Heinrich von Kleist - The Marquise of O--, and Other Stories

THE MARQUISE OF O
AND OTHER STORIES

HEINRICH VON KLEIST, born in 1777, came of an old Prussian military family but disliked military life and resigned his commission in 1799 to devote himself to studious pursuits. He turned to creative writing after undergoing an intellectual and personal crisis in 1801, and during the next ten years produced some of the most remarkable plays in German literature (notably the comedies Amphitryon and Der zerbrochene Krug, the tragedy Penthesilea and the problem drama Prinz Friedrich von Homburg) as well as eight masterly short stories and various minor writings.

Kleist had an unstable and almost schizophrenic personality; he was intensely ambitious yet unsure of his gifts. His works reflect his passionately uncompromising nature and his periodic fits of wild enthusiasm and morose melancholia. Episodes of great lyrical beauty alternate with scenes of the most frenzied brutality, and the highly emotional style predominating in his plays is often replaced in the stories by one of clinical detachment. Kleist committed suicide in 1811.

DAVID LUKE was born in 1921 and is an Emeritus Student (Emeritus Fellow) of Christ Church, Oxford, where he was Tutor in German until 1988. He has published articles and essays on German literature, and various prose and verse translations, including Stifters Limestone and Other Stories, Selected Tales by the brothers Grimm, Death in Venice and Other Stories by Thomas Mann, and Goethes Selected Verse, Parts One and Two of Faust, a volume of his erotic poetry, Iphigenia in Tauris and Hermann and Dorothea. His translation of Faust Part One was awarded the European Poetry Translation Prize in 1989.

NIGEL REEVES was born in 1939 and graduated at Worcester College, Oxford, in 1963, taking his D.Phil. in 1970. He was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the University of Tbingen and from 1975 to 1990 was Professor of German at the University of Surrey. Since 1990 he has been Professor of German at Aston University and was Head of the Department of Languages and European Studies from 1990 to 1996. He has translated stories by Kleist and Keller for the Penguin Book of German Stories and has published monographs on Heinrich Heine and Friedrich Schiller.

HELNRICH VON KLEIST

Translated with an Introduction by
DAVID LUKE AND NIGEL REEVES

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This translation first published 1978
Reprinted with a new Chronology and Further Reading 2004
30

Translation and Introduction copyright David Luke and Nigel Reeves, 1978
Chronology and Further Reading copyright David Deiner, 2004
All rights reserved

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EISBN: 9781101489802

IN the spring of 1799 the 21-year-old Heinrich von Kleist wrote to his half-sister Ulrike that he found it incomprehensible how a human being can live without a plan for his life (Lebensplan); the sense of security with which I employ my present time and the calm with which I look to the future make me profoundly aware of just what inestimable happiness my life-plan assures me. But fear evidently lay behind this confidence, and indeed behind the very notion of a life-plan, for he continued: Existing without a life-plan, without any firm purpose, constantly wavering between uncertain desires, constantly at variance with my duties, the plaything of chance, a puppet on the strings of fate such an unworthy situation seems so contemptible to me and would make me so wretched that death would be preferable by far. Less than thirteen years later Kleist wrote to Ulrike that there was no remedy for him on earth, and within hours of his completing this letter two shots rang out from beside the Wannsee near Berlin. In a suicide pact for which he had long sought a willing partner Kleist had first shot dead Henriette Vogel, a 31-year-old woman suffering from incurable cancer, and had then blown out his own brains. During those thirteen years Kleist had written plays and stories of a kind quite unprecedented in German literature. The special interest of his best work, its peculiar inner tension, lies in its negative expression of the ideals of the Enlightenment at the very point of their collapse as he personally experienced it. A typical intellectual product of the late eighteenth century, Kleist had started from certain unquestioned assumptions: that life can be planned, that its random element can be eliminated, that happiness can be achieved and assured if we go about it the right way, that man is educable and society perfectible, that the world is rationally ordered and that all things in principle can, and in due course will, be completely understood and explained. His creative writings expressed the state of mind that follows upon the loss of every article of this faith. They radically called in question the idealistic humanism which still inspired the mature works of Goethe and Schiller, the representative masterpieces of Weimar Classicism. Among his contemporaries Kleist met with little or no positive response. Goethe took a patronizing interest in him for a time, then snubbed and dropped him, writing him off as a pathological case, quite failing to recognize his genius and evidently sensing in him a threat to his own precariously-won Olympian balance. And yet it is precisely Kleists vulnerability and disequilibrium, his desperate challenge to established values and beliefs, that carry him further than Goethe or Schiller across the gap between the eighteenth century and our own age.

Bernd Heinrich Wilhelm von Kleist was born in Frankfurt an der Oder on 18 October 1777, the son of Joachim Friedrich von Kleist, a captain in the Prussian army, and his second wife Juliane Ulrike. The family belongs to the ancient nobility (Uradel) and has innumerable ramifications. Heinrichs father died when he was only eleven, and his mother, though eighteen years younger than her husband, when he was fifteen. He was educated privately in Berlin by a Protestant minister and entered army service shortly before his mothers death. This was a natural step since the family was, and continued to be, renowned in Prussian military circles. He soon experienced action during the Rhineland campaign against the armies of revolutionary France. But his heart lay elsewhere: he loved music, was a talented clarinettist, and studied mathematics with enthusiasm. Convinced that the maximization of his personal happiness was not only possible but his duty as a rational man, and that this goal could not be reached under the oppressive and dehumanizing discipline of the Prussian army, he resigned his commission in 1799 and embarked on what was to be a planless, uncertain, unstable life, never achieving a career or even holding a firm post, estranged from all but a very few members of his family, travelling restlessly about a Europe racked by the Napoleonic Wars. For a time he studied physics, mathematics, history and Latin at the University of Frankfurt an der Oder. In 1800, on little more than an impulse, he entered into a suitable conventional engagement with the daughter of the local garrison commandant, Wilhelmine von Zenge, but set off the same year on a journey through Leipzig and Dresden, ending in Wrzburg where he underwent some kind of unspecified medical or surgical treatment which would make him, as he enigmatically wrote to her, worthy of his fiance. (This obscure episode has never been clarified; in any case Kleist later broke off the engagement to Wilhelmine with callous abruptness, and a certain amount of mystery surrounds his sexual life in general.) A further attempt to settle down in state service, this time in a civilian capacity, lasted only a few months. Early in 1801 the conflict between his basic psychological instability and his frenzied longing for security broke out in the form of a crucial intellectual experience. The rationalistic and optimistic beliefs which he had imbibed from Wieland and other fashionable writers reflecting the spirit of the European and German Enlightenment were shattered by his reading of Kant. Lately, he wrote to Wilhelmine in March 1801, I became acquainted with the recent so-called Kantian philosophy. What exactly he had read is not certain, but it was the Kantian epistemological theory that seems above all to have disturbed him. Kant had demarcated the limits of human knowledge not in order to undermine confidence in mans rational faculty or strengthen the case for atheism: on the contrary he had intended to clarify the true foundations for religious belief, to show what was properly beyond empirical exploration and therefore a matter of faith, not of knowledge. But Kants distinction between the unknowability of things in themselves as