The Marquise of O— and Other Stories [antikvár]

Introduction In the spring of 1799 the 2i-year-old Heinrich von Kleist wrote to his half-sister Ulrike that he found it 'incomprehensible how a human being can live without a plan for his life (Lebensplan); the sense of security with which I employ my present time and the calm with which I look to the future make me profoundly aware of just what inestimable happiness my life-plan assures me'. But fear evidently lay behind this confidence, and indeed behind the very notion of a 'life-plan', for he continued: 'Existing without a life-plan, without any firm purpose, constantly wavering between uncertain desires, constantly at variance with my duties, the plaything of chance, a puppet on the strings of fate -such an unworthy situation seems so contemptible to me and would make me so wretched that death would be preferable by far.' Less than thirteen years later Kleist wrote to Ulrike that there was no remedy for him on earth, and within hours of his completing this letter two shots rang out from beside the Wannsee near Berlin. In a suicide pact for which he had long sought a willing partner Kleist had first shot dead Henriette Vogel, a 3 i-year-old woman suffering from incurable cancer, and had then blown out his own brains. During those thirteen years Kleist had written plays and stories of a kind quite unprecedented in German literature. The special interest of his best work, its peculiar inner tension, lies in its negative expression of the ideals of the Enlightenment at the very point of their collapse as he personally experienced it. A typical intellectual product of the late eighteenth century, Kleist had started from certain unquestioned assumptions: that life can be planned, that its random element can be eliminated, that happiness can