manner with Doctorow as well: religious, spiritual, mystical, or metaphysical authorization. Kleist injects an elaborate — and already somewhat alien — subplot into his story: the mysterious old gypsy woman who may be Kohlhaas’ deceased wife. As mentioned above, it is she who gives him the power to fully enjoy his revenge. She also amends Elisabeth’s insistence on the Christian commandment to forgive one’s enemies. Even Luther seems to come closer to Kohlhaas’ position and finally grants him absolution.31 Doctorow develops spiritual spheres in the episodes about J. P. Morgan’s dabbling in Egyptology and Henry Ford’s belief in reincarnation. However, the eccentric spirituality of the premiere Plutocrats remains unconnected to Coalhouse’s struggle. Doctorow is quite aware of this disengagement and does not shy away from insisting on it by alluding to numerous motifs that comprise Kleist’s mystical plot, but gain no function for Coalhouse’s story. Coalhouse conveys his message to the district attorney in “a silver tankard with a lid […] it was from the seventeenth century and had belonged to Frederick, the Elector of Saxony […]. The curator then raised the lid and found inside a piece of paper with a telephone number that he recognized as his own” (Doctorow, p. 231). “On the red silk walls” of J. P. Morgan’s library “were portraits of Martin Luther by Lucas Cranach the elder and several adorations of the Magi” (Doctorow, p. 238). At the assassination of the Austrian Archduke in 1914 we find: “The green feathers of the plumed helmet turned black with blood” (Doctorow, p. 264). The power struggles of Ragtime America are no longer based on the assumption of a common belief system; there is no “hope for a Christian brotherhood” (Doctorow, p. 237), as Booker Washington still maintains. But Kleist, too, already struggles with the spiritual base of Kohlhaas’ rebellion in the sense that he has to allow a fantastic subplot into his chronicle in order to challenge the politics of Christian ethics. In Ragtime’s (post-) modern conception of a societal pastiche of America before the outbreak of World War I, resurrection has become the centerpiece of the ever more daring shows of the world’s most celebrated escape artist, Houdini.32 Hein merely hints at the religious void in his hero’s struggle with the very last words of his story, uttered by a voice from the past, his aging mother in law:

31 32

Unlike the gypsy woman, Luther is, however, not aware of Kohlhaas’ feast of personal revenge. Christian Moraru bases his postmodern reading of Ragtime on the metaphorical and performative moments of reincarnation, resurrection, and reembodiment: “The Reincarnated Plot: E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, Heinrich von Kleist’s ‘Michael Kohlhaas,’ and the Spectacle of Modernity,” The Comparatist 21 (1997), pp. 92–116.

Terror in Kleist, E.L. Doctorow, and Christoph Hein 195

“damned fool of God.”33 Nevertheless, the battle for the power of spiritual elevation constitutes a separate item on our list of the narrative construction of terrorist meaning, even if it is often intertwined with the anticipation of a meaningful death and the sublimation in a strong collective cause.34 It is, therefore, quite fitting that Coalhouse Walker becomes an utter disappointment to his followers when he speaks of their collective experience of a higher cause as a mere “rhetoric we needed for our morale […]. But we meant it! Younger Brother cried. We meant it” (Doctorow, p. 246). Current theories of terrorism assure us that there is no such thing as a distinct psychology of terror.35 This is perhaps one reason why the terrorist mindset has largely resisted the novel.36 The Kohlhaas motif, too, seems less suited for the novel than for the chronicle as in Kleist’s case, or for a romance, as Harold Bloom labels Doctorow’s Ragtime: “[…] a narrative fiction in which psychological characterization is replaced by a concern with figurative types, state-of-being, visionary places, and fantastic transformations.”37 Doctorow’s play with figurative names rivals Kleist’s. Coalhouse, the potential founder of a black bourgeois household transforms instead to the collective name of a short-lived terrorist movement: the house of black. His second name Walker junior refers directly to the black revolutionary David Walker.38 In the case of Kleist’s Kohlhaas — the black “hare” or the “hare” in the cabbage field: the horse dealer from “Kohlhaasenbrück” — it takes only the exchange of one letter to turn hare into hate [“Haas” into 33 34

35 36

37 38

“verfluchter Gottesnarr” (Hein, p. 144; italics in the original). It is important to understand the elevating experience of a transcendent or divine purpose as a separate dimension and social space that crosses through the experiences of both social hierarchies and personal relations. Cf. Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis (New York: Basic Books, 2006), pp. 181–211. Cf. Jerrold M. Post, The Mind of the Terrorist: the Psychology of Terrorism from the IRA to Al-Qaeda (New York: Palgrave McMillian, 2007), pp. 1–9. Another example of this is Christoph Hein’s In seiner frühen Kindheit ein Garten (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005). The novel treats the failure of humanist ethics in the terrorist crisis of the BRD of the 1970s and 1980s without finding a narrative structure for the terrorist mind. Rather the story puts the search for a reason and meaning into its center by concentrating on the intellectual and emotional fate of Zurek, a teacher with liberal-humanist convictions, whose son has been shot by the authorities as a fugitive member of a terrorist organization. Harold Bloom, “Introduction,” E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime (Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2002), p. 1. Cf. Marion Faber, “Michael Kohlhaas in New York: Kleist and E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime,” in Heinrich von Kleist Studien, ed. by Alexej Ugrinsky (Berlin: Schmidt, 1981), pp. 147–156 (p. 148). There are, of course, also allusions to Nat Turner; cf. Walter L. Knorr, “Doctorow and Kleist: ‘Kohlhaas’ in Ragtime,” Modern Fiction Studies, 22 (1976), pp. 224–227, p. 227; and Rumjana Ivanova, “Michael Kohlhaas im Rhythmus des Ragtime,” Philologia, 12/13 (1983), pp. 106–112 (p. 107).

196 Bernd Fischer

“Hass”]. Understanding the “hare” to “hate” [“Haas” to “Hass”] transformation as part of an archetypical figuration of terror assumes that history repeats itself and that “political allegory is easily reversible” (Bloom, p. 2). Bloom refers to two historical phenomena that prompted him to republish eleven Ragtime essays in 2002: Timothy McVeigh and the election of George W. Bush. About the latter he writes: “The age of J. P. Morgan has come again […]. Our current farce is prophesied by Ragtime, and Doctorow’s insights into our country’s nature and history are all-too-likely to be sustained in the years ahead” (Bloom, p. 3). While Bloom’s collection was still in press, McVeigh had, of course, already been replaced by another example of this “figurative type,” which seems to come close to fulfilling all items on our list for the narrative construction of the terrorist mind, including, once again, the battle for religion. The Ohio State University

Friederike von Schwerin-High Causality and Contingency in Kleist’s “Das Bettelweib von Locarno” and Judith Hermann’s “Sommerhaus, später” Kleist’s works present unusually pointed and ironic treatments of situations of mock- and pseudo-causality, suggesting that reader assumptions of utter contingency and strict causality attribute logical and ethical connections to contexts that do not necessarily possess these in themselves. This type of narrative technique and prioritization can be found in Kleist’s short novella, “Das Bettelweib von Locarno.” The unthinking comportment of a castle owner, who orders a beggar woman to move her bed, is followed immediately by her death, and ultimately by his death and the destruction of his castle. In the short story “Sommerhaus, später,” Judith Hermann presents the story of a manor house that is eventually burned down by its owner. Like the beggar woman in Kleist’s story, here the female first-person narrator has been assigned a space by the manor house owner, only comprehending the radical exclusivity of this assignment after she refuses to comply and the house goes up in flames. Both stories place central emphases on pseudo-metaphysical chains of revenge that hover between contingency and causality, challenging the reader’s epistemological and ethical judgments with indeterminacy and equivocation.

In 2001 Judith Hermann received the Kleist Prize for a volume of short stories, entitled Sommerhaus, später (Summerhouse, Later, 1998). In her acceptance speech, delivered at the awards ceremony at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin on 24 November 2001, Hermann explained how she had once believed that Kleist’s canonization and his “Sprachallmacht” (language omnipotence)1 stood in troubling contrast to the ordinary life of her grandmother, who was an ardent Kleist enthusiast and had hoped for years that one day her granddaughter would discover him. Only later did Hermann become cognizant of the strange discrepancy — or correlation — between the frailty of Kleist’s tragic life and his ironic posthumous success. Though Hermann characterizes her eventual reading of Kleist as ordinary enough — “Schul-Kleist” (school Kleist; Rede, p. 16) — the topoi with which she engaged in her acceptance speech speak to a deeper affinity. To name one revealing example, she commented extensively on and marveled at what must have been a strange coincidence that set the chain of events into motion 1

Judith Hermann, “Das Paradox des Genießens: Rede zur Verleihung des KleistPreises,” Kleist-Jahrbuch (2002), pp. 14–20 (p. 15). Subsequent citations as “Rede” with page number(s).

198 Friederike von Schwerin-High

that led to her being elected as the recipient of the Kleist Prize. Reflecting and punning on the word “Zufall” (generally translated as “coincidence” or “accident”), Hermann foregrounded its meaning as something that falls into one’s lap, inexplicably and undeservedly, as one’s share of good luck. Certainly, Hermann’s considered approach to “coincidence” and to the complexities of causality in this speech and in her stories in general possesses an intensity reminiscent of Kleist’s interest in the exploration of coincidences, contingencies, and pseudo-causal chains. Like Kleist’s narrative fiction, Hermann’s published prose works, three volumes to date, comprise exclusively the short prose forms of the short story and novella. In an interview in 2004, Hermann characterized shorter fiction as the only narrative prose form proper for her.2 She received the Kleist Prize in recognition of her struggle for a lasting literary achievement, an achievement that transcends topicality and trendiness.3 Both Heinrich von Kleist’s mini-novella, “Das Bettelweib von Locarno” (The Beggarwoman of Locarno, 1810), and Hermann’s “Sommerhaus, spatter,” the titular short story in her debut story collection, are constructed around the imminence, experience, and violence of home loss faced by several of the primary characters populating these two stories. This essay will argue that in spite of the nearly two hundred years that separate the release dates of the two texts, the narrative techniques and the instances of epistemological skepticism they use in their approach to this subject matter merit a comparative examination.4 In particular, I will consider how, by intertwining perceptional and decisional uncertainties, the two stories establish correspondences between their characters’ irresolvable lack of knowledge about the causal chains governing events and the, quite literally, ghostly manner in which the ethical content of their comportment toward others is called into question. In Kleist’s story a Marchese, who lives in a castle at the foot of the Italian Alps, returns from a hunt and enters a room in which his wife had just invited an old beggar woman to lie down and rest. He orders the beggar woman to move behind the stove. The woman rises, slips, critically injures 2 3 4

Thomas Geiger, “Interview with Judith Hermann,” trans. by Ingo R. Stoehr, Contemporary German Language and Literature, 1/7 (2004), pp. 46–58. See Michael Naumann, “Rede zur Verleihung des Kleist-Preises 2001 an Judith Hermann,” Kleist-Jahrbuch (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2002), pp. 10–13 (p. 13). Adrienne Goehler characterizes Heinrich von Kleist himself, as well as the ideal candidate for the Kleist-Prize, as a writer who is marked by a kind of artistic and intellectual homelessness, which installs him or her in a place outside of any kind of selfsatisfied literary establishment or the merely fashionable literary scene. Adrienne Goehler, “Grußwort zur Verleihung des Kleist-Preises an Judith Hermann,” KleistJahrbuch (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2002), pp. 3–5 (p. 4).

Causality and Contingency in Kleist and Judith Hermann 199

her spine, rises again, moves behind the stove, and dies. Years of economic crises force the Marchese to put the castle up for sale. A Florentine nobleman visits to inspect the castle, but is dissuaded from purchasing it after he experiences a terrifying haunting in the guestroom he occupies. In the course of three consecutive nights, with a varying cast of companions, the Marchese investigates and witnesses the haunting himself — each time experiencing an invisible presence rising, groaning, and moving to the corner of the room where the stove is. On the third night, while the haunting is once again running its course, the Marchese sets fire to the wood-paneled room, which quickly spreads to the entire castle. Whereas his wife narrowly escapes from the burning castle, he dies within it. In Hermann’s story the unnamed narrator, a resident of Berlin, receives a call from her former lover, Stein, who invites her to visit the summerhouse he has just purchased, which turns out to be the ruins of an eighteenth century manor house in the small town of Canitz in Brandenburg. Reluctantly — and not quite comprehending why it is she, of all people, from their large circle of mutual friends whom Stein has singled out to accompany him on this inspection tour — she accepts his invitation. On their way, they stop at a modern, nondescript apartment building in the town of Angermünde to pick up the keys from a woman and her puny-looking child, who had both lived in the dilapidated manor house prior to their eviction from it in the previous year. Driving in wintry, snowy weather, the narrator and Stein arrive in Canitz and turn into a side street where the manor house, appearing to be on the verge of collapse, stands. As they enter the building, the narrator remarks that in the evening’s semi-darkness she can make out the puny child from Angermünde watching them from across the way and asks Stein how that is possible, but Stein fails to give a reply. Upon her return to Berlin, she begins receiving regular postcards from Stein in which he updates her on his renovation work, tells her that the child is always present, and sometimes prognosticates the time “when you come here.” She sees him occasionally at social gatherings with their mutual friends in Berlin, but neither she nor Stein ever mentions Stein’s manor house to anybody else. When the postcards cease to arrive, the narrator begins to miss them. One day in May, she receives an envelope written on in Stein’s handwriting and bearing the postmark of Stralsund, a city one hundred miles away. The envelope contains an article clipped from a local newspaper, which reports that the manor house in Canitz burned down, that arson may have been involved, and that the owner of the house disappeared without a trace. The story ends with the stunned narrator filing the newspaper article with all the postcards she received from Stein in her desk drawer and thinking, “Later.”

200 Friederike von Schwerin-High

Correlations and possible intertextualities that can be discovered between Kleist’s biography and Hermann’s story “Sommerhaus, Später” include geographical and name-related linkages. Hermann’s story takes place in the part of Germany in which Kleist was active: in Berlin and surrounding Brandenburg. Kleist’s temporary employer was Baron von Stein zum Altenstein; Hermann’s main male character is named Stein. A minor character and one of Stein’s lovers is Henriette, which recalls the name of Henriette Vogel, whom, as we saw, Hermann expressly mentioned in her Kleist Prize acceptance speech, in which she highlighted the strange discrepancy, or correlation, between the institutional stability of the Kleist Gesellschaft and the existential plight of the two suicides. All these potential connections aside, the primary aim of this study is not to demonstrate a direct traceable influence Kleist may have had on Hermann’s short story. Rather the analysis draws on a more general notion of poetics, which recognizes recoveries, adaptations, and recombinations of widely circulating tropes and invites the exploration of recognizably similar thematic and structural figurations.5 The trope drawing “Bettelweib” and “Sommerhaus” together might be described as “an eviction resulting in a house fire.” A comparison of the features that shape the presentations of this particular trope — the storytelling maneuvers that problematize causality and contingency on the one hand, and the trope’s embedment in a critical examination of a specific moment in social history on the other — allows both narratives to be seen in sharper relief.

I. Causality and Coincidence To specify what he calls Hermann’s “poetics of indecision,” and her narratives about the frailty and opacity of the world, Günter Blamberger quotes Kleist’s famous sentence describing his realization after reading Immanuel Kant, “that we are unable to decide whether that which we call truth is truly truth or whether it only seems to us that way.”6 Making this philosophical 5

6

In her recent plenary address, “Toward a Planetary Narrative Poetics,” Susan Stanford Friedman’s example of a widely-circulating figuration was that of “a female writer as gifted as her brother,” a trope that, as Friedman demonstrated in detail, has been developed in different, but usefully comparable ways by Bengali writer Swarnakumari Devi and by Virginia Woolf. Susan Stanford Friedman, “Toward a Planetary Narrative Poetics,” Twenty-fifth International Conference on Narrative, Case Western Reserve University, Renaissance Hotel, Cleveland, OH. 8 April 2010. Plenary Address I. Günter Blamberger, “Rede zur Verleihung des Kleist-Preises an Judith Hermann im Deutschen Theater in Berlin am 24. November 2001,” Kleist-Jahrbuch (Stuttgart:

Causality and Contingency in Kleist and Judith Hermann 201

question their central concern, both “Bettelweib” and “Sommerhaus” invite and resist cognitive mappings of causal chains since none of the chains suggested by the texts or inferred by readers can be thought through with logical impunity. We cannot sufficiently determine, for example, whether the appearance of the persistent ghost in Kleist’s story is necessarily attributable to the unthinking treatment to which the castle owner, the focal character of the story, subjected the beggar woman. Neither is our knowledge secure as to whether the course of action, or inaction, adopted by the unnamed narrator in “Sommerhaus” ultimately led to the fire that consumed the old manor house in Canitz, whether that fire had something to do with a — in both senses of the word — minor character, the ghostlike child who had been evicted from it, or whether it was a randomly occurring accident. Rather, the two texts foreground the nature of contingency and interrogate assumptions of and about causal relationships precisely to draw attention to the “frail constitution of the world.” Skilfully exploiting our mental predilection for causally stringing phenomena together, Kleist and Hermann achieve effects through which correlation uncannily suggests causation in their readers’ minds, but the causal chains these narratives offer are as titillating, immersive, and absorptive as they are inconclusive. Let us briefly examine the murky causalities, conditionals, and coincidences presented in these two stories before further investigating them through the lenses of Kant’s antinomy of causality and freedom, Freud’s typology of the uncanny and coincidence, and Hilary Dannenberg’s narratological account7 of coincidence plots. The strangeness of conditionality is already hinted at in the very first sentence, which is part of the framing setting in “Bettelweib”; cause-dependent and merely temporal successions are amalgamated beyond recognition, for the statement, “if [as] you come from the Saint Gotthard, you see lying in ruins: a house with high and spacious rooms,”8 begs the peculiar question whether you do not see

7 8

Metzler, 2002), pp. 6–10 (p. 8). For the concept of the “poetics of indecision,” see: Günter Blamberger, “Poetik der Unentschiedenheit: Zum Beispiel Judith Hermanns Prosa,” Gegenwartsliteratur , 5 (2006), pp. 186–206. Hilary Dannenberg, Coincidence and Counterfactuality: Plotting Time and Space in Narrative Fiction (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2008). “[…] das man jetzt, wenn man vom St. Gotthard kommt, in Schutt und Trümmern liegen sieht: ein Schloß mit hohen und weitläufigen Zimmern,” Heinrich von Kleist, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. by Helmut Sembdner, 2 vols (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2008), vol. 2, p. 196. Subsequent citations as “SW” with volume and page number(s). All English quotations for “Beggarwoman” follow David Constantine’s translation: Heinrich von Kleist: Selected Writings, ed. and trans. by David Constantine (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004), pp. 351–353 (p. 351). Subsequent citations as “Constantine” with page number(s).

202 Friederike von Schwerin-High

the castle in ruins if you approach it from a vantage point other than the Saint Gotthard Pass.9 When the deadly accident occurs in the embedded narrative, it is introduced in the following manner: “As [because] the woman rose her crutch slipped from under her on the polished floor and she fell, hurting her back in a dangerous way.”10 Did the old woman’s crutch slip when she rose or because she rose? We remember that the woman had come to the door begging and been given a bed by the mistress of the house “out of pity” (Constantine, p. 351). The explanation “out of pity,” seems slightly unmotivated and misplaced, for the woman had been given a bed even though she had just come to beg, presumably for food. Soon two other causational statements follow: “Some years later when the Marquis, through war and poor harvests, had got into financial difficulties, a Florentine nobleman called on him, wishing, on account of its fine situation, to buy his house.”11 These conspicuous and rather general statements of causal connections (“out of,” “through,” “on account of”) only highlight the absences of other causal explanations, most notably that of an explicit assertion of any connection between the death of the beggar woman and the haunting. The flagrant assertion of some causal links, moreover, forms a strong contrast with ostentatious and misleading evocations of coincidences: returning from his hunt, the Marchese “coincidentally” (zufällig; SW 2, p. 196) enters the room that he customarily enters after such hunting excursions to store his rifle there. On the third night, when the Marchese and Marquise witness the haunting along with a “faithful servant” (Constantine, p. 352), whom they have asked along, they put down the ghostly activity to some unimportant, coincidental (gleichgültige und zufällige; SW 2, p. 197) causes that they claim could easily be discovered (but whose precise details remain undisclosed). The following night they are “coincidentally” accompanied by their dog, which has been let off its leash and follows them into the haunted room. They are described as taking him with them into the room “without giving any particular reason, both perhaps unconsciously wishing to have a third party, another living being along.” The narrator’s cautiousness over the explicability of their motivation — “and without saying as much but 9

10 11

For this and the following questions about the absurdities and inconsistencies with which the plot is marred I am indebted to the incisive study by Eckart Pastor and Robert Leroy: “Die Brüchigkeit als Erzählprinzip in Kleists ‘Bettelweib von Locarno,’” in Etudes Germaniques, 34 (1979), pp. 164–175. Subsequent citations as “Pastor and Leroy” with page number. “Die Frau, da sie sich erhob, glitschte mit der Krücke auf dem glatten Boden aus” (SW 2, p. 196) “[…] da der Marchese, durch Krieg und Mißwachs, in bedenkliche Vermögensumstände geraten war, fand sich ein florentinischer Ritter bei ihm ein, der das Schloß, seiner schönen Lage wegen, von ihm kaufen wollte” (SW 2, p. 196).

Causality and Contingency in Kleist and Judith Hermann 203

perhaps in the involuntary wish” (Constantine, p. 352) — implies that neither he nor the characters are certain about the precise nature or status of their wishes and interpretations. Furthermore there are a number of absurdities, which the narrator simply presents: when the narration returns to the frame setting, the Marchese’s collected white bones are mentioned, which have been collected in the very room in which the beggar woman had rested, risen, and died. Why were the bones white and not scorched (had the Marchese not died in a fire in the most dreadful manner?), why did they need to be collected (had the Marchese died in an explosion?), and why was the second-floor room to which the Marchese had set the fire still intact and identifiable when the castle had completely collapsed? (Pastor and Leroy, p. 171.) The act of narrating makes all of these specific details just so and puts them before the reader, but they do not make a great deal of causal, logical sense and might best be attributed to the amateurishness of the narrator and the sophistication with which Kleist created such amateurishness.12 This collocation of simply and matter-of-factly stated chains of events; of the narrator’s refusal or neglect to make explicit certain other important causal links; of a sudden shyness on the part of the narrator regarding the exploration of the characters’ psychological states and motivations; and finally the narrator’s ascriptions of seemingly caused incidences as “unimportant” coincidences makes for quite a landscape of “reasoning.” In “Sommerhaus” the problem of ambiguous or insufficient causal attribution is first highlighted in the form of questions the narrator asks herself while engaging in certain activities or observing the goings-on around her: “And then he was back on the line, still yelling; ‘You have to see it, it’s incredible, it’s great, it’s fantastic!’ I didn’t ask why I, of all people, had to see it.” The question of “why, I of all people?” is repeated again later after the narrator has actually joined Stein for his drive to the manor house in the Brandenburg country. “I smoked a cigarette and wondered why I was the one who had to be sitting next to Stein now. Why, of all people, he had called me? Was it because, somehow, I had been a beginning for him? Because he couldn’t get a hold of Anna or Christiane or Toddi? Because none of them would have gone with him? And why was I driving out there with him? I couldn’t come close to an answer.”13

12

13

Gerhard Oberlin, “Der Erzähler als Amateur. Fingiertes Erzählen und Surrealität in Kleists ‘Bettelweib von Locarno,’” Kleist-Jahrbuch (Stuttgart, Weimar: 2006), pp. 100– 119 (pp. 101–103). Judith Hermann, “Summerhouse, Later,” trans. by Margot Bettauer Dembo, Chicago Review: New Writing in German, 48.2/3 (Summer, 2002), pp. 124–134 (p. 127). Subsequent English citations as “Dembo” with page number.

204 Friederike von Schwerin-High

The uncertainty about her own motivation seems to amplify her uncertainty about his. When they arrive at the manor house, the narrator sees that it resembles a ruin with all its parts on the brink of collapse: “‘Stein!’ I called up. ‘Get out of there! It’s going to collapse!’ ‘Come in!” he yelled back. ‘It’s my house.’ I briefly asked myself how that answer was supposed to be reassuring, then stumbled over garbage bags and trash onto the veranda” (Dembo, p. 130). The claim of a causal connection between his ownership of the house and its safety does not hold any explanatory power, and neither is the entire situation explainable for the narrator: .

I said, “Stein, would you please tell me something? Could you please explain something to me?” Stein flicked his cigarette into the snow and looked at me. “What should I tell you? This, here, is one possibility, one of many. You can go with it, or you can forget it. I can go with it, or I can forget it and go somewhere else. We could do it together, or pretend that we never knew each other. It doesn’t matter. I only wanted to show it to you, that’s all.” I said, “You paid eighty thousand marks to show me one possibility, one of many? Did I understand that correctly? Stein? What’s the point?” Stein didn’t react. (Dembo, p. 132)

As in Kleist’s story, a striking number of “random” coincidences contribute to the tenuousness of the represented causal links. The entire person of Stein is associated with a great deal of arbitrariness for the narrator: “As always when Stein randomly surfaced and I couldn’t think of much to say, I automatically lit a cigarette” (Dembo, p. 124). Furthermore, the narrator’s retrospective account of their brief love relationship and subsequent continued acquaintance includes a description of the narrator’s first encounter with Stein, which was also a chance event: He’d driven me to a party, and on the Autobahn he had pushed a Trans Am tape into the tape player; when we arrived I told him the party [was now] somewhere else, and we drove on; and at some point he switched off the meter. He came home with me, set his plastic bags down in my hall, and stayed for three weeks […] (Dembo, p. 125)

What was it that triggered the initial attraction and her pronouncement that “the party was now somewhere else”? Was it their shared affinity for the music of the band Trans Am? Subtly, the further description of their threeweek-long love story, which consisted mostly in riding around in his taxicab, would seem to suggest this. The passage conveys that Stein had different music for different kinds of streets, and that Trans Am was reserved for the autobahn. Since autobahn driving is described as their preferred shared activity, it follows implicitly that Trans Am, the music over which they had originally bonded, continued to furnish an important link in their subse-

Causality and Contingency in Kleist and Judith Hermann 205

quent togetherness. As we have seen the narrator wonders if the invitation to accompany Stein to the manor house extended to her is based on coincidence or somehow causally explainable. Also in the end she decides to wait for a coincidence and have it determine her subsequent actions: “After that the postcards came regularly. I waited for them; when they failed to come, I was disappointed. They always had photos of the church and always four or five sentences like little riddles, sometimes nice, sometimes incomprehensible. Stein often wrote ‘when you come.’ He didn’t write ‘Come.’ I decided to wait for ‘Come,’ and then I would go” (Dembo, p. 134). She would have only visited, or joined, him under the condition that he remove the conditional mood from his postcards. However, since that particular coincidence did not occur, she stayed away, in spite of her unambiguous feeling of sadness at the discontinuation of the postcards. Kant’s third antinomy in his Critique of Pure Reason addresses the very peculiar coexistence of the notion of spontaneity and that of strict causality vis-a-vis the origination of causal chains. The speaker of the thesis argues that we cannot imagine a spontaneously arising event that sets into motion a chain of subsequent events without having itself been caused by previous events. The speaker of the antithesis posits that we cannot imagine the infinite, regressive chain of previous causes that gave rise to one particular event and therefore, amazingly, our reason “invents” an initiating event.14 Unable to choose one or the other speaker’s scenario, Kant’s text later asks if we should not admit the possibility that a given event that has occurred is based in part on freedom (that is randomness, spontaneity) and in part on the universal causal laws of nature as they apply to the world at a particular moment in time. We will return to Kant’s peculiar notion of the possible coexistence of causality and freedom in the context of the ethical issues our two texts raise, but for now we can observe that Kant’s solution to his third antinomy oscillates between assertions of coincidences and causalities, just like Kleist’s third-person narrator and Hermann’s first-person narrator do.

14

“[…] reason creates for itself the idea of spontaneity, the power of beginning by itself, without an antecedent cause determining it to action, according to the law of causal connection. It is extremely remarkable that the concept of practical freedom is founded on the transcendental idea of freedom, which constitutes indeed the real difficulty which at all times has surrounded the question of the possibility of freedom.” Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. by F. Max Müller in Basic Writings of Kant, ed. by Allen W. Wood (New York: The Modern Library, 2001), pp. 1– 115 (p. 113). Subsequent citations as “Critique of Pure Reason” with page number(s).

