Word: kleist
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...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...
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...
...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...
...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...