World Books Review: The Mad Bad Moralist

The collection is streamlined, yet carefully balanced, giving readers a neatly packed sampling of the necessary lunacy and narrative brilliance of the Teutonic bad boy Heinrich von Kleist.

Selected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist Translated and edited by Peter Wortsman. Archipelago Books. 283 pages, $15.

Reviewed by Christopher M. Ohge

Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811) remains intriguing to many literati because in many ways he out-romanticized the German Romantics. Having committed a ritual Selbstmord with a friend’s cancer-stricken wife, this literary bad boy has been fodder for book-chatters interested in the artistic suicide case, as well as the prevalence in his works of mental instability, sex, and violence. Nevertheless, he epitomized the Sturm und Drang of younger Goethe’s Werther—and, one could argue, took those sentiments further by living hard and rootless, offending polite society with his works, and leaving many of his peers scratching their heads—including Goethe and Schiller. Though underappreciated in his lifetime, Kleist’s work became essential to Freud’s formulating the death drive, Thomas Mann’s intricate storytelling, and Kafka’s obsessive characters.

Peter Wortsman’s translation of Kleist’s prose comes as a gift to fans of German literary history. The edition is decidedly minimalist from an editorial point of view, providing (aside from the prose) only some scattered contextual footnotes and a concise afterword by Wortsman (a memorable line, on Kleist: “a man at once more brilliantly adept at the practice of his art and more painfully inept at the business of living”). Wortsman preserves much of Kleist’s difficult sentence structures and punctuation, and succeeds at modernizing Kleist’s sometimes antiquarian prose (although bits like “any Tom, Dick, or Harry,” or “footloose and fancy free” seem forced; and the repeated use of the legalistic construction—“he believed that said situation could not be resolved”—comes off finicky). The selection is streamlined, yet carefully balanced, thus giving readers all of Kleist’s necessary lunacy and narrative brilliance nicely packed into 273 pages.

Of the four short stories in the collection, “The Earthquake in Chile,” and “The Betrothal in Santo Domingo” stand out, both for their doomed characters and poignant themes on the inscrutability of the will and the world. “The Earthquake in Chile” takes place during the 1647 earthquake in Santiago. It begins with a tutor named Jeronimo Rugero, who, having been incarcerated for falling in love with his pupil, Josephe, planned to hang himself in his cell. After the earthquake strikes, he is free to move hurriedly through the ruins and finds Josephe. In their ensuing idyll, she calls the earthquake an “act of deliverance”—in which sense? Ostensibly, it is Jeronimo’s “liberation” from prison, yet it is also in the sense of Kleist’s foreshadowing how the idyll is illusion, and how at the end the two lovers will be set free from evil. Here the evil is manifested in what Nietzsche called the flies in the marketplace, a “satanic rabble” led by a Dominican priest who, trying to interpret divine will, encourages them to dispatch any symbols of earthquake-causing godlessness.

Once Jeronimo and Josephe encounter the mob in the church, a series of misunderstandings leads to a gruesome scene. Jeronimo and Josephe end up dead, and Don Fernando, “that godly hero” who single-handedly extinguishes the mob, still loses his son. For Don Fernando, “it almost seemed to him as though he ought to be happy.” A not-so-certain deliverance for him, because in Kleist’s world of epistemological uncertainty, heroic acts do not always lead to liberation.

“The Betrothal in Santiago” is another story of tragic amour which is set during the 1803 Haitian slave revolt. In the house of the revolt leader, Congo Hoango (“a dreadful old Negro”), his mistress Babekan and her daughter Toni lead a desperate French soldier into their home. This particular stranger seems involved in a routine set-up until it becomes clear that Toni has fallen in love with him. And though one may feel instances of apparent racism similar to other slave revolt tales (Melville’s story “Benito Cereno” comes to mind), at the end, the tragic murder-suicide conclusion reminds one of Othello—except for Kleist there is no self-laudatory speech for the murderer, the soldier merely ends his life after having little to say.

Translator Peter Wortsman

The superficial skimmer of pages may have the most difficult time figuring out “The Marquise of O…”, the well-crafted novella in which shifting perspectives complicate a “mysterious pregnancy” story. But this Cervantes-inspired whodunit lacks the narrative pace of the other novella, “Michael Kohlhaas,” which concerns a horse trader of the same name whose “sense of justice turned him into a thief and a murderer” after a country squire called Wenzel von Tronka (referred to as a—or the—Junker) requisitions Kohlhaas’s horses and abuses one of his stable hands.

Enraged by the injustice done to him, and seeing a “world in such monstrous disorder,” Kohlhaas wages war through the country, and determines to exact revenge on the Junker without regard to the costs (and it is part of Kleist’s genius that we are uncertain who the real criminal is). Politically, justice is moot because Kohlhaas continues to lose his legal appeals on account of the Junker’s connections, and, ultimately, Kohlhaas represents a rabid metaphysical rebel in a world where justice may not exist.

Given the rampant dissolution in Kleist’s tales, it is initially surprising to read “On the Gradual Formation of Thoughts While Speaking,” a lucid philosophical treatise on the importance of “a certain excitement of the mind” in formulating one’s ideas. Sounds simple enough; but in fact, this essay harkens back to Plato’s Symposium, showing the value of thinking out loud, forming opinions and testing them with others, as well as, in a sense, recollecting what we already know through dialogue—“For it is not we who know, but rather a certain state of mind in us that knows.”

Kleist suggests it “is something else altogether when the intellect is done thinking through a thought before bursting into speech. For then it is obliged to dwell on the mere expression of that thought.” One can also be fairly certain Kleist would stand against our current test-based no-child-left-behind zeitgeist when he says “There is perhaps no worse occasion than a school examination to put one’s best foot forward … the examiners themselves must also undergo a perilous appraisal of their own intellectual capacity.”

The final piece of the collection, “On the Theater of Marionettes,” is a rumination about perception, suggesting the darker the mind’s reflection, the more grace radiates. Kleist once said in a letter to his publisher that his stories should be considered Moralische Erzählungen (moral tales). Kleist was a great moralist, as many often are when confronted with how terribly humans act toward each other, and how there seems to be little retribution except from violence, whether toward others or oneself. Human being, mechanical figure, and puppet-master—this was Kleist’s dynamic; how do we judge ourselves?

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Christopher M. Ohge is a Ph.D. candidate at Boston University’s Editorial Institute.