Death wish
Jeffrey Meyers
Kleist: A Biography Joachim Maass Translated by Ralph Manheim (Seeker & Warburg £12.95)
The Prussian playwright Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811) is known to most English readers through the film of his story The Marquise of O., Mann's enthusiastic essay on his play Amphitryon Cale pro- foundest and most beautiful theatre piece in the world') and Kafka's comments on his bizarre life. 'Of the four men I consider to be my true blood relations,' Kafka wrote, `Grillparzer, Dostoyevsky, Kleist and Flaubert, perhaps Kleist, when compelled by outer and inner necessity to shoot himself on the Wannsee, was the only one to find the right solution.' Both Kleist and Kafka were dedicated to their all- consuming art, suffered agonies of com- position and portrayed extreme states of
being; both experienced prolonged psychological disorder and physical malaise; both were uneasy with women always the fiancé, never the husband; both were at odds with themselves, their families and society; both were writers 'whom the times could not sustain.'
The life of Kleist, who loved mystifica- tion and destroyed all his papers, is a minefield for the biographer: filled with
contradictions, obscurities, enigmas, rumours, gaps in the record (he once disap- peared without a trace for three whole months). This first biography of Kleist
available in English, originally published in 1957 and revised 20 years later, is a somewhat skeletal and speculative book. It has no bibliography or notes on the sources, but is scrupulous in the use of evidence.
Kleist, whom Maass calls 'Germany's greatest dramatic genius,' came from a noble Protestant family that had produced 18 generals. He was a contemporary of Haydn and Mozart, Schiller and Kant; his plays were produced disastrously by Goethe and with moderate success by E.T.A. Hoff- mann; and his letters were edited by Lud- wig Tieck. Kleist's works were written against the tumultuous background of Napoleon's triumphs over the Germans; he was thrice suspected of espionage and im- prisoned in France as a spy. His patriotic play, The Prince of Homburg, meant to rouse the Germans against the enemy, was
— like most of his work during his lifetime
— badly received. Maass is interesting on the sources of the works (Montaigne for The Marquise, Plautus and Moliere for Amphitryon), but assumes rather than demonstrates their greatness. His brief story, The Earthquake in Chile — 'full of life, horror, love, and death, of lust and passion', of characters destroyed by an orgiastic eruption of darkest evil — is characteristically overloaded with storm and stress.
The thickset, unprepossessing Kleist had a round head, reddish hair and bulbous nose. Joyless in youth, a stranger in his own family, his nervous system undermined by study, he formed the first of his several suicide pacts in childhood. He was gloomy, restless, irritable, had mysterious illnesses and breakdowns, frequently behaved like a madman. He was challenged to duels, wrote a story on the subject, but never ac- tually fought. He 'outlived his heart' and felt many 'dismal, sorrowful moments, in which consolation is altogether absent.' He was often idle and performed indifferently as a student of science and economics, an army officer, a civil servant, an editor of a literary journal in Dresden and a newspaper in Berlin. An aimless wanderer and resident in a dozen cities from Paris to Prague, he was upset by the church bells in Wiirzburg which reminded him of the Catholic religion as chains remind the prisoner of his solitude, and by the censored library which contained 'nothing but chivalrous romances, on the right with ghosts, on the left without ghosts.' He was a prodigal spender, always impoverished and depen- dent on an unreliable sister and unrespon- sive patrons. When they chided him for not writing letters, he retorted: 'The time may come when a blank page from me will make you shed tears of joy.'
Kleist presciently believed 'It is not we who know, it is primarily a certain state we are in that knows'. But he found it difficult to achieve that state and was disturbed by the relation of brain and body, that 'amaz- ing linkage of the mind with a bundle of bowels and entrails.' He may have gone to Wurzburg to be secretly treated for syphilis, and was certainly sexually incapacitated or impotent. Works like The Marquise and The Foundling portray his fantasies of rape, and he consummated his spiritual love in suicide rather than in sex. His morbid partner was a 31-year-old married woman, Henriette Vogel, who had incurable cancer of the uterus and begged Kleist to kill her. They went to an inn on the Wannsee, a mile from Potsdam, and appeared to be two merry guests, larking on the lake. After operatic, almost voluptuous preparations, he shot her in the heart and himself in the head.
Kleist's death was his first striking suc- cess and placed him in the tradition of self- destructive poets that extends from Chat- terton to Sylvia Plath. The main interest in his archetypal 'modern' life is the inex- orable drive towards what a friend called 'one of the most magnificent suicides of all time.' The story of Kleist's death appeared in The Times, became an international triumph, enriched his legend and con- tributed — as much as Penthesilea or Michael Kohlhaas — to his lasting fame.
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