206 Friederike von Schwerin-High

Focusing on the history of fictional, narrative representations of coincidence, Hilary Dannenberg distinguishes between the traditional coincidence plot, which typically involves the characters’ accidental rediscovery of longlost relatives;15 the postmodern coincidence plot, which — frequently unbeknownst to the characters themselves — employs many complex forms of analogy and correspondence across different ontological and temporal levels; and modernist coincidence plots, which tend to be more episodically driven, for example by one suddenly occurring link between two previously unlinked characters. Her example of a modernist coincidence is the accidental sharing of the same name by two characters in Joseph Conrad’s Chance, a coincidence, which brings about the rest of the novel’s events and has the characters themselves marvel at them. Dannenberg notes that this kind of coincidence plot typically does not focus on backwards-tracking kinship rediscovery, but rather on a link that becomes progressively important in the unfolding plot and might be between strangers rather than long-lost relatives. Even though neither “Bettelweib” nor “Sommerhaus” are modernist texts, they fit Dannenberg’s definition of the modernist coincidence plot rather well, perhaps on account of the fact that both of them are short narratives and therefore by nature episodic rather than characterized by expansiveness. Whereas no previous personal bond links the beggar woman and the Marchese,16 their fates become linked by analogy: in a manner the Marchese turns into a beggar himself as he is begging for a purchaser to buy his castle, the upkeep of which he can no longer afford. Moreover, the two characters become linked through their experience of agony: the ghost’s agony produces (repressed) horror in the Marchese, which in turn produces his gruesome death within the walls of the castle, which repeats the death of the beggar woman. Whether these analogies are coincidentally or causally linked remains indeterminable.

15

16

Dannenberg draws all her examples of the traditional plots of kinship coincidence from older British literature. But we can add to her examples that of Lessing’s play Nathan the Wise, in which, moreover, just like in the narratives under consideration in this chapter, the trope of a burning house is used in conjunction with a showcasing of the ambiguity of causality. While Nathan’s daughter, Recha firmly believes that an angel recued her from the flames, Nathan reminds her that it was a “natural,” yet “miraculous” causal chain: Just because the templar bore a resemblance to the Sultan’s late brother he was spared execution, which coincidentally enabled him later that day to save a young girl from her burning house. As if these coincidences were not marvelous enough, it later turns out the templar is the Sultan’s nephew and also Recha’s brother. No such coincidental euphoria occurs in Kleist or in Hermann. Only perhaps a general, feudal code of conduct, which, however, is no longer honored here.

Causality and Contingency in Kleist and Judith Hermann 207

The coincidental relationship struck up in “Sommerhaus,” perhaps over the same taste in music, produces what at least the narrator perceives to be further coincidences or instances of randomness. We have seen that from the outset the narration introduces Stein as somebody who has a habit of turning up “randomly” in the narrator’s life and whose interest in her she codes as random as well. Her overreliance on coincidence in the end impels her to stay away, and subsequently the house burns down, which might or might not be by chance. Dannenberg’s most general definition, which overarches her definitional subdivision into the traditional, modern, and postmodern coincidence plot, calls a coincidence a constellation of two or more apparently random events in space and time with an uncanny or striking connection. We can ask ourselves on what cognitive level of engagement readers, characters, or narrators attribute “apparent randomness” to certain events and at what level the sense of the uncanny. Why can certain narrative plots be so peculiarly unsettling? As Dannenberg’s definition seems to suggest, there is an inherent antinomy in our perception of coincidences, because they are “apparently” random yet appear “uncannily” and “strikingly” connected. Though foregrounding recurrence rather than connection, Freud makes a similar point when he observes: “it is only the moment of unintended repetition, which makes the otherwise harmless convey to us the idea of the sinister, ominous, and inescapable where we otherwise would have spoken only of ‘coincidence’.”17 Hermann’s narrator’s constantly reenacted refusal to react to Stein’s continually arriving postcards may have a connection with the house fire, but so may the presence of the puny, upset, silent, and inarticulate child, who is “always” present at the manor house when Stein is there. In Kleist’s story we seem to know the cause of the fire; the Marchese “tired of his life” had set fire to all four corners of the beautifully furnished room with the wooden paneling. However, this really merely indicates that we have reached the next link in the chain of causality from which it is necessary to regress further, for it is difficult to accept this general mental state of the Marchese without presupposing that he has made a connection between the accidental death he caused and the repetitive, persistent (and also, by all appearances, increasingly menacing) haunting. 17

“[…] dass es nur das Moment der unbeabsichtigten Wiederholung ist, welches das sonst Harmlose unheimlich macht und uns die Idee des Verhängnisvollen, Unentrinnbaren aufdrängt, wo wir sonst nur von ‘Zufall’ gesprochen hätten.” Sigmund Freud, Gesammelte Werke, ed. by Anna Freud, Marie Bonaparte, E. Bibring, W. Hoffer, E. Kris, and O. Osakower (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1947), vol. 12, p. 250. Subsequent citations as “Freud” with page number(s). All translations are mine.

208 Friederike von Schwerin-High

Freud’s identification of one form of the uncanny as “the constant recurrence of the same, the repetition of the same features, characters, destinies, criminal acts, even the name through several successive generations,” also includes literary presentations of the doppelgänger. Hermann’s genderless child character can be categorized as such a doppelganger or ghost of a living person. Not only is it improbably present during the visit to the manor house but also “always” during the later renovation work. While its presence during the renovation work in broad daylight in the spring seems plausible, its presence during the snowstorm in the dark strikes the narrator, and us, as inexplicable and uncanny. [Stein] leaned forward and looked intently out into the street. I followed his gaze; the light was dim and the last rays reflected by the snow made it hard to see. Someone was standing on the other side of the street. I squinted and sat up. The figure was about fifteen feet away; then it turned and walked into the shadows between two houses. A garden gate banged. I was convinced I had recognized the child from Angermünde, the pale, dumb child that had clung to the woman’s house dress. Stein got up and said, “Let’s go.” I said, “Stein. The kid. From Angermünde. Why is it hanging out, here on the street, watching us?” I knew he wouldn’t answer.18

The presence of the dumb, pale, and watchful child clearly raises apprehensions and feelings of helplessness in the character-narrator. Freud describes doppelgänger that are ghosts as the most disturbing doubles: “What appears strange in the highest degree to many people is that which has to do with death, with dead bodies and with the return of the dead, with spirits and ghosts,” arguing that “probably [our fear of death] also still has the old meaning, that the dead person has become the enemy of the survivor and

18

Dembo, p. 132. In the following quote from the German original, Hermann does not distinguish the child’s gender, using “es” throughout the text: “[Stein] beugte sich vor und sah angestrengt auf die Straße, ich folgte seinem Blick; die Straße war dämmrig, der Schnee reflektierte das letzte Licht und blendete. Auf der anderen Straßenseite stand jemand. Ich kniff die Augen zusammen und richtete mich auf, die Gestalt war vielleicht fünf Meter entfernt, sie drehte sich um und lief in den Schatten zwischen zwei Häusern. Ein Gartentor klappte, ich war überzeugt, das Kind aus Angermünde erkannt zu haben, das blasse, blöde Kind, das sich an den Kittel der Frau gekrallt hatte. Stein stand auf und sagte: ‘Lass uns fahren.’ Ich sagte: ‘Stein — das Kind aus Angermünde. Warum steht es hier auf der Straße herum und beobachtet uns?’” Judith Hermann, “Sommerhaus, später,” in Sommerhaus, später (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 2000), pp. 139–156 (p. 153). Subsequent citations as “Hermann” with page number(s).

Causality and Contingency in Kleist and Judith Hermann 209

intends to take him with him.”19 In the case of Kleist’s story, in which the unthinking one person’s unthinking command causes the death of another, Freud’s description seems particularly fitting.

II. Techniques and Tropes of Contingency Both stories operate with numerous of turning points. The disorienting effects Hermann and Kleist achieve in their respective prose texts with their constant reversals are enhanced by the two writers’ syntactical extremism. Hermann is as radical in her adherence to parataxis as Kleist is in his commitment to hypotactical structures, both achieving a similar kind of breathlessness by opposite means. The presentation of quick, sudden, and surprising reversals contributes to the reader’s apperception of, and bafflement at, the frail constitution of the world. Thus, one could retell the beginning of Kleist’s “Bettelweib” in the following fashion: Even though you only see ruins now, there once was a castle here. Even though a woman had one day come to the door begging for something, she had been given a bed. Even though the bed consisted just of some thrown down straw, it was situated in a beautiful room. Even though the mistress of the house had arranged for the beggar woman’s bed to be in a particular part of the room, her husband came in and told the old woman to get up and move into another part of the room. Even though she managed to get up, she fell down. Even though she fell down and injured herself, she did get up again. Even though she made it into the corner as told, she died there immediately. Kleist’s prose works in general are characterized by constant peripeteia. Whenever characters or readers recognize and analyze the implications of a particular situation, the speed at which reversals of fortunes, of the condition of the world, or of emotional states arrive is breathtaking. In “Das Erdbeben in Chili” (The Earthquake in Chili, 1807/1810), for example, two illicit lovers, who are about to die in their respective prisons, are rescued by the outbreak of a horrendous earthquake, but they survive only to be vanquished by the cruelty of the people’s superstitious wrath. Piacci in “Der Findling” (The Foundling, 1811), while trying to lead his son to safety, extends his generosity to a plague-infected orphan. While the orphan heals, 19

“Im allerhöchsten Grade unheimlich erscheint vielen Menschen, was mit dem Tod, mit Leichen und mit der Wiederkehr der Toten, mit Geistern und Gespenstern, zusammenhängt” (Freud, p. 254). “Wahrscheinlich hat [unsere Angst vor dem Toten] auch noch den alten Sinn, der Tote sei zum Feind des Überlebenden geworden und beabsichtige, ihn mit sich zu nehmen” (Freud, p. 256).

210 Friederike von Schwerin-High

Piacci’s own son dies. Mourning for his dead son, Piacci begins to love the exemplary foundling with a father’s love, only to see him turn into a villain who brings disgrace, destruction, and death to his adoptive parents. Constant reversals also characterize Hermann’s story, “Sommerhaus, Später.” These occurrences, however, tend to be mental events taking place within the narrator’s perceptions and cognitions and in response to the shifting interpersonal situations developing between her and Stein. In the middle passage of Hermann’s text, these kinds of reversals occur with particular frequency. After the narration has moved back to the beginning of the physical relationship between Stein and the narrator and then to its eventual mutation into a loose, nonphysical acquaintanceship characterized by occasional nostalgic interludes, we arrive at the centerpiece of the story, the visit to the manor house undertaken by Stein and the narrator. The situations and the beliefs and desires accompanying those situations reverse themselves constantly in manners that the narrator describes as sudden, jumpy, and surprising: even though she does not know why Stein has asked her of all people to visit the house and even though she does not wish to go, she goes. At some point she briefly touches Stein’s cheek, but though he reacts with a pleased exclamation of “See!” he seems to “immediately” regret this. Though she is not prepared to share his excitement about the house, at some point, while examining the keys she is holding, she “suddenly” and fleetingly understands him. When his ice-cold hand pulls her into the house that looks frighteningly close to collapsing right around them, she takes the hand and “suddenly” feels like she never wants to lose his touch again. When briefly thereafter he holds her head and turns it to make her see everything there is to see, however, she becomes fearful of him, feeling like she has “never” seen him this rough. When he touches her face gently, she jerks back and he stops. She is now at a point again where she seems to understand nothing, but then, “very far away,” she begins to understand something. In her mind she experiences a brief “surge” of anger towards all her friends who have left her alone here. After Stein apologizes and she accepts his apology, he takes her hand, which she “now” finds warm and soft. She feels as though she should say something optimistic about the future. Then she wishes he would look at her again the way he once did when they were at a party, and then immediately she hates herself for that wish. Her unstable and change-prone state of mind during the visit is mirrored in the fragile state in which the manor house finds itself:

Causality and Contingency in Kleist and Judith Hermann 211 He drove into a small cross street, brought the car to a stop, simultaneously taking his hands off the steering wheel with an emphatic gesture, and said, “That’s it.” I looked out of the car window and thought, That’s it for another five minutes, maybe. The house looked as though at any moment it might cave in, suddenly and soundlessly. I got out of the car and shut its door with care as if every tremor might be too much. (Dembo, p. 130)

The narrator perceives the traces of the house’s former splendor as creating a great contrast with its current, dilapidated state, and this contrast, in its turn, produces a kind of pathos: Stein and I walked toward the house cautiously, on tiptoe. The house was a ship. It sat at the edge of that Canitz village street like a proud vessel beached in times long gone. It was a large, two-story country manor house of red brick; its skeletonized gable roof had two wooden horse’s heads, one at each end. Most of the windows had lost their glass panes, the crooked veranda was held together only by a dense tangle of ivy, and cracks as wide as a thumb through the brick-work. The house was beautiful. It was the house. And it was a ruin. The gate from which Stein was now trying to remove a “For Sale” sign collapsed with a small plaintive sound. We climbed over it, I paused, startled by the expression on Stein’s face. I saw him disappear behind the ivy on the veranda. Moments later a window frame fell off. (Dembo, p. 130)

The collapsing edifice is once again a vivid reminder of the frail constitution of the world, but by setting the main scene of her story in a ruin of a castlelike house, Hermann is of course also inviting a whole host of comparisons with ruins and their function in the repertoire of Classicism and Romanticism,20 while also suggesting an ironic distance to that literature. In a particularly ironic reversal, this manor house becomes reverted from ruin to livable space in a long and loving renovation process only to go up in flames. Viewing Hermann’s texts primarily through the lenses of contemporary topics or other contemporary texts, many studies of her work persuasively argue for the participation of Hermann’s narratives in current reevaluations of gender constructions and for her literary rendering of the sound of her own generation.21 Juxtaposing Hermann’s text with Kleist’s, however, re20

21

For a systematic, recent study of the motif and the metaphor of ruins in the time of Goethe and Kleist, see Hermann Bühlbäcker, Konstruktive Zerstörungen: Ruinendarstellungen in Der Literatur Zwischen 1774 Und 1832 (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 1999). Bühlbäcker shows that later, starting with Heine, literary references to ruins had to become more ironic in order to avoid conventionality (pp. 237–240). See, for example, the following studies: Esther K. Bauer, “Narratives of Femininity in Judith Hermann’s Summerhouse, Later,” Women in German Yearbook: Feminist Studies in German Literature and Culture, 25 (2009), pp. 50–75; Thomas Borgstedt, “Wunschwelten: Judith Hermann und die Neuromantik der Gegenwart,” Gegenwartsliteratur, 5 (2006), pp. 207–232; Claudia Gremler, “Country Escapes and Designs for Living:

212 Friederike von Schwerin-High

veals that Hermann frames the particulars of her stories in ways that raise similar philosophical questions, including the epistemological question of how we know what we think we know and questions about aesthetic taxonomies; ever-changing dichotomies of beauty and ugliness transverse her text, as will be briefly discussed in the next section in an examination of how ethical and aesthetical considerations intertwine or come into conflict in the two texts.

III. Causality, Contingency, and Ethics Both stories revolve around visits and removals or self-removals of visitors. In “Bettelweib,” the beggar woman, after she had been invited into a room, is asked to change locations within that room, to go behind the stove presumably so she cannot be seen. Her movement causes her death. Another visitor comes to the house several years later and becomes the first witness to a haunting, whose literally rising and falling action is, remarkably, reported five times in the tight space of this very short story. In “Sommerhaus,” the narrator and Stein are mutual guests. The narrator meets Stein, a taxi driver, in his taxi, then she is his visitor for much of the following three weeks, during which he is also her visitor at her apartment. After she throws him out, he moves in with members of her circle of friends and has intimate relationships with each of them in succession. Thus he becomes, in a manner, part of her artistically inclined clique, while also remaining distinctly an outsider. Later she is his reluctant visitor during the manor house tour. Feeling “guilty” and obliged to say something future-oriented and optimistic, she tells him that he would have to cut the ivy, before “we” (perhaps just she and Stein or perhaps the entire circle of friends) will be able to sit and drink wine together on the veranda of his summerhouse. She is seriously underreading him and under-reporting here when she remarks:22 “I was dead certain that he didn’t hear a word of what I was saying.” For it is precisely her comment about the ivy to which he explicitly refers in one of his later post-

22

Christa Wolf, Sarah Kirsch, and Judith Hermann,” Women’s Writing in Western Europe: gender, generation and legacy, ed. by Adalgisa Giorgio and Julia Waters (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 1997), pp. 118–131. In his study of character narration, Living to Tell about It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), James Phelan distinguishes between six different kinds of unreliable narration. When narrators underreport or under-read, as this narrator does, readers have to supplement the information reported or interpreted by the narrator. Here we can supplement the narrator’s own account, which is evidently lacking, with the information we glean from Stein’s postcard, which clearly indicates that he has heard and acknowledged her comments.

Causality and Contingency in Kleist and Judith Hermann 213

cards (the one that is actually presented verbatim in the text): “I’ll cut the ivy when you get here.” While her forward-looking statement has put the narrator under no contractual, legally binding obligation to share any kind of future with Stein, it is nonetheless important that though it was born of a bad conscience, — “I had the vaguely guilty feeling that I should be saying something forwardlooking, something optimistic” (Dembo, p. 131) — no honouring of that promise of a however minimally defined shared future followed. She has clearly repressed important facts about the conversations she and Stein had during their one, momentous visit together of the ruin. Her mentioning of the child’s inexplicable presence and of the need to cut the ivy both surface in his postcards, but she does not address this reality. It seems to be easier and more justifiable not to join a man who is unable to listen and appears to be indifferent and exclusively involved in his own visions than one who actually listened to all of her comments. Stein, in his turn, has to live with his own bad conscience. After they have picked up the keys from the former inhabitants, he explains: “They used to live in it […] They’re mad because they had to get out a year ago. I wasn’t the one who kicked them out, though, it was the owner from Dortmund. I only bought it. As far as I’m concerned they could have stayed on” (Dembo, p. 129).23 The restitution and resale of property to which both East Germans and West Germans had claims became a complex issue with far-reaching legal and social repercussions in the early 1990s and oftentimes resulted in hasty and unjust outcomes, frequently with disadvantageous consequences for resource-poor East Germans.24 Ownership status of land

23

24

“‘Die haben drin gewohnt’, sagte Stein [...] ‘Sie sind sauer, weil sie vor einem Jahr rausmußten. Aber nicht ich hab sie rausgesetzt, sondern der Eigentümer aus Dortmund. Ich hab’s bloß gekauft. Von mir aus hätten sie drinbleiben können’. Ich sagte verständnislos: ‘Die sind doch ekelhaft’, und Stein sagte: ‘Was ist ekelhaft’ und warf mir den Schlüsselbund in den Schoß” (Hermann, p. 146–147). See the chapter “Restitution of Property after German Unification” (pp. 103–116) in Ryszard W. Piotrowicz and Sam Blay, The Unification of Germany in International and Domestic Law, German Monitor, 39 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997). The conclusion of the chapter reads: “Another concern of a more social nature was and still is that, since all of the claimants were either from the western part of Germany or from abroad, the restitution process may have deepened the division between owners of assets in the west and asset-poor earners and unemployed persons in the east” (p. 116). Andreas Staab also argues that since the government favored restitution over compensation, battles over land to which two parties had claims could last for years. Nonetheless, especially in the first several years after unification, there prevailed a gold-digger mentality on the part of western business people who acquired real estate easily, quickly, and in a manner that felt like a colonization. Andreas Staab, National

214 Friederike von Schwerin-High

property in Brandenburg was in a similar state of flux in the time Kleist wrote his story as in the time when Hermann wrote hers. The reform policies initiated by Karl August von Hardenberg and Karl Freiherr vom Stein, designed to liberate poor peasants, often had the unanticipated and unintended consequence of thrusting them into greater poverty and leaving them landless and without a support system.25 Via the éloignement — the remoteness and historical-mythical distance of the story’s setting — Kleist’s Marchese represents, in a hybrid fashion, traces of views that belong to former times but also attitudes to the poor of Kleist’s own time. That, vulnerable though she is, the beggar woman gets ordered around in an empty room that is otherwise unused and in which the Marchese is in the habit of storing his hunting rifle, seems to run against the old feudal code of responsibility for the destitute. The behavior of the Marchese toward the beggar woman corresponds to a change in attitude towards beggars, as it had developed from the late Middle Ages onwards, but especially since the mid-eighteenth century, when city ordinances became increasingly more strict, especially against beggars from outside. While beggars had once fulfilled a religious, justice-enabling and atonement-producing function by praying for the donor commensurate with the contribution received or at least by accepting alms with a “God bless you,” they later lost this socio-spiritual significance:26 “Already with Calvin the change starts from the medieval Caritas economics to modern employment economy, which reaches its completion in the classic period.”27 Kleist’s contemporary Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) describes this change as follows: “A man of wealth in ancient times supported others directly, he fed and gave water to the poor, and dressed the naked. The other use of wealth is to use it for luxury. This use has the more striking effect that the others will have their needs met only under the condition that they work.” Devoid of her former socio-spiritual function and unable to work, the beggar

25

26

27

Identity in Eastern Germany: Inner Unification or Continued Separation? (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998), pp. 34–35. See Elisabeth Fehrenbach, Vom Ancien Régime Zum Wiener Kongress, Oldenbourg Grundriss der Geschichte, 2nd rev. edn (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2001), vol. 12, pp. 116–119. For these remarks, I am indebted to Ulli Guckelsberger’s study: “Das Menschenbild in der Ökonomie: ein dogmengeschichtliche Abriß,” Fachhochschule Ludwigshafen am Rhein (2005), Web, accessed 13 January 2013: . Subsequent citations as “Guckelsberger” with page number(s). All translations are mine. “Bereits mit Calvin beginnt der Wandel von der mittelalterlichen Caritas-Ökonomie zur modernen Beschäftigungsökonomie, der mit der Klassik abgeschlossen ist” (Guckelsberger, p. 203).

Causality and Contingency in Kleist and Judith Hermann 215

woman is nothing more than an eyesore in the luxuriously arranged world of the Marchese. He has acted in accordance with some of the newly emerging economic views of Kleist’s own time, in which the feudal responsibilities toward the poor had significantly changed. Similarly Stein followed general practice and adhered to law when he purchased the manor house. In many cases, third, uninvolved parties were able to purchase property from former owners forcing longtime residents to vacate the premises. In both scenarios of forced but “legal” evacuation, a feeling of unfairness and discomfort and the idea that things might have been otherwise remains. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant offers a connection between causality, contingency, and morality. Because we are able to imagine that things ought to have been different, Kant argues, our reason is also able to produce alternate scenarios, that is to say scenarios in which a different, spontaneously occurring event is posited as possible. Since for the ethical realm we can conjecture states that ought to be or ought to have been, even if they do not or did not exist in the realm of factuality, we can conclude that there must be the freedom for things to develop and come out differently and that, for that reason, we must impute to sequences of events a quality that transcends strict causality. Our ability to imagine counterfactual better outcomes and to envision what ought to be or ought to have been speaks for moral freedom. Even though Kant is not discussing our reading of fiction, his drawing together of causality and contingency on the one hand, and contingency and ethics on the other provides us with an effective representation of engagement with fictional texts and characters in general, and these two fictional texts and their characters in particular. Stein realizes that the former inhabitants are unhappy “because they had to get out a year ago” (Dembo, p. 129). But he justifies his own acquisition of the house by stating: “I wasn’t the one who kicked them out, though, it was the owner from Dortmund. I only bought it. As far as I’m concerned they could have stayed on” (Dembo, p. 129). While he recognizes that things could have been or could be otherwise — “they could have stayed on” — he does not act on that realization, even though such acting would be within his power. The Marchese caused the beggar woman to get up. He did not cause her to slip, fall and sustain injuries, but the sustained injuries, along with her continued compliance with his command, caused her to die. Whereas his will (command) had set one chain of events in motion, he did not use his will again to interrupt it. The outcome is outrageous, but so is his failure to exercise his will again. Discussing the anxiety that attaches itself to unjust practices and power abuses, Kleist noted in 1799, at least a year before his oft-referenced “KantKrise” and eleven years before the publication of his “Bettelweib”:

216 Friederike von Schwerin-High A great, inexorable law rules over all mankind, to which the prince and the beggar are subject. Virtue is followed by reward, vice by punishment. Gold cannot silence an indignant conscience, and even if the depraved prince outperforms all others in glances, gestures and speeches, even if he summons all the arts of frivolity and extravagance, to scare the ugly specter in his eyes – in vein! He will be tormented and frightened by his conscience just like the lowliest of his subjects.28

Interestingly here the tropes “beggars,” “conscience,” “ugly,” “scare,” and “ghost” are presented jointly long before they were strung together into a proper narrative in “Das Bettelweib von Locarno.” In addition, the passage suggests the enlistment of beauty, “glances, gestures, and speeches,” and “all the arts of frivolity and extravagance” as an attempted but ineffectual fortification against ethical anxiety. Aesthetic desires and ethical anxieties form similarly complex configurations in Hermann’s text, which describes the arrival of the narrator and her clique in Brandenburg and their acquisition of buildings there, be they modest summer cabins or dilapidated manor houses, as follows: We hung out with [Stein], there in the gardens and houses of people we really had nothing to do with. Workers had lived there, small farmers, and amateur gardeners who hated us and whom we despised. We avoided the locals; just thinking about them ruined everything for us. It didn’t feel right. We robbed them of their feeling of exclusivity, and we disfigured the villages, the fields, even the sky; it was in the way we strode around with our Easy Rider gait, flicked our joint butts into the flower beds in their front yards, the way we nudged each other self-importantly. But regardless we wanted to be there. (Dembo, pp. 126, 143)29

28

29

Translation mine. “Es waltet ein großes unerbittliches Gesetz über die ganze Menschheit, dem der Erste wie der Bettler unterworfen ist. Der Tugend folgt die Belohnung, dem Laster die Strafe. Kein Gold besticht ein empörtes Gewissen, und wenn der lasterhafte Fürst auch alle Blicke, Mienen und Reden besticht, wenn er auch alle Künste des Leichtsinns und der Üppigkeit herbeiruft, um das häßliche Gespenst vor seinen Augen zu verscheuchen — umsonst! Ihn quält und ängstigt sein Gewissen wie den Geringsten seiner Untertanen.” Letter from Kleist to Christian Ernst Martini of 18/19 March 1799 (SW 2, p. 477). “Wir saßen mit [Stein] da rum, in den Gärten und Häusern von Leuten, mit denen wir nichts zu tun hatten. Arbeiter hatten da gelebt, Kleinbauern, Hobbygärtner, die uns haßten und die wir haßten. Den Einheimischen gingen wir aus dem Weg, schon an sie zu denken machte alles kaputt. Es paßte nicht. Wir klauten ihnen das ‘Unteruns-Sein’, entstellten die Dörfer, Felder und noch den Himmel, das kriegten sie mit, an der Art und Weise, wie wir da umhergingen im Easy-Rider-Schritt” (Hermann, p. 143).

Causality and Contingency in Kleist and Judith Hermann 217

Here, too, we encounter the self-assurance of those possessing purchasing power, but also the expression of their uneasiness, in the terms of aesthetic judgments, an evaluative mechanism that plays out again when the narrator and Stein pick up the keys from the former inhabitants of the manor house and the narrator observes: With exaggerated movements he slid over the icy concrete toward a woman in a house dress who had just emerged from the front door. A pale, puny child clung to the house dress. I rolled down the car window, heard him call out with jovial warmth, “Mrs. Andersson!,” I had always hated the way he dealt with these kinds of people, saw how he offered her his hand and how she didn’t take it but dropped a huge bunch of keys into it. (Dembo, p. 128)

The narrator’s disapproval of the jovial “way he dealt with these kinds of people” extends to “these kinds of people” themselves, when she objects to Stein’s condescending bonhomie with an equally troubling expression of revulsion: “‘But they’re disgusting,’ I said, not comprehending, and Stein said, ‘What’s disgusting really?’ and threw the bunch of keys into my lap.” With the recognition of ever-increasing globalization on the one hand and a widening gap between rich and poor on the other, the early 2000s in Germany produced significant commentaries on the apprehension the conspicuously wealthy feel in the confrontation with the have-nots. This kind of apprehension was particularly aptly portrayed in a well-received film, entitled The Edukators (2005), or, as it was called in German, Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei (The Fat Years are Over). In the film, three young friends routinely break into the homes of vacationing wealthy families where they remind them of the fragile constitution of the world by radically rearranging their elegant furniture and luxurious display items and leaving notes behind that read, “The fat years are over.”30 The German political essayist Lothar Baier has argued that the greatest source of intolerance at our current geopolitical moment may be the “horror in the face of impoverishment”31 coupled with the fear that the use and exploitation of differences in living standards, wages, and tax laws — differences that power economic globalization — are not 30

31

In addition, the youngsters participate in demonstrations in front of mainstream retailers to draw attention to the sweatshop labor arrangements on which these retailers depend for their profit margins in the global circulation of cheaply-produced items of ostentation. Weingartner, Hans, Matthias Schellenberg, Daniela Knapp, Dirk Oetelshoven, Andreas Wodraschke, Daniel Brühl, Julia Jentsch, and Stipe Erceg, Die Fetten Jahre sind vorbei: Edukators, DVD Video (London: Pathé Distribution Ltd, 2005). Lothar Baier, “The Grace of the Right Birth,” in Germany in Transit: Nation and Migration, 1955–2005, ed. by Deniz Göktürk, David Gramling, and Anton Kaes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), pp. 123–126 (p. 125).

