4 - Heinrich von Kleist’s Concept of Law, with Special Reference to “Michael Kohlhaas”

Summary

Heinrich Von Kleist wrote all his major literary works within the ten-year period from 1801 to 1811. As brief as this flourishing was, it was also intense, cut across by events of great international significance. Midway through Kleist’s decade the formidable Prussian army was routed by Napoleon at Jena. Once hailed as the disseminator of Enlightenment principles and the liberator of Europe, Napoleon instead increasingly appeared to many as a new kind of despot over the course of the first decade of the nineteenth century. His conquest of Europe for Prussians, in any case, brought grief at the loss of nation rather than any increase in freedom. In a short space of time, then, a world for which a new freedom of mind and spirit initially beckoned had been turned on its head. Kant’s cautiously progressive philosophy, which before the French Revolution had been measured enough to fit the spirit of toleration under the Prussian ruler Friedrich II., sat less and less comfortably with the post-Revolutionary world. By its end, Kleist’s decade had seen the steady erosion of notions the previous generation of enlighteners — the generation from Lessing and Moses Mendelssohn to Kant and Reinhold — had painstakingly elaborated. That Kleist’s relation to these notions could never be anything other than highly ambivalent is perhaps not surprising: Kleist’s age had itself reached no unanimity about the value of Enlightenment, nor was it able to endorse the optimism about the future that the movement of Enlightenment had once given rise to.

The relation of Kleist’s age to questions of law was no less ambivalent. Intimations of a radical new legality that flowed from notions such as Rousseau’s social contract were cut across by older ideas in this same tradition that emphasized the importance of obedience to the sovereign. In his Enlightenment essay of 1784, Kant himself had caught something of the delicate nature of the balance between the voluntarism that brought about political sovereignty according to Enlightenment precepts and the fidelity to the collective that underpinned the rule of law. In this essay he talked both of the emergence of a kind of mature understanding that built consensual communities and the obedience that maintained them. Rational human beings in Kant’s understanding were both animated by the freedom that enabled public disputation and constrained in “private’ ways by conditions without which such freedom would be bound to founder.