Prince Friedrich of Homburg Read online

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  Introduction

  I

  Heinrich von Kleist, who committed suicide at the age of thirty-four shortly after completing one of the finest dramas in the German language, was born in Frankfurt on the Oder on October 18, 1777. Although his short existence was marked by a series of never-ending failures and an ever-present sense of personal disgrace and shame, Kleist’s life began in promising circumstances with his birth into an aristocratic Prussian family. As the descendant of a long and distinguished line of army officers, however, he was unfortunately predestined for a military career: Kleist entered a Potsdam regiment at the age of fifteen and took part in a campaign in the Rhineland against the French Revolutionary armies. But after seven years of service—each of which he thoroughly loathed—he asked for his release in order to study mathematics and philosophy at his hometown university. Kleist’s abilities and temperament made military life as inappropriate for him as it was for the American writer Edgar Allen Poe, who was dismissed from the United States Military Academy at West Point after one year. Henceforth, Kleist embarked on a ceaseless quest to discover a profession or even a way of life suited to his often bizarre and always uncompromising temperament.

  A shy, sullen, and solitary person, plagued by a speech defect as well as by hypochondria, Kleist’s conduct in society was marked by spasmodic fits of embarrassment and blushing. His personality seemed to vacillate in a repelling fashion between extremes: thus, a delicate conscience and an almost pathological sensitivity to the remarks of others did not prevent him from occasionally behaving in a tactless and cruel fashion. Possessed of a profound sense of inferiority, Kleist also reveled in the euphoric conviction that he was destined to displace Goethe as Germany’s greatest writer. His feelings of unworthiness and deep depression often found outlet in outbursts of rage against a world that ignored his genius. Despite a long period of engagement, in which he pedantically attempted to instruct his fiancée in how to become a suitable wife for him, Kleist never felt able to commit himself to marriage and so remained a bachelor throughout his life. Not surprisingly, the artistic fulfillment and personal happiness which he so desperately sought continued to elude him. Near the end of his life, he wrote: “The truth is that there was no help for me on earth.”

  In addition to the difficulties that Kleist’s temperament may have caused him, there is little doubt but that the external world also colluded to destroy him. The shocks that he sustained from outside, particularly during the last year of his life (1810–11), were too great and too many for him to overcome, given his increasing exhaustion, pessimism, and despair. Berlin’s first daily newspaper, Die Berliner Abendblätter, which Kleist had founded, collapsed at this time, due in part to the pressure of government censorship. (His literary periodical, Phöbus, had failed shortly before, in 1809.) His patroness, Queen Louise, died, and a small pension that he had been receiving from her came to a sudden halt. The first performance of Prince Friedrich of Homburg was unexpectedly canceled at the last moment, and Kleist was also experiencing difficulties with the publication of his other dramas. At the age of thirty-four, then, he found himself unemployed and penniless, ostracized by his family, and unappreciated by the public. He wondered sadly: “Really, it’s strange how everything I undertake at present seems bound to come to nothing; how whenever I decide to take a firm step the ground simply vanishes from under my feet.”

  If anything or anyone could have rescued Kleist from his suicidal depression, it would have been an encouraging word from Goethe, to whom Kleist had sent his play Penthesilea “on the knees of [his] heart.” But Goethe continued to be not merely unsympathetic; he was positively repulsed by the violence of emotion in Kleist’s works and by their apparent lack of moral restraint and aesthetic discipline. Now securely wrapped in the mantle of his Olympian serenity, Goethe believed that art should glorify the noblest possibilities inherent in man’s nature, whereas Kleist’s works, embodying a very unedifying and morbid vision of man, seemed to him only to present a series of pathological case studies. Goethe once admitted: “With the best will in the world toward this poet [Kleist], I have always been moved to horror and disgust by something in his works, as though here were a body well planned by nature, tainted with an incurable disease.”

