Kleist’s narrative language is something completely unique. It is not enough to read it as historical—even in his day nobody wrote as he did. An impetus squeezed out with iron, absolutely un-lyrical detachment brings forth tangled, knotted, overloaded sentences painfully soldered together and driven by a breathless tempo.—Thomas Mann
Heinrich von KleistHeinrich von Kleist (1777–1811) was a German poet, novelist, and short-story writer. After serving in the Prussian Army during the Rhine campaign of 1796, he enrolled in Viadrina University, where he studied law and philosophy. Eventually, after much travel, he settled in Berlin. He passed away in 1811.
Translated from the German by Michael Hofmann
Kleist’s narrative language is something completely unique. It is not enough to read it as historical—even in his day nobody wrote as he did. An impetus squeezed out with iron, absolutely un-lyrical detachment brings forth tangled, knotted, overloaded sentences painfully soldered together and driven by a breathless tempo.—Thomas Mann
Perhaps the strongest of all German stories. Michael Kohlhaas seems to me to have a peculiar resonance to the present time, when apathy toward the law, callousness toward injustice, a limp acceptance of “the way things are” exercise a paralyzing influence all over the world. Kleist shows us, incidentally, with a superb, mordant humor, the predicament into which a society accustomed to constant abuse of the law is thrown by a man who refuses to put up with such abuse; how his associates gradually withdraw from the doltish robber baron who created the whole mess—with whom they would have continued to get along easily had it not been for the unpleasant consequences of his insolent act… We are filled with anxiety and terror, shudder in the face of mystery, doubt in the powers of reason, and, indeed, in the power of God himself—all our ‘affects are confounded.’ Kleist knows how to put us on the rack and—such is his triumph as an artist—succeeds in making us thank him for that torture.—Thomas Mann, 1955
What revolted the mature Goethe in the young Kleist, who submitted his works to the elder statesman ‘on the knees of his heart’—the morbid, the hysterical, the sense of the unhealthy, the enormous indulgence in suffering out of which Kleist’s plays and tales were mined—is just what we value today. Today Kleist gives pleasure, most of Goethe is a classroom bore.—Susan Sontag
His sentences are remarkable—great hatchet-blows of thought, an implacable narrative speed, a pulverizing sense of inevitability. No wonder Kafka liked him so much …—Paul Auster
I did not write to you last night, it got too late because of Michael Kohlhaas (have you read it? If not, don’t! I shall read it to you!); apart from a short section which I had read the day before, I finished it in one sitting. Probably for the tenth time. This is a story I read with true piety; it carries me along waves of wonder.—Franz Kafka