218 Friederike von Schwerin-High

sustainable and that “it is only the third world that is left for all of us.” The playwright Christoph Hein has made similar assertions, and it is especially interesting in this context that he singles out “the East German provinces,” which are “the poor regions of Germany,” as representing the avant-garde vision of a third-world Germany: “they are our future.”32 While Kleist’s “Bettelweib” depicts mutual threats arising between different social classes within the constellation of rural wealthy and subsequently impoverished populations (the Marchese and his wife), the rural poor (the beggar woman) and the urban rich (the Florentine nobleman), in Hermann’s story, “Sommerhaus, Später,” West Berliners and West Germans who yearn for the Brandenburg countryside that surrounds Berlin, thrust themselves into that region, displacing many impoverished long-time residents.33 Even as the two stories dramatize the discomfort about the contingent arrangement of privilege, both stories also portray the repression of awareness.34 Though on the one hand, Stein’s acquisition of the manor house has followed a perfectly legal, logical, and causal chain of real estate transactions, that chain remains, at the same time, not without its share of unfairness, frivolousness, and absurdity. For while the manor house was formerly a primary dwelling, it has now become an experimental, nonessential, expendable “summerhouse” for another party. The Marchese, though he manifests many signs of fear and horror, does not explicitly express remorse about his strict orders to the beggar woman to disappear behind the stove; his repressed bad conscience, however, resurfaces, leading him to end his life in the most dreadful manner possible. Whether the chased-away beggar woman and the displaced “dumb, pale child” incite the two homeowners to their acts of arson, or whether the castle owner and the manor house owner act on an impulse to punish themselves when they burn down their houses, remains undecidable. Written by Heinrich von Kleist and by the Kleist Prize 32

33

34

Christoph Hein, “Third World Everywhere,” in Germany in Transit: Nation and Migration, 1955–2005, ed. by Deniz Göktürk, David Gramling, and Anton Kaes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), pp. 491–494 (p. 494). “[Stein …] schlitterte auf dem vereisten Beton mit übertriebenen Bewegungen auf die Frau im Küchenkittel zu, die aus der Haustür getreten war. An ihren Kittel krallte sich ein blasses, kümmerliches Kind. Ich kurbelte die Scheibe herunter, hörte, wie er mit jovialer Herzlichkeit: ‘Frau Andersson!’ rief — ich hatte seine Art, mit Leuten dieses Schlages umzugehen, schon immer gehaßt —, sah, wie er ihr die Hand entgegenstreckte und wie sie sie nicht nahm, sondern ein riesiges Schlüsselbund hineinfallen ließ. [...] Das Kind an ihrem Kittel fing an zu heulen” (Hermann, p. 146). For an excellent analysis of the mechanisms of repression, concealment, and amnesia in the minds of both the narrator and the focal character, see: Kevin Hilliard, “‘Rittergeschichte mit Gespenst’: The Narration of the Subconscious in Kleist’s ‘Das Bettelweib von Locarno,’” German Life and Letters, n.s. 44.4 (1991), pp. 281–290.

Causality and Contingency in Kleist and Judith Hermann 219

recipient, Judith Hermann, these two stories about once impressive buildings, their violent demise, and the ruins and the houseless they have left behind, portray the frail constitution of the world, and of the causal constructions and social arrangements within it, in similarly haunting ways that resist closure and determinacy. Pomona College

Mary Helen Dupree “The Glazed Surface of Conviction”: The Motif of the Broken Jug in Kleist’s Der zerbrochne Krug and Ian McEwan’s Atonement Ian McEwan’s acclaimed 2001 novel Atonement strongly recalls Kleist’s 1811 play Der zerbrochne Krug (The Broken Jug) in its looping together of comic and dramatic narrative elements around the breaking of a prized earthenware vessel. In Atonement, the destruction of a vase sets in motion a series of “falls,” including the fall from innocence of the protagonist, Briony Tallis. Atonement, like Kleist’s play, is fractured along narrative lines, as unreliable eyewitnesses produce competing accounts of what took place at the scene of the vase’s destruction. In both texts, the figure of the broken jug is linked to eighteenth-century discourses of sympathy and virtue, figuring prominently in both authors’ exploration of the conflict between perception, knowledge, and belief. Through a discussion of the “Kleistian” in McEwan’s text, this essay seeks to expand beyond traditional notions of influence and origin towards a more global understanding of intertextuality in the twenty-first century.

Published in 2001, Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement, which chronicles the dissolution of an upper-class British family over the course of the twentieth century, has been acclaimed by turns as a triumphant return to the tradition of English realist fiction and as a wildly clever example of postmodern narrative. As Brian Finney has argued, McEwan’s novel uses intertextual strategies to initiate a dialogue with both modernism and realism, thus highlighting the constructedness of its own narrative.1 The long list of realist and modernist works referenced in Atonement includes, to name just a few: Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, (1798/1818) quoted in the novel’s epigraph (McEwan has called the book “my Jane Austen novel”); Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–48) and Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749); Henry James’s realist novels What Maisie Knew (1897) and The Golden Bowl (1904); works by twentieth-century British authors such as Elizabeth Bowen, H. P. Hartley and Rosamund Lehmann; Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929); and Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room (1922).2 Not surprisingly, most analyses of intertextuality in McEwan’s 1

2

See Brian Finney, “Briony’s Stand Against Oblivion: The Making of Fiction in Ian McEwan’s Atonement,” Journal of Modern Literature, 27.3 (2004), pp. 68–82 (p. 74). Subsequent citations as “Finney” with page number(s). Finney, pp. 71–72. See also Anna Grmelová, “About Suffering They Were Never Wrong, the Old Masters: An Intertextual Reading of Ian McEwan’s Atonement,” Litteraria Pragensia: Studies in Literature and Culture, 17.34 (December 2007), pp. 153–

222 Mary Helen Dupree

novel have focused on its references to works in the British and American literary traditions. For readers familiar with German literature, however, McEwan’s novel, in which the destruction of an heirloom vase signals a series of metaphorical “falls,” may evoke comparisons with Kleist’s play Der zerbrochne Krug (The Broken Jug, 1806/1811). This paper is an attempt to locate the Kleistian in McEwan’s work by means of an exploration of what is at stake in McEwan’s appropriation, intentional or not, of the broken jug motif. In Der zerbrochne Krug, the titular vessel is destroyed in the course of a thwarted erotic encounter between Adam, the local judge of a seventeenthcentury Dutch village, and the naïve village girl, Evchen, which occurs on the way from her back garden to her bedchamber. The play centers around the subsequent trial, in which Adam sits in judgment on his own transgression as Evchen’s mother, Frau Marthe, attempts to recoup the damages sustained both by the broken jug and her daughter’s reputation. McEwan’s vase, on the other hand, is broken before a fountain, during a hot summer afternoon on the estate of a country house in Surrey between the wars.3 It both foreshadows the novel’s primary catastrophe and signals the beginning of an affair between two mismatched lovers. In a pairing that Vermeule Blakey has described as quintessentially “Fieldingesque,” Cecilia, the oldest daughter of the wealthy Tallis family, is slowly coming to terms with her desire for Robbie Turner, the housekeeper’s son, whose ambitions to become a doctor are being supported financially by Cecilia’s father.4 The incident is witnessed by Briony, Cecilia’s thirteen-year-old sister, whose misinterpretation of the scene constitutes a betrayal for which she will spend her life trying to atone through her writing. In both texts, the “crucial breaking of a vase” (Blakey, p. 151) or vessel occurs simultaneously with an individual fall from grace that the text links with a larger, collective one. Can one describe Atonement as a Kleistian novel and if so, what does that mean? Although McEwan himself has cited many influences from Austen to Updike, Kleist is not among them. Indeed, Kleist references are a rarity in the English-speaking literary world. It is entirely possible that McEwan has encountered Kleist via John Banville’s English-language adaptation of The

3 4

157; and Ángeles de la Concha, “Unravelling Conventions; Or, the Ethics of Deconstruction in Ian McEwan’s Atonement,” in The Ethical Component in Experimental British Fiction since the 1960’s, ed. by Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2007), pp. 191–208 (pp. 199–200). Ian McEwan, Atonement (New York: Anchor, 2001), pp. 35–38. Subsequent citations as “Atonement” with page number(s). Vermeule Blakey, “God Novels,” in The Work of Fiction: Cognition, Culture and Complexity, ed. by Alan Richardson and Ellen Spolsky (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 147–166 (p. 152). Subsequent citations as “Blakey” with page number(s).

Kleist’s Der zerbrochne Krug and Ian McEwan’s Atonement 223

Broken Jug (1994), which transfers the play’s setting to an Irish village.5 McEwan can hardly be unaware of Banville, as the latter author notoriously gutted McEwan’s novel Saturday in the The New York Review of Books.6 However, none of this makes an adequate case for “influence” in the conventional sense. McEwan’s connection to Kleist is nowhere near as clear, for example, as that made by E. L. Doctorow in his historical novel Ragtime, which playfully offers a homage to Michael Kohlhaas in the form of the African-American activist Coalhouse Walker Jr., who incites a race uprising after the destruction of his car.7 In fact, it is quite plausible that the image of the broken vessel came to McEwan via James’ The Golden Bowl, as many critics have suggested. In the absence of explicit markers of influence, it becomes necessary to look for the tropes, ethical and aesthetic stances, structures of meaning-making, and rhetorical gestures that link together Kleist and McEwan’s very disparate, yet similar texts. Though it is risky to add yet another title to the long list of intertextual references in McEwan’s novel, I would argue that thinking of McEwan’s text as Kleistian can be productive insofar as it forces us to move beyond nationalistic and paternalistic notions of influence towards a more global reading of intertextuality. The possibilities for comparison between McEwan’s novel and Kleist’s play are seemingly endless, and in this paper, I will limit my arguments to what I believe are the three most compelling points. The first concerns the way in which the broken jug motif is connected to narrative proliferation and fragmentation, both at the individual level and at the level of history. The second point has to do with the way in which McEwan’s text references the visual tradition of using a broken jug to suggest damaged female virtue, a gesture that links it not only to Der zerbrochne Krug but also to questions about empathy, visuality, and theatricality informing the eighteenth-century cult of sensibility. This leads to my final point, which concerns the ways in which McEwan’s and Kleist’s landscapes are shaped by an awareness of the conflict between the empirical and the world of ideas. Both texts ask important questions as to how this conflict affects the possibility of making ethical decisions, and to what extent the aesthetic can resolve the terms of the debate.

5 6 7

John Banville, The Broken Jug: After Heinrich von Kleist (Loughcrew, Ireland: Gallery Books, 1994). John Banville, “A Day in the Life,” in The New York Review of Books (26 May 2005), pp. 8–9. E. L. Doctorow, Ragtime (New York: Plume, 1996).

224 Mary Helen Dupree

I. The Unreliable Witness and the Fall Into Narrative In both Kleist’s play and McEwan’s novel, the breaking of an earthenware vase or vessel functions as a signpost that separates one part of the narrative from another. Both texts describe the events associated with the breakage as a “fall,” and both depict a proliferation of narratives as a side effect of the attempt to reconstruct the vessel, literally or figuratively. In Kleist’s play, this fall is a literal one. At the play’s opening, we find Adam in bed and wigless, pulling himself together in preparation for a surprise inspection by the district magistrate, Walter. Adam’s head bears an ugly scar as the result of an apparent stumble, which he attributes to his own clumsiness: “All the same, I stumbled — / for we’ve got, each one of us, a nasty stumbling block/ inside ourselves.”8 The play reveals Adam’s injury to be the result of the same thwarted attempt at seduction (or more precisely, blackmail) that resulted in the fall of the titular jug from its pedestal. In her testimony in Scene 7, Frau Marthe describes finding her treasured jug in pieces in her daughter’s room along with a male visitor whom she incorrectly assumes to be Ruprecht, Evchen’s fiancé. Playing on the dual implications of the German word Fall, which can refer to a court case as well as a literal act of falling, Kleist makes the broken jug into a symbol of the personal fall of the appropriately named Adam.9 As many Kleist scholars have argued, the fall of Judge Adam corresponds to a fall or sacrifice of patriarchal authority, thus linking the play to the fall of Oedipus as well as the book of Genesis.10 It also signals the fall or destruction of history, as represented by the historical panorama depicted on the jug. In court, Frau Marthe takes account of the fall in a mock-Homeric ekphrasis, in which she describes the historical import of the images painted on the now-disfigured jug. The jug had depicted the transfer

8

9

10

Heinrich von Kleist, Five Plays, trans. by Martin Greenberg (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 89. Kleist’s original reads: “Gestrauchelt bin ich hier; denn jeder trägt / Den leidgen Stein zum Anstoß in sich selbst.” Heinrich von Kleist, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. by Helmut Sembdner (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2008), vol. 1, p. 177. Subsequent citations as “SW” with volume and page number(s). On the significance of “falling” in The Broken Jug and Kleist’s work more generally, see Helmut J. Schneider, “Standing and Falling in Heinrich von Kleist,” MLN, 115 (2000), pp. 502–518 (p. 508). Subsequent citations as “Schneider” with page number(s). Kenneth S. Calhoon, “Sacrifice and the Semiotics of Power in Der zerbrochene Krug,” Comparative Literature, 41.3 (Summer 1989), pp. 230–251 (p. 231). See also Christoph Menke, “Die Gegenwart Der Tragödie: Eine Ästhetische Aufklärung,” Neue Rundschau, 111.1 (2000), pp. 85–95.

Kleist’s Der zerbrochne Krug and Ian McEwan’s Atonement 225

of power over the Netherlands from Emperor Charles V to his son Philipp II of Spain:11 You don’t [see] — begging your pardon. You see pieces — the loveliest jug that ever was now lies in pieces. Right where this hole is, all the Netherlands were handed over to the Spanish Philip. Here Emperor Charles stood in his royal robes. Those are his legs, that’s all that’s left of him. Here Philip knelt before his father to receive the crown — he’s still there, down to his backside, but even it did not get off without a whack. There his two aunts, the Queens of France and Hungary, so touched, are dabbing at their eyes with handkerchiefs — but now one of them looks like she is weeping for herself. Here’s Sir Philibert in the retinue, still leaning on his sword, spared destruction by the Emperor’s catching it — but he’ll fall on his face now, him and that damned Maximilian, because they haven’t any swords to lean on. Here at the center with his miter on once stood the Archbishop of Arras — the devil came and carried him away. All that’s left of him is his long shadow on the pavement. In the background, standing in a circle in close order, were the Royal Guards with halberds and spears. And just look here and you can see the houses lining the great marketplace of Brussels, and from a window someone peering curiously But what there is for him to see now, I don’t know.12 11

12

Hinrich C. Seeba has argued that Kleist’s text substitutes visual models (Bildvorlagen) for historical background, both at the level of its structure and in the motif of the broken jug, on which history is literally painted or inscribed. The hole in the jug is thus quite literally a hole in the image of history (“ein Loch im Bild der Geschichte”). See Hinrich C. Seeba, “Overdragt Der Nederlanden in t’Jaar 1555: Das Historische Faktum und das Loch im Bild der Geschichte bei Kleist,” in Barocker Lust-Spiegel: Studien zur Literatur des Barock, ed. by Martin Bircher, Jörg-Ulrich Fechner, and Gerd Hillen (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1984), pp. 409–443 (p. 423). Kleist, Five Plays, pp. 113–114. “Nichts seht ihr, mit Verlaub, die Scherben seht ihr; / Der Krüge schönster ist entzwei geschlagen. / Hier grade auf dem Loch, wo jetzo nichts, / Sind die gesamten niederländischen Provinzen / Dem span’schen Philipp übergeben worden. / Hier im Ornat stand Kaiser Karl der fünfte: / Von dem seht ihr nur noch die Beine stehn. / Hier kniete Philipp, und empfing die Krone; / Der liegt im Topf, bis auf den Hinterteil, / Und auch noch der hat einen Stoß empfangen. / Dort wischten seine beiden Muhmen sich, / Der Franzen und der Ungarn Königinnen, / Gerührt die Augen aus; wenn man die eine / Die Hand noch mit dem

226 Mary Helen Dupree

The breaking of the jug throws the historical narrative depicted on the jug’s exterior into chaos, literally replacing whole sections of history with “nothing” (nichts; SW 1, p. 201). The individual details of the historical narrative have been comically rearranged or mutilated: only the Emperor Karl’s legs remain, Philibert and Maximilian’s swords are erased, and the devil has literally taken the Archbishop of Arras. In Kleist’s text, the broken jug negotiates between the grand sweep of historical events and the seemingly insignificant details of domestic life; it comically miniaturizes the former and blows the latter out of all proportion. It generates a multitude of mininarratives whose relationship to the larger historical narrative is unclear. Kleist uses metaphors of blindness and non-seeing to describe this interpretive impasse: the court “sees nothing” when looking at the shards, just as “someone peering curiously” (Kleist, Five Plays, p. 114) depicted on the jug’s surface gazes at an object that is now indeterminate. In Atonement, a similar process of “falling” into narrative proliferation can be observed. What at first appears to be a gripping, if somewhat conventional, upper-class British family drama is revealed, through a series of discursive shifts, to be a more complex reflection on the problem of narrative. McEwan himself has characterized Atonement as a “novel followed by two novellas.”13 The motif of the vase figures most prominently in the initial “novel,” which takes place solely on the Tallis estate. At the beginning of Part One, the center of focalization is Briony, who is trying to enlist her cousins in a performance of her play, a drama of virtue rewarded entitled The Trials of Arabella. After this theatrical project proves a failure, Briony wanders the house and, from an upstairs window, accidentally witnesses the drama between Cecilia and Robbie at the fountain outside. As Briony watches, Cecilia takes off her blouse and skirt, dives into the fountain and returns with “a vase of flowers Briony had not noticed before” (Atonement, p. 37). Through shifts in focalization, the novel reveals that this vase is a precious family heirloom, rescued by an uncle from the ruins of France in

13

Tuch empor sieht heben, / So ists, als weinete sie über sich. / Hier im Gefolge stützt sich Philibert, / Für den den Stoß der Kaiser aufgefangen, / Noch auf das Schwert; doch jetzo müßt er fallen, / So gut wie Maximilian: der Schlingel! / Die Schwerter unten jetzt sind weggeschlagen. / Hier in der Mitte, mit der heilgen Mütze, / Sah man den Erzbischof von Arras stehn; / Den hat der Teufel ganz und gar geholt, / Sein Schatten nur fällt lang noch übers Pflaster. / Hier standen rings, im Grunde, Leibtrabanten, / Mit Hellebarden, dicht gedrängt, und Spießen, / Hier Häuser, seht, vom großen Markt zu Brüssel, / Hier guckt noch ein Neugierger aus dem Fenster: / Doch was er jetzo sieht, das weiß ich nicht” (SW 1, p. 200–201). David Weich, “Ian McEwan, Reinventing Himself Still,” in Powell’s City of Books: http://www.powells.com/blog/interviews/ian-mcewan-reinventing-himself-still-bydave/authors/mcewan.html.

Kleist’s Der zerbrochne Krug and Ian McEwan’s Atonement 227

the First World War, and that Robbie has accidentally knocked it into the fountain, breaking it in two. This mysterious scene inspires Briony to concoct a second drama with more devastating consequences: she equates the breaking of the jug with an assault on Cecilia’s virginity. Her suspicions are confirmed when she accidentally intercepts a sexually explicit love note from Robbie to Cecilia, and again when she interrupts their first tryst in the library. By the end of Part One, Briony has accused Robbie of raping her cousin Lola and attempting to rape her sister, and Robbie has been taken away and imprisoned. The later sections of Part One are intensely concerned with the proliferation of narratives that seek to explain what happened to Cecilia, Lola, and the vase. Colluding with the police, Briony glosses over the “cracks” in her own narrative to create something that appears to be intact, a process that has catastrophic consequences for all involved. Like the broken vase, McEwan’s novel is fractured in a way that is rhetorically and semiotically productive. The two novellas that comprise the second half of Atonement are set years later, during the Second World War. The first follows Robbie, now released from prison, on a hellish journey to Dunkirk, whereas the second focuses on Briony’s guilt and attempts at reconciliation with her sister. The interrelatedness of the three parts is accounted for by a first-person narrative by Briony at the novel’s end, in which it is revealed that Briony, now elderly and about to succumb to dementia, is the author of all three parts; that the entire novel represents her lifelong attempt to atone for her guilt; and that she has made up a number of plot points including the happy ending that reunites Cecilia and Robbie, both of whom, it is explained, died ingloriously in the war. The novel thus undermines the fiction of a reliable, omniscient third-person narrator to reveal one who, like Frau Marthe, has a strong personal stake in the fragmentary story she tells, and who also, like Adam, is forced to sit in judgment on her own crime. In Atonement as in Der zerbrochne Krug, the breaking of the vase amounts to a fall that precipitates a number of other falls: Cecilia’s literal dive and her fall from virtue, Briony’s fall from innocence, the end of the aristocratic order, and England’s historical fall from innocence in the trauma of the Second World War. As with Adam’s fall in Der zerbrochne Krug, these falls are dizzyingly overdetermined, both morally and historically. On seemingly trivial events such as the failed play production and the scene at the fountain, the reader is invited to project his or her own awareness of the historical traumas to come. The English country house is equally overdetermined, serving both as a microcosm of English society between the wars as well as a well-worn trope linking McEwan’s text to a long literary tradition extending from Fielding to Evelyn Waugh. Seemingly monolithic, this structure is

228 Mary Helen Dupree

rhetorically linked to the broken vase: like the wounded, club-footed, and grotesque body of Adam in Der zerbrochne Krug, the Gothic house, which has replaced an older, “Adam-style” building from the eighteenth century, is fragmented, incomplete, and deceptive in its very foundations. The novel frankly describes it as ugly, having been subjected to multiple renovations and made up of disparate elements from different time periods. Its representations of family history are deceitful: even the “ancestral” portraits in the dining room were bought by Briony’s father in order to convey a false sense of lineage. The fountain in the garden is a cheap and aesthetically questionable copy of a Roman original. The motif of the broken vase is therefore no mere decorative flourish, but rather a semiotic lodestone and a satirical reflection of the brokenness of the world that the characters inhabit. As Frau Marthe exclaims in Der zerbrochne Krug, the jug’s beauty is relevant to the case (gehört zur Sache; SW 1, p. 201); the origins of the vase and its aesthetic composition have extraordinary significance for its interpretation. This is also true of the vase in McEwan’s novel, which plays with this idea by describing the vase as having great exchange value but little aesthetic value. Although “very valuable,” the vase is not a Ming relic as some family members assume. Its origins are in the German eighteenth century, specifically the golden age of Meissen porcelain production under August the Strong: When Cecilia was a teenager, a friend of her father who worked in the Victoria and Albert museum had come to examine the vase and declared it sound. It was genuine Meissen porcelain, the work of the great artist Höroldt, who painted it in 1726. It had most certainly once been the property of King August. (Atonement, p. 23)

Like many objects and structures in the Tallis home, the vase is not worthless, but not exactly what it is assumed to be, either. The references to Höroldt and August the Strong may in fact be teasing allusions to the past of Kleist’s play, or to the European historical pageant to which the images on Kleist’s jug allude. The Chinoiserie vase also tells a story of absolutism, mercantilism, and colonial power, which also surfaces in Kleist’s play via references to Adam’s threat to have Ruprecht shipped out to the Dutch colonies in Asia (SW 1, p. 196, pp. 242–243). Whereas Kleist’s broken jug is painted with a scene of enormous historical significance, the images on McEwan’s vase are decorative and seemingly arbitrary. The family’s matriarch, Emily Tallis, who directs the household from her sickbed in her husband’s absence, dislikes the vase precisely for this reason:

Kleist’s Der zerbrochne Krug and Ian McEwan’s Atonement 229 The truth was, whatever its great value, and beyond its association, Emily Tallis did not much like the vase. Its little painted Chinese figures gathered formally in a garden around a table, with ornate plants and implausible birds, seemed fussy and oppressive. Chinoiserie in particular bored her. Cecilia herself had no particular view, though she sometimes wondered just how much it might fetch at Sotheby’s. (Atonement, p. 23)

Here, no value is attached to the figures represented on the vase’s surface: in this regard, it appears to be purely decorative. Yet, these Chinoiserie images are not completely valueless in the novel’s symbolic economy. They provide another instance of the novel’s recurring garden motif and also a satirical reflection of the “fussy and oppressive” atmosphere of the Tallis household. What is represented on its surface is not the larger course of history, but rather the fragile present moment of stagnation, boredom, and domestic tension in the formal garden of the Tallis estate and England as a whole. In this way, McEwan uses the vase to satirize the self-serving motivations of the British upper class and highlight the extent to which economic and social relations have ossified in the Tallises’ world. The sanctity of this garden is disrupted by the vase’s destruction, which foreshadows both an Oedipal assault on the father (via Robbie’s quasi-incestuous relationship with Cecilia, his patron’s daughter) and a historical trauma (the events of the Second World War). The vase’s relationship to history is established through a narrative of origins, which comes to light as Cecilia is arranging flowers in it. In this passage, Cecilia remembers the funeral of Uncle Clem, who died when she was a small child, and the family legend that identifies him as the vase’s importer: The story of how he had come by the vase was told in one of the last letters the young lieutenant wrote home. He was on liaison duties in the French sector and initiated a last-minute evacuation of a small town west of Verdun before it was shelled. Perhaps fifty women, children and old people were saved. Later, the mayor and other officials led Uncle Clem back through the town to a half-destroyed museum. The vase was taken from a shattered glass case and preserved in gratitude. There was no refusing, however inconvenient it might have seemed to fight a war with Meissen porcelain under one arm. A month later the vase was left for safety in a farmhouse, and Lieutenant Tallis waded across a river in spate to retrieve it, returning the same day at midnight to join his unit. In the final days of the war, he was sent on patrol duties and gave the vase to a friend for safe-keeping. It slowly found its way back to the regimental headquarters, and was delivered to the Tallis home some months after Uncle Clem’s burial. (Atonement, pp. 21–22)

As this anecdote makes clear, the vase’s real value for the older members of the family lies not only in its price but also in its status as a symbol of al-

230 Mary Helen Dupree

liance, heroism, self-sacrifice, and familial continuity: “The vase was respected not for Höroldt’s mastery of polychrome enamels or the blue and gold interlacing strapwork and foliage, but for Uncle Clem, and the lives he saved, the river he had crossed at midnight, and his death just a week before the Armistice” (Atonement, p. 22). The vase serves as a focal point joining together familial, national, and historical narratives and as an emblem of survival and tradition, linking together the living and dead members of the family and the nation. The garden motif on the surface of McEwan’s vase can thus be read as an emblem of stasis and continuity in the face of historical change: “If it had survived the war, the reasoning went, then it could survive the Tallises.” The various legends that swirl around the vase point to a sense of idyllic timelessness and seamless progression from one generation to the next. Kleist’s play also evokes the idyll through Frau Marthe’s narrative of the vase’s history through its acquisition by a series of quasi-mythical characters, from “Childerich the tinker” to “Fürchtegott the gravedigger”: Fürchtegott the gravedigger inherited it next. A sobersided man, no rioter: three times he drank from it, all told, and even so he mixed his wine with water. The first time was, when he reached sixty and married a young thing; three years later, when she rejoiced his heart by presenting him with an heir; and after she had borne him fifteen children, he drank from it a third time, when she died.14

By skipping here from Fürchtegott’s marriage to fatherhood to his wife’s death, Kleist evokes idyllic time in the Bakhtinian sense, untouched by everyday conflicts and punctuated only by generational markers such as births, marriages, and deaths.15 In both texts, the breaking of the vessel thus signals the destruction of both history and the present, as this idyllic constellation is broken up by sexual transgression and historical change. Moreover, both texts use unreliable narrators to undermine the idea that the idyll ever ex14

15

Kleist, Five Plays, p. 114. Kleist’s original reads as follows: “Hierauf vererbte / Der Krug auf Fürchtegott, den Totengräber; / Der trank zu dreimal nur, der Nüchterne, / Und stets vermischt mit Wasser aus dem Krug. / Das erstemal, als er im Sechzigsten / Ein junges Weib sich nahm; drei Jahre drauf, / Als sie noch glücklich ihn zum Vater machte; / Und als sie jetzt noch funfzehn Kinder zeugte, / Trank er zum dritten Male, als sie starb” (SW 1, p. 201). M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. by Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 224–226.