  Assessing the result of his years of herculean struggle, Kleist had to admit that failure had followed all of his most varied attempts to secure a hold upon life; in the practical world of journalism, in his attempts to marry and found a home, and in his extravagant hope to dethrone Goethe. He could only believe that he was “a useless member of society, no longer worthy of any sympathy.” At this lowest point in his life, Kleist met and formed a suicide pact with a married woman, Henriette Vogel, who was suffering from an incurable cancer. They died by the pistol on Lake Wannsee near Potsdam on November 21, 1811. His creative period, which encompassed barely ten years, had yielded eight plays and eight short stories, all of which he believed would be forgotten along with himself. But history has proved Kleist’s extreme pessimism to have been wrong. A more correct estimate of the fate of his work and reputation appears as the epitaph upon his tombstone:

  He lived and sang and suffered

  in dreary, difficult times.

  Here he sought death

  and found undying fame.

  II

  A critical approach to the central issues in Prince Friedrich of Homburg requires a brief introductory discussion of the principal trauma in Kleist’s emotional and, intellectual life: his reading and misunderstanding of Kant’s philosophy in 1801. Before this experience, Kleist had professed to extremely optimistic views concerning man’s ability to perfect himself and thus find happiness on earth. Since God’s existence guaranteed for Kleist a rational world order, he believed that it was within man’s power to approach truth through the exercise of human reason. When Kleist decided in 1799 to study at the university, he was not primarily motivated by the need to satisfy a general intellectual curiosity. Rather, his systematic acquisition of knowledge was directed toward the formation of a rational life-plan that would gradually allow him to bring his daily life into harmony with the absolute. But his so-called Kant crisis convinced him that the quest for truth through an accumulation of knowledge was a futile exercise. He interpreted Kant’s philosophy as proving that the mind of man can never grasp and know ultimate truth but is forever condemned to perceiving at most the mere appearance of things: human reason can thus accumulate only illusion and falsehood. Kleist was plunged into the darkest despair: “My one supreme goal has vanished, and I am bereft.” The reading of a book had apparently robbed his life of all meaning and purpose.

  Kleist’s philosophical disenchantment only masked with an abstract terminology a more primitive and personal crisis. His discovery of Kant coincided with a period in his life when he was beginning to perceive that his volcanic emotions could no longer be held in check by a belief in the supreme power of reason to subdue and contain the feelings. Kant’s philosophy, by apparently dethroning the power of reason to perceive the truth, provided Kleist with an objective explanation for the fact that his life was now no less in turmoil than before he had begun his studies of mathematics and logic. Kleist suddenly felt himself set dangerously adrift upon a sea of chaotic emotions. His urgent need to regain inner stability was not to be accomplished (for instance) by anchoring his life to that of another human being. Rather, he eventually chose to affirm the relationship of the individual to the state, in which the individual voluntarily accepts the state as the embodiment of the sole existing absolute in a secular world without transcendence. The exploration of this relationship became a central theme in Kleist’s last works: the story �
��Michael Kohlhaas” (1809) and his last two dramas, The Battle of Arminius (1808) and Prince Friedrich of Homburg (1811). Indeed, Kleist admitted that he intended Prince Friedrich of Homburg to be “a patriotic drama.” Here, an egoistic individual learns to subordinate his infantile needs and fantasies to the collective good as defined by the state. It may be noted that some modern literary critics actually accuse Kleist of having glorified the mystique of Prussian nationalism to such a degree that they regard Prince Friedrich of Homburg as nothing less than a protofascist work.

  Brecht’s life and work provide a striking and illuminating parallel, for he, too, possessed a highly emotional and sensitive personality that often seemed at the mercy of compulsions beyond his conscious control. About 1930, however, he underwent an amazing dialectical reversal: he provided himself with an anchor in the objective world by becoming a fervent communist. Brecht affirmed the discipline of the party, which required the individual to sacrifice the needs of his own merely personal emotional life to the requirements of the common good as enumerated by the doctrines of the communist state. Thus, both Kleist and Brecht, feeling themselves threatened by the dangers of emotional isolation within their own pure subjectivity, as well as by the terrors of philosophical weightlessness in a world without God, affirmed the order and structure of external political authority. A twofold benefit accrued from such a decision: the tumultuous inner life could be disciplined as its importance was devalued, while at the same time the individual’s existence was provided with a higher purpose as a social being through voluntary participation in the realization of the state’s ever-growing power.

