Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) is the most celebrated German writer of the Classical period, and some, perhaps most, would say he is the most eminent German writer of any period so far, the author of Faust, Werther, West-Oestlcher Divan and many other distinguished plays, novels and poems. But also a botanist, a geologist -- he published some work on optics notable today mostly for some glaring errors, perhaps to demonstrate that no-one is completely perfect, not even Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. But also the longtime minister of culture of the the German city-state of Weimar. When Napoleon passed through that part of Germany, he and Goethe had a good long chat, because of course. But also too many other things to list them all here. When Germany founded its official international cultural center in 1951, they named it the Goethe-Institut, because of course they did.
The second-most eminent German writer of the Classical era is Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805), playwright, poet, historian, philosopher, friend of Goethe, perhaps best-known for his "Ode to Joy," which Beethoven put to music in his 9th Symphony.
And then there's the third-most celebrated German writer of the Classical era, one you may not have heard of if you're not from Germany and have taken no courses in German literature: the spooky one, Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811).
"Spooky" feels like a very inadequate adjective to describe Kleist's works. The German word "unheimlich" is much better. I don't think there is a single English word which translates unheimlich adequately. Unheimlich means frightening, eerie, ominous, unsettling -- come to think of it, when English-speaking people mis-translate the German noun "Angst" -- and they do, utterly, every time -- they tend to come up with something close to that which is described by the German adjective "unheimlich."
Kleist was born into a Prussian military family, in Frankfurt on the Oder, about an hour's drive from downtown Berlin today according to Google Maps, not to be confused with the much bigger and more well-known Frankfurt on the Main in western Germany, Germany's financial center and home of its highest skyscrapers, and also where Goethe was born. Kleist wrote plays, fiction and poems, and other things, including a fascinating essay on the marionette-theater.
One of his plays, Der zerbrochene Krug, is among the best loved German comedies. The rest are quite dark, and one, Der Herrmannschlacht, which tells the story of the crushing defeat of several Roman legions by a coalition of Germanic tribes in the Battle of the Teutoburg forest in 9 AD, is seldom performed, because it is considered, quite rightly, to be really about Kleist's hatred for Napoleon's army, for France in general and for non-German things in general. More about that later.
If you saw a photo from a production of Kleist's Prinz von Hombuurg, you might well assume that what you were seeing was from a weird modern or post-modern staging of the play. But actually, scenes from the play as Kleist wrote it, and as it was performed in his lifetime, look like that, because very weird things happen in the play. Unheimlich.
And then there are Kleist's stories. The longest and scariest of them, Michael Kohlhaas, has given a figure of speech to modern German: "to play Kohlhaas" means to be extraordinarily stubborn.
The story was inspired by a report of a 16th-century episode in which a man from the merchant class reacted violently to mistreatment by a nobleman. In Kleist's re-telling of the story, Kohlhaas is a horse-dealer whose horses and servant are mistreated by a drunken lout of a junker. Kohlhaas demands restitution, and doesn't get it, because, you may not be shocked to learn, in 16th-century Prussia, noblemen could sometimes get away with mistreating commoners. But turns out Koohlhaas was the wrong commoner to mess with: long story short, he and his friends declare war on the Junker after his legal efforts fail, burn down the countryside, and although Kohlhaas is eventually caught and executed, he also manages to prove that he was right.
This story is unheimlich right from the start. From the opening scene, where, now that the drunken lout of a junker has succeed his father, there is a toll charged to cross a bridge which Kohlhaas used for many years to bring his horses to market with no toll, there is the sense that what is portrayed is this fiction is both eerily real and and quite unpleasant -- that Kleist is thrusting under our noses the wrong things about the world from which we ordinarily choose to look away.
The world is not as it should be. And Kleist describes this with devastating skill.
It also ought not to be that a poet as talented as Kleist was infected with such common and ugly nationalism, but his play Der Herrmannschlacht, with its heroic ancient Germanic tribes standing in for the Germans of Kleist's own time and the ancient Romans standing in for France, leaves little doubt about that, and of you still doubt it, his political writings and letters from the time of Napoleon's occupation clear it up. You see, Kleist was very disturbed by the way in which French soldiers and German women were behaving with one another.
Not with the behavior generally of occupying soldiers of any nation, and of the predicaments of women of the nations they occupied. Not with horrors of war generally. Those could have been topics of reasonable discussion. But, no, Kleist was very specifically and exclusively disturbed about French soldiers and what they were doing with German women. There's no putting a positive spin on it.
And the final, very disturbing fact about Kleist is his death; a young, terminally-ill woman, Henriette Vogel, convinced him to kill her and then himself. In 1811, Kleist, 34 years old, his success and reputation growing rapidly, shot her dead, and then fired a bullet through his own brain.
The world is not as it should be.
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