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PARTISAN REVIEW
1798, so as to be able to devote
all
his time to scientific and philo–
sophic studies, Kleist engaged in a series of fruitless enterprises in–
terrupted by nervous breakdowns-which, in turn, were followed
by long periods of physical illness-and terminated only by his suicide
at the age of thirty-four. His resignation from the army might have
been forgiven him if he had attained prominence as a scholar or
scientist; but after the Kant crisis he put away his textbooks in dis–
gust. At the time when he was expected to serve his country in a
military or administrative capacity he spent his time abroad and de–
scribed himself as "a man who has no political opinions at all"; when
his country adopted a policy of appeasement toward Napoleon,
Kleist flared up into a patriotism so extreme as to embarrass the
Prussian government, who suppressed his newspaper and deprived
him of his main source of income. Even his suicide was as scandalous
as possible, for it involved a pact with a married woman suffering
from cancer, Henriette Vogel, whom Kleist shot before shooting him–
self. His last literary work was the
Litany of Death,
an ecstatic love
poem in free verse addressed to Henriette, the only woman in his life
who had proved capable of 'absolute' devotion.
Politically, Kleist's whole life was overshadowed by the Napo–
leonic wars, in which he took an active part as an adolescent, and a
vicarious part in his last years-as the author of brilliant and formid–
able tracts. In early manhood he had rebelled against his inherited
function in the Prussian State, having no other desire than to be in–
dependent and unprivileged, a citizen of the world. Once he had
broken away, his experiences taught
him
that in the Prussian State
there was no place for any virtues or talents but the military and
administrative ones-not, at least, for a member of his class. To be
independent was to be an outsider, if not an outlaw. The difference
between German and English literature of the period can hardly be
understood without considering that the German writers as such
had simply no status in society; this is one reason why many of them
strike us as so peculiarly modern. For a time Kleist took refuge in a
generous cosmopolitanism not unlike Goethe's; but Kleist's cosmopol–
itanism proved a poor substitute for the sense of security enjoyed by
those who feel that they belong to a powerful, or at least to an inde–
pendent, nation; and it did not stand up to the test which Goethe's
alone was able to pass: the defeat and invasion of his country by a
