1 - Kleist’s “Kant Crisis” and Its Consequences

Summary

Heinrich Von Kleist encountered Immanuel Kant’s philosophy in 1800 and 1801. It is not clear which of Kant’s works, if any, he actually read. Letters from that time reveal nevertheless how seriously he took the encounter with Kant’s thought. In a letter of 14 August 1800 to his sister Ulrike, for example, he wrote that he had composed, with no definite purpose in mind,“[eine] Schrift, über die Kantische Philosophie” (2:514). Kleist also referred to the “neuere[n] sogenannte[n] Kantische[n] Philosophie” (2:634) in a letter to Wilhelmine von Zenge. At another point, he even spoke of a “traurige[n] Philosophie” (2:667), apparently meaning Kantianism. Kleist’s letters, written six months later, on 5 February and 23 March 1801 to Ulrike and on 22 March 1801 to Wilhelmine von Zenge, his fiancée reveal how profoundly the encounter with Kantian philosophy affected him. These later letters indicate that Kleist experienced a deep psychological crisis, quite possibly precipitated by a second encounter with Kant’s writings, which ultimately led to his decision to become a writer.1 There is good reason to assert, then, that Kleist’s entire literary career was rooted in his struggle with Kant’s ideas or emerged indirectly from it.

Even if such an emphasis does not exhaust possible approaches to Kleist, most recent scholarship does not seriously question the importance of his relationship to Kant. The commentary to the first volume of the Deutsche Klassiker-Verlag’s edition of his Sämtliche Werke und Briefe declares that “der biographische Drehpunkt des Kleist-Verständnisses … die Kant-Lektüre ist.” It asserts furthermore that the Kant crisis marks Kleist’s abandonment of his belief in the “Autonomie seines Mehrwissens,” leading to this conclusion: “Diese Reibungsfläche zwischen Sprache und Wissen ist der hermeneutische Ort, an dem die Genese des Schriftstellers Kleist … auszumachen ist.”

In the face of such statements, several critics warn against overemphasizing the Kant crisis. They regard the letters describing the depths of the crisis into which Kleist felt himself plunged as merely a kind of “Inszenierung” before his fiancée. Indeed, Wilhelmine clearly appeared to be impressed by Kleist’s outpourings of feeling, as she affirmed two years later in a letter to her future husband, Wilhelm Traugott Krug, a professor of philosophy: “so lebte er ganz für mich, ich gewann ihn recht lieb.