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 Things

I'm getting to be an old thing myself. In less than 3 months I will be 59 years old, which really doesn't seem right. On the inside, I feel like I'm 15, tops. On the outside, various physical signs assure everyone that there's no mistake, that I'm really 58 going on 59.

My car is rather old. It's a 2003 Saturn Ion 1 which I got brand-new in the autumn of 2002. At the time, it was not only a brand-new car: the Ion model was brand-new, too, so I got a few Hey wow Mister what kinda car is that?! remarks. Not for very long. Production of all Saturns was halted in autumn 2009 and the brand was officially discontinued in autumn 2010, so that by many people's standards, the newest Saturn is a pretty old car.

The idea of holding onto old cars, and replacing their engines with electric motors, seems to be gaining in popularity. One big argument for this is that is effects the environment less to replace an engine, than to build an entire new car. Currently, such a conversion is much too expensive for the typical old-car owner, but as the number of conversions goes up, and it's going up fast, the price per unit comes down. Will my Saturn live on as an EV? The thought makes me smile.

Once, I held in my hands a pocket watch which was first sold in 1884, which seems very old to me. Nietzsche had not yet gone insane in 1884. I held that watch and said solemnly, "This is the watch which drove Nietzsche insane." A silly thing to say: there's no reason to suppose that that watch ever came within 1000 miles of Nietzsche, or drove anyone insane. But for some reason it amused me greatly to say with mock solemnity, "This is the watch which drove Nietzsche insane." I don't think it was wrong to say such a thing: Nietzsche himself was not big on solemnity, to put it mildly. He even wrote things in his books about how he laughed at those who didn't dare to laugh at him.

Once, through inter-library loan, I got a copy of one of Nietzsche's books which was published in 1887, also before he went insane, which meant that he himself closely oversaw its publication. I'm sorry, I don't remember which book it was. Perhaps the 2nd edition of Morgenroethe? Whatever it was, I was so impressed by the quality of the book, by the way that the paper had held, and how it was just the perfect size and weight, that I looked up Nietzsche's letters and read him writing about what paper and font he wanted for this book. Did he self-publish, or was it normal for German writers in the 1880's to have so much say in the construction of their books, or did Nietzsche choose a publisher who gave him a lot of consideration in such things? Your guess has to be at least as good as mine.

I own a book which was published in 1869. I got it in the early 1990's. At that time 1869 seemed incredibly old for a book which someone such as myself got for $8.50 at a second-hand bookstore (the price is written inside the front cover). It's volume 2 of a 2-volume set of the works of Schiller. Perhaps if both volumes had still been around, it would've been worth more than $8.50 per volume. Perjaps not. Again, surely, your guess is at least as good as mine. The volume is big, the publisher is the FG Gotta-sche Buchhandlung, the font is small Fraktur which I've never been able to read very well at all. This volume 2 is mostly or entirely non-fictional prose. After many attempts at reading Schiller's accounts of the revolt of the Netherlands against Spain and the Thirty Years' War, I found a copy of the same texts in Roman type and was immensely disappointed in the dopey things Schiller has to say about history.

1869 no longer seems like nearly such an incredibly old age for a book which I own; but this volume may still be the oldest I own. No, wait... I have a Teubner edition of Aeschines' orations which was published in 1851. I got it for $5.50, I have no idea when or where. In the case of the Schiller there are clues as to when and where I got it. It's my 2nd-oldest volume.

I read texts which are sometimes thousands of years old, but I tend to prefer to read then in recent editions. I'm not particularly interested in old books or collecting, other than for reasons which have to do with the texts themselves. What can I say, people have gotten better at setting type and making it legible. And the old editions, if and when I want to struggle through them, are available in new photographic reprints and in places such as Google Books.

Yes, Reading Schiller's Historical Works Was Idiotic

But don't worry, I stopped after a few dozen pages' worth of Geschichte des Abfalls der vereinigten Niederlande von der spanischen Regierung. So awful! Let me ask you, when you think of Lutheranism and Calvinism, is the first thing which comes to your mind -- freedom?

Yeah, me neither. But to Schiller it seemed much too plain to need any discussion that they equaled freedom, and that Catholicism equaled pure wretched evil, human misery and slavery. Except when it didn't, like when he talked about the brilliant Templars, or other brilliant Catholic orders.

When Schiller thought of Protestant freedom in the 16th century, did he think of peasants' revolts? No. To him, that sort of thing was "Rebellion," which was an even worse horror than Catholicism itself -- the horrible kind of Catholicism, not the brilliant knights in shining armor on white horses.

No, freedom was exemplified by Dutch businessmen. Catholicism was the religion of artists (if Schiller was saying here that he wasn't an artist, then finally we agree on something, except that I'm afraid he's not nearly that consistent), and Protestantism was the religion of commerce. And freedom.

I don't know. Maybe Schiller had some money invested in businesses and was a libertarian, and when he said "freedom" he meant laissez-faire, and when he said "tyranny" he meant taxes, just like a 21st-century libertarian bozo, and there was nothing more complicated about him than that.

Whatever. Earlier today I gave up on Schiller, and I started looking for the passage in Nietzsche where Nietzsche says that it is a measure of Beethoven's genius that he could take something as pedestrian as Schiller's "Ode to Joy," put it in his 9th symphony and turn it into something great, thus giving a great gift to an entire nation which until then had been suffering under endless non-musical recitations of Schiller's extremely-popular poem.

