Heinrich von Kleist

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.

Buy Heinrich von Kleist, Saemtliche Werke und Briefe at amazon:  https://amzn.to/3BFyWSL

Old High German

Old High German (Althochdeutsch) is the name given to the language in which some texts were written from AD 750 to 1050, including the earliest known written texts in German. 

"German" refers to the language spoken today in Germany, Austria, a large part of Switzerland, and in Luxembourg and Liechtenstein, and by about a million people each in France, Italy and the United States -- by about 100 million people worldwide. "Germanic," however, is a much broader term: in addition to German, the Germanic languages spoken today include English, Dutch, Flemish, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic and others. 

As I said, the earliest written German texts are Old High German. But they are not the earliest written Germanic texts. In the 4th century, Bishop Ulfilas translated the Bible, or least large parts of it, into his native Gothic language. Also in the 4th century, a few other documents were written in Gothic by Ulfilas and/or someone else. And that is all that is known. For whatever reasons, written Gothic did not thrive. 

About a century earlier than Old High German, the earliest known writing in Anglo-Saxon, or Old English, appeared, the poem called "Caedmon" after its supposed author.

Now, about the "High" in Old High German. To this day there are High German and Low German (Plattdeutsch). High German is the standard version of the language usually spoken on TV and radio, written by journalists and authors and so forth. Out of the huge number of local German dialects, High German has come to be standard German. But "High" is not a value judgment. It does not connote anything cultural or social at all. Rather, High German is a purely geographical term: it is so called because it comes from mountainous areas, and Low German from regions where the land is flatter and the elevation is lower. 

The earliest Old High German texts are glosses, German synonyms written in the margins of Latin manuscripts, and lists of Latin-synonyms. Then come actual translations, of gospels, of Psalms, of earlier Christian writers, occasionally even of "pagan" Latin Classics. There are official pronouncements of Frankish rulers, pieces of the liturgy, passion plays, magical formulas. There is the Hildebrandslied, a tragic story of a battle between a father and son, a survival of Germanic oral literature.

Old High German was strongly supported by Charlemagne and his successors. Then, as the Saxons took control in German, there was a century, roughly from AD 900 to 1000, when written German virtually disappeared. Latin had been the dominant written language the entire time, but under the Saxons, Latin's status returned from dominant to exclusive. 

And then, in the first half of the 11th century, in the period of transition from Old High German to Middle High German, the dominant figure in literary German was Notker, also called Notker the German, to distinguish him from the 9th-century Notker the Stutterer, known for his German additions to the liturgy. In addition to purely German works, Notker the German wrote distinctive mixed works, part Latin, part German.

After Notker, beginning around AD 1050 and lasting until about 1350, is the period of the literature referred to as Middle High German, with authors much more well-known and widely-read than anyone in Old High German: for example, Hartmann von Aue, Gottfried von Strassburg, Wolfram von Eschenbach, and, perhaps the most prominent Medieval German work, the anonymous Nibelungenlied. Old High German is more foreign, more difficult for contemporary readers to comprehend, often comparatively primitive. Still, it offers fascinating glimpses into the life of the times and places where it was made.

12th-Century European Vernacular Literatures

In the 12th century, an anonymous, book-length epic poem, El Cid, very loosely based on the exploits of an 11th-century Castilian knight, was written in Spanish, as well as one in French, La Chanson de Roland, very loosely based on the exploits of one of Charlemagne's generals, and one in German, das Nibelungenlied, very loosely based on some events in central Europe in the 5th century, mixed with some pre-Christian Germanic mythology. 

 

 Each, in a way, was either the beginning of literature in each of those languages, or was there very close to the beginning. I say "in a way," because creative literature including poems and fanciful stories had been written in each of those language for centuries beforehand. Still, an overall description or representative anthology of Spanish will tend to start with El Cid, of French with La Chanson of Roland, and although anthologies and descriptions of German literature tend to go back earlier than the the 12th century and the Nibelungenlied, perhaps they shouldn't always. Although it does so happen that a greater volume of poetry from before the 12th century has survived in German than in Spanish or French, to be honest, most of this very early German literature is of very little interest to anyone but specialists. El Cid, La Chanson de Roland and the Nibelungenlied are among the earliest works in each of their respective languages to be widely read and re-interpreted today. A continuous, conscious literature in each of those languages goes back directly to those three works, and not much further, if at all.

Why did Spanish, French and German literature each get going in such a big way around the same time, and why did a long anonymous quasi-historical epic poem play such a big part of this beginning in each language? I have no idea. I simply noticed that these three epic poems all appeared in the 12th century, and that there wasn't much by way of written literature in their languages before that. Maybe it's a coincidence, maybe it's much more than a coincidence. I also have no idea whether these three anonymous poems started the great waves of literature which started in Spanish, French and German at that time -- or if they just happened to be a part of that sudden explosion. In any case, beginning in the 12th century, many poems were published in those languages with authors' names attached to them. 

Latin literature, including Latin poems and Latin epics, continued to be written in Spain, France and Germany, and would continue to be written there for a long, long time to come, just as they were written everywhere from Iceland to Poland and Sicily. The sudden appearance of Spanish, French and German literature in the 12th century may seem like a large-scale explosion to us today. From the point of view of those who read and wrote Latin at the time, I'm not sure whether it caused much of a ripple. It could be that many 12th-century Latin authors and scholars never even heard about the new vernacular literatures. Big things often grow from small beginnings, beginnings which come to seem much larger than they were at the time. And as far the general populations were concerned -- most of them couldn't read any language yet.

And it's very likely that some people know much more about all of this than I do. I just sort of accidentally noticed some similarities between a few poems.