Selected Prose of Heinrich Von Kleist (27 page)

“When I appeared before him in stunned amazement, the bear stood upright on its hind legs, with his back to a post to which he was attached, his right paw raised and ready to strike, looking me straight in the eye: this was his fencing position. And finding myself face to face with such an opponent, I did not know if I was dreaming; but Sir von G . . . , egged me on: ‘Thrust man! Thrust!' he said. See if you can teach him a thing or two! And having gotten over my initial amazement, I lunged with my rapier; the bear made a very slight movement with his paw and parried my thrust. I tried with feints to trick him; the bear did not budge. And once again I lunged with a nimble stroke that would have pierced without fail any human breast; but the bear made a very slight motion with its paw and parried the thrust. Now I was almost as befuddled as had been the young Sir von G . . . The bear's perfect calm helped rob me of my own composure, I varied thrusts and feints, sweat dripped from my brow: for naught! Not only did the bear, like the foremost fencer in the world, parry all my thrusts; but, unlike any human counterpart would have done, not a single time did he go for my feints: Looking at me eye to eye, as if he could read my soul, he stood stock still, paw raised and ready, and if my thrusts were ruses, he did not even budge.

“Do you believe this story?”

“Absolutely!” I replied with cheerful applause; “I'd believe it from the lips of any stranger; all the more so from you!”

“Well then, my fine friend,” said Mr. C . . . , “you now have all
the knowledge you need to grasp my meaning. We see that in the organic world, to the same degree that reflection gets darker and weaker, grace grows ever more radiant and dominant. But just as two lines intersect on one side of a point, and after passing through infinity, suddenly come together again on the other side; or the image in a concave mirror suddenly reappears before us after drawing away into the infinite distance, so too, does grace return once perception, as it were, has traversed the infinite – such that it simultaneously appears the purest in human bodily structures that are either devoid of consciousness or which possess an infinite consciousness, such as in the jointed manikin or the god.”

“In which case,” I observed, a bit befuddled, “would we then have to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge again to fall back into the state of innocence?”

“Undoubtedly,” he replied; “which will be the last chapter of the history of the world.”

 

*
David Teniers the Younger, Flemish genre painter, 1610–1690.

*
Marie-Jean-Augustin Vestris, a.k.a. Auguste Vestris (1760 –1842), a French dancer dubbed “le dieu de la danse” (the god of dance).

*
Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Italian Baroque sculptor and architect (1598–1680)

(an afterword)

· · ·

In a letter to his fiancée, Wilhelmine von Zenge, dated November 16–18, 1800, Heinrich von Kleist, a 23-year-old ex-army officer at the time who had not yet published a single word and would soon break off the engagement to take up a passionate romance with pen and ink, described his state of mind:

On that evening of the most important day of my life I went walking through Würzberg. As the sun set, it seemed to me as if my happiness were sinking. I shuddered at the thought that I might perhaps have to abandon everything dear to me. So there I went, walking through that vaulted doorway, my mind turned in upon itself, thinking back on the city. Why, I thought, does this arch not come crashing down since it has no support? It holds, I replied, because all the stones want to
cave in at once – and from this thought I drew an indescribably comforting consolation that has stood by me until this decisive moment, always giving me hope that I, too, would manage to hold on if life were to let me fall.

In the mad tumble that ended eleven years later with a fatal bullet through the head, one of Germany's most enigmatic authors embraced his fall heart and soul, suspending the laws of gravity long enough to document the descent in plays, stories and essays that have held up over time.

It would be hard to imagine a personality more contradictory than that of their creator, a man at once more brilliantly adept at the practice of his art and more painfully inept at the business of living.

