(This obscure episode has never been clarified; in any case Kleist later broke off the engagement to Wilhelmine with callous abruptness, and a certain amount of mystery surrounds his sexual life in general.) A further attempt to settle down in state service, this time in a civilian capacity, lasted only a few months. Early in 1801 the conflict between his basic psychological instability and his frenzied longing for security broke out in the form of a crucial intellectual experience. The rationalistic and optimistic beliefs which he had imbibed from Wieland and other fashionable writers reflecting the spirit of the European and German Enlightenment were shattered by his reading of Kant. ‘Lately,’ he wrote to Wilhelmine in March 1801, ‘I became acquainted with the recent so-called Kantian philosophy.’ What exactly he had read is not certain, but it was the Kantian epistemological theory that seems above all to have disturbed him. Kant had demarcated the limits of human knowledge not in order to undermine confidence in man’s rational faculty or strengthen the case for atheism: on the contrary he had intended to clarify the true foundations for religious belief, to show what was properly beyond empirical exploration and therefore a matter of faith, not of knowledge. But Kant’s distinction between the unknowability of things in themselves as noumena and our cognitive operations with things as they appear (phenomena) seemed to Kleist to make a mockery of the ideal of self-cultivation, of man’s progress towards the complete possession of truth. If Kant was right, then appearance and reality, Kleist thought, were for ever confounded, nothing was predictable, there was no ascertainable single right answer or right way; human nature, our own selves, were a riddle, everything that had seemed straightforward became ambiguous and baffling. To Wilhelmine he wrote: ‘… we cannot determine whether what we call truth really is truth, or merely seems so to us’; and to Ulrike: ‘The thought that here on earth we know nothing of the truth, absolutely nothing… has shaken me in the very sanctuary of my soul – my only purpose, my supreme purpose has collapsed; I have none left.’ Yet it was precisely this breakdown of all his hopes, this very personal crisis of intellectual despair, that turned him into a creative writer.

In the years that followed Kleist travelled through Germany, lived for a while in Switzerland where he entertained Rousseauistic ideas of settling down on the land as a simple peasant, and even tried to join the French army in the hope of being killed during Napoleon’s planned invasion of England. Meanwhile his first play, The Schroffenstein Family, a grotesque tragedy of errors thematically indebted to Romeo and Juliet, had appeared anonymously in February 1803, and he had begun work on The Broken Pitcher, one of the few really successful German comedies. In 1803 he also wrote at least part of a grandly conceived second tragedy, Robert Guiscard, but burned the manuscript in a fit of discouragement. In 1805 a second attempt to join the Prussian civil service failed after a few months of preparatory studies. In January 1807 he was arrested by the French on suspicion of being a spy when trying to enter occupied Berlin without a passport, and spent nearly six months in a French prison. Here he wrote much of one of his finest works, the tragedy Penthesilea – stark, strange and ecstatic, breaking utterly with the established classicistic conception of Greek serenity and balance, and recapturing instead the Dionysian savagery of Euripides’ Bacchae which in part inspired this play. In Kleist’s version of the story of the tragic passion of the warrior Amazon queen for Achilles, love is shown to be ambiguously allied with hatred, a relentless elemental drive in which tenderness and the lust to destroy and devour are profoundly fused.

During his imprisonment Kleist’s friend Rühle von Lilienstern had found a publisher for his comedy or tragi-comedy Amphitryon, perhaps the subtlest of all the many dramatic treatments of this ancient tale, partly based on Molière’s version but reducing the latter, by comparison, to the level of elegant and unimportant farce. Then, upon his return from France, as if from the dead, his first completed short story, The Earthquake in Chile, appeared in a periodical under the title of Jerónimo and Josefa. In Dresden Kleist now founded a journal of his own in collaboration with the philosopher Adam Müller: they called it Phoebus and published in it The Broken Pitcher, The Marquise of O—, excerpts from Penthesilea and part of Michael Kohlhaas. But the venture was a financial failure and ended in a bitter quarrel between the two editors. Nor was the performance of The Broken Pitcher at the Weimar court theatre, under Goethe’s auspices, any more successful: Goethe’s production of it was a travesty and precipitated his final breach with Kleist. In 1809 it seemed possible that at least the disastrous political situation would improve and that Austria would be able to stem the tide of Napoleonic conquest. Since the crushing defeat of Prussia at Jena in 1806, Kleist had increasingly turned to fanatical patriotic fervour as a source of literary inspiration and for a sense of purpose in life; he wrote a number of political poems and tracts and notably, in 1808, The Battle with Hermann (Die Hermannsschlacht), a gruesome dramatic celebration of the Teutonic chieftain’s victory over the Roman legions in A.D. 9. But in July 1809 Austria was decisively defeated at Wagram; after visiting the scene of part of the campaign Kleist fled to the safety of Prague, where he fell seriously ill. After his recovery he returned to Berlin, and 1810 was perhaps the year of his greatest recognition as a writer during his lifetime. Kätchen of Heilbronn, a play designed to gratify the current popular taste for Gothick romance and chivalry, was performed in Vienna, and the first volume of his collected stories appeared, containing Michael Kohlhaas, The Marquise of O— and The Earthquake in Chile. At the same time Kleist became founder-editor of one of Germany’s first daily newspapers, the Berliner Abendblätter, which began very promisingly in October and in which he published two more of his stories, The Beggarwoman of Locarno and St Cecilia. These, together with The Betrothal in Santo Domingo (which had already been printed in another periodical), The Foundling and The Duel, then made up the second volume of collected stories which followed in 1811.

But Kleist’s relatively good fortune did not last. The initial popularity of the Abendblätter had been due much less to his own literary contributions than to articles on current affairs and above all, of course, to the sensational crime reports which during the first weeks were supplied to Kleist by the city chief of police. The government was embarrassed by some of the political comments and ordered strict censorship of the paper; its sales declined sharply and it closed down in March 1811, leaving Kleist in desperate financial straits. The small unofficial pension he had enjoyed from Queen Luise had ceased with her death, his own private means were long since exhausted, and his applications to rejoin the civil service or the army met, not surprisingly, with a cool reception. His most mature and balanced, yet still deeply enigmatic play, Prince Friedrich of Homburg, was completed in September 1811 and dedicated to Princess Amalie Marie Anne, wife of Prince William of Prussia, the King’s brother.