“What I now feel for thee, Alcmene dearest,
Ah, see! it soars far, far beyond the sun,
Which even a husband owes thee.
Depart, beloved, flee from this thy spouse,
And choose between us, either him or me.
I suffer with this shameful interchange,
The thought to me is all unbearable,
That this vain fellow's been received by thee,
Whose cold heart thinks he holds a right o'er thee.
Oh! might I now to thee, my sweetest light,
A being of another sort appear,
Thy conqueror since the art to conquer thee
Was taught me by the mighty gods.”
In truth Kleist, like every other poet, chose the most of his material in accordance with unconscious wishes, where beyond all else the mother complex presses for poetic expression.
Let us apply once more that which has been so far discovered to the “Prinz von Homburg.” This is rendered yet more easy from the fact that the electress is repeatedly designated by the hero as “Mother.” His real mother had indeed at her death delivered him over to the friend of her youth with the words: “Be a mother to him when I am no longer here.” And the electress had answered in similar strain, “He shall be mine as if my own in birth!” But since on the other hand Natalie also addresses her repeatedly as Mother as she does the elector as Father, so Natalie is Kleist's beloved sister in disguise. The poet would desire the laurel wreath thus from his own sister. Why then the father's acquiescence? If we now appeal to our psychoanalytic experience, this teaches us that regularly the sister incest represents a later form of the older and more serious mother incest. The boy, who first desires the mother, satisfies himself later with the less forbidden and more easily accessible sister. All poets follow very significantly this psychoanalytically established relationship, as Rank[31] has recently convincingly shown. The poets often represent this, that the phantasies and wishes are displaced from the mother to the sister or they are split up between mother and sister, which then makes their origin especially clear.
The latter is also the case with Kleist in the “Prinz von Homburg.” He takes for the mother he desires, at one time the electress, at another time Natalie, “his girl, his bride.”[32] It agrees strikingly also that the prince in the fear of death expects to be saved only by the electress, that is the mother, from the punishment with which the elector father threatens him. So a child who knows no way out for himself, no help any more, flees to his mother. Such an unusual, shocking fear of death on the part of a field officer needs explanation. It is nothing else than the child's fear in face of the stern parent. It is further overdetermined in an infantile way. In the drama the prince for a long time does not believe in the grim seriousness of his position. The elector father will only put him to the test. The sudden transition to frantic fear follows first when the friend informs him that Natalie has sent back the addresses carried by the ambassador, because she is betrothed to the latter. This would have so roused the elector against him. From this time on the prince—and the poet—holds everything as possible and is ready to sacrifice even the hand of the beloved for his life.
A second determination likewise is not wanting, which is also infantile. Freud has shown in the “Interpretation of Dreams” that the child does not at all connect the ideas of older people with the words “death” and “to die.” He knows neither the terror nor the shuddering fear of the eternal nothingness. To be dead means to him merely to be away, gone away, no longer to be disturbed in his wishes. For his slight experience has already taught him one thing, dead people, as perhaps the grandparents, do not come back. From this it is only a step that the child sometimes wishes death to his father, when the latter disturbs him. Psychoanalysis tells us that this is not perhaps a shocking exception but a matter of everyday occurrence. Such thoughts are touched upon in the “Prinz von Homburg.” The false report has come that the elector father has been shot and Natalie laments, “Who will protect us from this world of foes?” Then is the prince ready on the spot to offer his hand to the orphaned girl, also apparently to her mother. A child wish comes to fulfilment, the setting aside of the father who interferes with his plans for the mother. When the man believed to be dead nevertheless returns, he pronounces, as we can understand, the sentence of death upon his treacherous son. Only when the latter had acknowledged the justice of the sentence—I might almost have said, after he had asked forgiveness, is he not only pardoned but more than that recompensed, while now the father voluntarily grants him his wish.
It seems to me significant that Kleist freely introduced into his drama the complete condemnation to death as well as night wandering and moon walking. In the first point he had turned tradition quite to its opposite. In the original the great Friedrich relates that on the triumphant battle field the elector has already forgiven the prince that he had so lightly risked the welfare of the whole state: “If I had judged you according to the stern martial law, you would have forfeited your life. But God forbid that I should sully the brightness of this day by shedding the blood of a prince, who was once the foremost instrument of my victory.” Personal reasons, and, as we know from psychoanalysis, these are always infantile reasons, must have been involved when Kleist incorporated this directly into his poetry and yet in so striking a fashion. Some of these reasons I have been able to set forth above.