Kleist’s Der zerbrochne Krug and Ian McEwan’s Atonement 231

isted at all. Frau Marthe’s reliability as a narrator is compromised by her obsessive fixation on the broken jug and her misguided conviction that Ruprecht is the perpetrator. McEwan’s narrator, Briony, is similarly misguided and overly invested in her interpretation of the vase’s destruction; her unreliability is underscored once more in the novel’s final twist. In short, both texts deploy the motif of the broken jug in order to indicate a fall from stasis, unity, and tradition into heterogeneity, temporality, and fragmentation. They deploy the figure of the unreliable narrator in order to suggest that the fall was perhaps no fall at all, but rather a confirmation of the inherently fragmented nature of language, history, and the world.

II. Figures by a Fountain: Virtue, Theatricality, and the Image in Atonement In addition to its moral, semiotic, and historical associations, the image of the broken jug underscores the prominent role that images play in both Kleist’s and McEwan’s texts, while linking them to much older visual traditions.16 In the unpublished preface (Vorrede) to Der zerbrochne Krug, Kleist claims that the play was inspired by a copperplate of a court scene (Gerichtsszene) hanging in the apartment of his friend Heinrich Zschokke, in which a court secretary looks askance at the judge, “[...] much as Creon looked at Oedipus in similar circumstances [...]”17 This image has been identified as a 1782 copperplate by Jean Jacques Le Veau, Le juge, ou la cruche cassée (The Judge, or The Broken Jug), depicting the trial of a village girl; its original, now lost, is presumed to have been inspired by Jean Baptiste Greuze’s more famous 1771 painting, La cruche cassée.18 Greuze’s image does not depict the trial, but rather the girl herself in the moments following the incident that presumably led to it: the girl stands at a fountain, holding a broken jug in her hand and looking directly at the observer. The painting employs the same technique of visual metonymy employed in Greuze’s La jeune fille qui pleure son oiseau mort (The Young Girl Who Cries for Her Dead Bird), in which the destruction of a symbolic object is used to suggest the

16

17 18

In his semiotic reading of the broken jug motif, Kenneth S. Calhoon argues that the broken jug links Kleist’s play to the literature of antiquity via references to sacrifice, ekphrasis, and “narratives of refused reparation” (Calhoon, p. 231). Kleist, Five Plays, p. 87; “[...] wie Kreon, bei einer ähnlichen Gelegenheit, den Ödip.” (SW 1, p. 176). Seeba, pp. 411–415. Both le Veau’s engraving and Greuze’s painting are reproduced in Kleist 2: Abbildungen 8–9.

232 Mary Helen Dupree

loss of a young girl’s virginity.19 This gesture is even more forceful in Greuze’s image, whose partially clad subject holds a bundle of picked flowers in her skirts and stares somewhat provocatively at the viewer. The position of the girl’s hands draws the viewer’s eye directly to her groin before it travels upward to the broken jug she holds in her right hand. The motif of the broken jug thus acts as a corpus delicti and a final punch line, confirming what the viewer already suspects based on the girl’s stance and demeanor. The image of the girl at the fountain is also a central device in Atonement, which thematizes its iconic status. In Part Three, Briony, now a young woman, is seen rewriting the story of her crime as a novella, which she titles “Two Figures by a Fountain.” The title of this work, which she submits to Cyril Connolly’s journal Horizon, suggests a modernist approach to a classic, painterly theme. By repainting the events of the hot summer day as a modernist or Cubist exercise in form, the older Briony seeks to undo the damage caused by her earlier, naïve reading of the day’s events. As a witness, the child Briony follows the semiotic logic of Greuze’s painting: when she later encounters the shocking word “cunt” in the letter she intercepts from Robbie, this reinforces her reading of the not-yet broken vase as a stand-in for her sister’s violated hymen. However, as the novel shows, Briony’s crime consists precisely in projecting eighteenth-century narratives of sexual morality onto an image that stubbornly resists interpretation: she confuses life with the (didactic) work of art. The adult Briony’s attempt to reinterpret the scene using the techniques of literary modernism is also a failure. In a fictionalized rejection letter in which the novel presents its own self-critique, “Connolly” criticizes Briony’s “novella” (i.e. Part One) for aping the “techniques of Mrs. Woolf” (Atonement, p. 294). An excursion into pure formal experimentation, the novella lacks “the backbone of a story” (Atonement, p. 296). Here again as in Kleist, the destruction of the broken jug produces an endless chain of explanatory narratives that seek to replace and improve upon each other. Through Briony’s multiple rewritings of the story, this metonymic chain mirrors the forward movement of experimentation, a project in which the novel itself participates. In the intertextuality of both Kleist’s play and McEwan’s novel, one can detect a certain symmetry. Whereas Kleist’s play accesses the culture of antiquity via ekphrasis, the broken jug, and references to Oedipus, McEwan’s novel engages the eighteenth century via references to literature (Fielding, Richardson, and Austen), architecture (the temple and the “Adam-style” 19

See Denis Diderot, Salons, ed. by Jean Seznec and Jean Adhémar (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), vol. 2, pp. 145–149; also Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), pp. 57–59.

Kleist’s Der zerbrochne Krug and Ian McEwan’s Atonement 233

house), and the visual arts (the cruche cassée motif). In this way, both authors establish a playful relationship to the historical “origins” of their respective genres: Kleist converts classical tragedy into comedy, whereas McEwan returns to the scene of the novel’s birth in the eighteenth century. The eighteenth-century motif of threatened virtue, which is referenced somewhat waggishly in Kleist, also surfaces in McEwan’s novel not only through the broken jug motif, but also through the performance of Briony’s play, The Trials of Arabella, with which the novel begins. As Kathleen D’Angelo has observed, the heroine of Briony’s drama may allude to Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote, an eighteenth-century novel whose heroine, Arabella, suffers from an inability to distinguish between sentimental literature and real life.20 The tension between life and sensibility informs the scenes in which Briony attempts to enlist her less literarily inclined cousins from the north, Lola, Pierrot, and Jackson, in the performance. The stakes are high: Briony is invested in theater not only as an opportunity to receive praise and be the center of attention, but also as a way to exert a moral influence on her audience, particularly her visiting older brother Leon. As she conceives of it, the play is a classical tragedy “intended to inspire not laughter, but terror, relief and instruction, in that order” (Atonement, p. 4). However, the actors lay waste to Briony’s plans: Lola commandeers the role of Arabella, which Briony had intended for herself, and the twins Pierrot and Jackson resist their roles, arguing that theater is “just showing off” (Atonement, p. 11). The failure of The Trials of Arabella inspires a crisis that leads the young writer to abandon theater forever: “The rehearsals [...] offended her sense of order. The self-contained world she had drawn with clear and perfect lines had been defaced with the scribble of other minds, other needs; and time itself, so easily sectioned on paper into acts and scenes, was now dribbling uncontrollably away” (Atonement, p. 34). Working with a cast of exhausted, listless children on a hot summer day, McEwan’s Briony experiences firsthand the gravitational pull described in Kleist’s essay on the puppet theater (“Über das Marionettentheater,” 1810), in which he compares the effortless grace of mechanically controlled puppets with the contrived mincing (Ziererei) of live actors and dancers (SW 2, p. 341). Whereas the puppet master has complete control of and sympathy with his “actors,” the director of a theater must work with actors whose bodies are subject to the laws of gravity and whose hearts are unknown to her. In the process of wrangling with her cousins for control of the perfor20

Kathleen D’Angelo, “‘To make a Novel’: The Construction of a Critical Readership in Ian McEwan’s Atonement,” in Studies in the Novel 41.1 (2009), pp. 88–105 (pp. 91– 92).

234 Mary Helen Dupree

mance, Briony thus finds herself confronted with the problem of empathy, which stubbornly resists her attempts at instrumentalizing it in the service of moral instruction.21 Both in its extended discussion of theater and its strategy of embedding highly theatrical scenes and dialogues within a prose narrative, McEwan’s novel recalls Kleist’s narrative works, which, as Helmut J. Schneider has argued, emphasize the theatrical dimension by embedding stage directions in the narrative through descriptions of bodily postures and gestures that resist interpretation (Schneider, p. 502–503). Kleist uses this strategy to critique the eighteenth-century cult of sentimentality, which reads such bodily phenomena as blushing and crying as natural manifestations of the soul’s truth. Schneider writes: “In [Kleist’s] work the ‘truth’ of body language is inextricably connected to a particular situation and set of contingent circumstances in which the narrative figure acts and reacts; manifestations of the soul turn into a function of the external scene and must be read accordingly” (Schneider, p. 503). In Atonement, the heroine’s transgression lies precisely in her failure to read both linguistic signs (the intercepted note) and corporeal signs (the scenes with Robbie and Cecilia at the fountain and in the library) in light of the “contingent circumstances” that inform them. To paraphrase the novel’s epigram, a well-known quotation from Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Briony fails to consult her own observation of what is passing around her: rather than giving Robbie the benefit of the doubt based on her prior trust and her private, circumstantial knowledge of him, she projects a scenario of absolute good and evil (interpreted as “symmetry,” “tidiness,” or “common sense”) onto the scene she witnesses. Her atonement for this transgression through the writing of a narrative is in line with the eighteenth-century insight that literature may provide a more direct route to empathic identification with another, an insight that the novel alternately upholds and calls into question.

21

In his well-known post-9/11 essay in The Guardian, McEwan interprets the terrorist attacks as a failure of empathy and imagination, thereby affirming his own investment in Enlightenment questions of sympathy and morality: “If the hijackers had been able to imagine themselves into the thoughts and feelings of the passengers, they would have been unable to proceed. It is hard to be cruel once you permit yourself to enter the mind of your victim. Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality.” Ian McEwan, “Only love and then oblivion. Love was all they had to set against their murderers.” The Guardian (15 September 2001): www. guardian.co.uk/world/2001/sep/15/september11.politicsphilosophyandsociety2.

Kleist’s Der zerbrochne Krug and Ian McEwan’s Atonement 235

III. Perception, Belief, and Knowledge in Atonement and Der zerbrochne Krug Both Kleist’s play and McEwan’s novel are profoundly concerned with the philosophical questions about seeing, hearing, knowing, believing, and judging that are said to have prompted Kleist’s much-mythologized “Kant crisis” in the spring of 1801.22 Moreover, both works are attentive to the ways in which individual, private knowledge and perception can be manipulated in order to produce a collective or official judgment. In The Broken Jug, the court setting provides the perfect opportunity to expose the agendas of multiple characters, all of whom seek to manipulate the truth in order to produce an official judgment in accordance with their desires. These include Adam, who is satisfied with any possible outcome as long as it does not incriminate him; Ruprecht, who is convinced that the cobbler Lebrecht is the guilty party; and Frau Marthe, who is convinced of Ruprecht’s guilt and aggressively rejects any evidence that would suggest otherwise. Both Ruprecht and Frau Marthe give testimony without having actually seen or recognized the perpetrator; as a result, hearing plays an important role in both their testimonies. In Ruprecht’s account of apprehending a third party conversing with Evchen in the garden, the faculties of seeing and hearing are detached from cognition in grotesque-comical fashion. Upon hearing the garden door creak, Ruprecht sends his eyes in the direction of the noise, as he tells the judge: And then — as I’m passing through the linden alley just before you come to Martha’s, where the trees arch overhead and it’s as dark as under Utrecht’s dome, I hear the gate creak and I say: Hear that? That’s Eve, and try to make out in the darkness with my eyes what my ears report — but they are blind. I strain my eyes a second time. Not blind this time, but false: lying troublemakers, nasty scandalmongers. So I try again. And what I think the third time is, they’ve done their duty faithfully, they have, and now my eyes are popping out of my head: with indignation — for there is Eve, I know her by her dress, and someone’s with her, too, [a man!23] 22 23

See Ingo Breuer, Kleist-Handbuch: Leben, Werk, Wirkung (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2009), pp. 206–208. Kleist, Five Plays, pp. 120–121. “Drauf — wie ich übern Lindengang mich näh’re / Bei Marthens, wo die Reihen dicht gewölbt, / Und dunkel, wie der Dom zu Utrecht, sind, / Hör ich die Gartentüre fernher knarren. / Sieh da! Da ist die Eve noch! sag

236 Mary Helen Dupree

Here, Ruprecht’s helplessness is underscored by the Oedipal image of the disembodied eyes ripping themselves out of his head. Dependent on the partial and imperfect testimony of his eyes and ears, Ruprecht makes a leap in judgment and names Lebrecht as the perpetrator, but is frank about his doubts: “I couldn’t swear an oath about it on the sacrament. / You see, it was pitch dark, when every cat is gray.”24 Similarly, Frau Marthe’s testimony relies on incomplete visual and auditive evidence. As with Ruprecht, her suspicions too are aroused by auditive perception; she hears “men’s voices, a tumult” (laute Männerstimmen, ein Tumult; SW 1, p. 303) coming from her daughter’s room. Upon discovering a prostrate Ruprecht and the broken jug in her daughter’s room, Frau Marthe immediately jumps to the most obvious, but incorrect conclusion about what has happened: she assumes that Ruprecht has violated both the jug and her daughter’s honor. She does not see, but rather shapes her seeing to reflect what she already “knows” about the ways of men and the world. Both of these characters are literally and figuratively unable to catch up with their eyes and ears, whose testimony chronically exceeds their power to interpret it. In Atonement, the most concentrated reflection on the gulf between seeing and knowing occurs in the segments that describe Lola’s rape by Paul Marshall and the subsequent hunt for the perpetrator. This episode, too, takes place in a garden by night: having just interrupted Robbie and Cecilia in the library, Briony escapes to the garden and the lake island, where she surprises Lola’s rapist in the act. Briony cannot see “him” clearly, but forms an immediate conclusion about the rapist’s identity based on what she has seen in the library: “She had no doubt. She could describe him. There was nothing she could not describe” (Atonement p. 155). Her subsequent conversation with the traumatized Lola is both an interrogation and a catechism. Through questions and answers, Briony convinces her cousin that it was Robbie who attacked her without ever actually naming him: “Briony said, ‘It was him, wasn’t it?’ She felt against her chest, rather than saw, her cousin nod, slowly, reflectively. Perhaps it was exhaustion. After many seconds Lola said in the same weak, submissive voice, ‘Yes. It was him’”

24

ich, / Und schicke freudig Euch, von wo die Ohren / Mir Kundschaft brachten, meine Augen nach — / — Und schelte sie, da sie mir wiederkommen, / Für blind, und schicke auf der Stelle sie / Zum zweitenmal, sich besser umzusehen, / Und schimpfe sie nichtswürdige Verleumder, / Aufhetzer, niederträchtge Ohrenbläser, / Und schicke sie zum drittenmal, und denke, / Sie werden, weil sie ihre Pflicht getan, / Unwillig los sich aus dem Kopf mir reißen, / Und sich in einen andern Dienst begeben: / Die Eve ists, am Latz erkenn ich sie, / Und einer ists noch obenein” (SW 1, p. 208). Kleist, Five Plays, p. 121. “Ich kann das Abendmahl darauf nicht nehmen, / Stockfinster wars, und alle Katzen grau” (SW 1, p. 208).

Kleist’s Der zerbrochne Krug and Ian McEwan’s Atonement 237

(Atonement, p. 155). Here, two characters collude in an act of imagined seeing which is, like Frau Marthe and Ruprecht’s testimony, based in a priori knowledge rather than actual fact. The strategy that Briony employs in evincing this collusion is strikingly similar to the one Frau Marthe employs in her preliminary investigation of her daughter, which she recounts in court. Frau Marthe refers to a “him” without naming the actual suspect: “Mother, she exclaims, surely you / don’t think —? Then tell me who it was. — Who else / could it have been? And then she swears to me he / was the one.”25 Frau Marthe is so convinced that “he,” Ruprecht, is the guilty party that she fails to consider that her daughter might be talking about a different “him” — who else could it be, after all? In both texts, an empty signifier is bounced back and forth between two interlocutors in order to produce a false consensus. Neither Briony nor Frau Marthe actually “saw” the “him” in question, and yet their claim to knowledge based on what they did “see” overrides the testimony of the first witness to the crime, at least for a time. Their testimony is not based on empirical evidence, but is rather the result of inner conviction, of knowledge that determines seeing rather than the other way around. The conflict between perception, belief, and knowledge enters the novel in a clash of nouns and verbs that indicate perception, doubt, and certainty, as well as unreliable pronouns that indicate more than one antecedent. As in Der zerbrochne Krug, the tension between perception and conviction has concrete legal and practical consequences. The conversation between Lola and Briony on the island marks the beginning of a process by which Briony transforms her knowledge into a false account of seeing in order to incriminate Robbie. In her “weak, submissive” state, Lola is no match for Briony in her aggressive certainty. Lola, unlike Briony, has heard her attacker but claims not to have seen him, and as such is at a rhetorical disadvantage: “I mean, it was the sound of his voice, breathing, noises. But I couldn’t see. I couldn’t say for sure” (Atonement, p. 157). Briony’s conviction, grounded in a claim to visual perception, allows her to “say for sure” what Lola, whose experience may or may not be limited to hearing, cannot. Yet, Briony is also aware that when she says to Lola, “I saw him,” it means something more complicated than the literal fact of visual perception: “Her eyes confirmed the sum of all she knew and had recently experienced. The truth was in the symmetry, which was to say, it was founded in common sense. The truth instructed her eyes” (Atonement, p. 159). Briony’s vision, like Frau Marthe’s, is informed by what she perceives to be “common sense,” which in both cases 25

Kleist, Five Plays, p. 117. “Was denkt ihr Mutter auch? — So sprich! Wer wars? / Wer sonst, sagt sie, — und wer auch konnt es anders? / Und schwört mir zu, daß ers gewesen ist” (SW 1, p. 204).

238 Mary Helen Dupree

is linked to maternal or familial anxiety about a young woman’s virtue. However, it is precisely this common sense that blinds both characters to the truth, or rather the uncertainty, of their senses. Unlike Frau Marthe, however, Briony is fully conscious of the gap between what she has seen and what she knows, and therein lies the monstrosity of her crime. The novel explicitly links the damage done to the vase with the emerging fissures in Briony’s conviction: “As early as the week that followed, the glazed surface of conviction was not without its blemishes and hairline cracks” (Atonement, p. 158). Although Briony is self-aware enough to recognize the difference between seeing and knowing, she is neither assertive nor articulate enough to take back her testimony or explain to the local police what she means when she says “I saw him.” In her encounter with the local authorities, Briony finds herself at the mercy of a hermeneutic apparatus that is only interested in visible and tangible evidence: “You saw him then.” “I know it was him.” “Let’s forget what you know. You’re saying you saw him.” “Yes, I saw him.” “Just as you see me.” “Yes.” “You saw him with your own eyes.” “Yes. I saw him. I saw him.” (Atonement, p. 169)

As in The Broken Jug, asymmetrical power relations inevitably determine the outcome of these interrogations and fact-finding missions: just as Briony cajoles the weakened Lola into identifying Robbie as the perpetrator, the local authorities use the weight of their power to ensure that Briony’s testimony is consistent. “Minor deviations” in Briony’s story are punished with “little frowns on wise brows, or a degree of frostiness and withdrawal of sympathy” (Atonement, p. 159). No act of interrogation or confession in Atonement is free of an agenda, and self-knowledge is no obstacle to a pernicious instrumentalization of reason and perception. It is here that the aesthetic re-enters the picture, as an alternative way of encountering the world and a possible means of circumventing the divide between perception and belief, perhaps even a way of entering paradise through the back door, to put it in Kleistian terms. The older Briony seeks this solution insofar as she gives her sister and her lover a happy ending in the realm of fiction. In the novel’s last pages, after disclosing the “real” fates of Cecilia and Robbie, Briony confesses her desire to transcend reality by producing an enduring work of art that will survive the Tallises, much as the Meissen vase was supposed to do: “When I am dead ... and the novel is finally published, we will only exist as my inventions” (Atonement, p. 350).

Kleist’s Der zerbrochne Krug and Ian McEwan’s Atonement 239

Here, the novel becomes one with the broken jug that outlives multiple generations and presents history as a unified, pageant-like image. However, Briony’s hope of aesthetic consolation is undercut by the sense of selfreferentiality underlying her final reflection on the problem of atonement: “The problem these fifty-nine years has been this: how can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. There is nothing outside her” (Atonement, p. 350). Like Adam, the “God novelist” of McEwan’s text is faced with the problem of sitting in judgment on herself and the world, without recourse to a higher power or outside authority. In Kleist’s play, on the other hand, the final judgment is deferred into the future: the play ends with the magistrate, Walter, suspending Adam from his office but promising not to force him to “desertion” as long as his accounts are in order (SW 1, p. 244). Meanwhile, Frau Marthe appeals her case to the high court in Utrecht, a process that may extend infinitely into the future. In the absence of a final resolution, both texts offer only the vague hope that the iconic image (of history, of autobiography) may one day be restored. E.L. Doctorow has written that in our era, “we give homage to Goethe but recognize ourselves as denizens of Kleist.”26 In Atonement, Ian McEwan shows us what it is like to inhabit a Kleistian landscape in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The Tallises’ English garden bears strong traces of Evchen’s back garden with its swinging door and the Paradise from which Kleist’s characters have been expelled. Within its confines, one encounters dramatic falls and redemptions, flights into heaven and hell, narrative hemorrhages, fractured classical references, and tattered images of history. At the end of the text, we are left with the broken jug, as a metaphor for the text itself. Its fractured testimony is all we have in the absence of a reliable narrative about what has happened. In its brokenness, it displays an extraordinary staying power, though there is no higher court that can restore it to what it once was, or compensate for the losses that have been sustained on all sides. It has survived the war, and it will survive us as well. Georgetown University

26

E.L. Doctorow, “Foreword,” in Heinrich von Kleist, Plays, ed. by Walter Hinderer (New York: Continuum, 1982), p. vii.

Marie Isabel Schlinzig Artistic Reincarnations of the Author and his Texts: Adaptations of Kleist and Henriette Vogel’s Double Suicide Kleist’s suicide pact with Henriette Vogel has shaped the reception of his life and works for almost two centuries. Early critics suggested the suicides had been influenced by literature; since the 1980s scholarship has associated the double suicide with an act of deliberate authorship — as Kleist’s final work. Long before that, writers and artists had confirmed the double suicide’s literary potential by turning it into art. In the late twentieth century, a considerable number of artists began to refer explicitly to the texts produced before and after the double suicide, in particular to the letters between Kleist and Vogel, the suicide notes, witness reports, and autopsy protocols. This essay will examine this trend in three representative texts: Tod am Wannsee. Eine Novelle (2002) by Henning Boëtius, the radio play Letzte Stunde (2003) by Reto Finger, and the play Kopf oder Herz. Ein literarisch-musikalischer Suizid (2006) by Monika Radl. In these works, the authors subvert academic interpretations of the suicide pact by exposing the limitations of the historical texts and exploring the untold parts of the story.

At the heart of the myth surrounding the author Heinrich von Kleist (1777– 1811), as Klaus Kanzog wrote, lies his death in a suicide pact with his friend Henriette Vogel (1780–1811).1 This “unerhörte Begebenheit” (shocking event) or, as a contemporary journalist put it in the Zeitung für die elegante Welt on 30 November 1811, this “höchst tragische Geschichte” (most tragic story), had, Kanzog added, the potential to be turned into a Novelle.2 The ideas of this modern literary scholar seem to echo some of the more disapproving responses to the event at the time. Contemporaries established a link between the suicide pact and literature by accusing Kleist and Henriette Vogel of “an (unhealthy) passion for novels” (Romanenschwärmerei).3 The poet 1

2 3

Klaus Kanzog, “Vom rechten zum linken Mythos. Ein Paradigmenwechsel der Kleist-Rezeption,” in Heinrich von Kleist. Studien zu Werk und Wirkung, ed. by Dirk Grathoff (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1988), pp. 312–328 (p. 312). Subsequent citations as “Kanzog” with page number(s). See also Peter Goldammer, in Schriftsteller über Kleist. Eine Dokumentation, ed. by Peter Goldammer (Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau Verlag, 1976), pp. 7–26 (pp. 7–8); Günter Blamberger, “‘Nur was nicht aufhört, weh zu thun, bleibt im Gedächtnis,’ Zur Typogenese des Kleist-Bildes in der deutschen Literatur der Moderne,” Kleist-Jahrbuch (1995), pp. 25–43 (p. 26). Subsequent citations as “Blamberger 1995” with page number(s). Kanzog, p. 312. Unless otherwise stated, translations are my own. Friedrich Benjamin Osiander, Über den Selbstmord. Seine Ursachen, Arten, medizinisch-gerichtliche Untersuchung und die Mittel gegen denselben. Eine Schrift

242 Marie Isabel Schlinzig

and his friend, other voices added, had confused literature with reality. This argument was by no means new: on the contrary, it had been adopted as a common model of explaining all kinds of self-destructive behaviour during the second half of the eighteenth century. It had become particularly popular following Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s epistolary novel Die Leiden des jungen Werther (The Sufferings of Young Werther, 1774), which caused not only public consternation but also, allegedly, a number of imitation suicides.4 Accusing a suicide of having been driven to self-destruction by reading, or even by the wish to emulate a certain literary model, also implied they had somehow set the scene for their death. In this context, Kleist’s works presented a crucial body of evidence that fuelled discussions about the relationship between his literary activities and his suicide.5 Before long, the protagonist of Prinz Friedrich von Homburg (The Prince of Homburg, 1810), for example, was understood to represent the personality of its author.6 Kleist himself encouraged this reading by alluding to this very drama in his last letter to Sophie Müller (1775–1849),7 and it is indeed in Kleist and Henriette Vogel’s suicide notes that the ideas they themselves entertained appear to support the subsequent view that they were influenced by literature and presented their death as such. It is difficult to determine to what extent posterity’s notions might or might not overlap with what Kleist and Henriette Vogel had in mind. Nevertheless, since the 1980s scholarship has increasingly associated the suicide pact with a notion of conscious, deliberate authorship. Many have described the historical event as the writer’s the author and his friend were trying to convey or, as some would put it, to

4

5

6 7

sowohl für Policei- und Justiz-Beamte, als für gerichtliche Aerzte, und Wundaerzte, für Psychologen und Volkslehrer (Hannover: Brüder Hahn, 1815), p. 300. There have been many publications on Werther reception. One of the most recent is Martin Andree, Wenn Texte töten. Über Werther, Medienwirkung und Mediengewalt (Munich: Fink, 2006). The book contains a critical assessment of the imitation suicides, of contemporary readers’ responses, and extensive bibliographical information. See for example the letter by Friedrich Buchholz to Johann Friedrich Cotta, Berlin, 26 November 1811, in Heinrich von Kleists Nachruhm. Eine Wirkungsgeschichte in Dokumenten, ed. by Helmut Sembdner (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1997), no. 9, p. 29: “Sein Tod ist so seltsam gewesen, als seine Poesien es sind.” Subsequent citations as “Nachruhm” with entry number and page number(s). See for example Mary Howard, Vom Sonderling zum Klassiker. Hundert Jahre Kleist-Rezeption in Großbritannien (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1990), pp. 44–50. See Kleist’s letter to Sophie Müller, Berlin, 20 November 1811, with a postscript by Henriette Vogel, in Heinrich von Kleist, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. by Helmut Sembdner (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2008), vol. 2, p. 885–886. Subsequent citations as “SW” with volume and page number(s).