Born October 18, 1777, in the market town of Frankfurt-an-der-Oder, in the Margraviate of Brandenburg, into a family of proud Prussian Junkers, a lineage that produced 18 generals in its genetic pool, Bernd Heinrich Wilhelm von Kleist (a.k.a. Heinrich von Kleist) was predestined to bear arms and constitutionally disinclined to do so. Entering the army at age 15 and rising to the rank of second lieutenant in the elite King's Guards Regiment in Potsdam, he proceeded seven years later to resign his commission to pursue liberal studies, thereby vexing his next of kin and courting the disfavor of the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm II. Returning to Frankfurt to attend the university, after reading Kant, Kleist suffered a crisis of confidence and a paralyzing bout of existential doubt that forever shook his faith in pure reason and dispelled any prospect of an academic path, further rankling the already sorely disapproving clan. And when, thanks to family connections, he managed to get his foot
in the door of the Prussian state bureaucracy, the last refuge of the prodigal aristocrat, and landed an entry-level position in the Royal Chamber of Crown Lands in Königsberg, he promptly lost interest and proceeded to squander all good will, once again seeking his discharge, resolved to pursue a free life of letters. Fed up, the family broke off ties.

Kleist left for Dresden, a cultural capital at the time, but on the way an unfortunate misunderstanding with Napoleon's provisional military government, then occupying the region, landed him in the clink on suspicion of espionage. He was marched off to the Fort de Joux, the forbidding prison in which the Haitian rebel leader Toussaint l'Ouverture (1743–1803) had met his end. The experience would later provide the seed of Kleist's story “The Betrothal in Santo Domingo.” Grim as the conditions were, the period of incarceration proved a welcome respite from responsibility. Later transferred to considerably more hospitable quarters in Châlonssur-Marne, Kleist put the time to good use, writing “The Marquise of O . . .” and “The Earthquake in Chile.” While still a prisoner, he learned that a friend had managed to get the latter story published in a respected magazine, the
Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände
(Morning Journal for Cultivated Classes). Shortly thereafter, by the terms of the Peace of Tilsit, Prussia capitulated to France, and its prisoners, including Kleist, were released.

Kleist went straight to Dresden, where he had high hopes of launching a successful literary career. Yet he proved remarkably clumsy at maneuvering the social niceties, alienating with immoderate words and rash behavior many of his would-be patrons and benefactors, including the aged poet Christoph Martin Wieland and the
éminence grise
of German letters, Johann Wolfgang Goethe in Weimar. Lacking financial backing and adequate readership, his shaky business venture
Phöbus
, a literary review, soon went under, as did a subsequent venture,
Berliner Abendblätter
, a newspaper launched in Berlin, though both served as venues for his work.

But even his literary
succès d'estime
, such as it was, proved a Pyrrhic victory. With a few notable exceptions, Kleist's contemporaries missed the point and dismissed the result. His published plays were ridiculed. His stories were condemned by scandalized critics as “hack jobs,” “sheer nonsense,” “senseless frivolities,” “the work of a deranged mind,” “un-German, stiff, twisted and coarse.” As to the assessment of his next of kin, the author complained in a letter of 1811 to Marie von Kleist, a cousin by marriage and confidant, that his siblings viewed him as “a good-for-nothing link in the social chain no longer worthy of any attachment.”

“The truth is,” Kleist confided to a friend, “that I find what I imagine to be beautiful, not what I actually produce. Were I able to engage in any other useful pursuit, I would gladly do so: I only write because I can't do anything else.”

His own verdict on the work, communicated to his half-sister Ulrike, was as witty as it was merciless: “Hell gave me my half-talents, Heaven grants a man a complete talent or none.”

On November 21, 1811, the house of cards came tumbling down. Acting as judge, jury, executioner and the condemned, in a suicide pact with Henriette Vogel, the wife of an acquaintance, a pact of convenience, rather than romance – she was dying of cancer and he had had enough – he put them both out of their misery with two pistol shots.

Yet till the end Kleist managed to press his Prussian discipline and bellicose breeding to the service of his writing, sublimating tactical maneuvers into intricate syntax, waging a one-man war with society and himself, and in the process hammering the German language into a powerful weapon of expression. His plays, “The Broken Jug,” “Penthesilea,” the fragment “Robert Guiskard,” and “Prinz Friedrich von Homburg,” would become classics of the German theater, remarkable for their mingling of the idiomatic and the poetic, the impossible and the matter-of-fact, though he never saw them staged.

