Kleist’s Anecdotes and Fables

 

      Among his duties as editor of the Berliner Abendblātter, Heinrich von Kleist wrote feuilletons to fill the journal’s pages.  Sometimes these were like the News of the Weird of the day, sometimes little fables of his own composition. In the small scope of the form, Kleist sometimes manages to create the same tone characteristic of the rest of his oeuvre: a sort of bemused wonder in the face of a fate at once utterly indifferent and yet capable of fiercely ironic circumstances, the subject experiencing the strongest of passions while suspended in a dispassionate cosmos.

     Among the admirers of these little works was Franz Kafka, whose friend Max Brod claimed not only a stylistic similarity but also psychoanalytic parallels between the two writers.  (See Franz Kafka: a Biography, p. 32 ff.) 

          Though it is more artificial in English than in German, the primary quality I ought to preserve was Kleist’s lanky, wandering syntax, unfolding phrase by phrase just as lived experience arrives a bit at a time.

     Brief comments in italics follow each translation.

 

  

Anecdote from the most recent war

     The most monstrous joke perhaps that has passed men’s lips since the world was created was made by a drummer who, I believe, served in the last war in what was then the Puttkamer regiment, a man of whom, as you will soon hear, neither Greek nor Roman history can offer any counterpart.  After the Prussian army had fallen in Jena this man had got hold of a gun with which he alone carried on the battle, such that he shot any French who came within range on the country roads, striking them down and plundering them until a squad of French gendarmes managed to track him and seize him, dragging him into the city where, as it happened, he was condemned to be executed.  When he was brought to the place where the sentence was to be carried out, knowing well that any defense was now impossible, he asked the colonel commanding the detachment for one favor.  When the colonel, his officers crowding about him in waiting and wondering what the man might say, asked what he requested, the man pulled down his pants and said that he would like to be shot in the anus so that he might avoid having a new hole in his skin.  One must note the of the man who, in this extremity, never departed from his role as a beater on sound skins.   

 

     The reader may think of Orwell’s condemned man, stepping aside a puddle to avoid wetting his feet on his way to being hung.  In a way, this drummer maintained his dignity in defeat no less than did Montaigne’s tribal victim who spit at his captors while under torture but with the characteristic Kleistian bizarre individuality.  Thus he earned the poet’s applause.  Surely simply displaying his rear was a sly form of humiliating his captors, since his stated motive is patently absurd.

     Freud taught that jokes are a method for handling anxiety, and mortality is certainly a source of distress.  The soldier’s “Shakespearean quality,” his faithfulness to his role, first evident in his refusal to surrender, persists in a more pointedly dramatic if bizarre form at his execution.  

 

 

Anecdote

     A Capuchin monk accompanied a Swabian to the gallows on a very rainy day.  On the way the condemned man complained to God that he had to walk such a bitter route in such poor and hostile weather.  Wishing to provide Christian consolation, the Capuchin said, “You rogue, why would you complain like that when you need go only one way, while I must make my way back again in this weather.”  -- Whoever can feel how dreary it is for one, on even a fine day, to make one’s way back from a place of execution, will not find the expression of the monk to be foolish.

 

     While the friar may have merely meant to suggest with the orthodox thought that the world is a constant affliction and that there follows a better world (for some at least), he expresses it in such a slyly Kleistian manner that the condemned man’s last moments may have been spent puzzling over them. 

     An English speaker will have little trouble imagining the connotations of the word he uses to address the prisoner “Lump.”  It suggests more a scamp or rascal than a sinner on the threshold of Hell.  The last line poignantly indicates that the Capuchin was bemoaning the state of humanity, so fallen as to build gibbets and use them.   One who did not find an execution to be “dreary” would be a monster more frightening than those of legend.

 

 

The Dog and the Birds

     Two honorable pointers who, schooled by hunger, had come to think themselves quite smart captured anything they spotted on the ground, and one day seized a bird.  The bird, at a disadvantage as he was not in his element, gave way and hopped this way and that while his opponents felt they had triumphed; then, all at once, though sorely pressed, he lifted his wings and lofted into the air, leaving the dogs standing like oysters, those heroes of the pasture, their tails between their legs, gazing after him.

     Moral: When you mount into the air, the wise can only stand and gape.

 

     The story would not exist were it not for the fact that that bird and canine occupy different realms.  When they intersect first one and then the other is at a loss.  The pointers’ sheepish stupefaction in the end follows moments after the bird had felt itself doomed.  The moral to which the author points is heady with optimism.  Kleist surely thought of himself as that bird in joyful flight, having leapt free of limitation, though tomorrow, of course, he may not make good an escape.  

