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PARTISAN REVIEW
as in Kleist's great story
Michael Kohlhaas,
or, conversely, in the com–
plete subordination of the individual's conscience to a national cause,
as in
his
patriotic drama
Die H ermannsschlacht.
In this play Kleist
came close to the neat division between private and public morality
which has been a characteristic of German political thinking ever
since Hegel, Fichte and Treitschke took advantage of the eclipse of
rationalism to establish an idolatrous cult of the State. Until his very
last works, absolutism and anarchy were the only fixed points that
Kleist could see; in between them there was only a vague flux.
II
Several years after Kleist's death Goethe told Eckermann
that Kleist had appalled
him
"like one afflicted with an incurable
disease." From
his
own very different premises Kleist arrived at the
same conclusion about himself: in his last note to his half-sister,
dated "on the morning of my death," he told her: "The truth is
that there was no help for me on earth." Of all the experiments
that were his life, only one, his writing, had succeeded; and even this
one success was not confirmed by the kind of outward response that
might still have mended his self-esteem, by persuading him that his
literary works had penetrated into the realm of "action." Goethe, it
is
true, had once staged Kleist's comedy
Der Zerbrochene Krug
at
Weimar; but he had also informed Kleist of his displeasure at "young
men of wit and talent who are waiting for a theater that is yet to
come." Kleist never forgot this judgment, to which he replied with a
caustic epigram.
Even later critics of Kleist, from Grillparzer and Hebbel in the
nineteenth century to Gundolf in the twentieth, did not succeed in
disengaging Kleist's great qualities as a writer from their own reac–
tions to
his
person. In 1827, sixteen years after Kleist's death, Carlyle
mentioned
him
in passing as "a noble-minded and ill-fated man of
genius, whom the mismanagement of a too impetuous heart has since
driven to suicide before the world has sufficiently reaped the bright
promise of his early years." The notice is favorable, but somewhat
misleading with respect to Kleist's works. However, there is little
point in tracing all the misunderstandings that constitute the progress
of a writer's reputation, especially as such histories always imply that