Adaptations of Kleist’s Suicide 243

create in their suicide notes.8 Thus, the literary quality Kanzog associated with the historical event came to be seen as the result of Kleist’s own careful aestheticisation of his and his friend’s death.9 Long before this idea became popular in academic scholarship, writers and artists had already begun to realize the literary potential of the “shocking event” in a very tangible way: by turning it into art.10 The artistic reception of the double suicide, which had its origins in the early nineteenth cen-

8

9

10

See also Karl Heinz Bohrer, Der romantische Brief. Die Entstehung ästhetischer Subjektivität (Munich: Hanser, 1987), pp. 135–164; Hans-Dieter Zimmermann, Kleist, die Liebe und der Tod (Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1989), p. 17 (“Kleists und Henriette Vogels Tod erscheinen uns heute wie eine Inszenierung, die von beiden Hauptdarstellern den Einsatz des Lebens forderte, so als gehörte diese Tat zu den merkwürdigen Kunstwerken des Autors”); Dirk Grathoff, Geschichte, Politik, Sprache. Aufsätze zu Leben und Werk Heinrich von Kleists (Opladen and Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1999), p. 227. One of the most recent contributions to this discussion is Günther Blamberger, “Ökonomie des Opfers. Kleists Todes-Briefe,” in Adressat Nachwelt. Briefkultur und Ruhmbildung, ed. by Detlev Schöttker (Munich: Fink, 2008), pp. 145– 160 (p. 145). Subsequent citations as Blamberger 2008 with page number(s). See also Günther Blamberger, Kleist. Die Biographie (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 2011), pp. 450–468. For further interpretations of the suicide notes see Daniel Devreese, “‘Bis es für Dich ein Glück sein wird, zu wissen’. Heinrich von Kleists Todesspuren,” Heilbronner Kleist-Blätter, 8 (2000), pp. 17–49; Bettine Menke, “‘Literatur und Selbsttötung’, am Beispiel Heinrich von Kleists oder Die Worte und die Wirklichkeit,” in Sterben von eigener Hand. Selbsttötung als kulturelle Praxis, ed. by Andreas Bähr and Hans Medick (Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna: Böhlau, 2005), pp. 89–113; Walter Hinderer, “Seinsausstand als Lebensfeier: Anmerkungen zu Heinrich von Kleists Todesauffassung,” in Sterben und Tod bei Heinrich von Kleist und in seinem historischen Kontext, ed. by Dietrich von Engelhardt et al. (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2006), pp. 79–100, (pp. 91–94, p. 99). It should be noted that in the wake of the double suicide and the heated, public discussions it caused, early defenders of Kleist rejected the notion that the author had somehow dramatized his death. See “[Adam Müller], Der Österreichische Beobachter, Wien, 24. December 1811,” in Nachruhm, no. 23, pp. 42–44 (p. 44). According to Nachruhm, artistic reactions were known as early as 1812; see for example “Johann Jacob Hertel, Die neuesten vermischten Gedichte, Augsburg 1812” (no. 40a, p. 68); more remarkable for its witty cynicism is perhaps the miniature satire Allerneueste Tragödie in einer Nuß (The Very Latest Tragedy in a Nutshell, 1837) by Friedrich von Luck (no. 42, pp. 70–71). It is not uncommon for writers’ suicides to shape how they are perceived as historical individuals and how their literary work is received. In his book Der Selbstmord. Briefe, Manifeste, literarische Texte (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2002), for example, Roger Willemsen writes about Cesare Pavese: “Doch widerfuhr ihm postum, was allen Selbstmördern und nur ihnen widerfährt: Man deutet ihr Leben von seinem Ende aus. Ex negativo erhält alles ein Ziel. Wer dagegen jenen Tod stirbt, den man mit einer altmodischen Wendung ‘den natürlichen’ nennt, wird nie so gelesen und verstanden” (pp. 20–21).

244 Marie Isabel Schlinzig

tury, resulted in a vast variety of works.11 Artists and writers adopted the pact either as a motif or, more often, as a starting point for their own creative projects on Kleist, which ranged from lyric poems to Novellen, dramas, novels, and, in more recent years, art installations, radio plays, drawings, paintings, films, operas, and dance performances. During the latter part of the twentieth century and particularly in the early years of the twenty-first, one major trend became apparent in the artistic reception of Kleist’s death: an increasing number of artists began to refer explicitly to the texts produced immediately before and after the double suicide. These include the poetic exchange of letters between Kleist and Henriette Vogel (better known as the “Todeslitanei” [Death Litany]),12 the suicide notes, the witness 11

12

For further information on the artistic reception of Kleist’s (life and) death see for example Mary Rhiel, Re-Viewing Kleist: The Discoursive Construction of Authorial Subjectivity in West German Kleist Films (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1991); Blamberger 1995: “‘Nur was nicht aufhört, weh zu thun, bleibt im Gedächtnis,’” (pp. 25–43); Burkhard Wolter, “Zu Kleists Tod. Ein Streifzug durch die Selbstmordliteratur,” Beiträge zur Kleist-Forschung, 12 (1998), pp. 215–227; Klaus Schuhmann, “‘Die arge Spur, in der die Zeit von uns wegläuft’. Begegnungen mit Kleist im letzten Jahrhundertdrittel – Christa Wolf, Günter Kunert, Heiner Müller, Christoph Hein, Stefan Schütz, Elisabeth Plessen,” Weimarer Beiträge 3, (2001), pp. 418–432; Kleist-Bilder des 20. Jahrhunderts in Literatur, Kunst und Wissenschaft, IV. Frankfurter Kleist-Kolloquium 6.–7. August 1999, ed. by Peter Ensberg and Hans-Jochen Marquardt, Stuttgarter Arbeiten zur Germanistik, 414 (Stuttgart: Heinz, 2003); Alicja Kowalska, “Tot oder lebendig. Auf der Suche nach Kleist bei den Toten in Danzig,” in Internationale Konferenz “Heinrich von Kleist” für Studentinnen und Studenten, für Nachwuchswissenschaftlerinnen und Nachwuchswissenschaftler, ed. by Peter Ensberg and Hans-Jochen Marquardt (Stuttgart: Hans-Dieter Heinz, 2003), pp. 41–50; Anett Lütteken, Heinrich von Kleist. Eine Dichterrenaissance (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2004); Heinz Müller-Dietz, “Kein Ort für Kleist? Leben und Sterben des Dichters in der Sicht Christa Wolfs,” in Sterben und Tod bei Heinrich von Kleist und in seinem historischen Kontext, ed. by Engelhardt et al. (2006), pp. 193–210; Martin Maurach, “Hörspiele über Kleist während des Nationalsozialismus. Ein Versuch anhand einer Manuskriptauswahl,” in Kleist im Nationalsozialismus, ed. by Martin Maurach (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007), pp. 115–129; Nicolai Reher, “Auf der Spur einer Spurensuche nach den Spuren Heinrich von Kleists: Notizen zur performativen Installation ‘WANN THUN’ von Esther Ernst und Jörg Laue,” Kleist-Jahrbuch (2007), pp. 204–209; KleistHandbuch. Leben – Werk – Wirkung, ed. Ingo Breuer (Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 2009), pp. 409–469 (pp. 410, 422–424, 427–432, 447, 449–450, 457, 459, 461–462, 465); Arno Pielenz, “Der erdichtete Dichter (1),” Heilbronner Kleist-Blätter 23, (2012), pp. 90–116; Leonarda Trapassi, “Heinrich von Kleist in literarischer Fiktion der Gegenwart,” FÒRUM 11, (2004), [accessed 15 April 2012]. The term “Todeslitanei,” whose usefulness as a heuristic tool is, as Blamberger has pointed out, limited (“Ökonomie des Opfers” (2008), p. 158), was coined by August Sauer in his book Kleists Todeslitanei (Prague: Bellmann, 1907).

Adaptations of Kleist’s Suicide 245

reports, and the autopsy protocols.13 The use of the historical documents in new literary and artistic contexts ranged from allusion to quotation, and from imitation to parody. The artists’ focus on these writings suggests a heightened interest both in the suicides’ self-representation and in contemporary accounts and analyses of the historical event. In view of this, it might be assumed that at least part of this artistic reception might resemble, reflect, or even share scholarly ideas about Kleist and Henriette Vogel’s death. Before this problem is addressed in detail, the overall trend described above can be briefly illustrated with the help of three modern examples. Jonatan Karl Dieter Briel’s (1942–1988) film Wie zwei fröhliche Luftschiffer (Like Two Merry Aeronauts, 1969), to start with, tells the story of Kleist and Henriette Vogel’s friendship and death together in an intricate series of still images and scenes.14 These scenes do not contain any dialogue as such; instead, they are accompanied by a narrative voice-over in which Briel adapted passages from Kleist’s private correspondence, in particular his suicide notes, the witness reports, and the autopsy protocols. Since text and image are not always in harmony, the film does not offer a simple, straightforward reading of the historical event and its protagonists. The distance between the narrative, still images, and scenes helps the audience to experience the gap between imagination and reality, past and present. In contrast, the East German author Helmut T. Heinrich (b. 1933) adopts a different approach: in a skillful imitation of Kleist’s style and choice of motifs, Heinrich’s epistolary story “An Marie von Kleist” (To Marie von Kleist, 1971) offers an alternative, more politicized version of one of the dying poet’s suicide notes to his friend and relative, Marie. Wulf Kirsten’s (b. 1934) poem “Der Lebensplan” (The Life Plan, 1975), finally, weaves selected words and 13

14

See Zimmermann, Kleist, die Liebe und der Tod (1989), p. 17. For bibliographical information on the publication history of the suicide notes as well as the “Todeslitanei,” see Heinrich von Kleist, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe in vier Bänden, ed. by IlseMarie Barth et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1987–1997), vol. 4: Briefe von und an Heinrich von Kleist (1793–1811), ed. by Klaus Müller-Salget and Stefan Ormanns (1997), pp. 1071–1097, 1102–1108, 1159–1163. Subsequent citations as “DKV” with volume and page number(s). The autopsy protocols and the complete witness reports were first published, together with copies of some of the suicide notes written by Kleist and Henriette Vogel, in Kleists letzte Stunden. Teil I, Das Akten-Material, ed. by Georg Minde-Pouet (Berlin: Weidmann, 1925). It was, however, Helmut Sembdner’s Heinrich von Kleists Lebensspuren. Dokumente und Berichte der Zeitgenossen (Bremen: Schünemann, 1957; Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1996), which made a substantial part of the Akten-Material accessible to a wider readership. Subsequent citations as “Lebensspuren” with entry number and page number(s). Wie zwei fröhliche Luftschiffer (feature film, 85 minutes), written and directed by Jonatan Briel (DFFB, 1969).

246 Marie Isabel Schlinzig

phrases from the inquest report and Kleist’s private correspondence, including his suicide notes, into a laconic account of the author’s life.15 The final strophe of the poem is composed with material taken from Henriette Vogel’s “Todeslitanei” letter. Thus, the images Kleist created of and for himself during his life and shortly before his death are juxtaposed at the climax of the poem with fragments of a text which was, probably, written in answer to one of his own and which reflects the image of the poet as perceived by the woman who chose to die with him.16 This trend in the artistic reception of Kleist has become particularly distinct in the works of contemporary writers and artists. Since the turn of the millennium, several artists or groups of artists have presented interpretations of the double suicide; a number of them produced their contributions in the run-up to the bicentennary of Kleist and Henriette Vogel’s death.17 They either focus on the circumstances of the death of Kleist and Vogel, treat it as a defining element in the poet’s biography, or take it as a starting point for new works.18 A list of those I have identified so far can be found in the appendix to this article; in what follows, I will concentrate on three representative texts that centre on the suicides’ last hours together — Tod am Wannsee. Eine Novelle (Death by the Wannsee. A Novella, 2002) by Henning Boëtius (b. 1939), the radio play Letzte Stunde (Last Hour, 2003) by Reto 15

16

17

18

Wulf Kirsten, “Der Lebensplan,” in Schriftsteller, ed. by Goldammer (1976) pp. 354– 355. Gerhard Wolf’s “Obduktion” (1975) also quotes directly from the autopsy protocol (pp. 393–396). For a discussion of the texts by Heinrich and Kirsten see Theo Honnef, Heinrich von Kleist in der Literatur der DDR (New York, Bern, and Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1988), pp. 99–103, 113–114. The total number of writers and artists who, during that period, have fictionalized Kleist’s life or used details from it for their own works is, of course, larger. Examples include Jan Christ, “Kleist-Dramolette I–XII,” in Heilbronner Kleist-Blätter 10, (2001), pp. 9–50; Roman Bösch, Kleists “Geschichte meiner Seele” (Frankfurt: Knecht, 2007); Dagmar Leupold, Die Helligkeit der Nacht (Munich: Beck, 2009); Robert Löhr, Das Erlkönig-Manöver (Munich: Piper, 2007) and Das Hamlet-Komplott (Munich: Piper, 2010); Raphael Graefe, Heinrich von Kleist — Geschichte meiner Seele. Eine Fiktion, (Berlin: Berlin University Press, 2010); Miriam Sachs, Kleist in meiner Küche. Eine moderne Novelle (Heilbronn: Kleist-Archive Sembdner, 2010); Wolfram Lotz, Einige Nachrichten an das All (play, directed by Annette Pullen, premiered at the Nationaltheater Weimar, 2011). A discussion of the methods of analyzing fictional biographies can be found in the editor’s introduction to the anthology Fakten und Fiktionen. Strategien fiktional-biographischer Dichterdarstellungen in Roman, Drama und Film seit 1970, ed. by Christian von Zimmermann (Tübingen: Narr, 2000), pp. 1–13. See also Ansgar Nünning’s contribution to the same volume, “Von der fiktionalen Biographie zur biographischen Metafiktion. Prolegomena zu einer Theorie, Typologie und Funktionsgeschichte eines hybriden Genres” (pp. 15–36).

Adaptations of Kleist’s Suicide 247

Finger (b. 1972), and the play Kopf oder Herz. Ein literarisch-musikalischer Suizid (Head or Heart. A Literary-Musical Suicide, 2006) by Monika Radl (b. 1976), which premiered in 2007. I will discuss them in order to shed more light on how artists use the suicide notes, the “Todeslitanei,” the autopsy protocols, and the witness reports. In the process, we shall see whether the Novelle, the radio play, and the play do indeed advance the idea that the suicide pact was a literary event of some kind or, in particular, that it was Kleist’s last dramatic act and, following from that, whether contemporary artistic reception of the double suicide resembles, reflects, or challenges scholarly ideas of Kleist and Henriette Vogel’s deaths.

I. Henning Boëtius’s Tod am Wannsee begins with a prologue in which the events surrounding Kleist’s birth are narrated from his father’s point of view.19 In the first chapter an omniscient narrator is introduced who reminds us of the father’s early death and goes on to summarize the thirtyfour years of the writer’s life in not more than a page. Then the action proper sets in, with Kleist and Henriette Vogel arriving at the inn where they are going to spend their last night before committing suicide. By these simple means, the birth, life, and death of the author Kleist are weighted differently from the beginning of the Novelle. This imbalance mirrors the disproportionate importance that has been attributed to the end of Kleist’s existence in comparison to the rest of his life. In a series of thirteen chapters Boëtius depicts the last hours of the poet and his friend, their conversations, their encounters with the innkeeper, his wife, and their servants; Henriette’s death and Kleist’s suicide; the autopsy; and the funeral. Finally, a short epilogue informs us about the fate of their joint burial place in the period between their interment and the year 1936. Boëtius’ depiction, which generally conforms to accepted historical facts, is very selective in its choice of passages from the witness reports, the autopsy protocols, and Kleist’s essays, literary works, and private corresponddence. For the most part, none of the quotations or adapted passages are marked as such. Significantly, the author refrains almost completely from using Kleist’s suicide notes. Instead, Kleist’s way of thinking and feeling is illustrated with metaphors from other, earlier letters, for example the images of the archway that does not collapse (TW, pp. 46–47) and the green spectacles (TW, pp. 51–52). One reason for this choice of material may be the 19

Subsequent citations of Tod am Wahnsee as “TW ” with page number(s).

248 Marie Isabel Schlinzig

fact that Kleist’s suicide notes had already been analysed in great detail by literary scholars. By ignoring them, Boëtius could be reacting, as in his other fictional biographies, to the “‘expropriation’ of [an individual’s] statements, for example through using discourse theory.”20 In contrast, passages from Henriette Vogel’s “Todeslitanei” letter are woven seamlessly into her dialogue with Kleist in order to emphasize the intimacy and special nature of her relationship with him. She uses hymnic addresses to Kleist, for example “my happiness, my death, my heart’s little fool” (mein Glück, mein Tod, mein Herzensnärrchen; TW, p. 19; see also pp. 21, 25, 96), in a playful, familiar manner that nevertheless does not completely obscure their macabre side as a secret code between the suicides-tobe. Furthermore, these quotations are a signal, a clear reminder of what is to come, aimed at the informed reader. The question of what kind of relationship the suicides really had is one of the most common topoi of Kleist reception that Boëtius engages with. In doing so, he does not aim primarily to correct other interpretations; his efforts instead seem directed at a poetic and in part even humorous depiction of two human beings who are approaching death together. This is most obvious in the last, symbolic, sentence of the text, which is left to the dead Kleist, who turns to his female friend lying in the grave beside him and whispers: “Oh, Jette […] how wonderful it is that you are here with me forever.”21 Boëtius juxtaposes his quest for Kleist and Henriette Vogel’s human sides, which ultimately remain out of reach, with a critical assessment of the true value of the historical documents associated with the double suicide and their capacity to give any indication of the historical protagonists’ motivation, thoughts, or feelings. The fictional narrative here tells the story behind the texts — or rather the story of what might have happened. One scene, for example, shows Henriette beginning to question her plan to die with Kleist while writing her suicide notes (TW, p. 48). Later on, she reads over these notes and makes comments on them to herself that reveal an unexpectedly critical, even cynical opinion of her husband and daughter. This image stands in stark contrast to the formulae used in the suicide notes, which seem to be dictated by the conventions of the genre.22 In the world of 20

21 22

Christian von Zimmermann, “Individuen, Dichter, Sonderlinge. Henning Boëtius’ biographische Annäherungen an Brentano, Lenz, Günther und Lichtenberg,” in Fakten und Fiktionen, ed. by Zimmermann (2000), pp. 101–118 (p. 117), “‘Enteignung’ der sprachlichen Äußerungen durch etwa diskurstheoretische Bemühungen.” Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine. “Ach Jette […], wie schön ist es, daß du für immer bei mir bist” (TW, p. 122). For example, Henriette Vogel writes in a letter to her husband: “Mein teurer geliebter Louis! Nicht länger kann ich mehr das Leben ertragen, denn es legt sich mir mit eisernen Banden an mein Herz — nenne es Krankheit, Schwäche, oder wie du es

Adaptations of Kleist’s Suicide 249

the Novelle, this scene serves to characterize the main female protagonist; furthermore, the depiction challenges the reliability of the historical documents and thus implicitly our perception of them by making their limitations apparent. This critical assessment of sources in a fictional narrative that itself relies on a selection of historical texts seems like a game that Boëtius the scholar is playing with his audience. This becomes particularly apparent in the various ways in which reference is made to the witness report of day-labourer Johann Friedrich Riebisch. Riebisch’s account of a conversation between Kleist and Henriette Vogel about the poet’s desire to drink more rum, for example, is worked seamlessly into the narrative of the Novelle (TW, p. 92).23 In chapter twelve, the narrator refers to this witness report again, but this time he describes the circumstances in which it was written. Here, Boëtius abridges and modifies the original text: the historical Riebisch said that Kleist and Henriette Vogel had been “friendly together” (freundlich zusammen),24 but the fictional Riebisch testifies that they had been “in love with each other” (verliebt ineinander; TW, p. 114). In response, Felgentreu, the judge conducting the interrogation, thinks they were “in love with death” (verliebt in den Tod) and deletes the claim that Kleist and Henriette Vogel were lovers from the protocol (TW, p. 115). Felgentreu is shown here in his role as an author, while the historical document to which the Novelle refers is highlighted as a text that is the product of selection and interpretation.25

23 24 25

sonst magst, ich weiß es selbst nicht zu nennen.” After a short pause, she comments on this passage (which follows the historical wording), speaking to herself: “Du wirst es bestimmt Überspanntheit nennen, denn ich weiß, daß du kein Verständnis hast für alle heftigen Gefühle, alles wilde Geschehen, das mehr ist als bloße Daseinspflichterfüllung. Louis, du bist der langweiligste Mann, den ich je kennengelernt habe, und darum habe ich mich auch von dir heiraten lassen. Ich wollte wahrscheinlich den Teufel mit dem Beelzebub austreiben” (TW, p. 68). See also Kleists letzte Stunden, ed. by Minde-Pouet (1925), p. 38. See Kleists letzte Stunden, ed. by Minde-Pouet (1925), p. 38. In this context it should be mentioned that Minde-Pouet’s Kleists letzte Stunden (1925) also contains the final version of the autopsy reports for each of the suicides, which in Kleist’s case differs significantly from the original version. A comparison of the two texts shows that the physicians who conducted the autopsy, Sternemann and Greif, eventually fell back on contemporary models of physiology and psychology in their assessment of the case. While they considered Henriette Vogel’s uterine cancer sufficient reason for her wish to die, Kleist was imputed to have suffered from “schwarzes dickes Blut,” “verdikte Galle,” and, together with Henriette Vogel, “Religionsschwärmerey.” See Günter Blamberger, “Einführung” (KLI, pp. 245–249; p. 247); Wolfgang Jordan and Sascha Feuchert, “Strategien der Verweigerung. Stationen der (Psycho-)Pathologisierung in der Kleist-Rezeption vom Obduktionsbe-

250 Marie Isabel Schlinzig

Likewise, the protagonists’ behaviour during the last moments of their lives is depicted with an eye on Kleist reception. Well aware of the long series of interpretations and hypotheses about the time shortly before the two shots were fired, Boëtius falls back on Prinz Friedrich von Homburg to depict the situation. As we might expect, the Novelle questions, in a distinctly unrealistic scene that borders on farce, the juxtaposition of the play and the historical suicide. While both protagonists quote passages from the drama, Henriette’s approach and attitude differ markedly from Kleist’s. When she, for example, praises him as a poet and interprets the line “Life, so the dervish tells us, is a journey, a brief one. Indeed.”26 As an expression of his innermost self, Kleist clearly disapproves, reciting the continuation of the monologue in an unmistakably comical manner: “Kleist gets up, takes the empty cup in his hand, presses it to his breast like Hamlet the skull, and says, his voice filled with an actor’s pathos: ‘And I will make my resting place halfway.’”27 Each approach represents a different way in which Homburg has been read in relation to the double suicide. Whereas Henriette identifies the literary text with its author, even reciting Natalie’s part shortly before Kleist kills her, the writer’s attitude towards his drama remains distanced and ironic throughout. To the poet-figure, his “own” text is no more and no less than a literary quote that turns into an empty phrase in the face of death. By turning the very moment that posterity has imbued with myth into a farce, the Novelle exposes the dangers attached to linking formulations in a written text to historical reality or equating them with intentional authorship. Perhaps the most obvious attack on the myth-making, be it academic and otherwise,28 that has aestheticized Kleist’s suicide can be found when Boëtius depicts the Prussian writer on the morning of his death, meditating on his failure as a dramatist. Here, again, he quotes himself, or more precisely Alkmene’s last word in Amphitryon: “Oh!” (Ach!). As the word is repeated three times and followed by a half-serious, half-ironic reflection, its tragic-comic character is intensified almost to the point of exaggeration: “Oh, Oh, Oh …

26

27

28

richt bis zum psychiatrischen Gutachten der Adele Juda,” Beiträge zur Kleist-Forschung, 12 (1998), pp. 76–91. Heinrich von Kleist: Selected Writings, ed. and trans. by David Constantine (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004), p. 184. Subsequent citations as “Constantine” with page number(s). “Das Leben nennt der Derwisch eine Reise, und eine kurze. Freilich!” (SW 1, p. 686). “Kleist steht auf, nimmt die leere Tasse in die Hand, drückt sie an die Brust wie Hamlet den Schädel und spricht mit Bühnenpathos: ‘Ich will auf halben Weg mich niederlassen’” (TW, p. 102). See Kleist’s original in SW 2, p. 619. Blamberger, for example, has repeated the suggestion that Kleist wrote his suicide notes with his posthumous reputation as an author in mind (Blamberger 2008, p. 151).

Adaptations of Kleist’s Suicide 251

Nobody wants my plays. Is it surprising, then, that now I am becoming one myself? Censorship has closed down my newspaper and thus made my last source of income disappear, now I am playing the newspaper myself.”29

II. Like Boëtius’ Novelle, Reto Finger’s Letzte Stunde focuses on Kleist and Henriette Vogel’s final hours.30 In contrast to Tod am Wannsee, though, the action sets in in medias res, with Kleist and Vogel strolling through the KleinMachenower Heide (the area close to Potsdam where the double suicide took place) and ends shortly before the two shots are fired: Kleist, who is again given the last word, imagines in minute detail — and without any pathos — how he is going to kill first his friend and then himself. The radio play is made up of five scenes which consist almost exclusively of dialogues between the two protagonists: they talk about their past, troubled relationships with family or partners, the legitimacy of suicide, and about their story, which is not one of lovers but of kindred spirits. At the end of the first four scenes, a Narrator steps in briefly. He does not interact with the characters, and his speeches are all taken from historical sources: the first is a short entry from the church register of Stahnsdorf-Machnow, recording the date of the double suicide, what happened where, the names of the deceased, and their ages. The text of the radio play follows the original wording with one crucial exception:31 Finger does not repeat the prejudiced comment with which the original entry closes, “o tempora! o mores!,” and thereby reduces the text to a source of simple historical facts that provide a framework for the action. In his following speeches the Narrator quotes from the autopsy protocols: his second and third contributions are descriptive in nature and focus on the physical characteristics of the corpses, in particular on their wounds. Reversing the original order of the autopsies, first Vogel is under scrutiny, then Kleist. Only the Narrator’s last comment is, in keeping with 29

30

31

“Ach, Ach, Ach … Niemand will meine Theaterstücke. Ist es dann ein Wunder, daß ich selber darüber eines werde? Die Zensur hat meine Zeitung geschlossen und damit meine letzte Geldquelle verstopft, jetzt spiele ich selber Zeitung” (TW, pp. 64– 65). The radio play was first broadcast by SWR2 in 2003. The text has not been published to date. Reto Finger and SWR2 were kind enough to provide me with a copy of the manuscript (the version of 1 April 2003) and a recording of the radio play on audio CD. Since speeches in Letzte Stunde are numbered consecutively in the manuscript, subsequent citations appear as “LS” with speech numbers. See “Pfarrer Dreising, Stahnsdorf-Machnower Kirchenbuch” (Lebensspuren, no. 537, p. 479).

252 Marie Isabel Schlinzig

the final version of the autopsy protocol, openly judgemental: it repeats the physicians’ verdict about Kleist having been a “Sanguino cholericus in Summo gradu” (LS, 275), a hypochondriac and eccentric who was, in short, mentally ill. The cold, technical style of the Narrator’s comments contrasts starkly with the protagonists’ intimate, emotive exchanges. It emphasizes the distance between the Narrator’s speeches and the protagonists’ dialogue, which in turn highlights the separation of the suicides’ experience from comments made by officials after their death — and their isolation. At the same time, the dialogue scenes are carefully fleshed out with the help of stories about Kleist and Henriette Vogel by acquaintances and friends.32 These references to hearsay illustrate the fictional character of what is being said by the protagonists in contrast to the supposedly factual nature of the Narrator’s comments.33 The fact that the double suicide itself is merely verbalized in future tense but not depicted ties in with this: Finger refrains from adding yet another definitive version of this particular event; neither the Narrator, nor, for that matter, posterity gets a chance to offer an opinion. As in Boëtius’ Novelle, this treatment of the historical source material points to its limitations; yet again this is made most explicit when Vogel is writing her last letters. She produces no less than seven different versions of opening a letter to her husband and five suicide notes or beginnings of suicide notes, whose tone and style range from loving, humble, and almost obsequious, to cold, confident, and demanding. This scene shows a female protagonist who is caught up in a loveless marriage while convention obliges her to remain obedient to her husband even beyond death. As in Tod am Wannsee, we catch a glimpse of what the story behind the documents might have been like. Vogel is tempted to use the freedom of speech that her impending death and the written medium afford her to redefine the image of herself that she is leaving behind. After some deliberation, though, she dismisses this option for the sake of her child. The final version of her letter, which by now sounds like a mere farce designed to keep up appearances, quotes from the original wording of Henriette Vogel’s historical last

32

33

This includes an anecdote recorded by Eduard von Bülow in his Heinrich von Kleist’s Leben und Briefe. Mit einem Anhange (Berlin: Besser, 1848), p. 73, according to which Kleist said after one of Henriette’s musical performances that it had been “zum Erschießen schön.” This division is underlined by two different styles of background music used during the dialogue sequences and the Narrator’s speeches: the former are from time to time accompanied by chamber music in the Romantic style; the latter are underscored or preceded by modern atonal string music, which can also be heard between scenes and at the beginning and the end of the radio play.

