The Marquise of O– Read online

  HEINRICH VON KLEIST

  THE MARQUISE OF O—

  Translated from the German

  and introduced by Nicholas Jacobs

  PUSHKIN PRESS

  LONDON

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Introduction

  A Kleist Chronology

  THE MARQUISE OF O—

  Bibliographical Note

  Further Reading in English

  Acknowledgements

  About the Publisher

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  KLEIST’S STORIES

  A formidable academic literature on Kleist’s stories exists in German and in English, detailed for example in Seán Allan’s The Stories of Heinrich von Kleist (Camden House, New York, 2001), strangely subtitled “Fictions of Security”. However, the universality of these tales calls also for a lay approach, no matter how much analysis and insight academic readings have yielded and will continue to yield.

  Kleist’s stories are about the menace of freedom—its arbitrariness and potentially malignant anarchy. In The Foundling, in which an adopted orphan terrorizes his charitable adoptive parents, evil becomes natural, banal (Kleist was one of Kafka’s forebears). Neither Kleist nor Kafka ever sits in judgement over his characters, because to do so would imply that they have freedom of choice, when such freedom does not exist. Kleist’s characters develop from a natural inner compulsion and are always consistent. Their compulsive behaviour follows from their circumstances. They therefore cannot be judged, let alone found guilty. This sense of moral subjectivism and relativism came from Kleist’s reading of Kant. He never recovered from it. According to that reading—or misreading—there was no such thing as objective truth, he told his fiancée Wilhelmine von Zenge. That was Kleist’s personal coup de foudre and is a leitmotif of much of his work.

  The magnetism of Kleist’s stories lies in the relation of their form to their content. The Duel, set in fourteenth-century Germany, is about the trial of a sexual crime by formal duel, through which truth was thought to be established, but is not. The story’s dense syntax suggests Early Medieval painting or tapestry, evoking claustrophobia and primitive perspective. In The Marquise of O— the obsessive, breathless syntax and tempo mimic the urgency and compulsion of the story.

  Kleist’s stories are often characterized by a remorseless and bitter inconsequentiality, through which life can be switched in a half-sentence—in just a word—from ecstasy to horror (more rarely the reverse) up to the very last moment. This happens in one of his first stories, The Earthquake in Chile, where the horror of an earthquake is followed by an Edenic idyll of rescue and the happiness of restored love, returning to the horror of another restoration—brutal death by Catholic fanaticism.

  Kleist’s stories are compulsive, inevitable and as unpredictable as reality. That the world is innately precarious (gebrechlich) is another leitmotif of his work. His suicide, or in German more fittingly his Freitod, and his words, written to his beloved half-sister Ulrike—“Die Wahrheit ist, daß mir auf Erden nicht zu helfen war” (“The truth is that here on earth there was no help for me”)—concluded his life with the resolve and intensity with which he had lived it.

  Betrothal in Santo Domingo is a typical, horror-filled, skin-tight Kleist story set on the island of Haiti in 1804, when the black General Dessalines, brutal successor to the liberator Toussaint l’Ouverture, was preparing the massacre of the white population of the island, after Napoleon had reintroduced slavery after the Revolutionary Convention had ended it. Although the relations between black and white are at the heart of the events, Kleist’s interest is in the humanity of his characters. The colour of their skin plays an inevitable part in what happens, but their feelings as human beings always dominate; no one is reduced to a racial cipher. At the heart of the story is the betrothal between Gustav von der Ried, a young Swiss, and Toni, the mestiza daughter of a white Frenchman and the mulatto Babekan.

  Attempting to save herself from her brutal stepfather, Toni pretends to have captured Gustav, ties him up with ropes, fleetingly “pressed a kiss on his lips” (a typical Kleistian touch), and believes she has saved them both from discovery. However, she has only signed her own death warrant, because at the earliest opportunity the apparently captive Gustav puts a bullet through her breast, before shooting himself on discovering his tragic mistake.

