THE LIFE OF HEINRICH VON KLEIST
By JOHN S. NOLLEN, PH.D.
President of Lake Forest College
Brandenburg has, from olden times, been the stern mother of soldiers, rearing her sons in a discipline that has seemed harsh to the gentler children of sunnier lands. The rigid and formal pines that grow in sombre military files from the sandy ground make a fit landscape for this race of fighting and ruling men. In the wider extent of Prussia as well, the greatest names have been those of generals and statesmen, such as the Great Elector, Frederick the Great, and Bismarck, rather than poets and artists. Even among the notable writers of this region, intellectual power has usually predominated over gifts of feeling or of imagination; the arid, formal talent of Gottsched is an exemplary instance, and the singularly cold and colorless mind of the greatest thinker of modern times, Immanuel Kant, seems eminently Prussian in quality. Growing out of such traditions and antecedents as these, the genius of Heinrich von Kleist appears as a striking anomaly.
This first great literary artist of Prussia was descended from a representative Prussian family of soldiers, which had numbered eighteen generals among its members. Heinrich von Kleist was born October 18, 1777, at Frankfort-on-the-Oder, in the heart of Brandenburg, where his father was stationed as a captain in the service of Frederick the Great. The parents, both of gentle birth, died before their children had grown to maturity. Heinrich was predestined by all the traditions of the family to a military career; after a private education he became, at the age of fourteen, a corporal in the regiment of guards at Potsdam.
[Illustration: #HEINRICH VON KLEIST IN HIS TWENTY-FOURTH YEAR# Made after a miniature presented by the poet to his bride]
The regiment was ordered south for the Rhine campaign against the French revolutionists, but the young soldier saw little actual fighting, and in June, 1795, his battalion had returned to Potsdam; he was then an ensign, and in his twentieth year was promoted to the rank of second lieutenant.
The humdrum duties and the easy pleasures of garrison life had no lasting charms for the future poet, who was as yet unconscious of his latent power, but was restlessly reaching out for a wider and deeper experience. We soon find him preparing himself, by energetic private study, for the University; in April, 1799, against the wishes of his family and his superior officers, he obtained a discharge from the army and entered upon his brief course as a student in his native city. He applied himself with laborious zeal to the mastery of a wide range of subjects, and hastened, with pedantic gravity, to retail his newly won learning to his sisters and a group of their friends. For the time being, the impulse of self-expression took this didactic turn, which is very prominent also in his correspondence. Within the year he was betrothed to a member of this informal class, Wilhelmina von Zenge, the daughter of an officer. The question of a career now crowded out his interest in study; in August, 1800, as a step toward the solution of this problem, Kleist returned to Berlin and secured a modest appointment in the customs department. He found no more satisfaction in the civil than in his former military service, and all manner of vague plans, artistic, literary and academic, occupied his mind. Intensive study of Kant's philosophy brought on an intellectual crisis, in which the ardent student found himself bereft of his fond hope of attaining to absolute truth. Meanwhile the romantic appeal of Nature, first heeded on a trip to Würzburg, and the romantic lure of travel, drew the dreamer irresistibly away from his desk. His sister Ulrica accompanied him on a journey that began in April, 1801, and brought them, by a devious route, to Paris in July. By this time Kleist had become clearly conscious of his vocation; the strong creative impulse that had hitherto bewildered him now found its proper vent in poetic expression, and he felt himself dedicated to a literary career. With characteristic secretiveness he kept hidden, even from his sister, the drama at which he was quietly working.
Absorbed in his new ambition, Kleist found little in Paris to interest him. He felt the need of solitude for the maturing of his plans, and with the double object of seeking in idyllic pursuits the inspiration of Nature and of earning leisure for writing, he proposed to his betrothed that she join him secretly in establishing a home upon a small farm in Switzerland. When Wilhelmina found it impossible to accept this plan, Kleist coldly severed all relations with her. He journeyed to Switzerland in December, 1801, and in Bern became acquainted with a group of young authors, the novelist Heinrich Zschokke, the publisher Heinrich Gessner, and Ludwig Wieland, son of the famous author of Oberon. To these sympathetic friends he read his first tragedy, which, in its earlier draft, had a Spanish setting, as The Thierrez Family or The Ghonorez Family, but which, on their advice, was given a German background. This drama Gessner published for Kleist, under the title The Schroffenstein Family, in the winter of 1802-03. It had no sooner appeared than the author felt himself to have outgrown its youthful weaknesses of imitation and exaggeration. Another dramatic production grew directly out of the discussions of this little circle. The friends agreed, on a wager, to put into literary form the story suggested by an engraving that hung in Zschokke's room. By common consent the prize was awarded to Kleist's production, his one comedy, The Broken Jug.
In April, 1802, Kleist realized his romantic dream by taking up his abode, in rural seclusion, on a little island at the outlet of the Lake of Thun, amid the majestic scenery of the Bernese Oberland. In this retreat, encouraged by the applause of his first confidants, he labored with joyous energy, recasting his Schroffenstein Family, working out the Broken Jug, meditating historical dramas on Leopold of Austria and Peter the Hermit, and expending the best of his untrained genius on the plan of a tragedy, Robert Guiscard, in which he strove to create a drama of a new type, combining the beauties of Greek classical art and of Shakespeare; with his Guiscard the young poet even dared hope to "snatch the laurel wreath from Goethe's brow."