KLEIST, HEINRICH von. - German dramatist, b. in Königsberg on Oct. 18, 1776, d. in Berlin on Nov. 11, 1811. He pursued a military career for some years, studied philosophy and science to no purpose, then sought in vain a plan for his life, always beset by financial hardship, traveling ceaselessly and without lasting peace: a restless and excessive spirit, exasperatedly straining toward the realization of a supreme dream of art.
Having discovered in himself a vocation for poetry, he wrote, at intervals, two comedies: Der zerbrochene Krug, a prolix farce of little artistic value, and Amphitryon, an adaptation of Molière's comedy of the same name, some short stories of singular originality and dramatic power, among them Michael Kohlhaas, and six dramas, to which above all the poet's fame is entrusted. Die Familie Schroffenstein is the tragedy of irrational life born of the impossibility men have of understanding one another; Robert Guiskard is the tragedy of titanism, in which the man of genius is subject to the caprice of chance; Penthesilea is the tragedy of fettered love, Kleist's masterpiece in dark and fearful tones, at times with lights of dazzling splendor; Käthchen von Heilbronn, a dramatized fairy tale; Die Hermannsschlacht, the drama of the "furor teutonicus," and finally Der Prinz von Homburg, in which is exalted the complete dedication of the individual to the supreme demands of the State in one of the most calamitous periods for the life of the nation. K. is the tragic man of Romanticism, driven to clash against insuperable reality or to penetrate into the mysterious realm of life to discover there new aspects, whence tragic and fearful events are generated. His moral conception follows from his Weltanschauung: "if there exists in the world nothing stable and objective, there is also nothing that is absolutely evil"; and from this arises for him the proud presumption of substituting his own morality for divine law. It was therefore inevitable that as the poet felt himself sinking ever deeper into the abyss of his own despair, his tragic vision of life grew ever darker, until he deluded himself into finding in suicide the peace of the spirit.
Bibliography5 works
Rodolfo Bottacchiari