  The longest Kleist story, at some hundred pages, and the only one with quasi-political overtones, is Michael Kohlhaas, set in mid-sixteenth-century Saxony. The last sentence of the story’s first paragraph foretells the action: “But his sense of justice made him a robber and a murderer.” The plot cannot be summarized because every detail is an essential ingredient in a tale that demands to be read as compulsively as it appears to have been written. Michael Kohlhaas exemplifies Kleist’s belief that justice becomes injustice when it condemns a man acting under the force of circumstance and inner compulsion.

  THE MARQUISE OF O—

  The Marquise of O—, the exception among the stories for its unconditionally happy ending, is an operatic drama with a historical background—the War of the Second Coalition (1798–1802) against Napoleon, when the united forces of Russia and Austria won back control of Northern Italy. Evocative in its ability to thrill, like Mozart’s Don Giovanni, it is a concerto of individual voices within a varied, sometimes discordant, but containing whole. Its emotional content is such that the nearer the solution, the nearer dissolution seems to be. The story concerns the mysterious pregnancy of a young aristocratic Italian widow and mother of impeccable repute during the Napoleonic Wars in Northern Italy. It is set down in the overflowing thoughts and words of its cast of five, whose consciousness and consciences are over-excited by the intensity of the circumstances in which they find themselves. There is a simultaneity of narrative by which the virtual interior monologue of each character combines to make a rich textual palimpsest. Repeated readings disclose ever more insights into the bearing and behaviour of the characters, each under their own stress—the Marquise, her mother, father, brother and “lover”. The story begins with and culminates in passion. At its core are two bursting hearts beating simultaneously against, and only at the very end with, each other. The story is mostly written in erlebte Rede—direct speech, on the edge of monologue intérieur, and also what might be called monologue extérieur: the Marquise drops her knitting when the idea occurs to her of inserting a newspaper announcement inviting the father of her child to make himself known.

  RECEPTION OF THE MARQUISE OF O—

  The Marquise of O—, completed in 1807, was first published in the Berlin journal Phöbus, edited by Kleist’s friend Adam Müller, in February 1808. When, in the course of the story, the Marquise, thinking about the illegitimate child she was to bear, feared it “would be scorned as a shameful stain on bourgeois society”, she anticipated very well the initial reception of the story. Adam Müller was criticized by an anonymous reviewer in 1808 as soon as it was published. The reviewer could not understand how a respectable editor could publish such a thing. “Just to summarize the story was to exclude such a work from respectable society. The Marquise is pregnant and doesn’t know how and by whom. Is this a subject deserving of a place in an artistic journal?” Dora Stock, famous for her silverpoint drawing of Mozart, thought that no woman could read it without blushing, and so frequently did the story meet with public prudery that Kleist responded with the following comic epigram, also published in Phöbus:

  Dieser Roman ist nicht für dich, meine Tochter. In Ohnmacht! Schamlose Posse! Sie hielt, weiß ich, die Augen bloß zu.

  (Not for you is this story, my daughter. In a swoon! Shameless farce! I think she just closed her
eyes.)

  However, writing in the 1870s, the novelist Theodor Fontane was full of admiration for the story, calling it “the most brilliant and most perfect thing he ever wrote”, and this judgement has prevailed ever since, endorsed by Kafka, who read it repeatedly to his friend Dora Dymant, and by Thomas Mann. It remains the favourite of Kleist’s stories, with some half-dozen translations into English alone, beginning in 1929, and was filmed by Éric Rohmer in 1976.

  The first publication of this story was preceded by the following note: “Based on a true incident whose location has been transferred from north to south.” According to Richard Samuel (in Heinrich von Kleists Teilnahme an den politischen Bewegungen der Jahre 1805–1809—see below, p. 89), it is highly likely that the story is based on an incident that took place in 1805. Johann Heinrich Voß, translator of Homer into German, wrote to Goethe in January 1807 about a similar case that had caused an uproar in Heidelberg. It turned out that the father of the child was a French officer and that the “happy hour” had taken place shortly after the successful French siege of Ulm.

