Introduction: Poetica Asina — An Ass Brays, a Poet Is Born

Summary

The Inn at Butzbach

SOMETIME IN EARLY SUMMER 1801 a two-horse carriage lumbered along the road from Kassel to Frankfurt am Main. Passing through endless Hessian farm fields interrupted only by the occasional half-timbered village, the coach — probably close to midday — rolled into Butzbach, a small hamlet situated about twenty-five miles north of Frankfurt, and made what should have been a brief stop in front of the inn.

The passengers, Heinrich von Kleist and his half-sister, Ulrike, had been on the road for about two months. Their journey had taken them first to Dresden, where they visited the famous art gallery and viewed Raphael's Sistine Madonna with great enthusiasm. In the early evenings they strolled through the palace gardens or enjoyed the view from the bridge over the Elbe. Here they also made the acquaintance of the painter Heinrich Lohse and his future wife, Karoline von Schlieben. Although they had little genuine interest, they made an excursion to nearby Freiberg to inspect the famous mining academy and experience the descent into the subterranean mysteries of the adjacent mine. “I was obliged to do it,” Kleist wrote his fiancée Wilhelmine von Zenge, “so that when I'm asked ‘have you been there?’ I can answer: ‘yes.’” (“Ich mußte es, damit ich, wenn man mich fragt: sind Sie dort gewesen? doch antworten kann: ja.” [SW 2:650]).

After Dresden, Kleist and his sister turned their carriage in the direction of Leipzig. There they attended university lectures by mathematician Karl Friedrich Hindenburg and physiologist Ernst Platner.