Adaptations of Kleist’s Suicide 253

letters.34 Similarly to Boëtius’s depiction of the same subject matter, this scene demonstrates the power of convention and encourages the audience to question the authenticity of the historical texts. In comparison to Tod am Wannsee, though, Letzte Stunde is altogether more strongly concerned with the question of gender and in particular with legal and social discrimination against women in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Kleist himself gets into the firing line when Vogel criticizes his treatment of Wilhelmine von Zenge (LS, 61–133),35 or when she rejects his advances — imagined and real — in the hour of death (LS, 211–274). These exchanges help first and foremost to characterize the protagonists: rather stereotypically, Kleist is presented as a self-confessed “dreamer” (Träumer; LS, 133), who is at the same time in desperate need of genuine affection; Vogel comes across as the more level-headed individual. Her illness, however, turns out to be not the cause but rather a symptom of her wish to die. The latter is rooted in being a woman and, as such, deprived of the chance to seek self-fulfillment, as Vogel explains, contradicting the autopsy protocol’s conclusions: How much I would have liked to have been a traveller, a roamer, a sceptic, a man; looking for my own personal happiness. And if I had not found it, death would have been as welcome to me as it is welcome to you. I am not tired of life because I am ill. I am ill because I have grown tired of this life during all these years. One thing brought about the other, not the other way around.36

In the end, both protagonists appear weary of life for very different and yet similar reasons. In this context, the emphasis put on the characteristics of the wounds in the Narrator’s speeches — Henriette died from being shot in the heart, Kleist shot himself in the head — appears to correspond loosely with their reasons for leaving this world. As Vogel sums up shortly before 34 35

36

Finger does not quote at length from Kleist’s last letters, but his characters talk about them (LS, pp. 22–34, 50–62). See LS, 106. In this context, the text quotes from or paraphrases letters from Kleist to Wilhelmine von Zenge including Kleist’s letter written in Frankfurt am Main on 2 December 1801, as well as from the “Denkübungen” he sent her: “Du schreibst Dein Körper sei zu schwach für die Pflichten einer Bauersfrau” (emphasis in original) (SW 2, pp. 704–706, p. 705). “Wie gerne wäre auch ich ein Reisender, ein Streunender, ein Zweifler, ein Mann gewesen; auf der Suche nach meinem eigenen Glück. Und hätte ich es nicht gefunden, mir wäre der Tod so willkommen, wie er Ihnen willkommen ist. / Ich bin nicht des Lebens müde, weil ich krank bin. Ich bin krank, weil ich dieses Lebens in all den Jahren müde geworden bin. Das eine bedingt das andere, nicht umgekehrt” (emphasis in original; LS, 154).

254 Marie Isabel Schlinzig

the end of the radio play, each of them chooses the part that “hurts most” (am meisten schmerzt; LS, 314). At first glance, the remark could be read as repeating old gender stereotypes, but the superlative reminds us that the male as well as the female protagonist have been shown to have suffered disappointments on both an emotional and a psychological level. Finally, it should be noted that neither Kleist’s literary texts nor any references to literary aspirations in the face of death figure in Letzte Stunde. Throughout, the focus remains on Kleist’s and Henriette Vogel’s existence as individuals and social beings. This negative selection of source material could be read as a negation of interpretations that assume Kleist and his friend aspired to aestheticize or dramatize their suicides.

III. Monika Radl’s Kopf oder Herz. Ein literarisch-musikalischer Suizid, whose main title also alludes to the fatal wounds, turns Kleist and Henriette Vogel’s story into a drama that follows the suicides from the moment they got to know each other until their death together.37 The action comprises a short prologue and thirteen scenes, in which flashback-like images from Kleist’s memories are re-enacted. In addition to the central characters, Heinrich and Henriette, there are two guardian angels on stage, who try to prevent the couple from taking their lives right up to the very end. Also present is Mr. T. at the Piano, who accompanies the songs sung by the lead characters or the angels; he is rarely involved in the action but always seems to be watching it closely. In Kopf oder Herz, the structure and content of the individual scenes are defined not just by the historical events themselves but also by the various ways in which the double suicide has been put down to the literary aspirations of one or both protagonists or to a false understanding of literature on their part. The prologue, which contains passages from Homburg (the implications of this are familiar from Tod am Wannsee) and contemporary statements about Kleist and Henriette Vogel, makes this clear from the start. Here, Kleist’s Guardian Angel warns the poet not to mistake literature for life: “‘No, say. Is it a dream? — A dream, what else?’ Come back down! You are not facing the end! You are not one of your fictional 37

The play was commissioned by the Uckermärkische Bühnen Schwedt and premiered on 12 October 2007. The text has not been published to date. Monika Radl and the Uckermärkischen Bühnen Schwedt were kind enough to provide me with a copy of the manuscript and the list of songs (including an audio CD). As the manuscript does not contain page numbers, references to the script will be given using the abbreviation “KH” followed by the number and name of the scene quoted from.

Adaptations of Kleist’s Suicide 255

characters! You are not committed to the third act of a tragedy! You are nowhere near the fifth, yet!” (KH, Vorspiel; Constantine, p. 206).38 In these words, the reproach made against the historical Kleist after his death is directed at the fictional reincarnation of the Prussian writer.39 This passage is one of many in which Radl’s ironic stance toward the subject matter of her play is evident. The Homburg quotation, though, not only sets the scene for the protagonists’ confrontation with death but also recalls the amalgamation of dream and reality in the final scene of Kleist’s play with its two different ways of perceiving the world. This same amalgamation defines the structure of Kopf oder Herz, giving the play a surrealist quality that at times borders on the absurd. When Heinrich appears on stage for the first time, he immediately begins discussing posterity, including the audience present. Only his story will last, particularly since he himself is telling it in the face of his own death: This whole, dear life — made up. This is how I am, this is how I was. […] Incidentally a creature of flesh and blood. Born as Heinrich von, if that sounds familiar to you. […] now I am holding a dead woman in my arms and a pistol in my hand. The prospect is clear. And the good thing is: the less time I have left, the more exciting the story will sound. It will remain. “Now immortality you are wholly mine. Wings have put forth on both my shoulders. And now below me everything has misted. Oh such a sweet scent from the violets! Can you not smell them?” I’ve always said that. Jettchen, my china, my flock of swans, my dawdler-bride. […] This is the beginning of a strangely poetic death. It will be the most important death in my life. It’s a shame, though, that this time I’ll have to kick the bucket too.40 38

39

40

“‘Sag mir, ist es ein Traum — Ein Traum, was sonst!’ Komm runter! Du stehst noch nicht am Ende! Du bist keine von dir erdachte Figur! Du bist keinem dritten Akt einer Tragödie verpflichtet! Du bist noch lange nicht im Fünften!” See also Kleist’s original: “Nein, sagt! Ist es ein Traum?” (SW 1, p. 709). The Guardian Angel goes on to threaten Kleist with posterity’s judgement and quotes from a letter by Friedrich Schlegel to August Wilhelm Schlegel, written in Vienna, of 4 January 1812, in which Friedrich Schlegel polemicises that Kleist had “nicht bloß in Werken sondern auch im Leben Tollheit für Genie genommen” (emphasis in original). See Nachruhm, no. 33, p. 59. In the play this passage is quoted in a slightly modified form (see KH, Vorspiel). “Das ganze liebe Leben erdichtet. So bin ich, so war ich. […] Wesen aus Fleisch und Blut nebenbei. Geboren als Heinrich von, wenn Ihnen das bekannt vorkommt. / […] jetzt halte ich eine Tote im Arm und eine Pistole in der Hand. Die Aussicht ist klar. Und das Gute daran ist: Je weniger Zeit mir noch bleibt, umso spannender klingt die Geschichte. Die bleibt. / ‘Nun, oh Unsterblichkeit, bist du ganz mein! Es wachsen Flügel mir an beiden Schultern. Und jetzt liegt Nebel alles unter mir. Wie die Nachtviole lieblich duftet, spürst du es nicht?’ Hab ich immer gesagt. Jettchen, mein Porzellan, mein Schwarm von Schwänen, meine Tagesdiebsbraut. […] Dies ist

256 Marie Isabel Schlinzig

Heinrich’s rhetoric shows that he is aware of the extraordinary authority and truthfulness conventionally associated with the last words of the dying, a cultural tradition with which Kleist and Henriette Vogel were familiar, as we know from the formulae, gestures, and rhetorical devices used in their suicide notes.41 Like Heinrich’s short monologue, the play as a whole fulfills and frustrates expectations about the “Kleist myth” with a humorous note. As in Boëtius, Homburg’s pathos is nothing but a self-ironic quotation, contrasting here with emphatically modern colloquial words and phrases. His own life and, more importantly, his own death seem like a good “story” to the protagonist, but that death loses all its assumed poetry and grandeur when Heinrich thinks it through to the end. The pathos of the last word, however, is at least in part restored at the end of the play. This is perhaps best illustrated by the way in which the “Todeslitanei” is referred to. In the prologue, as can be seen in the passage quoted above, Heinrich’s apostrophes of Henriette parody the style of the historical letters they exchanged. The “Todeslitanei” is handled very differently when it features again in scene 13, shortly before Heinrich shoots Henriette and then himself. Here, Radl uses the poetic letter exchange almost in its entirety. Alluding to its dialogical nature and its supposed resemblance to a litany she turns it into a dramatic antiphony in which Heinrich’s and Henriette’s voices alternate. Radl’s protagonists also quote at length from “their” suicide notes, which, despite being abridged and slightly altered, retain their original function as last messages to posterity. The names of historical persons and places are deleted, and antiquated vocabulary is replaced by contemporary words or phrases. While Kleist’s and Henriette Vogel’s styles of writing remain discernible, their letters now have a more general appeal; in addition, the changes narrow the gap between the play’s audience and the historical figures on a linguistic level. Radl not only aims to provide a modernized version of the story of the suicide pact; her use of contemporary language and, in particular, her adaptation of popular songs from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries also highlight the modernity of Kleist’s and Henriette Vogel’s predicaments, sufferings, and hopes. In a manner similar to that of Boëtius (and Finger), Radl uses some of the historical suicide notes to characterize her protagonists and the rela-

41

der Anfang eines wundersam poetischen Todes. Es wird der bedeutendste Tod meines Lebens sein. Dumm nur, dass ich diesmal dabei draufgehe” (KH, 1, Der erste Schuss; SW 1, p. 707; Constantine, p. 204). Karl S. Guthke’s Letzte Worte. Variationen über ein Thema der Kulturgeschichte des Westens (Munich: Beck, 1990) offers an insightful account of the history of last (spoken) words. The letter scene in Letzte Stunde discussed above also alludes to this tradition.

Adaptations of Kleist’s Suicide 257

tionship between them. In the third scene, with the telling title “Topf und Deckel I” (Jack and Jill I), Heinrich und Henriette quote alternately from their letters. Whereas Heinrich by and large recites unchanged passages from his note to Marie von Kleist,42 Henriette quotes a text that has been adapted to her situation. The Henriette of the play addresses her husband with the words used by the historical Kleist in a letter to his sister: “I cannot die without having first, contented and cheerful as I am, reconciled myself with the whole world and so also and above all others with you, my dearest Louis.”43 Even the line “the truth is there is no help for me on Earth” (die Wahrheit ist, dass mir auf Erden nicht zu helfen ist) is put into Henriette’s mouth; although it has been modified, it is still very much recognizable as the one sentence that has become synonymous with the historical Kleist and his suicide. Eventually, when both protagonists turn to Marie, each finishes the sentence of the other.44 At the very moment when they take their final farewell from life and the people they loved, the couple are finally united and speak with one voice. The fictitious attribution of texts written by the historical Kleist to Henriette and the protagonists’ simultaneous recitation of passages from the suicide notes dramatize the fact that Kleist and Henriette Vogel actually wrote some of their last letters together and implicitly challenge fixed notions of authorship. From a chronological point of view, the letters the suicides composed together, addressed to Ernst Friedrich Peguilhen (b. 1770) and Sophie Müller, were among the very last ones they wrote.45 Passages from these letters, spoken by Heinrich and Henriette, are recorded on tape and played in the twelfth scene while the suicides are dancing and celebrating gaily with the Guardian Angels. Yet again, Radl does not limit her references to the historical texts to mere quotations: she uses the recording as an equivalent to the written suicide note, and thus translates the historically written episto42 43

44

45

See Kleist’s letter to Marie von Kleist, Berlin, 19 November 1811, and Kleist’s letter to Marie von Kleist, Berlin, 21 November 1811 (SW 2, pp. 884–885, 887–888). KH 3, Topf und Deckel I; cf. Constantine, p. 426. “Ich kann nicht sterben, ohne mich, zufrieden und heiter, wie ich bin, mit der ganzen Welt, und somit auch, vor allen anderen, mein teuerster Louis, mit Dir versöhnt zu haben.” Kleist’s letter to Ulrike von Kleist, Stimmings Krug bei Potsdam, 21 November 1811 (SW 2, p. 887). “Heinrich: Ich werde Dich hintergehen … / Henriette: … oder vielmehr, ich werde mich selbst hintergehen; wie ich Dir aber tausendmal gesagt habe, dass ich dies nicht überleben würde … / Heinrich: … so werde ich Dir jetzt, indem ich von Dir Abschied nehme, davon den Beweis geben” (KH 3, Topf und Deckel I; cf. Constantine, p. 426). See Kleist and Henriette Vogel’s joint letter to Sophie Müller, Berlin, 20 November 1811, and Kleist and Henriette Vogel’s joint letter to Ernst Friedrich Peguilhen, Stimmings Krug bei Potsdam, 21 November 1811 (SW 2, pp. 885–886, 888–890).

258 Marie Isabel Schlinzig

lary medium into a modern context. Radl thus enables the audience to experience two of the genre’s most distinctive characteristics: distance and closure. While the audience thinks they can still see the characters or hear their messages, the characters themselves are already out of reach. Heinrich and Henriette each quote from “their” suicide notes and also switch authorial roles: while she recites passages attributed to the historical Kleist, he in turn quotes from what the historical Henriette Vogel wrote. Their voices are united again when they announce the date of the very last letter, taking the personal pronoun “we” in the original text quite literally: “They say it is 21 Nov.; but we are not sure whether that is true.”46 At the end of Kopf oder Herz, the Guardian Angels are left dancing alone in the clouds. In stark contrast to the gloomy subject matter, a sense of playfulness and sheer delight in acting out a story — which pervades the whole drama — is still present, even now.

IV. All three artistic responses to the double suicide described above adapt passages from the historical documents or place them in new contexts in order to challenge audiences’ preconceptions. Not only the suicide notes but also other letters and texts by Kleist or his contemporaries, and literary texts by the Prussian author, are used to create this effect. Instead of presenting audiences with a carefully constructed biographical account or a definitive interpretation of the historical events, Tod am Wannsee, Letzte Stunde, and Kopf oder Herz engage with their subject matter in ways that are at once gentle, playful, and critical. The handling of the historical material demonstrates that the authors seek to expose the limitations of the original texts as factual sources and to tell those parts of the story which have not been laid down in writing. At the same time, they carefully avoid imposing any definitive version of the events on their audiences. Like Letzte Stunde, Tod am Wannsee and Kopf oder Herz acknowledge the literary potential of the double suicide through their very existence. In contrast to the radio play, which shows Kleist as anything but an author dramatizing his own death, Radl’s and Boëtius’s comments about the alleged literary aspirations of the suicides, Kleist in particular, are far from straightforward. In these works, scenes in which ideas of staging and authorship in the face of death are thematised usually tend toward irony, parody, or farce. Such presentations can, of course, be read as critical responses to the enthusiasm and 46

“Man sagt, hier ist der 21. Nov.; wir wissen aber nicht, ob es wahr ist” (KH 12, Ekstase Feuerwehrball).

Adaptations of Kleist’s Suicide 259

effusiveness of the “Todeslitanei” and some of the suicide notes. In this sense, they turn the screw still further, driving home what Kleist’s friend, Ernst von Pfuel (1779–1866), said about the suicide notes: Kleist seemed in them, he said, to have “in unächter Exaltation versunken” (lost himself in false exaltation).47 What this essay has tried to show, however, is that Tod am Wannsee, Letzte Stunde, and Kopf oder Herz present — albeit in different ways — a critical assessment not primarily of Kleist and Henriette Vogel themselves but of subsequent critical and, predominantly, academic interpretations of their double suicide. Yet, in so doing, Boëtius, Finger, and Radl tell stories of their own about the Prussian writer and his companion and thus add a further layer to the “Kleist myth.” University of Oxford

47

Ernst von Pfuel to Caroline de la Motte Fouqué, Vienna, 7 February 1812 (DKV 4, pp. 1088–1090; p. 1089).

260 Marie Isabel Schlinzig

Appendix: Primary Sources that Draw on Kleist and Vogel’s Double Suicide Donnerstag um Vier (short film, 20 minutes, directed by Anette Kuhn, Germany, 1999/ 2000). countdownKleist (music theatre, written, designed, and directed by Andreas Tiedemann, music by Christoph Jilo, produced by Ohrpilot in 2001). Die Nacht des Cherub. Eine Kleist-Oper (music by Winfried Radeke, text by Rudolf Danker, premiered at the Neuköllner Oper in 2001). Henning Boëtius, Tod am Wannsee. Eine Novelle (Gifkendorf: Merlin, 2002). Reto Finger, Die letzte Stunde (radio play, directed by Annette Berger, dramaturgy by Andrea Otte, produced by SWR2 in 2003). Do You Want to Die With Me? (dance piece, choreographed by Andrew Dawson, produced by fabrik Company Potsdam in 2005). WANN THUN. Kartographische Projektionen (mixed media installation by Esther Ernst and Jörg Laue, presented at the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin, 2006). Stephan Bock, “LAZARIUS COMMINAZZO” (poem, published in Stephan Bock, “Kleist-Texte,” Heilbronner Kleist-Blätter, 19 (2007): pp. 223–225 (p. 223). Jody McAuliffe, My Lovely Suicides. A Novel (Seattle: Ravenna Press, 2007). Monika Radl, Kopf oder Herz. Ein literarisch-musikalischer Suizid (play, directed by Olaf Hillinger, premiered at the Uckermärkische Bühnen Schwedt in 2007). Kleist. Oper (music by Rainer Rubbert, text by Tanja Langer, premiered at the Brandenburger Theater in 2008). Tanja Langer and Wolfgang Siano, Keine Ananas für Herrn von Kleist. Komödie (play, published in Heilbronner Kleist-Blätter, 21 (2009): pp. 221–266. Oliver Bukowski, Wenn Ihr Euch totschlagt, ist es ein Versehen (nach Motiven des H. v. Kleist) (play, directed by Markus Heinzelmann, co-production of the Ruhrfestspiele Recklinghausen and the Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg, 2010). Rolf Hochhuth, “Kleist am Wannsee” (poem, published in Die Welt, 15 September 2008, [accessed 26 June 2010]). An einem ungewöhnlich warmen Novembertag (installation by Dávid Szauder, presented at the Collegium Hungaricum Berlin, 2011). Christian Bahr, “Wie mag er Dich jetzt nennen, Henriette Vogel?” (painting, acrylic/oil on canvas, 2011).

Adaptations of Kleist’s Suicide 261

21 Minuten vor dem Schuss. Kleistfestival-Beitrag der Hochschule für Schauspielkunst “Ernst Busch” Berlin (six self-contained dramatic scenes, directed by Jörg Lehmann, premiered at the Maxim Gorki Theater Berlin, 2011). Tanja Langer, Wir sehn uns wieder in der Ewigkeit. Die letzte Nacht von Henriette Vogel und Heinrich von Kleist (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2011). TVG Menon, “Heinrich von Kleist” (drawing, 2011). Jean Ouzounian, “von Kleist” (drawing, 2011). Bianca Schaalburg, “Heinrich von Kleist” (drawing, 2011). Yaûar Kemal Turan, “Heinrich von Kleist” (print, 2011).

Hans Wedler No Home on Earth: Suicide in the Narratives of Kleist and David Foster Wallace1 Both Heinrich von Kleist and David Foster Wallace appear as relentless and razor-sharp analysts of the conditio humana of their times, as well as masterful psychologists. Suicide was a recurring, central life issue for both, from their schooldays until they ended their lives. Suicide is not only the culmination of Kleist’s tragedy Penthesilea and Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest; it appears in many narratives by both authors in varying degrees of gravitas. In Kleist’s stories, suicide is not a moral problem, but only one type of death among many, the result of failing to cope with life’s problems or with life, per se. Shame, guilt, mortification, despair, and the anger of a short-tempered character are the leading suicide motives for Kleist, as well as a weariness of life common to those who cannot cope with reality. In contrast, existential self-doubt, yearning for death, and above all the sick and wounded soul dominate Wallace’s narratives as motives for suicide. For Wallace, suicide is a serious moral problem and a constant challenge for man in the fight against the falsehoods in the world, the manipulability of mankind, and the threat of being overwhelmed by depression.

Every suicide is both understandable and enigmatic at the same time: understandable because it is within a man’s power to bring his own life and suffering to an early end. The puzzling question, however, remains: what power is even stronger than the common desire to maintain a solid grip on one’s already limited being? Sometimes suicide notes can shed some light, but unfortunately this is seldom the case, since they rarely offer any new information. Suicide notes serve less as a revelation than as a small conciliatory gesture to those left behind. In the case of writers — that is, those who already have something to share with their fellow man — there is a great temptation to search for a trace of an answer in the works they have left behind. This process of reinterpretation in light of an author’s suicide has an insincere, even insidious nature, which serves foremost to reassert the interpreter’s personal worldview. The interpreters respond, as it is written in one published obituary, “as if they had dealt with an impostor who had for years

1

This article mirrors the content of the previously published article in German, “Hier auf Erden kein Bleiben mehr? Der Suizid in den Erzählungen von Heinrich von Kleist und David Foster Wallace,” in Heilbronner Kleist-Blätter, 21 (2009), pp. 163–180, and was translated from the original German by Robert Lightner (Stuttgart), Lisa Beesley (Vanderbilt University), and Curtis Maughan (Vanderbilt University).

264 Hans Wedler

pretended to bear the brunt of life.”2 On the other hand, those who once stood so close to Heinrich von Kleist and David Foster Wallace did not seem surprised by the self-destructive act for which there had been signs for so long. Suicide had been a central theme for both authors in their lives and in their works.

I. Unequal Similarity Although some two centuries separate them, authors Heinrich von Kleist and David Foster Wallace share some striking similarities. After early years of introspection, both were suddenly perceived as possessing outstanding writing talents, but this perception was initially limited to a small circle of admirers. Both left behind works of timeless quality. The enduring resonance of Kleist’s work is no longer in question. Kleist’s thinking, which breached so many taboos of his time, and his language, which demonstates more traits of German Expressionism than of Classicism or Romanticism, fairly dictated that his work would not be appreciated until the twentieth century. Kleist is one of the most performed authors of the present stage. Wallace, whose works have only recently and not yet entirely been translated into German, has gradually attained similar international recognition as it becomes clear that his work stands above that of his contemporaries. With virtuosity and a variety of linguistic resources, Wallace engages only the reader prepared to accept thoughts that (for the sake of the precise nature of truths in his works) continually create new obstacles to hinder understanding, tripping up the reader and forcing her or him to feel the pain. Both Kleist and Wallace emerge as relentless and razor-sharp analysts of the conditio humana of their times, as well as masterful psychologists. It can be viewed as a distinguishing feature, as a kind of feather in their cap, that in their works, evil does not appear in people without being accompanied by at least a shimmer of “good,” so that despite all the horror, their actions remain comprehensible. The word “genius” applies to both men (this word, though overused, is permissible without embarrassment or procrastination, as its use here harms no one, and yet can be taken as a humble bow). In Kleist’s case, this is long since self-evident. His ability to expose the very core of a human truth with a few words is arguably unsurpassed. David Gates writes in an obituary about Wallace, for example, that perhaps he was less of a brilliant writer (like Hemingway) than a genius who had become a 2

Harald Staun, “Kein Weg zurück,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, 21 September 2008.

Suicide in Kleist and David Foster Wallace 265

writer, more of a discoverer than an observer.3 Was this any different from Kleist? Both authors had only a limited period of creativity: Kleist about ten years, Wallace some eighteen years. Throughout their lives suicide was a recurring, central issue for both authors, until they ended their lives at an early age. At thirty-four years of age, on 21 November 1811, Kleist first shot his companion, Henriette Vogel, who was ill with cancer, then himself. Wallace was forty-six years old when he hanged himself from a beam on the patio of his house in California on 12 September 2008. In the works of Kleist and Wallace the theme of suicide is seen in many places. Kleist had left behind eight plays, but no novels; Wallace left behind two novels but no plays; so short stories remain as the common object of comparison. Kleist published eight novellas4 and numerous anecdotes, while Wallace published dozens of stories in various forms and dimensions, making up a major part of his work. Even the two novels published by Wallace are in many respects stories held together by a common frame. The theme of suicide appears in the works of each author with a varying degree of gravitas spanning a spectrum of significance from central action that ultimately combines all narrative threads to an almost marginal mention of the mere possibility of suicide or the word itself. In the case of Wallace’s “Oblivion” (2005), a nightmarish and linguistically agonizing tale (featuring an actual nightmare) unfolds. The resolution of a marital feud between two neurotic individuals consistently fails, in the midst of an ultra-modern patchwork family, aided by the sophisticated technology of a sleep laboratory. A somewhat unsympathetic official plunges into a therapeutic discussion, accompanied by unnerving background noises, in order to evaluate the clinic’s “diagnostic procedures and activities.”5 This search for a solution to the marital strife takes place in an institution called, cynically enough, “Darling Memorial Clinic,” and the wife of the first-person narrator has the equally enigmatic and provocative first name “Hope.” At the climax of this meeting, which is unsatisfactory and unpleasant for all involved, the following is stated: “I then either imagined, hallucinated or witnessed Dr. ‘Desmondo Ruiz’’s — the large eyed Latin administrator’s or compère’s — mouth mouth, very distinctly, the word ‘Su-i-cide,’ sans any emergent sound” (Oblivion, p. 231–232). The theme of suicide is not mentioned anywhere else in the story, and even here it is so far beneath any linguistic articulation (pos3 4 5

David Gates, “David Foster Wallace, 1962–2008,” Newsweek Web Exclusive, 14 September 2008. Four of these stories contain suicidal behavior specifically; in two others it is implied indirectly. David Foster Wallace, “Oblivion,” in Oblivion (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2005), p. 227. Subsequent citations as “Oblivion” with page number(s).

266 Hans Wedler

sibly imagination, hallucination, or reality; silent syllable formation in the original interspersed French vocabulary) that it comes as a surprise to the reader. The reference to suicide is just a subtle suggestion that sticks like a burr in the reader’s memory (as suicide associations tend to in everyday awareness). A similar effect may be seen when regarding intellectual life at the beginning of the nineteenth century, in a brief, sudden suicide threat when the protagonist in Kleist’s novella Michael Kohlhaas (1810) draws a pistol in Martin Luther’s study and threatens to shoot himself immediately if Luther, who is completely surprised by the visit of this terrorist and justice fanatic, sounds the alarm bells to summon help. Although Kohlhaas is only partially successful in achieving his goal — Luther proclaims that Kohlhaas is beyond absolution, but he does agree to write to the Duke on Kohlhaas’ behalf6 — suicide is not mentioned again in the story, which nevertheless ends on the gallows. This all but casual mention of the disturbing and threatening presence of suicidal tendencies can be found at various points in the work of both authors, often in disguised form.

