4 - Passivity in the Novellas: “And it came to pass …”

Summary

Kleist, der sich jetzt hier aufhält, hätte eigentlich eine ungemeine

Anlage, so ein zweiter Dante zu werden, so eine Lust hat er an aller

Quälerei seiner poetischen Personen.

— Achim von Arnim to the Brothers Grimm

Er weiß auf die Folter zu spannen und es fertigzubringen, daß wir's ihm danken.

— Thomas Mann

COMMENTATORS GENERALLY HOLD that Kleist's greatest achievements lay within the realm of the drama. Sembdner, for example, dubbed Kleist an “arch-dramatist” and follows the main current of twentieth-century Kleist criticism in viewing the poet as “above all the great creator of Prinz Friedrich von Homburg and Penthesilea.” Despite serious reservations about the poet's alleged “reactionary narrow-mindedness” and “decadent individualism,” Georg Lukács could — also with Homburg in mind — still grant Kleist the status of “einer der großartigsten Szeniker und szenischen, sinnlich-gedanklichen Dialogkünstler der dramatischen Weltliteratur” (one of the greatest scenarists and scenic, material-philosophical dialogue artists of dramatic world drama). By far the bulk of the critical literature is concerned with Prinz Friedrich von Homburg. A fairly comprehensive bibliography of the dramas turned up more than twice as many items devoted exclusively to that work than Penthesilea, the next most frequently treated of Kleist's plays. It has even become customary to preface studies on Kleist's writings with a lamentation over the “quantitative plethora of Homburg studies.” Nevertheless, there is no question that Kleist made a substantial contribution to the genre of the novella as well.