The First Great Absurdist

By Melvin Maddocks

KLEIST: A BIOGRAPHY by Joachim Maass; Farrar, Straus & Giroux 320 pages; $22.50

AN ABYSS DEEP ENOUGH: LETTERS OF HEINRICH VON KLEIST, WITH A SELECTION OF ESSAYS AND ANECDOTES; Dutton; 297pages; $16.95 PLAYS by Heinrich von Kleist; Continuum; 341 pages; $17.50

No writer is more compelling than one who seems modern to later generations. Heinrich von Kleist, the German playwright, story writer and essayist, collected admirers who called him their contemporary for a century and more after his brief lifetime (1777-1811).

Nietzsche could hardly wait to turn 15; a new edition of Kleist was his birthday present. Rilke scribbled verses by the grave of the "dark, impatient Kleist." Wagner and Brahms agreed on few matters; Kleist's brilliance was one of them.

German Professor Joachim Maass's detailed, indispensable biography shows some of the reasons for Kleist's continuing fascination, and for his persistent obscurity. Maass describes Kleist's acquiring his skill, stage by stage, almost as if it were a fatal disease. Young Heinrich was by heritage the "right stuff' of which Prussian officers were made. There had been 18 generals in his family. At 15 he joined the King's Guards Regiment. Seven years later, he resigned his commission, apparently intending to take up an equally conventional career as a model civil servant. The youth devised a program of Knowledge, Fervor and Moral Beauty. He became engaged to a pretty 18-year-old whom he congratulated on her good fortune. "Am I not noble, Wilhelmine?" he asked, with no hint of self-mockery.

The first cracks showed when he began to put off both marriage and career. Maass blames his crisis, a bit too simply, on Kleist's discovering Kant and losing God. It seems more likely that Kleist began writing protest literature against the suffocating Age of Enlightenment.

As the selected Plays demonstrate, Kleist was the first great absurdist, obsessed with justice and the black-comic ways in which it can miscarry. The Broken Pitcher centers on a judge who is also a malefactor; in Amphitryon, the great Theban commander rages against an impostor "who wants me . .. out of the fortress of my consciousness." This sense of self as an armed camp is one of many traits that make the playwright seem a contemporary of another great admirer, Bertolt Brecht.

Kleist's letters, collected in An Abyss Deep Enough, augment this sense of modernity: "Heaven is pleased to grant desires that comply with its purpose, why then must it be we who are excluded from its favor?" It is no wonder that Kafka came to regard Kleist's writings as "the works of a master"; they anticipate The Castle by a century.

Absurd things had a way of occurring in Kleist's life as well as his art. The man who could never hang on to money served briefly as an assistant to the Finance Minister of Prussia. In 1810 he became editor of Berlin's first daily newspaper and made it into a popular journal that kept the city chatting. One of the things it chatted about was Kleist. Goethe decided that the young author was "no common talent" but "barbaric" and "misshapen."

For a decade Kleist had proposed suicide pacts to friends. Finally, at 34, he found a woman who said yes. Henriette Vogel had a long, pointed nose, pockmarked cheeks, insolent eyes and cancer of the uterus. Kleist, who probably died a virgin, loved her as his angel of death.

On Nov. 20, 1811 , the couple drove to a country inn outside Potsdam. After spending the night writing letters to friends and straightening out their wills, they strolled in great good humor to the shore of a nearby lake. They drank coffee and skipped stones; then there were two shots. When the servant who had served them coffee returned, she found the bodies.

Maass holds Kleist firmly to account for the spillage of his life. But he is overly apologetic for the writings. Penthesilea, Kleist's drama about the clash between Achilles and the Queen of the Amazons on the plain of Troy, does not, as he suggests, combine the best features of Greek tragedy and Shakespeare. It is Kleist's tart little fragments that most charm a reader today. There is, for example, the Swiftian modest proposal for sending messages by artillery and cannon ball, if speed is what everybody wants. There is the marvelously straight-faced account of an ascension in the balloon of Professor J. There is the wonderful little parody of The Sorrows of Young Werther: instead of killing himself, boy gets girl and lives happily ever after, fathering 13 children. Goethe, it is sometimes said, wrote Werther in order not to become Werther. Moderns can honor him for his sanity without feeling especially close. Kleist became Werther, and we cannot honor him for that. But the brilliant jokes that helped him last as long as he did help us survive today. For that, we can recognize him as a brother. -- By Melvin Maddocks

Excerpt

" Kleist's death was his first striking success. The echo of the two shots fired beside the Wannsee shook people out of their lethargy; some obscure instinct told them that this death had meaning, even at a time when human life counted for so little. Today, more than a century and a half later, we have well-nigh forgotten the untold thousands slaughtered in the course of Napoleon's mad struggle for power, while the echo of the shots fired beside the Wannsee still rings in our ears ... But it was not until the hundredth anniversary of Kleist's death, on November 21, 1911, that the family overcame its sense of shame over this 'useless member of society, unworthy of any sympathy.' On that occasion they laid a wreath on his grave. The inscription on the ribbon read: 'To the best of his line.' " This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.