Michael Hamburger
HEINRICH VON KLEIST:
AN INTRODUCTION
That complex and belated phenomenon, the German li–
terary Renaissance, can be roughly divided into two phases. The
earlier phase was one of humanistic Enlightenment, though of an
Enlightenment threatened from the start by the Powers of Darkness.
Goethe began by releasing the chthonic powers in
Werther
and in
his
early dithyrambic verse, but spent the rest of
his
life in the strenu–
ous and multiple endeavor to overcome them; hence
his
horror of
the tragic, the incongruous redemption of Faust in Part II and
his
attitude of cold reserve toward the most gifted writers of the second
phase, H6lderlin and Kleist. This second phase was a tragic one.
Both H6lderlin and Kleist started out with a set of enlightened ideals
inherited from their humanistic predecessors, especially from Schiller's
cult of liberty, friendship, classical beauty and pantheistic joy; but
just as H6lderlin's juvenile rhapsodies on his favorite abstractions gave
place to his mature odes, elegies and 'hymns'-lyrical poems that
are tragedies in miniature, moving from thesis and antithesis to syn–
thesis on the plane of tragic joy, of a joy purged by conflict and
suffering-so Kleist's most vital energies were not released till the
so-called Kant crisis of 1801 which, at the age of 23, left him be–
wildered, aimless, disillusioned and desperate--at the mercy of the
chthonic powers. To say that
his
early phase of enlightened idealism
had been unproductive is an understatement; his desire to believe in
the panacea of Reason, with its concomitant benefits of Truth, Virtue
and Happiness, had prevented him from even beginning to discover
his true gifts and his true vocation. Another year went by before–
to his own astonishment-he found himself at work on his first
tragedy. In the meantime he had considered almost every possible
profession open to a man of his rank and supposed talents; imagina–
tive literature was not one of them.