     Note that the dogs are not denied the title they have earned through their hunting.  They are capable heroes, but at a loss when out of their element.  Even the most modest of creatures is at home in its element, each has a sort of perfection which will fail out of context.  The story could have been told by Zhuang Zhou.

 

 

A Fable with No Moral

     “If I only had you,” said the man to a horse that stood before him in saddle and bridle but would not let him mount, “if I only had you as first came out of the woods, an uneducated child of nature, I could lead you quite easily over hill and dale as easily as a bird flies, just as seemed good to me, and that would be good for both of us.  However, you have learned many things, things which I, standing alone before you, as I now do, do not know, such that in the riding arena I must go to you (which God forbid) if we are to understand each other.” 

 

     Horse and man here, like dog and bird before, have irreconcilable visions.  Harmonious cooperation may be imaginable while remaining unachievable.  It is a prelapsarian fantasy, this symbiosis without friction, all the more as each gains learning and culture and strays ever further from that tightly woven interdependency we suspect must surely underlie our present confusion.  The flight of the bird lingers as an image, an ideal of psychic liberation.

Tristan’s World

This view of Tristan was written after I recently read the great romance in A. F. Hatto’s Penguin translation. Many years ago in graduate school I had slogged through the text in MHG. I cannot bring myself even now either to discard or to reread the voluminous notes I made at that time, but these comments make no scholarly pretense. I do not claim familiarity with the critical literature either, but this approach is, so far as I know, new. Parenthetical numbers refer to the Hatto paperback.

The study of literature I think would be enriched if more common readers were to record their reactions. Scholars might suggest ideas outside their areas of expertise. I suspect that even professors could learn a few things from non-specialists. Alas, I am afraid that no one today could make a living writing about literature as Edmund Wilson did without a university appointment.


     Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan is in part a hero in the old style: peerless physically, able to win every competition or single combat, a potent fighter in war. Yet he is far more an Odysseus than an Achilles, and his expertise at artifice is evinced by his cunning, trickery, and disguise, but also by his chivalry, elegance, and good taste. Tristan appears as a mysterious trickster, a shape-shifter, almost but not quite able to transform the tragic reality into which he is born. Tristan assumes disguises as a merchant’s son and as Tantris the minstrel, just as his mother Blancheflor had disguised herself to gain access to his father Rivalin. While the somewhat similar figure of Melville’s Confidence-Man plays hide-and-seek with the reader and remains wholly elusive in spite of the solid reality of the river boat, Tristan is wholly engaged in human suffering. Rather like Jesus, but lacking the promise of restorative justice after death, Tristan, a courtly elitist, a refined connoisseur among heroes, achieves his end through a love-death after enduring to the utmost the most ordinary of passions: love-longing, frustration, and mortality.
     The hero’s end, misled into thinking that his beloved is not arriving, affirms the sadness his name suggests while underlining the central motif of signs improperly interpreted, of counterfeit and genuine, deceptive and truthful, generating a scintillating play of appearance and reality. Different readings of Tristan are then unsurprising. One might read the epic as a post-modern spectacle with participants identifying themselves with conventions or ironic tropes on conventions to pass the time like Estragon and Vladimir though in Gottfried the setting may be a palace or a field of war and in Tristan a great deal happens, though the events generally seem governed by chance and guess-work and error. For all the sententiae dealt out here and there, Gottfried seems a profoundly skeptical man.
     The story itself is decentered. Unlike many authors of fiction until well into the nineteenth century, Gottfried does not claim that the story is true, only that it is of the sort that can uplift and entertain “noble hearts.” He notes the multiplicity of versions and promises to provide the very best using Thomas as his principal source, and, indeed, he does not wander far from his predecessor in the narrative. At various points in the telling, he emphasizes his own deviations from others who had told Tristan’s story. Beginning with an invented story current in many variations, he gives then his own reworking of what he considers to be the best of its past storytellers. It is a free play of fiction, governed by taste.
     Again and again along the way Gottfried stresses ambiguity and ambivalence. Tristan is above all else a lover. Yet a glance at the beginning and end of the narrative suggests that this status is dubious. His affair with Isolde begins only with the external chance of their accidental consumption of the love philtre. Then, at the end, Isolde’s double, Isolde of the White Hands, causes him to reflect. “Tristan was in two minds about whether he wanted Isolde or not . . .’Do I desire her or don’t I,’ he was constantly asking himself. ‘I think I do not, and then I think I do.’” (294) He marries the new Isolde, but does not make love to her and finally Tristan dies after she misinforms about the sail indicating the arrival of the Irish Isolde. His amatory career is thus muddied by chance, uncertainty, and lies, none of which affected his martial prowess.
     He realizes the inadequacy of language and declares “I do not know how to begin.” (108) He proceeds only after imagining a prayer to Apollo and the Muses and throughout the poem frequently pauses in self-reflection, commenting on his authorial decisions, asking himself such questions as “What fresh matters will I now set in train?” (121)
     In his prologue Gottfried sets forth his dialectical program, saying that, though his goal is distraction and entertainment to soothe the burden of life, his story is not for the many who value pleasure alone but for a more sophisticated audience that appreciates the “bittersweet.” (42) The hypnotic couplet of the prologue is a meditation on duality as much as an announcement of the author’s topic.