II. Love and Suicide Human conflict in real life relationships, and even more so in literature, is by far the most common motive for suicidal behavior: disappointed, unrequited, unfulfilled longing for love, as well as fraud, betrayal, jealousy, and hatred. The crucial point of emergence for the conciliatory so-called “weariness of life” (Lebensmüdigkeit) becomes the inaccessibility of the desired love object with which to be united in the “neurosis of love,” or to hold fast to what is considered indispensable for continued existence. Tellingly, one finds the motif of love as a trigger for suicidal behavior in the stories of Kleist and Wallace only in a highly modified form. In Kleist’s knightly drama Das Käthchen von Heilbronn (Kate of Heilbronn, 1810), the brokenhearted protagonist has sprung from a window onto the street, only to stay in bed for several months until her bones have healed, and the actual play can begin. The whole affair is strange enough, since Käthchen has seen her dream knight only once “for five minutes”7 and barely a word has passed between them. The knight had given the fifteen-year-old a farewell kiss on 6

7

Heinrich von Kleist, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. by Helmut Sembdner (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2008), vol. 2, pp. 44–49. Subsequent citations as “SW” with page number(s). “auf fünf Minuten” (SW 1, p. 434). Unless otherwise indicated, translations are by Robert Lightner, Lisa Beesley, and Curtis Maughan.

Suicide in Kleist and David Foster Wallace 267

the forehead, and, to her, this delusionally desired connection (which becomes a reality at the end of the play, with the help of many colorful dramaturgical magic tricks) probably seemed unachievable at the time of their meeting. In Kleist’s novellas, in contrast to the works of Goethe, love as a motive for suicidal tendencies constitutes the exception. Kleist’s novella “Das Erdbeben in Chili” (The Earthquake in Chile, 1807/1810) begins with Jeronimo Rugera, a prison inmate preparing to hang himself from a pillar after having visited Donna Josephe, the daughter of one of the city’s richest nobles, one night in a monastery garden and impregnating her — something her father had taken precautions against by hiding her in the monastery. After the birth of her child, Josephe is sentenced to be burned to death, but her sentence is then reduced to a beheading. As the bells toll announcing the beheading, Jeronimo sees no way out — “Life seemed detestable to him”8 — and he decides to end it all immediately with a rope. At this moment, his suicide is prevented by the onset of the earthquake that devastated Santiago in 1647. While thousands die in the rubble of the city, Jeronimo and Josephe reach freedom, but they can rejoice for only a single day. Ironically, an angry mob attending a church service for the survivors recognizes them and murders them on a public street. Only their infant is rescued. We see then that the core of the narrative is the interpretative manipulability of “divine signals.” While the reader, along with the young couple, interprets the earthquake as a divine symbol against the brutal violence of inhuman, immoral laws based on religious principles, the townsfolk — always looking for a scapegoat and spurred on by the clergy — perceive it as exactly the opposite: the earthquake is God’s punishment for the young couple’s violation of these very rules. Jeronimo’s nearly completed suicide appears to be morally neutral in Kleist’s novella. In this hopeless attempt to reach his beloved on the way to the scaffold once again, Jeronimo’s behavior is understandable, even if further events show that his appraisal of the situation as hopeless was inaccurate. Suicide, it seems, is no more than one of the many forms of death in the novella. And life, after all, is dangerous for many different reasons. A Kleistian anecdote with the distinctive title “Der neuere (glücklichere) Werther” (A Latter-Day (and More Fortunate) Werther, 1811) also hints at love as a motive for suicide. A young servant has secretly fallen in love with his master’s wife, and so while the couple is away, he creeps into their bedroom and into the bed of his beloved, but he is discovered when his master comes home early and finds him there. Out of shame and desperation, the servant shoots himself in the chest. However, the young man does not die, 8

Heinrich von Kleist: Selected Writings, ed. and trans. by David Constantine (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004), p. 313. Subsequent citations as “Constantine” with page number(s).

268 Hans Wedler

while the shot causes his master to have a fatal stroke, leaving the young servant free to marry the widow after his wounds heal and a proper period of decorum is observed — a happy ending even after an attempted suicide. Certainly, his motive can only be seen as partially attributed to a seemingly unattainable love. Rather, it is an expression of shame about the discovery of romantic desires with fetishistic tendencies. For Kleist, shame and despair are stronger motives for suicide than love, as we can see from the reading of his other works. When reading Wallace, pure longing for love as a motive for suicide is nowhere to be found. In the story “Lyndon” (1987), a semi-portrait of former U.S. President Lyndon Baynes Johnson, the intensely jealous homosexual lover of the first-person narrator and close advisor to the Texas Senator and late President commits suicide after the narrator leaves him due to his jealous behavior. The suicide takes place “in an especially nasty way”;9 before hanging himself from a heating pipe on the ceiling, he leaves behind a document of disavowel comprising a conflation of fantasy and truth, which becomes the basis for the narrator’s expulsion from Yale. Thus there is revenge at play in addition to disillusioned love.

III. Murder and Suicide It is not an uncommon occurrence that unrequited or fleeting love can turn into hatred and then lead to murder. Almost daily we read of such incidents in the newspapers, often euphemistically termed as a family tragedy. Of course, murder and suicide are prominent themes in literature, and are prominent in the stories of Kleist and Wallace. The murder and subsequent suicide at the end of Wallace’s short story “Tri-Stan” is the equally ridiculous and nightmarish consequence of people operating and acting like marionettes, while working in the profit-dictated world of the commercial television industry. The victim, who has been “enhanced” through numerous interventions of cosmetic surgery to become a beauty icon, is Sissee Nar, the favorite daughter of Agon M. Nar, the omnipotent TV program director of the production company “of passive reception,”10 Stanley, Stanley, and Stanley — or Tri-Stan for short. The perpetrator is the “recombinant head of all Tri-Stan” (“Tri-Stan,” p. 201), Reggie Ecko, who appears to be a native of 9 10

David Foster Wallace, “Lyndon,” (1997) in Girl with Curious Hair (London: Little, Brown & Co., 2009), p. 87. David Foster Wallace, “Tri-Stan: I sold Sissee Nar to Ecko,” in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (London: Little, Brown, 2001), p. 200. Subsequent citations as “TriStan” with page number(s).

Suicide in Kleist and David Foster Wallace 269

Venice, and is the first to be fired by Nar for strategic reasons. After losing his job, he suffers “a massive self-esteem displacement” and from that point on becomes dependent on alcohol and cocaine, yet he remains “highly vengeance oriented” (“Tri-Stan,” p. 203). In the end, due to his addiction, “diplomatic relations between R. Ecko & reality had pretty much broken down” (“Tri-Stan,” p. 209). He falls madly in love with Sissee, who has no acting talent and an unbearable voice and thus appears as a sleeping nymph in a mythological realm in a television production Ecko watches between four and five every morning. She is not only without talent, but, due to her father’s influence, is not capable of a single independent thought and “has an extremely small ego” (“Tri-Stan,” p. 213). Ecko becomes her stalker, but realizes that a relationship between such a young beauty and himself, a rundown old man, is “by nature unconsummatable in the merciless daylight of 3-D reality.” He also recognizes “that he can ‘attain’ Sissee Nar only in the unionized melt that is death’s good night” (“Tri-Stan,” pp. 211–212). Consequently, he first shoots the naïve Sissee, and immediately thereafter shoots himself. Predictably, the murder of the prominent star and the suicide of the famous, yet fired, TV program director Ecko, create a media field day. When the photos of the dead in their more glamorous days appear together in magazines, Ecko’s wish is fulfilled: they are indeed united in a “deep and mythic way […]; melded in death” (“Tri-Stan,” p. 215). In this short story, which is rich in associations and highly complex linguistic techniques, Wallace reflects on the deep mythological need of contemporary man drowning in passive consumption, existing despite the stifling effects of communication and media. “In a nation whose great informing myth is that it has no great informing myth, familiarity equaled timelessness, omniscience, immortality, a spark of the vicarious Divine” (“Tri-Stan,” p. 205). The author himself slips into the role of an Ovid and calls the story a “sort of ironically contemporary & self-conscious but still mythically resonant & highly lyrical entertainment-property” (“Tri-Stan,” p. 215). With a slightly different emphasis, Wallace’s description also applies to Kleist’s “Die Verlobung in St. Domingo” (The Betrothal in San Domingo, 1811). Kleist’s novella does not draw from Greek mythology or the medieval Tristan legend (or Richard Wagner’s mythos-adaptation thereof), but rather presents the myth of the angelic, idealized woman offering unconditional self-sacrifice, which begins with the loss of her virginity. Toni is a beautiful fifteen-year-old “mestiza” (SW 2, p. 162). During the tumult of the early nineteenth century slave uprising against the French colonialists on the Caribbean Island, her mother, a mulatto, uses her as a lure in order to trap whites in her home, where the brutal rebel leader Congo Hoango murders them. While fleeing the rebellion, the Swiss officer Gustav von der Ried and

270 Hans Wedler

his family seek refuge in their house for the night. Toni, who immediately reminds him of his former fiancée who died in his place on the guillotine as a heroine during the French Revolution, prepares him dinner and a footbath. Moved by the gallant officer’s sad story, Toni ignores her mother’s prohibitions and loses her virginity that night, whereupon she is torn between solidarity with her mother and the blacks on the one hand and the rescue of her beloved officer on the other. Upon the surprise early return of the rebel leader, Toni realizes that in order to rescue the officer and prevent a hopeless battle against superior strength she must feign solidarity with the blacks and tie the sleeping Gustav to the bed. When the rebels are finally driven away from Gustav’s band, the freed Gustav grabs a pistol and, in a fit of rage, shoots Toni, in the false belief that she has betrayed him. As soon as the horrified bystanders reveal the misunderstanding to him, Gustav shoots himself in the mouth — the same way Kleist will later bring his own life to an end. Gustav’s murder of Toni is a mistake, as is Penthesilea’s murder of Achilles in Kleist’s tragedy Penthesilea (1808).11 Although in both scenarios, external and extremely tense conditions, including an immediate, sustained threat to life, may have played a role in the misunderstanding, the real causes are interpersonal distrust, inadequate communication, and lack of attention, which lead to gross misinterpretations. Gustav’s erroneous actions are a confirmation of his own personal catastrophe. For the second time, a loving woman risks all for Gustav, only to be executed by him. Kleist leaves no doubt here that under such conditions — committed immediately out of shame and despair — suicide is not only justified, but also virtually inevitable. Love seems to be valued over life, and Toni and Gustav are buried in a common grave: “[…] having then exchanged the rings both wore on their hands they lowered them, with silent prayers, into the abode of eternal peace” (Constantine, p. 349–350). Kleist was also a master of hidden irony. In Wallace’s “Tri-Stan,” psychopathological conditions (along with profound mortification and thoughts of revenge) play a role in the motive of suicide and murder — arguably a “murder-suicide.” In response to the ruin of his career, Reggie Ecko yields to addiction, which in turn — despite treatment — drives him to a delusional misunderstanding of reality, as if “impotioned” (“Tri-Stan,” p. 211). In Kleist’s novella, it is the traumatic entanglement in a personal history of guilt (survival at the expense of an innocent wife), cowardice, negligence, and weakness of character (demanding a high 11

“So war es ein Versehen. Küsse, Bisse, / Das reimt sich, und wer recht von Herzen liebt, / Kann schon das eine für das andre greifen” (SW 1, verses 2981–2983, p. 425); So — it was a mistake. Kissing — biting, / That rhymes, and who loves from the heart, / May take the one for the other.”

Suicide in Kleist and David Foster Wallace 271

degree of confidence from another while not being able to reciprocate), which lead to murder and suicide. While Wallace ostentatiously stages mythological reinforcement with irony and sarcasm, Kleist allows fate to play a co-determining role in the form of the unconscious or hyper-real compulsion to repeat actions. In both narratives, victims and perpetrators are ultimately — in an ironic refraction — united peacefully.

IV. Suicide in Focus In the two previous stories, murder and suicide are secondary to the central actions to which all of the narrative strands lead. In detective novels, the murder is the central action around which the plot revolves. Certainly suicide alone is the central action in many literary works. The most famous example in German context is perhaps Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werther (The Sufferings of Young Werther, 1774). In his insightful book Warum will Frankensteins Monster sterben? (Why does Frankenstein’s Monster Want to Die?, 2005), the Berlin philologist Dirk Lange demonstrates the dominant role of suicide in the English novel of the nineteenth century. In addition to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), the best-known examples are Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). In none of Kleist’s works, however, does suicide take a comparably central position as in the tragedy Penthesilea. Certainly, the theme of suicide in the stage versions of Penthesilea today is (still?) largely suppressed. According to the uncut original, the Amazon queen not only takes her life near the end, but has attempted suicide two times previously. Indeed, the plot demonstrates an uncompromising focus on suicide from the very beginning, with an unconditional focus not found in many other works of world literature, while illustrating the ambivalence of the social environment and its suicide prevention efforts with a straightforward bitterness and laconic precision.12 Wallace places suicide at the center of his story “Good Old Neon.” In an afterlife confession, the first-person narrator Neal speaks about the decision to commit suicide: the last hours of preparation, the ambivalence, all the “back-and-forth conflict and dithering, which there was a lot of.”13 He concludes: “Suicide runs so counter to so many hardwired instincts and drives 12

13

Hans Wedler, “‘Staub lieber als ein Weib sei, das nicht reizt’ — Suizid als Thema in Kleists Penthesilea,” Heilbronner Kleist-Blätter 20, (2008), pp. 92–102. Subsequent citations as “Wedler” with page number(s). David Foster Wallace, “Good Old Neon,” in Oblivion (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2004), p. 173. Subsequent citations as “Neon” with page number(s).

272 Hans Wedler

that nobody in his right mind goes through with it without going through a great deal of internal back-and-forth, intervals of almost changing your mind, etc” (“Neon,” p. 173). He describes how he put his business affairs in order, wrote farewell letters, and imagined how the recipients would feel upon reading them. Finally, he tells of the suicide itself, how he took an overdose of sleeping pills and then crashed his car into the concrete pillar of a highway bridge, and saw the crash quite plainly before his eyes, in stark detail, right up to the end. He casually mentions that he met his psychoanalyst again, who had died from cancer, and how they “had a good laugh” (“Neon,” p. 163) about some of the thoughts and exchanges in their therapy sessions. The primary motive for Neal’s suicide appears in the first sentence of the story: “My whole life I’ve been a fraud” (“Neon,” p. 141). Since childhood, he has made every effort to leave a particularly advantageous and grandiose impression on his fellow man, but one that is not accurate in his view. Paradoxically, the more trouble one takes to impress others, the less impressive or attractive one feels. In a dream, he gains the insight “that in reality I actually seemed to have no true inner self” (“Neon,” p. 160). After many efforts to escape this “trap of fraudulence,” including high-performance sports, attending a “charismatic church,” meditation, jogging, hypnosis, cocaine, sexual excesses, and much more, he concludes with resignation that all he wanted was to stand in a more glamorous light than the others (“Neon,” pp. 142, 159). He resorts to psychoanalysis (if an unusual variation thereof), which accounts for many pages of the story. To the therapist’s triumphant insight that someone who speaks so openly about his own hypocrisy could not be a real hypocrite, the patient responds by exposing the inaccuracy: what the patient knows about himself is, above all else, that even in therapy he wants to be special, a “good” and open patient, and thus the hypocrisy necessarily continues. Having found some consolation in the idea that his hypocrisy is actually based on an inability to love, he finally realizes that this is merely a “melodramatic cliché,” concluding that once again, “I’d managed to con myself” (“Neon,” p. 168). Since this realization occurs to him as he is coincidentally watching an old cartoon on television, he feels that he is being mocked, which is the ultimate impulse for the decision to commit suicide. Even if Wallace does not particularly emphasize it, Neal’s story is also that of an intellectually gifted person who sees and understands too much of the world to simply plod through life as most people do. This unusual gift, which is largely genetic, is unfortunately a type of disability, like its counterpart, debility, even if medical textbooks have not yet identified it as such. This can be seen in the résumés of gifted patients, which often contain failures. (Echoes of the author’s own biography are obvious here.) As a four-

Suicide in Kleist and David Foster Wallace 273

year old, Neal discovers that he can manipulate the thoughts of his foster parents to make them believe that he is an especially good and loving child. He quickly becomes disappointed with his analyst, whom he could effortlessly “bat […] around like a catnip toy” (“Neon,” p. 170), and with his clever interventions, because the therapist cannot provide “any hope of getting helped out of the trap of fraudulence and unhappiness I’d constructed for myself” (“Neon,” p. 154). The constant longing to “come across someone who is your match or equal and can’t be fooled” (“Neon,” p. 155) seems wholly oppressive. The loneliness, which the first-person narrator Neal brusquely discounts — “the fact is, that we’re all lonely, of course” (“Neon,” p. 153) — did it not also plague Kleist and Wallace, despite the many friends who surrounded them throughout their lives? The author David Foster Wallace actually appears in person at the end of the story, when he separates from the first person narrator in a quasidissociative process. He turns out to be a former schoolmate who always found the older Neal to be very impressive and authentic, “like an actual living person” (“Neon,” p. 181). Wallace himself, as he later learns, shares all the same scruples as Neal, though he never would have expected this similarity. But all of this takes place many years back, and so we read at the end of the story: “[…] the realer, more enduring and sentimental part of him commanding that other part to be silent as if looking it levelly in the eye and saying, almost aloud, ‘Not another word’” (“Neon,” p. 181). This brave and moving impulse of self-preservation to prevent the suicide or to forestall it is tempered by some mental traps; that is, the philosophically derived logic from the relativity of time and the being embedded in it. Movement or speed can be measured with time, but not the rate at which time moves: “What if there’s really no movement at all?” (“Neon,” p. 179). What if everything that has ever been said or thought transpires in a flash — what “you call the present?” (“Neon,” p. 179). Then one can speak about what happens just after the moment of death, although verbal communication is “a charade and they’re just going through the motions” (“Neon,” p. 151), because at any given moment there are infinitely more thoughts present in the brain than what is being said. “The reality is that dying isn’t bad, but it takes forever. And that forever is no time at all” (“Neon,” p. 180). The luminous shining, like the aura of feigned brilliance: the term Neon is associated with both.14

14

The author’s reflections are somewhat reminiscent of Schopenhauer’s notion that the world exists only as an idea in relation to the subject. Arthur Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung [1819] ( Frankfurt am Main: Cotta-Insel, 1960–1965).

274 Hans Wedler

V. The Longing for Death In the analysis of modern man’s deep existential self-doubt at the core of the story “Good Old Neon,” Wallace follows a tradition of thinking that is more than two-thousand years old in order to explain suicide — one Albert Camus summed up accurately when he stated that suicide is the only serious philosophical problem.15 In a world where appearance and reality have become virtual values, and are apparently exclusively dependent on the perspective taken, and in which there is no knowledge of self-reassurance that cannot be manipulated by its own opposite, the consequence of suicide seems to be only a moral question, one of self-respect, and only a question of time. By noting the impossibility of grasping the passing of time — that with all the uncertainties in life, time seems to be the only reliable constant, especially with its close association with death — Wallace actually surpasses the usual existential self-doubts, leads them into the absurd, and nearly abolishes them in the process; it is as though it did not matter if, when, or how one dies. In his famous commencement speech at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, Wallace, three years before his suicide, reveals himself to be an almost old-fashioned sounding moralist that his readers may have always — in spite of the masquerade — suspected him of being. His burning plea to not see oneself at the center of the world, but to truly “care about other people and to sacrifice for them,” for only “that is real freedom”— in contrast to the rat race mentality — leads to a conditionally anti-suicidal confession: “The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness — awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over.”16 In his reportage on a cruise, Wallace observed the three typical forms of repression of death, which are continually maintained by the current tourism industry as a pars pro toto of the modern lifestyle: “Rigor of self-improvement” or “titivation” — as if to whitewash the dilapidation (for example, the rust on the outer hull of the ships); “titillation” in the form of “hard play”; and the simultaneously promised “relaxation.” But lurking behind these forms of repression are sadness, despair and “yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and futility […]. It’s more 15 16

Albert Camus, “The Myth of Sisiphus,” in The Myth of Sisyphus: And Other Essays (New York; Vintage, 1991), pp. 1–138 (p. 3). David Foster Wallace, “Kenyon Commencement Address,” The Wall Street Journal, 19 September 2008 (W14).

Suicide in Kleist and David Foster Wallace 275

like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming aware that I’m small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die. It’s wanting to jump overboard” (“Fun,” p. 261). Small remarks in Kleist’s letters reveal that weariness of life and longing for death were not strangers to him when he wrote that he found that life “vor mir ganz öde liegt” (lay bleakly before him; SW 2, p. 874), the faces of the people were “zuwider” (ugly; SW 2, p. 884), that his life was “das allerqualvollste, das je ein Mensch geführt hat” (the most tortured ever lived by any human being; SW 2 667; Constantine, p. 427), and, finally, that he had become “zum Tode ganz reif” (wholly ripe for death; SW 2, p. 885; Constantine, p. 425). These comments were written in four letters to Marie von Kleist between Summer 1811 and 21 November 1811, the day of his suicide. However, this weariness of life never appears in Kleist’s novellas in this direct, existential form, but as with most suicidal tendencies, always as a reaction to concrete external circumstances. A good example is the anecdote “Der verlegene Magistrat” (The Embarrassed Magistrate, 1810). A soldier with the city guard is fined for taking unauthorized leave of his post. But he is not prepared to pay the fine and insists on the death penalty. Although this punishment is formally still valid, it has not been applied for centuries. There is nothing left for the magistrate to do but remit the fine and to even be “happy” when the soldier explains that he wants to “bei so bewandten Umständen am Leben bleiben” (stay alive under these circumstances; SW 2, p. 263). In “Der Findling” (The Foundling, 1811), it is unrestrained rage that causes the cheated and vengeful murderer Piachi to demand his own immediate execution without last rites in order to meet with his ungrateful foster son, Nicolo — whose skull Piachi “crushed against the wall” — in “the deepest pit of hell” (Constantine, p. 365). In the novella “Die Marquise von O…” (1808), after evidently raping the Marquise (the reader is carefully kept in the dark), a mixture of shame, guilt, remorse, lost honor, and probably unobtainable love compels Count F. to recklessly charge his enemy in battle, where he is almost fatally wounded by a bullet. His declaration at the moment of injury — “‘Julietta! This bullet avenges you!’” (Constantine, p. 284) — appears to demonstrate a latent longing for death of a penitent rapist, before the story can proceed to the appearance of a happy ending, if not a very glamorous one. “Das Bettelweib von Locarno” (The Beggarwoman of Locarno, 1810) ends with a suicide brought on from the despair and weariness of life. The Marchese, tired of living, sets his castle ablaze so that nothing will be found but ruins and white bones, because the ghost of the old beggar woman haunted him in revenge for his momentary heartlessness towards her, making happiness for the lord of the castle no longer possible.

276 Hans Wedler

VI. Personality and Sick Souls In addition to the unfortunate, fateful entanglements, which seemingly lead the protagonists to give up their lives or even demand death, the four Kleist novellas discussed above demonstrate unusual psychological profiles, without which the stories would never progress. In the anecdote “Der verlegene Magistrat,” the indicted guard proves to be a stubborn, headstrong, and selfrighteous character (strongly reminiscent of Michael Kohlhaas), who does not waver, even when faced with a death threat. The salesman Piachi in “Der Findling” is just as stubborn, as he, fueled with rage and a thirst for revenge, transforms into the opposite of his former self (a model of human kindness). The rape — taking advantage of a chaotic situation and the unconsciousness of the Marquise in “Die Marquise von O…” — is the only misstep of an otherwise impeccable, honorable and noble officer; however, precisely because of this innocence, he searches out death in battle. In the same way, the lord of the castle in “Das Bettelweib von Locarno” is only responsible for a momentary error. He fails (if one interprets the Kleistian ghost story as a continuity of unprocessed feelings of guilt in the unconscious) because of the discrepancy between his claim to power and the stirring of his conscience, which he cannot bridge or reconcile by virtue of his personality. Wallace’s story “Suicide as a Sort of Present” (1998/1999) specifically addresses the relationship between particular personality traits and suicidal tendencies. It relates the sad tale of a woman who clearly suffers from a seriously disturbed, deeply insecure personality, and who experiences debilitating fear and self-hatred. She has raised her son alone — strictly denying all her negative feelings while pretending to be a perfect, loving, and all understanding mother. She now has to deal with the fact that her repressed emotions — including blind rage and even murderous impulses — which she herself finds abhorrent, are also apparent in her son, who grows up to become a disgusting person. Other than in the title, at no point in the text is there any mention of suicide. Perhaps the title could be read to mean that the mother, by refusing to accept her violent emotions, protects her son from their effects, and in so doing gives up her personality, destroying it entirely, in order to present this personality-suicide as a “gift” to her son. Psychopathological elements are often found in Wallace’s works, including the highly neurotic couple in “Oblivion,” Neal in “Good Old Neon,” and the narcissistically damaged Reggie Ecko, who becomes addicted to alcohol and cocaine in the “Tristan” story. Some of the author’s stories have the same effect as character studies in psychopathology. Wallace’s “The Depressed Person” (1998) is the tragic tale of a woman who appears to be de-

Suicide in Kleist and David Foster Wallace 277

pressed, but is actually suffering from a severely disturbed personality. In clinging to her dependency, she lives only to tyrannize her social environment in the most intolerable manner. The results are “toxic neediness”17 and a vicious cycle between an intensifying loneliness and the resulting, ever increasing paradoxical efforts to overcome this feeling. Ironically — but consistent from a psychopathological point of view — it is not the protagonist of the story who commits suicide, but the psychotherapist who is treating her. “The Depressed Person” (who obviously suffers from a serious personality disorder rather than depression) is treated with a litany of psychotropic drugs, none of which bring any success. Electroconvulsive therapy, which Wallace chose to undergo near the end of his life, is also mentioned. As much as the story serves as an acknowledgement of therapeutic efforts, it is also a quiet reproach of those doctors who are foremost concerned with the pursuit of their own theories, indulging in their pet projects and making inaccurate diagnoses out of bias or blindness. It is hardly surprising that the desired therapeutic effect is not successfully realized. In Wallace’s characteristic style, the story “Octet” (1998/99) contains a very touching passage regarding the author’s tale of suffering in a footnote describing the tremendous relief depressive patients feel when an antidepressant treatment is successful and the symptoms disappear: [… the antidepressant is] so efficacious that it completely wiped out every last trace of dysphoria/anhedonia/ agoraphobia/OCD/existential despair in patients and replaced their affective maladjustments with an enormous sense of personal confidence and joie de vivre, a limitless capacity for vibrant interpersonal relations, and an almost mystical conviction of their elemental synecdochic union with the universe and everything therein, as well as an overwhelming and ebullient gratitude for all the above feelings.18

Wallace also discusses the consequences of mental illness for the environment, and particularly the impact suicide has on the bereaved. In “The Depressed Person,” the suicide of the psychotherapist — camouflaged as an accidental poisoning — has catastrophic results for the patient. This means, at least in retrospect, that after three years of therapy, during which the patient regained her confidence and won the feeling that she could change the symptoms that were making a normal life impossible to live, she now feels betrayed. The consequences of suicide are even greater for immediate relatives. In “The Suffering Channel” (2004), a family man is reported to 17 18

David Foster Wallace, “The Depressed Person,” in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (London: Little, Brown & Co., 1999), pp. 37–69 (p. 48). David Foster Wallace, “Octet,” in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (London: Little, Brown & Co., 1999), pp. 131–160 (pp. 125–126).

278 Hans Wedler

have killed himself by leaving his car engine running in the garage of his home in a cozy Midwest suburb, “after which the son [...] and everyone else in the family had gone around with a strange fixed smile that had seemed both creepy and courageous.”19 Balanced between absurd reality and surrealism, suicide appears later on in the same story as a media event: in a television studio archive there are, among other things, the “highlight videotaped suicide note and handgun suicide of sixty-year-old patent attorney” (“Suffering,” p. 292). That which causes the faces of the bereaved to freeze into a permanent mask serves as entertainment for the anonymous masses.20 Can a moralist illustrate the dehumanization of a society in a more crass form?

