Unwilling as he was to return to a profession he had given up twelve years before, it at last seemed to him that the only possible way in which he could earn his bread was by re-entering the army. He did not even own money enough to procure an officer's outfit. An appeal to Hardenberg for assistance was left unanswered. It was exactly at this time that Prussia was compelled to enter into an alliance with Napoleon against Russia. Can one imagine greater "confusion of feeling" than was now the lot of the unhappy patriot? The author of the Hermannsschlacht, the mortal enemy of Napoleon, forced, as a Prussian officer, to fight for the humiliator of his country!
This last collision of duties broke his heart. "My soul is so spent," he writes, "that I feel as if the very daylight that shines on me when I put my head out at the window hurts me."
He was ripe for the irrevocable decision. Through Müller he had made the acquaintance of Frau Henriette Vogel, a gifted woman, who, like himself, suffered from melancholia, and who imagined that she had an incurable disease. This lady reminded him one day, that in an early stage of their friendship he had promised to do anything she might require of him, let it be what it might. He replied that he was ready at any moment to fulfil his promise. "Then kill me," she said. "My sufferings are so great that I can no longer endure life. I don't believe, though, for a moment that you will do it—the men of to-day are not men at all." This was enough for Kleist. In November 1811 he and Henrietta drove together to a little inn on the shore of the Wannsee, a small lake near Potsdam. They were apparently in the best of spirits, full of jest and merriment all that day and until the afternoon of the next, when they went down to a retired spot on the shore, and Kleist shot his friend through the left breast and himself through the head. They had previously written a strange, mournfully humorous letter to Adam Müller's wife. It runs as follows:—
"Heaven knows, my dear, good friend, what strange feeling, half sorrowful, half glad, moves us to write to you at this hour—when our souls, like two lightsome aërial voyagers, are preparing to take flight from the world. For you must know that we had determined to leave no p.p.c. cards upon our friends and acquaintances. The reason probably is, that we have thought of you a thousand times in as many happy moments, and pictured to ourselves a thousand times how you would have laughed good-naturedly if you had seen us together in the green or the red room. Yes, the world is a strange place! It is not unfitting that we two, Jette and I, two sorrowful, melancholy beings, who have always complained of each other's coldness, should have come to love each other dearly, the best proof of which is, that we are now about to die together.
"Farewell, our dear, dear friend! May you be happy here upon earth, as it is doubtless possible to be! As for us, we have no desire for the joys of this world; our dream is of the plains of heaven and the heavenly suns, in whose light we shall wander with long wings upon our shoulders. Adieu! A kiss from me, the writer, to Müller. Tell him to think of me sometimes, and to continue to be a brave soldier of God, fighting against the devil of foolishness, who holds the world in his chains."
Postscript in Henriette's writing:—
"Doch, wie dies alles zugegangen,
Erzähl' ich euch zur ändern Zeit,
Dazu bin ich zu eilig heut.[17]"Farewell, my dear friends! And do not forget to think, in joy and in sorrow, of the two strange beings who are now about to set out on the great voyage of discovery." HENRIETTE."
(In Kleist's handwriting)—"Written in the green room, on the 21st of November, 1811. H. v. K."
Kleist was the most intractable character in the intellectual world of the Germany of that day; he had, moreover, too much heart, too strong feelings. After he had given up all hope of attaining to a knowledge of the truth, he tried to build upon the foundation of feeling. As author he was able to do it; his Michael Kohlhaas is based upon the feeling of justice, Käthchen von Heilbronn upon the feeling of absolute devotion. But the real world to which he himself belonged had no use for strong, unmixed feeling such as his. He did not find it in others, and wherever he followed it himself, the consequences were disastrous. Alas! no; nothing was quite certain on this earth, not even his own vocation!
No one could prize decision, unity of character, more than he did, and never was there a more uncertain, divided, morbid man. He was always despairing, always wavering between the highest endeavour and the inclination to commit suicide. This explains how it is that we see him, the greatest of the Romanticists, liable to almost all the errors which distinguish his contemporaries. His own really fine, noble nature was spoiled very much as are most of the characters in his works, by sinister, disastrous peculiarities, which slacken the will and destroy the elasticity of the mind. Yet Heinrich von Kleist has assured himself a place in literature, like all others who have won places there, by the vigour and the passion with which he lived and wrote.[18]