Warned by the gypsy-woman, who also turns out inexplicably to be a kind of Doppelgängerin of his dead wife, that the Elector intends to recover the paper from his body after his execution and that for this purpose he will be standing incognito beside the scaffold, he removes it from around his neck just before putting his head on the block, tantalizingly reads it to himself in full view of the man whom he knows to be the Saxon Elector, and then swallows it so that it is lost for ever.

There are several artistic objections to this digressive subplot. For one thing, Kohlhaas’s final action destroys the sense of reconciliation at the close. Despite having at last, on Luther’s authority, received absolution and taken the sacrament, he dies gratifying a thirst for revenge, like Piachi in The Foundling. Moreover, the fact that the old gypsy-woman has furnished him with this last and only weapon of vengeance against the Elector, and generally added fuel to his vindictiveness, makes nonsense of the supposed identification of her with his deceased wife who had died begging him to forgive his enemies. It might be argued that Kleist intends all along to stress the obsessive, irrational element in Kohlhaas’s nature and to suggest, especially in the final scene, a psychologically realistic obscurity in the distinction between justice and vengeance – an illustration in advance, as it were, of the truth of Nietzsche’s punning aphorism to the effect that ich bin gerecht (I am just) really means ich bin gerächt (I am avenged). On the other hand it seems that Kleist was certainly motivated by an artistically extraneous desire to discredit Saxony. As we have seen, he had at about the time of completing Michael Kohlhaas become a fervent spokesman of the patriotic campaign of hatred against Napoleon. A few years earlier Saxony had joined the Confederation of the Rhine, the group of German states allied to France and enjoying Napoleonic protection; this had been in 1806, not long after the disastrous defeat of Prussia at Jena. Accordingly, in The Battle with Hermann, the King (as he now was) of Saxony had under a transparent allegorical disguise been represented as a traitor to the German cause. In 1810, filled with hopes of a Prussian resurgence, Kleist found it appropriate to invent in Michael Kohlhaas the notion of a prophecy foretelling the fall of Saxony and the future prosperity of Brandenburg–Prussia; he could thus underline the latter’s historic mission and greatness, which he was to celebrate again in Prince Friedrich of Homburg.

His reasons for adding the gypsy episode may also have included a literary intention, misguided in this case, of deliberately creating mystery. Michael Kohlhaas has the dramatic urgency of the best of Kleist’s other stories, but none of their economy of means. Its ever increasing and ever more confusing complications suggest that the narrator wishes to lose both himself and the reader in an impenetrable world, in a maze of detail and coincidence. The mystifying affair of the old woman was to have been, perhaps, the culmination of this process, raising it to a supernatural level. Not only the Holy Roman Emperor, but God himself, or Fate, is brought into play. Whereas, for example, The Earthquake in Chile implicitly raises theological questions and, as will be seen, certain other stories (The Beggarwoman of Locarno, St Cecilia, The Foundling) introduce or suggest a dimension of the more-than-natural, they all do so with great subtlety and tact. In Michael Kohlhaas the ‘real’ and the ‘fantastic’ are not compellingly fused but clumsily mixed. Close inspection of the episode of the gypsy’s prophecy shows it to have been cobbled on to the rest of the text with considerable carelessness. As already mentioned, the Phoebus fragment stops precisely at the point where Kohlhaas, after his wife’s funeral, rides off to attack Tronka Castle. In the book version he accidentally meets the Elector of Saxony while he is being escorted to Berlin and, not recognizing him, tells how he acquired the mysterious piece of paper kept in a lead locket which he has worn round his neck ever since. It was, he says, on the very day after his wife had been buried, and while he was on his way with armed followers to Tronka Castle, that he encountered simultaneously the Electors of Saxony and of Brandenburg, who were conferring in Jüterbock. He goes on to relate how, in the evening, the two princes had mingled with the crowd in friendly conversation, and how he, having paused at an inn with his men, stood idly watching them speak to the old gypsy-woman, in an incident roughly following the pattern of the meeting of Macbeth and Banquo with the three witches. Brandenburg frivolously asks the woman to make a prophecy about himself and receives an auspicious answer; Saxony does the same but the woman, instead of replying, writes her answer on a piece of paper and hands it to Kohlhaas. All this happens in public, in circumstances in which the horse-dealer, although not near enough to the two Electors to hear their conversation with the gypsy, obviously has easy access to them, and they are after all the ultimate judges in his dispute with the Tronka family. He gives in his account, however, no explanation of why he did not at least attempt to petition them for justice, nor does he even mention that it occurred to him to do so. It seems that he merely stood looking on, even exchanging a genial remark with the gypsy-woman when she approached him, as if the death of his wife and the events leading up to it had never happened. Thus the sub-plot, at its point of juncture with the main line of the Kohlhaas story, involves a gross improbability of behaviour on the part of Kohlhaas himself. This reinforces the reader’s impression that the whole thing is an artistically unfortunate afterthought; a further explanation may be that Kleist wanted to appeal to the popular taste, at this peak period of German Romanticism, for folkloristic, fairytale-like material. He had done the same thing in Kätchen of Heilbronn which for that very reason, although arguably the weakest of his plays, was the only one to be produced with some degree of success in his lifetime. But Kleist was ‘romantic’ and irrationalistic in too profound a sense to have needed to make such concessions to literary convention.

If the weighty realism of Michael Kohlhaas is stylistically and structurally marred by an ill-considered excursion into the region of the fantastic and the uncanny, this is not to say that in certain other works he did not cross or approach its frontier with greater success. The Beggarwoman of Locarno is a case in point.