  How, then, can the fact be explained that the government (respectively, Prussian and communist) took a most ambivalent, if not decidedly negative attitude toward those dramas of Kleist and Brecht in which they specifically intended to glorify the state? Prince Friedrich of Homburg was prevented from being performed in Berlin until 1828 because the Prussian King’s sister-in-law, to whom Kleist had dedicated the work, objected that her noble ancestor, the Prince of Homburg, had been slandered in the play. The play had been performed in Vienna in 1821 but was closed by the police after five performances. The Archduke felt that the drama would have a demoralizing effect upon his army officers. It is well known that the communist party has always regarded Brecht’s dramas with the greatest ambivalence and even suspicion. His works have rarely been allowed in the theaters of the Soviet Union but have instead been relegated to Brecht’s theater in East Berlin, where they form part of the communists’ artistic showcase to the West. In this sense, the Prussian and communist states revealed a greater understanding of these dramatic achievements than did the dramatists themselves. In treating the theme of the individual’s relationship to the state, neither Kleist nor Brecht was able to suppress the psychological complexities and moral ambiguities inherent in such a relationship in order to deliver a simple propagandistic message. Because of their own ambivalence toward the inner life, they created more than they knew.

  III

  Prince Friedrich of Homburg is one of the most stageworthy plays ever written. In spite of the presence throughout of intense emotional conflict, often causing the characters to swing from ecstatic exultation to blackest depression and from reflective calm to total hysteria, Kleist nevertheless managed to produce a drama that is balanced and perfectly constructed, a work at once intellectually subtle and yet marked by constant action. Unlike some of his earlier plays, this last drama is never sententious, wordy, or static. Perhaps particularly striking in the work of a German writer is the perfect unity in this drama between the exploration of highly abstract problems and their presentation in very concrete and personal situations. In Prince Friedrich of Homburg, Kleist treats at one and the same time a rather abstract theoretical problem (the individual’s relationship to the state), the most traumatic of human events (a man’s anticipation of his own death by execution), and the presence and effect of hidden wishes upon behavior (the unacknowledged desires of the unconscious). And yet, as the themes develop and merge, the spectator’s imagination is gripped primarily by the actual events of the play, which carry him forward without respite from the very first dreamlike scene to the play’s extraordinary conclusion.

  Kleist’s exposition of his protagonist’s character in the first scene is a brilliant stroke of dramatic genius. By introducing the Prince in a somnambulistic trance, Kleist is able to expose directly to the audience his character’s deepest desires freed from the inhibitions that the waking mind usually exercises when individuals converse. Fragments of speech and gesture form a kind of monologue from the unconscious in which the Prince reveals himself to be a man obsessed with military fame and personal glory. Upon waking and going into battle, he expects that his dream will become reality and that the outer world will inevitably support his heroic vision of himself. But reality in the form of the Elector rises up to challenge his dreams, presenting an argument which in its abstract formulation is quite incomprehensible to the emotionally immature young Prince.

  The Elector demands obedience. The fact that the Prince has won an important battle is irrelevant, for more battles will have to be fought. Therefore, the Elector prizes only a victory gained according to principles of strategy and not one brought about by the momentary and capricious inspiration of a single individual. The Prince cannot take such an argument seriously. He is quite unable at this point to see the Elector as a wise, prudent, and farsighted ruler, the embodiment of objective law, concerned only with furthering the general good of the state. This is not surprising: were the Prince to accept the Elector’s condemnation of his behavior on the battlefield, his heroic deed would be transformed into irresponsible, undisciplined, and impulsive conduct directed solely toward the immediate gratification of personal desires. Literary critics of the play have generally allied themselves either with the Prince or the Elector. Those supporting the Prince justify the right of the passionate individual to reject a cold and lifeless ruler’s insistence upon subordination and mindless obedience to rigid and inflexible law. But whether Kleist’s critics have come to the defense of the Elector or of the Prince, their language and argumentation have tended to be too intellectualized and too abstract to capture the most fundamental reality of the play: the inability of man, the animal, to face the certainty of his own death.

