HEINRICH VON KLEIST
223
Even now, and
till
the very end of his life, Kleist persisted in
regarding himself as a man of action and never quite overcame the
conviction that "it is better to act than to think." What he did not
know was that
his
proper field of action was literature; and that
only literature could liberate him from the false antimony between
action and thought. This lack of self-knowledge accounts for the long
sequence of resolutions, ambitions and "life plans" by which he tried
to exorcise his own daemon, and their invariable failure:
his
broken
engagement to Wilhelmine von Zenge, his abortive attempts to settle
down as a teacher, farmer, civil servant, soldier, publisher and editor;
his
wanderings around Germany, Austria, France, Switzerland and
Italy, his fantastic plan to take part in. Napoleon's projected invasion
of England in order to die an honorable death; and, soon after, his
threat to assassinate Napoleon in the cause of German nationalism. AS
he grew older, his plans to act became more, not less implausible,
until he could think of only one act that was both possible and suffi–
ciently decisive to qualify as a "great deed": this was the act of
suicide.
HOlderlin too considered himself doomed to destruction; but be–
cause he felt himself to be a mere "vessel" for divine truths and
because such vessels must be broken once they have served their
purpose. Kleist, being neither priest nor seer, was even denied the
comfort of immolation;
all
he knew was that the plane of action
permitted no realization of his passions, ambitions and fantasies.
It will be impossible here to investigate all the causes-ideologi–
cal, political and social-that gave a tragic turn to the second phase
of the German literary Renaissance; nor even to show in detail how
these causes affected Kleist's life and work. He was born in 1777
of a Prussian family distinguished mainly by a long line of dis–
tinguished military men. Kleist himself joined the Prussian Royal
Guards at the age of fourteen, saw active service in the following
year and was commissioned in 1797. He had become an orphan in
1793.
Of
his
six
brothers and sisters, it was his half-sister Ulrike,
three years older than himself, who became his life-long friend, sup–
port
and confidante; about the others he wrote at the end of his
life that they had ceased to look upon
him
as anything "but a use–
less member of society, no longer worthy of any sympathy." The
reason has already been indicated. After resigning his commission in
