The Marquise of O—

A KLEIST CHRONOLOGY

Heinrich von Kleist was born in 1777 into a Prussian military family in Frankfurt an der Oder, now near the Polish border. His father died when he was eleven and his mother five years later. By this time Heinrich, aged sixteen, was serving in a Guards regiment under the Duke of Brunswick, and took part in the successful siege and recapture of Mainz, then occupied by the French during the War of the First Coalition, and in skirmishes thereafter. Still in the army, he formed his first lifelong friendships with Otto August Rühle von Lilienstern (later head of the Prussian general staff), with whom Kleist, an accomplished clarinettist, played music, and Ernst von Pfuel (subsequently Prussian Minister of War and Prime Minister).

In 1799 Kleist left the army to study in his home town, Frankfurt an der Oder, where he met Wilhelmine von Zenge as her home tutor; she became his fiancée. Kleist broke off his studies after three terms and undertook clerical work for ministries in Berlin.

1801 was the year of his so-called Kant Crisis, when he interpreted Kant’s philosophy as meaning the impossibility of establishing objective truth. This is considered an understandable misinterpretation, but under it he fled in despair with his half-sister Ulrike to Paris and terminated his interest in the natural sciences.

In 1802 he broke off his engagement to Wilhelmine, finished his play The Schroffenstein Family and began work on two more plays, Robert Guiskard (never to be completed) and The Broken Jug (his most popular play).

In 1803 he spent two months with Christoph Martin Wieland, the amiable and popular writer who preceded Goethe’s ascendancy in Weimar. Kleist tried unsuccessfully to complete Robert Guiskard on a trip to Switzerland with von Pfuel, went to Paris and, in desperation at his failure with his play, tried, equally unsuccessfully, to join the French Army preparing to invade England. He destroyed his play.

He returned to Berlin in 1804 and worked for the Ministry of Finance, then moved to Königsberg and lived for a time with Ulrike.

In 1806 he turned again to writing plays and now stories, in particular finishing The Broken Jug and starting another comedy, Amphitryon. He also began his great and longest novella, Michael Kohlhaas. Due to ill health he was given six months’ leave by the ministry, during which time Prussia was defeated by Napoleon at the Battle of Jena-Auerstedt.

In 1807 Kleist travelled to Berlin, then occupied by the French, and was arrested and taken prisoner as a spy. The Marquise of O— could have been written that summer in Châlons-sur-Marne, when Kleist was still a prisoner of the French, but after he had been released into looser custody, spending two weeks in the prison fortress of Joux on the River Doubs in the Jura, near Pontarlier, the possible model for what is referred to as the fortress, castle or citadel in the story.

After the Treaty of Tilsit in July 1807, Kleist was released, worked on his play Penthesilea and founded the journal Phöbus with his friend Adam Müller, the future Prussian statesman and conservative thinker. Kleist dedicated a copy to Goethe “On the knees of my heart”. The Marquise of O— appeared in the second issue in February 1808.

In 1808 the first performance was given in Weimar of The Broken Jug. Directed by Goethe, who—against Kleist’s wishes—split the play into three parts with two intervals, it was a flop and led to their bitter estrangement.

Kleist then turned his hand to preparing a popular uprising against the French, another failed venture, involving the failure of starting a patriotic journal in Prague after the Austrian defeat by Napoleon at the Battle of Wagram (1809). In 1808 he wrote The Battle of Teutoburg Forest—Die Hermannsschlacht—depicting the defeat of the Romans by the German Arminius in the first century AD.

In 1810 Kleist moved back to Berlin and met the poets and writers Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, founders of the Romantic Movement in Germany. That year the first volume of Kleist’s stories appeared, including Michael Kohlhaas, The Marquise of O— and The Earthquake in Chile.

In 1811 he finished his play The Prince of Homburg, and a second volume of his stories appeared, including The Engagement in San Domingo, The Foundling and The Duel. Increasingly isolated, and after another failure to rejoin the military, Heinrich von Kleist took his own life, with Henriette Vogel, a married woman who had terminal cancer. At her request he shot her before shooting himself. He was thirty-four.

In condemning this double suicide in her Réflexions sur le suicide in 1813—and specifically Kleist for “annexing” Henrietta Vogel’s courage to end her life in order to end his own—Madame de Staël blamed “a people ruled by ‘metaphysical passion’ without specific object or useful aim. The defects of the Germans,” she continued, “are more the result of their circumstances than their character, and will be corrected when there exists a political order there able to offer careers to men worthy of being citizens.”

On Kleist’s gravestone by the Wannsee are the words, by the Berlin writer Max Ring: