Heinrich von Kleist

Heinrich von Kleist (Frankfurt an der Oder, 1777 - Berlin, 1811) was a German poet, dramatist and novelist who wrote at the point where Classicism gave way to Romanticism. He received little recognition during his lifetime. Decades passed before critics acknowledged his importance in German literature and before some of his plays entered the classic German repertoire.

He came from a family of the Prussian military nobility and received a modest education. He joined the Prussian army in 1792, during the wars against revolutionary France, and left it in 1799 as a lieutenant. He then studied law, philosophy and natural sciences at the university in his home town and held a brief post at the Finance Ministry in Berlin. His restless temperament took him to France and Switzerland, where he wrote his first tragedy, The Schroffenstein Family. Back in Germany he visited Goethe, Schiller and Wieland in Weimar. In 1807, on a journey to Dresden, the French arrested him on suspicion of espionage, and he spent several months in the Fort de Joux.

In Dresden and later in Berlin he co-founded, with Adam Müller, the journal Phöbus, and later a daily, the Berliner Abendblätter, which criticised the French occupation. His writing combines intense psychological tension with frequently violent action. Misunderstandings and errors in speech drive the plots of comedies such as The Broken Jug, while in Penthesilea romantic passion ends in destruction. In prose, The Marquise of O and Michael Kohlhaas pair a sober tone with extreme situations. His German nationalism becomes explicit in works such as Die Hermannsschlacht, written against Napoleon.

In 1811 he met Henriette Vogel, who was suffering from advanced cancer. After agreeing to die together, they shot themselves on the shore of the Little Wannsee near Potsdam on 21 November 1811, when he was thirty-four. His legacy grew slowly. Today he is remembered through the Kleist Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in German literature, and through the theatre that bears his name in his birthplace. He is also credited with influencing later short narrative, including that of Kafka.