What Rapture, What Agony: On Heinrich von Kleist & "Anecdotes"
Heinrich von Kleist, transl. Matthew Spencer | Anecdotes | Sublunary Editions | 2021 | 120 Pages
On October 1, 1810, about a week before his 33rd birthday, the author and playwright Heinrich von Kleist published the first issue of the world’s very first daily newspaper. As its name implies, the Berliner Abendblätter was delivered to newsstands every evening for the next six months. In its pages, Kleist published many intellectual stars of the Prussian capital, including notable Romantics like Clemens Brentano and Wilhelm Grimm (one half of those famous Brothers), but Kleist himself ended up filling out each issue’s four pages. He wrote book announcements, published a primitive crime blotter, and copied stories from the international collection of newspapers, encyclopedias, and scientific periodicals contained in Rudolph Werckmeister’s nearby Reader’s Institute. The newspaper was quite popular—even the Kaiser subscribed—and for a brief period it kept the manically unsettled Kleist in house, home, and the black.
It is from these pages that translator Matthew Spencer culled Anecdotes, a collection of Kleist’s writings recently published by Sublunary Editions. For in addition to news and gossip, Kleist filled his Abendblätter with all manner of brief, anonymously authored stories, vignettes, and bits of improbable hearsay that distill all of the writer’s profound irrationality into popular, page-sized chunks. Spencer includes many of the writer’s most famous micro-fictions, as well as a pair of longer pieces, “The Beggarwoman of Locarno” and “Saint Cecilia or the Power of Music (A Legend),” which first appeared in the Abendblätter.
As befitting a newspaper, these stories are all grounded in a certain vernacular reality. Kleist cites his sources, whether books or newspapers or eye-witnesses, sites his narratives in nearby cities or villages, even declares, in “The Beggarwoman,” that the ruins of a castle can “now be seen” in the Alps outside of Locarno, a place Kleist had never visited. Somewhere, somehow, everything, no matter how outlandish, has really happened.
This was all common enough for the era. His Swiss contemporary Johann Peter Hebel, whose perfect little fables were among Kafka’s favorites, published many dozens of such tales in his almanacs. Yet if Hebel’s work is defined by elegance and harmony, there is a certain derangement to Kleist’s fiction, a sense that nothing ever quite harmonizes. Call it irrational realism: writing that strives to depict a capacious experience of life, prone both to reflexive ironies and incoherent developments. A slow-witted young boy speaks with a ghost, who promises but never delivers a treasure; several pages are spent establishing the indisputable existence of mermaids; justice is twice meted out via lightning strike. There is always a gap between the confidence of the assertion—“In 1809, two strange and contrasting human phenomena appeared in Europe”—and its content: that one woman can survive by drinking boiling hot oil, and another will die if she drinks any less than twenty jugs of lukewarm water a day. In the resulting tension lies Kleist’s vision of an incoherent world, outwardly verifiable yet inwardly mysterious. As one of his informants declares: “experience teaches [that] probability is not always on the side of truth”—a remark which Kleist must have seen as profound, as he had already deployed it to conclude his novella Michael Kohlhaas.
As Becca Rothfeld has written at the Baffler, Kleist’s stories are often “riven by an irreconcilable doubleness.” Driven to despair by an encounter with Kant, Kleist obsessed over those aspects of the human nature which the encounter with irrationality makes crazed. Facts can be established, but their truth remains forever unknown. Pure intentions lead to disastrous ends, and the good achieved through the horrible. To quote those classic lines from Michael Kohlhaas, the protagonist’s “sense of justice turned him into a thief and a murderer,” a result made no less tragic by our comprehension of it.
Kleist often appears to us as a distressed figure, overpowered by his stutter, failing at every endeavor upon which he embarks. His short novels are presented as a series of extensive, unbroken paragraphs, full of viciousness and mayhem. He feels at once creator and captive of his own work. "I write," he states in Christa Wolf's novel No Place On Earth, "because I cannot help myself.”
The time in which Kleist lived was particularly chaotic, with various armies stomping across a still-fractured Germany. Kleist himself had served in the military at the end of the 18th century. He even attempted to sign up for a proposed Napoleonic invasion of England. Many of these anecdotes are related from past wars; several are set in Jena, where Hegel so famously identified the Emperor as History on horseback.
And yet these stories are gleeful, not despairing. A French officer boosts morale by telling his artilleryman the spot on which they will die. A Prussian cavalryman drinks so much that he becomes a one-man army. A drummer, headed for execution, asks the firing squad to “save his skin” by shooting him right in the asshole.
For six months, the Abendblätter channeled Kleist’s manic productivity into the sort of popular literature beloved by the Brothers Grimm, who, according to Spencer’s introduction, “collected issues specifically for the anecdotes.” Perhaps because they were written during a series of fairly stable, productive months, the Anecdotes are often flat-out funny, taking the form of jokes and deploying that ironic wit which would be extended by later acolytes like Kafka and Robert Walser into an entire style. He goofs on Goethe—who had earlier dismissed the work that Kleist had so reverently sent him “on the knees of my heart”—by making up his own, “Happier,” Werther. In a pair of articles, he submits a proposal for a postal system in which parcels are delivered by cannon ball, and then anonymously pens his own rebuttal. One senses Kleist’s persistent attempt to expand his own reality, a refusal to collapse life into the enlightenment binaries that drove him to despair. For a time, at least, he succeeded.
In his story “Kleist in Thun,” Walser writes of the months in 1802 that our subject lived in that Bernese city. The writer swings between rapture and despair, tears up his own writing, watches the swans. Eventually he takes ill, and his sister comes to collect him, and he has to leave his cottage by the lake, unresolved and unresolving. “What rapture this is,” muses Walser’s Kleist, “but what an agony it can also be.”
The Abendblätter ceased publication on March 30, 1811, after Prussia’s Prime Minister Karl von Hardenberg objected to an article on economic policy. Kleist was left without income or support. Unable to secure a position in the civil service or get his plays performed, he became more and more desperate. In late November, he retreated to a villa on the Kleiner Wannsee with Henriette Vogel, a poet and terminally ill friend. They feasted, drank wildly, and, according to eyewitnesses, joked and chased one another along the shore. Then, completing their pact, Kleist shot Vogel in the head and then himself in the mouth, perhaps so that he would not be able to cry out.