VII. Vulnerability of the Psyche In the scientific exploration of the exclusively human ability to eradicate one’s own life prematurely (currently almost solely dominated by medicine and psychology), mental illness is considered the crucial, and sometimes overstated, sole causal factor for suicidal tendencies. Although pathological features of the psyche, from mood disorders to difficult, persistent psychosis, can be classified as precursors to suicide (and it is hard to deny that no one takes her or his life “freely”), the question of what influences external life conditions have on a mental derailment remains. The human psyche is known to be a fragile construct, constantly besieged and warped by external forces, some pleasant and some threatening to disrupt the balance. Fortunately, one learns to protect the psyche with thick armor, or better, to encapsulate it within a permeable membrane, allowing the desirable — but not the hazardous — to pass through into the reservoir of the unconscious. Most people achieve emotional success living this way, even when their protective membrane proves occasionally imperfect. However, life is difficult for those who reflect on the reality of their world through their writing. The membrane that protects their psyche must be porous so that they can be aware of both the joy and suffering of the world and its inhabitants in a more naturally pure form and describe it in their work. That which the average consumer lets drip away in the hail of messages pelting down from the 19 20

David Foster Wallace, “The Suffering Channel,” in Oblivion (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2004), pp. 254–255. What Wallace had originally presented to the public as fiction has recently become factual according to the Los Angeles Times of 22 November 2008: A nineteen-year-old college student from Florida logged onto an online forum, linked a camera to the website of a video platform, Justin.tv, aimed it toward his bed and took an overdose of sleeping pills while some ten-thousand people watched. After twelve hours the police were finally called, but the student had already died.

Suicide in Kleist and David Foster Wallace 279

media on a daily basis, hardly influencing his mood, can sting exceptional writers such as Kleist or Wallace like arrows, constantly leaving wounds of varying severity. Whether and how such an experience is bearable — even under the umbrella of social gratification, financial security, or a shielding relationship — usually remains a lifelong question for them. Sometimes suicide is the answer. Striking psychopathological features are evident with both Kleist and Wallace. Kleist evidently suffered from recurrent depression21 and showed characteristics of a personality disorder (Wedler, p. 102). Some of his letters written in the context of critical debates during the last months of his life contain evidence of a situational misjudgment of reality. He saw himself as a failure in life, as reflected in one of his final letters: “[…] the truth is there was no help for me on earth” (Constantine, p. 426). The severe depressive states Wallace suffered, as well as the associated long-term therapy attempts that were failing at the end of his life should be mentioned. None of this, however, provides a final explanation. Medical Ethicist Matthias Bormuth writes: “The cultural peculiarity of suicidal thinking cannot in its speculative content alone be psychopathologically explained [...]. In consideration of self-destructive impulses, it is difficult to decide whether it is psychopathological abnormalities or mental radicalism that determines the human and artist.”22 In Kleist’s stories, suicide is not a moral problem. For him it is one type of death among many, the result of failing to deal with life’s problems or with life, per se, as Kleist had experienced himself. Shame, guilt, mortification, the anger of a short-tempered character, and despair are the leading suicide motives for him, culminating in a weariness of life common to a particular personality type — one that cannot cope with reality. In contrast, existential self-doubt, yearning for death, and above all the sick and wounded soul are the dominant motives for suicide in the stories of Wallace. For Wallace, suicide is a serious moral problem, a constant challenge for man in the fight against the falsehoods of the world, against the manipulability of mankind, and against the threat of being overwhelmed by depression. Kleist and Wallace both perceived the deep loneliness of the thinking individual in a world so unconcerned with the real consequences of serious thought. The departure of his friend and longtime collaborator Müller caused Kleist to

21 22

In his biography of Kleist, Gerhard Schulz describes Kleist’s psychopathology: Gerhard Schulz, Kleist — Eine Biographie (München: Beck, 2007), pp. 517–526. Matthias Bormuth, Ambivalenz der Freiheit — Suizidales Denken im 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2008), p. 321.

280 Hans Wedler

“sink into a great loneliness.”23 Just months before his suicide, in July 1811, Kleist wrote to Marie von Kleist: The life I lead is, since you and A. Müller left, too desolate and sad for words. […] I […] am almost every day at home, from morning till evening without seeing one single human being who might tell me how things are in the world. You come to your own assistance with your imagination […] But I, do you see, cursed as I am in some incomprehensible way, I have no such comfort […] Faced with the white page my imagination is as busy as can be […], but imagining what is real I find not only hard but actually painful. […] Life with its pestering, endlessly recurring demands tears one mind from another in so many ways even at the moment of their coming together, and how much more so when they are apart. We cannot hope to move any closer; and the most we ever manage is to stay where we are.24

Unlike Kleist, in whose lifetime mental illness as a cause of suicidal tendencies was already known but in no way scientifically validated (let alone present in the public consciousness), Wallace was highly conscious of these connections. Beginning in his adolescence, he often suffered from recurring depressive episodes, including, according to reports, a bipolar disorder, and had been treated with antidepressants for decades. After pharmacological reactions forced him to discontinue his use of the drugs, Wallace found his health radically deteriorating during the last months of his life. When all the alternative therapy attempts had lost their effect, the suicide was interpreted by next of kin as a resignation to severe illness. In retrospect, his mother said that he simply could no longer endure the suffering.25 In an article in Rolling Stone, David Lipsky describes a bleak exchange near the end of Wallace’s life that mirrors the weary tone of Kleist’s letters: 23 24

25

Constantine, p. 423; “Müllers Abreise hat mich in große Einsamkeit versenkt” (SW 2, p. 872). Constantine, pp. 423–424; “Das Leben, das ich führe, ist seit Ihrer und A. Müllers Abreise gar zu öde und traurig. Auch bin ich […] fast täglich zu Hause, von Morgen bis auf den Abend, ohne auch nur einen Menschen zu sehen, der mir sagte, wie es in der Welt steht. Sie helfen sich mit Ihrer Einbildung […] Aber diesen Trost, wissen Sie, muß ich unbegreiflich unseliger Mensch entbehren. […] So geschäftig dem weißen Papier gegenüber meine Einbildung ist […] so schwer, ja ordentlich schmerzhaft ist es mir, mir das, was wirklich ist, vorzustellen. […] Das Leben, mit seinen zudringlichen, immer wiederkehrenden Ansprüchen, reißt zwei Gemüter schon in dem Augenblick der Berührung so vielfach aus einander, um wie viel mehr, wenn sie getrennt sind. An ein Näherrücken ist gar nicht zu denken; und alles, was man gewinnen kann, ist, daß man auf dem Punkt bleibt, wo man ist” (SW 2, pp. 873–874). “But my feeling is that, even then, he was leaving the planet. He just couldn’t take it.” David Lipsky, “The Lost Years and Last Days of David Foster Wallace,” Rolling Stone, 30 October 2008, pp. 100–111 (p. 111). Subsequent citation as “Rolling Stone” with page number.

Suicide in Kleist and David Foster Wallace 281 In early May [four months before his suicide], at the end of the school year, he sat down with some graduating seniors from his fiction class at a nearby cafe. Wallace answered their jittery writer’s-future questions. “He got choked up at the end,” recalls one of his students. “He started to tell us how much he would miss us, and he began to cry. And because I had never seen Dave cry, I thought he was just joking. Then, awfully, he sniffled and said, ‘Go ahead and laugh — here I am crying — but I really am going to miss all of you’” (Rolling Stone, p. 111).

Bürgerhospital Stuttgart

Index of Names Achberger, Karen: 64–65 Adenauer, Konrad: 159 Adorno, Theodor: 24, 47, 139 Allan, Seán: 155 Alter, Robert: 124 Ameriks, Karl: 73 Angermeier, John S.: 90 Aristotle: 30, 72, 136, 150 Arkush, Allan: 25 Arnim, Ludwig Achim von: 12 Asmuth, Bernhard: 139 Atta, Mohamed: 166 Austen, Jane: 221–222, 232–234 Baader, Andreas: 150, 154, 157, 160 Bachmann, Ingeborg: 63–67 Bacon, Francis: 71–74, 81 Bahr, Christian: 260 Bahr, Ehrhard: 120 Bance, Alan F.: 89–90 Banz, Stefan: 139 Barth, Ilse-Marie: 245 Barth, Karl: 44 Barthel, Wolfgang: 64 Bauer, Esther K.: 212 Bauer, Felice: 12, 77, 79 Bauer Pickar, Gertrud: 182 Beck, Thomas: 64 Becker, Hartmut: 60 Beesley, Lisa: 263, 267 Beethoven, Ludwig van: 33–35, 45 Benjamin, Walter: 139 Berendsohn, Walter: 113 Bergemann, Fritz: 74, 104 Bernini, Cornelia: 96, 99 Bertram, Klaus: 160 Biermann, Wolf: 182 Bishop, Paul: 30 Bloom, Harold: 26, 195–196 Blume, Bernhard: 35 Blumenthal, Lieselotte: 30, 52 Boccaccio, Giovanni: 104 Böll, Heinrich: 153–155 Böttiger, Karl August: 6 Bohnert, Joachim: 53 Bohrer, Karl Heinz: 176, 243

Bonaparte, Napoleon: 8–9, 34, 46, 94, 186, 189 Borchmeyer, Dieter: 96, 106–107 Born, Jürgen: 16 Bowen, Elizabeth: 221 Braunbeck, Helga G.: 184 Brecht, Bertolt: 17–21, 72, 90, 135, 191 Brentano, Clemens: 5–6, 248 Breuer, Ingo: 60, 76, 235, 244 Brockmeier, Jens: 63 Brown, Hilda Meldrum: 118 Brown, Robert McAfee: 44 Browning, Robert M.: 18 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich: 43 Buber, Martin: 117, 119 Bürger, Jan: 164 Burke, Edmund: 28, 151 Bynum, Caroline Walker: 146 Champlin, Jeffrey: 22 Cixous, Hélène: 14, 144 Claeys, Gregory: 28 Clément, Catherine: 14 Cocteau, Jean: 142–144 Collenberg-Gonzalez, Carrie: 21–22 Colli, Giorgio: 27 Constantine, David: 19, 149, 186, 201, 257, 267 Coulson, Michael: 24 Cuonz, Daniel: 21, 170 Cuyler, Louise: 61 Dahlstrom, Daniel O.: 29 Dante (Alighieri): 32 Darwin, Charles: 71 Dawkins, Richard: 70–72 DeJean, Joan: 72 Delabar, Walter: 96 Deleuze, Gilles: 13, 136–137, 147, 176 Descartes, René: 71, 81 Detken, Anke: 138 Diderot, Denis: 57, 232 Didi-Huberman, Georges: 147 Dinesen, Ruth: 113–114 Doctorow, Edgar Lawrence.: 21, 45, 185, 189–191, 194–196, 223, 239 Donin, Hayim Halevy: 125 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor: 33–34, 41–42

284 Index Drees, Hajo: 153 Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt: 36 Dupree, Mary Helen: 21 Dyck, J. William: 90 Dyck, Julie: 90–91 Dyer, Denys: 122, 124 Eckermann, Johann Peter: 74, 104 Eichendorff, Joseph Freiherr von: 21, 45–58, 61 Ellington, James Wesley: 40 Elsaesser, Thomas: 14, 156–157 Emm, Amy: 21 Emrich, Wilhelm: 69 Engler, Jürgen: 184 Ensslin, Gudrun: 150, 157, 160 Ernst, Paul: 105 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner: 155–159, 163 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb: 160–161, 186 Fielding, Henry: 221–222, 227, 232 Fink, Karl J.: 19, 22, 26–27 Fischer, Bernd: 18, 21–22, 75, 99, 186 Förger, Annette: 64 Fontane, Theodor: 12, 164 Frenz, Horst: 93 Freud, Sigmund: 30–31, 41, 99, 201, 207–209 Friedrich Wilhelm III: 7 Frühwald, Wolfgang: 46, 57 Fucík, Bedrich: 99, 105 Furst, Lilian R.: 69, 91, 101 Gailus, Andreas: 26 Gearey, John: 124 Geißner, Hellmut: 120 Gilbert, Daniel: 75 Glauert, Amanda: 61 Goebel, Robert O.: 47 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von: 6, 10– 11, 14, 17, 22, 26, 28, 30, 32–35, 45, 54, 61, 70, 72, 74, 87, 92, 95– 99, 103–110, 113, 115, 136, 144, 152, 182, 211, 239, 242, 267, 271 Goetz, Rainald: 149, 161–163 Goldammer, Peter: 35, 241, 246 Golffing, Francis: 88 Gordon, J. J.: 64 Graener, Paul: 63 Grandin, John M.: 69–70, 73, 77–79

Grathoff, Dirk: 169, 241, 243 Greenberg, Jeff: 193 Greenberg, Martin: 88, 115, 224 Gregori, Ferdinand: 5–6 Greiner, Bernhard: 75, 77 Grell, Petra: 64 Greven, Jochen: 174 Grimm, Jacob: 140 Grimm, Wilhelm: 7, 140 Griswold-Nickel, Jennifer Ann: 62–63 Guattari, Félix: 13, 136–137, 147, 176 Günderode, Karoline von: 153, 165, 169, 180–182 Günzel, Klaus: 36 Guevara, Ernesto Che: 151 Gutjahr, Ortrud: 67–68, 160 Haas, Robert: 61 Häker, Horst: 150 Hafftitz, Peter: 78 Hagmann, Peter: 59–60 Haller, Albrecht von: 31 Halter, Martin: 164 Hamacher, Bernd: 76, 78 Hamilton, James W.: 192-193 Hamilton, John: 47 Hannay, Alastair: 36 Hardenberg, Karl August von: 7, 214 Hartman, Robert: 29 Hauptmann, Elisabeth: 21 Hauptmann, Gerhart: 139 Hebbel, Christian Friedrich: 12 Hebbeler, James: 73 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: 29, 34, 160–161, 214 Heidegger, Martin: 139–140, 160–161 Heimböckel, Dieter: 57 Hein, Christoph: 21, 185, 187, 189– 195, 218, 244 Heller, Erich: 12 Henze, Hans Werner: 59, 63–67 Herder, Johann Gottfried: 23–29, 33, 43 Hermann, Judith: 21, 197–219 Herwig, Malte: 89 Hesse, Hermann: 12 Heurck, Jan van: 180, 182 Heuss, Theodor: 159 Heyse, Paul: 104

Index 285 High, Jeffrey L.: 21–22, 52, 96, 99, 104–105 Hilzinger, Sonja: 184 Hindenburg, Carl: 183 Hinderer, Walter: 29, 65, 239, 243 Hinze, Klaus-Peter: 28 Hitler, Adolf: 44, 155, 157 Høystad, Ole M.: 136 Hölderlin, Johann Christian Friedrich: 160–16l Hoeps, Thomas: 54–55, 163 Hörnigk, Frank: 132 Hoffer, Hans: 160 Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus: 12 Holland, John H.: 71, 84 Holme, Christopher: 116 Holmquist, Bengt: 120 Holyoak, Keith J.: 71 Holz, Hans Heinz: 38 Homer: 30, 224 Horkheimer, Max: 24 Hoyer, Jennifer M.: 21–22, 113 Hüser, Rembert: 161 Humboldt, Wilhelm von: 27 Hume, David: 18, 75 Hughes, Robert: 74 Iffland, August Wilhelm: 6 Ishiguro, Hidé: 72 Jacobs, Carol: 56 James, Henry: 221 Jancik, Hans: 61 Jardine, Lisa: 74 Jelinek, Elfriede: 21, 149, 160–161, 163 Johns, Keith T.: 61 Johnson, Lyndon Baynes: 268 Johnson, Mark: 76 Jung, Carl: 30 Kaes, Anton: 156–157, 159, 217–218 Kafka, Franz: 12–13, 17, 21, 36, 39–43, 69–70, 73, 77–85, 90, 104, 136–137 Kalaga, Wojciech: 49 Kalb, Jonathan: 132–133, 142, 144, 153, 164 Kant, Immanuel: 9, 13, 18, 24, 26, 29, 35, 37, 40–42, 45–46, 69–70, 73, 75–77, 98–99, 152, 174, 182–183, 200–201, 205, 215, 235 Kanzog, Klaus: 60, 241, 243

Kaufmann, Walter: 30 Kehlmann, Daniel: 176 Kierkegaard, Søren: 29, 36, 40–43 Kimmig, Stephan: 68–68 King, Jr., Martin Luther: 43 Kittler, Friedrich: 139 Kittler, Wolf: 152, 186 Kleist, Ewald Christian von: 31 Kleist, Jürgen von: 8 Kleist, Marie von: 17, 20, 22, 149, 245, 257, 275, 280 Kleist, Ulrike von: 10, 19, 149, 155, 171, 183, 257 Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb: 31, 186 Kluge, Alexander: 157, 164 Köhler, Kai: 60, 67 Köhler, Willibald: 50 Koelb, Clayton: 77 Körner, Christian Gottfried: 32–33 Kolleritsch, Otto: 96 Koopman, Helmut: 53–54, 55 Koschel, Christine: 63 Kreps, David M.: 82 Kreutzer, Hans Joachim: 60, 64 Küp, Peter: 138 Kurzke, Hermann: 94, 101 Lakoff, George: 76 Langer, Tanja: 67, 260–261 Laqueur, Walter: 150–151 Lauper, Anja: 147 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm: 38–39, 72, 76 Lehmann, Hans-Thies: 132, 144 Lehmann, Rosamund: 221 Lentricchia, Frank: 149, 165–167 Leupold, Dagmar: 21, 149, 163–165, 246 Lilienstern, Rühle von: 8 Lindemann, Klaus: 54 Liszt, Franz: 61–62 Logan, Willis H.: 44 Lovejoy, Arthur O.: 76 Lowe-Porter, Helen Tracy: 93, 97 Lukács, Georg: 20, 47 Lützeler, Paul Michael: 53 Mahoney, Dennis F.: 46 Mann, Heinrich: 97, 103 Mann, Thomas: 12, 15–17, 20–21, 87– 110

286 Index Marmontel, Jean-François: 57 Maron, Monika: 14–15 Marquardt, Hans-Jochen: 64, 244 Martin-Sperry, Carol: 142 Martini, Christian Ernst: 38, 216 Mattes, Eva: 155 Massumi, Brian: 176 Maughan, Curtis: 21–22, 263, 266 Maupertuis, Pierre Louis: 25 Mayer, Brigitte Maria: 132 Mayr, Ernst: 70 McAuliffe, Jody: 149, 165–167, 260 McEwan, Ian: 21, 221–239 Mead, Matthew: 116 Mead, Ruth: 116 Mehigan, Tim: 18, 21–22, 75, 82, 99, 104 Meinhof, Ulrike: 149–155, 160–165 Meins, Holger: 150, 160 Meister, Monika: 132, 145 Mendelssohn, Moses: 24–25 Mendelssohn, Peter de: 95 Metzger, Raphael: 62 Meyer, Helen: 32 Meyer-Gosau, Frauke: 153, 181 Meyer Sherry, Peggy: 65 Micznik, Vera: 62 Middleton, Christopher: 179 Miller, Henry: 38 Möller, Irmgard: 150 Mörike, Eduard: 61 Montinari, Mazzino: 27 Moorse, George: 15 Müller, Heiner: 12, 14, 21, 131–147, 153, 163–164, 244 Müller-Salget, Klaus: 118, 245 Müller-Seidel, Walter: 35, 69, 169, 174 Müller-Sievers, Helmut: 27 Münster, Clemens: 63 Müssener, Helmut: 113 Muir, Edwin: 41 Muir, Willa: 41 Murray, Bruce Arthur: 156 Nägele, Rainer: 135, 143, 148 Nagel, Bert: 73 Nagy, Andras: 29, 36, 41 Naumann, Michael: 198 Naumann, Uwe: 119–120, 129 Negt, Oskar: 157

Neuenfels, Hans: 14, 59–60 Neumann, Gerhard: 175 Niebuhr, Karl Paul Rheinhold: 42 Niemöller, Gerhard: 44 Nienhaus, Stefan: 47 Nietzsche, Friedrich: 27, 30, 32, 84, 90–92 Nisbett, Richard E.: 71 Novak, Adolf: 34 Nussbaum, Martha: 23 Ormanns, Stefan: 245 Osthoff, Wolfgang: 32–33 Overath, Angelika: 164 Pahl, Katrin: 147 Paine, Thomas: 28 Paley, Grace: 182 Passage, Charles: 35 Perrey, Beate: 82 Petersen, Julius: 19, 30, 52, 106 Pevear, Richard: 33 Pfister, Manfred: 139 Pfuel, Ernst von: 6, 180, 259 Plachta, Bodo: 96 Plato: 72 Pocock, John Greville Agard: 28 Poe, Edgar Allan: 18 Politzer, Heinz: 174 Polt-Heinzl, Evelyne: 161 Ponten, Josef: 99, 104 Poundstone, William: 82 Rachwal, Tadeusz: 49 Raspe, Jan-Carl: 150, 157, 160 Reed, Terence J.: 89, 100 Reents, Edo: 97 Reinhold, Karl Leonhard: 73, 75 Reiss, Gunter: 89, 91 Reitz, Edgar: 156 Rentschler, Eric: 157 Richardson, Samuel: 221, 232 Rilke, Rainer Maria: 143 Robertson, Ritchie: 105 Roloff, Michael: 116 Ronell, Avital: 45–46 Rosenzweig, Franz: 21, 24, 41–43 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: 8–11, 14 Rubbert, Rainer: 67, 260 Rudolph, Andrea: 90 Ruschkowski, Klaudia: 131, 140, 142 Ryder, Frank G.: 18, 104–105

Index 287 Sachs, Nelly: 21, 113–124, 126–129 Sachsen, Sophie von: 28 Saffle, Michael: 61–62 Sander-Brahms, Helma: 14, 155 Schelm, Petra: 154 Schillbach, Brigitte: 46, 57 Schiller, Friedrich: 6, 10–11, 14, 27, 19, 29–36, 40–43, 52, 54, 62, 70, 72– 73, 87, 89, 91–92, 96, 99–100, 103– 110, 152 Schlechta, Karl: 84 Schlegel, August Wilhelm von: 73, 76, 104, 255 Schlegel, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich von: 47, 73, 86, 255 Schleyer, Hanns-Martin: 150, 157, 162 Schlinzig, Marie Isabel: 21–22 Schlöndorff, Volker: 15, 154–155 Schlösser, Rainer: 15 Schoner, Herbert: 154 Schmidt, Erich: 114 Schmidt, Helmut: 157 Schmidt, Jochen: 53 Schmidt, Raymund: 73 Schneider, Helmut J.: 176, 224, 234 Schoeck, Othmar: 59–60 Scholem, Gershom: 117 Scholl, Hans: 43 Scholl, Inge: 43 Scholl, Sophie: 43 Schütte, Uwe: 152–153, 162 Schulte, Christian: 132 Schultz, Hartwig: 46, 57 Schulz-Jander, Eva-Maria: 182 Schwerin-High, Friederike von: 21–22 Schygulla, Hanna: 157 Seeba, Hinrich C.: 225, 231 Sembdner, Helmut: 5–6, 8, 10, 17, 37, 51, 60, 77, 87, 89, 115, 141, 155, 169, 186, 201, 224, 242, 245, –256, 266 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of: 146 Shakespeare, William: 30 Sherry, Peggy Meyer: 65 Shookman, Ellis: 91 Silverthorne, Michael: 74 Simon, John: 18 Socrates: 23, 35, 40

Sontag, Susan: 179 Sprecher, Thomas: 96, 99 Stanitzek, Georg: 161 Steffen, Hans: 169 Stemann, Nicolas: 160 Stephan, Alexander: 182 Stevens, Wallace: 166 Stewart, Jon: 29 Stillmark, Hans-Christian: 132 Storch, Wolfgang: 131, 140, 142 Storm, Theodor: 105 Stock, Dora: 6 Strachey, James: 31 Syberberg, Hans-Jürgen: 15–16, 155 Telushkin, Joseph: 125–126 Thagard, Paul R.: 71 Thums, Barbara: 77 Tieck, Johann Ludwig: 12, 104 Trawick, Leonard M.: 28 Trotta, Margarethe von: 155 Trunz, Erich: 33 Tumat, Antje: 64 Tutu, Desmond: 125 Utz, Peter: 177, 180 Vaget, Hans R.: 96, 99 Venzago, Mario: 60 Viertel, Berthold: 5 Vitzthum, Wolfgang Graf: 7 Vogel, Adolphine Sophie Henriette: 7, 152, 165, 200, 241–259 Volokhonsky, Larissa: 33 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet): 57 Wagner, Wilhelm Richard: 30, 33, 103, 105, 269 Walker, Frank: 61, 63 Wallace, David Foster: 263–281 Walser, Robert: 21, 169–170, 177–180 Watzlawick, Paul: 172 Weber, Carl Maria Friedrich Ernst von: 102, 105, 134, 126 Weber, Maximilian Karl Emil: 26, 28 Wedekind, Benjamin Franklin: 12, 180 Wedler, Hans: 22, 271 Weidenbaum, Inge von: 63 Weigand, Paul: 89, 91 West, Cornel: 23–24, 43–44 Whewell, William: 71 Wicher, Andrzej: 49 Wickham, Christopher J.: 156

288 Index Wieland, Christoph Martin: 6, 37, 105 Wiese, Benno von: 30, 52 Wiesel, Elie: 44 Wiesel, Marion: 44 Wilczek, Markus: 21–22 Willson, A. Leslie: 94 Wing, Betsy: 14 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim: 72, 110 Winckelmann, Johannes: 26 Wirth, Iwan: 139 Wittkowski, Wolfgang: 53

Wolf, Christa: 12, 14, 21, 153, 161, 163, 165, 169–170, 180–184, 212, 244 Wolf, Hugo: 61–64, 67 Wolff, Kurt: 78 Zenge, Wilhelmine Charlotte von: 10, 14, 20, 37, 169, 172–174, 253 Zschokke, Johann Heinrich Daniel: 60, 175, 231 Zweig, Stefan: 21

Index 289

Index of Kleist’s Works “Allerneuester Erziehungsplan” (1810): 9 “An den Erzherzog Karl” (1809): 94 “An den König von Preußen” (1809): 94 “An die Königin Luise von Preußen” (1810): 94 “An Franz den Ersten, Kaiser von Österreich” (1809): 94 Anekdoten: 78–79 “Aufsatz, den sichern Weg des Glücks zu finden und ungestört – auch unter den größten Drangsalen des Lebens – ihn zu genießen” (1799): 9, 37, 90, 172 Berliner Abendblätter: 6–7, 45 Brief eines jungen Dichters an einen jungen Maler (1810): 11 “Das Bettelweib von Locarno” (1810): 104, 197–203, 206–209, 212, 215, 216, 218, 275–276 “Das Erdbeben in Chili” (1807/1810): 11, 74, 90, 100–104, 152, 155, 160, 162, 209, 267 Das Käthchen von Heilbronn (1810): 5, 266 “Das letzte Lied” (1809): 94 “Der Findling” (1811): 9, 15, 99, 102, 209, 275–276 “Der höhere Frieden” (1792/1808): 94 “Der velegene Magistrat” (1810): 275– 276 Der zerbrochne Krug (1806/1811): 5–6, 19, 45, 221–225, 228, 231, 235–239 Die Familie Schroffenstein (1803): 11, 18, 60, 160 Die Hermannsschlacht (1808): 9, 13, 94, 152, 160, 186 “Die Marquise von O…” (1808): 6–7, 45, 57, 74, 91, 100, 102, 106, 275– 276 “Die tiefste Erniedrigung” (1809): 94 “Die Verlobung in St. Domingo” (1811): 13–14, 74, 82, 103, 269

“Einleitung der Zeitschrift Germania” (1809): 94 Erzählungen (1810, 1811): 6, 57, 114 “Gebet des Zoroaster” (1810): 12 “Germania an ihre Kinder” (1809): 94 “Katechismus der Deutschen” (1809): 94 “Kriegslied der Deutschen” (1809): 94 Michael Kohlhaas (1810): 11–12, 15, 20, 23, 32–43, 45–47, 50–56, 69, 76– 81, 85, 95, 97, 113–118, 121–129, 131, 152, 154–155, 159, 165, 167, 185–188, 191–195, 223, 266, 276 “Notwehr” (1810): 94 Penthesilea (1808): 5, 11, 12–14, 35, 67, 9–97, 141, 144, 152–153, 160, 165– 166, 263, 270, 271 Phöbus (1808): 77 Prinz Friedrich von Homburg (1811): 5, 11, 21, 63–65, 67, 94, 160, 177, 242, 250, 255–256 “Rettung der Deutschen” (1809/1810): 94 Robert Guiskard (1802–1803/1808): 95 “Satirische Briefe” (1809): 94 “Über das Marionettentheater” (1810): 89–90, 133, 175–176, 233 “Über die Rettung von Österreich” (1809): 94