Heinrich von Kleist encountered Immanuel Kant’s philosophy in 1800 and 1801. It is not clear which of Kant’s works, if any, he actually read. Letters from that time reveal nevertheless how seriously he took the encounter with Kant’s thought. In a letter of 14 August 1800 to his sister Ulrike, for example, he wrote that he had composed, with no definite purpose in mind,“[eine] Schrift, über die Kantische Philosophie” (2:514). Kleist also referred to the “neuere[n] sogenannte[n] Kantische[n] Philosophie” (2:634) in a letter to Wilhelmine von Zenge. At another point, he even spoke of a “traurige[n] Philosophie” (2:667), apparently meaning...

A study of the dramas and stories of Heinrich von Kleist lends much support for the view that a profound skepticism about knowledge pervades Kleist’s worldview generally, as well as a specific sense of skepticism with respect to the claims of reason. At the same time it is not clear how Kleist could have derived such deep skepticism about reason and knowledge simply from reading Kant’s philosophy, especially as Kant’s moral philosophy ultimately seeks to offer a positive account of community and the role that reason plays in structuring it. While anti-rationalist philosophy was gaining influence in Kleist’s day —...

As most scholars readily agree, agonistic elements are not deployed merely for dramatic effect in Kleist’s works; they also point to a more deeply felt conviction of the author about the fundamental state of reality.¹ Conflictual relations pervade Kleist’s tragedy Penthesilea, for example, from the very beginning. Describing how the Amazons fight the Greeks like Furies, Odysseus speaks of opposing forces that allow for no resolution, no “third” position: “Kraft bloß und ihren Widerstand, nichts Drittes” (1:326; line 126). Concerning Penthesilea, daughter of Mars, and her adversary Achilles, son of the sea goddess Thetis, Odysseus continues: “Was Glut des Feuers...

Heinrich von Kleist wrote all his major literary works within the ten-year period from 1801 to 1811. As brief as this flourishing was, it was also intense, cut across by events of great international significance. Midway through Kleist’s decade the formidable Prussian army was routed by Napoleon at Jena. Once hailed as the disseminator of Enlightenment principles and the liberator of Europe, Napoleon instead increasingly appeared to many as a new kind of despot over the course of the first decade of the nineteenth century. His conquest of Europe for Prussians, in any case, brought grief at the loss of...

When Kleist used the symbol of the puppet in his article “Über das Marionettentheater,” it was not for the first time. He expressly referred to it in an early letter, the letter of May 1799, in which, significantly, his concern was to outline his “Lebensplan” to his fiancée Wilhelmine von Zenge:

Ja, es ist mir so unbegreiflich, wie ein Mensch ohne Lebensplan leben könne, und ich fühle, an der Sicherheit, mit welcher ich die Gegenwart benutze, an der Ruhe, mit welcher ich in die Zukunft blicke, so innig, welch ein unschätzbares Glück mir mein Lebensplan gewährt, und der Zustand, ohne...

Two of the shortest, and frequently least highly regarded,¹ of Kleist’s short stories, “Das Bettelweib von Locarno” and “Die heilige Cäcilie oder die Gewalt der Musik,” will be used here as exemplary narratives for the establishment of a narrative paradigm. Both stories reflect what is a readily discernible feature of all the narratives, namely a clear tripartite structure along the lines of drama² featuring an exposition, an unfolding and development of themes in a central or middle section, and a denouement or resolution marked by a return to the issue(s) foreshadowed in the exposition (see NK). This structure provides the...

Hermann Davidts has correctly observed that three separate threads run throughout the story of “Die Marquise von O. . .”: the story of the Marquise’s pregnancy (which is told in the manner of a detective story with an unknown perpetrator whose identity is revealed in the course of the narration), the issue of Graf F. . .’s proposal of marriage, and the conflict within the Kommandant’s family, which centers on the question of the Marquise’s relationship to her father (NK, 63). Each of these narrative threads is expressly linked to a form of writing that, as writing, registers the disturbed...

Of all Kleist’s stories, the functioning of the contract in form as well as substance is at its most conspicuous in “Michael Kohlhaas.” For one thing, the story takes the question of the individual’s relationship to his society for its subject matter. This relationship, conceived in legal terms, is encapsulated in an important passage from the famous Luther scene: “Verstoßen, antwortete Kohlhaas, indem er die Hand zusammendrückte, nenne ich den, dem der Schutz der Gesetze versagt ist!” (2:45) Legal protection, then, is what Kohlhaas receives in exchange for his oath of fealty to the state. His relationship to the state...

In his remarkable study of the stories of Heinrich von Kleist, Bernd Fischer characterizes Kleist’s relation to philosophy as follows: “Kleist [verfügt] über keine Theorie, die geeignet wäre, das idealistische Paradigma zu überwinden. So untypisch Kleists Verzicht auf eine geschichtsphilosophische Ästhetik für seine Zeit ist, so notwendig dürfte ihm die Beschränkung auf die bloß innerliterarische Reflexion sein.”¹ Dissatisfied with all extra-literary theories, Kleist’s only recourse, Fischer contends, was to lie in an “ironische[n] Metaphysik,” a philosophical outlook expressing deep skepticism about the presentiments of the major philosophical systems of his day. Moreover, Kleist could not locate an adequate literary program...

Game theory may properly be considered an invention of the twentieth century. It cannot usefully be separated from statistical analysis and probability theory, which arose in the last decades of the nineteenth century, along with the industrialization of the European societies whose study they aimed to promote. Game theory, therefore, takes its place alongside other theories of behavior and society that are preeminently modern, if the defining attribute of modernity is taken to be contingency, as the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann¹ and others have argued. Contingency, according to Luhmann, is anything that is “neither necessary nor impossible” (45), that is,...

That Franz Kafka and Heinrich von Kleist are linked by manifold stylistic and thematic concerns is uncontentious: Kafka himself acknowledged Kleist as a “blood relative”;¹ his enthusiasm for Kleist’s works, particularly Kleist’s story “Michael Kohlhaas,” is well known. Several authoritative critical voices, among them Wilhelm Emrich,² have found the connections between Kafka and Kleist to be compelling. It cannot therefore be the aim of any new addition to this scholarship to amplify what is already self-evident. My aim is rather to come at the question of influence and aesthetic inheritance from a new angle. As this aim requires me to...