Playwright and poet, born in Frankfurt an der Oder, E Germany. He left the army in 1799 to study, and soon devoted himself to literature. He eloquently expresses the conflict of reason and emotion, heroism and cowardice, dreaming and action. His best plays are still popular, notably Prinz Friedrich von Homburg (1821) and his finest tale, Michael Kohlhaas (181011). He committed suicide in 1811.
Bernd Heinrich Wilhelm von Kleist (October 18, 1777 – November 21, 1811) was a German poet, dramatist, novelist and short story writer. The Kleist Prize, a prestigious prize for German literature, is named after him.
Life
Kleist was born at Frankfurt (Oder), and after a scanty education, he entered the Prussian army in 1792, served in the Rhine campaign of 1796 and retired from the service in 1799 with the rank of lieutenant.
In the autumn of 1802 Kleist returned to Germany;
In 1809 he went to Prague, and ultimately settled in Berlin, where he edited (1810/1811) the Berliner Abendblätter. Captivated by the intellectual and musical accomplishments of a certain Frau Henriette Vogel, Kleist, who was himself more disheartened and embittered than ever, agreed to do her bidding and die with her, carrying out this resolution by first shooting the lady and then himself on the shore of the Wannsee near Potsdam, on the 21st of November 1811.
Kleist's whole life was filled by a restless striving after ideal and illusory happiness, and this is largely reflected in his work.
Literary Works
His first tragedy, Die Familie Schroffenstein, has been already referred to;
In comedy, Kleist made a name with Der zerbrochne Krug (1811), while Amphitryon (1808), an adaptation of Moliere's comedy, is of less importance. Of Kleist's other dramas, Die Hermannschlacht (1809) is a dramatic treatment of an historical subject and is full of references to the political conditions of his own times. This, together with the drama Prinz Friedrich von Homburg, the latter accounted Kleist's best work, was first published by Ludwig Tieck in Kleist's Hinterlassene Schriften (1821).
Kleist was also a master in the art of narrative, and of his Gesammelte Erzählungen (1810-1811), Michael Kohlhaas, in which the famous Brandenburg horse dealer in Martin Luther's day is immortalized, is one of the best German stories of its time. The Earthquake in Chile) and Die heilige Cäcilie oder die Gewalt der Musik are also fine examples of Kleist's story telling as is Die Marquise von O.
Apparently a Romantic by context, predilection, and temperament, Kleist subverts clichéd ideas of Romantic longing and themes of nature and innocence and irony, instead taking up subjective emotion and contextual paradox to show individuals in moments of crises and doubt, with both tragic and comic outcomes, but as often as not his dramatic and narrative situations end without resolution.
Seen as a precursor to Ibsen and modern drama because of his attention to the real and detailed causes of characters’ emotional crises, he was also understood as a nationalist poet in the German context of the early twentieth century, and was instrumentalized by Nazi scholars and critics as a kind of proto-Nazi author. Kleist reception of the last generation has repudiated nationalist criticism and concentrated instead mainly on psychological, structural and post-structural, philosophical, and narratological modes of reading.
Kleist wrote one of the lasting comedies and most staged plays of the German canon, Der zerbrochene Krug ("The Broken Jug", 1803-05), in which a provincial judge gradually and inadvertently shows himself to have committed the crime under investigation. To his question, whether this is a dream, the regimental commander Kottwitz replies, “A dream, what else?”
Kleist wrote his eight novellas later in his life and they show his radically original prose style, which is at the same time careful and detailed, almost bureaucratic, but also full of grotesque, ironic illusions and various sexual, political, and philosophical references. In Die Verlobung in Santo Domingo (“Betrothal in St. Domingo”, 1811) Kleist examines the themes of ethics, loyalty, and love in the context of the colonial rebellion in Haiti of 1803, driving the story with the expected forbidden love affair between a young white man and a black rebel woman, though the reader's expectations are confounded in typically Kleistian fashion, since the man is not really French and the woman is not really black. Here for the first time in German literature Kleist addresses the politics of a race-based colonial order and shows, through a careful exploration of a kind of politics of color (black, white, and intermediate shades), the self-deception and ultimate impossibility of existence in a world of absolutes.
Philosophical Essays
Kleist is also famous for his essays on subjects of aesthetics and psychology which, to the closer look, show an unfathomable insight into the metaphysical questions discussed by first-rate philosophers of his time, like Kant, Fichte, or Schelling.
In his first of his larger essays, "Über die allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden" (On the gradual development of thoughts in the process of speaking), Kleist shows the conflict of thought and feeling in the soul of man, leading to unforeseeable results through incidents that provoke the inner forces of the soul (which can be compared to Freud's notion of the "unconscious") to express themselves in a spontaneous flow of ideas and words, both stimulating one another to further development.
The metaphysical theory in and behind the text is that consciousness, man's ability to reflect, is the expression of a fall out of nature's harmony, which may lead to disfunction, when the flow of feelings is interrupted or blocked by thought or to the stimulation of ideas, when the flow of feelings is cooperating or struggling with thought, without being able to reach a state of total harmony, where thought and feeling, life and consciousness come to be identical through the total insight of the latter, an idea elaborated and analyzed in Kleist's second essay "The Puppet Theatre" (Das Marionettentheater). Only as a utopian ideal this state of perfection may lead our endless strife for improvement (one of Fichte's main ideas which seems to have crossed Kleist's thoughts).
And without saying this expressedly, works of art, like Kleist's own may offer an artificial image of this ideal, though this is in itself really wrenched out from the same sinful state of insufficiency and rupture that it wants to transcend.
Kleist's philosophy is the ironic rebuff of all theories of human perfection, whether this perfection is projected in a golden age at the beginníng (Schiller), in the present (Hegel), or in the future (as Marx would have seen it). Josephe in Kleist's "Earthquake in Chile" is presented as emotionally and socially repressed and incapable of self-control, but still clinging to religious ideas and hopes.
Bibliography
His Gesammelte Schriften were published by Ludwig Tieck (3 vols. Minde-Pouet, Heinrich von Kleist, seine Sprache und sein Stil (1897); Heinrich Von Kleist The Ambiguity of Art and the Necessity of Form. DFFB Production Plot: The last three days Kleist's life. With his lover, Henriette Vogel, dying of cancer, Kleist philosophizes about life and welcomes his planned suicide.
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