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Reviewed by:
  • Heinrich von Kleist and Modernity ed. by Bernd Fischer and Tim Mehigan
  • Edgar Landgraf
Heinrich von Kleist and Modernity. Edited by Bernd Fischer and Tim Mehigan. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2011. Pp. 314. Cloth $80.00. ISBN 978-1571135063.

The volume’s seventeen essays (revised and extended conference papers originally presented at a symposium in New Zealand in 2010) mark the 200th anniversary of Heinrich von Kleist’s death by focusing on the modernity of his writing. While there is no consensus on how to define modernity, most contributors subscribe to an understanding of modernity informed by postmodernity. They find the “signature of Kleist’s modernity” in the “anticipation of a paradigm or mindset that is characterized . . . by the failure of all metarécits” (4) and recognize Kleist as an author who examines the constitutive power of discursive formations and searches for political direction within a moral universe without ultimate foundations.

Within this trajectory, three threads emerge that tie together various contributions of this volume: namely, a focus on endings in Kleist’s texts, a renewed interest in strategies of aestheticization and the performative, and a return to the legal and political aporias that emerge in his writings. Starting the collection is Bernhard Greiner, who finds the modernity of Kleist in his determination to write to their (paradoxical) end traditional discourses (of grace or of the sublime), aesthetic-poetic conceptions, and even certain genres (in particular, myth and tragedy). Greiner interprets Die Familie Schroffenstein as a rewriting of Plato’s cave allegory whereby the idealism of the original text is replaced by a quasi-Nietzschean tragic insight into the limits and [End Page 184] helplessness of knowledge. Ends are also central to Andreas Gailus’s and Wolf Kittler’s contributions. In a brilliant rebuttal of Paul De Man’s claim that Kleist’s mathematics are unworthy of a Gymnasium student, Kittler makes a convincing case that “Über das Marionettentheater” includes a precise analysis and commentary of Gotthelf Abraham Kästner’s Analysis of the Infinite from 1799, perhaps the most advanced mathematical study of its time. Gailus examines the seemingly contradictory double endings that hold Kleist’s works in suspension between happiness and violence, redemption and condemnation, resolution and revenge. Expanding on his recent book, Gailus argues that these double endings dramatize the confrontation of two dimensions of speech, whereby the propositional content of language, which is tied to institutionalized truths and existing power structures, clashes with the “assertoric force” of language, its creative, transformative, and inventive power.

The end (and ends), namely of the humanist tragedy, is also at the center of Dorothea von Mücke’s reading of Der zerbrochne Krug. This text challenges the metahistorical narrative of the “happy fall” and with it the optimistic teleology of the Enlightenment. Von Mücke first raises what emerges as a second dominant theme of the volume, namely Kleist’s exposure of aestheticization strategies that underlie modern politics. Von Mücke sees Kleist recast the programmatic relationship between art and history, poetics and politics in ways that allow for “a freedom that makes history in the emphatic sense—as the passionate partisanship within an (imaginative) performance—possible” (51). Yet, with the broken jug, von Mücke argues, Kleist simultaneously exposes how the artifacts that produce history in an emphatic sense are “complex, heterogeneous, willfully appropriated” and “hence irreducible to a propagandistic paraphrase” (51). David Pan takes a different stance. He finds that Kleist’s writings do not necessarily resist propagandistic appropriations. Examining changes in political structure addressed in Prinz Friedrich von Homburg, he draws an immediate line to the twentieth century, suggesting that Kleist’s play provides “a template for the development of German culture” (108) that culminated in the politics of personality as practiced by the Nazis. The extent to which Kleist’s texts resist such a nationalistic appropriation might well hinge on how one reads Kleist’s modernity. To our contemporary, postmodern inclinations, the “inability to look at some reality behind the scene” (98), as Pan notes, foregrounds the performance aspects of representation—how the effects on the audience come to define the reality of the representation. This is, however, not how Kleist was received in...

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