A man, a woman; a woman, a man;
Tristan, Isolde; Isolde, Tristan.


     He goes to say “Their life, their death is our bread” (44) Surely this means not only that his contemporaries could relish the story but also that such polarities define our everyday reality. The realization that such oppositions as joy and pain, male and female, truth and lie form the fabric of the human experience is transformative. Thus Tristan’s father Rivalin in his passion for Blancheflor not only learns that love is sadness; this insight so affects him that it “changed his whole cast of mind.” He “became quite a different man, since all that he did was chequered with strangeness and blindness.” (53)
     Even Christianity provides no reliable truth in Gottfried’s world. In one of the most-discussed figures of the story, Gottfried declares, upon Isolde’s success in the ordeal of hot iron that Christ is “pliant as a wind-blown sleeve.” (248) There could hardly be a more powerful statement of the uncertainty in which people live than to claim that Christ, in Christian ideology the central focus and bedrock of reality, is no more stable than a passing breeze. Indeed through the story Christ is consistently assumed to take the part of love with little regard for the church’s traditional moral doctrine.
     The oscillation between possibilities is evident in the hero’s identity and disguise, in the multiple versions of the story, in the limitations of language itself, in emotions, even in the divine. In this story in which the heroic knight is a trickster and an artist, valor is assumed and refined taste is the criterion of value. Yet Tristan must function in a world of disguises, misinterpreted signs, and contradictions. Whereas some have regarded Gottfried as the founder of a religion of love, it seems more accurate to say that he portrays a world of chance, ungovernable compulsion, and impenetrable obscurity in which one must, like Tristan, blindly grope forward until the end without the benefit of revelation. Along the way is magnificent pageantry, beauty, pleasure, and constant hazard into which our hero has no nobler choice then to throw himself fully into the game, rather like an existential “man of action,” and we, the readers, pass our time by following along as the hero makes his way in the “darkling plain.”

Rereading the Classics [Kleist]

Kleist’s drama is also rewarding but not nearly as immediately entertaining as the stories. I hope to treat his plays in a future post.


Kleist is the great narrator of self-consciousness. His essay “On the Puppet Theater” suggests that, since the Fall, humans are at something of a loss, having lost the absolute rightness of animals [1] without gaining in compensation the omniscience of the divine. Though the opinions are given with ironic distance through the persons of a dialogue, the author seems in fact to have felt Angst bordering on despair until his death in a suicide pact with Henriette Vogel in 1811 when the writer was thirty-four. Some biographers say the poet came to the conviction that life was not worth living based on his reading of Kant which left him a helpless skeptic. Others have made a good deal of what might reasonably be taken to be partially repressed homosexuality and his close relationship with his cross-dressing half-sister Ulrike. His existential sensibility, though, was doubtless natural to him, of a piece with his Poe-like interest in the Gothic and his fiercely painful sense of irony.

The form of the Novelle is most appropriate for Kleist’s imagination. In a phrase often used to characterize the form, Goethe said that the Novelle should detail a “strange, unheard-of experience.” [2] With this license as well as the era’s taste for the supernatural, Kleist could compose with a very free hand, and he excelled at plotting. Of course, most of the world’s stories have been told with little regard for verisimilitude. Folk tales, fables, allegories, parables, Longus, the Legenda Aurea, Boccaccio, Margaret of Navarre, through the great German Novelle of the nineteenth century, none had much concern with direct representation of everyday events.

Given the freedom allowed by the form, Kleist proceeded to bend circumstance beyond coincidence into paradox. “The Marquise of O--” opens with a bizarre notion: a high-minded and aristocratic lady is advertising publicly to find who might be the father of her baby. No sooner has the reader swallowed this notion then the narration is suddenly swept up in the madness of war with flames, explosions, and soldiers bent on rape. The story works out at somewhat greater length than strict economy might suggest and, at the end, just when the neat denouement is imminent, the Marquise rejects her reappeared lover, This proves a mere hiccup as she accepts him eventually, but the reader wonders what further oscillations might occur beyond the tale’s horizon.

