Then there is Giulietta’s dramatic polarization of her lover or assailant into ‘angel’ and ‘devil’; this too might be dismissed as a literary cliché, but it seems to be something more. Giulietta’s whole relationship to the Count is an enigma to her, which she can only gradually resolve. The Count himself is enigmatic, with a dark and irrational streak in his nature. He rescues Giulietta from his troops, only to use her himself a moment later as a prize of war – we are reminded of the paradoxical association of love and violence in Penthesilea. Above all, Count F— carries with him, as we learn in what is certainly the oddest passage in the story (p. 82), a memory of having once as a child, on a perverse impulse, hurled mud at a beautiful white swan, an act of ‘defilement’ which he unconsciously identifies with his violation of the chaste Giulietta. Emotionally disturbed as he was, Kleist clearly had some strangely modern insights into erotic psychology; in the final scene of Penthesilea he had even unwittingly anticipated, by a certain choice of metaphor, Freud’s theory that slips of the tongue can express repudiated unconscious drives. Needless to say, The Marquise of O— was no less incomprehensible than Penthesilea to his contemporaries, who found both works deeply shocking and offensive to good taste, or at best ludicrous.

Michael Kohlhaas is not only by far the longest story in the collection but also probably the best known or at least the most discussed. As already mentioned, about one quarter of it was first published in November 1808 in Phoebus; it is not clear when that fragment was written. The story in its general outline was founded on fact: Kleist’s chief source seems to have been an excerpt from an earlier chronicle published in 1731 which tells how in the middle of the sixteenth century a horse-dealer named Hans (not Michael) Kohlhaas from Kohlhaasenbrück, a village near Berlin and just on the Brandenburg side of the frontier with Saxony, had two of his horses wrongfully detained and ill-treated while travelling to Dresden; how his legal action for damages failed owing to corrupt intervention; how he then took the law into his own hands, hired an armed band and, bent on vengeance, pursued the Junker von Tronka, burning down his castle and also part of Wittenberg; and how this private war grew in scale despite an attempt by Martin Luther to reason with Kohlhaas and persuade him to desist. The chronicle also mentions inter alia the political complications, the involvement of the Elector of Brandenburg and the eventual execution of Kohlhaas in Berlin on the Monday after Palm Sunday. The main events of the Phoebus fragment may be summarized as follows: Michael Kohlhaas is a prosperous and honourable man with a strongly developed sense of justice and fair dealing. It is this very passion for justice that will turn him (Kleist states this characteristic central paradox in his first paragraph) ‘into a robber and a murderer’, and make him ‘one of the most honourable as well as one of the most terrible men of his age’. Kleist keeps to the outline of his source, but makes Kohlhaas’s grievance the more poignant by having his wife, Lisbeth, die from an injury sustained when she is warded off by a bodyguard as she vainly tries to present to the Elector personally her husband’s petition, hitherto suppressed by corrupt courtiers. Lisbeth’s intervention is Kohlhaas’s last step within the bounds of legality; he has already mortgaged his property to raise money for his resort to violence. Immediately after he has buried his wife, he assembles the first of his followers and rides off to attack Tronka Castle. The Phoebus fragment of 1808 breaks off at this point (page 138 of our text). The remainder was not written, or at least not finished, until the summer of 1810. In these further seventy-five pages Kleist greatly complicates the material. If he had followed the story’s natural line of development and adhered more closely to his main source, he would have narrated only the following events: Kohlhaas and his men storm Tronka Castle and destroy it, but the Junker Wenzel himself manages to escape to Wittenberg. Kohlhaas now begins to issue proclamations of an increasingly paranoid character, declaring himself to be the representative of the Archangel Michael and to have formed a new ‘world government’, calling upon all good Christians to support his just cause against Tronka, and demanding that the latter be handed over to him for chastisement. The pay he offers, together with the prospect of further gain from plunder, naturally attracts an increasing number of followers. He sets fire to Wittenberg three times, defeating or evading the ever more formidable military expeditions sent against him, and also attacks Leipzig, to which he thinks the Junker has been taken, although he is in fact still in Wittenberg under heavy guard. At this point Luther intervenes with a public proclamation addressed to Kohlhaas, condemning his course of action. The horse-dealer, who deeply reveres Luther, returns secretly to Wittenberg and presents himself to the theologian. Society, he argues, has set him outside the law by refusing him the law’s protection; he is therefore justified and compelled to use force. His quarrel with the Junker has already cost him his wife and it is too late to stop now. Luther, as his spiritual father, urges him (as his dying wife had done) to forgive his enemy, and when Kohlhaas remains obdurate on this point, refuses him absolution. He consents, however, to negotiate on his behalf with the Elector of Saxony who, it appears, has improperly been kept in ignorance of Kohlhaas’s justified legal claims. When Kohlhaas has left, Luther writes to the Elector, pointing out that the horse-dealer has in fact been wronged and virtually outlawed, and that in view of the increasingly strong public feeling on his side there is danger of a general revolt.