On this basis, the first (or first completed) stories were The Earthquake in Chile and The Marquise of O—. The former was probably written in 1806 or early in 1807, appearing in September of that year in Cotta’s Morgenblatt; the latter, on which Kleist was probably working during his imprisonment in France, appeared in Phoebus in February 1808.

These two stories make an interesting stylistic contrast, although they might both be said to deal with a basically similar theme which is also that of the other stories and of most of the plays. Virtually all his important work reveals Kleist’s epistemological obsession, his preoccupation with the tragic or potentially tragic deceptiveness of appearances in the world and in human nature. He constantly presents situations and characters which are disturbingly paradoxical and intractable to rational analysis; they point towards the ‘absurdity’ of life, as Albert Camus was to call it nearly a century and a half later, and it is therefore not surprising that in his treatment of them he can range between the tragic and the comic modes.

The Earthquake in Chile, in some ways the most remarkable of all the stories, is starkly tragic and raises, by implication at least, the deepest theological and existential questions, leaving them of course unanswered. It is constructed with consummate artistry and also serves as a particularly good example of the laconic self-effacement which is Kleist’s typical stance as a narrator. In general his method is to abstain from comment on the events he chronicles, and indeed from almost any kind of explicit communication with the reader; where value-judgements occur in the course of the narrative they can usually be seen to be incidental and relative, arising from a kind of momentary dramatic identification with the particular character in an immediate situation, rather than representing the author-narrator’s overall viewpoint. Kleist here simply puts before us a sequence of events, based on the historical fact of an earthquake which destroyed Santiago on 13 May 1647; he had some knowledge of the details of this disaster, though it is not clear from what source. But uppermost in his mind must have been the famous earthquake of 1755 which not only shattered Lisbon but severely shook the optimistic theodicy of the Enlightenment. His story about the Chilean earthquake offers no explanation of why it has occurred, or rather it suggests a number of different possible explanations which cancel each other out. We are left with the impression that the author is no better placed to interpret his story to us than the reader or even the characters themselves. This ‘deadpan’ narrative effect is one of the factors that give Kleist’s work a more modern flavour than that of most of his contemporaries, and has led to its being compared with that of Kafka, who, it is known, greatly admired his stories.

Strictly speaking, Kleist does not maintain a wholly neutral attitude in his story of Jerónimo and Josefa but seems to invite our sympathy for the lovers and compassion for their fate. The paradoxes nevertheless remain. A young girl, forced into a convent against her will, cannot renounce her lover, becomes pregnant by him, and eventually collapses in labour pains on the steps of the cathedral during a solemn festival. She is condemned to death for fornication and sacrilege, and an enormous crowd makes elaborate preparations, in a spirit of sanctimonious vindictiveness, to watch her execution. A matter of minutes before what they describe as divine justice can take its course, Josefa’s life is spared by the earthquake, which at the same time kills thousands of other innocent people. The earthquake also saves her imprisoned lover Jerónimo only seconds before he is about to hang himself in despair, shattering the walls of his prison and terrifying him into a renewed desire for mere physical survival. It destroys both the just and the unjust, those who like the Abbess have been merciful to the young couple and those who have condemned them. The common disaster brings out in human nature both the best – heroic courage and self-sacrifice, mutual help and compassion, and the worst – the frenzied search for a scapegoat and the religious zeal that serves as a pretext for sickening cruelty. In the central section of the story the lovers are reunited, along with other survivors, in the countryside outside the stricken city, and in this idyllic interlude, the eye of the storm as it were, hope temporarily revives – the fabric of corrupt civilization has collapsed and what Rousseau regarded as the natural goodness of mankind has apparently been restored. But in the conclusion, with dreadful irony, Jerónimo and Josefa perish after all: returning to the only church in the city left standing to give thanks to God for their deliverance, they hear their sin denounced from the pulpit and are then recognized and lynched by a fanatical mob, only their child surviving when the wrong baby has been savagely killed instead. If the earthquake has been an ‘act of God’, then human reason can make very little of God’s deeds, unless on the hypothesis that he is an omnipotent and highly sophisticated devil. In two letters written in 1806 Kleist expresses the hope that, contrary to evidence, the world is not governed by an evil spirit, but simply by one who is not understood. At least The Earthquake in Chile renders impossible any theodicy to which the concepts of mystery and paradox are not central. The world as experienced here by human beings is theologically ambiguous, as is the world of real life; in this sense the story is radically truthful. It is no accident that it presents the church and the clergy in so unfavourable a light; at this level of questioning, the answers offered by conventional and institutional religion cannot avail.

The Marquise of O— operates in a very different literary vein. The mystery with which it deals is domestic and psychological rather than cosmic. In it Kleist refers to what he was fond of calling die gebrechliche Einrichtung der Welt, the faulty or imperfect or unstable structure or ordering of the world, the flaw in the scheme of things: but here he modulates this concept in a non-tragic direction. Gebrechlich strictly means ‘fragile’, which the earth’s crust in The Earthquake in Chile literally is. In the Marquise of O—, the phrase gebrechliche Einrichtung der Welt occurs at the end, when the world’s ‘inherent imperfection’ is invoked as a reason for the conciliatory conclusion of the story (P. 113); but at another crucial point (P.