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A Reading of Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

John R. Cary
John R. Cary*
Affiliation:
Haverford College, Haverford, Pa.
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Abstract

In Michael Kohlhaas, Kleist brings two kinds of law, human and extra-human, into conflict with each other. Kohlhaas, denied the protection of the written law, is driven to rebellion. Simultaneously, he gains the aid of the laws of fate through the gypsy soothsayer, who is an agent of Nemesis, goddess of justice. Kohlhaas is associated with the animal figures in the work, the horses and the stag, in his virtual death at the hands of men and his return from the dead with the aid of supernatural law to wreak his inhuman vengeance on the Elector of Saxony. The latter is depicted as a pragmatist whose attempts to deal with Kohlhaas within the rational written law are doomed from the start. It is the basic tragedy of the work that the rational ruler and his passionate subject are drawn into mortal conflict with each other because each operates according to a different kind of law. This underlying conflict between human and extra-human justice accounts for the paradox and irony, as well as for the complex plotting, of the work. Kleist creates an ambiguous world in which all the figures, including the judges and the judged, are at once innocent and guilty.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 85 , Issue 2 , March 1970, pp. 212 - 218
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1970

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Footnotes

*

A portion of this paper was presented before German 3 (Eighteenth Century and Goethe) at the 1968 meeting of the Modern Language Association in New York City.

References

1 Heinrich von Kleist: Samtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. Helmut Sembdner, 4th rev. ed. (Munich, 1965), throughout referred to within the text by volume and page number.

2 Kleist did not invent his animal figures. He found the horses in Haftitz' Markische Chronik, the stag in von Arnim's Der W inter garten, or in some other source which both he and Arnim may have used. See Josef Kôrner, Recht uni Pflicht: Eine Studie iiber Kleisls Michael Kohlhaas und Prinz Friedrich von Homberg (Leipzig und Berlin, 1926), p. 24 n.

3 In their examination of the theme of metaphysical justice in Kleist, Dieter Huhn and Jiirgen Behrens point to the “higher order” in Das Kathchen von Heilbronn, but they do not examine the “lower order” present in Michael Kohlhaas. “Uber die Idee des Rechts im Werk Heinrich von Kleists,” Jahrbuch des Wiener Goethe Vereins, LXIX (1965), 185.

4 I am in agreement with Benno von Wiese about the thematic and structural significance of the Dresden scene. We differ, however, about the nature of its significance. Von Wiese finds in it a confrontation of order and anarchy, while I read it as a collision of two kinds of law. See his Die deutsche ? ovale von Goethe bis Kafka (Diisseldorf, 1960), I, 55. Gtinther Blocker (Heinrich von Kleist oder das absolute Ich, Berlin, 1960, pp. 217–220) perceives a paradoxical conflict between what he terms a written and a higher law, but does not consider this theme in its implications for the work as a whole. See also Walter Silz, Heinrich von Kleist: Studies in his Works and Literary Character (Philadelphia, 1961), pp. 196–198.

5 Walter Muller-Seidel examines the relationship of the Elector of Saxony and Kohlhaas in terms of judging and misjudging, but primarily from the perspective of Kohlhaas. He stresses contradiction and paradox within Kohlhaas but does not pursue the implications of this pattern for Kohlhaas' relation with the Elector. Versehen una Erkennen: Eine Studie uber Heinrich von Kleist (Cologne, 1961), pp. 109, 149–150.