In “The Duel” the innocent Littegarde similarly finds herself unjustly maligned; even the divine verdict seems to have condemned her. She suffers the moral equivalent of Job’s afflictions, appearing guilty without having sinned.
Michael Kohlhaas, hero of what is doubtless Kleist’s best-known story, was, the reader learns at the outset, “one of the most upright and at the same time one of the most terrible men of his day” which sounds a bit like what one might have said of Old John Brown of Osawatamie. Philosophically, the principled horse-dealer enacts the disaster of idealism. His refusal to accommodate to the gravely flawed institutions of his day leads inevitably to his death. Still, his integrity remains a powerful statement both of the inevitably “failed” society around us and of the all-but-foolhardy rectitude of those who challenge it. Who will not cheer when Kohlhaas issues manifestos from the provisional Capital of the World? But who would join him?

In Kleist’s world (as indeed in all times) the wheel of fortune can turn exceedingly swiftly. The students in “Cecilia” change in a moment from light-hearted though anti-clerical to morbidly serious and pious. In “The Foundling” a kindly act leads to destruction as the most benevolent of men is drawn by circumstance into gradual brutalization until he actually embraces hell. In “The Earthquake in Chile” the dramatic noose is pulled tight from the very start. Love brings tyranny; love’s persistence brings a couple of death penalties. The lovers are miraculously saved, though thousands of other lives are lost in the process. Finally, their victory proves illusory, or at any rate temporary, and they are killed by a post-apocalyptic mob among the city’s ruins, a mob that fancies itself doing God’s work by killing a pair of lovers.

“The Beggarwoman of Locarno” is a simple little karmic haunt, illustrating how what dangers threaten the soul of the proprietor of a wealthy estate. Its primary appeal is Poe-like, a pure relish for the creepy.

Kafka thought so highly of Kleist that he described his predecessor as a “blood-relation.” In a rare public performance, he chose to read aloud from “Michael Kohlhaas.” The earlier writer’s influence, in both world-view and narrative style, led Oskar Walzel, in an early review of “Die Verwandlung” (“The Metamorphosis”) and “Die Heizer” (“The Stoker”), to find “etwas Kleistisches.” [3] Though Kleist may have thought himself the loser in his contention with an Olympian Goethe, he now seems prescient, like Byron a Romantic existentialist. Kleist’s essay “On the Gradual Production of Thoughts Whilst Speaking” anticipates the concept of the unconscious, recognizes the strength of the irrational, and portrays language as a tool for the discovery of knowledge but as one which is always to some extent inadequate.

The space between readings is politically evident. Kleist’s military service, described as the result of family coercion by most biographers, seemed exemplary to the Nazis. The playwright’s characters who might be today considered Existentialist “men of action” in an absurd world struck the Third Reich as admirably nationalistic. After a performance of The Prince of Homburg Goebbels said of him “What a man!” [4] In some respects a mirror image of this distortion was provided by East German critics who, primarily because of “Michael Kohlhaas” made him a proto-socialist. In fact Kleist adopted the progressive politics of most Romantics. For instance, he applauded the French Revolution, considering it a beneficial if insufficient opening toward liberation.

His rhetoric is consistent with the carnival ride of his plotting. Kleist took full advantage of the ability of his German language, just when a sentence may seem to be coming to a natural conclusion, to throw off new clauses with dependent phrases hanging in clusters, yet, realizing that all effects are heightened by contrast, he also employed the barest paratactic annal-like phrases to convey his hairpin narrative turns. His stories resemble folk narrative in their dependence on incident and the deadpan lack of affect. The reader is virtually never told what goes on in a character’s mind yet there is never any doubt.

For all his apparent sensationalism and singularity, all his neuroses and depression, indeed, to a large extent because of these characteristics, he portrayed a world recognizable to most of us in the twenty-first century.



1. The speaker tells a marvelous story, worthy of Zhuangzi, of a fencer’s duel with a bear whose unerring responses never fail to block the human’s artfully cultivated moves.

2. In one of the conversations with Eckermann. The German phrase is a “seltsamen, unerhörten Ereignis.”

3. Walzel found “something Kleist-like.” "The Stoker” is the opening chapter of the unfinished novel Amerika.

4. In fact, two twentieth century members of his family, Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist-Schmenzin and his son, though still maintaining the military tradition, participated in plots to assassinate Hitler.