  Nicholas Jacobs

  A KLEIST CHRONOLOGY

  Heinrich von Kleist was born in 1777 into a Prussian military family in Frankfurt an der Oder, now near the Polish border. His father died when he was eleven and his mother five years later. By this time Heinrich, aged sixteen, was serving in a Guards regiment under the Duke of Brunswick, and took part in the successful siege and recapture of Mainz, then occupied by the French during the War of the First Coalition, and in skirmishes thereafter. Still in the army, he formed his first lifelong friendships with Otto August Rühle von Lilienstern (later head of the Prussian general staff), with whom Kleist, an accomplished clarinettist, played music, and Ernst von Pfuel (subsequently Prussian Minister of War and Prime Minister).

  In 1799 Kleist left the army to study in his home town, Frankfurt an der Oder, where he met Wilhelmine von Zenge as her home tutor; she became his fiancée. Kleist broke off his studies after three terms and undertook clerical work for ministries in Berlin.

  1801 was the year of his so-called Kant Crisis, when he interpreted Kant’s philosophy as meaning the impossibility of establishing objective truth. This is considered an understandable misinterpretation, but under it he fled in despair with his half-sister Ulrike to Paris and terminated his interest in the natural sciences.

  In 1802 he broke off his engagement to Wilhelmine, finished his play The Schroffenstein Family and began work on two more plays, Robert Guiskard (never to be completed) and The Broken Jug (his most popular play).

  In 1803 he spent two months with Christoph Martin Wieland, the amiable and popular writer who preceded Goethe’s ascendancy in Weimar. Kleist tried unsuccessfully to complete Robert Guiskard on a trip to Switzerland with von Pfuel, went to Paris and, in desperation at his failure with his play, tried, equally unsuccessfully, to join the French Army preparing to invade England. He destroyed his play.

  He returned to Berlin in 1804 and worked for the Ministry of Finance, then moved to Königsberg and lived for a time with Ulrike.

  In 1806 he turned again to writing plays and now stories, in particular finishing The Broken Jug and starting another comedy, Amphitryon. He also began his great and longest novella, Michael Kohlhaas. Due to ill health he was given six months’ leave by the ministry, during which time Prussia was defeated by Napoleon at the Battle of Jena-Auerstedt.

  In 1807 Kleist travelled to Berlin, then occupied by the French, and was arrested and taken prisoner as a spy. The Marquise of O— could have been written that summer in Châlons-sur-Marne, when Kleist was still a prisoner of the French, but after he had been released into looser custody, spending two weeks in the prison fortress of Joux on the River Doubs in the Jura, near Pontarlier, the possible model for what is referred to as the fortress, castle or citadel in the story.

  After the Treaty of Tilsit in July 1807, Kleist was released, worked on his play Penthesilea and founded the journal Phöbus with his friend Adam Müller, the future Prussian statesman and conservative thinker. Kleist dedicated a copy to Goethe “On the knees of my heart”. The Marquise of O— appeared in the second issue in February 1808.

  In 1808 the first performance was given in Weimar of The Broken Jug. Directed by Goethe, who—against Kleist’s wishes—split the play into three parts with two intervals, it was a flop and led to their bitter estrangement.

  Kleist then turned his hand to preparing a popular uprising against the French, another failed venture, involving the failure of starting a patriotic journal in Prague after the Austrian defeat by Napoleon at the Battle of Wagram (1809). In 1808 he wrote The Battle of Teutoburg Forest—Die Hermannsschlacht—depicting the defeat of the Romans by the German Arminius in the first century AD.

  In 1810 Kleist moved back to Berlin and met the poets and writers Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, founders of the Romantic Movement in Germany. That year the first volume of Kleist’s stories appeared, including Michael Kohlhaas, The Marquise of O— and The Earthquake in Chile.

  In 1811 he finished his play The Prince of Homburg, and a second volume of his stories appeared, including The Engagement in San Domingo, The Foundling and The Duel. Increasingly isolated, and after another failure to rejoin the military, Heinrich von Kleist took his own life, with Henriette Vogel, a married woman who had terminal cancer. At her request he shot her before shooting himself. He was thirty-four.

