The Marquise of O—

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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.

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