He advises the Elector not to treat him as a rebel but to allow his case to be reopened in Dresden, granting him for this purpose a safe-conduct to the Saxon capital and an amnesty in respect of his deeds of violence. The Elector discusses this now extremely embarrassing situation with his advisers, who include Wenzel von Tronka’s cousins, Hinz and Kunz, both high officials at the court, and eventually decides to issue a proclamation to Kohlhaas in the sense advised by Luther. On reading it, Kohlhaas disbands all his men in accordance with the Elector’s stipulation, proceeds to Dresden and reopens his case against Junker Wenzel, applying to the court as before for his punishment, for damages and for restitution of all losses, including restoration of the horses to their former healthy condition. The Junker is released from Wittenberg and received in Dresden by his cousins, who are furious with him for making their family a laughing-stock. To make matters worse, it turns out after some investigation that the two horses are still alive but in so neglected a state that they have already been handed over to a knacker, who is ordered to bring them to Dresden. Hearing that the emaciated animals are on public display in the market square, Wenzel and Kunz von Tronka hasten to the scene; Kohlhaas is summoned to identify the horses as his, but the Tronka servants refuse to touch creatures in such a disgraceful condition and a riot breaks out. This grotesque incident turns public sentiment against the horse-dealer, and he is now willing to settle out of court for a simple payment of compensation. But chance, or rather the natural entropy of events in a corrupt human world, again operates against him, for a number of his officially dispersed followers led by a certain brutal and unscrupulous Johann Nagelschmidt (who is mentioned in Kleist’s source) have started to plunder the countryside under cover of Kohlhaas’s name and cause. Kohlhaas at once publicly dissociates himself from Nagelschmidt, but the Tronka family see their advantage: the amnesty is in danger of collapsing, time is on their side, and they begin to prolong the case by vexatious special pleadings. Kohlhaas notices that the number of lansquenets set to guard his house have increased and realizes that he has in effect been made a prisoner. To test this – for it is clear by now that he is obsessed by a desire to unmask official hypocrisy and politic dissimulation – he attempts to leave on a social visit but is prevented by a series of transparent pretexts. Nagelschmidt now writes to him suggesting that he should resume command of the band, and offering to engineer his escape. Unknown to Kohlhaas, this letter has been intercepted and read by the authorities. Since he now despairs of the amnesty and the whole affair, and intends to abandon his claims and emigrate, he writes back accepting Nagelschmidt’s offer and thus falls into the trap which the Tronka party have persuaded the Elector to lay for him. His letter to Nagelschmidt is published in order to discredit him, he is put on trial for conspiracy, makes no defence and is condemned to death by burning and quartering. He has, however, a friend at the Electoral court in Berlin, who has now at last succeeded in bringing the whole inside story of the affair to the notice of the Elector of Brandenburg. The latter intervenes; he dismisses the corrupt official who, as a relative of the Tronka family, had prevented Kohlhaas’s previous submissions from reaching him, and motivated partly by a desire to show his political strength as a potential ally of Poland, which is threatening Saxony with war, he makes the following demands: Kohlhaas, as a Brandenburg citizen, is to be transferred immediately to Berlin, where a Saxon attorney may present the case against him for his acts of violence in Saxony on which he will be tried according to Brandenburg law; and a Brandenburg attorney is to be allowed to come to Dresden to ensure that the Saxon court deals properly with Kohlhaas’s own case against Wenzel von Tronka. The Saxon Elector reluctantly agrees to the extradition of the horse-dealer but decides to appeal to the Holy Roman Emperor, who is not bound by any Saxon amnesty whether broken or unbroken; the Emperor is petitioned to send a representative to Berlin who will prosecute Kohlhaas for breach of the Imperial peace. All this is done, and the Berlin court duly pronounces sentence of death by beheading on Kohlhaas. He accepts this with equanimity on hearing that his claims against Tronka are also to be met in full. At the place of execution he finds the Elector of Brandenburg waiting, together with the Imperial prosecutor and other officials; his two fine black horses, the mistreatment of which set the whole terrible train of events in motion and which run through the tale as a sort of leitmotiv, are presented to him fully restored to health; the Junker, he is informed, has been sentenced in Dresden to two years’ imprisonment. He declares himself fully satisfied and ready in his turn to make reparation to the Emperor for having taken the law into his own hands. Thereupon he is beheaded; both sides have made their point.

This, at least, is the story as Kleist might have completed it: the story of an individual grievance developing, with fascinating and dreadful realism, through ever-increasing complexities until it becomes a major affair of state and is then brought to a paradoxical but impressively logical resolution. It is thought that the Kohlhaas chronicle was originally suggested to Kleist as the theme for a drama; it has obvious theatrical potential, and this was in fact well exploited recently by James Saunders in his brilliant stage adaptation of the story under the title Hans Kohlhaas, which was produced at the Questors Theatre in London in 1972 and also broadcast as a radio play (it has also been produced in Germany). Mr Saunders used the sequence of events outlined above, with no essential alteration, merely filling out some of the details and accommodating the present-day taste for Brechtian distancing effects. The result had great force and unity. Unfortunately, however, Kleist was not content to finish Michael Kohlhaas on those lines, but introduced a bizarre and fantastic sub-plot which seriously damages the artistic structure of an already long and complex narrative. This added material, which Mr Saunders wisely omitted, contains the episode of the gypsy-woman and her mysterious prophecy about the fate of the ruling dynasty of Saxony, which she writes on a piece of paper and gives to Kohlhaas as a kind of talisman which he can use to bargain for his life with the Saxon Elector. The latter learns at the time of the horse-dealer’s extradition to Brandenburg that it is he who is in possession of this fateful secret, and desperately tries every means to have him rescued or pardoned or somehow to retrieve from him the piece of paper which Kohlhaas carries with him everywhere; but Kohlhaas goes to his death rather than surrender it. The Elector, as he sees it, has cheated him by solemnly promising him an amnesty and then violating it in connection with the Nagelschmidt affair.