The present volume is devoted to his prose. It includes two insightful meditations on the nature of thought and art, “On the Gradual Formulation of Thoughts While Speaking” and “On the Theater of Marionettes,” and his most powerful narratives, “The Earthquake in Chile,” “The Betrothal in Santo Domingo,” “The Marquise of O . . . ,” “Michael Kohlhaas,” and “St. Cecilia, or the Power of Music,” in which Kleist forged peerless prototypes of German fiction that would influence writers for generations to come.

A word concerning the inclusion of “The Betrothal in Santo Domingo.” One of Kleist's most emotionally gripping, gut-wrenching stories, this tragic tale of the love of a white fugitive and a light-skinned, mixed-blooded erstwhile slave, set during the Haitian revolution, is soaked in racial clichés. Today's reader will wince at the portrayal of the villain Congo Hoango, “a dreadful old Negro,” who repays the kindness of his former master who granted him his freedom by putting a bullet through the latter's head, and slakes “his inhuman bloodlust” on a murderous rampage. All the more repulsive, albeit complex, character, his common-law wife, Babekan,
a cunning mulatto, enlists the seductive charms of the heroine, her lovely, young
mestizo
daughter, Toni, to lure an unsuspecting white fugitive, Gustav, into a trap. But falling in love with him – after he has had his way with her – competing blood lines and allegiances battle it out in Toni's heart.

Fashioning a faithful English take, this translator was inevitably reminded of the problems of staging “The Merchant of Venice” in our time. Like Jessica in “The Merchant . . . ,” Toni betrays her next of kin to follow her heart. Yet whereas Shakespeare resolves the conflict in a cutting comedic fashion – even if the laughs may jar modern ears – Kleist, no doubt hearkening back to the double death in another Shakespearean classic, whips up the frenzy of passion and betrayal, perceived and real, to a fever pitch finally defused in a blood bath. But the plot is so adroitly knotted, the action so compelling, and the young heroine so emotionally vulnerable and endearing – no character in Kleist's fiction is quite as scintillating – that, racist though it may be, “The Betrothal . . .” makes for a thoroughly riveting read. It would have been a literary calumny to leave it out.

No less a master than Thomas Mann recalled discovering “the work of Heinrich von Kleist early on; it made a powerful impression on me then and this impression was always confirmed and renewed in the course of my life.” Mann paid tribute to the language in an essay posthumously published as the preface to an English language edition of Kleist's tales issued in America by Criterion Books:

Kleist's narrative language is something completely unique. It is not enough to read it as “historical” – even in his day nobody
wrote as he did. [. . .] An impetus squeezed out with iron, absolutely un-lyrical detachment, brings forth tangled, knotted, overloaded sentences [. . .] painstakingly soldered together [. . .] and driven by a breathless tempo.
*

Another ardent admirer, Franz Kafka, found inspiration for his own style and stance in those of the disaffected Prussian Junker, treasuring, in particular, “Michael Kohlhaas” – “a story I read with true reverence.” There are indeed striking parallels in the narrative technique employed by the two authors, a shared fondness for bureaucratic precision and dispassionate description to evoke the ineffable. Kafka extolled Kleist in a letter to his own betrothed, the subsequently forsaken Felice Bauer, as “one of the four men I consider to be my true blood-relations.”
^†
The German satirist and critic Kurt Tucholsky recognized this elective affinity, calling Kafka “the grandson of Kleist.”

Kleist formulated his own fate in words that prefigure Kafka: “Oh, it is my inborn misshapen tendency always to live elsewhere than where I am, and in a time gone by or not yet come.”

The future confirmed Kleist's assessment. His Marquise inspired the spare aesthetic of the French Nouvelle Vague in Eric Rohmer's faithful screen adaptation (in which the young Bruno Ganz pulls off
a tour-de-force performance, embodying the soul of the author). And in an artistic tribute on this side of the Atlantic, E. L. Doctorow effectively reset Kleist's Kohlhaas in blackface, conjoining injustice and racism, in his novel,
Ragtime
.