Heinrich von Kleist: Not Accounted For

Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811) died on this day, 200 years ago, at the age of 34.

He wrote eight plays and eight short stories or novellas, along with short essays, journalism and letters. He wrote for a period of about 10 years. You could read all of his surviving writings in a couple of weeks.

Kleist is most commonly spoken of as some combination of the following:

• a genius
• a master of the German language
• a misfit
• violent
• 'modern', or impossibly ahead of his time, or 'timeless'
• in crisis
• 'conflicted'
• 'his own worst enemy'
• dangerous
• 'political'
• a rebel
• 'transgressive'

and the list could go on and on, with some references to 'the breakdown of language' and 'the breakdown of consciousness'. There's a certain amount of truth in this enumeration, despite its recourse to cliché.

For me, Kleist is one of 'the 26'--and yet, as I look back through the archives of Jascha Writes, I find that I have mentioned him only fleetingly, most recently in September in a post about Shakespeare in which I say only that Kleist is 'unclassifiable' but that his eight dramas for the most part still 'hold the stage' in German-speaking countries.

Because I suspect that most of my US readers have little direct experience with Kleist, I'm tempted to 'situate' him for them by likening him to potentially comparable writers (Büchner, Rimbaud, Kafka…) or telling stories of his clashes with better-established writers of his own time (Goethe…) or hinting at his intertextual relationships (to Sophocles, Molière, E. L. Doctorow--to say nothing of French director Eric Rohmer, who based one of his best films of the 1970s on Kleist's novella 'Die Marquise von O…'). But all of this feels like one more way of failing Kleist. (At the same time, it's worth noting that Kleist stands up to all the implied comparisons.)

Another way of failing Kleist, strangely enough, would be my usually automatic approach of sketching out my own 'relationship' with the writer in question. Does it really matter that I read him most memorably in the late 1960s and mid-1970s? That I feel I can never really finish reading Kleist, of all authors?

What I can't not share with you, though, is the fact that this author, so closely associated with tragedy and violence, also wrote what is usually considered the greatest German stage comedy, The Broken Jug. To say nothing (literally) of Amphitryon. Or Penthesilea. Or Prinz Friedrich von Homburg. Unforgettable, each in its own unaccountable way.

And those are all stage works. For those who are ready to go out and read Kleist in English, let me recommend the Penguin edition of his short fiction. Beware, though, of plot spoilers in the introduction, which at one point also takes Kleist to task (and at great length) for a plot twist in 'Michael Kohlhaas' which the editors find ill-considered and which for me makes the novella the masterpiece that most of us agree it is. (Whichever side of that question you come down on, the odds are you won't appreciate being made aware of the plot twist before you read the novella itself.)

Kleist's texts in the original German are readily available as free ebooks from Amazon.com or Amazon.de --although I benefited from the one-volume Kleist 'reader' made available this year in the series Fischer Klassik.

The German press, which overlaps with the German-language Internet, has been full of Kleist memorials and essays throughout this year and for the last few days in particular. I've been helped most (not as a blogger but as what I might call a mourner) by the contributions to the online edition of Die Zeit in general but by a piece by Volker Weidermann appearing at the FAZ website in particular.

Let's Talk about Shakespeare

I've been remiss about keeping my promise of almost a year ago to blog individually about the authors I call collectively 'the 26'--the first 26 favorites who came to mind when I was doing a '25 Things about Me' riff on Facebook in 2009. Among other things, I wanted to make recommendations of how readers (by which I mean especially ebook readers) could approach the 26.

Let's take the bull by the horns today by talking for a few minutes about Shakespeare--surely, it would seem, the most daunting of the 26, and until recently one particularly ill served by ebook technology.

Shakespeare was of course a playwright. So were, to some extent, at least 11 others of the 26: Büchner, Euripides and Schiller (it was their plays I was thinking about when I included each of these three); Chekhov (a special case: better known to the general public as a playwright but to fiction writers most important as an author of short stories); Diderot, Dumas, Marguerite Duras, Henry James, Sade and Wodehouse (six authors best remembered for work in other genres but who wrote between them some 85 full-length plays); and the unclassifiable Heinrich von Kleist (a) who could not be contained by any genre, (b) all of whose works I was thinking of collectively when I named him and (c) most of whose eight plays still 'hold the stage' in German-speaking countries 200 years after his death.

The first thing to be said about Shakespeare's plays could be said about those of most of the other 11 as well:

If you have to choose between seeing a good stage production of a  Shakespearean play and reading the play, see the stage production.

Shakespeare's plays, like most plays that are ever produced, were written to be performed, not read.

One of the hallmarks of a good stage production of Shakespeare is that every line of the text will make sense, will be understandable: the text will be opened up, not sloughed over, plowed through, mugged past. The audience will be lifted up, not condescended to.

The ease with which you can find good (and great) productions of Shakespeare may have something to do with where you live and where you travel. But there are surprisingly good (and a few surprisingly bad) productions almost everywhere. My own preference as a theatre-goer is for productions that people attend out of sheer love of the experience and not, say, to be seen attending a high-cultural event. (Why pass up falling in love, just to stay in love with some version of yourself?) I can tell you from personal experience that there are great productions of Shakespeare to be found in high-school auditoriums and municipal stages. And the presence of 'name' actors in the cast neither guarantees nor rules out that a production will be a good one.

So, good Shakespeare is not always easy to find. What this suggests to me is that we should reward it (with our patronage) when we find it, and that we be ready to take chances in the hope of stumbling upon great experiences. In most cases, the local theatre company doing A Midsummer Night's Dream is taking a bigger chance in staging it than we are in attending....

I've already gone on longer than I intended to in this first 'segment' on Shakespeare. When we return to him, I'll try to say something (very general) about Shakespeare on film (and on DVD, which is not exactly the same thing) before tackling Shakespeare editions available as ebooks. (There's hope on both fronts.)

Before I sign off, though, let me express my indebtedness to Jim Carpenter, which on the subject of Shakespeare in performance is even more obvious than usual. There's the conventional qualifier: if you benefit from what I say here, give him the credit; if not, I'm the one to blame.