  In condemning this double suicide in her Réflexions sur le suicide in 1813—and specifically Kleist for “annexing” Henrietta Vogel’s courage to end her life in order to end his own—Madame de Staël blamed “a people ruled by ‘metaphysical passion’ without specific object or useful aim. The defects of the Germans,” she continued, “are more the result of their circumstances than their character, and will be corrected when there exists a political order there able to offer careers to men worthy of being citizens.”

  On Kleist’s gravestone by the Wannsee are the words, by the Berlin writer Max Ring:

  Er lebte sang und litt

  In trüber schwerer Zeit;

  Er suchte hier den Tod,

  Und fand Unsterblichkeit.

  (He sang and suffered, both,

  Then to this spot he came

  In darkest days sought death,

  And found immortal fame.)

  The Marquise of O—

  IN M—, AN IMPORTANT TOWN in Northern Italy, the widowed Marquise of O—, a woman of impeccable reputation and mother of well-brought-up children, made it known through the newspapers that she had inexplicably found herself in a certain condition, that the father of the child she would bear should make himself known, and that out of regard for her family she was resolved to marry him. The woman who under the pressure of irremediable circumstances took such a strange step, risking universal derision with such fortitude, was the daughter of Colonel G—, Commandant of the citadel outside M—. Some three years before, she had lost her husband, to whom she had been most ardently and tenderly devoted, during a journey he had made on family business to Paris. At the behest of her excellent mother, the Marquise had, after her husband’s death, left her house in the country where she had lived outside V—, and returned with both her children to her father in the Commandant’s house. The following years she spent in deep seclusion, devoted to the care of her parents and the pursuit of art, literature and the education of her children, until the — War filled the surrounding region with the soldiers of almost all the European powers, even Russians. Ordered to defend the citadel, the Commandant urged his wife and daughter to withdraw either to the Marquise’s country house or to his son’s, near V—. However, before the women could weigh up the choice between the danger of remaining and the horror of what they might be subjected to in open country, the citadel was overrun by Russian troops and called upon to surrender. The Commandant told his family that from now on he would act as if they were not there, and responded with bullets and grenades. The enemy in turn bombarded the citadel, set fire
to the magazine and captured an outwork; and when the Commandant, once more challenged to surrender, hesitated to do so, orders were given for a night attack and the fortress was captured by storm.

  Just as the Russian troops, covered by heavy siege artillery, forced their way into the Commandant’s house, its left wing caught fire and the women were forced to leave. His wife, hurrying after their daughter, who had gone down the steps with her children, shouted that they should keep together and take shelter in the lower vaults, but a grenade exploding on the house at that precise moment caused total confusion inside. The Marquise came with her two children to the forecourt of the castle where the shooting, now at its heaviest, was already lighting up the night, forcing her, out of her mind where she should turn next, back into the burning building. Here she was unfortunate enough to meet a band of hostile riflemen just as she was intending to slip out by the back door. At the sight of her they suddenly fell silent, slung their weapons over their shoulders and took her with them while making the most abominable gestures. Tugged and pulled this way and that by the terrifying pack fighting among themselves, the Marquise vainly shouted for help to her trembling women servants, who were escaping through the door. She was dragged into the rear courtyard of the castle where, subject to the most shameful mishandling, she was about to sink to the ground when, at the sound of her screams for help, a Russian officer appeared and with angry thrusts scattered the dogs lusting after their booty. To the Marquise he seemed like an angel from heaven. He struck the murderous beast who was embracing her slender body in the face with the hilt of his sword so that blood poured out of his mouth and he staggered back; then, politely addressing her in French, he offered her his arm and led her, rendered speechless by all she had witnessed, into the other wing of the palace not yet consumed by the flames, where she proceeded to sink to the ground completely unconscious. There – when her frightened women reappeared, he took steps to send for a doctor, made assurances as he put on his hat that she would soon recover, and returned to the fighting.