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...MARQUISE OF O-AND OTHER STORIES (318 pp.)-Heinrich von Kleist -Criterion...
...Marquise of O- was not popular in its day, and neither was its author, Heinrich von Kleist. He was a sickly, unprepossessing young German who had gone into the Prussian army like his father before him, but quit to the disgust of his family at the age of 21. After years as an itinerant student, he began to write a series of plays which his contemporaries were hardly aware of but were praised by later critics. One of the plays was burned by Goethe, who threw the manuscript into his stove because of its "damnable perversity...
What critics exhume is seldom the writer who was buried. Where Goethe found perversity and disease, critics today find "true greatness," "a hero of the modern spirit," a precursor of Stendhal, Freud, D. H. Lawrence and Franz Kafka. Thomas Mann, Germany's greatest 20th century novelist, calls Von Kleist in the preface (written in 1955) to this book a "storyteller of the very first order." In this first English translation of his collected stories, the proofs are not always convincing. The compulsive violence that runs through these tales (notably Michael Kohlhaas, The Earthquake in Chile...
Author Von Kleist has the true storyteller's instinct, and most of the time he doles out such strong stuff as keeps the pages turning. That would be tribute enough. To credit him with insights he did not have is to play the familiar critics' game of he's-greater-than-he-reads...
Died. Field Marshal Paul Ludwig Ewald von Kleist, 73, German World War II tank commander, exponent and early practitioner of the blitzkrieg; of circulatory difficulties; in a Russian prison camp. Product of the Prussian military caste, Von Kleist contributed decisively to France's swift collapse by sending his Panzer divisions racing around the northern end of the Maginot Line. In 1945 he surrendered to two American soldiers (to avoid being captured "in the presence of common, retreating German soldiers"), was sentenced to 15 years as a war criminal by the Yugoslavs, who then turned him over to the Russians...