It is now clear that the apparently asexual desire for fame does not lack its erotic foundation. The desire for fame is so greatly exaggerated in Heinrich von Kleist that he will do no less than tear the laurel from Goethe's forehead, because in his infantile attitude he hopes through an unheard of poetic activity to supplant the father with the mother. After the shipwreck of his masterpiece, the Guiskard material, he longed for death because life had no more value for him, but he finds later in the “Prinz von Homburg” a happier solution. For not only does the mother herself now crown him but does it with the father's affectionate blessing. And the old theme of night wandering and moon walking, that is climbing into bed with the loved one, finds its place here although in an opposite form and under a certain sexual repression. The child does not come to the mother but she to him and places the longed for crown upon his head even with the concurrence of the father. Also the fact that the prince transgresses the elector's commands as the result of his moon walking, to which the prince is subject, must somehow, at least by analogy, have been created from the poet's own breast. Nothing is said about this in regard to Kleist, of whose inner life we know so little. Yet his very great interest in noctambulism and similar “night sides of the human soul,” as well as his exceptional understanding of the same, show that he at least must have possessed a disposition toward it. It should be emphasized once more in conclusion that the moon walking in the “Prinz von Homburg” does not lack the infantile sexual root, nor is the corresponding erotic purpose wanting, which we have always found, heretofore, to come to the loved one without being held responsible.
“Das Sündkind,” by Ludwig Anzengruber.
“Das Sündkind” (“The Sin Child”) by Anzengruber (in the first volume of his “Dorfgänge”) tells of an apparently non-sexually colored wandering by moonlight. There a 45-year-old pitch worker, the mother of twelve children, who had all died except the narrator, and for three years a widow, had become pregnant with a “sin child” whose father no one would acknowledge himself. She had always been a discreet woman, and was almost equal to her son in her work, although he at thirty years old was at the height of his manly strength. She had always been as exemplary in love as in her work, a combination, as we know, not rare to find. Having matured early she was with her first child at the age of fifteen and when she was a widow “the people could not wonder enough how long it would be before she showed her age.” Not rarely “love” suddenly overcame her and even toward her grown son she could occasionally make quite “God forbidden” eyes. One might almost draw the conclusion from the following circumstance that he also was more deeply dependent on the mother than he might acknowledge to himself. Left alone with her during her confinement, he was not able to look at her but drummed on the window pane and became more and more confused although “God knows, there was no call for it.” Then he turned around with his face burning red and said, “You ought to be ashamed, Mother, you ought to be ashamed!” Soon however not only remorse seized him but he began to curse at the folk, who see in the infant not his brother but only the “child of sin.” “Do you think for a moment that I would bear a grudge against the little innocent worm? Curse you, anyone who would separate the children of one mother from each other!” After he had lost the love of his youth in earlier years, he had no more interest in women but dwelt with his mother alone on the land which belonged to the family. Later Martin toiled early and late for the illegitimate child Poldl, as if he were its true father, for whom moreover he never might make inquiry.
When Poldl was perhaps sixteen years old, his mother's health began to fail and with her anxiety at approaching death she began to be concerned for her soul, which she, according to human custom, expressed as care for her illegitimate child. He should dedicate himself to the Lord, should become a clergyman, by which he would remain spotless. Martin, with keen insight, thought thus, “That is indeed the easiest way to get rid of one's own sin, to let some one else atone for it” and feared it might go hard with Poldl, hot blooded by inheritance, but he had no effect upon the mother, who was supported by the boy's guardian. Poldl also did not permit himself simply to be talked of by her, but applied himself ever more deeply to his future sacred calling, especially since all the people of the place already paid court to him as if he were even now an ordained clergyman. “Soon he had no other thought than of his future holy office and he might stay or go where he would, for nothing was for him too good or too bad to remind him of it.” “He strolled about one entire summer,” Martin tells us, “and did not condescend to the least bit of work but when I was out with the farm hands making hay in the meadows or reaping in the field, it very often happened that he rushed unexpectedly out of the bushes and began preaching to them. This seemed quite right to the lazy folk, they would let their work lie and would stand gathered about him and listen devoutly to him and I could not take ill their so excessive piety. The mother thought as they did and found that his absurd preaching there went straight to her heart.”