On the 210th Anniversary of the Death of Heinrich von Kleist
On the 210th Anniversary of the Death of Heinrich von Kleist
"Heaven only knows, my dear, most excellent friend, in this hour when two souls rise above this world, like two joyous aeronauts, what strange feelings, half wistful, half playful, move us to write...
Today marks the 210th anniversary of the death of Heinrich von Kleist. He committed suicide with Henriette Vogel, a close friend, shooting her and then himself, on the shores of the Kleiner Wannsee, a lake in the forested outskirts of Berlin. He was 34, she 31. Kleist had experienced periods of mental instability since childhood. He would ask friends, sometimes acquaintances, whether they would like to die with him. Vogel was suffering from a debilitating illness, which an autopsy revealed to be metastasized uterine cancer.
It’s quite likely that if Kleist had not died in such a spectacular fashion, he would have remained an obscure figure. Neither his dramas nor his prose fiction garnered popular interest or critical acclaim in his lifetime. The year before his death, Kleist founded the Berliner Abendblätter, the first daily newspaper in the city. It lasted for six months before shuttering, due to official censorship and Kleist’s mismanaged response, which included challenging a government official to a duel.
Like others of his generation, Kleist was steeped in a culture of morbid sentimentality, Wertherism, the name derived from Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, in which the protagonist commits suicide after a series of romantic and social humiliations. Kleist was involved a public quarrel with Goethe, after the poet staged a disastrous performance of Kleist’s comedy, The Broken Jug, in Weimar. The play closed after a single performance. Despite their public feud, Kleist continued to admire Goethe and read his novel Elective Affinities in weeks leading up to his death. He also read Hamlet in translation, quoted the play in his letters, another important work to the Romantic generation.
It’s unlikely that Kleist and Vogel’s relationship was sexual in nature. Kleist habitually broke off contact with women (including a fiancé) when a relationship appeared to be moving past the point of friendship. Vogel’s husband is said have tolerated the affair, whatever its nature. In any case, he made no effort to stop it. All evidence points to Kleist and Vogel being in full agreement on their suicide and planning it together. Vogel was said to been intelligent, artistically sensitive, and a gifted musician, so their relationship can be seen as one of artistic collaboration. The two drove out to a country inn between Potsdam and Berlin the day before their suicide. Both wrote letters regarding their impending deaths. Kleist famously (infamously) described them as “two joyous aeronauts” sailing above the earth.
That morning Vogel requested coffee by the lakeside, which caused some confusion with the inn’s staff, this being November. Despite their strange requests, they reported Kleist and Vogel being kind and in general good spirits. Vogel joked about Kleist having a “milk mustache”. They were seen skipping stones and playing tag along the lakeside. As with their letters, they made every effort to appear that their deaths were a joyous occasion. Kleist shot Vogel in the chest. He then put a then gun to himself (the first appears to have misfired) shooting himself in the head. They were found together in trench by the lake after the shots were heard.
The following day Vogel’s husband and a friend of the family arrived to see about the remains. Both she and Kleist had autopsies performed on them, confirming that Vogel was suffering from terminal illness. The autopsy, along with eyewitness accounts and their letters, make it so that Kleist’s last days are by far best documented portion part of this life. So many other aspects are unknown (his combat record as an officer cadet, his sexual orientation, his possible involvement in espionage) but we do know how and why he died.
The suicide made international news, was a scandal in Prussia, with Kleist receiving, his friends noted, more sympathy abroad than in the domestic press. This was far more publicity than he had ever received in his lifetime. Eventually his plays were staged or restaged, his prose works reprinted and sold well. A century after his death, German modernists such as Kafka, Rilke, and Walser took further inspiration from his work and life, cementing his place in the canon. Kleist also inspired the tradition of German writers burning or, later, requesting others burn unpublished manuscripts and correspondence. Kleist was said to have been working on a novel around the time of his death.
Kleist participated in the Romantic cult of morbid sentimentalism, but it’s important to note that he did so with a degree of irony and self-knowledge. He parodied Werther in his writings, but of course this did not ultimately stave off his wish to die, which had been present since late childhood. The line about he and Vogel being “two joyous aeronauts” recalls a childhood belief of Kleist’s, wherein the souls of dead journey to a star where they are morally perfected. This belief was shaken by a reading of Kantian philosophy, of all things. This bizarre mixture of joy and sorrow evident in his death also runs through Kleist's work as well, like some kind of exotic theoretical matter, neither light nor heavy.
If you’d like to read more, some of my Kleist translations are available here, through my newsletter, and here, via Sublunary editions