7 - Icons of Resistance: Kleist, Le Musée Napoléon, and Queen Luise of Prussia

Summary

“In the beginning was Napoleon” writes the historian Thomas Nipperdey. Few German writers of the early nineteenth-century were so profoundly affected by Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) and his impact on political and cultural life in Prussia as Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811). Kleist’s earliest surviving letter—a letter of March 1793 written to his aunt, Helene von Massow (1736–1809) shortly before his involvement in the siege of Mainz—reflects the experiences of a young lieutenant from the Potsdam Garde-Regiment fighting against the forces of post-revolutionary France in the first tranche of Coalition Wars (1792–97). That letter predates Napoleon’s arrival on the world stage as a brilliant young strategist whose talents would first emerge during the Saorgio Offensive of 1794 before coming to fruition in the Italian campaigns of 1796–98. However, Bonaparte’s growing influence on Kleist’s life in the intervening years is evident in a letter of February 19, 1802 to his sister, Ulrike von Kleist (1774–1849) in which he laments the expansionist ambitions of the “Allerwelts-Konsul” (That Consul of the world) and the threat posed to his dream of settling in Switzerland. Like so many of his contemporaries, Kleist experienced the defeat of Prussia in 1806 and Napoleon’s triumphant procession through Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate as a personal and political catastrophe. Nonetheless, Bonaparte’s rise to power—and the corresponding demise of the ailing structures of the Holy Roman Empire—inspired him to produce a series of literary experiments exploring the possibility of a new social and political order untainted by the “Geist der Herrschsucht und Eroberung” (the spirit of domination and conquest; SW, 2:378) as he put it in his essay of 1809 “Was gilt es in diesem Kriege?”(What is the aim of this war?). Such inspiration as Kleist drew from Bonaparte’s impact on the sociopolitical structures of late eighteenth-century Europe was not, however, confined to a desire to criticize what he saw as the despotic character of French rule. Bonaparte’s recognition of the importance of art and painting in boosting the status of the French Republic in the European cultural imagination prompted him to assemble a collection of Old Masters in Paris that not only inspired Kleist, but played a vital role in shaping the aesthetic views of an entire generation of Romantic writers and artists.