But this work, though thoroughly patriotic in sentiment, found no favour with the royal family. Kleist’s psychological realism, already shockingly manifested in Penthesilea, had led him to include in it a scene in which the young hero, unlike any proper hero, Prussian officer or gentleman, collapses into elemental panic at the prospect of his imminent execution and begs for his life at any price, like Claudio in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. This breach of convention was found intolerable and the play was not published until ten years after Kleist’s death, which followed soon after. The suicide pact with Henriette Vogel was executed on 22 November 1811, and on 28 December The Times carried the following report:

The attention of the people of Berlin has lately been very much occupied by the tragical adventure of M. Kleist, the celebrated Prussian poet, and Madame Vogel. The reports which were at first circulated with regard to the cause of this unfortunate affair, have been strongly contradicted by the family of the lady; and it has been particularly denied that love was in any respect the cause of it. Madame Vogel, it is said, had suffered long under an incurable disorder; her physicians had declared her death inevitable; she herself formed a resolution to put a period to her existence. M. Kleist, the poet, and a friend of her family, had also long determined to kill himself. These two unhappy beings having confidentially communicated to each other their horrible resolution, resolved to carry it into effect at the same time. They repaired to the Inn at Wilhelm-stadt, between Berlin and Potsdam, on the border of the Sacred Lake [sic]. For one night and one day they were preparing themselves for death, by putting up prayers, singing, drinking a number of bottles of wine and rum, and last of all by taking about sixteen cups of coffee. They wrote a letter to M. Vogel, to announce to him the resolution they had taken, and to beg him to come as speedily as possible, for the purpose of seeing their remains interred. The letter was sent to Berlin by express. This done, they repaired to the banks of the Sacred Lake, where they sat down opposite each other. M. Kleist took a loaded pistol, and shot Madame Vogel through the heart, who fell back dead; he then re-loaded the pistol, and shot himself through the head. Soon after M. Vogel arrived, and found them both dead. The public are far from admiring, or even of approving, this act of insanity. An apology for this suicide, by M. Peghuilhen, Counsellor at War, has excited unanimously indignation among all who have the principles either of religion or morality…

The eight canonical stories, those published in the two-volume book edition of 1810–11, vary in length from the two or three pages of The Beggarwoman of Locarno to Michael Kohlhaas, which has the dimensions of a short novel. Kleist also filled up the pages of the Berliner Abendblätter with some miscellaneous anecdotes of lesser importance; in addition there is some reason to believe that he did in fact write a full-length novel (as he states in a letter of July 1811) though this has never come to light. It may have been destroyed by Kleist himself, or suppressed by his family with other revealing personal papers which were rumoured to be still secretly extant in this century but were finally lost during the Second World War. The present edition of the stories departs slightly from Kleist’s own arrangement of them in the book edition, since it aims to approximate to the chronological order of their composition, or partial composition, so far as this is known. As we have noted, most of them first appeared in one or another short-lived periodical, exceptions being The Foundling and The Duel which were published in the book edition for the first time. the text of St Cecilia or The Power of Music in the same volume is an extended and improved version of the original story which had come out earlier. The preliminary fragment of Michael Kohlhaas, probably conceived in 1805, and printed in the November 1808 number of Phoebus, ran to only a quarter of its final length. Apart from this more complicated case there seems to be no good reason for assigning to any of the stories a date of composition in whole or in part significantly earlier than that of their first publication.