Heinrich von Kleist, along with his older contemporaries Goethe and Schiller, was one of the great innovative forces in the early Romantic movement. By the time of his death in 1811 at the age of thirty-four — he made a suicide pact with a woman he barely knew — his modest output of seven complete plays and eight Novellen, or chronicle narratives, together with such critical essays as “About the Marionette Theater,” had profoundly transformed German drama and, indeed, the very scope of European literature.…