  At the center of the drama, functioning as the ultimate symbol of unadorned reality, is the dark grave that is being dug for the Prince. It is before this abyss—and not before the Elector’s abstract arguments—that the Prince’s world of romantic dreams collapses completely. All thoughts of love and glory vanish. The Prince is now prepared to give up everything that he had once valued in order to be allowed merely to live at the lowest level of existence conceivable to him, as a farmer upon his distant estates. The Prince thus subscribes to the sentiment of another great warrior, Achilles, who admitted to Odysseus when the latter visited him in the underworld: it is better to live upon the earth as the humblest of men in the humblest of occupations than to reign as king over all the dead. The Prince, of course, has faced death countless times on the battlefield but, as the German existentialist Martin Heidegger writes, only in the self-deceiving way that most people regard death: either as something that happens to other people or as something that will eventually befall oneself but at another and much later time. At the sight of his open grave, however, the Prince is touched and overwhelmed for the first time by the horrible reality of death as an event that will inexorably overtake him in the near future: the courageous and proud Prince suddenly becomes an hysterical coward. It was precisely this unedifying spectacle of the Prince’s breakdown that caused Archduke Charles to ban the play from the Austrian stage. He may well have acted on the assumption that the fear of personal death dangerously subverts the strength of all social and political ties.

  A call from outside in the form of the Elector’s letter penetrates into the Prince’s isolation, a prison within a prison which Homburg has creat
ed by immersing himself totally in thoughts of his impending death. The Elector effects the Prince’s return to the world of social and moral ties by treating him as a man capable of evaluating his own behavior in terms of the collective needs of the state, needs which the Elector believes must be superior even to the individual’s instinctual need for self-preservation. When the Prince is given the freedom to choose, to control his own destiny, he admits to his astonished officers: “I want to die a freely chosen death.” By voluntarily choosing to die, he transforms death from a mere brutal force that mechanically destroys into a glorious event that corrects and crowns his personal existence. No longer an irresponsible and self-centered youth, the Prince believes he will be ennobled through the sacrificial surrender of his life to the collective ideal of the state as embodied and articulated by the Elector.

  Having affirmed the law of the state in his innermost heart, the Prince no longer perceives the law as brutally pressing upon him from outside. Paradoxically, now that the Prince recognizes as valid the rule of law that requires his execution, the Elector believes him to be worthy of pardon. Moreover, since the Prince has acted in the very manner anticipated by the Elector, the Elector is able to justify to himself and his officers his role as omniscient, godlike pedagogue. Glorification of the Elector as a Wise Old Man underlies most of the critical interpretations of Prince Friedrich of Homburg. This approach, however, places too much emphasis on an alleged process of education and the Elector’s role in it. The central theme of the play is not a conflict between the needs of the individual and those of the state, but the problem of what the individual must do and must believe in order to be able to face certain death.

  Since man is psychologically incapable of dying for nothing, the problem facing the Prince becomes one of finding a way to affirm his death. For, if it is a noble pursuit to give one’s life meaning, it is an absolute necessity to give meaning to one’s impending death. The key to such a psychological tour de force is guilt. It is the affirmation of personal guilt before an absolute—be it God, the father, or the state—that makes it possible for the individual to walk rather than be dragged to the place of execution. By means of this psychological process, death is not only transformed into a just punishment imposed from outside, it also gives the guilty individual the welcome opportunity to atone and cleanse himself. In Prince Friedrich of Homburg, the crucial step in this process of “personalizing” death occurs when the Prince reverses his earlier protestations of innocence and outrage and admits: “Guilt, grave guilt lies heavily upon me.”