Word: kleists
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...Kleist's letters, collected in An Abyss Deep Enough, augment this sense of modernity: "Heaven is pleased to grant desires that comply with its purpose, why then must it be we who are excluded from its favor?" It is no wonder that Kafka came to regard Kleist's writings as "the works of a master"; they anticipate The Castle by a century...
Absurd things had a way of occurring in Kleist's life as well as his art. The man who could never hang on to money served briefly as an assistant to the Finance Minister of Prussia. In 1810 he became editor of Berlin's first daily newspaper and made it into a popular journal that kept the city chatting. One of the things it chatted about was Kleist. Goethe decided that the young author was "no common talent" but "barbaric" and "misshapen...
...decade Kleist had proposed suicide pacts to friends. Finally, at 34, he found a woman who said yes. Henriette Vogel had a long, pointed nose, pockmarked cheeks, insolent eyes and cancer of the uterus. Kleist, who probably died a virgin, loved her as his angel of death...
Maass holds Kleist firmly to account for the spillage of his life. But he is overly apologetic for the writings. Penthesilea, Kleist's drama about the clash between Achilles and the Queen of the Amazons on the plain of Troy, does not, as he suggests, combine the best features of Greek tragedy and Shakespeare. It is Kleist's tart little fragments that most charm a reader today. There is, for example, the Swiftian modest proposal for sending messages by artillery and cannon ball, if speed is what everybody wants. There is the marvelously straight-faced account...
...Kleist's death was his first striking success. The echo of the two shots fired beside the Wannsee shook people out of their lethargy; some obscure instinct told them that this death had meaning, even at a time when human life counted for so little. Today, more than a century and a half later, we have well-nigh forgotten the untold thousands slaughtered in the course of Napoleon's mad struggle for power, while the echo of the shots fired beside the Wannsee still rings in our ears ... But it was not until the hundredth anniversary of Kleist...