I couldn't find that passage. I googled nietzsche beethoven schiller, and looked and looked and looked, and man oh man has there been a lot of nonsense written about Nietzsche and Beethoven and Schiller. But it's okay, I just got back into my volumes of Nietzsche. I prefer the editions from Insel-Verlag. So everything turned out okay. (Standard disclaimer: everything Nietzsche writes about women and war in his philosophical works is nonsense, the rest is incomparably brilliant.)

Is It Idiotic Of Me To Be Reading Schiller's Historical Works?

Nietzsche warned me: in Goetzen-Daemmerung, Schiller is the 3rd-listed of his "Unmoeglichen," his "impossible people." Nietzsche calls him the "Moral-Trompeter von Saeckingen."

Der Trompeter von Saeckingen (The trumpeter of Saeckingen) is an epic poem published in 1853 by Joseph Viktor von Scheffel which was an immediate and huge popular success. Viktor Nessler made it into a popular opera which debuted in Leipzig in 1884, just a few years before the extremely avid opera-goer Nietzsche published Goetzen-Daemmerung. If I had read Scheffel's poem or or seen or heard Nessler's opera, perhaps Nietzsche's one-liner about Schiller would've made me laugh.

Even as it is I schmunzelte. I get how Schiller tends to trumpet morality. I find it very tiresome how in the midst of an historical work he gets carried away and begins to shout at the reader about the Genius of This People and the Crushing of That Despot and The Laws of History and The Way that The Age of Heroes is Past and that We Today Can Only Look Upon Them like an Old Man Who Has lost His Nerve contemplating The Manly Caprices of His Youth, before settling down again and returning to the facts and figures and quotes and other things for which I came there -- there being Schillers historical writings. That last bit, about The Age of Heroes being Past, was especially troubling to me, because I had thought that we here in Western Civilization had left behind such ideas about past Golden Ages. I thought we had done that some time before Schiller. Maybe most of us had.

And anyhow, how much of this stuff, how much of works by Schiller such as Geschichte des Abfalls der vereinigten Niederlande von der spanischen Regierung (History of the Dutch Revolution) and Geschichte des Dreissigjährigen Krieges (History of the Thirty Years; War), is actually any sort of worthwhile historical writing at all?

What I don't know, what I've started to ask myself, is, Who reads Schiller's historical works, besides me? No one ever recommended to me that I read them, and quite a few people have recommended his poems and plays quite heartily, and a few are even enthused about such theoretical works of his as the one about naive and sentimental poetry. But I've never read or heard a thumbs-up about these historical works.

Perhaps if I'd never gotten that volume in Fraktur, vol 2 of a 2-vol collection of Schiller's works published in 1869 by the J G Cotta'sche Buchhandlung. That volume which begins with the works on the Dutch Revolution and the Thirty Years' War. I've had that thing for decades, and I finally came to grips with the fact that the Fraktur was keeping me from reading more than a paragraph or 2 at a sitting, and so, with not inconsiderable difficulty, I got this volume of the historical works in Antiqua, which is what Germans call the regular typeface the rest of the world uses and they have too for the most part for the last century or so. (Schiller's plays and poems are so easy to get, maybe the difficulty in obtaining his historical works should have warned that no sensible person wants them.)

Maybe if decades ago I'd gotten a volume of Schiller's historical works in a typeface more like this one, which I could read with less difficulty (How much difficulty? I'm not even completely sure that "J G Cotta'sche Buchhandlung" is a correct transcription, that's how much.), I would've been done with Schiller even before I became a fan of Nietzsche.

And yet, and yet, with a stupid serious look on my face -- very much, in fact, like the one Schiller himself seemed to be wearing whenever a painting or sculptor was nearby -- and against the sneers of the Nietzsches (I'm usually totally a Nietzsche!), I shall soldier on and see if maybe there is in fact a pony in here somewhere.

But, but -- I already mentioned, apart from my general disgust at the frequent melodramtic solos of the moral trumpeter about No Two Other Peoples were Ever So Dissimilar and It must Enliven The Heart of Every Friend of Freedom and so forth, the bit about the Forever Lost Golden Age really gave me pause. Another thing which made me throw the volume down and stomp around the room yelling "What?! What?!" was Schiller's assertion that printing was invented in Haarlem in 1482.

I mean, that's sure what it looks like to me he's saying: "Im Jahre 1482 wurde die Buchdruckerkunst in Haarlem erfunden," and one thing which really makes me wonder whether anybody at all is reading this stuff for the sake of historical edification, is that I can't find anybody anywhere saying that Schiller was off by at least 50 years and 1 country about the invention of printing. Even allowing for 230 years' worth of progress in process of writing history, this is the sort of thing which makes me wonder just how much Schiller was carried away with the moral--trumpeting, and whether the trumpeting left much actual worthwhile historical writing at all in its wake.

Hold everything: in the volume in Fraktur from 1869 it sez: "Im Jahre 1432 wurde die Buchdruckerkunst in Haarlem erfunden." This is why it's good to have more than 1 edition of the same book. Maybe 1482 is a misprint. Then Schiller would only be off by 1 country and not by 50 years. Or maybe not even by a country: there is a certain Laurens Janszoon Coster who, according to some Dutch patriots, invented printing before Gutenberg.

I'm not going to get into the middle of that fight.

CV Wedgewood doesn't mention Schiller in her history of the Thirty Years' War. Not in the bibliography, nowhere. In his biography of Wallenstein, Golo Mann, like his father a great fan of Schiller's poems and plays, quotes a line here and there from Schiller's Wallenstein-trilogy of plays, and otherwise mentions him twice entirely in passing, with absolutely no hint of a positive or negative opinion of him as an historian.